by Peter Cotton
‘And they’re still out there,’ said Jean, peeking through the curtains. ‘Waiting patiently.’
‘And what’ll satisfy them?’ I said, though I knew the answer.
‘We’ve got two options, really,’ she said. ‘We could tell our story to one of the networks, preferably mine, but there’s no guarantee that would kill the story. It could do the opposite. Or we could give the people down there what they want — us kissing on the stairs outside. That would do it for most of them. The thing is, right at this moment, we’re the biggest story in Australia. Bigger than the election. Bigger than the murders, even. So they’re not going to give up. Not till they get us.’
‘So you’re saying we should go down there and pose for them?’
‘One kiss and we get our privacy back. Mostly. Otherwise, we’ll have to skulk around for weeks. And they’ll get us in the end, you know. And when they do, it might have an ugly edge to it. And you and me, we don’t need that. Not right now.’
‘A kiss at the top of the stairs. Mmm. Well, my instincts say, “Stuff ‘em.” But then again, I’d kiss you anywhere, under any circumstances. And if it means getting rid of that lot? Let’s do it.’
Channel Four Live Cam
Thursday 8 August, 9.30am
Good morning, Jean Acheson here, and with the two major parties running neck-and-neck in the polls, Opposition Leader Lou Feeney went on breakfast television this morning in an attempt to break the deadlock.
A panel of interrogators spent an hour grilling Mr Feeney on his policies, then they canvassed his involvement in the so-called fire-dance affair. The studio audience included a group of Mr Feeney’s old schoolmates from Saint Phillip’s, and to a man, they backed his claim that the ‘rancid’ fire dance was no more than a harmless schoolboy ritual.
The opposition leader later detailed a number of other rumours that he says the government is spreading about him, and he attempted to debunk them as well.
Meanwhile, despite the government’s surge in the polls, Prime Minister Michael Lansdowne appears to have lost some of his trademark poise on the hustings. He’s even been snapping at reporters. Maybe the closeness of the contest is getting to him. Or perhaps the loss of Susan Wright and Alan Proctor is taking a personal toll. This is Jean Acheson. Back with more soon.
31
MY COLLEAGUES STOOD and applauded when I walked into the room that morning. I automatically backed away towards the door, but that prompted them to rush me, and pat me on the shoulder and slap my back. ‘Well done, Glass,’ said one. ‘You beauty, Dazza,’ said another. Dazza? No one had ever called me that. And I certainly wasn’t comfortable having my workmates all over me.
I couldn’t help thinking of my reception the week before, when Rolfe had revealed Lansdowne’s thoughts on Wright, and quoted me as his source. Everyone had avoided eye-contact with me that morning, as though I was the human incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah. How things had changed.
Given the pressure of the case, the glad-handing was mercifully brief, and everyone was soon back at their desks, either on the phone or focused on their screens. I got myself a coffee, and looked up the latest log on PROMIS. It turned out to be an upload from Brady’s forensic accountants. While I was ‘away’, they’d scoured Mondrian Bank for anything that linked the prime minister’s nephew, Mick Stanton, to the bank’s purchase of Dolman Holdings and its youth hostels.
The accountants had had access to all Mondrian files, but they’d found little concerning the Dolman purchase, other than the titles, and no one at the bank knew of any other documents relating to the matter.
I scrolled through the tasks the team had completed as they’d tried to find me. As well as searching my desk and my apartment, they’d spoken to everyone who knew me, which didn’t take them long. They’d done the same with Rolfe and Jean. I hesitated before looking at the summary of what they’d found at her place, but letters from old boyfriends were as close to bad as it got, and the latest was more than a year old.
The team had also completed title searches for the Rodway and Beagle Street places. Both of them were in Joe’s name. His full name had been Jozef Jankowski. According to Immigration, he’d emigrated from Poland eleven years before as a business migrant. To qualify under the program, he’d deposited half a million dollars into an Australian bank account, which had effectively bought him a passport. The money had stayed put for the required four years, and then he’d withdrawn it.
Efforts to track down Joe’s other bank details and his work history had so far come up empty. His prints were all over the painting gear and the landscapes I’d seen at Rodway Street. Interpol was chasing up his relatives in Poland.
Next, I went to the search of the two houses. It had turned up a few old toothbrushes and some dirty plates and cutlery, and the DNA from these was already being analysed. I hadn’t exactly searched the Rodway Street place — if I had, no doubt I would have looked under the double bed upstairs and spotted the two briefcases that had been found there.
According to the report, the cases belonged to Wright and Proctor. I saw this find as jaw-droppingly significant, so I was surprised that PROMIS only carried a summary of the cases’ contents. All it revealed was that Wright’s briefcase contained an exercise book in which she’d listed her achievements in the environment portfolio, and what she saw as her ‘future challenges’. From the challenges on the list, it was clear that Wright didn’t see a place for Ron Sorby in her future. He’d lost her trust. She wrote that he was ‘too close to Lansdowne’s people for comfort’.
There was also a parcel of documents in Wright’s briefcase. The PROMIS summary simply said that they ‘pertained to the Mondrian Affair’. McHenry no doubt had his reasons for applying this nondescript summary to these documents, and I was keen to hear it.
According to the summary for Proctor’s briefcase, most of its contents related to the electorate he’d visited just before he went missing. There was also a USB drive on which he’d kept a campaign diary, a contact list of party operatives, and a dirt file on opposition candidates in twenty-four marginal electorates.
The final item listed in the briefcase was a document with the mobile-phone numbers and email addresses of twenty New Zealanders, all of them males. The document also detailed a flight schedule for the men, Auckland to Sydney and return, plus an overnight booking for them at an airport hotel in the harbour city. I was mulling these details over when McHenry came in with a couple of takeaway coffees.
‘Back in harness?’ he said, placing a cup on my desk.
‘Like the workhorse I am,’ I said, raising the cup in salute. ‘Now, tell me. These briefcases from Joe’s house — the summary for them’s a bit brief, isn’t it? Especially the Mondrian stuff. Is it really that sensitive?’
McHenry bent over and put his mouth uncomfortably close to my ear.
‘You can have a look, Glass,’ he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. ‘But a word. Ruth and I are the only ones who’ve seen it all, and I can tell you, some of it’s positively radioactive. So you know what I’m saying. Any leaks, and we’ll know who to talk to.’
McHenry had the contents of the briefcases locked in a drawer in his desk. It was where he kept confidential material and any items of evidence that we might need to access during the case. I took the bundle tagged ‘Susan Wright’ to an empty interview room and locked the door. When I opened the bundle, I understood why the summary had been so brief.
As well as Wright’s hand-written assessment of her office, the bag contained a big red box file bearing an Australian coat of arms embossed in gold. It was the file that Wright had nicked from Proctor on the night she disappeared. I opened it very slowly, somehow needing to extend the moment.
The file contained three evidence bags, each of which held a thin set of documents. The bags were stacked on top of each other, and there was a note from For
ensics on top of the stack. The note said that the documents, when recovered, had been inside plastic sleeves, and the sleeves had been removed when an impression of a cassette case had been found etched into one of them.
That impression had subsequently been matched to the one on the sleeve that had contained Jean’s leaked documents. What had the killers done with the cassette itself? Maybe the documents held the answer. I lifted the three bags out of the box and lined them up on the table.
The document inside the first bag was almost fifteen years old. It was headed ‘Share Options Offer’, and it informed an unnamed beneficiary that they’d receive 25 per cent of Mondrian Bank’s shares in Dolman Holdings once they’d completed an unspecified task. The second bag contained a memorandum of agreement on the Dolman shares. It had been signed about six months after the options offer, and it stipulated that the shares would be signed over to ‘Beneficiary A’ for the same price that Mondrian had paid for them.
In the third bag was a page from Mondrian’s accounts, dated eight months after the introduction of Susan Wright’s voucher scheme. This document noted that ‘Beneficiary A’ had paid the bank four million dollars for an unspecified number of Dolman shares. It wasn’t clear if all three documents were talking about the same beneficiary, or the same shares. If they were, the voucher scheme would have boosted the value of those shares from four million dollars to something like sixty million.
These were the documents that the accountants had been looking for when they’d raided Mondrian. So how did Proctor get his hands on them? Maybe Lansdowne’s nephew had stolen them from the bank and given them to him. But why would he do that? And why had Proctor shown them to Wright on the night she disappeared? Was it to remind her that she was complicit in some deeper way in the Mondrian affair? Or was it to keep her in line on matters we didn’t know about yet? And how did the cassette feature? The only thing we knew for sure was that Wright had been desperate to get her hands on this file. And it also seemed clear that the material it contained had got her and Proctor killed.
McHenry was on the phone when I took the bags back to him. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, and handed me a photocopy of Proctor’s New Zealand file and asked me to look into it.
I phoned Major Crime in Auckland and spoke to Detective Adam Stowe. Stowe had been following our investigation and was keen to talk about it. I batted his questions away, and asked him to get me everything he could on the Kiwis who had featured in the file.
Then I called Jean. She was in Sydney working on a prime-time special with the network’s current-affairs unit. She said it was a ‘drippy’ little tabloid effort they’d titled ‘Canberra: Australia’s Capital of Fear’. As well as interviews with Wright and Proctor’s relatives, the production team had spoken to the dead pair’s friends and staff, including Ron Sorby. Jean said Sorby had become quite emotional when he’d been interviewed. The thought of him crying on camera had me returning to Susan Wright’s assessment of him.
Jean rang off and I got my mind back onto the mystery Kiwis. I called the Sydney hotel where they’d overnighted, and spoke to the duty manager. He agreed to dig out the records of every expense they’d racked up, including their incoming and outgoing phone calls. If anyone had asked me where I thought this effort might lead, I would have told them it was just another loose end from a dead man’s briefcase that we needed to tidy up.
I was thinking about another coffee when Ruth Marginson suddenly shot out of her seat. Her eyes were wide with alarm, and her mouth quivered as she struggled to speak.
‘C-comms just got a call from the PM’s office,’ she said, a piece of paper trembling in her hand. ‘From Adam Davies. Close Protection. It’s unbelievable, but Davies says the prime minister’s been taken. Or rather, he’s been abducted. And it seems that Penny Lomax is involved.’
Blood Oath subscription news
Thursday 8 August, 1.00pm
Where to start …?
by Simon Rolfe
What can you say when certainty is gone? Who do you call when the wolf breaks down the door? How do you respond to an awful truth? Where is hope when no one is safe?
Prime Minister Michael Lansdowne was abducted from outside his Parliament House office a bit over thirty minutes ago. They’ve snatched the one person in this country who should have been secure. The police have scrambled to confront this outrage, and while their commitment should not be questioned, their ability to get to the heart of this evil has been found wanting.
Having experienced what the PM is now going through, I could mouth words of comfort for those who know and love him. But I mustn’t lie. If Michael Lansdowne is in the hands of those who killed Susan Wright and Alan Proctor, any assessment of his chances must be tempered by their experience and mine.
This is the dawn of a terrible time for this nation. Let’s hope the prime minister is found soon. Safe and well. Let’s hope.
32
WHEN YOU’RE RACING to a scene where something truly dire has happened, your body flips into automatic pilot while your mind cascades with terrible possibilities. I was speeding down Commonwealth Avenue, part of a convoy of police vehicles zeroing in on Parliament House. Cars and buses squeezed into the outside lanes to get out of our way. Some even jumped the curb as our lights and sirens bore down on them.
McHenry sat in the front with me; Smeaton and Peter Kemp from Forensics, in the back. McHenry had already radioed ahead and spoken to Adam Davies from the PM’s close-protection detail. According to Davies, Lansdowne’s car had left the Prime Minister’s Courtyard at about twelve-fifteen. Lansdowne and Lomax had been in the back seat. A close-protection officer and the driver had been in the front. As with all road travel involving the PM, they’d had a security vehicle in tow. Davies said that soon after they’d set out, Lomax had shot the close-protection officer in the car with her, and had raised a set of bollards between the PM’s car and the security vehicle. She’d then forced the PM’s driver to speed off into the streets of Forrest. Like all vehicles in the VIP fleet, the PM’s car was fitted with a GPS tracker; it had been located within minutes, outside the girls’ school in Forrest.
From the chatter on the police radio, we knew that the prime minister’s driver and the close-protection officer were still in the car. The driver was alive, but unconscious. The officer was dead — a head shot. And Lomax and the PM were gone. It was assumed she’d transferred him to another vehicle, and all the suburbs south of Parliament House had been shut down. A big team of cops had already descended on Lomax’s apartment in Barton, just in case she’d taken the PM there. If we didn’t catch her quickly, her next move was a given.
As I drove, I thought through the contact I’d had with Penny Lomax over the past week. She’d made good eye-contact when we’d interviewed her. Her answers had been crisp and to the point, and she’d seemed relatively at ease. And when we’d caught her out, apparently protecting Janet Wilson, she’d confessed without dissolving. At the time, I’d put her equilibrium down to strength of character. I now knew that the stakes for her had been much higher than mere pride.
So had there been any warning signs, other than the Wilson business — some indication of what Lomax was capable of? We’d checked all the calls on her work-supplied mobile. She hadn’t used it in the toilet after her huddle with Wilson at the party, so she must have had a dedicated mobile for contacting Joe. And bizarrely, in that first interview, she’d volunteered the fact that she didn’t own a cat. Had she been making a reference to her agenda? Even having fun at our expense? Maybe, but we couldn’t have taken it any further at the time.
Lomax had played the part of the loyal underling — a woman devoted to the interests of her boss. I was pretty good at detecting bullshit, but she’d totally fooled me. So was she that good, or had my instincts gone to mush? This thought brought on a surge of self-doubt. It was lead in my veins, and then it lodged in my guts.
Again, I had to fight to retain focus.
We couldn’t automatically assume that the PM’s abduction was connected to the Wright and Proctor murders, but a connection was likely. Which meant that, if the same mob had been responsible for all three crimes, their original plan would have been to take Lansdowne back to Rodway Street. I’d spoiled that for them, so where would Lomax take him now? And what was her endgame? Did she have more surprises in store? With Joe out of the picture, was she operating alone, or was there a third party involved? Well, alone or not, in snatching the PM, Lomax had engineered an almost impossible heist.
A clutch of motorcycle cops had strung their machines across the ramp that led up to the House. Our convoy slowed, we killed our lights and sirens, and the cops unblocked the road and waved us through. At the top of the ramp, we wound our way around to the Senate side of the building and headed for the ministerial entrance at the back. Staffers in suits mingled with kitchen hands and gardeners on the footpath, all of them watching the choppers that clattered over the nearby suburbs. Other workers huddled in groups on the sloping lawns. Some cried. Others gave comfort.
When we turned the corner at the back of the building, we saw the close-protection vehicle that Davies had told us about. The front end of the big Fairlane sat up on a line of raised bollards like some sort of retro-rocketship ready for take-off. None of us said a word as we drove by, but the sight of that car, pointed at the sky, underlined the audacity of this crime.
The vehicles ahead of us turned onto Melbourne Avenue to join the search, while I took the road up to the ministerial entrance. A young woman in House livery stood beside the raised bollards at the top of the road. After she checked our ID, she took a small two-way from her belt and gave the okay. The bollards descended into the blacktop.
