Shooting Star

by Temple, Peter

  I see myself lay him down, stand up, see the blood on my bare upper body, my hands. Police are coming from everywhere. In the gate, Hepburn appears, black overalls, Kevlar vest, Fritz helmet.

  I walk towards him.

  He backs away. ‘

  Frank, the bloke was…’ I take two big strides, get to him, grab him by the throat with both hands. I feel the squeeze, my thumbs digging into his windpipe, my will to kill him. He tries to spear my arms apart with his palms pressed together but I butt him in the face, hear the sound the cartilage in his nose makes as it is crushed.

  Then I woke up, the dream always ended there, woke me. I got up, went downstairs, found Orlovsky’s no-name cigarettes, sat in the dark and smoked and brooded. Waiting for the light.

  LAUREN GEARY stood in the library doorway holding the envelope, uncertain of whom to give it to. It had been delivered just after 10 a.m. and brought from the gatehouse by a waiting security man.

  We had been in the library since 9.30 a.m., Tom and Barry, Stephanie, unable to meet my eyes, Graham Noyce. Pat Carson was next door, waiting to be told. Orlovsky declined to be present. ‘I hate stuff like this,’ he said.

  ‘Frank,’ said Tom.

  He was in his position, standing behind Stephanie. This morning, he was smoking cigarettes, had smoked three while we waited.

  My duty. I made the demand, I could tell them the result. I had no quarrel with that, only regret and fear.

  I took the envelope from Lauren Geary, got a finger in behind the seal, ripped it open, took out the contents, a photograph, not a big print, a 4 x 3, something like that.

  I turned it over.

  Anne Carson, Anne Carson’s head above the copy of the previous day’s Age she was holding under her chin. Both her little fingers were visible, her left one in a neat, clean bandage. She looked clean too, her hair damp and combed off her face, comb marks showing, clean and unafraid, something unfocused about her eyes.

  But alive.

  ‘She’s alive,’ I said.

  ‘Thank God.’ Tom closed his eyes, brought his hands up and made a steeple with his fingers, put his forehead to his fingertips for a second. Then he touched Stephanie’s shoulder, a father’s touch.

  ‘Tell your grandfather,’ he said and held out a hand for the photograph.

  ‘Good call, Frank,’ said Barry, not loudly, moving to look at the photograph.

  ‘She looks fine,’ Tom said. ‘She’s okay, we can get her out of this. Get her out. Yes.’

  I left the house, walked slowly back to the Garden House, enjoyed the misty rain on my face, the smell of the newly dug beds on either side of the brick path. The gardener I’d seen the day before was resting a foot on a fork sunk deep into the dark soil.

  ‘Good soil,’ I said. ‘Making the beds bigger?’

  ‘Mr Pat Carson went to Ireland last year,’ she said, as if that were explanation enough. What did that mean? Corin would know.

  Corin. I hadn’t phoned her the night before. I’d said, I’ll phone you tonight. Why had I said that? What would I have said to her? After one sandwich, one round sandwich with a hole in the middle, eaten in her vehicle?

  Not hearing from me wouldn’t have bothered her. She probably thought: Thank you, God, the psycho hasn’t called. Soldier-cop psycho killer. Self-confessed.

  I stood on the terrace at the French doors, cleaning my shoes on the bristle mat. Orlovsky looked up, put the phone in his lap. He was sitting in the Morris chair with the leather cushions, portable phone in his hand, ashtray full of no-name butts on the coffee table in front of him.

  I opened the door and stepped into the warm, bright room.

  ‘Alive,’ I said. ‘Yesterday afternoon, anyway.’

  WE PARKED in the Carson House carpark and sat there for a while in the gloom, not saying anything. Then the lift doors opened. Graham Noyce and a burly man came out, saw us, walked over.

  ‘You cannot believe,’ Noyce said, ‘how hard it is to get used money. The banks don’t want to give you used money. It’s pure luck we’ve managed to get this sum.’

  The burly man was carrying a briefcase: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in old fifties and hundreds.

  Orlovsky coughed, the cough of someone who wants to say something. ‘Knew the right people,’ he said, expressionless voice, ‘you could’ve bought this cash for a unit. Anywhere. Eighty grand unit.’

  Noyce glanced at Orlovsky. ‘Knew the right people?’ he said. He looked at me. ‘We’d appreciate it if your associate doesn’t put this job on his CV.’

  I took the briefcase. ‘It isn’t over yet,’ I said. ‘And when it is, no one may want to put this job on their CVs.’

  The instructions at 11.30 a.m. had been clear:

  Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in used fifties and hundreds in a briefcase. Be on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Swanston Street at 3.30 p.m. and you’ll get your instructions by phone. When we have the money and know that you haven’t tried to trick us, we’ll call you and tell you where to find the girl. If you do anything else, try anything, she dies. Understand?

  I said yes.

  Orlovsky dropped me in Little Lonsdale and I walked to the Swanston intersection, conscious of the weight of the case. An early twilight was settling in, thin rain being blown down the tatty street, everyone hurrying to be somewhere else. I watched two haggard boys across the street making a drug sale to a lanky young man in a good suit: a hit to see him through the night shift in some twenty-four-hour office, hunched over a screen.

  The phone vibrated at 3.29 p.m. my time.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go to Museum Station now. Take the escalator down. Wait near the escalators at the bottom. Put the briefcase between your feet. Someone will approach you and say, “Anne sends her love”.

  Got that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I walked up the street thinking, we haven’t been dealing with crazies or the Russian Mafia or the same people who kidnapped Alice. We’ve been dealing with small-time opportunists, people who somehow got hold of an advanced voice-changing device. They panicked at the MCG, realised that with the notice we had, we could trap them. Throwing the money to the crowd wasn’t planned. It was an improvisation.

  Mid-afternoon, no rush for the trains yet, half an hour before the early leavers came out of the office blocks. It seemed no more than a day since I’d come up from the depths of Museum Station carrying Vella’s package. How long ago was it?

  I entered the cheerless, echoing structure, paused only briefly at the top of an escalator, watched the iron stairway moving down into the cavern blasted from the rock. It was a long way down, and steep.

  On the stairs, going down, the briefcase heavy in my hand.

  No one waiting at the bottom. The person would be nearby, somewhere in sight of the escalators, waiting for a man with a briefcase.

  I looked back, up the steel stream. No one had joined me on the escalator. They’d picked a quiet time, they knew this station, the table of its human tides.

  Why did they want me to wait? Why not tell me to put the briefcase down, get on an up escalator? Thieves, that’s why. They’d lost the money at the MCG. It would be a painful thing for them now if some lurking kid saw me move away, leave the briefcase unattended, grabbed it and ran. They could hardly chase him. No. Better to have me wait, guard their money. Hard-earned money. Blood money.

  I reached the bottom and stepped off, walked a few paces, stopped, put the briefcase between my feet, looked around.

  No one coming my way.

  They were watching, a final check to see that I was alone.

  I turned back to face the escalators. People going up, the stairs I’d left still empty. At the top, far away, a tall person pushing someone in a wheelchair was looking down. Didn’t they have lifts for wheelchairs? It couldn’t be safe coming down this steep stairway, thousands of interlocked steel knuckles moving.

  I looked around again. Where was the pick-up person? Looking at my wa
tch, pointlessly looking at my watch, feeling a little tremor in my throat, looking back at the escalator, looking up, at the man with the wheelchair, it was a man, bearded, our eyes met in the way of animals, me on the canyon floor, him on the rim.

  Our eyes locked and his mouth opened, opened in his beard, I could see the pink of his mouth, pink like a rose, and he shouted:

  ‘HERE’S YOUR LITTLE SLUT YOU CARSON BASTARDS!’

  He pushed the wheelchair, pushed it and kicked it.

  Pushed it into the canyon, pushed and kicked it onto the moving steel steps.

  For a second, it was airborne, came down on its rubber tyres, bounced, lurched sideways, came upright.

  I could see the person on it, someone in a heavy coat, camel-coloured, a coat with a hood, a duffel coat, you didn’t see duffel coats these days…

  I didn’t think, ran, ran for the escalator, saw the wheelchair lurch forward, begin to topple…

  Saw the person on it, the hood falling off the face. Dark glasses.

  The dirty blonde hair, the lock falling forward…

  I was running up the moving stairs, against the stairs, running towards the wheelchair coming down, an impossible gap to bridge, the chair toppling, hitting the side of the stairs, bouncing across to meet the other side, Anne thrown about, thrown forward, not falling out, held by something, dark glasses off her face, in the air…

  Her eyes were open, pale eyes.

  The wheelchair was in the air, one wheel on the rail, people shouting.

  I could save her, stop her fall, if I could get there, get a hand on this chariot.

  Running uphill, the wheelchair above me now, going into space.

  I stumbled, falling, falling away from her, falling away from Anne, my arm out, my despairing, clutching hand.

  And then I touched a wheel, grabbed it, pulled the chair down, pulled it on top of me, pain as it met my face, my teeth, my throat, going over backwards, holding on to it, sliding, pain in my back, agonising pain, sliding, under the chair, head lower than heels…

  We were at the bottom, Anne and I, thrown across the threshold onto the tiles, the chair on my chest, screams, my scream, the screams of others, still in my ears.

  I fought clear of the wheelchair, got onto my knees at her feet.

  People still shouting.

  The hood was over her face again, her head lolling.

  Please God, not a broken neck, not now.

  I put my hands to her head, pushed it up, my fingers too big, too callous, pushed the hood away from her face. I pulled away the scarf around her neck, a woollen scarf, blood-red.

  Her mouth was open slightly, an unlipsticked mouth, pale, paler than her face. A child’s mouth.

  And her eyes were open, held open, taped with transparent tape, only the whites showing.

  I touched her face. Cold, cold beyond warming.

  Behind me, close, a woman screamed, a scream that resonated in that cold canyon, went to the walls and multiplied, came back and went up to the far roof and there expanded, grew and grew and formed a parachute over us, a canopy of livid sound, gradually turning to echo.

  I pulled the hood back over Anne Carson’s face, gently, gently over the lock of hair.

  Then I sat back on my heels and began to cry, just small sobs, nose and throat sounds at first, soon the other sounds, the sounds we cannot make, cannot call forth, the sounds that make themselves, that speak of pain and horror and helplessness and injustice, speak of regret, of the regrets. All the regrets.

  And so it ended, in a tiled space, pitiless light, pale people all around. A man and a wheelchair, a girl in the chair, bound to it, dead. The man on his haunches, weeping, keening.

  FROM THE windows of the homicide squad offices, you could look down on the lights of St Kilda Road, make out the Shrine of Remembrance where the flame never died, see the dark expanse of Melbourne Grammar’s playing fields. It was a quiet office, smelling of instant coffee, of too-pungent aftershave, of roll-on deodorant applied too lavishly.

  ‘So basically you found the sellers of the vehicle,’ said Detective Senior Sergeant Vella, ‘and ruled out the driver and the locksmith boyfriend.’ He was sitting opposite me, across two desks, two of the half-dozen plastic-veneered desks pushed together to form a dumping ground for files and folders and boxes.

  ‘Basically,’ I said.

  ‘Leaving only five security guards, two other drivers, gardeners, cooks, cleaners, disgruntled employees past and present by the hundreds, and so on.’

  ‘I wasn’t hired to conduct an investigation into everyone in the Carson empire,’ I said. ‘I was hired to hand over the money. How many times do I have to say that? Want me to say it again? I was hired to hand over the money.’

  ‘But you did start your own little investigation.’

  ‘We were waiting. I had nothing to do.’ My face was aching, my whole head, my neck and shoulders. ‘Got any aspirin?’

  Without looking, he opened a drawer, found a foil strip, threw it at me. I broke out three, washed them down with cold tea from a mug labelled Fuck Off, This Is My Mug.

  Vella’s eyes were closed and he was rubbing his temples. ‘Jesus, Frank,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. How could you let these people not call the cops? You had a duty to walk out of there and call us, tell us there’s been a kidnapping, fuck what the family wants, a fucking crime committed.’

  I thought about this, looked around the big room, only four people in it, looked at the newspaper posters on the bile-coloured walls, the files on the floor, the objects in labelled plastic bags, the death masks in a glass case, the board listing homicide cops long dead.

  Vella waited, sad expression.

  ‘I had no such duty,’ I said. ‘They called the cops once before and that girl’s only alive because of luck and her own efforts.’

  ‘This Noyce says you talked to the girl in England, to this one’s mother, he’s got a bill for surveillance on Barry Carson’s son.

  What’s the result of all that activity?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Just passing the time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing of any use at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Vella pointed his long nose at the ceiling and sighed, scratched his head with both hands. ‘A week behind,’ he said. ‘She could be alive today. Now from one end, we have to chase up every fucking Tarago in Melbourne, visit every fucking opshop that might ever have sold a duffel coat, ask ourselves where this arsehole got a wheelchair. And from the other, we’ve got a whole fucking small town to interview and that’s only the beginning. Two crews on it, fourteen people, and it isn’t enough.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ I said.

  He got up and came around the island, made a space on my desk and sat on it. Not looking at me, looking at the man sitting off to my right, he said quietly, ‘You get that thing to work?’

  I nodded.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘No. Just looking.’

  ‘Fuck, Frank, I’m compromised here. Who else knows?’

  ‘One person, there’s no risk there. Forget you gave it to me. I’ve forgotten.’

  A thin-faced man appeared in a doorway. ‘John,’ he said, ‘the Tarago’s clean, been gone over with meths, they think. And the wheelchair was stolen from Prince Alfred last Saturday.’

  ‘Things just get easier and easier,’ said Vella. ‘Tell me if you think of anything. Want a cab? Your face looks terrible.’

  The cab dropped me at the underground carpark entrance. I walked across the garden and into the main house through the side entrance.

  The house was quiet, smelling faintly of lavender wax. I went past the library, heard low voices, the smell of Tom’s panatellas. The door was ajar and I caught a glimpse of a fat ankle on a knee, a lurid homicide tie, a scalp gleaming under a homicide haircut.

  The study door was open. I didn’t knock, stood in
the doorway. Pat Carson’s chair was swivelled to face the French windows and his secret courtyard, only the top of his head visible.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He didn’t turn, didn’t say anything, moved his head slightly.

  I waited a while. Then I turned and left the house, went to the Garden House and packed my things and Orlovsky’s. As I closed the front door behind me, I smelled cigarette smoke.

  ‘Frank,’ said Stephanie Carson, face flushed as if from exercise, girlish in a poloneck sweater, ‘it’s terrible to say this at a time like this, but, the other night, you won’t…they’ll kill me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t remember the other night.’

  She flicked her cigarette away, didn’t look where it went, didn’t care, came up to me, a hand behind my head, on tiptoe kissing me on the lips, a full, sucking, wet, lascivious kiss, moved her head, teeth against mine, pressed her tongue into my mouth, pressed her pubic mound against me.

  I pulled away, picked up the bags and walked, drove out of the basement carpark in the old Alfa, aimed for home. Such as it was.

  ALL THE WAY, Stephanie on my lips, her perfume in my head, I thought about something I had said to Orlovsky on the day he fetched me from my helicopter trip to see Anne’s mother:

  This thing isn’t going to have a simple ending because it doesn’t have a simple beginning.

  I’d known that then and I knew it now, and I knew nothing more than that. But what did the beginning matter? The end was all that mattered. Had I caused the girl’s death on the morning I talked the Carsons out of bringing in the police? That depended on whether the police could have found her before the kidnappers killed her.

  But how could I be sure they always intended to kill her? What if my demand on Wednesday provoked them into killing her? These were not sane people.

  There were no answers to these questions and there was no point in asking them. But and but and but. In the same circumstances, Katherine Carson had blamed Barry for what happened to Alice.

  As the Carson family now blamed me. And from the beginning, I’d known the risk I was taking.