October

by Gabrielle Lord

  After I’d cleaned up my face, Winter began taking me through the progress Boges had made so far. ‘That’s his own fingerprint,’ she explained, pointing to the whorls and ridges of a fingerprint etched on a soft, malleable, transparent page. ‘He put it through the process and came up with this.’

  ‘It’s awesome,’ I said, lifting one of the transparent pieces and rubbing my forefinger over the print. ‘I can actually feel the little ridges,’ I said, looking up at her. ‘They’re pretty distinct.’

  ‘Boges says it’s good enough to fool the scanner on his computer.’ I gave Winter a dubious look. ‘However,’ she added, ‘the scanners at Zürich Bank may not be so easily convinced.’

  A sound outside made us both jump.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, looking out the window. ‘It’s just Boges.’

  Winter opened the door and Boges stepped in with a parcel under his arm.

  ‘I see you’ve shaved,’ he joked, stroking his upper lip, and indicating the red strip on my face where I’d scrubbed off the moustache he’d drawn on me.

  ‘You’re lucky it washed off,’ I said, thumping him playfully on the back. ‘Unlike this,’ I said, pulling up my jeans and pulling off my socks to show them my ankle.

  Boges and Winter stared at the letters and numbers on my skin.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Boges.

  ‘Wish I knew,’ I said. ‘All I know is that after I was captured, Oriana wanted me dead. She ordered Kelvin to dump me in Dingo Bones Valley, which he did, but he obviously couldn’t follow through on the “murder” part of her order because I woke up in the desert, alive. Then I found this on my ankle. I can’t get it off. It’s some kind of indelible ink—almost like a tattoo. I don’t know why, but Kelvin must have done it.’

  ‘SDB 291245,’ Boges repeated. ‘A phone number?’ He pulled out his mobile and pressed the buttons. He put on the loudspeaker function and held up the handpiece.

  ‘The number you have called is not connected,’ recited the tinny voice. ‘Please check the number and try again.’

  ‘Could it be a birthday?’ Winter suggested. ‘Do you know anyone born on the 29th of December, 1945?’

  I shook my head. The date meant nothing to me.

  ‘Why would Kelvin mark you?’ asked Boges, jotting down the letters and numbers in his bulging little notebook. ‘It had to be him; unless some wandering desert nomad came across you lying unconscious and decided you needed cataloguing. But why?’

  ‘I don’t know, but the only reason I’m alive is because of Kelvin. He’s a bad guy, don’t get me wrong, but not a killer. Oriana’s so cruel to him. Treats him like a dog. Worse than a dog,’ I corrected. ‘I don’t know why she didn’t finish me off when she had the chance.’ I reached for my bag and pulled out her leopard-print scarf. ‘She almost strangled me with this.’

  Winter scrunched up her face as she took the scarf from me, holding it out at arm’s length, like it was harbouring an infectious disease.

  ‘So,’ I said, turning to Boges, ‘what do you have for us?’

  ‘More glue,’ he replied, sitting down and emptying the paper package. A couple of tubes fell onto the table. He picked up the soft, transparent paper with the print Winter had shown me. ‘I did an impression, enhanced it with superglue to build up the loops and whorls of the fingerprint, and then I took a photo of the enhanced fingerprint and printed it off with really heavy contrast—to build up a thick layer.’

  ‘And that process gives you the positive version again. Ready to press down on a scanner,’ I said. ‘Winter tells me that it’s good enough to fool your PC, but will a copy of Oriana’s fingerprint fool the scanner at Zürich Bank?’

  Boges shrugged. ‘Sounds crazy, but it’s worth a try. We’ll trim it down to size, then you need to wipe it over your skin for a moment or two, to pick up some body oil, then all you do is wear it over your own finger and press down on the scanner. It should work. In theory, at least.’

  ‘I hate to be a downer, guys,’ Winter interrupted, ‘but even if the print works, we still have to get into the bank and access the scanner unchallenged. And, not only that, but we don’t even have Oriana’s personal identification number to get the security box open. Everyone has a PIN that they punch in to access their box in the vaults. The door won’t swing open unless you have the right combination. Somehow we need to get Oriana’s PIN.’

  We stared at each other.

  ‘We could capture her and torture her,’ suggested Boges, breaking the silence. ‘Force her to tell us the number.’

  ‘Torture her?’ scoffed Winter. ‘Stoop to her level? Seriously, Boges, tell me you don’t mean that?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Don’t forget the Piers Ormond will,’ I said. ‘It could have information in it that we need. We could still try and get our hands on that.’

  ‘How do you propose to do that? Sheldrake Rathbone has doublecrossed you once already over that document. There’s no way he’ll just hand it to you. That’s if he really even has it.’

  I thought of my failed meeting with Rathbone at the funeral parlour, and the unknown assailant who’d jumped up and knocked me out, like some deadly jack-in-the-box. Rathbone was a dangerous enemy.

  The three of us looked at each other hopelessly. I leaned on my knees and bumped my bulging pocket. ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, digging deep into my jeans. ‘I have something that should cheer us all up …’

  Boges and Winter both leaned in, curious to see what I was about to show them. I pulled out a handful of gold nuggets and carefully let them fall on the table.

  Boges blinked and Winter’s hand flew to her mouth.

  ‘What the?’ Boges said, confused.

  Winter picked up one of the gold pieces and glared at it closely, before turning to glare even more intensely at me. ‘You have some serious explaining to do,’ she demanded with a shove.

  ‘Yes, dude,’ Boges agreed. ‘Before we spontaneously combust out of curiosity.’

  ‘Not in here, thanks Bodhan,’ said Winter, threatening to poke Boges with a fork. ‘There’s been enough combustion going on in my place this morning, thanks to you.’

  Boges sprawled at the table and Winter sat cross-legged on her chair while I told them everything that had happened in Dingo Bones Valley. Boges’s eyebrows almost touched his hairline as he listened. Winter seemed spellbound as I described how I got away from the demented prospectors, who planned to kidnap me and hold me until the cops came, all for the price on my head. I even added the bit about the rats in my room, and the bone I found that I suspected was human. When I told them about Sniffer, allegedly the best nose in the nation, and how he hadn’t given me up, they were stunned into silence.

  ‘There was a struggle in the kitchen,’ I explained. ‘Snake attacked me when I was trying to sneak out. He was going to rope me when the kitchen table came down on top of us, sending these guys,’ I said, grabbing some of the gold, ‘flying everywhere! He must have been counting his gold before I showed up downstairs. I grabbed as much as I could. They’d told me the gold had dried up.’

  ‘Not true!’ said Winter, examining one of the biggest pieces.

  Boges shook his head. ‘I’ve gotta tell you, man, you are one lucky dude!’

  ‘Lucky? Me? Are you kidding? What about everything that’s happened to me in the last nine months?’

  ‘Boges is right,’ Winter said, dropping the gold and sitting back in her chair. ‘Well, I don’t know if I’d call you “lucky” exactly, but while heaps of bad things happen to you, just as many good things happen! I mean, why didn’t Kelvin kill you in the desert? Or why didn’t Oriana strangle you to death? And how come that dog let you go? It was a dog. Can a dog really know right from wrong? Good from bad? And now you’ve returned with pockets full of gold! Someone’s looking out for you. Someone’s definitely looking out for you.’

  ‘The Ormond Angel?’ Boges suggested.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. I didn’t agree with what
they were saying, but I couldn’t help thinking of the water delivery truck that had appeared on the road like a mirage. That was pretty incredible.

  Winter pulled a small, velvet pouch out of her drawer and tossed it to me. I started collecting up all of the gold from the table and the rest from my pockets.

  ‘So anyway,’ I said, ‘what should I do with it?’

  ‘I know a gold dealer,’ Boges said. He took the pouch from me and weighed it up in his hands. ‘Palladium Metal Traders. Uncle Vladi deals with them from time to time. A lot of people from the old country like to buy and sell gold. They don’t trust money. I reckon you have about four thousand dollars’ worth here. At least.’

  I nearly choked on my own spit.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘At least,’ he repeated, beaming. He wrote down the name and address for me on a piece of paper from his leather notebook and handed it to me. ‘That reminds me,’ he said, walking over to his bag and pulling out a folded piece of pink paper. ‘This is for you. She said you’d know what it meant.’

  89 days to go…

  Nelson Sharkey was wearing a sweaty grey tracksuit and a towel around his neck as we sat in the shade out the back of his gym. I’d done my best to get him up to speed on what had been going on with me. He offered me a sip of his blue sports drink.

  ‘No, thanks,’ I declined. ‘There’s something I need from Sheldrake Rathbone—the solicitor—and I know there’s no way he’ll give it to me willingly. Any suggestions?’

  ‘You’re not asking me to find someone to threaten him, are you?’

  ‘No, I was thinking I’d need something over him. I guess I’m talking blackmail.’

  Nelson considered what I’d said, and before long he was nodding.

  ‘That might be possible. Rumours about him have run rampant for years. There have been allegations about funds going missing from elderly widows’ trust funds, involvement in shady property dealings… But, of course, nothing’s been proven.’

  ‘But he is a criminal,’ I said. ‘I know that from my own dealings with him. He was part of a set-up that almost had me killed.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was he part of the set-up? Look, I’m sure there’s some truth to those rumours, but do you know that for sure? Sheldrake Rathbone may have been an unknowing pawn in someone else’s game.’

  I wasn’t sure at all, but I found myself saying, ‘He was definitely part of the set-up.’

  ‘If someone’s acting outside the law,’ he said, ‘and has been for a long time, then it’s a part of their life.’ Sharkey paused and skilfully pitched his empty bottle five or six metres into an open recycling bin. ‘It’s just a matter of catching them at it. That’s the hard part.’

  ‘Then I will watch him—like I’ve watched other people. See what he does, where he goes, who he meets up with—that sort of thing.’

  ‘Exactly. You need to run a surveillance operation on him. If he’s up to something, you’ll catch him sooner or later.’

  In a corner building, I found the sign I was looking for. I pressed the buzzer outside the glass door. The guy behind the counter looked me up and down before letting me in.

  ‘How can I help you?’ he asked. He had three gold teeth, a dark suit and a shoestring tie.

  ‘I have some gold to sell.’

  He leaned his head back, looking down at me with a superior sneer.

  ‘Let’s see it then,’ he said.

  I up-ended the velvet pouch, dropping the gold noisily onto the tray on the counter. I’d taken about half of it out and put it aside—I didn’t want to cash all of it in right now.

  I saw a flash of the gold teeth as the dealer smiled.

  ‘You’ve been a lucky boy,’ he said, hunched over my findings. ‘Where have you been digging?’

  ‘Dingo Bones Valley,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Maybe I’ve hit on Lasseter’s Reef.’

  His eyebrows shot up on hearing me mention ‘Lasseter’s Reef’. His eyes searched mine, examining me, while he rubbed some of the gold with a thin cloth. The nuggets gleamed brilliantly under the spotlights in the ceiling—some of them were rounded and smooth, others more jagged, pockmarked and uneven.

  He snorted before pulling out his jeweller’s loupe and squinting down through it at the collection of nuggets. He lifted the tray and poured them onto a small set of scales to weigh them, then straightened up and stared at me suspiciously.

  ‘Well?’ I prompted him, feeling uneasy under his intense gaze.

  ‘I’ll give you five hundred bucks for the lot.’

  ‘What? Five hundred bucks? Are you kidding? That’s robbery! This is worth over two thousand dollars,’ I said, halving Boges’s earlier estimation. ‘I’m not stupid, I won’t let you rip me off!’

  The gold teeth flashed at me again. ‘I don’t believe you came across this gold honestly,’ he said. He looked at me through his jeweller’s loupe, wearing a crooked smile. ‘You’ll take what I give you, and count yourself lucky, kid.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talk—’

  ‘You’re not fooling me,’ he said, cutting me off. ‘I can spot the difference between someone who’s telling the truth and someone who’s lying, like I can tell the difference between a cubic zirconium and a diamond. You didn’t dig this gold out. Look at your hands—they haven’t been swinging a pick or digging a mine. My bet is you knocked this off from someone. Take my offer or leave it.’

  ‘I’ll take it elsewhere,’ I said.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he said, dismissively. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘But there’s easily two thousand dollars’ worth of gold here,’ I pleaded. ‘You’re not even offering half!’

  ‘Six hundred bucks or I call the cops. There’s something about you that makes me think you wouldn’t like that very much.’

  There was nothing I could do. He knew he had me. I couldn’t risk this gold trader turning into another bounty hunter.

  He folded up his loupe and tipped the gold from the scales back onto the tray. Next he reached for my velvet pouch.

  ‘Deal,’ I said, stopping him.

  He counted cash from a red silk purse that had suddenly appeared in his hand. As he did that, I caught a whiff of that tantalising odour that I’d sniffed just before being knocked out at Rathbone’s undertaking business. It seemed to be coming from behind a closed door, some way down from the counter.

  ‘That smell,’ I said, trying to source it, trying to work out what it was. ‘What is it?’

  With a deft movement, he swiped all the gold nuggets into a container under the counter, and flicked twelve fifty-dollar notes at me. ‘Scram before I call the cops.’

  88 days to go …

  After lunch, Winter and I had been throwing around ideas on how to catch Sheldrake Rathbone out on something scandalous—something worthy of blackmail.

  A herd of zebras silently galloped across the tiny TV screen in the corner of the room. Winter was distracted by her textbooks. I knew school was tough enough on its own—it must have been really hard splitting her attention between the DMO and her study. I watched as she yawned loudly and let her head fall to rest on a pile of books on her desk.

  I looked closely at the names of the books on their spines and saw that the one on top was a history of Queen Elizabeth the First.

  Winter lifted her head and must have seen me squinting to read the cover.

  ‘I’m wondering,’ she mused, thoughtfully, ‘whether Oriana is so desperate to understand the Ormond Singularity because she feels some weird, kindred connection to Queen Elizabeth. You know, they both share that “Off with his head!” sort of power. And it turns out “Oriana” was one of the names that Elizabethan poets and courtiers used to give Queen Elizabeth. Maybe Oriana thinks she’s some kind of reincarnation.’

  ‘She has the red hair, I guess.’

  Winter turned away from her desk to face me, and folded her legs up on the chair. ‘It�
�s funny what motivates people, what drives them. Sligo wants to be respected and accepted by society, and Oriana—well, she already has both of those things. They both have money. They both have power. Some people are just never satisfied. They always want more.’

  ‘Speaking of more, is there any more of that pumpkin soup from lunch?’

  ‘In the fridge.’

  I jumped up and headed over to the fridge, pulling a plastic container with orangey contents out.

  ‘Want some?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, standing up and reaching for two small bowls from the sink. ‘So, back to Rathbone. We all know he is a criminal, so maybe Sharkey is right. If we just run a surveillance operation on him we should catch him out doing something he shouldn’t. Between the three of us—you, me and Boges—we should be able to cover a lot of his activities.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we get evidence and the blackmail begins.’‘Then we get evidence and the blackmail begins.’

  enhancement on target’s fingerprint proceeding. 1st attempt a failure. starting from scratch.

  ‘I hope he can do it,’ said Winter, after reading Boges’s message. ‘At least he’s found another place to use as a lab.’ She leaned back in her chair to look at the clock on the wall. ‘Miss Sparks will be back again tonight, don’t forget.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ll clear out in a couple of hours and find a new hideout.’

  A temporary wire fence had been built around the property and on it hung a developer’s notice. The doors and windows were boarded up and the overgrown yard was even thicker and wilder than before, creeping up the sides of the house like it was trying to swallow it whole.

  I was up and over the fence pretty quickly, forging my way through the bushes and grass in the front yard. I listened carefully and looked for any signs of movement.