S White - Hermit

Nathan snorted. ‘Good for the soul, or something?’

Dana didn’t consider herself an expert on what was good for the soul. Others decided that – seldom well, in her experience. No: confession was only good for the soul when the torment of not confessing was even greater. It was a judgement call; a balance. It was perfectly possible, she knew, to carry a guilty conscience for the rest of your life without it ever quite breaking you. The vice tightens every day; but you never quite snap. As Nathan had said earlier, everything can be survived, if you go about it right .

‘Everyone’s soul is different, Mr Whittler. I won’t presume to know the state of yours. But didn’t you run through this very scenario while you were sitting in your cell? That you’d be sitting in front of me, at this kind of moment?’

Nathan nodded. ‘Yes, I did. Imagined it every which way. But now, when you actually ask me…’ He ran to a halt and squeezed his hands together. A small bloom of blood pulsed against the bandage.

She gave him a minute. A long, silent minute where she made sure not to move a muscle. The only thing in motion was Nathan’s mind: whirling and twisting, predicting consequence, mulling angles and options.

‘I’m glad you understand what sort of person Jeb was,’ he said, ‘and what sort of home I grew up in. The iconography in the house, the threat; the dread in my anticipation of each day. I was permanently waiting for the dam to burst. I think – no, I’m certain – you understand that feeling, Detective. Am I wrong?’

Another response that could be given to defence counsel and thus to the world, but she couldn’t avoid making it. Nathan needed the last little shove.

‘You’re entirely correct, Mr Whittler.’

‘I’ve been considering and, hmm…’ Nathan nodded to himself.

‘And?’

‘And I think that, now you understand why I ran and lived in a cave, you can understand why this morning happened. It might make sense now in a way it wouldn’t have, earlier.’

It jolted her assumptions to learn that Nathan also had a plan. There had been polite inquiries she’d had to parry, there had been questions she’d answered to gain trust and find common ground, but she hadn’t detected a strategy behind them. But apparently Nathan had prioritised and put the crucial information into a preferred sequence, just like she had. It was something she’d semi-comprehended, but hadn’t truly appreciated. Not every reluctant answer, glance to the floor, hesitation or obfuscation was involuntary: some of it was conscious.

Nathan would confess now, because he was certain Dana could process and contextualise: she had the prerequisite data. Clever , she thought. Clever Nathan .

‘I see. Well, I’m happy to talk about this, Mr Whittler. But I really must suggest to you once again to have a lawyer beside you at this time. We’re about to discuss something that has profound legal implications for you. A lawyer would be able to advise you: I cannot. It’s your own free choice, but that would be my advice at this point.’

‘Uh, I’ve thought about that, too. No lawyers. I don’t really trust them, to be honest. But more than that, I think what I have to say is fairly self-explanatory. So I don’t really see how a lawyer would help. But thank you, Detective Russo. I appreciate that.’

‘Very well. I’ll try to keep my interventions to a minimum. In your own time, and in your own words, please, Mr Whittler.’

‘Okay. So. I’d visited Jensen’s plenty of times before. It’s the nearest walkable store. It’ll be in the journal, Detective, of course. But I hadn’t been there for a while. I went recently at dusk – trying to see their process for the alarm. I hide in the undergrowth when I reconnaissance. The tree ferns, the mulberry: you can get within twenty metres of that store and no one has a clue you’re there. It helps to watch them closing up, you see: you can infer what their alarm system is like.

‘I was… well, surprised at what I saw, in that particular reconnaissance. Rattled. I thought about never returning there – placing it off limits. Perhaps it was too risky, perhaps the stakes had become too high because of those changes. Even though it was handy and I knew the layout, and it was all so convenient, by my standards. But I thought it through later; I believed I’d set it all in context and worked out how I was going to deal with things. At least, I thought I had.

‘Since I’d scoped it out last, it seemed they’d added some security. A couple of the lights had changed on the corners, and I thought there might be motion detectors. But other than that I didn’t know there’d been any changes.

‘I’ve told you about the trick with the window locks. I’d picked a window right in the middle of that store front. I thought if any windows were going to be opened in daytime and then closed at night it would be the ones next to the coffee corner. They might open those. But the main ones at the front middle? Stores don’t open those up. Flies, dust on the produce – that sort of thing. They usually like to keep them closed and crank up the air conditioning. Besides, this time of year they probably wouldn’t be opening any windows much. So I was fairly happy that no one would have discovered the trick with the lock.

‘It was my own fault I hadn’t visited the place the previous week. I got caught in a rainstorm and I had a bit of a cold. I’m not feeble, Detective: I can live with a cold. But when you don’t live in a building, colds go down to your chest. I had a wheezy cough for several days and I couldn’t risk going out like that. Then I had to wait another couple of nights, because there was no cloud cover and it was a full moon. Out there, a full moon is practically daylight.

‘So what I’m saying is; I never intended to be there this morning. If I’d gone when I’d intended, I’d never have… well, perhaps I wouldn’t be here now. And if I’d known about what the owner… well, if I’d fully realised, then of course I would never have gone. I’d spent years being careful, avoiding… all that. I should have had more information, ought to have done it all the previous week. Just so you know. I was a little off my game. It was slightly outside my comfort zone. So maybe I wasn’t at, you know, full capacity or something. Not enough, uh, due diligence , on my part.’

Dana had a picture: she thought it was accurate because it fitted everything she knew – felt – about Nathan. He would sit among dripping ferns for hours, peering through the fronds at Jensen’s. Knowing that one mistake – one worker staying late, one missed camera – could bring his time in the cave to an end. And that would be crushing.

‘I like Jensen’s because they have so many things in wire baskets and bins. When it’s displayed haphazardly like that, it’s easier to acquire stock without anyone noticing. And they have a lot of batteries. Always well supplied with batteries.

‘I like that store as well because I don’t have to canoe down the lake to start the trip. Everything’s more complicated with the canoe. At night, you can hit tree roots, and so on. You have to moor it some place you’ll find it, but others won’t. And going from the mooring through the woods takes you nearer to people, for longer. So Jensen’s was a good store to go to generally, but not… then. Not recently. But I got there without a problem, about 4 a.m. or so. Dead of night. And I waited for an hour and nothing moved.

‘Everything went okay at first. I threw a couple of small branches at the corner of the store. It was to test the lights: they might be motion-sensitive themselves, or they might have motion sensors for an alarm on them. If they’re alarm sensors, you often get a tiny red-light flash for half a second. Alarm companies sometimes think that’s not a problem but in total darkness you can see that quite easily. Nothing. The branches, if anyone found them, would look like debris from the wind. Which they were – I picked them up off the forest floor, so they had the right kind of natural break at the base, and so on. No one would know the security had been tested.