by Peter Cotton
‘Well, excluding Proctor, we’ve got four Early Leavers who don’t have an alibi, but there’s not much more than that implicating them. Which raises the question. Why does it have to be an Early Leaver?’
‘I’ve never said it did,’ said McHenry. ‘But someone at that party was involved. Wright left early, and she was either followed by someone who was in on the job, or that person called the perpetrators to let them know she was leaving.’
‘Okay, so let’s go through who we’ve got, then, starting with the Early Leavers. And we obviously rule out Proctor now. So there’s Sorby. He had a motive, if Wright was planning to sack him. But if he did it, I don’t think he’d have been able to hide the fact. He’s just too nervy. Then there’s Staples, the radical greenie who joined the government. But she doesn’t feel like a fit, either. And Penny Lomax? She lied to us, or at least she failed to tell the whole truth, but I don’t think it’s her, either. She’s loyal to Proctor. Too loyal, you’d have to say, so it’s hard to see her hurting him. And other than them, there’s Tom Hanley, mouldering away at Lake George. He’s certainly got good reason to hate the government, but he’s barely functional.’
‘And what about Hanley’s sister, Sylvie? Are we sure she’s dead and buried?’
‘Officially she is, but who knows? She could’ve faked the whole thing and be floating around somewhere. Up to no good. So it’s a long shot, but it warrants a trip to Thailand. Especially with us drawing blanks.’
‘And Acheson? Or Rolfe? Have either of our news gatherers become newsmakers?’
‘No chance. We’ve got nothing connecting Acheson, other than the documents that were sent her way. And Rolfe? I was about to start the write-up, but I can tell you now, he was one of Wright’s biggest fans. Not that that necessarily counts him out, but I wouldn’t be looking at either him or Acheson.’
‘So, is it someone we haven’t seen yet?’
‘Well, there is someone we haven’t talked to yet, and I’m sure he’ll offer some insights when you see him later today.’
‘Yes. And what do you think we’ll get from him?’ said McHenry.
‘Wright’s dead, and Proctor’s disappeared,’ I said. ‘If you really wanted to hurt Lansdowne right now, taking out his right-hand man and his most popular minister would be a good start. Sure, the sympathy vote’s given him a bounce in the polls, but I’m told that won’t last. And the thing is, he must know people who’d wish this on him. Well, we need their names, because the names we’re working with at the moment are getting us nowhere.’
McHenry was silent, focused on his toes. Then he got up, I fell in behind him, and we headed back to the warmth of the room.
A couple of hours later, as I was finishing my summary of the Rolfe interview, McHenry called the room to attention and got immediate silence. By the look of him, he’d just received the news we’d all been dreading.
‘They’ve found Proctor,’ he said. ‘Down by the lake. Near where they dumped Wright. I want all seniors down there immediately, while things are fresh.’
Channel Four Live Cam
Sunday 4 August, 2.00pm
Good afternoon, Jean Acheson with the Live Cam coming to you from Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, and just repeating the news that a body found here a short time ago is believed to be that of the prime minister’s missing advisor and confidante, Alan Proctor.
Mr Proctor was last seen leaving Canberra airport on Thursday evening, and police have since held grave fears for his safety. When Susan Wright disappeared under similar circumstances, she was found dead two days later here by the lake.
The police tents you now see in shot are from an area at the edge of the lake. If Alan Proctor’s body is inside one of those tents, then it lies about a hundred metres from where Susan Wright was dumped four days ago.
We expect to hear soon about the identity of the deceased down there. When we do, I’ll bring it to you on the Live Cam. This is Jean Acheson.
17
THE KILLER’S CALLING card hung from a melaleuca tree that was growing in the hard ground near the water’s edge. It was a tabby cat, this time. Forensics had erected a big tent over the cat and the tree.
Alan Proctor’s body was inside a smaller tent about ten metres away. His legs were splayed across the shoreline, and his head and torso were partly submerged in the shallows. A couple of photographers from Forensics were still inside the tent, up to their knees in water taking final close-ups. News choppers hovered high over the middle of the lake, their ceaseless whoomping adding to my sense of dread.
The similarities between the two crime scenes were obvious. The bodies had been dumped within a few hundred metres of each other, and both had had a dead cat for company. Proctor’s coat and trousers were covered in a mixture of fur and blue carpet fluff. The lividity on his cheek and chin had the same cherry-red edge as Susan Wright’s. And the body-drag path was littered with bits of blue plastic.
Also, Proctor and Wright had been hauled to the water by one person; the footprints that the hauler had left at both crime scenes were remarkably similar; and no one had any doubt that Forensics would soon be reporting that it was the same person wearing the same shoes in both cases. If it was the same person, they’d struggled a bit with Proctor. Wright had been shortish and slim, and weighed about sixty kilos. Proctor was short but pudgy, and would have weighed about thirty kilos more.
As with the Wright crime scene, we’d found a second set of footprints in and around the drag path, and in the soft ground near the water. From the look of the heel marks and the chunky soles, this second set of prints had been made by someone wearing work boots. Work boots for an accomplice who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lend a hand.
There was movement behind me. I turned to see McHenry coming across the clearing.
‘What did you call these mongrels?’ he said as he neared. ‘“Brazen”, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but I’ve amended that to “cocky”. I mean, assuming it is the same pair, they dump Proctor here? A stone’s throw from where they left Wright? It demonstrates a certain sort of arrogance, don’t you think?’
‘It does that,’ said McHenry, watching another chopper join the clatter over the water. ‘So, apart from the obvious, what else strikes you about it all?’
The photographers had disappeared into the cat’s tent. From the flashes bursting through the canvas, they looked to be shooting the animal from every angle.
‘Their footwear interests me,’ I said. ‘The person who did the heavy work here wore the same sort of joggers as the person who dumped Wright. Now, if the same person dragged both bodies, while wearing the same shoes, maybe he’s running the show. He gets to keep his shoes, but the accomplice has to lose his. It means that maybe the lazy one can’t be trusted to keep his footwear under wraps, or maybe he’s more exposed to us than the workhorse is.’
‘Yeah. Good. Anything else?’
‘I said I’d amended my description of these guys to “cocky”. Well, I think “cold-blooded” would fit just as well.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said McHenry, eyeing the media officer who’d emerged from the trees. ‘Well, time to face the journos again. But without you this time, okay? Brady’s a big fan of these events, and I don’t want to spoil it for him. So meet you back at the car in, say, fifteen?’
As instructed, I waited near the car, about forty metres up the road from where the media had massed in front of McHenry. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying, so I focused on Jean. She was standing in the front row again, wearing a black biker jacket and black jeans. Rolfe was next to her, dressed in a shiny black suit.
At one point, Jean caught my eye and cocked her head a couple of times at a planting of eucalypts just down the slope from where I was standing. It seemed she was directing me there for a word. McHenry finished his spiel and took a few quest
ions, before his media officer called a halt to proceedings. As the journos and cameramen began to disperse, McHenry clapped a phone to his ear and, with a few members of his entourage still in tow, walked slowly back towards the crime scene.
Jean and Rolfe chatted briefly. Then she joined some of her colleagues and walked towards me, and I made my way down the slope to the stand of trees. A few minutes later, Jean was edging cautiously down the same bit of slope, and within no time she was standing in front of me, close enough to touch. She smiled, but her eyes betrayed a nervousness that I found reassuring.
‘I don’t envy you,’ she said, as we sat on the bench that fronted the trees. ‘What I do is a breeze by comparison.’
‘I don’t envy myself,’ I said, checking to see if McHenry was coming.
‘No. Well, ahh, look, this is probably not the time,’ she said. ‘I know it’s definitely not the time. But, I just wanted to say how I enjoyed the other night. And, you know, if ever we went out for another Guinness, we’d have to make it a rule not to talk shop.’
‘Are you asking me out?’ I said, turning to face her.
‘Well, no. I was just saying that if ever, you know, if ever we did have another Guinness together …’
‘And is that what you want?’ I said, smiling at her. ‘To have another Guinness. With me?’
‘I might like to,’ she said, her smile reflecting some embarrassment.
‘That’s a yes, then?’
‘I guess it is a yes.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, smiling so broadly that the corners of my mouth felt like they might tear.
Some people might have thought it weird of us to be organising a tentative date at a major crime scene, though it was no weirder than a doctor and a nurse flirting on a cancer ward. I was mulling this over and smiling at Jean when my phone rang. It was Steve Newings from Births, Deaths and Marriages. He had news on two death certificates, he said — the one issued for Susan Wright’s former senior person, Dennis Hanley, and the one for the PM’s nephew, Mick Stanton. I indicated to Jean that I had to take the call. She smiled, handed me her card, and mouthed the words ‘call me’. Then she headed back up the slope.
Newings said the certificates were typically short on detail. Then he told me he knew the doctor who’d certified Mick Stanton. In fact, the doctor was an old mate of his, and he’d called him to see what else he knew about Stanton’s death. I told Newings that I hated interfering amateur sleuths as much as I hated murderers. He countered by saying that his mate had told him things he’d never tell anyone else.
‘You see, everyone thinks Stanton died of a heart attack,’ said Newings, ‘but that’s not what happened. My doctor mate says that when the patrol car found Stanton up on Mount Ainslie, he had a hose hanging out the window of his car, and the engine was running. The coppers called my doctor mate to certify the death, and of course they also called Stanton’s parents. And that Mrs Stanton, she can be just as persuasive as her brother. When she got down to the morgue, she took the doctor and the cops aside, and told them that her son had just broken up with his wife and that he was very depressed. Then, according to my mate, she broke down and begged them not to call it suicide. Being a Catholic himself, my mate understood why. Good Micks don’t top themselves. So he got the cops to agree, and then he certified the death as a heart attack. I can tell you it’s not the first time it’s happened. And it certainly won’t be the last.’
Good Catholics might not top themselves, I thought, but sometimes they are murdered. And if that’s what had happened to Mick Stanton, maybe our killers had form long before they gassed Susan Wright and Alan Proctor.
Blood Oath subscription news
Monday 5 August, 7.00am
Proctor, the dog with bite
by Simon Rolfe
It’s now almost a week since Susan Wright’s body was found at Lake Burley Griffin, and yesterday, Alan Proctor turned up dead by the water as well. It’s probable both were murdered by the same people.
Michael Lansdowne was so shattered when he heard of Proctor’s death that he had to re-schedule an interview with the Plod. The PM’s people last night described his eventual contact with the police as ‘fruitful and co-operative’. I wonder if that’s how the boys in blue saw it.
They say that if you want a friend in politics, get yourself a dog. Well, Alan Proctor was Lansdowne’s dog. He was loyal and unquestioning, and when it came to protecting his boss, he had a tendency to bite first and ask questions later.
So why doesn’t Lansdowne now honour his dead best friend by suspending the campaign for a day, like he did for Susan Wright? An overnight Aztec poll might provide the answer to that question. Aztec now puts support for the government at 51 per cent, with the opposition at 49, two-party-preferred. This turnaround in the government’s fortunes owes everything to the recent slayings, and Lansdowne knows that to ride the sympathy vote back into office, he’s got to keep his foot flat to the floor all the way to polling day. Sometimes a politician will wrap himself in the flag to get elected. Sometimes he’ll smear himself with the blood of others. Michael Lansdowne enters the last week of this campaign covered in the red stuff.
18
THE WHOLE TEAM had crowded into the room to hear McHenry’s impressions of the Lansdowne interview, but first we had a briefing on the Proctor autopsy from Marjorie Rowan. Peter Kemp was there, too, to give us the latest from Forensics.
There were no surprises in what Rowan had to say. She confirmed that carbon monoxide had killed Proctor, that he’d been dehydrated when he died, and that he had canned food and ketamine in his system.
Peter Kemp’s forensics summary was even more predictable. His vet was still examining the cat from the Proctor crime scene. She was also looking at the fur from Proctor’s clothes. And the fluff that’d been found on the clothes had been sent to the same carpet manufacturer who’d looked at the last lot. It was all required procedure, but no one doubted that Proctor and Wright had been covered in the same stuff. As for the bits of blue plastic at the Proctor crime scene, Kemp said his people were 99 per cent sure it was from the same tarpaulin that had been used to haul Susan Wright’s body.
When they’d finished their outlines, Rowan and Kemp took some questions, which only prompted them to repeat themselves. After they packed up their notes and left, we moved onto the main game: McHenry’s debrief on the Lansdowne interview.
McHenry began the session by describing the contact with the prime minister as ‘not very productive’. It had been hard to get Lansdowne to focus, he said, and they’d been loath to push him, given his obvious distress over Proctor’s death. Lansdowne’s legal counsel and his senior staff had even helped by prodding their boss a few times, and though the interview had covered all bases, it had unearthed nothing new.
I’d already read the transcript and had found several flaws in McHenry’s approach to the contact. But I’d blown my chance to be there, and given the prime minister’s state of mind, I probably wouldn’t have done much better with him anyway.
Lansdowne had told McHenry and the interview team that he didn’t know anyone capable of murder. Nor did he know anything about Proctor’s missing file. When asked how he felt about being the only one connected with the Mondrian scandal who was still alive, Lansdowne had started sobbing, so they’d had to break for five minutes.
When the interview resumed, McHenry asked Lansdowne why Dennis Hanley had blamed him for his sacking over the Mondrian affair. Lansdowne said he’d always assumed that Hanley’s anger stemmed from the fact that, as the justice minister at the time, he, Lansdowne, had been the one who’d called the inquiry into Mondrian that had brought Hanley undone.
Asked about people he might have riled before he achieved high office, Lansdowne told the interviewers that politics by its very nature involved riling people. But he’d always tried to give the vote
rs what they wanted, he said. Then he’d conceded that some of his past colleagues resented his success, and he’d angered others by not appointing them to jobs they coveted.
And while he was adamant that there’d never been any really hateful outbursts directed at him, he said that, like most of his ministers, he regularly received physical threats, both through the post and via email. As for any connection between Wright and Proctor that might have got them murdered, Lansdowne had come to an obvious conclusion. They were both key personnel in his government, he said, and both of them had been very close to him.
‘He answered all our questions,’ said McHenry, ‘but he supplied no new names, and he was so disconnected that, in the end we were just going through the motions. In short, nothing he said was news to any of us. So, enough of that for now. Glass, I see you’ve got something new on the PM’s nephew?’
Most of the team regularly checked PROMIS for updates, so they would have seen what Newings had told me about Stanton’s death. And after another sleep-deprived night, including a couple of uneventful hours outside Jean’s place, I didn’t feel like a major rehash. So I kept it brief, and then updated them on contacts I’d since had with one of the cops involved and with the doctor who’d certified Stanton.
‘The quack admits to falsifying the certificate,’ I said, ‘but, under the circumstances, I’m not inclined to pursue charges. As for the cops, one’s dead, as you know, and the other’s retired to the south coast. When I spoke to him early this morning, he said he was still convinced that Stanton killed himself, so who knows? There was no autopsy. And Stanton was cremated. We don’t even have forensics for the car. All we know is, the Stantons were trying to hide a family suicide, and in the process they destroyed evidence of what might have been a murder. We could get them in, of course — Lansdowne’s sister and her husband — but that wouldn’t achieve anything, other than getting the media excited.’
