Malice Read online

  Instead of picking up the pen, Boges had swung round, grabbed my little radio from the bookshelf, tuned it to FM, switched it to Mono and turned up the volume. An unearthly squeal filled the room as he approached the desk where the pen lay.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ Ryan yelled.

  ‘Commonly called a “squealer”,’ said Boges. ‘Otherwise known as feedback detection, or loop detection. Watch this.’ As he moved the FM radio closer to the black pen on my desk, the squealing sound became more high-pitched.

  ‘That pen?’ I asked, incredulous.

  Boges nodded, bringing the little radio right in close to the pen. The squealing became unbearable in pitch. ‘That’s your bug. Take a closer look.’

  I lifted the pen out of its stand. It seemed like a normal pen with a screw-off lid … until I looked really closely. ‘Boges! Turn that radio down. It’s deafening!’

  ‘Sorry!’ Boges grimaced. ‘But take a look at the top of the lid.’

  ‘It’s tiny! It’s like a little bead. It’s even smaller than the one I wore around my neck at Sligo’s dinner! I can’t believe it! It’s been sitting right here on my desk, watching everything I did. That means they’ve seen you installing your camera, Boges. The whole thing’s been a waste of time. They know we’re onto them!’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Boges said. ‘This kind of bug looks like an audio transmitter. I doubt it’s got the capacity to do visual surveillance as well. In any case, I’m going to check every room now.’ Boges took the radio and his notebook with him. As he left, the squealing sound faded.

  9:44 pm

  We waited, looking from one to the other nervously. Boges finally came back shaking his head. ‘I’m not picking up anything anywhere else in the house. So it’s just this bug in your study.’

  I looked around wildly. ‘Why? Why on earth is someone spying on me? I don’t have anything that valuable, and anyway, why didn’t they just steal whatever it is they wanted when they were in here?’

  Ryan jumped off the desk that he’d been sitting on, his face lit up. ‘That means it must be something that’s not obvious. Something they couldn’t find.’

  ‘Makes sense, dude,’ said Boges, warming to the idea. ‘But that doesn’t narrow it down enough.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Cal said, ‘maybe it’s a document that they’re after, you know some valuable share certificate or bank document or something. Could be something in this huge pile.’

  I went to check the stack on the right-hand side of the computer and I suddenly stopped in my tracks. ‘Look! The Perdita folder … it’s gone! It was just there sitting on the top of the pile. You saw me put it there yesterday after I’d found it at the bottom! I even put this on top of it!’ I said, holding up a glass paperweight. I started racing round the room, even though I knew I hadn’t put the file anywhere else, searching desperately, pulling books out, throwing cushions and papers around, hurling drawers open, going through their contents.

  It was true. We looked everywhere, but the Perdita folder was nowhere to be found.

  ‘They were after that information!’ I yelled. ‘My diary had been opened at the page where I mentioned the Perdita file! And I can’t believe I helped them find it. I made it easy for them. I could kick myself!’

  I grabbed up the spy pen and yelled at it. ‘OK, you thieving criminals! You listen to me. We’re onto you. We’re coming after you and I’m going to get my Perdita file back, so you’d better watch out!’

  ‘Very impressive, Winter,’ said Boges. ‘But my bet is that nobody is even monitoring that bug anymore. They already got what they wanted. Save your breath.’

  ‘Why were they after Perdita?’ Cal asked. ‘And we still haven’t found out who the Drowner is.’

  ‘And are they related?’ Ryan asked. ‘Or just two different kinds of weird?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know?’ asked Boges, as we all swung round to look at him. ‘The Drowner is besties with Perdita,’ he said, keeping a straight face. ‘We’re chasing down the perfect mystery couple!’

  Ryan punched his arm before I could. ‘OK, Mr Clever. Where do you reckon we start?’

  ‘I’m thinking, I’m thinking. Give my brilliant brain a chance to work it out.’ He picked up the spy pen. ‘This is cheapskate stuff. You can buy it in electronic shops. They’re not really used by professionals—but I guess they didn’t want to risk putting in something better. Winter could have walked in on them while they were installing something more sophisticated.’

  ‘They think they’re just dealing with a bunch of kids,’ said Ryan, ‘so they’re just using kiddie stuff?’

  ‘I hate the thought that some thief was sneaking around my study,’ I said, shivering. ‘It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘Well, the good news is their observation post would have to be very close by,’ Boges said. ‘This signal wouldn’t carry very far.’

  ‘Continue please, Sherlock,’ I commanded, rallying from my shock and anger. ‘Where exactly are you heading with all this?’

  ‘I’m heading … somewhere very local. They would just need a car … or a nearby shed.’

  ‘So,’ I said, slowly, ‘we should search around my place?’

  Boges turned to me. ‘Noticed anything unusual in your street lately? Any cars that seem out of place?’

  ‘Now you mention it,’ I said, slowly, ‘there has been a dodgy-looking van parked across the road for a few days. I remember it because it had an Irish sticker, Beautiful Kilkenny, on the back window.’

  ‘Let’s check it out,’ Boges said.

  I grabbed my torch.

  Two minutes later, the four of us were standing around an abandoned old van parked on the high point of the hill in Mansfield Way. There was a large towing notice stuck to the windscreen. I did a quick check up and down the street, then deftly dealt with the lock on the driver’s side.

  Swiftly, I unlocked all the other doors. ‘Ballet and art weren’t the only things I learned living with Sligo,’ I muttered.

  I switched on the torch and ran the light across the front seats of the van as Boges slid in for a closer look.

  ‘Look at these newspapers—they’re just from the last couple of days,’ he said, moving across into the driver’s seat. ‘Someone’s been sitting here reading and doing a lot of crosswords.’

  Ryan and Cal flung open the rear doors and crawled into the back of the van. ‘OK,’ Ryan said. ‘Let’s turn it inside out, see if they left a calling card.’

  ‘There’s nothing much in the back, I’m afraid,’ Cal called out as they rummaged around. ‘Any luck up front?’

  There was a plastic bag hanging off the gear stick as a makeshift rubbish bin. Carefully, I tipped out the contents onto the passenger seat. Three empty plastic sandwich cases had ‘packed on’ dates that suggested the spy had been monitoring my place for at least three days. This did not make me feel any better. There was, however, no empty case with today’s date.

  ‘You were right, Boges,’ Ryan said. ‘He didn’t need to listen anymore because he’d found the file.’ Normally, Boges would’ve grinned and said something like, I’m pretty much always right, but today, what with everything that had happened, he let the joke go.

  ‘Hey, look at this!’ I yelled, plucking something from the corner of the floor mat near the accelerator. I held it up. A Triple Mint chewing gum wrapper, balled up in exactly the same way as the wrapper in my study.

  ‘Snap!’ said Ryan. ‘This has got to be our guy. Is there anything else in that plastic bag?’

  ‘Only some ripped up paper.’ Boges spread the pieces out. We could see that there was writing on it but it had been torn up over and over.

  ‘Let’s go back to your place,’ Cal said, ‘and see if we can fit these pieces of paper together. Look at what we’ve got.’

  ‘OK. I want to find out how this person got into my house,’ I said angrily. ‘And make sure they can’t ever do it again.’

  We checked every door and window of my plac
e. It didn’t take us long to find the weak spot. One of the laundry windows was just a little open at the top and there were dirty finger marks along the top of the dusty frame. ‘He’s been coming in and out through here,’ I said, ‘and I thought that window was locked. It definitely is now.’ I closed it firmly and locked it. ‘I’ll lock the laundry door too, just in case.’

  We sat around the glass-topped coffee table in my living room. ‘Let’s try to put this paper together,’ I said. ‘It looks like something from a business notepad.’ Eventually, we fitted the pieces back together like a jigsaw and got sticky tape to hold it all together. Someone had scribbled:

  ‘It’s the job description, the job he was doing,’ I cried. ‘Spying on me!’

  But the best thing of all was the small print running along the bottom of the notepaper: Mulligan Business Services, Shop 21, Liberty Mall.

  ‘I’m pretty sure U/C means “undercover”,’ Boges said. ‘Tomorrow we’ll practise a little surveillance of our own, on Mulligan Business Services. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find a few answers.’

  ‘But why is this P. Smith paying money to spy on me and get hold of the Perdita file? Who is he? Is he the Drowner?’ No-one could answer my questions.

  ‘Are you going to stay here tonight, Winter?’ Cal asked, his face still creased with concern.

  ‘Yep, now we know my spy has gone, I’d rather be home … but thank you,’ I said, squeezing his hand.

  DAY 3

  28 days to go …

  Home

  Mansfield Way, Dolphin Point

  8:02 am

  I was going to meet the boys at Liberty Mall. Cal and Boges had a free period on Monday mornings, and Ryan’s class was at the local library working on group assignments—he didn’t think he’d be missed. Being homeschooled had its advantages. As long as I got my assignments done for my tutor, I could organise my time pretty freely.

  I grabbed a coffee and an apple, my mind going crazy trying to work out what the warning about the Drowner and the theft of the Perdita folder could mean. I got nowhere. I needed more information—much more.

  I paused in the hallway near the big stained-glass front door where a small half-circle table held a photo of me and my parents, taken about a week before their deaths. They look so happy—and so do I, smiling up at my dad. On the way out of the house, I touched the picture softly, whispering, ‘Hi there, Mum and Dad. Look after me?’ They smiled back at me.

  I grabbed my jacket and a beret, automatically checked for my locket around my neck. I was ready for anything.

  Mulligan Business Services

  Liberty Mall

  8:43 am

  The four of us hurried towards the escalator that took us up to the first level of the mall. The information map displayed Shop 21, Mulligan Business Services. ‘Look!’ I said to the others as we stepped off the escalator, ‘that coffee shop is Shop 18. We’re close!’

  Mulligan Business Services turned out to be a small shopfront, sandwiched between a solicitor’s office and a florist.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Ryan.

  ‘We wait and we watch,’ Cal said.

  ‘What about some hot chocolate while we do that?’ asked Boges. ‘You know how boring surveillance can be.’

  The small cafe was noisy with people having breakfast and coffee. We sat at a table with a view of the door of Mulligan’s through the leaves of the shiny indoor plants that shielded cafe customers from passers-by. A couple at the next table made loud remarks about people who should be at school, so Boges started giving a totally incomprehensible lecture on quantum mechanics and we all nodded along wisely, as if we knew what he was talking about.

  9:52 am

  As we kept watch through the leaves, we finally saw a stout man, wearing rimless glasses, an open-necked shirt and sports jacket, walk up to the front door of Mulligan’s. He unlocked the door, pushed it open and walked in, leaving the keys dangling in the lock.

  ‘For someone who breaks into other people’s houses, his own security is rubbish,’ muttered Ryan from across the table.

  ‘Hey, look!’ said Cal. ‘He’s come back out and closed the door, with the keys still in it. Don’t look now … he’s coming in here!’ As the man stood at the counter, waiting behind a few other people to give his order, I kicked Cal under the table.

  ‘Now’s our chance! Quick! We’ve got a few minutes while he waits for his coffee. Ryan, you stay here and watch. Don’t let him go back into his office until we’re out of there. Delay him if you have to. Cal, Boges, let’s go!’

  Leaving Ryan at the table, we hurried out of the cafe and dashed over to the closed door with the keys hanging in it. No-one was taking any notice of us, everyone too busy hurrying to work. The key turned easily and we darted inside.

  It was a small one-room office, with a desk, a couple of chairs and some filing cabinets.

  ‘We’ve gotta find that file, guys,’ I said, turning my attention to the filing cabinets. I tugged on the drawers but they were locked.

  The desk had a heap of folders on it, none of them mine, and what looked like a two-way radio system. Cal was searching the shelves above the desk and Boges was working his way through the drawers on the right-hand side of the desk while I turned my attention to the drawers on the left.

  Cal’s phone buzzed. ‘It’s Ryan,’ he hissed. ‘The guy’s digging in his pockets to pay up. We’ve gotta get out of here!’

  I doubled my speed. The first thing I found was a handwritten cheque for $1,500 with an illegible signature. Although unreadable, something about the writing seemed familiar and I wondered where I’d seen it before.

  ‘We have to leave now!’ said Cal. ‘There’s no other way out of this place. And he probably knows your face, Winter.’

  I pulled open the last drawer. There it was, my Perdita folder! I snatched it up, bashing the drawers closed. Boges had done the same as Cal straightened the files on the shelves and the three of us hurtled towards the door. We cracked it open and peeked out. There Mulligan was, only a few metres away, outside the cafe, talking to Ryan. Any moment he might turn around and see us coming out of his office.

  ‘Come on!’ I hissed, pushing the boys out the door. I pulled it closed until I heard the lock click. Seconds later, the three of us strolled innocently past the detective who was still talking with Ryan, and around the corner.

  I caught snatches of conversation: ‘… best to finish school … private investigator’s licence … quite a lot of law … ’

  A few minutes later, Ryan caught up with us. ‘That was close,’ he grinned. ‘I had to practically block his way and pretend that I was desperately interested in becoming a private investigator. His name is Arnold Mulligan. Did you get the file?’

  ‘You bet,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  I couldn’t wait to get home and have a look at the Perdita file, but the others had to go to school. They made me promise I’d wait until they were free later in the day.

  To keep myself from peeking, I went to the library to research an assignment that Miss Sparks had been hassling me to hand in.

  Home

  Mansfield Way, Dolphin Point

  4:14 pm

  I heard Cal’s motorbike outside and I put the folder down on the dining table where everyone could see it. A few minutes later, Boges and Ryan turned up too. With everyone crowded around, I slowly opened the folder and looked at the first page, my heart beating with excitement and apprehension. There had to be something interesting in this file for someone to have paid to get their hands on it.

  ‘Looks very legal, whatever it is,’ said Cal, looking over my shoulder. ‘Looks like title deeds or something.’

  At first, it didn’t make any sense and I felt disappointed. It was just some boring old legal document. What had I been expecting? But as I read further, it started to become clear.

  I looked at the others. ‘Perdita isn’t a person,’ I said, ‘it’s a property—a house!’

&nbs
p; ‘Must be some kind of mansion—worth squillions—for someone to go to so much trouble to steal the deeds!’ Ryan said. ‘Maybe they were hoping that you would never know about it, with the masses of paperwork you had to go through. I’ll bet it’s a palace with amazing bathrooms and swimming pools and tennis courts and a helicopter pad on the roof.’

  ‘And a Lear jet parked in the huge driveway!’ Boges added, catching Ryan’s enthusiasm. ‘You can take us for a ride, dude,’ he said, turning to Cal.

  ‘I’m going to google it,’ I yelled, running upstairs. It didn’t take me long. ‘Hey! I’ve found the house. Come and have a look!’

  The others leaned closer to the picture on the screen of my computer. I zoomed in on the property but I could only see a tiny bit of the roof because it seemed to be surrounded by lots of trees. Perdita stood by itself at the end of a long headland, quite close to the edge of an escarpment. When I zoomed back out, I could see waves at the bottom of the cliff and the beach running along the coast.

  ‘That must be Deception Bay,’ I said. ‘Wonder why it’s called that?’

  ‘Looks like a really fantastic spot,’ Boges said. ‘Pity we can’t see the house clearly.’

  ‘It’s heaps overgrown, but it could be awesome!’ said Ryan.

  I turned to the boys and gave them a wide smile. ‘So who feels like a road trip?’

  DAY 7

  24 days to go …

  Cal’s House

  Flood Street, Richmond

  5:53 pm

  The week crawled by and I hardly saw the others. I tried to take my mind off everything by working on my assignment and looking forward to dinner with Cal’s family before he left for flight school.

  Finally Friday night came, and I arrived just as Boges and Ryan turned up. Ryan had brought flowers for Mrs Ormond and we enjoyed her meal of spaghetti bolognese, followed by a chocolate mud cake I’d made for the occasion.

  ‘Will you be a real pilot when you get back, Cal?’ Gabbi asked.