Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel

by Peter Corris

‘Jane,’ I said, ‘I can see what’s in it for Lee and possibly for me, but what have you got to gain? Just supposing it goes according to your plan, and I wouldn’t bet on it, you’ll be finished in the police force. A lot of mud’ll stick to you. Your future’d be pretty bleak. You might write a book, might sell the film rights, but …’

  ‘It stinks,’ Jane said. ‘People are getting hurt. It sickens me. Call me a martyr.’

  The use of that word worried me a lot. In my book, martyrs of all kinds are deluded—paradise doesn’t exist and neither does a clean city. To do him credit, Townsend, who had most to gain, was as uncertain as me.

  ‘It’s not something to rush into,’ he said. ‘There might be other ways.’

  ‘There aren’t,’ she said.

  ‘When were you thinking of making your move?’

  ‘I can’t stand it much longer. As soon as possible—a week?’

  Townsend shook his head. ‘It’d take that long at least to set up the locale and other necessary arrangements.’

  Jane finished her brandy. ‘Ten days, max!’

  ‘Or?’ I said.

  ‘Or I find someone else to do it with.’

  That’s where we left it. Townsend paid for the dinner and took Jane off, whether to her place or his I didn’t know or care. I watched them walk away, holding hands. She was ten centimetres taller in her flatties, but Townsend held himself so well and moved so fluently the difference wasn’t as noticeable as it might have been.

  I decided that I was sober enough to drive, but I went for a long walk anyway. I had a lot of thinking to do and walking helps. The rain held off, but those Chatswood canyon winds got to me and made me step up my pace. Lily and I used to walk around the streets at night, in Glebe and Greenwich, burning off the evening meal calories, processing the booze, talking. We talked about politics, books, films, people. We told stories from our past that helped to bind us together. When someone knows that much about you and you know a lot about them, there’s a connection. It helps you to avoid mistakes, anticipate needs, keep things flowing. I missed those walks.

  I found myself thinking more about Lily than Townsend and Jane Farrow and her extraordinary claims and proposal. I got lost, and had to concentrate to find my way back to the car park, so I stopped thinking about the evening’s developments altogether. I retrieved the car, paid the fee and drove out into heavy rain. More thoughts of Lily, who’d always mocked my clunky wipers.

  I drove carefully in the sort of moderate to heavy traffic that seems to be on the move in most parts of Sydney day and night. For a couple of kilometres I found myself behind one of those drivers who hit the brakes unexpectedly and too often, and change lanes without signalling. I surprised myself by remaining patient. I turned the radio on but I could scarcely hear it over the drumming of the rain. I was back in my own territory before my mind could focus on the shape of things again. One thought came through clearly: Find out a lot more about Jane Farrow.

  part two

  14

  Townsend rang me the next morning. Hank Bachelor had left a note saying that he’d found the bugging device and removed it. He’d also installed an up-to-the-minute alarm system geared to a private security mob he recommended.

  ‘We have to talk,’ Townsend said.

  ‘I’ll say we do. I’ve had this phone debugged, so we can talk on this line.’

  ‘I’m on my mobile. Should be okay.’

  Thank God he didn’t call it my cell. ‘Is she with you now?’

  ‘No. She’s back on the job, bright and early. Have you ever had a relationship with someone you knew was obsessed, maybe unstable, but you wanted her just the same?’

  I thought of Glen Withers, Marisha Karatsky. ‘Yeah, once or twice,’ I said.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Fun at the time. Didn’t work out well for either party long-term.’

  ‘What d’you think about Jane?’

  ‘I’m not sure whether you’re talking about you and her, or her and this scheme she has.’

  I could hear his sigh down the line. ‘Neither am I.’

  ‘I’d like to get her on a polygraph to ask if she was the one who talked to Lily.’

  ‘No chance of that. She’d drop us like hot scones. I’m not wide-eyed, Hardy. I know she’s using me.’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘Right, but at one point you told her she was convincing.’

  ‘Good recall, Lee. One of the things I wanted to ask— did you have a tape running?’

  He laughed. ‘Jesus, I was tempted, but no I didn’t. And just as well. She patted me down, which I didn’t mind, and insisted I leave my briefcase in the car.’

  ‘D’you have any idea where this safe place she spoke of might be?’

  ‘Not a clue. I get your drift. It’d help if we could get a look at the material she claims to have.’

  ‘How was she this morning? How did you read her?’

  ‘She was very edgy. Dreading going to work, but going just the same. A prime candidate for stress leave. I care about her, and I’m bloody conflicted.’

  We talked it over for a bit longer and took some comfort from having ten days before Jane put her head in the lion’s mouth. I suggested to Townsend that he tap his sources for confirmation of some of the details of what Jane had told us about corruption north of the Bridge.

  ‘I could do that. What’ll you be doing?’

  ‘Investigating Gregory, Kristos and this Perkins character. Seeing where they live, what they drive, who they fuck.’

  ‘How will you do that? Through Frank Parker?’

  ‘And in other ways. One thing I should tell you. Apparently I’ve come into property and money through Lily’s will. Kristos said that made me a suspect.’

  ‘Fuck, why are you telling me that?’

  ‘Just so you’ll know how complicated it all is.’

  What I didn’t tell him was that the person I was intending to investigate was Jane Farrow. Duplicitous, but what was he keeping back from me? Bound to be something.

  A good hacker can get into most computer files and Phil Lawton was one of the best. A long way from being a nerd, he works out at the Redgum gym, runs half-marathons and the City to Surf, and can talk intelligently on quite a few subjects. About the only similarity between Phil and the stereotype of the computer geek is that he has a beard— well, more of a stubble. I went to the gym hoping I might catch him there, but I was told he’d been and gone. My knees were still sore and I didn’t feel like a workout, so I headed for the spa and soaked and thought. Then it was coffee at the Bar Napoli, an often repeated routine, except that my mobile wouldn’t ring with Lily telling me she was heading to Brisbane. Or that she was back from Canberra, and how about dinner?

  Phil works at whatever computer experts do, from home in Annandale, where he converted a garage into a temple to Microsoft, Google and the digital solar system— make that the universe. No point ringing him, he never answered.

  I drove to his house via a couple of sneaky streets, a route that’d let me know whether I was being followed. No tail. Phil’s street dead-ends at a set of steps leading down to Booth Street. I parked near the foot of the steps and walked up. Exercise wherever and whenever you can. I pressed the buzzer and didn’t need to speak. I knew Phil could see me in full colour from several angles. The house is nothing to look at, but the security is Fort Knox-like. A soft hum sounded and I was able to open the security door. A chime, and I could open the main door after that.

  Once inside, I knew where to go and that I’d be tracked. The workroom door opened when I was two strides away and Phil had swivelled round in his chair to greet me as I stepped into the softly murmuring, light-blinking sanctum.

  ‘Hi, Cliff,’ Phil said. ‘Can you hang on a minute while I zap this fucker?’

  I found a non-electronic place to sit while he spun around and tapped keys. He spun back.

  ‘So, healing cut and bruise on forehead. Slight stiffness of movement. Same old Cliff. Sor
ry to touch a nerve, but aren’t you out of business?’

  He didn’t know Lily and I didn’t want to go into the details.

  ‘I’m sort of freelancing,’ I said. ‘Consulting, you might say.’

  ‘Good for you. So, whatcha want? If it’s in my power …’

  Phil was in my debt. One time when he was pushing iron without a spotter, the upright he slotted the weight into gave way. I was there and managed to grab the weight and hold it until he scrambled out from under it. Otherwise, he’d have had a bar with 70 kilos attached coming down somewhere near his chest or head. Almighty crash when I let it go.

  I told him I wanted information on a person who’d attended the University of Western Sydney and the Goulburn Police Academy and was a current member of the state police service.

  He whistled. ‘Don’t want much, do you? The university’s a snap, but the police stuff. Shit, they’ve got all sorts of firewalls and cut-outs.’

  ‘Can it be done?’

  He waved his hand at the banks of screens and printers and scanners and God knows what else. ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ he said. ‘Everything that’s out there is in here. It’s Aladdin’s cave, mate, and all you need is about a thousand and one ways to say “Open Sesame”.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  He moved his chair along to another machine. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Name?’

  I told him.

  ‘DOB?’

  ‘1980, approximately.’

  ‘Shit, that’s all? Okay, leave it with me.’

  I’m no computer expert, but I’ve paid my fees and have access to the databanks of a few of the broadsheet newspapers. The computer in my office in Newtown is a laptop, even more of a clunker than the desktop one at home, but it can do the job if you’re patient. With cyber stuff, I am—let’s say still a bit amazed at what the bloody machines can do. I hadn’t been to the office in weeks, had given my notice to quit, and would have to clear it out very soon. It had been an okay place to work, hard to get a park though, and on this Friday afternoon I had to circle several blocks to get anywhere reasonably close.

  Evidently whoever had broken in and stolen the computer from Glebe hadn’t known about the Newtown office or had reasoned that Lily wouldn’t have worked there. They were right; no self-respecting journalist would have used the old Mac with its antiquated operating system and floppy disks.

  The office was grotty at the best of times, but when I was working there regularly I’d occasionally go over it with a broom, duster and a wet cloth. After the recent neglect, the cobwebs had gathered and the room and its small alcove smelled musty. A hundred years of dust sits in the building and filters down. There was a layer over every surface, and a few big cockroaches scuttled for cover from the shelf where I kept the coffee and sugar.

  I opened the windows to let the petrol fumes compete with the mustiness and gave the chair, the printer, the mouse pad and space for a notebook a few wipes. I turned the computer on and let it plod slowly through its paces. The coffee was stale but I brewed it up anyway. While I waited for what I wanted to come up, I thought about the few years I’d worked here and some of the people who’d sat across from me with their troubles, their lies, their threats. Some of them I missed, others I wished I’d never laid eyes on.

  I trawled through the papers looking for articles by and about the late Rex Robinson. He was an old hand, a freelancer who’d broken a lot of stories back in the seventies and eighties but seemed to have tapered off through the nineties and after. The occasional piece still turned up—crime reporting—but the material was thin and there was plenty of harking back to earlier days when he’d given evidence to enquiries of one sort or another into the police service. One thing was relevant: his later stories, bland though they were, focused on the area covered by the Northern Crimes Unit.

  His last published piece had a little more muscle than the others and dealt with the death of an Asian prostitute in North Sydney. The very young woman, who’d overstayed her visitor’s visa, had been released from a detention centre, apparently by mistake. The official verdict was suicide by drug overdose, but Robinson had implied there was more to it. One sentence read: ‘A former police officer from the Northern Crimes Unit said that the coroner’s verdict was “unsafe”.’

  Townsend’s recall on Robinson’s death was accurate. His fairly aged Volvo had gone through a railing and into Sailors Bay at Northbridge. Police divers recovered the vehicle and the body the next day when the broken rail was noticed. The inquest was held soon after and no significant evidence was offered other than the police opinion that the vehicle was in such poor repair that mechanical failure was the likely cause of the accident.

  All this had happened when I was in the throes of my trouble with the Police Licensing Board and I was scarcely glancing at the papers. If there’d been anything on television I hadn’t seen it. Now, scanning the follow-up news coverage and somewhat perfunctory obituaries, I gathered, reading between the lines, that Robinson was an unpopular figure. He was an arrogant big-noter who others judged to have achieved, briefly, an eminence far above his merit. Tributes from the journalistic profession were dutiful rather than sincere. I didn’t recall Lily ever having mentioned him.

  I printed out some of the material and highlighted bits of the printout, especially the stuff about the sex-worker released from detention and the ‘former police officer from the Northern Crimes Unit’. It had been a sad insight into what seemed like a sad life. No Walkleys, no books, no television spots. Robinson had two failed marriages, a bankruptcy and two DUI convictions. But at least it was some confirmation of what Jane Farrow had told us.

  15

  Talking to key-tappers and tapping keys is all very well, but it doesn’t feel like real work. I didn’t want to just sit around waiting for people to get back to me with information that might or might not be useful. I felt I owed it to Lily to do something.

  I drove home, still cautious about a tail, made a stop at an ATM to draw out some cash, and investigated my closet. I had a blazer, worn but respectable. I had dark trousers and a burgundy shirt, both recently dry-cleaned. I had a matching pair of black socks and slip-on Italian shoes that only needed a touch of the Nugget brush to get rid of the white mould. After a shower, a shampoo and a shave, I reckoned I was ready for a Friday night out at the Lord of the Isles hotel in St Leonards where, according to Jane Farrow, the Northern Crimes Unit brass gathered.

  In the past, the bars favoured by the cops around Darlinghurst and the Cross were bloodhouses. The television series Blue Murder got it about right, with a little exaggeration for dramatic effect. There were drunken brawls between the cops, between the crims and between the cops and the crims. The occasional gunshot, the odd thrust with a broken glass. I was there myself once in a while, keeping my head down, but I saw an eye gouged out and half an ear bitten off. Blood everywhere.

  I doubted that a modern North Shore police hangout would be in any way similar and I was right. The Lord of the Isles was a fancied-up old pub that was working the Scottish theme to death—tartan everywhere, claymores on the walls, full kilted figures in glass cases, bagpipes. A sign outside advertised a Tuesday trivia night with a well-known stand-up comic as moderator, a mid-week happy hour and Friday night exotic dancing in the Robert the Bruce bar. Hoots! Whoop-de-doo.

  It was a bit after nine when I got there and the place was in full swing. The main bar was crowded with the younger set drinking European beers and Jim Beam and cola. The Royal Stuart bar was smaller, quieter, with older people, both sexes more formally dressed—the men, and some of the women, in suits. A few small groups stood at the bar, but most of the drinkers were at tables with bowls of pretzels and nuts, and short drinks.

  I went to the bar, ordered a scotch, and saw Vince Gregory and Mikos Kristos at a table with two other men. Nothing advertised them as cops. They could’ve been advertising executives, merchant bankers … A few other tables were occupied by similar groups of men. Possi
bly more police.

  Gregory saw me first. He spoke to Kristos, who turned around to look at me. The other two didn’t react. Kristos made an elaborate show of finishing his drink and came over to the bar for a refill. He got it and moved along to stand near me, out of earshot of the other drinkers.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here, Hardy?’

  ‘It’s a free country, last I heard. And they take my money here just as they take yours. While money’s being mentioned, what’ll you have?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘What about a wrestle? Graeco-Roman? Remember Roy and HG? That was brilliant.’

  He stared at me as if I’d lost my mind, turned on his heel, started to walk away, but Gregory joined him. The musty smell about him was less strong, though still there. Maybe he’d showered and changed his shirt before coming to the pub. He’d had a few drinks and his tie was askew; his thin hair was sticking up at the back. His five o’clock shadow was a ten o’clock stubble. I thought of Lee Townsend’s immaculate grooming and how Jane Farrow appeared to appreciate it. I couldn’t see how she’d be attracted to Gregory. Unless there was a reason that had nothing to do with grooming.

  Kristos shook his head and urged Gregory back to their table. I left the bar but I hung around. Gregory and Kristos left the pub soon after, looking worried. The other two went to the Robert the Bruce room to join in the fun. I followed them, bought a drink and took a seat. It was essentially a strip show, again with the Scottish theme—kilts and sporrans, dirks and tam-o’shanters coming off to AC/DC and Rod Stewart. Very tasteful. The room was darkish away from the stage, and I kept out of the eyeline of the two men anyway. One checked his watch and nodded. Soon after they were joined by two stylishly dressed young women. Escorts. A bottle of champagne arrived and their evening got underway.

  I’d rattled Gregory and Kristos a bit, I thought, but hadn’t achieved much else. I was about to call it quits when a woman walked into the room, looked around and spotted the group I was watching. She was in her thirties, tall, casually dressed, neither particularly attractive nor plain. She strode through the tables, reached the one where my party was sitting and shouted something I couldn’t hear over the music. One of the men got to his feet and she picked up a champagne glass and threw the contents in his face. She grabbed another glass and emptied it over one of the women.