by Peter Corris
‘This is Hardy. Is Kristos there?’
‘No, he’s been suspended along with the other senior men. What—?’
‘Where does he live?’
She kept her voice low. ‘What’re you on about? Hasn’t Lee told you we’ve—?’
‘I don’t care about that. Where does he fucking well live?’
‘You’ll spoil everything.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At my desk.’
‘If you don’t tell me where he lives I’m coming over there and I’ll do damage to anyone who tries to stop me finding out what I need to know.’
‘He lives in a flat across the road from the station here in Longueville. He’s probably there now. He was in collecting stuff not long ago.’
‘The exact address.’
She gave it, then she said, ‘You’re an arsehole, Hardy. I was talking to Lee just a little while ago. We’re setting up the meeting with Perkins for tomorrow. You’re going to fuck it up.’
‘I don’t care about your meeting or about you or Lee, but I’ll tell you this, if you alert Kristos that I’m after him you’ll be very sorry.’
‘Fuck you.’
Had to admire her. Oddly, her resilience calmed me down. ‘Listen, Jane, I reckon I’ve got the highest stake in this and there’s a move I have to make now. Maybe I can do it so it doesn’t blow your plans. I will if I can. Just sit tight and don’t tell Lee about this. Go on with your arrangements. It might work out—’
She hung up on me; the second woman to do it in one day. Maybe a record.
I was calm but seething inside. I had no precise idea of how to handle Kristos, but sometimes improvisation is the best policy. It started to rain and the traffic slowed, increasing my impatience. The rain got heavier and my wipers struggled to cope. I had to concentrate to drive safely, and I had the additional worry that the petrol gauge was low. To run dry in the rain in the middle of slow-moving traffic would be no joke. It was stop-start all the way over the Harbour Bridge and through North Sydney and Greenwich—a drain on the fuel.
By Northwood the rain had stopped and, with the needle flickering below empty, I found a service station. I was about to use the pump when I remembered that I’d left the only cash I had back in the car park. I had a keycard, but I suspected that the account was just about tapped out. I put in twenty dollars worth, which gets you bugger-all these days, and asked for thirty dollars on top hoping the card would support it. It did, but it must have been a near thing.
I got on the road again and immediately lost myself. This was unfamiliar territory to me. The police had brought me to Longueville after I’d reported the Williams killing, and a taxi had taken me back to Milsons Point. I hadn’t paid any attention to the route on either trip. I remembered William Hurt’s line in Body Heat: Sometimes the shit comes down so heavy I feel I ought to wear a hat. I stopped, dug out the UBD, and plotted my way to the Northern Crimes HQ. My mood wasn’t improving.
I turned into the street, looking out for a block of flats opposite the police station. It was easy to spot. Cream brick, three storey, pebbles and garden, balconies. I drove past and found a parking place around the corner. It felt chancy to be across from a police station, carrying a gun and about to front up aggressively to a serving, if suspended, policeman, but I was charged up enough to do it.
There were several entrances to the block and the one that led to Kristos’s flat was at the front. Good security: you had to buzz from outside the building to be admitted. I pressed the buzzer for the flat number Jane Farrow had given me and waited for a response. None came. I tried again with the same result. Frustration was building as I thought I’d have to lie in wait for him to come home. I pressed again. Still nothing.
The standard trick is to press all the buttons, hope you get an answer and try to bluff your way in. I sneezed and stepped away to wipe my nose and, for no reason in particular, looked up. Kristos, casually dressed, was standing on a balcony three levels up, looking down at me with a mobile phone in his hand. A truck went past on the street and probably drowned out what I shouted up at him. Anyway, he didn’t care. He closed the phone and went back into his flat.
I stood there, frustrated and angry. A man came walking briskly across the road, down the path to where I was, and pulled a small leather folder from his pocket. He held it up like a photographer with a light meter. Suit, tie, moustache, beer gut, warrant card. A cop. He stopped just short of arm’s length.
‘I’m from Internal Affairs, Hardy. You are not to make contact with any member of the Northern Crimes Unit. Do you understand?’
I glanced up. Kristos was back on his balcony, leaning on the rail, watching us.
Fall over, you bastard, I thought.
‘What if he wants to see me?’
The cop shook his head. ‘Do you take yourself out of here right now, or do I arrest you?’
‘What for?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
I looked up again. Kristos had gone.
‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘Give my regards to M and M.’
‘What?’
‘Matthews and Mattioli.’
I pushed past, forcing him to step into a garden bed and muddy his shiny shoes. Petty, but satisfying. Back on the street I looked across at the Northern Crimes Unit HQ with two thoughts in my mind: Had Jane Farrow alerted Kristos? And was Internal Affairs keeping Kristos under some form of house arrest?
The sky had cleared and the breeze was light. I went back to the car, dumped the raincoat and the pistol, and went for a walk to find a pub. There’s no let-down like an anticlimax and I’d been all primed to give Kristos hell. The frustration needed working out and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it than to walk and drink. Longueville is a small peninsula leading down to the Lane Cove River. Good views of the water from the high points and some of the residents and flat-builders had gone up high to make sure they got them. It took a few twists and turns, but I came upon a pub that still looked vaguely the way pubs used to look, except for the pokies.
I bought a pint of draught Guinness and a packet of chips and settled down in a corner well away from the few other drinkers in the bar. I sank half the pint in a couple of long pulls and prepared to linger over the rest—to let it soothe me as it no doubt had my Galway ancestors going way, way back.
The way things were, it looked as if Jane Farrow’s plan would have to be on the agenda. There were two question marks over that. If Perkins was under the same protection or confinement as Kristos, how would she get him to a location where the whole sticky business could be carried out? Apart from that, was Farrow playing for our side or theirs? Kristos had spoken to someone to sic the Internal Affairs guy onto me. Who?
She’d said on the phone that arrangements had been made with Townsend to set up the meeting with Perkins for the following night. That was before my intervention, but I couldn’t see how that would make any difference. It was time to talk to Townsend, to make a judgement on Farrow and her plan. I finished the stout and the chips, called Townsend on my mobile, found him at home and told him I was coming over. He didn’t even ask why. Was that strange? I was finding many more questions than answers.
Townsend received me cheerfully at the door and we went through to his spotless, well-appointed kitchen. He offered me coffee. I accepted. He seemed relaxed and I commented on it.
‘Why not?’ he said.
‘You’re about to mount a covert operation of a sort on a senior police officer who’s in collusion with a multiple killer. Plus your girlfriend will be right in the firing line. I’d have expected a little more tension.’
‘Before I answer, tell me why you’re here.’
I told him about my day—the happy news about Hannah Morello’s holiday in the sunshine state, about the good description of the possible killer, and my failed attempt to confront Kristos.
I said, ‘Has Jane spoken to you about that?’
‘No, why would she know about it?
’
‘She’d know if she was the one who alerted Kristos that I was coming. I told her I was.’
‘I haven’t heard anything of this. Setting a trap, were you? You still don’t trust her.’
The coffee was good and I was tired after the day’s comings and goings. I drained the cup and he poured me some more—black with sugar.
‘Trust can fuck you,’ I said.
‘That’s one of the most cynical things I’ve ever heard, and I’m in a game where there’s almost nothing but cynics.’
I shrugged.
‘I’ll answer your earlier question, Cliff. You don’t know much about me, do you? Well, I’m older than I look. I was in Rwanda and Bosnia and Sierra Leone, and after seeing things there I got a different perspective. I mean, what happens here in Oz is a sideshow, really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be here and happy to survive being close to all that civil war, ethnic cleansing shit, but it’s still a sideshow.’
‘What about Jane?’
‘I know she’s got her own agenda. No idea what it is but I trust her. No, make it that I trust my instinct about her.’
He was an experienced, perceptive man, and I had nothing solid to put up against what he was saying.
‘Well, she’s got the call,’ I said.
‘Yeah, one thing she said worries me most though. She reckons there’s no way she can nominate the meeting place. Perkins’ll have the say on that.’
‘Can’t see how that’ll work.’
‘Jane says she’ll have a veto and they’ll have to negotiate. She says she’ll rule out obviously dangerous places, but we’ll have to settle for the least worst.’
That ‘we’ almost amused me. By ‘we’ he didn’t mean him and me, he meant him and Jane. It reminded me of the way boxing managers talk about their fighters’ performances, and the famous line from manager Joe Jacobs after his fighter, Max Schmelling, lost to Jack Sharkey in a notorious hometown decision: ‘We wuz robbed. We shoulda stood in bed.’
I asked him about the technical details and he said that Jane would have about her person a digital device no bigger than a pea that would pick up everything that was said over a wide range. No worries about cigarette packet-sized receivers taped to the body.
‘The … event … meeting can be filmed with absolute clarity and soundlessly from a fair distance,’ Townsend said.
‘How far?’
‘About a hundred metres.’
I remembered situations I’d been in when wearing a wire did involve taping something to the body with a high risk of discovery, and when remote-controlled videoing had to be done at close range and was anything but noiseless.
‘Sounds all right,’ I said. ‘So we sit and wait for her to contact you tomorrow about the time and place?’
‘That’s it.’
Another evening and night to fill in, I thought. Without Lily or the prospect of Lily.
Townsend’s mobile was on the table. I didn’t recognise the ring-tone. He snatched the phone up.
‘What? God! Yes, yes. Okay.’
He put the mobile down. ‘It’s tonight,’ he said.
‘Good, sooner the better. Less time for things to go wrong. What was that ring-tone?’
He was suddenly so intensely focused that my question caught him on the hop. ‘What?’
‘The ring-tone, what was it?’
‘Why?’
‘Just curious.’
‘No you’re not. You’re just showing me how cool you can be under pressure. It’s Mahler.’
‘Paul Keating’s favourite composer.’
‘You like Mahler?’
‘Lee,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t know Mahler from Marley.’
25
I asked the only two questions that mattered: ‘Where and when?’
‘Eleven thirty, Balmoral Beach.’
‘Is that the best she could do?’
‘Give her a break, she’d have been treading on eggshells.’
‘Where precisely?’
‘The rotunda. Where else?’
I tried to bring it to mind. I’d only been to the beach a few times and not recently. I seemed to remember a green belt between the road and the sea wall bordering the sand, with some sort of folly in the middle—round with white pillars. There were trees around and a building I vaguely remember—white again, and big.
‘How is it for you?’ I asked.
‘A while since I’ve been there. Okay, I guess, depending on the weather.’
‘Meaning?’
‘High winds can interfere with the pick-up, also crashing surf.’
‘It’s a fucking harbour beach.’
He flared, ‘Bugger you, I’m just—’
‘Okay, okay, we’re both on edge. I’m glad to see you’re human.’
‘I was wondering the same about you. I’ll let you in on something—she told me not to tell you, not to bring you along.’
I laughed. ‘Some chance. Where’s she coming from, to say that?’
‘You’ve rubbed her up the wrong way, obviously.’
‘It’s mutual. So how do we proceed?’
‘I’ve got an offsider to handle the filming. We can’t be seen to be reconnoitring, right?’
‘Right.’
‘But Jacques can drive by a bit earlier and look the place over. Work out where we can take up positions.’
‘Jacques?’
‘He’s number one. Are you anti-French?’
‘Hell, no. I’ve got a frog squatting in my family tree back there. Escaped from Devil’s Island, they say. Probably bullshit. I’ll go along with Jacques and drop off where I think best. He can tell you what to do.’
‘I don’t know about—’
‘This is her show, your show and my show. I’m playing it my way. Lee, I’ve been in on sieges and ransoms and exchanges before. I think I know how to handle it.’
He sighed, looked at his Rolex. ‘Okay. It’s just gone eight. Plenty of time. Forty-five minutes to get there at the most. Jacques’s on standby, he’ll be here in a couple of minutes after I call. Is there anything you need?’
‘A map’d help.’
He got on the web, Googled, and before long had a printout of information on the beach and a map. The building I only half remembered was a temple built by religious crazies in the 1920s who thought the second coming would be at Balmoral. Now it did the same job as the Bondi pavilion—changing rooms, function spaces, cafes.
‘Anything else?’ Townsend said.
It had been quite a few hours—not since I’d left home. ‘Just a good long piss,’ I said.
Jacques looked the way a Jacques is supposed to look—dark hair, eyes and skin, neat in movement and manner. His accent was Canadian, with the Scottish vowels. Townsend introduced us and we were off in his HiAce van. I asked him a few questions about the filming technique, but I didn’t understand much of what he said. The night was clear and the mid-week traffic was light. He asked me to navigate. I used the UBD and small torch from the glove-box, and got us there pretty efficiently.
Even at night, the view dropping down towards the beach was dramatic, with lights on the headlands and the sea shimmering. Lights blinked on the boats moored at the small marina. We cruised along the Esplanade, the road bordering the strip of park, and then drove up a few streets until we had a view down to the beach and surroundings. The Esplanade wasn’t well lit, and the big Moreton Bay figs would diminish the light in the park area. The park lights were dim. Good for some, not for others.
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
‘Plenty of places to set up—those trees, over by the … what is that building?’
I didn’t bother with the history. ‘Bathers’ Pavilion.’
‘There are some other spots over there. Down on the steps to the beach, or off to the right—behind that big tree with the triple trunk. What do you call it?’
‘A Moreton Bay fig. Looks the best bet, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes, I think
so.’
‘How’s the light?’
‘Irrelevant, man, with the equipment I’ve got.’
‘My eyes obviously aren’t as good as yours. Have you got any night-vision glasses?’
‘Of course.’
He got out, opened the side of the van and came back with field glasses as light as a feather. He made adjustments, and when I looked through them the scene was reddish-tinged but very clear.
‘What’s with the pistol?’ Jacques said.
I’d brought the raincoat with me and the shape of the pistol in a pocket must have been plain at some point.
‘Sharp eyes,’ I said.
‘Professional necessity. So?’
‘It’s more of a prop than anything else.’
‘Just prop it well away from me.’
I nodded and used the glasses again, sweeping them around this time. I laughed and handed them back to him.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Jacques, mate, this is a bloody dodgy situation all round, but there’s one thing to be glad of.’
He was looking through the glasses now. ‘And that is …?’
‘That we’re not setting up so we have to deal with that dinky little island out there.’
I’d forgotten the island although the webpage had noted it—a small outcrop reached by a stone bridge. Only a few metres out, so not really an island, but it would’ve added to the complications.
‘You’re right,’ he said.
‘Bien sur.’
‘You speak French?’
‘You’ve just heard ninety per cent of it.’
We drove down and parked a couple of hundred metres to the right of the rotunda, past the old toilet block and bush shelter, angle parking all along and there were no cars in the immediate vicinity of our target area. We established ourselves behind a Moreton Bay fig big enough to hide a caravan. Jacques phoned Townsend, who was on his way, telling him where to park. He joined us. They tinkered with their equipment while I kept watch. We had a clear view of the rotunda at about forty metres away.
