The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  ‘I was thinking of the snow,’ I’d said, pleased to have found a smart reply.

  Yet I knew that the night after, or the night after that, when Derek came home, and I felt like complaining because I’d been shut up inside all day with a sick child, I wouldn’t be able to. The luxury of complaint would be locked inside a small square room with ‘I told you so’ in bold red letters on the front.

  ‘What were you thinking of?’ ‘I told you so.’ Why did those two ­sentences sound so much the same? Judgement. Punishment. Some part of me sought that still.

  I realised that Detective Sergeant Brook was watching me, and that his expression was interested, not unsympathetic. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked.

  ‘Snow,’ I said. ‘And consequences. Cause and effect.’

  Brook didn’t come back into the house. He shook my hand at the driver’s door of his plain blue Toyota. I hesitated, wanting him to be gone, yet not wanting to be left on my own. I’m sure he knew this. His brown eyes were shrewd, and he smiled at me from beneath his hat.

  . . .

  ‘Heard about your accident. It wasn’t me.’

  It was the one-eyed man on the phone. I realised I’d been waiting for his call.

  ‘Who was it?’ I asked.

  ‘I really am sorry, Sandra. A broken arm’s a nuisance.’

  ‘Was it your idea?’

  ‘Hear your car was pretty mangled too. You should have taken my advice.’

  ‘I will from now on,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you can pass the message on.’

  When you’ve decided that your phone might be bugged, it makes you perform for unseen listeners. I was kind of getting the hang of it.

  The one-eyed man said, ‘I get the feeling that the police are satisfied Evans is their lady. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘I get feelings,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know what any of them mean.’

  . . .

  ‘You’re sure it was Whitelaw?’ Detective Sergeant Brook asked when I rang him a few minutes later.

  ‘Positive.’

  ‘Did he threaten you?’

  ‘He rang to offer his condolences.’

  Brook had some more information for me. Claire Disraeli’s parents lived in Townsville. She had a younger brother in Brisbane, also working in computing. No sisters, apparently no relations in Canberra. And she lived alone. A townhouse in Braddon.

  ‘Townhouse?’ I repeated vaguely.

  ‘That new block on Ainslie Avenue.’

  Brook asked me if this accorded with what I knew of Claire. I said I didn’t know anything about Claire’s personal life, apart from the fact that I believed she and Guy Harmer were lovers. I scrawled her address on the back of my shopping list. My left-handed writing looked as though Fred had dipped his claws in ink and scraped them across the page.

  ‘Like I told that hairy pal of yours’—Brook sounded pleased with himself—‘not up to legwork, so I let my fingers do the walking.’

  Hairy pal? Had Brook talked to Ivan since our walk in Southwell Park? But of course he would have. Had the detective sergeant repeated my accusations? What had Ivan said?

  ‘Here’s something else for you to think about. Disraeli wrote a couple of programs for them. For that Compic crowd. And the pretty one, that redhead, is being super-helpful. Offered us her books, any computer files we’d like to check.’

  Of course she has, I thought.

  To Catch a Thief

  Emptied of its treasures, Ivan’s house had the look of a dark-eyed, abandoned woman.

  Low clouds that had promised rain all day made the interior twilight dim. I flicked a light switch. The phone rang. Detective Sergeant Brook picked it up and spoke in gruff monosyllables.

  When Brook had phoned to tell me Ivan’s house had been burgled, I’d got in a taxi and gone straight there without giving myself time to think.

  Brook hung up the phone, and together we faced Ivan. ‘Was your stuff marked?’ Brook asked. ‘Have you got a list? How many people know about this set-up here?’

  Ivan looked at us as though these words were incomprehensible to him.

  Brook flicked a chair around and straddled it, leaning both arms across the back. His hat was off and a nailbrush of grey and brown stubble was sprouting from his head. He ran his hand lightly, quickly, over the top of it, through the air above it.

  ‘Listen to me, mate. How much of your equipment’s traceable?’

  Ivan said, ‘Bastard comes back, I’ll grab him by the balls and lock him in the broom cupboard.’

  Ivan had no broom cupboard, or broom to keep in it.

  I walked over to the wall and ran my finger down the place where the photograph of Alexander Graham Bell had been.

  No-one had switched on any lights yet at the back of the house. The glow along the corridor, no stronger than Peter’s night-light, was like the chance illumination of an abandoned stage. Ivan’s house reminded me more than ever of a place of bad spells, cordoned off by magic rather than police tape, a place sealed up and silent for a hundred years.

  A forensics van was outside, and voices echoed matter-of-factly through a wall. Yet the shadows were like the figures you get on a doubly exposed roll of film, their features diminishing in clarity, becoming more blurred one by one.

  A uniformed policeman came to the kitchen door, turning on lights and making the room suddenly grubby and ordinary. I walked out of the house and began a circuit of the yard. The first few drops of rain hit the top of my head like dollar coins. I hunched my neck between my shoulders, knowing that within minutes, seconds if I was unlucky, it would be pelting down.

  Outside the window of Ivan’s computer room, spiky grevillea branches looked bitten into, as though there’d been a dog fight. Gingerly, I parted wet, slippery spines. The light was grey and heavy, the colour of old Commonwealth Bank money boxes. Then I saw the print.

  I stared down at it, convinced that it was staring up at me, one round brown eye the colour of neglected soil. Soon, any second now, it would fill with water and disappear.

  ‘Who in their right minds would break into a house wearing stiletto heels?’ I asked Brook, after I’d called him to come and look. He was kneeling beside me, his brushy head lowered, studying the shoeprint.

  Brook grunted and stood up. ‘I don’t think this little baby was made by anybody climbing in the window.’

  I put a hand to my head, realising that the storm, after its metallic fanfare, was holding off.

  ‘The angle’s wrong,’ said Brook. ‘Too straight, too flush with the wall. There’re no high heel marks inside the house, no mud or dirt.’

  ‘Maybe she took them off?’

  ‘It’s just a little too convenient. This is how I think we got our lady’s shoe mark.’

  Brook opened the window as wide as it would go. It screeched and protested. ‘Jesus,’ he said to Ivan, who was watching us silently from inside the room. ‘Your neighbours must be bloody deaf.’

  Framed by the window in the semi-darkness, Ivan looked like a misplaced illustration from the Old Testament.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Brook said. He left me and reappeared a few seconds later, inside the room. Grunting, he leant out and dug a stick into the soft earth beside the grevillea. It made a clear, almost perfectly round print.

  ‘It’s a shoe, not just the heel,’ I said, feeling ridiculous.

  Ivan had disappeared.

  ‘Oh, I think whoever made the print had a shoe with them all right,’ said Brook. ‘They just weren’t Cinderella.’

  I went round to the back door. Ivan was crouched on a dilapidated kitchen chair under the Hills hoist. Ordinary mayhem was erupting somewhere else. An ambulance siren sounded very loud, but it could have been a couple of kilometres away. I pictured Ivan in another rented house, in another city. Would he choose one with dark bushes all around it? Would he carry a photograph, or any souvenir of his time with me?

  I wanted to touch him, make contact in some way, but I didn’t. He was sitting wit
h his back to the house, still as a winter statue. I’d moved quietly and he hadn’t seen me.

  Brook appeared at the door, placed a hand briefly on mine, and raised his voice. ‘Semyonov! I’ll need a list, a full statement of what’s missing. Phone me when you’ve done it.’ He turned to me. ‘Mrs Mahoney. Would you like a lift?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ I smiled at Brook gratefully, then looked back at Ivan.

  The storm was in the sky’s wings, waiting for its cue. Then the sun appeared beneath the clouds and turned them grey and rose, a million galahs wing-tip to wing-tip.

  ‘Take it as a compliment,’ Brook called out, directing a fist that was half a wave, half a punch in the air towards Ivan, who still hadn’t moved. ‘Bastards knew that if they crashed your system, you’d re-wire, be up and running in twenty-four hours. Only way they could be sure to stop you was to pinch the bloody lot!’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Brook,’ I said, as we were backing out of the drive, and I was wondering if we shouldn’t be looking for a nifty cross-dresser, ‘I love your hair.’

  . . .

  Ivan rang my doorbell late that night. My porch light carved him in yellow. He smiled uncertainly and swayed, and I moved forward instinctively to catch him. I held him against me, my thick, awkward arm for once not an encumbrance, but a fine buttress and a bridge.

  His skin was clammy, and the light picked out the grey wash of shock behind his eyes.

  ‘We’ll get them back,’ I said.

  I led Ivan in through all those doors and locks, and those other ­barriers of the mind with which I’d kept him out. I let him in and made him a hot drink and wiped his forehead, sticky as cement that wouldn’t set, and offered him the most basic, the merest, I suppose, of comforts.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Just tell me. Was it you or wasn’t it?’

  Ivan blinked. I could see him forcing his mind forward through incomprehension.

  ‘I’ve always thought it would be fun to rob myself blind,’ he said at last. ‘We make a good team. You panic first and jump to ridiculous conclusions. Now I’ll do the same. You broke into my house in the middle of the night and pinched all my gear. Now I’ve come to demand it back.’

  I laughed. Ivan didn’t.

  ‘Know why I chose computer science? My father was furious. A career for philistines, he called it. Something only an idiot would choose, when he could study history, philosophy, literature. You know, for a man who spent half his life committed to Marx and the other half denouncing him, my father misunderstood the basis of materialism.’

  Ivan picked up his hot chocolate and glared at me through the steam. With my good hand I heaped sugar into my mug, while Ivan said with fatalistic quietness, ‘It was as far away from European politics as I could get.’

  ‘They could go on like this until the trial,’ I told him. ‘It keeps them busy, but it keeps us busier, always on the back foot. We can’t give in now.’

  Ivan’s old brown jumper that smelt of wet dog was rucked up over his belly, his shirt loose, his head skewed to the side.

  ‘I’ll never be an inventor, Sandra. Did you know Babbage’s plans for the analytical engine weren’t rediscovered until 1937? And that was only because of Ada Lovelace?’

  Most of Ivan’s heroes I knew nothing about. But I’d heard of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician, friend and colleague of Charles Babbage who’d called her his Enchantress of Numbers.

  ‘Ivan,’ I said, ‘come to bed.’

  Ivan stared at me for a long moment, then followed me into the bedroom. He watched while I plumped up my doona with one hand, straightened the sheets, conscious of a rip in my pyjamas, the unseemliness of carting a plaster cast around with me everywhere.

  My plaster throbbed in the near dark, grew swollen and then shrank, like the white, pulsating light outside the labour ward at Royal Canberra Hospital the night my son was born. I followed it with my eyes, my breath. There was the dark shape of a man, the smell, the hair, the beard. Naked, Ivan had the look of a bewildered calf.

  In the middle of the night, he got up for a glass of water, and on the way back he walked into the end of the bed and cut his ankle and bled on the carpet.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said, in answer to my question about Brook. ‘He’s got leukemia. He’s gone into remission.’

  I looked down at my breasts, and thought about how I continued to inhabit the same body, day in and day out. I kissed my forearms, finger­tips, kissed the white skin of my plaster and found it tasted sweet.

  Some people lose too young what they love best, while others ­anticipate, with every breath, the loss that has not yet crippled them, so that in the end they cannot tell the difference between being given something and having it taken away.

  Towards dawn the phone rang and I ran to it, thinking only of Peter. It was Dianne Trapani. Tony had been in a car accident. He was in intensive care at Woden.

  . . .

  Strips of white bandaging made Tony’s face a mock-up drawing, a model someone was preparing for a sculpture. The bandages accented his thin face and dark colouring, yet he looked less Italian than French, a character made up for a part in a play about the Revolution.

  Detective Sergeant Brook was standing in front of the window at the end of Tony’s bed.

  I was so surprised to see him there that for a moment or two I couldn’t speak. Then I said in a rush, ‘Where’s the nurse? What’s going on?’

  Brook ignored my agitation and replied, ‘I was just having a few words with my friend here.’

  Tony’s expression was unreadable. It could have been that he was trying not to cry.

  ‘Where’s Dianne?’

  ‘Went off with the doctor,’ Brook said. ‘Be back in a few minutes.’

  I sat by Tony’s bed and held his hand. His parents were conspicuously absent. Tony tried to speak, but I shook my head to tell him that he shouldn’t.

  On our way out of the ward ten minutes later, Brook and I stopped at the sister’s desk to confirm what I was afraid of. Tony’s parents hadn’t come to the hospital, or left any message.

  Brook said, ‘I thought only kids could be that cruel.’

  As we walked out of the hospital together, to get some fresh air and find a place to talk, it was as though Brook and I had come round again to the point on a circle where we’d begun. It occurred to me that, in his first interview with me, Brook had been operating on a kind of automatic pilot, like one of Peter’s battery toys. And when he moved along the hospital corridor now, towards the main entrance, it was as though he was pushing against the physical barrier of strong wind.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘for snapping at you back there.’

  Brook nodded, accepting my apology indifferently, and said, ‘Poor little bugger could hardly open his mouth.’

  Outside the hospital’s main entrance, the air still had the singing clarity of an early spring morning. White awnings stretched above automatic doors and along a walkway to the road, giving the unlikely impression of a beach promenade at the height of summer. The rigging of Floriade flags rattled like ships’ masts.

  We stopped in front of a low brick wall decorated with a mosaic of enamel and coloured stone: grass, trees, a hill, houses, a man with a watering can. All the man’s internal organs were revealed—his heart, lungs, stomach, liver, thigh muscles and brain. And they didn’t look as if they would sustain life. They looked sick. I stared at them, revolted. What did the artist have in mind? A red-and-blue bird was flying past the man’s left ear.

  Brook leant against the mural, taking no notice of its subject matter or design.

  ‘Let’s sit over there,’ I said with a grimace, motioning him towards a bench underneath the awning.

  ‘How did you find out about Tony’s accident?’ I asked.

  ‘Policemen do talk to one another, Mrs Mahoney.’

  ‘Did you tell Tony about my car?’

  ‘What do you take me for, a ghoul?’

  I smiled and said,
‘I don’t know. You might be.’

  The more I stumbled on, the more the connections I made seemed like tiny sudden spasms, stabs of light.

  ‘When will you get the report on Tony’s car?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Brook answered. ‘There’s a queue.’

  ‘You think it’s my fault, don’t you?’

  ‘Who’d link the kid with you?’

  ‘Ateeq. Allison Edgeware. Professor Bailey. Ivan.’

  Brook rubbed his hand over his hair.

  ‘Anyone who’d taken the trouble to monitor my computer would’ve seen the emails Tony sent me about Allison and Compic,’ I said. ‘Not that they contained any startling revelations.’

  The white awning leached the colour from our faces, a fickle, ­fabricated suggestion of the seaside. It seemed that Brook was mentally plotting the irregular steps he’d taken, surprised at the point they’d brought him to. Or maybe he was just thinking I was a crabby woman, more trouble than I was worth.

  How could I tell him that by failing Tony, I was somehow failing Peter too?

  A statue of a skinny heron standing over a fish looked skeletal and ugly. I stared at my thick wrist, turning it slowly towards the light and back.

  Brook said, ‘I interviewed the boy and his mate. Coupla weeks back now. The Pakistani kid. Soon as you told me about them. Tony asked me not to say anything to his folks, so I didn’t. At the time there didn’t seem to be a pressing need. But I did drop by Akewa Hi-Fi and have a chat to Ateeq’s Mum. She told me they’d stopped paying his phone bills months ago. Cocky little bugger, boasting that his folks were loaded and didn’t give a shit. Mum had a different story.’

  ‘So where’ve they been getting the money from?’

  Brook sighed and said, ‘I reckon that crusty old Professor is spot-on. I went to see him too. They were using his account. The ANU was footing the bill, no doubt about it.’

  ‘Do you think they’re the ones who booby-trapped my car?’

  ‘Like I said, I’m a fussy bastard when it comes to checking details, but at this point no, I wouldn’t put my money on the kids.’

  Was Tony alone upstairs in that bed, thinking that he could have died? Or that somebody might want him dead? In spite of what Brook had just said, I did not feel reassured.