13

I call Wurbik before it’s decently light, trying to tell him about the word—My God, she played me a word! But he tells me to hold that thought, saying he’ll meet me outside Collegiate High at home time with updates. ‘Because you’re going to school today,’ he says. ‘You don’t put your education on hold for anything.’

‘Even homicide?’ I query, fear and curiosity piqued. ‘Does it mean she’s still alive if she’s playing words?’

‘Go to school,’ Wurbik insists. ‘If I had a kid I would be telling her the same thing.’

Before I can say anything else, he hangs up.

Next I make a call to Don Sturt’s mobile and go straight to his message bank, which is only mildly annoying because there’s something about the man that gives me the willies. The way he can’t look me in the eye.

I had spent hours on the charts before I’d noticed the anomaly—my heart sinking because the first two were almost done. ‘Are you absolutely sure,’ I say now, slowly and loudly into the dead air of Don’s voicemail, ‘that the two Australian-born suspects were born at exactly the same time? There are a lot of minutes in a day. I mean, it seems a bit weird, but not entirely out of the question. Call me back, okay?’

In my ear, as I’m pulling on my clothes in the bathroom, I hear Mum murmur: Every minute counts, Avi. And I feel a spurt of acid in my heart that she could honestly believe that all that separates the psychopaths from the rest of us are mere minutes, mere revolutions. But here I am, doing it, following in her footsteps: giving comfort to the desperate and gullible and deranged.

The morning is icy, but sunny. Unwilling to face another packed tram of bald-faced, staring people, I pull my beanie down low over my ears and unbound hair, beginning the long uphill walk to school against a slicing wind.

On autopilot, I almost trudge past Little La Trobe Street. But somehow I find myself turning in, already looking out for numbers.

Specifically, 232A. A part of me is actually expecting to see a giant wooden boat marooned somewhere in the middle of the street by the right hand of God, but of course there isn’t one. Instead I come across a dim, Victorian-era shopfront.

On the windows, outlined in faded gilt, I read:

Behind the grubby glass, there are mysterious-looking brass scientific instruments on display; a full-sized human skeleton on a stand wearing a feathered, tricorn hat; stuffed birds and animals under bell jars; shells; corals; weirdly shaped pieces of tusk and horn; lumps of rock; found objects; liver-spotted nature lithographs in dusty, unmatched frames.

I wrinkle my nose, thinking, Ugly junk, unable to imagine what more Mum could possibly have wanted to add to our already festering collection. The place looks neglected, but eccentric. Expensive, too.

But then I remember the $40,000 sitting in our bank account and crowd closer to the window. There’s a crooked Closed sign hanging in the top glass pane of the locked front door. I’m about to turn away when I see a flash of movement behind the dirty glass.

The shop is unlit. But I get an impression of long silver hair trailing down over a black-clad shoulder; a high forehead and stern, straight nose. Someone is leaning over the countertop at the far end of the shop, studying something on the white blotter pad before him. Most of his face is hidden, just the palely gleaming crown of his head, but it’s a man, I’m sure of it: tall and broad-shouldered, almost blending in with the overflowing case of antiquarian books behind him.

It is hours before the official opening time. But he’s here, and I’m here, so I tap on the door, peering around the sign, but the man doesn’t look up from what he’s doing. I tap some more, sure he can hear me, sure that he’s just being phenomenally rude, but he still doesn’t look up. His gaze is intent. As if he’s memorising something out of the thing that’s open before him.

Pressing my nose right up to the glass I see that it’s a thick book, bound in black, as black as his clothes. The man’s long-fingered hands are marble-white against the covers. He looks up, suddenly, straightening behind the counter, still holding the book open, a frown pleating his brow. And I see that his eyes are sharp on me, as blue as the daytime sky. Despite the fall of silver hair over the man’s shoulders, his face is young, sharply planed. It’s possibly the most arresting face I have ever seen.

I look above the lintel at the name edged in faded gold, surprised that someone as ordinary-sounding as R. Preston, prop. could have a face like that.

He’s a giant of a man, I’m guessing even taller than Simon. As we stare at each other across the crowded, dusty expanse of the shop, I see a look of recognition, or maybe consternation, cross the man’s face.

His gaze on me never wavers as I now pound on the door in earnest. He doesn’t look away or make a move forward. He just continues to hold the large, open book in his hands, weighing me up steadily through the dirty glass as if I’m a particularly noisome bug.

‘Please!’ I yell, pushing on the fixed handle of the front door, which I see with a jolt of revulsion is shaped like a long human femur, cast into unyielding bronze. ‘What do you know?’ I cry, shouldering the door. ‘What do you know about my mother? Please!’

I’m sure he can hear me, because the man shakes his head sharply, closing then placing his book down on the countertop. With a suddenness that shocks me, he turns and vanishes through a door set into a gap in the back wall that I hadn’t known was there.

He doesn’t return, though I wait and wait until I’m sure I’ll miss the first bell at school, even if I sprint the whole way to get there.

‘Everyone’s talking about it,’ Vicki confides from the corner of her mouth with relish. ‘They’re just too afraid to bring it up. Honestly, it’s like you’ve got actual leprosy.’

All morning, the personal forcefield we Crowes carry around with us has been up, sizzling away; Vicki the only person proof to it. Even the school principal and the school counsellor couldn’t get at me with their long, sad faces and offers of help because, as Wurbik himself had said resignedly: ‘You can’t make a person do something they don’t wanna do, right?’

I’m aware of the awareness about me. Everywhere I go, spaces open up; people draw together in groups of two and three, the air filling with sibilant waves of: That’s her, there she is, she’s the one.

I overhear Glenn Tippett confidently telling Miranda Cornish as I pass right by that: She sure got hit with the ugly stick, hey? I turn on him immediately and he actually shrinks back—all pimply, flaky-skinned, sandy-hued, six feet of him—even though he meant for me to hear.

‘Hey, double consonant,’ I snarl. ‘Glen with two ns. Where’s Simo? You know, Lucky-as. Where is he? Seen him?’ I don’t know why I’m asking, but I am. And from Vicki’s startled body language, I can see she isn’t sure why, either.

Glenn, recovering himself and standing up straighter, shakes his head, tight-lipped. I turn on Miranda with her size-six ballerina’s body, doe eyes and long caramel hair. ‘You know?’ Miranda looks at me with something approaching hatred and pulls Glenn away by the sleeve.

Vicki murmurs, ‘And she scores, with another delicious instance of foot-in-mouth. Rumour has it that Simon Thorn dropped the divine Miss M last week because she couldn’t spell, can you believe it? I give them three weeks, max. Glenn always takes Simon’s slops, and it always ends badly. The parties concerned should all know better.’

Vicki takes me by the arm and steers me in the direction of Maths Methods, through a sea of rounded eyes and mouths. ‘If Thorny stays away long enough, will you split the Tichborne with me?’ she says, laughing.

But I think of cups of just-add-water instant noodles, towels gone grey and frayed from the repeat ministrations of coin-operated tumble dryers, and I don’t reply.

After school, plenty of people see me getting into the bright blue unmarked police car (that screams police car) with the grim-faced, grey-haired man at the wheel. They point and stare. A few hold up their mobiles and take pictures. Mum has been everywhere. Every news concession stand I pass, every newsbreak, features that heartbreaking photo of my big-eyed, grinning mother in which my tanned right arm makes a cameo.

‘Let’s give them something to go with, hey?’ Wurbik says under his breath as he fires up the red-and-blue flashers on the dashboard and the siren, giving it a few more loud whoops until we reach Royal Parade and turn right into city-bound traffic, before switching it off. ‘People can be shits,’ he says into the sudden impression of silence. ‘Just hold your head up, the way you’re doing. She would be proud.’

My skin prickles because he’s using the past tense again, but maybe I’m just being too goddamned sensitive. ‘So, “updates”?’ I say, trying to sound upbeat, chatty.

‘First things first,’ Wurbik says, letting the siren have its head again until we cut up through Elizabeth Street into La Trobe. ‘Need you to make sense of something for me.’

I recall R. Preston, prop. ‘Did you speak with him?’ I say eagerly as Wurbik turns into Little La Trobe Street: a stub-end more than a thoroughfare, really, of crouching, mismatched buildings.

Wurbik nods, braking. ‘A very helpful man. He’s agreed to stay open just to speak with you.’

I frown in the act of getting out of the car. ‘But he wouldn’t even let me in this morning!’ I grumble. ‘And we were both right here. I was throwing myself at the door like a lemming. Could have saved himself the trouble.’

Wurbik shrugs as he points his key at the car. There’s a deet, deet and blink of headlights. ‘Mr Preston has been very sick, still is. Doing us a favour, from what I can see.’

The Closed sign is still up on the door, but Wurbik curls his fingers confidently around the femur-shaped door handle and gives it a push. The lights are on this time: three dim pendant lights—beautiful, antique Moroccan lamps in shades of rose and emerald green and old gold—and I look for the tall man with the long, silver hair and blue, blue eyes. But I’m confused when a small, elderly man in a white shirt and gold-framed glasses greets me from the back of the shop with a raised hand.

I stop dead before I’ve even taken three more steps. There’s a Mariner’s Compass set into the centre of the marble floor, in veined shades of variegated blues and reds, outlined in thin bands of gold. Its outlines are interrupted by stacks of old newspapers and protruding bookcases set at weird angles, but for a moment I feel like the ground’s pulling away from me.

Wurbik grabs me by the arm and says, ‘Steady on.’

‘Do you see it?’ I murmur helplessly. ‘The Mariner’s Compass?’

He nods. ‘Is that what it’s called? It was one of the things I wanted to ask you—whether she made those pillows because she saw this first, or whether it was just a coincidence. Some New Agey thing I’m not aware of.’

‘Those pillows aren’t new,’ I say breathlessly, lurching forward again in the direction of the small shopkeeper whose expression is now concerned, rather than welcoming. ‘She hasn’t worked on anything like them, all the time we’ve been living here. It’s just an old design. People have been making them for centuries, Mum said.’

Wurbik and I come up to the counter and I see the black book set neatly to one side, its spine tantalisingly out of view, mottled, unevenly cut pages facing me.

‘R. Preston?’ I query, my voice sharpened by a weird anxiety I can’t name. ‘Mr Preston?’

The old man is shorter than I am; his grey skin, with a sweaty sheen to it, slack over his facial bones. I can see his flaking scalp straight through his sparse white comb-over.

The old man nods. ‘Call me Robert,’ he says huskily, spittle shining at the corners of his mouth. ‘And you must be Avicenna.’

He hesitates next, as if he’d like to shake my hand, but I take an infinitesimal step back and his own hands drop flat onto the white blotter I recognise from this morning. ‘I’m very sorry,’ he says slowly, perspiration shining old gold under the light overhead. ‘If I can help in any way?’

The act of speaking makes him cough and cough.

‘If you could show her the entry?’ Wurbik queries after the man has stopped dabbing at his face with the back of one shaky hand. ‘She might be able to explain it to me in, ah, layman’s terms.’

I glance sideways at Wurbik as the old man brings up a blue, leather-bound journal from under the countertop. He turns to a page marked with a gold ribbon and I see it’s some kind of ledger, filled with book-keeping entries in blue fountain pen, flowing copperplate handwriting.

‘Here it is,’ Robert Preston says, frowning. ‘It’s in my hand, certainly, but I can’t understand how I would have sold her that particular one. If—as you say—she was a professional astrologer, this one would have been nigh well useless to her. It’s a bit of a mystery. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall…’ The rest of his sentence is cut off by a fit of coughing.

The entry says, as far as I can make out:

Sold—the Kairwan-school (mistake) Astrolabe.
$2200 (excl. GST).

‘Mum bought an astrolabe?’ I exclaim. She’d shown me an encyclopaedia entry once, years ago, of what an astrolabe was, and what it could do. Used for determining latitude on land, it was essentially some kind of manual calculator or star taker; that was literally what it meant. If you knew how to read it, the thing you held in your hand could predict the positions of celestial bodies: determine time, latitude, the future. We’d never been able to afford one.

I explain all that to Wurbik as Preston comes around his counter to fetch one out of the front window for us to look at. It’s made of brass: a flat, disc-like thing on a sturdy fob chain, slightly bigger than my palm. It looks kind of like a manually manipulated compass—the kind that shows magnetic north, not Mum’s kind, with the arms—with a rotating bar or ruler in the centre that moves over an ornately designed, stylised map of what looks like an ecliptic plane. With a pointer finger misshapen by terrible arthritis, Preston shows us how the map itself can be rotated over an underlying plate engraved with clusters of circles, like a web.

Layers on layers; all moving and circling. I see immediately the elegance of it, the genius. How, years before computers were invented, you could use one to take the measure of your place in the universe, provided the map, and the pointers, reflected your slice of the horizon.

‘She’s always wanted one,’ I say aloud, tentatively touching the face of the thing Preston is holding out to us. It swings a little on its chain, when I push it. It’s surprisingly heavy for its size.

‘But the one she purchased was useless,’ Preston wheezes, laying the astrolabe flat on the white blotter. He peers over his glasses at it. ‘It was never properly assembled. I mean, the tympan’—he points at the flat plate with etched circles on it that lies beneath the two moving layers—‘is of no known azimuth or altitude. The celestial sphere it represents certainly doesn’t correspond to our horizon. And the stars that are the subject of the pointers on the rete are completely unrecognisable, at least to me…’

Preston twirls the ornate upper layer of metal that lies beneath the movable ruler-like arm. ‘I bought it cheap out of a private collection, on that basis: that it was some kind of elaborate 18th-century fake. It’s certainly old, but almost a joke astrolabe. A mistake. That’s what I called it, you see here?’ He points again at the journal entry, from about a month back. ‘It’s Tunisian in origin—of the Kairwan school—cast metal, antique, rare; but a joke, nevertheless. Just someone’s interpretation of a sky I have never seen. Probably worthless but, because of its age, and the delicacy of its manufacture…’

Wurbik thanks Preston for his time and the old man nods, clearing his throat before saying, ‘Any time, Detective, any time. If I can be of any further assistance…’

The old man starts turning off the lights as we head back towards the door, but I stop and turn, remembering the tall man in black with the gleaming hair and skin like marble, who was reading the old book that still sits to one side of the blotter. There’s no giant now, though the book’s here, it’s as solid as I am. If I don’t ask, I will never know.

‘Do you have any assistants, Mr Preston,’ I call out, ‘who might have seen my mum or maybe talked to her? You don’t remember selling her that astrolabe, but there was a man here this morning…’ I describe him, and it’s Robert Preston’s turn to look startled. I see his right hand pause over the book beside the blotter, then come to rest protectively on it.

He shakes his head. ‘No, it’s just me these days. It’s not a going concern of much consequence, you understand,’ he rasps. ‘And since I started my last course of treatment, well…’ He shrugs.

Baffled, I point at the book under his palm. ‘But he was reading that book,’ I say. ‘And then he turned and left by the back door.’ I indicate a spot to the left of the bookcase, unable now to spot the egress through the dim of the shop.

The old man looks down sharply at the leather-bound book and turns it over. ‘This book?’ he queries, again surprised. ‘I confess I’ve been dipping into it lately, as I’ve been much…preoccupied with the things it speaks of: death, time, love, God.’

I feel a cold trickle down my spine as he murmurs, ‘Donne’s Songs and Sonnets of 1635. A rare edition, hand-cut pages; I would never dream of selling it or letting anyone handle it. You must be mistaken,’ he adds, patting the shelving behind him with pale and twisted fingers that almost shine in the gloom. ‘There’s no back door here; never was. These are handmade shelves; solid jarrah. I had them put in back in 1978; cost me almost as much as my car in those days. Behind them? There’s a wall of rendered double brick. And behind that? A block of flats, some trendy warehouse conversion. The side door’—he points to a spot just behind my right shoulder—‘leads to Boundary Lane. It’s where I park…’

His voice trails off, baffled, and turns into coughing that sounds draining, fatal. I reach out blindly to Wurbik, who I’m sure can feel strong tremors in the hand that’s resting on his sleeve.

‘Thanks again!’ the detective calls out as the door with the leg bone for a handle swings shut behind us.