And then it was over. Wolf raced to the balustrade. I was right behind him, but what was anyone going to do? Ali Khan was lying like a broken doll on the ground floor, his left leg bent at a seriously wrong angle, a trickle of pink and milky fluid seeping out from a crack at the back of his head.
There were paramedics on the scene, of course, and they were with Ali Khan within seconds of his fall, rolling him over to clear his tongue from his throat, lifting his shirt to make sure that he wasn’t wired to any other kind of suicide bomb, applying an oxygen mask to his face. But even before they were done with all that, before anyone had even come close to declaring him dead, we heard the noise from Cups and Saucy: the bang, and then the breaking glass, and the sound of Mouse, screaming.
Chapter Thirty-one
‘You’re from Bondi, are you?’ Roger said.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘You own a place there?’
‘I do.’
‘Bondi, hey. Gone up a bit in recent years. Bondi Rescue and all that. What did you pay for it, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I didn’t pay for it. My sister left it to me when she died.’
Roger didn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s bad luck,’ or ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ or any of the things people normally say. He said, ‘If you’re ever thinking of off-loading it, you’ve got my number. My real estate license is good in New South Wales, too.’
We were still outside the café on Beaconsfield Parade. The spitting rain was threatening to turn into a downpour.
‘Are you still happy to sit here?’ I said, ‘You don’t want to move indoors?’
He said, ‘Nah, mate. Look, I only wanted to meet you here to check you out but you look alright to me. If you want to talk, let’s go back to mine.’
He drained the last of his coffee, got up from the table, winked at Pippa and walked over to his car, leaving me to put ten bucks on the table to cover the tab.
It probably goes without saying that Roger had replaced the Audi – he got a new car every year – for some other European car, which beeped and flashed when he pointed the car keys at it. I got in the passenger seat. The interior was all shiny, with a wooden-looking dash, with glowing dials and a stubby little gearstick, and the seats were tan leather.
Roger jerked off the kerb, pulling the car more sideways than straight ahead, directly into traffic, like he knew the other cars would make way for him, and they did. He made one right turn, at the lights, and we were at his place. Somehow the garage door sensed that we’d arrived; it was already going up by the time we pulled around the corner.
We went up in the elevator, which opened straight into Roger’s pad. It was as you’d expect: flat-screen TV with speakers in the ceiling, shag rug on the floor, open kitchen with stainless-steel everything.
Two wineglasses in the sink I noticed, too.
Roger threw his keys with the fancy little buzzer onto the benchtop, and flopped himself down on the modular lounge, taking all the corner, his arms spread along the back of the L-shape.
‘So, where were we?’ he said.
‘Well, it’s like I said before. I’ve been asked by the coroner to provide what’s called pastoral care to those who were there on the day of the siege. I’m only here to talk about what you want to talk about. It’s not evidence you’re giving. It doesn’t even have to be about the day. We can talk about what’s happened since, if you like.’
Roger ran a hand through thinning hair, grinned and said, ‘You think maybe I’m upset that Amy left me? I’m not. Truth is, I’m not cut out for marriage. To be honest with you, Father, I was seeing one of the girls in the office even when I was engaged to Amy. I just don’t think I’m a one-woman man.’
I said, ‘Maybe something else then, like the death of Ali Khan?’
‘Him! No way. People say to me, “Oh, that poor kid,” like he’s the victim! He tried to kill me!’
I waited for him to say something else about that, but he didn’t.
I was beginning to think I was wasting Roger’s time. He didn’t need my services. We talked a bit longer, mostly about how Roger was going to capitalise on the publicity when the inquest came around. Then when I got up to leave, I got the feeling he didn’t want me to go. He was happy to keep talking. I felt obliged to listen.
‘You know they shut down our access to our own mobile phones?’ he said. ‘The whole time I was in there, no messages, no internet! I couldn’t see how much attention the whole thing was getting.’
At first I thought, surely he’s not lamenting the fact that he couldn’t get any work done? He wasn’t.
‘Maybe I’m an idiot but I was thinking, this is going to be one of those stories that’s big in Sydney but nobody in Melbourne is going to have heard about it,’ he said.
‘Something like that happened to me once before, only in reverse. I’d been in Sydney with Krystal. Here in Melbourne, there’d been some kind of drama in the Burnley Tunnel – a truck stuck in the tunnel caught fire, something like that; traffic held up for five hours.
‘I knew nothing about it. I’d been in bed all day. I got back on the plane and put on the headphones and watched Two and a Half Men, laughing my arse off. I got off the plane, into a cab. The cabbie didn’t say anything – not, “Jesus, what a shit day on the roads,” nothing.
‘It was the normal chaos at home – kids running down the hall to show me whatever they’d made at school, Amy in the kitchen loading the dishwasher, crap everywhere. I was loosening my tie, saying, “I could do with a glass of wine,” and Amy said something like, “Did you get stuck in the traffic?”
‘I was like, “What traffic?” and Amy said, “In the Burnley Tunnel,” and maybe you don’t know, but there’s always a lot of traffic in the Burnley Tunnel so I was thinking she was talking about normal traffic. I said, “It actually wasn’t too bad today.” She was like, “Not too bad today? They had that giant fire. People died in there.”
‘I’ve got to tell you, I was cacking myself. I was thinking, I’m caught out here. Amy was looking at me like, how could you not know that? I said, “I’m sorry, honey, I was in meetings all day. Things are so bad right now . . . I didn’t hear a word about it.”
‘Amy said something like, “That’s so typical. Half of Melbourne held up and you just glide through.” So that was a close one. And that’s what was on my mind when I was in that lingerie shop. I was thinking, okay, if I can get out of here in a reasonable amount of time, Amy won’t know anything about it.
‘She’d never know that I’d been in Sydney, and that was bloody important because I had no good reason to be in Sydney. And there was a good chance that Amy wouldn’t have heard anything about it: she was in Melbourne, up to her ears in kid things – ballet, clarinet, whatever – so even if it’d been on the news, maybe she wouldn’t hear about it.
‘Of course I’d have to be questioned by the cops: how did you end up in there, and so on? But I would tell the cops, “I want my name kept out of this. This has nothing to do with me. You arrest the little grey bastard, I go home; if you need me to give a statement, you contact me through my office.”’
I listened to this, more fascinated than horrified. Roger’s main concern while he was in Surf City was how he was going to have to lie to Amy about being in Sydney.
He was not thinking about the impact of the day’s terror on little Kimmi K. There would be no stopping to see if she was alright, no offering of an adult’s calm authority, no guiding her to the door.
There was no interest in Mouse, which surprised me least of all. Mouse was chubby. Mouse wore rabbit ears to work. Mouse on a good day would have been invisible to Roger.
There was certainly no interest in Mitchell.
Roger’s interest was in getting out in time to board his plane, so he could glide through traffic back to the heavily mortgaged, extremely pretty family home that Amy held together for him; have his Scotch and soda; let the kids tumble over him.
There would be
no mention of anything he’d seen, no fighting, no argument, no risk of being tossed out of the house onto the street, which is certainly what would happen if Amy found out he’d been stuck in a lingerie shop most of the day because he’d gone in there to buy something for his mistress in Sydney, who stripped for a living.
That in itself was excellent news, because the last thing Roger needed at that moment was a divorce. He was drowning in debt on the development that soured. He didn’t doubt that the market would recover – the market always recovers – but he needed some more time. Make no mistake: on some level, Roger always intended to divorce Amy at some point – he’d make sure it seemed like her idea – but he wanted to be the one who decided when it would happen, probably when Amy got to forty-five, and he was feeling like a bit of a change.
He’d find somebody younger, get sloppy with leaving his mobile phone lying around the house, let Amy find some text messages and organise his exit that way: not exactly deliberately, but certainly by design.
But to get divorced right then? No. Right then, Roger needed Amy or, to be more precise, he needed not to be selling the family home.
As to Krystal, he could absolutely tell her where he’d been all day – he’d stopped to buy her lingerie, hadn’t he? To buy her a gorgeous gift – and next thing he knew he was stuck with some lunatic in the shop while police faffed around outside doing God knows what. They’d scrambled all the phone lines; he couldn’t even send her a text. He’d missed out on seeing her! He could see himself saying, ‘Oh, baby! I’m so sorry! The idea of you waiting for me, lying there on the bed, ready for me . . . and me stuck with that scared, weird little kid in the underwear shop . . .’ and she’d say, ‘Don’t be crazy! I’m the one who’s sorry! You went to get me something lovely and it must have been so scary!’ And he’d be able to play brave: ‘Nah, it was okay, I just wanted to get to you! Now come here and get on my lap!’
Roger kept talking. I found my mind drifting back to the first time I’d seen him, back at Surf City.
The pipe bomb had gone off. I felt like I’d been lifted off my feet. There was ringing in my ears. Wolf’s hair was on end. He ran from our side of the atrium into Cups and Saucy, crunching over broken glass. The front windows were completely blown out. Paramedics – guys who had been on standby in our little group and who had then gone down to the ground floor to try to save Ali Khan – came storming back up the escalators. I remember the white of their shoes. I remember the red boxes they were carrying: red, plastic boxes, with a simple white cross.
I could hear Wolf yelling, ‘Get everyone down, get everyone out!’
I’d been with him at a the scene of an emergency often enough to know what he meant: those of us who weren’t hurt, and who weren’t needed, should get moving, out of the way, as quickly as possible.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I wasn’t injured. There was a little scrape on my hand. I wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. I felt a bit dazed. I was hardly the walking wounded. I wondered whether I should stay to do whatever it was that a priest was supposed to do in a crisis. Be kind? Offer solace?
It wasn’t left to me to decide: one of the SWAT team manhandled me toward the exit. I kept looking back. Everyone did. What had gone wrong? We all wanted to know. I’d say I’d gotten as far as the second floor when I saw police moving Mouse out of the shop. You could look back up, through the atrium, and see. Everyone was doing it: we were riding the elevators down and looking back up.
Mouse was crying hard. I remember thinking: are those pyjamas shredded? She looked like she was wearing rags. Kimmi K was there – she had her arms stretched out and was running down the escalaters toward her uncle. I heard somebody, probably Mouse’s mum, calling, ‘Nichole! Nichole!’ And then I saw Roger. A female constable had him by the elbow. She was walking him swiftly toward the escalator, trying to shield him from the edge of the atrium, probably so he didn’t look down and see Ali Khan on the floor. I looked down. Some paramedics were still going hard at Ali Khan’s chest. I thought I could hear his ribs cracking. It was probably a trick of the mind.
I can’t say that Roger seemed all that interested, either way. He looked a little dishevelled. Then I saw him make some quick movements with his hands, like he was swatting himself on the head. I thought, what’s he doing? Is he okay? Why is he hitting himself on the head? And then it dawned on me: the sides of the escalators at Surf City are mirrored.
Roger Callaghan was checking out his reflection as he made his way down.
‘So, you know when I was in the shop?’ he said. I shook my own head, trying to bring my mind back from Surf City to the L-shaped lounge, where he sat.
‘I took my suit jacket off while I was in there. I was that stressed! Then when I ran for the door, I forgot it. I’ve been kicking myself ever since. That jacket is from one of my favourite suits! Do you reckon there’s any way I could get that back, Father? That was Hugo Boss. That was not cheap! I’ve still got the pants, but no jacket. Who do you reckon I’d need to speak to about getting that back?’
I told Roger I didn’t know. Then I took my leave.
It was some months before I saw him again. He arrived at the inquest holding the hand of somebody who looked like Krystal but definitely wasn’t Krystal. Krystal had given him the flick. I’d read about that in New Idea, or one of those magazines. She called him a cad and said he’d broken her heart. Promised her they were going to get married as soon as he could leave his wife, but then when he’d gotten famous after the siege, he’d ‘dumped me like a dog’.
He was wearing a well-tailored suit; the girl on his arm had on something well cut, sexy, but tailored, and expensive. I got the feeling that she hadn’t been on the scene long. She was clearly devoted to Roger, which to my mind meant that she couldn’t possibly know him very well.
The divorce from Amy was in the process of going through. My understanding was that Roger tried to fight it for a while, saying, ‘If you leave me now and we have to sell the house, what do you think we’re going to get for it? People will know you’re divorcing me. That will drive the house price down. We’ll end up having to take the boys out of school.’
To her eternal credit, Amy told Roger she couldn’t even look at him anymore, let alone feign a marriage for long enough for the property market to recover. She moved with the kids to a small unit, near her mum.
By the look of him, Roger had taken that in his stride.
He looked a little older than I remembered from that day at the coffee shop. Maybe he’d been dyeing his hair while he’d been seeing Krystal, and maybe his lawyer advised him to quit that for the inquest (no bloke with dyed hair is ever going to win points with the public, which is something all of them should be told).
He looked pretty cocky as he took the stand. He agreed that he and Mitchell had helped get the device off Ali Khan’s neck.
‘It was the kid’s idea, but I helped, yeah,’ he said.
Hanrahan asked him to explain how it had happened, in his own words.
‘We’d been stuck in there a few hours and the cops didn’t seem to be doing much, and finally the kid kind of talked the guy with the bomb around to letting us help him. He undid the lock with a Bic biro. From there it was a matter of loosening it and lifting it high enough for the guy with the bomb to get out underneath.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And once he was out from under the device, Ali Khan took off toward the door?’
‘Right. And I figured he would bump straight into the door because when he’d tried to open it when he’d first come into the shop, it had been locked, and the police had been telling us it was locked. But he pulled on the handle and the bastard just opened. Excuse my French.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And that left you and Mitchell carrying the weight of the explosive device between you?’
Roger said, ‘Right, right, that’s right.’
Hanrahan said, ‘And then you let your end go?’
Roger said, ‘Right. My thought was, let’s get out of h
ere. We’d been in there what, three hours? I just wanted to get out of there.’
Hanrahan said, ‘Did you speak to Mitchell? Did you say, “Let’s put this thing gently down on the ground?”’
‘It was all moving too fast for that. I was talking to myself, saying, “I’m out of here,” and I figured he’d be thinking the same thing.’
‘But . . . obviously he wasn’t?’
The question seemed to confuse Callaghan.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
‘Because Mitchell didn’t drop his end, did he? He was still holding his end of the box when you let yours go?’
Callaghan looked surprised. Was this really the first time anyone had suggested to him that he shouldn’t have let his end of the device go?
‘Perhaps he was thinking, maybe it would be better to set it down gently or that you – being the bigger man, the adult – would take the weight from him?’ Hanrahan said.
Roger looked stunned. He was staring at Hanrahan, as if to say, ‘What, and put my life at risk?’
Hanrahan was looking over his silver-framed glasses, waiting for an answer.
‘How am I supposed to know what the kid was thinking?’ Roger finally said. ‘I just dropped my end and I figured he’d do the same. Only later they told me that when he dropped it, the bloody thing exploded.’
Hanrahan said, ‘He dropped it because he couldn’t take the weight of it, I guess?’
Roger said, ‘Right. Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know why he dropped it.’
‘But that’s why he asked you to help him lift the weight of it, wasn’t it? Because it was too heavy for him alone?’
Roger stood silently.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Anyway, he dropped it, but I don’t know when or why. I was already halfway out the door when I heard the bang.’
The room was completely quiet. Then Hanrahan said, ‘Yes. You certainly were.’
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