Shooting Star (16 page)

I said, ‘We’ll get this over with quickly so that you can get on with your day. Alice, I’ve read the police interviews with you and I’ve only got a few questions. I know you never saw anyone and that you only heard voices from a distance, through walls.’

‘Yes.’ An uncomfortable look, her head moving left.

‘Voices are strange things, aren’t they? We read so much into them.’

She didn’t give any sign of agreement. Suspicious eyes. Waiting.

‘In the interviews, they kept asking you about what you heard. Noises, the voices.’

‘Yes.’

‘They asked you what you heard. Over and over.’

‘Yes. Over and over.’ She lifted a glass of water and drank some. ‘I felt so tired, all I remember is, I felt so tired, I wanted to go to sleep in my own bed. Forever.’

I drank some water from my glass. ‘A precious thing, your own bed. You’re never really home till you’re in your own bed.’

What did I know about the preciousness of own beds, a good part of my life spent in institutional beds I hated or didn’t give a shit about?

Alice smiled, half a smile, a smile. I smiled. We nodded at each other across the world, images bounced off a satellite.

‘I feel ridiculous asking you questions all these years later,’ I said.

I waited, looking at her, trying to keep the full smile in my eyes, in my face. Thinking about smiling.

A nod, not an unhappy nod now.

I said, ‘Alice, if you can bring yourself to think about the voices, a last time.’

She looked uncertain, lowered her chin.

‘You told the police that you heard two voices and they sounded the same to you. Is that right?’

A nod. ‘Yes. That’s right.’

‘The people who talked to you didn’t follow this up. You heard two people with similar voices?’

‘Not similar, the same. At first, I thought it was someone talking to himself, having a conversation with himself.’

‘You didn’t tell the police that.’

‘I don’t know. Didn’t I?’

‘It’s not in the transcript. In the transcript, they move on to asking you about noises outside. But that doesn’t matter. You thought it was one person but it wasn’t?’

‘No. I could hear they were apart.’

‘You could tell them apart?’

‘No, but the voices were apart, coming from different places. It was two people.’

‘Two people with identical voices.’

She frowned. ‘Well, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I suppose the wall was too thick. So I can’t say identical, but the voices went up and down in the same places. I…’ She hesitated.

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got quite a good ear for music, so I suppose…’

‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve got it right. Now the other thing I want to ask you is whether you’ve remembered anything else. In the years since. It’s not uncommon. You were in shock when the police talked to you, I could see that in your responses. Is there anything else, anything at all that’s come back to you?’

We looked at each other. Alice moved her shoulders, her head, apologising with her body.

‘This is rather silly,’ she said, ‘but two things…I’m not sure if it’s just my mind playing tricks. I’m always reading something into nothing. Harmless strangers, parked cars.’

I smiled. ‘I’m constantly reading something into nothing. It’s a way of life for me. Go ahead, it doesn’t matter whether it sounds silly. What’s rather silly?’

She seemed reassured. ‘The one thing is, we use the television and computers a lot at work. I work with autistic children.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I know that.’

‘Well, about a year after I started working there, one of the other people put on a computer game for a child and it had this music, this simple tune repeated over and over…’ She was distressed by the story. Her hands had moved from the arms of her chair into her lap. She was clenching one hand with the other, I could see the tension in her neck and shoulders.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I felt sick. And scared. I couldn’t bear it, it’s impossible to describe, I had to go out of the room, out of the building. I went to a toilet and…and I was physically sick.’

‘You couldn’t recall hearing it before?’

‘No, never.’

Time to leave the subject. ‘The second thing. There’s another thing.’

She was feeling even more tense now, tried to smile, just a baring of teeth, nice small teeth.

‘I went to Sardinia for a holiday last winter. With my mother and my grandparents, we were staying at this new hotel, a resort sort of place, they showed us to our cottages and I thought they were lovely, adobe, sort of Moorish-style and we unpacked and I went to have a shower and I got out all wet, water in my eyes and I had to steady myself and I touched the wall…’

She stopped. In her rushing speech, words tumbling over rocks, no still water in sight, I could hear the horror she was trying to keep out of her mind. And I could see white all the way around her pupils.

Find the words. Find a form of words.

‘Sardinia must be a nice change from London in winter,’ I said. ‘I spent a winter on the English moors one year. Very moorish winter. All I can remember is the way my fillings tasted in the cold. Normally, you don’t notice your fillings. If you’re unlucky enough to have fillings, that is. I’ve got five fillings. Sweets in childhood. But when your nose is blocked by a terrible cold, you breathe through your mouth, you suck in that freezing moorish air, and it gets to your fillings. They get colder than your teeth. And then you can taste them, it’s some chemical thing or something to do with metals. The most unbelievably awful taste, like sucking lead filings.’ Pause. ‘I often suck lead filings, so I know.’

I stopped. As I’d drivelled on with this boring rubbish, she’d looked less likely to bolt, more likely to make a polite excuse and leave.

‘The message is this,’ I said. ‘Only have ceramic fillings.’

‘Ceramic? Can you have ceramic fillings?’ She was smiling, not going to bolt, not going to leave.

‘You can have fillings made from anything you like. Titanium, Kevlar, old-fashioned stainless steel. They say you should go for the tusks of departed walruses. Not killed for their tusks, of course. Washed up walruses. Peacefully departed. Recycled.’

Alice laughed, not a big laugh, but on her mouth and in her eyes there was a laugh. I laughed with her, celebrated my own stupid ability to amuse her. In her face, I now saw the resemblance to her father. They were handsome people, the Carsons, and they selected for handsome genes, even if that sometimes meant ending up with handsome people missing the warmth chromosome.

But they could laugh. It was possible. I’d seen two of them laugh. As a sub-species, they had the capacity to laugh. The single-minded pursuit of money, the worship of it, the fear of losing it, these had made redundant, vestigial, almost everything that had once made them social animals. But the ability to laugh, that had some value and it lingered.

Time. Time to speak of the things that the mind does not want spoken of.

I said, ‘So, you touched the wall. And…’

She was more relaxed, she closed her eyes. ‘Repulsive, revolting, the feel of it…I ran out, I didn’t have anything on, I think I was screaming, I gave my mother a terrible fright…’

She opened her eyes.

I was nodding, as if I understood.

She swallowed, swallowed again, looked at me, her face coming to me in brilliant clarity, grey eyes, a sad person, sad forever, nothing could subtract from what had happened to her, nothing could bring her back into the world of people who hadn’t endured what she had.

‘I couldn’t stay there,’ she said, ‘so they moved us, put us in another part of the hotel, the main building.’

‘Adobe,’ I said.

She nodded, looked down.

‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You’ve been brave and I admire you.’

She looked up and there were tears in her eyes.

On the way to the Carson compound, waiting to turn, Orlovsky said, ‘Mr Compassion. That’s another side. Sorry I didn’t get to see that side.’

I was looking at the couple in the Mercedes next to us. A woman with a long, pale face was driving, the man next to her was fat and angry, gesticulating. He had rings on all his fingers.

‘You didn’t qualify for compassion,’ I said. ‘You only qualified for a kick up the arse. And that was too late, anyway.’

We were in the underground garage when he said, ‘And now?’

I needed a drink badly, my back needed it. ‘Mark,’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere else
.’

MARTIE HARMON worked for Hayes, Harmon, Calero, a firm of solicitors in South Yarra with an office next to a Thai restaurant.

‘Mark’s been involved with him in a couple of interesting ventures, his so-called associate,’ said Barry, speaking briskly from his car at 7.15 a.m. ‘One was importing caviar from the Caspian, a container load. I gather they paid half in advance, some fabulous sum, and the Russians sent them a container of fish meal. Hold on, I’ve got another call.’

Music, trippling piano music. I ate sourdough toast spread with Normandy butter and bitter Scottish marmalade and watched a gardener, a slim woman dressed for wet weather, choosing flowers from the cutting garden in front of the Garden House. She felt my eyes, turned and nodded a greeting.

Barry came back. ‘Frank, yes, Martie Harmon. Mark and Martie also combined to sell the Indonesians a South African crowd-control device. I don’t know how that went. I’d have thought the Indonesians already had shotguns. I’m indebted to Stephanie for this information. Tom ends up paying and he confides in her.’ ‘And she in you,’ I said, not a clever thing to say.

I could hear the music on his car stereo: a symphony.

‘Something tells me,’ he said, ‘that you may end up knowing more about this family than we would have wanted. Perhaps we should have had you sign a confidentiality agreement.’

‘Take it as signed,’ I said, to make amends.

I was Martie Harmon’s first of the day, no waiting. He was fortyish, short, plump, red-lipped, had opted to confront baldness by shaving his head.

‘Sit down, Mr Calder. How can I be of help?’ He had a warm, welcoming smile.

‘Mark Carson. I’m engaged by the family. They’re worried.’

The smile went and he made a scornful laughing noise. ‘Mark. They’re worried? Believe me, Mark worries lots of people. I no longer have anything to do with Mark. There is nothing I have to say about Mark. I don’t want to discuss Mark. Full stop.’

I looked around the office, at the framed things on the walls: a degree certificate, something with a Rotary cog on it, a graduating class photograph.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, this is a working office.’

I sat absolutely still, hands below the desk, looked him in the eyes, looked down, looked at him again, focusing on the inside back of his skull, didn’t blink.

He couldn’t bear it.

‘What are you, some kind of intimidation? Fuck that, buddy. Fuck the Carsons. I’ll get security in here in thirty seconds flat.’ He picked up his phone.

‘How’d that crowd-control device go?’ I said. ‘I reckon the best way to control crowds is to spray them with Russian fish meal. From the Caspian.’

Martie Harmon replaced the receiver, held both his hands up, pinkies facing me. ‘That’s not funny. That’s why Mark and I are no longer in any way associated. I have believed the lies and I have paid the price. Also I have done nothing wrong or unethical. So, will you go?’

I shook my head. ‘We’ve got off on the wrong footing, Mr Harmon. No one’s accusing you of anything. It’s Mark the family’s concerned about. They can’t contact him in Europe.’

Martie Harmon made a chewing movement and his shoulders relaxed a little. ‘Just as long as it’s understood,’ he said. ‘I have no involvement with the bastard, nil, zip.’

‘Understood,’ I said. ‘His father’s had a threatening phone call. From Poland.’

Martie closed his eyes, shook his head. ‘Mark and the fucking Poles,’ he said. ‘And they’re not even Poles, they’re Russians. The Poles are the frontmen. They’re the ones you meet, the ones that went to college in America.’