The White Tower (4 page)

‘An access card?'

‘That's what gets you in. Say you're working on the broadcasting platform here.' Litowski indicated the one with the white discs. ‘You have to go through this security door. That's what your access card's for. When you've finished your shift, you're signing off, you hand back the card. Access cards never leave the building. That's why I say that boy must have jumped from the public platform up here, because it's impossible for an unauthorised person to enter a restricted area.'

I nodded. I wanted Litowski to think I was taking careful note of everything he said. But I was used to security people—in particular I was used to computer security people—claiming their systems were foolproof. They were obliged to. If this man had any doubts he ­certainly wasn't going to admit them to me.

I asked politely, ‘What happens if a card is lost?'

‘An access card?'

‘Yes. What if a card's lost, or even stolen, while a technician is at work? What happens then?'

‘The technician would notify security and the card would be ­cancelled. No one could use it.'

‘How is that done?'

‘By computer.'

‘So access to and from restricted areas is controlled by computer, and if you tried to use a cancelled card to get through a door, the computer wouldn't let you?'

‘That's more or less the way it works.'

‘And the technician who'd lost his card?'

‘He'd be personally escorted in and out.'

‘Just as a matter of curiosity, are there any female technicians employed at the tower?'

‘No.'

‘What happens at ten o'clock?'

‘Ten o'clock at night? We clear the public galleries. All the outside viewing areas are checked, the café, restaurant, and basement. Then we lock the doors.' Litowski paused and added, ‘I understand that Howley liked the tower, I mean that it was some sort of favourite spot.'

‘Who told you that?'

‘I can't recall exactly.'

‘Where were you on June the twenty-second?'

Litowski answered with more hostility than the question warranted. ‘That's none of your business.'

Any second now, I thought, he'll make some excuse and tell me my time is up. I hadn't prepared for my interview with him, or Olga Birtus, and that was a mistake. Instead of waiting for the coronial brief, studying it first, I'd rushed ahead. I'd used my association with Brook to get Litowski to agree to an interview, but he wouldn't respect my right to ask questions until I showed him I was serious and had done my homework. Maybe not even then.

‘If he jumped from where you say he did, how did Niall manage to clear this lower platform?' I felt like a kid at a blackboard, pointing while the teacher stood to one side, ready to pounce on my mistake. ‘He would've hit it, wouldn't he? Or landed on it.'

For the first time, I felt Litowski unbend a little. ‘He could have cleared it by jumping out wide. Or else—'

‘Yes?'

‘Or else he hit the platform, as you say, and then kept falling.' Litowski sounded less certain. I could feel his guard slipping and willed it to slip further.

‘If he did that,' I said slowly. ‘If that's what happened, whoever was working there would have heard or seen him.'

Litowski began to speak, then apparently thought better of it.

‘Where were the technicians at that time?'

‘In the basement.'

‘Both of them?'

Litowski's eye caught someone over my shoulder. ‘Yvonne!' he called.

A young woman dressed as he was, except for a black skirt, was walking to the lifts. She stopped and looked back.

‘I'll have to leave you now.'

‘One last question. What was the weather like the night Niall died?'

‘It was winter.'

‘Raining?'

‘Well yes, there was some rain that night.'

I thanked Litowski for his time and held out my hand. He looked at it with distaste before he shook it briefly, and marched away to join Yvonne.

. . .

I walked around the base of the tower, looking for the security door. A sign at the entrance to a small car park said
Authorised Vehicles Only
. That was okay, since I was on foot. There was a surprising amount of rubbish around the car park, including what appeared to be abandoned parts of a satellite dish. The security entrance was just a door set into the wall, opposite parking spaces reserved by registration numbers. A sign said
Absolutely No Unauthorised Entry
.

Next to the door, also set into the wall, was an intercom microphone. Presumably a technician arriving for work gave his name and the door was opened from the inside. My desire to speak to whoever was on the other side of the door was rapidly disappearing. Assuming he let me in, which was extremely doubtful, what were the chances he'd have seen Niall on 22 June?

I walked back to my car and unlocked it, but instead of starting the engine, I pulled a brochure out of my bag. I'd picked it up on my way out through the main doors.

The front of the brochure showed the tower with a storm behind it, forked lightning cutting the sky in half, as the tower itself did. There was a page of sociable photographs, people eating dinner in the restaurant, buying a coffee at the canteen, a stuffed koala at the souvenir shop. Technical details were given half a dozen short paragraphs. Telstra Tower provided essential communication facilities for Canberra. These included—I mouthed the words to myself—major trunk line radio telephony facilities, television and radio transmitters, mobile radio telephone and cellular phone base stations. A huge telecommunications centre in the middle of the national capital had to be among the top ­terrorist targets in the country.

I'd checked with the woman at the front counter. She'd told me Yvonne's surname was Radecki.

I phoned from my mobile and asked to speak to Yvonne Radecki. As soon as I introduced myself, I sensed her freeze.

‘I'm sorry Ms Mahoney, I can't talk to you right now.'

‘Later then? If you could suggest a time for me to ring back?'

‘We're not allowed to talk to you. I'm sorry.'

‘Would you mind telling me a bit about your work? Help me fill in some background?'

‘I'd like to Ms Mahoney, but I'm afraid I can't.'

Five

We were a family. We'd grown up together. We knew each other's characters, their strengths and weaknesses. God's plan to execute Ferdia destroyed that. It turned us from a fighting unit into attacking one another.

I was very critical. I told Niall to appeal. I said to Fallon, ‘What's got into you?' ‘I make the rules,' Fallon said. He deleted my character and my password. When I heard Niall had killed himself I was devastated. I couldn't believe it. Some of us had been together for years.

Reading through the responses to the emails I'd sent out, it was clear that Niall Howley's death had shocked
Castle of Heroes
players. My impression was that they were deeply divided over the God's treatment of Niall, who'd played a character called Ferdia. I'd been doing some research into MUDs, and aspects of this one struck me as unusual. Of those I'd visited, most seemed to be run by a group of people who called themselves Gods, or Immortals. There were subsections of these, and their tasks were often set out on the MUD's website. It was common for different Immortals to build and maintain different ­sections of the game. In contrast to this,
Castle of Heroes
appeared to have been run by one man on his own.

Other information I gained from the half dozen ex-players who answered my email. Death in battle had been common, what kept players on their toes. You entered the game as an English foot soldier, and fought your way up from that. To become an Irish character was to be promoted to playing on the ‘right' side. To become a Hero was to gain the power to plan battles and entry to the Castle, which was, if the English gained the upper hand in a fight, the only safe place to be. Soldiers who were killed in battle could be given new characters and start again.

A couple of months before Niall's death, I was told, something had happened to sour the relationship between Ferdia and his God.

According to a character called Sgartha, Ferdia had risen to a status no other Hero had ever reached before, to God's unquestioned second in command, with privileged access to the Castle. I asked Sgartha if this had made any of the other Heroes jealous, and he said it might have, except that God had turned on Ferdia, and begun accusing him of sabotage and treason.

It was really bad. Verbal abuse and threats. And the thing was, Ferd wouldn't defend himself. He just kept TELLING that he'd done nothing wrong. I guess that's a kind of defence, but it was so passive. I think at that point Ferd gave up. He started to disintegrate.

On other MUDs I'd visited, the TELL command meant that everybody saw what you were saying. There were other commands, like CHAT, for private conversations between players.

The dispute had gone from bad to worse, with God threatening to delete Niall's character, then God had changed his mind and decided on a public execution.

Deleting's no big deal. You gotta expect it, if you want to move up levels.

Sgartha was answering several of my questions in one.

You get knocked off as a Brit, if God's in a good mood that night, he'll bring you back as an Irish, low level of course. I mean, hell, Ferd'd been through that heaps of times. First, God closes sections of the Castle down. Nobody can go there, and I mean nobody. Some of the Heroes queried it. I mean like what's the use of privileges if you can't use them? God's reply—the Castle is under threat.

I'd established that the Heroes had the run of the castle, while the lower levels didn't.

Okay, like most of us thought, God's planning a new campaign. He'll open up the sections again when he's finished the changes he wants to make, and reveal the new campaign plan.

But then God gets really serious about this sabotage stuff and starts accusing Ferd of treason. At this point, some of us begin to wonder, you know, like what's really going on? Then God calls a special meeting and announces the execution. I didn't know what to think. It was obvious that God was way off on his own trip by then. There's no way he would listen. He remodelled a section of the courtyard for the execution, built a scaffold. The Heroes were supposed to stand around and watch.

At that point, Sgartha had quit the MUD. But his protest, it would seem, was too late for Niall Howley.

. . .

I tried to will myself into Niall's shoes. I liked live theatre. During my adolescence and early twenties, going to plays and performing in them had been a kind of lifeline for me. I'd delighted in the chance to be somebody else. But this highly structured yet ad lib theatre of the internet left me cold.

To become so obsessed by a fantasy that you lost the ability to step outside it—that was on one side. On the other were Niall's break-up with his girlfriend, his relationship with his parents, and his work—I knew nothing yet about Niall's work situation, or his relationships with people at the hospital.

Moira Howley's instructions to me had been straightforward. Do the computer stuff. Find out about the MUD, uncover its secrets and explain them. But I felt that, if I was to understand what had happened to Niall and why, it was just as important for me to investigate his physical life in Canberra. Moira hadn't objected so far, but would she go on paying me to do that?

There was a risk, in any kind of theatre. It wasn't just you, alone with your imagination. You were dependent on other people for the make-believe to hold. There was a time—I was around sixteen—when I planned to make acting my career. When friends of my mother asked me what I was going to be, I replied defiantly, ‘An actress', knowing how my mother disapproved. She considered my choice frivolous, and did not think I had the talent. Looking back now, I don't think so either. But who knows? I stuck with it long enough to begin to understand the simultaneous delight and danger of losing myself in a part, giving myself to it, not wanting to come back.

What had happened to Niall when that place of the imagination, his inner, yet shared sanctuary, had been destroyed? Perhaps the question I needed to ask first was what part he himself had played in the destruction.

Memories of my youthful aspirations gave me some kind of connection to Niall. I didn't want to think about this much, or question it, in case it fell apart. I needed some tendon or connective tissue to the person, otherwise Moira Howley's son was just an outline on a screen, or a pulpy mass at the bottom of a wall.

. . .

On Saturday morning, I printed out the email correspondence and put it in an envelope to take to Moira. My reason for choosing Saturday was that I wanted to meet Bernard Howley, Niall's father.

I knocked on the Howleys' front door and waited on the porch, Niall's computer balanced in my arms with the envelope on top of it. Ivan had examined the hard drive, but had found no files or documents except for the castle scene.

Moira let me in. She blinked as though her eyes hurt and it was an effort to focus on anything. I followed her into the living room, where I put Niall's computer on the floor. She stood waiting, clasping and unclasping her hands.

Bernard Howley walked in, startling me though I was expecting him.

He shook my hand with unsmiling gravity, looked me up and down, and asked me how long I'd been in the computer business.

Erring on the generous side, I told him three years.

I hadn't known what to expect, probably not a man who wore his grief as openly as Moira's, but not someone so closed and immediately hostile either.

Bernard's hair was silver grey, neatly cut and combed. He wore a shirt and tie under a beige hand-knitted vest. His trousers looked freshly ironed, and his shoes were polished.

He said stiffly that he would like a few words alone with me before I left, then, with a disdainful glance at Moira, turned to go. He closed the door behind him with a small, sharp clap.

I reminded myself that Moira had hired me, and I'd be working for her until she told me otherwise. I could stare Bernard down, or whatever else it took.

Moira sat abruptly on one of the vinyl-covered chairs.

I smiled, handing her the emails. ‘Have a look at these.'

While she read, I looked at the crosshatched iron filings of hair curling at her temples, as though a magnet had collected them, brown cardigan with holes in both the cuffs, her expression that was cowering yet defiant.

After a few minutes, she said, ‘They were his family. These people meant more to him than Bernard and I did. How could this have happened?' She hurried on without waiting for me to form an answer. ‘How could I have been so wrong?'

‘I'm not sure what you mean.'

Moira's lips became a thin, grey line. ‘I let him down.'

‘These people are sorrowing and angry. I think they've proved that by their willingness to talk to me. But there's nothing to suggest they were a replacement for you. Or for Niall's father.'

Unless her husband was deliberately eavesdropping, I didn't think he could hear us, but I was conscious of the need to keep my voice down.

Moira glanced at the last email. When she looked up again, her eyes grazed her scant furniture as though to fix each item in its place, then caught Niall's computer.

She stood up and walked over to it. ‘Could you—do you think you could—call up this game? I mean, I know you couldn't do it here. We don't have the internet. That was Niall's. We didn't renew his subscription? Is that the right word?'

‘The game's not running any more. It's been shut down.'

‘What?'

‘The man who invented the game and ran it—the one the players refer to as God—he's closed it down. It doesn't exist as a MUD any more, but there's still information about him, and some of the other players, on the internet. That's how I was able to contact them.'

‘Did you contact this—does he have a name apart from God?'

‘The name he gives himself is Sorley Fallon. That might be his real name, and it might not. He might not even be a he.'

‘I don't understand,' Moira said. ‘If these other players have the game, why can't they—?'

‘It's not something you buy over the counter. It's a live thing, or was. I mean people played it live.'

‘What?' Moira asked again, impatiently.

‘There were rules, and levels,' I went on, hoping that by staying calm and explaining I could win her trust. ‘A player started at a low level and had to win points to move up. From what I can gather, most of the points were won by fighting, in battles between Irish and English ­soldiers. But where it differs from a board game is that a character, your son's character Ferdia for example, could talk, interact with other characters, plan battles by typing out what he wanted to do, and the other characters would respond, except they're not sitting in the room with him, they're in America or Ireland, or wherever.'

Moira was standing next to the computer as though connected to it by some thin, tough string. She still had the sheaf of printed emails in her hand. She glanced at it, then said, ‘This is your correspondence with these people, but what I really want to know is what this character of my boy's was like. This Ferdia. What sort of a person was he?'

I began to speculate. She interrupted me to tell me she'd been born in Northern Ireland. Her parents had emigrated to Australia when she was six.

‘I remember the war and the cold. And the day my mother bought me an orange.' She shuffled the sheets of paper without looking any further at them. ‘I was just starting to read, the year we left. We didn't have many books, but my mother used to read them to me. In any case I knew the stories of the Irish heroes. Everybody does.'

I could hardly remember anything of my life before I was six. There were a couple of pictures that I'd worked on, worked over, until they attained a definite, yet shadowy life. They were like short rolls of film that ran a certain length and could never be enlarged or added to. One was of me walking up a laneway under overhanging trees, with my hand in someone else's. I'd ridden this memory hard, desperate to give form to the other person, convince myself that it was my father. In my self-appointed task of recollection, it hardly mattered that my mother insisted my father had left us when I was only a year old.

Moira asked, ‘Where is it, do you think?'

‘The Castle? I'm not sure. It might not be a real place at all.'

‘Probably the north. Hard to imagine a southerner making all this up. Going to the trouble. Though I guess anything is possible.'

She waited for me to comment, and when it was clear I wasn't going to, she continued with a grimace, ‘Probably a castle belonging to a rebel family. They all got screwed by the Brits, one way or the other. Some things never change. Even if one of these people did save a few passages of the game, what you're saying is—it'd be like reading the credits to a movie rather than seeing the movie?'

‘Something like that, yes. But they liked your son.' I pointed to the emails, half embarrassed, to demonstrate that I'd been doing what she wanted, though I was no longer sure about this. ‘They miss him, and some of them are grieving for him.'

‘I'd say he was the clever one, Ferdia. He would've got to the top level, or whatever you call it, and stayed there.'

It was unsettling, the mixture of pride and remorse, yearning and defiance in Moira's voice. It seemed that, whereas I'd been looking for Niall Howley behind the character of Ferdia, trying to guess or deduce Niall's state of mind from comments
Castle of Heroes
players made about him, Moira wanted me to help her do the opposite. It was her son's other life that she was interested in.

The player tributes I'd brought her were some help, but they didn't come anywhere near satisfying her.

I opened my mouth to say I'd email the players back with different questions, when she said, ‘That picture. The one he left. Do you think Ferdia really looked like that? Was that how he dressed?'