BooksBarbecue
Back The Last Guests Save as PDF
Chapters (54)
  1. Cover
  2. Dedication
  3. Epigraph
  4. PROLOGUE
  5. PART ONE
  6. ONE
  7. TWO
  8. THREE
  9. FOUR
  10. DEADLY SAS RAID IN AFGHANISTAN UNDER SCRUTINY
  11. FIVE
  12. SIX
  13. SEVEN
  14. EIGHT
  15. NINE
  16. TEN
  17. ELEVEN
  18. TWELVE
  19. THIRTEEN
  20. FOURTEEN
  21. FIFTEEN
  22. SIXTEEN
  23. SEVENTEEN
  24. EIGHTEEN
  25. NINETEEN
  26. TWENTY
  27. PART TWO
  28. TWENTY-ONE
  29. TWENTY-TWO
  30. TWENTY-THREE
  31. TWENTY-FOUR
  32. TWENTY-FIVE
  33. TWENTY-SIX
  34. TWENTY-SEVEN
  35. TWENTY-EIGHT
  36. TWENTY-NINE
  37. DANIEL MOORE: ‘A SINGLE BLOKE, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, A BIT OF A DUNCE BUT WITH A GOOD HEART,’ BEST FRIEND SAYS.
  38. THIRTY
  39. THIRTY-ONE
  40. THIRTY-TWO
  41. THIRTY-THREE
  42. THIRTY-FOUR
  43. THIRTY-FIVE
  44. BREAKING: POLICE CONFIRM DANIEL MOORE ACTED ALONE
  45. THIRTY-SIX
  46. THIRTY-SEVEN
  47. THIRTY-EIGHT
  48. THIRTY-NINE
  49. SECOND ARREST MADE IN WESTAY HIDDEN CAMERAS CASE
  50. EPILOGUE
  51. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  52. Discover More
  53. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  54. Also by J. P. Pomare

Amnesty International has also called for a probe and five New Zealand human rights lawyers announced this Friday that they were representing affected Afghan villagers. They supported the idea of an independent investigation and have publicly called for anyone within the special forces community to speak up about what they may have witnessed.

Another prominent lawyer called the killings ‘a textbook war crime with no ambiguity whatsoever’.

FIVE

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN a house and a home can be something as insignificant as the smell. New, sterile places don’t have their own smell. The lake house does. It’s something I barely noticed growing up; it was a scent that belonged to me. Old pine, musty carpets. A scent I’ll always associate with the happy moments of my childhood. But now the paint fumes have chased the smell away. I know it will come back, but what if it’s like those marks showing my increasing height, gone forever?

The large house echoes as Cain closes a cupboard in the kitchen downstairs. It’s still light out, and he continues working to get the place ready. It’s becoming a house, not a home. All traces of life sanded down, polished away. He’d already cut down the snapped rope from my old tyre swing, the rotting tyre was already in the trash. He’d found new rope in the basement, hitched it to the branch and used an old piece of timber from the basement to fashion a seat. ‘It’s not a tyre, but it’ll do,’ he’d said.

My mind is still reeling from the messages. Keeping busy, distracting myself by cleaning doesn’t seem to help; new linen sheets go on the beds, pillows stacked against the headboards in each room. I tie the curtains back so far that sheets of light pass through the windows and drape the bed in the master bedroom. I flatten the duvet with my palms, snap a loose thread with my fingernails. While I reach up to sweep the spider webs in the corners, I can hear Cain drilling into wood, attaching a lock to the basement door. Grandpa’s old dinghy sits dusty and unused out in the padlocked shed. That’s where it will stay – it needs a bit of work to get it running again so we won’t be letting the guests use it and it saves us searching for the key to the shed.

The guests. Those invisible, idealised travellers.

After tidying, I sit downstairs at the kitchen bench, my phone nearby, never out of reach now. I’m thinking about the text message, I’m thinking about Daniel and what I did. I’m thinking about my ring. There’s a tension in my chest. Guilt? Yes. Fear? Possibly. It feels like I’m bracing for a blow. The moment that will destroy my marriage.