ISOBEL THOUGHT ABOUT Joss as she scribbled shorthand. Her direct boss was updating the senior partners on their world domination progress since the last monthly meeting. His account was longwinded, as always. When he finally sat, she stretched her cramping fingers and peered through the rain at the bridge.
From the boardroom on the twenty-third floor, Sydney Harbour was typically a gaudy showgirl, but this morning she seemed to have gathered her shawls around her to hide. The mist rendered the wide window a mirror, and Isobel caught her boss, Bob Shields, staring at her in the glass as she watched the rain. She dropped her eyes back to her notepad and held her pen as a pointer, pretending to read over the notes she had taken.
Instead, she worried about her husband. This morning she'd felt the return of the impenetrable emotional barrier he'd brought home with him from Rwanda. For eighteen months after his return from deployment, Isobel had felt she was living with a different man, a soulless robot who ate and drank – a lot – but had no ability to relate as a human. She'd missed her best friend. But then when the barrier had eventually started to come down, she'd almost wanted it back. Joss had spent months alternating between angry tyrant and melancholy drunk. Isobel had used humour and reason, patience and sex to forge brief moments of connection with the man she'd married. But with Charlie's birth she finally felt him come fully home to her. She'd woken from her first sleep after the eleven-hour labour to find him leaning over her. One look in his eyes had told her.
'I missed you,' she'd said. 'Where've you been?'
'You've only been asleep an hour,' he'd smiled, smoothing her hair from her face, his mouth almost touching hers. 'I've been here the whole time.'
'Yeah? Anyway, welcome back.'
But this morning he was a soldier again: his body in the kitchen, his mind guarding the wire. She wondered whether he was correct about the man at Andy's. She prayed he was just being paranoid. That monster couldn't be the guy he'd grown up with. Could he? She flipped a page in her notebook and stared at the name. Henry Nguyen.
Finally, the meeting was drawing to a close. Isobel forced herself to remain seated until the first of the group left the boardroom before joining the others making their way through the doors. She swallowed her impatience as the two men ahead of her stalled in the doorway to make a final inane joke, the more junior of the two throwing his head back and braying falsely. She'd almost reached the end of the corridor when she felt a hand touch the small of her back.
'You seem a little distracted today, Isobel,' Bob Shields said, close to her ear. 'I'm not giving you too much work to do, am I?'
Isobel kept walking, aiming for the bright hallway flanked by offices outside the boardroom. She worked hard to keep plenty of people around when she talked to her boss.
'Well, yes, as a matter of fact,' she smiled, facing him, her back to the wall. 'I think I'll go to lunch.' It was 10.30 a.m. She strode purposefully in the direction of her office.
Shields's loud laughter followed her. 'I expect the Donatio report on my desk this afternoon,' he called to her back.
She waved her arm in reply. She wasn't sure how much longer she could bear working for that sleaze. She'd known about Shields's reputation for wandering hands before she started working for him – everyone knew – but that didn't make it any easier dealing with the man. She knew she could take it to antidiscrimination, but she wasn't ready to give up working in the legal industry just yet. Though he wasn't her direct line manager, Andy Wu looked out for her, and would assign her duties that kept her away from Shields whenever he could. She shuddered, remembering the last time she'd seen Andy, and wondered how the hell Lucy was bearing up. She and Joss should go out to visit her soon, she thought guiltily, but they had to get on top of this new threat first.
At last she reached her office, shut the door, and began the searches that made her services so highly prized round here. It wasn't the Donatio file she was working on, though. The name she typed into her search engines was Nguyen.
As always, she started wide and worked her way inwards. The Vietnamese name was one of the most common, and the programs hauled in thousands of hits. She narrowed the fields continually, honing in on his approximate age, geographic location, the nickname 'Cutter', and other small details she'd gathered from Joss. She roughly sifted court reports, quickly discarding mismatches and corralling possibilities to explore more carefully later. She downloaded Freedom of Information applications for credit reports, lease agreements, criminal record history, insurance claims, motor registrations, phone contracts, Medicare and Centrelink records. For the average person, these applications could take months to process, but there were back-entrances for certain groups: finance and insurance institutions, various welfare departments, lawyers acting on behalf of their clients. For her job, Isobel had carefully cultivated contacts with some of the most powerful people in the country – the clerks who held the records to personal information.
She started to dial.