morning. It seemed not even all this technology could stop them getting through.
'So.' He pushed his chair back a little from his screen and looked at her. 'What did you think of Isobel Rymill?'
'She seemed even more nervous than her husband,' she said.
Gabriel pulled a USB flash device from his pocket and plugged it into his terminal, where it began downloading a large document. 'Anything else?' he asked, eyes back on his screen.
'Well, I noticed clusters of deception signals.' The words she'd learned from him yesterday seemed cumbersome.
'And they could mean…'
'She's hiding something. It could be guilty knowledge, something shameful, or the truth. She might be lying to us, or just holding something of importance back.' Jill felt half-curious and half-annoyed by this oral examination.
'Exactly.' He nodded and smiled slightly.
She waited for him to add something. He seemed delighted by their exchange, but as she had come to learn, he didn't always conclude his train of thoughts aloud.
She waited while he clicked on some icons on his screen, and a computerised drone started up from the terminal as it obeyed his commands. Suddenly he reached straight across her and used the mouse for her computer. His back touched her chest and her mouth was almost on his neck. She pushed her chair backwards, startled by his abrupt invasion of her space, but he continued what he was doing without heeding her movement.
'Just saved the audio MPEG to my machine,' he said, straightening up and turning to face her. 'Remember I told you that if I heard the anonymous caller again I was sure I would know her?'
Jill stared at him, the realisation raising the hairs on her arms. 'Isobel Rymill – she was the one who called and told us to investigate Henry Nguyen?'
He didn't answer, and she watched as he used the program he'd opened to compartmentalise parts of the recording they'd made of Rymill earlier that morning. He created a series of digitised sound bites and lined seven or eight of them up next to the file that held the recording of the anonymous tip-off. He then opened another program and opened two of the files with it. When he pressed 'Enter' the drone of the computer kicked up a notch. Almost immediately a coloured graph and readout appeared on the screen.
'Ninety per cent match,' he said, white teeth flashing. 'Not bad, considering the distortion from the phone call caused by her covering the receiver.'
'Wow,' said Jill, leaning close over Gabriel's shoulder. 'Where'd you get this voice recognition software? I don't think we've got anything that good at work.'
'I know. It's amateur hour in there. What are you gonna do?'
'So, we've got a clear new line of inquiry,' he continued, opening another program. 'We need to know everything about Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill, and we need to know why they so desperately want us to investigate Henry Nguyen.'
Joss had thought his day at work would never end, but he was surprised at how quickly he'd slipped into robot-mode and completed his chores for the day. He'd brushed aside the concerned comments about the fading bruises on his face, and left the office at 4.30 p.m. exactly. He called the house phone, knowing Isobel would not yet be there with Charlie – tonight Charlie had dancing lessons – and left a message indicating that he would not be home for dinner. Then he turned his mobile phone off and caught the lift down to the employees-only gym. He changed out of his work clothes and shoved them into his backpack. Imagining Isobel's face when she saw the clothes, he took the trousers out again and folded them neatly.
He went to the weight rack wearing a singlet and shorts and loaded fifteen kilos onto the hand weights. He moved rapidly through six sets of fifty bicep curls, dissociating through the pain, then hit the showers. He held his face under the water, eyes open, breathing in the steam.
He could see only Cutter.
He changed into jeans, a dark tee-shirt and runners. And for the second time in two days, Joss went back to his old world. He caught the train from Central to Cabramatta. Isobel had grudgingly told Joss the things she'd learned about Henry Nguyen.
'I don't see why you need to know this stuff,' she'd protested. 'The police have it now.'
In Cabramatta two days before, he'd visited a medical centre. Isobel had found Cutter's medical records and they showed monthly visits to the centre, mostly on Thursday afternoons. The timing was about right, but Joss, waiting at a bus stop directly across from the front door, had seen no sign of Nguyen. He'd had no firm plan as to what he would do if he did. All he knew was that his life had changed completely since the home invasion, and he was not going to let it fall apart without doing everything he could to stop it.
He considered staking out Cutter's grandmother's house. When they were kids, he, Fuzzy and Esterhase had dropped Cutter there at around five one morning using a car they'd stolen the night before. Half asleep, they'd driven the car over a couple of streets and dumped it at a soccer field before walking home. Joss remembered that he'd helped his drunken mum from the lounge up to her bed before he'd gone to bed for the rest of the day. He shook his head. What a way to grow up.
He decided against the trip to Cutter's old home. He could think of no obvious information he could get from the family at this point. It was unlikely Cutter still lived there anyway. Joss needed to know more about his associates – who he hung out with now. Maybe he could find out the name of the arsehole that'd stood on his head at Andy Wu's house.
He got off the train at Cabramatta station and the smells of his past slapped him in the face. The area had been predominantly Italian when he was a kid, but since then Asian, and particularly Vietnamese, communities had been steadily migrating to the suburb. Now, most shop signs were in both English and Vietnamese. The rest were in Vietnamese only.
He made his way to the pub closest to the station. Back then, he and his friends had sold stolen watches and cameras, typewriters and aftershave to the patrons of this pub. It could be that some of the old crew still came here.
The ground felt gummy out the front of the hotel. Because of too many broken heads from the bashings and paralytic falls, the council had replaced the pavement with the rubber material used in children's playgrounds.
Joss left the last of the warm twilight behind him and stepped inside the pub. Like most hotels, it was always the same time once you entered those doors. Ten a.m. or midnight, it all felt the same, with the aim of aiding the punters to forget the troubles of the outside world, kick back for a while, lose some more money.
Cigarette smoke already impregnating his tee-shirt and whispering its way down his lungs, he took a seat at the end of the main bar, facing the door. Determined to ask for a light beer and sit back to sip it slowly, he found himself instead ordering a schooner of full-strength VB. Ten minutes later he asked for the same again and for two packets of chips. He hoped the grease would counteract some of the alcohol.
Tragedy performed a series of vignettes around the hotel. A woman sat with two men, her features sliding off her face with her lipstick, gazing with naked desperation from one man to the other as they spoke the inscrutable language of the drunk. Her expression altered to one of begging appeasement when she had their attention. He twice watched her flinch when one of the men moved his arm suddenly to sneeze, to make a point.
A bloke in the fluorescent shirt that was the uniform of unskilled labourers kicked his workboot in disgust against the base of the poker machine he was feeding. When he stood up from his stool, Joss was surprised to see he looked no older than twenty or so. He made his way to the front of the room, but instead of leaving, he withdrew two fifties from the ATM near the door. He returned to his stool, slid in a note, his jaw slack, his eyes on fire, as though he was watching pornography.
A wizened man laughed into his glass on a stool next to Joss. A section of greasy hair that had long abandoned its comb-over position slipped in and out of his beer as he drank. The bald spot on his head was beaded with sweat, despite the refrigerated air. A dark area at his groin signalled that he'd found the trip to the toilet a waste of good drinking time. He's probably a digger, thought Joss, draining the last of his beer. The thought made him want to order another, but he figured he'd use the toilet instead. He swayed a little when he got off the stool.
He splashed his face with cold water before leaving the bathroom.
