‘From the website. I’ve been downloading. On the site, it’s all grainy and low-res, black and white, easy for shuttling through. But the downloads are full colour and high resolution. Like reality TV. And I don’t want to leave it sitting on the site. Too easy for someone to erase it, like the files of Max Fuller.’
Mandy counts the cameras. Twenty-two in all. ‘Quite the set-up.’ ‘Extremely expensive,’ says Yev. ‘They all play back in sync, and you can switch between the cameras, bring it up here.’ He indicates a larger image. ‘Just like a television studio.’
‘Show me,’ says Mandy.
‘Okay. This first bit—this was what I was watching when I called you.’ Yev hits play and all the screens start moving in sync. He’s right about the quality: it’s like watching television. The camera by the front door reveals it to be night-time. Each screen carries a date and time stamp in the top right corner. The early hours of this morning, just after two. Suddenly, lights flare, and the night is repelled.
‘Here we go,’ says Yev.
A man is at the front door, the camera looking down from above. He’s wearing an overcoat with the collar turned up, a scarf covering the lower half of his face, his eyes hidden by a felt hat, his hands in leather gloves; give him a cigarette and it could be Humphrey Bogart.
‘Who is he?’ asks Mandy.
‘Someone who knows about the cameras,’ says Yev. ‘But watch this.’ He cuts to a wider shot, looking along the narrow verandah, just in time to see the man go through the process of unlocking the door. Three keys, three locks. He enters, pausing at a keypad by the door, punching in a code. ‘He’s disarming the internal alarms.’ Before moving on, the man relocks the front door.
‘Where’s the judge?’
‘Inside.’
‘He sets alarms when he’s inside the house?’
‘The nurse does, when she leaves for the night.’
Mandy and Yev watch as the man moves deeper into the house, lighting his way with a torch. The video struggles with the lack of illumination, but the shape of the man is clear enough, trailing the pool of light made by the flashlight. He enters a room, disappears.
‘Toilet. No camera,’ says Yev.
Seconds later the man reappears. He walks back the way he came, entering the lounge, flicking on the lights. Two of the screens flare to clarity, bright with colour, high resolution. The man is now wearing a ski mask. The leather gloves have been replaced with latex.
‘Audio?’ Mandy asks.
‘No.’
The man is moving quickly, with confidence.
‘He knows the layout of the house,’ observes Yev.
‘So where’s the judge?’ asks Mandy again. ‘You said he was inside.’ ‘Here.’ Yev switches to another camera. It’s a bedroom, a grainy black-and-white picture. Mandy can just make out the shape of a man in a single bed. ‘This is as far as I’d watched when I called you. But there is more.’ He draws a breath. ‘It’s fucking terrible.’
‘Show me.’
But Yev doesn’t. Instead he pauses the playback. ‘The intruder searches for almost an hour. Takes his time. He’s methodical, searching the judge’s study and the library. Here …’ He shuttles the video forward. ‘This is interesting.’ The camera captures the man examining a small notebook at a desk, testing passwords on a computer. He pauses, putting on a pair of reading glasses over his mask.
‘Green frames,’ says Mandy.
‘He’s aware of the cameras, but might assume they’re black and white, like on the website. And here …’ Yev shuttles forward again. ‘The library.’ The man is reaching into a cavity. He pulls out some sort of electronic device, like an amplifier or home media computer. They watch as he sets it on a table, calmly opens it with screwdrivers, pulls out a component and places it in his briefcase. ‘It’s the hard drive. He has the recording of the camera feed.’
‘He doesn’t know about the live feed to the website.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What aren’t you showing me, Yev?’
He turns to her, eyes disturbed. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘This.’ He moves the vision forward again, the two dozen recordings spooling forward in sync, different screens flaring as the man proceeds through the house, turning lights on and off. The final two brighten to reveal the judge’s bedroom. Yev brings up one of the screens. The intruder is standing over the bed. He has a gun. He prods the judge in the face with it, waking him.
‘They talk for almost fifteen minutes,’ says Yev. ‘At first it seems almost convivial, but by the end the man starts hitting the judge with the gun, putting the barrel into his mouth. Look here.’
The video moves rapidly forward again. When it stops, Mandy can see the judge’s face covered in blood, his hands up, defence-less. She feels sick in the stomach, an unbearable dread of what is coming next. She doesn’t need to see it, but she needs to know.
‘And then?’
‘And then he shoots him. Three times. And leaves.’
chapter thirty-nine
As the cab drops Martin at Sir Talbot’s Centennial Park home, his phone chirps in his pocket. A WhatsApp message from Yev: Come to shop. Urgent. Martin ignores it, pays the driver, climbs from the cab. He’s not going to allow himself to be distracted from the story again; he doesn’t want Torbett talking to D’Arcy Defoe instead of him.
He walks through the open pedestrian gate and sees the BMW parked outside the front door; Titus must be here. He knocks twice before the door opens. It’s the former judge himself, Sir Talbot, looking less spritely and more bent over than on Martin’s previous visit, as if his grief has devoured him.
‘You came,’ says the old man, an air of vague puzzlement in his voice.
‘Yes, I came,’ says Martin, not knowing how else to respond.
‘Well, I guess you must enter then.’
Martin follows the old man inside the understated home, so different from his own inner-city apartment, as if the quality of Sir Talbot’s furnishings insist on a higher level of neatness and
