No Place Like Home Read online

  About the Book

  Shortly after 9.30 am, a young man walks into Surf City, Bondi’s newest shopping complex.

  He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie — and a bomb around his neck.

  Just a few minutes later he is locked in a shop on the upper floor. And trapped with him are four innocent bystanders.

  For police chaplain Paul Doherty, it’s a story that will end as tragically as it began. Because this is clearly no ordinary siege. The boy, known as Ali Khan, seems as frightened as his hostages and has yet to utter a single word.

  The seconds tick by for the five in the shop: Mitchell, the talented schoolboy; Mouse, the shop assistant; Kimmi, the nail-bar technician; and Roger Callaghan, the real estate agent whose reason for being in Bondi that day is far from innocent.

  And of course there’s Ali Khan. Is he the embodiment of evil, as the villagers in his Tanzanian birthplace believe? Or an innocent boy, betrayed at every turn, who just wants a place to call home?

  Praise for Caroline Overington

  ‘Potent, dramatically assured and thought-provoking fiction’ Saturday Age on Sisters of Mercy

  ‘Brilliant, original, heart-breaking. I couldn’t put it down’ Mia Freedman on I Came to Say Goodbye

  ‘A gripping and emotional tale of love and marriage’ Australian Women’s Weekly on Matilda is Missing

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Postscript

  Reading Group Questions

  Also by Caroline Overington: Can You Keep a Secret?

  Ghost Child

  I Came to Say Goodbye

  Matilda Is Missing

  Sisters of Mercy

  About the Author

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  CAROLINE

  OVERINGTON

  No Place

  Like Home

  For Helen

  Chapter One

  I can’t have been in bed for much more than an hour when I heard what sounded like a woman screaming. I wasn’t particularly worried, mainly because it wasn’t a particularly loud or frantic scream. Also, the sound was coming from my bedroom, so I knew it couldn’t be coming from a real woman. I might have been a normal, red-blooded heterosexual man but I’d never had a woman in my bed.

  The obvious explanation was that the sound was not a scream but a ringtone, and that it was coming not from a woman but from my mobile telephone, somewhere under the pile of clothes on my bedroom floor.

  Just so you know, I wouldn’t personally set my ringtone to sound like the shower scene from Psycho but I had spent the night on the streets with some kids who would certainly have done so. I was in those days employed as what’s known as a ‘chaplain’ – technically, that means I was a priest, linked not to any particular parish but to the New South Wales police force. One of my key responsibilities was to spend every second night serving Cup-a-Soup to kids in the Cross. Most were as tough as nails – they’d have teeth rotten down to the nerve and they’d treat it with alcohol – yet still innocent enough to take my phone when I wasn’t looking and change the ringtone to something like a frog croaking or a duck quacking or, in this case, a woman screaming; probably in the hope it would go off during mass and embarrass me.

  In any case, I groped around on the floor for the phone, hoping that whoever was calling was somebody I could ignore, but it wasn’t. The caller ID – don’t you love that invention? – showed that Superintendent Wolfgang Boehm of the Bondi Local Area Command was on the line. I figured I’d better answer.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Are you awake, Father?’

  I was tempted to say, ‘Please, Wolf, it’s Paul,’ but I’d tried to get Wolf to call me by my first name before. It was never going to happen: Wolf has old-fashioned values. He’d have called his teachers by their surnames, and he was never going to call a priest anything other than Father.

  ‘I am now,’ I said, meaning of course I was awake; I was answering the phone, wasn’t I?

  Wolf said, ‘Can you come to Surf City?’

  I don’t mind admitting that my first thought was, ‘You have got to be kidding.’ Surf City is the name of a shopping centre near Bondi Beach but I guess I knew Wolf wouldn’t be asking me to go for a spot of breakfast at the food court or anything like that.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t give you all the details now,’ he said, ‘but somebody’s taken hostages.’

  I said, ‘Taken hostages? Where?’

  Somewhat impatiently, Wolf said, ‘Here, at Surf City.’

  Now, Surf City is no run-of-the-mill shopping centre. As befits Bondi, it’s luxurious. It went up on vacant land near the beach a few years ago. The public – by which I mean locals – tried to object, saying they didn’t want shops down behind the sand dunes. There were already enough people coming to Bondi on the weekends without attracting more. It would force out long-time residents, who were already struggling to pay the rent.

  They lost the argument, and then something strange happened: Surf City went up and locals fell in love with it.

  I can’t say I blame them: as shopping centres go, Surf City is pretty good. It’s cool inside in summer; it’s quiet and glamorous. It’s got four floors of what they call ‘boutique shops’ – little shops that sell pointless things – and an ‘artisan baker’, a butcher with an old-style wooden chopping block and a shop that sells only tea leaves. I’m sure you get the picture.

  The idea that somebody would try to take hostages at Surf City was intriguing. Like most shopping centres, it’s got more security than an airport terminal and there’s a police station not three blocks away.

  I said, ‘That doesn’t sound too smart.’

  Wolf said, ‘It probably isn’t that smart. Can you come over? I don’t have a good feeling.’

  Now, when a police officer tells the police chaplain that he doesn’t have a good feeling – well, that was all I needed to know.

  I said, ‘Give me ten minutes,’ and Wolf said, ‘Thank you, Father.’

  I moved quickly, picking my pants up off the floor and dressing in the clothes I’d worn the night before. I fished around in the bowl I kept on the kitchen bench for my wallet and keys, and made my way out the front door of my flat. I’ve owned it for years. It’s cream brick and pretty run down but in a good position on the beach. Of course I didn’t pay for it. Priests don’t earn that kind of money. It was given to me by my sister, Ruth. She died when I was twenty. I remember the conversation we had about her intention to leave it only to me, and not to any of
our seven sisters.

  ‘I’m doing this because I think you’re crazy,’ she’d said.

  I was in the seminary at the time, so it wasn’t like she was the only person saying so. Plenty of the blokes I’d gone to school with were saying much the same. It was ‘the celibacy bullshit’ – that’s how Ruth put it – that she didn’t understand; the idea that anyone would willingly go their whole life without having any sex was, to her, bonkers.

  She said, ‘I’m leaving you the flat in case you change your mind.’

  She’d lived in it alone for lots of years, having inherited it from her husband. He’d been killed in a workplace accident – something to do with a horizontal saw – when Ruth was still fairly young herself. She never got married again. She had no children, either. She smoked instead, and drank, and enjoyed her parties, gambled on the horses, and said things like, ‘I had a husband once, and once was enough.’

  For a long time after Ruth died I didn’t really use the flat, mostly because by then I’d become a priest, attached to various parishes, and when you’re the local parish priest, you have to live in the house they give you, whether you like it or not. It was only in 2005, when I quit being a parish priest and became a chaplain, that I moved into the flat. Chaplains don’t get a house.

  Living alone didn’t come easily: for the first time in my life I didn’t have a housekeeper. I had to keep reminding myself to run the vacuum cleaner around. I probably still don’t keep the flat as clean as my mother would like but my mother’s never going to know that, just like she’s never going to know that I’ve now left the priesthood. She’s 100 years old, and thinks she’s twenty-one.

  In any case, Ruth’s old flat – my flat – is on the fourth floor of a five-storey building with no lift, which means that when I’m in a hurry I’ve got to run up and down the stairs. I don’t mind; keeping fit is something I’ve always liked to do.

  I appreciate that not everybody knows what a police chaplain does. They might see one at the scene of a car accident and assume we are there to counsel the public. In reality, we’re there for the police.

  The fact that Wolf had called me out to Surf City suggested to me that he thought police might get hurt at Surf City that day or that they’d be traumatised by what they might see.

  I took the stairs two at a time, muttering a bit as I went because it was raining harder than it had in months. I hadn’t bothered to pick up an umbrella, mainly because the last umbrella I bought – a cheap one – was last seen in the bin, nose down with bent arms.

  I was also trying to remember where I’d parked the car. Ruth’s flat – I’m sorry, I’ve never been able to stop calling it that – doesn’t come with a car space – probably because, when it was built, Bondi had trams. A car space in Bondi is today like gold. I remember once telling Wolf that after I knocked off from serving soup to street kids at 6 am, I’d have to drive home and circle the streets of the neighbourhood, trying to find a parking space.

  On this particular day, I had parked in the public car park opposite Bondi Beach, about 500 metres from my front door.

  I thought, ‘Well done, Paul, you’re a genius – you’re going to have to run across to that car park and, in the process, you’re going to get soaked.’

  Lucky for me, there was an old tan bomber jacket hanging on a hook by the building’s front door. It had been there for something like a year. Nobody seemed to own it, and I figured it wouldn’t matter if I borrowed it for a while. It smelled of cigarettes and there was mould growing around the collar but that was okay; I wasn’t planning to wear it. I was planning to throw it over my head while I made a dash for the car.

  Once behind the wheel, I turned on the radio. I was hoping to find news of the siege. That wasn’t difficult. All the main stations were carrying it. Through the hammer of the rain on the car roof, I heard one after another say, ‘Shoppers are being warned that there’s a major police operation underway in Bondi. We’re hearing that an armed gunman has stormed through Surf City, and police have had to shut the whole place down.’

  I had no way of knowing it at the time but that wasn’t accurate. What actually happened was this:

  Shortly after 9.30 am on the day in question – 18 April 2011 – a young man with a pockmarked face had walked into Surf City via the main entrance on Bondi Road.

  He was wearing faded denim jeans – so faded they were almost white – and he was wearing them in that way that young people tend to wear their jeans these days, with the waistband hanging low enough to show off the elastic band on his underpants, and the back pockets halfway down the backs of his legs.

  Some people have said that he was barefoot but he wasn’t barefoot. He actually had canvas shoes on his feet, brand name Vans. They might once have been white but were now grey. His jeans had frayed along the hems, so he was trailing dirty cotton tendrils across the marble floor. He was also wearing a grey hoodie. He was about to cause havoc.

  I’ve heard people say, ‘Why didn’t management stop him?’ But stop him for what? The young man – let’s call him Ali Khan since that’s the name he was given, even if it’s not the name by which everyone knows him – didn’t look any different to anyone else who happened to be walking into Surf City at that hour. It had been raining all morning, so he was hardly alone in having the hood of his hoodie up. There was no hint of what lay ahead – not for him, not for anyone. That’s not the way life works. You don’t get warning of the things that will change you. They come out of left field.

  Chapter Two

  Surf City is supposed to be a posh shopping complex. To that end, it doesn’t have what you and I might call an information desk. It has what it calls a ‘centre concierge’ – who, on the day of the siege, took the form of a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the Australian School of Hotel Management whose name was Zoe Handler.

  Zoe’s job was to sit up high on a swivel stool behind a desk, near the front door. To her right was a vase of white flowers; to her left, a small bowl of mints, individually wrapped in blue and clear cellophane. If shoppers had queries, such as where to find the baby changing room, she could help.

  Zoe hadn’t been at Surf City very long, and she wasn’t particularly interested in the work. Like most of the centre’s young concierges, she had taken the job because she was hoping it would lead to a better job, further up the management chain.

  She wasn’t the only concierge on duty on the day of the siege, either. Surf City has got a concierge near every entrance but, by chance, Zoe was stationed closest to the door that Ali Khan walked through. Footage from the centre’s CCTV cameras – there are roughly 4000 of them, including at least three in every shop – shows Zoe was dressed in the Surf City uniform. Whoever designed it obviously wanted to make the shopping centre concierges look like the concierges at a five-star hotel. The uniform comprised a knee-length skirt with a matching blazer and sensible, polished shoes. She had her hair tied up in a bun like airline stewardesses wear their hair. Her make-up was flawless, her jewellery discreet.

  I probably don’t need to tell you that Zoe was attractive.

  There’s no question that Zoe noticed Ali Khan when he walked into Surf City. The CCTV footage from six of the nine cameras pointed at her desk shows her looking up from whatever she was doing – fiddling with her iPhone, probably – to glance at him as he came through the door. The fact that she did so – glanced at Ali Khan, I mean – would later take a whole day out of the coronial investigation into the siege at Surf City.

  ‘What was it about Ali Khan that made you look up?’ Coroner Ian Hanrahan wanted to know. ‘Was there something, maybe, about the way he moved . . . or about the way he smelled?’

  Twitching nervously in the witness box, Zoe said that she couldn’t really explain it.

  ‘I promise that I didn’t notice anything funny about him,’ she said. ‘I was as surprised as anyone to get called up here (meaning, to testify at the inquest) because I can’t honestly remember looking up. I mean, I can see
from the footage that I must have. Maybe his sneakers made a squeak on the floor? Or maybe I was actually looking at something else? Because, I mean, looking at him, he looks just like a normal kid. I definitely don’t remember seeing him.’

  In any case, Ali Khan walked past Zoe, and he walked past the Westpac bank, which was to his right, as he entered Surf City. He kept walking past several other shops, all the way to the base of the escalators. He passed at least thirty people on the way. As far as anyone knows, none thought that he looked particularly strange or, as the coroner would later suggest, that he smelled any different to anyone else.

  Upon reaching the escalators, Ali Khan proceeded to ride them, one after the other, until he got to the fourth floor. That is as high as you can go at Surf City, and it was only after he reached that floor, stopped riding the escalators and started to run that people began to notice him, and that makes sense, doesn’t it? A young man with his hands stuffed into his pockets, his hoodie up and his pants almost falling down is one thing. A young man taking off across the top floor of shops, slipping and sliding in his worn shoes on the marble – that’s bound to get attention.

  Like most new shopping centres, Surf City is built around a central atrium. The shops are on one side, the gap in the middle. When Ali Khan first started to run, it was in a clockwise direction, meaning the shops were on his left, and the atrium on his right. He passed, in this order, a shop that sold cheap fashion for teenage girls, a wax-and-nail salon called Cute Nails, a loose-leaf tea shop and a homewares shop, before turning sharply into a bike shop called The Bondi Cruiser.

  I mentioned earlier that I’m a man who likes to keep myself reasonably fit. It’s a habit I got into back when I was in the seminary, still struggling with what Ruth called the ‘celibacy bullshit’. I would try to run off what were called ‘the urges’. It didn’t always work. Later, when my knees got bad, I switched to riding bikes. That didn’t always work, either. All that said, I’d never had cause to go into The Bondi Cruiser – not before the day of the siege at Surf City, and not after, since it’s now closed (that had nothing to do with Ali Khan; The Bondi Cruiser just went broke).