The Ambulance Chaser

by Richard Beasley

  Richard Beasley lives in Sydney, where he works as a barrister.

  Thanks to certain bizarre amendments to the Legal Profession Act by the New South Wales Government, he would risk imprisonment were he to advertise here his marital status, the sex of his children, or the date of his birth.

  He is the author of one previous novel, Hell Has Harbour Views, which has been hailed as a ‘flawless masterpiece’ by thousands of lawyers’ clients, and described by a former CEO of one of Australia’s largest legal practices, shortly prior to his imprisonment, as a ‘penetrating biography of our firm’.

  Also by Richard Beasley

  HELL HAS HARBOUR VIEWS

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  First published 2004 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Pan edition published 2005 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited St Martins Tower,

  31 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Richard Beasley 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Beasley, Richard, 1964 –.

  The ambulance chaser.

  ISBN 978-1-74334-641-9

  Insurance companies – Fiction. 2. Lawyers – Fiction.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Author photograph: Jan Kuczerawy

  These electronic editions published in 2004 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © Richard Beasley 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Beasley, Richard.

  The ambulance chaser.

  Adobe eReader format 978-1-74198-636-5

  ePub format 978-1-74334-641-9

  Mobipocket format 978-1-74198-692-1

  Online format 978-1-74198-580-1

  Macmillan Digital Australia www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  To Mary Beasley and Jenny Caldwell

  Acknowledgments

  Sincere thanks to Cate Paterson of Pan Macmillan and Tara Wynne of Curtis Brown for their great assistance with the first draft. Similar thanks to Sarina Rowell of Pan Macmillan for all her hard work, and to Jo Jarrah.

  Thanks to David Colovic for providing me with the benefit of his expertise on insolvency and bankruptcy law. I commend him to any barrister still in practice who may have absent-mindedly and very, very innocently neglected to file a tax return for, say, ten, twenty, or perhaps thirty, years.

  Thanks to those who provided encouragement for early drafts, including Kendall Odgers, and Imogen Thomas, who dealt valiantly with the first wave of typos.

  Finally, love and thanks to Trish Hobson of the Randwick Writers’ Support Centre for her generous decision to fund this book.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Beasley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  One

  Clark Kent, in his tiny starship, crossed galaxies to reach us, the sole survivor of the planet Krypton. Peter Parker, shy and bookish, was bitten by a radioactive spider. There was the murder of a loved one, then a glorious career fighting crime. Daredevil lawyer Matt Murdock had his own run-in with radiation. It left him blind, only for him to see more clearly.

  My transformation to superhero was less dramatic than these, and my powers slower to reveal themselves. I roamed galaxies too, only to land on the Planet of the Failures. Animals would taunt me, but none of them radioactive. Then murder played its hand. Murder and a corrupt city. These were my Causes of Action. Your standard superhero motivation finally worked its magic on me.

  At first, though, I didn’t look nearly so promising as a comic book legend. I looked like I would only ever be, at best, The Incredible Loser. Captain Inert.

  And there is nothing quite so inert as a depressed man, lying on a couch, watching TV. It was a sweltering afternoon, December 31, and my annus horribilus was at last limping into its final hours.

  I was watching a re-run of a cooking show on the LifeStyle Channel. When your own lifestyle has violently come to an end, when it’s curdled, there’s something strangely nostalgic about this channel. Sam was sitting on the couch opposite me. Her couch. She was talking. ‘You don’t really want to do this, do you?’ I clearly remember her asking that. What she meant by it was harder to nail down. It was hard, for Samantha O’Brien is good at spin. She’s great at it.

  She can give stockbrokers specialist expertise in the Asian region. Accountants become purveyors of strategic advice across global boundaries upon the tap of her keyboard. Lawyers gain partnership philosophies, firm cultures. They become dynamic, focused and, above all else, ethical. Architects push the frontiers of form. Everything is complex, but then the complex is made simple. Advice is strategic, pithy. The only English used is plain. The only thoughts are those outside the square. The only services provided are seamless.

  Sam spins all these things. Your CEO get caught drink-driving? Better let Sam draft the press release. Did your company pollute a river? A lake? Let Sam help you get through all those dead fish.

  How would Sam spin Andersens, for example? That now deceased globally integrated professional services firm? Well, she would have focused on its people, their talent,
their experience, their passion. Nine point three billion in net revenue didn’t come out of thin air, after all. Passion, that’s the key. A little too much of it in the end, as things turned out.

  Then, what of Enron, World Com, HIH, BCCI, One. Tel? Well, she might say, anyone can make an error of judgment. That’s what Andersens said. An error of judgment, by an isolated few. The penalty was unfair. The jury instructions were flawed. There were erroneous evidentiary rulings. It was just a technical conviction.

  Sam can put a spin on anything. Even on me. Had I merely made an error of judgment? Was I just the victim of one of life’s erroneous evidentiary rulings? Cut the spin. Now, just the facts.

  The most important fact is this. In the fading hours of that awful year, Samantha said to me, ‘You don’t really want to do this, do you?’ If by that she was asking me whether I wanted to talk during the re-run of Nigella Bites, my answer would have been ‘No, I don’t.’ She didn’t mean that, though. I heard a faint, dull blip in my brain, like a faulty, final heartbeat, and I assumed that what she meant was You don’t want to be with me anymore, do you? And without taking my eyes off the chocolate fudge cake that Ms Lawson was preparing (serves ten, or one with a broken heart) I calmly answered, ‘No, I don’t.’

  The look that I then detected on Sam’s face raised the prospect in my mind that she and all her worldly possessions would be out the door before I was informed what Nigella would be cooking next week. But no, I had misinterpreted that look for now. Besides, I remembered just as quickly that she had become the sole owner of the terrace, and I would be the one doing the packing.

  ‘I gave you the opportunity weeks ago to let me know what you wanted to do tonight. You had your chance, Christopher. I asked you a dozen times!’ She stormed out of the room, red lipstick glowing, towel trailing off her head, before slamming the door shut on both the bathroom and any whimper of protest I might have contemplated. I had contemplated no such whimper. Oh, I simply thought. The fucking party. That’s what she’s on about.

  In the early days I would have followed her to the bathroom door. I would have pointed out to her that while she may have raised it many times, to suggest that she had given me any opportunity in the matter, much less choice, was a conclusion worthy of her entire agency’s spin at its best. I would have asked her how telling me what we were doing, and where we were going, could have become a forensic analysis of every available option. I might have opened the door and sought to ascertain how the rejoinder ‘no way’ to my tentative enquiry about whether she’d mind spending the night with my friends had become a full, frank and fair discussion of all competing claims.

  But it is not the early days anymore. Now I just sit, inert before the screen, while Nigella Lawson sautés my depression in a little olive oil and a white wine sauce.

  ‘No, I don’t’ was not the cataclysmic expression of will that led to our bust-up. It wasn’t even the straw that broke the camel’s back. The camel was already spread-eagled on the floor, humps flattened, tongue out, not breathing. So, how did the camel get its back broken? And when?

  By July, if I’m honest. The month that marked the all-time low point in my professional life. July should have been a wonderful month. The month of our first trip to Europe together after two years’ cohabitation and three years as a couple. It’s just that July turned out to be too good a month for me to get out of town, and the change in my professional and financial circumstances that had been looming for some time had by then entirely overwhelmed me.

  We did a five-week jaunt in a car through France and Italy. Sam paid for much more of the trip than she had planned. If we had been honest we both would have said that the relationship was kaput even before the mad scramble for passports and tickets, and the endless, silent taxi ride to the airport. Instead, we were about seventy-two hours into the holiday before we both knew, for different reasons but just as emphatically, that this holiday would never get a sequel.

  The tension rose each time a romantic opportunity was presented. A walk over the Pont Neuf in Paris or through a hilltop vineyard in Tuscany remain, for example, moments of excruciating agony rather than golden memories to be savoured. And with seventy-two hours of the holiday left, I was certain that when we got home Sam would be collecting her bags from the carousel and walking straight out of my life via customs. There was a slight delay, that was all.

  Until right on midnight on December 31.

  Two

  During the month of December our choices for the evening of the thirty-first were these. My best friend, Harry, had invited us to a barbecue at his place. I was perfectly happy with this prospect, but there was another invitation. Thirty-ninth floor balcony. Black tie, cocktails, champagne, catered food, all those coloured lights exploding on the harbour. Sam could see plenty of backyard barbecues in my future, so the high-rise do it was.

  And the high-rise do meant tuxedos. Party frocks. Jewellery. Professional couples. Canapés of all kinds. Private educations. The odd northern hemisphere university. Informed conversations about nothing, uninformed conversations about everything else. And by seven, well before sunset or sparkling lights in the sky, everyone high-spirited if not totally legless.

  At dinner, Sam and I were seated next to Robert Crompton, a ‘dealer’ whose job was to do something with money. Gamble it, I think. Opposite him was his girlfriend, Kate. Kate worked in a large law firm drafting documents that enabled her beau to gamble with the money. She snorted when she laughed, and specialised in greedy lunges for Dom Perignon.

  On my left was Scott Byrne. Scott, the forensic accountant, worked for one of the enormous ‘worldwide multidisciplinary’ firms, although fortunately for him not Andersens. Sam had written parts of some of their publicity brochures. Scott helped his clients excel despite the travails of a rapidly changing and turbulent economy. He had been to Siena to the Palio. He understood what the Nasdaq was. He was eminently suitable for a skyline balcony on the thirty-first of the twelfth.

  Nearly half a lifetime ago, Scott’s wife, Sarah, and I had shared one semester of English lit together. Sarah Byrne had firm views on Literature, and was prepared to share them as if they alone were worthy of a Pulitzer or two. When I turned to my left she leant over her husband (whose fiction reading extended no further than large company accounts) and attempted to engage me in a discussion about the latest literary wunderkind. ‘It’s overwritten, overambitious and pretentious,’ was her conclusion. Too terrified to disagree, even though I did, I said nothing. ‘Have you read her latest one, Chris?’ I shook my head apologetically. ‘Don’t bother,’ she said.

  The only thing that surprised me about Mrs Byrne’s conclusion was that she hadn’t delivered it in French. Madame Sarah spoke fluent French, and reminded people of this almost every troisième sentence. Back in the days when she was a mademoiselle, I had once been stuck with her and two of her friends on her parents’ patio at a drinks soiree while they conducted an animated conversation in French. Right in front of me. A few giggles, a word in Français, and away they went. Like I was L’Homme Invisible. It’s funny, I thought. All these years later and look what’s happened to me. L’Homme Invisible once again.

  After deconstructing Modern Lit, Sarah had enquired after a friend of mine who was an artist. ‘Does your friend have another exhibition coming up this year? I think I heard something. Eddie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Edward Adams,’ I said. ‘In May, I think.’

  ‘His first one created some interest, didn’t it? Was the last one a little disappointing? I think the view taken was that he hadn’t moved on?’

  I preferred her when she talked books. ‘He sold them all,’ I said.

  ‘Did he? Not quite the same, though, is it? Perhaps I’m thinking of someone else.’

  ‘Perhaps you are.’

  ‘Where’s the next exhibition? Charlotte’s gallery again?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so this time.’ I told her where I thought the next exhibition was.

  �
�There?’ She looked at me like anything less than the New Tate was a failure. ‘I’m not sure that’s the best place for him,’ she said. ‘He does have some talent, after all.’

  Really, I thought. Vous êtes très gentille. Still, at least she hadn’t brought up the topic of what I was doing now. Now that . . . well, after my . . . humiliation. I knew she would be just dying to ask. I turned to my right.

  John Morella was a stockbroker and, therefore, a friend of both Scott the Forensic Accountant and Robert the Dealer. John wore Armani glasses and Gianfranco Ferré (pronounced perfectly) ties. He was married to Nicole, a lawyer who sounded English but was not. No one is really sure how this happens, but it does. Nicole wore lots of pearls. Strings and strings. An entire oyster farm had been cultivated so she could go out in public. She was prone to wearing her hair pulled back in a bun. Suitably severe. Very.

  ‘This Peking duck isn’t bad,’ John said to me, ‘but not as good as the Flower Drum.’

  ‘That’s in Melbourne?’

  ‘The best I’ve had. Beats anything here. As good as Hong Kong.’

  ‘What we have here tastes pretty good if you come from Dubbo,’ a voice piped up.

  ‘Well,’ Nicole replied tightly, ‘we’re not from Dubbo.’