14

‘What was that all about?’ Wurbik says as he steers the car back into Exhibition Street.

We’re only minutes from home, so I babble through my recollections of the morning. ‘I know what I saw,’ I insist fiercely. ‘He had to have been at least seven feet tall. He was standing there like you’re sitting there, reading that black book. Then he disappeared through a wall.’

‘Grief does strange things to people,’ Wurbik mutters, firing up the siren long enough for us to get past a turning bus.

‘I know what I saw,’ I repeat numbly. ‘He was real. He looked at me and he shook his head.’

Wurbik stops the car outside my building in a No Standing zone, because he can, and I suddenly remember the word Mum played: always. Thinking about it again sends a shiver straight across the skin of my belly and I clutch at it as if I have just been knifed. Eagerly, I hold up my mobile to Wurbik’s scrutiny. He peers intently at the screen, then pulls his notebook out of a side pocket in the car door, jotting down the word; the time and date it was sent.

‘I passed on my turn,’ I say shakily, ‘in the hope that she’d play something back straight away, but she didn’t.’

‘It could be a spasm in the system,’ Wurbik says cautiously, handing my mobile back. ‘Word was maybe sent a lot earlier, but it came through on delay. My wife plays this,’ he adds, sounding resigned. ‘Gets locked out all the time; up to a day, even two. She’s always getting invited to play phantom games with strangers who resign without making a single move, days later. Drives her bananas. The system seems to just, I dunno, generate things.’

But he can see the whites of my eyes, feel my desperation, and says hastily, ‘But we’ll double, triple check, okay? It’s important, and I’m glad you told me. But it’ll depend on where the server is. If it’s run out of another jurisdiction we’ll have trouble getting a straight answer. But someone will be on it right away.’

I nod, shoving my phone back into the pack at my feet. ‘Well, thanks for the lift. Saved me walking.’

I’m pulling on the car door with fingers that won’t work properly when Wurbik says from behind me, ‘They’re organising a line search for tomorrow, Avicenna. Nothing definite yet, but I’ll call you the second we know anything.’

I turn back to face him. ‘That’s the update?’ I whisper.

He nods, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘Mount Warning National Park.’

I look at him blankly. Never heard of it; never been there. I would remember, I know I would.

‘It’s in New South Wales, near the Queensland border. They’ll start at first light. Her phone goes offline inside its boundaries just before 9pm on the Friday. Your dad, you know, the anniversary of the fire, would have been the Saturday. But if the place had any special significance to her, we’re struggling to find it. She was’—he stares out the windscreen for a second, then back at me—‘a long way from home. That’s all I want to say at this point. I’ll tell you more when I know more.’

I do the math like I’m standing underwater with concrete shoes on.

Friday was three days ago. Although it was sent on Saturday—the anniversary of the fire?—I saw her word today. Any way you look at it, by the time it reached me, the word was already a lie.

It didn’t mean always, as in love always, be home soon.

It meant gone for always, dead for always.

I find myself shrieking, pounding on Wurbik’s chest. ‘You need to work on your delivery! Your delivery sucks!’

Then I slam my way out of his neon-bright car and into my building, a raging, noisy, tearful bull, blundering up the stairs in the dim afternoon light, bouncing off the turns and railings like a pinball. I don’t notice the young man leaning against the wall outside my front door until I’m almost on top of him. But the sight of him chokes me silent. I stare at him appalled, face smeared, tears still clumping my eyelashes together, as he pushes off the wall, crossing his arms like the explanation I’ve got for him had better be good.

He is honestly…breathtaking. I see that right away. It’s unavoidable, how good-looking he is, like a hand seizing you around the throat.

My gaze snaps away from his face, then back again. I can hardly stand to look at him, having to take tiny, incredulous, up-from-under-the-eyelashes peeks. People like this actually exist? It’s an insult to the rest of us.

The guy is tall, and built along these perfect lines. Early twenties, I’m guessing. Dark-blond, tousled, collar-length waves, great shoulders, great bones; slim-fit jeans with torn knees under a dark-grey flannel shirt open at the collar and rolled up tight at the elbows to reveal forearms corded with veins and lean muscles. Artfully maintained two-day growth shadows his jawline and he wears a shark tooth pendant around his neck. A leather satchel with a black jacket and grey-toned scarf draped over it sits near one boot-shod foot.

I blink as the stranger begins moving towards me with a languor that doesn’t quite match the fury in his dark eyes. I figure he must have blundered his way into my stairwell by mistake until he demands harshly, ‘Who are you? Where’s Joanne?’

A sneer curls his beautiful mouth as he looks me up and down, his eyes narrowing momentarily on my scars. ‘She told me to come back today for my reading, so I came, preparing to be read to, and no one was here. Do you know how long I’ve waited?’

An awful thought is forming.

Ish Hee-yoooooo.

I’d completely forgotten about him. What had I promised him the other night, to make him go away? My hands rise up to my face in horror and I shrink back in the direction of the stairs as he draws closer, snarling, ‘You’re crooks, aren’t you? Scammers? It was you the other night, in the bathroom, wasn’t it? Not Joanne. I thought she sounded funny, different.’

I’m shaking my head as he spits, ‘Where is it? My so-called “fortune”? She hasn’t done it, has she?’ He pushes his hair back off his forehead. ‘What you people don’t understand,’ he adds slowly, like I’m stupid, ‘is that I’m not your usual brain-dead spiritualist who’s easy to put off and con. Unless I see every cent of my money back, I’m going to report you charlatans to the police.’

The shouted word reverberates, hanging there in the still, cold air of the stairwell, and for a churning instant—when he extends his hand in accusation—I think he’s going to touch me. Or hit me.

Then there’s a sudden clatter of shoes on the stairs and I back straight into a hard male chest, my scream freezing in my throat as a large hand falls on my shoulder and gives it a squeeze. I slump where I stand, recognising the tobacco-raddled scent of the man’s aftershave.

‘The police are already here,’ Wurbik says laconically from behind me, causing the young man to blink and straighten in surprise. ‘What seems to be the issue, Sport?’

Inside my apartment, Wurbik refuses to hand me back the bag I’d left in his car until he has established to his own satisfaction who it is he’s looking at. But when he realises that he’s actually in the presence of the last client named in Mum’s journal—in the flesh—not a single muscle moves in his face. I can almost hear him thinking: Well, that’s all of them then, come forward. Kircher, Bawden, de Crespigny.

While Wurbik’s distracted, I grab my pack out of his big callused hand and kick it under the overhanging lip of the kitchen bench, giving him a speaking look with one eyebrow that says: Thanks, Dad, I can take it from here with the angry hot guy.

But Wurbik steps around me and opens my fridge door. He peers at a bowl of collapsed and weeping tomatoes with every appearance of interest, saying casually, ‘So, Mr de Crespigny, you haven’t seen or heard any of the blanket media coverage regarding Joanne Nielsen Crowe’s disappearance last week?’

Beside me, Hugh de Crespigny visibly hesitates. ‘Disappearance?’ He looks to me for confirmation, but a sudden wave of pain makes me look down. As the silence lengthens, Hugh blusters, ‘I’ve been in Tasmania all week.’ He draws himself up, saying like it matters, ‘At the opening of an arts festival, if you must know.’

‘They get the news in Tasmania, too, last I heard,’ Wurbik replies evenly, giving Hugh a sideways glance, before slamming the fridge door shut. ‘But it does go some way towards explaining why you haven’t returned a single one of our calls.’

‘Look,’ Hugh says in a more conciliatory tone, ‘I got back late on Friday and this girl here’—he jerks a thumb in my direction—‘promised me a reading if I came back on Monday. That’s all this is. I’m here for a reading. And if she can’t do it, I will settle for my money back and be on my way.’

‘He was drunk,’ I tell Wurbik beseechingly when his pale gaze alights on me. ‘He came with a couple of mates while I was locked in my bathroom.’ Wurbik frowns and I dart Hugh a venomous look, which he declines to acknowledge. ‘I was scared.’

The detective comes out of my galley kitchen and leans against the bench, studying the younger man expressionlessly. ‘You one of the Ballanchine Road, Toorak, de Crespignys?’ he says, and I can tell by Hugh’s sudden stillness that he’s been caught off guard. ‘The judge’s boy? Justice Alaric de Crespigny? Look like him.’

The younger man’s brows draw together. ‘He’s my uncle,’ he responds warily. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Ah,’ is all Wurbik says.

Hugh’s eyes widen. ‘Surely, you don’t think I had anything to do with, with…’ His voice rises incredulously.

‘Can you give a good account of your recent movements, Mr de Crespigny? We’ll be needing a statement from you in short order,’ Wurbik says, deadpan. I know Wurbik is shit-stirring, but it still shakes me, to hear the words, how official they sound, the weight of them.

Hugh’s frozen expression suddenly dissolves. ‘I have been out of the state,’ he enunciates bitingly. ‘Happy to give you the names of all the people I slept with over the course of the last few days, Officer.’

For some reason known only to my traitorous subconscious, I flush a hot beet-red right up to the roots of my hair.

‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ Wurbik replies.

Ducking forward awkwardly, I open the door, and it is Wurbik’s turn to hesitate when he realises the furious younger man—watching us with arms crossed—is actually intending to stay. ‘You don’t have to do it,’ Wurbik urges, his deep voice going quiet and gravelly with concern. ‘I know Eleanor Charters made contact, asking for answers. Lovely woman, but her judgment’s skewed. She’s desperate, tried everything, is willing to believe. I can understand why it would make sense for you to see Elias Kircher—I mean, Mal and I talked long and hard about it but decided there was no harm because his chart was already done—but you don’t have to deal with him’—he tosses his wiry, clipped head of grey hair in Hugh’s direction—‘or get involved in “finding” Fleur Bawden’s murderer. The $250,000 reward Eleanor posted in 1985—that’s a quarter of a mill in 1985 dollars, Avicenna—has not yet been touched. The best police minds in the country haven’t been able to pin it down to a single man. There’s just not enough to go on and no star chart’s going to do it. You can just say no, okay?’

Behind me, Hugh is very still, very silent. But I’m tough enough and ugly enough, I tell myself sternly, to handle a rich boy who wants to know how his rich life is going to pan out; piece of cake.

Wurbik and I continue to glare at each other, both refusing to be the one to look away first, but I feel something in my face softening. He would have made a great dad. A scary, gun-toting, hard-arse—but great—dad. ‘I know, I know,’ I say finally, ‘if you had a kid, you would be telling her the same thing. But even if Mum’s journal doesn’t hold any answers, I owe it to her to finish, don’t you see? No loose ends was one of her favourite sayings. All loose ends, I used to say right back. Meeting her halfway, for a change.’ The laugh I give sounds harsh, like a bark.

Wurbik blinks. ‘Well, you call me if this clown gives you any trouble, understand? And the duty to provide updates is an entirely mutual one, unlimited by normal office hours. If I don’t hear from you, Avicenna, you’ll be hearing from me, right?’

Wurbik scans Hugh de Crespigny’s face again, as though searching for visible signs of a flawed character, saying in his direction, ‘And you’ll be hearing from us,’ before pulling the door shut behind him.

As the detective clatters away back down the stairs, Hugh says, almost like he’s thinking out loud, ‘I could have that man seriously inconvenienced.’

It takes a good second for the meaning of his words to filter in. I swing on him, revolted. ‘What did you pay her?’ I demand, stepping around him and heading straight for the meals table covered in its plasticky, faux lace.

But he doesn’t answer. I am simultaneously drawn to Hugh and terrified by him, and that makes me angry. I pull out a chair and wave a hand at it before hurrying into my bedroom for my laptop and Mum’s almanacs, some paper and my pencil case and protractor. When I come out, Hugh is still standing in the same spot, looking around with that faintly sneering lip. ‘I didn’t imagine it,’ he adds for no one’s benefit. ‘This place is an unrelieved dump. How did Rosso talk me into doing this?’

I drop the whole teetering mess I’m cradling on the table and pull out my own chair at the head, exactly where Mum would have sat, banging it down. ‘What did you pay her?’ I repeat. It would give me some idea of how much time I would lawfully have to spend with this bozo.

Hugh’s dark eyes snap to mine and he stalks over before sprawling in the chair opposite, the whole length of the table away. ‘Enough,’ he snaps. ‘Rosso’s mother is an incredibly superstitious woman who swears by these things. I lost a bet.’ Hugh’s voice suddenly hardens, as does his face. ‘So here I am. Hit me.’

I glare at him over the collapsed mound of books and paper between us. ‘Don’t tempt me,’ I reply. ‘Hugh Athelrede de Crespigny?’ He inclines his head curtly. ‘Birthdate: 19 October, 1992. Birthplace: London, United Kingdom. Time?’

The time of his birth hadn’t been in Mum’s journal or on the back of that envelope he’d left me. Without it, the chart I was about to draw for him would read like a greeting card: Hugh has lovely people skills; is a great self-starter and party host. I swallow down a snort of derision. Jerk.

‘What?’ Hugh replies, gaze challenging, sensing my amusement. ‘Why do you need to know that?’

‘Time,’ I repeat, like he’s the slow one. ‘It’s quite vital.’

Hugh eyes me coolly then leans down and draws a slender mobile phone out of a pocket of his designer bag. He hits a pre-programmed number while he studies me across the table.

‘How’d you get that scar?’ he says before suddenly drawling in a completely different voice, ‘Mother, dear, at what exact moment was I born?’ He laughs, and it is a warm and natural sound.

There is a muffled flurry of surprised noise at the other end, then silence. My colour rises again as Hugh says, the phone still held to his ear, ‘What sort of name is Avicenna, anyway?’ before bending in to hear her response.

As he slides the phone back into the front pocket of his shirt, he purrs, ‘4.52am, darling. Take it away. Do your worst.’

He knows I want to. Dislike and suspicion hang over the table like warring storm fronts. According to Mum’s notes, all Hugh asked for was a simple radix. Emphasis: wealth, health, love. No progressions were required, no answers to specific questions. Just platitudes and generalisations. Cake.

But I can’t stop my scalp from prickling as I start charting. Every time I look up, Hugh is watching me intently. He’s a looker: one of those people with so much confidence and entitlement that he is without shame, without embarrassment. There is a cool and absolute stillness about his indolent frame that’s almost preternatural. He’s a big guy—all legs and arms and hard shoulders—but while I consult books and websites, shuffling pieces of paper and rulers around nervously, he doesn’t fidget. It’s like he’s breaking me down into little pieces, just with his eyes, as I try to do my worst.

But glyph after glyph, the building picture tells the same story: excellent general prospects for money and success, love and physical health, no adverse aspects or major afflictions involving either of the luminaries, his midheaven or his ascendant sign. In all probability, throughout his life he’ll be loved and have children, friends, community; every material thing he could wish for. These are good stars; you would want to have been born under stars like these. Without going beyond Mum’s brief, without progressing his chart forwards, I will not find the twist: the one that could unmake him; derail his assured and munificent future.

So in a monotone I tell Hugh that the universe was both kind and bountiful when he was born, that he will have love, wealth, health, in spades—The signs in your fifth house regarding offspring are particularly fruitful, I find myself droning—but I don’t pull any punches as I go, overcome by the desire to hurt, but also by desire itself.

‘You’re a perfectionist who can’t stand to be alone,’ I say gravely, hands on my knees under the table so he won’t see them shaking. ‘This may stem from issues with your father, who may be cold or distant? Absent?’

Hugh actually shifts in his chair when I say that, but he doesn’t speak. There’s something troubling about the stars in his fourth house signifying the male parent, but nothing definitive. Lots of people are raised by a single parent; I mean, look at me, no biggie, right? Hugh’s face has tightened but he doesn’t ask me to elaborate, so I continue with: ‘You’re highly sociable, hypercritical, judgmental, intelligent. Analytical, touchy. Vain.’

I let that word linger a little before adding: ‘And you’re also a hedonist with a constant craving to be needed, desired, loved, which—thankfully for you—is largely reciprocated by all who meet you—though you have a strong tendency to be overly possessive, obsessive, jealous. You don’t so much love people as smother them. And if you don’t like someone? Then they are dead to you.

‘You abhor everything that is ugly or mundane,’ I say finally, knowing that I must fall somewhere into this sub-category of ugly things with all my surface flaws. ‘And the indications are that you will always have your wealth.’ I can’t resist finishing with, ‘So, congratulations, yeah?’

Hugh is silent as I scribble all this down beneath his roughed-out astrological chart. And he is still silent as I date and sign it the way Mum always did.

A good astrologer, I remember her saying once, as she autographed someone’s chart with a flourish, always takes pride in, and stands by, her work. Those with the knowledge are here to be tested.

But I go against Crowe protocol and don’t bother keeping a copy of the radix for myself because I don’t expect this prick to ever darken my doorstep again. The thought of it actually hurts me—that this is the only time our two lives will ever intersect—but there it is.

I push the piece of paper over the table to him and get to my feet, marching across the room and throwing open the front door. Awareness—of him, the shabbiness of the room, the unfairness of it all—is making it hard to breathe. Still, job done, right? Easy money.

Suddenly I find myself blinking away tears, actually tilting my head back against the door to hold them in; a feeling in the back of my throat like razor blades that I can’t swallow down. If the year at Collegiate High never ended up panning out, I could always become the fortuneteller Sergeant Docherty accused Mum of being. Maybe she’d been onto something, my mother. Maybe she’d always meant for this to be some kind of lucrative fallback for her plain, ungainly daughter: because people are always going to be credulous slobs, having ‘the knowledge’ would mean I’d never starve.

Good one, Mum. Thanks. Always thinking about me.

Hugh hasn’t moved. He just stares down blindly at the piece of paper I gave him like it’s toxic. For a second I feel almost guilty because I’ve seen that look before. Somehow every word I uttered has seemed to him to have held some essential truth.

It’s the nature of our art, I almost tell him. To raise hopes, or destroy them. Don’t let it affect you too badly. But there’s no duty to offer comfort, so I don’t.

I look on silently as Hugh finally rises from the reading table, knotting his elegant scarf around his neck before shrugging into his jacket and slinging his leather satchel over his head. He hesitates above the piece of annotated paper, then folds it in half, then into quarters, before shoving the small square into a pocket. Why is it, I find myself thinking, that the worst arseholes have faces like angels?

But if that were really true, it would make me one of the kindest people on the planet, and I’m not. I know the reading I just gave was deliberately harsh, mean-spirited. There were so many other ways I could have phrased things, but I chose the low road. Mum would be appalled.

Hugh draws alongside, muttering, ‘Looks like you have me all worked out. I haven’t turned out to be a very nice person, have I?’

There is that awareness. I don’t know if he can feel it, but it’s almost an atmosphere in the room, stifling.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say vaguely, crossing my arms, staring at a point past the guy’s broad shoulder; wanting my dinner, wanting to cry, wanting him over with and crossed off, just like Wurbik’s crossed him off. Really pretty people have this effect on me—something goes wrong with the muscles in my neck and I can’t hold my head up properly or look them in the eye for any length of time. It’s a defensive reflex I’ve developed against the possibility of judgment, or hurt.

With Hugh, I think it is the worst it’s ever been. He’s both magnetic and intensely repellent. Very push-pull. And I have to remind myself that the only reason he’s in my life in the first place is because Mum isn’t.

He’s standing so close now, I almost have to lean backward or we’ll touch. But there’s nowhere to go and even the air I’m breathing smells of him. ‘You forgot one thing, though,’ he says.

That makes me look at him, stung. ‘I don’t forget,’ I say hotly. ‘I don’t forget anything. You got what you paid for and, buddy, it’s accurate. You know it is.’ Hugh’s gaze on me is watchful; his irises so dark I can’t see into his soul. And I want, desperately, to look away. But I can’t. Instead I flick my fingers in the direction of his pocket to distract and confuse because I’m good at deflection, at attack. At the heart of all attack is defence. I live by that credo.

I jabber, ‘That radix is you in a nutshell, right? Am I right?’

I know I’m right, but my left hand slips up nervously into the loose ends of my hair anyway, pulling it into a thick rope that I tug down tightly over my ruined ear. Around him, I am a bag of nervous tics, and it’s disgusting.

Hugh is staring at me like he could melt me with his eyes. Maybe it’s the ugliness thing, and I offend him. Snake and mouse, mouse and snake, I think.

Then Hugh gives me a sudden, crooked smile that does something painful to the muscles of my diaphragm. As I flush beneath his steady scrutiny, his smile broadens, actually reaching his eyes, making all the interesting lines of his face more prominent.

‘You forgot to say,’ Hugh emphasises quietly, ‘that I hate mysteries; that I won’t leave them alone until I get bored…’ He steps forward until I’m pressed into the grain of the door, trying to keep some air between us. ‘Or I get answers. You’ve given me a lot to think about, Avicenna. I think I was wrong about you, and I hate being wrong. You missed that, too.’

Then he laughs—a laugh of genuine amusement—and says, ‘Later,’ in the kind of light, Prince Charming voice that only serves to remind me of our last encounter before this one; the innate violence of him, drunk, beating at my door.

My hands are still shaking as I draw the safety chain across. And I listen with my good ear pressed up against the wood, not breathing out until I hear the door at the bottom of the stairs slam shut behind him.