The White Tower (14 page)

‘He was loyal.'

‘To you?'

‘I wanted to believe he was.'

‘If Niall told Bridget he was being stalked, surely he would have told you too.'

‘You forget, he and I weren't on the best of terms.'

‘But you were in a good position to catch the stalker. Being God.'

‘I was that.'

‘What did you find?'

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. On a busy night, there could be twenty hits from new players. Some would only last five minutes.'

‘But they all had to sign up and be given a password and a character?'

‘Of course.'

‘And they wouldn't all be logging on from the Monaro Hospital.'

Fallon was silent.

‘Trust me,' I said. ‘I'm trusting you.'

His eyes took on a glittering hardness, and he looked up past me again, to the open sea. Perhaps he was remembering Niall, or Ferdia, or some fusion of the two that shone in his mind more brightly than any living person. His eyes darkened even further, and his face closed in on itself, becoming ugly. He looked suddenly much older, fixed. I saw how he would be when youth left him. I'd ceased to matter, my niggling questions and reasons for asking them. It was as though the wind and the elemental fastness of castle and cliff had stripped a layer from him, revealing what was underneath.

Then he shook his shoulders as though preparing himself for some final effort. ‘I didn't kill Niall, if that's what you came here to find out.'

‘Who did?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Was it the same person who sent you that picture?'

‘I honestly don't know.'

‘Help me work it out.'

The towers and dark stone walls were as deserted as if there were never any sightseers, as if the gulls had the fortress to themselves.

‘Don't you find,' I said, ‘this whole business of castles and battles a bit old hat? After all, Tony Blair's just shaken hands with Gerry Adams, and most of Northern Ireland, so I understand, is trying to look forwards, not backwards.'

Fallon said coldly, ‘It remains to be seen whether Blair, like so many British prime ministers before him, will prove to be a Judas.'

‘So what about Niall?'

‘Is politics just a game to you in Australia then?'

I bit back a retort.

‘You know I think it must be,' Fallon said. ‘All very well to condescend to us, then fly back home to sleep snug in your bed.'

‘But there is a possibility of compromise?'

Fallon winced. ‘Niall did what he felt he had to do, Sandra. I think you should take that back to his mother, or whoever sent you here. And then I think that, out of respect for our mutual friend, you should let the matter rest.'

Thirteen

I returned the car to the office of the rental company, and was booked on a flight to Sydney via London early the next morning. My one night in Belfast. I decided I would walk, not plan where I was going, just walk. There were a lot of people in the streets, young couples with babies and toddlers in the universal, tag-along position, women of my age and older, carrying their shopping home.

Puddles of rainwater reflected streetlights, and the whole centre of the city seemed floodlit, black and silver. I had a weird impulse to stay, find out something about the place. I could ring Ivan and say I'd been unavoidably delayed, or else say nothing. Go AWOL. Abscond.

The street I was in gave onto a large square. I stood staring across it at the city hall. I remembered seeing the square on television, after the 1995 ceasefire, when Bill Clinton had lit the lights on a huge Christmas tree. The cameras had focused on reflected light, just as my eyes were doing now, the shadowed square with foreign dignitaries muffled up in coats. Music, and a tree bursts forth.

Tonight, the square was empty. It was too early for Christmas decorations. I didn't feel like stepping out across it, but decided rather to skirt around the edges. In my pocket I had the address of the Bobby Sands wall mural, and a vague idea of finding it. I thought of Sorley Fallon, trained in the lightning time frame of computers, choosing to spend his energy crafting legendary battles which the Irish always won.

I loved walking at night. It was funny the way something as simple and apparently innocent as streetlights reflected in a puddle could flip through memories and give them a connection.

I recalled the night I'd sneaked through Canberra's back streets to visit my old boss, suspended on charges of computer theft and fraud, my broken arm in a black sling, afraid that I was being followed. Nights when I was young, scouring Europe on my own. I'd never got as far west as Ireland. I'd stood and stared for hours at Italian and French buildings, top-heavy with the kind of history bewildering to a third ­generation Australian, content at the time to let impressions mean as much or as little as they would, rain and light and shadows.

A fool's journey. I'd been warned. Ivan and Brook had both warned me. I thought of Moira Howley and what little I had to take back to her, then of Yeats's poem,
The Second Coming
. When I got home, I'd ferret out my
Selected Poems
and refresh my memory.

It was the nature of ambushes not to be predicted or foreseen. Just as it seemed to be in the nature of some people—I thought again of Fallon—not to be bowled over by an ambush, but to set about turning it to their advantage. What did such people learn about themselves and others as a consequence?

Being young and single, studying poetry at university. Looking back, I realised that those years had been the time of greatest peace between me and my mother, years of truce, when I was no longer at home, under her winged shadow, before I joined the workforce and began, once again, to disappoint her. My mother had expected me to hold fast to her values and to act on them, and at the same time to be everything she wasn't.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun

Niall Howley in flight, an Icarus no one would make a poem of, however much his mother might yearn for a poem, or a song of praise. In flight on a winter's night in Canberra, unwitnessed until a tiny Polish kitchen hand on her way to work was startled by a shape in the fog, a burst of yellow hair.

Fallon in mind again. The beast in the poem seemed connected to him. The reckoning took an immediate and cruel form.

. . .

I'd scarcely taken two steps inside my hotel room when the phone rang.

‘I found something,' Ivan said. ‘In Niall's room. Tucked into the cover of one of his textbooks, would you believe?'

‘How—?' I began, but Ivan cut me off. ‘Something the little bugger didn't want anyone to know about.'

‘What?'

‘Numbers.'

The line went fuzzy for a second. It had been as clear as though Ivan was standing next to me.

‘What numbers?' I shouted.

‘No need to raise the roof, Sandy. Your ears might be gummed up, but mine are perfectly okay. Don't worry. Have it cracked by the time your feet hit the tarmac.'

There was a metallic crash in the background.

‘What's that?'

‘Just Kat getting into the saucepans. I fronted up to Ma Howley. Asked her if I could have a look around her son's room. That woman's a witch, but she let me. I tell you Sandy. Our local constabulary. Their standards have been slipping.'

I thought of Bill McCallum and his turtle neck, his memories of heads rolling, a ute awash with blood. I thought about who else might have scanned Niall's shelf of textbooks and decided they could stay.

Ivan dictated the numbers to me. ‘Sort of a diagram underneath. Stables, bakery, hall—'

‘A diagram of the Castle?'

‘Could be. It's not called anything. Looks like a kid's drawing. Peter could do better with his eyes shut.'

‘Niall's handwriting. I forgot to ask Moira if it was his writing on the back of the photograph. I think it's probably hers. See if she's kept something with his writing on it.'

‘Done. I don't think she minds me
that
much.'

‘Where was it again?'

‘On a scrap of paper folded inside the cover of a physiology textbook. Nice touch that. Give me a few days. Pity there's not more. Anyway,' Ivan said happily, ‘I found it.'

‘Did Moira mind? About you going through his books?'

‘Didn't seem to. I wore my best jumper and I've cut my hair.'

‘Well done. Have you told her?'

‘Nup. I'll leave that up to you.'

‘How's Kat? And Peter?'

‘Tip top. Hey, guess what? She's got another tooth.'

‘And Peter?'

‘Rang up to say g'day. Sounds fine.'

‘Did you talk to Derek?'

‘Nah. Don't worry Sand. He's fine.'

. . .

Would Sorley Fallon know what the numbers meant? Why a diagram of the Castle? Did it mean anything? It could be years old, a meaningless doodle. Why hadn't I searched Niall's room?

I rang Fallon, who wasn't answering, then Bridget. I read her the list of numbers. She claimed never to have heard it before.

‘Did Niall say anything to you about a hidden file?'

‘I'm afraid he didn't.'

‘Did he tell you he was putting together information that he had to hide?'

‘What information would that be now?'

‘To do with the MUD maybe, the accusations against him, the way that he was being persecuted?'

‘If he was hiding information, what did he intend to do about it?'

I wanted to be the one asking the questions. ‘Why didn't you tell me before about the stalker? You could have emailed me.'

‘I'm not used to trusting people.' There was a pause. Had Fallon rung and told her I'd asked for
his
trust? Had they laughed about it? ‘Email's not secure, and—and when I offer someone information, I like to know how they intend to use it.'

‘Who was the stalker?'

‘That I don't know, truly.'

‘Was it Fallon himself?'

‘I did think of that. But why would he?'

‘One of the other Heroes?'

‘I'd swear on Sgartha's reputation that it wasn't.'

‘Can you do something for me? Can you contact them and ask them about these numbers? There's a diagram of the Castle underneath them, a kind of floor plan,' I went on, hoping this was accurate. ‘Did you ever download a floor plan of the Castle?'

‘Fallon would have it.'

‘He says he got rid of all that. Can you ask about the stalker too?' Before Bridget could object, I said, ‘Fallon knows that Niall was ­murdered.'

Silence on Bridget's end.

‘Did he warn you against talking to me?'

‘Actually, I think he was quite impressed.'

Fourteen

Peter's face was huge and white, a full moon at the airport.

‘Mum!' he cried. ‘Mum!' As though he thought I'd disappeared for good.

Katya was a tight lozenge of baby-in-a-blanket, solemn and wide-eyed.

I can't sleep on planes, at most had had three hours since London. Ivan looked as though he'd been managing on less.

As soon as the kids were in bed, he got down to business.

‘Who's Fallon got his email account with?'

‘Pegasus,' I said, recalling a young Irishman making coffee in a tiny, light-filled kitchen.

Ivan smiled, a different Ivan, focused and determined. ‘We might even be able to get away without a password.'

The sleuth in him, that the necessity of making a living had forced underground, had come to life while I was on the other side of the world. What had he unearthed? A line of numbers with an awful lot of noughts.

200180001602080415000

It wasn't much more than thirty hours since we'd spoken on the phone, but already Ivan had exhausted all the well-known encryption devices Niall might have used. He'd been at Weston Creek, talking to the police encryption people.

His description of the diagram was accurate—a pencil sketch such as any child might have wiled away time creating. No attempt at scale or perspective, and the rooms' rectangular boxes joined to each other without apparent purpose, but each with a handwritten name and a number after it in brackets. It was Niall's handwriting, and recently done, but that was all the police had been able to establish.

I felt as though I'd passed beyond physical exhaustion and out the other side, but it simply didn't occur to Ivan that all I might want to do was fall into bed.

It took us a few minutes to track down the Pegasus site. While we were looking, Ivan explained that some providers ran a list of clients online at any particular time. If we were lucky, Pegasus would be one of these.

The site featured all sorts of information, useless to us, about how long the service had been running, the benefits of signing up, how their costs were incredibly competitive. At the bottom was a list of present users. It grew as we were reading it.

‘Fallon isn't there.'

‘That's because he's probably asleep, or seducing some poor peasant girl.'

‘I think he's gay.'

‘Whatever. When the fucker
is
online, here's what we'll have to do. This might, or might not work—if he's using Telnet—which he may do if he's still into MUDs.'

‘I don't think—' I began, but Ivan cut me off.

‘Some versions of Telnet use an old FTP server, which is lovely from our point of view because it's got a hole big enough to drive a truck through.'

I waited, knowing better than to interrupt again, but I was thinking: one, Fallon had given up MUDs; two, he wouldn't use a dodgy server. He was too smart, and too particular.

‘It'll be fiddly Sand, but once we catch him with the server open, we should be able to download any files we want.'

‘Isn't there a simpler way?'

‘Well you can try and guess his password.'

I felt suddenly alone and frightened. Fear caught up with me, a slice between the shoulder blades.

I put my arms around Ivan from behind. He'd trimmed his hair and beard himself, a bathroom mirror job with the nail scissors. Springy black hair upstanding at his temples, short behind his ears, gave his face a leaner, older look. I was never so reminded of his foreignness as when he was concentrated on a task.

His eyes left the screen reluctantly, and he turned to face me like a startled Buddha, a man transported too quickly from one time frame to another.

. . .

Next morning was cloudy, threatening rain.

Moira Howley said, ‘That Fallon does sound like rather a cold, manipulative kind of man.' Her voice was tentative, not yet disappointed.

‘Well manipulative certainly. You know you were wrong to tell me you couldn't manage a trip to Ireland. I think you would've managed splendidly.'

‘Me?'

‘Let's go out into the garden,' I suggested.

Two compost heaps were neat pyramids without, it seemed, a single piece of refuse out of place. The wisteria was in full bloom now. Wind blew the smell of it up against the house.

Moira breathed in deeply. ‘Bernard says my clothes smell. He takes his to the drycleaners. I
do
wash them. He sees me.'

I slipped my arm through hers.

Leave the house behind our shoulders, I wanted to tell her, walk out of it, as you're doing now, only more emphatically. Leave the shell, or else let life creep back. If you let it, it will begin to, bit by bit. Leave behind those two chairs in the living room.

‘What else did Fallon say?'

‘That Niall was a good person. Loyal.'

‘Did he mean it?'

‘Yes.'

‘I thought he might—accidentally on purpose, you know—' Moira hesitated, lifting her chin to the damp air. Her cardigan fell open on a crumpled T-shirt. She laughed at herself and her expectations. ‘At least you established one thing. The young man exists. He's flesh and blood. If only Niall had had the sense to talk to someone.'

She stared across the garden without seeing it. Now she'll dismiss me, I thought. She'll thank me for having done my best, and write me a final cheque.

I said, ‘You waited up for him, didn't you, the night he died.'

‘No. Well, yes and no. I normally go to bed between ten-thirty and eleven, and that night I was very tired. I couldn't have known, I didn't know, that something dreadful was about to happen, but I was more tense than usual, and that made me tired. And then there was Bernard. But I stayed up anyway, till after eleven. I suppose it was about eleven-fifteen, eleven-twenty, when I went to bed.'

‘What about Bernard?'

‘Do you mean, did Bernard wait up for Niall? No. He went to bed at the same time I did. Sometimes Bernard stayed up late, well usually he stayed up later than me, but he'd had an early meeting that morning.'

‘Did you go straight to sleep?'

‘Yes. I woke up later, though. Funnily enough, I thought I heard Niall coming in.'

‘You what?'

Moira stared at her hands. ‘It's cold, isn't it? I wish the sun would come out, just for half an hour. I woke up. I thought it was because I'd heard a noise in the passage. I lay awake for a few minutes, but I didn't hear anything more. I thought to myself, well, he's home at any rate, and I went back to sleep.'

‘Why didn't you tell me before?'

‘It's not important. I must have been mistaken.'

‘What time was it?'

‘I'm not sure, I didn't look at the clock. I don't like to know the time when I wake up at night. It makes it harder to get back to sleep. Anyway, it couldn't have been Niall because the police—they say he died before midnight. He probably died around ten o'clock.'

‘Was Bernard asleep?'

‘I think so.'

It didn't seem to have occurred to Moira that the noise might have been made by someone else.

I opened my bag and took out the diagram.

‘In one of Niall's books, you say?' Moira's voice was petulant, ­confused. ‘What does it mean?'

‘Have you seen it before?'

Moira shook her head. ‘Why didn't the police find this?'

‘I don't think they looked hard enough. Did Niall ever say anything to you about information that he had to hide?'

‘What about?'

‘His work perhaps? Did he tell you about some trouble he was in at work?'

Moira shook her head. Her personality, what I thought of as the force of it, the energy, was slipping away. She was interested in Sorley Fallon and my trip to Ireland, but not this. Or else it was too much suddenly, this new piece of information. But was it really new? If Niall had hidden something, who better to entrust with knowledge of his hiding place than his mother? She'd misled me before, not by outright lies, but by omission.

‘Did Niall mention any of these numbers? Singly, in pairs, a group?'

Moira smoothed the sheet of paper flat with both hands, then held it at arm's length. She said, ‘Niall's birthday, that's January, and Bernard's is in April.'

She made to give it back to me.

‘Keep it. Something might come back to you.'

. . .

I met Brook in Civic for a bite to eat. Time was, before Kat was born, before Sophie, we had lunch together once a week.

I took his arm and we walked in step. Four people greeted him on the way to Bailey's Corner Café.

‘Do all these people know that you're a cop?'

‘Canberra's a conceited country town Sandra. And you forget how long I've worked here.'

He looked well and happy. ‘You've brought the rain back with you.'

‘It was sunny in Ireland,' I told him. ‘The sun shone on Dunluce Castle.'

‘You're back safe, that's the main thing.'

‘Thanks for minding Kat.'

‘I only did it once.'

We sat down and ordered BLTs. We talked about the diagram.

‘There's not enough to work with. So the guys at Weston say. There's no prints on it but Howley's.'

‘How old?'

‘Probably only a few months.'

‘You still think he killed himself, don't you?'

Brook didn't answer immediately. When he did, it sounded as though he was letting me down gently. ‘The kid was fixated on that game.'

I took a bite of my roll. ‘How did your officer in London get on with Sorley Fallon?'

‘He's making inquiries.'

I waited.

‘That's all I can tell you Sandra.'

‘One of the computers used to play
Castle of Heroes
belongs to the hospital,' I said. ‘Can you find out who had access to it at the times Niall was supposed to have been logged on?'

‘You think it was someone else?'

‘It might've been Niall in his tea break. It might've been someone we've never even heard of. It's just that Niall doesn't strike me as the type who'd use a hospital computer to dial up a MUD.'

‘Who would?'

‘Somebody who wanted to get him into trouble. Someone, another player, or players, was stalking Niall online. He told Bridget Connell and Sorley Fallon about it. There's more. That castle picture was sent to Fallon the night Niall died. After midnight.'

Brook stared at me, his attention finally caught.

‘There could have been a delay in transmission.'

‘Moira Howley says she thought she heard someone in the house late that night. She thought it was Niall coming home.'

‘Did she get up to look?'

‘No.'

I'd almost finished my roll and Brook had hardly started his. ‘What's the matter? Aren't you hungry?'

‘There's something about the smell.'

‘Bacon?'

‘Mayonnaise.'

‘You have to eat.'

‘Sophie thinks I should go on a health diet to clean out my system.'

‘Your system looks fine to me.'

Brook smiled. Responsibility was not to be sloughed off, but ­balanced.

Forgiveness was sweet, but did I want to be forgiven? How could I lay claim to Brook's attention? There were a dozen claims on it. Some said Follow me, Love me, Take Pleasure In Me. Some said Duty.

I said, ‘Here's what I think. Part of the fascination for Sorley Fallon was exerting his control over what
couldn't
be controlled. There could have been one player accessing the MUD through that hospital computer, or there could have been more than one. It could have been Niall Howley playing Ferdia each time, or it could have been someone who wanted Fallon and the Heroes to
believe
that it was Niall. I think we should be looking for someone who'd been playing cat and mouse with Niall for months. They spooked and frightened him. They wore him down, and then they killed him.'

Brook refused to comment on my theory. He pushed his plate away and said he should be getting back.

I went off to do some shopping, thinking it was odd the way I projected bits of myself into relationships—floated, rather than projected? I thought of the tide coming in, and an underwater plant, dried and parched from that long wait through the ebb, stirring and lifting in response, a green branch here and there. That could be Ivan now his mind was working again, swapping notes with the encryption people, his imagination lifted from the everyday. It could be the picture I was building up of Niall Howley, feeling my way through the confusing ­testimony of those who'd claimed to be his friends. It could be Brook with his smile that said, just so far and no further.