Matt Eaton - Blank

“I was just about to say that,” he remarked dryly.

“Cognitive dissonance is when you have two conflicting, but equally strong, beliefs about the world.”

“As in when something changes but you don’t want it to,” Luckman realised.

She nodded. “Exactly. It’s the central mechanism at work in our minds when we deal with the need for change of any sort. Often people simply try to ignore it, hoping it will go away.”

“The driving force of conservative politics.”

“We want life to stay the same, but it never does. Some changes are unavoidable. When they happen, if they’re big enough, we’re compelled to adjust our belief systems.”

“Or to irrationally pretend that nothing has happened.”

“That would be hard to maintain in isolation, but when an entire town’s on board – that’s a different story,” she told him.

He smiled. “I spent some time with the detective in charge of this murder case. Spun him a tale about how New Zealand was this grand new player in world espionage. He knows nothing of the floods and the earthquakes that wiped New Zealand off the map. In his mind, none of that has happened.”

Mel leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes. He grabbed her hand and yanked her to her feet.

“Stay with me, sleepy head.”

“So what now?” she muttered wearily.

“Turns out my disappearing man is Father Paulson’s personal assistant. Or bodyguard. Anyway he suggested we take a little excursion tonight.”

Luckman was unsurprised to hear Bell wanted no part of a break and enter. He said he was happy to stay put at the motel and watch for trouble, although Luckman suspected he would probably just fall asleep again.

Clarence Paulson’s house was about 15 minutes away on foot. The quickest route was straight across the river bed, which, by now, was bathed in eerie moonlight. Luckman took Mel past the place where Paulson’s body had been discovered.

“Someone dumped the body here,” he explained. “The Aboriginal couple are just patsies to keep the police occupied. I can’t see that they had any reason to kill him, although Detective Pollock seems determined to focus on the notion of some mythical domestic dispute.”

Mel stopped in her tracks. “What are we doing, Luckman? I take it you haven’t forgotten why you came here?”

“Whatever weird shit is happening in this place, that mob at Pine Gap have gotta be wrapped up in it. If I just waltz out there now they’ll see me coming a mile off.”

They finished the rest of their journey in silence. Paulson’s house was in total darkness. Luckman pulled himself over the brick wall and opened a small door beside the main gate to let Mel in.

“You hang here in the front yard and keep an eye out for trouble,” he whispered. “If anyone turns up, run to the back door and knock.”

“Who’s going to turn up?”

“Probably no-one but let’s not take any chances.”

The rear of the house was likewise shrouded in darkness. He spotted the back door, but also noticed a large shed a short distance away. It had a roller door and a window. He peered through the window. It was pitch black inside. He glanced around and decided to risk shining his torch through the window. There was a US Army truck parked on the other side of the roller door. He had no idea what to make of it, but it was surely confirmation the defence base was linked to Paulson’s death.

All the entry points to the shed were locked. He would have to break the window to get in. That would almost certainly prompt the neighbours to call the police. He headed for the house. He found a key under a pot plant as Favaloro had said he would. He opened the back door, but made sure to put the key back where he had found it before going inside. He pulled out his torch again and quietly padded around to check for Daisy the housekeeper. Her room was empty. If she wasn’t still in police custody she had headed for the hills. He found his way to Paulson’s office, pulled the curtains closed and then turned on a desk lamp.

It occurred to him any self-respecting spy would be wearing gloves, but he decided that if Pollock had wanted his boys to fingerprint the desk they would have done it already. And the detective had let him loose in the room earlier in the day – his prints would prove nothing now. Anyway, they had no way of accessing any database outside of Alice Springs.

He pulled open drawers, searching for anything that might give him a handle on Father Paulson’s activities. They contained little other than pens and stationery. No doubt Daisy or Favaloro had already removed anything that might be deemed controversial.

He started making a mental checklist of what they knew… Paulson travelled regularly, had longstanding connections in the Vatican. He had a wife. And, according to Charlotte, he hired local Indigenous people.

For what?

Luckman found an A4 notepad in the bottom drawer of the desk. There was nothing written on it, but he could see the imprint of handwriting from a page that must have been torn from the pad. He grabbed a pencil and shaded over the paper. It was a name – written over and over again.

John Cutler.

He realised the office had no filing cabinet of any description and there was nothing on the shelves to indicate accounting or bookkeeping records of any sort. Everyone had a telltale paper trail. Paulson’s was notably absent. Where was his passport, his bank records, his bills and other correspondence?

Favaloro had specifically said to look here. There must be a safe. How had he put it? A key at the back door and another key in the study . But even if he found a key there was nothing to unlock.

He began tapping the floor with his boot to look for hollow points, but there was nothing. The only thing hidden under the chocolate woollen carpet was a concrete slab. The room was an open page.

To the best of his knowledge there was only one key in this room. He returned to the shelves and pulled out The Keys of Enoch .

Mel quickly found herself mesmerised by the cool silence of the evening. She detected no movement from the street or from the houses on either side of Paulson’s property. She gazed around his front yard, marvelling at the immaculate garden. Police tape was draped haphazardly at various points to indicate areas the detectives had deemed pertinent to their investigation.

She sat down on a wooden bench under a medium-sized desert oak near the front corner of the yard, unseen from the street thanks to the large wall around the perimeter of the house. It was a perfectly secluded corner from which she had no doubt the priest must have spent many hours contemplating the bigger picture. Through the lazy dance of the leaves she stared at the smudge of the Milky Way and the countless stars that lay within it. She became aware of how much the light of the town reduced her view of the night sky.

Star gazing was perhaps one thing that had been greatly improved by the end of the world. From the prison of her Gold Coast apartment, she had spent hours on end staring up into the pitch black, mesmerised by the eternity of outer space. She had come to believe that gazing at the stars and their clockwork precession across the night sky had helped keep her sane in the days and weeks after the cataclysm.

She tried to imagine the priest sitting here doing the same and for a fleeting moment thought she heard a man speaking. She gazed around anxiously. There was no-one in the yard.

An echo of the past, perhaps, or a memory she had tuned into. She didn’t catch what was said.

An ornamental plant caught her eye. It reminded her of a chess piece. A pawn. How apt.

More voices – this time from next door. A light was switched on at a window from which the neighbours could stare down into Paulson’s lush garden. She hoped Luckman was keeping out of sight. She thought she detected a peevish tone to their voices. Perhaps they had heard something.