The Trojan Dog (13 page)

‘I guess what we did was pretty stupid, eh?' Tony said in his shy way.

When I asked about Allison Edgeware, Tony laughed nervously and said, ‘Like, everybody knows who she
is
.'

I asked him if he'd do something for me, find out as much as he could about Allison and Compic. He hesitated for a second, then agreed.

In the few minutes before I fell asleep, I'd taken to going over what I'd learnt that day, which was usually not much. I mulled over Ateeq and Allison, whether they were up to something, and if so, what.

Unable to fall asleep, I got out of bed and phoned Gail Trembath, who kept late hours. I told her about my failure to get Bambi to confess. We laughed, and the episode didn't seem so humiliating. I apologised for accusing her of meeting Felix Wenborn in the travel centre. I said I thought the woman who'd been seen with Felix might be Allison Edgeware, who was heading up Compic. I told Gail what Rae had said about the contract Compic had successfully tendered for, and the complaint, and that I was sure there was a story there if the day ever came when she could print it.

. . .

The phone rang at 7.30 in the morning. Peter got to it first. The joy in his face and voice stopped me in my tracks. Finally, I forced him to hand over the phone.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing?' Derek demanded. ‘What's Peter going to do on his own all day while I'm at work? Why did you let him send that letter? How dare you set me up like that?'

‘What letter?' I asked, gulping in great mouthfuls of cold air.

I shooed Peter away. Eventually we got it sorted out, at least to the point where Derek stopped saying it was out of the question. Peter might be able to come for the school holidays. He'd look into taking a couple of weeks' leave, but he couldn't promise, and I'd better not spring anything like this on him again.

I hung up the phone and turned around to Peter.

‘I know how much you want to see your father,' I said. ‘But don't you ever,
ever
go behind my back like that again.'

. . .

Over the next few days, Tony left me cryptic emails about Compic and Allison Edgeware. I looked forward to getting to work and finding them. I puzzled over them while Ivan leant over my shoulder, clicking his tongue with mingled curiosity and exasperation.

Tony's messages contained his own personal spellings and abbreviations. According to him, Allison was C/l. I figured out that this was short for cool. But what was Allison's background? Where had she come from? I emailed Tony back. She'd been in Canberra a relatively short time, Tony thought, a year or two at most. Tony gave me the impression that Allison was one of those women men talk about a lot, whose name is always in the air, but that no-one knew her as well as they would like.

She had a couple of programmers working for her, but Tony didn't know anything about them. I fired off a few more questions. Did Compic have branches in other cities? A board of directors?

Had Allison and Felix met to talk about the tender, I wondered, if it had been Allison that Di Trapani had seen with Felix in the travel centre bistro? Who'd complained about the tender going to Compic? And why had Rae Evans been asked to deal with the complaint? Had Rae done something, or failed to do something, that made Wilcox or Felix, or both of them together, confident of manipulating her decision? Had she refused to be manipulated? Was this what she and Felix had been arguing about? Or had Wilcox picked her because he knew she and Felix were enemies? And, if so, why?

I realised I had to get hold of the letter of complaint, find out who'd written it, and, if possible, arrange to see them.

What had we actually bought from Compic? It wasn't as though there were boxes of their software sitting in the corridors. It depressed me that it had taken me so long to ask myself these elementary questions.

Allison. Angela. Angela Carlishaw. The press reports had named Angela Carlishaw as director of Access Computing, and when reporters had wanted to question her, she couldn't be found.

Allison and Angela were names that sounded the same to me, reminded me of china dolls. Was the similarity coincidental? For a crazy moment, I wondered if they were the same person. Maybe the journalist who'd queried Angela Carlishaw's existence was spot on. But Allison was real enough. For a while, I fancied I saw her around every corner, her beauty multiplied on reflecting surfaces, from the glass-fronted airline companies in Northbourne Avenue to the small pool and fountain in Glebe Park.

Often, in these imagined reflections of mine, Allison was laughing at me. Yet I didn't mind. I liked my pictures of her; I was attracted by them, and I liked them, and I wished to go on liking them. Reflections could be skewed, off true, yet more revealing than a clear and proper likeness.

Of course, it was always possible that there'd been no redhead in the travel centre, that Di Trapani had been lying through her teeth.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire

We were told to keep calm. No-one was to panic, but this was not a drill. Real fire trucks were at that moment beating through the traffic in Northbourne Avenue. Real firemen were hauling their extension ladders to the white face of the Jolimont Centre.

The wardens for our floor got us out on to the fire stairs quickly. They kept everyone in line, their white helmets shiny in the smoke-filled air. Doors kept opening above and below us, and the stairs were flush with evacuees from other floors. Di, Bambi and I stuck together and moved quickly in the shush of skirts and woollen suits, the press of unfamiliar shoulders, the rasp of quick feet on concrete.

A flushed purple face gaped at me from the landing below, dribble hanging from the corner of a wide, slack mouth. With a shock, I recognised Jim Wilcox.

The travel centre had never looked so bright and various, colours rich, polished plastic undulating like silk held up to dry. Safe, silly with relief, I grinned and waved at Kerry Arnold, who was wearing a red chief warden's hat a good three sizes too big for him.

Muffin vendors and espresso attendants stood outside on the footpath, cheek by steamy cheek. In my jacket pocket, I fingered the disk containing a backup of the outwork report, which I'd snatched before dashing for the fire stairs. Ivan had a box full of his precious disks and tapes. He must have worked fast collecting them, because he was outside before I was, holding forth to a queue of bus passengers, waving his free arm above his head like a propeller.

A crowd watched the fire trucks from a respectful distance, the tops of ladders resting against broken fourth-floor windows. The smoke seemed to move in slow motion along Northbourne Avenue, charcoal grey and black. With no wind to disperse it, it rose slowly, a viscous, greasy cloud.

I spotted the Secretary talking to the Dep. Sec. Tall men in expensive suits, they were joined by one of our senior executives, a woman who'd spoken to me kindly in the lift one morning when Peter had been sick.

Jim Wilcox walked up to them, waving pudgy hands. He appeared to have recovered from his fright on the stairs. I remembered the warning Wilcox had given me the day I discovered someone had been fiddling around with the names and addresses of my interviewers. I'd spoken to Wilcox in the lift as well, one lunchtime when he'd been carrying a huge bagful of chocolate muffins, with a naughty, half-defiant expression, as if he planned to eat them all in one sitting.

It wasn't long before we were told the fire was out. Only a small section of the building had been damaged.

That afternoon, we were allowed back inside. The smell of smoke was everywhere, but the smoke itself had cleared. The carpets in our corridor and office were drenched with water from the fire hoses. Though none of the furniture seemed to have been damaged, a film of soot hung over everything. I began going through the drawers of my filing cabinet, stuffing my briefcase with papers, thinking that I'd enjoy working at home for a few days.

I stopped, unable to believe my eyes. When the fire alarm had sounded, I'd grabbed my bag and coat, and the back-up disk for the outwork report. I'd run for the fire stairs like everybody else, not thinking to stay for a few more minutes and clear out my filing cabinet.

My records were gone. A whole drawer of the cabinet was empty, those hard copies I'd been so glad to have when I'd discovered that someone had been tampering with my computer.

Stomach lurching, I pulled my chair towards me and sat down. I had to compose myself before Di and Bambi arrived to collect their things, not to mention the trio from next door. I would ask no questions. I would give none of them the satisfaction of seeing how upset I was.

One thing the theft proved—my enemy was in the building. He or she was someone working close to me, maybe on my floor, definitely under the same roof. Maybe I knew her scent. Maybe
he
shared the lift with me twice or three times a day.

As soon as I got home, I rang Rae and told her about the fire. She'd already heard it on the news. I told her about the Trojan Horse that had been programmed into my computer, and the false address that had been added to my list of interviewers, and said that someone had taken the opportunity to remove all my printed files while the Jolimont building was being evacuated.

Rae made sympathetic noises and told me not to worry too much. I thought
she
should be more worried.

‘Was it that Felix didn't think you were competent to review that complaint about Compic?' I asked her. ‘Or didn't he want anyone to find out that he'd been doing favours for them?'

After a long pause Rae said, ‘It's no secret that there's no love lost between us, Sandra.'

‘Have you ever been asked to do anything like that before?'

‘No.'

‘Did you ask why? I mean, why you?'

‘I wasn't exactly in a position to do that.'

‘Have you ever met a woman called Allison Edgeware?'

‘Who?'

‘Allison Edgeware. She calls herself Compic's director.'

‘No.'

‘Did you go through all the correspondence? I mean the original tenders for the contract, the unsuccessful ones?'

‘I didn't have time to do that.'

‘Is there a file in your office with the letter of complaint and your reply?'

‘There should be. There was.'

. . .

We never did find out how the fire started. My guess was that it was meant to be a big one, a proper conflagration, but for some reason the plan hadn't quite worked out. How convenient it would have been for the department to be gutted, all our records burnt.

There was no quick move to clean things up, and this, in a way, was more worrying than the fire itself. When we resumed our normal work, you could see that the regular cleaners had done the best they could, but there was no move to replace smoke-damaged furniture. People brought rugs and covers from home to protect their clothes, and at lunchtime the more industrious got busy with upholstery shampoo.

In the general confusion, I took the trouble to borrow a set of keys from Deirdre's desk, copy and return them.

A week or so after the fire, I stayed back late at work. It was a Wednesday night, Peter's cubs night. He'd gone home from school with one of his friends from cubs, and I was to pick both boys up at nine o'clock.

I walked along the corridor to Rae Evans's office, trying to look as if I had every right to be there.

I unlocked Rae's door and switched on her computer. It was just after seven-thirty. I'd followed Deirdre downstairs at half-past five, relieved that she was leaving on time, then gone back to my own office to wait.

If anyone caught me, I'd say Friday was my deadline for the outwork report, that the fire had put me seriously behind, and there was some information that I had to check.

It was a bit thin, but it might work. I knew the security rounds didn't begin until later in the evening, and I figured that it looked less suspicious if I was found in Rae's office while it was relatively early, rather than at midnight or two in the morning.

I raised my head at the sound of a step in the corridor. Someone was coming.

‘Working late?' It was Rahoul from transport industries. His ­question was polite, his smile companionable.

I leant back so he could see the screen. ‘No choice, I'm afraid,' I said.

I'd maybe said ten words to Rahoul in my time at DIR. Why did he have to pick tonight to work back?

I moved my hands to the keyboard, willing him to leave.

‘Want some coffee?' he asked. ‘I'm just on my way to make some.'

‘Thanks, no.' I forced a smile. ‘Just got about twenty minutes left here, then I'm done.' I cursed myself as soon as I'd said this. I'd have to stay in Rae's office now for another twenty minutes, no matter what I found, or failed to find.

Rahoul said, ‘You know, that tea room is a mess. You'd think they would have done something about it.' I nodded agreement, praying that Rahoul would forget he'd seen me, that he wouldn't say anything to anybody else.

He left, closing the door behind him.

I fitted a key into the top drawer of the filing cabinet. I had to twiddle it for what seemed like a year before I got it to turn. I didn't know what heading the tender correspondence would be under. There was nothing labelled Compic, Tenders or Complaints, but Corres­pondence took up the whole of the second drawer.

With a glance at my watch, I began to go through it one folder at a time. Two doors down, I could hear the sound of the electric jug, a faint rattle of cups, the fridge door that shut with a small flat clap.

My twenty minutes were used up, plus an extra ten, when I finally admitted to myself that my search had got me nowhere. There was no file containing the correspondence about Compic in any of the four drawers of the filing cabinet, in Rae's or Deirdre's desk, or on the bookshelves or behind them. I'd looked everywhere I could think of. If there was a file, and I had no reason to doubt Rae's word that there had been, someone had removed it.

Had they used the fire to do this, or had the file been gone for weeks?

On the way out, I mulled over what might have happened if I hadn't kept all my original copies of my interviewers' details. And what might happen to me now that they'd been stolen.

Was the basic plot the same, in my case and in Rae's? Was it only luck and timing that made the outcome different? Had the thief operated in the same way? Pinch my password, make a single alteration, then let the electronic payment system do the rest? Would the next step have been to leak a story to the
Canberra Times
about DIR sending money to a false address? Of course, the amount was negligible. Of course, I was a tiny fish to bait and catch. But then, Rae wasn't that big a fish herself. Whoever was out to get us planned incremental damage, allegations of theft and corruption that piled on top of one another. They were relying on the pre-election paranoia that the Opposition was creating. Maybe I'd been thinking too much about Rae the person—who liked her, who didn't. Rae as Access Computing's public ­benefactor.

I knew that our Admin computer's operating system could not be accessed through my PC. My password would not get the hacker in. He or she needed Kerry Arnold's password, or that of someone with the authority to override him. System manager. Or someone
masquerading
as a system manager. I was sure Kerry was telling the truth when he said that he believed the amount for Access Computing's grant had been changed from $100,000 to $1 million
after
he had signed for it. But wasn't it also possible that someone with authority over Kerry had been able to make whatever changes to the system he or she liked?

Mirrors within mirrors, leads that weren't leads but forever doubling back on themselves. The hacker hadn't reckoned on my keeping those hard copies of my interviewers' names and addresses. Therefore it had to be someone who didn't know me all that well. Who couldn't have predicted that I was the sort of person who kept everything. And who took the opportunity of the fire, or created it, to clear out my filing cabinet.