Dreamland

by Gilling, Tom

  There was a grim irony, Nick used to think, that a company founded on concrete should trade so heavily in gossip, but it had been that way from the beginning.

  The very name Dreamland evoked dark rumours about the blaze that had destroyed the rotting Edwardian amusement park two decades ago. Three street kids had died in the Tunnel of Love, their names memorialised in a children’s charity generously funded by the Grogan Foundation.

  Speculation about the cause of the fire, fuelled by a fat insurance payout and by the local council’s decision not to allow the park to be rebuilt, had dogged Harry Grogan ever since. But Grogan wasn’t the only developer benefiting from insurance fires in Sydney during the 1980s. Keeping the Dreamland name was either an act of monstrous hubris or of clumsy atonement; the media had never been sure which.

  There was still the odd ratbag, of course, like the old man in shabby coat and shiny trousers, father of one of the dead children, who used to disrupt press conferences by shouting questions about the Dreamland fire—but these days the ratbags rarely made it onto the evening news bulletins. If there was something rank beneath the foundations of Harry Grogan’s harbourside citadel, Sydney didn’t want to know about it.

  For the few eccentrics (American widows on cruise ships, the occasional lone yachtsman) who still came to Australia by sea, Dreamland was their first sight of the continent, a glittering steel-and-marble monolith rising seven storeys above the harbour on the site where the creaking timber roller-coaster had rattled and roared since the 1920s.

  Inside the atrium stood the tallest pot plant in the southern hemisphere, a Canary Islands Date Palm (Phoenix canariensis) only a few metres shorter than the great Chilean Wine Palm (Jubaea chilensis) at the Temperate House in Kew Gardens. Asked by a journalist what he would do when the date palm grew too tall for the atrium, Harry Grogan had smiled and replied that he would chop it down and plant something smaller.

  Nick had been among the crowd that day, a cadet reporter in an uncomfortable suit sent to pester the suntanned socialites swarming over the newly-opened hotel in hopes of getting their picture taken with Billy Joel. Danny Grogan, not surprisingly, had refused to be anywhere near the site of his father’s triumph. His mother had floated in the background: a slim, sorrowful-looking figure in a wide-brimmed hat clutching a permanently half-full champagne flute. According to Danny they had stopped sleeping in the same room while he was still in his cot and by the time he was at school could barely stand to be in the same house together. Her expression that day was something Nick had never forgotten—a steely rejection of the celebrations going on around her and a silent avowal that, whatever it might be to her husband, this wasn’t her idea of Dreamland.

  Two hours after leaving Sydney, the Jaguar swung off the road onto a gravel track that wound through the vineyards to the rammed-earth building with GROGAN ESTATE WINES painted in black letters on its corrugated iron roof.

  Harry Grogan stood in the doorway, the pinstriped boardroom megalomaniac rather unconvincingly dressed in lumberjack shirt, corduroy trousers and olive-green Wellingtons.

  ‘Nicolas. It was good of you to come.’

  ‘I don’t think I had a choice, did I?’

  They shook hands. ‘One always has a choice, Nicolas.’

  ‘I’d assumed we would meet in the city.’

  Grogan smiled and ushered him inside. ‘Never assume anything. That’s a rule I’ve always followed, Nicolas. Assumptions have a tendency to be misplaced.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  The room was much bigger than it promised from outside. Light flooded through big north-facing windows. The wall behind the tasting counter was covered with diamond-shaped wine racks. Other walls were decorated with plaques and awards. In the centre of the room stood a rustic table, already laid for lunch, and two high-backed chairs.

  It was just after eleven o’clock. ‘I thought we might have something to eat,’ said Grogan, gesturing towards a chair. ‘I hope you’re hungry.’

  ‘Listen, Mr Grogan. If this is about doing something for Danny—’

  The older man cut him off. ‘He always liked you, Nicolas.’

  The possibility suddenly occurred to Nick that Danny might be somewhere near, waiting for the right moment to show himself. ‘Was calling me Danny’s idea?’

  ‘Danny doesn’t know I’ve spoken to you. He thinks he can sort this out by himself.’ Grogan smiled. ‘My son has always had an exaggerated impression of his independence. You know it was my money that bought the nightclub?’

  Nick thought for a few moments before speaking. ‘It was a disused church when you bought it, Mr Grogan. Danny turned it into a nightclub.’

  ‘I admire your loyalty, Nicolas. Deluded as it probably is.’

  A middle-aged woman emerged from a red door behind the tasting counter, carrying a plate of antipasto. Without looking at her, Grogan said, ‘Thank you, Estelle.’ He picked up the bottle of Grogan Estate pinot noir that was standing in the middle of the table. ‘You’ll have some wine?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Danny’s father poured two large glasses. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘About Danny?’

  ‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’

  ‘I know what I read in the paper,’ said Nick. ‘A camera caught Danny speeding on Moore Park Road.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  It was obvious that Danny’s father knew more. ‘Pretty much,’ he said.

  ‘You know Danny is serving a suspended sentence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If he’s convicted of another offence he’ll go to jail.’

  Nick didn’t say anything. Danny had been lucky until now but his luck had run out. Some people never had any luck to begin with. Maybe Danny deserved what was coming to him.

  ‘Danny’s mother is under sedation, Nicolas.’

  Nick had never met Mrs Grogan face-to-face. She was as reclusive as her husband was ubiquitous. Apart from a handful taken at the Dreamland opening, the only picture in the Star’s photographic library was nearly fifteen years old: the developer’s wife in silk headscarf, white raincoat and dark glasses scurrying into a Paddington boutique. The shot reminded Nick of Jackie Onassis—or Princess Diana. As a child Danny rarely spoke about his mother. Nick had the impression she was often ill. Of course the rumours of her husband’s infidelities couldn’t have helped. If the gossip was true, Harry Grogan had a whole harem of mistresses installed in penthouse units around the city. None of the mistresses had ever come forward, of course. Still, it wasn’t hard to see why Mrs Grogan shunned the public gaze.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It would kill her if Danny went to jail.’

  ‘If you want me to speak on Danny’s behalf in court,’ said Nick, ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, Nicolas. But it’s not exactly what I was thinking of.’

  ‘What were you thinking of ?’

  Danny’s father picked up his glass and swirled it around, his eyes fixed on the wine. Half a minute passed before he lifted his gaze. ‘I want you to say you were driving Danny’s car.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Nick. ‘They have him on camera.’

  ‘They have the car on camera. It was nearly midnight. In such cases, I’m told, it is all but impossible to identify the driver.’

  ‘Why should I have been driving Danny’s car? And if I was driving Danny’s car, why would I have been doing ninety kilometres an hour on Moore Park Road? I know that road. There are speed cameras all over the place.’ He paused. ‘No, Mr Grogan. I’m sorry. It’s a crazy idea. I’d like to help Danny but… not like this.’

  Grogan waited for some time before speaking again. ‘Danny will nominate you as the driver at the time of the accident. He will say you offered to drive him home. At some point he changed his mind and asked you to take him back to the nightclub. All you have to do, Nicolas, is agree. Danny’s lawyer will obtain a formal statement to that effect. The case against Danny will b
e dismissed. I believe I’m right in saying that you have recently experienced the break-up of a long-term relationship. The magistrate will take into account your emotional state at the time of the incident, together with the fact that it happened on New Year’s Eve, and let you off with a fine.’

  Nick studied his face over the table. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

  ‘No, Nicolas. I’m not joking.’

  ‘What makes you think the police will believe I was driving the car?’

  ‘Can you suggest any reason they might have for not believing you?’

  ‘I’d be committing perjury,’ said Nick. ‘I could end up in jail.’

  ‘Nobody would be able to prove it,’ said Grogan. ‘Not if you were careful. Not if you stuck to your story.’

  Nick thought about the sequined handbag he’d seen in the front seat of the Audi. ‘Someone was with Danny that night. A girl.’

  Grogan’s expression hardened. ‘Danny was alone, Nicolas. He wasn’t with anyone.’

  ‘No, Mr Grogan. I’m sorry Danny’s in trouble. But I’m not getting mixed up in this.’ A few seconds passed before Nick heard himself say, ‘It’s not worth the risk.’ Those last few words took him by surprise—as if they had been spoken by someone else. ‘What I mean is, it’s too dangerous. For Danny as well as me. Lying will only get Danny into more trouble than he’s in already.’

  ‘Danny has always been a good liar,’ Grogan said. ‘It’s the one thing I can always trust him to do.’

  Nick didn’t say anything.

  Grogan finished his wine and cradled the empty glass in his hand. ‘What do you think the risk is worth?’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘A few moments ago you said that doing this little favour for Danny wasn’t worth the risk.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, I’m asking you what would make it worth the risk?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, Nicolas. You’re an intelligent man. And like an intelligent man, you’re pretending not to know.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Mr Grogan. I thought we were talking about helping Danny.’

  ‘We are.’ The older man paused. ‘I’m just waiting for you to tell me the price.’

  ‘The price?’

  ‘Your price.’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘Of course you are. The course of action I’m urging carries a degree of risk. It’s only fair to put a price on that risk. I’m asking you to name the price.’

  ‘In terms of what?’

  ‘In terms of money, Nicolas.’

  ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You think money will persuade me to lie for Danny?’

  ‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  Nick hesitated. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Come on, Nicolas. You must have some idea. Twenty thousand? Fifty? A hundred thousand? Would it be worth a hundred thousand dollars to you to tell the police you got carried away by the excitement of driving Danny’s car and broke the speed limit?’

  Grogan made it sound trivial—a game almost, like stealing traffic cones or defacing road signs. Maybe it was a game, Nick thought. After all, nobody had been hurt. Nick thought about the money. A hundred thousand dollars was roughly ninety-five thousand more than he’d managed to save after a decade of full-time employment. He thought about the timing. He’d left the Judgment Bar around 10 p.m. and stood outside the Supreme Court for a while smoking a cigarette before deciding to try his luck at the Crypt. The speed camera had clocked Danny’s Audi at 10.27 p.m. on Moore Park Road. Between leaving the Judgment Bar and joining the queue outside the nightclub just before 11 p.m., he hadn’t spoken to a soul.

  Nick waited a long time before answering. Once he might have said yes without thinking. He might even have felt he owed it to Danny, as a friend, to give him the alibi he needed. Maybe, deep down, he still felt that. Or maybe he didn’t. He thought about the money. He thought about himself thinking about the money. The money wasn’t his idea. It wasn’t as though he’d asked for it. Maybe, after all, he would have done this thing for Danny without the money. Maybe.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Nick. ‘I’m not promising anything.’

  Grogan scribbled a mobile phone number on a lined page torn from his diary. ‘In case you need to call me.’

  Nick glanced at the last four digits—7777—before folding the page and slipping it in his pocket.

  Looking at Danny’s father, Nick knew that the last thirty minutes had been a charade: of patience and humility on Grogan’s side, and of integrity, or at least discretion, on his. If he hesitated it was because he wasn’t sure of being able to pull off his side of the bargain. He could imagine lying impulsively— or even cunningly and deliberately—to save his own skin. In fact he didn’t need to imagine it. He’d done it countless times, in greater or lesser ways. But what would it take to stand up in court and perjure himself—to coolly take the blame for something he hadn’t done?

  He watched Harry Grogan put out his hand and he watched himself take it. For an instant he had the weird sensation that this wasn’t him, that the person shaking Grogan’s hand was a stranger. He used to get the same feeling on death-knocks, speaking to the parents of teenage boys who’d driven into power poles or jumped in front of trains: the momentary feeling of not recognising himself, of listening to a voice that wasn’t his, of knowing and somehow not knowing what he was doing there. There was something hard and sarcastic in Grogan’s smile, as if he knew exactly what Nick was thinking, as if he’d witnessed such moral spasms before and always seen them overcome.

  ‘You’ll need to speak to Danny’s solicitor. His name is Roy Bellamy. He’s expecting your call.’

  After leaving the circulations department of the Sun, Nick’s father had taken a job in insurance. He became an adjuster: he adjusted people’s claims to fit their losses. Nick’s father understood loss and the effects of loss—grief, anger, the need to recover what was not recoverable. He was generous in his adjustments. He liked to think of himself as fair, although fairness was not his business.

  Mr Carmody was well known in Sydney’s hailstorm belt: a balding cheerful little man who never said no to a cup of tea. And further afield, in flood-prone towns up north and hamlets in the Blue Mountains where bushfires raged every few years. Nick had seen photographs of his father standing in his shirtsleeves among the ashes of burnt-out homes; bending down among the charred timbers to rescue a brooch or a teapot. People still spoke of him in Bellingen, Taree, Mount Victoria, Medlow Bath, towns famous for their disasters. He was the fellow who arrived in the wake of hailstorms and whirlwinds and set about putting a price on what was lost.

  Nick thought of him as he sat in the Jaguar, watching the scenery fly past the darkened windows. His father had never accepted a dollar he hadn’t earned. But the world had changed. In his father’s day money was the means of acquiring essentials: a car, a house, a two-week holiday at the coast every summer. Now money was the essence, and Nick felt the lack of it. By Harry Grogan’s standards a hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a big sum, but it felt like a big sum to Nick—enough to change his life. When the driver handed him a small package from the Jaguar’s glove box, he took it.

  It was 2.15 p.m. as Nick climbed the steps from Town Hall station. He had an hour to kill before his meeting with Roy Bellamy. There was a big red ‘Sale’ sticker in the window of the Rubicon bookshop. The Rubicon was where Nick and Carolyn had met—upstairs, among the second-hand shelves. Nick had lost count of the afternoons they had spent in the coffee shop, reading books they had no intention of buying, and afterwards buying books they had no prospect of reading.

  He went inside. The upstairs section was even more cluttered than usual. Scattered around the walls were hundreds of distressed paperbacks: concave airport thrillers and dog-eared romances bought by the kilogram or by the metre and displayed i
n pink plastic baskets, like offal in a Chinese market.

  Near the window overlooking the street was a trestle table marked ‘Crime’. Nick circled the table, picking up books and then putting them back: long-out-of-print detective novels by Fergus Hume and Frederic Dannay; obscure psychological thrillers by Frances Iles; the odd Father Brown mystery, smelling of must and Mortein. This was the sort of literature Nick liked to read, the sort he wished he had the talent to write.

  Among the leaning towers of broken-spined paperbacks were publishers’ remainders and dumped foreign editions, never opened, let alone read. These held no interest for Nick. There was something abject, he thought, about an unread book in a second-hand bookshop. He picked up a well-thumbed Simenon and took it downstairs to the counter.

  Roy Bellamy had rooms in Macquarie Street overlooking the Mint in a building pregnant with obstetricians. He was a short fleshy man with a comb-over that looked as if it had been painted on with a calligrapher’s brush.

  The solicitor waited for his elderly secretary to close the door before signalling for Nick to sit down. ‘Mr Carmody,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’

  After shaking hands Bellamy removed his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a corner of his white cotton handkerchief.

  ‘Are you related to George Carmody, by any chance?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it.’

  ‘Who’s George Carmody?’

  ‘He’s a barrister. An unscrupulous one. I had a fleeting suspicion that you looked like him.’ He replaced his glasses and steepled his plump fingers on the desk. ‘You’ve come forward, I understand, to give evidence on behalf of Daniel Grogan.’

  The formal way he said it made Nick suspect for a moment that Bellamy might be recording the conversation.

  ‘Are you taping this?’ he asked.

  ‘Would it matter if I was?’

  ‘It might.’

  Bellamy smiled and produced a small tape-recorder from the top drawer of his desk. Nick could see that the spools were not turning. ‘Satisfied?’ Bellamy studied him across the table. ‘You’re the man who tracked down Mr Milhench.’