I took two days off, flew to Brisbane, talked to him for half an hour in a scented tropical garden. He was clean shaven, shorthaired, clothed in a towelling outfit with matching slippers. I rang people, all the people I could think of. That afternoon, a pale Defence shrink who ceaselessly rotated a gold wedding ring, and a Defence lawyer, a major in uniform, arrived by military aircraft from Canberra. The major insisted on calling me Captain. The shrink talked to Orlovsky’s shrink, to Orlovsky, then the major went to see the Public Prosecutor’s office. Just after 6 p.m., we went to an out-of-session court hearing where the charges against Orlovsky were formally withdrawn. The two of us were on the 8.10 flight to Sydney.
On the plane, drinking whisky in business class, I’d said to him, ‘We’re quits, sunshine.’
He’d looked at me, thought about it. ‘You’re getting off bloody lightly,’ he said.
Now we sat in silence. I sensed that he wasn’t finished with the subject of Afghanistan.
‘What do you feel about it now?’ he said.
‘Guilt.’
‘For what?’
‘For not being able to save them.’
‘Inquiry didn’t think you could’ve done anything.’
‘Inquiry wasn’t there. I could always have done something.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Yes. But it’s my bullshit. What’s your problem?’
He sniffed his whisky, drank half the glass. ‘I haven’t got a problem. I had a problem, a minor problem.’ He opened the old briefcase on the coffee table and fiddled with the laptop. ‘Been thinking about something else,’ he said. He put a speaker plug in his left ear, tapped keys.
The electronic voice from Saturday:
Becoming less stupid. Learning to do what you’re told and…
‘What’s that mean?’ he said. ‘Less stupid than when? Nothing done before that.’
‘Probably just a way of speaking.’
‘You don’t think he means less stupid than the last time? The first kidnap?’
‘I’ve said this before. I don’t see people waiting seven years for another try.’
‘Maybe they would if it’s for revenge. People who want to punish the Carsons, make them suffer, they might wait.’
He tapped again, listened, tapped:
I WANT YOU TO SUFFER AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS SUFFER. I WANT YOU TO FEEL PAIN AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS FEEL PAIN. I WANT YOU TO BLEED TO DEATH.
‘Aimed at Tom or the family?’ said Orlovsky.
‘At Tom, but he might simply stand for something. The bastards. The rich. People hate the President, hate the Queen, hate the Pope, but it’s not personal.’
CNN had moved on to an explosion in Egypt, ambulances, sirens, police and soldiers everywhere, people comforting each other. A dog, just a skeleton covered in thin stretch-cloth, was licking a dark patch on the hard-packed dirt.
‘So do they want money or revenge?’
The thought had been on my mind since the phone call on Saturday. How long ago was that? Early Tuesday. Saturday seemed far away. Was the girl alive? Two joints of a finger will keep in the fridge. Her body could be in the ground somewhere, not far down, waiting for a pet dog to snuffle at the wet soft earth like a truffle-hound one evening, a happy dog digging frantically, rolling in the find, the owner calling it away, fearing the stench of dead possum, of having to wash off the smell of something rotten.
The smell of Anne Carson, age fifteen.
‘Maybe both,’ I said. ‘Lots of both. Then again, maybe they’re just crazy. Think it’s fun to see people throw money into a crowd. We’ve got to get them to show us she’s alive.’
‘And then?’
‘If she is, we try to find them before they kill her.’
Orlovsky picked up the bottle by the base and tipped whisky into our glasses. ‘Not we,’ he said. ‘You. You’re the sad case, you think you’re doing this for the money but you’re not. You’re the guilty person who wants to make amends, save people.’
‘Just one would be nice,’ I said. I finished the drink and went to bed and on the slide into sleep I thought about Alice and came awake as if plunged into cold water.
21
Barry Carson had a surprisingly modest office on the fourth floor of Carson House: two wood and leather chairs for visitors, old desk, desk chair just like the ones in the office outside, faded Persian rug on a parquet floor, a nondescript view of the building opposite. On the dull cream wall hung black and white photographs of bulldozer-gouged building sites, concrete pours, and tree-raising ceremonies on the windswept tops of buildings, construction workers and men in suits wearing hardhats and raising cans of beer. Only the construction workers’ hardhats fitted and only they looked as if they planned to drink the beer.
‘Two or three months with Katherine’s family in England,’ said Barry in his boyish voice. His hands were locked behind his head, he was being open, unguarded. ‘We all thought it was a good idea. Get away, somewhere different. But they’ve never come back.’
His phone rang.
‘Excuse me, Frank.’ He looked at me as he listened, studied me as he spoke into the old-fashioned handset. It wasn’t the unseeing look. He was looking at me.
‘Miranda, forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have made more of this, made sure everyone understood.’ He had a gentle delivery. ‘All media inquiries about the float and the company go to Tom’s people.’ Pause. ‘Yes, I know some people may wish to talk to me or to other senior staff but this is a Tom affair. He has a regiment of unemployable ex-journalists waiting to handle it. Yes. Thank you, Miranda.’
He put the receiver down. ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s taken all the shine off going public, emerging from my father’s shadow.’
I detected no sympathy in his voice. ‘It’s a long shadow,’ I said.
‘Yes, these generational changeovers should happen when you’re in your forties, I suppose. In some families, the children take over in their thirties, earlier. But.’
Not so much a smile as a lip signal of resignation and acceptance.
‘Alice,’ I said.
‘Yes. The kidnap shook us, changed our whole world. We’ve never been the same again. The whole family. We went from being pretty carefree to verging on the paranoid. My wife in particular. She seemed more disturbed than Alice. Visibly, that is. Alice was just quiet. Not that she’d ever been all that vocal.’ He looked away. ‘Well, perhaps I didn’t notice. Always busy, travelling a lot. Pretty standard confession that, I suppose. The absentee father.’
He brought his arms down and folded his hands on the desk, long-fingered hands, square-clipped nails. ‘Katherine almost took our son Pat to England too but the old man talked her out of it. Good at that kind of thing, the master manipulator. I think he had some premonition that Katherine was going for good.’
‘Can Alice talk about the subject?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never raised it with her, never wanted to. She may have talked to her mother about it, I don’t know. Katherine wouldn’t tell me if she did.’
I followed his eyes out of the window. We could see two men in an office in the building across the street, one seated, the other standing at a whiteboard. The seated one’s chair was quarter-turned away from the whiteboard; he didn’t want a lecture.