20

AS SOON AS I got back to the station, I dialled Jean’s number. It rang and rang and went to messages, so I hung up. I hit redial, and it rang and rang again, but just as I thought it was going to go to messages again, she answered.

‘Hi, Jean,’ I said, keeping all emotion out of my voice.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, very snaky. ‘And I suppose you’re on your way over here with the documents, are you? And that’s why you called. To see if I’d be around.’

I couldn’t respond to her anger, so I said nothing. After an eternity, she sighed deeply and broke the silence.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m just very frustrated at the moment, as you’d understand.’

‘And I wish I could do something about it,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I just wanted to check that you made it back to your office okay. And I wanted to say that, you know, I thought we had something there, but I can see how it might not suit at the moment.’

‘At the moment?’ She laughed ruefully, and we lapsed into silence again.

‘Look, as for us,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘Well, it’s like I told you. Timing’s everything. We’re both very busy, and even when things quieten down, it could be hard. Being on opposite sides of the fence.’

She had her anger under control, but she sounded resolved, all the same. Here was the brush-off. I’d set it up for her, and she’d done the rest.

‘Okay,’ I said, trying to put some steel in my voice. ‘But when the election’s over, and this case is out of the way, expect a call from me. From the other side of the fence.’

She laughed and said that would be fine, but without enthusiasm. Then she hung up and, immediately, all the hopes I’d had for us, all the daydreams I’d entertained, began whirling around inside my head in a confused mess. Then my guts got involved, and I knew I had to assert control. I told myself that I hadn’t won her heart, so I hadn’t lost it. And I had a job to do and I had to be effective, not distracted. I had to get back on task. But as the afternoon wore on, in everything I did, my thoughts returned to Jean. And it occurred to me that keeping a tail on her had suddenly become much more dangerous. If she caught me at it again, she wouldn’t swallow another half-baked excuse. And she certainly wouldn’t be asking me out for a drink.

Luckily, I owned an old GPS vehicle-tracker that I could monitor her movements with. It was another gift from my American friend James — the one who’d given me the mandolin. His tracker wasn’t as small or as sophisticated as the type we had in the storeroom, but it worked just as well, with one complication: once I’d got the thing attached to Jean’s car, I’d have to call James in Memphis so he could locate the car through his service provider. It was a bit of an imposition, but when he’d given me the device he’d said to call him any time for a reading, day or night. In fact, he’d said he’d be offended if I didn’t try the thing out.

It was almost seven when I walked past Jean’s place. Her lights were out, so I scanned the road and the footpaths, and then plugged my mobile to my ear and walked briskly down into her carpark. Her car wasn’t there, so I decided to give her fifteen minutes. If she hadn’t turned up by then, I’d pick up some dinner and go back to work.

I’d decided on stir-fried noodles, and was about to go and get them when Jean’s black VW swung into Giles Street. The car slowed as it turned into her driveway, the glow from the streetlight catching her face as she flashed past.

When the lights went on in the penthouse, I took my usual evasive trip down to Canberra Avenue, crossed Giles Street, and walked back up to her drive. I checked the street again before descending into her carpark, where I found her car reverse-parked against the back wall in a numbered bay. When I got to the rear of the vehicle, I removed my backpack and took out the tracker, a torch, and a wire brush. I laid them on top of the pack, and then got onto my back and eased myself under the car.

There was a flat metal plate next to the rear bumper bar that looked made for the magnetic base on the tracker. I brushed the dirt from the plate, then took the tracker in both hands and eased it into place. The magnets and the metal met with a clang; when I tested it, the thing felt like it had been glued there. I turned it on. A dull, red light flickered rapidly next to the switch, and then went out. The job done, I eased myself out from underneath the car, put the torch and the brush back in my pack, and returned to my hide via the usual route. I’d only just settled in there when Jean’s lights went out; a few minutes later, her VW emerged from the carpark and headed for Canberra Avenue.

Earlier in the day I’d had an email exchange with James in which I’d spun him a line about my girlfriend’s wanderings. I’d told him I wanted to track her for a few nights. It might be completely innocent — I just needed to know the score. James was sorry to hear about my troubles, and said to call him anytime I needed her co-ordinates.

It was three in the morning, Memphis time, when I dialled his number. James picked up after a couple of rings and said to call him back in a few minutes. When I did, he’d already tracked Jean to Mueller Street in Yarralumla. Rolfe lived in Mueller, so I figured she was visiting him. I thanked James, and as there was no way of telling how long Jean would stay at Rolfe’s, I headed off to a noodle place in Manuka.

Back at work, I spent a couple of hours calling Marie Staples’ old radical mates, but none of them had seen her in years. Then I called James to check on Jean; after only a brief delay, he told me her car was stationary in Giles Street. I thanked him, and, secure in the knowledge that she’d got safely home, I retreated to a camp stretcher in the rec room and went straight to sleep.

In one of my dreams that night, I was creeping along a low white passageway, Glock in hand, on-guard against some unspecified threat. I came to a door that I opened, and there was a huge room with a big hourglass sitting in the middle of it. The top bulb of the hourglass was almost full, and the sand trickling from it formed a pointed pile in the bottom bulb.

I went back into the passageway and came to another door. The room behind it contained a big hourglass, too, but there was much less sand in the top bulb of this one, and it seemed to be emptying out at a faster rate. I rushed from the room and saw a third door. I knew exactly what I’d find behind it, and, sure enough, there was another big hourglass, except the top bulb on this one was almost empty. I watched the last of the sand fall through it, and then I realised I’d been going into the same room all the time, and seeing the same hourglass. It was just that there were three different doors leading to it. That thought made me panic for some reason. Then McHenry was yelling at me to get out of the building. I smelt smoke and could hear fire crackling somewhere, and I was suddenly very hot. McHenry was yelling, ‘Get out! Get out!’

I woke in a sweat in the dark. It was just after four. I could have done with a lot more sleep, but I knew I’d just lie there, so I got up, had a shower, got dressed, and went down to the room. Not much had come in through the night — just a handful of callers to the hotline, mostly insomniacs offering half-baked advice.

At seven, I walked down to Northbourne Avenue for a croissant and a coffee. Just after I got back to the room, McHenry called a team meeting that turned into a talkfest which ate up a big chunk of the morning and got us nowhere. It seemed everything we did and everything that came our way was leading to the same old dead ends and dross. The bosses upstairs would be telling their political masters we were making progress, but the truth was we had two very disciplined predators in circulation, and our hunt for them had all but stalled.

At about one, I got a sandwich from the lunch cart and checked my news sites while I ate it. Rolfe hadn’t updated his blog since the night before, which was unusual. He’d been filing a story or a comment piece every few hours since the election kicked off — in fact, with the race tightening, he’d even been updating his site in the middle of the night. I put his failure to file down to a technical glitch, but, only a few minutes later, McHenry called the room to attention. The grim look on his face gave me an inkling of what he was about to say.

‘I’ve just got off the phone with Simon Rolfe’s people in Sydney,’ he said. ‘They can’t contact Rolfe. Now, they were a bit cagey, but it seems he goes missing sometimes, without notice, and then turns up after a couple of days. So it might be a false alarm, but we’re taking no chances.’

By the time we arrived at Rolfe’s house, Peter Kemp and his team had given the place the once-over, and Kemp was looking very frustrated. It seemed Rolfe was a believer in spray and wipe-type products, and as a result his kitchen benchtops were as clean as a whistle, as was every other surface in the house. Adding to Kemp’s irritation, the place had been vacuumed within the last day or so, the parquetry floor in the hallway had been mopped, and all the beds had clean sheets.

The porch light had been on when Forensics had arrived. According to a neighbour, Rolfe left the light burning whenever he went out at night, but always turned it off when he got home. Well, by the look of things, he hadn’t made it home. What had happened to him? Was he off on a jaunt, or had he been nabbed? And if he had been nabbed, why him?

We spent the next six hours pulling Rolfe’s place apart. When that proved fruitless, people started to head back to City Station, and I told McHenry that I’d see him back there after I’d got hold of some food. But, instead, I drove over to Kingston to check on Jean. She and Rolfe were friends, and according to the GPS under her car, she’d been in his street just hours before he’d gone missing. She might have been seeing someone else on the street, of course; but if she had been visiting Rolfe, that made her one of the last people to lay eyes on him. If my surveillance on her had been above board, I would have brought her in at that stage, but all I could do under the circumstances was to keep shadowing her.

Her lights were out when I drove past her place, so I called James. He already had the GPS site up on his computer, and he quickly located Jean’s car: it was stationary near the corner of Tennant and Gladstone Streets in Fyshwick, he said. I thanked him for his help, and drove over to Fyshwick to see what she was up to.

The street corner was occupied by a self-storage facility, and Jean’s car was parked under floodlights next to the security office that guarded the place. I stopped outside a mower shop ten doors up, and thought through my next move. In the end, I decided to give Jean half an hour. If she wasn’t out of there by then, I’d go in and look for her. The only obstacle to this plan was the young female guard hunched over her textbook in the security office.

As I waited, two lots of people left the facility, and the guard barely raised her head as they walked past her. After half an hour, I walked into the light of the glassed-in security office, my library card up at eye level, hoping that she was habitually slack. She gave me a fleeting glance, and waved me through.

The storage facility was essentially a large area of fenced-in bitumen with three long, squat buildings of brick and steel. Each building had what looked like about fifty storage units of various sizes running along each side. The door to each unit was numbered, and beside each door was a slot with a removable name tag. I worked my way along the first building, looking for light at the bottom of each door, and listening for movement and other sounds of effort.

I’d reached the middle of the second building when a dull thud came from a unit just up ahead of me. Almost simultaneously, I heard Jean shout, ‘Shit.’ I slipped into the nearest doorway, fearing she was about to come out and spot me. When she didn’t materialise, I sidled up to what I figured was her unit. There was a strip of light at the bottom of the door, and I could hear her muttering to herself inside. She didn’t sound distressed — just frustrated. I took out my torch and read the name tag in the door slot. The unit belonged to Simon Rolfe.

What was Jean doing in the storage unit of a man who’d mysteriously gone missing? Should I go in and see? She might not be alone; so, if I went in, I couldn’t afford to take any chances. I’d have my Glock out, and I’d be ready for anything. But with no warrant and no probable cause, that could open me up to another world of trouble. So, instead, I decided to stick close to her, without getting in her way. If she took anything from the unit, we could always recover it.

The security girl nodded as I walked past her, but returned to her book in a trice. I got into my car and waited. When the cold became too much, I got out and paced back and forth. Within a quarter of an hour, Jean emerged into the light of the security office and walked to her car. She sat with the interior light on, reading something in her lap. Then she started the vehicle and drove back towards Kingston. I waited fifteen minutes, and rang James. It was four in the morning, Memphis time. ‘Sorry to get you up,’ I said. He managed a laugh and struggled to his computer.

‘She’s in a suburb called Red Hill,’ he said in a croak. ‘In a street called Roebuck. The car’s stationary. Close to a park that runs down to a Beagle Street. Funny name, that, for a street, isn’t it? Beagle Street?’

‘Par for the course around here, mate,’ I said. ‘Look, thanks again for all your help. It’s really been important to me. And next time I’m over, we’re having a big one out. On me. Okay?’

I took the Monaro Highway out of Fyshwick. I knew Beagle Street, so I had no trouble finding the park that James had mentioned.

I left the car on Beagle and walked up through the frost-covered park to a hedge of callistemons that separated the top of the park from Roebuck Street. I pushed through the hedge, saw Jean’s car parked under a streetlight ten metres away, and darted back into the foliage. When my breathing had settled, l listened for any movement and poked my head out again. I was still scanning the footpath on my side of the street when Jean’s voice cut through the air. She was stepping out onto a well-lit porch on the other side of the street, just a few doors along from where I was hiding. She had her back to me, so I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

The door to the house eventually closed with a bang, and Jean walked down to the footpath, took out a small torch, and scribbled something into a notebook. Then she approached a neighbouring house built of 1960s pink brick. She pressed the doorbell, and an electronic fragment of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ played faintly inside the house. Jean waited a minute or so, and then she pressed the doorbell again, reprising the tune.

Finally, an old woman in a dressing gown opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. They talked for a bit, and the old girl pointed across the street in my direction. They talked for a bit more, and she pointed the other way. Jean thanked her and returned to the footpath. Once again, she took out her torch and scribbled in her notebook.

Over the next twenty minutes, she approached five more houses, and was answered at two of them. She engaged in a couple of brief chats, and after each she returned to the footpath and added to her notes. Finally, she got into her car, consulted her smart phone for a minute or so, and drove off.

At the end of the street she turned right and disappeared down the hill, and I ran down through the park towards my car, wondering whether to bother James again. As I scurried down the steep bit of the slope where the park bordered Beagle Street, I heard a vehicle, and then saw it, heading down the street towards me. I slipped behind a tree as the car passed under a streetlight about twenty metres away. It was Jean’s VW. I dropped to the ground and crawled behind a clump of bushes, and she slowed and then stopped directly opposite me.

Jean stayed in the car and consulted something on her lap. Then she went back to knocking on doors, starting with a two-storey place lit up like a national monument. The owner spoke to her from behind a security screen, but the contact was brief. Next she approached another pink-brick place, but no one was at home, so she walked a few doors along to a dark-brick house with a well-lit porch and garden. She pressed the doorbell, and scanned her notebook while she waited. The door opened, and she spoke to someone on the other side of the screen. Then the screen opened, and she went inside.

Suddenly, all the lights went out in front of the house that Jean had entered. Were they motion-sensitive? They’d been burning brightly well before she went anywhere near them. I studied the place, and saw that not only had the lights gone off outside, but there seemed to be no lights inside either. It didn’t feel right. Why would they pitch their place into complete darkness when they’d just invited someone in?

If my tail had been sanctioned, I would have called in a team right away and raided the place. But while that remained an option, I wasn’t going to exercise it immediately. Instead, I waited. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. She’d been in there longer than she’d been on the street. I told myself that an interview could take half an hour or more. But time continued to tick away.

After forty minutes, I seriously considered calling in a team. Jean would either be thankful that I’d gotten her out of a sticky situation, or she’d be very angry that I’d tailed her and disrupted her interview. But regardless of how she saw it, Brady would make sure that I was drummed out of the service just for being there. So I decided to scope the place out before doing anything self-destructive.

I moved down to the footpath, my complete focus on the dark house twenty metres away on the other side of the road. Tree by tree, I went, pausing in the shadows, straining to detect any sound or movement as I closed in.

When I reached a tree almost opposite the place, I stepped from the shadows and casually walked across the street as though I was a man out for a mid-evening stroll. I passed the house and the tall hedge that hid it from the house next door. Then I turned and made my way back. At the border of the two properties, I pressed myself into the hedge and strained to see if there were any lights on inside the place.

Then something metallic banged hard into the back of my head, and from behind me came an accented voice that sounded more like a wheeze than a whisper.

‘Don’t turn,’ said the European. ‘Walk now.’

He prodded me so hard that I stumbled forward.

‘Walk up to porch and stop,’ he said, his voice now an urgent croak.

I did as he ordered. There was no letterbox to identify the place, and no house number that I could make out in the darkness. He prodded me with such force that I stumbled onto the porch, cursing my stupidity and knowing with utter certainty that my life was on the line.