The Redactor, Chapter 03

 I didn’t sleep well over the weekend. Neither could I read to battle the insomnia. It felt like a month had passed when I got to my office Monday morning.

  I was still holding my briefcase, with the key in my office door lock, when a secretary collared me.

  “Did you hear the news?”

  “No. What news?” Why was I smiling?

  “Rhianne Goldman was attacked last week. One of our students.”

  “Rhianne?” I said, conscious of my lungs hauling air.

  “Pretty young thing, on exchange from Santa Fe. Doing journalism.”

  It leapt out of my mouth before I could shut the gate: “Does Rhianne have red hair. Big breasts?”

  The secretary’s hand went to her own ample bosom and fluttered.

  “I—” I said, wracking my brains for words that would patch my reputation. Couldn’t find any. Hang it. “Well? Does she?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And, I suppose she is ... quite well proportioned.”

  “Big?” I said, and gestured for emphasis.

  She shook her head and strode back along the corridor.

  I closed my office door, flung my briefcase down, and booted my computer. Within minutes I was scrolling through the university’s student database looking for two contact numbers. One each for Hieronymus E. Beck and Rhianne Goldman.

  I found both, and scribbled them in my diary.

  I turned to the phone on my desk, then hesitated. Which to call first?

  The cautious half of my brain thrust my hand toward the receiver, and loaded my fingers with Rhianne’s number.

  A male voice answered. “Yes?”

  “It’s Jack Griffin. I wanted to speak to Rhianne.”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “No, no—professor of literature. Rhianne is a student of mine. I wanted to see how she is.”

  “Traumatized. Why don’t you call again next week.”

  “No—it concerns her degree. It could impact her visa. I must speak with her. I’ll be brief.”

  There was a silence, then the rumble of a receiver being put down.

  A minute later a girl’s voice said, “Hello?”

  “Rhianne, you don’t know me. But I’m a professor at the University of WA.”

  “You’re calling about my visa?” she said uncertainly.

  “No. That was a lie, but please don’t hang up.”

  More silence. Then, “What do you want?”

  “This will sound crazy, but I need to know if you know who attacked you.”

  I heard rustling, and then a wet, sniffing sound.

  When Rhianne finally spoke, it sounded laboured. “I can’t talk now. I have to go—”

  “Please don’t hang up,” I said, louder than intended. “Just tell me if you saw him. What did he look like?”

  Just tell me he was five foot nothing, or weighed twenty stone, or had dark skin.

  She hung up.

  I replaced the receiver, leant back on my chair, and raked my hands through my hair. I screwed my eyes up and watched the firework patterns wriggle in the dark. When I opened them again my gaze fell on a whiteboard beside the door. Half of its surface was covered in a tangle of green marker—a mind map for my novel that was in permanent gestation. The other half was the schedule of my contact hours for the semester just finished. Lectures and tutorials were blocked out of a grid representing the week.

  The sight of that grid usually depressed me. It said, students. It meant work. Tunneling for coal in dark minds.

  But today it prompted a different chain of thought. Students—always joking around. And Heiro, the biggest joker of all.

  Then it was as if a great filter had been yanked from in front of the sun. The light spilling through my window suddenly blazed whiter.

  It was all one big joke. A last pull of the professor’s chain before Heiro left for home.

  And I’d swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

  A smile spread over my face, and seemed to loosen my muscles in a wave from neck down.

  Definitely Hollywood.

  Rhianne had to be in on it.

  And the paper? said the cautious half of my brain. The police?

  The room plunged back into gloom.

  I wasn’t thinking straight. With a glance at the portal in my office door, I trundled my bottom drawer open, and retrieved the bottle of Johnny Walker stashed there. I unscrewed its lid and took a nerve settler.

  Before I replaced it, I held the bottle to my eye and with a shock, noticed it was almost empty. The cleaner must have found it. It was the first bottle I’d put there, and that was only three months back.

  I called the second number.

  No answer. Hieronymus would be gone, home in San Francisco. I wanted to talk to his host family.

  I looked up his record again in the student database and scribbled the address on a post-it note. Some instinct made me record Rhianne’s too.

  Quarter of an hour later I was pressing the doorbell of Hiero’s billet.

  Someone was home. There was a family mover parked in the drive, and its hatch was open.

  I heard footsteps thump on a wood floor and the door swung open. A girl of about ten years stared up at me, but before she could speak a woman, evidently her mother, appeared and shushed her away.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Hi. Sorry to bother you. Did you know your car hatch is open?”

  “Ohhh,” she said, then shouted over her shoulder, “Renae!”

  She smiled at me and stepped out onto the porch. I walked beside her to the car. She tugged a bag of shopping from the boot and slammed the hatch.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem. You must be a glutton for punishment—big family and an exchange student.”

  Confusion wrinkled her forehead.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “Hiero Beck, the American exchange student billeted here? He left Saturday?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Perhaps you have the wrong address?”

  “Perhaps,” I said, and had a struggle keeping the smile on my face as I took my leave.

  I sat in my car for a long time, staring at the family mover parked in the drive, without seeing it. My fingers drummed on the steering wheel, until calm stole over me.

  Enough prancing around. I needed to take an axe to the root.