Starlight Peninsula

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  Now, outside, the sun made a burning cross on a shop front opposite, filling the window with glare. There was a tall, dark-haired man walking past, in front of the glass. She stood up and looked after him, but he’d disappeared.

  Eloise sat down and opened her diary.

  One: Silvio just for a few nights? Discuss with Carina.

  Two: Nick? Cook him dinner? Invite to pub?

  Three: A hobby.

  Four: A flatmate?

  Five: Who is Mereana?

  TWELVE

  ‘Get the email on strike action?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘Jack Anthony’s not happy about getting zapped in the toilet. Personally I’m going to use the pub across the road.’

  ‘I haven’t had a shock for a while.’

  ‘Like a rat in a maze, you’ve learned what to avoid.’

  ‘Everyone looks so tentative, so unrelaxed. Scared to touch.’

  ‘All ginger.’

  ‘Tip-toeing around.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a management tactic.’

  ‘Or a big science experiment.’

  Selena walked past, talking on her cell phone. ‘And then I did this amazing course. I was blown away by it. It’s about finding your inner awesomeness.’

  Scott rolled his eyes.

  They were watching film of Kurt Hartmann. The tycoon on his throne, with his smile, his wicked little teeth. Another one with a fairytale quality.

  ‘Put simply,’ Hartmann said, ‘I am a citizen of this country. The security forces of the GCSB, who do not have jurisdiction over citizens, spied on me illegally. Prime Minister Dance is in charge of the security services. How can he say he didn’t know?’

  Scott paused the clip. ‘Bradley Kirk keeps saying he’s got proof that Dance knew about the spying, but he’s not coming up with anything.’

  He pushed play. Hartmann, who was strikingly articulate when he got going, began talking about the US Government’s application to extradite him, which he’d been fighting since the police raid on his house.

  In the room beyond, there was a cry of pain.

  Scott nudged her and said, ‘Selena holds the record for the number of times shocked. It proves to me—’

  ‘How does the Prime Minister justify any of this?’ Hartmann said. Chustify any off ziss.

  ‘—It proves once and for all how thick she is.’

  ‘Hey, Selena’s not thick. She’s got inner awesomeness.’

  Hartmann went on, ‘I am a businessman. I owned a large, popular file-sharing website. That is all. To this day, I don’t know what was stored in it. I have done nothing wrong.’

  ‘See, I always knew Selena was the dumbest rat in the maze,’ Scott whispered.

  They edited in a clip of Jack Dance at his weekly press briefing, dismissing Hartmann’s claims that he knew about illegal spying. His tone was contemptuous. ‘Mr Hartmann is simply trying to avoid extradition. I had no idea he was being spied on. That was an operational matter.’

  ‘Satan’s looking a bit haggard.’

  Dance had recently developed a new crease down the side of his face, and dark loops under his eyes.

  ‘All the gossip’s about Ed Miles making his move. Backed by the Hallwright faction. I wouldn’t underestimate Satan, though. He’ll be looking to push back.’

  ‘How’s he going to do that?’

  Jack Dance was a right-wing hardliner. His handicap was the perception that he was aloof. Miles, who was now Justice Minister under Dance, was centrist, populist, and had recently been working on his friendly ‘down-to-earth’ persona. Dance’s smoothness made people wary, but there was something about Miles that made you uneasy too: those noticing, calculating eyes. Neither had the charm of the ridiculously popular Sir David Hallwright, whose sunny goofiness, during his reign, had concealed layers of cunning and guile.

  When Hallwright was in power, Scott used to reckon the real political brain was his wife, Roza Hallwright, who, while her husband was in office, spent her time writing children’s books. ‘Hallwright’s lady,’ Scott once mused to Eloise. ‘What a brain. What a mind.’

  Opinions were divided on this. Eloise wasn’t sure what she thought. Carina, who disapproved of the Hallwrights, called them a folie à deux, which didn’t seem quite right to Eloise.

  And Demelza said, ‘There’s only one political brain in that pair, and it’s him.’

  Eloise now thought of Sean, holed up at Jaeger’s with Sir and Lady Hallwright and their due diligence. There was a slight confusion in her mind about Roza Hallwright. The TV series and movies, Soon and Starfish and Soon and the Friends, which had been described as post-post-modern, contained jokes for adults as well as children, and featured Mrs Hallwright and her son Johnnie as characters; they were the creators of Soon and the Friends, who continually argued over plot in a slapstick mother-and-son power struggle. When Mrs Hallwright was mentioned, Eloise saw her cartoon — Mrs H as rendered by some witty Hollywood geek: bendy, curvaceous, faintly menacing. Her son Johnnie’s cartoon image was reminiscent of one of the Sparkler’s early favourites, SpongeBob SquarePants. ‘Johnnie’ was a brick-like figure with freckles, tiny legs, big sandals and billowing shorts.

  Eloise didn’t have an opinion about which Hallwright was the brains, but she did sometimes wonder what the Soon hype said about the country. Wellington airport, these days, was so tricked out in Soon merchandising it looked like a theme park. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to hear that New Zealand schoolchildren believed they were born in Soonworld. That they were citizens of the Land of Soon …

  She went on watching Kurt Hartmann, who had revealed, at this point in the tape, that he had political ambitions. He wished to help anyone who wanted to get rid of Jack Dance. This had much to do with the fact that Dance wanted to get rid of him, by sending him to an American jail.

  ‘I have considered starting my own political movement,’ he said. Moofmint. His tiny, avid eyes gleamed behind his tinted glasses. With his brutal jowls, wide mouth and pointy teeth, he’d been described as ‘Bond villain’, but Eloise thought he looked like the Ort Cloud in the Soon stories, a giant, gaseous character who sometimes landed, shimmering and pulsating, in Soon Valley. Hartmann was a creature massive yet somehow dainty, his pinky finger fussily crooked as he sipped his mineral water, reached anxiously for his hand sanitiser. He looked scandalised by the low level of debate (who were these agonising simpletons, these Luddites, who didn’t understand his brave new megaworld?), yet at the same time he played the teenager: scoffer of lollies, game addict, gangsta.

  Now, in the dark room, Scott made one of his noises: a cross between grunt and sigh. It signified deep thought. He was known for being a deep thinker, a real journalist, who hadn’t succumbed to the network’s pressure on content. At Roysmith they did real stories, not fluff. Scott made his noise again. Eloise looked at her watch.

  Scott leaned over and whispered, ‘What do you think of this suit? Too much?’

  Eloise said automatically, ‘It’s gorgeous. Lovely lining. When it sort of falls open. That mint green and pink combo — is it paisley?’

  ‘It’s a lightweight weave Ronald sourced from Italy.’

  ‘Right.’ She was gearing up to make an excuse.

  ‘I hope I don’t look like a stockbroker.’

  ‘Oh God, no.’

  ‘I don’t want to look shallow. Like Mike Hawkens, say.’

  ‘Everyone knows you’re deep. Into the arts and, um, literature. A reader. A thinker.’

  ‘Thanks, Eloise. You and Sean must come over some time. As James K Baxter once said—’

  ‘I’ve got this appointment. I’d better go now or I’ll miss it.’

  He flourished his hand. ‘Go. Fly.’

  There was a loud click and a shriek from the hall outside.

  ‘Ouch,’ Scott said, pitilessly.

  She left the building and hurried through town. She was walking on the right-hand side of the road, and there was a bus stop twenty metres ahead.
A car passed the bus stop, slowed and braked next to her, and a girl opened the car door and called back towards the stop, ‘Want a ride?’

  Eloise thought: The girl in the bus stop is crying.

  The bus stop was a walled shelter and she couldn’t see who was inside it until she reached it. Sure enough, it was a girl, and her face was contorted, and smeared with tears.

  Eloise walked on. She didn’t believe in ESP, or star signs, or fortune tellers or God. So how did a thing like that happen? How did information fly in, out of the blue? Perhaps something in the manner of the girl who’d called from the car had suggested it: that she was calling out to another girl, and that the girl was crying. Perhaps it showed that Eloise wasn’t going nuts. That she could still read the world accurately, at least some of the time.

  The police station loomed ahead of her, like a giant block upended on the hill. It was a brutal and unlovely building, all flat concrete surfaces, grimly functional. You reached the front office by way of a pebble-dash walkway. From across the road, the rectangular windows looked as small as arrow slits. What a dump.

  Eloise had visited this dump before, having been driven there on the day Arthur died. She had spent hours in a CIB office high above the city, watching a neon sign on the horizon, while the murder squad milled and bustled outside the door. At that time, Arthur was the subject of serious CIB interest: the white boards, the diagrams, the hurrying detectives. And then his death had been downgraded, relegated, the squad moving on to new mysteries. He was no longer a homicide; he wasn’t suspicious or even unexplained. He was just an accident.

  Yesterday’s fish-and-chip paper, she thought. Old news. Life goes on. Best not to dwell. Her phone rang. Absent-mindedly, Eloise answered.

  ‘Ooh hello. It’s your mother. I know you’re at work, but I just wanted you to know your father’s having tests with the specialist.’

  ‘What specialist?’

  ‘The one he’s been recommended. I understand he’s wonderful.’

  ‘What’s he a specialist of?’

  ‘Of? Goodness me, I don’t know. The internal organs, I imagine.’

  ‘Any hint which organ? Organs?’

  ‘Listen to you. Which organ. Which organs. The organs he’s having the twinges in.’

  ‘Mum, I’m actually in the middle of the road.’

  ‘The middle of the road? What are you up to?’

  ‘I’ve got an appointment.’

  ‘Are you under the doctor, too?’

  ‘I’ll have to ring you back.’

  Eloise reached the top of the pebble-dash ramp. A piece of paper taped to the smeared glass of the front door read: Doors broken. Buzz and WAIT.

  She buzzed. Waited. After a few minutes a heavily tattooed couple with a toddler came up the ramp and buzzed, and resignedly waited. They were joined by a youth with a shaven head, who buzzed and waited and then, with a look of amazed affront, as if this really was the last straw, began kicking the door and shouting. A policeman appeared and opened up.

  Eloise avoided the altercation between the youth and four officers, and went to the desk. Directed to a waiting area, she sat. A buzzer sounded, a door opened, and Detective Marie Da Silva appeared.

  She hadn’t changed. Wiry white-blonde hair sticking up on top of her head, short at the top and long at the back: an eighties hair style. A straight, freckly nose on an angular face. Strong features, defined cheekbones. Eloise thought: leonine. That pale hair and the feline face, and the unusual eyes. You noticed her eyes immediately. One was blue and one was brown, and they made you feel just slightly disorientated. You started focusing on one or the other, because both at the same time seemed wrong.

  ‘Hi,’ Da Silva said with a sharp glance, and put out her hand. She looked extremely alert, also impatient, as if she had little spare time. She was wearing khaki pants, boots and a short jacket.

  They rode up four floors in silence, in the scarred lift. Eloise followed her along a corridor and into an office. Da Silva pointed to a seat, and Eloise sat, while the detective shifted books and files on the desk, and drew out a cardboard file.

  ‘So. Eloise Hay. How are you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Arthur. Arthur Weeks.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘You interviewed me. He was my …’

  Da Silva opened the file. ‘Arthur Weeks. Died after falling from a retaining wall on the side of Mt Eden. He was your partner, you and he had been living together, half in his flat, half in yours. Detective O’Kelly and I interviewed you, let’s see, here and here.’ She sifted through pieces of paper, reading.

  ‘They said he was drugged with pills when he fell.’

  Da Silva lifted a page. ‘Fractured skull. Spinal injury. Tests showed levels of …’

  What was she doing? Eloise stood up. ‘Actually, I think I should go.’

  Da Silva paused, her gaze steady.

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking, really. Just a whim.’

  ‘A whim.’ Da Silva looked amused, then her smile dropped and she said, ‘Perhaps you’d better sit down and explain yourself.’

  Silence.

  ‘Since you’re here,’ Da Silva added.

  Eloise looked at the door, hesitated.

  ‘Otherwise I’ll just go on wondering why you came,’ Da Silva said.

  Another silence.

  ‘Oh, all right.’ She sat down.

  Finally Eloise said, ‘It’s just that I never asked anything. I didn’t ask questions.’

  Da Silva folded her arms and leaned back, considering her. ‘That was our job.’

  ‘But I don’t believe it, that he fell off the wall because of pills. Arthur wasn’t like that, he was never stoned.’

  ‘He was a barrel of energy,’ Da Silva said softly.

  Eloise stared. ‘You remember.’

  Da Silva smiled.

  ‘I can’t believe you remember I said that. I meant ball. Ball of energy. I got it wrong. I got everything wrong.’

  Da Silva’s eyes were fixed on her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I was so … I was so ashamed.’

  ‘Ashamed?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain.’

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

  ‘What? No.’

  ‘Something about Arthur?’

  ‘No. I mean ashamed because I felt that Arthur and I were both in such trouble.’

  ‘Both in trouble? But Arthur was dead.’

  ‘I know. But I couldn’t grasp it. I felt as if Arthur and I were both in terrible trouble. I was out of my mind.’

  Da Silva waited, then said, ‘Why have you come here today? What’s happened?’

  ‘There’s something I want to know.’

  Another silence, then the detective said, ‘Okay, sure. Just let me do one thing.’

  She got up and went out of the office. Obviously she thought Eloise was crazy.

  ‘Remember this guy?’

  Eloise looked up. It was the taciturn partner, O’Kelly. He sat down in a chair next to Da Silva’s desk, clicking his ballpoint pen.

  Da Silva said, ‘So, now we’re all here. What did you want to know?’

  Eloise leaned forward. ‘You showed me something Arthur had written, some names. You asked me if I knew who they were and I said no.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What were the names?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want to know then, but now I do. I’ve realised I let Arthur down. I should have asked questions.’

  ‘All this time later you’ve decided this? Why?’

  Silence. The clicking of the ballpoint pen.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Why? I don’t know. My husband left me.’

  The two cops glanced at each other. ‘And so …?’

  ‘I’m alone. I feel like I’m being visited by Arthur. And he’s saying to me, Why were you so useless? Why didn�
��t you ask a few questions, instead of sitting around being embarrassed because you said barrel of energy.’

  It sounded angrier than she’d intended. A long pause. Da Silva glanced at her partner again. His eyes were on Eloise.

  Finally Da Silva said, ‘You didn’t need to be embarrassed. You were fine. You were very together.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  Eloise sighed. ‘You see those stories on TV about people whose loved ones have been killed and they swear they won’t stop until they find out what really happened. Until there’s justice. You know those stories?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Well, I just accepted it. I didn’t lift a finger.’

  ‘There wasn’t anything else you could do. It was pretty straightforward.’

  ‘Do you really think that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Will you tell me the names?’

  ‘I’m not sure which names you mean.’

  ‘They were divided by a forward slash.’

  Da Silva regarded her steadily. ‘Just give us a minute,’ she said, signalling to O’Kelly. They went out of the room.

  Should she leave? Would they let her? What must they think? They’d be arresting her next, for suspicious behaviour. It seemed a long time before they came back in and sat down. The ballpoint pen clicked.

  Da Silva said, ‘Arthur’s death was filed as accidental.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m saying, Eloise, the questions were answered.’

  Da Silva drew out a booklet from the cardboard file. It contained photographs. She flicked through the pages, not showing Eloise, until she came to one, which she turned over. The photo was of a piece of paper, on which was written in Arthur’s handwriting:

  Simon Lampton/Mereana Kostas

  Eloise put her finger on the photo. ‘That’s it. You showed me those names, and I didn’t know who they were.’

  ‘Do you know now?’

  Eloise looked away, suddenly unsure. ‘Mereana’ was the name written on the back of the photo of the girl in Arthur’s file. And Simon Lampton was on Arthur’s list of the friends of David Hallwright; he was the one who’d adopted the daughter of Hallwright’s wife.