by Phyllis King
The policeman took down contact details, folded up his notebook and tucked it back into his shirt pocket.
‘That’s it for the moment, but don’t leave town, as they say. We’ll probably want to talk to you again in the next day or two.’ He turned to go, but paused and added: ‘It might be worthwhile for you to have a blood test this morning, check alcohol and drug levels. Unless you’re used to unexpectedly passing out in public parks.’
With that he was gone. She could see the police packing up and heading off. She was suddenly desperate to find Pippa and make sure she’d be okay. Work could wait.
She’d been sitting by Pippa’s bedside for hours waiting for a flicker of life, taking breaks outside to call Pippa’s mum and friends, arranging for her current crop of fostered dogs and cats to find new places, arranging the day off work. Eventually Bec put her head down and must have drifted off, only to be woken by her mobile trilling its magpie carol.
‘Ms Mather?’ It was the policeman from that morning. ‘Can I check the contact details for this Michael Best?’
‘The only number I’ve got is the mobile I gave you, and the fact he worked at the Mirror. Oh, and we dropped by his place to pick up his dog last night. That was Arkwright St, off the top end of Rae St. I don’t know the number, but it’s the brick place beside the lane on the north side. The dog at least is real, because he’s still at my place.’
‘Can you describe him, please? Age, colour of eyes, hair?’
She rattled through it - six foot, mousy brown curly hair, blue eyes, about 35. Nice smile.
‘Well, one thing I can tell you is that whoever you were with two nights ago, it wasn’t Michael Best from the Daily Mirror. He was with his wife on Hamilton Island; 20th wedding anniversary. And he’s short and quite bald.’
He let the implication sink in. She’d been conned. Spectacularly.
‘We’ll check out the house next. I think you should be doing your best to remember everything you can about this guy. And did you get that blood test?’ She had. ‘We might just hurry up those results. We’ll talk again soon.’
And he was gone.
The blood test results when they came were the final betrayal. Her alcohol level was embarrassingly high, but the shocking thing was the evidence of rohypnol. No wonder those hours were completely blank.
But why? It was the depressing question that kept rolling around Bee’s head. She thought men used rohypnol to drug women for sex. That surely wasn’t what Michael - or whatever the hell his name was - was after, since he must have known she was pretty keen and he only had to ask, and she was sure that nothing like that had happened while she was out cold. So that meant he needed her out of the way for some other reason. And given the timing, it was hard to avoid assuming it could only have to do with Pippa.
She thought back to their conversation on Tuesday night. She was sure she’d told him Pippa was supposed to be away for the night when they went back to pick up Billie the wonder whippet for the midnight run. Explaining why they didn’t have to creep around and be quiet, because no one was there, and wouldn’t be.
So why was Pippa home when she was supposed to be up at her mum’s for the night, 200km away? And what could she possibly have that would be worth this much violence? She could only hope Pippa would wake up soon to clear up some of the mysteries.
Her final stop on that exhausting day was the police station. Michael’s house was a bust. It was the Bests’ home, not his. The police now wanted her to help create an identikit image of ‘Michael’, even more interested in him since they’d noted her rohypnol alibi.
Doing her best for Pippa’s sake, Bec could only feel what a monumental failure she was. It was one thing when her stupidity only hurt herself, now it had almost killed a good friend, one who only ever cared about others.
By the time she got home Bec was exhausted, physically and emotionally, but knew her own collapse would have to wait until the dogs had been walked.
Back in Yarra Bend, the dogs happily chased each other across the cricket fields and through the fly-fishing ponds. Watching Billie have a ball with Toby, she wondered if he was the fake or real Michael’s dog. Perhaps the faker had taken possession of his dog along with everything else. He’d planned this whole thing so carefully, even stashing the dog in advance. It was baffling.
How had she been so easily duped? She wasn’t stupid. You couldn’t do the work she did and be stupid. Naive? Ditto. But -and it was a big but - there was no doubt she had been both naive and stupid about Michael. She had got into party mode, started having a few drinks and stopped thinking clearly or sensibly. She was just uncritically enjoying his attention. And, as usual, he ended up being bad news.
Despite the self-recriminations, as she watched the dogs play and breathed in the fresh air, her mood began to lift. It was impossible to be miserable when two creatures were having that much fun.
Night wasn’t far away, but it wasn’t dark yet. She could hear the chittering of the bats in the distance and saw the dark silhouettes overhead of a few heading out, probably to attack some unsuspecting local fruit trees.
She walked back to where she had woken up this morning -a lifetime ago already. As she walked, snippets of the night started coming back: walking hand in hand with Michael, him encouraging her to sip from the bottle of champagne he was carrying. And no, he hadn’t had any himself. Lying under the trees, looking up at the moon, kissing. Then nothing. Thinking back, she still had no idea.
Except, if she wasn’t going to descend into self-pity about how useless she was, maybe there was a clue to be found here. It had been dark, they’d stumbled about, had rolled about on the ground. There was every chance perhaps he’d dropped something, or something had slipped out of a pocket. There’d been some breeze, so paper could have blown some distance.
She widened her range, looked under bushes and up trees. Had all but given up when she spotted it. A slip of paper. A torn bit of notebook with a number on it, a phone number maybe. It could have been dropped by anyone, but it was something.
Bec called back the dogs and started walking back to Pippa’s house, a bit of energy in her steps that had been missing before. A fresh determination.
She wondered if the number was part of a mobile phone number, with the prefix missing, maybe in some attempt to disguise it. She wrote down the mobile phone prefixes she knew, started dialling them. The first was not connected, the second rang out, the third went to an anonymous message bank, the next answered by someone who was bewildered by Bee’s questions and who’d clearly never heard of Michael or her before. The next clicked straight to voicemail, but a real voice this time: Caroline Jenkins, director of marketing for Haven Farms.
Haven Farms - the biggest supplier of free-range chickens in the country. The ones who’d made free-range affordable a couple of years ago, and they’d sewn up the market.
Strange.
Completely out of left field, and yet not. One of Pippa’s biggest bugbears was factory-farmed chicken. It incensed her that people would eat it. She’d been talking about some place recently, but Bee, ashamed as she was to admit it, usually zoned out when Pippa started on her animal lib rants. Now all she could remember was something about chickens and fraud.
Well, the best place to look further was probably in the house and here she was. She started on Pippa’s room. Slowing putting things away if she knew where they belonged, piling up the things she didn’t. Looking at everything and hoping she’d recognise a connection when she saw it.
When Pippa’s phone started ringing, Bec had to scramble under the bed to find it, hauling it out from a tangle of clothing by her fingertips, answering just in time with a breathless hello. A vaguely familiar female voice answered.
‘I see you called my phone earlier. Have you rethought my offer? It could be too late for that, you know. You should have reconsidered sooner. But it might just be possible.’
‘Sorry, can I help you? This is a friend of Pippa’s here.’ Bec kne
w she couldn’t fake Pippa’s voice, so played it straight.
‘Oh. Is Ms March there?’
‘No, she’s not. Who is speaking please?’
‘Ah, no, my business is with Ms March, and no one else. Is she available?’ The more the woman spoke, the more sure Bec became that this was the person whose voicemail she had heard just a few minutes before.
‘Pippa’s in hospital. If you had business with her I’m sure the police would like to know about it as part of their investigation into who nearly killed her. Can I pass on your name and contact details?’ There was a long silence at the other end of the phone.
‘In hospital? Ah, no, I’ll contact them myself. Thanks.’ And the woman, presumably Caroline Jenkins, rang off. No surprise that she didn’t ask for the police contact details.
Now Bec was sure that whatever had happened to Pippa was somehow connected with the chicken farm. Odd that it should be a free-range farm, though. Pippa still hated them, but she usually left them alone to concentrate on the real baddies of the chicken world. Bec had seen the pictures, knew that the worst of the factory farms were hellholes, but in typical fashion had put it to the back of her mind, to be ignored whenever she felt like a chicken roll.
She dived back into the mess that surrounded her with new enthusiasm. Every bit of paper, every book, item of clothing. Nothing.
There had to be something. It was clear that whatever Caroline Jenkins and Haven Farms wanted from Pippa, they didn’t have it yet. As she went through the events of the past week, she saw it made some kind of sense.
Michael had to be working for them to get back whatever it was that Pippa had on the company. Michael had used his dog to meet her, to get info about Pippa and get access to the house, had discovered when it was supposed to be empty, and arranged to get her out of the way.
Until, obviously, something went wrong. Pippa had been home for some strange reason - had she had a fight with her parents and stormed home? It wouldn’t be the first time. There had been some kind of altercation. But it was also clear that, although he had searched extensively, whatever it was he was after was still missing.
Trouble was, Bec had no idea what it was, or even if Pippa had kept it at home. Bec just knew that if it was here, she couldn’t find it, or simply couldn’t see what it was.
She grabbed a glass of wine and curled up on the couch. Within moments, both dogs had crept up, one on either side. Toby was twice the size of her little Billie, but still somehow just as sweet and fragile when he was asleep like this. The warmth and body contact gave her the first moment of comfort and peace she’d had all day.
She watched the huge body of the wolfhound snuggle into a smaller space than she would have thought possible, nestled hard against her. He was a beautiful dog. What was she going to do with him? She’d found it hard enough to find a place to live with just one small whippet, who on earth was going to want her when she had a second dog the size of a pony? But the alternative was leaving him at the St John’s Animal Shelter and she wasn’t sure she could bear that.
Animal shelter? Why did that ring a bell?
Michael. He’d said Toby came from there, hadn’t he? Then Toby would have a microchip. Microchips had contact details. Bec grabbed Pippa’s phone. Some ex-girlfriend of Pippa’s had worked there, part of that whole animal lib network.
She flicked through the names. What the hell was her name? Janet, Jane, no, June! There she was. Even better she answered, didn’t seem fussed about how late it was.
Bec started babbling without ever letting June get a word in. All about Pippa and Michael and the dog and how she had to scan that microchip RIGHT NOW.
She finally ran out of steam and lapsed into silence.
‘Of course. Meet me there in 15. Okay?’
Bec was startled. ‘Urn ... that’s it? I was expecting to have to fight hard to convince you I wasn’t completely nuts.’
‘I heard about Pippa just a couple of hours ago, and I don’t expect the police will care too much. I think they put animal libbers on some kind of terrorist watch list these days. I remember she was certain there was some secret government file on her, after that break in at the uni research lab a couple of years ago. She had to be really careful. I’m just glad there’s someone to fight for her. I’m happy to help.’
It was a whole new insight into Pippa’s life. Bec knew the paper had run stories about animal rights activists being classified as terrorists, but she had never associated it with Pippa. How could she not have realised? As sweet and gentle as her friend was, she knew she was pretty hard core about animals and never cared that she might get into trouble herself.
Pippa had always done what she did because it was the right thing to do, and that was all there was to it. Had Bec been deliberately blind to what that could mean? It seemed so. She wondered just how much of the rest of her life - her friends, her lovers, her pastimes - she was in denial about. It wasn’t an attractive portrait.
With a deep breath and a promise - a threat — to herself to not turn her back on the things she had learned today, she gathered up the dogs, piled them into her car and headed for the animal shelter. June was already there and the equipment ready to scan. In a few seconds there it was.
Jonathon Barry, 15 Eleanora PI, Brunswick. A phone number. A purchase date from the shelter of just a week ago.
Toby must have been intended to be part of the bait. She never could resist wolfhounds, had in fact noticed him before she’d noticed Michael or Jon or whatever. Though how he might have known that about her was frightening.
With a hug of thanks and a promise to let June know what happened, Bec grabbed the dogs and left. And realised all too soon that she had no idea what she was going to do now. Confront him? Try to steal it back, whatever ‘it’ was he’d taken from Pippa, if he’d even found anything?
Bec sat outside what might be Michael’s - Jon’s house. There were no lights on, but she saw his car in the street.
She couldn’t imagine herself breaking in, getting caught, being bashed. Did the next best thing and rang the police and told them the address. Better for them to sort it out, risk the violence. Anyway, she was pretty sure he hadn’t found what he wanted. If he had, that call she had from Caroline Jenkins would have made no sense.
But what could it be? What might they all be looking for? She would have kept something that precious close to her, Bec was sure of that.
Pippa never carried a proper handbag, just a pouch thing in which she kept phone and wallet. The phone had been recent. She’d fought them for a long time, but once she had one it had never left her side. She’d been amazed at how useful it was for all sorts of things that had nothing to do with phone calls.
Bec remembered Pippa had been playing with it last time she’d seen her, taking a video of one of the new foster cats, wanting to post it online to help it find a new home.
Then it struck her. The phone; hidden in a pile of clothes deep under the bed. Bec started the car and sped home, hoping that the phone would still be there, and that Michael/Jon hadn’t also worked it out and gone back for another look, that her stupidity hadn’t made Pippa’s courage pointless.
She rushed into the house and saw the phone sitting on the table. She searched for videos and hit play. And there it was. A short grab: a small Haven Farms sign out the front, then a trek through the darkness, past the free-range pens into a huge shed of some kind. Floor to ceiling cages, thousands of birds packed in one on top of another, beaks clipped off, half bald. Horrifying.
Finally Bec understood. Haven Farms could provide cheap free-range chickens because they weren’t free-range at all. And Pippa had found out.
If that got out, Haven Farms would lose everything, and as the biggest provider in the market, that was a lot to lose. No wonder they’d tried to get the evidence back, were prepared to be violent if necessary.
Bec knew she had only one choice. It wasn’t the choice she would have made 24 hours ago. It would have been too hard. Sh
e’d probably have to fight to get the boss to do it. It was a news story no doubt, but a messy one, and it would piss off what was a major advertiser. That was never a popular thing to do when newspapers were bleeding money already.
But suddenly she knew that this time, she couldn’t just take the easy way out. She had to do something that was right, just because it was.
She uploaded the precious video to her computer and emailed it to the techs at work. It was a powerful piece of film, and that would help her case with the editor. At least it would be safer there, already uploaded, ready to go public when her story hit.
She poured herself another glass of wine, curled up with the dogs again, and planned a good night’s sleep.
Tomorrow was going to be a big news day.
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Side Window
Vikki Petraitis
My name is Kath and I regard myself as a new millennium woman. I live in Fountain Gate which is renowned for its shopping centre and the fact that we had the first Melbourne Krispy Kreme donuts franchise. I have a part-time job at the chemist, and I lead a rich and fulfilling life as a mother to Skye-Rose and Meaghan, and a grandmother to young Jack who looks just like his grandfather, God rest his soul.
