by Tim Ayliffe
‘I know about Dimity Clay.’
Mrs O’Reilly took another long drag on her cigarette.
‘As soon as those men arrived, I knew they were bad news.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I dropped a shopping bag while one of them was standing on the lawn.’ Her face scowling with the memory. ‘He just stared at me as I got down on one knee and put my oranges away. A woman in her ninth decade. Disgraceful.’
Little things, like good manners, told you a lot about someone. People in their twilight years understood that better than most.
‘Sound like arseholes to me.’
‘Your word, not mine.’
Mrs O’Reilly clearly didn’t like bad language, Bailey could tell by her tone.
‘Sorry. It wouldn’t take much for someone to help out an older neighbour.’
‘But that’s not why you knocked on my door, is it, Mr Bailey?’
‘No.’ Bailey wasn’t going to lie to her. ‘It’s not.’
‘You want to know about the boy.’
Dexter wasn’t bullshitting him after all. ‘What can you tell me?’
She took another drag on her cigarette, looking past Bailey at the flashing lights down the street.
‘You’re not the police, Mr Bailey. Why should I tell you anything?’
‘Because his father’s a friend of mine.’
‘Then why did you introduce yourself to me as a reporter from The Journal?’
From all the doorknocks that Bailey had done over the years, he couldn’t remember being interrogated like this.
‘I don’t know . . . who else would I be?’
Mrs O’Reilly smiled and patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay, love. I’m just toying with you. I know who you are. You were that war correspondent. I used to read your articles. There must be darkness in there. Just like my Alfie.’
‘I wasn’t a soldier.’
‘If you’re doing a job there, that’s service.’
Bailey didn’t like where the conversation was headed and he needed to get it back on track. ‘You were about to tell me about the boy?’
‘Alfie didn’t like talking about it either.’ She paused and stared at him, like she was peering under his hood, inspecting his engine. ‘The boy, then. All I can tell you is that yesterday evening I saw him escorted by two men into that house. He looked like he didn’t want to be there, like he was afraid.’
‘How could you tell?’
‘Because the men on either side of him were gripping his arms so tightly that he could barely move.’ She grabbed Bailey’s arm, reinforcing her point. ‘One of the men punched him in the stomach and he fell over, then they dragged him inside. And that’s when I called the police.’
‘Do you remember what time you made the call, Mrs O’Reilly?’
‘Yes, I do. It was about six o’clock because I was just sitting down to watch the news.’
If Carmel O’Reilly had tipped off the cops yesterday, why had it taken them so long to go in? Another question for Dexter.
‘Is the boy safe now?
‘Not yet, Mrs O’Reilly. He wasn’t there.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Did you see anything else?’
‘No, that’s it.’
‘Thanks so much for your time, Mrs O’Reilly.’
‘You’re welcome. I do hope you find him.’
‘So do I.’ Bailey grabbed hold of the rail and started back down the path.
‘And Mrs O’Reilly,’ he called back, ‘happy birthday for tomorrow.’
She laughed. ‘You don’t bother celebrating birthdays at my age.’
That was enough doorknocking for one day.
Bailey decided to head back to his car. He needed time to think, because things weren’t adding up. One thing in particular. If the men in that house and Tariq were planning an act of terrorism, then why – as Mrs O’Reilly said – did Tariq look like he didn’t want to be there? Was he was having second thoughts? Or was he being held against his will?
Back at the house, the dead guy on the lawn was being zipped inside a body bag and carried into the back of an ambulance by two paramedics in blue uniforms. No one would have survived that many bullets. The other two guys were sitting in the back of an unmarked police car. They looked the same, like brothers. Bailey couldn’t know that for sure, but it was a good line of inquiry. Another question that Dexter would hopefully answer for him. Later.
Bailey was still the only reporter on the scene. He had watched the raid in person. Even without names he had a good story. He needed to get back to the paper and get it down while it was still fresh in his mind.
He couldn’t see Dexter, she must have been inside the house with the forensics team. He wasn’t getting anything more from her at the moment, anyway. That was made blatantly obvious by the young cop leaning on Bailey’s car.
‘Careful with the paintwork, son. I’ve just had her resprayed.’
‘Yeah, right.’ The bloke ran his hand across the duco which was covered in a cocktail of dirt and bird shit. ‘Time to go, mate. Major crime here. We’re shutting down the street.’
Bailey didn’t bother arguing with him. He’d got what he came for. He owed it to Dexter not to cause any trouble.
‘I was just leaving.’
CHAPTER 20
Dexter
The Salma brothers lived like pigs.
Clothes were strewn across furniture, along with old newspapers and crumpled pornographic magazines. You couldn’t see the coffee table because it was piled so high with fast food containers. The kitchen wasn’t any better, rubbish bags dumped in the corner and dirty dishes stacked in the sink.
And the smell. Horrendous. Like someone had sprayed a men’s locker room with off milk.
Dexter was smelling her fingers to soften the stench as she walked in and out of the bedrooms searching for any sign of the kid. The rooms weren’t any better than the rest of the house. Dirty clothes on the carpet and mattresses slept on without any bed linen. In three bedrooms Dexter counted four beds. One of them was a thin, blue, inflatable mattress in the corner of the room with no windows. She wondered whether that one had been for Tariq.
‘Anything interesting, Dave?’ Dexter asked the forensic guy who had his head down, dusting the area around the inflatable bed.
‘Just starting,’ Dave said, without looking up.
‘Sorry, dumb question.’
‘One thing I can tell you,’ he said. ‘These blokes were grubby bastards.’
‘Not the finest members of society.’
He paused what he was doing and met Dexter’s gaze. ‘You should go look in the garage.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Go see for yourself.’
Dexter did as she was told, tracing back past the mess in the lounge, through a door next to the kitchen. Walking down the steps, she almost bumped her head on the large globe that was dangling from the roof in the garage. The globe looked like a fluorescent pear, its bright light bouncing off the shiny concrete floor, illuminating the entrance. The rest of the garage was enveloped in darkness.
‘Over here.’
She could just make out Nugget’s stumpy silhouette in the corner. Dexter walked towards him, squinting as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. It wasn’t a cluttered mess like the rest of the house. No dirty clothes. No rubbish. No porn.
Nugget was standing beside a camera that had been loaded onto a tripod. The camera was pointing at a chair set next to the wall under a black flag with white Arabic writing on it.
‘Holy shit.’
Nugget swung around. ‘You got that right, boss.’
Dexter couldn’t read much Arabic but she recognised the phrase.
Mohammed is the messenger of Allah.
The line was used as a declaration of faith across Islam, known as the Shahada. Extremist groups liked to hijack the populist message to legitimise their cause.
Dexter pointed at the camera. ‘Is there a card i
n that?’
‘I wasn’t planning on touching it till the Feds got here. I’m no good with this tech shit, we need one of the nerds. I’d probably erase what’s there, if there is something there.’
‘I think we can all guess what’s –’
‘Speak of the devil!’ Nugget interrupted Dexter as Marty Singh from the Australian Federal Police walked through the door. ‘No sign of the kid, Marty. But my hunch, he’s the star of a movie made right here. A little martyr’s message to the world. Grubby little shit.’
Dexter felt a sudden pang of sickness in her gut. Everyone was talking about Tariq as if he was a terrorist. What if the old woman they’d spoken to up the street was right? What if the Salma brothers had been holding Tariq against his will? If that was true, then what they were about to watch could be even more disturbing than a suicide video.
She bent down on one knee and touched the floor, inspecting the dust on her fingertips, trying to imagine what went on here. Other than the flag, chair and the tripod, the garage was empty. No sign of a struggle, or something more sinister.
Singh slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and started gently fiddling with the camera.
‘What’s there?’ Nugget moved closer, trying to get a better look.
‘Give me a minute, Nugget. This camera’s a relic. I’m surprised it’s even digital.’
Dexter stepped around the camera, trying to give Singh more space.
‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ Singh said.
Nugget gave him an impatient look. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Card’s gone.’
‘Fuck it.’ Nugget whacked the wall with his fist. ‘We’ve got to find this kid before he does something stupid.’
‘Let’s stop and think about this for a minute,’ Dexter said. ‘What if Tariq was a victim here?’
‘Then why hasn’t he turned up at a police station?’
Nugget was right. If Tariq had managed to escape and he was innocent, why hadn’t he turned himself in?
Dexter stepped back, holding her phone up so that she could get a photograph of the camera pointed at the chair beneath the black flag.
‘Chief! You better get out here!’
One of the other cops was calling out from the back of the house.
Dexter walked back through the kitchen and outside onto an undercover patio, where a uniformed policeman was standing beside a woman in a suit, down on her knees, scraping something off a plastic board with a scalpel.
‘What is it?’ Dexter said.
‘These guys were preparing for something, all right.’
It was Bess Langard from the New South Wales Bomb Squad. Langard was a good operator. Thorough. She never talked things up and she certainly never talked things down.
‘Trinitrotoluene.’
‘Say that again?’
The word sounded familiar to Dexter but she couldn’t remember what it was.
‘TNT.’
‘You’ve got to be bloody joking.’ Nugget had followed Dexter outside and he was standing over her shoulder.
‘No, Nugget. I’m not.’
Langard pulled back a tarpaulin, revealing five boxes with images of pressure cookers on them. Two of the pots were sitting on the ground, open, with ball bearings inside. A third one had been dismantled and was lying on its side next to a bunch of loose wires. There was also a bag of black powder and a paint tin that was open with yellow goo inside.
‘That one’s full of it.’ Langard was pointing at the tin. ‘There’s enough TNT in that to take out half the block.’
‘Okay,’ Dexter said, pointing at the cop in uniform. ‘We’re going to need to clear half the street. I want homes emptied within a one hundred metre radius of this house. Now.’
The guy in uniform nodded his head and trotted off to do as he was told.
‘Hey, Bess?’ Dexter said, her eyes back on the bomb-making materials.
‘Yeah?”
‘Unless I’ve got this wrong, I’m counting five boxes and only three pressure cookers.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Nugget,’ Dexter said. ‘I think it’s time we introduced ourselves to the two living Salma brothers.’
CHAPTER 21
By the time Bailey made it back to Sussex Street, his body was all but ready to confirm that the egg and lettuce sandwich was a bad idea. Beads of sweat were building on his brow and he needed to get to a toilet. Fast.
‘Bailey!’
Word had got around that Bailey had been there for the raid in Roselands, so he was a popular man when he stepped out of the elevator on the newsroom floor.
‘Bailey!’
The Journal’s Chief of Staff, Rachel Symonds, was so excited that she was almost running across the carpet towards him.
He held up his hand to cut her off. ‘In a minute.’
‘C’mon Bailey, this is huge. When are we going to –’
Bailey had his hand cupped over his mouth when he shouldered open the door to the men’s toilets and went straight for an empty cubicle, emptying his guts into the porcelain.
It took him a few minutes to gather himself. When he walked back outside, Symonds was still waiting for him. She would have heard everything.
‘You okay, mate?’
Bailey used a paper towel to wipe away the water he had splashed on his face. ‘Service station sandwich. I’ll never learn.’
‘Here.’ She handed him a piece of chewing gum. ‘Good for you, even better for me.’
He popped it in his mouth with a wink. ‘I wouldn’t want you feeling uncomfortable, now, would I?’
‘Mate.’ Gerald appeared beside them. ‘Let’s get this thing out there before someone beats us to it.’
The newspaper editor, always thinking about the competition.
‘Relax, Gerald. I was the only one there. You’ve got a story up already, like everyone else. I’ll give you the feature. The blow by blow.’
‘I know that, Bailey. I want it up. Let’s own the traffic on this.’
Gerald was sounding like a guy who wasn’t ready to give up his day job. Not yet.
‘Got anything new?’ Symonds asked the question every chief of staff would ask.
‘Not that we can print. Still waiting for IDs. But the cops knew these guys, I’m certain of it.’
Bailey had spoken to Symonds and Gerald on the drive back from Roselands, so they knew most of what he had. Symonds had also been working with Bailey for almost two decades, so she wasn’t about to get in his face and tell him how to do his job. It wasn’t her style.
‘Anything on the scanners?’ Bailey said.
‘Nothing. We’ve got the pups watching social, not much there yet, either.’ Symonds turned back towards the newsroom. ‘Nicki! Got a minute?’
Nicki came bounding up beside them, excitedly. Bailey had only met her once before, when she’d showed him how to set up a twitter account on his phone. Not that he’d ever used it.
‘What’s up, Rach?’
‘Anything more on social about this raid in Roselands?’
‘A bit,’ Nicki said. ‘I’m just writing it up now.’
‘What’ve you got?’ Symonds said.
‘Local Roselands angle. People worried about heavy-handed cops. Apparently, they stormed in there, guns blazing. Locals are worried about their community being unfairly targeted.’
‘Who’ve you spoken to?’ Bailey said.
‘I’ve got heaps off social. Tweets, conversations on Facebook.’ She was sounding confident, like the story was in the bag. ‘Police minister’s just put out a statement too. Not much in it, but it’ll help pad out the yarn. The government reassuring people they’re keeping them safe.’
‘Yeah, but who’ve you spoken to?’ Bailey said again.
‘Don’t need to. With the social comments and the minister, I can have something up in thirty minutes.’
‘I think what Bailey’s saying is that you need to make a few follow-ups here, Nicki,’ Symonds said.
‘Why? The comments are out there. I can build this story now and –’
‘I don’t want to blunt your enthusiasm,’ Symonds said. ‘You need to pick up the phone and interview people yourself. The old-fashioned way.’
Bailey couldn’t believe the conversation that was unfolding in front of him.
‘For starters, how do you know these people are who they say they are?’ Bailey said.
‘I’ve got my ways of verifying people online, it’s not hard.’ Nicki was sounding defensive. ‘Cross-checking older conversations, identity checking. I do it all the time. It’s why I get my yarns up so quickly and why we own the web traffic.
‘And no offence, Bailey, but I’m filing three, sometimes four stories a day, and getting more hits, more shares, than anyone else here.’
‘We’re a newspaper, not a fucking messaging service.’
‘Bailey –’
‘Paper? Who reads us on paper, these days?’
‘Old guard versus the new, eh?’ Gerald laughed, trying to defuse the tension that was building. ‘Let’s all calm down. You’re both right.’
‘Can’t remember the last time I wrote a story without having spoken to anyone,’ Bailey said. He stopped himself from going further. What was the point? He only knew how to do his job one way. Even if Nicki was half-right, he wasn’t changing.
Nicki turned to Symonds. ‘Do you want me to write the story, or not?’
‘Let’s take a look at what you’ve got.’
Nicki made a huffing noise and followed Symonds back to her desk, leaving Bailey and Gerald alone.
‘That’s the new world, eh, Gerald?’
‘The train’s already left the station, mate. No point fighting it. How else do we stay competitive?’
‘You’re sounding like a management dickhead. Even more than usual. Don’t defend this crap. Doesn’t suit you.’
‘Bailey, c’mon –’
‘No, seriously, Gerald. What are we doing here? Journalism used to be about chasing the truth, now it’s about clicks and shares on platforms that I’ve never heard of. It’s like I woke up one day and some kid who thinks Google’s more trustworthy than a doctor has changed the locks on the whole damn news business.