One Single Thing

by Tina Clough

  My phone buzzes before we get to the end of the beach; Charlie getting back to me.

  ‘Great to have you back! I just turned my phone back on – I’ve been flying clients to Kauri Cliffs. How’re your arms? We must get together soon.’

  ‘Listen, Charlie, Benson’s sure to call you any minute. We’ve just been talking to him at the station.’

  She interrupts before I get any further. ‘He called me last week and we’ve made two appointments that I had to cancel because of new flight bookings. I’m due to see him tomorrow morning. What’s it about? He seemed a bit curt, I thought.’

  ‘It’s about that barrel of drug parcels from the island. They can’t find it and they think you or I might have taken it. He asked if we had landed there.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake! After all we’ve done for him. What sort of things did he ask?’

  ‘Just basic stuff – did we land at the island, did we go there by car and boat at any stage. Can you prove we didn’t land when we flew over?’

  ‘No, I can’t. I filed a flight plan, of course, and I keep a flight record as well as the automatic recording of what we call time-in-service. But that means nothing. Even the transponder isn’t totally tamper-proof. All those things mean nothing if you’re determined to keep something secret.’

  ‘Let me know how it goes with Benson.’

  Later on, when Dao is watching a TED talk on her laptop, I open the CCTV surveillance program on mine and go back over the time we were in the South Island. We had the cameras set to motion activation while we were away, so only someone who came onto our strip of grass between the sidewalk and the front of the house would set it off. There are a few shots of the postman, who rarely stops at our letterbox because I get most things by email, and one morning two ducks land on the grass. And a few days later, nine days before we returned, a man walks right up to our garage and peers into the narrow window beside the door. He stands there for a moment, shading his eyes with his hands before he walks away, but he never faces the camera squarely. I snip the side view of his face and save it. I have never seen him before.

  Next, I scrutinise the recorded views of the courtyard behind the house. A cat activates the camera a couple of times each week. It belongs to the couple next door and climbs their lemon tree, leaps onto the two-metre wall between us and drops down on our side. It gets back by taking a flying leap from our table to the top of the wall. Very impressive.

  Eight days before we returned, at 3.18 in the morning, a man comes over the wall from the lane behind us. He sets off the outside light and ignores it, walks right up to the house and looks in the windows. He shakes his head, looks up at the higher windows, spots the camera and turns back. He is too short to make it back over the wall. He grabs one of the chairs by the table and clambers up and over; I presume he had something on the other side to stand on as well. The shot of his face when he looks up at the camera only shows his mouth and chin clearly. His cap casts a deep shadow over the top half of his face, but I snip and save it. After the armed invasion I had mesh-reinforced glass installed downstairs on the courtyard side of the house. I wonder if he would have smashed the glass otherwise, despite the clear warnings about an active alarm system. Is this guy looking for the barrel?

  Three weeks later I get a call from Benson.

  ‘We haven’t found the barrel,’ he says, ‘but I thought you’d like to know we no longer think you or Charlie took it.’ He sounds pleased.

  ‘So you found out something new? Or can’t you tell me?’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s OK to tell you. We’ve spent a lot of time searching for shots of Bramville’s vehicle on CCTV cameras, tracking him after he left the island. We have a good one from a camera mounted high up on a lamp post at a supermarket in Whangarei. We think it was the day he left. We missed it the first time we checked that site – the barrel was on the back of his pick-up truck. The following day he was caught on camera on the Harbour Bridge, but he had a cover over the back. Then four hours later he got filmed at a BP station in Manurewa – the cover was off and there was no barrel on the back. So either he sold it already or he’s stored it somewhere. We know one of the gangs is trying to find it, so we presume he hid it before the Boss killed him. Maybe that’s what the Boss was trying to find out and he died too soon? Perhaps cutting Bramville’s foot off with that machine was only meant to make him talk.’

  ‘Or maybe he did tell the Boss where it was, and he killed him anyway,’ I say. ‘After my own encounter with him, nothing would surprise me.’

  Benson sighs. ‘Tell me about it! Endless possibilities and nobody alive who can tell us.’

  ‘Thanks for telling me I’m not a suspect any longer,’ I say. ‘I’ll tell Dao – she was a bit pissed off that you thought it might have been me.’

  Chapter three

  The present

  ‘Do you want to go out for dinner?’

  No answer. ‘Dao, can you hear me? Dinner out somewhere?’

  Dao looks up from her laptop with the dislocated expression of someone woken from a deep sleep. ‘You mean go out – to eat? Tonight?’

  It’s astounding, this ability to concentrate for hours. It’s usually when she is immersed in something mathematical. First it was something called fractals, then it was linear algebra. Currently she is studying algebraic number theory, which I freely admit I know absolutely nothing about.

  ‘Don’t you want to go out?’

  ‘I’d rather stay home and have soup or whatever. Or toasted sandwiches and ice cream, if we have no real food?’

  ‘There’s plenty of real food in the freezer, don’t worry. I’ll start making dinner if you go down and get Scruff in from the courtyard before he gets really wet.’

  Dao runs down the stairs. I am hesitating between frozen meatballs and smoked salmon when she comes back up the stairs very fast. She has snatched the tablet from the dining table on the way; she is opening the security system screen as she comes.

  ‘There’s a guy outside – I went into the garage to pick up the towel to dry Scruff off and I saw him through the narrow window. He’s acting strange.’

  Even now, when her life is no longer in imminent danger and nearly everyone concerned is either dead or in jail, we have the system active all the time. Sometimes the ground-floor alarm is on, even when we are at home. I’ve got used to always checking before I go downstairs, so I don’t set it off. Scruff has learnt to pause on the top step and look for reassurance. The loaded Remington shotgun is always beside the stairs on the living-room level. The Glock pistol I borrowed from Charlie is still under the front seat of the car, loaded.

  While Dao was the only living witness who could testify against a major drug king, we got into the habit of leaving nothing to chance. The man they called the Boss was determined to eliminate her; we both bear the scars to remind us of his efforts. There is one man still out there, John, who would love to see her dead. From what Benson told us last year it seems likely that he is no longer in the country, but I’m not taking any chances.

  Now and then Dao asks, ‘Is that gun still loaded?’ and I say, ‘Of course it’s loaded. Not much use otherwise.’

  My brother-in-law Matt says the alarm system is Dao’s comfort blanket. She is hooked, and either cannot or will not give it up. Have patience, he says. I have unlimited amounts of patience.

  Now she holds the tablet up for me to see. ‘Look! Quick!’

  A man is walking away from our front door. He gets to the footpath, turns and approaches the door again.

  ‘He was doing that when I first saw him, then he just stood there for ages.’

  After the trial of Mint last year people got very interested in Dao, too interested. Everyone was fascinated with her; a few turned into temporary stalkers and hung around outside the house. Two families offered to ‘adopt’ her, which annoyed the hell out of her. Being twenty-two and looking like fourteen can be a pain.

  The doorbell rings
. ‘Stay here,’ I say and go down.

  He is a skinny guy, forty-ish. Medium height, untidy dark hair, sweatshirt and jeans; could be anyone or anything.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. He’s moving from one foot to the other, nervous. ‘You don’t know me. I read about you last year … when that boat chap was in court … the drug-smuggling guy. My sister has disappeared.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ I say. ‘You should go to the police.’

  I start closing the door, but he grabs hold of the edge.

  ‘Please! Just let me tell you. The cops aren’t interested. It’s really …’ His voice is rising, his face creased with worry. ‘And my parents are going crazy. Something has happened to her and nobody will do anything!’

  Dao appears beside me.

  ‘Hunter is not a detective,’ she says kindly. ‘It’s not his job. You should get a real private detective.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about them.’ His voice drops back to normal. He is focusing on Dao now, calmer. ‘How would I know if they are any good? It’s not as if it’s, you know, a case of adultery or whatever. And there are some things I found. Some weird things.’

  I can see his brain doing a fast search for something that will convince us to let him in.

  ‘I found her flat unlocked, her things were still there. Nobody knows where she is.’

  ‘You have to go back to the police,’ I say. ‘I really can’t help you. Tell them what you found and insist on talking to someone a bit more senior than the front-desk constable.’ I close the door.

  The doorbell goes late in the evening a couple of days later; we have just come back from dinner at Willow and Matt’s place in Castor Bay. I grab the tablet, which is always on the dining table, and see a man looking up at the camera.

  ‘It’s that guy again, the one who came the other day.’

  He starts talking very fast as soon as I open the door. ‘Please let me tell you about it. I know something is terribly wrong. I did go back to the cops, but they just won’t listen. Please!’

  Once again Dao appears silently beside me. She moves around the house like a shadow on bare feet; unnoticeable unless Scruff is following her, and I hear his claws click on the floor.

  ‘Come in.’ She reaches out as if to take his hand. ‘You can tell us about it, but you have to understand that Hunter might not be able to do anything.’

  Upstairs in the living area he comes to a halt beside the dining table, looks around the room and at the stairs to the next level. He is jiggling a bunch of keys, a continuous clicking sound. I go to make coffee and Dao stands where she can watch him and see me at the same time.

  We sit at the dining table and I push a mug in his direction. ‘What’s your name? You know that I’m Hunter and this is Dao.’

  He picks up the mug and puts it down without drinking. His hand is trembling. ‘My name is Noah Barber. My sister Hope is a photojournalist. She’s brilliant. She writes long articles about humanitarian issues. Her agent gets them published in magazines and newspapers – often abroad. She takes wonderful photos. She has been to Pakistan and Afghanistan many times, knows everything about the culture. She came back not long ago. She’d been there for a few weeks researching those so-called honour killings. You know, when families kill their daughters because they’ve brought dishonour on the family.’

  He stops and looks as if he has forgotten what he was going to say.

  ‘And? Go on.’

  ‘It’s hard to know where to start.’

  He is turning over information in his mind. Some part of him is always moving, fingers, hands, feet tapping against the chair leg. It is distracting and irritating. I need to speed this process up or we will be here all night.

  I look hard at him, make eye contact, make sure he is listening. ‘Take it from the start and in order. Only what is relevant – like verbal bullet points.’

  A long pause. ‘Well, she got back. I suppose she started working on her material. I saw her twice, maybe three times. We visited my parents and one evening we had a meal together. We’re always in touch by text, several times a week. Then I went to Australia for a holiday. I called her once and she said she thought she had a stalker, but she kind of made fun of it, said he was too young for her. The last two days I was away I heard nothing from her. I got back and called my parents and asked if they knew where Hope was. They said they had called her a couple of times and left a message, but she hadn’t called back. They live in Hamilton.’

  He stops again and stares into the distance. Dao nudges me under the table, frowns and shakes her head; I keep my mouth shut.

  ‘Right,’ he says after a while. ‘That’s what started this bloody nightmare. After I talked to my parents I went straight over to her place – she lives on the top floor of an old building in Shaddock Street. It’s an attic that someone converted into a big open studio. One huge space plus a little bedroom.’

  His fiddles with the keys, pushes the coffee mug to one side. Just as I am about to tell him to continue, he starts up again. ‘I came up the stairs, turned the corner to the top flight of stairs and her door was open, just ajar. The flat was empty. Her laptop was there, still on, in sleep mode. It looked as if she had rushed off in a hurry and not locked the door – like an emergency. Only she would never do that. Never!’

  ‘And that’s what you told the cops?’

  ‘Yeah. I locked the place and went straight to the police station and reported her missing. I told them nobody had heard from her and she hadn’t responded to calls for at least two days.’

  He rubs a hand roughly over his face, probably reliving the scene in his mind. Dao never takes her eyes off him. My sister Willow is a lawyer with a law firm specialising in trust and tax matters. She says she would like to have Dao with her sometimes, when she meets with difficult clients. She reckons Dao has a finely tuned instinct for body language, or perhaps she notices something in people’s voices that we miss; possibly because she spent a decade with an abusive man and had to be always alert.

  We wait again; neither Dao nor I say anything.

  ‘I told them something must have happened to her. They got me to describe exactly what I had found and wrote it all down – and the details of how long it was since she had answered her phone. All sorts of questions about her age, any male friends, what she does for a job. Get in touch with her friends, they said, we’ll make some enquiries in the neighbourhood. Make sure to tell us if she turns up. She might have gone off with a friend or a boyfriend. We’ll be in touch, they said.’ His voice tapers off.

  ‘And then? Did they get in touch?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I went back the next day. I knew a bit more then and I was sure they would take it more seriously. But no – they listened to what I said, told me adults often take off for short periods of time and it’s everyone’s right to do so, said people don’t always tell family what they are up to. They said it didn’t sound like a crime had been committed, and for me to come back if we hadn’t heard from her in a week.’

  He does his looking into the distance trick again, lost in thought for a moment. ‘I’ve stayed in her flat since. I wanted to see what I could find. I’ve set up all her electronic gear – I know her laptop password and how to unlock her phone, her PINs.’

  Dao bends down to pat Scruff who is beside her chair and Noah stops talking, his eyes follow her movements. He is very easily distracted. ‘And another thing.’ He rubs his hand hard over his face again, stretching the skin under his eyes; it’s painful to watch. ‘It was really strange. It must sound mad. The second time I went back to the cops I got this weird feeling, like they were stalling. When I told the woman at the desk what I had come about, she looked something up on her screen and then she went and got a guy from the back somewhere. A more senior guy, not in uniform. And he just kind of blocked me, deflected everything I said. Like a politician avoiding straight answers, lots of stock phrases.’ He shakes his head and sighs.


  ‘But you have a theory about it,’ says Dao, and I wonder what she noticed that I didn’t.

  ‘Kind of, yeah. Not very specific. Would you give me your email address? I’d like to send you a couple of things to read. It might explain some things. Hope writes about things that happen to her, not as a diary – more sporadic. Little stories. She’s been doing it for years, hundreds of them.’

  On the doorstep he turns and says, as if to reassure us, ‘I have her laptop and I’ve put an extra lock on her door.’

  He walks across the street towards his car, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets. I stand in the open doorway and look after him for a moment. I am wary and intrigued in equal parts.

  Chapter four

  Before breakfast the next morning I go back to the CCTV recording from Noah’s first visit.

  I have a vague impression there was another person in the picture, when Dao held up the tablet for me to see. I find the place and slow the recording down. Noah is nearly at the front door and a man comes into view on the other side of the street, on the extreme left. He stops and takes a couple of steps sideways into the shadow of the big tree nearly straight across from my house. Noah stands indecisive at the door for a while, before he reaches out as if to press the bell. He pulls his hand back and turns, walks down the short path to the street. The man on the other side stands immobile in the deep shadow of the tree. Noah changes his mind and approaches the door again, hesitates for a minute and finally presses the doorbell. I never noticed the man when I was standing in the doorway talking to Noah, but he was there all the time. When Noah leaves the man is still there, but the recording stops after a minute, when nothing new close to the house triggers the motion sensor. I can’t tell if he followed Noah.