Facing the Music

by Brian Smith

  They travelled in silence and, although the trip was a short one, it gave time for Mike to collect his thoughts. Mary would have told them about the phone call Shane received on the night he was killed and how he called Mike a pest before he went out. It would be natural for them to jump to the conclusion he was going to meet Mike – Mary had done the same. He would have to deal with that issue before he told them about Rossi and Sarac. Feeling reassured, Mike sat back and recalled the tall police building that looked as though it had been rendered with wet sand and often appeared in news reports of high profile crimes. He did not see the familiar facade of the building, however, as Clarke drove them into an underground car park from which they travelled by lift to an anonymous corridor where he was led into a small windowless room containing a deal table and four wooden chairs. Ryan left him there with the comment that he would be back shortly. After ten minutes Mike began to wonder whether this was some kind of softening-up technique akin to the delay he had suffered at the commission. There was no hidden camera; it was prominently mounted in a corner of the room opposite where he was sitting.

  Eventually the door opened and a thickset man of medium height with a square face and bald head entered the room. He was dressed almost entirely in grey: a grey single-breasted suit, a grey and white striped shirt and a grey tie. Behind him came Sergeant Ryan. The two of them sat across the table from Mike and the man in grey said, ‘Mr Georgiou, I’m Detective Senior Sergeant Max Robbins of the homicide squad. Thank you for coming in this morning.’

  Mike had thought Robbins might thank him for helping them with their enquiries, but he did not look like a man who went in for clichés. The senior sergeant nodded to Ryan who leant forward to the console which sat on the end of the table beside the wall and flicked a switch, before saying, ‘Mr Georgiou, this interview is being video-recorded and you will be given a copy.’

  He then made a preliminary statement, eerily similar to the one the commission man had made yesterday. Mike reflected ruefully that the police went one better than the commission: he would have a DVD of this one.

  The first questions Ryan asked established for the record Mike’s full name, address, occupation and employer. The next question was unexpected.

  ‘How well did you know Shane Francis?’

  ‘Not very well at all. After he linked up with my sister, he came to the occasional family lunch, but that was about it.’

  This was far too curt an answer for Ryan who sought much greater detail, including many questions Mike considered irrelevant, such as when they had first met, how often they had met and whether they had met other than on family occasions. When Mike said there were none, Robbins intervened. ‘You’re both in the building game. I would have thought you would have bumped into one another from time to time. Most recently you’ve been on adjacent sites.’

  Mike was becoming irritated by the policemen’s persistent interest in what he saw as trivia. Why didn’t they come to the point? He smiled and said, ‘Building sites don’t welcome drop-ins.’

  ‘A common interest though. Something to talk about when you did meet.’

  ‘I guess neither of us liked to bring work home.’

  ‘What did you think of him?’ Ryan asked sharply.

  ‘I didn’t like him.’

  ‘No. Why was that?’

  Mike did not answer immediately, wondering whether Mary had told them about Shane hitting her. She had done her best to camouflage the marks from her most recent beating, and they had faded, but the police would probably have noticed.

  ‘He was a loudmouth who was too sure of himself.’

  ‘A loudmouth? But you didn’t talk much. Anything else?’

  Ryan’s tone was challenging and Mike decided he should not hold back. ‘Shane hit my sister on a number of occasions.’

  ‘Have you ever taken this up with him?’

  ‘Yeah, last Monday at Doherty’s Gym. I should have done it a lot sooner, but Mary didn’t want me to get involved.’

  ‘Did your sister ask you to go?’

  ‘No, she was in denial. I believe that’s common.’ He appealed to the police with his eyes; they would have much more experience of domestic violence than he had.

  Robbins continued to examine him as though observing an interesting specimen, before saying, ‘So you did meet him outside the family?’

  ‘Just that once. I thought you were asking whether we had met socially.’

  ‘Best if you answer the questions and leave the thinking to us,’ the senior sergeant replied gently.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘He tried to pretend it hadn’t happened and I was imagining it. That made me angry. I don’t remember the exact words I used.’

  ‘You don’t remember any of your words?’ Mike noticed Ryan calibrated the level of his doubt by the pitch of his voice. This time it rose into the range of outright disbelief.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We have spoken to witnesses of the confrontation between you and Shane. They say you threatened to kill him. They also say he was the one who calmed things down and got you out of the gym.’

  ‘Shane was like that. He could be a brute but he liked to wrap it up as though he was on good terms with everyone.’

  ‘You threatened to kill him.’

  ‘I might have said something like that, but I didn’t mean it literally. Haven’t you ever said anything like that when you were angry?’

  Robbins nodded and Mike thought the senior man was showing some sympathy for him, until he realised the nod was a signal to Ryan that Robbins was taking over the questioning. He took Mike back through the material already covered, pushing him to recall more detail of his conversation with Shane. Eventually, he said. ‘It must have been galling for you to go to Doherty’s to sort out the man who was beating up your sister and have him patronise you.’

  When Mike made no reply, Robbins nodded again and Ryan continued.

  ‘Where did you go after you left Doherty’s? Tell us about the rest of your evening.’

  ‘I went home. Then I went with my family to a concert our younger daughter was in. Later I drove to the Lord Nelson Hotel in Fitzroy to meet a union official, Alan Reardon.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘I arrived there just before eight. We spoke for about half an hour. Returning to my car I was mugged by a man called Bruno Kordic.’

  ‘Unusual to be mugged by someone you know?’

  ‘I don’t know him,’ Mike snapped back. ‘I know his name.’

  ‘Why did he mug you?’

  ‘He was taking revenge for some damage I did to him the previous week.’

  ‘So you can handle yourself – no stranger to fights.’

  ‘Kordic was involved in an attempted robbery on the CityView site where I’m project manager. When we caught him at it, he went for me, but I got in a lucky blow with a crowbar and he got away without seriously harming me.’ Mike no longer carried any illusions about his abilities as a street-fighter – the other night had taught him that. And there was certainly nothing to be gained by pretending to these two cops.

  ‘The robbery was reported to police?’

  ‘We prevented anything being taken and my boss, Vern McKenzie, decided nothing was to be gained by reporting a failed robbery.

  ‘And the mugging? Did you keep that secret, too?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘I felt the same. The only other witness was one of Kordic’s mates, Rick Jennings, and all he would do would be to give Kordic an alibi.’

  For an instant Mike thought that Ryan was about to smile but, if he was, he changed his mind and his face remained set.

  Robbins stirred himself to say, ‘You told us you didn’t know Kordic but you do know his name and the name of his mates, it seems. How come?’

  Mike noticed that Ryan shot a dark glance at the senior man. Perhaps Ryan had been about to ask the same question. This was the chance Mike had been looking for to start talking about Sarac’s gang.
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  ‘Alan Reardon told me about them when we met at the Lord Nelson. He’s been involved at the Riverside site, which has switched the design of its latest tower to compete directly with our CityView project. Reardon told me there have been a number of problems at Riverview where a man called Ivan Sarac has been involved. Sarac has a gang of heavies he uses to threaten people who get in his way. Reardon showed me some photographs he had of the gang and I recognised Kordic. He told me the names of the others as well. One …’

  ‘So when did you leave the scene?’ Ryan asked impatiently.

  ‘I remember looking at my watch. It was about nine-thirty.’

  ‘It took an hour to mug you?’ Ryan’s voice reached the height of the red zone on his disbelief scale.

  ‘I had a bang on the head. After they left me it took me a while to feel up to driving.’

  ‘And when you did reach home, what did you do?’

  ‘You know what I did,’ Mike answered angrily. The drip, drip of this man’s questions, most of which he knew the answers to already, was getting to him. ‘I washed the filth of the alley off my clothes.’

  ‘Are you normally that neat and tidy?’

  Mike struggled with the conflict between making clear the reasons for his strange behaviour and facing the shame of what had happened to him. He could see both of them watching him closely. They hadn’t yet got to the phone call and Shane calling him a pest, but Mike could see they had accumulated much more circumstantial evidence than he had appreciated which pointed to him as Shane’s killer. Mike took a deep breath and said, ‘After he had me down in the lane, Kordic pissed all over me. I don’t know if you’ve ever had something like that happen to you, but I found it completely humiliating. I wanted to get rid of it as soon as I possibly could.’ He lowered his eyes and added, ‘My wife normally does most of the washing.’

  ‘It took you a long time to come up with that,’ the sergeant said drily. ‘Show me your hands.’ Mike gaped at the unexpected question but then held out his hands in a gesture that the camera might register as supplication. ‘No, turn them over.’

  His knuckles still showed the scabs from the damage he had done when clawing the pitchers in the lane on Monday. ‘Got those in the mugging on Monday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Funny that. Your hands look more like you were handing out punishment, not taking it, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I scraped them on the stones in the lane trying to save myself as I was knocked to the ground.’

  ‘It’s been a bad couple of weeks for you,’ Ryan said. ‘I’m told you’ve been stood down from work because you’re accused of bribing this Alan Reardon you met on Monday night and your boss has the idea you might have run him down after the two of you had an argument about your lack of performance. Still, some of the men at your site speak well of you.’ When Mike’s face softened in response to this single ray of light, Ryan nodded. ‘They say you’re quite a scrapper.’

  When Mike made no response, Robbins took over the questioning as he had done before, going back over the details of the mugging and Mike’s response to it. This time Mike did speak of his suspicion that Reardon was in league with Sarac and started to tell them about the bribery allegations, but Robbins cut him off, returning to more questions about his mugging and his movements afterwards. Mike could feel himself beginning to fray under their unremitting questioning and they hadn’t yet raised Shane calling him a pest after the phone call.

  ‘Look I can see where you’re going with this,’ he said, ‘But you’re wrong, totally wrong.’

  ‘So tell us what’s right,’ Ryan snarled at him. ‘Tell us why the last thing Shane Francis said to your sister before he went out to his death was that you were a pest. Tell us that.’ At last they had got to it.

  ‘He also said to whoever called him that they had “got it all wrong”,’ Mike replied. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. Shane was part of Ivan Sarac’s gang of thugs I told you about earlier. Shane was Sarac’s man on site at Riverside. Last week Angelo Rossi, the head of Rubicon, saw Shane and me together at a family dinner. Rossi told Sarac and Kordic. They were suspicious Shane had told me what they were up to. On Monday Sarac rang Shane, demanding he come and explain himself. That’s why Shane said, “You’ve got it wrong,” and that’s why he told Mary I was a pest. But before Kordic dealt with Shane he came to the Lord Nelson, having been tipped off by Alan Reardon that I would be there. Kordic took it out on both of us the same night, going further with Shane than he did with me. Maybe I was lucky not to be killed and maybe Shane was unlucky; I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know anything,’ Ryan spat back at him. ‘You made that up as you went along. I could see the wheels spinning in your head. Suddenly you know a lot about what Shane Francis did on the Riverside site and who he worked for, although back at the start of this interview you said you knew nothing about him.’

  ‘I said Shane and I didn’t talk about work. My information came from Alan Reardon.’

  Ryan scoffed. ‘Alan Reardon, the man you say tipped Kordic off that you were going to be at the Lord Nelson and is trying to frame you for bribery? You ask me to believe he told you that the guys he’s working with killed Shane Francis?’

  ‘No not that. He told me Shane was one of the gang – showed me photographs of them together.’

  ‘So how do you know they killed Shane?’

  Mike hesitated before saying lamely, ‘You should talk with Angelo Rossi.’

  Again Ryan scoffed. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. You …’

  ‘Mr Georgiou,’ the senior sergeant said with an authority that silenced Ryan. ‘You have the bones of a theory there. There are a lot of loose ends dangling from it that would need to be tied up before anyone is likely to believe you. Worse still, you lack evidence for most of your claims and we have statements from witnesses that rebut those claims.’

  Mike had been right when he guessed that they had been talking with Sarac and his gang, who were sure to give one another the alibis they needed.

  ‘I’ll put it to you this way, Mr Georgiou. We have considerable evidence that points to you as the killer of Shane Francis and we are confident we will find more. We have more work to do and we will want to speak with you again. However, over the weekend, I want you to think about this.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t intend to kill Shane Francis. Perhaps you were goaded into wanting to give him a taste of his own medicine, the medicine he gave your sister. But sometimes your temper gets the better of you and this time you went too far. Or perhaps in the process he fell, was killed and you panicked. An early plea of manslaughter, triggered but not excused by the victim’s treatment of your sister, is the best course of action for you. You should take legal advice before we meet again.’

  15

  The overnight rain had cleared, but heavy cloud remained and a chill south wind clawed at the small group of spectators watching Christos’ soccer match. Mike wished he had worn more than a padded bomber jacket and woollen scarf as his defence against the cold. Disconsolately he watched the ball wander up and down the muddy pitch surrounded by a swarm of players, none of whom seemed capable of driving it into open ground. Not that he paid a lot of attention; his thoughts, like the soccer ball, were wedged amid his problems without any idea of how he might find space to deal with them. When one of the other spectators, perhaps as little interested in the game as Mike, said, ‘Nice car!’ he turned to see what had caused the admiring comment and was surprised to find Mario Mancini stepping from a large, silver Mercedes sedan. Mancini did not hesitate but strode directly towards him. The black ankle-length overcoat, maroon woollen scarf and nautical cap gave him a presence among the spectators as imposing as his car parked among the other vehicles. He removed a leather glove.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mike,’ he said, taking Mike’s hand in a firm grasp. ‘Must be great to come along and support your lad. Never had that privilege myself.’

  Recovering from his surprise, Mike
said, ‘How did you know to find me here?’

  ‘I thought we should have a chat,’ Mancini said and stepped away from the crowd, drawing Mike with him. He didn’t say how he knew where to find Mike. ‘You told Carla that Demetri is feeling guilty about having used his recording of me as insurance, rather than giving it to the police.’

  ‘I can understand why that would worry you.’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ Mancini declared. He lifted his chin and said in a challenging voice, ‘Have you listened to the recording of my so-called “confession”?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ he replied disdainfully. ‘You should. When I first heard it, all those years ago, I found it damning. But I was young and inexperienced. For a long time now, I’ve been vastly more experienced and able to afford the best legal advice. Without any corroborating evidence – and there is none – it would be dismissed in court as the very thing it is – the posturing of a young hood.’

  ‘Then why come here today?’

  ‘It’s time Demetri heard the truth. But he won’t listen to me, so you must tell him.’

  ‘But …’

  Mike got no further before Mancini spoke over the top of him. ‘It served me well in those days for it to be thought I murdered Drago Fontini and what I said to Demetri was the bravado of youth. Fontini led a gang that fought with mine for control of the market. He looked and sounded like someone to fear, but at heart he was a coward. When his gang was there to protect him he was cruel and fearless. Without them he was nothing. Yes, I started the fight the night I found him alone, but very soon Fontini turned tail and ran. In his rush to escape he tripped and fell, hitting his head against the edge of a row of bricks lining the alley. It was a freak accident.’

  The further Mancini went with his story the more he seemed to retreat into memory and, when he was done, he looked around as though puzzled to find himself where he was. It was the first time Mike had seen him appear anything but completely assured. Mancini pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and said, ‘Demetri need not be ashamed. The world’s better off with Fontini dead, and the police of the time knew it. That’s why they spent so little effort trying to find out what really happened. There was no murder – not even manslaughter.’