I’m awake but I don’t dare open my eyes. The ocean is in my head. It rolls its giant weight across the base of my skull, pressing on one side, then the other, and clamping down on my neck. The bed rocks with the movement of the water. It is a gentle swaying, no waves, just a rolling swell, three feet at the most. It would be almost pleasant if I knew I could get out, if I could reach my toes to the sandy bottom and walk them through the salty water to the shore. I imagine this is what seasickness is like, feeling the roll of the ocean with no escape, the land an unswimmable distance away.
If I’m honest, the vertigo could be Meniere’s or it could be overwhelming guilt. It turns out that having a legitimate ID and password even if it is your co-worker’s and not yours, isn’t enough to escape the alerts in the forensics database. The tiny robots that live in the system also identify the computer you use. My computer, obviously, is not a permitted device.
Bigfoot was stern but unexpectedly forgiving. ‘Given your excellent track record and no previous missteps, I’m prepared to overlook this. Fortunately, it was a routine report and the State Forensics Laboratory doesn’t know it was you or that you were misusing a co-worker’s ID. You will, though, need to repeat our online course on information security, and pass it.’
‘Yes, Catherine.’
She’d eyeballed me from under her pale eyebrows. ‘Don’t do anything like this again.’
‘I won’t.’ I’d waited for her to ask me what I’d been doing, what I was looking for. She didn’t ask, so I didn’t tell.
Lying in bed, I tighten my throat and feel my larynx drop as the nausea pushes up from below. My right ear is ringing. It is always ringing. A perpetual summer of cicadas by the beach. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth and breathe in. I swear I can feel my ear drums flexing, drawing toward each other on the in-breath and rounding outwards when I exhale. I focus on my forehead, on the clear, unburdened space above my eyes. I picture it hollow, a smooth, buoyant void. I need it to be free of the unreliable land and sea, holding its own place, independent and steady.
Vestibular inconstancy notwithstanding, I have to get up. I need to go to work to be on hand to help prepare answers to questions that the media or members of parliament ask about the fraudulent activities of Dr Gordon Wolf PSM, Assistant Director for Homelessness Strategies. The questions will be predictable. Was the CEO of the Department of Housing aware of Wolf’s activities? The Minister for Housing? Why not? Does this indicate a lack of ministerial oversight? A culture of fraud within the public sector?
The CEO didn’t know about the fraud and neither did the minister – or at least we have nothing to suggest that they did. If it wasn’t for our whistleblower we might not have found out that the rot had risen as high as Gordon.
‘So it was a whistleblower who tipped you off?’ James had asked when they got back from lunch. I still hadn’t told him. I didn’t know how miffed he’d be that Belinda was in on the Public Interest Disclosure and he wasn’t. Turns out, he couldn’t have cared less.
I nodded in response to his question, working my jaw even though I know it wouldn’t do any good. My right ear was already filling with fluid.
‘Public servant?’
I shook my head. Can’t say. Whistleblowers are protected. Since I took the call from Colin in the east metropolitan manager’s office, I’d told only Neil and Belinda. I’d needed her to recheck the records in the metropolitan offices while I was in the South West.
I’d interviewed Colin offsite the day after I returned from Riverside and checked in with him again on Friday. He was doing fine, he said. Happy to have the weight off his chest. Saraj, the sacked project manager, had called him to lodge an unfair dismissal claim. When he told him why, Colin knew he was ethically obliged to make a Public Interest Disclosure.
He struggled with it, he told me, knowing the allegation would bring the department into disrepute and potentially even compromise future public housing projects. None of us are in this for the money, Frances, he said. We believe in what we do. But it galled him to think that his fellow public servants were lining their own pockets while pretending to be social justice warriors. In the end, it was a no-brainer. Colin asked for me, he said, because he’d seen me stand up to Duncan before. The files I reviewed at Riverside confirmed what he’d told me.
By the time I’ve got my act together, caught my bus, and ridden the lift to the office floor, the workstations are full of diligent investigators quietly totalling numbers and checking boxes. My own little team has departed for their respective Department of Housing offices. Despite the PID report, the housing inquiry still needs to be finished. I have no doubt they will receive total – if somewhat wary – cooperation this morning. Nothing much is going to be expected of me for the next hour or so, so I reach into my bag for the file that has been languishing there since my unsuccessful attempt to log in to the forensics database. So much for pointing the finger at Eric for lax recordkeeping. If Bigfoot knew I’d been carting an inquiry file to and from the office in my handbag every day, I’d be getting a written warning, not just a telling-off in her office.
I open the file to the photocopied outpatient spreadsheet with its sliced-off column headings. I’ve tucked the torn page with the green numbers in next to it, and now I smooth the page flat, pick up a pen and start doing my thing. I work through the spreadsheet, comparing each serial number against Eric’s green-penned list and marking them off until I get a match. Aggarwal is the first, then Alexander, Calder, Chut. I move down the list, matching numbers to names, until I find the last one – Stewart. Helen Stewart, of the misfiled report, who cleaned her oven. Tenancy renewed. I read my new list: Aggarwal, Alexander, Calder, Chut, McKenna, Meleshe, Paine, Patel, Simpson, Stewart. Now I have ten real people instead of ten numbers. All I have to do is find out who they are and why their mysterious serial numbers were so important to my missing boss.
Noises from the foyer tell me that my team has returned. I slip the notes I’ve made into my handbag, login to the cloud in its mysterious location, and make a show of searching for the community health file. Miraculously, all the documents that I scanned in are there, right where I put them. I remember the level five analyst’s offer to find the original of the beheaded outpatient spreadsheet, scroll through the list of documents and surprise myself again. It’s there, helpfully titled Outpatient List. I open it, perhaps just a little too excited that the solution to the serial numbers is as simple as an orderly filing system.
It isn’t. The spreadsheet is the same one: same names, same dates, and on the electronic version, the column headings are clear and present and highlighted in bold. But the column I want is missing. I look back and forth between the photocopy and the screen. At some point, someone has deleted the column of six-number-three-letter numbers from the electronic spreadsheet. The hard copy version is all I have. Maybe I’ll need to ask Aaron for his medical records after all.