Peter Temple - Shooting Star

I WANT YOU TO SUFFER AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS SUFFER. I WANT YOU TO FEEL PAIN AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS FEEL PAIN. I WANT YOU TO BLEED TO DEATH.

‘Aimed at Tom or the family?’ said Orlovsky.

‘At Tom, but he might simply stand for something. The bastards. The rich. People hate the President, hate the Queen, hate the Pope, but it’s not personal.’

CNN had moved on to an explosion in Egypt, ambulances, sirens, police and soldiers everywhere, people comforting each other. A dog, just a skeleton covered in thin stretch-cloth, was licking a dark patch on the hard-packed dirt.

‘So do they want money or revenge?’

The thought had been on my mind since the phone call on Saturday. How long ago was that? Early Tuesday. Saturday seemed far away. Was the girl alive? Two joints of a finger will keep in the fridge. Her body could be in the ground somewhere, not far down, waiting for a pet dog to snuffle at the wet soft earth like a truffle-hound one evening, a happy dog digging frantically, rolling in the find, the owner calling it away, fearing the stench of dead possum, of having to wash off the smell of something rotten.

The smell of Anne Carson, age fifteen.

‘Maybe both,’ I said. ‘Lots of both. Then again, maybe they’re just crazy. Think it’s fun to see people throw money into a crowd. We’ve got to get them to show us she’s alive.’

‘And then?’

‘If she is, we try to find them before they kill her.’

Orlovsky picked up the bottle by the base and tipped whisky into our glasses. ‘Not we,’ he said. ‘You. You’re the sad case, you think you’re doing this for the money but you’re not. You’re the guilty person who wants to make amends, save people.’

‘Just one would be nice,’ I said. I finished the drink and went to bed and on the slide into sleep I thought about Alice and came awake as if plunged into cold water.

Barry Carson had a surprisingly modest office on the fourth floor of Carson House: two wood and leather chairs for visitors, old desk, desk chair just like the ones in the office outside, faded Persian rug on a parquet floor, a nondescript view of the building opposite. On the dull cream wall hung black and white photographs of bulldozer-gouged building sites, concrete pours, and tree-raising ceremonies on the windswept tops of buildings, construction workers and men in suits wearing hardhats and raising cans of beer. Only the construction workers’ hardhats fitted and only they looked as if they planned to drink the beer.

‘Two or three months with Katherine’s family in England,’ said Barry in his boyish voice. His hands were locked behind his head, he was being open, unguarded. ‘We all thought it was a good idea. Get away, somewhere different. But they’ve never come back.’

His phone rang.

‘Excuse me, Frank.’ He looked at me as he listened, studied me as he spoke into the old-fashioned handset. It wasn’t the unseeing look. He was looking at me.

‘Miranda, forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have made more of this, made sure everyone understood.’ He had a gentle delivery. ‘All media inquiries about the float and the company go to Tom’s people.’ Pause. ‘Yes, I know some people may wish to talk to me or to other senior staff but this is a Tom affair. He has a regiment of unemployable ex-journalists waiting to handle it. Yes. Thank you, Miranda.’

He put the receiver down. ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s taken all the shine off going public, emerging from my father’s shadow.’

I detected no sympathy in his voice. ‘It’s a long shadow,’ I said.

‘Yes, these generational changeovers should happen when you’re in your forties, I suppose. In some families, the children take over in their thirties, earlier. But.’

Not so much a smile as a lip signal of resignation and acceptance.

‘Alice,’ I said.

‘Yes. The kidnap shook us, changed our whole world. We’ve never been the same again. The whole family. We went from being pretty carefree to verging on the paranoid. My wife in particular. She seemed more disturbed than Alice. Visibly, that is. Alice was just quiet. Not that she’d ever been all that vocal.’ He looked away. ‘Well, perhaps I didn’t notice. Always busy, travelling a lot. Pretty standard confession that, I suppose. The absentee father.’

He brought his arms down and folded his hands on the desk, long-fingered hands, square-clipped nails. ‘Katherine almost took our son Pat to England too but the old man talked her out of it. Good at that kind of thing, the master manipulator. I think he had some premonition that Katherine was going for good.’

‘Can Alice talk about the subject?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never raised it with her, never wanted to. She may have talked to her mother about it, I don’t know. Katherine wouldn’t tell me if she did.’

I followed his eyes out of the window. We could see two men in an office in the building across the street, one seated, the other standing at a whiteboard. The seated one’s chair was quarter-turned away from the whiteboard; he didn’t want a lecture.

‘They’re in trouble,’ said Barry. ‘Someone’s been selling them down for weeks.’ He looked back at me. ‘I might as well say it. Katherine blames me for what happened. She never said it at the time but when I went to England to see them the first time, she spat it out.’

‘Blames you for the kidnapping?’

‘No. For calling in the police. She believes that if we’d waited for the ransom instructions and paid the money, Alice would have suffered less.’

‘She was assaulted?’

He looked away again. ‘Yes, but apparently not until the story broke in the media. It may be that that was when they decided to kill her. So I suppose the logic is that if we, I, hadn’t called in the police, we wouldn’t have had the media exposure, and the kidnappers wouldn’t have decided to kill Alice and wouldn’t have done anything to her.’

‘That’s pure conjecture,’ I said. ‘To kill her may always have been their intention. If it had happened, you would be blamed for not calling the police.’

Barry nodded, still looking out of the window. ‘I try to look at it that way. Katherine sees a reluctance to part with money as being involved. Nothing in my life has ever hurt me more than that accusation.’ He sniffed, a delicate intake, moved his head. ‘But there you are. It may be clearer now why we didn’t want the police this time.’

‘Yes. What does Alice do?’

He looked more cheerful now, making eye contact again. ‘She works with children, with autistic children. In a public clinic in London. She started as a volunteer, then they offered her a job. We give the clinic some money, which we earmark for salaries, an annual grant, quite generous. Alice doesn’t know about that and it doesn’t matter. She’s very good at what she does and the clinic values her.’

‘Will you ask her today if she’ll talk to me?’

‘Why?’

I felt uneasy, shrugged. ‘It’s remotely possible that the abductions are connected. Remotely.’

‘The same people? Seven years apart? What suggests that?’

‘Something the voice said on Saturday. About becoming less stupid, learning.’

‘Just a way of being threatening, I thought. Anyway, if the police couldn’t track them down then, what chance do you have now?’

‘Something may have come back to Alice. It’s worth trying.’

Barry hesitated. ‘I’ll ask her. Have to catch her early. Do you want a video linkup?’

‘If possible.’