The White Tower Read Online Free

sweet things.
    I knew he couldn’t understand why I wanted to take on cases, involve myself in the misfortunes of strangers.

Three
    A crumpled arm half hidden by an angel’s head, a leg twisted at a crazy angle—the body in the centre of the photograph looked like a doll, a clumsily made toy that had been tossed in a heap by some giant child tired of playing with it. Given that Niall had planned his suicide, had taken pains to get the computer graphic right, had spent time, presumably, deciding on the best position, it made sense that he’d also thought about creating this impression of abandonment.
    Why? To make his parents and everyone who’d known him feel guilty? To haunt them? Had this been his intention? What about his fellow Heroes in the Castle?
    In the police photographs taken to establish the position of Niall’s body, the base of the Telstra Tower was a grey smudge in the background. If you didn’t know what it was, it could have been any building, anywhere.
    I fetched my hard copy of the castle scene and placed it on my desk beside the photographs. In key respects, the similarities were so strong they had to be intentional.
    In both, the body was lying face down, yet favouring the right side. The position of the limbs was different. The twisted right leg of the computer image was, in the police photographs, hidden underneath the body. Yet the overall impression—black clothes, grey background, long bright hair—was the same. The young man who might just be sleeping.
    Cold fingers danced along my spine. I was seeing what to the police must have been obvious. Niall’s real death was a clever copy of his virtual one. He had died, in actuality, as he had already died in his imagination. The photographs captured the last twist of a play within a play. Niall Howley had scripted his suicide and the performance had gone off without a hitch.
    I set aside the distance shots, and the next one hit me between the ribs.
    In the photographs I’d looked at so far, Niall’s face and the front of his body had been concealed. The earth at the base of the Telstra Tower was hard—baked, unyielding Australian earth—but its impact had been hidden. The first close-up shot showed the side of Niall’s face and head squashed to an unrecognisable pulp, his hair dark with blood. Blood ran from what remained of his right eye and nose. There was no right ear. Bits of cheekbone poked through skin that the ground had torn away. His right hip and leg seemed disconnected, as though his clothes covered a body not just broken, but cut up into bits.
    There were a number of differently angled close-up shots, the main purpose of them being to catalogue Niall’s injuries. I wondered who had seen them apart from the police, the pathologist and coroner, whether Niall’s parents had asked to. I felt a scarf of responsibility slip itself around my neck, a scarf that might remain loose and comfortable, or might tighten of its own accord. I’d felt so pleased with myself telling Ivan about my new case, sounding important to Brook on the phone. It hadn’t taken much to pull the plug on that.
    I sat back and looked out my office window. I’d been in such a hurry to see the photographs that I’d practically grabbed the envelope from Brook when he arrived with it. In spite of what he’d said to me, in spite of trusting him to pull whatever strings were necessary, I’d woken up afraid that he’d turn up empty handed, or ring and say, ‘Sorry mate. No dice.’
    Before I went to bed the night before, I’d packed away the files from my last job, a routine one for the Industry Department, and my desk was clear apart from a vase of flowers. I kept hard copies of my reports and notes in a double filing cabinet. The office was at the back of the house and offered an uninterrupted view of a trampoline and rotary clothesline. When I lifted my head from my work, I