by Peter Cotton
Bond University’s Professor Stephen Billings says Mr Proctor’s apparent disappearance is a cause for grave concern, coming as it does just days after the kidnapping and murder of Environment Minister Susan Wright.
The professor says that if Alan Proctor has been taken by the same people who took Mrs Wright, the police only have until tomorrow night to rescue him. This is Jean Acheson. Back with more in a moment.
12
WE SPENT THE night and most of the next morning pulling Alan Proctor’s house apart. For all its slick artwork and furnishings, the place turned out to be little more than a crash pad where he kept a few changes of clothes and some basics in the fridge, and not much else. There were certainly no significant documents in his study. And no computer, either. We found no sign that he’d made it home from the airport, and nothing to indicate what had become of him.
As I helped process Proctor’s place, my increasing sense of foreboding about his fate caused a knot to take hold of my guts. I was certain that the pair from the lake were also behind his disappearance, and that they weren’t just doubling up on their crime. They were issuing a challenge to us, and a warning to all senior ministers and their staff. No one was safe, they were saying; everyone was fair game. Their sheer bloodlessness was perplexing in the extreme. What could have led them to this? What had motivated their outrage? And how profoundly committed would they have to be to plan and execute these high-profile crimes in the way that they had?
Of course, not everyone had such a dire take on things. Initially, there was even talk around that Proctor had done a bunk — disappeared himself, believing that the government was on the way out. But when we canvassed that thought with the party people he’d been working with up in Sydney, they all said he’d been very upbeat about the government’s chances.
By mid-morning, I was back in the room scrolling through PROMIS. I opened a just-posted Forensics file on Proctor’s Audi; but the car, like the house, told us nothing about its owner’s fate.
Then I went to CCTV footage of Proctor from the airport. It had been captured at six-fifteen the previous evening, as he walked through the terminal concourse. He was carrying a briefcase, and wearing a funny little short-brimmed hat — the sort favoured by Swiss yodellers.
The other vision of Proctor on the system was of him driving out of the long-stay carpark at the airport. And a traffic camera had snapped him as he ran a red light on Kings Avenue. Somewhere between that camera, and the meeting in Parliament House where he’d been heading, Alan Proctor had fallen off the face of the earth. His disappearance had sent the room into overdrive — people now moved in and out of the place at a clip, keyboards clattered with a new urgency, and every phone conversation sounded sharp and to the point. Given Susan Wright’s fate, we all assumed that Alan Proctor’s time was running out. I turned back to my screen and continued to scroll.
Also up on PROMIS was a Forensics report on the documents that Jean Acheson had received from the European. They turned out to be two receipts from the treasurer’s American addiction clinic, and there were three sets of fingerprints on them. One set belonged to the treasurer. The second was from the accounts person at the clinic. The third were Acheson’s — and her prints were the only ones on the opaque plastic sleeve that had held the receipts.
As well as Acheson’s prints, Forensics had found a small, oblong impression freshly etched into the bottom edge of the plastic sleeve. Their report said that the impression had been made when the sleeve was stored in a tight space next to an object the same size as a small audiocassette case. The plastic sleeve had most recently spent time in the dirt file that Susan Wright had ‘pinched’ the night she disappeared. If the impression on the sleeve was from a cassette case, and if that case and the sleeve had been together in Proctor’s dirt file, it raised a number of questions.
Assuming the cassette case had contained a cassette, what was recorded on it that needed to be secured with Proctor’s dirt? Did the recording relate to the treasurer’s clinic visits, or was there altogether different dirt on it? Maybe something related to Susan Wright? Stuff so damaging that when she got the chance, she’d felt compelled to nick it and do a runner?
Only two people knew the answers to these questions. One of them was dead, and the other was missing. But maybe Proctor’s staffers, Penny Lomax and Janet Wilson, knew something about the cassette, if indeed there had been one in the file. Lomax was in Adelaide with the prime minister and wasn’t due back in Canberra for at least twenty-four hours. I’d been planning to talk to her about Proctor again, anyway, but now I thought I’d get both her and Janet Wilson down to the station for something a bit more wide-ranging and intensive.
I ducked out at lunchtime for a shish tawook from the Lebanese on Northbourne Avenue. As I carried the food back to the station, I put all thoughts of Proctor aside, and instead tried to think through arguments for why we should be talking to the prime minister. They were all pretty obvious, really. His most popular minister had been murdered, right at the business end of an election campaign, and now his closest confidante had disappeared. Surely that was enough for us to seek a face-to-face with the man. Then again, if he agreed to it, he’d probably just spout the same pious rubbish he’d given me over the phone.
For some reason, my thoughts then turned to Jean Acheson. I pictured her smiling at me from behind the crime-scene tape, and sitting in the green room, nailing me with those eyes of hers. But I didn’t get any pleasure from these images. Instead, they added to my sense of foreboding. The nub of it was, the more I thought about the killers’ choice of Acheson to publicise the treasurer’s drug problem, the more I worried about her safety.
These people were careful and considered in the way they went about things, so they were hardly likely to have dropped the treasurer’s drug story on a random journo. So why had they chosen Acheson? Sure, she had a high profile, but so did lots of her colleagues. And some of them had much bigger audiences than hers. It could be that the killers were big fans, or maybe they were fixated on her. Whatever it was, I figured that, having achieved a good run for the story nailing the treasurer, they’d use her again when they next had something to air. And that was a danger for Acheson, as I saw it. If she irritated them in the way she handled one of their stories — or, worse, if she made them angry — they might react in an extreme way, and we’d already seen what they could do. So although I had no evidence to support my fears, I made straight for McHenry’s desk when I got back to the room.
‘What’s on your mind, Glass?’ he said, his eyes on me, but his fingers poised over his keyboard.
‘There’s a few things, actually,’ I said. ‘So I’ll wait till you’re finished there before I go through them.’
I took a seat beside his desk, and unwrapped my tawook and took a big bite out of it. McHenry hated people eating in front of him, and he soon pushed his chair away from his desk and told me to get on with it.
‘First, why don’t we get some European accents on tape?’ I said, still chewing. ‘Down at the Migrant Resource Centre or somewhere? Then run them past Acheson for a possible ID?’
‘Good idea,’ he said, writing the suggestion on a pad next to his keyboard. ‘Next.’
‘I’ve been thinking about the plastic sleeve that Acheson’s documents came in. And the cassette case that might’ve been stored with it. Janet Wilson’s the only one we can talk to now who handled Proctor’s file on the night of the party, and she says the thing was closed all the time it was with her. But I think we should assemble the CCTV footage, just to be sure she didn’t have a peek inside.’
‘Good. I’ll get Audio-Visual on to it. Next.’
‘You’ve got the profiler coming in tomorrow. Can I just say that, even without a psych degree, it’s clear to me that we’re not looking for serial killers here. There’s nothing random about what’s happening. These people have murdered a cabinet minister.
And it’s a fair bet they’ve now got Proctor — the prime minister’s top advisor.’
‘That’s not right,’ said McHenry, his voice full of challenge. ‘Just think about it for a minute. No one knows where Proctor is, but, given what happened to Wright, we have to assume that he’s been taken by the same people. That’s safety first. But to take it as fact? That’s just sloppy.’
I wasn’t sure if McHenry was prosecuting an argument, or if he really thought that Proctor could be anywhere other than with Wright’s killers. He must have seen the doubt in my eyes because he proceeded to clear that one up for me.
‘Look, Glass, let’s assume that Proctor didn’t do a runner and that he’s being held against his will. How do we know it’s the same people who killed Wright? Mightn’t we be dealing with a copycat here? Or maybe Proctor killed Wright, and now someone’s doing a vengeance job on him. Or if Proctor was in on the Wright murder, maybe his accomplices have decided to do him in for some reason? There’s any number of possibilities, so let’s leave speculation to the journos. We operate in the real world, and we’ve got to work this through as though he’s been abducted. But don’t close yourself off to anything. What else?’
‘I think we should interview Lansdowne,’ I said — a suggestion that drew a groan from McHenry. ‘If you assume for a moment that Proctor is being held by Wright’s killers, then their real target in all of this is obvious. It’s the prime minister. And if he wasn’t so well protected, I reckon he would have been their first kill, and probably their only one.’
‘And why do you say that?’
‘Who’s the common link between Wright and Proctor? It’s Lansdowne. Who was the source of their power? He was. Were they up to anything that he didn’t know about? Probably not. Lansdowne’s a control freak. I mean, he is the prime minister, so by definition he’s into control, but from what I understand …’
‘From your mate Stevo …’
‘No, not from Stevo — from listening to the political commentators and reading what they say. All of them reckon that Lansdowne likes his hand on the tiller. At all times. He’s a micro-manager who doesn’t let go. So, assuming he knows what’s going on in his government, shouldn’t we be fronting him as a matter of priority?’
‘Anything else?’ said McHenry, his eyes flitting between me and his screen.
‘I’m also convinced we should be putting surveillance on Jean Acheson. She’s spoken to one of the killers, or someone pretty close to them. That makes her the only person with that sort of link. There’s also the fact that when they wanted her to have those receipts, they left them in a fairly obscure place, but one that she knows well. That says to me they’re keeping an eye on her, and, as you know, predatory killers often end up targeting people they’re fixated on. If I was drawing up a list of their possible next targets, I’d put Acheson right up there.’
‘Along with Lansdowne,’ said McHenry.
‘He’d be their number one, as I say.’
‘So, surveillance on Acheson, eh?’ he said, smiling wearily. ‘And if we did tail her, we’d have to tap her phone, too, I guess. And monitor her emails. The question is, where are you going to find a Federal Court justice who’ll approve a fishing expedition like that? And even if you found one, you saw how Acheson’s colleagues went off when we just wanted to talk to her. Commissioner Brady wouldn’t want a repeat of that — not unless we could guarantee him something.’
‘Okay, okay. It was just a thought. And what about Lansdowne?’
‘Brady’s one step ahead of you there. He raised it with the PM’s people this morning, and he expects to hear back from them first thing tomorrow. As for who’ll be in on it, the commissioner tells me you ruffled the PM’s feathers the other day, and he’s not keen on a repeat. So, if and when we speak to the prime minister, you should consider yourself a doubtful starter. Now, if there’s nothing else …’
There was plenty else, but I restrained myself. My run-in with the PM was always going to come back to bite me, but using it to ban me from the team that would interview him was vindictive and ridiculous. McHenry went back to his screen, but all I could do was sit there, trying to calm myself. There were two other things I’d planned to raise with him. The first was to push him again for access to Proctor’s dirt files. But, as I was in no mood for another backhander, I held fire on that one, and moved on to the second thing — getting a psych out to Lake George to have a chat to Tom Hanley.
McHenry said he’d read the Hanley interview, and seen my recommendation, and he agreed a psych assessment was warranted. He said he’d organise it.
Back at my desk, I let the full implications of what McHenry had said sink in. The Lansdowne interview could be crucial to the case, but it looked like I’d be excluded from it, all on the whim of that pumped-up little bastard Brady. The thought of it made me furious. Yes, I’d stuffed up, to a degree, but not so badly that it should limit my role in the investigation.
I took a few deep breaths, trying to put a cap on my anger. But I was too worked up. I went to the kitchen and got a coffee, hoping that the activity and another dose of caffeine would help. But they didn’t. In fact, by the time I got back to my desk, my emotions were bubbling close to the surface.
I sat and did more deep breathing, telling myself that my anger would dissipate. It always took time. I had a mantra: these thoughts weren’t me; they were external to me; they did not control me; they were mine to control. I knew I could do whatever I chose to do — and, to show it, I gritted my teeth and pushed on with my work. I called Tony McManus, the police liaison at Foreign Affairs, and asked him for a check on Sylvie Hanley. Essentially, I was after confirmation that she was dead. While it was possible that Tom Hanley was one of our killers, he seemed barely organised enough to feed himself. If I could establish with certainty that Sylvie Hanley had died in Thailand, we could probably rule a line under the whole Mondrian business, and Tom Hanley as well, and forget about taking a psych out to see him.
Next, I began writing up the Acheson interview. It was a pretty straightforward account of our contact with her; but the further I got into it, the more it became clear to me that McHenry was making a huge mistake in not backing surveillance on her. If the killers were watching her, our doing the same would get us closer to them. It would also give her some protection.
As the afternoon wore on, my anger at missing the Lansdowne interview melded with my growing anger at McHenry over his refusal to keep an eye on Acheson. The boss was pandering to Brady’s fear of negative publicity. And Brady was being far too sensitive to the needs of his political masters. Especially when it came to who might best interview the PM. These festering thoughts got such a hold on me that I was forced to put the Acheson write-up aside a few times. And by late afternoon, I was furious with Brady, and ropeable with McHenry for having done his bidding.
Then it dawned on me — there was a way of getting around McHenry’s ruling. Maybe I could keep an eye on Acheson. At night. In my off hours. It would be limited protection, but better than nothing. And the killers moved at night, so if our paths crossed while I was shadowing her, I could nab them, or call in the troops. And even if I just spotted them from a distance, it would at least give us something to go on, which was more than we had now. And whatever way it played out, I was sure I could handle myself.
The main risk was, Acheson might spring me. If she did, I’d no doubt be kicked off the case. Or, worse, it could mean my job. But I was confident I could shadow her undetected. Then it struck me that I’d never risked my career like this before. So why was I considering such a dire move? Did I really think that a limited tail on Acheson could help us solve the case, or was my anger at McHenry and Brady clouding my judgment? And what about Acheson? Was my fascination with her the real reason I was considering this half-baked mission? I mulled it all over a bit more, then I resolved that, despite my misgivings, I had to put some
time into watching her. And I felt much better having reached that decision.
I got the make and plates of Acheson’s vehicle from motor registry, and took a note of her Kingston address. I was back to reading the latest entries on PROMIS when Tony McManus called with the details on Sylvie Hanley.
‘She left Australia thirteen years ago,’ he said. ‘Almost to the day. She was down as a temporary resident of Thailand. Then she was listed as missing in the north of the country. There was a search for her, and then the file was amended to “Missing, presumed dead”. I guess by now we’d say she’s definitely dead.’
‘Why “definitely”?’ I said, taking the photo of the Hanley children out of its plastic sleeve. ‘People disappear themselves all the time and change their identities. Why not her?’
‘We did look into that, but we found no reason for Sylvie Hanley to slip out of sight. She had no police record. No outstanding fines. She didn’t have a family she wanted to escape from. Both her parents were deceased, and the dispersal of their assets didn’t cause any dispute between her and her brother Thomas. It seems they were very close. And there was no bank acquittal in the end, which made her debt-free. The thing is, parts of Thailand were very, very dangerous at that time. She was just one of the unlucky ones.’
So, Sylvie Hanley was shaping as another doubtful lead. Then again, a suspected death without a body left a lot of questions hanging, especially when a live Sylvie Hanley had a strong motive for murdering Susan Wright. If our other leads didn’t start producing soon, McHenry would have to dispatch a team to Thailand to try to establish Sylvie’s fate. It would probably prove a futile effort, given the time that had elapsed, and I hoped like hell that if he did send a team over there, he’d leave me at home.
Jean Acheson’s face filled the mute TV screen at the front of the room, and then the program credits rolled. She was signing off for the day. I packed my papers away and told McHenry I was taking a few hours off. Then I raced to my car.
