Covet

by Tara Moss

  ‘Thanks for speaking with us again today,’ Andy began. ‘Now, you told my colleagues that the prisoner Ed Brown slept odd hours. What were odd hours?’

  ‘Like, five in the afternoon or so until midnight.’

  ‘Can you tell us anything else about that? Any impressions?’ Mahoney said, mimicking Andy’s own style of questioning, and trying not to lead him too much about the night-shift guard, Harpin. ‘Why do you think he did that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I barely spoke to him at all myself, but he was definitely odd, even compared with the others. And not just the sleeping.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he talks funny, I guess you already know that,’ Stevens said.

  Andy nodded. ‘What about his habits? Anything else that stands out?’

  Stevens scratched the stubble on his head with one mighty hand. Andy noticed scars on his knuckles. ‘Well, he is a clean freak. Really afraid of germs. He was always very, very clean, obsessively clean, which you don’t see a whole lot of in here. There’re always guys defecating on the floors and spitting, smearing stuff on the walls. But Ed kept his cell real nice. Oh, and he, ah…’ Stevens laughed. ‘He watches soap operas.’

  Andy was stunned.

  ‘Soap operas?’

  ‘Yeah, The Bold And The Beautiful. He watched it religiously, the last six months or so.’

  ‘It can be addictive,’ Mahoney murmured.

  ‘Brown was always courteous, and never caused me any trouble. Maybe it made my job easier that he was asleep. Ms Harpin seemed to know him better.’

  ‘What do you mean by “She seemed to know him better”?’ Andy pressed.

  ‘I don’t mean anything by it, it’s just that I know she spoke to him on occasion and I certainly didn’t.’ Stevens seemed on guard suddenly. ‘I don’t mean to say there is anything to it. I’m not going to rubbish Suzie.’

  ‘We understand.’ Andy shifted in his chair. He was definitely on to something. He’d hit a nerve.

  ‘Look, Ms Harpin has been here for as long as I can remember,’ Stevens went on, visibly uncomfortable. ‘She is a solid worker, tough and professional. Practically part of the walls.’

  He seemed reluctant to suggest anything negative about his colleague. Andy respected that, but dirt was what they wanted, not teamwork. If there was something suspicious about Harpin, he would have sensed it.

  ‘But you were concerned…’ Andy coaxed.

  ‘I had never seen her chat with one of the prisoners like that before. It struck me as odd, that’s the only reason I mentioned it,’ he said. ‘But he slept all day, and there was no one much up at night so they might have been talkative because of that.’

  ‘So, most of his waking time would have been on Ms Harpin’s shift,’ Mahoney jumped in.

  He nodded.

  ‘And how long have you known Ms Harpin?’

  CHAPTER 44

  ‘What on earth are you eating?’

  Mak sat cross-legged on a sofa cushion on the living-room floor in the early evening, watching the bright lights of Hong Kong through the tall windows. She had her dinner in a bowl in one hand and a copy of Sandra Lee’s Beyond Bad in her lap. She looked up to see a tall, dramatically thin brunette with arched eyebrows standing in the doorway. She spoke in a Cockney accent.

  ‘I’m eating soup. I think,’ Mak replied.

  Finding a good grocery store within walking distance had proved a challenge, but Mak had stumbled across a tiny, hole-in-the-wall kiosk and bought some packages of noodles with Chinese writing all over them from the fantastically wrinkled old lady who smiled kindly at her from behind the counter. Mak had just cooked up a bowl of the stuff and it actually tasted pretty good, though salty, a bit like ichiban.

  ‘Yuck, carbs,’ the woman said.

  ‘You are Gabrielle, I presume?’

  ‘Gabby, yeah. Who are you?’

  ‘Makedde Vanderwall. It’s nice to meet you.’ She stood up.

  ‘Don’t go in the first bedroom. That’s mine,’ Gabby said flatly.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘And don’t touch my towels. They’re the white ones hanging over the towel rack.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m off. Meeting some friends at the Felix.’

  ‘Ah, I love Philippe Starck’s designs. I’ve heard it’s fabulous,’ Mak said, still trying to be friendly.

  ‘What?’

  Mak had seen magazine stories on the Felix bar and restaurant. It was a marvel of design with sloping walls and a circular bar with illuminated floors. Apparently, there were faces of some of the designer’s friends sculpted into the walls.

  Gabby looked blank.

  Mak forced a smile. ‘Um…well, have fun,’ she said.

  Gabby was already jogging to forbidden bedroom number one as Mak resumed her solitary position by the window.

  The shower went on in the bathroom, and then off again. Mak heard bare feet and then the click of shoes, the sound of closets opening and closing. In less than fifteen minutes Gabby was gone.

  Her first night in Hong Kong, and Mak had plenty of time to ruminate on the events of the previous week. What was happening in Sydney? Were they any closer to catching Ed? God, I hope he hasn’t hurt anyone else. It was tough to fathom his escape.

  The thought of him walking free disturbed her right to the core of her being.

  CHAPTER 45

  The immigration officer looked them over. He was a short Chinese man in quasi-military dress, and he held their two passports in white-gloved hands. Shrewd black eyes looked carefully at the passport photos and back to them, back to the passport photos, back to them. Looking, looking.

  Suzie Harpin.

  Ben Harpin.

  They didn’t look much like brother and sister. They did, however, look like they could be husband and wife. Ed Brown wore a gold band on his ring finger. It had belonged to Ben Harpin, the Prison Lady’s dismembered brother, and she had happily thawed the frozen hand that was wearing it and removed it for Ed’s purpose before they left. It was a plain wedding ring, much like the one Ed had worn in the past to help lull his ‘girls’ into a false sense of security. The band was a bit big for Ed’s thin fingers, but he was careful to keep it in place. The Prison Lady wore a cheap costume jewellery ring on her left hand. The glass stone could have been a diamond, if you didn’t look very hard. But it was enough. It was enough to make them look like Mr and Mrs Harpin, coming to visit lovely Hong Kong on holidays.

  Ed noticed with a touch of uneasiness that there were a number of heavily armed guards at Hong Kong airport, dressed in pressed and polished military uniform. The Red Army, he supposed, although they weren’t dressed in red. The security at Sydney airport hadn’t been toting submachine guns like these men. None of the guards were looking at him, he didn’t think. Not yet. Their weapons hung from their necks on long straps, their fingers held close to the trigger. Ed had never been to an airport before boarding this flight to Hong Kong. He had never flown before. The thought of being in the air made him nervous, but the security and immigration officers gave him much more concern. And the guns. He didn’t like the guns he saw now, especially after experiencing the destructive impact of a bullet from Detective Flynn’s Glock pistol.

  ‘Well, I just can’t wait to see Hong Kong,’ the Prison Lady gushed. ‘We’ve always wanted to come.’

  The immigration officer did not respond.

  Shut up, woman.

  The black eyes narrowed, looked them over again, looked at the photo of Ben Harpin…

  Ed had dyed his hair dark brown to match it, with a messy dye that had stained the porcelain sink in the big suburban house, but he was much thinner in the face than Ben appeared to have been. He was also shorter, and his nose was different too. The tenuous resemblance was probably enough for a glance. Enough for a glance, but for this? He had wanted to discard the Prison Lady, especially after she had proved that she was not useful as a source of money, having only withdrawn a mea
sly $200 from her account. She’d said that was all she could access; most of her money was tied up, apparently. But the game had changed once he he found out where Makedde had gone. Ed knew well that the authorities would be looking for him at every port. A man travelling alone would stand out as suspicious, but a man and his wife? The relief at slipping through Sydney airport had been enormous. He was good at keeping his cool, but he knew perfectly well that he never would have made it through without his ‘wife’ and his changed appearance. He was not home free, though. Not yet.

  Black eyes examining, squinting…

  Come on, wave us through.

  The officer was stalling. Other people were being waved through, but not them. Ed could feel himself begin to sweat. Did he look nervous? Did those black eyes sense that something was wrong?

  He waited to hear, ‘Would you come this way, please?’ or more likely a fast string of Chinese words that would bring the armed guards down upon them to haul them away to prison. At Sydney airport, he had been nervous when he’d had to take off his shoes and belt going through a big metal detector, but the security man on the other side had smiled and sent him and the Prison Lady on their way to the gate without incident. As it turned out, no one was interested in an innocuous looking brown-haired man and his plain wife. That’s exactly what Ed had counted on. But what if the police had caught up with them? Perhaps they had cottoned on to the Prison Lady’s involvement.

  ‘Thank you,’ the man said, unsmiling, and waved them over to another officer.

  Ed’s stomach dropped.

  The other officer looked the same to Ed—same uniform, same black eyes taking in their every move. He led them over to a large machine that Ed did not recognise, and made motions to see their passports. They handed them over, Ed’s heart pounding.

  ‘Australian?’ they were asked in a heavy accent.

  They nodded.

  The officer examined their passports.

  Behind the strange machine a woman with a surgical mask pointed some kind of sensor at them and peered intently at a computer screen. Ed could not see the screen display. He felt a bead of sweat roll down his temple.

  ‘Thank you, yes,’ the officer said, and handed their passports back with some documentation.

  Relief.

  It was a brochure on SARS. The nurse behind the computer had been checking their body temperature for flu symptoms. They were free to go.

  Ed smiled.

  He and the Prison Lady collected their luggage, walked past more armed guards and finally emerged through sliding doors into the sweltering cacophony of a Hong Kong morning.

  They’d made it through.

  Ed Brown was in Hong Kong.

  And there was no Andy Flynn this time.

  CHAPTER 46

  By eight-thirty in the morning on Tuesday Makedde was already wandering through the Central District of Hong Kong, feeling remarkably positive and relaxed. She gawked at the sights around her.

  The giant Bank of Hong Kong building loomed above her, extending higher than the rest of the impressive concrete towers that crowded the sky in all directions. Puffs of cloud reflected in thousands of office windows spread over blocks and blocks of dense urban jungle. So many millions of people on one island. Mak had the peculiar sensation of wading through a solid, chest-high sea of strangers as she moved along the bustling streets. But of course she was the stranger. Her towering height and Western features stuck out like sore thumbs, but she was politely ignored for the most part.

  Sparkling designer shops with impressive window displays beckoned from all directions: Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Givenchy, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior. Like most models, Mak wore their clothes in photo studios and on catwalks but couldn’t afford to buy them. It was fun to window shop, though, and dream.

  Spotting the ubiquitous green signage of a Starbucks across the road, Mak had to laugh. Starbucks had popped up everywhere in the world, as McDonald’s had done decades before. She shook her head and thought of her meeting with Loulou in Sydney. And of Andy.

  She hadn’t called him.

  And what will you say when you do?

  She was tempted to get in touch, though they seemed destined to be apart. The thought of letting him go made her sadder than she was willing to accept.

  ‘Copy watch! Copy watch!’ someone cried out. She spun around, startled. It was a tall Indian man with a stack of photocopied brochures. He tried to press one into her hand. ‘Rolex?’

  ‘No thank you,’ she replied, and moved away from him, crossing the street with the flow of pedestrian traffic. A young girl in pigtails and neon space boots pointed at Mak and said something excitedly to her friend. Who knew what they thought of the gargantuan lumbering white woman with the big blonde head? If she were them, she would laugh too.

  ‘Faith Hill! Faith Hill! Photo! Photo!’

  What?

  The girl with the pigtails ran up to her. She and her friend had the Tokyo punk look, and Mak wondered if they were visitors as well.

  ‘Faith Hill!’ the girl said again, clearly excited.

  ‘Oh, um…sorry, I’m not Faith Hill,’ Mak replied.

  Her statement didn’t register. The glowing smiles and excited giggles did not wane. Mak thought momentarily of telling them her real name to prove that she was not the tall blonde country singer they sought, but thought better of it. If they didn’t speak English, the words ‘Makedde Vanderwall’ wouldn’t help.

  ‘Photo!’ The girl with the pigtails nodded eagerly. ‘Photo!’

  Now a shiny compact digital camera had been produced, no larger than a cigarette lighter, and the girls looked around for someone to take their photo. Fine. Mak posed beside the giggling duo, who she guessed were no older than thirteen, while a grim-faced businessman stopped to take the photo for them and exchange some quick words in Cantonese. Once the girls had their picture, they took off, still excited.

  ‘You’re not Faith Hill,’ the man said in flawless English.

  ‘I know,’ Mak replied, and stood on the street alone.

  CHAPTER 47

  Lisa Milgate-Harpin knocked on the front door of Ben’s house with one hand, and held her mobile phone to her ear with the other. Her face was set in a frown, eyes narrowed.

  There was still no answer at either the door or the phone.

  This, she had decided, would be the last time she would attempt civility with him. Ben was being rude and unreasonable, not even returning her calls or bothering to make any attempt to cooperate. He was obviously trying to avoid a divorce by simply not responding to her. It was an irritatingly immature attitude, another item to add to her list of things she could not forgive Ben for.

  That’s it. I’m coming in.

  Lisa stuck her key into the door. It still fitted. After everything, he had not changed the locks. She was hardly surprised. Changing the locks would take effort, something Ben was not adept at. Lisa turned the key and the door opened with a creak. There was no sound inside the house. Lisa gave a quick glance over her shoulder, as if expecting to see her soon-to-be ex-husband approaching behind her, but there was no one on the drive, no curious neighbour watching from the safety of their manicured lawn. Lisa quickly shut the door behind her.

  ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Helloooooooooooooo?’

  With an unexpected rush of triumph, she climbed the stairs. She had not entirely anticipated that she would come inside, or that her key would still work, but now that she was in the house it felt good. There had been no car in the drive this time, and she had noticed a couple of days’ mail in the letterbox by the door. So he had finally taken a holiday, had he? Ben Harpin had been the disappointing kind of husband who thought that an episode of The Simpsons was as good as a night out at an expensive restaurant, and a spot of smelly fishing with his mates was more fun than a luxury cruise. Come to think of it, he was probably fishing now. The bastard might have said something to her if he was planning a trip. Maybe she should call his mate Brad and see if he was with him.
It would have been nice if Ben had left a message for her somewhere so she didn’t have to waste all this time.

  Nevertheless, Ben’s absence was a blessing. If he wasn’t going to return her calls, then she owed him nothing. While she was at the house, she would pick up the cappuccino machine. He couldn’t stop her, and really, it was hers. So what if Heinrich had a perfectly good Krups? It had been Lisa’s decision to put the Gaggia cappuccino maker on the wedding gift registry, therefore it was hers. Ben had not done any of the research. He probably didn’t even know how to use it.

  Lisa was almost at the top of the stairs when she sensed that something was amiss. Perfume? The house smelled strangely of lavender.

  ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

  The house responded with eerie silence. Lisa walked into the living room and her jaw fell open.

  What is this?

  The biggest shock for Ben’s wife was that the house was spotlessly neat. Ben was not a tidy man, left to his own devices. And there was an empty birdcage in the centre of the room. Since when did Ben have the faintest interest in birds, or pets of any kind? But that wasn’t all. The place had been more or less redecorated. There were knick-knacks and photo frames everywhere. Lisa walked across the living room to take a closer look at a woman’s photo on the mantelpiece. No way, she thought with disbelief. Does Ben have a girlfriend? Wait…she recognised the face. It was photo of Ben’s sister, Suzie, but she looked different, somehow. She was wearing make-up and smiling for a change. Lisa inspected another photo, puzzled, then put it down and backed away. Who was that—the soapie actor Ronn Moss? Then there was a cut-out of some television wedding in a heart-shaped pewter frame. A stack of wedding magazines. What was all this stuff? There was heart-shaped crap everywhere, and that horrible lavender smell.