‘Right. Yes. Of course.’ Now she gets it; he’s using her as a conduit.
‘What’s your email address? I’ll send it to you.’
She hesitates. Does she really want to give him her email? ‘Why don’t you just AirDrop it to me?’
‘Sure. We can do that. And then we’re done, you got me? Otherwise we both crash and burn.’
‘Agreed.’
A few minutes later she’s back in the fresh air, filling her lungs, but there is no relief, no cleansing, as if the Turtle has pulled her down to his level. She knows what happens to sex tapes: they spread across the internet like a Blue Mountains bushfire: flaring and spotting and destroying lives. But unlike bushfires, they never truly go out; there’s no cloudburst big enough to extinguish them. They smoulder deep down, like mallee roots or peat bogs, always threatening to burst into life, wreak new havoc. They’ll be everywhere, and they’ll still be everywhere as Liam enters preschool, and they’ll still be there when he catches the bus to high school, and they’ll still be there when he’s an adult. They’ll still be there when she and Martin are old and grey and decrepit. She needs to give the police the video, but she needs to tell them she received it anonymously.
She finds herself on the platform at the light rail stop, deep within a sandstone cutting, where once she would catch her tram home from work. She has stumbled there by instinct, following her old route without realising it. She takes a seat, watches a tram arrive on its way from Dulwich Hill to Central, disgorge one set of passengers and ingest a new load, and leave again. She doesn’t rise, doesn’t attempt to board it, she just stares.
The video. The Turtle knows she’s taking it to the police, must know she’ll show it to Martin. He must know that he risks identification, interrogation. So why give it to her? Why insist on anonymity? He could always claim to have shown his superiors—Clarity Sparkes, possibly Harry Sweetwater—back when Tarquin first disappeared. Maybe he did, at that. Yes, she concludes, he probably did. They would have slowed it down, established the passwords Tarquin had used. Zelda’s and whoever else was implicated. But not hers; Tarquin hadn’t asked for her replacement passwords. He’d used her desk, but not her log in. It makes sense: that’s what exonerated her. They must have seen it.
She thinks it through. If the video had gone up the line, helped management to accuse Tarquin of larceny, what then? They brought criminal charges against Zelda Forshaw. The video was critical evidence, him typing in her passwords. Surely the police must have seen it. But if she could identify the man entering the lift as Henry Livingstone then surely the police would have done the same, back then. The man was notorious; Montifore had even known his brand of hair oil. The thought makes her shiver: the police had seen Livingstone, a convicted killer, enter the lift, yet the accepted wisdom was that Tarquin had got away with millions and fled overseas. Could Vandenbruk be right? Could the police and the ACIC be complicit? Jesus.
Another tram eases in to the platform, heading in the opposite direction. Still she remains seated, still she stares. She can feel her imagination starting to career away from her, her own runaway tram. She tries to stop it, tries to organise her thoughts. The video. It all comes down to the video.
She pulls out her phone, finds the clip, plays it. The date stamp identifies it as the last day Molloy was seen alive, the Friday when she was already on the Gold Coast. The stamp could be fabricated, she knows that, but she doesn’t doubt its authenticity: she knows she’s watching Tarquin Molloy’s last moments of freedom. Of life. The thought sends a shiver through her. Again she watches him saunter across the trading floor, moving to her desk, as if nothing could be more natural. She’d never known that, that he’d used her desk. Why? Why use her desk but not her log in and passwords? Was he trying to implicate her or protect her? Maybe neither. Perhaps he needed a computer on the trading floor, one accessing the same servers as the traders. Was that why he’d lured her to the Gold Coast, to make sure her computer was free? Was it that simple?
She watches the video. Tarquin reaches down by the side of the desk. That must be him inserting the flash drive. It makes her remember: the drives on her computer were disabled, a security measure. So how had Tarquin managed to use it? He must have had help. Or the computer skills to activate the drive. Training. The police would have been able to supply that. She watches the screen. His confidence is high; he doesn’t even look around to see if anyone is watching him. And now he is tapping at the keyboard, although the camera is too far away to identify what he is typing.
She pauses the video, overcome by a new realisation. This is the wide-angle version, showing much of the room. The Turtle has not given her the close-up. Of course not; he doesn’t want anyone to know about the spy camera he installed above her desk. And he doesn’t want her to slow it down and work out what passwords Tarquin did use. She pauses the video and unfolds the slip of paper he gave her again. Passwords all right, but probably of little use.
She starts the video again. It runs for twenty minutes, with Tarquin typing for less than a minute here, less than a minute later, and again a third time. At one point he leaves the desk altogether, walking away, coming back after
