It was Peter’s first question when I phoned.
‘Can you feed Fred, Mum? Should I come home and feed him?’
‘I can manage. I’d like you to stay with Dad for a bit longer, love.’
Peter chattered the way he did when he was happy. I pictured him and Derek eating American pizza, Derek washing up. When Derek came on the line, I had an overwhelming urge to tell him I was jumping on the first plane I could.
I took a deep breath and began to explain what had happened, pleased now that I hadn’t insisted on doing so from the hospital. I had to make Derek understand that I was in danger, and that they might be too.
Derek said very little—probably because Peter was breathing down his ear—but what he said was calm and reassuring. I told him I’d write and send a copy of the police report on my car.
We said goodbye and hung up, and I let myself out the back door and lay down in the grass and rubbed its wet smells into my eyes. I would have eaten earth as recompense, as thanks.
Several hours later, I was staring at Detective Sergeant Brook standing splay-legged on my porch. He was wearing the same hat he’d on in the hospital, pulled low on his forehead, squashing his eyebrows too close to his eyes.
‘What kind of computer have you got?’ he barked at me.
‘A Macintosh LC,’ I said.
‘Where is it?’ The detective sergeant was already moving past me down the corridor.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Where?’ he repeated with his back to me.
‘Here—in my son’s room.’ At the door to Peter’s room, I stepped aside, and the policeman entered it ahead of me.
Peter’s room was exactly as he’d left it, last-minute discards from his packing spread across the bed. At least the bed was made, and I’d vacuumed round it, though not very recently.
The air smelt musty. I went straight to the window and opened it. The detective sergeant was already sitting at the computer, loading up a disk.
Rows of figures appeared on the screen. It was my list of interviewers’ names and addresses, the one that had been altered.
The detective sergeant swivelled in his chair. Suppressed excitement seemed to flow from underneath his hat. ‘Choose a line and delete it,’ he ordered me.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Just do as I say.’
I moved the cursor down, randomly highlighted a name and number, then, using the mouse, unscrolled the edit and clicked ‘cut’.
The detective sergeant watched me as though I was performing an unusually sensitive and tricky task.
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
‘It’s gone,’ I replied inanely.
‘Can you get it back?’
‘Yes, by clicking paste, or undo.’
‘What if you shut down the computer? Can you get it back then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Watch.’
Rapidly, the detective sergeant shut down Peter’s computer, then rebooted it. The same row of figures reappeared, minus the one that I’d deleted. With a few rapid keystrokes he brought the complete list of addresses back.
He grinned at me, pink-faced, delighted with his performance, a boy who’d learnt his first card trick and run out to show his parents.
‘Someone stole my password,’ I said stiffly. ‘But they added an address to the file. They didn’t remove anything. Where did you get the disk?’
The detective sergeant was watching me carefully. ‘Did you add that address yourself?’
‘By mistake? It was a fake address. Nobody lives there. Whoever did it was trying to get me to send a cheque to a false address.’
The detective sergeant rubbed his pale fingers up and down his tie, his face still flushed. ‘I mean intentionally,’ he said, ‘Did you make that change?’
‘No, of course not.’
He waited, continuing to watch me. I guessed policemen all had their own ways of working out when somebody was lying. Watch the body language, listen to a voice rather than self-righteous denial.
‘I was luckier than Rae Evans,’ I said carefully. ‘I found the alteration before any money was sent. Did Felix Wenborn give you the disk?’
The detective sergeant didn’t answer. Who else but Felix? I asked myself. Or could it have been Ivan?
The policeman took a notebook from his pocket and began writing without looking at me or asking me any further questions. After a couple of minutes standing there like an idiot, I blurted out, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t like a cup of tea? I think I need one.’
Brook followed me into the kitchen. He sat down on a wobbly chair and lined up his notebook and pen on the table beside him. Now, I thought, now he’ll take his hat off. But he didn’t. He watched me boil water and open cupboards one-handed, with an expression of mild amusement, as though my awkwardness, and his withholding of an offer to help, gave him some kind of pleasure.
‘Might the case against Rae Evans be reopened?’ I asked, with a small flicker of pride that I’d managed to make tea without breaking anything, or burning myself.
‘Reopened?’ Brook looked at me as though I was referring to a packet of stale biscuits. ‘It was never closed.’ He drank his tea without a word of thanks, and patted his lips with a large blue-and-white checked handkerchief.
‘What’re you going to do now?’ I asked.
My arm was beginning to hurt. I felt dizzy, and I longed for him to go so that I could pull the curtains in my room and lie down with my doona pulled right over me.
‘Report back to the Fraudies. See which way they play the ball.’
I realised I was sitting hunched into my chair, my broken arm pressed against my side. Without knowing I was going to, I started talking. I told Detective Sergeant Brook about the payments to Claire Disraeli that Ivan and I had found on one of Compic’s computers. I summarised the financial exchanges that appeared to have taken place between Access Computing and Compic. I told him everything I knew about Felix Wenborn, Jim Wilcox and Charles Craven from Finance, about my meeting with the one-eyed man and the complaint he’d made to our department about Compic, and how Rae Evans had been asked to deal with it. I didn’t follow any chronological sequence, just spilt the lot in whatever order it happened to be in my head.
Detective Sergeant Brook made notes, and stopped me when I got ahead of him. I left out my late-night visit to Compic’s office.
When I finally stopped, and the detective sergeant was satisfied he’d got everything down, he stood up and put away his notebook. He looked exhausted. He muttered something about getting in touch with me in the next day or so. Then he sighed and raised his hat a little with two fingers. I saw with a shock that he was completely bald.
. . .
How easy it is to harm people. It hardly takes brains or planning. How much had it taken for someone to fix my car so that the brakes were sure to fail?
Every one of Derek’s letters and postcards had a return address. You’re supposed to include the sender’s address on the back of a letter, so of course Derek does. My postbox doesn’t have a lock. It’s never occurred to me that it should. And if I had bought one, it would only have been a simple padlock that any fool could break. Anyone watching me would know that Peter was staying with his father. All they needed to do was check my mailbox to find the postcards Peter sent to me and Fred.
In my letter to Derek, which I typed with two fingers of my left hand, I said the police were treating the case seriously, which I hoped was the truth. I begged Derek not to leave Peter alone, to deliver him to school and pick him up, talk to his teacher and explain that he might be in danger. I didn’t think Peter was necessarily worse off in a school, and what was the alternative? To sit in Derek’s office all day? I said to Derek that he might be tempted to leave Peter in the evening while he went out to pick up a pizza, but that on no account was he to do this.
Should I go to America? Or should I bring Peter home where I could watch over him myself?
The closer he was to me, the closer he was to the trouble I was in. I had to trust Derek. I couldn’t see that there was a better plan. My options were fewer, and clearer than before. I could give up my investigation, such as it was; or I could redouble my efforts to find my enemies, and Rae’s, before they struck again.
Ivan stayed away and didn’t phone. No-one crept by my house at night to throw a brick through my window and climb in with a knife between his teeth, to jemmy open the back door and strangle me where I half-sat, half-lay against my pillow and Peter’s, glad I hadn’t washed his pillow case, sucking up the faint smell of my son as I waited for the attack, forcing my eyes to stay open, my ears alert for every tiny sound.
No-one burnt my house down, or shot me through the kitchen window while I made a cup of tea left-handed early in the morning. No-one poured boiling oil down my chimney, or stalked me when I went outside with Fred and brushed him and left a pile of dog hair for the magpies.
I shut myself up in my house, while spring flounced along Goodwin Street. Every time I went into a room, I had to close the door behind me. My house was no longer open on the inside, but a box within another box, bordering on yet another. Not Chinese fashion, though I dreamed of this, of folding myself inside a small container that smelt of sandalwood, and then each time a smaller one, until squashed ant-like I might at last be safe.
I rang America. Listening to the dial tone, I broke out in an anxious sweat in case this time Derek’s calm would be gone, and he would shout at me to stop being neurotic. But he didn’t, and for that I thank him now.
. . .
Detective Sergeant Brook turned up in the middle of the afternoon, brandishing a sheaf of printouts.
‘You look as though you’ve been busy,’ I told him.
‘Insomnia.’ Brook grinned and scratched his head beneath his hat. ‘Reading in bed isn’t such a punishment, provided you’ve got a good soft pillow.’
‘I should try it,’ I said, then asked, ‘Read what exactly?’
‘I’ll show you in a minute.’
I invited him inside. This time we went straight through to the kitchen, where I’d set a tray with cups, a teapot with fresh leaves. Of course, I didn’t have to offer Brook tea. But again I felt proud that I was managing.
‘Our man,’ Brook said, ‘if he is our man, the one with the wall eye? Name’s Whitelaw, Bernard Whitelaw. Runs a company called Phoenix Information Services.’
‘Just him?’ I grasped the handle of the teapot with my good hand. It was strange to hear the one-eyed man given a name.
Brook took a cup from me. I remembered that he drank his tea black and sugarless. ‘Company’s unlisted. Last year they made a loss of over half a million.’
‘Who are Whitelaw’s backers?’
‘I’m working on that. Another interesting question’—Brook downed his tea in a couple of gulps and dragged the pot towards him for a refill—‘what does Access Computing want with state-of-the-art computer graphics?’
I looked at him and waited.
‘Access Computing bought a heap of software off Compic. I’ve seen the invoices.’
So that was the pile of boxes I’d seen in the Brisbane office.
Brook shuffled through his papers and handed me one. It was a bank statement for Claire Disraeli and included the amount Compic had paid her that I’d seen on the computer file.
I read through it, while he topped up his tea once more.
I looked up at him, wondering if he guessed, or already knew, the parts of the story I’d left out.
‘The bank just gave this to you?’ I said at last, handing back the statement.
‘I had a handy piece of paper called a warrant.’
‘So soon?’
Brook smiled and said with a slight bow, ‘Let’s just say it’s hard to refuse a dying man a legitimate request.’
Confessions
‘Hello,’ I said, moving quickly in through Rae Evans’s front door.
‘Sandra!’ Rae spoke softly, but she didn’t attempt to hide her surprise and annoyance. ‘I don’t know if anyone’s—’
‘Anyone?’ I repeated sarcastically. The adrenalin that had got me to Rae’s flat was rushing out of me, and I felt empty and light-headed. ‘You mean your friends from Compic?’
Rae stared at my arm and asked, ‘What happened?’
‘The brakes failed in my car.’
‘I’ll take you out the back way.’ Rae was suddenly decisive. ‘Through the laundry. The back way’s—’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not leaving till I get some answers.’
Rae stared at my arm in its plaster cast and sling, as though staring hard enough might make it disappear. Her lips looked dry and cracked, and her voice came as though forced through thirsty ground. ‘What happened to you?’ she repeated.
‘I was in a car crash.’
My shoulders slumped. Oh God, I thought, I’m not going to cry now. Not when I’ve got this far. My broken arm, which I’d carried possessively, protectively, in the taxi to Rae’s flat, in the sling I’d made out of a square of black cotton I’d found at the bottom of my rag bag, felt impossibly heavy.
Rae put her arm around my shoulders and gently lifted aside my jacket, so that the black sling caught and drank the light. She asked gently, ‘Does it hurt?’
‘A bit.’
Rae’s hair, her silver-grey no-nonsense helmet, looked dull and dry. Her clothes were creased, as though she’d been wearing the same jumper and tracksuit pants for days. Without make-up, her face looked smaller, compacted and pressed down.
She stayed close to me, but let go of my arm, then cocked her head, listening for a noise outside. I hadn’t been frightened on my way to the flat; I’d been determined, as though I was moving along on a steady blue-and-orange flame. I tried to take hold of that again now, to keep it in front of me.
‘Come and sit down. I’ll get you something to drink.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Water will be fine.’
Rae came back with the water, and I sipped it slowly while I told her about the accident, still believing, with half of my mind, that she already knew. She was looking at me apprehensively, and rather helplessly too, as though I was a child she’d been asked to mind and did not know how to deal with. Yet, at the same time, it seemed to me that Rae really couldn’t be bothered any longer, that the hint about somebody watching her flat might be as much to get rid of me as anything, because all she wanted was to be left alone. Rae’s poor judgement, her passivity, her spurt of nervous energy, were the result of a desire somewhere deep inside to have done with the whole thing.
‘I made a mistake.’ Rae spoke with an effort. ‘I should have looked at Access Computing’s grant application more closely—’ Her voice, not strong to start with, tapered off.
‘If you had, what would you have found?’
When Rae didn’t answer, I asked, ‘Who are you protecting?’
She laughed, a small dry laugh. ‘I can’t even protect myself.’
She moved a few steps away and stood with both hands pressed down on the back of a chair.
‘I did ask you to stay out of it.’
I began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I felt so ridiculous suddenly, with my broken arm, my hopes of saving this woman, and maybe myself. And once I’d started laughing, I couldn’t stop.
I drank more water, and it helped a bit.
‘Did you and my mother sleep together?’ I asked Rae.
She accepted the question indifferently. ‘Once or twice. But it wasn’t that, I don’t think. It wasn’t sex, at least it wasn’t only sex. It was me, my job, my education, my ambitions.’
‘Do you remember meeting me one day, when you came home with Mum?’
Recognition flickered, and Rae almost smiled.
‘What happened?’
‘You mean that night? Nothing.’
I hadn’t meant just that night, but perhaps Rae had already answered my more general question.
&nbs
p; Rae said. ‘Your mother put out ideas of herself, ideas about all sorts of things, and then when it came to letting herself go with them, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t.’
‘You only saw one side of her,’ I said.
Rae looked different again, or maybe it was that I was looking at her with different eyes. Sadness seemed to fill her whole body, from her grey dome of hair to the toes of her awkward-looking sneakers. It occurred to me that she was dressed in the uniform of the ’90s housewife, the uniform I’d lived in myself until three months ago—tracksuit, running shoes, thick white cotton socks bought in packs of three at Woolies, a uniform that announced itself as comfortable, serviceable, no need to look any further.
I said, ‘The person behind all this—I think it might be Ivan.’
I waited for Rae to offer an opinion, and when she didn’t, I told her about finding the printouts in Ivan’s cupboard, how he’d been watching her for months.
It seemed to spark a memory. Rae said, ‘Ivan did take an interest in those grants. He wanted to know all about Access Computing. But I didn’t think there was anything odd about that. Ivan’s like a bowerbird, always picking things up and peering at them and putting them down again. He joked about it. Self-help groups for women. Hens’ clubs.’
‘Was there anything else? Anything he did?’
‘Well, he was caught up in that business with the Compic tender. Because Felix Wenborn was making such a fuss.’
‘Was Ivan backing Compic, do you know?’
‘I never got far enough into it to find out.’
‘But you would have.’
‘If this other business hadn’t blown up in my face, yes. I got the impression—it wasn’t any more than that—that Felix listens to Guy more than he listens to Ivan or any of the others.’
A dark, lakeside image brushed my shoulders. I’d been hurrying towards this moment, and now it had come all I could do was sit and feel relief dissolve and flow away from me. What had I wanted Rae to do? Prove Ivan’s innocence and her own in one fell swoop?
Rae held out her hand and said, ‘Come on. I’ll show you out the back way. Someone, I don’t know who, has been watching my flat.’
The Trojan Dog Page 23
