Peter Temple - Shooting Star

I waited a while. Then I turned and left the house, went to the Garden House and packed my things and Orlovsky’s. As I closed the front door behind me, I smelled cigarette smoke.

‘Frank,’ said Stephanie Carson, face flushed as if from exercise, girlish in a poloneck sweater, ‘it’s terrible to say this at a time like this, but, the other night, you won’t…they’ll kill me.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t remember the other night.’

She flicked her cigarette away, didn’t look where it went, didn’t care, came up to me, a hand behind my head, on tiptoe kissing me on the lips, a full, sucking, wet, lascivious kiss, moved her head, teeth against mine, pressed her tongue into my mouth, pressed her pubic mound against me.

I pulled away, picked up the bags and walked, drove out of the basement carpark in the old Alfa, aimed for home. Such as it was.

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.

In the night, the dream of Afghanistan, one of the dreams, the one in which I am trying to get to Cowper, liquid-eyed Cowper, who is screaming, the scream of a child, calling for me. His captain. If I can get to him, I can save him. There is no logic in this, it is a dream. I am crawling towards him, gunfire, pieces of the helicopter burning around me. I am burdened by a weight, it holds me back, I move with agonising slowness. Then I realise what the weight is: my legs are missing, a large part of my legs, well above the knees. I am having to haul my body without help from my legs. And at the moment of this realisation, pain floods through me and I know that I cannot save Cowper because I am dying very quickly.

I woke up, still there, still legless and bleeding to death on that dark Afghan plain, sat up, pushed away the blanket, felt for my knees, found them and lay back, exhausted, as wet as if I had been swimming. Eventually, I fell asleep again, but a fitful, fearful sleep this time, broken by the slam of a car door, a snarling cat skirmish, an alarm trilling far away. When I could see the dark behind the blind fading to grey, I got up, put on a tracksuit and runners and went out into the cold, near-empty world. It had been weeks and all the bits of my body that needed regular moving had stiffened up. For a while, everything hurt, my back, ankles, knees, but by the time I reached the Esplanade, I had found my stride, the pains were down to tolerable levels. And, gradually, the chemical balance in my bloodstream seemed to return to normal, my skin stopped feeling stretched like kite paper, my jaw stopped clicking.

Running, early misty rain on my face, thinking, unable to stop thinking.

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.

A grievance against the Carsons. Hatred, enough to kill an innocent girl for. Madness. Hatred turned to madness. What were the Carsons being blamed for? An eye for an eye. For a death? The death of someone in a part of the Carson empire, the diversified Carson empire, now not just a construction company but the owner of shopping centres and retail chains and big pieces of other companies? Industrial accidents? A death on a building site? Presumably there’d been many people killed over the years. Deaths for which the Carsons could be held directly responsible.

Anthea Wyllie. The Altona nurse who vanished after seeing Mark Carson. Jeremy Fisher gave Mark an alibi. Was there a family who didn’t accept that, who thought Mark was responsible? What was it that made a rich city lawyer give his services to the needy in a distant suburb? Was he in search of prey?

Did this mean Anne had been chosen simply because she was an available Carson, female Carson, because the kidnappers watched the school and followed Whitton’s car? Cars-he used three Carson cars. Chosen because she was the easiest Carson child to get to. Anne Carson was a soft target, walking down Revesdale Road alone, flushed from whatever took place in Craig’s yellow van, going into an alley. The other children were too young or too old, were elsewhere, far away. Anne’s younger sister, Vicky, went to an exclusive primary school, a walled school, driven in a minibus with five other rich children. The driver and guard came from a security firm.