For Theo Brannigan, falling off a cliff was as easy as closing his eyes.
Typically, he’d been head down in another gory murder mystery, fairly certain he’d picked who the serial killer was, torn, as always, between self-congratulation and annoyance that he knew how it was going to end. Then he’d got a face full of Mrs Harlow’s boob, the
bus had given a tremendous lurch and he’d woken up … here.
He was on a ledge, perhaps a metre wide, covered with scrub and dense spiky flax, his feet dangling over the riverbank. His head hurt. He reached up, and his trembling fingers came away red and wet. He sat up, confused, taking in his surroundings.
Behind, a cliff rose almost vertically, up and up to the peaceful blue sky. To his right, a wall of rock. To his left, the ledge opened out onto a loose clay slope dotted with bushes and flax. It was scarred by sweeping skid marks and littered with bits of bus, bags, luggage and crumpled piles of clothes. The bank at the bottom of the slope had collapsed, the crumbling brown clay turning the river cloudy.
Solving this mystery was easy. Everyone had joked that the old bus was only held together by rust and hope, and from the looks of it, the front had pretty much disintegrated. The back end was nowhere
to be seen.
Still dizzy, Theo crawled off the ledge towards the wreckage, grabbing at the tough flax leaves for balance on the steep slope. And then his fingers wrapped around something soft. He instinctively flung it down, and wiped his hand convulsively on his thigh.
It was an arm. A floppy, freckled, female arm, torn off from the shoulder, bloody tendons and sinew dangling like wet strings. As Theo vomited into the flax, he decided that blood and gore weren’t really his thing after all.
