She tailed off.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘It’s nicer to talk when I can see your face.’ She laughed.
‘I always felt they didn’t believe me when I told them…what happened. It’s stupid but the more they asked me questions, the more I felt they didn’t believe me. They asked me the same questions over and over.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They were scared they’d missed something.’
‘I understand that, why they’d do that, they have to do that, but I was just a girl. And I was young for my age, I think. When people keep asking you the same questions, you think they want different answers. Your answer’s not good enough. You’re not telling the truth. Am I sounding stupid?’
‘Makes perfect sense to me.’
‘My father’s like that. There’s a wait after you say something. And the man with the beard and the soft voice, he scared me so much, I can’t tell you. I didn’t know what a psychiatrist was. It was like…it was the beard more than the voice. Lie down and relax, he said, that was the most awful thing he could say…’
This was another Alice, an Alice released from bondage.
She said, ‘Frank, it’s a terrible thing to say, when I heard about Anne, I had this thought, not really a thought, a feeling, well, a thought. I thought: now they’ll believe me, now they’ll believe me. Is that awful?’
‘That’s not awful at all, Alice,’ I said, ‘that’s got nothing to do with awful. People can only pretend to understand other people’s pain. And they can only do that for a while. Then it annoys them, they think: how bad can it have been? If you talk about it, they want you to shut up. If you don’t, they think you’re sulking.’
I looked up and met Orlovsky’s eyes, he looked away.
Alice laughed, a laugh of relief, tension dispelled. In the trade, if she was holding a gun on people I’d have taken that as a good sign.
‘Alice,’ I said. ‘I want to play something to you, I want you to listen to something. May be nothing, probably won’t mean anything to you, just a silly hunch. Can I do that?’
‘Of course.’ There was a firmness to her voice, an adult, grownup firmness.
I held out the telephone to Orlovsky’s machines, gave him the nod.
A hippety-hoppety tune, a childish tune, a few bars, repeated.
I put the receiver to my ear. ‘Hear that, Alice?’
The line was open. She was there, you know when someone is there.
Silence.
‘Alice?’
She made a sound, a tiny sound, a sound in her throat, and put the phone down.
After a while, I put my phone down. Orlovsky had his elbows on the table, chin on his hands, looking at me.
‘The authors, they’d have written that tune, would they?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘What’s the game called?’
‘Shooting Star.’
‘Nice name.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Early. I want to see them.’
‘See them? Are you mad? If all this means anything, they’re crazy kidnappers and murderers. For fuck’s sake, go to the cops, tell your mates what you know.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to see them. This happened on my watch.’
‘So did Afghanistan. You planning on going back there? Have another crack at them? Bring the boys back to life?’
I looked at him for a time, then I said, ‘We’ll need some ID.’
‘I’m going along, am I? That’s taken for granted?’
‘No,’ I said. I got up. ‘I’ll drop the pay envelope around.’
I was in the passage when he shouted, ‘What kind of ID, you bastard?’
It was 10.30 p.m. when I rang the Carson compound. The switchboard spoke to Stephanie Chadwick, put me through.
‘Hello, Frank,’ she said. ‘This is a nice surprise.’ She’d been drinking.
‘Stephanie,’ I said, ‘does the name Cassie Guinane, Cassandra Guinane, mean anything to you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t know the name.’
‘She was in your class at school.’
‘Was she?’ She laughed, an uneasy sound. ‘Lots of unmemorable girls in my class. Why?’
‘I think her brothers may have kidnapped Anne. And Alice.’
I heard her draw breath. ‘Have you told the police?’
‘No. I don’t want to yet, not till I’m certain. Sure you don’t remember her? Tall, dark, pretty?’
‘No. Well, perhaps vaguely. The name.’
‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘Yes. Goodnight.’
Sleep was hard to come by, my nights with Corin seemed to be in the distant past. I thought about the Carsons, their laundered clothes, their Italian soaps and French butter, their Jamaican coffee beans freshly roasted each morning. I thought about Pat not acknowledging my presence and Stephanie’s lascivious kiss and pelvic thrust and Martie Harmon’s story of Mark salivating at the memory of seeing women abused. I thought about the security men patrolling the walled compound and the Carson child taken from them and put to death. And I wished I had never heard the name Carson.
I left my bed long before dawn, no rest in me, and ran down the snakeskin streets. See them. See the Guinanes. What
was
the point? The point was to see if my skin tightened, to see if I was in the presence of people who murdered a girl in a bath, of a man who pushed a dead girl through the streets in a wheelchair, pushed the wheelchair down an escalator.
That was the point. That was the point.
ON THE way, too early to pay the call, we parked in Eltham’s main street.
Orlovsky lit a cigarette with the slim stainless-steel lighter he’d always had. Then he had a thought, offered me the packet. I took one. He lit it, regretted it instantly.
‘That’s not good,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t smoke, I’m not comfortable with you smoking.’
I knew what he was talking about. I’d taken a cigarette off him on the night C Troop went to hell.
‘Omens now,’ I said. ‘Mick, it’s just a fucking smoke. Why don’t you get your palms read? Palms. Soles of your feet. You could get your dick read. There must be some meaning there.’
He blew a thin stream of smoke at me. Contemptuous smoke, his composure regained. ‘Flippancy,’ he said. ‘You cloak yourself in flippancy.’ Then he changed tack. ‘Ever given your command instinct any thought? What it might stem from?’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘It stems from a fear of being led by idiots. The only worse fear is of being followed by idiots.’
Cigarettes didn’t last long, promised more than they could deliver. I’d forgotten what hot and acrid teases they were, tiny unbalancing hits. I threw the end out of the window.
‘Time to go. Think like an inspector.’
The house was hidden from the road behind a dense screen of mature gums. A long steep unmade driveway curved to the right. We drove up and parked in front of a low building surrounded by vine-covered pergolas built from massive timbers. There was no garden, just native plants everywhere, many close to death.
‘Do inspectors have the power to hurt people?’ said Orlovsky.
‘Like tie them up and torture them?’
‘I don’t think so.’
The front door was huge, double doors, metal-studded, probably saved from some public building hammered to fragments by the wrecker’s ball. I rapped a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a clenched fist.
We waited, quiet here, no sounds except birds in the gum trees, waited.
I dropped the knocker again, once, twice.
The lefthand doorknob turned and the door opened, just the width of the opener’s face.
‘Yes?’
A tall man, in his thirties, thin, clean-shaven, long hair combed back, dirty fair hair, touching his shoulders. I looked into his eyes, didn’t feel anything.
Orlovsky said, ‘Mr Guinane?’
‘Yes.’
Orlovsky offered him a card. ‘We’re from Powertron, your electricity supplier.’
He looked at it. ‘Powertron? The bills come from EasternPower.’ He had a thin, scratchy voice.
‘They did. EasternPower is now Powertron. Your bills will come from Powertron from now on.’
He gave Orlovsky the card back. ‘Okay. Is that it?’
‘Well,’ said Orlovsky, ‘we’ve got a problem. We don’t have any power usage pattern for this address.’
‘What?’
Orlovsky ran a finger along his upper lip. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing but before we took over, EasternPower managed to wipe the consumption records for this whole area. So we don’t have any record of your power usage over the past few years. The pattern of usage.’
The man opened the door a little wider, shook his head, impatient. He was wearing an old sweater over a tee-shirt, camou-flage pants. ‘So? We’re not behind. The bills get paid on time.’
Now Orlovsky scratched his head. ‘They do, yes, that’s not the problem. May I ask, are these domestic premises?’
‘Domestic premises? Do you mean, do we live here?’
‘Not business premises? Industrial?’
‘What’s this about?’ He was annoyed now, not just impatient, getting angry.
‘Mr Guinane. Mr K. Guinane, is it?’
‘Keith, yes.’
‘Mr Guinane, these premises use far more power than we would expect from domestic use,’ said Orlovsky. He coughed. ‘Now the usual practice in these cases is to notify the police, but…’ ‘The police? What for, what are you talking about?’
‘We don’t wish to do that because of the embarrassment it can cause. And because we don’t have the usage records, we thought…’ ‘Notify the police about what, for fuck’s sake?’ High voice, loud.
‘If we can be satisfied that you are using the power for some legitimate purpose, then we can simply note that.’
‘What’s illegitimate?’
Orlovsky coughed again. ‘Well, for example, people growing certain kinds of plants under lights tend to use large quantities…’ The man smiled, a smile in which he didn’t open his lips.
‘Oh Christ, is that it? You think we’re growing dope. It’s computers, we use half-a-dozen machines.’
We both smiled back at him. ‘Right,’ said Orlovsky, ‘right, computers, that makes sense.’
‘Yeah,’ said the man, ‘that’s it.’
‘Could you just show us that?’ said Orlovsky. ‘We have to report that we’re satisfied the usage is for legitimate purposes.’
‘You’re like an arm of the fucking cops,’ Keith Guinane said. ‘Come in, I’ll show you.’
As he opened the door, I saw movement in the second doorway along the passage. He led us down a wide passage with a polished concrete floor, mudbrick walls, doors opening on both sides at the end. The second door on the left was open. He went in first.
It was a big room, dark, heavy curtains drawn. There were benches along the inside walls and on them computing equipment, screens glowing with coloured images of people running, all slightly different. At first, I thought they were photographs but there was something of the comic strip about them.
A man was standing in the righthand corner, his back to a screen. He was the double of Keith, right down to the clothes and the long dirty hair combed back.
‘This is my brother, Victor,’ said Keith. ‘These people are from the electricity company,’ he said to Victor. ‘We’re using so much power, they thought we were growing dope under lights.’
Victor laughed, a screeching sound. ‘Growing dope under lights,’ he said, delighted.
It was like rewinding a tape, playing it again, listening to the same speaker.
…growing dope under lights.
Rewind, play: …
growing dope under lights.
Alice on the monitor in the television studio:
Not similar, the same. At first, I thought it was someone talking to himself, having a conversation with himself.
‘Well, that’s all we need, Mr Guinane,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I can see where the juice’s going. Sorry we had to bother you, but you can understand, there’s not many houses pulling this kind of current.’
‘Yeah,’ said Keith Guinane. ‘I know. Just doing your job.’
He went out first, then Orlovsky.
The door across the passage was open. I had a moment to see a section of wall. It was covered with photographs, at least a dozen framed photographs of different sizes, some of them school photographs, class pictures, all arranged around a big picture of Cassie Guinane. On a table in front of the pictures, a candle was burning, a candle in a silver candlestick on a small table covered by a white lace tablecloth.
There was something odd about the school photographs.
I took an extra pace across the passage, focused on a picture of girls in school uniform.
A girl had been blacked out.
In every school class picture, a girl had been blacked out.
It would be Stephanie Carson. Stephanie Chadwick.
We went down the passage, walking behind Keith Guinane. On the way, I put out my hand and touched the wall, ran my fingertips along it.
Mudbrick, mud-plastered mudbrick.
Adobe.
…and I thought they were lovely, adobe, sort of Moorish-style and we unpacked and I went to have a shower and I got out all wet, water in my eyes and I had to steady myself and I touched the wall…Repulsive, revolting, the feel of it…I ran out, I didn’t have anything on, I think I was screaming, I gave my mother a terrible fright…