In Orlovsky’s car, just after 9 p.m., the long night before and the whole of Tuesday felt in the spine, crossing the Yarra bridge, smart Southbank glowing on the right, people eating and drinking there, lots of other people about, the city alive, the water not its daytime mud-grey, now a surface that reflected and glittered. The city’s Arno, romantic. Behind us, Flinders Street station, the first of the night people on the steps: prey, predators, and the guardians, young cops from nice families in the suburbs, from the country towns, getting their taste of the real, their eyes getting harder every night.
The studio was in South Melbourne, not too far from the premises of Cairncross amp; Associates, whose operative had reported both Pat Carson and a woman in a red Alfa leaving Conrad Street not long after we did. Pat had gone home and hadn’t moved today. I’d called them off.
I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, opened them to see the technician behind the glass saying things I couldn’t hear into the black stalk in front of his mouth. He looked down at the console in front of him, then his voice was startling in my ear.
‘They’re ready if we are, Mr Calder. Try not to look away to right or left or down for too long. It’s disconcerting for the other party. Ready, are we?’
I nodded at him. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at something else. ‘Ready,’ I said.
A young woman appeared on the big monitor on the wall, her right hand at her right ear. She was looking straight at me, a thin, intelligent face, no makeup that I could see, short dark hair in no style, just combed back, straight line of eyebrows, almost meeting, ungroomed.
It was just after 9.30 a.m. for her and Alice Carson, kidnap victim, almost a murder victim, was looking at me on her studio monitor somewhere in London. She looked fresh for someone who had been woken by a telephone call from her father at 5.30 a.m.
‘Good morning, Ms Carson,’ I said. ‘I’m Frank Calder. Your father’s told you who I am and the reason for this. May I call you Alice?’
She seemed startled by the question, nodded. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Good…evening.’ She was nervous, you could see it in her mouth.
‘I know this is difficult for you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think about asking you to do it if it could be avoided.’
She nodded again. ‘That’s all right.’ She paused. ‘I’m in a bit of shock at…at the news. I don’t really know Anne well, but…’ She tailed off, blinking rapidly, said, ‘I don’t know what I can tell you that…it’s so long ago. I try not to think about it.’
Across half the world, we were looking at each other as though we had eye contact. We did have eye contact. I could see her swallow, see the cords in her neck move. I smiled, she responded, smiled back, a tight smile.
I said, ‘We’ll get this over with quickly so that you can get on with your day. Alice, I’ve read the police interviews with you and I’ve only got a few questions. I know you never saw anyone and that you only heard voices from a distance, through walls.’
‘Yes.’ An uncomfortable look, her head moving left.
‘Voices are strange things, aren’t they? We read so much into them.’
She didn’t give any sign of agreement. Suspicious eyes. Waiting.
‘In the interviews, they kept asking you about what you heard. Noises, the voices.’
‘Yes.’
‘They asked you what you heard. Over and over.’
‘Yes. Over and over.’ She lifted a glass of water and drank some. ‘I felt so tired, all I remember is, I felt so tired, I wanted to go to sleep in my own bed. Forever.’
I drank some water from my glass. ‘A precious thing, your own bed. You’re never really home till you’re in your own bed.’
What did I know about the preciousness of own beds, a good part of my life spent in institutional beds I hated or didn’t give a shit about?
Alice smiled, half a smile, a smile. I smiled. We nodded at each other across the world, images bounced off a satellite.
‘I feel ridiculous asking you questions all these years later,’ I said.
I waited, looking at her, trying to keep the full smile in my eyes, in my face. Thinking about smiling.
A nod, not an unhappy nod now.
I said, ‘Alice, if you can bring yourself to think about the voices, a last time.’
She looked uncertain, lowered her chin.
‘You told the police that you heard two voices and they sounded the same to you. Is that right?’
A nod. ‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘The people who talked to you didn’t follow this up. You heard two people with similar voices?’
‘Not similar, the same. At first, I thought it was someone talking to himself, having a conversation with himself.’
‘You didn’t tell the police that.’
‘I don’t know. Didn’t I?’
‘It’s not in the transcript. In the transcript, they move on to asking you about noises outside. But that doesn’t matter. You thought it was one person but it wasn’t?’
‘No. I could hear they were apart.’
‘You could tell them apart?’
‘No, but the voices were apart, coming from different places. It was two people.’
‘Two people with identical voices.’
She frowned. ‘Well, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I suppose the wall was too thick. So I can’t say identical, but the voices went up and down in the same places. I…’ She hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘I’ve got quite a good ear for music, so I suppose…’
‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve got it right. Now the other thing I want to ask you is whether you’ve remembered anything else. In the years since. It’s not uncommon. You were in shock when the police talked to you, I could see that in your responses. Is there anything else, anything at all that’s come back to you?’
We looked at each other. Alice moved her shoulders, her head, apologising with her body.
‘This is rather silly,’ she said, ‘but two things…I’m not sure if it’s just my mind playing tricks. I’m always reading something into nothing. Harmless strangers, parked cars.’
I smiled. ‘I’m constantly reading something into nothing. It’s a way of life for me. Go ahead, it doesn’t matter whether it sounds silly. What’s rather silly?’
She seemed reassured. ‘The one thing is, we use the television and computers a lot at work. I work with autistic children.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I know that.’
‘Well, about a year after I started working there, one of the other people put on a computer game for a child and it had this music, this simple tune repeated over and over…’ She was distressed by the story. Her hands had moved from the arms of her chair into her lap. She was clenching one hand with the other, I could see the tension in her neck and shoulders.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I felt sick. And scared. I couldn’t bear it, it’s impossible to describe, I had to go out of the room, out of the building. I went to a toilet and…and I was physically sick.’
‘You couldn’t recall hearing it before?’
‘No, never.’
Time to leave the subject. ‘The second thing. There’s another thing.’
She was feeling even more tense now, tried to smile, just a baring of teeth, nice small teeth.
‘I went to Sardinia for a holiday last winter. With my mother and my grandparents, we were staying at this new hotel, a resort sort of place, they showed us to our cottages and I thought they were lovely, adobe, sort of Moorish-style and we unpacked and I went to have a shower and I got out all wet, water in my eyes and I had to steady myself and I touched the wall…’
She stopped. In her rushing speech, words tumbling over rocks, no still water in sight, I could hear the horror she was trying to keep out of her mind. And I could see white all the way around her pupils.
Find the words. Find a form of words.
‘Sardinia must be a nice change from London in winter,’ I said. ‘I spent a winter on the English moors one year. Very moorish winter. All I can remember is the way my fillings tasted in the cold. Normally, you don’t notice your fillings. If you’re unlucky enough to have fillings, that is. I’ve got five fillings. Sweets in childhood. But when your nose is blocked by a terrible cold, you breathe through your mouth, you suck in that freezing moorish air, and it gets to your fillings. They get colder than your teeth. And then you can taste them, it’s some chemical thing or something to do with metals. The most unbelievably awful taste, like sucking lead filings.’ Pause. ‘I often suck lead filings, so I know.’
I stopped. As I’d drivelled on with this boring rubbish, she’d looked less likely to bolt, more likely to make a polite excuse and leave.
‘The message is this,’ I said. ‘Only have ceramic fillings.’
‘Ceramic? Can you have ceramic fillings?’ She was smiling, not going to bolt, not going to leave.
‘You can have fillings made from anything you like. Titanium, Kevlar, old-fashioned stainless steel. They say you should go for the tusks of departed walruses. Not killed for their tusks, of course. Washed up walruses. Peacefully departed. Recycled.’
Alice laughed, not a big laugh, but on her mouth and in her eyes there was a laugh. I laughed with her, celebrated my own stupid ability to amuse her. In her face, I now saw the resemblance to her father. They were handsome people, the Carsons, and they selected for handsome genes, even if that sometimes meant ending up with handsome people missing the warmth chromosome.
But they could laugh. It was possible. I’d seen two of them laugh. As a sub-species, they had the capacity to laugh. The single-minded pursuit of money, the worship of it, the fear of losing it, these had made redundant, vestigial, almost everything that had once made them social animals. But the ability to laugh, that had some value and it lingered.
Time. Time to speak of the things that the mind does not want spoken of.
I said, ‘So, you touched the wall. And…’
She was more relaxed, she closed her eyes. ‘Repulsive, revolting, the feel of it…I ran out, I didn’t have anything on, I think I was screaming, I gave my mother a terrible fright…’
She opened her eyes.
I was nodding, as if I understood.
She swallowed, swallowed again, looked at me, her face coming to me in brilliant clarity, grey eyes, a sad person, sad forever, nothing could subtract from what had happened to her, nothing could bring her back into the world of people who hadn’t endured what she had.
‘I couldn’t stay there,’ she said, ‘so they moved us, put us in another part of the hotel, the main building.’
‘Adobe,’ I said.
She nodded, looked down.
‘Thank you, Alice,’ I said. ‘You’ve been brave and I admire you.’
She looked up and there were tears in her eyes.
On the way to the Carson compound, waiting to turn, Orlovsky said, ‘Mr Compassion. That’s another side. Sorry I didn’t get to see that side.’
I was looking at the couple in the Mercedes next to us. A woman with a long, pale face was driving, the man next to her was fat and angry, gesticulating. He had rings on all his fingers.
‘You didn’t qualify for compassion,’ I said. ‘You only qualified for a kick up the arse. And that was too late, anyway.’
We were in the underground garage when he said, ‘And now?’
I needed a drink badly, my back needed it. ‘Mark,’ I said. ‘There’s nowhere else.’