Cavalier could hear the landline ringing as he stepped from his car. He reached the phone just as it stopped. Seconds later, it was ringing again.
‘Victor Cavalier?’ a deep voice asked.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Fuck you! You fucking bastard! You’re gonna die!’
Cavalier gripped the phone. ‘Who is this?’
‘You won’t know how it comes! A bomb under your car; a bullet from fuckin’ nowhere!’
For a few seconds, he was shaken. But he’d had death threats before. It’s not the way it happens, he reminded himself. A real killer would never forewarn his victim. But it was still unsettling.
‘C’mon, hero,’ Cavalier said, ‘tell me who you are.’
More abuse poured down the line.
‘This is being taped,’ Cavalier continued, looking at the tiny recorder attached to the phone base. ‘I’ll trace . . .’
The caller rang off.
As always, Cavalier ran through the possibilities. A gang member? A disgruntled criminal from another investigation? He walked outside and took his mail from the post-box, looking across the road and down the street. There was a card telling him he had a parcel to collect.
Half an hour later, he drove to the local post office. Back home, he examined the small brown parcel. His name—spelled Victar Cavalear—and address were handwritten. There was no sender’s address, and only Australian postal markings. Cavalier opened the parcel. It contained an unmarked DVD. He poured himself a double Scotch with ice and sat back to watch it on his large TV.
Judging from the jumpiness, an amateur had been behind the camera. At first, Cavalier was not sure where the panoramic shots of undulating country had been taken. Then a chill touched his spine. It was the border town of Matamoros in north-eastern Mexico. He had visited it six years ago, when trying to find his lost daughter, Pon. He had just put his glass down when he heard her mellifluous voice. It was an out-of body experience to hear her talk in her gentle singsong voice: ‘It’s hot as hell here, Dad. A furnace. The town has about half a million people. It’s the kind of place where you get killed and no one notices . . .’
Cavalier sat in shock.
‘You get dumped in a mass grave in the back garden of a house or a football field, with maybe scores of other unidentified corpses.’
The screen went blank. Then the stunningly beautiful Pon, in a light blue denim suit, was in front of the camera.
‘How do you like my first venture into being a video journalist, huh?’ she asked. ‘You always warned me off it when I was a kid. But I’m afraid that, after this travel, I want to do it. I’ll use travel writing as a front, and pick up stories like this . . . about the disappeared ones in Mexico.’ She paused and her expression turned grim. ‘What the next sequence will show is an unused canal. Instead of water, it has hundreds of, maybe a thousand, rotting bodies in it.’
There were long-shot, medium-shot and, finally, nauseating close-ups of decapitated bodies.
Pon’s voice was now nervous and disjointed: ‘These are low-level drug dealers, migrants on the way to the States that never got there, corrupt cops, women, lots of women . . . raped . . . I am told . . .’ There was a close-up of half-naked female bodies, looking like headless tailor’s dummies. ‘I’ve learned that these women were used for pleasure, or even payback, or intimidation of family members opposed to the drug bosses.’ She was speaking through tears as she added: ‘This kind of slaughter knows no criteria for brutality. Anything goes. Maybe eighty thousand were butchered this way. This is modern Mexico. Hell on earth.’
The video stopped. Cavalier sat back, sipped his Scotch and attempted to assemble his thoughts. Was the threatening call connected with this revelation? There didn’t seem to be any link. Who had sent the video? He pulled out the packet from the kitchen bin, examined it, then wrapped it up in foil. Could there be fingerprint clues? Then he thought of the number of times the package would have been handled.
For a moment, he dared to think that his daughter could still be alive. Then the tape started again. A party was in full swing. Pon and her best friend were in medium shot dancing to a hip-hop beat. In the foreground, Cavalier could make out Mendez and Labasta talking to several young women. The tape stopped again. He stood unsteadily and walked around the living room, holding his head. He wandered into a bathroom and leaned over the basin, ready to throw up. He dry-retched, and returned to the sofa.
If he’d been shocked before, he was shaking now, as he watched his distressed and bedraggled daughter being pushed down a staircase to a basement. Unseen hands dragged her aside. Then the camera focused on a strange metal contraption. ‘My god, no!’ Cavalier heard himself whisper in horror as he recognised it as a guillotine.
Two black-hooded figures stood beside it. The jerking video moved in close on the blade that hovered two metres above the neck rest. The next sequence, in medium shot, showed Pon being dragged to the guillotine. The two figures pushed her into position and dragged down a locking device, which held her head in position. She struggled but could not free herself. Pon screamed and screamed.
Cavalier was standing now, unable to think, as he watched, transfixed. The blade rushed down towards his daughter’s neck. Then the screen went blank. He fiddled with the remote. Nothing. He tried to fast-forward but seemed to be at the end. But he wasn’t.
Both figures had removed their hoods and were facing away from the camera. Then one of the men turned around. His sharp nose, close-set eyes, weak jaw and permanent half-grin, half-leer were unmistakable.
It was Leonardo Mendez.
The other man turned around. It was Labasta.
He bent over to pick something up. The camera came in close on his hand as he reached for what appeared to be a head. Then the screen went blank again.
Cavalier sank onto the sofa, staring at the TV screen. He was breathing heavily. He had never felt so utterly alone and desperate. He reached for the Scotch bottle on the glass table in front of him. He poured the whisky into his glass, but could not hold it. He was trembling.
Five days later, Cavalier’s elderly cleaners, a brother and sister called Fred and Agnes, waited at the front door to his house. After fifteen minutes of bell-pressing, they let themselves in, and found him lying on his back on the sofa, with his TV on but the screen blank. Cavalier was in a sea of empty Scotch bottles, glasses and half-full Thai food cartons. A stench of vomit pervaded the room.
Fred, with Agnes’s help, dragged him to the bathroom, ran the bath and slapped him awake. With his vague acquiescence, they helped him remove his clothes. Cavalier climbed into the bath and the water seemed to revive him. After cleaning up, they left him to slump into bed, where he slept for fourteen hours straight.
On waking up, the nightmare returned. His first thought was that he should let his ex-wife Pin know. But it was such terrible news, he wondered if he should leave it. Pin had always been convinced their daughter was dead, no matter what he hoped or said. His second thought was to wait to tell her when he had more information, some extra confirmation, such as the location of Pon’s remains . . . but these rational thoughts were soon overcome.
He really had no one to turn to. The information was too delicate to discuss with anyone. He now wanted revenge, but he had no idea at that moment what this would be, or how it could be exacted. In a rage, he drove to his gym on the beach at St Kilda and took out his feelings on a punching bag, so hard that he split knuckles on both hands. An instructor friend came up and asked him if was okay.
‘No, but I will be soon,’ Cavalier responded.
‘You look terrible!’ Driscoll said as Cavalier walked into her office, two days after his cleaners had found him. She knew he had been on some sort of bender.
‘But you never look terrible,’ Cavalier said, attempting to smile.
‘Victor, you can’t continue like this. I—’
‘I’m going to Thailand,’ he said, interrupting her.
‘What?’
‘I’m, uh, playing in that cricket tournament.’
‘What changed your mind?’
‘Is that offer for the Jacinta story still open?’ he said, ignoring her question.
‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly. ‘If you can trust yourself to stay sober.’