No Safe Place

by Jenny Spence

  I glance around. People are sneaking looks at me.

  “Putting it together,” says Derek, “Elly was the last person here to talk to Carlos. She went to see him on Monday to look at the updates to the parsing engine, make some notes. Later on, seems he did his backup like always, called the courier. His disk arrive in the office Monday afternoon and Sunanda logged it in. Right, Sunny?”

  She nods.

  “So yesterday Elly went back to see him again.”

  Faces turn to me expectantly.

  “It wasn’t about work,” I say. “I thought Carlos might be able to help me. You probably saw that thing on the news, the old lady who was shot in the street? Well, it was right outside my house.”

  Exclamations and questions break out. “In Brunswick?” “Is that where you live?” “Did you see it?” “Did you know her?”

  Finally I have to ask for silence.

  “Look, I’m still trying to sort out exactly what happened. It was someone in a car, they sort of followed me down the street. It was a real shock, and it . . . it seemed possible it was really aimed at me.” I sense incredulity. Good old Elly? “I was going to see if Carlos had any ideas. He always seemed to know what was going on.”

  “Some lady cop was here, asking us all about your relationship with Carlos,” says Viet Lei.

  “Relationship?” I snort.

  “Sam told her you’re one of the few people he’ll let in to his place.”

  “Yeah, but you must have told her I didn’t have a relationship with him? For God’s sake. Carlos?”

  They look at me, their young faces blank. To them, the lives of people over forty are a mystery. I decide to let it go.

  “Anyway,” I say sadly. “Carlos didn’t open the door, so I got worried. I found him dead in his backyard. It looks like he ordered a pizza just after the courier left, and someone pretended to be the delivery guy, so he let him in. Then he realised straight away, and he tried to run.” My voice quavers. I look up and see that Sunny is crying.

  “Derek says someone tried to break in to the office,” I continue. “All these things must be connected, but I don’t trust the cops to figure out what it’s about. That bloody policewoman, Webster, doesn’t seem interested in anything that’s not in her textbook.”

  Once again they’re all talking at once.

  “Come on!” I say, feeling like a school teacher bringing a class to order. “Just let me finish. Someone trashed Carlos’s place but it didn’t look like they were after stuff they could sell. I thought Luke and Steve should go over and have a look.”

  “Yeah, so the cops came and got us,” says Luke. “None of the sound gear was taken, and that’s, like, the best German stuff, and some of it is definitely portable. What the killer did, he just ripped the hard disks out of all the boxes. Must’ve taken a while because some of them had to be unscrewed. And there was no laptop, iPad or phone anywhere around. Carlos would have had all those, wouldn’t he?”

  I nod.

  “It looked to us like he was after all the data,” continues Luke. “Either there was something there he wanted, or he was trying to destroy everything Carlos had. But he must have known there’d be backups. And in Carlos’s case, backups of backups.”

  “Looks like he knew about the backup Carlos sent to the office,” I say. “Don’t you think that’s why someone tried to break in? To do the same thing here?”

  Derek looks horrified at the thought. He wouldn’t be too upset about burglars stealing his money or his computers, but the thought of someone stealing data from him is insupportable. After a while, he says, “What would someone want with Carlos’s data anyway? The stuff he was working on wasn’t such a big deal.”

  We think about that for a while.

  “Carlos himself was worth more than anything he had on his hard disks,” muses Sam.

  “Yeah,” says Ravi. “They could kidnap him, or something, and make him work for them.”

  “And why would anyone want to kill Elly?” says Sunny.

  “Could be someone got a grudge against this company,” says Derek. “We don’t know what they’re going to do next. Maybe we all better be careful.”

  There’s some uneasy shuffling and murmuring at this. People start speculating about Derek’s rivals.

  “I don’t like those guys at Horizon,” says Ravi. “Haven’t you beaten them for a few tenders lately?”

  “Or what about that Serbian contractor you sacked last year?” says Nick. “That guy was psycho. You should tell the cops about him.”

  Trust Nick to bring that up. Nick is pessimistic and prone to angry outbursts, though his workmate, plump, placid Anna can always keep him under control. They make a good work team, too, his wild creativity balanced by her razor-sharp logic. But he’s highly critical of anyone else who’s erratic, especially if they do work similar to his.

  I remember the Serbian. Derek didn’t exactly sack him – just didn’t renew his contract, on Nick’s recommendation, because his work was inconsistent and his behaviour unpredictable. I did hear raised voices in Derek’s office when he got his marching orders, though why that would lead to him targeting Carlos and me rather than Derek and Nick seems a bit of a stretch.

  Derek lets everyone go on for a while, talking off the tops of their heads, airing whatever theories they’ve been cooking up. Omar brings up his terrorist idea, but he doesn’t mention Romanians. Steve Li keeps his mouth shut, as always, but after a while he whispers something to Luke.

  “Steve’s looked at the CD,” says Luke. “It’s got Carlos’s work on it, but there’s also a dump of some files he’s been looking at in his own time. Steve says it looks quite interesting.”

  Eyes turn to Steve who remains silent, so Luke continues.

  “Carlos had been hacking some interesting sites. He’d saved a few databases. Looks like he was trying to analyse them.”

  “Hacking?” Derek explodes. “You guys know our rule about hacking.”

  "Carlos was off site,” Luke reminds him.

  “We don’t want to mess with data he got through hacking,” says Derek uneasily. “Anyway, we don’t know what he was doing with it. Without his hard disks, we don’t have any history.”

  “You were looking at one of his computers that was still on,” I say to Steve. “Did anything show up in the RAM?”

  “Just a chess game,” says Steve, “against someone with a Ukrainian IPP.”

  It’s not hard to believe Steve could look at the string of numbers that constitute an IPP address and deduce where the user is.

  Steve whispers again. Luke says: “There’s a few log files on the CD.”

  People start asking questions, and I raise my voice to be heard.

  “We shouldn’t be talking about this. If Carlos found out something it’s dangerous to know, we need to keep it quiet.”

  “Okay,” says Derek. “I’m gonna take this off-line and make it a project. Luke and Ravi, you’re not too busy right now, so you’re both on it. Go through what Carlos was working on, in his own time as well as mine, and report back to me. I give you a couple of days, charge time to the company. Everyone else, back to work.”

  I’m not happy to be excluded, but my reaction is eclipsed by Steve Li, who’s showing signs of agitation, high drama for him.

  “Steve wants to work on this too,” says Luke.

  “No way,” says Derek firmly. “Steve’s full-time on Synergy 3.4. We’re too close to release date.”

  They negotiate. Steve calms down immediately, knowing what the outcome will be.

  “He’ll work extra hours,” says Luke.

  “He might have to anyway.”

  “He’s only got three criticals left.”

  “They all top priority.”

  “It’s cool, Derek. It’ll all be done.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  Inevitably, Derek concedes that Steve can join the project as soon as he’s finished his last lot of bug fixes. Like Carlos, Steve is too valuable to t
he company not to get his own way. In fact, although he looks like a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and is pathologically shy, his ability means he’ll be Carlos’s natural successor.

  As we’re dispersing, I say quietly to Luke: “There was one thing Carlos mentioned to me. Let me come to one of your meetings and I’ll tell you what I can remember.”

  “Sure. Maybe after lunch? I’m gonna get the guys together right now to work out a rough plan.”

  “Omar said Carlos had Romanians on his payroll,” I say. “Do you know anything about that?”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised. I wish I could afford Romanians,” says Luke, then sees that I don’t get it. “Okay, Elly, it’s like this. If you’re really into gaming, you spend a lot of time on the lower levels, fighting your way up to where it starts getting interesting, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, people like Carlos, with plenty of money and plenty of other stuff to do with their time, don’t want to be trudging round endless dungeons fighting monsters just so they can build up their strength and collect their weapons, so they pay someone else to do it. Preferably someone in a country with low pay rates.”

  “Romania.”

  “Yeah. There’s a whole industry over there.”

  “So he could have had them doing other stuff, besides playing his games for him?”

  “It’s possible. If I were him I’d have farmed out anything tedious and repetitive.”

  “God, I could do with some Romanians myself.”

  “Yeah, they’re cheaper than Indians, but Indians are better at English, of course. Hey, Steve,” he says. “Did Carlos use Romanians?”

  “Nah, Ukrainians,” says Nick, having heard the last part of our conversation. “Ukrainians charge about the same as Romanians, and he found some guys he liked. I did a bit of interpreting for him at first, but their team leader spoke good English.”

  “So he wasn’t just playing chess with them?” I ask.

  “Nah. Those Ukrainians are pretty good. They can find out just about anything for you.”

  “So,” I muse, “would we have any record of his dealings with the Ukrainians?”

  “Unlikely,” says Luke. “No reason why he’d back up emails or online conversations. But we’ll have a good look anyway.”

  “Ukrainians, Romanians.” I shake my head as Luke and I head for our desks. “You guys always surprise me.”

  “Steve’s got this great team in Bali,” says Luke. “They maintain his website and do a bit of code cutting for him. Best thing is, he and his girlfriend go over for a holiday twice a year and he gets it off his tax.”

  “Steve has a girlfriend?” I say, incredulous.

  13

  When I get to my desk, the voicemail light is blinking. It takes me the rest of the morning to go through all the messages, which fall into three categories: friends who’ve heard about Mabel and are anxious about me, whether or not they realise I was involved; work acquaintances who have heard about Carlos and are inquisitive; and people I don’t know who don’t say why they’re calling. One of the last messages is from Constable d’Alessandro, telling me that the police have finished examining my house and it’s fine for me to go home now. There’s nothing from the other cops.

  Even though the police don’t see any problem with me going home, I’m not prepared to risk it until I work out what’s going on. I wish I knew the order in which things happened. Did he kill Carlos that night, after he’d missed me? Maybe he didn’t even know he’d missed. Or did he kill Carlos first, and then stalk me?

  Either way, if he tried to kill me once, whatever the reason, why wouldn’t he try again?

  I decide to call Lewis.

  “It’s Elly Cartwright,” I say.

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Nice to talk to you too. So what’s happening? What have you found out?” I ask.

  “Ummm. Best if we talk in person. Where are you right now?”

  “I’d rather not say. But I can meet you somewhere in the city this afternoon. If you give me a time, I’ll text you an address.”

  “Okay. Make it two-thirty.”

  I turn back to my computer, and try to do some work. I’ve got two or three small projects to finish off before I have to think about my next major piece of work, which was supposed to be the update of Carlos’s software. When Derek settles down we’ll have to decide what to do about that.

  I also make a list of the phone messages I’ve received from people I don’t know, with their numbers, and print it out. Then I borrow Ravi’s phone and text the address of a café in Exhibition Street to Lewis. Instead of signing it, I just add “two thirty” at the end.

  Some of my colleagues are in the habit of going out to lunch together at a pub in Spencer Street. When they start to make a move, I pick up my coat and one of the patterned scarves and drift over.

  “You coming to the pub with us, Elly?” asks Chang.

  “Nah, just going your way,” I reply, tying the scarf over my head, Audrey Hepburn style.

  We leave the office in a tight group and walk down Spencer Street together. When we get to La Trobe Street, I detach myself and jump on a tram that’s headed downtown. I squeeze into a corner seat facing backwards and watch the doors. The only other people who get on the tram are a couple of young Chinese women with a baby in a stroller. Nevertheless, I get off at William Street and duck into the Flagstaff Station, where I catch the first city circle train that’s going. Once the train’s moving, I go through to another carriage.

  I get off at Parliament, wearing a different scarf and with my coat now folded over my arm, and walk down Little Collins Street to the alley behind Carol’s building. The back door is propped open as usual during business hours to accommodate smokers, who hover furtively in the lane, indulging their habit.

  Carol is lucky enough to have professional rooms in a highrise where several floors are occupied by a large, old-fashioned finance company which provides a canteen for its employees. We often meet here. There’s nothing fancy about the food, but if you only want a soup or a toasted sandwich you can’t beat it for price and privacy. Most people who buy lunch here must take it back to their desks, because the cavernous space is never more than a quarter full.

  Carol is waiting for me by the counter.

  “Toasted cheese and tomato okay?” she says.

  I nod, and hug her without speaking. It’s so good to see her, broad and dependable, both feet on the floor. She’s always been there in my life from as far back as I can remember. When my mother was dying and I sat by her hospital bed day and night, it was Carol who would appear beside me, handing me food, cups of tea, messages from the outside world. Sometimes I would doze off, and when I woke she would be sitting in the chair on the other side of the bed. We didn’t talk, my mother’s rasping breath the only sound in the room.

  Now we receive our food and take it to the lounge chairs in the corner.

  “I don’t know if you should be out and about,” she says.

  “A scarf isn’t much of a disguise. You haven’t been at the office, have you?”

  “Yes, but I’m being careful.”

  “How’s the arm?”

  “Actually, I think the dressing needs changing, and I’m a bit worried about going to the hospital. Have you got first aid stuff up there?”

  She groans.

  “Okay, we’ll do it after this. I really ought to take you to hospital and have you admitted. To the psych ward.”

  “We’ll have to make it quick. I’m having coffee with that Senior Sergeant Lewis, at two-thirty.”

  “Getting a bit chummy with him, aren’t you?”

  “He seems to have a few brains, for a cop.”

  “You didn’t recognise him?” she asks.

  “From where?”

  “He’s a local.”

  “No way,” I say.

  “Him and his wife. They usually go to the farmers’ market. They were at that jazz thing in the park last year. They’ve got
that kid. The changeling.”

  It all falls into place. Now I know why he looked vaguely familiar, though I hadn’t seen him that much. It’s usually his wife on her own: the sweet-faced woman with the monster child, big for his age, angelic-looking in repose, but he doesn’t stay like that for long. People are polite, and of course you have to feel sorry for her, but there’s a ripple of dread when they turn up at any event. The child has some sort of autism and it must be extreme because he doesn’t speak, just grunts. Every now and then he goes berserk, and as he gets bigger and stronger it’s obviously getting harder for her to control him.

  Last night’s dream flashes through my mind. It’s been a long time since I felt myself soften when I thought of a man or said his name. Lewis might have peeped over the barricade of my defences, but this has knocked him back down for good.

  I feel stupid, but Carol is her usual tactful self and pretends not to notice.

  “How’s the investigation going?” she asks.

  “Well, I don’t know how the police are getting on,” I say. “But all my workmates are upset about Carlos, and they’re going to try to figure out what happened to him. Whoever killed him, they tried to rip off all his data, but we’ve got a backup of some of it, so we’re going to analyse it.”

  “Don’t the police have IT people? Won’t they do that?”

  “Oh, shit.” How can I have been so stupid? “Can I use your phone?”

  “What’s wrong with yours?”

  “If I carry it around it shouts ‘Here I am’ to anyone who’s looking for it.”

  I call Derek.

  “Derek, you’d better make a copy of that backup. The police might come and want to take it away.”

  “We already did, Elly. We thought they ask for it straight away, but nothing yet. I don’t hear from them at all today.”

  I hang up and give the phone back to Carol.

  “What sort of people are you dealing with?” she asks worriedly. “Do you really think they’ll be tracking your mobile phone?”