Dead Man’s Footsteps

88

‘Where’s my mother?’ Abby yelled into the phone before Ricky had a chance to speak. ‘Where is she, you bastard? WHERE IS SHE?’

A door behind her opened and an elderly man peered out, then closed it again loudly.

Distraught now, in retrospect, that she had been so stupid as to leave her mother with this old woman, Abby hurried to the relative privacy of the stairwell.

‘I want to speak to her now. Where is she?’

‘Your mother is fine, Abby,’ he said. ‘She’s as snug as a bug in a rug – in case you were wondering where it had gone.’

With the phone clamped to her ears, she tripped back downstairs and into her mother’s flat, closing the door behind her. She walked through into the sitting room, staring at the bare boards showing through the underlay again. Tears were streaming down her face. She was shaking, starting to feel disassociated, the first signs of a panic attack coming on.

‘I’m calling the police, Ricky,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else any more. OK? I’m going to call the police right now.’

‘I don’t think so, Abby,’ he said calmly. ‘I think you are too smart to do that. What are you going to say to them? I stole everything this man had and now he’s caught up with me and he’s taken my mother as hostage. You have to be able to account for things, Abby. In the western world today, with all the money-laundering regulations, you have to be able to account for substantial possessions and amounts of money. How are you going to account for what you’ve got, on the earnings of a Melbourne bar waitress?’

She screamed back down the phone, ‘I don’t care any more, Ricky. OK?’

There was a brief silence. Then he said, ‘Oh, I think you do. You didn’t do what you did to me on a sudden impulse. You planned this long and hard, you and Dave, didn’t you? Any position he didn’t tell you to shag me in, or was it just me who got fucked?’

‘This has nothing to do with my mother. Bring her back. Bring her here and we’ll talk.’

‘No, you bring me everything you’ve taken and then we’ll talk.’

The panic attack was worsening. She was taking deep gulps of air. Her head was burning. She felt as if she was half floating out of her body, that her body was going to die on her. She tripped sideways, hit the end of the sofa, clung desperately to one of the arms, then swung herself down on to it and sat there giddily.

‘I’m hanging up now,’ she gasped, ‘and I’m calling the police.’

But even as she said the words she could feel that some of the conviction had gone from her voice, and that he could feel it too.

‘Yeah, and then what?’

‘I don’t care. I don’t bloody care!’ Like a child having a tantrum, she repeated several times, louder each time, ‘I don’t bloody care!’

‘You should. Because they’re going to find a chronically ill woman who has committed suicide, and her daughter a thief, with a cock-and-bull story about the man she stole from, and the man who put her up for it isn’t exactly in a position to enter any witness box to back her up. So think your way out of that one, smart bitch. I’m going to leave you to calm down now and I’m going to brew your mum a nice cup of tea, and then I’ll call you back.’

‘No – wait-’ she shouted.

But he had hung up.

Then, suddenly, she remembered the taxi waiting outside, with the meter running.