I turned it over.
Anne Carson, Anne Carson’s head above the copy of the previous day’s Age she was holding under her chin. Both her little fingers were visible, her left one in a neat, clean bandage. She looked clean too, her hair damp and combed off her face, comb marks showing, clean and unafraid, something unfocused about her eyes.
But alive.
‘She’s alive,’ I said.
‘Thank God.’ Tom closed his eyes, brought his hands up and made a steeple with his fingers, put his forehead to his fingertips for a second. Then he touched Stephanie’s shoulder, a father’s touch.
‘Tell your grandfather,’ he said and held out a hand for the photograph.
‘Good call, Frank,’ said Barry, not loudly, moving to look at the photograph.
‘She looks fine,’ Tom said. ‘She’s okay, we can get her out of this. Get her out. Yes.’
I left the house, walked slowly back to the Garden House, enjoyed the misty rain on my face, the smell of the newly dug beds on either side of the brick path. The gardener I’d seen the day before was resting a foot on a fork sunk deep into the dark soil.
‘Good soil,’ I said. ‘Making the beds bigger?’
‘Mr Pat Carson went to Ireland last year,’ she said, as if that were explanation enough. What did that mean? Corin would know.
Corin. I hadn’t phoned her the night before. I’d said, I’ll phone you tonight. Why had I said that? What would I have said to her? After one sandwich, one round sandwich with a hole in the middle, eaten in her vehicle?
Not hearing from me wouldn’t have bothered her. She probably thought: Thank you, God, the psycho hasn’t called. Soldier-cop psycho killer. Self-confessed.
I stood on the terrace at the French doors, cleaning my shoes on the bristle mat. Orlovsky looked up, put the phone in his lap. He was sitting in the Morris chair with the leather cushions, portable phone in his hand, ashtray full of no-name butts on the coffee table in front of him.
I opened the door and stepped into the warm, bright room.
‘Alive,’ I said. ‘Yesterday afternoon, anyway.’
33
We parked in the Carson House carpark and sat there for a while in the gloom, not saying anything. Then the lift doors opened. Graham Noyce and a burly man came out, saw us, walked over.
‘You cannot believe,’ Noyce said, ‘how hard it is to get used money. The banks don’t want to give you used money. It’s pure luck we’ve managed to get this sum.’
The burly man was carrying a briefcase: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in old fifties and hundreds.
Orlovsky coughed, the cough of someone who wants to say something. ‘Knew the right people,’ he said, expressionless voice, ‘you could’ve bought this cash for a unit. Anywhere. Eighty grand unit.’
Noyce glanced at Orlovsky. ‘Knew the right people?’ he said. He looked at me. ‘We’d appreciate it if your associate doesn’t put this job on his CV.’
I took the briefcase. ‘It isn’t over yet,’ I said. ‘And when it is, no one may want to put this job on their CVs.’
The instructions at 11.30 a.m. had been clear:
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in used fifties and hundreds in a briefcase. Be on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Swanston Street at 3.30 p.m. and you’ll get your instructions by phone. When we have the money and know that you haven’t tried to trick us, we’ll call you and tell you where to find the girl. If you do anything else, try anything, she dies. Understand?
I said yes.
Orlovsky dropped me in Little Lonsdale and I walked to the Swanston intersection, conscious of the weight of the case. An early twilight was settling in, thin rain being blown down the tatty street, everyone hurrying to be somewhere else. I watched two haggard boys across the street making a drug sale to a lanky young man in a good suit: a hit to see him through the night shift in some twenty-four-hour office, hunched over a screen.
The phone vibrated at 3.29 p.m. my time.
‘Yes.’
‘Go to Museum Station now. Take the escalator down. Wait near the escalators at the bottom. Put the briefcase between your feet. Someone will approach you and say, “Anne sends her love”.
Got that?’
‘Yes.’
I walked up the street thinking, we haven’t been dealing with crazies or the Russian Mafia or the same people who kidnapped Alice. We’ve been dealing with small-time opportunists, people who somehow got hold of an advanced voice-changing device. They panicked at the MCG, realised that with the notice we had, we could trap them. Throwing the money to the crowd wasn’t planned. It was an improvisation.
Mid-afternoon, no rush for the trains yet, half an hour before the early leavers came out of the office blocks. It seemed no more than a day since I’d come up from the depths of Museum Station carrying Vella’s package. How long ago was it?
I entered the cheerless, echoing structure, paused only briefly at the top of an escalator, watched the iron stairway moving down into the cavern blasted from the rock. It was a long way down, and steep.
On the stairs, going down, the briefcase heavy in my hand.
No one waiting at the bottom. The person would be nearby, somewhere in sight of the escalators, waiting for a man with a briefcase.
I looked back, up the steel stream. No one had joined me on the escalator. They’d picked a quiet time, they knew this station, the table of its human tides.
Why did they want me to wait? Why not tell me to put the briefcase down, get on an up escalator? Thieves, that’s why. They’d lost the money at the MCG. It would be a painful thing for them now if some lurking kid saw me move away, leave the briefcase unattended, grabbed it and ran. They could hardly chase him. No. Better to have me wait, guard their money. Hard-earned money. Blood money.
I reached the bottom and stepped off, walked a few paces, stopped, put the briefcase between my feet, looked around.
No one coming my way.
They were watching, a final check to see that I was alone.
I turned back to face the escalators. People going up, the stairs I’d left still empty. At the top, far away, a tall person pushing someone in a wheelchair was looking down. Didn’t they have lifts for wheelchairs? It couldn’t be safe coming down this steep stairway, thousands of interlocked steel knuckles moving.
I looked around again. Where was the pick-up person? Looking at my watch, pointlessly looking at my watch, feeling a little tremor in my throat, looking back at the escalator, looking up, at the man with the wheelchair, it was a man, bearded, our eyes met in the way of animals, me on the canyon floor, him on the rim.
Our eyes locked and his mouth opened, opened in his beard, I could see the pink of his mouth, pink like a rose, and he shouted:
‘HERE’S YOUR LITTLE SLUT YOU CARSON BASTARDS!’
He pushed the wheelchair, pushed it and kicked it.
Pushed it into the canyon, pushed and kicked it onto the moving steel steps.
For a second, it was airborne, came down on its rubber tyres, bounced, lurched sideways, came upright.
I could see the person on it, someone in a heavy coat, camel-coloured, a coat with a hood, a duffel coat, you didn’t see duffel coats these days…
I didn’t think, ran, ran for the escalator, saw the wheelchair lurch forward, begin to topple…
Saw the person on it, the hood falling off the face. Dark glasses.
The dirty blonde hair, the lock falling forward…
I was running up the moving stairs, against the stairs, running towards the wheelchair coming down, an impossible gap to bridge, the chair toppling, hitting the side of the stairs, bouncing across to meet the other side, Anne thrown about, thrown forward, not falling out, held by something, dark glasses off her face, in the air…
Her eyes were open, pale eyes.