by Jenny Spence
She gives him a thumbs-up sign and disappears. I slip out of the room too.
“Mouth shut, Ravi,” I warn as I go.
He nods vigorously. It bothers me that these guys are enjoying this so much. It’s like they’ve been in training all their lives, reading and watching the most convoluted thrillers they can find, longing for a mystery adventure of their very own.
By the time Derek comes in everyone is at their desks, heads down. Steve is firing off emails at a great rate, including one to me, cc’ing Derek, telling me he’s close to fixing the final bugs in the software update he’s been heading up for the past three months, which means that various new features which were looking uncertain are now going to be included. I’m going to be busy updating the user guide, a job I could do in my sleep. Unfortunately I can’t get settled into any of my comfortable daydreams today. I keep glancing around the office at Steve, Ravi, Luke and the others. They’re all so fresh-faced, eager – and vulnerable. I wish I could lock them up in this office where they can fight monsters made of light and never have to deal with the horrors of the real world.
At the end of the day I ask Derek for a lift to somewhere outside the CBD. He keeps his Mercedes in the basement car park, so it’s an ideal opportunity for me to get out of the building without being observed. I wrap my scarf around my head, and rely on that and Derek’s tinted windows to see me through.
“Just drop me at a station out of the city,” I say as he points his remote at the garage door. “Clifton Hill would be good. Then you can get onto the freeway.”
“Okay, where you staying?”
“Somewhere else. I’ll catch a train from Clifton Hill.”
We clear the building and settle into the traffic crawl.
“So how are you going to manage without Carlos?” I ask him.
“It’s gonna be a different company,” he says. “I don’t know yet. Gotta talk to some people.”
We both think about that for a while.
“What was Carlos doing?” he says suddenly. “He must have been dealing with some bad people. Why he doing that?”
“I don’t know, Derek.”
“What, those guys think this some kind of game? Bad people kill you.”
“Do you have any ideas, Derek?”
“I don’t know. But I tell the guys, no hacking. Then they see Carlos, number one hacker. So cool. What they gonna do?”
“Carlos wasn’t out to do anyone any harm,” I say. “He was just inquisitive. I don’t know why anyone would be that upset at his nosiness, and it’s hard to see how they would have known. He knew how to cover his tracks.”
“Yeah, well, make sure the guys don’t get carried away. They only look at the data he got, right? No hacking on their own.”
“Well, you’d better put me on the project, Derek. Come on. I need to keep an eye on them.”
“Okay. I can’t stop you anyway. But just a couple of days, right? This is all bad for business. And you make sure nothing happen to Steve Li.”
I think I’ve got enough to keep me awake without Steve, but I’m going to worry about him anyway.
“You in early tomorrow?” asks Derek.
“Sure.”
“Good,” he grins. “I got a surprise for you.”
Derek drops me off in Hoddle Street, which feels inauspicious given its history. There’s a lot of traffic and instead of crossing the road to Clifton Hill Station I slip into the park and walk back towards Queen’s Parade. It’s getting dark, a still, sharp night, and I haven’t had any proper exercise for days.
There are a few people on the streets, heads down, their minds on home, and after a while I’m confident no-one is following me. Once I warm up and get into a rhythm I enjoy the walk, threading my way through the streets of North Fitzroy, time-travelling back through my student days, glancing through the windows of houses where I once lived in shabby rooms, went to parties, fell in love, stayed up all night drinking cheap wine and pontificating on the meaning of life. I met Max when we were both idling in Europe, and we settled in Sydney for a while. I didn’t move back to Melbourne until the whole disaster with him forced me out of the house we’d bought up there. The haunts of my youth were no longer accessible, so I see them now through the starry eyes of nostalgia.
After Rushall Crescent I move into the lovely reserve along Park Street that follows the former railway line. There’s a broad path under dense willows where people are walking, running and cycling through yellow pools of light. A possum scuttles from one tree to another, and the last harsh cries of birds settling in for the night drown out the hum of traffic noise. Wrapped in anonymity, I walk on and on, my eyes on the path, trying to stay out of the way of cyclists who swoop silently up behind me then glide past, their tail lights winking.
While I walk, I think about water. Is Peter Talbot’s disappearance the key to all this, and could it be something to do with water? Blue gold, they call it. Our forebears suffered and struggled and failed for lack of it. Visionaries bargained and traded and raided the river systems for their great irrigation schemes, not realising that this land could go for years without rain. It’s one big market now, and the waterways are all connected, if only in theory. People can buy and sell their water rights, present and future, up and down the country. When the rains come in Queensland and a great head of water starts creeping south, moving down the map at walking pace, spreading across the inland and filling the cracked beds of rivers and lakes, that bounty from the sky already has someone’s name on it. It’s pre-sold. Like Napoleon’s army marching to Moscow, the great torrent is cut down as it comes, and by the time it reaches the Murray and Victoria there’s not much left. Sometimes, rarely, there’s too much and it drowns the parched land; but far more often there’s not enough. For every year of stunning, gushing floods there’ll be ten years of drought.
And the less water there is, the more it matters. Does it matter so much that someone might kill for it?
On the far side of Melbourne, rain falls in the eastern mountains. If we’re lucky, it ends up in the reservoirs, and we get it in the city. But other people want it too. Isn’t there some dispute with forestry in the Warburton catchment area?
Startled, I look around and realise that I’ve automatically turned into Lygon Street; I’m already in the southern part of Brunswick heading towards home. I stop, gazing north, and imagine walking up through those back streets, opening my front door and stepping into my little house. I hover in the shadows, exiled. This is how it feels to be a ghost, yearning to return to the world of the living.
I turn left and thread my way to Jewell Station, where I can catch a train to North Melbourne, then another to Footscray.
16
Once I’m back at Lily’s I feel confident enough to eat out the front of the Khá Sen Restaurant. Little faces peep through the plastic strip curtains, and as soon as I’ve finished my noodle soup I’m visited by Lily’s younger children one by one, each with some kind of English homework to show me. I suspect their work is already much better than that of their classmates, but I find things to improve because that’s what’s expected. Afterwards, Lily comes out with a flask of jasmine tea and sits with me while I tell her how clever all her children are.
After we’ve got through that and Lily’s beaming, I say, “Do you have any friends who do house-cleaning, maybe around Brunswick?”
“Sure, Elly. I get you good price. You want regular house clean?”
“No, actually it’s just a one-off.” I’m not sure how much to tell her. “I had to leave my house a few days ago, and I can’t go back there myself. It doesn’t really need cleaning, but there’s food in the fridge that will go off, and I need some more clothes, and a few other things.”
“You okay, Elly?” she asks, putting a gentle hand on mine.
“I’m fine, Lily. I’m just a bit . . . I don’t know if you watch the news, but my neighbour got killed right in front of me, and I’m scared.”
“Someone want
to hurt you?” She’s concerned.
“I don’t know. Probably not, but I don’t feel safe about going home.”
“It’s okay. You okay here.” She pats my hand. “My friend Mai get your stuff.”
“You’re an angel, Lily. Could I talk to her? I’ll tell her how I want her to do it.”
Back in my room, I try to find out more about Peter Talbot. I can’t find his name on the Water Conservation and Catchment website, but public servants tend to be anonymous, and I have no idea what his role was. I’ll have to wait and see if the team have found any information about him on Carlos’s CD.
All I find that’s of interest is a blurry photograph of one of the friends who were with him, Suresh Chandra, comforting the missing man’s partner, Fiona.
Fiona. Cherchez la femme. There are a few Fiona Talbots in Google, but none that could possibly be her.
There’s a light tap on my door. I leap up and stand next to it, my heart thumping.
“Who is it?” I call gruffly.
“I am Mai,” comes a quavering voice. “You want I clean your house?”
I open the door to a timid Vietnamese woman. She’s about Lily’s age, shorter and plumper. I greet her effusively and make tea for her before explaining what I want her to do.
“The thing is,” I say, “I’ve seen people who clean offices. They take away all the rubbish in big plastic bags.”
“Yeah, sure.” She nods vigorously. “I do that too.”
“So when you get my clothes, I want you to put them in the same kind of bag. That way, when you bring them out, it just looks like more rubbish.”
“Hmmm! So no-one know I getting your stuff?”
“That’s right, Mai. But I want you to be careful. If anyone asks about me, how to contact me, you can give them this phone number.” I get out one of my business cards and underline the office number.
“You sure that okay?”
“Yes, it’s my number at work. I think they’ll know it anyway.
The main thing is it’ll get you off the hook. If they want to know how you’re getting paid, tell them the money goes into your bank account.”
“I tell them it not their business!”
“Yes, Mai, quite right. You tell them that.”
After we agree on an hourly rate and Mai has left I go back to the Internet. The Warburton catchment area, where Peter Talbot went missing, provides a major part of Melbourne’s water supply. That makes sense, because it doesn’t rain much anywhere else. And it turns out I was right about there being an issue. It’s about logging. Politicians keep making, then breaking, promises not to allow logging near the Warburton catchment area. With increasing incredulity I read the arguments about logging old-growth forest in catchment areas. The logging itself reduces the water quality and cuts down the flow of the creeks and streams. Old-growth trees use water more efficiently than young trees, leaving more to run off into the reservoirs. The newly planted trees need a lot of water to get started. And what’s it all for? Wood chips, for paper and cardboard, ground out of those beautiful giant mountain ash forests.
I close my web browser in disgust. I don’t want to read any more about greed and stupidity tonight. There’s just time for a quick chat with Miranda on Skype before I turn in.
“Oh Mum, I’m absolutely wrung out!” she moans. “There’s so much preparation, and the lesson plans take longer than the lessons.”
“I’m sure you’ll get a brilliant report,” I reassure her. “Are you getting on well with the other teachers?”
“Yeah, they’re great. We go to the pub after work. It’s one of those cute country pubs.”
“Sounds nice.”
“The local cop was hanging around trying to chat me up. What a loser. He’s – like – fat, and at least as old as you. Everyone thought it was really funny.”
I squirm. “I’m sure he was just doing his job. New person in town and all that.”
“Come on, Mum. You sound like Miss Marple.”
That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, I think, as I put on both the pairs of socks that I bought today, testing my Dad’s theory that if your feet are warm the rest of you will be okay. Trouble is, even in the socks my feet feel like ice under the inadequate blankets in the cold room. I curl up and pretend I’m back in my own bed, but my mind’s still racing.
Maybe I’m wasting my time with Peter Talbot. There was no hint in any of those stories that anyone thought his disappearance was fishy – not even that careful code they use to suggest the person might have topped himself. Just because Carlos happened to mention him . . . but there must have been lots of other things he was prying into. He mentioned the Athena Resources case too, but surely there’s nothing new to be uncovered there. It’s the usual sorry story of company directors making free with their shareholders’ money then hiding behind complicated business structures and claiming to be broke, while they’re still driving around in BMWs and living in Toorak.
Desperate to switch off, I read Wolf Hall for a while, trying to imagine life in a world where admitting to rational thoughts can earn you the most hideous punishments. How did we ever find the courage to move on?
17
Omar picks me up on the same corner the next morning. I’m wondering if it’s safe to keep doing this. Although I’m making it up as I go along, I do know that it’s better not to form habits or do anything predictable.
“If we do this again,” I tell him, “I might get you to pick me up somewhere a bit different.”
“Sure,” he says brightly. “I don’t mind coming to get you. Are you staying with Nam’s folks?”
“Why do you say that?” I ask, my heart dropping through the pit of my stomach.
“Just a guess. You’re old friends, so . . .” He takes his hands off the wheel and spreads them wide.
“How did you know?”
“Nam’s a good mate. We play poker together. Asian poker. Just socially,” he adds hastily. “You wouldn’t want to take on the big guys. Anyway, your name came up once when I was talking about work, and he’s known you since he was a kid, so . . .”
“Yeah, well. Small world,” I concede, trying to sound casual.
This is not good. I thought I was being so clever, staying with Lily, and my cover has already been blown by Omar, of all people. He’s not going to go around broadcasting it, but I’m shaken. Maybe I’d be a lot easier to find than I thought.
When I step out of the lift, there’s a young man with straggly fair hair lounging in the visitor’s chair by my desk. I’ve seen him somewhere before. As I approach, he jumps up to shake my hand.
“Elly?” he says. “Scott. Derek said you’d find a possie for me.”
“Me? Did he?” I say, shaking his hand automatically. “What are you working on?”
“Some kind of content management system? Department of Water Resources?”
It all comes back to me. “Oh, wow! Derek got you! That’s great.”
He shrugs modestly. I interviewed Scott as a young graduate two or three years ago and wanted to take him on as a sort of trainee, but I couldn’t convince Derek to pay him what he was obviously worth. It’s hard to find Scott’s combination of talents, so I’m delighted to see him now.
“If you’re willing to do this job with Water Resources there might be some more interesting work coming up,” I tell him. “We’ve got a lot of developers now and lots of documentation is needed.”
He smiles, non-committal, and I wonder what Derek has told him. I make an appointment for us to meet with Surinder at twelve, so I can introduce Scott and get his security clearance organised. Then I take him around our office to introduce him to everyone before leaving him with Sunny so she can organise a computer and a login for him.
Finally I can sit down at my desk and check my emails. There’s a stream of messages from Steve Li, who’s not in the office yet. He’s been analysing the metadata on the emails in the backup CD, most of which is gobbledygook to me, but following my suggestion
he has been looking for matching metadata in the mail going through our mail server. Through the night there are messages in which he reports on a series of breakthroughs. First he managed to identify the Carlos messages on our server. Then he discovered that the text of the messages was encrypted, and despite several attempts he couldn’t crack the code. He verified that Carlos used our server to communicate with his Ukrainian buddies. Then he discovered that several of the messages had attachments, which were not encrypted. He’s saved all the attachments in a folder on our server.
I open the folder and start looking through the attachments, which are bewildering. Some of them are tables of numerical data in a format that I don’t recognise. Some of them appear to be bank account details, but there are no names attached, just identity codes. Others are unreadable binary files.
I continue through the rest of Steve’s later emails, sent in the wee small hours, and see that he’s clearly more excited than I am by this material. He includes some cryptic directions to Ravi, who’ll be taking up the mantle this morning. It seems like they’re making progress – even if it’s not obvious to me what the progress is.
I spend some time explaining the Department of Water Resources job to Scott, and just before twelve we get a taxi from the back entrance to take us downtown. Scott is subjected to the usual security rituals, then we repair to the conference room with Surinder who is her usual charming self.
Surinder goes through a well-practised spiel about the department. Scott takes copious notes and I half-listen, my mind drifting down to the street below. Was I careful enough, arriving in that taxi? What if my unseen enemy has lots of minions watching all the places I’m likely to go to?
I get jolted back by the realisation that Surinder is talking to me.
“Rosemary,” she’s saying, “our newest water engineer. Have you met her, Elly?”
“Oh! Umm – I don’t think I have, actually.” I’m trying to imagine what a water engineer does, and I picture bridges and great meccano-like structures all made from shimmering water. I think I’m a bit sleep-deprived.
