Peter Temple - Shooting Star

He pushed the wheelchair, pushed it and kicked it.

Pushed it into the canyon, pushed and kicked it onto the moving steel steps.

For a second, it was airborne, came down on its rubber tyres, bounced, lurched sideways, came upright.

I could see the person on it, someone in a heavy coat, camel-coloured, a coat with a hood, a duffel coat, you didn’t see duffel coats these days…

I didn’t think, ran, ran for the escalator, saw the wheelchair lurch forward, begin to topple…

Saw the person on it, the hood falling off the face. Dark glasses.

The dirty blonde hair, the lock falling forward…

I was running up the moving stairs, against the stairs, running towards the wheelchair coming down, an impossible gap to bridge, the chair toppling, hitting the side of the stairs, bouncing across to meet the other side, Anne thrown about, thrown forward, not falling out, held by something, dark glasses off her face, in the air…

Her eyes were open, pale eyes.

The wheelchair was in the air, one wheel on the rail, people shouting.

I could save her, stop her fall, if I could get there, get a hand on this chariot.

Running uphill, the wheelchair above me now, going into space.

I stumbled, falling, falling away from her, falling away from Anne, my arm out, my despairing, clutching hand.

And then I touched a wheel, grabbed it, pulled the chair down, pulled it on top of me, pain as it met my face, my teeth, my throat, going over backwards, holding on to it, sliding, pain in my back, agonising pain, sliding, under the chair, head lower than heels…

We were at the bottom, Anne and I, thrown across the threshold onto the tiles, the chair on my chest, screams, my scream, the screams of others, still in my ears.

I fought clear of the wheelchair, got onto my knees at her feet.

People still shouting.

The hood was over her face again, her head lolling.

Please God, not a broken neck, not now.

I put my hands to her head, pushed it up, my fingers too big, too callous, pushed the hood away from her face. I pulled away the scarf around her neck, a woollen scarf, blood-red.

Her mouth was open slightly, an unlipsticked mouth, pale, paler than her face. A child’s mouth.

And her eyes were open, held open, taped with transparent tape, only the whites showing.

I touched her face. Cold, cold beyond warming.

Behind me, close, a woman screamed, a scream that resonated in that cold canyon, went to the walls and multiplied, came back and went up to the far roof and there expanded, grew and grew and formed a parachute over us, a canopy of livid sound, gradually turning to echo.

I pulled the hood back over Anne Carson’s face, gently, gently over the lock of hair.

Then I sat back on my heels and began to cry, just small sobs, nose and throat sounds at first, soon the other sounds, the sounds we cannot make, cannot call forth, the sounds that make themselves, that speak of pain and horror and helplessness and injustice, speak of regret, of the regrets. All the regrets.

And so it ended, in a tiled space, pitiless light, pale people all around. A man and a wheelchair, a girl in the chair, bound to it, dead. The man on his haunches, weeping, keening.

From the windows of the homicide squad offices, you could look down on the lights of St Kilda Road, make out the Shrine of Remembrance where the flame never died, see the dark expanse of Melbourne Grammar’s playing fields. It was a quiet office, smelling of instant coffee, of too-pungent aftershave, of roll-on deodorant applied too lavishly.

‘So basically you found the sellers of the vehicle,’ said Detective Senior Sergeant Vella, ‘and ruled out the driver and the locksmith boyfriend.’ He was sitting opposite me, across two desks, two of the half-dozen plastic-veneered desks pushed together to form a dumping ground for files and folders and boxes.

‘Basically,’ I said.

‘Leaving only five security guards, two other drivers, gardeners, cooks, cleaners, disgruntled employees past and present by the hundreds, and so on.’

‘I wasn’t hired to conduct an investigation into everyone in the Carson empire,’ I said. ‘I was hired to hand over the money. How many times do I have to say that? Want me to say it again? I was hired to hand over the money.’

‘But you did start your own little investigation.’

‘We were waiting. I had nothing to do.’ My face was aching, my whole head, my neck and shoulders. ‘Got any aspirin?’

Without looking, he opened a drawer, found a foil strip, threw it at me. I broke out three, washed them down with cold tea from a mug labelled Fuck Off, This Is My Mug.

Vella’s eyes were closed and he was rubbing his temples. ‘Jesus, Frank,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. How could you let these people not call the cops? You had a duty to walk out of there and call us, tell us there’s been a kidnapping, fuck what the family wants, a fucking crime committed.’

I thought about this, looked around the big room, only four people in it, looked at the newspaper posters on the bile-coloured walls, the files on the floor, the objects in labelled plastic bags, the death masks in a glass case, the board listing homicide cops long dead.

Vella waited, sad expression.

‘I had no such duty,’ I said. ‘They called the cops once before and that girl’s only alive because of luck and her own efforts.’

‘This Noyce says you talked to the girl in England, to this one’s mother, he’s got a bill for surveillance on Barry Carson’s son.

What’s the result of all that activity?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Just passing the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing of any use at all?’

‘No.’

Vella pointed his long nose at the ceiling and sighed, scratched his head with both hands. ‘A week behind,’ he said. ‘She could be alive today. Now from one end, we have to chase up every fucking Tarago in Melbourne, visit every fucking opshop that might ever have sold a duffel coat, ask ourselves where this arsehole got a wheelchair. And from the other, we’ve got a whole fucking small town to interview and that’s only the beginning. Two crews on it, fourteen people, and it isn’t enough.’

‘Are you finished?’ I said.

He got up and came around the island, made a space on my desk and sat on it. Not looking at me, looking at the man sitting off to my right, he said quietly, ‘You get that thing to work?’

I nodded.

‘See anything?’

‘No.’

‘Looking for anything in particular?’

‘No. Just looking.’

‘Fuck, Frank, I’m compromised here. Who else knows?’

‘One person, there’s no risk there. Forget you gave it to me. I’ve forgotten.’

A thin-faced man appeared in a doorway. ‘John,’ he said, ‘the Tarago’s clean, been gone over with meths, they think. And the wheelchair was stolen from Prince Alfred last Saturday.’

‘Things just get easier and easier,’ said Vella. ‘Tell me if you think of anything. Want a cab? Your face looks terrible.’

The cab dropped me at the underground carpark entrance. I walked across the garden and into the main house through the side entrance.

The house was quiet, smelling faintly of lavender wax. I went past the library, heard low voices, the smell of Tom’s panatellas. The door was ajar and I caught a glimpse of a fat ankle on a knee, a lurid homicide tie, a scalp gleaming under a homicide haircut.

The study door was open. I didn’t knock, stood in the doorway. Pat Carson’s chair was swivelled to face the French windows and his secret courtyard, only the top of his head visible.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He didn’t turn, didn’t say anything, moved his head slightly.