The White Tower (7 page)

I wondered whether, in common with a lot of other nervous people, Colin wasted energy worrying, that his instinct was immediately to worry, or whether there was something particular about Fenshaw that required attentive listening, and about Niall's death that required him to say no automatically.

The steps receded. Further off, voices rose and fell. The air-conditioning sighed. Colin was staring into space, hands in the pockets of his lab coat.

‘What happens if something goes wrong with one of the accel­erators?'

He started, shook his hands free. ‘We'd get someone from the Biomedical Engineering Department. What I mean is, there are full-time technicians here in the hospital. If they can't fix it, Dr Fenshaw rings Sydney. We can have an engineer here within three hours of reporting a problem.'

‘The manufacturers are in Sydney?'

‘A rep. Wilton's an American company. In the very unlikely event of it turning out to be something the guy from Sydney couldn't handle, he'd ring the States. We can get parts from the States in under two days.'

Colin was controlling his voice with an effort, but determined to go ahead and make his point. ‘The thing you have to understand about the treatment is—it's critical. I wasn't exaggerating when I told you about that patient who came in thirty-five days straight. We've worked over Christmas, Easter, so a patient won't have to miss a day. The Ventacs are incredibly sophisticated machines. Sure there are going to be minor technical problems from time to time. But it's important to remember that every minute they're operating here, they're saving lives.'

My stomach was knotting with the intensity of this. What had I said to bring it on? And what was it about Niall Howley that Colin didn't want to talk about? Was it that Niall had killed himself? Was this sufficient reason for Colin to want to dismiss him, and subtly, or not so subtly, put him down?

On my way from the radiotherapy department back to the side of the hospital where I'd parked my car, I recognised Eve, the young woman who'd come to set up the treatment room while Colin was putting the accelerator through its paces.

I hurried to catch up with her and, when I was half a dozen steps behind, called out her name.

She swung round and stared at me blankly.

‘Eve?' I repeated. ‘It's Sandra Mahoney. I met you a little while ago. With Colin Rasmussen.'

‘Oh,' she said. ‘Oh yes.'

I could see her caught between wanting to hurry on to whatever business she had waiting, and not wanting to be rude to me in case I was somebody official.

I walked up level with her. ‘I won't keep you. I was just wondering, did you know Niall Howley?'

‘He was the guy who died, right? No, I didn't know him.'

‘Could you tell me who in the department he was friends with, who might have known him best?'

Eve looked startled, then guilty. ‘Why do you want to know? Who are you anyway?'

‘Niall's mother's hired me to see if I can find out more about what led to his death.'

‘Oh,' Eve said. ‘Colin—' She bit her lip. ‘Sorry, I'm in rather a hurry.' She began to move away.

‘Did Niall have any friends here?'

‘They—we're all new, you see.'

‘You mean nobody working in the department now was here when Niall was?'

‘Except Colin. And of course Dr Fenshaw.'

‘What happened to the others?'

Eve caught sight of someone out of the corner of her eye. ‘Dominic!'

A tall, good-looking man was bearing down on us, lifting his hand in a quick salute.

‘Nick! I'm sorry!' Eve's olive skin had gone a deep red-brown.

The man ignored me and smiled at Eve, giving the impression that he was annoyed, but prepared to let her make it up to him.

Eve turned to me. ‘I have to go. I'm sorry.'

I thanked her and said goodbye, wishing handsome Dominic had been held up somewhere too.

. . .

Coloured arrows on the floor converged towards two men unaware of me, half hidden from me by the angle of a corridor. Colin's face was thin and flushed. His blond hair flopped forward, and his gestures were exaggerated, arms poking out of the too-short sleeves of his white coat. He was appealing to Dr Fenshaw, who was leaning towards him the way a man did when he was certain of his power of attraction.

It was only a moment before Fenshaw continued on along the ­corridor, Colin staring after him, red-faced and intent. I was sure that, whatever Colin was asking for, the answer had been no. He stood looking anxiously after his superior with his eyes from once discrete, lost twins. Then he too moved away, energetic suddenly, in a hurry, his white coat a spinnaker that the wind has filled.

I thought of following, then decided I didn't want either man to know I'd seen him. Though I'd left the accelerators behind a maze of corridors, I was aware, in my inner ear, of their constant, authoritative song, a long, one-toned exhalation.

. . .

I phoned Eamonn that evening and thanked him again for making time to see me. I asked if he'd been aware that there'd been a complete turnover of radiotherapists at the Monaro Hospital, apart from Colin Rasmussen. Eamonn said he'd heard about it.

‘How many were there?'

‘Six, I think. Six or seven.'

I asked him if he'd help me track them down. After a pause, he replied in his mild, pleasant way that he'd see what he could do.

I put the phone down conscious of the pressing in of memories. The huge, unquiet breath of the accelerators had followed me home, but it couldn't be something I associated with my mother's illness, because she'd had no radiation treatment.

There'd been wards with other women. I remembered how symmetrical and alike these women had looked, putting on a good face in pink and aqua bedjackets. Women of a certain age with a lifetime's practice at putting on a face.

The phrases, ‘Just a few tests love.' ‘Be out of here tomorrow.' And she was. But in a few months back again, to a ward identical in almost all respects. More tests. What had I been thinking of? Or was it that I had not been thinking, had refused to think? Had got back on the plane and home to Canberra and Derek?

The four or six bed ward. The women sitting against pillows primped for visitors. My mother's false cheerfulness repelling conversation. Not her cowardice, but mine.

. . .

‘Hey you,' I said to Ivan late that night, pulling on his arm. ‘Do you know what time it is?'

‘In a minute Sandy. Don't wait up for me. Go to bed.'

‘I did. Hours ago.'

Ivan had found a game similar to Niall's, and was playing it for all he was worth.

‘Celtic magic,' I said crossly. ‘Ruined castles. A bad guy lurking behind every rock.'

I recalled Ivan's cold side of the bed, my side cooling down, and was irritated because I knew it was a false opposition to set up—work and bed.

‘It's given me an idea.'

‘What kind of an idea?'

‘Not a MUD,' Ivan intoned. ‘MUDs are boring. I've got to work it out. Dangerous to talk about it too much. Words might steal it.'

I lay awake waiting for him, then I must have fallen asleep because he woke me with waves of bathroom air and a smell of toothpaste.

I lay against his chest and felt damp hair. ‘What are you doing having a shower in the middle of the night?'

‘The water splashed while I was cleaning my teeth.'

‘You'll catch cold.'

‘Australians have no idea of cold.' Ivan rolled over, getting comfortable. ‘It's true Sandy. This doona is a heap of shit. I have to go to sleep now. Wake me up at seven.'

‘You'll be stuffed.'

‘I'll catch a nap at lunchtime.'

I liked the moonlight coming in between and under skimpy curtains, and had always resisted Derek's nagging that we should get proper, made-to-measure ones. But that night I would have liked the darkness to be total. Perversely awake—Ivan was snoring lightly in five minutes—I did not want to look at the bulk of him beside me, or rather would have preferred to see it only with my inner eye.

Black hair and eyes, and thick white skin, were transferable and ­travelled well. What would a childhood of Canberra summers do to Katya's? High cheekbones instructed eyes towards an almost slant. I wanted to say to Ivan, look, I may not know much about families, about yours practically nothing because you refuse to talk about it. But I do know this. There's never as much time as you think.

I stared at objects and felt my attempt to force a solid and recognisable shape from them to be a kind of joke against myself. A chill passed between my shoulderblades. I thought that maybe, on other nights, Ivan lay watching me asleep. Ivan didn't look for patterns in relationships, in people, but through the digital images he created, and that were his greatest pleasure, suspended now because of having to work eight hours a day at the ANU. It occurred to me that he needed me to be a certain type of person, a certain type of Australian person—down-to-earth and plodding. He'd remarked once that Brook and I were two of a kind.

Ivan's face was blank with fatigue in the early morning, that once favourite time for sex, in the days when it was still supposed to be a secret from Peter asleep in the next room, Derek in America. I pictured a man sitting in front of a computer screen, a young man with his life ahead of him, concentrating, deeply moved. Dead before his time, this young man now stood between me and Ivan, me and Brook, me and Moira Howley. Eamonn had described him as independent. Colin Rasmussen had had little time for him. As Ferdia, he'd been respected and admired, but had managed to make an enemy of God.

There was the question of knowledge for its own sake, whether such a thing was possible, and, if so, what its consequences might turn out to be. And the related idea that, for certain people—Niall among them?—idealism equipped them poorly for dealing with people for whom knowledge was a way to power.

Seven

I emailed Sorley Fallon.

Why did you decide to execute Ferdia?

It was my MUD. I ran it. I could do what I liked.

Why that form of punishment? What had Ferdia done?

Ferdia turned traitor. Before that he was the best player, the greatest Hero the Castle ever had.

Did you give Ferdia a chance to demonstrate his innocence?

Dozens of them.

Do you believe Niall was so devastated by your decision to execute Ferdia that he took his own life?

That idea is absurd.

Were you questioned by the police about Niall's death?

No.

Civic police station was an ambiguous refuge with rain knifing straight down off the Brindabellas. September sometimes threw up days that were colder and wetter than mid-July, Canberra days that made people feel spring had made an appearance only to mock them.

I'd dressed with more care than usual for my interview with Detective-Sergeant McCallum, in a skirt, boots I'd cleaned the night before, a neat woollen jumper. Now my boots were decorated with frills of mud and the hem of my skirt had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when a car skidded to a halt at the Northbourne traffic lights. Because of the weather, all the Civic car parks were full, and even though I'd left myself plenty of time, I had to park way over on Marcus Clarke and ended up running and sloshing my way to the station.

Rows of wet people filled the waiting benches. Maybe it was the rain, the throwback to winter, maybe it was the fact that I'd sat up late the night before reading the police report that Brook had finally brought round, but I felt depressed.

Brook's helpfulness. The way he'd smiled and said, ‘Here you go Sunshine.' Borrowing the report for me, so I could read it at my leisure, copy what I liked. His pride in his ability to do this, even with the delay. The dry courtesy of that generation of policemen. I'd asked him if he'd read it himself, if he'd known that all the radiotherapists who'd worked with Niall had left except for one, if he knew that Niall's best friend had described him as happy on the night he'd died. Brook said no to all three questions, the careful no of a man who'd done what I wanted, but reluctantly, who did not want to be pushed into telling me I should leave well enough alone.

I'd started reading and was immediately disappointed. There was plenty of technical information, lists of the bones Niall had broken in his fall. But as to motive, states of mind, leads pointing to other people and the parts they might have played—it was less than sketchy. I'd built it up in my mind as giving me a clear direction, something I should never have done.

Moira hadn't seen it, had not asked to see it. She hadn't looked at the photographs either. Her imagination supplied her with a horror that they could not match. Would they have added to it though? Would they have seemed unreal?

Moira spent each day alone in her house with memories for company. Did she count the hours till Bernard came home from work? Did she dread that moment when he walked through the door? I thought of the television set and two chairs facing it, a black joke surely, a rotten nasty joke. And of the mother sitting, hands fondling, biting at one another, in her son's empty room, watching a blank screen.

Dr Fenshaw's testimony had stuck in my mind. The beginning came back to me almost word for word.

I have known Niall Howley for a little over two years, since he began working in the radiotherapy unit. During that time, and in particular in the last six months, I was disappointed, indeed distressed, to find Howley's work deteriorating. His ability to concentrate and to perform even simple tasks could not be relied on. It became a habit for him to come to work tired, and indeed on more than one occasion, it looked as though he'd had no sleep at all. I tried to talk to him about what was bothering him but, I am afraid, got nowhere. On the day in question, Howley appeared much the same, that is, physically tired, withdrawn and uncooperative.

That day at the hospital, I'd watched with admiration as Fenshaw comforted a young patient, but was struck by his readiness to conclude that Niall had lost his professional competence to an interactive game.

. . .

Bill McCallum's eyes were blue, deep-set, fringed with dark blond lashes. He smiled and half stood up, shaking hands across a desk piled with papers. I felt a kindliness approach, then fix itself on me, as though whatever I'd done wrong would be understood and eventually ­forgiven.

‘I had a bit to do with Moira Howley around the time of the inquest.' McCallum settled himself back down behind his desk. ‘How's she doing?'

‘Not too well.'

I suddenly noticed that McCallum had no neck. His shoulder pads, with their Federal Police insignia, bunched his shoulders up to short grey hair, which, cut straight above his ears, added to the squashed effect. The band of his black trousers sat too high on a non-existent waist.

‘Of the forty or so suicides we've had in the last year,' he was informing me, ‘only two have been jumpers. Most people gas or hang themselves.'

Forty seemed a lot for a population of three hundred thousand.

My expression must have shown what I was thinking. McCallum said, ‘Oh yes, it's more common than most people think. There are ­traditions. Not something ordinary folk think much about. Well of course suicides aren't reported in the press. Jumping's a tradition. Top of the Currong flats. Last year we had two brothers. Terrible that was, the second following the first.'

‘Why didn't—?' I began.

‘Block it off? Knock it down? They'd find somewhere else.'

I wondered about the people living there, the non-suicides, and for a farcical, stupid moment pictured a young woman looking up through the window and saying to her toddler, ‘There goes another one.'

Under his thick eyelashes, McCallum was returning my gaze shrewdly. I thought of Brook, how when ill, bald, chemoed to the eyeballs, Brook had had that cocky manner, that okay you might have got me but I'm still breathing you bastard look about him.

‘Jumpers,' McCallum was saying. ‘Jumpers are—well, in my experience jumpers are always badly disturbed. They choose to jump because it's so violent.'

He flashed me another quick, assessing look. ‘That seems odd to you, doesn't it? You're thinking that all suicide is by definition a violent end to life. But only a very particular type of person chooses to jump. I've never come across an exception to that in all my years of police work. And never from the Telstra Tower. That's a first.'

His eyes, transforming his pale scrunched face, watched me, not impatiently, not accusingly, but offering knowledge based on experience and waiting to see what I did with it.

‘And it's an awful thing. Just now I mentioned tradition. Well, ­traditions have to, you know, augment themselves, become more elaborate, and in the traditions of suicides and potential suicides, more crazy from our point of view. They have to go one more, do better than the last fellow.'

‘You think that's what could have happened with Niall Howley?'

‘Yes, I do.'

‘But there's a puzzle, isn't there? How did Niall clear the lower platform?' I took my brochure of the tower out of my bag and put it on the desk between us, pointing to the broadcasting platform with the large white discs. ‘The width here—the difference between this, where Niall's supposed to have jumped from, and this, is over a metre. How did he manage to jump out far enough to clear it?'

‘I agree it seems unusual. Howley was very disturbed and very ­determined.'

But that doesn't make him Superman, I thought, biting my lip, determined to stay on the right side of McCallum since that was how I seemed to have started off.

‘Did you consider the possibility that he jumped from the lower platform?' It was one of my frustrations with the report that there was no discussion of this.

‘It certainly occurred to us, but there's no evidence to suggest Howley gained entry to any restricted area. You need a pass for that and Howley didn't have one.'

Perhaps I was right in assuming that, on this point at least, the police had made only superficial inquiries. Why go looking for unnecessary complications? Had this been their reasoning? I reminded myself that it hadn't just been this man, that he'd had detective-constables knocking on doors and asking questions. But it had been McCallum who'd read through all the answers, collated them, drawn his conclusions, and influenced the coroner, in turn, to draw his.

‘Going back to this platform,' I said, indicating the higher public one. ‘Were any bits of Niall's clothing found on the spikes? Or maybe blood, where he'd scratched himself climbing over?'

McCallum shook his head. ‘You see, they don't think like you and me, these young guys. It all seems crazy, unbelievable to you, but that's because you're looking at it from the outside.'

‘Have you had much to do with computer addicts before?'

In his experience, McCallum said, addiction was addiction. It mani­fested itself in different ways, but there was an underlying psychology which was depressingly the same. He told me the story of a young man who came to Canberra from Thailand to go to university.

‘A mate found him dead in his room a week before his third year exams. Heroin overdose. Parents flew straight out here. I drove them to the morgue and left them with him. Of course we're not supposed to do that. If any of the blokes out there had dobbed me in—but they needed to be with their son to pray.'

‘Where were you while they were with him?'

‘Waited outside. Got a chair and sat down by the door.'

I pictured McCallum hunched on his chair, nervous, but not too nervous, of a reprimand. I rephrased my question. ‘Have there been other suicides associated with over-use, or—addiction—to computers?'

‘You mean computer games?'

I nodded, thinking that in Niall Howley's case I did, but I could think of other instances, cases that had been reported in the press, of boys who'd become so hooked they'd been unable to get up from their computers to eat, or sleep, or use the lavatory.

‘Not here in Canberra.'

‘Did you contact any of the other players, or the guy who ran the MUD?'

The answer had to be no, I thought, otherwise they would have been referred to in the report. There was also Fallon's no, but I still wanted to hear McCallum say it.

He frowned. ‘Police resources are tight enough, without wasting them on no-hopers like that.'

‘Was the coroner satisfied that playing the game led to Niall's death?'

‘Yes.'

I heard a noise, turned round and there was Brook, appearing from behind a perspex partition, its wavery reflections and the angle of the light multiplying his new suit.

He winked at McCallum, and kissed me on the cheek.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘Are you on your way to court?'

‘After lunch.'

I thanked McCallum and shook his hand again. ‘You've been very helpful.'

‘Not too gruesome?'

‘If it is, that's hardly your fault.'

‘This old man remembers.'

‘Too well,' Brook said with a grimace.

McCallum leant back in his chair. ‘Remember that time we were sent out to the Cotter? There'd been that double suicide and they couldn't find the head? We were on bikes and I raced you.'

‘You always raced me.'

‘One of the heads was in the back of the ute and they were beating the bushes for the other one,' McCallum explained for my benefit. ‘This young couple tied ropes to a tree and then around their necks. Going down this slope to the river. Ropes ripped their heads off. Back of the ute was covered in blood. Sharp eyes here found the second head. It'd rolled more than fifty metres down the hill.'

Brook said, ‘We were too young to be doing that.' He was dressed for an outing. His skin shone, and he seemed ready to lift out of clothes and buildings, grey skies and a downpour.

‘I'd go to the pictures with him,' McCallum said, noting my appreciation. ‘But he'd have to buy me popcorn and a coke.'

‘It's a date,' Brook answered, grinning. He squeezed my arm. ‘Phone me tonight. I should be home by eight.'

‘You haven't forgotten?'

‘Peter's birthday? How could I forget?'

. . .

On my way out of the building, I met Sophie going in. I was putting up my umbrella and she almost ran into me. Her umbrella still up, me struggling with mine. We stared at one another. Sophie was taller, but I was two steps higher, which should have given me a momentary advantage. Her dark hair looked darker, not bedraggled, in the rain. She wore a suit and shoes with heels so high that, had I tried to wear them, I would have fallen over. Brook wasn't a particularly tall man, short, in fact, for a policeman. Was Sophie trying to outreach him? She must have found a park close by, or else was far more adept than I was at negotiating puddles.

I silently congratulated her. She looked me up and down and I had a flash of Mikhail Litowski doing the same at the Telstra Tower—a sharp, confident, masticating look. She was Brook's age and a widow. She'd had her kids very young, so now, conveniently, they were off her hands. So much compatibility in what seemed a record time. But who was measuring? Anyone could see they'd hit it off. Had he told her how his wife had left him, taken their two children, not returned to visit even when he was in hospital?

We said hello, smiled, passed each other.

Meeting him at work. A lunch date. Now she was with him, he with her, a lightness that two, three flights of stairs did not account for. But wasn't Sophie too matt, too sharp, too limited? So careful with me. A mask that umbrellas and the rain, the awkward steps, excused. Brook laughing, glowing. I used to think his chemotherapy had made him transparent. The bad blood might come back, trick him and the doctors. But the other stuff, the stuff that made him Brook, that he walked about on, breathed with, felt with, had been made see-through by his illness and its cure.