Photo Finish

“We’ve heard about it,” Alleyn said.

“Yeah? You’ll still be surprised.” He slewed his head toward Troy. “You’ll be the painting lady,” he said. “Mr. Reece reckoned you might get the fancy to take a picture up at the head of the pass. Where we have lunch.”

“I don’t think that’s likely,” Troy said.

“You’re going to paint the famous lady: is that right?”

His ma

“Rather you than me,” said the driver.

“Do you paint, then?”

“Me? Not likely. I wouldn’t have the patience.”

“It takes a bit more than patience,” Alleyn said mildly.

“Yeah? That might be right, too,” the driver conceded. There was a longish pause. “Would she have to keep still, then?” he asked.

“More or less.”

“I reckon it’ll be more ‘less’ than ’more,‘” said the driver. “They tell me she’s quite a celebrity,” he added.

“Worldwide,” said Alleyn.

“What they reckon. Yeah,” said the driver with a reflective chuckle, “they can keep it for mine. Temperamental! You can call it that if you like.” He whistled. “If it’s not one thing it’s another. Take the dog. She had one of these fancy hound things, white with droopy hair. The boss give it to her. Well, it goes crook and they get a vet and he reckons it’s hopeless and it ought to be put out of its misery. So she goes crook. Screechin’ and moanin’, something remarkable. In the finish the boss says get it over with, so me and the vet take it into the hangar and he chloroforms it and then gives it an injection and we bury it out of sight. Cripes!” said the driver. “When they told her, you’d of thought they’d committed a murder.” He sucked his teeth reminiscently.

“Maria,” he said presently, “that’s her personal help or maid or whatever it’s called — she was saying there’s been some sort of a schemozzle over in Aussie with the papers. But you’ll know about that, Mr. Alleyn. Maria reckons you’ve taken on this situation. Is that right?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Alleyn. Troy gave him a good nudge.

“What she reckons. You being a detective. ’Course Maria’s a foreigner. Italian,” said the driver. “You can’t depend on it with that mob. They get excited.”

“You’re quartered there, are you? At the Lodge?”

“This is right. For the duration. When they pack it in there’ll only be a caretaker and his family on the Island. Monty Reece has built a garage and boathouse on the lakeshore and his launch takes you over to the Lodge. He’s got his own chopper, mind. No trouble. Ring through when required.”

The conversation died. Troy wondered if the driver called his employer “Monty Reece” to his face and decided that quite possibly he did.

The road across the plains mounted imperceptibly for forty miles, and a look backward established their height. Presently they stared down into a wide riverbed laced with milky turquoise streaks.

At noon they reached the top, where they lunched from a hamper with wine in a chiller kit. Their escort had strong tea from a thermos flask. “Seeing I’m the driver,” he said, “and seeing there’s the Zig-Zag yet to come.” He was moved to entertain them with stories about fatal accidents in the Gorge.

The air up there was wonderfully fresh and smelled aromatically of manuka scrub patching warm, tussocky earth. They were closer now to perpetual snow.

“We better be moving,” said the driver. “You’ll notice a big difference when we go over the head of the Pass. Kind of sudden.”

There was a weathered notice at the top. “Cornishman’s Pass. 1000 metres.”

The road ran flat for a short distance and then dived into a new world. As the driver had said, it was sudden. So sudden, so new, and so dramatic that for long afterward Troy would feel there had been a consonance between this moment and the events that were to follow, as if, on crossing over the Pass, they entered a region that was prepared and waiting.

It was a world of very dark rain forest that followed, like velvet, the convolutions of the body it enfolded. Here and there waterfalls glinted. Presiding over the forests, snow-tops caught the sun but down below the sun never reached and there, threadlike in its gorge, a river thundered. “You can just hear ’er,” said the driver, who had stopped the car.

But all they heard at first was bird song — cool statements, incomparably wild. After a moment Troy said she thought she could hear the river. The driver suggested they go to the edge and look down. Troy suffered horridly from height vertigo but went, clinging to Alleyn’s arm. She looked down once as if from a gallery in a theatre on an audience of treetops, and saw the river.

The driver, ever informative, said that you could make out the roof of a car that six years ago went over from where they stood. Alleyn said, “So you can,” put his arm round his wife, and returned to the car.

They embarked upon the Zig-Zag.

The turns in this monstrous descent were so acute that vehicles traveling in the same direction would seem to approach each other and indeed did pass on different levels. They had caught up with such a one and crawled behind it. They met a car coming up from the Gorge. Their own driver pulled up on the lip of the road and the other sidled past on the i

Alleyn’s arm was across Troy’s shoulders. He pulled her ear. “First prize for intrepidity, Mrs. A.,” he said. “You’re being splendid.”

“What did you expect me to do? Howl like a banshee?”

Presently the route flattened out and the driver changed into top gear. They reached the floor of the Gorge and drove beside the river, roaring in its courses, so that they could scarcely hear each other speak. It was cold down there.

“Now you’re in Westland,” shouted the driver.

Evening was well advanced when, after a two hours’ passage through the wet loam-scented forest that New Zealanders call bush, they came out into more open country and stopped at a tiny railway station called Kai-kai. Here they collected the private mailbag for the Lodge and then drove parallel with the railway for twenty miles, rounded the nose of a hill, and there lay a great floor of water: Lake Waihoe.

“There you are,” said the driver; “that’s the Lake for you. And the Island.”

“Stay me with flagons!” said Alleyn and rubbed his head.

The prospect was astonishing. At this hour the Lake was perfectly unruffled and held the blazing image of an outrageous sunset. Fingers of land reached out bearing elegant trees that reversed themselves in the water. Framed by these and far beyond them was the Island and on the Island Mr. Reece’s Lodge.

It was a house designed by a celebrated architect in the modern idiom but so ordered that one might have said it grew organically out of its primordial setting. Giants that carried their swathy foliage in clusters stood magnificently about a grassy frontage. There was a jetty in the foreground with a launch alongside. Grossly incongruous against the uproarious sunset, like some intrusive bug, a helicopter hovered. As they looked, it disappeared behind the house.

“I don’t believe in all this,” said Troy. “It’s out of somebody’s dream. It can’t be true.”

“You reckon?” asked the driver.

“I reckon,” said Troy.

They turned into a lane that ran between tree ferns and underbrush down to the lake edge, where there was a garage, a landing stage, a boat house, and a bell in a miniature belfry. They left the car and walked out into evening smells of wet earth, fern, and moss and the cold waters of the Lake.

The driver rang the bell, sending a single echoing note across the Lake. He then remarked that they’d been seen from the Island. Sure enough, the launch put out. So still was the evening they could hear the putt-putt of the engine. “Sound travels a long way over the water,” said the driver.