Into the Darkness

by Robin Bowles

  Eric explained that the machine had two electronic eyes, one in the chute to tell it whether the garbage had built up to the point where it needed compacting, and one pointing into the bin under the chute, to detect when it was full and needed to be rotated out. Each time it rotated, it beeped to tell anyone in the compactor room to stay clear of the carousel.

  He hadn’t done an experiment to see what happened when the chute was blocked down the bottom, but he was pretty sure that the machine would keep beeping. He said, ‘It’s telling the machine that there’s garbage there and it’s not coming out so it’ll keep moving the bins around.’

  His Honour asked, ‘Is it a single beep, or “beep, beep, beep”?’

  ‘There’s a few,’ Eric said.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I haven’t counted them, Your Honour.’

  Eric said he couldn’t hear the machine beeping from his office, but he could hear it from the corridor.

  Ms Siemensma asked whether he’d have paid attention if the machine was beeping that day, and he said, ‘Normally I would answer that question as “no, I wouldn’t”. However, in that particular week, that machine had just gone through a major overhaul. It had gone through a bad stage where there was a lot of problems.’ The waste system had been blocking before Wastech serviced it earlier in the week, so Eric was keeping an ear open in case it blocked again.

  Ms Siemensma shifted to the question of the first fire alarm. She asked if anybody had checked the people coming back into the building afterwards. Eric didn’t think they were checked, but he reminded her he wasn’t there. Tony Basile was covering his shift. Eric’s key fob shows him swiping in at 2.39 p.m. when he came back from the city, and again at 7.40 p.m. in response to Beth’s call.

  Ms Siemensma next asked which doors would open during a fire evacuation. There was a photo showing that the front door had been chocked open, but what others were open during an alarm?

  ‘It would trigger all the fire exit doors to open,’ Eric said. ‘They have striker plates so it would trigger the striker plates to remain open so that people can exit using those doors. They don’t swing open, they just click and unlock.’

  ‘What happens in the lift?’

  ‘You’re not supposed to use the lift. I believe that the lifts are disabled once there’s a fire. If there’s a full evacuation, I believe that that’s the case, but I have seen the CCTV footage and I have seen people obviously come down with the lift, so my answer to that would be that I’m not sure.’

  Eric and Ms Siemensma spent a lot of time on who said what to whom about the CCTV, but the end result was that the police didn’t seize it on the night and the footage was lost.

  Eric told the court that before 2 December, he’d already advised the owners’ corporation committee that the CCTV system should be upgraded. Since Phoebe’s death, that had been completed. The old equipment was left in boxes in a store room until some time in 2012, when Natalie Handsjuk applied to get the recorder to see if the hard drive still contained anything of use that could be extracted. But when they looked, the equipment was gone. Eric didn’t know who’d taken it or where it had been taken to.

  I was pretty sure that the rest of the afternoon would be taken up with the barristers’ questions trying to extract more from Eric, but there wasn’t much more of interest to me. So with an apologetic glance in his direction and a little bob to His Honour, I sidled out. I was going on a mission.

  CHAPTER 11

  TRESPASSING

  I was sneaking away to Balencea while everyone was elsewhere. I knew there’d be a concierge on duty, but I wanted to conduct some field research and also to look at the location, so I was on the same page as everybody else when evidence was given. I often do this sort of thing when I’m writing, so that I can better describe locations.

  I planned to arrive just before the residents started returning from work. My visit had several purposes. I wanted to see how difficult it was to gain access to the building without a swipe card or security fob, and whether it was possible to use the lift to enter the residential floors. It would be interesting to see how residents and or the concierge reacted when encountering a stranger who obviously had no key/fob access, and I wanted to check access to the fire escape and view the rubbish chute in the building.

  The building was easy to spot, shiny black in the afternoon sunlight and dominating a corner in St Kilda Road. I found a park easily and crossed to the front of Balencea. The time was 4.55 p.m. I could see a small desk to the right of reception, inside the glass doors, but no one was sitting there. The concierge was probably out the back in the office. But I knew a security fob was needed for the front door, and I didn’t want to get stopped on the way in. If I could get in. I walked around the back to Queens Lane, which runs parallel to St Kilda Road. I knew cars entered the basement car park from a driveway leading off the lane, because I’d checked Mr Google on my iPad at the lunch break.

  The driveway sloped up gently for about half its length and then dropped steeply into the gated car-park entrance. The gates looked very solid. I waited at the apex of the driveway so that I could follow a car going in or walk down and go through the gate as a car exited.

  I was casually dressed in a pink top and jeans, and I could see a CCTV camera trained exactly on the spot where I was standing. Halfway up and halfway down. I wondered if someone would come out to investigate why a middle-aged, casually dressed woman with a handbag was standing in the driveway. I hoped I didn’t look like a crook (how do crooks look these days anyway?), but my behaviour might have seemed odd if anyone had been watching. I also hoped the CCTV would provide a record of my visit in case my findings later proved controversial.

  I waited in the driveway for about ten minutes until 5.09 p.m., when a small red Mercedes turned in from Queens Lane. The driver was a young woman wearing a big floppy hat. She was talking on her mobile and had no idea her arrival was my signal to follow her down the drive. I easily got through the cantilevered gate before it closed. The driveway led to the basement car park at the visitor level, B1. I then easily found the lift and took it to the reception level. No fob needed. So far, so good.

  In the ground floor hallway (Level 1), I sat in a black armchair opposite the lift doors, where I was covered by CCTV. The entrance corridor curved slightly around the front desk before reaching the lift lobby, so I could see the front door but not the concierge’s desk. A fortyish man with a girl about ten came in through the front door. I stood up as if waiting for the lift and followed them in.

  The man used a fob to press 15, which lit up. As the lift began its ascent, I pressed 12, but the light didn’t come on. At least this showed you needed a fob to get to your own floor. The man asked me if I was a visitor and I told him yes, I was visiting the building, which was absolutely true. He was very friendly, not suspicious. He said that he’d have let me off at 12, but the security key only allowed him to access his own floor. This little exchange occupied our whole ascent, and I told him I would go back to the ground level and try again. He did reach across and press 1 before he and the girl left the lift. He may have been being polite, or he may have been making sure I went down again. Hard to tell.

  I returned to my black chair and waited again.

  A twentyish casually dressed man came in through the front door and entered the lift. I followed him in. He didn’t have a key, but he pressed 11. I tried again to press 12, in case the system worked differently without the security fob being used, but I had no success. The man saw 12 fail to light up and helpfully explained to me that if you’re visiting, you have to buzz your friend’s apartment number at the front door and they will activate the lift for you.

  I said, ‘Silly me’ or something like that. He also wasn’t in the least suspicious and appeared to be a visitor. As we got to 11, I said, ‘I might as well get out with you and run up the stairs’. He didn’t show any surprise at this.
He obviously wasn’t from the building, or he’d have known I couldn’t do that. We left the lift, and his friends greeted him loudly from an apartment at the end of the corridor. I turned right, looking for the fire escape (I didn’t know where it was), giving them time to shut their door.

  The fire-escape door was at the far right-hand end of the corridor on the same side as the lift. It wasn’t in a traffic area. There was an apartment door a couple of metres closer to the lift on the opposite side of the corridor, but the owner there wouldn’t normally need to walk past the fire door. I thought no one would notice if the door was slightly chocked open. The view of the door from along the corridor wouldn’t reveal it was slightly open, as the handle was on the side closest to the lift and the crack would be masked by the architrave. The tongue of the lock could also be taped tightly back with clear or white tape to allow access from the fire stairs. From even a short distance, a piece of tape wouldn’t be visible. The doors are painted white.

  This was a trick my fellow nurses and I used to good effect back in the Dark Ages, when we lived in the hospital nurses’ residence with a midnight curfew. If we planned to be out later, we’d use a bit of leucoplast to hold the snib of the door in its socket so we could sneak up the outside fire escape and avoid getting the nightwatchman to open the front door. Calling him out meant a compulsory sign-in to the late register and a visit to Matron the next day.

  The lighting on the fire escape landing is quite dim, so there’d be no telltale sliver of light showing in the corridor. I’d brought some tape with me to test this theory, but could see it would work without trying it. The door opened easily into the fire escape, and I held it open while I checked to see if the handle would work from inside the stairwell. It didn’t. The door wasn’t alarmed, and no one came to investigate. I propped the door open with my handbag and walked up to Level 12, where I tried the door. Locked, as I expected. I resolved to have a word to our building manager to try to get the same system adopted in my building.

  So, what had I learnt? It was possible to get into the building despite all the newly beefed-up security installed since Phoebe died. I was a stranger and I’d been in full view of several CCTV cameras, but no one had challenged me. On 2 December, if someone had run up the stairs or got out of the lift on any floor, they could have gone to Level 12 while the fire evacuation was in progress, because the fire doors were unlocked for the duration. They could then have chocked open the Level 12 fire door and returned at their leisure, piggy-backing on a resident to any floor, then entering Level 12 from the fire escape. That probably wasn’t what happened, but it could happen. I could also have been more patient and done more trips in the lift until someone came to Level 12, then I could have tested my theory about chocking the door open, but I didn’t want to be in the building too long.

  Next, I went to the Level 11 refuse room on the left of the lift. The refuse rooms are the same on each floor, with the height of the chute flap varying only by millimetres. I took some photos to verify that I’d been there. In the whole time I’d been on Level 11, not one apartment door had opened, nobody else had come out of the lift, and the corridor was as quiet as a library.

  I could have left the building without being seen at all if I’d gone down the fire escape and out through an emergency exit. I wasn’t sure if there were CCTV cameras above those outside doors. But I figured that nobody had challenged me coming in to the building, so it was unlikely I’d have a problem going out. I summoned the lift and took it to Level 1, then went out through the front door at 5.30 p.m. There was nobody at the front desk, and the door to the manager’s office was shut. I noticed a sign at the front desk saying there was an on-duty manager working.

  In the 20 or 25 minutes I was in the building, although it was ‘coming home time’, I saw no one except the four people I encountered — the girl driving in, the man and his daughter, and the young male visitor. They all saw me, but no one challenged me. No one from the office challenged me either.

  I made it easily to floors 15 and 11 and could easily have reached Level 12 if the fire-escape door had been unlocked. I could also have exited the building unnoticed through the emergency door at the foot of the fire escape. Anyone familiar with the security system could have done the same.

  I sat in my car opposite the tall glass building, watching the sinking sun coat the glass with sheets of molten red. I wrote down my findings as follows:

  Degree of difficulty in obtaining access to the building without a key or security fob — easy.

  Degree of difficulty of using the lift to enter any, or a specific floor, inside the building — any floor, easy. Specific floor difficult via lift.

  Security alertness of people I encountered — nil.

  Access to the fire escape once inside the building — easy.

  Accessing rubbish chute in the building without being seen — easy.

  I was well aware that my test proved nothing except that I had easily trespassed on private property without being challenged. I hadn’t tried to prove or disprove any theory, just test the security system. I’d deliberately exposed myself to CCTV cameras, but attracted no attention. It demonstrated nothing really, except to show that a one-off event such as an evacuation would give a determined intruder a chance to reach parts of the building that were supposed to be out of bounds.

  *

  Next day at the Coroners Court, I met Phoebe’s family properly. I was introduced to Jeannette, Lorne, Len, her brothers Tom and Nik, and Russell Marriott. I told them the reason for my early departure the day before. I said I’d write up a summary and give the report to Mr Moglia. I decided I should give a copy to the police as well.

  Russell was a witness and couldn’t sit in court until he’d given his evidence. Len had the status of an ‘interested party’ but didn’t have legal representation. He was aiming to question witnesses himself. He came and went as the inquest progressed because he was still running his consulting practice. Lorne hadn’t been given ‘interested party’ status, and most of the submissions he’d made and interviews he’d done didn’t form part of the evidence. Some were explicitly excluded. I figured this was because he’d sometimes expressed his beliefs passionately and he’d often severely criticised the police investigation.

  Eric Giammario was still giving evidence. I felt a bit guilty as I watched him going through his careful answers. What would his reaction be if he knew about my covert visit to Balencea? I guessed he’d be cross.

  Ms Siemensma asked whether he recalled Beth being shown CCTV footage on her return to work. She pointed out that nobody else had been shown that particular segment.

  Eric said it might have happened, but he wasn’t sure. Then, pressed further, he said it didn’t happen. That was a surprise. What had happened to that footage?

  Mr Moglia now introduced himself to Eric and apologised if his questions jumped around a bit, as many of them were going over ground that had already been covered. He took Eric to the second fire alarm at 6.05 p.m., eliciting the information that the alarm would have had to be notified as a false alarm within eight seconds to prevent the fire brigade being sent out. Beth had rung the fire brigade, and there was a note to that effect in the logbook.

  Moglia went back over Eric’s statement that he’d told police about the problems with the CCTV and explained that if they wanted footage, they should start downloading it immediately. Was he sure he’d said that?

  Eric was sure. He said he was surprised they didn’t ‘confiscate it, if that is the right word’, because of his advice.

  The Coroner interrupted. He didn’t want Mr Moglia to continue this line of questioning, he said. ‘I don’t want this to be turned into a prosecution of the manner in which this case has been investigated by police.’

  Well, that is quite a clear restriction, I thought. I wonder why not?

  Moglia tried to get out of it by saying he was trying to check Eri
c’s memory because it was so much later when his statement was taken. But the Coroner wasn’t having that. He said that line of questioning wasn’t going to be ‘particularly helpful’.

  Eric explained that when he later engaged Sielox to download whatever was salvageable from the system, he did it on his own initiative. The process took all night and produced both an electronic file and a hard copy. It cost around $2000, and he sent the account to the owners’ corporation for payment. That footage was later made available to police preparing the brief for the Coroner.

  His Honour said that he’d like Eric to look up any information that he had that could inform the court about the work that Sielox undertook in reviewing the CCTV, and alert Ms Siemensma if he found anything.

  Mr Galbally rose from his seat and asked that Eric be given the records of the key fob and swipe use on 2 December.

  Eric looked at the records and interpreted them for the court. He said that the fob allocated to Ant Hampel was distinguished by its readout number, and the records demonstrated that someone using that fob had gone to the gym level and entered the gym area that morning. He couldn’t say it was Ant and he couldn’t say if he’d gone into the gym, the pool area, the sauna and steam room, or even the restrooms. He could only confirm that a person using that fob entered the gym area.

  ‘Similarly, after leaving the gym and entering the lift on Level 1, that record tells me that someone from Apartment 1201, using the swipe No. 533, gained access to lift No. 1, and had access on that lift either up or down. It doesn’t distinguish if the person went up to Level 12 or came down and went to a lower level.’

  Galbally said, ‘Mr Hampel was on his way to work and wanted to get to his car park on Level B2. Would he need to swipe the lift in order to get down to the car park?’