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.
TWENTY-EIGHT
SURVEILLANCE
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.
I hit play again and watched the two men argue on the balcony. Merrin pointed his finger into the big man’s face and then Moon Face’s hand went over Merrin’s mouth, trying to silence him. They struggled for a moment, Merrin pushing Moon Face back before the big man shoved him very hard. Merrin went over the railing and I saw the back of the larger man as he looked over the balcony for a few seconds, then he turned and walked quickly across the apartment, directly towards the camera. I could hear his footsteps in my mind, the way I’d listened to them last night. I paused again and looked at him. Silver hair, double chin, wide, waxy face like the moon. His eyes were heavy, dark, wrinkled sockets. He looked like a banker or the head of a company. I did not need to zoom in. It was him, the cop.
Harry Garner had known this would happen, had expected it. He had surveillance footage of the death of another crime reporter. But he had not been around to see it. Why had he not taken his laptop with him today? I scanned the interface of the video surveillance program. I went into Preferences and, under ‘General’, a box had been ticked: ‘Stream to Cloud’. I figured this meant that Harry could watch this footage from somewhere else. From everywhere else. ‘Stream to Cloud’ also meant that Harry had wi-fi here, which really annoyed me. I’d been going mental all this week without the web and he’d had it all along.
Who had set the cameras up for him? This was a pretty sophisticated system for a guy as tech-phobic as my dad. Unless he was the world’s greatest actor and liar and secretly he was a tech-genius, which seemed pretty unlikely to me. He had tried to help me set up my Xbox when I first arrived and he was hopeless. Someone had installed this system for him. Someone from the Herald? The woman he met at the bakery? I wondered how they got the cameras into the other apartment. In comics and movies, surveillance experts broke into apartments all the time, but I had never thought about it happening in real life.
I had everything I needed to identify the perpetrator of this crime. My phone screen finally came alive. There were three texts from Mum and seven missed calls. Another text buzzed in as I went to my messages. She said:
What trouble? What’s
happened?
Sam?
Why won’t you answer
the phone? I’ll come
right now.
Getting in car. Please text
me back so I know you’re
okay.
There was a knock on the front door of the apartment. Only quiet, but it felt like a shotgun blast to my heart. I pocketed the phone, clicked the laptop closed and slipped it into my backpack.
‘C’mon, girl,’ I whispered. I dragged Magic up by her collar. She snorted and grunted, then sneezed. I led her to the hole in the wall. She tried to refuse but I lifted her front paws and then her wide behind in and I pushed her into the narrow cavity, down to the right. She growled as I slid her along and I felt bad but it was for the best. I would give her snacks later to make up for this. If there was a later.