Shooting Star

35

All the way, Stephanie on my lips, her perfume in my head, I thought about something I had said to Orlovsky on the day he fetched me from my helicopter trip to see Anne’s mother:

This thing isn’t going to have a simple ending because it doesn’t have a simple beginning.

I’d known that then and I knew it now, and I knew nothing more than that. But what did the beginning matter? The end was all that mattered. Had I caused the girl’s death on the morning I talked the Carsons out of bringing in the police? That depended on whether the police could have found her before the kidnappers killed her.

But how could I be sure they always intended to kill her? What if my demand on Wednesday provoked them into killing her? These were not sane people.

There were no answers to these questions and there was no point in asking them. But and but and but. In the same circumstances, Katherine Carson had blamed Barry for what happened to Alice.

As the Carson family now blamed me. And from the beginning, I’d known the risk I was taking.

If it goes wrong, it’ll somehow be my fault. And I’ll blame myself too. For not having the brains to walk out now.

That was all I had to blame myself for: not walking out when I should have. What would they have done? Hired someone else? Brought in their international security consultants?

All I had to blame myself for? All? Vella was right: my duty had been to leave the Carson house that night and tell the police that a girl had been kidnapped. The trail was fresh. An hour would have produced addresses for every Tarago ever registered in Victoria and, in a few hours more, the field narrowed to perhaps twenty per cent of them.

In the cold and sordid apartment, too cold to take off my jacket, I lay on the sofa and ate old salt and vinegar chips, chips so old they could have been made from papyrus, drank wine left open in the fridge for I didn’t know how long. Too long, much too long.

When the wine was gone, I thought about going out for more, hunted without optimism in the kitchen cupboards, experienced a miracle, found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in a box, gift-wrapped in striped paper, tied with a green ribbon. Little Morris had given it to me, the day I went to hand in my resignation, to short-circuit the procedure that began with my hands around Hepburn’s throat. ‘Everyone put in,’ he said. ‘They asked me to say, why is it you can never do a job properly?’

I had come home and stuck the package somewhere, anywhere, out of sight, didn’t want to know about it, about no longer being a part of something bigger than myself.

Anne. Dead how long? She had been cold, icy.

Not a night to think about that. A suitable night to drink this expensive whisky and think about other things. Try not to think about anything would be better.

The room began to warm, my aches diminished and I felt a numbness stealing over me, half-drunken numbness. I kicked off my shoes, put my glass on the floor, folded my arms, closed my eyes, could have gone to sleep, was going to sleep.

Vibration in my chest. Insistent.

I sat upright, clutched myself.

Noyce’s tiny weightless mobile, not given back, not left behind in the Garden House, throbbing in my inside pocket.

I got it out, with difficulty, squinted at the buttons, pressed the phone symbol.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The voice. Croaky John Wayne and awkward Jimmy Stewart and shy Alan Ladd and dry Randolph Scott, all in it.

‘Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.’

I should have rung Vella. I didn’t, put the lights out, lay in the dark and sipped whisky till sleep threw itself over me like a blanket.