Nick worked quickly. He went to the underground garage and came back with rope and some rags. He stuffed rags into Rebecca’s mouth and then tied another rag around her face. He tied her hands tightly behind her back and bound her feet together. He dragged her by the armpits down the stairs to the garage and with some effort managed to get her into his boot.
When he’d seen Rebecca go into his study earlier, he had cursed under his breath. He’d been so clumsy, not putting the belt in a safer place. He had narrowly escaped detection that morning when the police had searched his house. By a stroke of luck, he had taken the belt from the container in the car the previous night to continue to make Leong’s prized possessions into an artefact in the Dayak tradition. He had put the belt into a secret underground safe under one of his prized Turkish rugs in his bedroom. It was typical of police sloppiness that they hadn’t found the safe during either search they had made of the house. It had emboldened him even more.
Nick reversed out of his steep driveway. It only took about twenty minutes at that time of night to get to Hollies Winery and Café in the Adelaide Hills. The winery and café was a neglected muse of one of his rich friends. The café only operated for the peak summer period and was closed for the rest of the year. The winery was never open to the public but just used at harvest time in February or March. A contractor who never went near the cellar tended the vines on the property. Once the wine from a select vintage was bottled and transported down to the owner’s vast cellar in his Rose Park house, and once the new year’s harvest was put into a mixture of vats and oak casks, the place was locked up and not visited again until the following February.
Nick normally helped out on the one day of harvest that was set aside for a picnic. Each harvest, Nick was charged with opening the place and using the café kitchen to cook up food for the lunch. Anticipating that he might like to access a bit of wine for himself from time to time, he had had a replica key cut a couple of years ago.
Nick pulled off the road into the long driveway that led to Hollies. He drove past the old stone café, with its verandah posts framed by the variegated holly. He stopped outside the large stone barn. After unlocking both the door to the barn and the cellar doors and switching on the lights, he unlocked the boot. Rebecca was still out cold. He heaved her heavy body out of the boot, roughly bumped her down the stairs, and placed her on the floor of the cellar.