The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  A lot of them were to the same address. Someone had told me—was it Ivan?—that email fitted somewhere between a phone conversation and a written memo. Going through those informal notes and conversations, seeing a side of Jim Wilcox I’d never dreamed existed, was the most voyeuristic thing I’d ever done.

  Anger was slowly beginning to take hold of me by the hair roots. Had Felix been through the disks? Had he shown them to the police, and if so what had the police done about them? What were they doing sitting in Felix’s office? It made more sense to assume that Felix didn’t know. There were thousands of messages stored in those boxes, with hundreds more being added every week.

  I felt a pang of sympathy for Felix. Here he was, amassing huge amounts of data, building one haystack after another.

  When Felix had accused me of carelessness after my worm virus, I’d smarted because he’d never given me a chance. With no evidence at all, except that I’d foolishly let a virus wipe my data, he was convinced I was guilty of something much more sinister.

  Even then, it seemed to me, something had cut short Felix’s ability to discriminate, to separate small matters from large, to shove his fist into the haystack in just the right place to bring out a drop of blood.

  Ivan tracked down the address most of the email messages had been sent to. It belonged to someone called Charles Craven of the accounts section of the Department of Finance. It was Craven who’d counter-signed for Access Computing’s grant money.

  ‘Here’s a scenario,’ I said to Ivan. ‘Felix knows what’s on these disks and he’s blackmailing Wilcox. Felix has his own copies, so it doesn’t matter if Wilcox gets rid of this lot. He’s left them in his office to make Wilcox sweat.’

  Ivan groaned and said, ‘Don’t give me that cat’s-bum smile, Sandy. You like Evans, God help me if I can fathom why, so you’re sure she’s innocent. You don’t like Felix, and if you find anything that sticks to him you’ll be happier than a pig in mud.’

  ‘Felix is like the pig who’s built his house of bricks, only it turns out, to his amazement, that the bricks are made of straw.’

  Ivan laughed, then grimaced.

  ‘Scenario number two,’ I said. ‘It was Craven who changed the figure from a hundred grand to a million. Kerry Arnold had nothing to do with it. What I don’t understand is why Wilcox was stupid enough to send those emails in the first place.’

  While we were packing up—I took care to replace the boxes in exactly the right order—I asked Ivan, ‘Why are you helping me with all this anyway?’

  Ivan drew himself up to his full height and pretended to look down his nose at me.

  ‘Let’s just say it’s a matter of public-service pride. I know we’re for the chop next year, but I’m buggered if I’ll go down with a mess like this still on my hands. It’d just prove everything that Johnnie Howard’s mob say about our inefficiency.’

  ‘And if the crook turns out to be one of us?’

  ‘Ah—but if I find her, or him, toss the bad apple out, then I’m ­exonerated, aren’t I?’

  ‘So you’re doing it for you’re own professional advancement.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’

  ‘And if it is Rae Evans?’

  ‘That’s the difference between us—I’m prepared to accept that.’

  ‘And I’m not?’

  ‘No.’

  . . .

  I listened to Detective Sergeant Hall on the other end of the telephone breathing down my neck, and said, ‘I’m not sure who else knows about this.’

  Ivan and I had argued over what to tell the police about the email. In the end I told him to go home, I’d deal with it myself. After being asked to wait for a few minutes, I was put through to Hall, the detective who’d interviewed me at DIR and read the charges against Rae at her committal hearing. I remembered Hall’s sculptured chin pressing close to mine.

  He asked a few questions and told me he’d arrange to have someone go through the disks as soon as possible. I replaced the receiver with a sense of anticlimax.

  My next call was to Rae’s lawyer. The impatience under his polite veneer bubbled closer to the surface every time I rang him. I was determined to tell him everything I knew, about the email, Charles Craven in Finance, how easy it would have been for him and Wilcox to have plotted the theft together and pinned it on Rae.

  Rae’s lawyer didn’t interrupt. I hoped he was making notes. But he didn’t ask me any questions and, as soon as I’d finished, he thanked me and rang off.

  . . .

  On Monday afternoon I met Felix in the travel centre, on his way back from a run.

  ‘What were you and Rae Evans arguing about that day in the lift?’ I asked him.

  ‘Never give up, do you?’ Felix stared at me, chest pumping. ‘Listening at keyholes. That’s just about your level.’

  ‘You asked me to listen, remember? Why was Rae Evans asked to deal with that complaint about the tender?’

  ‘She volunteered.’

  ‘I’ve got another idea,’ I said. ‘Jim Wilcox told her to because he knew it would mean trouble, and he hates her guts.’

  Felix turned away from me without bothering to comment. I watched him go, admiring his supple, athletic stride. I felt strongly connected to Felix, through fear and inadequacy, as though we were bound together by some soft skin that would hurt if I pulled on it. My eyes fixed on the disappearing back of his neck. Maybe Felix had had his hair cut, or the low neck of his T-shirt made it look different. The skin was very pale there. Seen from behind, his head looked thinner, older, without the snub features that gave his face its boy’s expression.

  Walking back upstairs—I seemed to have developed an aversion to the lift—I thought about how much strife between people could be traced back to first impressions.

  The more Felix claimed to be in control, the less he really was. He knew that; he’d as much as admitted it to me. Felix had to be thinking of the future. Where would he go when outsourcing made his job at DIR redundant, or when DIR collapsed beneath him? Who would take him on? Of course, once Rae was found guilty and sentenced, Felix began to look a whole lot better. A man who knew his job and did it. Was he thinking along similar lines to Ivan?

  I got the go-ahead to finish the outwork report, but a kind of lethargy soaked into my clothes, my skin, like the smoke from the fire that had soaked into everything. When I was able to concentrate for two, three hours at a stretch, the report was all I thought about. But three hours was the most I could manage. After that I felt exhausted, took the fire stairs to the ground floor, and hunched my shoulders over coffee that tasted of damp soot.

  I waited for a week, and when I hadn’t heard from the police, I made an appointment to see Detective Sergeant Hall.

  The Winchester building had a low-slung, white colonial look about it. Maybe it was the flagpole, a tall one with a crisp new flag flapping in the Belconnen breeze.

  Detective Sergeant Hall met me at the entrance and led me along carpets so springy and fresh I couldn’t imagine that any other feet but mine had trodden them. He stopped at the open door of a spacious office, walked around and sat behind a huge, pale grey desk with nothing on it but a touchphone in a matching shade. He motioned me to sit opposite him. Even the chair was upholstered in pristine grey velour.

  I asked him if the police had made any progress with the email disks.

  Hall rested his hands on the desk and looked at me. There was none of the belligerence of our first interview; his expression was concerned.

  ‘There’s certainly been a few, you could say, indiscreet remarks,’ he said.

  ‘I work in that building.’ I’d meant to stay cool, but it was hard. ‘There’s at least half-a-dozen people who’ve got it in for Rae Evans, and who had the opportunity and the means to set her up. And what about Craven from Finance?’

  Detective-Sergeant Hall nodded. ‘We’ve interviewed both men.’ He was looking at me with an expression I didn’t know how to ­interpret. ‘They admit that some of t
heir exchanges were unwise.’

  ‘What’s the—’ I began.

  ‘Mrs Mahoney,’ Hall interrupted. ‘I appreciate your concern. Believe me. Since your phone call, we’ve been through every one of those disks. And we’ve spoken to everyone who received, let me say again, Mr Wilcox’s aggressive and—unwise messages. I’m going to tell you something. It’s not my normal policy to do this, but I think perhaps you ought to know. Ms Evans received money from Access Computing. Quite a large sum, a single lump sum credited to her Commonwealth bank account.’

  . . .

  My lunch hour was up, but I couldn’t go back to work without first speaking to Rae. I dropped by my house to make the call.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me Access Computing had paid you a bribe?’

  ‘It wasn’t any of your business, Sandra.’ Rae’s voice was sharp, but this time I wasn’t going to be fobbed off.

  ‘How did the money get into your account?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  I knew I should have left it there, that Rae would only evade my questions or lie to me. But an unbearable itch inside my head made me continue. ‘If you did steal that money, why would you be so stupid as to deposit it in your own bank account?’

  Rae hung up on me with a small, sharp click.

  I picked up the phone to dial her number again, then put it down. I thought of going round to her flat, and dismissed the idea. I asked myself what I was trying to save Rae from. Who had an enormous question mark over it—but what? Maybe I could begin to answer that.

  Pictures of Rae—in the corridor telling me she couldn’t talk to me, outside the magistrate’s court—remote, removed, as though nothing could touch her. Her remoteness a veneer. Outer shells can burn and shrivel. Being hard and dry makes them all the more combustible.

  I thought of the solitary life I’d lived since Peter’s birth. Loss pushes you out towards things, so often blindly. I did not want to go blindly. I wanted to understand what I did and why, even if afterwards I was proved to have been wrong. Yet it seemed that the more I sought clarity, the less I was able to come anywhere near it.

  Stray Dog

  People who write about investigations must surely all have this problem—they know the result before they start. They can beat up the whole story, make it appear more dramatic than it was, cramming incidents together that were isolated in time and that no-one at the time believed were connected, squeezing from them a tension altogether different from the anxiety and confusion they felt. Or they can go too far in the other direction, playing down events and the connections between them out of some misplaced sense of tact. The conduct of an investigation is inevitably coloured by its conclusion—or lack of conclusion—and memory, unreliable memory, grasshoppers backwards more or less where it will.

  In spite of the fact that Rae Evans’s innocence or guilt was never far from my thoughts, most of my energy over the next week or so was taken up with rescuing a dog.

  . . .

  There was no smell of oil, and when I looked more closely the viscous rainbow coils evaporated, leaving only the memory of sun on water, a playful reflection on the water’s skin.

  The skin of rainwater, red-brown worms, and a dog so thin it carried a dark cave inside it, huge hollow shadows between each rib, a face all bones and ears.

  I walked closer. A puppy was absorbed in licking up a line of worms that rippled down a slope of wet asphalt bordering my son’s school playground.

  I squatted and held out my hand. The dog took off across the oval and I felt guilty for making it waste what little energy it had in running.

  That evening, when I picked Peter up from after-school care, he complained of earache. My stomach dropped and I thought, not again. We were out of Panadol, so I sat Peter in front of The Simpsons with a drink, and told him I’d be back in a few minutes.

  At the chemist’s I saw the dog again, a flash of sticky, iridescent brown, four leg bones curved like a miniature wrecked ship, darting through the automatic doors.

  The doors closed behind me with a click, and I heard a loud voice say, ‘It’s the third time that animal’s been in here. I should call the pound.’

  It was the combination of callousness and inaction in the phar­macist’s grim voice that made me say, hoping to forestall her, ‘Dogs shouldn’t be allowed to run round loose. I’ll phone the pound when I get home.’

  The pharmacist stared at me. Then he asked, ‘Did you want ­something?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling the clean indifference of blue commercial carpet through the soles of my work shoes. ‘Yes, please. Liquid Panadol.’

  Peter knew he was supposed to stay inside, but as I parked the car I heard him nattering over the fence to the Chinese boy whose family had just moved in next door. I left him there and went straight to the phone.

  The woman at the RSPCA sounded young, harassed.

  ‘It must have been abandoned,’ I said. ‘It’s got no collar and it’s obviously starving.’

  Peter came running in. ‘What’s starving?’

  ‘You,’ I said, hanging up the phone. ‘Like a Dany?’

  ‘Who were you talking to?’

  ‘Just someone.’

  Peter had dashed in, flushed and grinning, his hair flopping in his eyes. He pushed it back with four fingers together, held stiff as a plank. At my evasion his shoulders rounded, shrinking yet defiant. I wondered how old he’d be before he accused me of lying, instead of just looking at me like that. I poured the analgesic into a green plastic crocodile with measurements along the side, and handed it to him without meeting his eyes.

  . . .

  ‘In the morning we’ll go,’ I said. ‘In the morning, I promise we’ll go and look for him.’

  It was a few hours later. Peter was sitting up in bed, reading to me in the voice he knew I liked best, pausing at full stops and commas.

  I hadn’t intended telling him about the dog; it had just come out.

  ‘Mum!’ Peter had leapt out of bed, book flying, feet tangling in the sheet. ‘What if he’s still there!’

  I’d had to stop him from running out the front door. Never mind that it was dark.

  ‘First thing in the morning,’ I assured him.

  ‘Mum?’ Peter asked, as I reached across to switch off his light, thinking that I wouldn’t put it past him to wait till I was asleep and sneak out by himself.

  ‘I hope it rains! There’ll be heaps of worms for him to eat!’

  We found the stray dog at a long puddle along the edge of the asphalt at the school. It was walking along the puddle, systematically licking up the worms. Again, the dog reminded me of a small wrecked ship that you might find on a beach after many winters, washed and scoured by sand.

  Peter ran, and the dog took off towards the road, but not very fast. He was limping. Peter threw himself, arching his body over the skinny, miserable creature, and brought him to the ground.

  ‘Careful!’ I called out.

  Peter was groaning and laughing and crying. ‘Got him! Mum! I did it! I’ve got him!’

  . . .

  ‘Do you want us to collect the dog?’ asked the woman from the RSPCA, a different one this time, older. She’d heard it all before.

  ‘We can keep him. But I wanted to check, I rang yesterday. Has anyone reported a puppy of that description missing?’

  The woman took a long time to look it up, so long that I began to worry, though I was sure the dog was a stray. She came back on the line and told me no.

  The smell of flea soap hung around our back step, as though Lyneham had some special local air inversion just to keep it there.

  Within hours, the dog had put on weight. Peter would have fed him till he burst.

  Ivan dropped by around three with a Saturday offering of cream cakes, and said that no self-respecting flea would dream of hitching a ride on such a heap of bones.

  We’d already taken him to the vet. Close to the dog, I’d noticed a sweet, faintly rotting smell that reminded me o
f a time when I’d tried to cook sweet and sour pork and put in too much brown sugar. The vet said the smell was caused by ear mites, and gave us a bottle of stuff to wash his ears out with.

  Peter was very solemn throughout the vet’s examination, each of his movements slow and careful, so small an action as unclipping the new lead a ceremony.

  When it came to filling out his card, we guessed the dog’s age, and the vet surprised us by saying that he was at least a year old, maybe more.

  ‘But why isn’t—why didn’t—?’ Peter stammered.

  ‘He may’ve been living with a family,’ the vet said. ‘They may’ve moved, or maybe this fella left them.’

  ‘But we’ve called the PCA!’ Peter cried. I moved to put my arm around him, but he shook me off, clutching the puppy by his brittle forepaws.

  ‘If no-one’s reported the little fella missing,’ the vet said kindly, ‘then I think you’re pretty safe.’

  It was Peter who insisted on the flea wash, extra vitamins. If he forgot the ear-drops, he acted as though something terrible would happen, and I had to stop him pouring in a double or a triple dose to make up for the one he’d missed. Nothing that concerned the dog was taken lightly.

  He was christened Fred. Peter said that Fred was the right name for a dog who’d had to survive on worms.

  Peter wrote to Derek describing every detail of Fred’s life, reading the sentences aloud as he composed them. I worried about Derek’s response, but Peter was so happy that I couldn’t bring myself to stop him. He made a toy out of a two-litre plastic bottle and a bit of rope. He called it dead bird, swung it round his head and yelled like a ­barbarian. Fred hid under the sofa and wouldn’t come out for a dog biscuit.

  Peter refused to go to after-school care. No threats or inducements made the slightest difference. I walked into the house at five-thirty to find him and Fred curled up in front of the TV, with various plates and cups licked clean and strewn around them on the floor.