Tristan Bancks - The Fall

I had read something online about the easy passwords people choose, especially older people who aren’t that good with technology. Even smart older people. While I waited for the phone screen to come alive I tried a few passwords that I could remember from the list and a few that seemed like Harry:

123456

password

12345

12345678

123456789

football

boxing

Magic1

browndog

letmein

abc123

111111

crime

Crime

krime

crimereporter

123123

Trustno1

Nothing.

Phone still dead. If Mum received my message she would be panicking now.

I tried Harry’s birthdate again.

230954

Nothing.

Out of desperation, I tried my own birthdate.

060504

A little blue circle started to spin in the centre of the screen. A fan whirred at the back of the machine.

There is no way he used my birthdate .

But a warm feeling rose in my chest. This morning my father said he loved me. Tonight I discovered he uses my birthdate as his password. I wouldn’t have thought that he even knew my birthday.

‘Father Loves Son and Uses Birthdate as Laptop Code.’ For most kids this would not be headline news. I tried to push the warm feeling away but I couldn’t.

My mum had done pretty much everything for me my whole life. Harry had done pretty much nothing, apart from once sending me a pile of old comic books. Knowing my birthdate did not suddenly make him World’s Greatest Dad. And it was probably a stupid code, really, for someone so worried about cyber-security that he’d often leave his phone at home. But it felt good. I couldn’t help it. It meant that he thought about me sometimes, maybe even every time he punched in that code. It meant that I mattered to him. I sent out a prayer that he was okay, wherever he was. Even if he was out drinking again.

The blue circle stopped spinning and the laptop screen came alive. The image filling the screen was divided evenly into four black-and-white rectangles. I stared at them, my eyes flicking between the four until I realised what they were and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

The window in the top-left quarter of the screen looked like a wide security-camera shot of the inside of Harry’s apartment. The kind of image you see on the news or in a movie when a petrol station or convenience store is robbed. I looked carefully at the grainy picture and I thought I could see the side of my own head at the bottom-right. I waved my hand in the air and watched my hand rise on-screen. I pulled my hand down and it disappeared from view. My heartbeat quickened. I turned to look up into the corner of the room where the camera must have been, but I couldn’t see anything.

Why would he have surveillance inside his own apartment?

I turned back to the screen and waved my hand again, then struggled to my feet. I picked up my crutches and moved to the corner of the room, using the light of the laptop screen to make out where the camera must be.

I thought of a horror movie I’d seen during one of my sleepless nights at home a few months back. In the movie, the phone kept ringing and the owner would pick up, only to hear heavy breathing. It happened again and again until police were brought in. They tapped the phone and the lady was asked to keep the caller on the line so that they could tell where the call was coming from. She did, and they got a reading on it. The call was coming from inside the house.

I hadn’t slept for nights after that and for weeks afterwards I freaked every time the phone rang.

Why would Harry have been watching his own apartment? All those nights I had seen him keeping an eye on the laptop screen, not pressing buttons, just watching. Was he watching me? Was he watching me now from another computer?

I stared hard into the corner of the lounge room, the corner diagonally opposite the front door. He was watching the door , I thought. Did he think that someone would break in? Or was it just a precaution?

A little way along, halfway between the corner of the room and Harry’s bedroom door, was a pine bookcase, the one the man had raked books off the night before. There wasn’t much on the bookcase but on the very top shelf was a brass elephant about the size of a guinea pig. I reached up. I wasn’t tall enough so I used my right crutch to push the ornament towards the edge of the shelf, just gently, not wanting to break it. I reached up again and could only just get my fingertips to scrape the elephant’s front foot. I pushed it another few centimetres with the crutch and the elephant reached out over the edge of the shelf, tilted sharply and began to fall. I dropped my crutches and tried to catch it, but it was too heavy, too slippery. It fell through my fingers and onto my left foot. Hard.

Pain shot up my leg like someone had poked the hot metal tip of a spear through my foot. I bit my hand to stop myself from screaming. I bent down to grab my toes. They felt angry and swollen from where Dumbo had landed. Magic arrived on the scene and licked my face, then my fingers and toes. I shrugged her off and stayed there for a moment till my pulse slowed.

The elephant lay on its side. I picked it up and inspected it. I noticed, in the dim laptop glow, that one of its eyes looked shinier than the other. I twisted it right and left to see if there was light reflecting in that eye. It looked like a small camera lens, shiny and glassy. I glanced back at the laptop sitting on the floor. In the top left of the screen, I could see the side of my face in close-up. My dad had been watching me. Why was he watching me? Was he watching now? Could he hear me? I looked into the lens and pleaded, ‘Come home. Please.’ Just in case.

The other three cameras were filming a balcony, the inside of another apartment and a front door. The number on the front door said ‘6A’. The ‘A’ was slightly twisted to the right.

Each of the four video images had timecode running beneath. In twenty-four hour time it was now 23:28:16. The 16 turned to 17, then 18 as the seconds ticked over. Next to the timecode was today’s date: 05.05.17. I wondered why security cameras always seemed to record such murky, grainy images when this was the one time you really needed to see clear detail.

There were ‘play’, ‘fast-forward’ and ‘rewind’ buttons under each video feed. I clicked on the timecode and realised that I could change it. My eyes flicked to the camera view showing what had to be the inside of apartment 6A, looking out towards the balcony. The camera was filming from up high. I wondered if they had an identical elephant or if the surveillance company offered a variety of heavy brass animals. My toe throbbed.

How did he get a camera inside 6A? Had he broken in? No, he wouldn’t have known how to set it up. Someone else must have done it for him. I took a sharp breath and typed in 02:10:00. That was 2.10 this morning.

My skin seeped dread.

The picture flickered for a second and the two men appeared on the balcony. I could see the big man from behind. He was blocking the view of the other man’s face.

My concentration was broken by a sound on the stairs outside Harry’s front door. I hit pause on the video and looked up from the laptop screen, listening carefully. I was ready to climb inside the wall and close the hatch, but the noise seemed to pass. I waited and waited, to be sure.

I pressed play again and watched. The big man moved to the left a little, pointing in the face of the smaller man. I hit pause. I clicked on a button with a magnifying glass and a ‘+’ symbol and zoomed in. I recognised the smaller man’s face right away. His skin was white and blurry from the zoom, and he was older than he looked in the photo I had taken on my phone from the news story. He had a shiny bald patch at the front of his hair. But, even so, I was 90 per cent sure it was John Merrin, the missing journalist. I wanted to take a shot of the screen but my stupid phone still hadn’t come back to life.