Meg watched the time stamp in the corner of the screen. Brooke, the nurse who had been working in Jenny’s wing on Thursday, had narrowed down the time of the visit to the hour between three and four.
‘Slow it down, please,’ Meg said, when the time flipped over to 2:50. An extra ten minutes on either side made sense. Each time a person appeared on the screen, approaching the front door in jerky movements, the officer would pause the grainy footage to give Meg a better look.
A middle-aged woman with three kids in tow.
A slight, wiry man pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair.
A young couple, hand in hand.
Meg sighed and waved him on, watching the minutes elapse, devoid of activity, until the clock flicked over to four.
The officer hit stop. ‘Nothing there,’ he said, as though he knew the exercise was a waste of his time.
‘Please,’ Meg said. ‘Please, can we just watch a bit more?’
‘I don’t have all day to sit here looking for someone who might not exist.’ He stood.
‘The nurse may have been mistaken! She said shethoughtit was between three and four. She didn’t say she was certain. Please can we just watch until four thirty?’ She paused, waiting for him to cave. ‘Rosedale management won’t be happy if they find out two of their cameras are broken.’
He said nothing.
‘Did I mention I’m a journalist? I write forNews Day Online.’
He glared at her, sniffed loudly and sat back down. Without a word, he pressed play, then sped through the footage and picked up where they left off.
The timestamp said 4:26 when a man walked into the frame, head down, hands in pockets.
‘Stop!’ Meg leaned forward, straining to make sense of the image, trying to create detail where there was none. ‘That’s him.’
The officer paused the tape. The man was tall and thin with hunched shoulders, like someone who was trying to make themselves smaller. His face was obscured, but there was something about his lanky build that felt familiar. Meg searched her mind but came up blank. ‘Can you move through the frames, please, one at a time? I need to see his face.’
He moved the tape forward, frame by frame.
Come on. Look up.She held her breath, hope sinking. Then, just as he was about to step through the door and disappear, he glanced up, making eye contact with the camera.
She inhaled sharply, leaned in closer. Even the officer seemed to sit up straighter in his chair.
The footage was blurry, but one feature was clear: the black earrings which encircled large holes in the man’s lobes. Ear tunnels, Meg recalled, not sure where she’d heard the term.
‘I’ve seen that guy before,’ she whispered. Where, though? ‘Is it possible to print that?’
The officer hit a button and a printer whirred to life behind them. Meg searched her mind. Was he a friend of Jay’s? She tried to picture some of the losers she’d found asleep on her couch. No, that wasn’t it. The officer reached for the page and put it on the desk in front of her. The image was even grainier in print than it was on the monitor. She leaned forward and took a photo of the screen with her mobile phone.
‘At least you found something,’ the officer said, standing up. ‘I really gotta go.’
‘Thanks,’ Meg said.
She looked back at the printed page and inhaled sharply.
She knew where she’d seen him.
Meg drove towards Rosedale, thoughts reeling. Hopefully her mum would be awake now. Maybe she could shed some light on what had happened—if today was a good day. As Meg waited for a break in the seemingly endless traffic on Parramatta Road, she thought of the strange man. The shady way he held himself, lurking rather than walking, glancing surreptitiously at the camera overhead. What had he said to Jenny? Meg said a silent prayer for her mother to be lucid when she reached Rosedale, even though she didn’t believe in God.
Her stomach churned. She had a bad feeling about this. Something must have scared Jenny. She put a hand to her chest, where her mother’s hands had struck her on Christmas Day. Jenny was scared. That’s why she’d hit out at her. Something in that Pandora’s box of past secrets Meg had wrenched open had terrified her. That’s why she’d gone to such extreme lengths to escape it. She must have been scared again, after the man had left, and frustrated as she tried to tell the nurse.
I should never have taken their money.Those were Jenny’s words, written down by the nurse. What did it mean? If Jenny had robbed the Ashworths, why would they send someone here, now? Why would they care about something that happened such a long time ago? The poor woman was losing her mind, literally, in a care facility. She was no threat to them.
Meg exhaled loudly. First, her room was broken into. Now this. She couldn’t make sense of it. The only thing she was sure of was that it had something to do with her presence in Hartwell.
