The Ones You Trust

by Caroline Overington

  ‘But she said she was an older woman,’ protested Emma. ‘Airlie’s practically a kid. She still lives with my sister, at least as far as I know. I can give you the address.’

  ‘We’ve been to the address,’ said Franklin, furiously. ‘We’ve been trying to locate your sister since we were at Crayon and Clay. There’s nobody at her address. Where else could Airlie be? Her father’s? Her boyfriend’s? Call up her Facebook page for me.’

  Franklin handed an iPad to Emma, who urgently began tapping the keys.

  Turning to Brandon, Franklin said, ‘And you . . . tell me why you fired this kid. And this time, don’t leave anything out.’

  Airlie had always liked Brandon. She had uncles on the other side of her family – her dad’s two brothers, who had always been Uncle Paul and Uncle Brian. Old men, like her dad.

  Brandon was different. Cooler. He’d always said, ‘Jeepers, call me Brandon. Uncle makes me feel ancient, man.’

  She liked his accent. She liked how he didn’t treat her like a kid. She liked how he’d talk to her about things he got up to in college – beer pong, for example – and how he didn’t mind admitting that he’d smoked ‘so many drugs’ when he was a kid, whereas every other adult she knew was always saying, Ooo, don’t take drugs, drugs will kill you!

  It was all such crap. As if smoking drugs could kill you. As if they all hadn’t done it. As if she didn’t know what bullshitters they were.

  Back when she’d still been at school, Brandon had introduced her to music he thought she’d like. Indie bands, and hard-to-find punk. From the time she was little, he’d called her Air-Bear.

  There was stuff she didn’t like, once she’d started working for him: how he’d hang around the kitchen in a singlet with deep armholes and long shorts, sweaty after a workout. Also, how his office was totally out of bounds to her and the kids, meaning she could have all three of them in the kitchen having meltdowns, with plastic bowls being thrown on the floor and meals not being eaten, and Brandon’s door would stay closed.

  What could he be doing in there?

  Brandon – or Emma, since she did the hiring – told all the nannies the same thing: he had a home office because he was working from home, meaning he could be on the phone, or doing a complicated deal, and the last thing he’d want was the kids storming in, having tantrums, or trying to show him something. She’d showed them a dumb video of a guy getting interrupted by his kids while he was on TV, talking about Korea. No way was he doing something like that. Airlie figured he played a lot of computer games, or went on Facebook. One afternoon, when Brandon was out doing some kind of errand for Emma, Airlie went into his office and had a look. It hadn’t taken long to figure out what had been going on. She touched the space bar on his computer, and up came a conversation he’d been having.

  OMG gross.

  Brandon had been on Affairs-4-U!

  He’d been on there, having sex talk and ewww, because Brandon was so old. Young people, when they wanted to hook up, they just used Tinder. Maybe Brandon couldn’t use Tinder? He was Mr Emma Cardwell. He could maybe go on with no profile picture but maybe he didn’t want an actual hook-up. Maybe he just wanted the sex talk. Affairs-4-U was mostly just texting. Dirty messages, or dirty pictures being shared by people who, as far as Airlie knew, weren’t even real. They were bots! Computer programs that made loser blokes think somebody was there, lusting after them. Or even if they were real people, they were just college girls paid to sit there and type out sexy messages.

  Did Brandon not get that? Did he really think there was a heap of married women out there, just sitting around, dying to have sex with strangers, no strings attached?

  It sure looked like it, because as far as Airlie could tell, he’d been on the site for hours that day. His history went back pages!

  I wanna be bad 4 u.

  R u ready for round 2?

  Baby you make me cum so hard.

  Are you misbehaving? Don’t make me give you a spanking.

  Thinking about you today HARD.

  I want to be limp for a week. I want to have all the juice sucked out of me. I want to be sore.

  Behave. I take it back, don’t behave. Be naughty LOL. Wanna be bad? I wanna be bad with you.

  Airlie had been careful not to close the screen down. She’d left it exactly as she’d found it, and when Brandon came home from his errands, she said nothing. Later that night, after rolling around on their old mattress with the stained sheets, she’d told Denim.

  ‘That is gross,’ he’d said. ‘You could blackmail him.’

  ‘Blackmail him? He’s married to my Auntie Emma!’

  ‘Exactly. They’ve got heaps of money. They’ve gotta have money if she’s on TV.’

  ‘Yeah, but he’s her husband.’

  ‘He’s not much of a husband if he’s on Affairs-4-U. That’s rank. We should put a Trojan on his desktop. Demand money or else we’ll pass his messages to the media and it will be, “Emma’s husband is a pervert!”’

  ‘But how do we even do that?’

  Airlie hadn’t wanted anything to do with it, but Denim had been all over it. He wouldn’t let it go. He’d pushed and pushed, giving Airlie a disk to load onto Brandon’s computer. Reluctantly but obediently, she’d inserted it into his hard drive and downloaded the Trojan, giving Denim control of his keyboard and screen.

  Denim had sent the first, hacker-style message: a screenshot of Brandon’s conversations on Affairs-4-U, with a demand for money.

  Brandon hadn’t responded, presumably because what did a screenshot prove? He hadn’t used his own name. He knew it was him, but nobody else would know. He shut his account down. But it was too late: Denim had his entire history – his log-on, his banking details – and he followed up with more screenshots of Brandon’s profile, complete with credit card details, and the billing address.

  Brandon wanted to know what they wanted.

  Denim had told him: twenty thousand dollars. Brandon had been, Are you fucking kidding? Where was he meant to get twenty thousand dollars, that Emma wouldn’t notice? He’d played for more time and Denim had given him a bit more time, but not much.

  Airlie had freaked out. ‘You can’t tell the media! Emma will lose her job and I’ll lose mine!’

  ‘Why does she lose her job?’ said Denim. ‘He’s the pervert.’

  He’d carried on, seizing control of Brandon’s computer so that all that would come up was a blank screen – with a message that floated across: Pay now, pay now . . .

  Pay now. Or else.

  ‘I paid them two thousand,’ said Brandon. ‘I was thinking, it’s probably Nigerians. Two grand is a fortune. They’ll back off. They didn’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t Nigerians?’ Franklin said.

  ‘No. But even so. They came back, wanting more, and I could see there was going to be no end to it. Tip of the iceberg. So I just told my wife.’

  ‘What did you say?’ said Franklin.

  ‘I just told her – I paid a fee to join a soft-porn site. I never met any of the women. Now I’m being blackmailed by people who know who you are. And Emma was upset, obviously.’

  Brandon could still see her, stalking through the kitchen, putting the plates down so hard that one of them cracked. They had gone upstairs to fight about it in the upstairs bedroom, hissing rather than shouting so the kids couldn’t hear.

  ‘How could you be so stupid? What do you think The Snoop is going to do with this story when it gets out?’

  ‘That’s all you’re worried about, isn’t it? The fact that I am bored out of my brain doesn’t concern you. The fact that we never have sex doesn’t concern you. Your only concern is that I’m Mr Emma Cardwell and this could hurt your career.’

  ‘That is not true.’

  ‘That is true, Emma. Our marriage is fucked. When is the last time we even had sex? Why do you think I was on that site?’

  They’d blamed each other. Brandon saying, ‘I’m so fucking bored.’ Emma saying, ‘I’m st
retched so thin.’ They’d put it back together, finally consoling each other. Emma smashed the hard drive with a hammer, but not before she’d replied to the hackers, saying, This is EMMA. You can stick your demands.

  The following Monday, shortly after Brandon had gone to Crayon and Clay to beg and cajole and convince Noelle to take Fox for an extra day, Emma had turned to a startled Airlie and said, ‘You’re fired.’

  ‘This is amazing,’ said Maven. She was scrolling through various social media sites on her phone. ‘Cuppa is the number one search term on Facebook and Twitter. Hashtag EmmaCardwell is number two, and hashtag FindFox is number three but gaining. That’s more retweets than we’ve had since I don’t even know when. The Facebook post has forty-five thousand Likes and it’s only been up since, I don’t know, maybe not even an hour. This is the kind of attention you get when Trump says something sensible and the Left goes nuts.’

  Franklin wanted to know how Emma had figured out that Airlie was behind the Affairs-4-U blackmail.

  ‘Because it was obvious,’ she said, her tone frustrated. ‘I’d talked to Airlie a million times about how she had no money. Every time we paid her, she’d say oh, thank God because she had no phone credit, or she owed money to the tattoo artist. From there, she was getting her tattoos filled in, and talking about wanting a French bulldog.’

  ‘Did you confront her?’ asked Franklin.

  ‘Yes, and I told her we had CCTV in the house that she didn’t know about, which we don’t. And she just confessed. She said the boyfriend had made her do it.’

  ‘And you fired her?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Emma. ‘I told my sister, I can’t keep her on. Even without the blackmail, she’d been snooping. She’s not supposed to be going through Brandon’s office. She was supposed to be taking care of the kids.’

  ‘And she took it badly – Airlie?’ said Franklin.

  ‘She didn’t seem to care. I don’t know how much she even wanted the job. She didn’t complain. She didn’t storm out. It was Freya who was most upset. She came over and we had a big fight. Freya’s view was, “You’re not firing Airlie because of the snooping. You’re firing her because you’re embarrassed.” Which wasn’t true. I fired her because she was threatening us. Brandon, me, my kids. But the idea that she’s done this . . . Believe me when I tell you, Airlie couldn’t pull off something like this.’

  Franklin ignored that. She’d been smart enough to load the Trojan and the boyfriend had been smart enough to extract two thousand dollars.

  ‘What about the boyfriend?’ he asked. ‘Is he really called Denim or is that a made-up name? Do we have an actual last name?’

  ‘I’ve never met him,’ said Emma. ‘I’ve only ever seen him on Facebook. I brought her profile up.’ She turned to Panton, who had the page up on the iPad. ‘He’s all over this page,’ she said, moving the screen so Franklin could see the image of a heavily-tattooed, twenty-something male, with a disc the size of a twenty-cent piece pulling the piercing hole in his ear out of shape.

  Franklin glanced across. ‘If he’s behind this, where are they holding her? Do we know where our tattooed friend lives?’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ said Emma, alarmed. ‘My niece isn’t going to kidnap my child.’

  ‘I asked you before, Emma, to try to think of anything. At this stage, we can’t rule anyone out,’ said Franklin. ‘We need to know everything. So tell me now, who else might hold a grudge? And who knows your movements, your family’s movements, during the day? Because it occurs to me, whoever picked her up knew to do it in the middle of the day, not later, when Brandon or you would be there. That’s pretty detailed knowledge of your schedule. Who’s got that kind of knowledge? I’m guessing Airlie.’

  ‘Okay, Airlie, but most people . . . Mum, Freya, Lena, even Liam.’

  Franklin said, ‘Liam being?’

  ‘He’s my driver,’ said Emma.

  ‘He’s not your driver,’ said Brandon. He’d been staring down at his shoes as Emma recounted his shame, but now he looked up. ‘He’s your bodyguard.’

  Franklin shot back at Emma, ‘You have a bodyguard?’

  Emma made an exasperated face. ‘Not really. When we first hired him, yes, but now he’s mainly my driver.’

  ‘No, he’s not, Emma,’ Brandon insisted. ‘He’s your bodyguard. He was hired to protect you.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ said Franklin. ‘What else aren’t you telling me?’

  Emma went through the story as quickly as she could.

  ‘I had to go back to work pretty soon after Fox was born. I don’t know if you watch breakfast TV . . .’

  Franklin said, ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘Okay, over on Saturn, they launched a program like Cuppa, called Brew,’ said Emma, speeding up. ‘They’ve got the pop star, Cassie Clay, as host. They’re doing really well. Stellar told me to come back to work to try to fight them off. I was on set maybe three weeks after Fox arrived when somebody came in – a fashion designer guest – and he picked on me about my weight and it went viral. Most people were on my side but one guy – really thin, really creepy – started following me around, trying to get my attention.’

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Franklin.

  ‘He wasn’t somebody I knew. The first time I saw him, I was with some fans,’ Emma said. ‘This was at a “Meet the Cuppa Stars” event. There were people everywhere, having champagne and wine, and I was standing near a bowl of chocolates, those Lindt Ball ones. I picked one out and put the whole thing in my mouth, and this guy, he sidled up – you could smell him – and said something like, “You’re enjoying that.” The way he said it, it was just a bit leery. I wasn’t that worried. Most people get nervous when they come up and say hello, but this guy was different. He smelled bad. He was, I don’t know, creepy. I said, “I’m not supposed to eat them. They go straight to my hips.” And he said, “Men like a healthy woman.” And again, leery. Like touchy-feely without the touchy. He never touched me. It was just creepy. Like he was looking me over. And you know when you get the feeling you want to get away from someone? He had that breath that makes you want to turn your face.’

  Impatient, Franklin said, ‘And?’

  ‘And I couldn’t get away,’ said Emma. ‘I’d step away, and turn around ten minutes later, and there he’d be on the periphery of my vision. He started asking me if I’d seen a card he sent. We get a lot of cards at Cuppa. Kids write in. Bitchy women write in complaining about my clothes. It’s hopeless trying to remember them all, but he got offended.’

  ‘Because you couldn’t place him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was he aggressive?’

  ‘I don’t know about aggressive,’ Emma said doubtfully. ‘He was persistent. He followed me right out the front, where I got into a taxi. He was watching me when we drove away. I thought he was going to follow me, maybe try to figure out where I lived. About a week later, our producer, Matty, came and told me that this guy had been calling the studio, saying that I’d asked him to bring Lindt Balls to the studio for me, and he wanted to deliver them personally.’

  ‘But you hadn’t?’

  ‘Asked him to buy me chocolates? No. He was stalkerish,’ she said. ‘I have a private Facebook page with a fake name, for my friends and family, where I can post pictures of the kids, not for social media – and this guy, this Lindt Ball man, somehow found it, and left all these vile comments.’

  ‘And he went to the studio,’ said Brandon.

  ‘What for?’ asked Franklin.

  ‘To deliver the chocolates. He came with one of those green recycling bags full of Lindt Balls. You’d normally laugh, except . . .’

  ‘Did you call the police?’ asked Franklin.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, because it comes with the territory. They see you on TV. They think you’re a friend. You’re talking to them every day in their lounge room.’

  ‘But you got a bodyguard?’

  ‘Not really,�
� Emma protested. ‘Stellar hired Liam. And he’s not really a bodyguard. I’d been complaining about this guy and PJ told Maven that he knew a guy who’d left the army and taken up security work, and he was looking for more hours. PJ had only met him once or twice, at the gym, but he said he was big. So we hired him. Stellar hired him. But we don’t call him the bodyguard because Cuppa is a down-to-earth show. We’re not supposed to be big stars who have bodyguards. So Maven said, “He’ll be your driver. He’ll pick you up in the morning and bring you home again and take you wherever else you need to go.” I thought it was a bit over the top but it was also kind of nice, and Stellar was paying, so, even after Lindt Ball Man stopped hassling me, I kept Liam on.’

  ‘And the stalker – Lindt Ball Man – stopped harassing you when?’

  ‘I guess I haven’t received anything from him for . . . I don’t know, maybe eight months? And that’s normal too. Fans get obsessed and then they move on.’

  ‘We need to find him,’ said Franklin. Sensing movement in the doorway, he turned to look.

  ‘I can help you find him. I’ve got a photograph. And his name.’ Maven was standing, feet wide apart in her shiny flats.

  ‘We had a photo from the meet-and-greet blown up and stuck inside the reception desk at Stellar, with DENY ENTRY on it,’ she said. ‘I ran a check on him. Boris Stanojevic. I’ve just looked it up. A total weirdo who still lives with his mum, but essentially harmless.’

  ‘Says who? You?’ said Franklin.

  ‘Me.’ Maven shrugged.

  ‘Not the police?’

  ‘I told you, I can get his name for you, and a picture,’ said Maven. ‘Do you want that, or not?’

  Franklin didn’t answer right away; he was battling to control his frustration. ‘Get it for me,’ he said finally.

  ‘No problem. All you had to do was ask,’ said Maven, primly. ‘And while we’re at it, we should call Liam.’

  ‘Why?’ said Franklin.

  ‘Because I’ve just been outside. It’s already a zoo out there, and it’s only going to get worse.’ Thrusting one hand deep into her pants pocket, she pulled out a phone in a dazzling cover. ‘He’s a good person to have around in this kind of situation, when you just never know what’s going to happen.’