No Safe Place

by Jenny Spence

  “Yeah, you do. If anything happens, that’s the number Steve will use. Keep it super secret. You and me and Steve, we’re a cell.”

  “Okay,” I say, thinking they’re rather sweet, really. We get up and head downstairs into the main part of the store.

  “You go out first,” he says. “No point being seen with me. I’ll watch your back.”

  “Thanks, Luke. I do appreciate this,” I say before striding off quickly. Sometimes the youth and enthusiasm of the guys I work with really gets to me. It reminds me of those Christmases when I have to avoid the main entrance of the Myer department store because it’s taken over by a horde of young musicians. They stand in baggy shorts, feet planted firmly apart, tearing into Mozart with the verve and vigour with which the music was originally written. It always brings tears to my eyes.

  Work calms me down and I spend another routine day. I get deep into the technical detail of the document, which is Greek to me, but I still check the calculations and make sure that the scientific expressions make sense and that all the terminology is consistent. You don’t have to be Einstein to recognise the odd typo in some scientist’s waffle, and by the end of the day I’ve had to call a couple of the contributors to authorise some corrections.

  At lunchtime I make a conscious effort not to look over my shoulder for Steve Li. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the thought of him shadowing me as I wander the city, but I do feel strangely comforted. In theory my pursuer won’t look for me in Sydney because he won’t know I’m here; but I can think of a dozen ways that could go wrong.

  After work, as threatened, I walk all the way back to Newtown. It gives me a chance to think. I’ve promised to fill Derek in on what we know, which is not much. What I know personally is that whoever is after me will keep trying, if he gets a chance, until I can remove the reason why he wants to kill me.

  So, what’s the reason? He must have thought Carlos told me something. But I would have had plenty of opportunities to pass this information on, so I don’t see why I’m still a threat. Unless he thinks I know something without understanding its significance. That’s possible. Maybe by now he knows I haven’t passed the information on, because there would be repercussions for him.

  What else have we found out? That someone else died. Peter Talbot. He got paid a lot of money, then he disappeared. And Carlos was interested in that.

  We know that some people are running a very sophisticated online bank that doesn’t show up in search engines, and that a company was using that bank to pay Peter Talbot for a service that wasn’t part of his official job. We know the company isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and that someone has been accessing Peter Talbot’s money.

  So did my nemesis kill Peter Talbot, and does he think Carlos found out? Was someone lying in wait on that mountain, or did Brian O’Dwyer follow his best buddy up the track and fight with him, smashing his head on a rock? I don’t know what sort of person Talbot was, but O’Dwyer is probably physically capable of that. He’d also need to cart the body off into the distance, hide it exceptionally well.

  What would O’Dwyer’s motive be? At some point after that, he removed himself to Sydney in company with a “gorgeous chick”. Was that Fiona? Maybe they’re both up here, spending Peter Talbot’s money.

  I reach home and let myself into the flat. Is Steve behind me? Did he check to make sure no-one followed me home?

  I put my things down and start pulling food out of cupboards, preparing my dinner.

  That’s if Peter Talbot really is dead. It’s always a bit suspicious when there’s no body. It would be easy to disappear with that amount of money, but maybe he didn’t go very far. Maybe he’s sitting in some sort of bunker, sifting through data, watching endless images on CCTV, running facial recognition software on the footage from trains and railway stations until he gets a match – look, there! My face, or my facial type, showing up more often than is statistically likely on the Footscray line. He dispatches minions to the stations, and eventually one picks me up and tracks me to Lily’s. Then he waits, late one night, in the shadows.

  My thoughts are interrupted by the strange buzzing made by a phone vibrating on a table, and I jump in fright. But it’s not the new super secret blue phone, it’s my other one. Ravi.

  “Elly? Are you near your computer? I’ve found the anomaly.”

  26

  I’m looking at the last photograph in the series, the phone forgotten in my hand. It’s Talbot himself, at arm’s length, slightly crooked, smiling triumphantly into the camera. Behind him is a glorious panorama of mountains.

  He’s bearded, gingery, not a care in the world.

  “Elly?” Ravi’s tinny voice from my phone. “What do you think?”

  “How did you find this?”

  “Steve said the wife’s called Fiona? So I was going through some crypted emails between Carlos and the Ukrainians, and I noticed ‘Peterandfiona’ in one of the links. It got me to this Flickr site. So when I saw the pictures, I wondered if they’d checked out the geotags.”

  “And?”

  “I checked them out myself. Elly, that last picture was taken from the top.”

  “Ravi, go back a bit. Where do you find geotags?”

  “It’s part of the metadata of a digital image. Like the camera and exposure information, that anyone can see. You just have to interrogate the file a bit more to get the geotags, but if the picture was taken on a device with GPS they’ll tell you the time and geographical coordinates.”

  “How do you get to that data when the image is on Flickr?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Elly.”

  I flick through the sequence of images again. There are about a dozen, starting with an image of an untidy camp, taken from above. There are no people to be seen except Talbot in the last one.

  “He’s on his own, isn’t he?” I muse.

  “It’s not something you could prove,” says Ravi, “but I’m sure. The way he’s holding the camera out to get that shot of himself.”

  “So what we have here is a sort of pictorial record of his journey, only he sets off up the path and goes all the way to the top?”

  “That’s right. I’ve overlaid it on the other map to show where it deviates from the path that his phone suggested. The times aren’t compatible, either. He was at the top about five minutes before he supposedly went off the path, about an hour further down.

  I’ll send you the composite image, if you like.”

  “You’re a gem, Ravi.”

  I keep going back to that last carefree picture. Talbot in his domain.

  “Maybe it’s not him?”

  “Elly, this is his Flickr stream. You can check out his wedding photos if you like.”

  “Okay, okay, it’s him.”

  “It’s an anomaly all right,” says Ravi.

  “Does the metadata tell you what kind of device was used to take the pictures?”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. It was an iPhone. The signals they triangulated were from an iPhone too.”

  “Is it possible to identify the phone?”

  “No, that’s not recorded. But if we look at his phone account we’ll soon see if it was his. There’d be a spike in the amount of data transmitted on that day, if the pictures came from his phone.”

  “How come you guys have access to his phone records?”

  “I’ve got a mate who does it. It’s his specialty.”

  “How soon could Talbot have uploaded the pictures to Flickr?”

  “Well, if you’re doing it from a phone, the smart way is to set up an automatic link. You have the account set up, take the pictures and select the ones you want as you go. Then as soon as the phone can see a network they just get sent.”

  “Reception was bad up there.”

  “Yeah, don’t forget phone links and data links are different. Data links tend to be better.”

  “Right,” I say. “Can you find out more about that? It might be important to know where the phone was
when the upload happened. If it was still on the mountain.”

  “Sure thing,” he says happily. “I’ll tell Luke and Steve about this, too.”

  “Okay. Great work, Ravi. Thanks.”

  I chop garlic and pour olive oil into a heavy pan, but my mind is far away, trying to make sense of what I’ve just seen. How can a guy who strayed from the path and fell down a gully pop up on top of the mountain he was climbing? On the other hand, if someone stages his own disappearance, is he going to post photographs of himself on Flickr?

  Damn the police, I think savagely. Do they even know what century they’re in? For all I know Peter Talbot is on Facebook, happily reporting from Ibiza, and it hasn’t occurred to them to look.

  Leaving my pasta sauce simmering on the stove I have a quick look on Facebook myself, but no luck. I lurk on Facebook with all my data hidden, but people can still find my name. I trawl through numerous Peter Talbots, but the one I want doesn’t even have an account, which puts him in a tiny minority these days.

  My dinner nearly burns while I’m wasting time on this enterprise and I dish it up, setting aside extra sauce for tomorrow night’s dinner and salad for lunch, if I can remember to take it; but I eat without tasting anything, my mind still going round and round, forming and discarding ideas. Is the triangulation data wrong? Has someone faked it? Who would be in a position to do that, and how? I think of more questions to ask about geotags. Is the time dependent on the time set on the phone? Could we be looking at some sort of Agatha Christie fiddle, where clocks get reset? And if so, why?

  Something Ravi said about Peter Talbot pops into my mind.

  “This is his Flickr stream. You can check out his wedding photos if you like.”

  What an idiot I am. Talbot’s Flickr photos will tell me a lot about him.

  I whiz through interminable bushwalks and camping holidays before I find his wedding album. Patrick Donnelly appears once or twice in the crowd: not such a close friend, then. I spot Suresh in the wedding party along with two more men. Surely one of them is Brian, but which one? They both look unremarkable.

  Peter Talbot is not a great one for labelling his photos, and Flickr doesn’t have the face-tagging that’s so handy in other social media. But there are a few captions, and finally my efforts are rewarded. Here’s a family grinning sheepishly at the camera: dressed-up parents, a teenage son and a girl in a bridesmaid’s outfit, the image of Fiona. It’s captioned The Davis family.

  I’m still logged in to Facebook, and it takes only seconds to find Fiona Davis. The carefree photograph, possibly taken around the time of her wedding, tells me it’s definitely her.

  Fiona’s clearly one of those people who keep their Facebook page up to date with their latest random thoughts, and she has lots of like-minded friends who are given to gushing over her entries, including some painfully sentimental tributes to Pete a few months ago on what would have been his birthday. I marvel that people are so willing to expose their whole lives to any stranger, like me, who wants to have a look. It makes me feel grubby and I’m about to stop spying on her when a status update from a month ago catches my eye.

  Sold the flat!!! Time to move on.

  My scalp prickles. Was this a precursor to her moving to Sydney in company with Brian? But it doesn’t take long for her faithful friends to set me straight.

  Cheer up, Fee . . . Hear your moving in with your mum she’ll be happy . . .

  Oh Fiona, your lovely flat! I’m sure it won’t be long before you get your own place again

  You go gurl – best decision yet

  Yay, Fiona! Life’s too short for mortgages.

  I do close the page now, embarrassed and ashamed. It’s still possible that Fiona has constructed an elaborate smokescreen, that she has Peter’s money stashed away somewhere and is patiently waiting before she starts enjoying it; but the overwhelming impression is of a bereaved woman, lost and bewildered, who can’t meet the mortgage payments on the conjugal flat and is falling back on her parents.

  It’s time to sleep on this, but of course I can’t sleep, and I spend an uneasy night half-dozing. Somehow my editing work and the technical data I’ve been grappling with merge with the triangulation tables I glimpsed last week and what I imagine geodata looks like, and I can’t seem to escape from pages of endless numbers scrolling round and round before my eyes like an old-fashioned newsreel.

  So I suppose I do sleep, in a way, though I wake with gritty eyes and a terrible headache. But I have thought of something I can do. I wait until eight o’clock, then I call Scott.

  “How’s it going at Water Resources, Scott?”

  “Oh, fine. They’re all pretty nice.”

  “That’s good. Any problems?”

  “Nothing major. There’re a few things I think could be easier, if I knew the short cuts.”

  “Send me some questions in an email, and I’ll see what I can do.” I’ll be glad of a bit of a diversion, I’m thinking.

  “Scott,” I say carefully. “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

  “Yeah?” He’s already wary.

  “That guy Surinder introduced us to the other day, Patrick Donnelly? I need you to ask him something. Can you get the phone number of a friend of his? The name’s Brian O’Dwyer.”

  “Is this about work?”

  “Not really, but it’s important. Don’t tell him it’s for me, though. Listen, O’Dwyer’s a personal trainer. Say your girlfriend wants to hire him, or something like that. I don’t care what you say. I need his number. It’s got to be his mobile.”

  He’s not happy. “I’m not really on speaking terms with Patrick Donnelly. I only met him for a few seconds.”

  “Scott, do you like working for Soft Serve? Do you think you’ll want to stay on?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “When we first interviewed you, I pushed really hard to get Derek to hire you. It’s not just because you’re talented. There’s also a thing about company ethos. We help each other.”

  “This isn’t something illegal, is it?”

  “No! God no, Scott. In a way it is for work.” That’s stretching the truth a bit. “Ask Luke next time you’re in the office. But the way we operate, sometimes someone asks you to do something unusual and you just do it, okay?”

  “Yeah, I see. Okay.”

  “Good. I need it ASAP. And send me those questions as soon as you like.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” he says bleakly, and hangs up.

  Poor Scott. Well, let’s see what he’s made of. If he wants to be part of the company he’d better not let me down.

  I wonder if he’s any good at pool.

  27

  Concentrating on work is hard while I wait for news. Frustratingly, I get an email from Scott just before lunch with a neat list of technical questions related to his work. There’s a note at the end saying: Patrick Donnelly not in today.

  I send a curt reply: Call his mobile

  A swift rejoinder comes back: Not listed

  I don’t hear from Ravi all day. I know there’s no point hassling him because he’ll tell me as soon as he knows something. Anyway, it’s just as well because I want to keep my theory to myself until I have a chance to check it out. I turn it over and over in my mind, testing it for credibility, my thoughts only half focused on the words on the screen in front of me.

  Almost imperceptibly the text I’m editing has progressed from scientific mumbo-jumbo to English-language waffle as we approach the meat of the document, and in the middle of the afternoon I start to see dimly what it’s all getting at. The contentious thing about this coal mine is that they are going to tunnel down through the water table. Alarm bells ring in my head. Through the water table! I don’t know coal, but I know water. In particular, I know this water. It’s the water that falls in Queensland in great abundance and soaks the earth, then starts creeping south as though you’d flicked it at a map stuck on the wall. Some of it comes all the way down to Victoria and South Australia through t
he Murray Darling river system, filling the inland lakes in those rare good years; and a lot of it plunges underground, into the huge aquifers under central New South Wales. In those vast black-soil plains, with no mountains to trap rain clouds, there’s a miracle of agriculture, irrigated by the plentiful water from the aquifers. If only we had this in Victoria.

  I scroll back through the technical stuff. What they’re showing here is how they’re proposing to sink mine shafts past the level of the aquifers without damaging them. You’d need an iron-clad guarantee, and a promise isn’t good enough. I think immediately of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Going down that deep is dangerous because if aquifers close to a coal seam are breached all sorts of horrible pollutants will get into the whole system. Aquifers are sometimes referred to as connected waters. There’s no such thing as polluting them just a little bit.

  So they’ve developed a new technology for getting down there safely, and they sank a number of experimental holes and reported on the excellent results. Yesterday I went through all the repetitive technical data under some eminent scientist’s name, not really understanding what I was looking at; and now I’m starting on his conclusions.

  Skimming these ten or so pages, I see that the results of the testing were overwhelmingly positive. I’m a little surprised at this, partly because I would have anticipated a few problems, but also because I didn’t expect to find things so clearly and concisely expressed. Knowing how bad these boffins are at documentation, I expected this section to need a lot of work, so I’m pleasantly surprised to find it’s well laid out and quite readable. He hasn’t followed the guidelines, but he’s actually used proper heading styles, and used them consistently, so it’s going to be very easy to get this into the right format.

  If he had followed the guidelines properly I’d probably find myself skipping this bit. When a piece of documentation looks really authoritative in the first few lines you can usually assume that there’s nothing wrong with it. But I do like to get things perfect, so I start going through it.