by Peter Corris
Traffic on the road was sporadic and becoming more infrequent, and over the next hour lights went out in most of the apartments across the Esplanade. Immediately opposite was a school with a tennis court attached and one of the large apartment blocks was vacant undergoing major renovation. The couple of cafes would still be doing business at this time of night in the summer months, but were closed now. The apartment blocks were ornate, pillared numbers. With the rotunda, the area was big on pillars. It wasn’t the kind of place where drunks slept on the benches or the homeless camped out with their bags and sheets of plastic. For no good reason, I remembered that the beach had a shark net. Why think of that?
I saw moving shadows now and then and judged them to be swaying tree branches, flickers from occasional car lights, late-night seagulls, flapping bunting left over from some event. The waves were quiet on the beach and rocks, audible but no problem for the microphone. The only other sounds came from passing cars, a distant aeroplane or two, and our breathing.
Headlights. A car drew up on the road adjacent to the rotunda and a man got out. He stared around, squared his shoulders and marched towards the meeting point. Townsend tapped me on the shoulder. His opened hands said, ‘Perkins?’
I used the night glasses. I’d only seen the man once, in the Lord of the Isles pub, but there was no mistaking him. He had the belly, the bullying stride. I nodded. Jacques and Townsend did things with their equipment.
Another headlight. Jane Farrow, in jeans and jumper, got out and went towards the rotunda with only the barest glance around. I couldn’t decide whether this was a good attitude to take or not. There was enough moonlight to see the two figures as they stood on the steps of the building. I couldn’t hear anything, but the body language—a waving hand, a shrug, a vigorous nod— suggested an animated discussion. The sound of Jacques’s filming was negligible—a very muted whirr. Townsend stood stock still, his hands clasped in front of him like a penitent.
So far, so good, but I was troubled. Was I right about those shadows? I used the night glasses, swept the field, saw nothing. But there was still a niggle, an irritant. Was it likely that Perkins would come alone? People engaged in dodgy enterprises usually like to have support of some kind. Weren’t there alleged to be two people on the grassy knoll in Dallas? I decided to check on Perkins’s car.
Without disturbing the other two, I crouched and retreated, using the shadows of the trees to circle around, go down to the beach, and come up on the cars on the blind side. It was slow going, and moving in a crouch tests muscles you don’t always use. No bushman, I had to watch my footing in case there were sticks to snap, rocks to trip over. It took time.
When I was twenty metres from the car I saw movement inside it. The night glasses revealed a figure in the back seat. He touched his left ear several times. Adjusting an earpiece? Then the window slid down and a rifle barrel protruded. Not far, but far enough. The car was fifty metres away from the rotunda with a clear line of sight.
I dropped the glasses and sprinted, stepped around the car, grabbed the barrel and pulled. You don’t hold a long firearm tightly; you cradle it. The rifle came free and the man swore. He opened the door and came at me like a charging bull. I hit him hard on the side of the head with the rifle butt. He sagged back against the car but he wasn’t done. He lashed out with his foot, hit the rifle and sent it spinning away. The cap he’d been wearing fell off. He was bald, stocky, strongly built. He was my man.
He knew how to fight, coming in low and hard. He was younger and stronger than me, but I had the fuel of rage. He tried a vicious swing at my crotch but I got my knee up in time. The blow hurt, but it hit bone and hurt him more than me. I stamped down hard on his instep and used the leverage to slam my fist into his nose.
That didn’t worry him too much and he aimed a kick at my knee. Just missed, and it put him off-balance. I drove a left uppercut into his balls and brought my clenched right fist down on the back of his neck as he dropped. He sprawled on the ground, stunned but still conscious.
I crouched over him like Dempsey over Firpo.
‘You killed Lily Truscott.’
He was game, tried to needle me into giving him another opportunity. ‘Sure did,’ he said, with a flow of blood and mucus running into his mouth. He spat it all up at me. ‘Gave her a fucking good feel too, after I did her.’
I pinned him at the throat with my left hand, cutting off his windpipe. I could hear noises around me now— shouts, running footsteps. Torch beams probed the darkness. I didn’t care. I reached into my jacket pocket where I’d put the Walther, jerked it free. I hammered my knee into his chest to hold him while I used both hands to cock the pistol. I pressed the muzzle to his forehead.
‘Go ahead, cunt. Bet you haven’t got the guts.’
I heard a shout, ‘Cliff, don’t!’ Townsend?
I pulled the trigger.
26
The gun didn’t fire.
Hands grabbed me, arms wrapped around me, and I was dragged away from the man on the ground. Someone tried to take the pistol from me but I chopped the hand down and pushed past people standing in my way. Who were all these people?
I wandered off towards the beach. Someone ran to outflank me but I pointed the pistol at him and he fell back. I went down the steps and across the sand. What I had almost done seemed to put my brain in a spin so that I couldn’t see, hear or feel anything until water lapped over my feet and the waves splashed up at me. The shock of the cold water snapped me out of the daze. I drew back my arm and threw the pistol out as far as I could towards the cable holding the shark net and screamed Lily’s name as I let it go. It felt like a signing-off of some kind.
They were waiting for me back on the grass. I saw the man I’d flattened being bustled into a car. Townsend was there, and Jacques, and two men I didn’t know and two I did—Matthews and Mattioli from Internal Affairs. They kept their distance but I held out empty hands to show them I wasn’t armed, just in case they hadn’t seen me throw the pistol away.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
Matthews said, ‘You almost committed murder.’
‘Didn’t though. Who’re these other guys? What’re you all doing here?’
Jane Farrow came close and touched my arm. ‘Thanks, Cliff. I think you saved my life. That guy had a sniper rifle with an infra-red scope, zoned in just right.’
‘What do you mean you think?’ Townsend said.
‘She means he might’ve been going to kill Perkins,’ I said. ‘With these bastards anything’s possible. I still don’t understand where everybody’s come from.’
‘I’ve been with Internal Affairs all along,’ Jane said. ‘We knew the unit was dirty and I was working my way to this kind of meeting with someone who’d do a deal against the others. We targeted Gregory, then had to switch to Perkins.
Like you, we brought the technicians.’
‘But why did you recruit Cliff and me if you already had the plan?’ Townsend said, with pain in his normally controlled voice.
A light drizzle started.
‘Do we have to do this here?’ Mattioli said.
‘I didn’t trust them,’ Jane said. ‘ After what I’ve seen the past year or so, d’you blame me?’
It was all a blur of police cars, phone calls and interviews after that. Piecing it together later, I learned that Perkins had made certain admissions, captured on tape and film by both Townsend and Jacques and the Internal Affairs boys. Townsend’s results were the better ones.
Perkins implicated Kristos and others in the Northern Crimes Unit and they all started to do the dirty on each other. The man I’d tackled was Paul Henry Brewer, who’d been acquitted on one charge of murder and was suspected of several others. His motorcycle and .22 pistol were located and DNA evidence placed him at the scenes of the murder of Williams and Gregory. Kristos implicated him in the killing of Lily, but he was only charged with the deaths of the two policemen. Stronger cases. I didn’t care. I’d heard his admis
sion about Lily and wished I’d hit him a few more times, and harder.
All sorts of charges could have been laid against Townsend—concealing evidence, conspiracy—and me, the same, plus weapons offences. None were. In fact I was almost in good order with the police and they offered me counselling to help me cope with the rage I’d experienced when I’d intended to blow a helpless man’s brains out. I told them what they could do with it, politely.
I met with Pam Williams—who’d changed her mind about Sydney—and Hannah Morello after they got back from Queensland. They invited me to a barbecue—kids, in-laws, cousins, family. They thanked me for helping them find some sort of closure with the deaths of their husbands. I thanked them for their contributions in much the same terms. They told me that they’d each received two pieces of legal advice. One suggested that they had cases for compensation from the police service, the other was that their superannuation payments might be in jeopardy if they pursued the matters. Some things never change.
The story made big news for a while but, with the state government struggling in the wake of the resignation of the premier and various bungles, and the federal government in trouble over international embarrassments, politics pushed it aside. But Townsend kept in touch with it and told me that the Northern Crimes Unit business affairs were coming to light and unravelling. The media personality and religious figure turned out to be one and the same—an evangelical church pastor with a TV show. He was found to be blackmailing a church member over a murder with the connivance of the police. He misused substantial federal funds for money laundering ploys involving the cops, and gave confidential information to the police in return for protection by them from complaints as he feathered his nest. This was the main story Lily had evidently been pursuing, but not the only one. Last we heard, the prosecutors hadn’t got on to the politician working the immigration scam. Caught some councillors with money and connections they shouldn’t have had, though.
Townsend didn’t get his inside story. All the evidence was sub judice. I stayed in touch with him over the next few weeks as the police and prosecution wheels slowly started to turn. We drank a bit.
‘How’s Jane?’ I asked when we were sipping his single malt whisky on a cloudy day in his neatly bricked courtyard.
He shook his head. ‘It didn’t work out.’
‘Why’s that? You did everything she asked.’
‘That could’ve been the problem.’
I knew what he meant. Some women, not that many, want opposition, contest. I said something along those lines.
‘Yeah. That’s partly it, but she’s hooked on the undercover stuff, the covert, the deceptive. It’s like a drug. Remember telling me that there’s a gap in her service record?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She said—don’t worry, I didn’t let on that you’d told me—that she was doing a course to equip her for undercover work. She won’t surface when all this stuff comes out in the wash. She’ll be protected, and she’ll be able to go on and do something else under the covers. No pun intended. Shit, I’m pissed.’
‘You’re human,’ I said.
I had a loose end to tie up. I asked Phil Lawton to find out who the IT person for the Northern Crimes Unit was. I had no doubt he could do it and he did, muttering something about systems signatures, whatever that meant. Rodney St Clair, IT consultant with a PhD from MIT, had an office in Chatswood. I made an appointment, claiming to need advice about the installation and servicing of a computer network in my small but growing business.
The office was across the street from the wine bar where I’d met with Lee Townsend and Jane Farrow what now seemed like a long time ago. I promised myself a drink there when I’d finished my business.
St Clair Systems occupied half the building’s second floor. It boasted a secretary and several offices. I could hear the clicking of keyboards behind closed doors as the secretary led me to where the boss received his clients. St Clair was a middle-sized man, in his early thirties, neatly groomed. The office was well appointed without being flash. It inspired confidence, but didn’t suggest excessive expenditure on overheads. St Clair had risen and come around from behind his desk when I walked in and his hand shot out automatically.
He took one look at me, turned pale and retreated to his chair.
I locked the door behind me and perched on the edge of the desk. I pushed the telephone out of his reach.
‘I don’t have a small business,’ I said, ‘and I don’t need a consultant. Any buzzers, alarms under the desk?’
‘Y … yes.’
‘Keep your hands where I can see them. She was still there when you worked on her computer. Lying dead on the bed.’
He closed his eyes as if he was reliving the scene.
‘Are you from the police?’
‘No. She was my partner.’
‘Oh, God …’
‘Who else was there? Kristos?’
He nodded, speechless with fear.
I eased back on the threatening manner. ‘What did he have on you?’
He struggled to pull himself together. ‘What’re you going to do to me?’
‘Nothing, if I get the information I want. If I don’t, you can kiss all this goodbye.’
‘I … I installed systems in several businesses and made them less than secure so that Kristos and the others could exploit them. He threatened to expose me if I didn’t—’
I stopped him. ‘Okay, he had you by the balls. Now, you read what was on her computer, right?’
Nervous again, he nodded.
‘What did Kristos want to know? Don’t lie to me because I know the answer.’
‘He … he wanted to know who in the police had given information to … the journalist … to her.’
‘And were you able to tell him that?’
‘Yes. There was a code but it was very simple to crack.’
‘Who?’
‘Someone called Jane Farrow, a detective in the same unit as Kristos.’
I slid off the desk and took a seat while St Clair carefully removed a tissue from a box on the desk and wiped his face.
‘You’ve been lucky,’ I said, ‘you haven’t actually caused anyone’s death.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You don’t have to. You just better hope your name doesn’t come up in the investigation of the unit.’
‘That’s why I was worried when I saw you.’
‘Keep worrying.’
I went to the wine bar and ordered a big glass of red. It was late afternoon and getting dark. Could be rain on the way, and I still hadn’t done anything about getting the Falcon’s wipers fixed. I sipped the wine and thought it through. It made sense in a weird way. Kristos and Perkins knew that Jane Farrow had leaked, but they didn’t know she was an Internal Affairs plant. They knew she’d taken kickbacks, as she admitted to Townsend and me—to maintain credibility. They probably thought she was angling for a bigger share of the action or the strategic discrediting of someone blocking her path to promotion. Probably saw her as in league with Williams and took him out to scare her. Then Gregory cracked all on his own and had to be eliminated.
I’d have given a lot to have heard the conversations between Kristos and Perkins after the Internal Affairs people had moved in on the unit after Gregory’s death. They must have been sweating. Assuming they still thought Jane Farrow was playing her own game, the chance to kill her when she proposed the meeting with Perkins would have seemed heaven-sent. Brewer was up to the job.
Given the way she’d contributed to Lily’s death, and how she’d lied to and manipulated Townsend and me, it was almost comforting to know that she wasn’t as clever and covert as she thought she was. Or that things were more complicated than she’d imagined. Almost. Somewhere down the track she might get her comeuppance.
27
Probate on Lily’s estate went through smoothly. Tony sold her house and my share was close enough to three hundred thousand. I got another sixty th
ousand from Lily’s share portfolio. I gave a chunk of the money to Megan to help her buy a flat. I spent some on fixing up the Glebe house—the roof, the stairs, the windows. I got new carpets and new bathroom and kitchen fittings. The trees were trimmed, the bricks in the courtyard were re-laid and bits that badly needed it got painted. Plenty of money left over.
I stayed with Frank and Hilde while the work was being done and the strange thing was, when I got back to the house, I didn’t like it. Some kind of connection with it had been broken. I junked a lot of the furniture, shoved the rest in storage, put the house up for lease and Frank and Hilde had me back again inside a week.
‘So what’re you going to do?’ Hilde said.
‘Ever heard of Tony Truscott?’
‘No—oh, well I know the surname …’
‘Lily’s younger brother. He’s fighting an elimination bout for a shot at the world welterweight title in Nevada next month. He’s dedicating the fight to Lily. I’m going over there to support him.’
Frank said, ‘Rubbing shoulders with Russ and Jeff and Mike.’
‘That’s right. Ringside.’
‘What then?’ Hilde said.
‘Travel a bit, I suppose. Europe, the States. I would’ve liked to have seen New Orleans when it was operating. Might have to settle for Memphis—Graceland, the Sun studios.’
Hilde persisted. ‘After that?’
I hadn’t looked any further ahead. There were friends scattered around the globe and in Australia. People to catch up with. A few enemies, but no unfinished business.
‘Who knows?’ I said.
A Cliff Hardy novel by Peter Corris
The Coast Road
Wealthy Frederick Farmer died when his weekender burned to the ground. Death by accident, the police found. But his daughter, Dr Elizabeth Farmer, a feisty academic who resembles the younger Germaine Greer, hires Cliff Hardy to investigate. Is her only motive jealousy of her father’s attractive second wife, now very rich?
