The price of her forgiveness

THE MAIN IN THE CAP

Chapter 8: The Man in the Cap

Kaelia's 

Mack Delaney held the note between two fingers, tilted it toward the window, and said, "Cheap paper. Cheap printer. Whoever sent this wanted to scare you, not impress you."

"It worked," said Jett.

"It was meant to, yes." Mack slid it into a plastic sleeve with the care of a man who'd done it many times. He was sixty, with a retired policeman's squint and a shirt that had never met an iron. "People who want to hurt you don't write notes. They just do it. A note means somebody wants you to stop."

"Stop what?" I said.

"That's the question."

We were in the back room of a pie shop in Surry Hills, because Mack didn't trust his own office. The air smelled of pastry and hot fat. His laptop sat on a stack of flour sacks. Jett perched on an upturned crate with a sausage roll he hadn't touched. I stood, because I couldn't sit.

I'd rung Thea from the car. It had gone badly.

"The email came through a board portal," she'd said, in the clipped voice that meant she was angry at herself. "The name on it was Gideon Marsh. I told them nothing, Kaelia. But they'd already guessed it was a woman. He wrote her. Twice."

Marsh. A fifty-two-year-old with expensive watches and an eleven-year board seat. I'd read his name in the papers at my kitchen table.

"Could he have found me himself?"

"With enough money, anyone can find anything." She'd paused. "But if he knows it's you, he didn't get it from me. And I'd stake my licence on the accountant."

"Then who?"

"I don't know," Thea had said. "That's what bothers me."

"The building has cameras," Mack said now. "Lobby, lifts, corridors, carpark. The manager owes me a favour. I kept his nephew out of prison."

"What did the nephew do?" asked Jett.

"Stole a boat."

"What kind of boat?"

"A big one." Mack didn't smile. "Let's see who's been visiting Level 9."

The footage was black-and-white, shot from high in a corner of the lobby. Marble floor, security desk, a revolving door spitting out office workers in bursts. He scrubbed through the hours until I said, "Stop."

At 5:48 on Wednesday evening, when the lobby was nearly empty, a man had come through the door. Medium height, medium build, grey jacket, navy cap pulled low, a courier's satchel across his chest. He didn't glance at the guard. The guard didn't glance at him.

"Walks like he belongs," Mack murmured.

He tapped a card at the turnstile. Green light. The barrier opened and he went through without breaking stride, a man who'd done it a hundred times or had practised until he looked it.

"Where'd he get the card?" Jett asked.

"Stolen, cloned, borrowed." Mack followed him to the lifts. "Floor nine at 5:51. Three minutes and ten seconds in the corridor."

On the next screen the man crouched at my door with his back to the lens. One hand went into the satchel and came out with a white square, and slid it under the door. A small neat movement, like posting a birthday card. Then he stood and turned, and for half a second the camera caught him almost side-on.

"Freeze it."

The cap swallowed most of his face. I could see a hard jaw, a flat nose, a mouth pulled straight. Forty, maybe fifty. A face you'd pass in a hundred lifts and forget before the doors opened.

"There's nothing there."

"There's always something," said Mack. "Let it run."

The man walked back toward the lift, and as he moved, I saw it. A hitch in the left leg. Barely a drag, but steady, a half-beat behind the right, like a metronome.

"He limps," said Jett.

"A little. Good. Limps are hard to hide."

It took two more hours. I paced until the shop owner came through to ask if we were buying anything, and Jett, out of embarrassment, ordered four more sausage rolls. Mack worked through three friends and a favour, pulling city cameras one by one, tracking the man backward and forward through the afternoon like a thread through cloth.

The man had left Martin Place on foot, caught a bus on Park Street, and got off near the Barangaroo reserve at 6:34. Mack lost him for twelve minutes in a crowd, found him on a bank camera, and followed him along a long pale concrete plaza.

"He's going to the towers," I said.

I came around behind Mack's chair and gripped the back of it. The camera was angled down from a building of glass and steel, thirty storeys, with a curved canopy over the entrance. A name was cut into the stone at the edge of the frame in clean silver letters.

VANCE.

My breath stopped.

The man walked through the main doors. He bypassed the visitors' desk and the public turnstiles, crossed to a smaller entrance on the side, and nodded to the guard. The guard nodded back, easy, the way you do for someone you see every day. The man touched his card to a panel. A second set of glass doors slid open and he was gone.

Mack froze the frame. None of us said anything for a moment.

"That's the executive entrance," he said. "Staff only. Top floors."

"So he works there," said Jett.

"Or someone gave him a card that does."

I let go of the chair. My hands were cold.

"He didn't just deliver a note for someone," I said. "He walks in and out of Lachlan's building and nobody stops him."

"Two thousand people work in that tower," said Mack. "You can't walk in and ask."

"I know."

"Then what are you going to do?"

I looked at the grey figure paused at the threshold, half a step from the light. I thought about a voicemail. I thought about someone who'd listened to that man say I'll say it more and then picked up a pen.

"Nothing," I said. "I keep buying."

"Kaelia." Jett stood so fast the crate went over. "They know your name. They know your office. They left a threat on your floor. Listen to yourself."

"I'm listening."

"Think about Wren."

"I am." My voice shook, and I let it, for the first time that day. "Every second. That's why I can't stop. If I stop, they win, and they keep hiding, and one day they come for her and I'm not standing in front of her. I won't live like that."

The oven timer pinged out the front. Mack slid his laptop shut like a man leaving a room without moving his feet.

Jett breathed out through his nose. "Fine. Then we do it properly."

"Meaning?"

"My mum goes up to Palm Beach and stays. Two guards on the gate, twenty-four hours, whatever it costs. Nobody takes Wren anywhere you can't see. And you don't walk around alone. Not to the shop, not to the car, not to the bathroom if I can help it."

"That's insane."

"That's the price."

His jaw was set. His eyes were furious and terrified and wet, and he was being very careful not to blink.

"Okay," I said. "Your terms."

He let out a breath like a man surfacing from the bottom of a pool. Mack coughed. "I'll set up the guards today. Triple rate."

At the door he stopped. For once he had no dry remark. He looked at the note in its sleeve and then at me.

"Miss, whoever's doing this has planned it a long time. You don't build a card like that overnight. This isn't a jealous ex or a rival. It's someone with patience, access, and a reason worth waiting for." He left. The bell clinked.

Jett stayed where he was, hands in his pockets, studying the floor. "I wasn't trying to boss you."

"You were absolutely bossing me."

"Fine. A bit." He scuffed his boot on the tile. "I watched you carry this alone for three years, Kael. I'd like to carry some of it. That's all."

"Then carry the stupid stuff," I said. "Doors. Guards. Sausage rolls."

It almost made me laugh. It got as far as my throat, and stayed there.

I turned back to the screen. In the glare off the glass door I saw something I'd missed, because I'd been staring at his face. A lanyard. It had been tucked into his collar, but walking had pulled a corner loose, a thin strip of fabric in a colour I'd seen exactly once before, on a board paper I'd read in my Palm Beach kitchen.

Gold.

"Jett." My voice came out small. "Gold means senior executive."

"So?"

"So he didn't borrow somebody's card. Someone senior walked him in."

The man in the cap stepped through the door of Lachlan's tower. And whoever had held it open was still in there, a few floors above Lachlan's head, waiting.