My main concern on the way home was Ronnie. He already thought I was a useless dickhead who couldn’t run a chook raffle. When I told him I’d given up on the electoral roll thing after five minutes online in a café, it was going to confirm his worst prejudices. Why that bothered me so much, I didn’t like to think, but it was probably something to do with my contempt for myself and not wanting to see it reflected in Ronnie’s eyes.
I needed some way to get around this but nothing would come. I grappled with it on the ride home, through a long, cool shower, through a cheese sandwich, and a half-hour lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling. Turning up at the AEC offices with a large bribe in a brown-paper bag was the best I could come up with after all that. I even spent five minutes wondering where on earth I could buy a brown paper bag, followed by a brief fantasy about life behind bars. I’d given up and was steeling myself to call Ronnie and confess my failure when another, equally illegal but slightly more promising plan occurred to me.
I texted Kazima at the office to tell her I was coming over and ran down to the car. I was there just before lunch and she greeted me at the door.
“We’ll have to save you a parking space if you’re going to come over so often,” she said. She seemed more cheerful than last time I saw her and the office seemed to be buzzing with activity. It was only reasonable. Making her the CEO had probably ended a week of terrible uncertainty for her and the whole team.
“It’s just a one-off,” I said. “I’ll get out of your hair in a minute. I just need a favour.”
“Of course. Would you like a coffee?”
“No, look, I need to borrow one of your developers.”
“What?” We reached her office and we sat down. “For how long?”
“Not long. At least, I don’t know. Just this afternoon maybe.”
She considered me for a moment, her deep, dark eyes growing a shade more guarded. “Of course, this is your company and you have the right to do what you like with our resources, but you realise we have schedules we’re working to, milestones we’re trying to hit. We lost a lot of… momentum, I suppose, after Chelsea died. I’ve been trying to get the team back on track.”
“I know. Look, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ask if this wasn’t really important. I promise it won’t be for long.”
She was struggling with the idea and clearly didn’t like it. “Who did you want, exactly, and what for?”
“Yeah,” I said, grimacing. “I don’t know exactly who’d be best. And I don’t really want to tell you what for.” She didn’t say anything but gave me a hard stare, demanding that I say more. “I need someone who’s a good...” Hacker is what I wanted to say. I needed a hacker to break into a government database and steal information for me. “I need a security specialist.”
She nodded. “Why?”
It was best for both of us if she knew nothing about what I was planning. “I’m trying to catch Chelsea’s killer,” I said. “I think I have a lead but I need someone who can… Someone who’s good with computers.”
“Don’t you think you should leave all that to the police?”
“I’d like to. I really would. But they’re getting nowhere.”
“And you think you can do a better job?”
“I couldn’t do much worse. I don’t think that bloke Reid could find his arse with both hands.”
A little smile touched her lips. “They came to see me today. Reid and a woman. It’s the third time they’ve spoken to me. Reid asked a lot of questions about you. More than last time.”
I shrugged. “What good was that? We’ve hardly ever met.”
“Oh, Chelsea talked about you a lot. I feel like I know you. I had lots to tell them.”
“All of it good, I hope.” A feeble joke to mask my sudden nervousness.
“Oh yes. Chelsea loved you and she felt loved by you. Inspector Reid was not happy with my answers.”
Chelsea felt loved. If there was one thing in the world I wanted to hear right then, that was it. Tears sprang to my eyes and I said, “Thank you,” though my throat was trying to close.
“Do you really think you can find who did it?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve got a guy helping me. A professional, sort of. He reckons we’re making progress. But if I don’t get… this security issue solved, we’re almost back to square one.”
Kazima pursed her lips, then suddenly seemed to reach a decision. She stood up and walked to the door. Leaning out, she shouted, “Karen, can you come here a minute, please?” She came back to me but didn’t sit down. “Karen is our sysadmin. I think she’s the person you need. She’s very, very good and takes an interest in the kind of security matter I think you are talking about.”
A small, very smartly dressed Asian woman walked into the office. She was delicate and pretty and looked about fifteen. Kazima introduced me as the new owner of the company and I shook her tiny hand.
“Luke is going to take you to lunch,” Kazima told her – which was news to me. “He’s going to offer you a bit of work which I’m guessing may not be completely legal.” Karen looked at me with wide eyes. “Listen to his proposal and, if you accept the work, you can have as much time off to complete it as you need – on full pay, just as if it was an ordinary work assignment. If you decide you don’t want to do it, that’s OK. Don’t worry that Luke is the boss. Just say no and that will be the end of it. No-one here wants you to do anything you are not completely comfortable with.”
Karen nodded and said, “OK.” She swallowed hard and her eyes seemed to have set into a look of permanent fright.
Kazima ushered us out. Everyone in the office cast curious glances as we walked past them to the door. “Take him somewhere nice,” Kazima told Karen as we left. “He’s paying.”
We walked about five minutes in the hot sun to a row of busy cafés and restaurants, already buzzing with the lunchtime crowd of local office workers. We walked in silence almost all the way until Karen said, “I’m sorry. About Chelsea.”
“Thank you. Did you know her well?”
“I’ve only been with the company a few months but she was always very kind. Everybody liked her.”
She led me to a relatively quiet little place that served over-elaborate salads and twenty kinds of coffee. She caught me staring at the menu boards and asked, “Is this all right?”
I assured her it was. We made awkward small talk until the meal was ordered. She was from Hong Kong. She left after she finished uni to avoid the troubles there. She’d been in Australia three years, she said, as I rapidly reassessed her age. Then she sat in silence, waiting for me to speak. She sat upright, with a straight back, like a young lady from another era. She had square shoulders and a long neck. Under the table, I was sure here knees were pressed together. I had been hoping to be hooked up with some counter-culture type with half a kilo of body piercings, bleached hair and a thrash metal T-shirt, not this prim and elegant escapee from a BBC period drama. It made it almost impossible to broach the subject I wanted to discuss.
“What’s a sysadmin?” I asked by way of openers.
“What?”
“Kazima called you a sysadmin.”
“Oh, a systems administrator. I look after the network, keep the servers running, you know.”
“So, you know all about system security, how to keep hackers out, that kind of thing?”
“Oh yes.” It wasn’t at all boastful, just matter-of-fact.
“Have you ever done anything like that yourself?”
“Sorry?”
“Have you ever hacked a company or whatever?”
Her face fell. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, no. I – I just want to know if you can do it. I...” Oh what the hell? I leaned into her and said softly, “I need you to hack a government database for me.”
If I’d grabbed her knee under the table, she couldn’t have reacted any more violently. She leaped to her feet saying, “No, no, no!” and walked straight out of the r
estaurant. I leaped up too and ran after her.
“Hey!” I caught up to her as she waited to cross the road. “Hey, I’m not asking you to steal money or anything. All I want is the electoral roll for the electorate of Brisbane Central.”
She scowled at me. She was really angry. “Go to the library.”
“Yeah, well, that was my thought too but it doesn’t work like that.” She set off across the road and I dogged her heels. “I need to compare two lists of names: one the electoral roll and the other some school records. I’d be happy to do it manually but I just can’t get that kind of access.”
“Tough,” she said, over her shoulder, walking faster.
I ran in front of her and blocked her way. “What the hell is wrong with you? I’m just trying to find out who killed Chelsea. The police are stuffing it up and this might be my only lead. If I could do it myself, I would, but I just don’t have the skills.”
Her scowl softened. “Why don’t you get the police to do it? They could get access to whatever they needed.”
“The police think I had something to do with the murder. Look, if you won’t help me, I’ll probably have to go to them and try to persuade them but, honestly, I don’t think they will. They’re trying to build a case against me and they’ll keep at that until they succeed or they’re forced to try some other theory. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s killer is out there on the loose. Maybe he’ll kill again. Maybe he’ll skip the country.” Her eyes dropped. She still wore a surly, stubborn expression but at least she was no longer furious. “Wouldn’t you like to help me catch a murderer? I know there’s some risk involved but, look, if you get caught, I’ll tell them I made you do it, threatened to sack you if you didn’t do what I said.” She kept her eyes averted and her brows pulled down. “Please help me. You’re my only hope.”
She tilted her head up sideways and eyed me suspiciously. “How do I know you’re not a bad man? Maybe you’re planning a big office development and you want those names so you can buy people out and threaten them to sell. Maybe you’re a stalker and you’ve got some victim you’re trying to find information about? Maybe you’re a—”
“Hey! I’m not. I’m not any of those things. I just want to find my girlfriend’s killer.”
“And kill him?”
“No!”
To be honest, I hadn’t really thought about what I wanted to happen to Mr. X. I just wanted to catch him. Killing him hadn’t crossed my mind. Well, just once. That night after the funeral but that was, like, a moment of madness. The realisation gave me a rush of shame. Surely, if I’d really loved Chelsea, I’d want to see her killer dead?
Crestfallen, I said, “I just want to hand him over to the police.”
Not beat him to death with my fists like some vigilante arsehole in an American movie. What kind of man did that make me? Even though I knew full well that Chelsea would have been repulsed by the idea, I couldn’t help feeling that I was unworthy, not man enough, that I’d let her down.
“I knew some bad men in Hong Kong,” Karen said. “When I was a kid, they made me do some very bad things. I had to do those things over there. Not here.”
I looked into her set, stubborn face. I had no idea what she might mean but it was obvious I’d just kicked over a white ant nest in her life.
“I – I – Look, I don’t know about any of that. I just thought maybe you could help me. If you don’t want to, that’s OK, I suppose. I just don’t know where else to turn.” My life had become a Jean-Paul Sartre novel. Every life I touched was a chasm filled with angst. Was there some kind of moral or philosophical message I should be looking for in all this, or was Chelsea’s death just a big rock of misery dropped into the calm pool of our everyday lives?
“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping aside. “I should let you get back to work.”
She didn’t move. She looked straight ahead down the road. After a while, she said, “I’m sorry too. About Chelsea. I want to help.” She kept looking straight ahead. “Tell me what you want to do.”
So I laid it all out for her right there in the street. She listened in silence and, when I’d finished, nodded. The sadness in her big brown eyes was hard to look at.
“If you don’t want to...” I said.
She looked at me at last, her lips pursed. “No. It’s OK. I need to go back to the office and pick up my machine.”
“What machine?” I had visions of some high-tech hacking device.
“My laptop. Then I will need somewhere to work.”
“We can go to my unit. What else do you need?”
“Just an Internet connection.”
“And you can do this? Get the data?”
“Sure.” She spread her hand, palm down and made a rocking motion. “Pretty sure.”
We started walking again. “Don’t you want to go back and get some lunch?”
“Not hungry.”
“Right-o.” I could make her a sandwich later if she started feeling better about things.
When we got to the office, she went up to get her stuff while I called Ronnie. I felt good about calling him now that I had a plan. But the call went to an answering service. Ronnie’s recorded voice said, “If you’re selling anything, fuck off. Otherwise, if you really think I’ll be interested, leave a message. Don’t expect an answer.” I thought he would be interested, but I hung up anyway.
Chapter Nine
Karen’s laptop was an enormous black slab that looked even bigger against her tiny frame. It had a picture of an alien’s head on the lid and, when I said, “Cute,” she looked at me sideways as if I might be joking. She settled on the sofa with it and I eventually managed to find her the wi-fi password and fetch her a large mug of coffee.
“Don’t you need special equipment, or something?” I asked. “You know, like routers and servers and stuff?”
She grinned at me – the first smile since we were in the café. “For a guy who owns a software company, you don’t know much, do you?”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t expect to be in this position.”
Her smile fell and I regretted my bitter tone.
“All the tools I need are software,” she said. “And I have them right here, or I’ll get them from the Web.”
“How long will it take?”
“Huh?” She was already absorbed in the screen and took a moment to pull herself away. “I don’t know. It’s quicker if I focus.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I wandered around the room a bit, went to stare at the whiteboard, sat down with my coffee and watched her work, got up, went to the bathroom, came back, stared out the window while I finished my coffee, checked my watch. Just ten minutes had passed. Karen hadn’t moved. She seemed frozen in front of that giant screen. If it wasn’t for the way her fingers would suddenly flick into action, moving so fast it seemed like a superhuman ability, I would have thought she was in a trance. Her face was blank and she hardly blinked. I don’t remember ever seeing such intense concentration.
The urge to ask her how it was going became unbearable, so I went outside and stood in the sun. A bunch of noisy miners were squabbling in the trees nearby. A small flock of cockatoos passed overhead, flapping lazily in the early afternoon heat. On days like this, Chelsea would want us to go out to Mount Coot-tha, get an ice cream and sit by the lake. She loved the water dragons and the ibises, and we’d walk through the cactus house and the succulent beds and the scented garden, where she would touch every leaf and smell her fingers. Sometimes there’d be exhibitions – by the local cactus society, or orchid growers, or some fossicking group – and we’d trail among the trestle tables admiring the weird and wonderful things that people grew or found or made.
I should go there soon, I told myself but I didn’t know why. It had always been Chelsea’s thing, not mine. I’d always have rather stayed home with a good book. But not going now would seem like some kind of rejection of her. Going would honour her memory. It was weird. She was dead and, to me, that meant gone completely
. There was no way that anything I did now could hurt her in the slightest. Yet I was as prey to all these superstitious notions as my poor old Catholic grandma; like it was wired into my DNA and no amount of rationality could quite overwrite it. But I had to admit it was there inside me and I knew I would go back to Mount Coot-tha and walk around miserably and hurt when I saw the water dragons and cry when I smelled the scented geraniums – because that’s what Chelsea would want.
I went back inside, wiping the wetness from my eyes. Karen was still frozen in place. She didn’t even glance at me.
“I’m off out for a bit. Help yourself to anything you want. I won’t be long.”
I don’t know if she heard me. I had no idea where I’d go or what I’d do but I had to go somewhere and do something. So I walked up the road. I’d come to some shops eventually and maybe I’d get sandwiches and cakes. I pulled out my phone as I walked and tried Ronnie again.
“If you’re selling anything, fuck off. Otherwise, if you really think I’ll be interested, leave a message. Don’t expect an answer.”
“You know, you’re a total fucking dickhead?” I told his answering service. “Why do you have to be so bloody…?” I took a breath. “Call me when you get this. If you can be bothered.”
The shops were miles away. I’d only ever been to them in the car before, I realised, and had grossly underestimated the distance. So I was hot and sweaty and completely knackered by the time I got back.
I found Karen still on the sofa but her laptop was closed beside her and she was watching the telly with my packet of chocolate biscuits on her lap. She’d turned on the air conditioning and was looking cool and relaxed and everything I was not.
“Taking a break?” I asked, trying to sound cheerful.
“Finished.”
“What?”
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