The White Tower (23 page)

Bernard wasn't in a position to challenge anything I said, but that didn't make him like it, or approve of me. I hadn't expected him to thank me, but a slight unbending in his manner would have been welcome.

In a reflective mood, I called Sorley Fallon and thanked him for sending me Fenshaw's memo to the hospital board. I apologised on behalf of Brook and his colleagues for the sudden arrival of a carload of police demanding to know about the kidnapping of a ten-year-old boy.

Fallon said he was sorry for what Peter had been through. ‘Give him my best wishes.'

‘I will.'

I heard a young male voice in the background. Of course, it could be a customer. It was the middle of a working day in Ireland, but I'd never seen much evidence that Fallon bothered himself with ordinary work.

He mentioned Moira Howley and said he was glad that she'd made contact with him. When I referred to the possibility of her visiting Ireland, he surprised me by saying, ‘If business picks up, I might even make it to Australia next year.'

‘We don't have any ruined castles. Plenty of natural attractions though.'

Fallon laughed. Again I heard a voice, or voices, though I couldn't make out any words.

‘I'd like to see where Niall lived.'

He didn't need to add, and where he died. The image of the tower was strong between us. I said I'd look forward to meeting him again, and then goodbye.

I rang Bridget next, clocking up a phone bill. At this rate, I'd use up all of Moira's last cheque. But I needed to hear Bridget's voice, as I'd needed to hear Fallon's, that Irish sibilance, a way of saying ‘Sandra' that they had in common. I needed to keep convincing myself that there was more to them than sleight of hand, ciphers on a screen.

I told Bridget, thinking that she'd probably already got the news from Fallon, that Colin Rasmussen had confessed to Niall's murder, and that when it came time to enter a plea he would be pleading guilty. I said I was afraid that no one would get to the bottom, the extent of Dr Fenshaw's responsibility. I asked Bridget if she was still giving tours of the factory, and she replied that her father had finally put his foot down. She didn't sound disappointed, and I recalled her telling me that she was getting bored with it. I had no doubt she'd find another game, another bit of acting to amuse her for a while, even another MUD, or some kind of net impersonation. The possibilities, after all, were endless, and the attraction always there. She didn't share Sorley Fallon's guilt. She'd taken Niall's side, supported him as much as she was able to. Somehow with Bridget though, I had the feeling that guilt would never cut deep, or dissuade her from a course of action that she'd set her heart on.

. . .

By the weekend, when Ivan and I headed off for a few days at the coast, I'd seen Brook's doctor and discussed his treatment. They were going ahead with the bone marrow transplant. When the doctor spoke to me, it was always with a slight frown between his eyebrows, not knowing where to place me. Clearly I wasn't family, yet I persisted in asking questions that only family members had the right to ask. Just as clearly, there was no wife around to ask them. There was Sophie, and there was me.

I couldn't pester Brook to contact his ex-wife and children. He'd made it clear in the past that he didn't want to. But I pestered McCallum on Brook's behalf. I was determined to track them down, one way or another. I didn't discuss this plan with anyone except McCallum. It had arrived perfectly clear and fully formed, and I knew it would succeed.

I watched Fred and Peter running in the surf. Peter was determined that Fred could learn to catch waves. Never mind that Peter couldn't catch a wave himself. Fred was the cleverest dog, and he would learn.

It hadn't been easy finding a place that would take dogs, but eventually we did—a small Bed and Breakfast the other side of Moruya. Too far south for the main tourist trade, and a couple of kilometres inland, it was a farm rather than a beach house. Fred had to stay shut up in a small yard when we were at the house, but we headed off to the beach early each morning and, luckily for us, the weather held.

Ivan spent as much time as he could under the umbrella, set up as close as possible to the water line so Katya could dig in the damp sand. What Katya loved most was for her father to dig holes, so she could watch the water seeping in.

We had the beach practically to ourselves. I divided my time between lying in my crescent of shade, squinting at the roistering dark shapes in the water that were my son and his dog, looking for shells along the tide line, and short bursts of swimming. After one of these quick swims, I flopped down on my towel next to Ivan, listening to the soft sounds of spade and hands as he dug yet another hole.

‘There's planning that goes with an ability to take advantage of ­circumstances,' I said. ‘Surely that was Fenshaw's kind.'

Ivan looked up from his digging reluctantly. ‘You're still insisting he told Rasmussen what to do?'

I thought of Sorley Fallon, and the extent to which a man should be considered responsible for his followers, the lengths such a man would go to repudiate them, if and when those followers became a nuisance.

‘“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”' I said. ‘It's odd how, in the play, you're waiting for those words, you know they're coming, yet they're still a shock.'

‘What's a shock?'

‘The coldness I suppose, the inhumanity.'

Peter took a tumble and came up blinded by swirling sandy water. I called out. Peter rubbed his eyes and, still half blinded, managed a wobbly wave.

I smiled at Katya, sitting perfectly straight and steady between us, talking to herself as she patted down the sand.

‘What do you think? In a minute it might be time to pack up and have lunch?'

I called out to Peter to tell him we were going. He pretended not to hear me. After Christmas he was going to stay with Derek for a month. Derek was having his backyard dog-proofed and he'd bought a kennel. He was taking the whole of January off. Peter had permission to drop in to see his sister any time. She would miss him more than he could guess.

I shook sand out of my towel and folded it. I clenched my teeth as I collapsed the beach umbrella. Our umbrella was old and vicious, and either refused to dismantle itself at all, or did so with such force and speed that I'd frequently had my fingers jammed.

Peter came running up from the water's edge with Fred, and both of them shook cold salty water over us.

I laughed and handed him his towel. I hoisted the swimming bag over one arm and picked up the umbrella, which had for once behaved itself. I enjoyed the tramp back to the clump of trees where we'd parked the car, the trappings and slowings of parenthood. Even Fred's nose pressed against the backs of my knees, announcing that it was dinnertime, didn't bother me. In fact I found myself wishing we could spend the rest of our lives, or at least the summer, on a beach.

I saw the frightened way Peter hugged Fred to him, in this expanse of sea and yellow light. I saw the way his eyes went blank sometimes when I spoke to him. We would be going back to Canberra all too soon for Peter, city of white towers and dark plunging verticals, a town built for men caught on a trajectory of love and duty, young men who had to learn to jump, and then to keep on jumping.

— END —

One

Eden Carmichael died on a hot Tuesday afternoon in January. He was found lying across a double bed at one of Canberra's best-known brothels, dressed in a blue and white flowered silk dress and a blonde wig.

Carmichael's loyal constituents felt betrayed by a death of such robust indignity. Not that he had many loyal constituents left. He'd never fully recovered from a spectacular public heart attack, and was rumoured to be retiring before the next election.

Others, who'd never voted for him, were drawn to the politician's death by a mixture of boredom and revulsion. A photograph had been printed in
The Canberra Times
a few days afterwards, of Carmichael in his flowered dress and wig. He stared at the camera from beneath a mass of yellow hair, one hand clutching the top button of his dress, with a dazed and wondering expression. He could have been drunk. Some of the people who sent protest letters to the newspaper concluded that he was. The most bitter and accusing of them reminded readers how Carmichael had argued that the ACT should change its laws and make prostitution legal, as though being found dead in a brothel was a logical consequence of this, and no more than he deserved.

Others speculated about who had sold the demeaning picture to the paper, whether its publication constituted a breach of privacy, and if it been taken on the day he died. None of these questions was answered in the one editorial the
Times
ran on the subject, which concentrated instead on the issue of freedom of the press.

More interesting questions, to my way of thinking, were: who had Carmichael been mocking that hot afternoon, besides himself? How had the joke of his last moments been shared?

Details continued seeping out, though not ones that threw light on these particular concerns. I wondered if the published photo was the only one that had been taken, and concluded that it seemed unlikely.

Canberra was a small enough city for any untimely public death to be felt personally. Cracks opened in the minds of citizens whose lives had in no way touched that of the Independent MLA. Television interviewers dug out anyone who had, or could claim, a connection with the man, or the club in which he'd spent his final hour, and the subject of prosti­tution, which had received little public attention for a decade, was daily in the news.

I lingered over my breakfast, savouring the quiet, and staring at the photograph, attracted to it as so many others were. I hadn't cut it out, but folded the page over and left it at the one end of my kitchen table cleared of children's clutter.

Carmichael faced the camera squarely. His dress looked neat. It fitted him. He wasn't wearing make-up. The picture was cut off just below the knees, so I couldn't see his shoes. He appeared to be a little nervous, as though he was waiting for someone who'd been unaccountably delayed. There was nothing to identify exactly where he was. It was an arresting picture, though not, to my mind at any rate, a degrading one.

Later that morning, after I'd washed up my few breakfast dishes, and begun work on as dry-as-dust report, one of Carmichael's former ­colleagues at the Assembly rang.

He introduced himself as Ken Dollimore, a veteran of Canberra politics and Carmichael's oldest rival, then asked for my partner, Ivan Semyonov. When I explained that Ivan was in Moscow, he asked me to send him a copy of a report Ivan had written for an anti-censorship lobby group.

‘It's on the net,' I told him.

Dollimore seemed to be waiting for me to catch on to something he hadn't explained, and apparently didn't want to explain.

‘I'm interested in anything additional your husband did for them.'

‘What might that have been?'

‘Oh, come now. It hardly helps Electronic Freedom's image to ­suppress its own research.'

It was my turn to be silent.

‘This company,
CleanNet
it's called, that your husband refers to in his report, it's important to know if there's any further information about them, in informal notes, for example, that haven't yet been published.'

I had no idea what was in Ivan's notes, but I wasn't about to admit this to Ken Dollimore, much less offer to send them to him.

‘I suggest you try Electronic Freedom directly, since you seem confident of their obligation to supply you with whatever it is you're after.'

Dollimore hung up.

I recalled the last occasion I'd exchanged words with the Canberra politician. It was during a case that had ended with a young radiographer at our major hospital being charged with murder. Dollimore had been Health Minister at the time, and had done all he could to block my access to the hospital's records, even those that were supposed to be publicly available. Now here he was expecting a favour from me, and not even bothering to be polite about it.

I remembered that a woman called Lucy who worked for Electronic Freedom had rung Ivan and asked if he'd look into
CleanNet
's history. The lobby group was campaigning vigorously against the Internet censorship legislation that had just been passed, and looking for ways to discredit its supporters.
CleanNet
produced filter software, and the company had put out a press release in support of the legislation and of mandatory content regulation. Hardly a surprise, since they stood to make money out of it.

Ivan had been in two minds about the job, but had finally agreed to do what he could in the rushed couple of weeks before he'd left for Moscow with our three-year-old daughter, Katya.

We'd celebrated our fifth anniversary as business partners just before he left. Sometimes it seemed a small miracle that our consultancy had survived, that we'd managed to go on making a living. ‘Computer security checks—fast, discreet, efficient', our ad in the yellow pages said. Our names were under it—Ivan's followed by a list of diplomas and degrees, mine, Sandra Mahoney, without any such obvious recommendation. Most of our work came from small firms and agencies who wanted to improve their security, or suspected that something fishy was going on, but were unwilling to call in the police. Electronic security was big business. Ivan and I hadn't succeeded enough to expand ours, but we'd hung in there, and that, I told myself, was reason to feel pleased.

I found the report. It was very short.
CleanNet
specialised in blocking technologies for filtering out undesirable material on the Internet—that much I already knew. They were based in Sydney and had begun life as a private company in 1996 with start-up capital of a modest half million dollars, going public with their first share offer just two years later.
CleanNet
looked like hundreds of computer companies, who so far had not made any money, but had managed to attract some reasonable-sized investors on the promise that very soon they would. The world was full of people investing in the Internet. The skill was in picking a winner, or trading on promises, then getting out before the crash, which Ivan said was just around the corner.
CleanNet
was making a play for sales to schools and libraries, and, like everyone else, fighting competition from America.

I didn't know a whole lot about filters, but I did know that the ­technology was at a pretty crude level of development. It might stop six-year-olds coming across couples having sex, but it stopped access to a whole lot of perfectly unpornographic sites as well.

I looked up Ivan's notes, and printed out a hard copy since I couldn't find one on his desk. Eden Carmichael's name appeared in connection with a presentation
CleanNet
had put on last November for Senator Bryant, the Minister for Broadcasting and Telecommunications. Carmichael seemed to have been in favour of
CleanNet
, and impressed by the product they'd come up with. Ivan had listed all the members of the Federal Parliament, and Canberra's Legislative Assembly, who'd been at the presentation, and had checked with a friend of his, who'd confirmed that Carmichael appeared to be giving the company his blessing.

There the notes came to an abrupt end.

It wasn't unusual for politicians to become more conservative as they grew older. There were famous examples, like Winston Churchill and Billy Hughes. But the idea that Ed Carmichael should suddenly take up a pro-censorship position conflicted with everything I knew about him—not least the circumstances of his death. Why that particular switch? Why not a religious conversion, which I was sure Ken Dollimore would have loved, and brought about if he'd been able to?

I was getting ahead of myself. Perhaps Carmichael had been moving away from his small ‘l' liberal views on a number of issues. I recalled the drama surrounding his first heart attack, when he'd fallen over the Blackwood banisters at the old Parliament House, landing just inside the main entrance. I hadn't seen him fall, but I had seen him lying there. Like many others present, I'd thought he was dead.

In order to avoid going back to the report I was supposed to be writing, I logged onto the Australian Securities and Investment Commission website. It was a requirement for all companies to register with ASIC—names and certain basic details, such as year and place of registration, and their directors' names.
CleanNet
had only one director, Richard McFadden.

For more details, it was necessary to pay one of the brokers. I filled in my credit card details, and typed a list of questions.

. . .

A couple of hours later, the answers were there for me to download. McFadden was listed as the major shareholder, but I was disappointed there was so little information about him available under ASIC's rules. Apparently McFadden was not, and never had been, director of any other company, nor did he own shares in any company but his own. Only the top twenty shareholders had to be included in the information that was sent to ASIC. All were fairly minor, underlining the point that
CleanNet
was McFadden's company. The top three were a brewery, a real estate group, and another group called
Herman Marcus Limited
, which was registered with a Canberra solicitor. Carmichael's name was not among the shareholders, nor was Ken Dollimore's.

CleanNet
's website, which I visited next, was a mass of kindergarten colours, big balloons and beach balls with large, naively formed words around them leading to different sections of the site—mission statement, investment news—
CleanNet Is Family Friendly
. The combination of images and words was a curious one, since the product was aimed, not at children, but their parents. What preschool-aged child, the kind I imagined being attracted by red and yellow letters leaning against each other, was going to go surfing for net porn? What person over the age of eight would think the design anything other than condescending? There was something suggestive, almost obscene, about the balloons and their configuration. Collections of swollen testicles, they could have been, or silicone-inflated breasts. I looked for the site designer's name, but couldn't find one.

I did a bit of site hopping between filter companies next. I hadn't realised how much of a censorship debate had been going on at the level of online marketing, with companies out to attract buyers for their products, and their shares as well. Many sites included investment advice and nicely coloured graphs showing beautifully rising prices. Their critics pointed out how faulty the technology was, how clunky and unreliable. The names and addresses of the blocked sites were encrypted, so consumers could never find out exactly what they, or their children, were being protected from, nor were the owners of the sites informed. If you were an AIDS sufferers' support group, and had your site blocked because it happened to contain the word ‘penis', there was no way you could appeal.

No one was answering the phone at Electronic Freedom. They were probably taking a long lunch break at the beach. I looked for any additional notes Ivan might have made, but couldn't find any. Ivan followed his own filing system. You needed to be trained in his eccentric form of archaeology to make sense of it.

Ivan and I shared one house, office, bed and occupation, but the words husband and wife carried too much weight to use, or even think of. A part of my wariness was that we'd both been married before. I'd known early in my first marriage that it wasn't any good, but it had taken me a long time to pay attention to this knowledge, or to act on it, while Ivan had taken years to recover from a failed marriage. Sometimes I suspected that he hadn't recovered at all.

I sent him an email, asking about links between Carmichael and
CleanNet
, and whether he'd come cross any further information concerning
CleanNet
's director, Richard McFadden.

It depressed me that it would be at least six hours before I could expect a reply, and probably longer. Ivan was checking his mail once a day at most. Mentally and emotionally, he was far away from Canberra, concentrating on our daughter and his sisters, re-weaving threads that had loosened almost to dissolving after his parents died.

I admitted to myself that I was wasting time, and might just as well be at the pool. I was doing what I despised others for doing, leaping at any connection with Eden Carmichael to give my day a bit of excitement.

I hadn't chosen to spend most of January alone. I had my son Peter's dog, Fred, for company, but I hadn't planned it this way. I'd intended to spend the time with Peter, while Ivan and Katya were visiting Ivan's sisters. Halfway through last year, Ivan's younger sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She'd had a partial mastectomy and recovered well. Ivan had begun to plan his trip. Then the week before school broke up, Peter's father, Derek, had announced that he and his second wife Valerie wanted to take him to Tasmania with them. There was no question of changing Derek's mind, and Peter had been happy to go. He'd spent the time between Christmas and New Year reading about convicts.