by Peter Temple
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Orlovsky, staring at the large computer monitor. ‘I know this software.’
We were on the sixth floor of Carson House in Exhibition Street, in a huge work area, alone except for two women and a man looking at three-dimensional views of a tower building on a wall-mounted computer monitor.
‘My contact says it’s based on an army program for keeping track of how much the cooks, the clerks and the storepersons are stealing. The Feds are using it.’
Orlovsky made a noise of contempt. ‘Correction, the Feds would be using it if they could work out how to.’
‘Does that mean you know how to?’
He shook his head in pity. ‘Frank, it’s my software. I worked on it for fucking Defence. Two years of my life. This is what I was doing when…anyway, it’s mine. Partly. Largely.’
He concentrated on the screen, loaded and unloaded CDs. ‘Christ there’s a lot of data here,’ he said. ‘Text, program files, image files. Compressed to buggery.’
‘All we want is the Carson kidnap,’ I said.
‘Got the grunt here to run the whole thing.’ He hummed. ‘There’s a lot of sweat gone into this.’
‘It’s a sex substitute for people like you, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Caress the keyboard, instant response, feelings of power and dominance.’
He didn’t look at me, tapped. ‘Sex add-on,’ he said. ‘For people like you, it could be a healthy substitute. But there’s nothing like real power and dominance is there, Frank? You should talk to Stephanie Chadwick. She’d understand you, your special needs.’
‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I think I should’ve left you snivelling in that tropical swamp, wearing your little blue towelling pyjamas and those nice slippers.’
‘Tropical paradise,’ he said. ‘Pure paternalism, Daddy knows best. I was happy there. Free drugs and some intelligent people to talk to. You ripped me away.’ He tapped. ‘We can do this. Yes.’
He looked happier than I’d seen him in years. ‘So what do you want to know? Captain.’
‘What can it tell me?’
‘Depends. Try something.’
I said, ‘See what it’s got under Carson.’
Orlovsky looked at me and shook his head. He tapped and the heading CARSON, ALICE and a date in 1990 came up, followed by menu boxes, dozens of them. ‘Be a bit more specific.’
I was reading the menu over his shoulder. ‘Crime scene.’
He tapped. ‘Stills or video?’
‘Video.’
More tapping. Almost instantly, we were watching film shot by a police camera inside a brightly-lit four-car garage, two cars in it. The camera panned around the space, walls, the floor, went up to the nearest car, a BMW with driver and front passenger doors open, circled it, looked into the driver’s side, into the footwells, along the dashboard, everywhere, came back to the passenger side and did the same. Then the camera left the garage through an open door and went slowly, painfully slowly, down a driveway, filming the brick paving, the verges, around a bend to a gateway with open spear-pointed steel gates. It filmed every square centimetre of the entrance and the pavement and gutter outside.
‘That’ll do,’ I said. ‘Records of interview.’
‘Who do you want?’
‘Alice. And the witnesses. I assume the driver of the car was a witness.’
He tapped again, produced a sketch, a view from behind of the BMW, both front doors open. A man wearing a balaclava was pulling a small schoolgirl out of the passenger side. On the other side, another man, short, also hooded, was pointing an automatic pistol at the driver.
‘Only witness,’ said Mick. ‘Dawn Yates. The nanny.’
He typed in her name. Her driver’s licence picture appeared, a woman in her late twenties, thirtyish, short fair hair, square jaw. She looked like a tennis coach or a gym instructor. Mick scrolled and her biographical details came up, her work history. She had been a nurse and a part-time karate instructor before taking the Carson job. Then a diagram appeared, a complex relationship diagram: Dawn’s family, family friends, their friends, Dawn’s friends, their families, their friends, all annotated with ages and jobs. Of the dozens of names, three were starred.
‘What’s that mean?’ I pointed at a star.
Mick tapped the asterisk on the keyboard. Three driver’s licence pictures appeared, two men and a woman, names, biographical details.
The woman was Dawn’s cousin’s wife. She had worked for an arm of the Carson empire in 1985-86. The men were both Carson employees, one an architect in Sydney, the other an office manager in Brisbane.
‘What about that bloke with the key next to his name?’
Tap, tap. Another face. ‘Did eighteen months in New South Wales for fraud. Her father’s cousin.’
‘Jesus, they shook Dawn’s tree,’ I said. ‘Can you print this stuff?’
‘Gee, that’s a hard one.’
‘Print Alice’s interviews, will you?’
When he’d issued the command, Orlovsky said, ‘That’s it? That’s all you want? They give you a banquet and all you want is a fucking cocktail sausage roll?’
‘I’m tired, Mick. Brilliant inquiries will come to me. Can you get into the system from outside?’
He gave me the kind of look I’d once given him, the look that said, shape up Sunshine, the day’s just beginning, it can only get worse from here, looked away, started fiddling with the computer.
Happy now, in charge, happy as he could be. Who could know how happy that was?
‘First I’ve got to make it hard for anyone else to get into,’ he said.
I went over to the printer, watched the paper being spat into the collating trays, felt the ache growing in my back, the pointmen of pain advancing down my legs.
24
In Orlovsky’s car, just after 9 p.m., the long night before and the whole of Tuesday felt in the spine, crossing the Yarra bridge, smart Southbank glowing on the right, people eating and drinking there, lots of other people about, the city alive, the water not its daytime mud-grey, now a surface that reflected and glittered. The city’s Arno, romantic. Behind us, Flinders Street station, the first of the night people on the steps: prey, predators, and the guardians, young cops from nice families in the suburbs, from the country towns, getting their taste of the real, their eyes getting harder every night.
The studio was in South Melbourne, not too far from the premises of Cairncross amp; Associates, whose operative had reported both Pat Carson and a woman in a red Alfa leaving Conrad Street not long after we did. Pat had gone home and hadn’t moved today. I’d called them off.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, opened them to see the technician behind the glass saying things I couldn’t hear into the black stalk in front of his mouth. He looked down at the console in front of him, then his voice was startling in my ear.
‘They’re ready if we are, Mr Calder. Try not to look away to right or left or down for too long. It’s disconcerting for the other party. Ready, are we?’
I nodded at him. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at something else. ‘Ready,’ I said.
A young woman appeared on the big monitor on the wall, her right hand at her right ear. She was looking straight at me, a thin, intelligent face, no makeup that I could see, short dark hair in no style, just combed back, straight line of eyebrows, almost meeting, ungroomed.
It was just after 9.30 a.m. for her and Alice Carson, kidnap victim, almost a murder victim, was looking at me on her studio monitor somewhere in London. She looked fresh for someone who had been woken by a telephone call from her father at 5.30 a.m.
‘Good morning, Ms Carson,’ I said. ‘I’m Frank Calder. Your father’s told you who I am and the reason for this. May I call you Alice?’
She seemed startled by the question, nodded. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Good…evening.’ She was nervous, you could see it in her mouth.
‘I know this is difficult for you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think about asking you to do it if it could be
avoided.’
She nodded again. ‘That’s all right.’ She paused. ‘I’m in a bit of shock at…at the news. I don’t really know Anne well, but…’ She tailed off, blinking rapidly, said, ‘I don’t know what I can tell you that…it’s so long ago. I try not to think about it.’
Across half the world, we were looking at each other as though we had eye contact. We did have eye contact. I could see her swallow, see the cords in her neck move. I smiled, she responded, smiled back, a tight smile.
I said, ‘We’ll get this over with quickly so that you can get on with your day. Alice, I’ve read the police interviews with you and I’ve only got a few questions. I know you never saw anyone and that you only heard voices from a distance, through walls.’
‘Yes.’ An uncomfortable look, her head moving left.
‘Voices are strange things, aren’t they? We read so much into them.’
She didn’t give any sign of agreement. Suspicious eyes. Waiting.
‘In the interviews, they kept asking you about what you heard. Noises, the voices.’
‘Yes.’
‘They asked you what you heard. Over and over.’
‘Yes. Over and over.’ She lifted a glass of water and drank some. ‘I felt so tired, all I remember is, I felt so tired, I wanted to go to sleep in my own bed. Forever.’
I drank some water from my glass. ‘A precious thing, your own bed. You’re never really home till you’re in your own bed.’
What did I know about the preciousness of own beds, a good part of my life spent in institutional beds I hated or didn’t give a shit about?
Alice smiled, half a smile, a smile. I smiled. We nodded at each other across the world, images bounced off a satellite.
‘I feel ridiculous asking you questions all these years later,’ I said.
I waited, looking at her, trying to keep the full smile in my eyes, in my face. Thinking about smiling.
A nod, not an unhappy nod now.
I said, ‘Alice, if you can bring yourself to think about the voices, a last time.’
She looked uncertain, lowered her chin.
‘You told the police that you heard two voices and they sounded the same to you. Is that right?’
A nod. ‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘The people who talked to you didn’t follow this up. You heard two people with similar voices?’
‘Not similar, the same. At first, I thought it was someone talking to himself, having a conversation with himself.’
‘You didn’t tell the police that.’
‘I don’t know. Didn’t I?’
‘It’s not in the transcript. In the transcript, they move on to asking you about noises outside. But that doesn’t matter. You thought it was one person but it wasn’t?’
‘No. I could hear they were apart.’
‘You could tell them apart?’
‘No, but the voices were apart, coming from different places. It was two people.’
‘Two people with identical voices.’
She frowned. ‘Well, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I suppose the wall was too thick. So I can’t say identical, but the voices went up and down in the same places. I…’ She hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got quite a good ear for music, so I suppose…’
‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve got it right. Now the other thing I want to ask you is whether you’ve remembered anything else. In the years since. It’s not uncommon. You were in shock when the police talked to you, I could see that in your responses. Is there anything else, anything at all that’s come back to you?’
We looked at each other. Alice moved her shoulders, her head, apologising with her body.
‘This is rather silly,’ she said, ‘but two things…I’m not sure if it’s just my mind playing tricks. I’m always reading something into nothing. Harmless strangers, parked cars.’
I smiled. ‘I’m constantly reading something into nothing. It’s a way of life for me. Go ahead, it doesn’t matter whether it sounds silly. What’s rather silly?’
She seemed reassured. ‘The one thing is, we use the television and computers a lot at work. I work with autistic children.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I know that.’
‘Well, about a year after I started working there, one of the other people put on a computer game for a child and it had this music, this simple tune repeated over and over…’ She was distressed by the story. Her hands had moved from the arms of her chair into her lap. She was clenching one hand with the other, I could see the tension in her neck and shoulders.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I felt sick. And scared. I couldn’t bear it, it’s impossible to describe, I had to go out of the room, out of the building. I went to a toilet and…and I was physically sick.’
‘You couldn’t recall hearing it before?’
‘No, never.’
Time to leave the subject. ‘The second thing. There’s another thing.’
She was feeling even more tense now, tried to smile, just a baring of teeth, nice small teeth.
‘I went to Sardinia for a holiday last winter. With my mother and my grandparents, we were staying at this new hotel, a resort sort of place, they showed us to our cottages and I thought they were lovely, adobe, sort of Moorish-style and we unpacked and I went to have a shower and I got out all wet, water in my eyes and I had to steady myself and I touched the wall…’
She stopped. In her rushing speech, words tumbling over rocks, no still water in sight, I could hear the horror she was trying to keep out of her mind. And I could see white all the way around her pupils.
Find the words. Find a form of words.
‘Sardinia must be a nice change from London in winter,’ I said. ‘I spent a winter on the English moors one year. Very moorish winter. All I can remember is the way my fillings tasted in the cold. Normally, you don’t notice your fillings. If you’re unlucky enough to have fillings, that is. I’ve got five fillings. Sweets in childhood. But when your nose is blocked by a terrible cold, you breathe through your mouth, you suck in that freezing moorish air, and it gets to your fillings. They get colder than your teeth. And then you can taste them, it’s some chemical thing or something to do with metals. The most unbelievably awful taste, like sucking lead filings.’ Pause. ‘I often suck lead filings, so I know.’
I stopped. As I’d drivelled on with this boring rubbish, she’d looked less likely to bolt, more likely to make a polite excuse and leave.
‘The message is this,’ I said. ‘Only have ceramic fillings.’
‘Ceramic? Can you have ceramic fillings?’ She was smiling, not going to bolt, not going to leave.
‘You can have fillings made from anything you like. Titanium, Kevlar, old-fashioned stainless steel. They say you should go for the tusks of departed walruses. Not killed for their tusks, of course. Washed up walruses. Peacefully departed. Recycled.’
Alice laughed, not a big laugh, but on her mouth and in her eyes there was a laugh. I laughed with her, celebrated my own stupid ability to amuse her. In her face, I now saw the resemblance to her father. They were handsome people, the Carsons, and they selected for handsome genes, even if that sometimes meant ending up with handsome people missing the warmth chromosome.
But they could laugh. It was possible. I’d seen two of them laugh. As a sub-species, they had the capacity to laugh. The single-minded pursuit of money, the worship of it, the fear of losing it, these had made redundant, vestigial, almost everything that had once made them social animals. But the ability to laugh, that had some value and it lingered.
Time. Time to speak of the things that the mind does not want spoken of.
I said, ‘So, you touched the wall. And…’
She was more relaxed, she closed her eyes. ‘Repulsive, revolting, the feel of it…I ran out, I didn’t have anything on, I think I was screaming, I gave my mother a terrible fright…’
She opened her eyes.
I was nodding,
as if I understood.
She swallowed, swallowed again, looked at me, her face coming to me in brilliant clarity, grey eyes, a sad person, sad forever, nothing could subtract from what had happened to her, nothing could bring her back into the world of people who hadn’t endured what she had.
‘I couldn’t stay there,’ she said, ‘so they moved us, put us in another part of the hotel, the main building.’
‘Adobe,’ I said.
She nodded, looked down.
‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You’ve been brave and I admire you.’
She looked up and there were tears in her eyes.
On the way to the Carson compound, waiting to turn, Orlovsky said, ‘Mr Compassion. That’s another side. Sorry I didn’t get to see that side.’
I was looking at the couple in the Mercedes next to us. A woman with a long, pale face was driving, the man next to her was fat and angry, gesticulating. He had rings on all his fingers.
‘You didn’t qualify for compassion,’ I said. ‘You only qualified for a kick up the arse. And that was too late, anyway.’
We were in the underground garage when he said, ‘And now?’
I needed a drink badly, my back needed it. ‘Mark,’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere else.’
25
Martie Harmon worked for Hayes, Harmon, Calero, a firm of solicitors in South Yarra with an office next to a Thai restaurant.
‘Mark’s been involved with him in a couple of interesting ventures, his so-called associate,’ said Barry, speaking briskly from his car at 7.15 a.m. ‘One was importing caviar from the Caspian, a container load. I gather they paid half in advance, some fabulous sum, and the Russians sent them a container of fish meal. Hold on, I’ve got another call.’
Music, trippling piano music. I ate sourdough toast spread with Normandy butter and bitter Scottish marmalade and watched a gardener, a slim woman dressed for wet weather, choosing flowers from the cutting garden in front of the Garden House. She felt my eyes, turned and nodded a greeting.
Barry came back. ‘Frank, yes, Martie Harmon. Mark and Martie also combined to sell the Indonesians a South African crowd-control device. I don’t know how that went. I’d have thought the Indonesians already had shotguns. I’m indebted to Stephanie for this information. Tom ends up paying and he confides in her.’ ‘And she in you,’ I said, not a clever thing to say.