‘But there are other ways you can feel empowered outside of your work. We have spoken before about this,’ Mak reminded her.
Brenda Bale was a youthful and sexual forty-two, intelligent and successful in her trade. She had previously worked in a well-known bondage–dominance house called The Tower, but now operated from home, where she had the necessary accoutrements and a dedicated ‘slave’ named Julio who guarded her safety. But Brenda had grown increasingly concerned that she was becoming ‘less Brenda and more Mistress Scarlet’ with each passing day. Makedde now suggested that taking her work home might have caused this psychological shift, blurring the lines between Brenda Bale and Mistress Scarlet until the more dominant of the two was taking over.
Brenda shook her head at Mak’s comment, seemingly frustrated with herself, her bright red ponytail flipping back and forth. ‘I tried joining one of those rock-climbing classes you suggested and I just felt so out of place,’ she said, exasperated.
‘That’s okay. It may take a while for you to find activities that connect with you outside of the role you play in your work life. The more dedication you give to developing activities and
friendships in your personal life, the more fulfilling your personal life is likely to become. It’s like anything else: the more you put in, the more you get back.’
‘I know…you’re right…’
‘Give some more thought to what we’ve discussed,’ Mak said, wrapping up.
‘Oh yes, thank you. I will,’ the red lips responded.
It was now ten to five and the fifty-minute hour of the psychologist was up.
‘I hope you have found our sessions helpful. You know, this is not my area of expertise. I still suggest that if this issue remains unresolved, you would really benefit from speaking to a specialist in the area. I would be able to get the name of someone for you.’
‘I know, I know,’ Brenda responded. ‘I really do appreciate our talks, though.’ Brenda stood and straightened her suit. She looked to Mak, and the arched eyebrows lifted in a sincere expression. ‘You’ve helped me so much. You’re really good.’ She leaned in to give a hearty handshake.
I am?
‘I won’t impose on you much longer, I promise. But I really feel we are getting somewhere. I feel I’m close to a breakthrough,’ Brenda continued, bringing her smooth pale hands to her sides and making determined fists.
Mak hoped she was right. She couldn’t afford to keep doing this for free for ever.
‘If there is ever anything I can do for you, let me know,’ Brenda continued. ‘And I mean
anything.
I have all kinds of friends who owe me favours,’ she said.
Mak didn’t venture to think what kind of favours might be returned.
She saw Brenda out, bade her farewell for another week and closed the door behind her. She locked it.
Mak walked back and looked around the living room. It was furnished with a plush sofa-and-chair set she didn’t particularly like, and a handsome oak table she had covered in photo frames and books. She had ushered out a bouquet of dead flowers just prior to Brenda’s arrival and now she noticed that a stem of pollen had fallen on the carpet, making a small bright yellow stain.
‘Oops.’
Makedde hurried to the kitchen and returned with a damp soapy cloth to try to fix the carpet. She got on her knees and scrubbed away at the stubborn mark. Slowly, the pollen’s colour faded. Hunched down like that, Mak’s eyes were level to the low table, and her focus rested on a small framed photo she liked of her widowed father, Les, and his girlfriend, backdropped by the familiar doorstep of the Canadian west coast home of her youth. At the sight of it her mouth curved upwards in the sad, sentimental smile of those who have strayed far from home.
Dad.
She blinked.
She frowned.
This wasn’t how she had imagined things would be when she left Canada. It had been eighteen months since Mak had finished her PhD and postgraduate studies, one of only a handful of PhD grads that year who were already in their late twenties. A slew of personal and family crises had at one point made her feel like she would never get there. However, despite all the obstacles put in her way, she’d made it this far. But this wasn’t a practice: this was chatting with an identity-conflicted bondage mistress for an hour a week.
So Mak’s existence in Sydney wasn’t quite what she had planned—and her being with a cop was not what her father had wanted.
You warned me he’d never be home.
The yellow pollen stain was now more faint, but it wouldn’t come out completely. Mak didn’t know what else she could do. These little household spills and stains were the kind of things mums automatically knew how to fix, but Mak was clueless in these areas, and she didn’t have a mum to call.
Mak wisely sensed that her thoughts were spiralling into unproductive territory. As she often did in such circumstances, she abandoned them in favour of work activity.
Meaghan Wallace.
She made for her laptop, which was plugged in and ready for her on the dining-room table, a spot she often used as an impromptu office. Mak sat down and unbuttoned her suit jacket. She threw it over the chair, unsnapped her bra with one hand and pulled it off from underneath her black singlet. Now comfortable, she got to work.
One of the first things Mak had learned about investigation work was that a valuable part of the inquiry into a person’s background could be done online. Some good cyber-sleuthing often saved a lot of field work down the track.
She had three names to check up on: Meaghan Wallace, Simon Aston and Tobias Murphy. And while she was at it, she might just spend a minute or two finding out a few things about her secretive client, Robert Groobelaar, and his company. It wasn’t part of her job, but it couldn’t hurt to get a better idea of where he was coming from.
These days the vast majority of people under fifty—university students, board members, people in every imaginable type of interest group, bloggers, photo-mad personal website posters and anyone with a passing moment in the public eye—left their mark on the internet. A simple Google search could bring up all kinds of gems.
Mak began with the murder victim, Meaghan.
MEAGHAN WALLACE
.
SEARCH
.
Mak frowned. Google showed remarkably little on ‘Meaghan Wallace’.
MEAGAN WALLACE
.
SEARCH
.
The change of spelling showed many entries on various Meagan Wallaces that were sadly nothing near Meaghan’s match.
Damn.
She tried again.
MEG WALLACE
.
SEARCH
.
There were a lot of hits. Millions. And most of them looked useless. Mak checked the option for Australian pages only, and that narrowed down the listings, but there were still too many. Mak tried the image search instead. It came up with brunettes, redheads, the wrong blondes, some men, and even a labrador retriever.
On the third page of Meg Wallace image results, the search brought up a single photo of the same Meg Mak was after. She felt a small rush of excitement when her eyes fixed on the familiar face.
Bingo.
The image source was a website for a Sydney nightclub called The Rocking Horse. Mak clicked on it.
The caption read:
JAG LESLIE
,
MEG WALLACE AND AMY CAMILLERI ENJOY THE ROCKING HORSE NYE CELEBRATIONS
.
It was definitely Meaghan. She and her friends were sexily dressed in the photo, wearing lycra crop tops and mini-dresses. Meg’s tiny shirt had
the word ‘
TRINITY
’ printed across the chest. It was a photo clearly taken after dark—all three of them had red-eye from the flash. The club was near black behind them, but the camera had picked up a glinting disco ball, some reflecting lights and the backs of various clubbers dancing away, oblivious to the camera.
Jag Leslie and Amy Camilleri.
They could be close friends of Meaghan’s. Mak would track them down. She had a thought about the T-shirt, too. Maybe it was a company or a club Meaghan had worked for?
TRINITY
.
SEARCH
.
Mak’s computer came up with millions of Holy Trinity biblical sites and fan sites for Carrie-Anne Moss’s character in the
Matrix
series.
It’s probably nothing.
Mak didn’t have access to Marian’s professional directories or contacts from home, so she went to her simple dog-eared phone book and looked up Jag Leslie first. Surely there couldn’t be that many Jags out there who weren’t automobiles. If Jag had been a good friend of Meaghan’s, she might know something about who the girl had been seeing and what she had been up to before her murder. Perhaps even more than Meaghan’s parents would know, if and when Mak could get them to talk to her.
L…Leslie…Leslie, J…
It was amazing how many people overlooked the simple, uncomplicated effectiveness of the
common phone directory when looking for someone. In fact, a startling number of investigation cases that came into Marian’s office were solved by a simple flick through the phone book and a knock on the door. Employers wanted to hunt down rogue employees, mothers wanted to hunt down exes who failed to pay child support, and much of it could be done simply by the phone book and its old slogan, ‘let your fingers do the walking’. True to form, in only a few minutes Mak had come up with a number of Leslies: a slew of Jane Leslies and John Leslies, and the ones that looked like her best bet, J Leslies.
Mak phoned the first J Leslie listing, dialling #1 first to ensure that the number she was calling from was safely blocked. She dialled a J Leslie of Rose Bay, whose phone rang out until an answering machine picked up. Disappointed, Mak didn’t leave a message. She couldn’t leave a return number for this ring-around. She moved on to J Leslie number two.
The phone rang three times.
‘Hello?’
‘May I speak to Jag Leslie please?’ Mak asked politely.
‘Jade?’
‘Sorry—I’m looking for Jag. Perhaps I have the wrong number?’
There was a dial tone.
Thank you for hanging up. That’s very nice.
Mak had been hung up on many times in her work, so she wasn’t offended by it—she just wished they’d warn her first. Sometimes a phone slamming down hurt her ears. Undeterred, she lifted the receiver again and called the number of J Leslie of Newtown, New South Wales. If this wasn’t her, she would check through the database Marian had access to.
Someone picked up. ‘Yeah?’ came the answer.
‘Hello, is this Jag Leslie?’ Makedde asked.
‘Speaking.’
Mak smiled. ‘I’m calling from The Rocking Horse Nightclub. You’ve just been nominated for a Gold VIP pass.’
‘Really? I haven’t been there in like…months.’ The woman sounded genuinely surprised, and not as excited as Mak had hoped.
‘Well, you must have an admirer. Your nomination has been accepted.’ Mak concocted the details as she went along, trying to make the deal sound as exciting as humanly possible. She’d heard enough telephone sales lines to slip into the jargon. ‘Your
exclusive
Gold VIP pass allows you free entry and two free drinks for the next twelve months, including free entry to our next New Year’s Eve party.’
‘But it’s February.’
Come on, a little more enthusiasm, please. I’m trying here…
‘Yes. You will get to use the pass all year,’ Mak replied patiently. ‘Right through to January first.
We need to send the pass out to you. What is the best mailing address for you?’
Jag paused. ‘Um, this isn’t going to cost anything, is it?’
‘No,’ Mak assured her.
It will only cost you a free visit from me.
‘This is an exclusive Gold VIP pass. It can’t be bought.’
That statement finally seemed to work.
‘Okay. Cool. My address is post office box—’
Crap.
Mak couldn’t work with a post office box. ‘I’m sorry,’ Makedde interjected, ‘we can’t accept PO boxes on our database. Do you have a business or residential address I can type in?’
There was another pause.
‘Okay.’ Finally Jag gave out an address—hopefully her home address—and Mak gave her a spiel about how exclusive and fabulous the VIP pass was.
Mak wrote down the address, which was different to the one listed in the phone book—the phone book was never as up to date as Marian’s full database system. Someone young and unattached like Jag might move every six months.
Mak would attempt to make contact on Saturday. With any luck, Jag knew Meaghan well, and would have a thing or two to say about her friend’s murder.
Damien Cavanagh drove his new black Diablo into the bowels of a private underground car park in Sydney’s CBD, ignoring the attendant who uttered some moronic, smiling welcome from the booth as Damien coasted past with the windows up and the stereo on. Engine purring, he reverse-parked into a spot reserved for him alone—a spot that had been vacant for the three weeks since his last visit.
God, I hate coming here.
He cut the engine and stepped out wearing expensive ripped jeans, and Gucci sneakers and cap. He knew he would be the only one in the building not wearing the uniform of business, and the idea pleased him. The vehicle bleeped twice as he clicked the transponder button over his shoulder to lock it.
Damien hated driving here to the ‘Cavanagh building’, where his father, despite being past retirement age at sixty-seven, still insisted on working. He hated walking through the building, most often at his father’s side, suffering all those
sycophantic fools who actually thought Damien cared who they were and that he gave a damn about their jobs—or even his own coveted position as a company director. His father liked meeting him here to make him feel guilty about his lack of interest in the family company. He kept that parking spot reserved for Damien even though he didn’t want it. He insisted that his son make appearances.
Damien hit the button for the elevator. It soon collected him. At ground level the doors opened again to take another passenger.