by Tina Clough
I reverse the car out of the garage and head back through the house to the courtyard to pick up the hose. Scruff has been trying to shift the two pavers I put over his filled-in hole; I must deal with it in a more permanent way later. When I return with the hose reel Dao and Scruff are in the open garage playing a new game they have invented. It is a floor-level game of squash played with a yellow tennis ball in two rather than three dimensions. Dao shoots it hard across the floor with the broom and Scruff runs like a demon to catch it as it bounces off the wall at an angle. I am about to start hosing down the car when she comes running out and gets down flat on the ground to poke around under the car with the broom handle.
‘Watch out,’ I say from the other side. ‘You’ll get hosed in a minute if you stay there. What are you doing?’
‘We lost the ball. It’s right under the middle.’ She gets up and looks at me across the roof with a guilty expression. ‘Sorry, Hunter, I’ve knocked a piece off the car.’ She holds up a small black cube about the size of two matchboxes stuck together. ‘What is it? Do you think you can put it back?’
I turn it over in my hands. ‘I have no idea. Where did it come from?’
She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. I was just using the broom handle to try to smash the ball back into the garage and that thing fell down.’
I turn the cube again and see a little catch on one side. I push it and the box opens. Inside is a lightweight black cube with ‘iTrail’ in white on one surface. Dao stares at it and then at me, still worried she has damaged the car.
‘Stay here,’ I say and hand her the two parts. ‘And watch that Scruff doesn’t go on the road.’
I run upstairs and get the tablet, my mind busy with uneasy conjecture. I stand in the garage where the light is not so bright, do a search for ‘iTrail’ and my suspicions are confirmed.
‘It’s a GPS tracking device. Let me have a look at the box it was in.’
I put it against the side of the car and I can feel the strength of the magnet pulling it towards the metal. ‘It’s magnetic, very strong. It can’t have been attached properly.’
She understands immediately. ‘Someone put it there to check where we go. And they can find out remotely, like that “find my phone” app you put on our phones.’
Now the significance of Dao noticing the same man ‘a couple of times’ and the man caught on our surveillance camera begin to make threatening sense. We put the two halves of the device in the glove box and I finish cleaning the car before we go back upstairs.
I pick up the laptop and open the saved images I snipped from the CCTV videos. ‘Come and have a look at these, Dao. Do you think that’s the man you’ve seen?’
She spends a long time going from one image to the next, back and forth, says nothing for a long time. Then she nods. ‘It might be. I wish he didn’t always wear something on his head. It makes it hard to see what he really looks like. The man I saw was wearing a cap, and he had a moustache, a big one like this man. He was wearing sunglasses.’
‘Where did you see him the first time? And how many times do you think you’ve seen him?’
‘I’ve only seen him twice.’
‘Where was this?’
‘The first time was at the supermarket. He was kneeling between our car and the one next to us. Remember the day after we went to Hope’s flat? You were buying a Lotto ticket at the entrance and I was standing inside the big window looking out into the parking lot. I saw a man kneeling between our car and his. He must have just arrived, because the space beside us was empty when we parked. And I thought, poor man, he’s dropped something, and it’s shot in under our car. I nearly told you, in case you needed to move the car, so he could get it.’
‘And you saw him again when?’
‘When we went to the pizza place the other night. He arrived just after us and sat in his car. He was still there when we left. I never thought to check if he followed us.’
‘Could it be John?’
She thinks for a while. Probably her mind has taken her back to the island. She will picture John coming ashore from his boat, touching her if gets a chance, making suggestive comments when Bramville can’t hear. Perhaps her mind is playing back the time Bramville said he would sell her to John the drug runner, ‘because your name is Slave and anyone can own you’. It terrified her; she was sure John would keep her on his boat, abuse her and then throw her overboard to drown. She is very aware that for John she is a serious threat, the only eyewitness who can attest that he brought the barrels of drugs to the island.
I reach out and pull her closer; she leans into me and studies the image on the screen. ‘It might be him,’ she says finally. ‘But I can’t be sure. He never used to have a moustache and it makes such a difference. It’s hard to say. If it is him …’
‘I know,’ I say. ‘If it is, then he’s back from wherever he sailed to and he’s heard that damn barrel full of drugs is still missing – and he’s thinks I might have it.’
In the morning I call Benson and ask if we can come and see him. He sounds cagey, probably wary after his recent experiences of Dao demanding information. I don’t tell him what it is about; I want Dao to tell him. He never goes off on a tangent and starts firing his own questions back when she is talking to him.
On the way to the station I warn Dao to be careful what she says next time we see Willow. ‘The tracker on the car isn’t likely to have anything to do with Hope’s disappearance. If we tell her about it, she’ll just start to worry.’
Dao nods. ‘Of course. She’ll tell you not to do anything silly and she’ll say please don’t do anything illegal again. I know. And then she’ll ask if you have guns in the car and all that stuff. Much better not to tell her.’
When we say we have an appointment with Detective Sergeant Benson, the woman at the front desk smiles. ‘It’s Detective Inspector Benson now.’
He comes out to fetch us and as we walk towards his office Dao says, ‘It’s great you’re a detective inspector now, Benson. Then if they demote you one step, you won’t go all the way back to be a constable.’
He looks sideways at her and they both grin. I would never have dared say that; I just congratulate him politely on his promotion.
Twenty minutes later we have been through the whole saga backwards and forwards. Benson has saved the images I brought in on a USB stick and we are comparing them to the only picture the police have of John. It’s at least ten years old and he is clean-shaven; impossible to relate to the CCTV pictures. Benson flicks back through the images on his screen, thoughtful and slightly worried.
‘It will be well known on the street that the drug barrel has never been found. If it is John, we have to get hold of him. The fact that we saw CCTV images of the barrel on the back of Bramville’s truck when he left the island wouldn’t be widely known. We know he hid or sold it, but they think someone else took it.’
He goes back to the picture from a year ago. ‘And this first guy having a good look at your house while you were in the South Island, just after it all happened – I bet he was after the same thing.’
He gives me a wry smile across the desk. ‘And you’re known as a hard man, Hunter. Maybe the gangs think you have the barrel, just waiting till the heat’s off before you sell it.’
Dao is outraged. ‘Hunter’s never had anything to do with drugs, and he wouldn’t know how to sell them.’
He raises his hands above his head. ‘Sorry, sorry! I know he isn’t into drugs, I just said others might think he took the opportunity to earn some cash. I know Hunter is not part of the drug world.’
‘OK,’ says Dao, slightly less ferocious. ‘But listen, Hunter and I don’t agree about the tracker. I mean what we should do with it.’
‘I should have asked you. Did you put it back on the car?’
‘It’s in the glove compartment. I think we should put it on your car.’
‘My car? Why?’ It’s clear he never expecte
d this.
‘Well, we can’t just put it on a random car,’ she says, in that way of hers, as if she is explaining to someone who is not very smart; I know it well. ‘Because then this guy might hassle some poor person who knows nothing about it. We can’t put it on a bus – the person tracking us would get suspicious right away. But the tracker needs to be on the move and going places, otherwise he will just put another one on – and we’re back where we started. If you have it on your car, you can arrest him if he approaches you. Perfect!’
Benson and I look at each other and Dao smiles. ‘And think how surprised he’ll be when he discovers he has been tracking a police officer.’
‘Brilliant,’ I say. ‘I hope your wife doesn’t use your car, Benson. You wouldn’t want her involved.’
‘I don’t have a wife any longer, so that’s not a problem. She left me a few years ago – said I paid more attention to the job than to her. Not to mention that she was afraid of being alone in the house at night. It was kind of doomed from the start. Anyway, how is it that nearly every damn time I see you two, I end up doing something I have doubts about?’
He sighs. ‘By the way, I checked on Noah, and the answer is no, nothing at all. Now tell me where you parked – I’m heading out, so I’ll come by and pick the tracker up.’
Dao nods and says cryptically, ‘OK, good to know. Thank you. See you outside.’
We walk out of the building into the humid heat and my shirt instantly clings to my back. Dao is unperturbed, as always. Heat has no effect on her whatsoever; she says she has heat immunity.
‘What was that item from your list that Benson was looking into? I forgot to ask.’
‘Oh, that. I wrote something like “Has Noah got a police record or is he just a bit mental, paranoid?” Because of how he always gets really twitchy when he talks about the police. More twitchy than usual, I mean. I wanted to know if he’d been arrested for drugs or something. But now we know he doesn’t have a record, so he’s probably just a bit crazy.’
‘Or he’s very lucky and never got caught.’
We wait in the car for a few minutes and then Benson pulls up beside us, leans over to the passenger window and I hand him the tracker. He drives away, and I pull out into the traffic. Time to go home.
Chapter sixteen
That evening Tama calls.
‘Hang on,’ I say. ‘I’ll put the phone on speaker, so Dao can hear you.’
‘Don’t bother, I’ll come and see you,’ he says. ‘I’d rather tell you in person. But I’m concerned about Hope’s brother.’
He noticed how volatile Noah was the first time he came and how I had to keep him under control. What Tama is going to tell us must be something he suspects could trigger an explosion from Noah.
‘He’s very stressed,’ I say, trying to keep it casual. ‘His reactions are a bit over the top sometimes. I take it you’re going to tell us things that will upset him?’
‘Yes.’
That crisp ‘yes’ makes up my mind. No way is Noah going to be allowed to create a scene or start issuing threats if Tama is prepared to share vital information.
‘OK, we’ll leave him out of it. Come straight from work if you like – have dinner with us.’
No point mentioning that we have decided to operate in parallel to Noah without his direct involvement. Depending on what Tama tells us, we’ll share the information with him and Willow – or not.
Tama arrives at half-past six. We make small talk while we set the table and by seven we sit down to smoked salmon pasta bake from the deli and wine for Tama and me.
‘Right, let’s talk while we eat. Why don’t you tell us what you found?’
He pushes his pasta around, eyes on his plate; when he looks up I can tell he is really troubled about this.
‘It’s going to either burn my career and land me in jail – or make me famous. Or infamous.’ His smile is half-hearted; he knows he is facing personal disaster.
Dao is staring at him. ‘Do you know who he is, the man who abducted her?’
‘He’s my boss, Stuart.’ He looks as if he has surprised himself by saying it out loud.
‘He’s your boss?’ I can hardly believe I heard him right. ‘Do you have proof?’
‘Yes, of a kind. Shall I tell you how it developed, so you get the context? It’s a story of many parts.’
He takes a sip of his wine and clears his throat. He is an unusual guy; sometimes he sounds like someone much older, perhaps a grandfather. ‘It started when Rob at work told me that Stuart looks at the videos from Hope’s flat – repeatedly. Rob and I both have administrator status on the system. We’re IT and tech people. I checked the VMS on the server and what I found made me really worried. Stuart, my boss, goes back to some of those videos just about every day. He probably doesn’t know that the system records which files he has accessed and when.’
Dao jumps up. ‘Let’s record this too if you don’t mind, Tama. If it’s complicated, we’ll want to go back and listen to it again – get it all exactly right.’
She puts her phone in the centre of the table. For a girl who spent more than ten years removed from IT and electronic advances, she has come to grips with things at amazing speed. I didn’t even know that our phones have a recording function until she told me that first time Tama came.
‘OK, carry on – and tell us what VMS is, please,’ she says and picks up her fork.
‘It’s an acronym for video management system. Rob just thought it was a bit creepy and pathetic, he wasn’t concerned about it. He came across it by chance and he mentioned it quite casually – he thought it was funny. I checked the log and it was crazy – Stuart seemed to be obsessed with that clip. I wrote a little Trojan script that grabs Stuart’s log data from the VMS and pulls it together – so now I have a continually updating report of how many times Stuart accesses recordings from Hope’s flat, which ones he watches and when. It also tells me which particular segments he has bookmarked.’
He glances at Dao, looks a bit embarrassed, which amuses me.
‘I’m sorry you have to hear this, it’s unpleasant. But there’s one part that Stu looks at regularly, at least once a day, sometimes two or three. It’s a segment from one morning when Hope turns the kettle on, reads her emails and then she gets up and dances around in the living room in her bra and panties – she’s got Pakistani music on. Stu goes straight to the bit where she dances, five minutes and twenty-six seconds in.’
‘Can you print the log report or email it to me? Just in case he starts trying to cover his tracks?’
‘He can’t cover his tracks – the autonomous audit trail creates itself and can never be deleted. He doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does, the arrogant creep,’ says Tama dismissively. ‘He has no access to the server or the VMS software. He can log on and see video, but he can’t access the back-end functions. And no, I can’t send the log report anywhere or even print it without leaving a footprint myself.’
He thinks for a minute and eats some of his pasta. ‘I can take photos of the report relating to Stuart – photos of my computer screen – because I can’t even print screen grabs without leaving a trail. The log report I created is quite long now, but I can scroll through and capture it screen by screen.’
‘Is there anything else that links Stuart to Hope’s disappearance?’
‘Not real, direct proof, no. But I know it’s Stuart. I’ll come to that later.’
‘Can we report it to the police?’
‘I doubt that they would touch it. They probably have some protocol for dealing with us. I imagine they would pass it on to Wellington.’
‘Couldn’t you simply report him to Wellington, then?’
‘If I lodged an accusation with the top brass in Wellington, they would probably say that his obsession with Hope doesn’t mean he abducted her. They’ve known him for years. And the process would be at a snail’s pace with all the procedures they’ll have in pl
ace. Stuart doesn’t like me, made it very clear when I arrived. I was interviewed and security-cleared in Wellington, so by the time I got to Auckland he couldn’t do anything about it. He would probably say that I’m always fantasising and being dramatic or maybe that he never trusted me – anything to discredit what I say. He’s one of those guys who can make people believe him, a creative liar and good at it.’
‘Why doesn’t he like you?’ says Dao, without worrying about being tactful. ‘Do you know?’
‘He made a couple of derogatory comments when I first got there – made sure I was within earshot and heard what he said. He doesn’t like me, it’s a fact.’
Dao is on a mission and won’t be put off by vague statements. ‘What did he say?’
I hold my breath; wonder if he will tell her it is not her business, but he hesitates only for a moment.
‘He said, “That new bloke looks like a damn model, probably useless and got the job because he’s pretty,” and then he laughed.’
‘What a pig,’ says Dao. ‘I bet he’s just jealous. But please eat your dinner, Tama – we’re having a fabulous ice cream we’ve just discovered.’
He smiles. ‘And you don’t want to have to wait for it? Is that it?’ The serious look is gone, and he is just a nice-looking young guy teasing someone.
Dao blushes. ‘Yeah, kind of. All those years, you know, when … I didn’t have ice cream or …’
‘And we both love ice cream anyway,’ I say, to help her out.
We finish our pasta and I get up and take the plates to the kitchen. ‘Keep talking, Tama, I can hear you from here. We need to discuss what we do next. Any ideas how to hold Stuart accountable? I wish we had more to go on.’
‘There’s a lot more,’ says Tama. ‘But for you to be able to use it, I will have to totally compromise myself. I will become the extreme whistle-blower.’
This is a surprise; I thought he had told us all he knew. I return to stand beside the table, waiting to hear what he will say. He takes his time; his gaze is unfocused. Is he weighing up the odds, making the final decision or is he simply deciding where to start? Dao glances at me and minutely shakes her head: ‘Don’t say anything.’