The Trojan Dog (22 page)

He glanced down at his fingernails as though checking them for dirt, then began to ask me questions about my car. I told him exactly what had happened, and repeated what I'd said to Ivan, that it hadn't been an accident.

‘Where was your car the night before the accident, Mrs Mahoney?'

‘In my carport at home. Was anybody else hurt?' I added, flushing with shame because I hadn't thought of this before.

‘You hit a young chap. Bruises. Bit of whiplash. Apart from that, motorists managed to brake, or steer out of it. Lucky. That time of the morning, that intersection. Could've been a pile-up.'

Unsmiling, offering no words of comfort, the detective sergeant went back to his questions. Where did I park my car during the day? Did anybody drive it besides me? No, but I did give people lifts. Had I given anyone a lift in the twenty-four hours before the crash? I shook my head.

Had I seen any strangers in the vicinity of my car? There were people in the work carpark every day when I left it, and again when I went to pick it up. Normally I took no notice of them.

‘Is there a parking attendant there during the day?'

It was an uncovered parking area, I explained, two blocks from DIR. You could buy all-day vouchers, and it was relatively cheap. Parking inspectors patrolled it, but I knew of no-one else. I reminded the detective that the brakes had failed on my way to work, early in the morning.

Had I noticed anyone acting suspiciously, differently from how I might expect?

‘No,' I said, after a long pause, ‘there was nobody acting suspiciously, there was nothing like that.'

The detective sergeant had been writing as I spoke, slowly, as though it was an effort. I tried to read the expression in his shadowed face. He was one of those men whose age could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. Something—late shifts, personal difficulties perhaps—had deepened the lines around his mouth and eyes, and given his skin a raw-dough quality.

Finally he stopped writing, brushed invisible dust off his suit lapels, and said it would be twenty-four hours before he got the report on my car from the police garage at Weston. There was a backlog.

Something happened then that jogged my memory, made it slip a cog. If it hadn't been for the anaesthetic still making me feel woozy, I probably would have recognised the detective sergeant straight away. He took a few steps towards the door and stumbled, righting himself almost immediately with a shake of his shoulders suggesting intense irritation, and jamming his Akubra hat down hard with his left hand. A nurse, who'd been attending to the patient by the door, was instantly beside him, her arm around him, helping him upright, speaking softly to him, her voice calm and kind, not competent and clear as it had been when she'd talked to me.

The detective sergeant shook her off, some colour coming back into his face. The nurse smiled to reassure him, and then bit her lip. He left the ward without another glance in my direction. It was then that I remembered seeing him in the corridor at DIR.

He phoned me after lunch. I'd managed to eat a couple of sandwiches and keep them down. Detective Sergeant Brook. I mentally repeated the name to fix it in my mind.

‘Seems someone did monkey with your car, Mrs Mahoney.'

‘I thought you told me there was a queue.'

‘I jumped it,' Detective Sergeant Brook said in a deadpan voice. ‘Looks as if they weakened one of the brake lines. Like to pop over to your place and ask you some more questions. Around sixish, if that's OK with you.'

I started giving him my address, but he interrupted to tell me he already had it. He hung up and I realised I'd been hunched over the phone, holding it awkwardly in my left hand, my broken right arm in its plaster heavy and useless and thick in front of me. My neck ached.

When Ivan arrived at the hospital at three o'clock, I was drinking a cup of tea and nibbling an Anzac biscuit. The sight of Ivan's bulk in the doorway caused a spasm in my bowels, and in my hurry to get to the toilet, I knocked over my tea. I rushed past Ivan, whose smile of greeting vanished into the wings of his beard.

I dressed in my oily, bloody clothes because they were all I had. Ivan didn't have a key to my house, so he hadn't been able to fetch clean ones. During the hours I'd spent lying in the ward, it was one of my small comforts that I hadn't given anyone a key.

I signed the hospital discharge papers with my left hand and shoved a pack of Panadeine Forte into my bag, every action, every breath an act of will. Ivan stood to one side, a hairy mountain in the wrong landscape, his face blotched and frowning, while I returned the nurse's curious glances with a fixed and narrowed glare.

Ivan got into the back of the taxi with me, taking no notice when I protested that I could manage perfectly well without him. As the taxi swung round the corner into Wakefield Street, it seemed as though the road and nature strip, the grass on either side, turned into a peculiar green-white-green striped lolly twirling into a greedy giant child's mouth. Ivan was tense beside me, saying nothing, his shoulders falling away under his old brown jumper, his careful hands between his knees.

I fumbled in my bag for money, and when the taxi pulled up in my driveway I shoved it at the driver, shouting, ‘Thanks! This man wants to go on into Civic! Thank you!' I'd been nursing my bag tightly all the way, grateful that I didn't have anything heavier to carry. I was out the taxi door and slamming it behind me.

‘Sandra, for God's sake!' Ivan called out, but that was all I heard.

I had my key in my good left hand and it was working its magic on my front door, and I was falling through it, pushing it shut behind me.

. . .

Spring had come to my street overnight.

Peter had been born in the spring. Derek had driven me to Royal Canberra Hospital with the prunus trees at the end of Goodwin Street still grey and brown, quiescent. The three of us returned to a corridor of brides and bridesmaids, white, pink, white, pink, white, pink, all the way to my front door.

It had happened again. Until the pasty-faced policeman arrived, I was free to accustom myself to wedding trees dropping bits of bouquet over my back fence, to my sprout of a neglected lawn, unbearable soft new green of apple leaves. Back from the hospital with Peter, I'd walked haltingly around my back yard, wincing at stitches that I had not wanted. Now I watched magpies scrape for bits of string and wool, and made a mental note that tomorrow, if I was feeling up to it, I'd give Fred a good brush and leave the hair for them. Fred welcomed me as though he'd been left alone for at least a month. I'd phoned a neighbour from the hospital, so at least he'd been fed.

It was Peter's first question when I phoned.

‘Can you feed Fred, Mum? Should I come home and feed him?'

‘I can manage. I'd like you to stay with Dad for a bit longer, love.'

Peter chattered the way he did when he was happy. I pictured him and Derek eating American pizza, Derek washing up. When Derek came on the line, I had an overwhelming urge to tell him I was jumping on the first plane I could.

I took a deep breath and began to explain what had happened, pleased now that I hadn't insisted on doing so from the hospital. I had to make Derek understand that I was in danger, and that they might be too.

Derek said very little—probably because Peter was breathing down his ear—but what he said was calm and reassuring. I told him I'd write and send a copy of the police report on my car.

We said goodbye and hung up, and I let myself out the back door and lay down in the grass and rubbed its wet smells into my eyes. I would have eaten earth as recompense, as thanks.

Several hours later, I was staring at Detective Sergeant Brook standing splay-legged on my porch. He was wearing the same hat he'd on in the hospital, pulled low on his forehead, squashing his eyebrows too close to his eyes.

‘What kind of computer have you got?' he barked at me.

‘A Macintosh LC,' I said.

‘Where is it?' The detective sergeant was already moving past me down the corridor.

‘Why do you want to know?'

‘Where?' he repeated with his back to me.

‘Here—in my son's room.' At the door to Peter's room, I stepped aside, and the policeman entered it ahead of me.

Peter's room was exactly as he'd left it, last-minute discards from his packing spread across the bed. At least the bed was made, and I'd ­vacuumed round it, though not very recently.

The air smelt musty. I went straight to the window and opened it. The detective sergeant was already sitting at the computer, loading up a disk.

Rows of figures appeared on the screen. It was my list of interviewers' names and addresses, the one that had been altered.

The detective sergeant swivelled in his chair. Suppressed excitement seemed to flow from underneath his hat. ‘Choose a line and delete it,' he ordered me.

‘Where did you get this?'

‘Just do as I say.'

I moved the cursor down, randomly highlighted a name and number, then, using the mouse, unscrolled the edit and clicked ‘cut'.

The detective sergeant watched me as though I was performing an unusually sensitive and tricky task.

‘Now,' he said. ‘Where is it?'

‘It's gone,' I replied inanely.

‘Can you get it back?'

‘Yes, by clicking paste, or undo.'

‘What if you shut down the computer? Can you get it back then?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Watch.'

Rapidly, the detective sergeant shut down Peter's computer, then rebooted it. The same row of figures reappeared, minus the one that I'd deleted. With a few rapid keystrokes he brought the complete list of addresses back.

He grinned at me, pink-faced, delighted with his performance, a boy who'd learnt his first card trick and run out to show his parents.

‘Someone stole my password,' I said stiffly. ‘But they
added
an address to the file. They didn't remove anything. Where did you get the disk?'

The detective sergeant was watching me carefully. ‘Did you add that address yourself?'

‘By mistake? It was a fake address. Nobody lives there. Whoever did it was trying to get me to send a cheque to a false address.'

The detective sergeant rubbed his pale fingers up and down his tie, his face still flushed. ‘I mean intentionally,' he said, ‘Did
you
make that change?'

‘No, of course not.'

He waited, continuing to watch me. I guessed policemen all had their own ways of working out when somebody was lying. Watch the body language, listen to a voice rather than self-righteous denial.

‘I was luckier than Rae Evans,' I said carefully. ‘I found the alteration before any money was sent. Did Felix Wenborn give you the disk?'

The detective sergeant didn't answer. Who else but Felix? I asked myself. Or could it have been Ivan?

The policeman took a notebook from his pocket and began writing without looking at me or asking me any further questions. After a couple of minutes standing there like an idiot, I blurted out, ‘I suppose you wouldn't like a cup of tea? I think I need one.'

Brook followed me into the kitchen. He sat down on a wobbly chair and lined up his notebook and pen on the table beside him. Now, I thought, now he'll take his hat off. But he didn't. He watched me boil water and open cupboards one-handed, with an expression of mild amusement, as though my awkwardness, and his withholding of an offer to help, gave him some kind of pleasure.

‘Might the case against Rae Evans be reopened?' I asked, with a small flicker of pride that I'd managed to make tea without breaking anything, or burning myself.

‘Reopened?' Brook looked at me as though I was referring to a packet of stale biscuits. ‘It was never closed.' He drank his tea without a word of thanks, and patted his lips with a large blue-and-white checked handkerchief.

‘What're you going to do now?' I asked.

My arm was beginning to hurt. I felt dizzy, and I longed for him to go so that I could pull the curtains in my room and lie down with my doona pulled right over me.

‘Report back to the Fraudies. See which way they play the ball.'

I realised I was sitting hunched into my chair, my broken arm pressed against my side. Without knowing I was going to, I started talking. I told Detective Sergeant Brook about the payments to Claire Disraeli that Ivan and I had found on one of Compic's computers. I summarised the financial exchanges that appeared to have taken place between Access Computing and Compic. I told him everything I knew about Felix Wenborn, Jim Wilcox and Charles Craven from Finance, about my meeting with the one-eyed man and the complaint he'd made to our department about Compic, and how Rae Evans had been asked to deal with it. I didn't follow any chronological sequence, just spilt the lot in whatever order it happened to be in my head.

Detective Sergeant Brook made notes, and stopped me when I got ahead of him. I left out my late-night visit to Compic's office.

When I finally stopped, and the detective sergeant was satisfied he'd got everything down, he stood up and put away his notebook. He looked exhausted. He muttered something about getting in touch with me in the next day or so. Then he sighed and raised his hat a little with two fingers. I saw with a shock that he was completely bald.

. . .

How easy it is to harm people. It hardly takes brains or planning. How much had it taken for someone to fix my car so that the brakes were sure to fail?

Every one of Derek's letters and postcards had a return address. You're supposed to include the sender's address on the back of a letter, so of course Derek does. My postbox doesn't have a lock. It's never occurred to me that it should. And if I had bought one, it would only have been a simple padlock that any fool could break. Anyone watching me would know that Peter was staying with his father. All they needed to do was check my mailbox to find the postcards Peter sent to me and Fred.