The White Tower (21 page)

Twenty-two

Detective-Constable Freda Jansz met me on the grass at the front of the school at eight o'clock next morning. She was fair-haired, narrow-waisted. She shot warning glances at me, her blue eyes so dark they were almost black. I knew she could sense that a scream was there, just underneath the surface. It was as though we could both see it, this scream of mine, which would sweep away the effort I was making.

A number of people had rung in response to the news bulletins, reporting sightings of boys who resembled Peter, wearing the Lyneham uniform. Each of these calls was being followed up. In a case like this, Jansz reminded me, there were bound to be any number of false leads. Dozens of boys roughly answering Peter's description had been making their various ways home from school yesterday afternoon.

‘With a man and a dog?'

‘We're not certain of that, Mrs Mahoney.'

I wanted to start quizzing Peter's classmates, working my way through them one by one. I knew from the way Jansz looked at me that she didn't want me there, thought I should leave interviewing to the people who were trained to do it. She wanted me to see that she knew I was being indulged.

By the end of the morning, my head was buzzing with the sound of the same questions over and over, the answers coming back mono­tonous, repetitive. Three children I'd spoken to had seen Peter leaving through a side door. I interrogated these three as though they'd committed crimes themselves. Where had Peter been going? They didn't know. What door? The one near the library. Who had been with him? No one. What about once he got outside? They didn't know.

Two boys and a girl. They'd seen Peter leave the building alone, through a door the students weren't supposed to use, which led across a patch of grass to the street. The reason no one had seen Peter outside was almost certainly that no child had been between that door and the street. If Peter had turned in either direction, towards the front of the school where I'd waited, or to the back, the ovals, someone would have seen him. The only possible explanation was that he'd got into a car.

Police constables had already interviewed the shop owners and ­assistants in the shopping centre across the road from the school. They spent the morning tracking down and interviewing parents who regularly parked outside, plus everybody with a connection to Niall Howley.

. . .

‘Hello, hello!' I shouted down the phone.

‘I'm at the Downer shops.' Brook sounded out of breath. ‘Get over here.'

I ran a late orange light on Northbourne Avenue, deaf to the long annoyance of a semitrailer's horn. I changed lanes like a demented rally driver.

Was Brook on his own? If the news was bad, then surely he wouldn't be ringing me from a shopping centre. I'd already spoken to him twice that day. He'd spent part of it interviewing Fenshaw, who'd been at a fundraising dinner the night before, and had about a hundred ­witnesses to prove it. Fenshaw had gone straight to the dinner from the hospital. It was just possible that he'd grabbed Peter from school and hidden him somewhere. There was an hour during the afternoon when he said he'd gone home to have a rest. None of his neighbours had seen him arriving at his house, or leaving. It was Colin Rasmussen's day off and nobody, including Fenshaw, knew where Colin was.

A brick arch spanned the small concrete square of Downer shops. There were two police cars in the car park. Brook was standing stiffly to attention underneath the arch, next to an empty fountain. As I ran up, he turned and nodded towards a small supermarket. His face was white, and the jacket of his suit hung on him as though on a wire coat-hanger.

It was only a short distance to the supermarket, across the barren square. As we covered it, Brook explained that he'd decided to take another look at Colin's flat, even though a constable had visited it last evening and found it empty.

The flat had once again appeared deserted as Brook approached it, blinds drawn, junk mail in the letterbox. He'd knocked on an adjacent door and found a surly, uncooperative tenant who said no, he hadn't seen Colin in the last twenty-four hours. A young policeman had already asked him that.

Brook said to the balding man behind the supermarket cash register, ‘Here's Mrs Mahoney. Could you just tell her what you told me?'

The man blinked and pursed his lips. ‘We're a small place here, as you can see. I know most of my customers, people from the flats like. They drop by on their way home from work to pick up milk and bread. I know that Colin fellow because he used to smoke. We used to joke about it as the price of cigs went up, the warning signs got bigger. I'm a smoker too, still am off duty. Then one day Colin, he comes in and gets his usual wholemeal sliced loaf, litre milk. No cigarettes. “I've quit,” he said. “Don't talk to me about it. My willpower's about that big.”'

The balding man held up his thumb and forefinger so close that they were almost touching. ‘Last night Colin came in. He bought his milk and bread, a packet of rice bubbles and a coupla tins of dog food.'

‘He doesn't have a dog?'

‘Not allowed in the flats.'

‘Did you ask about it?'

‘He seemed to be in a hurry. As a matter of fact I had a few customers waiting.'

‘Did he have a child with him?'

‘Came in by himself. I would of told you if he didn't.'

‘Where did he go after he left here?'

‘Didn't see. Like I said, had some customers to serve.'

. . .

Colin's block of flats was surrounded by a double cordon of police cars. Brook explained as we walked towards them—I wanted to fly over the cars and men in uniform—that Colin's flat was at the back. He stopped me at the first row of cars, pointed out a van, said Frank was inside and may have already made contact. A man wearing close-fitting black climbed the steps to the van and disappeared inside it.

While Brook was busy with the duty officer, I called Ivan, who'd been sitting outside with Katya when Brook rang, left another message for Derek, who was on his way, then went over to the van.

From the outside, it looked like an ordinary white van. Through open doors, I glimpsed a floor to ceiling panel behind the driver's seat, covered with communication equipment. Narrow benches lined two sides of the interior. A man with short black hair, shiny as a panther's coat, was sitting with headphones on and his back to me. Was he talking to Colin? Was it Colin on the other end? Could it be Peter? If the duty officer hadn't pulled me back, I would have run up the steps.

I sat in a car with the duty officer and told him all I knew about Colin, packing as much into every sentence as I could.

A loud hailer on the car's back seat looked over-large, impossibly remote and smooth. I looked up at the sound of a door slamming. Derek's voice cracked through a thin bit of plywood that had been nailed inside me, holding me together. I watched him run first towards the van and then, diverted, to the car where I was sitting. He shouted at me through the window, banging on it with his fists. A young red-haired policeman dragged him off. I watched him go with no emotion, unable to connect him to my son.

Ivan arrived and sat with me. He'd left Katya with Sylvia, but he obviously wished he hadn't. I leant against him and listened to his heartbeat. His face was grey and craggy. I would have used it as a mask, to blot out the mocking frontage of the flats.

Darkness fell. People came and went across my line of vision. Bill McCallum walked like a man who'd once enjoyed authority, but had set it down somewhere along the way, and had not gone back for it. His shoulders were hunched and he did without a neck. It occurred to me that the body recalled effortlessly what the mind would just as soon set down and not return for.

I went for a walk. I watched McCallum and Brook talking. In the brackish light, they were trees of the same shape, same species, trained by the same winds. If Brook belonged anywhere it was with McCallum and these other men, whose shapes made patterns between the rows of cars. Brook's mind moved between barriers like these. His heart? That could be offered variously. What bound us—Brook, Ivan and myself? Not marriage, not blood or work that was enduring, not, as we were here now, genuflecting to the illusion of control.

I was allowed to move around behind the cars. Colin had switched on every light in his flat. I knew what he was doing, what he was saying with the lights. You've made sure I've no way of leaving without being seen, but I don't care. I'm going to sit here with my lights on and you can watch my shadow on the blinds.

I found Brook, who said the duty officer was about to respond by turning off the power to the whole block. One second I was looking up at a phalanx of lights, the next a shadowy wall. I thought of the thick boles of trees on Lyneham oval, their amputated arms, how the physical world was at the same time precisely tuned to terror and indifferent.

‘They won't let it go on past midnight Sandra.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I know the officer in charge. If he hasn't got them out by eleven, eleven-thirty, he'll get set to move.'

‘What's Colin asking for? What's he want?'

‘He's not making much sense. Got it fixed in his head that there's a conspiracy to stop him doing his job. Keeps ranting about machines that save lives and people who destroy them.'

‘Is he using Peter as a hostage? Why doesn't he—?' My voice cracked.

‘Where would Rasmussen go if he
did
get out? He says Peter won't come to any harm if he's left alone to perform his duty. There's a heap of swearing and abuse, but that's the guts of it.'

I knew Brook was holding out on me. ‘He's threatened to kill Peter hasn't he?
Hasn't he?'

‘If they don't get a result in the next half hour, they're going in.'

‘What if it's too late?'

‘Listen to me Sandra. If he was planning to kill Peter, he would have. He's boasting about how he threw Niall Howley off the Telstra Tower and fooled the lot of us.'

Brook was called away, and a constable dragged me back to what I thought of as my car. I held on to the steering wheel. Colin was crazy and might do anything to Peter. Throw him out the window. With a start of shame, I realised that I'd wet my pants.

Freda Jansz brought me a thermos and a sandwich. She didn't say anything about the smell of urine, or offer any reassurance, and I was grateful for this. I drank something from a cup. It had no flavour of tea or coffee, but was sweet.

There was movement on the roof of the flats. Men dressed in black, with black helmets and guns, merged with the darkness, moving with ease across the sloping roof.

An enormous noise filled the night, not one gunshot but ten. Another and another. My stomach heaved. Up came the tea and bread and I was running, screaming, kicking and punching at arms, legs, bodies that would hold me back.

I stumbled. The entrance to Colin's flat was a dark noisy tunnel. A man was coming through a doorway at the end of it with a bundle in his arms.

Peter was staring at me, eyes huge as though the pupils would never again get sufficient light. I squashed him to me as though my body, ill-practised when it came to danger, had only just now realised what was required of it.

The man who'd been carrying Peter let me take him and led both of us back to the entrance to the flats.

Derek rushed forward, his face framed above Peter's head in car headlights and the outside lights of the flats, so bright they blinded us.

An ambulance had backed up. I craned my neck, looking for Ivan. Where was Colin? What had the police done with him?

Someone was shouting behind us. Colin appeared, half carried by the special operations men. As they passed us, Colin swung his head and spat, hard and accurately, in my face.

Ivan and I managed a few words while Peter was being settled in the ambulance. He wouldn't come to the hospital with us. He wanted to fetch Katya and go home. The sight of his big head bobbing over others round the side of the ambulance, disappearing between paramedics in their red and white, told me it was over.

Twenty-three

‘Come on,' Ivan said, ‘a family hug.'

Peter grinned and held his arms out to his sister. He yawned—he'd only just woken up—then giggled, his face against Ivan's chest and my right arm.

Katya laughed. I squeezed Ivan's other hand and answered his raised eyebrows with a nod.

I'd cleaned myself up in the bathroom next to Peter's ward, and Derek and I had sat with him until dawn. Bill McCallum had looked in briefly. He'd told us that as soon as the team had broken down the door to Colin's flat, Colin had let Peter go. He'd shouted abuse, but he hadn't used Peter to defend himself. As soon as they got him to the city station, he'd said he wanted to sign a statement confessing to Niall Howley's murder.

Why had Colin hidden Peter overnight, then taken him to his flat? Had he planned to kill Peter, but found himself unable to go through with it?

This was the horror Derek had held over me, after McCallum left, as we talked in low voices while our son slept. Peter was safe now, no thanks to me. His life had been hanging in the balance for the last thirty-six hours. It was my fault, no one else's. I was an unfit mother. He wanted Peter to live with him and Valerie.

Had Colin meant to use Peter as a hostage to demand a safe passage for himself, out of Australia somewhere? But then, why hadn't he pressed his demand once the police had his flat surrounded? On the other hand, why was I expecting Colin to behave logically, make logical demands?

‘Mum?' said Peter. ‘Did you ask them about Fred?'

Fred had been sedated for most of the time since their abduction. It was Brook who'd found him, and for this Brook had gone up a ­thousand fold in Peter's estimation. Peter wasn't able to forgive me yet for going with him in the ambulance, rather than staying behind to look for Fred myself.

Brook had sought out the manager of the flats, and asked if he'd heard or seen anything of a dog. The manager hadn't, and kept repeating that there were no pets allowed in the flats, as though this was proof enough. But Brook had persevered, and eventually learnt of a basement room adjoining the laundry by a door only the manager had the key to.

Here, after braving the manager's protests that no tenant could ­possibly get into the room, let alone hide a dog there, Brook had found Fred, tied up behind a tall steel cupboard, lying on the concrete floor beside an empty water bowl and a pile of dried vomit. Brook had taken him straight to a vet in Limestone Avenue. He'd been doped so severely that the vet said it was a small miracle he'd survived.

It was the recurring theme of Peter's story, how Colin had taken Fred away and hidden him, how Colin had said that if Peter made any noise at all, if he didn't do exactly what Colin told him, he'd never see his dog again. The terror of Fred's death had hung over him every hour of his captivity, and was mixed up now with details of where he'd been taken, what Colin had said and done and threatened to do.

After Colin had picked Peter up outside the school, they'd driven out of Canberra. ‘A long way,' said Peter, ‘in the bush.'

He described how Colin had let him sit in the back with Fred, eat a leftover sandwich from his lunchbox, and have a drink. It wasn't until after he started feeling sick, especially after he was separated from Fred, that his real fear started.

He recalled a river, going along beside it for a while, then turning off onto a dirt road. They'd pulled up in front of a hut. Colin had tied Fred up at the back of the hut, but that was still okay, Peter said, because even though he was made to go inside the hut and stay there, he could look out a small window and see Fred, and could hear him whining.

There was no toilet. Colin made Peter go to the toilet in the bush, while he stood right next to him. Peter pressed his lips together as he told this part.

They'd spent all of that night and the next morning in the hut. Colin had a gas stove and had heated up some soup. ‘It tasted awful, Mum.'

Colin made hot chocolate and forced Peter to drink some of that as well. Then he'd gone to sleep.

The first thing he did when he woke up was run to the window to look for Fred. Fred was lying down where he'd been tied up. He didn't move when Peter called his name.

That was when Colin had turned really mean. Peter had to go to the toilet again, with Colin standing over him, and then was told to get back into the car. Colin said he wasn't to make a sound. If he did, that would be the end of Fred, a threat made more compelling by the fact that Peter discovered, when Colin lifted Fred into the car, that he wasn't really asleep, not normally asleep. His breathing was shallow and laboured.

‘Like this,' Peter said, ‘Uh-hng, uh-hng! I got really scared then. And Mum, I had such a bad headache.'

Peter leant against three great white pillows, the hospital blanket rucked up around his knees. His already pale skin was greenish-grey and his lips had become a thin line, but he didn't cry.

At Colin's flat he'd been locked in a room with the blinds drawn, while Colin took Fred away. When he came back, he wouldn't say where he'd taken Fred, but he had a grocery bag with him, and Peter noticed with joy that it contained two tins of dog food.

‘I asked him, and he told me to be quiet or I'd get Fred in trouble. And Mum, he started acting really weird. He made me get under this blanket and he wouldn't even let me have my head out, but I did, I peeked, and he was just standing at the window.'

It had been much worse than the shack because he and Fred were completely separated, and he had no idea where Fred was, but also because he'd been forced to stay in one corner. And Colin had been worse.

‘Weird,' said Peter. ‘Really crazy. No one could hear me whispering, but I wasn't even allowed to do that. And you know what, all the time he was talking on the phone, he got so angry and he couldn't hit the guy he was talking to, so I thought he was going to hit me. Then when I heard that banging I thought, if I don't get out of here in two minutes I'll be dead.'

A nurse came, took Peter's temperature and pulse, and suggested that he use the bathroom and get ready for breakfast. To give him some time alone with Ivan and his sister, I went downstairs to visit Brook.

The accoutrements of Canberra Hospital were all arrayed before me as I followed the signs to the lifts and then ward 101, from chrome bed frames and railings glimpsed through open bathroom doors, to the curved night sister's desk with its serviceable lamp. Disposed in soldier lines, all those bright things that make a hospital. I thought about the time I'd sat in the Monaro cafeteria with Eamonn, the day I'd chased Eve up and down corridors toting a dripping, wrecked umbrella. Now the real heat, the flat, breath-squashing inland heat had at last arrived, the rain and those long September winds seemed not only to belong to another season, but another time frame altogether.

Brook had collapsed as soon as he'd delivered Fred to the vet. I'd looked in on him twice during the night. Both times he'd been asleep.

I sat down in a chair beside his bed. His arms were outside the cotton blankets, a drip attached to his left wrist. In a weak voice he asked how Peter was.

‘Fine,' I answered, moving my chair closer. ‘They told him if he's good he can come and see you. You should hear all the please and thank yous.'

Brook smiled.

‘How are you feeling?'

‘They've taken a bone marrow sample.' The parched edges of his voice summed up all the other times that marrow had been sampled. ‘In the meantime I've been told to rest.'

‘You've been doing too much.'

‘I've been living.'

‘I should have noticed.'

‘What?'

‘You getting thin again.'

‘Fashionably.'

‘I didn't say anything.'

‘You didn't need to. I can tell what you're thinking by looking at you.'

‘That's why I'll never make a detective?'

‘One of the reasons. Come here.'

I squashed my face against Brook's chest, wanting to bury it, shut out the light. His chest was too thin to bury anything in, even a small gift, a mouse's heart. His chest was thin and brittle and resistant, and a little further up was where his dry voice came from.

‘Has Bill apologised for doubting you?'

‘Bill? Apologise?'

‘But it's okay between you?'

Brook didn't answer.

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘I'm sorry you had to go through that—'

‘Not me. Peter.'

After a moment, Brook said, ‘When I saw that damn dog lying there, it could have been me.'

‘Don't.'

‘You think I never imagined dying in a hole?'

He started to speak again, coughed, then blinked as though the words were somehow trapped behind his eyes. Then his face cleared and for a moment he looked calm, unwrinkled, a man who accepted himself, who had no great wish, just then, for deliverance.