‘Nah, I’m only joking,’ Roger said, slapping the table and making the sugar packets jump. ‘We know each other, don’t we, Pippa?’
Pippa had gone from giggling to having convulsions.
‘Stop it, Roger!’ she said.
‘What do you mean, stop it? That’s not what you usually say – stop! – is it?’ He slapped his thigh again and said, ‘Nah, I’m just kidding, just get me the usual will you, beautiful?’
Pippa skipped back to the coffee counter, where she collapsed into laughter with one of the other staff. I’d already ordered and been brought my coffee, so we made a bit of small talk, waiting for Roger’s ‘usual’ to arrive. I had him down in my mind as a bloke who drank short, dark espresso shots from miniature glasses but no, when the coffee came it was milky, and served in a tall glass with cream on top.
‘So, how many people do you have to counsel?’ Roger said. He’d taken one of the sugar packets out of the pewter jar, shaken and torn it open, dumped the contents into the tall glass, and he was stirring it with a long spoon.
‘I’ll see as many who want to see me,’ I said.
He said, ‘I’m not actually traumatised, if that’s what you’re worried about. I was actually thinking of writing a book about it: Siege by the Surf, or something like that.’
I said, ‘That’s your prerogative.’
He said, ‘I’m talking to some publishers. If I sell the rights, I’d want to make a movie, too. Who do you reckon should play me?’
He’d put his tall spoon onto his saucer, and straightened himself in the aluminum chair. He turned his face this way and that, I guess to show me what he considered to be his best side. He had his chin jutted forward.
‘Not Tom Cruise,’ he said, ‘he’s too short! But what about Hugh Jackman? Or maybe George Clooney?’
I didn’t know what to say. The day had started out sunny but in the ten minutes before Roger had arrived I’d noticed clouds gathering, and now it had started to spit. I decided to get down to business. I wasn’t there to discuss movie deals with Roger. I was there . . . well, why was I there? Officially, I was there to counsel Roger – to ask him whether there was anything he wanted to talk about, anything he wanted to get off his chest.
I’ll be honest: normally when I ask that question, I’m not particularly invested in the answer. I am a good listener, but I am rarely curious about how people are going to answer, mainly because I can usually guess. Things with Roger were a bit different. I really did want to know whether he was at all troubled by what had happened, whether he would, if given the chance, have done anything differently.
I must have been suffering delusions. This is what he said:
‘Oh, look, I don’t really give a shit about what happened that day. But you know, Father, there’s two sides to every story. People seem to have forgotten that. Like, have you been on my Facebook? There’s all these gutless bastards bagging me, saying stuff they’d never say if they were standing in front of me.’
At first, I thought I must have heard him wrong – that I’d missed something important in the way he’d put that sentence together – but in my heart, I knew I hadn’t and, since we’re being honest, I might as well admit this: right at that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt for years.
Right at that moment, I wanted to punch Roger Callaghan in the face.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Not everyone knows what an inquest is. Basically, it’s a formal inquiry chaired by a coroner into the circumstances of a suspicious or unusual death – the key being, the death has to be suspicious or unusual.
You wouldn’t get an inquest into somebody’s heart attack or death from cancer. You might if somebody fell from a boat. Was it an accident or was somebody to blame? That’s basically the question that the coroner is trying to answer.
An inquest isn’t a trial, either. It’s not supposed to decide whether any one is guilty of anything. That’s for the court to decide. An inquest is exploratory; it’s more of an investigation than a trial.
I mentioned earlier that it took a while for the inquest into the events at Surf City to get underway. The media, in the meantime, had pretty much chewed over all the details. They knew who Ali Khan was, how he’d come to be in Australia, how he’d been kept in detention much longer than was necessary. They’d gone over his time with Mrs Devlin in the home stay program, and they’d made note of the fact that he’d been sent to Baxter and Villawood, despite the fact that he was an Australian citizen.
I got the feeling there was a bit of sympathy for him. Some reporters had gone to the trouble of spelling out the circumstances of how he came to be at Surf City: driven there by two disenfranchised men, one of whom – Harding – was now in prison, his bail having been denied; the other fighting against plans to have him deported.
Detail like that tends to get lost by the time it reaches the public. People don’t think, ‘The government put this poor kid in a house with a couple of losers who took advantage of him.’ They think, ‘He was running with a bad crowd – good riddance to bad rubbish.’
I guess what I’m trying to say is, people had made up their minds about Ali Khan before the inquest into events at Surf City had even started.
I remember standing in the foyer of the coroner’s court on the first day, listening to the reporters as they gathered with their sippy coffee cups in the foyer. None were counting on there being any major revelations.
‘Be lucky to get a page five story out of this,’ one said. ‘Everything’s already been said.’
The inquest started as they usually do, with Hanrahan coming into the room through a door at the back. He bowed his head. We all bowed back. The counsel assisting – that’s the title they give to the lawyer who is there to question the witnesses – gave his opening statement and then the first of the witnesses was called.
Listening to counsel assisting on that first day, I got the feeling that he was going to try to answer a few basic questions: who was Ali Khan, and why had he ended up in Surf City with an explosive device strapped to his neck? What kind of device was it?
The first two questions were answered quite easily: Ali Khan was a troubled young man who had, since he was a child, been bounced around refugee camps and detention centres. He had a strange skin condition that had people in his home country treating him like he was possessed or jinxed. He had ended up at Surf City because he’d been driven there by Brian Harding, with Safi along for the ride, after being placed in a house with them, by our own immigration department.
As to why Harding had driven him there, the plan had apparently been to get Ali Khan to rob a Westpac bank.
Wolf told the coroner that a note had been found in the top right pocket of Ali Khan’s faded jeans. It was hand written, and it said, ‘Do not speak I have a bomb hand over the mony.’
They wondered at first whether Ali Khan had written it, but had since decided that the handwriting was probably Harding’s.
It hadn’t taken police very long to trace the van that had dropped Ali Khan at Surf City. Harding had muddied up the plates but there was a registration sticker in the window. He really was not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Wolf said the plan had apparently been to send Ali Khan in, have him extract the money by showing the bomb, and for Ali Khan to then come out the same door he’d gone in, so Harding could pick him up.
Harding’s role in sending Ali Khan into the centre was confirmed by the CCTV I mentioned earlier, from outside Surf City, which showed Harding shoving Ali Khan out of the van, standing next to him on the street and making adjustments to the explosive device around his neck, and shoving him toward the entrance.
Things went awry when Ali Khan walked straight past the Westpac bank and began trying to get as far away from Harding as possible, by climbing the escalators from the ground floor, toward the car park on the roof.
Harding’s van was shown on CCTV circling Surf City for more than 30 minutes, presumably waiting for Ali Khan to come
out with a bag of cash, before police started clearing the streets. I’d have loved to have seen Harding’s face when the rain-soaked cops popped their heads into his driver’s-side window to tell him that he was being re-routed away from the scene of the crime of which he was mastermind.
He must have known the game was up but he didn’t go straight home. He and Safi were found sitting in the front seats of the van in one of the side roads near the Bondi Junction railway station, about four hours after the siege ended.
seats of the van in one of the side roads near the Bondi Junction railway station, about four hours after the siege ended.
Police dragged them back to the house in Auburn, where they found a toolbox under Harding’s bed with battery leads, offcuts of electrical wire, a string of decorative lights with battery clips and connectors; suffice to say, the kind of things people need when they’re planning to make some kind of explosive device.
On the computer, they found a folder marked ‘Robert Banks file – private’ – Rob Bank, anyone? – with instructions on how to build a pipe bomb, using a digital alarm clock, rolls of silver tape and end caps from sewerage pipes.
It was obvious from CCTV footage that Ali Khan had never intended to take hostages. He looked alarmed to find himself on the fourth floor of the complex with no obvious way out – was he expecting to find a fire escape, or something like it? – and it seems that the petrol in the pipe bomb had started to leak.
Terrified that people were starting to notice him, Ali Khan had started to run.
I don’t know what he made of Mouse dragging him into Cups and Saucy, but the first thing he did when he saw the door closing was leap to his feet and try to open it so he could get out again. Mouse testified that she’d had to say something like, ‘Hey, relax, it’s been locked by security; we’re quite safe in here.’
The coroner wondered why Ali Khan didn’t allow explosives experts into the room to free him from the device around his neck.
The general consensus was that he thought that’d he’d be blamed, or else he thought nobody would bother to save him from a controlled detonation. Perhaps he thought, ‘If they open the door, and the hostages run out, they will blow me up; or they will shoot me, and I’ll blow up.’
After a day or so of evidence of this nature attention turned to the type of bomb that Ali Khan had been wearing. Explosives experts took the stand, describing it as ‘your classic pipe bomb’ – literally a piece of pipe, stuffed with sugar and potassium nitrate from the hardware store that had been cooked up in a skillet.
It was surreal, seeing the army’s top explosives guys – military men in fatigues, guys used to dealing with the most sophisticated weapons in the world – giving evidence about a device that had been put together in somebody’s kitchen.
Hanrahan said, ‘It was something that anyone could make at home, was it?’
The reporters in the media seats leaned forward, pens at the ready for the answer to that one.
‘That’s right,’ the military expert said. ‘All you need, really, is a piece of steel pipe and a hacksaw. You put the pipe in a vice, and you cut it down until it’s about ten centimetres long. You don’t want it any larger than that, or it becomes too heavy to carry.
‘You put one end in a vice and squeeze it, so the pipe is closed at one end, and then you stuff the other end with match heads, bits of broken glass, screws and nails and some firecracker powder, which you can get from Chinatown. Then you put in the fertiliser and sugar mix and you’re good to go.’
The reporters loved that. I read some of the stories they produced: ‘Surf City Bomb was Homemade – Ingredients in Your Kitchen!’
Hanrahan wanted to know whether the New South Wales police and other bomb disposal experts who had gathered on the day were equipped to deal with such a device.
The military expert said, ‘Oh sure, but we had no way of knowing what kind of device we were dealing with, before we’d examined it. We weren’t able to tell anything from where we were sitting, watching on the laptops. We could study the CCTV – it showed there was a box around the young man’s neck, and we’d been told that the young man smelled of petrol.
‘We were taking some educated guesses as to what kind of explosive device it might be, but to really know what he was carrying, we would have needed to be a lot closer so we could either X-ray the device or sniff at it electronically, neither of which we could do without going into the shop.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And if you had gone into the shop . . . ?’
‘We’d have done so cautiously. We wouldn’t have sent in anyone without a blast suit – padded out with explosive protection; you’ve probably seen them, it makes them look like the Michelin man – and they would have one of those plastic contraptions around their face, a bit like the old plastic buckets they used to put on dogs to stop them from chewing off their own tail; they’d also have boots and gloves.
‘The other option we’ve got is robot – we call it Wall-E – controlled from an army truck. You can send Wall-E in, and he can do a controlled explosion. He can cover the device, trigger the device, but again, you’ve got to have access to the shop to do that.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And while you were outside the shop . . . you had no idea, really, whether or not the pipe bomb that Ali Khan was wearing was wired up to a timer or whether it might have been capable of being triggered remotely, by somebody with a mobile phone, for example?’
The military expert said, ‘Not at the time. Only later we realised how strange it was. What normally happens, at least in a terrorist situation, when a person makes a pipe bomb they will stick in a fuse and maybe connect it to an eggtimer, so it’s actually going to go off at some point.’
Hanrahan said, ‘But there was no timer in this case?’
The military expert said, ‘That’s right. The pipe was loaded with an explosive powder but there was no fuse, and no timer. There was no remote trigger. There was actually no way that we could see for anyone to set that bomb off.’
Hanrahan said, ‘Not even with the petrol in the mix?’
The bomb expert shook his head.
‘Petrol on its own isn’t explosive,’ he said. ‘The pipe bomb in this case had been wrapped in a towel, and somebody had poured petrol into the shoeshine box, and that petrol was leaking out. But petrol can’t just explode itself. You still need a trigger.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And there wasn’t one?’
The military expert said, ‘There wasn’t one in the conventional sense. There was no fuse, and no timer. There was nobody outside Surf City, sitting in a van, waiting to push a big red button like you see in the movies.’
Hanrahan said, ‘But, obviously, the pipe bomb did explode?’
The military expert nodded.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Not immediately, but yes; ultimately, it did explode.’
Chapter Thirty
For all the information people have at their disposal these days, they still have short memories. If they remember Ali Khan, for example, it’s only as the refugee – ‘Wasn’t he, like, albino or disabled or something?’ – who went into Surf City with a bomb strapped to his neck and ended up dying there.
They forget how.
It wasn’t the pipe bomb that killed him.
Mitchell did a great job of getting the pipe bomb off Ali Khan. He’d unlocked the U-lock, loosened the device and, together with Roger, he’d lifted it high enough for Ali Khan to escape from underneath it.
Mitchell couldn’t have been more careful. He didn’t scrape Ali Khan’s ears or the sides of his grey face. The device, in coming off, didn’t graze so much as Ali Khan’s buzz cut. It took some effort: from where I was standing, I could see that Mitchell wasn’t that much taller than Ali Khan, and yet, with Roger’s help, he managed to hold the device a good metre above Ali Khan’s head. His arms were pretty much vertical. He was standing like tennis champions do when they hold a trophy.
He did it for long enough for Ali Khan to scoot out
from underneath.
‘Go,’ he said, and Ali Khan skidded to his left. From where I was standing, it looked like he briefly touched his own chest as if to make sure the weight was really gone from it, and then he ran toward the door. Foto mentioned earlier that it had long silver handles, inside and out, and Ali Khan was again tugging on them.
Wolf said, ‘He wants out!’ And then he said, ‘Spring the door!’
He meant, ‘Spring the lock,’ or ‘Open the lock!’ but everyone understood: he wanted Foto to use the keyboard to get that door open so Ali Khan could run out of the shop into the shopping centre.
Foto’s hands were shaking but I’d still say that it took less than a second for him to oblige. A keystroke later, Ali Khan was out of the shop and running down the corridor in those grubby Vans, the tendrils of his jeans trailing behind him, the sides of his hoodie now flapping loose.
Did he have any idea how much danger he was in as he started to run? There were snipers all around the atrium with high-powered rifles aimed right at him. There were at least twenty police officers with service revolvers drawn on my side of the atrium alone.
Wolf started shouting, ‘Get on the floor! Get on the floor or we’ll shoot!’
It never came to that.
Ali Khan was too quick. He skidded a bit in his worn shoes, just as he’d done when he first entered the centre. He reached the atrium balustrade well before anyone could get near him, and he went straight over. I didn’t notice this at the time, but watching the CCTV footage of the incident – it’s all over YouTube – it’s like watching a kid leap a fence.
Ali Khan’s got two hands on the balustrade, and he brings his two legs up and over together, and then he lets go. He falls through the space, falling four floors, spread out now, star-shaped, like a parachutist, except he has no parachute, and he falls fast – it takes seconds – toward the marble floor.
He made a sound when he landed that I probably won’t ever forget – a sound that wasn’t a thud but a thump, a sound more fleshy and wet than any sound I’d heard before.
No Place Like Home Page 22
