Shooting Star (19 page)

So, what the hell.

‘In the strictest confidence,’ I said, ‘and without giving any reasons, I’d like to ask you a few questions about the time when you were the solicitor at the Altona Legal Centre and Mark Carson was a volunteer.’

‘Yes?’

He said
Yeees?
An intonation conveying extreme caution. The kidnappers’ electronic device could convey that intonation. I was beginning to see that it might be a technical achievement.

‘It was about that time that Mark left Ross, Archer & Stegley.

I wondered if you knew anything about the circumstances of his leaving the firm?’

‘The circumstances?’ A musing tone. ‘As far as I can remember, Mark was with Ross’s all the time that he was helping out at Altona. So that must have been later. But I really can’t say, it’s so long ago.’

Pause. A pause for thought.

‘Mr Calder, I’ve got an overseas call on the line,’ he said. ‘I’ll get back to you soonest. Sorry about this, these people won’t wait. Talk to you again.’

Not in this life, I thought. I didn’t know why, but I knew. I took my time finishing the very fine French tea, held the cup to the light, extended a finger behind it. Through the pale, translucent, expensive shell, I could see its shape, like a boat’s shadow on the seabed.

The phone rang.

‘What the fuck is this about?’ Graham Noyce, equal stress on each word, not the affable, careworn, reasonable Graham Noyce. ‘Frank, exactly what the fucking hell is this about?’

I didn’t have the remotest idea what it was about. And every hour that passed left me more ignorant.

Mid-week. It was mid-week.

CORIN McCALL answered her phone from what sounded like a building site, brute machines roaring in the background.

‘Back from the bush, yes,’ she said. ‘Came back last night, had to. My earthmoving man found he had a day free, you don’t let that get away.’

‘That’s him in the background?’

‘Rearranging nature. Socrates Kyriakos. No one can play an earthmover like Soc.’

‘The earth moves for him.’

A laugh, not big, but a laugh. The laugh when I’d called off our date, that hadn’t been a laugh.

‘I’m in a bad position,’ I said. ‘Sort of a twenty-four-hour-a-day job, open-ended, no end in sight.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘thanks for calling. Anyway.’

‘No,’ I said, nervous. ‘Lunch. What about lunch? Eat lunch?’

‘Eat my sandwiches. My sandwich.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In Hampton. My client’s flattened two houses and he wants to get the landscaping done before he builds some appalling structure.’

‘I can get to Hampton in fifteen, twenty minutes, we can have lunch in Hampton. Many good places to have lunch, I’m sure.’

She thought about this incredibly appealing proposal for a long time.

‘I’ll give you the address, but I’m not dressed for eating out,’ she said. ‘Bring your own sandwich. We’ll eat in my vehicle.’ Pause.

‘Buggered old Land Cruiser with bags of compost in the back.

How’s that suit your style?’

‘To perfection. How do you like your coffee?’

Another pause. ‘Black. Long black.’

‘The address?’

I took a Carson car, an Audi, the high life coming easily to me now, stopped at a smart coffee place, ordered bagels with smoked salmon and other exotic ingredients, long black coffees.

At the address, the Land Cruiser was parked in what would once have been the driveway of a house. Twenty metres away, a small earthmover was triumphant on a heap of sandy earth. On the street frontage of the two suburban quarter-acre blocks, a large rectangle had been pegged out where the building would go.

Corin McCall got out of the Land Cruiser as I parked. She was dressed like a workman: check shirt, sleeveless oilskin jerkin with many pockets, jeans, lace-up boots. I’d never seen her in work gear, only in lecturing gear, which was suits and high-collared blouses. It was hard to say which outfit made the more favourable impression on me.

We met on the pavement, dishwater sky, the wind off the bay blowing right through me. She put out her right hand and we shook.

‘Welcome to the glamorous world of landscape design,’ she said, running her left hand through her short dark hair.

‘What’s happened to Socrates?’

‘Soc’s got another job going in Sandringham. He’s gone over to check on Soc junior in his lunch hour, get on the machine and redo everything the boy’s done today.’

‘Ah, the family firm,’ I said. ‘I’m learning about the family firm.’

‘In your twenty-four-hour-a-day, open-ended job?’

I nodded. ‘I’ll get the supplies.’ I went back to the car and got out the box with the bagels and coffee.

‘I hope this vehicle doesn’t smell of manure,’ Corin said. ‘I’m beyond being able to detect it.’

The Land Cruiser didn’t smell of manure, it smelled of nothing except a suspicion of perfume, such as might come to you in a memory.

‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘Like an urban picnic.’

I opened the box, offered her a bagel. ‘I thought you could save your sandwich for afternoon tea.’

She looked at me, eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know I’d prefer smoked salmon and cream cheese on a bagel to Vegemite on last week’s bread?’

‘Call it intuition, call it a shot in the dark.’

We settled down to eat. After her first bite, Corin said, ‘Good filling, proper boiled bagel too. Do you mind me asking what you do for a living?’

‘I’m a mediator.’

She was looking at her bagel, gave me a sideways glance. ‘Someone at the college said you used to be a cop.’

I nodded. ‘It scares people off, ex-cop. I usually say I used to be a soldier, that’s more acceptable somehow.’

‘Were you?’

‘A soldier, yes. Much longer than I was a cop.’

‘Why’d you stop being a soldier?’

‘I got hurt.’

I paused. That was what I always said, all I said. Today, I added, ‘Other people got hurt at the same time. And afterwards I didn’t think I had what it took anymore.’

We chewed in silence. Then she wiped her lips with a napkin, no lipstick, and said, ‘What does it take?’

‘A certain indifference to personal safety. How’d you get into landscape design?’

She wasn’t easily deterred. ‘Why’d you stop being a cop?’

‘That was a matter of someone else getting hurt. A fellow officer.’

‘You were blamed?’

‘Not unreasonably. I was trying to strangle him.’

We sat in silence for a while. I knew I should not have said that.

She had turned away from me slightly; she would have formed the view that I was a psycho.

‘So,’ she said, ‘you showed a certain indifference to his personal safety?’

‘Total indifference. And no, I’m not a psycho. Do it again tomorrow, though.’

Corin shook her head. ‘The accused shows no remorse,’ she said.

‘Well, you know enough about me now to stop taking my calls,’ I said. ‘How’d you get into landscape design?’

She turned her upper body towards me. She wasn’t rejecting me.

‘Total indifference to personal solvency,’ she said. ‘I was an architect and all I did was work on tower blocks and shopping malls and ablution blocks. No one ever asked me to join their smart little practices, do restaurants and things. So I said, I don’t think I have what it takes to be an architect, to hell with this, and I went back to uni and starved while I did landscape design.’

‘And became an ornament to the profession,’ I said. ‘To the landscape, for that matter.’

Our eyes met. Grey with light flecks, hers. I looked away first, swallowed, balled up my bagel wrapping. ‘Trying to flirt with the teacher,’ I said. ‘That’s probably not done.’

‘It’s flirting with students that’s frowned on,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be careful. While we’re asking questions, what’s a person of your, um, varied background doing at horticultural college?’

‘I like gardens,’ I said. ‘I had a garden when I was a kid, a vegie and flower garden. The lady next door marked off this plot for me in her back yard, gave me the seeds, showed me how to plant them.

I used to go there every day with my little watering can, water the ground. Sit there and watch. I didn’t want to miss the moment…’ I tailed off. It wasn’t a story I wanted to tell. I’d already said things I didn’t want to out of some need to explain myself to this woman, have her like me.

‘When they came up.’ She finished the sentence for me. ‘I know. You only have to look away and up the bastards come.’

We were smiling at each other when one of my phones, Noyce’s vibrating phone, fluttered against my ribs.

‘Phone,’ I said, taking it out. ‘I’ll just get out. Coffee’s getting cold.’

I got out, closed the door, stood in the cold wind, felt it on my scalp, felt the fear in me, and pressed the button.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Who’s that?’

The voice.

‘Frank Calder. I work for the Carson family. Who’s that?’

Silence.

‘Put Tom Carson on.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘from now on you talk to me. And don’t start shouting, I don’t give a shit about shouting, I don’t give a shit about the Carson family either, I’m just someone paid to do this and shouting is a waste of time. You talk to me or you don’t talk.’

Silence.

The voice.

‘Okay, listen, this is what you do…’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t do anything until we know the girl is alive. Don’t like that, fuck off.’

Silence. I waited, then I said, ‘Send us a photograph, Express Post, same as your last letter. A Polaroid, any picture. We want to see the girl, see her properly. She’s got to be holding today’s newspaper, any paper, the front page. Today’s paper. Close up. And we want to see her pinkie, the little finger, see that it’s properly bandaged. You with me?’

Silence.

‘Then you ring at 11.30 a.m. tomorrow. We’re convinced she’s okay, you can tell me what to do and we’ll do it. No argument. To the letter. Failing that, fuck you and we’ll find you if it takes fifty years.’

Silence.

A click.

Dear God, what had I done? Condemned the girl to death?

Not if she was already dead.

Corin was looking at me from inside the vehicle, styrofoam cup under her lips, a faintly quizzical look. She had nice eyebrows, I registered for the first time.

I opened the door and got back in, felt the body warmth.

‘A client,’ I said. ‘How’s the coffee?’

I took the cap off mine, had a sip, a thrumming in my body, in my chest. A new feeling. A sign of weakness, thrumming.

‘Good coffee. You’ve got the kind of client I’d like.’

She’d watched me speaking.

‘What kind of client is that?’

‘Someone you can give orders to. Instead of the reverse.’

‘You lipread?’

‘I wish. You were doing all the talking.’

I drank more coffee, half the lukewarm cup. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, hesitated. ‘I’m hopeless at this kind of thing. Can I see you again? Is that possible?’

Corin had some coffee, touched her short hair.

‘That’s possible,’ she said. ‘That should be probable. From my point of view.’

‘I’ll call you tonight,’ I said. ‘Is calling you always okay?’

She gave me her slow smile, put a hand out and touched my sleeve, plucked something off it. ‘A leaf. You won’t get anyone else, if that’s what you mean.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said.

‘What about you? Are you safe to call?’

I got out a card with the mobile number. ‘I don’t know whether it’s safe to call me,’ I said. ‘But I’m on my own, if that’s what you mean.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she said.

I RANG Graham Noyce and told him about the call.

‘What if they don’t come through?’ he said.

‘Call the cops. It’s over then.’

‘I’ll tell the Carsons.’

Aware of the pointlessness of what I was doing, I drove to Altona, over the Westgate Bridge and along the freeway to Millers Road, down towards the bay past the carbon black factory and the refinery with its chimneys that flamed day and night.

The Altona Community Legal Centre didn’t spend any money on front. It was housed in an ugly yellow-brick building that still carried faint fancy signwriting saying it had once been the premises of the Modern Bakery.

A young woman with two children was sitting in the reception room, the children fighting for her attention like small but vicious animals attacking a much larger and wounded creature. Behind a counter bearing neat stacks of pamphlets on subjects such as rape counselling, domestic violence and the legal rights of teenagers, a woman in middle age, good-humoured face, was on the phone. She eyed me warily, ended her conversation.

‘Yes?’ she said.