by Garry Disher
That’s how she found the. ladder.
Stacked with the vacuum cleaner, mops and brooms was an extendable ladder in lightweight aluminium. Two metres long, it would extend to four, and she ran with it to the balcony, closing the curtain and the sliding door behind her. Now she was alone in the breeze from the river, eight storeys above the hard ground.
Wyatt, being a minimalist, had left nothing on his balcony to impede her movements. She extended the ladder, rested it against the railing and then slid it out until she’d bridged the gap between her balcony and the one with the plants and open door. She’d crawl across, slip inside and call Wyatt.
That’s if the rungs and rivets held her weight. They seemed to protest. The metal flexed beneath her, bit into her knees and hands. Her wound throbbed and flared into an acute ache behind her eyes. Then she felt movement in one swaying wing of her Levi jacket, the breast pocket, and, reaching around with her right hand while balancing with her left, was too late to save her mobile phone. It plummeted to the ground, splitting open on the footpath, scattering fragments of plastic.
Panic washed through her. Her only record of Wyatt’s number was on that phone. Now she couldn’t warn him, he couldn’t call her, they couldn’t find each other.
Lydia scrambled across wanting to kick and weep, and when she reached the other balcony, and stood, her head rushed with stars. She reeled, clasped the railing. Controlled breathing, she told herself. The stars receded.
She recovered the ladder, restored it to its original length, and carried it with her into the apartment. She was in a living room. Seeing that it was empty, she concealed the ladder behind a sofa.
A student pad? She could smell incense and marijuana. Plenty of other clues, too, such as textbooks and folders scattered over a table, an open laptop with a Chinese boy’s face for a screensaver, a pair of knickers on the floor, some bright cushions and scarves, and photographs of a smiling Chinese family posed before the towers of Hong Kong city.
But no one in the open-plan main room and adjacent kitchen. Whoever lived here was in the bathroom or the bedroom. Pausing to grab one of the scarves and pocket a pink mobile phone and $3.75 in coins, Lydia crept down a short hallway to an open door. She peeked and saw a Chinese girl lying on a bed, headphones clamped to her ears, eyes closed. The room was hazy; Lydia hoped the girl was stoned.
She pulled the door until it was almost closed. If fully closed, it might puzzle and alert the girl. If open too far, she might be seen, a movement, a shape flickering in the light.
Then Lydia stationed herself at the front door and looked through the peephole. By angling her head she was able to see a short distance in each direction. She saw the woman from the courtyard pass the door, prodding the doctor towards Wyatt’s apartment, a gun at his spine.
* * * *
45
Khandi shot out the lock and pushed the doctor in ahead of her. She raced through the apartment, using the guy as a shield, but it was clear that bitchface had skipped. Right apartment, though: the clothes in the bedroom, the cloying perfume hanging in the air, fine auburn hairs in the bathroom, bandages in the trash bin.
‘Where is she?’
‘Don’t hit me,’ croaked the doctor.
Khandi hit him. ‘Where is she?’
‘Don’t know. I called her, you heard me.’
‘You warned her with that second call.’
‘No!’
Khandi pistol-whipped the doctor for a while. When the guy was on his hands and knees, spraying blood, mucous and teeth, Khandi nudged him with her toe. ‘You’re pathetic. What are you?’
The doctor spat again.
‘Pathetic,’ said Khandi. ‘Say it: “I’m pathetic”.’
‘You’re pathetic.’
Khandi was shocked. She began a battery of kicks, wallops and froth-flecked denunciations until the doctor was begging for mercy and the phone rang.
* * * *
Wyatt was puzzled when Lydia failed to answer her mobile. He pressed redial, with the same result.
He ran through the explanations. She was separated from the phone. Someone had a gun to her head. She was unconscious. She was dead.
A knot of unfamiliar emotions started inside him. He stood in the shadows outside his building, trying to name the feelings. It was more than dread—dread tinged with grief. If she wasn’t answering, someone had come for her. He should have waited with her, tackled Rigby later.
He shook off the regret. Regret was useless. Whatever had transpired in the apartment was less important than what happened next. Before going up, he dialled the landline number. If someone answered, he’d know more than he knew now. The apartment phone rang and rang.
* * * *
Khandi stared at the phone, a black cordless on a small bureau pushed against the sitting room wall. She prodded the doctor. ‘Answer it.’
He complied. ‘Hello.’
Khandi tried to listen as the doctor grunted ‘uh huh’ a couple of times and said, ‘Sorry, not interested.’
He replaced the handset and said, ‘I think he was calling from India, something about phone plans.’
Khandi was a patriot. She didn’t see why the country’s banks, department stores and phone companies had to use overseas call centres, and she didn’t like cold callers anyway. She shot the phone dead centre. Amid the smoke and racket the doctor crouched on the floor and whimpered.
Then one of Khandi’s instincts kicked in. ‘That was Wyatt, wasn’t it?’
The doctor hawked and spat, and out popped a red tooth.
* * * *
Wyatt ran down the incline to the underground car park and across the shadows, touching a handful of car bonnets out of habit. One, an elderly Holden, was still warm, the engine ticking as it cooled. Behind a security door in the far corner was a small, enclosed stairwell, with concrete steps that made one turn and ended at a metal door beside a storeroom in the foyer above. It was not continuous with the building’s main stairwell and so Wyatt didn’t know he had company until Khandi and Lowe appeared on the landing above him.
Nothing was said: he halted, the woman and the doctor halted.
He aimed the .32 at the woman. It was a difficult shot, on two counts: it was uphill, and she’d shielded herself behind Lowe. The doctor was irrelevant to Wyatt, but the woman didn’t know that. Lowe made an effective shield, however. Only a corner of the woman’s head was visible behind his left ear. Wyatt ran his gaze down the doctor, ignoring the dishevelled clothes and clots of blood. He could see the woman’s left ankle and foot.
Wyatt weighed the options. It’s more difficult to fire accurately up a flight of steps than down. On the other hand, he was ready to make his shot, whereas the woman’s gun was still in Lowe’s back. He had the advantage, but only for a second or so.
He studied her face. Plenty of hyped-up rage there, her mouth and eyes stoking the anger. Something personal here, Wyatt thought, and knew where his advantage lay.
‘You shot Eddie,’ she screamed.
‘Like a fish in a barrel,’ Wyatt said. ‘He died calling for Lydia.’
It was inspired. The woman flung the doctor aside and crouched, swinging up her gun arm, and Wyatt shot her through the throat. He’d gone for a groin shot, but she’d ducked too quickly, surprising him, and the bullet tore through her gullet. She fired too, but twenty minutes of carrying a heavy pistol and beating it over the doctor’s head had strained her gun arm. Her shot went low and wild, buzzing off concrete and over Wyatt’s skull.
He stood. Lowe had scooted away from the woman, his eyes wild in their cut and swollen sockets. ‘Is she dead?’
‘You’re the doctor.’
Lowe looked. ‘She’s dead.’
Wyatt hauled Lowe to his feet. ‘We have to get her out of here.’
‘What about Lydia?’
‘Isn’t she dead? In the apartment?’
Lowe shook his head. ‘I warned her, using our phone signal. She got out.’
So wh
y wasn’t she answering her mobile? Wyatt didn’t have time to think about the implications. He doubted that anyone had heard the shots—a small, enclosed location under the ground—but the stairwell was a convenient shortcut to the car park. Tearing off his jacket, telling Lowe to mop up the blood with it, he shouldered Eddie’s woman down the steps and through the metal door. The tenants’ cars sat in their bays like patient beasts in a barn, the air hung motionless and toxic. Wyatt hurried to the recently-parked Holden. It was an easy car to break into, the trunk was roomy, and the owner might have finished with it for the day.
He tumbled the dead woman into the trunk, and was returning to help Lowe when he noticed dry mud caught in the tyres of a nearby Land Rover. He gathered some of the mud and entered the stairwell. Lowe sat on a step, shocked, swiping uselessly at Khandi’s spill of blood.
‘Get up,’ Wyatt said.
There was less blood than he’d thought, but he finished mopping and then crumpled the mud clods into dust and powdered the steps with it. It was makeshift, but would fool the eye. That was something Wyatt knew how to do.
He got Lowe into the car and away from the building. Out on St Kilda Road, he said, ‘Are you going to be okay?’
‘I didn’t sign up for this.’
‘Are you going to be okay?’
Lowe brightened. ‘The wife’s Bill Henson.’
Wyatt gave a twist of the mouth. ‘Full recovery,’ he said, stopping the car. ‘This is where you get out. Go straight home. If Lydia contacts you, look after her. I’ve got things to do.’
‘What things?’
Wyatt didn’t answer but steered the Holden through the streets. Saturday afternoon, cars streaming to DIY stores and sports grounds, no one to notice him enter the forgotten corners where Abbotsford abutted the river. Seven minutes later he was wiping the car and setting it alight and walking away from another death.
Now he allowed himself to think about Lydia Stark. He didn’t expect to see her again, but she’d rub against his thoughts like a pebble in a shoe.
* * * *
46
Lydia had remained at the peephole, not daring to leave the Chinese girl’s apartment. She heard shrieks of rage next door, and then Dr Lowe was being prodded back along the corridor, Eddie’s woman screaming, ‘Where was he calling from? Foyer? Car park?’
Wyatt, Lydia thought. She caught herself wringing her hands and stepping from one foot to the other. She didn’t know how to warn him, she didn’t know how to save the doctor, and she’d be going head to head with Khandi if she tried. She stayed put. Heard the soft boom of the heavy stairwell door, and then silence, as if all sounds were trapped. Five minutes passed, and in the bedroom behind her the Chinese girl coughed and yawned.
Lydia fled. Khandi had gone down the stairs, so she chose the lift. At ground level she poked her head out, half expecting to find a couple of bodies sprawled there. She felt claustrophobic, the entire building a trap. Breaking cover was her only choice.
Pausing at the front door to wrap the stolen scarf over her crown and ears, she stepped into sunlight. People would notice the scarf, nothing else, not her poor, bandaged, shot-up scalp. She didn’t know where she was going or where she should go. Not that she’d get very far with only the Chinese girl’s pink mobile and $3.75 to her name.
Hang on: if the SIM card from her damaged phone worked in the pink phone, she’d be able to call Wyatt. Head down, she skirted the courtyard and headed along the footpath below Wyatt’s window, searching for the wreckage. On the path, and in the grass border, she found bottles, wrappers, shards of plastic and tiny scraps of soldered electronics. No SIM card.
Mid afternoon now. Lydia hurried away from Southbank, still with her head down. She couldn’t risk making eye contact with anybody. They’d see the fear, and they’d want to help, or interfere, or at least remember. She had to be invisible now. Eddie was dead, Lowe probably dead, and although Wyatt didn’t feel dead in the corner of her being that registered these things—he remained an unstoppable force going about his business—she didn’t know for sure. The realisation broke her a little. Her eyes watered, she gulped and stumbled. She was on her own. She had no resources. She couldn’t go home again.
Get a grip, she told herself. She knuckled her eyes and walked on, taking stock. Find money, then friends. A bolthole. Start with what you’ve got, even if it’s only a handful of coins, the clothes on your back and a stolen mobile.
Recalling Eddie’s nod-and-wink relationship with men in certain pubs around the city, pubs where no one asked questions, Lydia altered direction, heading northeast now, over St. Kilda Road and across the park to the Swan Street Bridge. She followed Swan Street into Richmond, the setting sun at her back. Wandered until she found a depressed pocket of greasy potholes, Housing Commission flats, pockmarked workers’ cottages and the kind of corner pub that a woman down on her luck can fade into.
She bought a Coke poured over ice and wandered through the pub, stopping at a chokingly small side bar, the walls painted with decades of cigarette smoke and hopelessness. The sole occupant wore day-old stubble, an anachronistic ponytail and plenty of chunky gold. She watched for a while, and knew he was a guy who makes a living by sitting at a corner table and letting people come to him. So that’s what she did. Seating herself across the grimy table, she murmured, ‘I’ve got a mobile phone.’
He ran his gaze over her. ‘Gis a look.’
She took it from her pocket and pushed it across the table. A milli-second later, the pink phone was in his lap and she could hear the beeps as he ran through the functions. ‘You’ve got a bandage above your ear,’ he announced, as if she mightn’t have noticed.
Lydia tightened the scarf. ‘Got shot,’ she said, amusing herself.
His snort was derisive. ‘Give you ten bucks.’
‘Twenty.’
‘Ten.’
She shoved out her hand. The guy wet his fingers and peeled a ten from a fat, dampish roll of notes, taking his time as if to underscore his contempt. Lydia got to her feet and returned to the streets of Richmond.
She almost gave up then. Having only ten dollars in her pocket was somehow worse than having nothing at all. Ten dollars was all she was worth, all she was capable of raising. Shoulders slumped, she wanted to weep.
Then she recalled her escape from Wyatt’s apartment. Had she really done that? Done it alone? It had been a Wyatt kind of move.
Think like Wyatt. That would save her.
And so Lydia Stark began to map out the next few hours of her life. Planning, anticipating hazards and making decisions that took her to South Yarra, to a house she knew from tailing Henri Furneaux.
Furneaux had been dead since Thursday: surely the police would have finished searching his place by now? She watched and waited in the evening light for any sign of a surveillance team on the street or in a nearby house, but this corner of Melbourne slumbered, dense with shadows and sedated by expensive goods and old, hard-to-get-at money.
She darted into the front garden and skirted shrubbery to the main door. No key under the nearby rocks and pot plants, so she headed around the side of the house and found the laundry. She eyed the window beside the door. The street was unbearably silent; the whole world would hear it if she broke the glass. She began to edge back into the shadows.
But sometimes you just got lucky—did luck come Wyatt’s way, too?—for at that moment a racket erupted from a shed on the other side of the fence. Drums, cymbals, guitars, tormented voices: teenagers, she guessed, a garage band. Lydia smashed the laundry window, reached through to unlatch the door, and entered the house. She wasn’t worried about the alarm: the police would have turned it off and not reset it, knowing they might need to visit the house again.
First she searched the laundry itself. Still lucky. In a cupboard beside the sink she found a torch, masking tape and rubber gloves. Stepping through into the main part of the house, she moved from room to room, closing the blinds with her gloved hands and tapi
ng the edges hard against the frames. She knew that the windows wouldn’t be entirely light proof so she kept the torch beam trained on the floor as she prowled through the rooms again, familiarising herself with the layout. Furneaux had struck her as a man who needed pampering, but the house was a newish box, barely furnished, with expanses of white walls and polished floorboards. A cold house, an unstamped house, not loved or lived in. At the rear she came upon glass, cold, uncurtained walls of it overlooking a terraced garden. She kept to the front rooms after that. She walked in Wyatt’s skin—or maybe he walked in hers, with nerve, containment and a sense of focus.
There was plenty to indicate that the police had searched the place. Furneaux wasn’t coming back to chide them, so she was obliged to wade through upended drawers, overturned mattresses and split-open packets of pasta and biscuits. Furneaux’s computer had been confiscated and his desk and filing cabinet stripped of every sheet of paper. They’d ransacked the freezer and dumped the lid of the toilet cistern in the bath. The manhole cover in the hallway was still open, the laundry sink was full of detergent and the guts of the TV set were laid bare.