He rolls his chair through the front door and places the keys on the coffee table along with his wallet and phone. The bag sitting across his lap he drops in the bedroom as seen on camera 2 – 44 viewers. He moves closer to the mirror and assesses himself, combing his fingers through his groomed beard, before running a hand back over his dark crew cut. He finds a pack of cigarettes in his bag and rolls his chair out to the balcony, grabbing his phone off the table on the way. He can be seen on camera 1, through the glass, lighting a cigarette and taking a drag while he looks down at the phone in his hand.

THIRTY-THREE

THE CAR RIDE home is tense, there are no words, no sound other than the voices on the radio and the hum of the tyres. When we are parked in the driveway, we sit as if bracing to step out into a storm, wide-eyed, waiting for the other to do something. Finally he speaks. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what happened at work?’

I shake my head, still reeling. Filled to the brim with an anxious energy that, if I opened my mouth, would bubble out like toxic gas. The radio is quietly playing a song now and when it finishes the news starts. It’s dark outside the windows, I find my gaze lingering on the front of our house. He asks again. I turn to him, my head already shaking. ‘I don’t know, Cain. I couldn’t tell you. Not with everything else.’

… the psychologist was apprehended at the train station in Melbourne…

I tune out the news story.

‘And you called him Daniel? It just seems odd, Lina.’

‘I froze up. Forgot his last name.’ It’s a lame excuse but it seems to do the trick because now he says, ‘Oh well. Twenty grand, and we did what we went there to do. Nothing we can do about it now. I actually feel kind of relieved. Like we can move on at last.’

Inside, Cain goes to the bedroom to call Axel.

I climb the stairs to listen in.

‘You’re probably right,’ he’s saying, his voice quiet. ‘It just seemed like an ambush at times. The same thing happened with the Skelton stuff. They just seemed to know.’

A pause.

‘No,’ he says. ‘She barely touched upon it and didn’t mention Skelton, we’ve got nothing to worry about.’

Another pause as he listens.

I press the door open, and he turns to me. The unmistakeable look of guilt etched in his eyes. He’s still listening to Axel.

‘Hey, I’ll have to call you back,’ he says into the phone.

‘You’ve got nothing to worry about?’ I say.

‘Sorry?’

‘You said, “We’ve got nothing to worry about.” What did you mean by that?’

‘Oh nothing just…’ He pauses, swallows.