Crystal Coffin

by Anita Bell

  ‘The medical supply flight is expected to leave Amberley for Dili tonight,’ Allen said, filling him in with the details.

  ‘Very well,’ Chang said. ‘At least we know where to pick him up if we can’t find him sooner.’

  ‘You have to find him sooner,’ Allen said. ‘If you’re right about his mental state, it has to be before he hurts himself.’

  Actually, Chang thought as he handed the pilot back his mike. It’s him hurting someone else that’s got me worried.

  Bobby screamed at the top of the stairs, wondering where his mother had gone. Thorna picked him up and cuddled him, while Nikki went ahead to Alex’s room to unpack more of his clothes.

  From the address labels on the packaging, she could see they’d only been stacked there by the removalists the day before and she wasted no time ripping into them. By the time Thorna came in, she had unpacked another box into the dresser drawers. Each box took only a few minutes, but all the rooms still had plenty to be unpacked.

  ‘Some of these drawers are full already,’ Nikki said, seeing drawers overflowing with men’s socks and underwear.

  ‘They’re not ours,’ Thorna snapped. ‘The last owner died. Just pull everything out and pack it in the boxes as we’re finished with them. Make two piles. General stuff, I’ll donate to the church. Personal effects I’ll send off to his daughter if I can track her down.’

  ‘Sure,’ Nikki said, wondering how the previous owner had died.

  ‘My furniture is still next door,’ she went on. ‘You can help me swap some of the good bits next week once we’ve got this lot sorted out.’

  Nikki nodded, saying nothing as Thorna sat her toddler on the rug. He cried again and Nikki fossicked through a box of cars to find one that had no sharp corners or small wheels. She found a fast-looking red one and gave it to him. He tried it once on the mat and promptly rolled over to the smoother floorboards.

  ‘You’re no dummy, matie, are you?’ Nikki said, patting his shoulder.

  He made vroom noises as the car whooshed across the polished timber and his mother had to hop to avoid it as she straightened the sheets on Alex’s bed. Behind her, Bobby toddled after the car, chatting words that only he could understand, just like Nikki’s baby brother used to do.

  Thorna smiled, watching her son at the same time as Nikki did. They glanced at each other and an awkward silence followed.

  Nikki closed her eyes and turned away. Part of her wanted to crawl into a closet and hide in the dark, like she used to after the car accident. Another part of her wanted to run away again, find another job in another town, but she knew she needed money for that first, which meant she had to survive here until she got some. She had to hold her tongue until then.

  She forced her feelings behind another closet door and watched Thorna take a broken clipper ship out of the biggest packing box. Two of the three masts had snapped and the sails had become tangled beyond repair in transit. She frowned and tossed it into a bag for rubbish while Nikki opened a smaller box of toys to unpack.

  The first thing Nikki took out of her box was a rag clown. It had brittle yellow wool for hair and faded striped overalls with pant legs that had begun to fray. Stuffing peeped from a hole in one elbow and its faded red nose was only hanging by a thread. She could stitch up the nose and elbow, but the hair and overalls were falling apart. There was a much newer clown in the box under it and she threw the rag clown into the rubbish bag beside the clipper ship.

  ‘Hey!’ Thorna wailed, diving after it. ‘Not that!’ Her first husband had bought it for their babies when the twins were born. It had been a year since Rick had taken his own life at the boathouse, but sometimes it seemed like less than a day. ‘Marry again, baby,’ he had told her, knowing that he’d been dying anyway. ‘It takes two to run Scrubhaven and you’ll lose it if you don’t,’ That much had been true and when Eric Maitland had made the offer she had accepted — and regretted it. The home she loved was next door now, dilapidated but repairable, just like the clown. She had lost one and couldn’t lose another.

  ‘I need to fix this,’ she said, sitting the clown against a pillow. She sighed. The clown didn’t match the walls in this house like it did at home. Its saggy nose and torn pants somehow made the whole-room look drabber, and it kept falling over.

  Nikki saw the look on her face and took the larger, newer clown from the box, sitting it beside the rag clown with one arm around it to prop it up.

  ‘He just needed a friend,’ she said, turning back to the box to unpack more. She took out the next largest toys, a tyrannosaurus, an army jeep and a rocketship and turned to find Thorna slumped on the mat beside her son. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet.

  ‘Why did you tell those men I’d been nice to you?’ she said, wiping her nose.

  Nikki shrugged her shoulders, knowing there was no way she could answer that without making things worse. She arranged the toys on the shelf, saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve been horrible,’ Thorna added, and Nikki didn’t argue. ‘You’ve been great for the kids,’ she went on. ‘You even swept the bugs off the verandah. I hate doing that. You’ve been patient with me and with the kids and I’ve just been horrible.’

  ‘I’d choose you over my stepfather any day,’ Nikki said without exaggerating.

  ‘Is that why you left home?’ Thorna asked, strangely relieved to know that Nikki was hurting too. ‘Your stepfather?’

  ‘You could say that,’ she said. But she didn’t have to worry about that now. She’d locked him behind a door in her mind with ail her other problems.

  ‘And your mum’s friends came to get you?’

  ‘Sort of,’ she said, avoiding another lie.

  ‘Are you going?’

  Nikki stared at her employer, sitting on the floor. Bobby had pulled himself up to stand at her shoulder and was running his car through her bobbed-blonde hair. There was sadness in her eyes, a sadness that she recognised within herself — of being alone, even though she preferred it that way. The alternative — of getting close to someone only to lose them — had always seemed worse.

  ‘How could you tell them I was nice?’ Thorna persisted.

  ‘Well,’ Nikki said. ‘I didn’t really tell them you were nice.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nikki said, sitting on the rug beside her. ‘I told them you were horrible.’

  Thorna laughed — and then she cried.

  ‘Hi,’ Nikki said, offering to shake hands. ‘I’m Nikola, but you can call me Nikki.’

  ‘Hi,’ Thorna said, accepting her hand. ‘I’m Thorna. Pleased to meet you.’

  Behind them, Bobby clapped his chubby hands.

  ‘We may have a problem,’ Sergeant Underwood said quietly over the restaurant table.

  Fletcher clenched his fists on either side of his dinner. He was learning to hate those words. ‘Explain,’ he said with more patience than he felt. Paying off a cop with computer skills was supposed to make security one less worry.

  Underwood took a sip from his black coffee and put his cup down. ‘You said you needed security protocols enhanced, so I looked through the case, files on hackers and copied the latest Hunter/Destroyer program from what we had in the evidence files. Big program, but easy to install and …’

  ‘Spare me the details. Get to the problem. Were you detected borrowing it?’

  ‘No, but it bounced a visitor who was already in when I uploaded. Date signatures indicate they emailed a Trojan Horse onto your Italian server some time yesterday, but it didn’t activate until someone at your aircraft subsidiary in Rome opened the email it was attached to.’

  ‘Do you know who the visitor was?’

  Sergeant Underwood nodded. ‘Helen MacLeod. Sound familiar?’

  Fletcher chewed his steak slowly and swallowed. ‘Related to our friend?’

  Underwood nodded again. ‘His eldest daughter.’

  ‘You told me she was a pregnant typist — no risk. Now she’s a hacker on the verge of brea
king us wide open?’

  ‘She’s a typist, but she’s a typist who relieved for four years on a technology helpdesk for Main Roads Department,’ Underwood said, defending himself. ‘And she didn’t hack us. She used a program intended for remote maintanence of administration files, like when someone in a head office wants to make sure their computers in other towns are working properly.’

  Fletcher didn’t have to say anything. His glare told Underwood that he had lost patience with the technicalities.

  ‘She emailed it attached to an animated greeting card,’ he said more simply. ‘So it wouldn’t be noticed when it loaded onto your server. You know, like a Trojan Horse rolling into town with a belly full of enemy soldiers.’

  Fletcher sliced the next piece of steak from against the bone, not appreciating the colourful explanation either. ‘How much does she know?’

  ‘Not much. As far as I can tell, she only made it through the top level, the fake store-front and a few dummy links. There were underlying secure links on that site with encrypted details of the laundering process for your delivery aircraft, but I’m pretty sure she was booted before she accessed the passwords.’

  ‘How sure is pretty sure?’

  ‘As sure as I can be. I posted an emergency Autoclean to all the other sites in your link to see if they’ve received the Trojan, but I won’t be sure if they’ve been accessed or invaded for another few hours. It’s just lucky she was doing things when I loaded,’ he added. ‘Or it could have been days before I knew what to look for.’

  Fletcher swallowed the last of his meal without tasting it. Underwood had that look on his face that said that the really bad news was still to come.

  ‘And?’ he prompted.

  ‘And …’ Underwood mimicked as he swallowed hard, ‘these are some of the files that I was able to download off her PC before she unplugged. I deleted them off her hard drive as I downloaded them, but there’s no way to know how many backup copies she made.’

  Underwood handed three photos across the table and Fletcher studied them. The acid in his stomach rose to his throat and he couldn’t tell if it was the spicy steak that gave him heartburn or the fact that one little country town could suddenly give him so much trouble.

  They were pictures of the crystal coffin, laid out on its purple satin bedding. Risen as if from beyond a grave and laughing at him were a pair of silver angel earrings. Beautiful. Handcrafted from the finest sterling silver that money could buy. Paid for in blood.

  He flicked through the photos again to the darkest shot. Taken from what looked like shoulder height in a dark room, the reflection of the flash off the crystal made the edges of the photo dark. But on the far side of the table from the photographer, three sets of legs below hip height could just be seen. One set appeared to be medium build and muscled like an athlete, one skinnier and short, like a teenager and the other short but solid, like a middleaged man with a belly that’s just starting to sag.

  He studied the other photos over again, wondering how many other people could have been there.

  ‘You said she unplugged. Did she know you’d spotted her, or did she just finish and get off coincidentally?’

  Underwood took another sip of courage from his coffee. ‘That’s one of the drawbacks of having to use an automated program written by a hacker,’ he said. ‘On a rush job there’s no time to edit out all their ego.’

  ‘So she knows.’

  ‘I think the message she got nearly scared the baby out of her. She was typing exit commands faster than my wife can empty my wallet.’ Underwood downed the last of his coffee. ‘This is out of control,’ he added quietly. ‘I recommend terminating the project. Relocate and start again somewhere else.’

  ‘I can’t terminate,’ Fletcher cut in. ‘The buyers are already on their way. Stage three of the deal is going down tonight.’

  ‘Can you relocate the exchange then?’ Underwood asked, cautious not to overstep his authority. ‘Find somewhere close enough that Maitland can still get the work done and make the rendezvous in time, but still far enough away that someone won’t interrupt?’

  Fletcher was already thinking about that. There was still time to contact the buyers and the pilot, maybe even time enough to vary the approved flight path so he wouldn’t alert either civilian or military air traffic controllers along the way to any suspicious air traffic. But there was no way he could hunt up another landing site nearby.

  ‘The bird’s got webbed feet,’ he said, referring to the Cessna Caravan that was fitted with floats. ‘She can virtually land in a puddle, but she needs a longer stretch of flat water to take off again. I know Somerset Dam is only half an hour away, but after seven years of drought, it’s little more than a mud wallow now.’

  Fletcher wished he could send half a dozen of his men to neutralise the situation, but he’d been careful to weed out anyone from his organisation who could think for themselves, and the security of this deal was too important to leave to instructions.

  ‘I’ll go myself,’ he decided. ‘I’ll leave now.’ He paid for his meal and Underwood’s coffee, and waited for the cop to open the door.

  ‘I’ll arrange an alibi,’ Underwood said, pushing it open. ‘I’ll write up a follow-up interview report or something to say that I spoke to you at the gallery tonight. You can backdate your signature when you get back.’

  Fletcher nodded as the cop let him through, realising that Underwood was a thinking man too. But at least he knew his place.

  Nikki unpegged Bobby’s bedsheets from the clothesline and Thorna picked up the bottom corners to help fold them so they wouldn’t touch the dusty ground.

  ‘Would you like fresh bedsheets in your room?’ Thorna asked. ‘They might help you sleep better.’

  ‘What makes you think I didn’t sleep?’ Nikki asked, wondering for a second if Thorna was the person with orders to keep an eye on her instead of Locklin.

  ‘All the bumping last night,’ Thorna said. ‘I thought you must have been tossing and turning, with your bed bumping against the wall.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she fibbed, still wondering what the noise had been. ‘I thought it was you.’

  ‘Must have been Eric,’ Thorna decided. ‘I don’t remember smelling whisky on him, but I could be used to it. He often walks an alcoholic’s definition of a straight line before bed,’ she said. ‘If you know what I mean.’

  Nikki smiled, looking forward to living with a family man who sounded benign compared to Fletcher for a change. ‘Will I get to meet him today?’

  Thorna frowned, taking her daughter’s spotted socks and panties off the line. Practically everything the six year old wore had a spot on it, while her twin brother had a tendency to wear stripes or dinosaurs.

  ‘Don’t be so keen to meet him,’ Thorna said, folding a shirt into the laundry trolley. ‘He’s got a temper.’

  ‘My stepfather has a temper,’ she confided. ‘I can handle that. Will he be back today?’ she asked, still trying to get an answer without sounding too insistent.

  ‘If he’s not here, he’s working at that stupid boathouse he calls his studio. He’s a painter, you know, and once he gets going he loses all track of time.’

  ‘You have a boathouse?’ Nikki asked with the first hint of excitement she’d felt in ages. ‘On the lake? Can I take the kids for a swim? I can give you some time to yourself. You must need it.’

  Thorna paled, feeling guilty again. ‘That’s the nicest thing anyone’s offered me in ages,’ she confided.

  ‘Great, I’ll take them after school today.’

  ‘No!’ Thorna said more sternly than she meant. ‘He won’t like that. Eric, I mean. It’s his place. That’s where he gets his in-spir-a-tion,’ she said, wiggling her fingers and mimicking a mysterious voice with more sarcasm than her age befitted. ‘I’d never hear the end of it if I let the kids disturb him there.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Nikki said, wondering if he’d mind her popping in to visit by herself.

&nbs
p; ‘It’s about time I left to pick the kids up anyway,’ Thorna said, two seconds before the two o’clock alarm on her watch went off. ‘I’ve got to pay some bills at the post office first, and I’ve got shopping to do afterwards, but we’ve broken the back of what had to be done here. Why don’t you take the afternoon off? Maybe get the workman to saddle up a horse and take you for a ride? We can get into this again tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? What about tonight? I’ve got nothing better to do.’

  ‘Tonight’s the church carnival,’ Thorna said, picking Bobby up out of the gravel. ‘The kids have been looking forward to it for weeks. Want to come?’

  ‘No thanks,’ Nikki said, pushing the trolley towards the laundry. A quiet night alone wouldn’t hurt her either.

  Locklin watched her from the stables. The dye was drying nicely on Jack’s face and legs and it had been good to catch a few winks on the hay after staying awake all night waiting for Maitland. But the stitches in his leg itched him awake and he needed to pull them out before they drove him crazy. He pulled out the four in his shoulder too, but there were two in his leg that wouldn’t budge without a fight and he left them there trying to put up with them until they were ready. He was awake now and keen to use his last few hours to find out anything else that he could.

  2.15pm and still no sign of Maitland. He paced without realising it inside one of the empty stalls, watching Nikki on the verandah through the open top half of a stable door.

  She adjusted a deckchair in the shade and lazed into it, letting her head roll to the left to watch the brood mares grazing. He used to do that too, he remembered, years earlier when he was supposed to be doing his homework. Only he used to sneak off now and then, climb up onto the mares bareback, lie back and watch the clouds while they grazed. Strange, he thought, that someone so close to the centre of his turmoil could remind him of innocent times.

  He tried to push the thought away but it was back to nag him again as soon as he noticed the second deckchair beside her. It was a red one that he’d helped his father paint when he was ten, only you couldn’t tell so easily that it was red now, with its paint all but seared away by a decade of morning suns.