by Brett Adams
I heard the front door thunk and footfalls in the corridor below.
“Never mind what it is. Do you know Hiero? Hieronymus Beck?”
She shook her head. “Should I?”
“He’s an American,” I said.
She frowned.
“Not because he’s an American,” I said, exasperation leaking through my made-calm. “He’s a linguistics student on exchange at UWA.”
“I’m doing journalism,” she said.
On a table beside her bed were stacked books. Tilting my head to read their spines, I read aloud. “Wuthering Heights, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Gatsby, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and—good Lord, Ash Wednesday. T.S. Eliot is not a poet I can even tempt my students with. Been reading it long?”
“Long? I never stop,” she said matter-of-factly.
I heard the footfalls pause, then come clattering up the stairs. Fear tugged my guts.
“Look, did you see your attacker or not? I can get his photo from student services.”
She shook her head again. “It was dark. He wore a hood.”
“Is that it?” I barked. “How tall was he? Above six foot?”
She shrank away.
“I don’t . . . He was—” Her eyelids drew together, and I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “About your height.”
Of course he was. Hiero was about my height.
The clatter on the stairway died as the same feet fell on the carpet at the stair’s head. Two men I didn’t know entered ahead of the man who had greeted me at the door. The newcomers were smiling in a way that struck my blood cold.
So this is what it feels like . . .
The older of the two men extended his hand, and I took it on reflex. We shook hands, and he said, “Afternoon, sir. I’m Detective Thomas, and this is Detective Palmer.” I gave the other man my right hand, which had turned into a dead fish.
“We’d like to have a chat with you,” said Thomas. He gestured to the doorway. I retrieved the folder from where it had fallen on the bedclothes, and walked out of the room, feeling four sets of eyes on my back.
Minutes later I was seated at a kitchen table, facing the detectives.
“Coffee?” said Thomas. “You want some coffee?” he said to me, then to his partner, “You want some coffee?”
I nodded just to be agreeable.
Palmer rose, switched on an electric kettle, and began poking into cupboards for cups and coffee.
“So, Mr Masters?” said Thomas.
“My name is Griffen, Jack Griffen,” I said. Lay it all out. This was good. Sanity was settling again on my shoulders like snowfall. The police is where I should have gone in the first place.
A theatre scowl appeared on Thomas’s brow. “But the owner of the house says you introduced yourself as a Mr Masters from immigration.”
“I’m a professor at UWA, and—” I smiled. God it felt good to be having this out face to face. “You need to see this.” I slid the folder toward him. “I fear I know who assaulted Miss Goldman.”
Thomas’s eyes didn’t leave me as he reached for the folder, turned it right-side up, and opened it. I made sure he was reading the right page, then sat back. The kettle was roaring like a jet, and I found myself salivating for the coffee.
Thomas muttered something, and a moment later my brain interpreted it. He’d said, “kyoketsu-shoge.” He glanced at me. I answered him with a twitch of my eyebrows.
The kettle clicked off and its wail died as if it had been dropped from a cliff. The other detective poured three cups, and the aroma of coffee filled the small kitchen. He placed a mug on the table for each of us and sat.
Thomas slid the still-open folder in front of his partner.
“Mr Griffen, do you know why we log calls to all police services?”
I shook my head. I didn’t, but I wanted to know. Little-known facts like that made great detail for a story.
“Because perpetrators of violent crimes—it should come as no surprise to a man of your intellect—are as thick as two bricks.” He sipped his coffee and grimaced. “And twisted. Do you know how many rapists call us to see how big was the wrecking ball they put through some young lady’s life?”
I didn’t. And I didn’t want to know anymore.
Sweat sprung out under my armpits, and trickled down the inside of my upper arms.
I jabbed a finger at the folder. “I called because of that.” Palmer closed it, raised his head, and began plucking at his lip with thumb and forefinger.
“Hmm,” said Thomas. He retrieved a notebook from his shirt pocket and a pen stowed in its spiral binding. “Do you know Miss Goldman?”
“Well, yes—now.”
“Before today.”
“No.”
“Never set eyes on her?”
Was that a trick question?
“I can’t guarantee I’ve never seen her. UWA has over twelve thousand students, and she’s in the same faculty. But I don’t remember having seen her before today.”
Thomas scribbled in his notebook.
“What were you doing last Friday evening, between Nine and Eleven?”
“I met with Hiero.” I stabbed a finger at the folder. “That Hiero. Then went home.”
“And you live?”
“Nedlands.”
“Full address, please.”
I gave it, and Thomas took forever to record it with his ponderous script.
“Anyone verify your whereabouts?”
Shit. Something else to blame Kim for.
Then another voice: Nah-ah, Jack. The blame game goes back much farther than that, and you started it.
“No,” I said, gulped coffee, and burned my throat.
“Okay, Mr Griffen. We’ll leave you be for the moment. But please don’t leave Perth.” He smiled the death-smile again.
As I walked back down the corridor and out onto the lawn, I felt strange, as if my feet were numb.
6
Tuesday passed in a dream.
I gave my Orwell lecture by rote and left the theatre without taking questions.
Wednesday I hid in my office nursing a growing headache. Turns out the cause was the pressure of a thought that wanted out.
A fever woke me at 2:33 Thursday morning.
But it wasn’t a fever. I’d snarled myself up in the bedclothes and sweated through a nightmare. This nightmare didn’t linger like normal. Its power dispersed in an instant, was squeezed to the edges of my mind by the thought that had finally burst through: the other notes.
Hiero’s folder held five sets of notes. One had been enacted. A failure, but not for want of trying. Four remained.
I hurried down the stairs to the ground floor of my apartment in the dark. I missed a step and felt a moment of terror when my torso lurched past my feet, before I clutched the balustrade and fought myself upright.
In my study, I found the pull-cord of the reading lamp by feel, and raked the folder to me. I opened it and hunted for the next set of notes in the sequence.
It wasn’t hard to find. Each of the five précis had printed in the top right corner in black permanent marker a number. Perhaps the easy-index should have concerned me more. The sheet for asphyxiation sat on top of the pile. To ‘Who: Female jogger. Redhead . . . large-breasted’, I could now add: ‘Rhianne Goldman’.
That is history. Move on, Jack.
Slipping Rhianne’s sheet under the bottom of the pile, I was faced with the second note. It was the same template. I ran a finger down the margin of the topmost page, and stopped at How. The next word was Poison.
Poison?
My mind flared with the memory of goading Hiero to nail the details, because that was where the devil lay.
‘I’ll research,’ he’d said, and smirked at me from behind his fringe. The devil gets around . . .
Below the word ‘poison’ were notes on the word’s origin. Hiero had underlined its roots in the Old French word for magic potion. And next to this he had listed a number
of notable deaths by poison, concluding with Socrates drinking of hemlock for the charge of ‘introducing new deities’. Next to this a smiley face blazed incongruously.
I scanned the page for the details, while telling myself this was all hypothesis. Loose conjecture that I could drop any time, no harm done. The door to my study could burst open, and the candid camera enter, and I’d laugh it all off.
For Where, Hiero had written: a bedroom a hundred feet above a sprawling, glittering mass of humanity.
Great time to get poetic.
Then tagged on the end, almost as an afterthought was Hong Kong.
For When, he’d written, A celebration.
My eyes flickered before I reached Who. I had to fight the compulsion to look away, slip the paper beneath the others.
It said: Female, Asian.
That narrowed it down to—what?—one billion? If I was to infer this female Asian had normal breasts, maybe that cut it down another—
I gave that calculation away.
A bedroom in a Hong Kong high-rise and a celebrating woman. It sounded like the setting line of a screenplay.
No, it’s a prophecy, damn it. Wake up.
But the oracle has drunk too much of the mystic wine, part of me protested. What the hell could I do with Hong Kong, female, party? Antarctica, penguin, standing around, was hardly worse.
And what kind of a celebration did you have in your bedroom?
I stared at the summary sheet. Same format, different girl.
How: Poison
Where: A bedroom a hundred feet above a sprawling, glittering mass of humanity. Hong Kong.
When: A celebration
Who: Female, Asian
The memory of Hiero’s eyes struck me again. Their glint forced me to calm. I rehearsed a few facts. I was an intelligent man. I’d been told just that today by a policeman. Wonderful.
I recalled what I knew of Hiero, to recollect how the world looked to a student. I tried on his shoes, walked around in them a while. They didn’t take me any place I wanted to go, but everywhere I went, I bumped into other students.
Rhianne was a student. An exchange student, like Hiero
What were the chances?
Who cares. Again, it was an easy hypothesis to test and, if no good, discard.
From the back of my bureau I dragged my laptop, opened it, and waited while it booted. My fingers hung over the keypad, ready to enter my password, but it went straight through to the desktop. I was too intent on my test to notice the anomaly.
I opened a web browser and hit the bookmark for the university staff portal. Soon I was peppering the student database with queries.
Students from Hong Kong? Many.
Exchange students from Hong Kong? A handful.
Studying humanities? Two.
And—thought the intelligent professor—exchange students from Hong Kong with a birthday in the next week or so? One.
I clicked on that student’s profile. I shouldn’t have. I forgot that profiles included a color photo.
Li Min gazed out at me, the skin around her eyes crinkled by her smile. Hair bobbed, and wearing the kind of checkered blouse that either meant she was a square, or conducting a subtle subversion. She was an Arts student, so probably the latter.
Her smile looked genuine, in any case.
Would she still be smiling on her birthday—in two days?
Crap.
I spun on my chair, and hauled myself back up the stairs to my bedroom. It felt empty during the day. Cavernous at night. Through a chink in the curtains I glimpsed channel markers winking red and green over the Swan River. The breeze streaming through the window smelled of lemon-scented myrtle.
I undressed, then redressed in track pants and t-shirt. I descended to the ground floor, and keyed the alarm to arm. The last thing I did before I bounded off across the lawn was to press the button on my Medline watch that told it I was going for a jog, and that it was okay to be in the Orange Zone for a while. Told it I was happy to walk at the precipice of death for a few minutes tonight in order to push away that unknown future time when my heart would throw me over the precipice without my say-so.
I should have stretched, would pay for it tomorrow. But I needed the rush of air around me, the thump of my feet on the tarmac. The smell of dew-wet grass.
I needed to think.
7
“Sorry, Mr—”
“Professor.” I corrected the woman behind the Qantas ticket counter.
“Sorry, Professor Griffen, the chances of getting on that flight are slim. The waitlist is already long.”
I thanked her and shuffled off the head of the queue.
I set my briefcase down on the floor and shrugged my shoulders in an attempt to stretch my neck. My body felt stiff from the base of my spine up. The buzz of the airport’s eternal twilight filled my ears.
There were no seats on Qantas Flight 97 from Perth to Hong Kong. The prophecy written on the sheet in my briefcase foretold the imminent murder of Li Min. But Fate had spoken again. The next flight with seats wouldn’t get me there on time.
Can’t argue with Fate.
Besides, Hiero wouldn’t do it. Perth was one thing, and he can’t have meant more than to scare Rhianne. She was a slim girl. If he’d meant murder, she’d be dead. So he’d done his research, and learned what mortal fear looks like, and how the garroting cord feels in your palms as it pulls taut on young skin.
But Hong Kong? He was yanking my chain.
I wandered past a bar, and ran my eye over the bottles arrayed behind it. Perhaps a snifter would loosen my neck. An electronic billboard flashed an advertisement for a service that offered to turn your pet’s remains into jewelry grade diamond, and I wondered if I’d slipped into an episode of the Twilight Zone.
Then I remembered Li Min’s voice on the phone. I’d called her number and reached an answering machine. The same smile I’d seen on her photo was in her voice, and I could see her speaking, recording the message, telling me, telling the world, she would be away until the next day. Her birthday.
But Hong Kong? It was unreachable.
Yet here I was at the airport. After one of the weirdest days of my life.
I mentally retraced my steps.
Phonecalls. The day had been full of phonecalls, and I hate phones.
I’d called Li Min’s number, of course. When that failed, I checked the university record for her next of kin, an Aunty Mae. But Aunty Mae’s line was disconnected. So I tried the property manager of the high-rise listed as Li’s address. They put me through to a ‘concierge’ who sounded like he was in a call centre. He had great English, and said he’d take a message, and didn’t say he’d file it in the rubbish bin. The lady at the embassy didn’t lie: she said she would not take a message, as Li Min was not an Australian national.
I even tried Hong Kong police, but chickened out before it picked up. That’s when I figured that Jack Griffen calling just about anybody was a non-event. More firepower was needed.
So I bit the bullet and called the Murdoch detectives. I got Thomas, who asked me if there was something I wanted to tell him. So I told him Li Min’s life was in danger. That didn’t seem to count.
By that stage it was late afternoon. My forehead was resting on the edge of my office desk, when I heard the clap-clap of shoes walking the corridor past my door. It was probably Grace grabbing dirty coffee cups the resident slobs had left in the lunch room. The sound triggered a flash of inspiration: if one voice wasn’t loud enough to be heard, maybe two would?
I dashed to my office door and threw it open in time to startle her. Cups rattled in her grasp as she jerked away from me. I’m not sure if it was my imagination, but her eyes had held a strange light ever since I’d gone on about Rhianne Goldman’s breasts.
“Prof—”
“Grace.” Winning smile. “I need a huge favor.”
Her gaze dipped, and she rearranged the skewed collection of cups gripped in her hands. Before she could
demur, I went on. “You know the assault. Rhianne Goldman?” Now she was leaning toward me. “Don’t ask me how I know, but I think another student is in danger.”
“Who?” she whispered.
“An exchange student from Hong Kong. A pretty young girl.”
Ten minutes later, Grace had joined my lobby group of two. She seemed, in fact, to have been primed from birth to throw her formidable frame behind a scandal, any scandal. I sat on a desk opposite her, and listened to half of a conversation as she called Detective Thomas.
She used the words I’d coached her to use. She didn’t mention my name. But I knew by the way her speech degenerated into monosyllables, and her glance kept darting at me, that my name had been mentioned. When she hung up, I had to press for an answer.
“He didn’t buy it?” I said.
She shook her head, and began arranging piles of paper on her desk.
“Damn. Why not? What did he say?”
She still hadn’t looked at me. “He said that all necessary precautions—”
“He guessed I put you up to it, didn’t he?”
A nod.
“Why the hell won’t he believe me?” I rose, and paced around the empty desk. “Would it really be that hard to check this girl’s okay?”
Grace finally looked up. One of her hands crept across the desk toward me. Her knuckles were hidden beneath a chaos of costume jewellery.
“Professor . . . Jack. He was very polite, but he said there was—” She halted. Then in a rush, “A flag on your—on you.”
“A flag? What does that mean? What kind of flag?”
“An MH flag.”
I was completely baffled.
“A what?”
“A mental health flag. He said you have a ‘psych admission’ on your record.”
“That’s preposterous!” I stormed from her office.
Preposterous.
Only, it wasn’t.
Back in my office I killed time researching how a Murdoch detective could have discovered I’d once been admitted to Graylands Hospital suffering nervous collapse, while the import of this trickled into my consciousness. Turns out the Health Records Act of 2012 exposed digital records to police for ‘the detection, investigation, and prosecution of criminal offenses.’ Learn something every day.
