The Fourth Season (5 page)

Six

The proprietor of the first internet cafe I visited looked Middle-eastern, and spoke English with an accent. I decided to pay for a session first, and ask questions later, well aware that he could refuse to answer them.

I logged on to my provider's website, checked my mail and sent off a few messages, at the same time glancing round the cafe, noting how many booths there were—twenty-three, packed close together. The cafe was in the middle of Civic, open long hours. It had to be staffed by more than one person.

I paid my two dollars, then said to the proprietor, ‘I'm wondering if you can help me.' I handed him my business card. ‘An investigation I'm working on leads to one of your computers.'

‘What do you mean?' The man sounded hostile and on guard, and I told myself I should have worked out a more indirect approach. But it was too late for that now.

I explained that, on 12 October last year, on a Thursday night from about nine o'clock, a hacker had been using one of his computers. He looked at me as though I'd asked him to recall his entire childhood and recite it back.

When I asked if he ran the business on his own, the man replied that he and his brother managed it between them. He recovered and said testily that he couldn't possibly remember who'd been in the cafe five months ago, and that no logs or histories of their customers were kept.

The second cafe to which Ivan had traced the environment minister's would-be hacker was much smaller, and actually in our neighbourhood. It wasn't open such long hours as the one in Civic. The hacker, or hackers—I reminded myself that there could be more than one—had used the cafe on a Thursday night as well, a week later and at the same time.

A woman in her sixties, with hair dyed black and lipstick practically the same colour, stood behind the counter. This time, I dispensed with any pretence at being a customer and showed her my card straight away. I'd rehearsed approaches in the car, and decided I did not have time to beat around the bush.

Prepared for another brush-off, I nevertheless put more care into explaining what I wanted. The woman told me her name was Rita Thomas, and that she and her husband, Owen, managed the cafe between them. When I told her the date and time, she stared at me and went pale behind her make-up.

‘I think you should speak to my husband,' she said.

. . .

Owen Thomas—he introduced himself with a handshake that was damp but firm—was seriously overweight. He leant forward in his wheelchair, breathing in hoarse, uneven bursts. Extra chins and cheek fat made his face look ponderous and slow, but his expression was alert and his eyes took in everything there was to notice about me, from my hair that needed cutting to my denim skirt that could have benefited from close contact with an iron.

Owen brought along a photograph of Laila cut out of the newspaper to make sure there was no mistake.

‘That waistcoat—she was wearing it the night she came in. It had goldy brown embroidery. Like autumn leaves.'

He told me he'd rung the police as soon as he'd recognised Laila's picture in the paper. An officer had interviewed him. ‘Young chap. Polite.'

Listening to Owen's description, I saw the waistcoat as clearly as though I'd created the design myself, an abstract design of reds, dark golds and browns. I recalled Laila at the Lennox Gardens picnic, the flashes of colour under the trees, her hair darker than the shadows I'd been hiding in.

‘Am I to understand this girl was a hacker?' Owen said.

I explained briefly, then asked if by any chance he recalled which machine Laila had been using.

Owen wheeled himself away from the counter to where he had a clearer view of the three rows of monitors and the aisles between them. I hesitated, wanting to follow him, to see what he saw, yet not wanting to interrupt his concentration.

He looked around and waved me over, and I checked the number. Owen could tell immediately by the look on my face that it was the right one. He wheeled himself slowly back to the counter, where I took him again through the details of that Thursday night, full of admiration for his capacious memory.

Laila had arrived at the cafe on her own. When I asked Owen if he kept histories of sites accessed by his customers, his answer was an emphatic no. He muttered something to himself, and I caught the phrase ‘police state yet'.

‘The boys all noticed her. I caught them staring, but that girl kept her head down. She didn't give any of them so much as a glance.'

There'd been three boys. Owen closed his eyes in order better to recall their features.

‘The first, first to come in that is—it would have been well before nine—had very short hair, spiky, with some sort of grease to make it stick up—you know what I mean. He was tallish, thin. I can't recall the others arriving, but I do know that a few minutes before nine all three of them were here.' Owen opened his eyes and nodded. ‘I can see them as clearly as I can see you now. Pam brought me a hot chocolate. I checked my watch and it was three minutes to nine.'

Pam, Owen explained, worked at the club next door. One of the boys had glasses and dark hair. The third looked younger. Not that the other two were old, but he looked more like a high school student. And plumpish,' Owen added, in the voice of someone who has undertaken and failed many diets. ‘I can't remember him coming in or leaving, though he's what I would call a regular.'

‘Did any of the boys tell you their names, or anything else that might help identify them? Did they seem to know each other?'

Owen shook his head.

‘The high school student,' I asked, ‘next time he comes in, could you give me a call?'

‘I didn't say he
was
a high school student, just that he looked younger.'

When I asked if Laila had used a mobile phone while she was at the cafe, Owen frowned. ‘Now you mention it, she did. I'd forgotten about that.' His frown was that of a man who never forgot details, and hated admitting that he had. ‘She rang somebody. Of course I didn't listen to what she said. I'm not an eavesdropper. What I'll never forget is the way that girl walked through that door like she was a countess. There was something very proud about her. Who could do that to such a beautiful young creature?'

I asked if Laila had left on her own, and Owen nodded, adding that ‘the kid was only a few steps behind.' He hadn't seen which way either of them went.

Owen looked at me and waited. I could see him thinking that he'd given me the information I'd asked for. Now it was payback time.

‘I don't know much more about Laila than what's been in the papers,' I said. ‘I—my partner had no idea, when he was asked to investigate that hacking, or attempted hacking, that she might have been involved.'

Owen caught my eye, then looked away, knowing I was being less than frank.

‘It was somebody important, wasn't it? Who? Not that politician she was supposed to be on her way to see?'

‘I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to say.'

I'd given Rita my card, but I handed Owen one as well. ‘Please phone me if you remember anything else, any little detail. And if any of those three young men come into the cafe again.'

Owen murmured something that I took for half-hearted assent.

. . .

When I got home, Ivan was sitting in the living-room with the curtains drawn. I registered his shape first—well known and yet so strange. A blade of light where the curtains didn't quite meet caught the circle of his hair, but his face was entirely in shadow. I had the feeling that he'd been waiting there like a statue for the whole time I'd been out.

Ivan didn't look up, didn't speak, squatting in some private darkness, while I felt as though I was standing in the hard, unforgiving daylight, waving flags, jumping up and down.

He'd made a big effort for Kat and Peter the evening before, but I could see what a struggle it was for him to keep it up.

Ivan had always been a big man, heavily built, inclined to fat. Just then he reminded me of Owen Thomas, the layers of Owen's thick, inert body imprisoned in a chair.

I shivered, knowing that I had to tell Ivan what I'd learnt at the internet cafe, but unable to predict how he would react. The waistcoat flared between us as I repeated Owen's words, as though it might be a talisman of some kind, a brightness from the grave.

Ivan listened without interrupting, but the hostility I felt growing behind his silence made me feel like an intruder in my own house. When I'd finished speaking, Ivan said he couldn't see Laila as a hacker, and then, without pausing for breath, ‘The police were here again. They keep asking if I saw anyone that night, talked to anyone. They keep making me go over the route. I just walked, I said. I don't remember where.'

‘Please don't lie to me, Ivan.'

‘I'm not lying. If I was, I'd make up something more plausible.'

I told myself there were people I could question, places I could go. What I felt I couldn't do was stay there in the house with Ivan. Being around him made me feel dull, and stupid with anxiety. I could talk to Laila's friends, and other members of the group.

The assignment Don Fletcher had given me was ambitious, yet vague; demonstrate that my client was ‘a good man who'd made a mistake', to repeat a phrase that Don had used; prove this to his wife and save his marriage. A tall order, but was saving my own marriage any less ambitious? And did I really want to?

I told myself I must shut off thoughts of this kind. There would be plenty of time for them later, when Ivan had been cleared of suspicion and Laila's killer had been caught.

. . .

The Garema Place internet cafe turned out to be run by a young man with ginger dreads and tiny octagonal-shaped spectacles that I couldn't imagine did anything for his vision. He looked approachable enough, but when I started asking questions, I found him to be dismissive and rude. What's an old bat like you doing in a place like this? his body language and his voice implied. I wouldn't have given his cafe a cool award. I preferred the Dickson one, with its dusty wooden floor and old but serviceable machines.

The young man appeared not to recognise Laila from the photo­graph I showed him. The way his eyes had trouble focussing over the tops of his glasses made me wonder if certain chemicals pinging around in his brain were making him simultaneously discourteous and blind. Whatever the reason, he was no use to me at all. He had no idea who'd been in his cafe on the dates and times I asked about, and laughed when I attempted to jog his memory. I was lucky to have found Owen, a man who possessed both an encyclopaedic memory and, though he remained wary, a willingness to help.

Home felt like a trap I did not want to spring, yet it drew me with the magnet of a family's needs. I felt precariously balanced on the edge of Ivan's grief. I tried to think of ways that I could find out what he'd really been doing on the night of Laila's murder; but my brain seized up when faced with the fact of betrayal, his to me, and mine, in return, to him.

Seven

I'd only ever once seen a wombat close enough to touch, the summer I'd gone camping at Wilson's Promontory, before Ivan and my children, before Derek even. I'd opened my tent flap early in the morning, and there was this squat, hairy animal staring at me, with an inquiring yet bemused expression, as though it had never been in contact with a human before. I soon learnt that wombats roamed the camping ground at night, and that it was advisable to hang your food from trees if you didn't want it eaten.

Bill Abenay reminded me of that holiday twenty years ago. Long greying hair met the beard that covered his plump cheeks and chin. He was short and broad, with thick, hairy arms and legs, exposed by his T-shirt and crumpled khaki shorts.

Abenay showed me into his living room, looked at me and waited. I registered the sadness and intelligence in his dark blue eyes. He didn't ask me to sit down, or offer me anything to drink. On the phone, when I'd rung to tell him what I wanted, and to make a time if he was agreeable, he'd responded in a voice that lacked surprise, lacked even the merest flicker of interest, as though my visit could not possibly matter one way or the other.

Abenay explained that he'd met Laila when she took one of his first year courses. She'd been an enthusiastic student, passionate about the environment. He offered brief responses to my questions about the conservation movement in Canberra, and Laila's place within it. He had no idea why she'd made an appointment to see Greens Senator Brian Fitzpatrick, or why she'd detoured to the lake on her way to Parliament House.

‘I've been wondering if Laila was having an affair with a married man,' I said.

Abenay turned to stare out the window, giving every appearance of placid strength, and an inability to be startled out of what I recognised as a very private grief.

‘You mean your husband,' he said with his back turned.

‘Among others.' I thought Ivan was probably telling the truth when he said he hadn't slept with Laila, that she'd brushed him off, but if Bill Abenay wanted to see me as a wronged wife, then I didn't mind.

‘I don't know anything about all that,' he said. ‘Laila's personal life was none of my concern.'

He spoke with such conviction that I knew it would be pointless to press him further on the subject.

Instead, I told him I'd received some documents that Laila had been interested in; technical, scientific documents. They'd arrived in the mail that morning, with note from Don Fletcher expressing the hope that my inquiries were progressing. On impulse, I asked Abenay if he'd mind helping me to understand them. His answer was an indifferent nod.

In spite of feeling that I hadn't handled the interview very well—I'd been too abrupt, a common fault of mine—I'd found being in Bill Abenay's house curiously restful. I'd expected him to be suspicious of my motives. I'd expected to have to tell him about Ivan. But he'd asked nothing, and nothing I'd asked
him
had come anywhere near touching his grief.

. . .

I thought over our conversation while I was washing up, having sent Ivan to the shops. The phone rang just as I was emptying the sink.

It was Rita Thomas. One of the three young men had come into the cafe. Rita sounded nervous, but determined.

‘Right,' I said, and thanked her. ‘I'll be over right away.'

The plump young man was just as Owen had described him, except that the description had highlighted only a few features. His hair was long and honey brown, tied back with a leather thong of the kind Ivan used to wear. A few strands had escaped and floated on his shoulders. He looked as though he was trying for a sophistication Peter did not yet know existed.

When I introduced myself, he smiled and said he knew who I was. ‘You're like Pete's mother, right? Your picture was in the paper when that guy fell off Black Mountain tower.'

‘Pushed,' I said. ‘Unfortunately.'

The young man's name was Rowan. I swallowed my question as to why he was not at school. He didn't seem surprised when I said I'd like to ask him a few questions, but rather to take it as his due. There was a slyness round Rowan's lips, a taste of condescension; he smiled too much, and insincerely. While we talked, he fiddled with a loose strand of his hair, twirling it around a forefinger.

Rowan remembered Laila clearly, but not anybody else who'd been in the cafe that October evening. At first he claimed not to have noticed which way Laila had gone when she left, but after a bit of careful prompting, he said he'd seen her get into a car—a smallish, dark sedan. It had been too far away for him to see the driver, or to be sure of the make or colour. But the driver, whoever he or she was, had switched on the lights as Laila approached. Rowan recalled a flash of red as Laila opened the passenger side door.

I walked home from the cafe slowly, mulling over Rowan's story. Did the fact that Laila had been picked up suggest that the driver knew what she'd been doing at the cafe? If it had been Laila. Was the flash of red decisive? I had to admit that it was not. What
had
Laila been up to, besides attempting to break into a computer belonging to the environment minister's principle advisor? Stealing Don Fletcher's password came to mind. But if Laila could do that from an internet cafe, why not steal the files while she was at it? Why bother fronting up to Don at all?

Ivan was back from the supermarket. I heard the sound of running water and found him in the bathroom cleaning his teeth. I stood in the bathroom doorway, feeling as though I was returning from a distance to a place that I no longer recognised. A fine wire of tension held us both together and apart, so sharp a wire I felt sure that if I stretched out my fingers towards it, blood would splash onto the bathroom floor.

I went into our office and, after closing the door behind me, sat down at my desk. I picked up the top bill on the pile, then logged into my netbank account. I paid the bill, then the second, then the third one. Don Fletcher's parcel had contained a cheque.

Feeling better than I had for days, I tried thinking about the hacking question from another angle. Perhaps Laila had targeted King's office not because she suspected the minister and his staff of some cover-up or other misdemeanour, but because of information that might have been sent
to
him—information concerning the new marine park, for instance. Of course, just hacking into King's office would have been a coup, which brought me back to the question of whether Laila had been acting for the conservation group, or flying solo. Had Laila's attempt at hacking, that night at the internet cafe, been interrupted, and, if so, by whom? Or had no one interrupted her? Had she done her best and failed, leaving a trail that led to the cafe, if no further? Had Laila believed she was more skilled at stealing information than she really was?

. . .

Peter was reluctant to talk about Rowan. For some time now, he'd been keeping his school life to himself.

When I mentioned Rowan's name, Peter glared at me and said, ‘That drop kick. What do you want to talk to
him
for, Mum?'

Most of the kids in Peter's class had a home computer, and access to the internet. I knew this because I'd given a talk on security issues to the P&C. First, I'd helped them prepare and circulate a questionnaire. According to the responses, the first choice of those who didn't have a home computer was the free internet service at Dickson library. My talk had been well publicised, and had helped me win the education contract. I thought I could make a reasonable guess as to why Rowan was paying for sessions at the cafe, and Peter confirmed it for me.

‘His parents have put this filter on. It blocks out heaps of stuff.'

‘Did Rowan tell you that?'

‘He carries on. I told you, he's a drop kick.'

‘What does he carry on about?'

‘Just stuff, okay! Why'd you have to go and ask him all those ­questions? He won't let me forget it.'