She looked exhausted as she said goodnight.
I raised my broken arm in its white cast and black cotton sling in a kind of half-hopeful, half-resigned salute.
Loyalty comes at you in such devious ways, I thought as I made my way along the alley beside Rae’s block of flats. I still wasn’t frightened. I wondered if it was stupidity, or plain lack of imagination. Out there in the dark, nothing seemed certain except that somebody was out to get me, but for this evening at least, the fear that accompanied that knowledge lifted, allowed me some respite.
My hope that Rae and I might help each other seemed as slippery as the reflections of streetlights in the grey puddles of water on the footpath. What did I want Rae to do? Help me get over losing my mother, once and for all?
Loyalty grips you by the scruff of the neck, and by the time you wake up and try to shake yourself loose, it’s too late. You’re caught. I should have known, from all those years of tagging along behind my mother, that the claims of loyalty were devious, with more legs than a centipede.
. . .
On Detective Sergeant Brook’s next visit, he and I ended up walking further than we’d intended, along the drain under the bridge at Mouat Street and on through Southwell Park.
It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, my suggestion of a walk, grabbing Fred’s lead—a combination of sudden, choking claustrophobia, and anxiety that needed movement, outside air. If I had to go through another round of questions, I couldn’t bear the thought of being shut up inside while I answered them, tried to fathom what was behind the detective sergeant’s unsympathetic, but persistent manner.
‘To be honest’—Brook stopped at a line of young eucalypts and spoke portentously, as though this was the moment he’d chosen to set himself straight with me—‘at first, I didn’t think your accident was any more than that.’ He was looking better, I noted, his skin firmer, less like unbaked dough.
‘I want you to start at the beginning,’ he said, ‘and this time tell me everything.’
I lowered my head and pretended to fiddle with my sling. I knew I shouldn’t be using one. The doctor had forbidden it. But the weight was punishing, and I cheated in the afternoons. I was supposed to go back to work in two days time. I knew I had to, if there was to be any hope of getting the outwork report finished on schedule. I hated the thought of having to face Ivan.
We started walking again, at Fred’s pace, pausing while he sniffed at trees and dug for crickets in the clumps of grass that bordered Sullivan’s Creek. I cast around in my mind for something I could tell Brook, and remembered the silly episode with the disk in the first-aid room, the even sillier one with me taped to a microphone trying to get Bambi to confess.
Brook gave a short laugh when I’d finished. Then he said, ‘You think this—Bambi did it? Surely that’s not her real name.’
‘Brenda, but she won’t answer if you call her that.’
‘And she admitted planting this disk? Who has it now?’
‘Felix Wenborn,’ I said. ‘And no, unfortunately she didn’t.’
The detective sergeant was watching me as he had before, his shadowed eyes a mocking brown.
We were heading towards a picnic table and chairs. I told Brook about Di Trapani’s brother, Tony, and the mess he’d got himself into at the ANU. And Tony’s friend, Ateeq, and the international bulletin board they seemed to be addicted to. I said I’d seen Ateeq with Allison Edgeware, and they seemed to know each other well. I’d had asked Tony to find out what he could about Compic and Allison, but he hadn’t told me much.
Brook scratched his scalp underneath his hat. ‘What made you think you could help the kid?’
‘I didn’t really. It was a dumb idea, but I liked him so I said I’d try.’
The truth sounded lame, untruthful. ‘Tony’s a scared kid,’ I went on. ‘He’s done some silly things. But he wouldn’t booby-trap my car, I’m sure of it.’
Brook sighed, and gave me a quick, reproachful glance. ‘When I’ve got a few days to spare,’ he said, ‘remind me to tell you some stories about 19-year-old hackers.’
I coughed and cleared my throat, thinking of Ivan’s shadow in the dark.
Someone had lit a fire in a rubbish bin and it had spread and blackened the whole picnic area. The smell of burning was strong, though the fire did not look recent.
Brook eyed the nearest bench. ‘Are you tired?’ he asked me. ‘Do you want to sit down for a minute?’
I nodded. I did feel tired; but I thought he’d asked because he wanted a rest. I’d noticed that when Brook’s energy ebbed below a certain level, his voice flattened out. If you represented it on paper, it would be a long flat line.
Fred ran down to the drain and began scratching for worms on the edge, where the soil was soft.
‘Old habits die hard,’ I said.
Brook didn’t ask what I meant. He’d ignored Fred so far, and hadn’t offered to help while I’d struggled one-handed to let him off the lead.
Brook lowered himself on to the bench, first brushing off some dirt and loose soot with his hand. He took off his hat and set it on the seat beside him. Pale, unbaked skin stretched across the bones of his skull, white and shining as my plaster when I woke in the middle of the night. He ran a hand lightly over his head, not touching the bare, bald skin, his bloodless hand momentarily reflecting the milky light of water in the drain.
I licked my dry lips, and sat down on the opposite bench, trying to work out why he’d decided to remove his hat now, what he expected me to say. ‘Are you ill?’ was wrong. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ didn’t sounded right either. I was too embarrassed to ask, but my unspoken questions made the silence ring.
‘Why did your colleague go through the rubbish bin when she searched Rae Evans’s office?’ I said finally.
Brook looked surprised, then he smiled and leant forward on his elbows.
‘Let me tell you a story about trashing. This was back when I first joined the police, right? I knew how to direct the traffic and ride a motor bike.’ He shifted on the bench, making himself more comfortable. ‘I was on the desk in Civic at ten o’clock one night. I remember that, because I had the ’flu, and I was already mentally at home in bed. An Inspector came in—this guy who thought he was the ants’ pants, and I pretty much thought so too, at the time. He handed me this floppy disk in a plastic bag and asked me to take a copy of it. Then he said he’d be back in half an hour and left. I photocopied the label on the damn thing—that’s what I thought he meant by copy it. I got hung by the balls because the static on the photocopier erased all the data on the disk.’
I laughed and said, ‘You must have felt terrible.’ After a moment I added, ‘You didn’t answer my question.’
Brook shook his shoulders. He crossed and re-crossed his legs, eyeing his hat on the table between us as a reformed alcoholic might a glass of whisky.
‘I’m getting to it. This will give you an idea of my meteoric rise from the dork who thought copy meant photocopy. I might add that what I am about to tell you is my one and only venture into undercover work. A child porn case, right? Me and two other officers collect the rubbish at this house in Narrabundah for four months straight. Once a week, we’re garbos. We turn up on the truck, empty the bin—a metal one, I might add. The residence is classy. Around the corner we peel off, drive to the station with our plastic bags, start going through the loot. After four months we hit pay dirt, no pun intended. Would you believe our suspect had tossed a list of his clients? Ripped into bits the size of snowflakes and covered with vanilla yoghurt, but a fair dinkum list.’
Everything Brook had said up to this point might have been a speech that someone else had proofread, his natural way of speaking a creamy sun rising underneath his hat.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘So what did that policewoman find in Rae Evans’s rubbish bin?’
Brook gave his head a small, sharp shake and grinned.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nix.’
I took a deep breath, and began the
story of how I’d gone to Compic’s office in the middle of the night and broken in, how I’d booted up one of their computers and found their dodgy transactions, and someone had come in on me and chased me to my car. I was aware of how mad it sounded. Madder because it had taken me so long to confess. By the time I’d finished, my arm was itching unbearably underneath the plaster, and the gauze smelt, to me at any rate, of rotting fish nets.
Brook let me blunder on, his gaze fixed on his hat and the sooty mess on the picnic table next to it. I wished he would raise his eyes, make contact, instead of leaving me to stare at a burnt table and a worn Akubra hat.
‘Why didn’t you go straight to the police and tell them what you’d found?’ he asked at last.
‘That I’d been hacking into Compic’s computers, breaking into the office? What kind of a reception would I have got?’
Brook indicated my plaster with a lift of his right elbow. ‘One that might’ve helped you to avoid this.’
Two archers were practising on the other side of the drain, which was beginning to look more like its name, Sullivan’s Creek, still concreted at the bottom where water flowed, but bare now of fences and bridges with metal railings.
Peter and I had sometimes stopped to watch the archery competitions on Saturday afternoons. Peter was fascinated by the bull’s-eyes, white at the centre, then red, blue, an outer edge of darker blue. I had to hold tight to his hand to stop him running up to them. One afternoon, at a pause in the play, we’d asked if we could, and I’d held Peter up so he could touch the white heart, the colours pricked by arrow heads.
Now two young men were practising—I’d never thought of archery as a sport for young men. They’d set up a single bull’s-eye and were sharing it, joined by their common purpose. Yet they didn’t speak. There wasn’t so much as a ‘good shot’, or ‘hard luck’ when one arrow missed the target altogether, sailing over the top of it into a stand of casuarinas.
‘Shall we keep walking?’ I said. ‘The golf course is just along this way a bit.’
I called Fred. He seemed more confident and relaxed than on any of our previous walks. The first time I’d taken him to Southwell Park, he’d crouched between my legs and hadn’t moved.
Brook got to his feet, picking up his hat carefully in both hands, as though it was made of some precious substance that had mysteriously reached breaking point.
The sun had warmed a huge cement cylinder where Peter and I used to sit and watch the golfers. I’d never figured out exactly what the cylinder was for. It looked like part of an old-fashioned steamroller, the sort I’d watched pressing stones into new asphalt when I was a kid. I hadn’t seen one on a road for years. And it had no holes in the sides. I couldn’t see how it fitted to an engine. It had just been there, on the other side of the fence, where rubbish from the golf course tended to end up, part of an overgrown copse of self-seeded birch and she-oak. In summer, long grass hid bottles, newspapers, bricks, tangled bits of wire. Winter bared them again.
The cylinder’s surface was weathered, roughened; moss had colonised the shady side. Peter and I used to have favourite golfers that we barracked for. We liked to sit side by side on the cylinder, and watch them tee off from the rise directly opposite. We’d make bets about how many balls would land in the pond that ran the length of the fence a few feet from our seat.
I tried not to notice how uncomfortable Brook looked with about an eighth of his bum resting against damp curved cement. I’d never found the cylinder an awkward place to sit.
Long grey winter grass was flattened all around us, new pale green shoots coming up through it. Fred ran, fell over one shoulder, rolled on his back. He stood up and ran again, into the tall dead grass a little way along. It covered him completely. He barked once. I wondered if he wanted me to come and find him. He’d never played like that before—not with me, at any rate.
‘Did you bring a ball?’ asked Brook.
‘No, but you can throw a stick for him. Peter does. He likes it.’
The game worked until Fred broke the stick in half and sat down to eat it.
Brook propped, out of breath, against the concrete block. This time he didn’t try to sit on it.
‘I wish I knew who was behind Compic,’ I said.
‘I’m working on that.’
‘Can you get some help?’
Brook said sharply, ‘I’m the resources on this one at the moment, and the boss thinks even that’s too much.’
‘I don’t know how anyone knew I’d be at Compic’s office that night. I think Ivan Semyonov might have followed me.’
Saying his name made Ivan grow enormous in front of me. At the same time, I was aware of Brook’s indifference to my feelings and allegiances, and the pull of this indifference. How amazing it would be to be able to view the whole thing from a distance, as he did, to take or leave it, to report back to your colleagues in the fraud squad and let them decide.
‘You recognised the Russian bloke?’ Brook asked me.
‘No. The door opened. I saw someone’s shadow.’
‘Does Semyonov drive your car?’
‘Ivan’s got a licence, but he doesn’t drive. Not normally,’ I added, remembering the hire car in Queensland.
‘Did he ever drive your car?’
‘No,’ I said, then hesitated, remembering Ivan loping through the carport in the middle of some backyard game with Fred and Peter, banging his knee on the bumper bar of my car and swearing. Me washing up, looking out through the kitchen window, smiling at his fuss and bluster. Peter laughing. The domestic ordinariness and pleasure of it.
‘OK. Semyonov’s a possibility. Who else?’
‘Felix Wenborn. On his own, or with Jim Wilcox. Allison Edgeware. I suppose the Trapanis. But what would be their motive? Claire Disraeli, because of the money? Claire with Guy Harmer maybe? I’ve crossed Bambi off my list because I just don’t think she’s up to it. Any of those people could’ve found out where I live. I don’t have a lockable garage, just a carport. I didn’t see any signs that anyone had been messing with my car. But then, I wasn’t looking for them. I didn’t tell anyone I was planning to break into Compic’s office. But Ivan and I—we got on to Access Computing’s bulletin board, and Ivan showed me how to hack into one of Compic’s computers. We did that together.’ I remembered something else. ‘And that man with the one eye, Whitelaw, he’d been watching me.’
Repeating Ivan’s name, I felt only drift and emptiness. Fred was rolling over and over in the grass. I looked across at the pond. A shelduck skittered, sliding in to land feet first, water spraying up, her wake rippling out behind her.
‘What will your colleagues in the fraud squad say?’
‘Let me worry about that.’
‘But you’ll tell them? What I’ve just told you? All of it?’
Brook nodded, then with one swift movement jammed his hat low on his head. ‘They’ll be fully briefed. But I’m a fussy bastard when it comes to checking details for myself.’
We would go back to the house, and this strange, sick policeman would get into his car and leave, and my fear would be there waiting for me.
Brook stared at me as I bent down to pick up Fred’s lead. I thought, it’s not that he’s letting me off, or even that he’s undecided. He’s mentally working himself through to a certain crossroads. I wonder if I’ll know, if he’ll tell me, when he gets there. I wonder how much it has to do with his illness.
I chose a different route for our return, one that was marginally shorter. About halfway to Mouat Street, we passed a mass of rotting old tree roots, where four years ago a top-heavy willow had fallen during a storm. Peter had spent a morning playing on it in the snow. The first and only snow I’d seen in Canberra.
Peter had put out his tongue to catch snowflakes, and twirled with his arms out straight on either side, in a slow and graceful dance. Then, tired out with climbing on the tree, he’d giggled, crumpled to the ground, pretending to be dizzier than he was, while I’d pulled his too-
small parka down to cover frozen skin.
Derek had said that night that he couldn’t understand why I couldn’t dress Peter properly, when I had nothing to do all day but see to his needs.
I didn’t know why myself. It was no more than a couple of hours’ work to drive to Target, and buy him new winter clothes. But I’d put it off. I didn’t understand my lethargy, what Derek called being in a rut. At first it had to do with my mother’s death. Then, gradually, a time of mourning had been replaced by—what?
I’d been looking for something, that day with the fallen tree and the snow. On all our outings. But I hadn’t found it. I’d known that, whatever it was, it wasn’t in the house.
Peter had been stoical about the cold. There was that in him still. I understood why Derek had been so angry when I refused to go to America with him. He was offering me a chance to pull myself out of the rut. I’d become dull, excessively introverted, lazy and pig-headed. This was how he saw me. I could see myself that way too. It took only a little effort.
Those years at home alone with Peter. My two closest women friends had gone back to work after having children. I’d watched them stagger on through months and years of insufficient sleep, no time for themselves, or me. Friendship had shredded, becoming thin and light as an old gauze bandage.
When Derek had first told me about the invitation to Philadelphia, smiling in advance at the thought of my excitement, my congratulations, the plans we’d make, and I’d replied instead with, ‘Actually, I think I’ve got myself a job,’ it was the first time I’d ever seen him speechless. ‘Nonsense,’ he’d said when he recovered. ‘You’re coming with me, we’re going as a family, don’t be ridiculous.’ But he didn’t sound convinced. He sounded different. As though he’d glimpsed something I thought only I could see.
And so it was easy to be stubborn, to present a stone wall to Derek’s anger and his arguments. I was only proving what he said about me. I didn’t have to exert myself for that.
The night that Peter had played on the fallen tree, I put him to bed with a sore throat and Derek asked, ‘What were you thinking of?’
The Trojan Dog Page 24
