The Distant Home by Tony Morphett

went for their jugular veins. The wise ones took one look at her eyes, and took Kate seriously in the way a sensible person might, for instance, take a female leopard seriously.
    Today, Kate was in the mood to be taken very seriously indeed. The twins were her only niece and nephew and she loved them very dearly. Anyone giving them trouble was about to experience deep pain. Anyone locking her niece Sally up and not allowing her to see her parents was about to experience positive agony.
    As they entered the lobby, Bobby was bringing her up to speed on the situation, and then Kate was moving across the lobby to where Maria and Jim were sitting.
    They saw her coming and stood, smiling. ‘Kate!’ Maria threw open her arms and embraced her sister.
    ‘Where have you been?’ Jim was asking Bobby.
    ‘Is it true what Bobby tells me?’ said Kate, ‘that you’re not being allowed to see Sally?’
    ‘I was getting Auntie Kate on the job,’ Bobby explained. ‘This IS unlawful imprisonment, they’ve got her held hostage!’
    Jim nodded. He should have thought of calling Kate himself.
    ‘Point me to them,’ said Kate in the clipped voice she used when she was about to do something very positive and often very spectacular. Jim pointed the way and Kate walked briskly over to the desk clerk.
    As she did so, Bobby turned to Jim. ‘Can I have the keys to the car, Dad? Something I need.’
    Jim handed the keys to him, his eyes on Kate and the desk clerk.
    ‘My name is Giovanelli,’ said Kate in that same clipped voice. ‘I’m an attorney representing the Harrison family. I have already spoken by phone to a judge in chambers, and if the Harrisons don’t see their daughter in the next ten minutes, I will be back with a court order in half an hour. At that point anyone standing in my way will be in contempt and is going to feel like a bulldozer hit them. Say if you understand me.’
    Only half an hour before, Bobby had left the private room where Sally was being kept captive, going out the way he had come in, through the air-conditioning duct. Sally had then replaced the wire grille, and waited.
    She had not had to wait long. Soon after Bobby had cleared the room, Dr Chambers had arrived with the nursing sister and a man and a woman Sally had not seen before. ‘Ms Forbes and Mr Soulos want to run a few tests on you, Sally,’ Dr Chambers had explained.
    ‘Are you doctors?’
    Sally had asked the black-suited man named Soulos, but it was his black-suited woman partner who answered. ‘I think that’s on a need-to-know basis, don’t you, Sally?’ the woman had said with a twitch of the lips which on a good day might have done duty as a smile.
    ‘I guess you’re not doctors then,’ Sally had said, and her eyes had shifted from the bulge just below
the left shoulder of Soulos’s comfortably cut suit jacket to the similar bulge in Ms Forbes’s jacket. ‘Since you’re wearing guns,’ she had added.
    Forbes had looked at her blankly and then snapped open her briefcase. Soulos had already opened his and they had begun getting out their equipment.
    Now Sally was sitting in a chair, hooked up to a machine which read, among other things, her pulse rate, blood pressure and breathing. She suspected that what she was hooked up to was a polygraph, a lie detector. She had read about them, knew how they worked, but had never experienced one before.
    Forbes and Soulos were now testing the machine’s readouts.
    ‘What’s your name?’ said Forbes, asking a simple question to which they already knew the correct answer.
    ‘Sally Maria Harrison,’ said Sally. Then asked, ‘Is this a polygraph machine? I’ve never seen one before.’
    Soulos did not answer, but simply marked the chart. Then across the room, the phone on the bedside table began to ring. Dr Chambers gestured at the nursing sister, who went to take it. Sally sat there hoping that it was not Bobby on the line, and her anxiety showed up on the polygraph’s