The Tower Mill

by James Moloney

  ‘I’m honoured you’ve come all the way from Australia to interview me.’

  Ah, he was trying the naivety-as-charm approach.

  ‘I’m a Londoner these days,’ I said, to deflect him, then wondered about the accuracy of my words. ‘Not such an epic commute, after all.’

  But he knew that.

  While we negotiated the pleasantries he was sizing me up from head to toe and clearly approved of my new shoes. Italian men tended to rape you with their eyes, while the French merely noted how well the package was wrapped, withholding judgment about whether to undress you until they’d at least offered a coffee.

  ‘Would you like un café, Ms Kinnane?’

  The lapse into his own language was deliberate. Could I be charmed as a woman, could my questions be blunted by feminine distractions, would this gauche Australian-come-Englishwoman go starry-eyed at finding herself in the centre of civilisation?

  We were seated by this time in exquisite chairs to the side of his desk. Time to set things straight for Monsieur Berringer.

  ‘I’d like to begin by asking about some recent stock market transactions. Is Société d’Europa planning to take over one of Australia’s big banks? The anz, for example?’

  Surprise has a way of sneaking out between the cracks, especially when the charming smile is manufactured.

  ‘What transactions are you referring to, Ms Kinnane?’

  ‘Oh, please call me Susan.’

  ‘In that case, you must call me Robert.’ He pronounced his name in the French manner, lingering on the long final syllable. But I had beaten him to this offer of informality and tipped him off balance again. I went in hard with the share trading.

  He claimed ignorance: ‘Wouldn’t that upset your Mr Keating?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s what your bank is trying to find out. Test the government’s resolve. How open is this new policy and how much are they going to protect iconic brand names in the banking industry?’

  ‘I can assure you, Susan, that Société d’Europa is setting up in Australia for the long haul.’

  He quoted the official line, pretty much as I’d read it in the company prospectus, but he was choosing his words carefully, in an English that belied the laboured accent and, as he spoke, he watched me cautiously. There was respect in those eyes. The charm of faux seduction had given way to the pas de deux of interview, which, for me, carried a certain charm of its own.

  I backed my foot off the pedal. ‘How will you like living in Australia?’

  ‘I was in Sydney for a few days last month, to sign the lease for our offices. The bank has arranged an apartment for me overlooking . . . is it Rose Bay? Magnificent. It will be like living on the Riviera without the faded aristocrats and American widows in search of one last husband. I am looking forward to it.’

  The last part was surely meant to make me feel proud of my home town, but his caricature of the Riviera coaxed a genuine smile onto my lips. We continued to dance around the bank’s intentions, drawing laughter from one another on several occasions until he suddenly dispensed with the prospectus and spoke with real passion about the opportunities in a market energised by reform.

  ‘You’re a banker, yet your heart hasn’t been removed, and your blood hasn’t been replaced with iced water.’ I said, wondering how he would react.

  If he was insincere, this would sour the interview, I’d calculated, but instead my comment earned his freest smile so far.

  ‘The dotted lines are drawn on my chest, ready for the surgeon,’ he said, grabbing the lapel of his suit as though he wanted to show me, ‘but so far I have avoided the knife. Tell me, Susan, are you always so hard on a man?’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘Oh! I’m sure I detected personal relish in what you said.’

  Relish! His English was too good. Had I managed to strip back more from Robert Berringer than he realised?

  A clock sounded eleven-thirty from somewhere behind me and, almost instantly, the pa appeared to announce the next appointment. Berringer waved him off with a hand splayed wide to indicate another five minutes. When the pa returned, we rose and shook hands.

  ‘I have enjoyed our talk very much,’ he said. ‘So much, in fact, I would be delighted if it could continue this evening, over dinner. I’m sure we’ll find something other than finance to discuss. Chest surgery, perhaps. Blood transfusions.’

  I was booked on a six-thirty flight, and had only the outfit I stood in.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to, very much,’ I said, and laughed out loud at the madness of it all when, later, I stared through windows in Rue de Grenelle and dared imagine the price tags.

  We ate at Le Cochon à L’Oreille near Les Halles, starting with kirs royaux and progressing on to a bottle of burgundy over foie gras and entrecôte de boeuf. Since I wore the same skirt and jacket, he had surely guessed at my impulsive change of plan, but despite this I didn’t feel I was being talked into bed. The more we sparred across the table, the more his throaty English dissipated, until I had to challenge him about it.

  ‘The accent is something I put on to entertain the tourists. Actually, I spent a year at Cambridge as a postgraduate and then two more in the us for Crédit Agricole.’

  When it was my turn, I told him I’d been married, and, breaking a rule, I told him I had a son who lived with his father. Before I quite knew how, it was out there on the table between us that I’d seen little of Tom for five years, and none at all for the last three.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘He will have changed a lot. I’m about to experience something similar with my own, but they are teenagers, of course. Their characters are largely formed.’

  I hadn’t made that connection between us until then.

  In London the next day, I submitted my copy about Société d’Europa’s plans and a profile of its first Australian ceo. In reply came a note from Joel.

  We pay you plenty, especially when you file late. By the way, whitewash factories going broke in Queensland. The royal commission is drawing blood. Fun for young and old.

  Before I left the office for my flat in Islington, I read all that the wires had to say about what was being called the Fitzgerald Inquiry. There was blood in the water, right enough – brothels and bookmakers had been paying off senior policemen and the commissioner had been stood down.

  I remembered his name – Lewis – the fawning puppet Bjelke-Petersen had installed. Who else would fall, I wondered, while I waited on the crowded platform beneath Charing Cross.

  Above ground again and approaching my flat in the autumn cool, I could see an enormous bouquet of irises propped against my front door.

  Thank you for a delightful evening. Robert, read the card.

  I hadn’t given him my address, yet these flowers had come to my home, not the office where they would have been an embarrassment. Had he known as much? Sensitive or not, bankers were resourceful people, or their pas were, and I loved irises. I was tempted to phone and tell him so.

  It was a Friday night. I poured a glass of red and watched the late news, which, as ever, had nothing to report from Australia.

  Fun for young and old, Joel’s message had predicted. Despite the wine, I didn’t sleep well and spent the weekend in an unfamiliar quandary until Monday, when I rang Joel in Sydney.

  ‘I’m thinking about coming back to Oz.’

  ‘Susan, my axe-wielding angel. We’ll have you home by Christmas.’

  TOM

  Mike Riley was a teacher who wrote poetry and he didn’t kid himself that those roles could be transposed. He was never going to win literary prizes or have his name spoken by prime ministers and this was why the residency in 2003 was such a thing for him – a tick of recognition, and from East Anglia, a university renowned for its creative writing program, too. What did it matter that it was for
a summer school in Norwich, not a semester? When he rang to tell me, his excitement couldn’t quite smother the pride; this time it was the dad who was desperate to show off the ribbons he’d won on sports day.

  He was never going to fly off to England without Mum, either. They used their long service leave to make a decent go of it and didn’t they have a ball. Gabby, Emma and I had all beaten Mum and Dad to Europe, which made them determined to see everything, taste it, swim in it, to make their own what had always seemed so far away. Once Dad started in Norwich, Mum was to head back to Brisbane, and with that day looming they spent the last week with me in London.

  Hilary was gone by then. They were too polite to say anything and too open-faced to hide their disappointment. We thought she was the one, their silent glances told me, even though they had never met her. With explanations left unspoken, I did my best as tour guide and snatched a day off work to show them around, as I’d done when Susan came the year before. That was the day we went to the National Portrait Gallery. It sticks in my mind because of a single moment that occurred there, before a portrait of Germaine Greer, of all people.

  You’d think a bit of company in a flat that I now had to myself would enliven me, but, in truth, they made me more aware of Hilary’s absence. After the first gush of catching up, I felt myself going dry and started in with questions about home, and people I hadn’t seen in years – or cared about for longer.

  On the second night, Dad shot a breath down his nose and smiled like a happy devil. ‘A famous old name popped up in the papers just before we left, in fact. Do you remember the police commissioner exposed by Fitzgerald?’

  ‘Lewis?’ I said instantly.

  ‘That’s him,’ said Dad. ‘Wants his superannuation back, apparently. Says it shouldn’t have been forfeited just because he went to gaol.’

  ‘You’re joking. Has he run out of the money he took in paper bags?’

  ‘You’re getting your villains mixed up, Tom. Joh was the one who liked paper bags for his cash. And Joh’s on the make, too, now that I mention him. Thinks he should be compensated for lost business opportunities because nobody’d touch him after Fitzgerald. He’s made an application to the government.’

  If Mum hadn’t been there I would have let fly with more than ‘Bloody hell! Shows how much he cares about the damage he caused. I tell you, I’m going to piss on that man’s grave!’

  ‘That’s a bit over the top, Tom,’ said Mum. ‘What are you so hot about Joh for? He’d gone before you even left school.’

  Dad saw it the same way. He leaned forward on the sofa and said more seriously, ‘It was our generation that copped all of Joh’s crap.’

  No, Dad, I wanted to say, that crap was mine, even more than it was yours. But I didn’t say it, just as I’d kept quiet a dozen times before when the urge had taken me. It was Susan’s story. She’d kept the Bindy letter from him and I wondered what good it would do to tell him now.

  SUSAN

  March, 1988

  They were the hottest seats in town. Even a year into the Inquiry, there was often a queue outside the court, the Brisbane boys told me, and it doubled in length whenever another big fish was about to go belly up. The police pond was already ripe with putrid carcasses.

  I wasn’t actually covering the Fitzgerald Inquiry for my paper. I had wangled my way to Brisbane a few times on blatantly false pretences, but when the name I’d been waiting for came up, I simply took leave. I couldn’t miss his moment on the hook.

  I was at the court in George Street in plenty of time and with a borrowed press pass to be sure of a seat, for today the gavel would fall on his head at last. There would be no damage for the surgeons to mend, not like there was for Terry Stoddard, but the bastard’s life would never be the same.

  I could barely sit still while the hearing room filled. Council assisting appeared, consulted with associates and rifled notes at a lectern facing the commissioner’s bench. I didn’t see the commissioner take his seat, nor take in the murmur of those around me.

  ‘The commission calls Detective Senior Sergeant Barry Dolan.’

  And suddenly he was there. I had stared at his photograph many times, more than one shot, in fact, because the higher you climbed in the police force the more often the media wanted your face. I knew what his voice would sound like, after the phone call years earlier, but this was the first time I’d sighted his flesh, finding it pink, not newsprint grey after all, and with the bulk of it buttoned into an ill-fitting suit. Even so, he couldn’t hide his humiliation. I breathed it in as he passed in the aisle.

  The years hadn’t been kind. What had once been a formidable frame now sagged beneath too many shouts with his mates, or was it too much time at the trough? His jowls were wider than the sweating forehead and even accounting for a sleepless night, he seemed withered. He was forty-five years old, I knew, young to have risen to the rank he would soon lose, thanks to the services rendered and favours proffered in return, which now hung about him like a shroud.

  ‘They’re going to bury you,’ I said, under my breath.

  ‘Detective Senior Sergeant, is it correct that you have made certain admissions to investigators representing this Inquiry?’

  A long pause followed, yet even the most stubborn must yield eventually.

  The answer extracted itself like a stubborn tooth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what was the nature of those admissions?’

  I remembered Tom in his highchair, many years ago, with his little mouth clamped shut against the spoonful I was determined to get down his gullet. I wanted to shout at Dolan, Open wide, you fucker. There are no thirty-six-inch batons in this courtroom, no darkness to hide you, no frightened mates to keep their traps shut. Open wide, swallow the purgative, and let me be cleansed.

  ‘Senior Sergeant?’ prompted Council.

  ‘That I have received payments.’

  Come on, Barry, you could do better than that – which Council Assisting reminded him, until it came out at last.

  ‘Illegal payments, yes.’

  ‘Corrupt payments?’

  ‘Yes.’ It didn’t seem so hard now.

  ‘How much did you receive in corrupt payments?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘How much was each payment, in rough terms?’

  ‘Five hundred dollars.’

  ‘And approximately how often did you receive such payments?’

  I once interviewed a torturer in Egypt, who trained Alsatian dogs to attack naked men in their cells. The injuries, shown to me in photographs, had turned my stomach, but the moment of purest horror came when I realised he enjoyed inflicting such pain. On that day, before Commissioner Fitzgerald, I understood my Egyptian torturer. The savage bite of Council’s questions couldn’t elicit enough agony, as far as I was concerned. I wanted the shame to linger in his florid face, so that I could savour it like no one else. Hadn’t I come halfway round the world to see it?

  Dolan’s admissions continued, while the crowded courtroom listened in silence. It was a familiar litany, which I’d read many times in the transcripts stretching back to before I left London. Corruption was so banal, so unimaginative; grubby notes palmed to look the other way when passing the door to a brothel or a backroom casino that half of Brisbane knew was there. No wonder Lewis and his mates dubbed it ‘The Joke’.

  But this was all Dolan had to answer for. There were no questions about a young man running through Wickham Park on a cold winter’s night, no questions about undue force or a conspiracy with an unnamed constable to make what happened look like an accident. Dolan didn’t know that a woman in the court wanted to put those questions to him, a woman he’d dismissed as a joke as well, more than ten years ago. He’d got away with that one, and for all I knew he’d forgotten it ever happened.

  Today he was being held to account
for something, at least.

  I began to cry, too loudly to go unnoticed. The commissioner himself glared at me from the bench because I was interrupting vital testimony. Did I seem like a relative, a sister? Oh God, he thought I was the bastard’s wife!

  I blundered free of the courtroom, and, in the seclusion of the ladies’ room, sobbed as loudly as I damned well needed to, for the seventeen years I’d waited and wasted and hated myself because of what I couldn’t do, and which today was being carried out by others who didn’t even know what Dolan had destroyed.

  Later that day, I met Tom. Our meeting had been arranged before I was quite sure when Dolan would appear at the Inquiry, and I knew I couldn’t simply fail to turn up when I’d been so cruel to him on my last visit.

  For some reason, he stopped at the old windmill and was looking away from the Tower Mill Hotel, where we’d agreed to meet. Then, as I tried to join him, he started towards me, throwing his school bag over his shoulder as he walked.

  Oh God, Terry once carried an old-fashioned briefcase like that. I saw Terry in his face, too. The nose, the line of his jaw. I’d picked these out years ago, before I left for overseas, but today, after the hearing, the similarities became a fist closing tightly around my heart.

  I asked him what he knew about 1971.

  He stared blankly at me. I prompted him with the Springboks and the State of Emergency.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Come with me,’ I demanded, leading him to the place beside the path where Terry had lain for hours while the pressure inside his skull crushed all trace of the man he’d been. ‘This is where your father was found. Your real father,’ I told him, even though the emphasis sounded cruel in my throat.

  ‘This is where it happened?’ he asked, that same face darkening in fear.

  No, I wanted to say. The worst of it happened somewhere else in the park. Impossible to know where. I couldn’t explain, though. Instead I said, ‘You’ve seen what it did to him.’