by Jaye Ford
For the first time since Liv had moved in, the townhouse felt like the right place to be. Daniel had declared it safe before he left, which soothed some of the muscle-clenching anxiety she’d had all day. The uneasiness was still there, though. The thought that someone might be watching, that she needed to worry about safety, had lodged itself like a weight in her stomach. She checked which neighbours had lights on, limited herself to half a glass of the white wine with her cheese-and-gherkin dinner and watched TV with one ear on sounds from the street. But tiredness eventually took over and somewhere between a cop show and the late news, she drifted into a dozy sleep on the lounge.
Benny’s barking woke her. Actually it was her bald neighbour who brought her to full consciousness when he flicked on the floodlight in his yard and shouted, ‘Oi, Benny. What’s with the noise?’
Liv realised the dog had been at it for a while but the sound got mixed up with gunshots and a car chase and a military fly-past on the TV. She stood up, rubbed her eyes, saw the top half of the old sheet hanging over the back windows lit up like a blank movie screen. She rinsed her empty plate and glass at the sink, heard Benny start up again, ducked her head to look under the roller blind on the kitchen window – and a shadow moved through the light spilling over the fence.
Christ, was someone in her yard?
Water was running over her hand, saturating the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She turned the tap off, moved quickly to one side of the window and peered out. Had the shadow come from her yard or next door’s?
‘Oi, Benny! Come ’ere!’ The shout was irritable this time. The barking stopped.
Liv stayed at the window wishing her fear would tell her what to do instead of just making her heart thump in her chest. Then she saw it again. The shadow. Followed by a bald head. Trevor, the neighbour, moving through his yard.
She waited until he disappeared through his screen door then flicked on the lights in her courtyard, lifted the sheet away from the glass, peered left and right.
Nothing. She checked the locks, gave the door a yank. Did the same thing at the kitchen window, tested the front door again, tugging on the deadlock.
You’re safe in here, Liv. Daniel said so. Go to bed. Get some sleep.
She didn’t. At least, never for very long. She kept jerking awake as a hand slammed over her mouth, as her face hit the car. Once she was already sitting upright and breathing hard.
There was a dog in the parking lot now. She couldn’t see it. Just heard its incessant bark as she walked through the dark, as the hand crushed her mouth. Then she was blinking in the stripe of light from her ensuite, the dog still barking. A long, continuous stream of noise.
She rolled over, felt cool, damp sweat on her pyjama top. She’d never owned a dog. They weren’t allowed to have pets in the flat above the gym and Thomas hadn’t been interested. What did dogs bark at in the dark? Possums? Bats?
People?
She sat up, looked down into the courtyard. The lights were off but she could make out shapes in the night. The line of her fence, the roof of the neighbour’s townhouse, the square of their yard. Benny was a small, moving form in the darkness.
She rested her forehead on the cool glass and watched him. He was barking and pacing over near her fence, moving from side to side, a few bounds one way, a few back again with an occasional dash to the middle of the yard. After ten minutes, she gave up trying to find what was making him crazy, slid under the blanket and listened to him for a long time.
What are you barking at, Benny?
14
The trill of the phone made her eyes snap open. She searched blindly in the dark for it, annoyed that when sleep had finally come, someone was waking her.
‘Hello?’
‘Livia, it’s Ray Hepple. Sorry to call so early.’
Who?
‘There’s been a break-in at the office. You need to come down.’
Ray Hepple. Maintenance Ray. She cleared her throat. ‘Is there damage?’
‘Yes. You should come take a look. The police are on their way.’
She checked the time on the clock by the bed. Five-sixteen. ‘Okay. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.’
Liv and Kelly took it in turns to be the emergency contact. When they’d first moved into the building, the two businesses with street frontages had suffered regular broken windows. Once, vandals had crashed through the front entry and smashed all the doors along the corridor before running off as a police car arrived. The owner got sick of paying for replacement windows and had heavy-duty, strengthened glass installed. There had been other break-ins but not for a while.
Liv pulled on jeans and a warm top, the uneasiness in her gut rousing again as she flicked on lights. She collected her handbag and keys from the kitchen counter, peered briefly, cautiously into the dark courtyard. There was no sound from the dog.
She hesitated at the garage access door, fingers on the slide bolt Daniel had installed, a sudden thought making her hesitate. Could someone have got in during the night and be waiting for her to open the door?
Pay attention and be ready to get the hell out. She opened the door to the understair cupboard. Boxes in there, too. And a soccer ball, Cameron’s raincoat, a couple of baseball caps, an ironing board. An umbrella. A big golf umbrella with a heavy timber handle.
Liv clutched it with her good hand, flipped the light switch with the other and threw open the access door. No one there. A surge of adrenaline prickled like pins and needles in her arms as she stepped down to the concrete. No one this side of the car – and she was glad now she’d moved the boxes. She walked with the umbrella held out in front, the point in her hands, so she could swing it like a club, moving cautiously all the way around the car. No one.
Just her, feeling shaky and jittery and a tad overthe-top.
It was an eerie time to be driving around. Too late for partygoers, too early for daytime workers. The streets were dark and almost empty and didn’t do anything to lessen her concern at being out on her own.
A police car was in the lane beside the building. Ray was standing under the portico waiting for her when she stopped. The front entry behind him was half open and streaked with jagged cracks.
Pre-dawn light had lifted the solid veil of night. The door of Lenny’s Cafe was shut but there were lights on inside. Liv looked up and down the length of the footpath, saw only empty pavement.
‘Is anyone else here yet?’ she asked Ray as she met him at the door.
‘I didn’t need to call anyone else.’
Liv eyed the bent metal frame of the front door. ‘No one else was broken into?’
‘No. Just Prescott and Weeks.’
It didn’t make sense. They were the third door down the corridor.
‘Liv,’ Ray touched her arm briefly, ‘it’s a mess in there.’
She looked along the dark, quiet corridor. The only light came from inside Prescott and Weeks. A spray of shattered glass lay on the carpet outside, as though a bomb had gone off and the force had blown it out the door. Her stomach tightened in apprehension.
Ray came up beside her as she stopped short of her office, eyeing the trail of shards that had been flung across the hallway to the orthodontist’s surgery opposite. Liv crunched over it, expecting a disaster zone. Then frowned in confusion.
Reception was lit up and the area seemed the same as when she’d left, minus Teagan behind the counter. The light was on in her office. The door was open and resting against the wall inside, a glittering mass on the floor told her the glass had been smashed there, too. A uniformed police officer walked backwards into the gap, bent over at the waist. Examining something under her desk, Liv guessed.
‘Hi,’ she called.
He looked up and met her before she reached the door.
‘I’m Livia Prescott. That’s my office.’
He took her details before he let her go any further – name, when she’d last been there, et cetera. Eventually, she said, ‘Can I see it?’
She stepped past him and checked the damage to the door as she went in. When she turned to the rest, the air was sucked from her lungs.
It wasn’t damage. It was destruction. Everywhere. Walls, desk, chairs, filing cabinet. She didn’t know where to focus, just stood with blood pounding in her head and pulsating in the bruises on her face.
Every item on her desk had been swept to the floor, the drawers upended and the contents dumped. The two chairs were overturned, the filing cabinet tipped on top of them. The frames on the wall behind her workstation gone, just the nails left.
‘It must be a shock.’
There was a different uniformed cop standing where the cabinet used to be. Liv stared down at the mess on the floor, pushing debris aside with her feet. Books and stationery and folders. Cameron’s photo from her desk. The poster-sized picture of her father in his last fight was wedged between the desk and the wall, a crisscross of broken glass on the front. Her computer monitor was on its side in the middle of it all. She used her toe to roll it towards her. The screen was broken. Not shattered like the doors. A hole had been smashed in its centre, a spider web of cracks radiating outwards, as though the fat end of a baseball bat had been rammed through it.
‘Are you the only person who uses this office?’ the cop asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anything you can see at first glance that’s missing?’
How could she tell? ‘No.’
‘The other office here hasn’t been touched so it appears the damage was directed specifically at this space.’
She swallowed in a dry mouth. ‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me how you got the bruising on your face?’
She couldn’t. Not straightaway. She needed to sit down before the trembling in her legs made her fall down. The female cop sat in a chair beside her in reception, and Liv told her about the assault and the notes and Detective Sergeant Rachel Quest. The woman had a brief conference with her partner, asking Liv not to touch anything while she made a call.
Ray appeared with two large take-out coffees, one for Liv, the other for himself. Lenny’s must be open. Her office was trashed but the neighbourhood was still working. She called Kelly and told her she needed to come down. Asked her to bring a camera – their insurance company would need pictures.
‘I’ve spoken to Detective Quest,’ the cop said when she came back. ‘She asked that you stay until she gets here. I’m sorry but you won’t be able to go through your office until Fingerprinting has been.’
Liv was pacing the corridor, staying out of the cops’ way, avoiding the street that was now bathed in early light, when Daniel Beck pushed through the security door. She saw his double take at her presence then the glance at the glass on the carpet.
He walked straight to her. ‘What happened?’
‘Someone broke in.’
His eyes swung to Prescott and Weeks.
‘My office is trashed.’
He frowned back at her.
‘Just my office. Nothing else. Nothing taken. Nothing obvious, anyway. But the place has been completely, totally wrecked. Furniture, computer, files, pictures, everything. Every bloody thing.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
She shook her head.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Not sure.’ She registered his dark suit and white shirt. What time was it? She checked her watch – six-forty-eight. ‘Why are you here so early?’
‘I’ve got a job in the valley. I wanted to make an early start.’
‘Daniel Beck? Where did you come from?’ It was the first cop. He had a smile on his face and a hand out to shake Daniel’s. It seemed they knew each other from his fireman days. Daniel explained he worked down the hall.
‘Can I take a look?’ Daniel asked.
The officer gave an in-you-go cock of his head. ‘Detective Quest shouldn’t be long,’ he said to Liv.
It was her cue to stay where she was. That was fine. She didn’t need to see it again. She didn’t need a reminder of the violence. She had a full-colour image of it stuck in her head.
Kelly arrived not long after. Liv let her find her own way to the mess and the cops. She came back into the corridor fifteen minutes later, looking as shocked as Liv still felt.
‘Insurance will cover it all.’ Kelly was trying to find a positive. It was what she did, she was a silver-lining kind of girl.
Liv was a move-forward type but she felt pinned to this awful, ugly moment. ‘I can’t stop thinking that someone had me in mind when they were doing that.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t like that. Maybe they were going to smash up the whole office but got interrupted. Maybe we should feel lucky that they didn’t get any further.’
Liv pressed her back to the wall, felt scepticism on her face. ‘Do you really think that?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kelly leaned beside her. ‘It’s not necessarily the man who attacked you in the car park. It might be completely unrelated. Just a coincidence that it happened in the same week.’
Liv was grateful Kelly wanted to find a way to make it better but rose-coloured glasses weren’t going to change what it was. That three days after she’d been attacked in the car park, her office – the place she spent most of her waking hours, where until this morning she’d felt most at home – had been singled out for a violent and destructive act.
It was no coincidence. This was about her.
15
Other staff from the building trickled in to start their work days, wandering inquisitively down the hall, peering into Prescott and Weeks, some even going right in and being asked to leave by police.
Gino and Mariella from the wigmaker’s made horrified noises, the latter hugging Liv several times before the former shooed her into work. Scott, the mortgage broker, had a bit of a poke around and a couple of the travel agents brought their take-out coffees down as though they were on a tour. Anthony, the solicitor who worked on the other side of Liv’s wall, went in and out then spoke quietly to her as she leaned against the wall in the corridor.
‘I’m not saying I know what’s going on here,’ Anthony told her. ‘But I’m available anytime if you want to talk about your legal options.’ He handed her a business card. ‘It’s got my mobile number, if you prefer to talk out of business hours.’
What did he think was going on? What legal options did she have against someone she didn’t know and couldn’t identify? ‘Thanks.’
It was past eight o’clock by the time Rachel Quest appeared. She walked down the corridor like she was ready to break into a run. She shook Liv’s hand. Liv tried not to wince at the pain in her knuckle and smiled wanly when Rachel thanked her for waiting – where the hell else was she going to go? Rachel told her she wanted to take a look before they talked. Liv followed her in but watched from the doorway of her office as the male cop went over the details.
‘The intruder broke in through the street entrance and came to this business. The lock was jemmied then this office ransacked. It appears from the spread of glass in the hallway that the front door was smashed on the way out. There’s no evidence so far that any other stops were made to other offices.’
As he talked, Rachel put gloves on, lifted and replaced various upended items – a chair, the filing cabinet, a drawer, the computer monitor. Liv listened with her arms wrapped around her torso, her stomach feeling like it was trying to push its way out through her throat. When she’d had enough, she turned to leave and saw Daniel at the other end of reception. He had a large coffee and something warm and sweet smelling in a bag.
‘I’m just about to leave,’ he told her. ‘Thought you looked like you could do with some breakfast.’ He held out th
e cup and brown paper package.
‘That’s for me?’
‘You should eat.’
Rachel Quest stepped up beside her, glanced at the food then up at Daniel. ‘Daniel Beck.’ It sounded more like a statement than a greeting.
‘Rachel,’ he replied, just as deadpan.
The detective checked her watch. ‘You’re in early. Office hours don’t start for a while yet.’
‘My day starts when it needs to. Just like yours.’
Rachel was head and shoulders shorter than him and had to lift her chin to look him in the face. Liv figured it might have been easier if she’d taken a step back but she pushed her hands into the pockets of her trousers, nodding at his delivery of food like she was impressed. ‘That for Livia?’
‘Yeah.’ He handed it to Liv with a quick quirk of his brow. ‘I put it on my tab.’
And she was covering his tab this month. ‘Gee, thanks.’
‘I wish I had colleagues who bought me breakfast after a tough morning.’ Rachel said it like she was joining in their banter but there was an edge to it. Nothing nasty. Just making some kind of point.
Whatever it was, Liv didn’t get it. But she saw Daniel’s dark eyes catch on Rachel’s. Maybe it was directed at him. Maybe it was professional, if they’d worked together before. Or maybe it was personal.
‘If you’ll excuse us now,’ Rachel said to Daniel and pointed Liv towards the chairs in reception.
Before Liv moved away, Daniel closed fingers around her elbow, lowered his face to hers and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve got my number. Call if you need anything.’
He was gone by the time she sat down. Beside her, Rachel waited while Liv took a sip of coffee and checked in the bag to find a chocolate croissant. She put it aside, not sure her stomach was up to it.
‘I think you already appreciate the break-in appears to have been aimed specifically at your office.’ Rachel pulled out a notebook as she started. ‘In light of the two notes you’ve received, my assumption, for the moment, is that they’re connected. The fact your workplace has been targeted and that your assault occurred in the car park outside and the notes have been delivered here, suggests the motive may be related to your business. So I want to ask you a few questions about your situation here.’