computer. The bloke who gave it to me’s very nervous. Can you get rid of it without going back there?’
Orlovsky nodded, sat down at the keyboard and went to work. I went into the kitchen and tapped some water from the earthenware filter barrel, had a sip. It tasted worse than water from the tap.
‘Ready to destroy here,’ Orlovsky shouted from the back room. ‘No last requests? Never have the grunt to run this thing again.’
Glass at my lips. Keith Guinane of Eltham.
‘Try the name,’ I shouted back. ‘Try the subscriber’s name.’
I was in the computer room doorway, when Orlovsky said, ‘Jesus Christ, come here.’
On the screen was the heading GUINANE,
‘Who’s Cassie Guinane?’
Orlovsky clicked on a box. A colour photograph of a young woman appeared, dark shoulder-length hair, a strong face, good looking. She was sitting at a table, wearing a low-cut dress showing a deep cleavage. A dinner party, a celebration of some kind, perhaps a wedding reception or a twenty-first birthday. The people on either side of her had been cropped out but you could see a man’s shoulder and a bare arm.
The text beside the picture said:
‘Any Keith Guinane?’
Orlovsky went back to the menu, clicked
Three names came up:
‘Is this stretching coincidence or what?’ said Orlovsky.
‘Bring it up.’
It took almost three-quarters of an hour to skim the Guinane material in SeineNet, me sitting on a kitchen chair next to Orlovsky. When we’d finished, he made espresso coffee and we sat outside the kitchen door in the late morning sun.
‘Buggered if I can see how this can tie in with the Carsons,’ said Orlovsky.
‘Not exactly your innocent, Cassie,’ I said.
Orlovsky sniffed his coffee. ‘Costa Rican blend. Produced by slave labour, no doubt. She was twenty-four. They found four blokes she’d possibly screwed. That’s not setting any records. For a male, they’d probably have turned up six times that many.’
‘And that would be for an underachieving wimp like you. It’s not the number. Only one of them was under thirty-five. And that was when she was twenty and he was thirty-four. The lecturer was twice her age.’
For a moment, my mind went to a lecturer, a landscape design lecturer. I shook the thought away.
‘Women find maturity appealing,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Real maturity, that is. Men grown out of childish pursuits like playing with guns, playing cops-and-robbers, that sort of thing.’
‘I find that hard to understand,’ I said. ‘Anyway, she liked older men. Which may be hugely significant or mean absolutely piss-all and I’m sorry I raised it.’
‘Hitting on the name when you’re interested in voice systems, finding it in SeineNet, it’s one of those coincidences,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Weird but there’s weirder, much weirder.’
‘Don’t tell me about them. How’s your neighbour?’
I’d briefly met the woman who lived in the other half of Orlovsky’s house. He seemed to be on more than neighbourly terms with her.
‘Gone white-water rafting in New Zealand.’ A pensive note in his voice. ‘With her upper-level management colleagues. Bonding, they want them to bond. Costs the company four grand a head.’
‘Should make them all join the Army Reserve,’ I said. ‘It’s free and I gather they bond like two-pack adhesive. Can’t separate them. After dark, they become inseparable.’
He laughed but it was a duty laugh. ‘I think she may be entering a bondish phase,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘I can’t quite work out what to do. Don’t know where to go from here. If I want to go anywhere.’
This wasn’t standard Orlovsky talk. There was vulnerability in his voice, the way he moved his shoulders, his head.
‘Things can dry up in you,’ I said. ‘That’s the worst of the life. You don’t learn to live with women. You learn to shut them out. It’s not a good way to be.’
We sat in the weak sunlight, a still winter’s day, smog haze building up over the city, drinking Costa Rican coffee. Dun-coloured sparrows who would inherit the earth in partnership with the cockroaches walked right up to our feet. Orlovsky lit a cigarette, exhaled. The smoke hung in the air, didn’t want to fade away.
‘Well, you’d know,’ he said. Barrier up, the standard Mick back in action. ‘Twice married. Unsuccessfully.’
‘You can’t be married twice successfully unless they leave you for health reasons. The first one was just practice. It doesn’t count, shouldn’t be recorded as a conviction. Listen, Mark Carson. He’d be in SeineNet. The missing woman in Altona. Last person to see her.’
We went inside. Orlovsky called up a Find box, typed in
‘Let’s see Jeremy Fisher,’ I said.
We read the transcript of the interview. Jeremy said that he’d heard Mark leaving shortly after the last client left the Altona Community Legal Centre. A matter of minutes afterwards, he thought.
Under the transcript, the interviewer noted that Jeremy had rung him two hours later to say that he’d remembered that after hearing the client leave, he’d gone to the filing room to look for something. It was after he was back in his office that he heard Mark leave. As he’d been away for at least fifteen minutes, Mark must have been in the building for about twenty minutes after his client left.
We went to the investigating officer’s summary. He concluded that Anthea had been abducted while walking from the legal centre to the hospital, a distance she could have covered in less than fifteen minutes. He noted Jeremy Fisher’s change of story but said there was no reason to doubt him. Fisher and Carson denied any discussion of their statements. Carson’s sister, Stephanie Carson, said in a statement that she rang her brother at home that night around 9.30 p.m. and spoke to him. He said he had just come in the door. The timing matched Jeremy Fisher’s revised estimate that Mark left around 9 p.m.
Two days after Anthea Wyllie disappeared, the investigating officer concluded:
There were several more investigation summaries. The most recent review said:
