by Garry Disher
‘You win some, you lose some,’ Muecke said.
Henderson curled his lip. ‘Well, what did you learn?’
Using his flattest voice, Muecke relayed Carl Ayliffe’s impressions of the man who’d apparently conversed with Sam Kramer.
‘So, nothing new then.’
Nothing new? A guy who was super careful talking to another just like him, thought Muecke.
‘For all we know, he was a council worker,’ said Henderson, disdainful, ‘and they were discussing hardy perennials.’
Muecke shook his head. ‘I checked.’
‘If you hadn’t lost him…’
If I’d had more officers to shadow him, Muecke thought. If I’d had more cooperation from the Robbers, rather than this ongoing fucking pissing contest.
‘Twice you’ve lost him now,’ Henderson said, satisfied with himself but not the world at large.
Not true. The Art Gallery of New South Wales operation had been a success in that Muecke’s overstretched team had tracked the man to an address in Coogee, and from there to a seafront bistro. Except that something or someone had spooked him and he’d vanished. Walked away from his car and his flat.
Nothing had spooked him today, however. Muecke had been extremely cautious about that.
‘What now?’ Henderson said, his tone freighted with meaning: Any plan of yours is unlikely to cover us in glory.
‘Lend me a few more bodies and we’ll saturate the area next time.’
Henderson tipped back his head and looked down his nose: a first-rate-mind-at-work pose. ‘That’s all you’ve got?’ Then he was gone.
Muecke collapsed into his swivel chair and fired up his computer, anxious to do some work. In part, it was a waiting game now. Wait for Kramer and Warner—if that was his name—to make contact again. Wait for rumours to trickle upwards in the Watervale prison population—which could be sooner rather than later. Prison rumours spread like small-town gossip.
The other part was footwork, phone calls and emails. Operation Cirrus had been formed a year ago, after Muecke had spotted similarities in a string of high-end domestic break-ins. On two occasions the thief had bailed up the occupants, who described him as tall, athletic, quiet, composed, efficient, gravely menacing. If the same man was behind the other robberies, his haul included coin and stamp collections, rare watches, one guy’s collection of Kellyana, and, most recently, a pair of rare five-dollar banknotes.
Muecke had been tapping into his network of contacts for some time. Patrol cops, security guards, pawnshop owners, bouncers, taxi drivers, small-time break-and-enter merchants, fences. As usual, the rumours trickling in were contradictory. The robberies were the work of one thief; they were the work of two or three, depending on their particular skills. The thief was local; the thief flew in from another state, pulled the robbery, flew out again. The thefts were solo; they were the work of small teams; they were random; they were brokered and bankrolled.
But it all added up to something, and two names cropped up more than once: Warner and Kramer. Those names were also disputed. There used to be a thief named Warner. And Kramer wasn’t known for arranging the theft of rare coins and stamps. He’d gone to jail for receiving and distributing nearly two million bucks’ worth of cigarettes stolen from a Smithfield warehouse.
An enigma, Kramer. Well spoken, university educated, grandfatherly. North Shore upbringing, but rumoured to have taken part in, or at least organised, a number of armed hold-ups of banks and security vans in the late 1990s. Genial most of the time, with a volcanic temper a bit of the time.
If he had a man on the outside pulling robberies for him, how did they communicate? And so Muecke and his team had checked the prison’s visiting-day logs and calls in and out. Nothing. Then they’d watched Kramer’s family—the loser son, the crippled wife, the carer daughter. Where they went, who visited them, phone calls, bank transactions.
And that had given them the Art Gallery of New South Wales encounter, an almost-conversation involving wife and daughter and a stranger in front of a landscape painting. A stranger who seemed to take evasive tactics on his way home. And who then disappeared. From the city, for all Muecke knew.
It hadn’t been until he’d gone back over the surveillance photos and gallery CCTV footage that he’d understood one aspect of the communication process: Phoebe Kramer and the man from Coogee had been carrying similar daypacks.
Muecke had sent Centennial Park surveillance photos to all of his contacts before interviewing Ayliffe in Watervale. Now, he saw, he had a result: an email from a Wollongong fence named Hartzer. He calls himself Warner.
That name again. Muecke swivelled in his chair. He’d shared some information with Sam Henderson and his team of Robbers, and might share more as it came in. Or not.
MEANWHILE A HEAP OF other cases needed his attention. The next day found him at a boatshed in Sans Souci for a routine follow-up on behalf of South Australia Police, who were seeking a yacht stolen from the Eyre Peninsula town of Tumby Bay. A messy case; just as well he wasn’t required to do more than poke around. The yacht, named Sandman, had been owned jointly by a builder named Dirk van Horen and his brother, Albert, who ran a string of motels. Dirk, short of cash after his business went down the tubes, sold his half share to Albert for $45,000. Albert immediately put Sandman on the market with an asking price of $250,000, whereupon Dirk and his wife Missy sailed off in it. Sandman had been spotted twice since then. First near Lakes Entrance in Victoria and later, displaying storm damage, in the waters off Byron Bay. Now an anonymous call had come in placing the yacht, renamed Santa Ana, at Rowntree Marine in Sans Souci. The caller wouldn’t give her name.
Muecke parked. Rowntree Marine was a wreck of a place: rusted fuel drums, mildewed coils of rope, the listing ribcages of rotting watercraft. A miasma of bilge water hanging over everything. The only shiny thing here was a glossy black Audi SUV, indicating to Muecke that most of Rowntree Marine’s business was transacted under the counter. He felt tired. He didn’t care. He did care that the tipoff had been anonymous—more valid, somehow, than simple misidentification by some harbourmaster.
Missy, the thief’s wife? In over her head?
He entered the office, a fake log cabin that creaked under his weight. A chipped counter with a young woman behind it, pecking at a keyboard and peering short-sightedly at a dusty screen. A shore-to-ship radio on a bench behind her, nautical charts and an ancient nudie calendar on the walls.
The woman looked up, blinked Muecke into focus. ‘Can I help you?’
Muecke showed her his ID. ‘If I could have a word with the boss?’
She looked at him helplessly. ‘The boss…?’
Muecke jerked his head. ‘The black Audi—is it yours?’
Her hand flew to a silver talisman on a leather strap around her neck. Silver everywhere, Muecke realised: earrings, finger rings, nose and eyebrow studs, bangles. ‘Oh. That’s Mr Rowntree’s.’
Muecke said patiently, ‘May I have a word with him?’
‘He went sailing.’
Muecke nodded. ‘You do repairs and refits here?’
She nodded, on surer ground now. ‘We do.’
‘A yacht came in, called Santa Ana.’
Silence. Something in her body language.
‘You called the police?’
She nodded again, wouldn’t look at him.
‘Why?’
‘It doesn’t feel right.’
‘You’re not in any trouble, and I won’t reveal your identity to anyone,’ Muecke said gently, ‘but could you give me some indication…?’
‘You go and see,’ the young woman said, pointing to the shipyard clutter beyond the window. ‘Berth two.’
Berth two was a short distance along a pier of crumbling planks. Here Muecke found a careworn yacht sitting free of the water in a hydraulic cradle, two lithe young men scraping the hull, a tubby older man on the cabin roof fiddling with what might have been antennas or windspeed indicators. To Muecke’s eye, the trio ha
d barely begun work. Torn sail rigging, the tip of one mast broken away, one porthole missing, a small hole above the waterline.
A woman was watching from a deckchair on the pier—watching the young men, Muecke thought. Wearing a bikini despite the chill in the air. Cigarette in one hand, wine glass in the other. Maybe she thinks she’s on the Riviera, thought Muecke. It was a ghastly tableau.
But he went to her first. The men were busy. ‘Mrs van Horen?’ She looked at him over dark glasses, all ageing cleavage and scraps of fabric. ‘Sorry, who?’
‘Is your name Missy van Horen?’
She was astonished. ‘Not me. Who’re you?’
The pudgy man clambered down to join them, making a meal of it, as if the stationary yacht might pitch him into the sea. Thrust his drinker’s nose at Muecke and insisted he wasn’t Dirk van Horen. What gave Muecke that impression? Ownership papers? ID? No problem, back in a tick.
While the man climbed aboard again and ducked below decks, Muecke eyed the young shipyard hands, if that’s what they were. Slender, shirtless gods. They continued to scrape barnacles but seemed, from the tension in their rippling torsos, very aware of Muecke. Interesting.
He turned to the woman again. She also seemed tense. ‘Storm damage?’
‘What? Oh, no, just a refit. We’re off to sail around the world.’
‘Just the two of you?’
She shook her head. ‘Bit beyond us. No, the boys are coming too.’
‘They’re your sons?’
She wouldn’t look at him. ‘That’s right.’
Muecke glanced at the yacht. ‘Much more to do?’
She hesitated. Muecke thought she couldn’t very well deny that more work was needed, but she didn’t want to nominate a time frame in case the police took the opportunity to do some digging before the Santa Ana set sail again. She was saved by her husband, who returned with a crisp set of papers that seemed to confirm the yacht was named Santa Ana, owned by Bryce and Felicity Reschke.
‘May I see some personal ID?’ said Muecke.
The man frowned. ‘Not on us, no. It’s all at home.’
‘Where do you live?’
The man named Reschke gestured. ‘Over in Sylvania.’
‘You’re originally from South Australia?’
‘What? No. Is something going on? Should we be worried?’
Muecke left it at that. Things to do, crooks to catch. He’d ask SA Police to send him photographs of Dirk and Missy von Horen—should have asked for that in the first place, on reflection.
11
JACK TREMAYNE. WYATT DIDN’T want to use a library computer or link a broadband account to the farmhouse so he bought an iPad and used the various free Wi-Fi spots in town. He’d park outside the shire offices with the tablet in his lap, or prop it on one of the little tables in the café attached to the bookshop.
There was plenty of public-domain material, and it proved to be a local story, a regional story, like so many other bogus investment schemes in Australia. Type Ponzi scheme Geelong into Google, and you found out about the sixty-eight million lost by ordinary investors there. Typing in Ponzi scheme Newcastle gave you Jack Tremayne and Kyle Roden.
Two entries told Wyatt almost all he needed to know about Tremayne as a person. Twenty years earlier he’d listed himself as Sir James Tremayne in the Brisbane White Pages, and his third (current) wife was a hot young blonde named Lynx.
Tremayne the businessman was an accountant who’d been convicted of fraud in 1998 and declared bankrupt in 2005. Banned for five years, he seemed to drop out of sight before resurfacing in Newcastle as plain Jack Tremayne in 2013. He quickly made a splash in the old industrial city on the coast north of Sydney. He seemed to arrive out of nowhere and created a front-page buzz: he owned a Bentley, ran a Darby Street eatery and a Honeysuckle Drive club, lived in a sprawling house with harbour views on The Hill, and hosted extravagant cocktail parties with his less flamboyant partner, Kyle Roden. Soon he’d donated a hundred thousand dollars to the children’s wing of the hospital, and another fifty thousand to various sporting clubs. Breathless articles referred to him as a man of drive and vision, a financial planner, an investment analyst, a real-estate developer, who saw ‘great things’ for Newcastle. He was ‘getting in on the ground floor’.
Tremayne and Roden began to attract investors, many of them first paying $33,000 for a seven-day seminar on stock market investing and property development. The pair promised returns of up to thirty per cent, and the early investors did achieve high fortnightly earnings. They spread the word among friends, neighbours and work colleagues, who also made money, thus sealing Tremayne’s reputation for knowing how to exploit investment loopholes and pick profitable trades using computer analysis. His ‘patented’ trading software was ‘guaranteed’ to analyse currencies, securities, options and indices in the local and international markets, and he liked to whisk potential investors through a trading room fitted with a wall of widescreen monitors flickering with marketplace graphs.
No one—not the investors, the bankers, the business and lifestyle reporters—looked beyond the dollar signs to dig into his history. No one discovered that he didn’t, as claimed, have an Australian Financial Services licence.
Although Tremayne and Roden attracted a handful of wealthy investors, most were average people who wanted to build on their superannuation or life savings. They were lured by the success stories of those who’d gone before them, and by Tremayne’s evident wealth and glib charm.
Not just charm, though. Contempt seemed to work, too. He’d known when to tip his nose in the air and say, ‘I can’t waste my time if you don’t have a quarter mill to invest.’ He’d known how to shut down anyone who requested documentation or wanted to see an investment property. ‘It’s a privilege, investing with me. You don’t get to question my acumen.’
Lynx Tremayne was an asset in the image-building side of things. Wyatt googled her: straight-backed, icy cool. She’d have got the meeker clients over the line.
In late 2017, the first cracks appeared. The Tremayne-Roden businesses were rumoured to be in strife. A punter who asked to see her investment property was given a false address. Fortnightly returns stopped landing in bank accounts. When worried investors contacted Tremayne, he talked them down. Mostly, and for a time, it worked. People left their money with him. New investors took the risk.
But then TR Investment Corporation, TR Futures and Tremayne-Roden Capital were wound up. Many investors lost their homes and savings and a retired schoolteacher who’d sunk $850,000 in TR Futures committed suicide. The Newcastle Herald ran an investigative piece on Tremayne and Roden, claiming they’d been running a Ponzi scheme, using the investments of new punters to cover the fortnightly returns of original investors until the whole edifice collapsed. Even then they’d continued spending on salaries, office rents, company limousines, car, house, boat and plane loans, credit card debt and cocktail parties.
Oh, and Kyle Roden had paid $480,000 to Madam Carla, an ex-circus acrobat from Byron Bay, for astrological trading tips, aura analysis and general office feng shui advice.
It didn’t do him any good. The Securities and Investments Probity Commission recognised him as the weak link. In return for a reduced fine and jail sentence, he’d pleaded guilty to fraud charges and agreed to testify against Tremayne.
Tremayne was made of sterner stuff. He lawyered up and employed delaying and withholding tactics. Said he had no knowledge of various transactions, meetings and paperwork. Held press conferences to express his dismay at his old partner’s dishonesty. Claimed, hand over heart, that he, too, was a victim; that meanwhile investors needn’t worry: he’d make things right for everybody. Lynx Tremayne got busy on social media, hitting back at her husband’s critics.
All the while, the two of them were selling off assets—the Bentley, the yacht, the holiday house. They settled a few small debts and partially settled larger ones, keeping the loudest creditors at bay.
Wyatt though
t: what happened to the rest? His exit stash.
He sat back and closed his eyes to rest them. Did the wife know Tremayne was planning to run? Was she going too? Did she know where the money was?
And was it a million? There was plenty of out-of-pocket—plenty of palm-greasing—involved in going into hiding. Twenty bucks wasn’t going to do it. A million at least, Wyatt thought. Of course, that was just getting there: Tremayne would doubtless have access to hidden accounts overseas.
Another day passed. Wyatt read on. Investigations into Tremayne and Roden had started at a local level, and Wyatt was betting progress had been slow and piecemeal. Delays, mislaid documents, lack of staff. Not many people were trained in the sophisticated forensic techniques needed to investigate complex financial arrangements. Witnesses and other victims were spread far and wide. Any who’d made a profit early and cashed in would have disputed the claims of those who’d lost everything.
Even when major fraud investigators from Sydney took over they made little headway. A Sydney Morning Herald reporter accused the Fraud Squad and the Probity Commission of poor case management and lack of sympathy for the victims: ‘By and large they are not greedy silvertails who can afford to lose a few hundred grand but ordinary mums and dads whose modest retirement nest eggs have been lost forever.’
The investigation into Tremayne limped along, which further incensed the reporter:
The liquidator of TR Wealth Management and TR Blue Chips has demonstrated conclusively that both firms failed to maintain accounts, employ staff, hold assets or conduct business of any kind. The public is entitled to know if the Fraud Squad and the Probity Commission do in fact have a threshold for taking action. It appears to be so high as to be undetectable.
The Probity Commission stirred. It charged Tremayne with operating without a Financial Services licence (‘Like hitting him across the face with a damp tissue,’ the reporter said) and seized his passport.
Tremayne continued to duck and weave. With what Wyatt considered to be a fair amount of chutzpah, he told his investors their money was held in a blind trust in Panama that only he could access. First, though, he needed them to help him get his passport back, pay his legal bills, withdraw all allegations against him and agree to a settlement of sixty-five cents in the dollar.
