Shooting Star

by Peter Temple

  I entered the cheerless, echoing structure, paused only briefly at the top of an escalator, watched the iron stairway moving down into the cavern blasted from the rock. It was a long way down, and steep.

  On the stairs, going down, the briefcase heavy in my hand.

  No one waiting at the bottom. The person would be nearby, somewhere in sight of the escalators, waiting for a man with a briefcase.

  I looked back, up the steel stream. No one had joined me on the escalator. They’d picked a quiet time, they knew this station, the table of its human tides.

  Why did they want me to wait? Why not tell me to put the briefcase down, get on an up escalator? Thieves, that’s why. They’d lost the money at the MCG. It would be a painful thing for them now if some lurking kid saw me move away, leave the briefcase unattended, grabbed it and ran. They could hardly chase him. No. Better to have me wait, guard their money. Hard-earned money. Blood money.

  I reached the bottom and stepped off, walked a few paces, stopped, put the briefcase between my feet, looked around.

  No one coming my way.

  They were watching, a final check to see that I was alone.

  I turned back to face the escalators. People going up, the stairs I’d left still empty. At the top, far away, a tall person pushing someone in a wheelchair was looking down. Didn’t they have lifts for wheelchairs? It couldn’t be safe coming down this steep stairway, thousands of interlocked steel knuckles moving.

  I looked around again. Where was the pick-up person? Looking at my watch, pointlessly looking at my watch, feeling a little tremor in my throat, looking back at the escalator, looking up, at the man with the wheelchair, it was a man, bearded, our eyes met in the way of animals, me on the canyon floor, him on the rim.

  Our eyes locked and his mouth opened, opened in his beard, I could see the pink of his mouth, pink like a rose, and he shouted:

  ‘HERE’S YOUR LITTLE SLUT YOU CARSON BASTARDS!’

  He pushed the wheelchair, pushed it and kicked it.

  Pushed it into the canyon, pushed and kicked it onto the moving steel steps.

  For a second, it was airborne, came down on its rubber tyres, bounced, lurched sideways, came upright.

  I could see the person on it, someone in a heavy coat, camel-coloured, a coat with a hood, a duffel coat, you didn’t see duffel coats these days…

  I didn’t think, ran, ran for the escalator, saw the wheelchair lurch forward, begin to topple…

  Saw the person on it, the hood falling off the face. Dark glasses.

  The dirty blonde hair, the lock falling forward…

  I was running up the moving stairs, against the stairs, running towards the wheelchair coming down, an impossible gap to bridge, the chair toppling, hitting the side of the stairs, bouncing across to meet the other side, Anne thrown about, thrown forward, not falling out, held by something, dark glasses off her face, in the air…

  Her eyes were open, pale eyes.

  The wheelchair was in the air, one wheel on the rail, people shouting.

  I could save her, stop her fall, if I could get there, get a hand on this chariot.

  Running uphill, the wheelchair above me now, going into space.

  I stumbled, falling, falling away from her, falling away from Anne, my arm out, my despairing, clutching hand.

  And then I touched a wheel, grabbed it, pulled the chair down, pulled it on top of me, pain as it met my face, my teeth, my throat, going over backwards, holding on to it, sliding, pain in my back, agonising pain, sliding, under the chair, head lower than heels…

  We were at the bottom, Anne and I, thrown across the threshold onto the tiles, the chair on my chest, screams, my scream, the screams of others, still in my ears.

  I fought clear of the wheelchair, got onto my knees at her feet.

  People still shouting.

  The hood was over her face again, her head lolling.

  Please God, not a broken neck, not now.

  I put my hands to her head, pushed it up, my fingers too big, too callous, pushed the hood away from her face. I pulled away the scarf around her neck, a woollen scarf, blood-red.

  Her mouth was open slightly, an unlipsticked mouth, pale, paler than her face. A child’s mouth.

  And her eyes were open, held open, taped with transparent tape, only the whites showing.

  I touched her face. Cold, cold beyond warming.

  Behind me, close, a woman screamed, a scream that resonated in that cold canyon, went to the walls and multiplied, came back and went up to the far roof and there expanded, grew and grew and formed a parachute over us, a canopy of livid sound, gradually turning to echo.

  I pulled the hood back over Anne Carson’s face, gently, gently over the lock of hair.

  Then I sat back on my heels and began to cry, just small sobs, nose and throat sounds at first, soon the other sounds, the sounds we cannot make, cannot call forth, the sounds that make themselves, that speak of pain and horror and helplessness and injustice, speak of regret, of the regrets. All the regrets.

  And so it ended, in a tiled space, pitiless light, pale people all around. A man and a wheelchair, a girl in the chair, bound to it, dead. The man on his haunches, weeping, keening.

  34

  From the windows of the homicide squad offices, you could look down on the lights of St Kilda Road, make out the Shrine of Remembrance where the flame never died, see the dark expanse of Melbourne Grammar’s playing fields. It was a quiet office, smelling of instant coffee, of too-pungent aftershave, of roll-on deodorant applied too lavishly.

  ‘So basically you found the sellers of the vehicle,’ said Detective Senior Sergeant Vella, ‘and ruled out the driver and the locksmith boyfriend.’ He was sitting opposite me, across two desks, two of the half-dozen plastic-veneered desks pushed together to form a dumping ground for files and folders and boxes.

  ‘Basically,’ I said.

  ‘Leaving only five security guards, two other drivers, gardeners, cooks, cleaners, disgruntled employees past and present by the hundreds, and so on.’

  ‘I wasn’t hired to conduct an investigation into everyone in the Carson empire,’ I said. ‘I was hired to hand over the money. How many times do I have to say that? Want me to say it again? I was hired to hand over the money.’

  ‘But you did start your own little investigation.’

  ‘We were waiting. I had nothing to do.’ My face was aching, my whole head, my neck and shoulders. ‘Got any aspirin?’

  Without looking, he opened a drawer, found a foil strip, threw it at me. I broke out three, washed them down with cold tea from a mug labelled Fuck Off, This Is My Mug.

  Vella’s eyes were closed and he was rubbing his temples. ‘Jesus, Frank,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. How could you let these people not call the cops? You had a duty to walk out of there and call us, tell us there’s been a kidnapping, fuck what the family wants, a fucking crime committed.’

  I thought about this, looked around the big room, only four people in it, looked at the newspaper posters on the bile-coloured walls, the files on the floor, the objects in labelled plastic bags, the death masks in a glass case, the board listing homicide cops long dead.

  Vella waited, sad expression.

  ‘I had no such duty,’ I said. ‘They called the cops once before and that girl’s only alive because of luck and her own efforts.’

  ‘This Noyce says you talked to the girl in England, to this one’s mother, he’s got a bill for surveillance on Barry Carson’s son.

  What’s the result of all that activity?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Just passing the time?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nothing of any use at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Vella pointed his long nose at the ceiling and sighed, scratched his head with both hands. ‘A week behind,’ he said. ‘She could be alive today. Now from one end, we have to chase up every fucking Tarago in Melbourne, visit every fucking opshop that might ever have
sold a duffel coat, ask ourselves where this arsehole got a wheelchair. And from the other, we’ve got a whole fucking small town to interview and that’s only the beginning. Two crews on it, fourteen people, and it isn’t enough.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ I said.

  He got up and came around the island, made a space on my desk and sat on it. Not looking at me, looking at the man sitting off to my right, he said quietly, ‘You get that thing to work?’

  I nodded.

  ‘See anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Looking for anything in particular?’

  ‘No. Just looking.’

  ‘Fuck, Frank, I’m compromised here. Who else knows?’

  ‘One person, there’s no risk there. Forget you gave it to me. I’ve forgotten.’

  A thin-faced man appeared in a doorway. ‘John,’ he said, ‘the Tarago’s clean, been gone over with meths, they think. And the wheelchair was stolen from Prince Alfred last Saturday.’

  ‘Things just get easier and easier,’ said Vella. ‘Tell me if you think of anything. Want a cab? Your face looks terrible.’

  The cab dropped me at the underground carpark entrance. I walked across the garden and into the main house through the side entrance.

  The house was quiet, smelling faintly of lavender wax. I went past the library, heard low voices, the smell of Tom’s panatellas. The door was ajar and I caught a glimpse of a fat ankle on a knee, a lurid homicide tie, a scalp gleaming under a homicide haircut.

  The study door was open. I didn’t knock, stood in the doorway. Pat Carson’s chair was swivelled to face the French windows and his secret courtyard, only the top of his head visible.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He didn’t turn, didn’t say anything, moved his head slightly.

  I waited a while. Then I turned and left the house, went to the Garden House and packed my things and Orlovsky’s. As I closed the front door behind me, I smelled cigarette smoke.

  ‘Frank,’ said Stephanie Carson, face flushed as if from exercise, girlish in a poloneck sweater, ‘it’s terrible to say this at a time like this, but, the other night, you won’t…they’ll kill me.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t remember the other night.’

  She flicked her cigarette away, didn’t look where it went, didn’t care, came up to me, a hand behind my head, on tiptoe kissing me on the lips, a full, sucking, wet, lascivious kiss, moved her head, teeth against mine, pressed her tongue into my mouth, pressed her pubic mound against me.

  I pulled away, picked up the bags and walked, drove out of the basement carpark in the old Alfa, aimed for home. Such as it was.

  35

  All the way, Stephanie on my lips, her perfume in my head, I thought about something I had said to Orlovsky on the day he fetched me from my helicopter trip to see Anne’s mother:

  This thing isn’t going to have a simple ending because it doesn’t have a simple beginning.

  I’d known that then and I knew it now, and I knew nothing more than that. But what did the beginning matter? The end was all that mattered. Had I caused the girl’s death on the morning I talked the Carsons out of bringing in the police? That depended on whether the police could have found her before the kidnappers killed her.

  But how could I be sure they always intended to kill her? What if my demand on Wednesday provoked them into killing her? These were not sane people.

  There were no answers to these questions and there was no point in asking them. But and but and but. In the same circumstances, Katherine Carson had blamed Barry for what happened to Alice.

  As the Carson family now blamed me. And from the beginning, I’d known the risk I was taking.

  If it goes wrong, it’ll somehow be my fault. And I’ll blame myself too. For not having the brains to walk out now.

  That was all I had to blame myself for: not walking out when I should have. What would they have done? Hired someone else? Brought in their international security consultants?

  All I had to blame myself for? All? Vella was right: my duty had been to leave the Carson house that night and tell the police that a girl had been kidnapped. The trail was fresh. An hour would have produced addresses for every Tarago ever registered in Victoria and, in a few hours more, the field narrowed to perhaps twenty per cent of them.

  In the cold and sordid apartment, too cold to take off my jacket, I lay on the sofa and ate old salt and vinegar chips, chips so old they could have been made from papyrus, drank wine left open in the fridge for I didn’t know how long. Too long, much too long.

  When the wine was gone, I thought about going out for more, hunted without optimism in the kitchen cupboards, experienced a miracle, found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in a box, gift-wrapped in striped paper, tied with a green ribbon. Little Morris had given it to me, the day I went to hand in my resignation, to short-circuit the procedure that began with my hands around Hepburn’s throat. ‘Everyone put in,’ he said. ‘They asked me to say, why is it you can never do a job properly?’

  I had come home and stuck the package somewhere, anywhere, out of sight, didn’t want to know about it, about no longer being a part of something bigger than myself.

  Anne. Dead how long? She had been cold, icy.

  Not a night to think about that. A suitable night to drink this expensive whisky and think about other things. Try not to think about anything would be better.

  The room began to warm, my aches diminished and I felt a numbness stealing over me, half-drunken numbness. I kicked off my shoes, put my glass on the floor, folded my arms, closed my eyes, could have gone to sleep, was going to sleep.

  Vibration in my chest. Insistent.

  I sat upright, clutched myself.

  Noyce’s tiny weightless mobile, not given back, not left behind in the Garden House, throbbing in my inside pocket.

  I got it out, with difficulty, squinted at the buttons, pressed the phone symbol.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The voice. Croaky John Wayne and awkward Jimmy Stewart and shy Alan Ladd and dry Randolph Scott, all in it.

  ‘Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.’

  I should have rung Vella. I didn’t, put the lights out, lay in the dark and sipped whisky till sleep threw itself over me like a blanket.

  36

  In the night, the dream of Afghanistan, one of the dreams, the one in which I am trying to get to Cowper, liquid-eyed Cowper, who is screaming, the scream of a child, calling for me. His captain. If I can get to him, I can save him. There is no logic in this, it is a dream. I am crawling towards him, gunfire, pieces of the helicopter burning around me. I am burdened by a weight, it holds me back, I move with agonising slowness. Then I realise what the weight is: my legs are missing, a large part of my legs, well above the knees. I am having to haul my body without help from my legs. And at the moment of this realisation, pain floods through me and I know that I cannot save Cowper because I am dying very quickly.

  I woke up, still there, still legless and bleeding to death on that dark Afghan plain, sat up, pushed away the blanket, felt for my knees, found them and lay back, exhausted, as wet as if I had been swimming. Eventually, I fell asleep again, but a fitful, fearful sleep this time, broken by the slam of a car door, a snarling cat skirmish, an alarm trilling far away. When I could see the dark behind the blind fading to grey, I got up, put on a tracksuit and runners and went out into the cold, near-empty world. It had been weeks and all the bits of my body that needed regular moving had stiffened up. For a while, everything hurt, my back, ankles, knees, but by the time I reached the Esplanade, I had found my stride, the pains were down to tolerable levels. And, gradually, the chemical balance in my bloodstream seemed to return to normal, my skin stopped feeling stretched like kite paper, my jaw stopped clicking.

  Running, early misty rain on my face, thinking, unable to stop thinking.
/>   Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.

  A grievance against the Carsons. Hatred, enough to kill an innocent girl for. Madness. Hatred turned to madness. What were the Carsons being blamed for? An eye for an eye. For a death? The death of someone in a part of the Carson empire, the diversified Carson empire, now not just a construction company but the owner of shopping centres and retail chains and big pieces of other companies? Industrial accidents? A death on a building site? Presumably there’d been many people killed over the years. Deaths for which the Carsons could be held directly responsible.

  Anthea Wyllie. The Altona nurse who vanished after seeing Mark Carson. Jeremy Fisher gave Mark an alibi. Was there a family who didn’t accept that, who thought Mark was responsible? What was it that made a rich city lawyer give his services to the needy in a distant suburb? Was he in search of prey?

  Did this mean Anne had been chosen simply because she was an available Carson, female Carson, because the kidnappers watched the school and followed Whitton’s car? Cars-he used three Carson cars. Chosen because she was the easiest Carson child to get to. Anne Carson was a soft target, walking down Revesdale Road alone, flushed from whatever took place in Craig’s yellow van, going into an alley. The other children were too young or too old, were elsewhere, far away. Anne’s younger sister, Vicky, went to an exclusive primary school, a walled school, driven in a minibus with five other rich children. The driver and guard came from a security firm.

  That would be a hard target.

  I ran out of legs on the home stretch, had to push myself, to ignore the body’s protests, to strive to hold the pace and not to weaken. Once I’d found satisfaction in that, asked it of others, demanded it of others. Not anymore. Proving yourself to yourself, to others above you and below you, that came to an end in fire and blood and broken bodies.

  At the apartment, I showered and shaved, put on a shirt laundered by the Carson housekeeping staff, grey flannels cleaned and pressed. Then I drove to Acland Street, bought the papers and had breakfast, no relish in the eating of it after I saw the front-page headlines, the grainy photographs lifted from Museum Station’s security cameras. Both papers carried sequences of pictures of the wheelchair on the escalator and blurred enlargements and a police artist’s sketches of the man’s bearded face, full on and in profile.