The White Tower

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘The accident report?’

  ‘It’s classified confidential, but I should have the authorisation by tomorrow.’

  . . .

  I held the floral paper to my nose and inhaled a smell that was innocently, subtly suggestive of a wealthy English garden. I drank it in as though it was a balm of some kind, a soothing draught that had all but evaporated.

  Bridget’s handwriting was open, loose. The beginnings and ends of letters crossed a border of roses and forget-me-nots. Her message was businesslike and introduction swift. Another of the Heroes had got back to her with a story about Ferdia and his shadow. This Hero who, like the previous one, Bridget did not name, had been struck by Ferdia’s timidity, how, with his reputation for audacity, Ferdia hesitated before making the simplest move, to make sure all his hard-earnt shields and protections were in place. He passed up moves that newer players took advantage of, and seemed content to slip back, let others make the running, take the glory when the risk paid off. He was not the Ferdia this Hero had expected from his reputation, not a character to emulate, admire.

  The incident he recounted to Bridget involved a plan to strengthen forward defences. Everything was organised but, as they were about to leave, Ferdia changed his mind and said he’d stay in the Castle. He didn’t even stay long on the game that night. A few minutes after his back down, he logged off. The group had left the Castle at the appointed time. In the band of hostile soldiers who immediately approached them, the Hero recalled one who was clearly waiting for Ferdia. He took his aggression out on the other Heroes when he discovered Ferdia had remained behind.

  . . .

  I phoned Bridget. It seemed the natural thing to do.

  ‘I like the paper.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She sounded wide awake. ‘I’ve got a heap of it.’

  ‘A birthday present?’

  ‘Years of,’ Bridget said.

  ‘You must have disappointed someone.’

  ‘My mother. She hasn’t given up yet.’

  I bit my tongue because it was on the tip of it to say, wait till you’ve got children of your own.

  ‘Sandra? I meant to put this in the letter. It was when we were talking about quitting, Niall and me. I’d emailed him to say I’d decided to. It was just getting too creepy. Niall emailed me back to say he was thinking about quitting too. The only thing holding him back was that if he quit then it would look like he was guilty. That’s what Fallon and everyone would think. I remember him saying that he was waiting for a decision and that if it went his way he wouldn’t give a stuff about who was lying in wait for him outside the Castle.’

  . . .

  Tuesday was a creche day. It was threatening rain again.

  I rummaged in the hall cupboard for my umbrella, recalling, as I pulled it out, that Peter and Fred had had a tug of war with it and broken half the spines. I shoved it and a coat into the back seat of the car and drove over to the hospital.

  The first big gobs of rain hit the car window. I shivered, though it wasn’t cold. It was going to be one of those October cloudbursts I usually relish, spring blossoms scudding along footpaths, the lift under the diaphragm that the combination of warmth and heavy rain can bring, that makes you feel your clothes are suddenly too tight.

  The main car park was full. I drove up and down a few times, hoping to see somebody leaving, but the squat cars under steady rain looked permanently fixed. I left and drove around to the car park at the back, finally finding a space in a corner furthest from the main building. I struggled into my coat and put up the umbrella, which was even more mangled than I remembered. Resigning myself to getting soaked, I began the long trek to shelter.

  Heavy rain muted the hospital’s luxurious façade. Close up, I began to feel the by now familiar mixture of dread and excitement. From blurred shapes, the buildings became clear, all-of-a-piece, still new and shiny with self-importance, not having yet worked out what might endure.

  I’d received a letter in that morning’s mail from Zhou Yang Zhu, one of the radiotherapists I’d written to, now living in Melbourne. I’d rung straight away and arranged a meeting with him. Over the phone he sounded courteous, but wary.

  Looking round to get my bearings, I spotted Eve, walking quickly, a pile of folders in her arms.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, catching up to her.

  Eve glanced round. ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Mind if I talk to you for a minute?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t really have the time.’

  ‘I can walk with you if you’re in a hurry.’

  Eve hesitated, then began to move away.

  ‘It’s about the accelerators,’ I said, keeping pace.

  She took a quick left turn into a corridor with a wide green stripe painted down the middle.

  ‘Have they given you any trouble in the time you’ve been here?’

  Eve frowned. Someone called her name. She turned and her face relaxed a little as she waved at a fair-haired, good-looking young man.

  Oh shit, I thought, just what I need. Another Dominic. But the young man grimaced, gesturing towards some double doors.

  Eve quickened her pace.

  ‘The accelerators?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to talk to you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Eve flushed, glancing in my direction but not catching my eye.

  ‘I know about the overdose.’

  She stopped and looked at me then, startled, but also passive, ­fatalistic.

  ‘How often has the Ventac 2 been down in the last few months?’

  ‘Please. I said I’m not allowed to talk about it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the Ventac?’

  ‘We have to get on with the job of treating cancer, that’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘What did Dr Fenshaw tell you about Tanya Wishart?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Eve said with a grimace, biting her lip and raising her folders, holding them across her chest.

  She disappeared through the next door, letting it swing shut behind her.

  I retraced my steps, glad I had the green line to follow, thinking of the tension under Eve’s skin, her small, bright frame, the impression she gave of living under siege.

  . . .

  A sharp voice made me swing around.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Having different-coloured eyes made it possible for Colin to appear concerned and disengaged at the same time, angry yet with a nervous desire to placate.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘One question. You were working with Tanya Wishart on the day of the accident. Why did you leave her alone in the control room?’

  I watched a dozen different responses pass across Colin’s face.

  ‘Who have you been talking to?’

  ‘Why did you leave Tanya alone?’

  ‘Do you know how many patients we’ve treated here since we began, how many people are alive today because of what we do?’

  ‘What’s wrong with the Ventac? Why can’t it be fixed?’

  Colin looked from left to right, frowning, along corridors busy with the everyday comings and goings of staff, visitors and patients. His arms curved by his sides, and his hands, poking out of the too-short sleeves of his white coat, were clenched so tightly that the skin stretched across his knuckles looked transparent.

  ‘I know your type,’ he said. ‘You’re a parasite, feeding off other people’s troubles. I met Moira Howley once. She was such a nice person. If you don’t leave now I’m calling security.’

  ‘Call them. Hospital security’s important. There’s the physical side. That’s obviously important. Then there’s the electronic side, that’s important too, though perhaps not quite so well looked after as it should be.’

  Colin reached for his beeper.

  I gave him a goodbye smile, found the entrance I’d come in, and headed out across hectares of sodden car park, the rain a gentle but relentless poc-poc on the working side of my umbrella.

  . . .

 
I rang Brook from my car.

  ‘That hospital’s a snake pit,’ he said cheerfully.

  For Brook to be interviewing doctors about cancer treatment and radiotherapy machines was a strange turnaround, a joke he would not have dared to script. Somehow, we seemed to be sharing the joke without having made it.

  ‘Oh, the legal system’s very useful when it works their way,’ he told me. ‘Their lawyer found out we were applying for another warrant. He met me with a court order blocking it.’

  ‘So you weren’t able to get the accident report?’

  ‘I will.’

  . . .

  Eamonn called to complain that the police had been all over the ­hospital.

  ‘What did you tell them about me?’ he asked in a tone of voice I hadn’t heard before, petulant with an undercurrent of hysteria.

  ‘Did someone threaten you?’

  Eamonn didn’t answer.

  ‘Tell Detective-Sergeant Brook that Fenshaw threatened you.’

  ‘I tried to warn Niall,’ Eamonn said. ‘I did try to be a friend to him.’

  ‘I’m sure you did.’

  I thought of Moira Howley waiting for her son to offer her some sign, a sign that she, in her fear and anxiety and courage, longed to make herself. There was the shock, and after that came the unravelling.

  Nineteen

  It was a spring day such as only Melbourne could turn on, the sort I remembered being young in, when months of rain and wind and fog seemed atoned for and forgiven. Southern winters aged a person, seeming to go on forever. But then, one day in September or October, you woke up and everything was different.

  It was Zhou Yang Zhu’s day off and he’d invited me to his home for lunch. He lived in Hawthorn, in a pleasant, leafy street with a few houses and a lot of flats. It was close to a busy intersection, but as I hurried along looking for number twenty-five, the noise of traffic receded and I could hear blackbirds in the gardens.

  I found the right entrance and began to climb the stairs.

  A young man came to the door in answer to my knock, wiping his hands on a paper towel. He looked no more than seventeen, with fine straight black hair falling in his eyes, a wide attractive face and braces on his teeth.

  I smiled and held out my hand as I introduced myself, thinking that this must be Zhou Yang’s younger brother.

  He explained to me while he served lunch—I don’t know what I’d expected, but it wasn’t a three course meal cooked specially for me—that his parents had been living with him, but they’d gone back to Hong Kong, that he was the youngest of the family. Depending on what happened now the handover was completed, he might return as well.

  My curiosity got the better of me and I asked about the braces. Zhou Yang’s answer was simple. He’d only recently been able to afford them.

  All of this was very pleasant, but it wasn’t telling me anything about linear accelerators, or Niall Howley. On the phone, I’d told Zhou Yang that Niall’s mother had hired me to look into his death.

  His dining table stood in front of a large window. I leant back in my chair, savouring the pleasure of looking down over the city. Few Canberrans, among my acquaintance anyway, lived in houses with stairs. The sun warmed Zhou Yang’s perfect olive skin. His braces flashed a reminder. I bit my lip, trying to work out how to introduce the Ventac—whether the indirect approach was best, or should I come straight out with it?

  When I finally asked a question, his reply was brief.

  He knew there’d been an overdose, of course. He gave me a look I was familiar with, gauging how much I’d already learnt, how much he could get away with not telling me, a look only partly disguised by his good manners and evident willingness to help.

  He pushed a dish of spicy beef towards me. ‘Take some more.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, beginning to wonder if I shouldn’t have insisted on meeting somewhere neutral. On his home turf, he was too much in control, and had the perfect excuse to duck out to the kitchen when he wanted to think about a question, or preferred not to answer it.

  ‘Why did you leave Canberra?’ I asked, thinking to try another tack.

  He stared at me without replying.

  ‘What made you leave?’ I prompted.

  ‘It was not a good place for me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘In the beginning,’ Zhou Yang pushed his chair back and looked at me, deciding to repay my directness with his own, but uncomfortable about it, ‘it was not too bad. And it was my first job since graduating, you understand, so I had nothing to compare. And I was so busy, I had so much to learn.’

  I nodded, thinking of Eve. ‘And then?’

  ‘I ask myself—what should I expect?’ Zhou Yang ran his lips over his braces, heaped food into his bowl and began to eat. Each of his movements now seemed a subtle way of distancing himself from me.

  He swallowed and said, ‘Work became difficult. There were jokes.’

  ‘What kind of jokes?’

  ‘Anti-Chinese. Racist jokes.’ His skin darkened, the memory bringing back an angry flush.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘At first I try to ignore and do my job, that is all.’

  ‘Who told these jokes?’

  ‘Colin Rasmussen.’

  ‘Did he tell them in front of the others? How did they react?’

  Zhou Yang bent his head once more over his bowl of food. I gave him a moment, then asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I tell Dr Fenshaw.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I talk to Niall one day when he is my partner.’

  ‘What did Niall do?’

  ‘Colin call Niall a—a pansy.’

  ‘What happened after that?’

  ‘Niall tell me to complain. He tell me people to write to.’

  ‘And did you? Complain?’

  Zhou Yang shook his head.

  ‘What do you think caused the accident?’

  ‘I think Tanya must have typed incorrect dose rate.’

  ‘Who told you she’d done that?’

  ‘We all talk about it.’

  ‘Who said it was Tanya’s fault?’

  ‘Colin was with Tanya in the control room.’

  ‘If Colin saw Tanya making a mistake, why didn’t he point it out to her? Why didn’t she correct it?’

  ‘I think Colin has to leave.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There we are, I thought. Zhou Yang had been humiliated and all he’d wanted was to finish out his time and leave. He did not challenge Colin’s version of events, even though it was Colin who’d humiliated him. And here I was reminding him of it, expecting truthfulness in return.

  ‘When you were entering treatment data,’ I said, ‘did you ever get a message that you didn’t understand?’

  ‘Once I get—it says Malfunction 12.’

  ‘Malfunction 12? That’s all?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I check, and Brian, who is with me, he checks too. Then we call Dr Fenshaw. He tell us we must have make mistake and start again.’

  ‘Did Fenshaw come and see the message for himself?’

  ‘Dr Fenshaw is angry at anything that delays treatment.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘He authorise to go ahead with treatment.’

  ‘And everything was all right? Your data was correct and the patient was successfully treated?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind helping me with one more thing,’ I said. ‘What was the date you left?’

  ‘May the eighteenth.’

  I pulled out a fresh copy of the numbers and glanced at it, even though I already knew the combination wasn’t there.

  I watched Zhou Yang closely as I handed him the list and explained where it had been found.

  ‘Why do you think Niall Howley recorded Tanya’s date of departur
e, but not yours?’

  Zhou Yang stared at the numbers, as I’d so often done.

  ‘Could it be,’ I said, ‘because these here—’ I pointed to the combination after 1602, ‘refer to another overdose, a second accident which couldn’t be Tanya’s fault because she was no longer there?’

  Zhou Yang nodded again, this time almost imperceptibly.

  ‘So we have two overdoses, 8000 rads and 15,000 rads. On the twentieth of January and the eighth of April. What happened to the patient?’

  ‘Mrs Slater was her name. She did not die straight away.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘A few weeks later. She was going to die anyway.’

  ‘Who got the blame? Did you?’

  A quick flash of rebellious anger in Zhou Yang’s dark eyes suggested I might have been mistaken about him. He said reproachfully, ‘Shirley. It was Shirley.’

  ‘Were you Shirley’s partner?’

  ‘No, Niall is Shirley’s partner.’

  Zhou Yang claimed he didn’t know a lot about the second overdose, though he was able to confirm the date. Nobody had talked about it the way they had about Tanya’s. It had happened only three weeks before he was due to leave the hospital.

  ‘When Niall talked to you, did he seem depressed?’

  ‘Oh no. Niall was not, was never—’ Zhou Yang paused, searching for the right word. ‘A quiet guy, but not—’

  ‘Do you think Niall believed himself responsible for the second overdose? That it was his fault?’

  ‘I think Niall tell Shirley not to proceed with treatment, but Shirley is worried about what Dr Fenshaw will say.’

  ‘Did Niall argue with Fenshaw?’

  Zhou Yang nodded, then said he didn’t want to talk about it any more. The remains of the large meal, the dishes we had barely touched, looked back at us reproachfully.

  . . .

  I rang Brook from the airport. ‘There was a second overdose. After Tanya left, so it couldn’t have been her. Zhou Yang, the guy I’ve just been talking to, said that Niall was operating the Ventac when it happened. His partner’s name was Shirley Henderson. I’ve an address for her in Perth.’

  ‘Will this Zhou Yang sign a statement? Testify in court?’