16

As I run through the results for Mallory Bloch, Eleanor’s eyes grow cloudy, distant. When I reach the end of my notes on the man, Don turns to her and says, ‘He was a long-shot anyway, remember? Just because no one remembered seeing him at the house party in Mount Eliza didn’t mean he wasn’t there, or coming back from there, the way he insisted. Even though the man’s an abusive, officious prick, and there was never any proof, I never thought he was a liar.’

Eleanor picks at one of her cuticles and says nothing as I push on with the reading for Ferwerder.

Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.

As I shuffle the notes for Ferwerder to the back of the pack, Eleanor insists unhappily, ‘But Chris Ferwerder knows something. He couldn’t look me in the eye back then, and he still can’t. I have seen him leave a function, just to avoid me.’

‘He might know something,’ I answer gently, ‘but it’s not something I can tell you from the question you asked me to address. There’s just nothing in his stars.’

‘She was supposed to be at a party at his place,’ Eleanor whispers. She places a miniature scone absently onto the edge of Don’s saucer and I watch as he saws it in two with a butter knife before slathering it in jam and eating the thing whole; flushing slightly when he catches me watching. ‘Geoff Kidston used to drive her everywhere,’ Eleanor continues with quiet anguish. ‘I trusted him to do it because he was Margaret’s son. He and Lew Boardman used to take her around, like she was their mascot: drive her to school, pick her up from parties, never a hint of trouble. They were supposed to be good boys; fine young men. I knew them when they were children.’

I exchange a helpless look with Don, who is busying himself pouring another coffee.

The moment I tell Eleanor Charters that Lewis Boardman possesses the stars of a serial sex fiend and womaniser—but that he didn’t do it—she pushes herself out of her chair, hands over her mouth, and leaves the room. After a second’s hesitation, Don walks out, too, and I’m reminded that I still don’t get the vibe around these two, why they are even together; how this gaunt, hard-worn, stick of a man became a kind of general dog’s body, driver-cum-servant, to a haunted rich lady.

When Don returns a moment later, he is alone.

‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him as he dips an entire scone into the dish of jam, cross-contaminating the cream with it, before stuffing the whole catastrophe into his mouth. ‘These are what their charts say.’

‘Well, what about Kidston’s?’ he counters, wiping self-consciously at the corners of his lips with the knuckles of one hand.

‘Yes,’ Eleanor begs as she sweeps back into the room. ‘What about his?’

Her eyes are very red, but she sits back down in her chair, her posture rigid. I give Don a hard look, and he tells Eleanor sheepishly about the transposition error he made with Kidston’s birthtime. I read out my original summary and Eleanor tilts her head to one side, saying, ‘And now? How does this one mistake change anything?’

I tell her that taking Kidston’s birthtime backward by several hours intensifies the apparently secretive, selfish side of his nature, and his phenomenal sensitivity. ‘I’m seeing a lot more arrogance and snobbery, ego, the pursuit of people and things that make him look good, or befit his perception of himself.’

‘Fleur would have fit right into that category,’ Don says musingly.

‘Fleur treated him like an annoying older brother,’ Eleanor snaps back. ‘Fleur was a young fifteen. She wasn’t even thinking about boys or…’

Her eyes go shinier, and Don and I exchange furtive glances as Eleanor blinks rapidly and looks down. I know that when I was fifteen I was thinking about boys and cars and riding around in cars with boys. But I was never a young fifteen, after all, with this rack, and this face, and I don’t say anything because it won’t help.

After a while, Eleanor looks back up at me and murmurs, ‘Did he or didn’t he do it?’

I hesitate before shaking my head, and she covers her mouth with her hands and rocks forward, wordlessly, in her seat. ‘But,’ I say tentatively over her bowed head, grey hair swept into its signature, elegant chignon at the nape of her slender neck, ‘there is something in Kidston’s progressed chart. Something the others don’t have.’

She raises her eyes to mine like a threatened animal, and I say quickly, glossing over the finer detail because it would make no sense to someone like her, ‘That night? The way Kidston’s ascendant was conjunct progressed Neptune indicates that he was brewing some weird plan or deception. Looking at where Uranus sits with regard to his natal moon, and how Mercury is moving into square with Mars, all this signifies some kind of conflict or fight, some issue to do with travel or…delivery? Is that making any sense to you?’

Eleanor’s eyes have grown very wide, and she shakes her head, mystified, while Don struggles to write it all down in his little notebook between bouts of nervous eating. ‘If you look at the way Saturn is transiting through here.’ I indicate a portion of the rough handwritten chart I threw together between PE and the final bell. ‘The interrelationship between Mercury, Mars and Saturn indicates a conflict with someone he considered an authority figure. Someone he was afraid of, or maybe wanted to impress? It can also mean a forced farewell of some kind.’

Eleanor actually inhales with horror at my words, and begins crying in earnest, plucking at the front of her sweater, rocking and shuddering in her chair.

I actually jump out of my own seat then and hold out my notes to Don, wanting to be free of these people and their horrific burden. ‘I’m sorry,’ I babble. ‘I’m so sorry, that’s the best I could do. You asked me to do it; I didn’t want to.’

Don takes the untidy sheaf of notes and diagrams out of my clenched fist. He looks at Eleanor, but she’s gone to that place beyond speaking. I see him hesitate before reaching out and placing his free hand—thin, sun-damaged, hairy-backed—onto her frail and shaking shoulder.

The juxtaposition between his hand on her, and the elegant, jewel-coloured room—lit with rainbows from sunlight hitting all the glass—brings on something like hot panic, or nausea, and my own hands rise to my face in horror.

Some things have no answers. God, let that not be true.

I swing my pack onto my shoulder, already backing away from the two of them, seated in awful tableau. The roaring in my ears seems to grow louder. Jesus, I don’t even know where I am. I’m so far out of my narrow comfort zone, it’s like I’m in a parallel universe. ‘If you could just tell me what tram or bus I need to take?’ I plead. ‘To get home? It’s kind of late. I just need to get there. I need to go home.’

Don looks up, an arrested, almost pained, expression on his face. And it strikes me again how wasted and out-of-place he looks, despite his expensive clothes, his expensive surroundings. He’s like a grey, weathered tree—uprooted from the side of a dusty bush track somewhere—that’s been replanted in a hothouse.

Don’s eyes slide away even as he mutters, ‘I’m to see you home. It’s all been fixed.’

And I nod once, sharply, before fleeing the room, and the howling old woman in her bright, jewel-box house, who will never find peace. It’s like looking into my own future.

While Don brings the car around to where I’m standing like I’m too delicate or posh to walk the short distance to the carport, I check my phone and see at least a dozen missed calls. A couple of the early ones are from Wurbik, but there’s one from a mystery landline, one from the mystery mobile caller of this morning—the inhaler, I’ve taken to calling that one—and the rest are from Malcolm Cheung.

Malcolm Cheung: who’s Homicide.

I climb numbly into the front passenger seat of the royal blue Mercedes, agonising over which of them to call first—Malcolm or Wurbik.

The light is fading.

Where they are, the searchers, the light would be fading, too. Most likely they’d all be reporting in after a long day of bush-bashing. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that Don’s driving and that I’m stuck driving with him. Don could be wallpaper. Don doesn’t matter. As he shifts the big car into gear and we sail out of Eleanor’s grounds straight into peak-hour traffic, like a coward I speed-dial Wurbik first. Wurbik is a known entity. While I continue to deal with Wurbik, it will continue to be just a missing persons case.

That’s all, I tell myself, she’s just missing and they’re just checking in.

But Wurbik’s unmistakably cagey; unwilling or unable to give anything away. ‘You need to hear it from Mal, who’s been trying to reach you for hours. Where have you been?’

I tell him I’ve been to afternoon tea at Eleanor’s place—me and Eleanor and Don—and Wurbik makes this unhappy noise that could be exasperation, or sympathy. ‘Call Mal before you do, see or hear anything else,’ he insists. ‘Got that? You need it all put into context.’

‘Context?’ I parrot dumbly.

‘Just call him,’ Wurbik says with a harshness I recognise as checked emotion, ‘especially if you don’t already know.’

‘Know what?’ I mumble, staring out blindly at shiny shop windows that proclaim: Versace, Miyake, Provence, Saldi, Boss.

‘Do it now,’ Wurbik replies by way of not replying, and hangs up.

‘At least Eleanor had a body to bury,’ I find myself saying in a dazed voice and I swear I see Don wince out of the corner of my eye.

I’m still dumbly staring down at my phone when the thing rings in my hand—how I freaking hate when that happens—and I freeze.

But it’s the mystery landline number that’s flashing up at me, not Malcolm Cheung’s, of Homicide. And it’s not an anonymous number (the kind favoured by dickless sickos who like to make calls to young girls) so I answer it.

‘Hello? Am I speaking with Simon Thorn?’ says a woman—brisk, efficient, harassed. Immediately I sit up straighter because this is something I can handle; it’s not about me.

‘No, but he’s just in the bathroom…’

I see Don’s eyes dart sideways before hastily refocusing on the red light we are waiting at. Thank God he didn’t decide to put on the radio.

‘…and I can give Simon a message as soon as he gets out,’ I finish smoothly.

‘He’s not answering the primary number he gave us,’ the woman says, ‘and he needs to make a decision. I’m sorry, but we need it today. And there are forms to fill out, if he’s really serious about what he agreed verbally with Dr Gurung. He needs to come back in and speak with the specialists in charge because things need to move quickly from here—if he’s serious. Can he come in right away?’

I have no idea, but I say, ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll let him know. Sorry, tell me again, where were you calling from?’

The woman tells me Royal Melbourne Hospital and I ask for directions, and she tells me, suspiciously, ‘Intensive Care Unit. His mum’s situation’s worsened. Tell him it’s critical that he comes back in, as soon as possible. Her organs…’

She thanks me, and I thank her and hang up while we’re passing some snobby boys’ school all decked out in bluestone and ivy and broad skirts of emerald-green playing field. I turn to Don and tell him quite calmly that if it’s all right with him, could he drop me outside the Emergency Department at the Royal Melbourne instead of taking me home?

Don doesn’t actually answer. But instead of cutting right at Flinders Street Station, he turns left and does a sharp U-turn into Elizabeth Street, sending up a flock of dirty pigeons. While he negotiates the giant nightmare roundabout just before Parkville with five hundred other angry drivers, I send a quick message to the mystery mobile caller who keeps calling me, but doesn’t leave messages.

You need to go back to the hospital NOW and make a decision. They said something about her organs. I’m very sorry.

I’m not dumb. I can put two and two together. He wants to talk but he can’t. I get that.

The mystery guy may be one of the raft of random mouth-breathers I seem to have attracted in the days since Mum’s story got out. But I don’t think so. What had Eleanor said? Gut feeling. Even the sound of him drawing breath has become familiar to me, and necessary.

A moment later Don’s pulling into the hospital’s front courtyard and I’m out of there without a backward glance, asking for directions to the ICU ward.

Looking through the ward doors, I see that the ICU is full. I don’t recognise any of the still and shadowy shapes strapped to rhythmically beeping machines as having anything to do with Simon Thorn. And because I’m nothing to him, or to the ill and the dying in that room, the nurses won’t let me past the night desk.

There is nothing left to do now except call Malcolm Cheung from a quiet place. But I can’t make myself do it. Unsure what I’m even doing here, I head in the opposite direction to quiet, backtracking towards the public cafeteria, which is lit up like a bad dream and packed with people. I’ll need to be with someone, anyone, when I hear what I’m supposed to hear in its proper context.

The air smells of hot pies. Something by The Carpenters is playing and it’s like a sign. Mum loved The Carpenters; loved that tragic, anorexic singer with the voice like liquid caramel. I join the queue at the window for hot food and the woman behind me says out loud, nudging me, as if we’re in the middle of a conversation: ‘Isn’t it sad? Such a beautiful smile. Such a beautiful woman.’

I turn and look at her and her tight, grey perm and lilac velour tracksuit, tan comfort shoes. ‘Sorry?’

The woman takes a step back when she clocks my face but she points up, gamely, above the counter, at a TV screen. It has white, computery text running along the bottom of the picture which I recognise as tele-text for deaf people. Put on especially for those cafeteria patrons who like to watch their news while enjoying The Carpenters singing of rainy days and Mondays; even though it’s a Tuesday today, and fine out. The text says:

–blood-stains found in a clearing, several kilometres from the main hiking trail close to the summit.

I see people in orange jumpsuits, boots and hard hats with miner’s lamps emerging from the trees with the characters SES emblazoned across the front on a glowing white band positioned at chest level. A slightly out-of-focus man in a police-issue jumpsuit holds up a plastic bag with something white inside. The words continue:

–and emergency workers with assistance from the Queensland police cadaver dog squad recovered what appears to be an item of clothing. Homicide detectives are pursuing several lines of enquiry–

The text makes way for the newsreader saying brightly, ‘In other news…’ and my eye is drawn to the photograph behind the newsreader’s shoulder: a head and shoulders shot of an elderly businessman in a navy suit. He looks younger in this photo because the neat pencil moustache is not yet completely white. It’s the kind of photo you’d see on the wall of an office building, or in an official report. No red-eye, a snowy white background; the subject deliberately angled towards you in a firm, reassuring stance. Your money is in good hands.

The photo is followed by images of several rescue boats motoring around the partially submerged hull of a big yacht. Blue water; open water; waves. The sea under bright sunlight, dazzling: like the eyes of the giant, in the curiosity shop. Police divers in sleek wetsuits and face masks.

‘Excuse me,’ the old woman nudges me again, less friendly this time. ‘Were you going to order?’

I can feel myself beginning to tremble, already starting to gasp, so I step to one side so the woman can get at her pre-heated pastry items without delay. Face tilted towards the screen, I keep reading, the blood roaring in my ears:

Mr Kircher, a non-executive director of several ASX top 100-listed companies and founder of biotech powerhouse Emer-Tech, is survived by six adult children from several marriages, and
five grandchildren–
Foul play–
Homicide–
Contract hit gone wrong–