The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  It wasn’t a good shot. That was my immediate impression. The light meter hadn’t been properly adjusted. The background was dark, and Lauren was wearing a very dark blue or black dress. Her face shone out palely from a circle of black hair, and she wasn’t smiling. She looked younger than I’d imagined her, and much more severe.

  ‘Hates having her picture taken,’ Ivan had said softly.

  ‘Did you take it?’

  Ivan had nodded, tucking the photograph away.

  Had I heard the fondness in his voice, or was my memory putting it there now? Had I assumed that because Lauren’s picture wasn’t framed and sitting beside his bed, it didn’t mean a lot to him?

  Wishing I’d never set eyes on Lauren, or Ivan for that matter, wishing I’d gone to America with Peter, I puzzled over questions that were new, though they should not have been.

  When I was growing up, there’d been just Mum and me. Mum’s job, her friends, my friends. But family had been the two of us. No cousins, uncles, aunts or grandparents. Why? What had my mother done, or suffered to be done, that had ended with her being so alone? And was I somehow repeating a lesson I had learnt without wanting to, without even being aware that I was learning it?

  There was a woman in my mother’s life. Her name was Sylvia Billis. I’d scarcely taken any notice of her. To me, at thirteen, fourteen, she seemed already old. She was probably around forty at the time she and my mother became friends. Sylvia Billis hadn’t cried at my mother’s funeral. She’d stood there with her back as straight as Rae Evans’s in the courtroom, her face the colour of old chewing gum. People had stared at her. I know I had. I don’t think she was aware of any of us.

  Not long after the funeral, I spent a Sunday going through my mother’s things. I culled them savagely, throwing out nearly everything. I remember the day well. It was one of Peter’s bad ones, and I parked him in another room and let him cry himself to sleep.

  There were photographs of my mother and Sylvia Billis squinting into the sun, one of Sylvia standing behind Mum as though guarding her, one slim hand on her shoulder. I burnt them in a rage of grief and jealousy. I remember being jealous. Now I remember. But why haven’t I thought about it in the last eight years? Why have I steadfastly refused to think about this aspect of my mother’s life?

  I remember other times, years before she died, Sylvia and my mother doing things together, sometimes with me in tow. They used to go shopping, or to meetings or a movie. I recall most clearly Sylvia’s arrivals and departures, and my mother getting ready for her friend with a look of trust and pleased anticipation on her face.

  I didn’t ask my mother any of the important questions before she died, nor did she ask them of me. Maybe I was too arrogant and self-centred. Or too frightened. Maybe she was too tired, in too much pain. Or confident that she knew me, knew who I was, and that I would not let her down.

  . . .

  The night after Ivan left for Sydney to meet Lauren, I wrote a long letter to Peter and gave Fred two extra dog biscuits and a cuddle while I watched the end of an old Cary Grant movie. Unable to settle to anything, not wanting to play tag with sleep, I got into my car and drove over to Ivan’s, telling myself I needed to check his log, make sure everything was going smoothly.

  I used his spare key to get in.

  Ivan’s computer room had the appearance of only having been left for a short time, but the rest of the house gave off a sour, abandoned smell. There was a coffee mug with a spoon standing in it on one end of the kitchen table. I picked it up and sniffed the weeks-old instant welded to the bottom.

  Ivan’s cat suit hung over the back of a swivel chair. To my nervous eyes, it looked not so much hung as deliberately placed, glass eyes upraised, front paws arranged on either side of the chair top. The skin didn’t look empty, but as though there was a body inside it, holding it up and out. I wasn’t going to poke it and find out.

  Crouched on top of the laser printer, Garfield seemed to be staring at me, warning me. I tried to lift him, and discovered that his feet had been stuck down. He couldn’t move.

  The room was full of cats.

  I shivered and switched on Ivan’s computer.

  Ivan’s plan to keep a detailed log of all dial-ins to DIR had proved to be incredibly time-consuming. My gut feeling was that, with Rae’s trial date set, our hacker was laughing down his modem for all he was worth. Ivan’s hope that he’d return to DIR and trap himself seemed a thin one to me, a hope with about as much meat on it as a skinny man turned side on.

  After a few minutes, I stood up and began to walk around the room, scarcely seeing where I was going, stumbling over a black snake pile of cables. I began flicking through printouts on a shelf, then moved to the cupboard where Ivan kept his manuals.

  For ten seconds after I opened the door and saw them, I held my breath and couldn’t move. Something that had been beating at the back of my head for so long was coming forward, and there was nothing I could do but wait for it to arrive and settle.

  I bent down and began flicking through the printouts, reading fast. Ivan had been spying on Rae Evans since before Gail’s story in the Canberra Times. The date on the top sheet was more than a month before that. He’d highlighted sections dealing with Rae’s budget for the previous financial year. There were some figures with double underlining.

  My stomach contracted as though I’d been hit. My eyes blurred, and I wiped them angrily. I scanned through the cost breakdown for the outwork project, running a finger backwards and forwards across the paper, as though underneath the ink there might be some sort of invisible writing that rubbing would miraculously bring to light.

  The arrogance of it, tossing the printouts in a cupboard as if he wanted me to find them, waiting for them to be found, the absurd cleverness of everything Ivan had done. He’d veiled himself in so many fantastic outfits, played so many parts at once, and with such enthusiasm. Taking me to bed. The lonely wife. How he must have laughed.

  Getting at me through Peter. That’s what hurt the most. Their study sessions, Peter’s high, enthusiastic giggle, Ivan’s many-legged word pictures.

  What I couldn’t bear was that a part of me had always suspected Ivan, had known all along without wanting to, without being able to face the knowledge.

  I toyed with the idea of taking the printouts home. Then it occurred to me that if they were found at my house, there was nothing to prove that they belonged to Ivan, not to me. I kept reading, looking for something conclusive, something that would leave no room for doubt.

  ‘Sandra.’

  Ivan was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed. The light from the corridor picked out his thick beard and high cheekbones. A single silver thread of light ran through his hair.

  ‘I see you’ve found my stash.’

  The room was quiet as a nocturnal animal in a hollow tree. Ivan must have noticed my car in the driveway, the light in his computer room. He’d let himself in without making a sound.

  ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Sydney.’

  I clutched the wad of printout tightly and began to back away.

  Ivan threw back his head and laughed. ‘Oh, Sandra, you’re a sight for sore eyes. You really are.’

  ‘You didn’t go to Sydney, did you? That was a lie too.’

  ‘Just let me show you one thing first. I promise I’ll be quick. After that, you can do whatever takes your fancy.’

  I watched Ivan take a box of floppy disks from a shelf, my fear honed to a single point, a shaft of fire on ice.

  Ivan said, ‘I’ve been taking apart the contents of Evans’s hard disk line by line. It dawned on me after you left the other night. How could I’ve been so stupid? What I needed was a record of the past from way back. The recent past’s been fiddled with so often it’s all tied in knots. I found something for my pains. Nothing on Evans’s hard disk pre-dates that stone wall virus.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you expect the virus to wipe everything? Isn’t that what happened
with my computer?’

  Ivan nodded, then he said, ‘But none of it’s been replaced.’

  My legs had a determination of their own, to fold and rest, no matter what orders my brain was giving. I grabbed a chair and tried to make it look as though I was sliding on to it with some residue of dignity.

  ‘If that’s true,’ I argued, ‘surely Rae would’ve said something.’

  ‘Not if she was responsible for getting rid of the data herself.’

  ‘But that makes no sense! If Rae wants to get rid of something on her own computer, all she has to do is delete it!’

  ‘Data that’s deleted in the ordinary way can still be retrieved. The virus scrambled the files and then trashed the lot.’

  It had been a mistake for me to sit down.

  Ivan pulled his black swivel chair towards him, swung it round and straddled it. He was smiling at me, waiting for me to catch up with his reasoning.

  I remembered what Rae had said to Felix on the phone the day of the stone wall virus. Just send someone to fix it.

  ‘Who got Rae’s computer up and running that day?’

  ‘Felix,’ Ivan said.

  Felix knew how to get rid of data so it couldn’t be retrieved. Felix could have made any number of changes to Rae’s hard disk without her noticing. Why use the virus? It was too complicated, too clever by half. Like getting dressed up in a long black cape, high silver boots, to perform an act of simple burglary. The sort of trick Ivan himself would play.

  ‘If there’s something extra on there,’ Ivan was saying, ‘something that was added, I haven’t found it yet.’ With a lift of his right elbow, he indicated the printouts I was still holding wedged against my chest. ‘I thought maybe scrutinising hard copy for a change might help.’

  I stared at Ivan, lacking the energy to move. He was being very clever, cleverer than he’d ever been. Admitting failure was just part of his cleverness. Another turn of the wheel and I was inside it, clinging to a wooden spoke.

  ‘Why didn’t you go to Sydney?’ I asked him finally.

  ‘I did.’ Ivan made a face. I couldn’t tell whether it was disgust with himself, or disappointment, or possibly relief. ‘Decided to come back early.’

  ‘Lauren didn’t show?’

  Ivan leant across and switched off the light over his keyboard. In shadow the lines on his face were deep and bold, his beard a tangled maze.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘she showed.’

  ‘How was Taronga Park?’

  ‘Lauren fed the flamingos.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘A zoo’s a zoo. I don’t want to talk about it.’

  Ivan’s eyes went soft then, like an old man’s in the sun. A funny wave of sadness and relief washed over me, like the waves children make for themselves sometimes in the bath. My anger was going, and I was left with a hollow feeling, incomplete, like before, when I took the VR helmet off in that same room, dizzy and sick, and relieved to have escaped something that was, and yet was not, meant for me.

  . . .

  Driving home, I tried to picture Ivan chasing Lauren from one hot city to another. Was he prepared to follow her till her desire for revenge grew thin, till she got tired, could no longer see the point? What was she punishing him for? Or had Ivan made up the whole business about meeting Lauren at Taronga Park? Had he made up the story about Rae’s hard disk and printouts, invented it on the spot when he’d surprised me reading them?

  I wanted nothing more, just then, than to get on a plane and fly off to America, leave the sorry mess behind me. Had I overreacted back there? Had the shock of seeing Ivan when I’d thought he was with Lauren in Sydney skewed my judgement so that I could no longer see what was in front of me at all?

  My motive for rushing off to Ivan’s place seemed suspect. My ­jealousy of Lauren, which I’d prided myself on not feeling, keeping underneath my hat.

  It felt as if I was looking down into the bottom of a well and seeing, not water, but newly poured concrete, shining, silver-grey, giving the illusion of liquidity, of cool, genuine reflection.

  I was surprised that I should have come to this as an image of myself, of what I faced, and then it seemed to fit. An empty well, not just dry but tantalising me with wet cement. I had discovered nothing that would help Rae when she came to trial. Instead, I was discovering all sorts of things that I would rather not. Maybe I should just give up. Rae didn’t want my help, and the way her lawyer cleared his throat when I rang him, his short, not quite polite replies, told me that to him I was merely troublesome. And the police were obviously convinced they had enough evidence for a conviction.

  I was afraid to phone Rae to ask for another meeting, to tell her what I’d found in Ivan’s workroom. I was afraid to see reflected in Rae’s eyes the woman I’d become—sneak, adulterer and coward.

  The suppression order was meant to make Rae invisible until her trial. And her trial would be conducted in a closed court, not open to the public or the press. Whoever had set her up was also invisible. A sneak. As I was learning to be.

  At home in my silent living room, I drew two rough squares on a piece of paper and joined them by an arrow with two heads. I thought of flipping coins and always coming up with the same answer, or non-answer. If I’d been Ivan, maybe I’d have drawn a horseman, or woman, or two, facing one another, lances at the ready, bandy legs well hidden.

  I flipped the pen over in my fingers, actually a marker pen of Peter’s. I lifted it to my nose, wishing I could catch the faintest smell or hint of him. In the end I left the two squares blank.

  What did theft mean besides the obvious, stealing something of value that could be sold, or used? There was $900,000 missing, but no-one had come forward to say, ‘Hey guys, here’s a bill of sale!’ There was the deposit in Rae’s bank account, but apart from that, so far as I knew, no paper trail to follow, no fingerprints, only the whispering ­butterfly dust of computer files that kept their secrets well.

  To Catch a Thief. That was one of my mother’s favourite movies. She liked Cary Grant a lot. A truism that thieves knew best how to set traps for other thieves: but was it also true that those who set themselves to catch thieves grew to resemble thieves themselves? And where did this end, if it ever did?

  Memory is not abstract, yet in trying to retrieve it we force abstractions on ourselves. Memory is hunger for the taste and smell and heartbeat of a person, rage that they are not there with us now.

  Lunch in the Park

  The first time Ivan and I tried hacking into Compic, there was only the fledgling light from the screen, as if we were watching some old movie together in the darkness at the drive-in.

  I have no recollection of Ivan’s face that night, his expression, his physical presence beside me, or the conflicting emotions I felt when he and I were alone together. I can hear Ivan’s voice giving me instructions, but even that memory has the quality of a poor recording, flat and lacking resonance.

  The air hadn’t really been cleared between Ivan and me since I’d stumbled on those printouts. The more I thought about it, the weaker Ivan’s explanation seemed. I knew I had reason to distrust him, yet alone, in the dark together, I wasn’t frightened.

  I had crossed the boundary between quarry and hunter as though I’d known all along that all I had to do was change my costume.

  Suddenly, his room seemed even darker. My senses were intently focused on a narrow yellow movement on a screen, yet I was more than ever conscious of the fullness of the air, the warmth, the sweet smells of concealment.

  In the end, I’d relented and told Ivan about the Compic boxes in Access Computing’s office. We were gambling that Isobel Merewether’s password would get us into Compic. If it worked, it would be further evidence that there was a connection between the two companies, and that Isobel Merewether was linked to both.

  It was almost too easy. Once we were into Compic, I grabbed the mouse from Ivan. First, to be on the safe side, I installed the Trojan Horse. It was turning out to be quite
useful. Then I began opening files. One appeared to contain Compic’s accounts for the start of the new financial year. On 15 July there’d been a payment of just under $50,000 from Access Computing to Compic.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ I whispered, as though my enemy might be in the room next door.

  Ivan printed out the page. After about five minutes of looking through the accounts, I found a payment to Claire Disraeli. Not a huge amount. A little over $20,000.

  ‘Why would Compic be paying Claire?’ I said. ‘Do you know anything about Claire working for them?

  I scrolled back, looking for anything that might explain the payment. I found a record of the program Ivan had written for Compic, and recalled his excitement, and Peter’s, that day Ivan had shown the program to him. But no more references to Claire.

  The light on Ivan’s modem flashed from green to red, his monitor gave a small click, and I was faced with a blank screen. It was exactly as though a hand had reached around and flicked off the power switch.

  ‘Bugger it,’ I said.

  Ivan pushed his chair back and got to his feet without looking at me. I watched his big back hump away in its brown jumper. He looked like a sad old dancing bear, and I thought—is it Lauren again? What now?

  But within a couple of seconds, my excitement came back doubled. I’d been looking for links between Access Computing and Compic, and I’d found one: money. I knew Compic had been using Access Computing’s mailing list. It was reasonable to suppose they’d paid for it. But here was money going the other way.

  The spatial element of words and numbers, my bits of clues that might not be clues at all, singing out through wires, through space, more solitary than a humpback’s song.

  From now on, if I wanted some information from someone, I’d sneak in through their computer. I’d play dirty. The decision had been growing, like wattle buds, for weeks.

  . . .

  A few days later, Ivan and I were facing one another in the Glebe Park Restaurant, two business colleagues sharing an early-morning coffee. Ivan had combed his hair and beard. We were rehearsing for Thursday, casing the joint. Was that the right phrase? It sounded too old-fashioned, trenchcoat pockets deep with guns.