‘No.’
Andrew Ferguson rose to his feet to cross-examine. He was a tall man, with a shaved head and fashionably rectangular glasses, his voice slightly hoarse. One exchange went like this.
Ferguson: ‘How can you be sure that Mr Teller worked for Mr Deeb? The Java nightclub was in the name of Mr Teller himself and two other men.’
Knight: ‘We know those three individuals must have been a front for someone because they lacked the resources to lease and renovate the club, which they did two years ago, at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars. The Drug Squad told us employees of Mr Deeb—men on wages—visited Java twice every night it was open and spent about ten minutes in the office.’
Ferguson: ‘Mr Deeb comes from a leading crime family, does he not?’
Knight: ‘I believe two of his brothers are in jail, but they’re not involved—’
Ferguson: ‘We’ve heard the suggestion Sam Deeb might have placed Steve Beric in Jason Teller’s house, his flat, to keep an eye on him. The suggestion is he suspected Mr Teller of some disloyalty?’
Knight: ‘I don’t know.’
Ferguson: ‘But you would agree, as a general point, that there is a great deal of betrayal in the drug world.’
Mabey: ‘Objection!’
Judge: ‘Sustained.’
Ferguson: ‘I withdraw that. But there would have been some reason for Mr Beric to leave his job as Mr Deeb’s bodyguard and move into Mr Teller’s flat?’
Knight: ‘I don’t know.’
Ferguson: ‘If he was there to keep an eye on Mr Teller, he might have spotted something? Let’s say he found Mr Teller was dealing in drugs. As a legitimate businessman, Mr Deeb would be upset that one of his key employees was breaking the law?’
As Mabey rose to her feet to object again, Bec looked around the court and noticed two large men in the upper public gallery. The Samoan in the black T-shirt was Sam Deeb’s current bodyguard. They stared at her, arms folded. It was what they were there for, to stare. They didn’t realise how stupid it looked to people outside their world.
The judge sent the jury out while the barristers argued the admissibility of Ferguson’s question. The judge allowed it, within limits, and when the jury returned Ferguson pushed on.
Ferguson: ‘I was saying, Mr Sam Deeb would have been upset to learn—’
Mabey: ‘Objection!’
Ferguson: ‘I rephrase that. This is speculation, but so is a great deal to do with this case. Had Mr Beric found evidence Mr Teller was doing something wrong, for instance skimming profits, and told his employer, would Mr Deeb have been unhappy?’
Knight: ‘You’re asking me to speculate on three hypotheticals. Four, really.’
Ferguson: ‘Just answer the question.’
Knight: ‘Yes. If—’
Ferguson: ‘Are you aware of criminal intelligence that Mr Deeb was indeed concerned that Mr Teller was stealing from him?’
Mabey: ‘Objection!’
Judge: ‘Sustained.’
Bec had seen it before, a barrister using questions to put propositions to the jury. The other barrister could object, but had to be careful not to create the impression of trying to suppress the truth. But Mabey had no choice: the judge was letting Ferguson range far too widely.
Courts always rise at four. As the judge adjourned, Knight told Bec to wait outside. She walked up and down the loggia, watching the public flee the court complex, returning to normal life. She twisted her shoulders, relaxed the muscles made tight by the past two hours. Up in the square out front of the other Supreme Court building, a big office block where civil trials were held, she could see Rafi Habib and his family arguing, their arms flailing. A minute later they were gone.
Knight was making a call when he emerged and she had to wait some more. Maybe she could try calling him to find out why she was here. When he’d finished he stared at the sky for a bit and took a deep breath. ‘I have to fly to Adelaide tomorrow morning.’ Bec listened in mild disbelief as he described some crisis with the case involving the politician. So far this week he’d brushed off all her attempts to talk about the trial in any detail, and now this. ‘Could take a few days, so you’re in charge here.’ Disbelief turned to gentle panic. ‘Thomson will give you the Crown case to read tonight, witness list. You okay?’
Martin Thomson was Mabey’s solicitor.
‘Why me?’
‘You don’t want it?’
‘Of course I want it.’
‘Burchell’s in the middle of that shooting at Palm Beach. First job as OIC, Vella doesn’t want to disturb her. Gorton’s left, O’Brien’s on leave.’
‘Wallace?’
‘I picked you. Safe pair of hands.’ Bec felt a moment of faint pleasure, quickly gone. ‘Done it before?’
He was pulling earbuds for his phone from his pocket, plugging in the end of the lead. Bec felt two waves of anxiety, first the fact of the handover and then its speed. Most bosses in this situation would tell you too much rather than too little.
‘Of course,’ she said. But not for a murder. Not in the Supreme Court. It was an opportunity. ‘When’s the handover?’
‘I told you, Thomson’s got the brief.’
‘You and I though, we need to talk.’
‘About what? You know the case inside out. I’ve got a plane to catch.’
‘You knew about this didn’t you? Adelaide?’
‘Talked to Ray Vella, knew it was a possibility, didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. Up for it?’ As though that were all that mattered.
‘Vella?’
‘Inspector Ray Vella, my boss. Call him if you have any issues.’
‘You sacked me from the investigation before the end. And now this. It’s . . .’ She sought a better word but none came. ‘Ridiculous.’
He eyed her with a grin, seemed to be enjoying her confusion. Fat bastard. Big, fat, lousy bastard. People get power, they abuse it. Maybe it’s a universal. ‘Thomson’s a moron. Keep an eye on Mabey. She’s distracted about something.’
He walked out onto King Street, inserting the earbuds.
Then Karen Mabey was beside her, watching the big detective’s retreating back. ‘Russell Knight is an unusual character,’ she said. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure.’ She’d been in positions of authority a few times before, understood the bit about conveying confidence. ‘We’re going to win.’
Mabey turned to gaze at her. Bec had come across a word in a cryptic once, sardonic. Had never seen it in action before, but here it was.
‘Can I call you Rebecca?’
‘Yes. It’s Bec.’
‘And you can call me Karen. There’s much about this investigation that remains unclear. Do you know anything about that?’
The barrister’s voice was firm yet slightly languid. To Bec it conveyed complete self-confidence.
‘No.’
Mabey’s sigh was barely audible above the background noise of the city. She looked back down the street where Knight had disappeared around a corner.
‘I rather feared that might be the case.’
part 2
fog
For many years after it occurred, Karen thought her divorce would be the low point of her life. As she recovered, remarried and had more children, she looked back on the experience of finding out about Phillip’s affairs, of taking Ian and leaving him, as her time in the wilderness.
Fifteen years later she was a senior counsel, married to a successful politician, and the mother of three wonderful children. She felt with all modesty that she had paid her dues and deserved her happiness, and that the tone of the rest of her life had been set.
All this changed in the space of a few minutes a year before the Habib trial, on a night Ian came to dinner. He was twenty-two, had moved in with Phillip seven years earlier, her pale and lean-limbed son. Intelligent but feckless, he had begun law, dropped out, was now studying communications. She could not be too impatient with him because her love was mixed with guilt, she knew th
e separation must have contributed to who he was. Knew also that not to study law was not the end of everything, that there were good people who were not professionals. Of course and obviously.
That night he was wearing a red-checked shirt over a black T-shirt and jeans, dirty white Converses. Heaven only knew where he lived these days. The twins thought he was cool and she hung on to that, but his clothes needed a wash and he hadn’t shaved in days. Her dear boy, who was handsome and intelligent and could be anything. Her friends’ children were studying at the universities of Sydney, Harvard and Oxford, while Ian still didn’t know what he wanted to be. People were kind to her and said there was still time. But he was not of the jeunesse dorée, and those who step off the steady path can find it hard to get back on. Compound interest, as Phillip had observed, applies to more than money.
Ian went into the bathroom before the meal, and was there so long Stephen had to go up and knock.
‘I hope he was having a shower,’ Stephen murmured when he came downstairs.
Karen pinched him lightly on the arm. ‘You’re home tonight?’
Her husband, the state attorney general, was out at all hours. He was a big man, balding now he was in his late fifties, with a natural smile that he used to evade her question. ‘I’m here for Ian,’ he said. ‘And you.’
When Ian came down there were no signs of hygienic improvement, but he seemed calmer. ‘I’ve been reading about Le Corbusier,’ he said in his soft, emphatic voice, long arms floating above the items on the table as he made a shape in the air. ‘The first person to build against the landscape, a pure white cube. Can you imagine it?’
He had the attention of Lizzie and Georgia during the first course, but for the wrong reasons; the words were slurred and Stephen was looking at his wineglass, still half full.
‘It was a brilliant moment in history,’ Karen said with her keen voice, ‘and it could happen again.’
Ian waved contemptuously, almost knocking the vase of daisies. ‘It can’t happen again.’
‘Next time it will be different.’ Standing up, she said firmly, ‘Anyone for dessert?’ As a lawyer she was perhaps too confident in the power of speech.
In the kitchen she applied the blowtorch to a tray of his favourite dessert, crème caramel. And then she returned to the dining room and everything had changed. Stephen wasn’t there—he’d left to take a call—and Ian’s head was on the table. He was asleep, and the twins were threading daisies through his hair. It was long, and black like his father’s, but greasy. Georgia stopped suddenly and shrieked.
‘Mummy! He’s got nits.’
They got him upstairs. He was hardly awake yet he could walk. She started to cry, wanted to hit him. His hair was a matted pelt, and he smelled of dirty washing and sour breath. They laid him in the bed in his old room, which she’d had redecorated after he’d snapped one day and told her he was no longer a schoolboy. Stephen pulled off his shoes and socks, drew up the doona and left.
In Ian’s backpack she found a plastic container with cotton wool, a spoon, a ziplock bag with a small quantity of pale grey powder, other items. You didn’t come across heroin in the courts much these days. It was all amphetamines and cocaine. But people still took it, of course. Still died of it. Karen felt her senses shutting down, but before it happened she stumbled into the bathroom and tipped the powder into the toilet, followed by the contents of her stomach.
Stephen was superb. Only later did she realise just how good, the thoughts that must have been going through his mind about the Trojan horse she’d brought into his life. She didn’t want to think about Ian like that, she wanted to continue to love him unconditionally. But now when she tried, in the long months after the discovery of his addiction, she felt herself being drawn towards the edge of everything she knew.
She’d done a trial with Russell Knight years before. When he called in to her chambers to discuss the Habib case, she saw there were streaks of grey in what was left of his hair.
‘Karen Mabey,’ he said, big smile and handshake. ‘The murderer’s nemesis. Admired by homicide detectives throughout the state.’
She recalled him better now, the face spotted by too much sun, the lugubrious gallantry. The vague hints of past corruption and of course his size: surely the police force had a weight limit? On a number of levels it was a surprise he’d survived the ancien régime, an implausible Talleyrand.
‘So,’ she said, ‘why give me this one?’
He ran a finger around his collar, a gesture she remembered, although it looked tighter now. ‘My boss thought it’d be a good thing. And so did yours.’ The case had been referred to the DPP just before the last election. The director at the time was acting in the job, hoping to be appointed to the permanent position. The government had been excited by the Spaddaci incident, when a taxi driver was killed by a stray bullet from a shootout between two teenage gangs in a suburban car park. Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. Or not. Knight smiled. ‘You know. Drugs. Shootings. Charge someone.’
Karen grimaced. Wherever she turned, Ian was there.
‘You okay?’ said Knight.
‘Tell me the story.’
‘Huh?’
‘I’ve read all this.’ Waved a hand at the brief. ‘Now give it to me, in your own words.’
People absorb information as stories. It was why she’d moved from commercial law to crime in her late twenties. Tyler O’Regan, failed advocate but a wise man, lunch one day at the Union Club and into his second bottle of red. ‘The criminal law is almost unique because it has juries and a jury needs a good yarn. No narrative, no conviction.’ Smart barristers despised the criminal law, but there was more to life than intelligence. There was the need to tell stories, and so she had found herself a criminal barrister.
Knight went over the case but there was nothing not already in the brief. She knew there must be more and also that there was no sense in pushing for it now. When he stopped talking, she said, ‘No plea?’
If Habib pleaded guilty to murder, he’d receive a discount off his sentence of up to a quarter. Or he could offer a plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter, and Karen could decide whether to accept this different version of what had happened.
‘Not a peep.’
The plea had to come from the defence lawyer, and it would be unwise for Karen to raise the prospect if they didn’t. Sign of weakness.
He said, ‘You’d be interested?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’ll have a word. I doubt you’ll get Imad’s phone call in. We were lucky at committal.’ The law of evidence is Byzantine. ‘But you’re Karen Mabey. You don’t do deals, do you? That’s your reputation.’
She was grateful for the reminder. Sometimes, this business with Ian, she forgot who she was supposed to be.
Stephen and she had bought the house in Killara soon after the twins were born. It had been built in 1902 in the Federation style, a massive bungalow with sandstone foundations, lots of attractive brickwork, and a sprawling slate roof. A big veranda ran around three sides and led into an established garden of almost two thousand square metres, double garage hidden behind a verbena hedge, tennis court and pool. The court was grass but they’d had it resurfaced with all-weather, reluctantly.
The street was lined with similar homes, people talked about foreign holidays and the relative merits of German automobiles, the need to move their sons to soccer as Islanders on sports scholarships at the top schools made rugby too dangerous. Or they had talked. Suddenly—it seemed sudden, although Stephen and she had attended most of the farewell parties—half the street was Chinese. They’d made the effort to welcome their new neighbours, but it wasn’t the same.
Still, the newcomers were good people, quiet and well-behaved. This was the only ethnic influx Killara had experienced, and it could have been much worse. Tentatively the remaining Anglos started to think proudly of themselves as part of multicultural Australia. There was little alternative.
Stephen’
s party had been elected to government six months before the Habib trial. As attorney general he cut a fine figure, with his assurance and balding dome, the blend of humour and intensity that served him well with the media. In the early days at least, most members of the government seemed nervous when they appeared in public. But whenever she watched Stephen at a podium or on the television, she knew it was what he’d been born to do.
Law and order had been one of the cornerstones of his party’s campaign, but so had fiscal responsibility: the state was almost broke, and the trick was to find policies that worked but were cheap. Stephen wanted to reform the bail laws so fewer young people would be locked up—almost half of those in jail were on remand, and almost half of those never went on to be convicted, because their trial was cancelled or they were found not guilty. So locking up almost everyone who was charged was expensive and unjust.
The bail act had been amended and prisoner numbers started to decline. But it was necessary Stephen not appear soft, hence his suggestion of another major piece of legislation, a controversial proposal that would see the users of drugs punished far more heavily. He’d realised, he declared in many speeches, that the traditional way of fighting the war on drugs had failed because it regarded drugs as either a crime or a health issue. But it was also a financial one, a market, and until you suppressed demand you could never stamp out supply. For decades the state had gone soft on users under the rubric of harm minimisation, out of sympathy for heroin addicts. But the time had come to rewrite the drug narrative. In fact, most users were recreational—most did not use heroin—and until they stopped buying, the market would flourish. So users would be the new targets.
The police minister, Chris Byrne, disagreed strongly, claimed Stephen’s proposal lacked humanity, and drug users should be seen as victims. Byrne was not normally a compassionate man, but for the chance to cripple his main rival he was prepared to modify his image. He proposed they drastically increase the penalties for small-time dealers.
It was generally agreed that the government needed to do something, but only one of the proposals would become law, and Stephen and Byrne were set to clash at the next party conference. The premier had made it known Cabinet would then move to adopt the proposal for which there was more support.
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