No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  A second part of the strategy involved either using Cate – something Wolf decided not to do, given that there had been no contact between them for so long – or contacting the next of kin of the people stuck in the shop. The presence of Mitchell’s mum, for example, might move Ali Khan in a way a plea from a trained negotiator could not.

  I mentioned earlier that two of the four people in the room had been relatively easy to identify, and it was a simple matter to reach their next of kin. That’s because of all the paperwork Surf City employees have to do to get an ID, and you can’t fill out a form of any kind these days without giving a next of kin.

  It’s going to sound like a cliché but it’s actually true: Kimmi’s family – not her parents, who were still in Vietnam, but her uncle – owned a restaurant in Sydney’s west. It was a modest place: a few small, round tables with long, red tablecloths; small bowls for soy sauce, with chopsticks in paper sleeves balanced on top. The family was Vietnamese, but the restaurant was Chinese. That seemed to be what people wanted: wonton soup, and Peking duck pancakes. Wolf sent two young constables to the restaurant. I only heard this second hand, but apparently Kimmi’s uncle was out the back making a hell of a noise with his pots and pans. There was a young bloke out front with a machete or a hacksaw – some kind of frightening implement – and he was hacking into fatty chunks of pale chicken on the wooden countertop.

  He called out to Kimmi K’s uncle, who marshalled a younger member of the family – Australian-born, with perfect English – to come out and interpret. Police explained the situation: there was a siege at the shopping complex where Kimmi worked. She was trapped in a shop with a man who ‘looked dangerous’. Kimmi’s uncle had frantic questions: was it a gun? A knife? It was none of those things. He seemed to have some kind of pipe bomb attached to his neck, smelling of petrol.

  The family didn’t have to go to the scene, but they would be escorted to the scene, if that’s what they wanted. The uncle wanted to go, and he wanted everyone to go with him: Kimmi’s aunts and cousins and other relatives, pouring out of the woodwork of this little restaurant.

  They all had mobile phones – the girls had dazzling ones, with diamante cases – and they were using them constantly, calling people overseas, or friends or family elsewhere in Sydney to tell them to come, too. Their distress was obvious. The police explained that the situation was delicate; they needed to decide who should go. The aunt insisted that she couldn’t. It would give her a heart attack, so it was Kimmi’s uncle who finally got into the police car and went to Surf City.

  Mouse’s mum had been easy to find for the same reason: as her next of kin, Mouse had given her mum’s name and address when she’d filled out the form for her Surf City security card. Mrs Harding wasn’t a well woman, but when contacted by police, she seemed quite calm. Maybe she knew Mouse well enough to know that whatever trouble she was in, she had the courage to deal with it.

  The situation with Mitchell’s mum was different. She’d been on her knees scrubbing a bathtub at the Luxe hotel in Ultimo – private work was drying up in the GFC, so she’d taken on some shifts at various hotels – when she looked up, rubber gloves still on, to see police standing in the doorway with a hotel manager.

  She thought they were going to accuse her of stealing something. She’d heard of that happening with other maids. She was about to start defending herself when the manager, in her black blazer, with her plastic ‘Can I help YOU?’ badge on her lapel, said, ‘Mrs Cousins, the police want to see you. It’s about your son . . .’

  Her heart had ‘done a flip-flop, like did he get hit by a bus?’ and then soared when she was told, no, there hadn’t been an accident, and it soared higher when they said Mitchell had been caught in a hostage drama at Surf City – because Mitchell couldn’t be at Surf City; he was at school. She’d been asked to sit on the stiff lounge in the hotel room, gloves still on, wiping her brow, and look at the images on the little laptop they’d brought with them. She burst into tears.

  ‘We’ll take you straight there,’ police said.

  Mitchell’s sister, Eloise, was at school. There was some debate over whether Mitchell’s mum needed to go and get her. She was too young to walk home alone. She would be waiting for Mitchell at the school gate, but police decided against going to get her; with some luck, Mitchell would be out of Cups and Saucy before the school day was done. If not, they could worry about it later; send a female police officer, maybe.

  A young constable helped Mitchell’s mum into the back of the police car. She and everyone else had been asked not to tell anyone what was happening but word was starting to spread. The first reports as to who was stuck in the shop with the bomber popped up on Twitter about twenty minutes after the door closed. Mouse was known to everyone in Surf City. People had seen her dragging people to what she thought was safety, so there was a tweet saying, ‘Hope Mouse is safe. Love U MOUSE! #hostages’ – that spread like wildfire.

  The news about Mitchell Cousins took a bit longer to spread, I suppose because his mum wasn’t going to tweet it, and neither was the school principal, but once the kids had cottoned on, they had it up on Facebook.

  As to Roger, I mentioned earlier that he had his own business, called Roger Callaghan Real Estate. His office was in Hawthorn, near where he lived. Hawthorn is one of what they call the ‘leafy’ suburbs of Melbourne, meaning people who live there tend to have a bit of money.

  I also mentioned earlier that police had put a call into his office, asking to speak to him. That seemed the easiest way to find out whether it actually was Roger in the shop. The girl on reception – Roger’s secretary, or executive assistant as she’s probably called these days – had said he hadn’t been in the office that day. A short time later, he’d popped up on the CCTV at Surf City.

  Wolf’s team got in touch with their colleagues in the Victorian police, who lifted Roger’s address off his licence. At Wolf’s request, they sent two constables over to his house. It was typical of the suburb: tuck-pointed brick, leadlight windows, romantic verandah, pots on the chimney. The police car pulled up out the front, near the box hedge. The constables raised the brass knocker on the door.

  There was quite a bit of noise coming from inside the house – children shrieking, maybe, or else it was Dora, singing on the plasma TV.

  In any case, the door opened, and there stood a slim and pretty woman, dressed in tan pants and a collared polo, with a cashmere jumper loose around her shoulders.

  There was a small child clinging like seaweed to her leg. His eyes went wide at the sight of two police standing on his tiled porch.

  ‘Can I help you?’ this woman said, over the noise coming from inside the house.

  One of the young police officers said, ‘Are you Amy Callaghan?’

  The woman in the tan pants said, ‘Yes, I am. Just excuse me,’ and detached the small boy from her leg. She called out to the nanny, saying, ‘Aileen, can you come and get Milo?’

  A pretty young girl – an Irish backpacker turned au pair, perhaps – poked her head out from the kitchen, saw the police, came down the hall, scooped up Milo, and whisked him away.

  ‘I’m sorry, yes, I am Amy Callaghan,’ the woman said. ‘How can I help you?’

  The young constable said, ‘We’re sorry to disturb you . . .’

  Amy said, ‘It’s alright; please, just tell me what’s happened. Is this to do with Roger? He’s not home. He’s at work. Has something happened to him? You can tell me. I’m his wife.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  It’s not for me to judge but I have never understood why a bloke like Roger Callaghan would get married. My best guess – and it comes after watching quite a few of them do it – is that men like Roger get sick of being bachelors or, more accurately, they get sick of still being a bachelor, long after everyone they know has settled down.

  One minute, they’re in their twenties, hanging around in clubs and strip joints, playing golf and going on footy trips and learning to skyd
ive and snorkel, and the next, they’re going to buck’s nights.

  It’s a bit of a lark at first, a continuation of the parties they’ve long been having, except that they get to be a best man or a groomsman and joke about shagging the bridesmaids, but then their mates are married and getting mortgages, and maybe even having babies. They’re not available to go out anymore, so the pool of people to party with starts to dwindle.

  One by one, they start popping off and, if you’re the last man standing, there’s a risk that you’ll start to look a bit tragic, and looking tragic was something that Roger desperately wanted to avoid.

  He’d dropped out of school early, despite coming from a family where that wasn’t really done. He felt the heat of his father, breathing down on him, ready to say, ‘I told you so,’ if it all went wrong.

  It had gone so right. He’d gone from the kid who carried the clipboard at auctions to the man who brought down the gavel. He had a business with his own name on the door. He was the principal, owner and managing director of Roger Callaghan Real Estate on the high street in one of Melbourne’s leafiest suburbs. He employed seven people, including a pretty girl to answer the phone. He had all the necessary club memberships – football, cricket, golf, gym – and a shiny car he’d picked up brand new from the dealer, just to soak in the smell.

  He was doing well on the club scene, getting laid most nights of the week, even if he occasionally paid – and then, one by one, his old school friends had started to get married, and look and behave like they were middle-aged. Some had risen quite high up in the banks and law firms where they worked; others were running their own small businesses, and it all took up a lot of their time.

  Before long, they were also having babies. First one, then another, then somebody had two. They couldn’t go to the pub. When they did, they didn’t want to get drunk. They’d say things like, ‘The hangover’s not worth it, when Rory’s up at 5 am,’ and Roger could not understand why that was funny and not tragic, and they spoke of other things he either didn’t understand or couldn’t have cared less about: the way baby shit came out in different shades of green, or how the DVD player wasn’t working because one of the kids had stuffed a piece of toast in it, or how they never got any sex. It didn’t sound all that enticing but Roger could see that if he didn’t join them, he’d be beaten by them: he’d be the one who hadn’t settled down and gotten married, which in turn would make him look a bit tragic.

  Also, a man in his thirties with no responsibilities – people might think he was gay, and Roger didn’t want anyone to think he was gay.

  If he got to forty and he still wasn’t married – and if he was known to have a thing for the young and spray-tanned – he’d start to look sleazy.

  So he got married.

  Maybe you’re wondering how he did that. Believe me when I say it’s not that difficult for a bloke in his thirties, reasonably good-looking, with some money in his pocket, to decide that he wants to be married within a year and to easily achieve it. Women in their thirties who want the same thing might be appalled by how easily it’s done.

  They’d come in for pre-marriage counselling, these couples, back when I had a parish. We made it compulsory, ostensibly so the couple could see whether they were really suited, but mostly because we wanted to make sure that whatever children were born of the union were raised Christian.

  We didn’t expect to see them in church every week. Hardly anyone does that anymore. But we’d expect those babies to be baptised and to return to the church when it came time for them to get married, and to bring their dead parents to us to get buried.

  We called it matches, hatches and dispatches, and that’s how the future of the church is secured.

  Maybe you’re thinking, that’s all very well, but where did Roger find his bride? In the strip club?

  Of course he didn’t find her in the strip club.

  Men like Roger marry certain kinds of girls, and they are not the kind of girls they pick up at strip clubs. They marry girls they can control; girls who will deliver children for them; girls who aren’t particularly ambitious in their own careers, so there never has to be an argument about who earns the money, and therefore who wears the pants.

  Having decided to get married, all Roger needed to do was look around at the flock of sweet, attractive, not-too-ambitious girls in his social circle, and choose one; or else he could find somebody completely new, which might break a few hearts of the hopeful, but so what?

  He met Amy through work. Not at work, because that would have been wrong. He regularly slept with girls who worked in his office but they were all party girls, and when the time came to choose a bride, a party girl wasn’t what Roger wanted.

  Amy had called him one afternoon, seeking a ‘professional evaluation’ of her parents’ home. Her father had passed away, she said, leaving her mum alone.

  ‘She’s rattling around in the big family home,’ she’d said. ‘Us kids are grown up. The place is too big for her. The garden’s getting a bit much. Things keep going wrong: there are loose tiles on the verandah. It’s going to cost a lot to make them good. Bit by bit, the house is falling apart. We think she should sell the place. She isn’t that keen. But once she’s got the money from the house, she could move into a nice apartment: something smaller, with everything new. She would feel safer. It would be easier to keep clean.’

  Roger understood. It was precisely the kind of situation he was paid to understand. It was the same story he heard over and over on his particular real estate patch, comprised as it was of large, family homes, purchased by married couples with children in the 1980s, whose kids were now grown up.

  They were his vendors, and they all wanted to downsize.

  His buyers were young couples with little kids, moving up and out of apartments they’d outgrown in places like St Kilda and Collingwood, people who were looking for something bigger, with a garden.

  Given that most of the homes in his area hadn’t been renovated for thirty years, they were looking a bit dated, and were therefore somewhat affordable.

  Exchanges like these – old, dated house to a fresh new family – were his bread and butter. Roger made all the right noises on the phone and got invited around to give the appraisal. He put on a good suit. He shined his shoes. His tie was immaculate. He knocked on the door not slightly early and not a little late but dead on time.

  Amy and her mum invited him in. The three of them sat together on the dated, floral lounge suite. Roger could tell that Amy’s mum was fretting. She wasn’t really sold on the whole idea of selling. Amy was nervous; she wanted the deal done, so she could stop worrying about every leaking pipe and loose tile.

  Roger could also tell that Amy’s mum had never made an important financial decision in her life. She needed somebody to take control, and Roger was happy to oblige.

  Sitting on her couch, leaning slightly forward, he told Amy’s mum that the house, unrenovated, was worth something in the order of $1.2 million. His share of that, as selling agent, would be around $60,000.

  ‘The rest will be yours,’ he said, knowing that he was talking about more money than she, as a woman, had ever seen in her life.

  ‘You can get yourself a beautiful little place, a smaller place, a more manageable garden, and enjoy your retirement.’

  ‘I’ve got so much invested in this home,’ Amy’s mum said.

  ‘And now it’s time,’ Roger said, ‘to look after yourself.’

  The deal was as good as done.

  He’d have a lackey in the office do the open-for-inspections. Somebody else would organise the advertising. It would be his responsibility to turn up on the day and raise the gavel. That was about it. All it required was old-fashioned, time-honoured courtesies. He thanked both Amy and her mum for the invitation to inspect their ‘beautiful home’. He praised the gardens.

  He did not fail to notice Amy. She was petite and brunette. She did not have perfect, half-cup, entirely silicon breasts like the girls he
picked up in clubs. She had a lovely curve to her hip and her breasts were probably real. She had pale skin; no tandoori tan here. If she was wearing make-up, it was so subtle, he could not tell. Her eyebrows were neatly plucked into a sensible shape, not a thin line. She wore heels but they weren’t what he called ‘stripper heels’ – she could actually walk in them.

  He told her that her mum’s house reminded him of the house he’d grown up in.

  He wasn’t fibbing: the house had that musty smell that gathered in the heavy drapes and the carpet and the thickly upholstered furniture that nobody bothers with anymore, but which had lasted twenty years.

  He made sure to sit on the couch, not the only armchair. He could tell by looking that the armchair had been Amy’s father’s, and only his: there was something about the way the material at the end of the seat was worn away, where the old man’s hands had gripped for years, watching Channel Nine News, and World Series Cricket.

  He enquired about the children who had once lived in the house.

  Amy said it was only her and her sister, Elizabeth, who now lived in London with her banker husband.

  Roger asked Amy whether she was working, or married, or . . .?

  Amy blushed and said, no, she wasn’t married; she was working at an advertising agency as an account executive, and Roger knew that job: it was a starter job. It paid nothing. All the girls hired to do it were pretty. Some would kick through the glass ceilings and go on to have careers. Most would meet a guy in the pub after work one night, settle down and get married.

  Amy’s mum had sensed that they were getting on and she’d gone to the kitchen and come back with a tray with teacups and saucers and Melting Moments, the homemade kind, with a fork scraped across the top to make the pattern.

  Roger made a show of putting his hand on his chest – on his silky, ice-blue tie, over his crisp shirt – and said, ‘My mum used to make these!’ Amy’s mother had said, ‘Oh, please have one! Have more than one!’ and so he’d taken one and then another, apologising as he took the second, but he couldn’t resist they were so delicious.