‘Call it intuition, call it a shot in the dark.’
We settled down to eat. After her first bite, Corin said, ‘Good filling, proper boiled bagel too. Do you mind me asking what you do for a living?’
‘I’m a mediator.’
She was looking at her bagel, gave me a sideways glance. ‘Someone at the college said you used to be a cop.’
I nodded. ‘It scares people off, ex-cop. I usually say I used to be a soldier, that’s more acceptable somehow.’
‘Were you?’
‘A soldier, yes. Much longer than I was a cop.’
‘Why’d you stop being a soldier?’
‘I got hurt.’
I paused. That was what I always said, all I said. Today, I added, ‘Other people got hurt at the same time. And afterwards I didn’t think I had what it took anymore.’
We chewed in silence. Then she wiped her lips with a napkin, no lipstick, and said, ‘What does it take?’
‘A certain indifference to personal safety. How’d you get into landscape design?’
She wasn’t easily deterred. ‘Why’d you stop being a cop?’
‘That was a matter of someone else getting hurt. A fellow officer.’
‘You were blamed?’
‘Not unreasonably. I was trying to strangle him.’
We sat in silence for a while. I knew I should not have said that.
She had turned away from me slightly; she would have formed the view that I was a psycho.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you showed a certain indifference to his personal safety?’
‘Total indifference. And no, I’m not a psycho. Do it again tomorrow, though.’
Corin shook her head. ‘The accused shows no remorse,’ she said.
‘Well, you know enough about me now to stop taking my calls,’ I said. ‘How’d you get into landscape design?’
She turned her upper body towards me. She wasn’t rejecting me.
‘Total indifference to personal solvency,’ she said. ‘I was an architect and all I did was work on tower blocks and shopping malls and ablution blocks. No one ever asked me to join their smart little practices, do restaurants and things. So I said, I don’t think I have what it takes to be an architect, to hell with this, and I went back to uni and starved while I did landscape design.’
‘And became an ornament to the profession,’ I said. ‘To the landscape, for that matter.’
Our eyes met. Grey with light flecks, hers. I looked away first, swallowed, balled up my bagel wrapping. ‘Trying to flirt with the teacher,’ I said. ‘That’s probably not done.’
‘It’s flirting with students that’s frowned on,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be careful. While we’re asking questions, what’s a person of your, um, varied background doing at horticultural college?’
‘I like gardens,’ I said. ‘I had a garden when I was a kid, a vegie and flower garden. The lady next door marked off this plot for me in her back yard, gave me the seeds, showed me how to plant them.
I used to go there every day with my little watering can, water the ground. Sit there and watch. I didn’t want to miss the moment…’ I tailed off. It wasn’t a story I wanted to tell. I’d already said things I didn’t want to out of some need to explain myself to this woman, have her like me.
‘When they came up.’ She finished the sentence for me. ‘I know. You only have to look away and up the bastards come.’
We were smiling at each other when one of my phones, Noyce’s vibrating phone, fluttered against my ribs.
‘Phone,’ I said, taking it out. ‘I’ll just get out. Coffee’s getting cold.’
I got out, closed the door, stood in the cold wind, felt it on my scalp, felt the fear in me, and pressed the button.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Who’s that?’
The voice.
‘Frank Calder. I work for the Carson family. Who’s that?’
Silence.
‘Put Tom Carson on.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘from now on you talk to me. And don’t start shouting, I don’t give a shit about shouting, I don’t give a shit about the Carson family either, I’m just someone paid to do this and shouting is a waste of time. You talk to me or you don’t talk.’
Silence.
The voice.
‘Okay, listen, this is what you do…’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t do anything until we know the girl is alive. Don’t like that, fuck off.’
Silence. I waited, then I said, ‘Send us a photograph, Express Post, same as your last letter. A Polaroid, any picture. We want to see the girl, see her properly. She’s got to be holding today’s newspaper, any paper, the front page. Today’s paper. Close up. And we want to see her pinkie, the little finger, see that it’s properly bandaged. You with me?’
Silence.
‘Then you ring at 11.30 a.m. tomorrow. We’re convinced she’s okay, you can tell me what to do and we’ll do it. No argument. To the letter. Failing that, fuck you and we’ll find you if it takes fifty years.’
Silence.
A click.
Dear God, what had I done? Condemned the girl to death?
Not if she was already dead.
Corin was looking at me from inside the vehicle, styrofoam cup under her lips, a faintly quizzical look. She had nice eyebrows, I registered for the first time.
I opened the door and got back in, felt the body warmth.
‘A client,’ I said. ‘How’s the coffee?’
I took the cap off mine, had a sip, a thrumming in my body, in my chest. A new feeling. A sign of weakness, thrumming.
‘Good coffee. You’ve got the kind of client I’d like.’
She’d watched me speaking.
‘What kind of client is that?’
‘Someone you can give orders to. Instead of the reverse.’
‘You lipread?’
‘I wish. You were doing all the talking.’
I drank more coffee, half the lukewarm cup. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, hesitated. ‘I’m hopeless at this kind of thing. Can I see you again? Is that possible?’
Corin had some coffee, touched her short hair.
‘That’s possible,’ she said. ‘That should be probable. From my point of view.’
‘I’ll call you tonight,’ I said. ‘Is calling you always okay?’
She gave me her slow smile, put a hand out and touched my sleeve, plucked something off it. ‘A leaf. You won’t get anyone else, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ I said.
‘What about you? Are you safe to call?’
I got out a card with the mobile number. ‘I don’t know whether it’s safe to call me,’ I said. ‘But I’m on my own, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ she said.
29
I rang Graham Noyce and told him about the call.
‘What if they don’t come through?’ he said.
‘Call the cops. It’s over then.’
‘I’ll tell the Carsons.’
Aware of the pointlessness of what I was doing, I drove to Altona, over the Westgate Bridge and along the freeway to Millers Road, down towards the bay past the carbon black factory and the refinery with its chimneys that flamed day and night.
The Altona Community Legal Centre didn’t spend any money on front. It was housed in an ugly yellow-brick building that still carried faint fancy signwriting saying it had once been the premises of the Modern Bakery.
A young woman with two children was sitting in the reception room, the children fighting for her attention like small but vicious animals attacking a much larger and wounded creature. Behind a counter bearing neat stacks of pamphlets on subjects such as rape counselling, domestic violence and the legal rights of teenagers, a woman in middle age, good-humoured face, was on the phone. She eyed me warily, ended her conversation.
‘Yes?’ she said.
I introduced myself, said I’d spoken to Sue Torvalds, the solicitor, earlier in the day about someone who had been a volunteer solicitor in the late 1980s.
She smiled. ‘Yes, Sue told me. I’m Ellen Khoury, I’m the only worker who was here then.’
‘Can you spare a few minutes?’
‘Sue’s not here. I can’t leave the phone really. We can talk here if you like.’