The Trojan Dog

by Dorothy Johnston

  I stood up, saying, ‘I’m going back up to the ward. I want to see Dianne.’

  I began to say goodbye when Brook spoke, forestalling me. ‘You know, they’ve given me a deadline.’

  For a shocked moment, I thought he was referring to his cancer, to the doctors.

  Brook stood up too, in an oddly formal way, looking over my left shoulder, not meeting my eyes. ‘Boss reckons I’m barking up a gum tree. Fraudies’ve got their pinch. I should let justice take its course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I reckoned they owed it to me, you know, like instead of a gold watch.’

  ‘A deadline? You mean a date?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve got until October 1st.’

  . . .

  Tony smiled, at least I think he did. As the light strengthened, white bandages made his face into a human badge, camouflage for moonlight.

  Reflections through high hospital windows were suddenly too bright, white bouncing off white as though repelling such a simple thing as looking out with open eyes. The light bleached every corner of linoleum. In midsummer, heavy vertical blinds would make the ward a green-and-yellow upstairs cave, artificially cooled air flowing over every surface, creating the uniform temperature of a hole under the Nullarbor.

  Dianne wasn’t there. I sat down again by Tony’s bed. ‘What ­happened?’ I asked him. ‘Can you tell me?’

  Tony’s bruised jaw opened just enough to make his words intelligible. He’d been a bit over the speed limit, he said.

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Driving.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Ran off road. Hit the—hit a tree.’

  ‘Has anyone from Compic phoned you?’ I asked. ‘Or contacted you in any way at all?’

  Before Tony could answer, Dianne appeared, filling the swing doors of the ward with her ashen dress, her tangled hair and swollen eyes. She looked surprised to see me there, as though she’d forgotten that she’d phoned me. I said I’d like to talk to her, and that I didn’t mind waiting in the cafeteria while she spoke to Tony.

  Dianne nodded, too worried about her brother to take in much else. I told Tony that I’d call in to see him tomorrow or the next day. I grabbed his hand and squeezed it, whispering, ‘Hang in there.’

  On my way to the cafe, I took a wrong turn and ended up near the main entrance. I stopped to get my bearings next to what appeared to be a bridal-wear shop. Most of the window space seemed to be taken up with multiple white flounces and a veil. The shop was closed. It was hard to see how anyone would make the trip to Woden Valley Hospital to buy their wedding dress.

  Some twenty minutes later, Dianne sighed and slid into the seat beside me, saying, ‘Thanks for coming.’ She spread her hands palms downwards on the cafe table, fingers splayed and tense.

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  Di felt for her cigarettes, then remembered that she couldn’t smoke them there.

  ‘Tone was pissed, you see. I can’t believe they’re doing this to him.’

  ‘You don’t think he deliberately—’

  ‘Tone didn’t think. Doesn’t. That’s his problem. Just had one too many.’

  We were on the third floor, level with the treetops. The cafe was practically empty. I realised that we were in the section reserved for staff. I’d misread the arrows at the entrance, which way was staff and which way public. But they couldn’t be too particular about it, because no-one came over and asked us to leave. A folded room divider had a top that sloped steeply down towards the floor. I couldn’t quite see how it was meant to work. It was painted improbably cheerful colours, orange tree-trunks, sky straight out of a tube.

  I fetched two coffees. When I handed Dianne hers, she gulped it down and reached for her cigarettes again.

  ‘I’m sure you’re doing your best,’ I said.

  She grimaced.

  ‘Do your parents know about the tribunal?’

  ‘I told them last night. Only way to make them understand. The grog. That he was depressed. Got me bloody nowhere.’

  A sign on the noticeboard above our heads said ‘Wanted: Dragon Ladies. Women required to paddle a dragon boat.’ Training once a week. That could be a distraction. Of course, I’d have to wait for my arm to heal.

  ‘What will Tony do when he’s discharged?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s not going back there. I won’t let him, even if they will, which I doubt. He can stay with me.’

  I waited a few moments then said, ‘Dianne? What happened between you and Rae Evans?’

  Dianne gave me a long look. I could see her thinking about brushing me off, how, under other circumstances, a brush-off would have risen quickly to her lips, followed by a dose of sarcasm large enough to shut me up. But she hesitated, and then it was too late. Dark brown patches crimped the skin under her eyes, deep lines curved from her nose to the corners of her mouth.

  ‘This coffee’s shit,’ she said. ‘But I’m thirsty. Want another one?’

  ‘No thanks, but go ahead.’

  Waiting for Dianne to come back, I remembered I was supposed to be at work. I looked around for a phone to tell them—tell who?—I’d be a little late.

  When Dianne came back with her coffee, she looked at me levelly and said, ‘You’re either with Evans or against her.’ She raised an eye­brow, testing my response, but I don’t think she cared much what it was.

  ‘Evans buys your allegiance, and then you have to sing her song.’

  ‘Which is?’ I asked.

  ‘You would have recognised the tune.’

  ‘Since it was interrupted,’ I said, ‘could you tell me? Spell it out?’

  Listening to Dianne’s story, told in her stop-go voice, more staccato than usual because of her fatigue and preoccupation with her brother, my throat went dry, and I found it hard to swallow.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ I said when she’d finished. ‘Rae Evans wanted you to change some figures in the outwork report, to exaggerate the difference between outworkers’ rates of pay and the award rates?’

  ‘Not change. You’ve got to understand how these things’re done. Evans made it clear to me that she wanted a particular interpretation.’

  ‘And you said no?’

  ‘She didn’t ask me directly, so I didn’t have to, but I knew what I was supposed to do.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I stalled. Wasn’t that I objected outright to her interpretation. It was possible. Not the most likely, not the one I would’ve chosen, but remotely possible. What I objected to was how she did it. Such a lady. And so fucking superior.’

  ‘Who knew about this?’ I asked.

  ‘Apart from me and Evans? No-one. I didn’t tell a soul.’

  . . .

  Bambi made a fuss of me when I turned up at work later that day. She brought me a bunch of flowers, and I thanked her without wanting to reflect on where they’d come from. We sat down together and worked out how to steer the report through its final stages. Bambi was ­surprisingly sensible, and had one or two really good ideas. I felt my dull head clear, and though I knew it was only a temporary reprieve, I let myself enjoy it.

  Guy Harmer wrote a get-well message on my arm. ‘Dear Sandra. Break two legs.’ He bent over my plaster in his Christian Dior shirtsleeves. I was conscious of my unironed skirt, savouring the novelty of looking down on Guy’s blond head with the slightest hint of thinning at the crown. The idea that Guy might go bald early made him more human, as vulnerable to the tics and long road of ageing as the rest of us.

  I put down the phone after talking to Rae’s lawyer and once more getting nowhere. I wanted to rip the cord from the wall and wind it round his Brut-sprinkled neck. He wouldn’t say what he’d done with any of the information I’d passed on to him. Either he didn’t trust me, or else, as I suspected, he was preternaturally thick.

  Brook phoned as I was getting ready to go home. Tony’s car was clean.

  ‘I thought you said you wouldn’t get the repo
rt until to-morrow.’

  ‘I pulled a string,’ Brook replied with that demure dryness I liked in him so much.

  I Know You Like the Colour Red

  Allison Edgeware appeared out of the late-night shopping crowds in Garema Place. Had she seen me in the queue at the ATM?

  I braced myself, heavy arm out to one side for balance, legs square on the concrete, while Allison walked towards me, holding out her hand and smiling. Her face clouded and she said, ‘Whatever happened to you, Sandra?’

  ‘You’re obviously a woman of many talents,’ I replied. ‘I should congratulate you.’

  Allison laughed and said, ‘Congratulate me—what for?’

  I raised my fat white arm between us, as a posse of girls dressed for Friday night brushed past. Allison’s brown eyes were locked on mine in an expression of concern.

  ‘Let me buy you a cup of coffee or something, Sandra. You look as though you need it.’

  I stood flat-footed, lumpish in one spot, for a crazy second ­picturing my arm as weapon, basher, thumping Allison with it, knocking her out cold.

  ‘I’ve told the police everything I know,’ I said, ‘and now I’m staying out of it.’

  Allison smiled again, a picture of bewilderment and clear-eyed ­innocence. ‘Stay out of what? I’m sorry, but I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

  My memory of the accident rose in my throat, a lump of bloody bile and gristle.

  Allison said, ‘I have to hand it to you, Sandra. You’ve got quite an imagination. I’d be enjoying this conversation if I had the foggiest idea what it was all about.’

  . . .

  At home, I turned the lights on in every room, including the laundry. Then I sat at the desk in Peter’s room and laboriously wrote two names on a clean sheet of paper: Rae Evans. Ivan Semyonov. I turned the paper over and wrote them again, leaving a bigger space between each one. I drew two columns. In the first I wrote what each one might have done, in the second the reasons why I hoped they hadn’t.

  Hacking blurred all boundaries, not just those it was convenient to blur. At certain times before, I’d had the feeling that I was closing in on the hacker—not in the sense that he or she was a stranger and I was approaching from a distance, along a line or path existing in the outside world in three dimensions. But, accepting that the hacker might turn out to be a stranger, but might, as credibly, be someone I saw every day, somebody I cared about—accepting both these possibilities—I now had the feeling that I was growing closer inwardly. I can think of no better word for it than that. To some extent, and awkwardly, I had mimicked my enemy’s methods, and this had changed me more than I ever could have guessed.

  . . .

  Brook phoned and asked me, ‘Do you like geraniums?’

  He told me proudly that he’d finally prised the first-aid-room disk from Felix.

  ‘What’s on it?’ I asked.

  ‘Jokes,’ said Brook.

  ‘Jokes?’

  ‘Drawing of a bloody great terracotta pot with a red geranium, over water, but in the reflection there’s no flower. I mean, like the pot’s completely empty.’

  ‘Jesus.’ I was thinking that whoever was listening to our call, if anyone was, would have something to chew over at least. The police hadn’t found any bugs on my phone, but I wasn’t convinced.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Brook?’ I said. ‘Be careful when you make a copy.’

  He chuckled and hung up.

  Unable to get to sleep, I began another detective novel. I crunched through them like chocolates with hard centres. I like the moral ones best, Adam Dalgliesh and Inspector Thomas Lynley. Upright, sensitive, thinking men. Gorgeous.

  I read until my eyes crossed, but as soon as I put out the light, settled into the pillows, I was wide awake again. Late at night I surfed TV channels, looking for a story as different from mine as I could imagine.

  . . .

  ‘I see you’ve taken up drinking,’ I said to Ivan, unable to keep my voice quite steady. But surely no-one was likely to leap out of the woodwork and clobber me while I was sitting back in the dark red warmth at Tilley’s enjoying a Cooper’s Light.

  ‘Only when phoney coppers give me no choice.’ Ivan held up his glass. ‘Babe.’ He saluted me and winked.

  Brook ducked his head and grinned lop-sidedly.

  ‘Copper!’ Ivan crowed. ‘Put your hat back on. You’re indecent, man.’

  ‘What’s the celebration?’ I asked, looking from one man to the other, already feeling superfluous, and wondering why Ivan had phoned and asked me to join them.

  Brook reached one arm round Ivan’s shoulders, the other around mine, and brought our heads down close to his. ‘Know why I did those computer courses?’ He chuckled in our ears. ‘I got sick of looking at dead people.’

  Real coppers, coppers with a future, he told us with the expression of a man giving away state secrets, were too busy chasing real crooks who had beaten, knifed or shot someone, or stolen something you could touch. Did he mean the fraud squad? Them, too. They were chasing money you could stuff inside your underpants. That’s what they understood.

  ‘I’ll tell you about the case of the shoe factory.’ Brook made us lean further forward, and his voice was a soft hiss. ‘This was before my conversion. Called a factory, but in actual fact a whole lot of Vietnamese and Cambodian women cutting up leather in a shed at the back of a house. You need sharp knives for that, and one day one of them took to the boss with hers. No doubt she was provoked. When we turned up, all the women were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and working their way through the contents of the fridge. Reckon they were half-starved. The one who’d done it was cool as a cucumber. Offered me some spring rolls!’

  The two men laughed.

  ‘What happened to the woman?’ I asked.

  ‘Her boss bled to death, unfortunately. She got manslaughter.’

  I leant back in my chair and stared at the stage, its row of pretty cream lights winking round the edge. I liked Tilley’s, but it seemed an inappropriate choice for an ex-homicide cop and a techie who might also be an attempted murderer.

  It used to be that men were only allowed at Tilley’s if accompanied by a woman. It was many years since that rule had been relaxed, but it had given the bar an edge, a notoriety that it had never quite lost.

  I imagined myself up there behind the stage lights and felt a stab of self-pity because I never would be. I couldn’t sing, or play any kind of music. I’d taken myself to Tilley’s a few times when Peter was a baby, a night out, a rare escape. I’d sat alone in that dark, fluid space and soaked the voices, the guitars and keyboard through my skin.

  I counted the lights—two large ones on the floor of the stage at either side, one at the back, and above, at ceiling height, nine more. Fans rolled above our heads. The carpet, walls and ceiling were a deep burgundy shading into black. The wall lights were fake diamonds with the backs cut off, the long downward pointing end of each one fitting into a gold bracket. Photographs of famous artists filled two-thirds of one wall, under a black banner with Tilley’s Keeping Music Live in large gold letters.

  ‘As well as geraniums,’ Brook said more soberly, ‘that disk of yours had a nice little present of a computer virus tucked away inside.’

  He bowed towards me, brandishing his crewcut. ‘From my con­versation with Wenborn, it seems he doesn’t believe your story about finding the disk.’

  ‘If it hadn’t happened,’ I said. ‘I doubt if I’d believe it either.’

  I glanced across at Ivan, who had his head bent over his beer and appeared to be giving it his full attention. ‘Felix just gave you the disk? Why didn’t he take it to the police before?’

  ‘Like I told you, it’s harder to refuse a sick man.’

  ‘I was sure it was Bambi who left it there,’ I said. ‘I told you I saw Bambi go into the first-aid room earlier that day.’

  ‘Was she carrying anything?’

  ‘She could easily have tuc
ked the disk up somewhere in her clothes.’

  I tried to sound convincing but, like so much of what had ­happened, this seemed ridiculous.

  Two young women were working behind the bar. Their shirts under black waistcoats glowed a luminous bluish-white. The strongly angled bar lights made the cakes behind the glass display front twinkle and pulsate, as though there were crystals embedded in the icing.

  The old feeling came to me again of watching performers on a stage, and I was suspended somehow, neither an actor nor a legitimate member of the audience, ticket paid for, popcorn clasped in hand. I wasn’t comfortable in either role. I had a giddy feeling that might be stage fright, but was really closer to travel sickness, somewhere indeterminate, unfixed in space.

  When Ivan went to get refills for the three of us, Brook passed his hand over the top of his head and said, ‘I’ve been looking for anything linking Edgeware to your department—boyfriend, girlfriend, former employer, sister, brother, maiden aunt. She comes up clean every time.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be that obvious,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure she has an accomplice. A partner inside DIR.’

  Brook followed my line of sight and said, ‘I got the impression you two had kissed and made up.’

  I couldn’t tell whether Brook was pleased about this, or whether, as far as he was concerned, the fact that I’d named Ivan as my chief suspect, yet continued seeing him, simply set the seal on my stupidity. I guessed that my physical safety wasn’t top on Brook’s list of priorities. He had one foot inside the shoe of his policeman’s habits and responsibilities, but the other was way off somewhere, dancing to a different tune.

  Ivan came back, and was handing me a full glass of beer when he stumbled and managed to knock over both our drinks. Beer splashed on to the table and all over me.

  ‘Oh fuck. Sorry, Sand. Here.’ Ivan pulled out his hanky. I looked at it and said, ‘No, thanks. There’ll be a towel or something in the Ladies.’

  In the toilets, I dried my skirt as best I could with paper towels. My good hand was shaking. I knew I didn’t want to stay there any longer. I’d make my excuses and then leave.