by Jenny Spence
Because the job took so little of my time I allowed Lily to pay me a reasonable amount, so she didn’t lose any face; and at the same time I helped her with the costings to convert the numerous spare rooms behind and above the two buildings into short-term accommodation. This has turned into a nice little earner for the family. I don’t know how many one-room flats they managed to fit in, but the two buildings have been knocked together and extended with corridors and staircases like a game of snakes and ladders. If your taste in decor runs to downtown Saigon and you like Vietnamese food, it’s an ideal place to stay: close to the Footscray Market and station, and less than ten minutes to the city. As Lily prefers not to trouble the tax department with her additional income, it especially suits cash-paying customers who appreciate not leaving a trace.
Now Lily leads me back through the building. A small boy, her youngest son Oscar, has materialised and is dragging my bags despite my protests.
“I have best room for you, Elly,” Lily says happily. “Quiet, like you say. You don’t pay me one cent.”
“Now, we’re not going to argue about that,” I say firmly. “I pay my way, Lily. But I tell you what, I’d kill for a bowl of your pho.”
“You got it,” she says. “You eat in kitchen with family tonight. We catch up, okay?”
We climb to a big attic room at the back. It’s nice, with a wide dormer window overlooking rooftops. The bathroom is tucked in under the roof, and there’s a kitchenette in a cupboard. Naturally Lily has brightened up the room with plastic flowers and some colourful Buddhist pictures from her collection, but the bed looks comfortable and there’s a little table I can use for my computer.
“It’s great, Lily,” I say. “Thanks so much.”
“I didn’t know what you like for breakfast,” she says. “You give Oscar a list and he go to the store for you.”
“That’s a great idea, thanks.” I turn to Oscar. “Is that all right with you? What about your homework?”
“It’s all done,” he says shyly.
“He good boy. Class captain this year!” says Lily, managing a matronly hug before Oscar flees.
10
I’m left alone for a while before it’s time to eat, so I log into my work account using Lily’s wireless router. Now I can use Skype to make phone calls that can’t be traced in a hurry. Miranda is first.
“Mum? Are you using Skype? I’ve left a million messages on your phone. Have you lost it?”
I explain what’s happened as best I can. I choose my words carefully, but I still have to rein her in now and then.
“Oh Mum, no! But why? What’s happening? Are they going to try and shoot you again?”
“I don’t know, Miranda, I don’t know what all this is about. I saw Carlos yesterday for work, now all this is happening.”
“So you think the person who killed Mabel was trying to get you? What, are they going round whacking everyone at Soft Serve?”
I feel a jolt of alarm, thinking about Derek and the others.
“No,” I say. “I don’t think that’s likely.”
“But it must be something to do with your work. You don’t have anything to do with – like – classified stuff, do you?”
“No, nothing like that at all. It’s got to be that Carlos found out something he shouldn’t, and they think he told me.”
“You’ve got to get police protection! Or . . . like . . . a bodyguard. Can you get a bodyguard?”
“I don’t think . . . I think that would cost a lot of money, love.”
“Oh Mum, what are we gonna do?”
“You’re not going to do anything – just stay well away from me until this is over. Don’t go home until I tell you it’s safe. Don’t call my phone. You can send me emails at my work address, and I’ll call you often, okay?”
“Okay. What about you?”
“I’m just going to stay out of sight until the police catch this person. I’m not telling anyone where I’m staying. You spread that around, all right? You don’t know where I am.”
“Are you at Diana’s?”
She knows me pretty well. Diana is the friend I would normally turn to in a crisis. “Miranda, for God’s sake! No, I’m not!” I tell her now. “It really is safer if you don’t know where I am, so you’re not going to know. It’s much better that way. Anyway, how are things with you? What’s the place like?”
“The people I’m staying with are really nice, only the food is overloaded with carbs, so I don’t know how I’m going to survive. And the guy . . .” she lowers her voice “. . . has sausages for breakfast! With two fried eggs! But the school’s great, and the kids are really sweet. It’s only been two days and Gareth and I have both had little girls sidling up to us saying ‘You’re the best teacher ever’.”
“Gareth?”
“The other intern. He’s from Monash.”
“Oh! It must be nice to have another student there.”
“Yeah, he’s okay.”
This cheers me up considerably. When bad thoughts come later on I’ll be able to console myself with visions of Miranda and a gentle young man with fair hair and a beard – did I have a teacher who looked like that? Surely not, they were all sour old shrews – bending together over a desk to correct the wobbly writing of an earnest child with pigtails and gingham dress. No, better update that image – they’re in the schoolyard playing kick-to-kick, girls at one end and boys at the other, laughing in the bracing country air.
After I hang up I think about what I said to Miranda. If this is not some crazy vendetta against Soft Serve, then maybe it is about something Carlos found out? It wouldn’t be surprising if his nosiness got him into trouble. I think back to what he talked about while I was trying to get my work done. He was interested in the Athena Resources swindle that’s before the courts at the moment. He perked up when I mentioned the job in Sydney, in the coal industry, and I got the impression he was going to tell me something about that. And what was the other thing? Oh yes, that guy who disappeared on the mountain last year – Carlos said there was an anomaly.
While I’m searching for the news stories about that case I call Omar.
“Hey, Elly! Where were you today? Big dramas in the office.”
“Yeah, I heard. Omar, I was wondering if you could do me a favour. Are you driving in tomorrow?”
“Yeah, course.”
Omar’s panel van is his pride and joy and he drives to work every day, even though parking near Soft Serve is a nightmare.
“Could you pick me up on the way? What time do you leave Sunshine?”
We work out a time and a corner where I’ll be waiting. It’s about five minutes’ walk from the Khá Sen.
It’s time for dinner in the warmth of the restaurant kitchen. The family lives several blocks away in a neat double-fronted weatherboard with beautifully maintained gardens at the front and back where they grow all the herbs for the restaurant; but they still converge here every day at six. Du closes up the printing shop and comes in with whoever is currently working for him. Uncle Van, who has always been with the family although his relationship to them is obscure, takes over the cooking for any early customers.
Lily sits at the head of the table and steaming bowls appear in front of her. She sniffs, tastes and gestures until all is to her liking. She then serves the food and passes it around. I’m sitting on one side of her, and silent Du on the other. The children sit in their proper order on both sides, ranging in age from Anh, now in her early twenties with a baby on her knee and a husband, probably the young man helping Uncle Van; down to Oscar. The younger children are alert to operations at the stoves, leaping to their feet from time to time to help.
The food, as always, is sublime, and not much is said as we all shovel in the first helping. Then Lily and I begin the usual formalities.
“How your daughter? She doing good?”
“Yes, she’s great. Nearly finished her course. She’ll be a teacher by the end of this year. What about Nam?”
>
“He’s in America. Big shot at Google now. They need him over there.”
I’m not sure if Nam is a big shot, but just getting a job at Google is something many of my workmates dream about. He was a delightful boy, and I’m proud of my small contribution in giving him a bit of English tutoring in his last year of high school.
We go on through the achievements of her children, which takes some time as there are six of them, all highly accomplished and diligent. I tell her a little about what I’ve been doing at work, but we avoid the subject of why I’m here. Lily assumes that this is delicate, and I just don’t want to talk about it. In this kitchen, washed with white fluorescent light, the outside world does not intrude. Chatter rises and falls, competing with the crackle and whoosh as woks flare. There are sudden flurries of activity, and Lily occasionally breaks off mid-sentence to bark instructions, but there is an overall sense of tranquillity. For the first time since I walked down my street in Brunswick, I feel safe.
11
I go back to my room and sift through the search results about the man who disappeared on the mountain. Peter Talbot, that was his name. In the first weekend of October last year he was camping with a group in the Upper Yarra Park, when he went off on his own up something called the Doctor Creek Track and never came back. The early news reports were optimistic. He was an experienced bushwalker, he was well equipped, and he had his mobile phone and a PLB.
I look up PLBs – Personal Locator Beacons – to see how they work. I’ve heard of EPIRBs, but it looks like that term is misused, and a bushwalker is more likely to have a PLB. They’re lightweight, less expensive and easy to use. The beacon uses GPS and triangulation to find the person, but it has to be explicitly set off. This makes it potentially less effective than finding someone through their mobile phone, because a PLB is useless if you’re unconscious, or can’t reach it.
Carlos mentioned triangulation, too. That is something I know about, because I had to write about it for one of the telcos last year. It’s obvious when you think about it that your phone sends out signals all the time, checking to see if there are transmitters within range and picking up messages. But not everyone realises that this means your mobile phone is traceable even if you don’t use it. Even if the signal is too weak for you to make a call, there’s some signal, and the nearest transmitter can sense your phone.
I think about my own phone, sitting in my bag with the battery and SIM card removed. That’s really the only way to make sure it’s not traceable. Even like that it worries me, and I’m going to put it in Derek’s safe tomorrow and leave it there.
Imagine a circle on a map, with the transmitter in the centre and you and your phone somewhere on the edge. A searcher can calculate the radius of the circle by measuring the strength of the signal your phone is sending to the transmitter. Now the searcher looks around for the next closest transmitter, measures the strength of the signal to that transmitter, and draws another circle. Where the two circles intersect, they should find the phone. It’s not quite as accurate as one might like – maybe a fifty-metre margin of error – but it’s pretty good. In city areas, that is. In remote places, where the transmitters are far apart, it’s less reliable, and you’ve got a search area that can be a couple of kilometres wide. That’s because the two circles might not intersect at all, so you just have to look at the area where they come closest together.
Still, it should have helped them find Peter Talbot. He set off on a three-hour walk about mid-morning and hadn’t returned by nightfall. His friends – Patrick Donnelly, Suresh Chandra and Brian O’Dwyer – reported him missing late in the day.
The signals the searchers picked up from Peter Talbot’s phone showed that part of the way up he’d strayed from the track, which was steep and ill-defined, into a rough area full of gullies and steep drop-offs. He didn’t use his PLB. His phone signals stopped sometime during the night, indicating that his battery had gone flat, and the temperature dropped below freezing. They searched for three days but they couldn’t find any trace of him. In the summer his day pack was found at the bottom of a gully, a couple of kilometres downhill from the track he should have been on. The PLB was stowed inside. They never found his mobile phone.
An article in one of the Saturday papers held forth on the folly of walking alone in treacherous conditions as it reconstructed Talbot’s downfall. The journalist imagined him confidently striding the wrong way, then a stumble, maybe a trip on a tree root or a loose rock, then over the edge, crashing down the steep slope. It seemed the tumble didn’t kill him or they would have found his body right there; but he must have been badly enough injured to be disabled and disoriented, and in the sub-zero temperatures he wouldn’t have lasted long. He must have lost the phone and the vital pack on the way down, then crawled for some time searching for them, or trying to find a way back to the track, before being overcome. He may have fallen into another gully, or just got himself into even denser bush. In any case, he managed to move so far from his starting point they couldn’t find his body. Case closed.
That night, cocooned in my attic room, I sleep soundly though towards dawn I dream about Lewis. He takes my hand and leads me out of a Bosch painting of writhing bodies spattered in blood, doing hideous things to each other. We walk together down a long laneway flanked by steel doors. Then he disappears behind one of the doors and I can’t find him because they all look the same. Next thing I’m being chased by Detective Senior Sergeant Webster on a bicycle. She’s green like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, and if she catches me she’s going to cut my throat. I try to run, but can only move in slow motion because my feet are stuck in viscous, blood-soaked mud that’s oozing up between cobblestones.
12
I wake up shivering and for a moment I don’t know where I am. The light coming around the synthetic curtains is all wrong. Everything seems so strange I wonder if I’m still dreaming and I close my eyes again, willing myself back into my own bedroom with my good worn Persian rug, white cotton sheets, and the print of Vermeer’s Seamstress on the wall. But it’s no good, I’m at Lily’s, and though DS Webster isn’t chasing me and there’s no cobblestones oozing blood, Carlos and Mabel are both dead and my life could well be in danger.
I steel myself to get up, but the room is very cold. Lily turns off the heating at night and all the residual warmth is long gone. Finally I force myself out of bed and shower and dress as fast as possible, still chilled to the bone.
I can hear signs of other people in the building: water running in the pipes, staircases creaking; but Lily’s other guests are very discreet, and when I come out of my room I don’t see anyone else.
In preparation for the day, I’ve shoved a couple of patterned silk scarves into my bag and arranged a merino scarf around my head hijab-style. Someone like me would be pretty conspicuous in this neighbourhood, but now nobody will look twice. I leave carefully by the back entrance, which gives onto a garbage area and a car park, and walk purposefully, head down, to meet Omar in his van. Although I’ve never seen this vision in purple metallic paint before it’s easy to recognise, because he spends a lot of time describing it in loving detail to the other guys.
“Hi!” he says, as I jump in. “Whatcha doing around here?”
“Staying with some friends,” I say. “I had some trouble at my house, and I can’t go back there for a while.”
I’ve decided I’ll have to explain things to Omar, because I need to ask him to keep quiet about where he’s picking me up. He’s very impressed by my story.
“You and Carlos must’ve been into something really heavy!” he says enviously. “Derek never tells us anything. Anyone else working on it?”
“No, Omar, I swear it’s nothing to do with work. I only went to see Carlos about his new parsing engine. Nobody could possibly find that threatening. I think it’s all some huge mistake.”
“I reckon it’s terrorism,” says Omar. “Carlos hacked one site too many, or maybe those Romanians found out someth
ing.”
“Romanians?”
“You know, all those guys on his payroll. Ask Steve Li.”
By now we’re approaching Spencer Street, and I’ve got another favour to ask him.
“Omar, your access card gets you into the car park, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, but I’m not allowed to park there.”
“I know, but can you drop me, then drive out?”
He sees the point, so I slide down in the seat and he gets me into the building without being visible. That’s if there’s anyone looking. I go up to our floor in the goods lift, and it’s a good fifteen minutes before Omar appears. He must have to park miles away.
The mood in the office is sombre and Derek has summoned everyone to a meeting at ten-thirty in the lunchroom. He coughs up some cash – most unusual for him – so Viet Lei and Luke go out and buy takeaway coffee for everyone. Finally we all assemble in the lunch room. The whole company is there, even the Russians Nick and Anna, who have been working at a client site for so long I’d almost forgotten about them.
Ravi and Vijay have the decency to put their pool cues on the table and abandon their game. They join Sam, Chang and Omar on the stools at the back of the room. Sunanda and Viet Lei sit with me at the table where we often have gossipy lunches together. Sunanda has only been back at work for a couple of weeks after her recent wedding. I remember her joy when she came in the day before to show us the elaborate decorations painted on her hands.
Miranda’s remark rests like a lead weight in my stomach. Maybe this is something to do with Derek’s business after all? Are all these people in danger?
“I don’t know too much more than yesterday,” says Derek. “But maybe best if we have a big talk now, get it out of the way. We all got work to do.”
There’s a slight murmur of discontent at that. We all know Derek is a hard man. But he raises both hands defensively.
“Just listen, okay? Part of what I want people to do, it’s finding out more about what Carlos has been getting into, see if we can figure out why this happen. In a minute, we’ll get Luke to tell us what he knows. First, though, I think we should hear from Elly.”