Chapter Ten #2
‘Yes,’ Robert said. ‘I should have the report any minute.’ He said it with more confidence than he felt.
Would Vanessa hold the report back? Use it to get what she wanted in the divorce?
He wasn’t going to make it that easy for her.
No bloody way. He’d find someone else to look at the video if he had to.
‘Great. Well. When you have the report, send it through to my office.’
‘And what . . . in the meantime you do nothing?’
James was unruffled. ‘I’ve already made a formal complaint.
If you want me to kill this case, we can’t go after them piecemeal.
Really we should be holding everything in reserve for a possible trial, but if the complainant has disappeared, we might not even need it.
The best thing you can do right now is keep your head down and wait. ’
‘I want to sue the clinic. The university too, if possible. I want them running scared. And I’m not going to keep my head down. That’s a fool’s game. My reputation will never recover. I need PR now. I need to release a statement.’
There was an infinitesimal pause. ‘You’ve hired PR?’
‘Of course.’ He hadn’t. He didn’t know who to call, how to start.
Vanessa would know, of course, but he could hardly ask her now.
And . . . Christ. Could he afford to pay for it?
They shared bank accounts, sure, but they were transaction accounts; money flowed in and out, it didn’t stick.
Vanessa had a business manager who took care of her investments and the investments were all in her name. That had always rankled.
‘Why don’t you have them call my office,’ James was saying, smoothly. ‘We’ll help them with a statement.’
And then the meeting was over. Robert’s coffee cup was empty.
He poured himself a whiskey, added a few ice cubes from the ice dispenser, and took his glass outside.
He sat on the pool lounger, took a deep drink from his glass, and called Vanessa’s number.
It rang out. He tried again, then again. Finally, he sent her a message:
I’m not trying to get you back, if that’s what you’re afraid of. But in case you’ve forgotten, I’m in the fight of my life. I need to have what you’ve got on the video. Can you please send it through to me as soon as possible?
It killed him to write the please. It physically hurt to write the word.
He hated her. The ease with which she’d left him.
Just picked up and walked out. She’d hire her own PR next, if she hadn’t already.
Some hard-nosed bitch who would pitch stories to weekend magazines about Vanessa’s strength in facing up to the ‘lies’ at the heart of her long marriage.
They’d find photos of Vanessa from the early years, something that made her look innocent and carefree and very young, photos that made an unspoken suggestion that she couldn’t be blamed for marrying an arsehole when she was too innocent to know any better.
Vanessa wouldn’t criticise him directly, but there would be highlighted quotes where she mused on how well one person could really know another, and about the pressure to stay together for the kids.
There would be photographs of her with the boys and everything would be photoshopped to make her look beautiful and pensive.
The fucking bitch.
Robert went back inside and refilled his glass. He took his drink back to the poolside. He called Lachlan.
‘Dad. Hi. Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine. I’m completely fine.’ Robert found that he was laughing.
‘Oh shit. You’re not fine, are you? Look, I’m sorry I didn’t come home last night. Mum was upset. Moving into a new place, all of that. I thought maybe she needed my support. She’s not . . . I mean I don’t know if she’s as strong as you are.’
That made Robert laugh again. Vanessa was titanium strong. Granite strong. She just knew how to cover it with the right amount of feminine charm and faux vulnerability.
‘Listen Lachy. Everything’s going to be all right.
We’re going to prove all of this is bullshit, and shove it up Judith Lee’s arse.
That bitch is out to get me, but I’ve made a complaint to her boss.
She’s not going to get away with this. And I’m going to sue the clinic and the university.
’ He’d have to sell the house to pay for it, he was beginning to realise.
His share would cover the costs of the litigation, but what was left over would buy him what? A shitty CBD flat?
‘Yeah.’ Lachy sounded uncertain. A bit freaked out.
Robert played the last lines of the conversation back over in his head.
Maybe he was speaking a bit roughly. Maybe saying he was going to shove something up a policewoman’s arse wasn’t his usual manner of speaking around his sons.
But Lachy wasn’t a baby anymore, and these were extraordinary circumstances.
‘You come over here,’ Robert said. He stood up while he was talking, and carried his glass back inside.
It was getting cold. He should make a hot whiskey.
Or . . . screw it. He should make a whole carafe of Irish coffee, put on the outside heater and enjoy it on the balcony.
He was on leave, after all, through no fault of his own.
He should make a bloody vacation out of it.
‘You come over here and I’ll order pizza. ’
‘Yeah, okay Dad. That sounds good. Only, it’ll be a bit later, if that’s okay, because I have practice.’
* * *
Robert made his Irish coffee. Memories came back to him, despite his best efforts to push them away.
Moments where he might have—might have—crossed the line.
He wasn’t a saint, after all, had never claimed to be.
But those . . . those encounters . . . they’d been years in the past, when times had been different. When people had been less uptight.
He needed a new lawyer, that was it. Someone really aggressive. Someone who wasn’t afraid to play the game. And then he needed a kick-arse divorce lawyer who would get him a massive settlement. He could take his money to Bali, buy himself a nice villa with a view, and never work again.
Robert drank his drinks, dozed on the couch on the balcony and ate leftovers from the fridge.
He fell asleep, and didn’t wake until after six, when the sun had already gone down and even the blanket and outdoor heater were no match for the cold.
His mouth tasted stale, and his headache was back.
He went inside and got a beer from the fridge.
He was hungry. He should order pizza. Two pizzas. There was no sign of Lachy yet, and no message from him on Robert’s phone, but there was an email from a colleague of Vanessa’s. Craig Wallace.
Craig said nothing at all in the body of the email, just attached a report which, when Robert clicked on it, confirmed that the video was a deepfake.
It was everything he had asked Vanessa to get.
A complete breakdown of the video, explaining how it had been made.
Essentially, whoever had put the thing together had taken original video footage of Robert’s consulting rooms, taken a porn movie and removed the background, then superimposed the performers onto the background of Robert’s rooms. Then they’d almost certainly put existing video of Robert through an AI like DeepFaceLab or a similar neural-network-based tool.
But Craig said that there were temporal inconsistencies in facial landmarks, and compression artefact anomalies that confirmed that the video was a fake, and also indicated that it had been made by someone who had, at best, intermediate-level technical skills.
The report noted that Robert had given three speeches at various mental health conferences over the past five years, all of which were available online.
Robert frowned. Original footage of his office?
What did that mean? Who would have original footage of his office?
And who the hell would go to the bother of making this video, of sending it to his wife anonymously?
Was it that girl, who’d called herself Alexis Turner?
Robert tried his best to remember her. He’d spent forty-five minutes with her, but very little came back to him.
The truth was, she’d bored him with her complaints of anxiety and panic attacks.
He’d heard it all a thousand times before.
Robert sent the report to the printer in his home office.
He carried his beer and his laptop in there, and was just settling himself behind his desk to read the report again when the doorbell rang.
Lachy had finally arrived. Except . . . Lachy had a key and no need to ring the bell.
Maybe he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it was the pizza delivery. Except he hadn’t ordered it yet.
Jesus. Day drinking had made him stupid. Shaking his head to clear it, Robert went to answer the door. No more drinking from now on. He needed to get his shit together.