Blood Ties (47 page)

“No,” the Sarge admitted, exchanging an embarrassed glance with me. It was the first thing we should have done. I blamed the late hour of his apprehension for our negligence.

She scalded us with a scornful look that said a lot about what she thought of the abilities and brainpower of country cops. “Take him into that room and search him. He might have a driver’s licence on him or something. I can’t process him without a name.”

The Sarge grabbed him by the arm and dragged him towards the room.

The Senior Sergeant called out after us. “There are gloves in the cupboard if you need to do a full cavity search.”

The man shouted out at that and continued to shout the couple of minutes that the Sarge spent patting him down.

“Can you shut up for a while?” the Sarge asked him, exasperated. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“You’re violating my human rights!” the man shouted at the top of his voice. “I want a lawyer.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the Sarge responded impatiently. “Anyway, you’re the one who violated Senior Constable Fuller’s rights by peeping on her and scalding her with hot coffee.”

He pulled out a wallet from the man’s pants pocket and threw it to me.

“That’s stealing! I want a lawyer!” he shouted again.

I opened his wallet and looked inside.

“Jackpot!” I smiled triumphantly. “Sarge, this troublesome man’s name is Graham Mundy and, by some strange coincidence, he lives at exactly the same address as Stanley Murchison himself.”

“Graham Mundy, huh? Son of Lionel Mundy, nephew of Stanley Murchison.”

“I want a lawyer,” was all he would say. We took him back to Daisy to be processed into custody, advised that he was being charged with unlawful stalking and assault of a police officer. We tried again to interview him when that was done, but he refused to cooperate without a lawyer present, so we had to cool our heels until a duty lawyer was dug up for him and he had time to consult with her.

In the end, finding him a lawyer turned out to be a good thing, because the level-headed woman who turned up in a plain brown tweed suit, sensible shoes and with a conservative brown bob, convinced Graham Mundy that it was in his best interest to start singing for us. She stared at me curiously as we all settled into one of the station’s interview rooms, probably hoping that her client hadn’t been responsible for my injuries.

And once Graham started talking, he couldn’t stop, his nervousness making him garrulous. We soon learned that he worked for Stanley Murchison, who was indeed his maternal uncle, as a paralegal even though he didn’t have any formal qualifications for the job. Uncle Stanley had instructed him to find both Miss G’s diaries and a particular land title. He admitted spying on Miss G on four occasions in an attempt to determine where she hid her diaries with no luck, being foiled by Miss G’s sharp eyes and my subsequent searches each time. He admitted breaking into and tossing Miss G’s place, looking for the diaries and the title.

“Title to what?” asked the Sarge.

“A property on Mountain Road.”

“We were told that all the Greville properties had been sold,” I commented.

Graham squirmed evasively. “I don’t know anything about that. Uncle Stanley looks after all that side of things. He’s the trustee for the family.”

“Why was this title at Miss Greville’s house and not in safe storage with your uncle?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” His eyes flitted from the Sarge to me nervously and back again.

“I think you know more than you’re telling us,” said the Sarge bluntly, leaning back with his arms crossed.

I pressed him. “You must have known that peeping on a frail elderly woman and tossing her house when she wasn’t there are both unlawful activities.” I frowned at him. “Not to mention despicable.”

He flushed, sighing, and glanced desperately at his lawyer, who nodded at him encouragingly. He looked down at his hands that were twisting together anxiously and sighed again heavily as though he had come to some difficult inner decision.

He talked again. “Look, Uncle Stanley thought he might have misplaced the title to the Mountain Road property and didn’t want to ask Miss Greville directly if she had it at her house.” At the Sarge’s raised eyebrow, he hastened to explain. “Because that would be admitting potentially incompetent behaviour, and you don’t want that kind of reputation when you’re a lawyer, especially an ageing one like him. So he came to me with his problem. He suggested that I go to her house and see if I could find the title, without her knowing anything about it. But she was always at home, and I only got the chance to go through her things when you took her away.”

So he had been watching us.

“And you believed Uncle Stanley when he gave you that reason for breaking into Miss Greville’s place – that he didn’t want to seem incompetent?” I asked sceptically. “You didn’t think that sounded rather weak?”

“He’s my uncle. Of course I believed him,” he defended strongly, but slightly less sure now that I’d raised the doubt in his mind.

I pushed on. “And what reason did he give you for wanting Miss Greville’s diaries?”

Graham was flustered by that question. “He . . . he didn’t really give me one. He only said he didn’t want to appear incompetent.”

“So did you find the land title?” asked the Sarge.

“No.”

My turn again. “Why did you trash Miss Greville’s lounge room? That wasn’t a very nice thing to do. You left her with a terrible mess to clean up and you ruined her furniture too. She’s ninety-three years old. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I . . . I was frustrated when I couldn’t find the title. I didn’t want to let Uncle Stanley down.” He flushed and glanced sideways at his lawyer. Her eyes lowered to the legal pad she had open in front of her, professionally covering her disgust with him. The Sarge and I didn’t bother to hide ours.

“Why did you peep on Mrs Villiers too?”

“After you came to see him, Uncle Stanley told me to spy on some other women in the town to make it look as though it was a genuine peeping tom, not just someone targeting Miss Greville in particular.”

“So that’s why you made it so obvious that you’d been peeping on Mrs Villiers?” Sarge asked. Graham nodded.

I asked, “Is that why you peeped on me as well?”

“No. Uncle Stanley told me to. He wanted to know if you had Miss Greville’s diaries at your house.”

“Do you do everything that Uncle Stanley tells you to?” derided the Sarge. “How old are you? You must be about thirty-five. Why don’t you grow a pair of your own?”

“He’s been very good to me,” Graham replied in a small, self-conscious voice. “He gave me a job and somewhere to live. I didn’t get along with my parents.”

I asked, “Why don’t you live in your parents’ house? It’s standing vacant.”

“My mother won’t let me. She says I need to grow up and stand on my own two feet for a change,” he said, jumping up in agitation.

“Sit back down again!” barked the Sarge.

When he’d resettled himself, I asked him sweetly, “Got a few mother issues, have you, Graham?”

“I don’t want to disappoint her,” he answered in that small voice before becoming angry again. “I love my mother! What’s wrong with that? You make it sound wrong!”

“Your mother is going to be very disappointed in you when she finds out what you’ve been up to.”

“You . . . you can just
shut up
!” he shouted at me, half-standing. I smiled at him innocently. He lowered his rear to the chair again, calming down slightly when his lawyer placed a restraining hand on his arm. He eyed me with loathing. “I don’t like you one little bit. You’re . . . you’re,” he turned to his lawyer beseechingly, before back to me. “You’re a . . . a female dog!” His skin mottled red at his daring.

“Aw, you’ve hurt my feelings now, Graham,” I mocked. “And here I was hoping we could be friends.”

His lawyer shot me a jaded glance and restrained Graham again with that hand on his arm. “Can we please return to questions relevant to the matter at hand?” she requested in a cool, efficient tone. I shut up for a while, suitably chastened.

The Sarge changed direction. “What do you know about a company called Traumleben Pty Ltd?”

Graham looked at him blankly. “Never heard of it.”

“Your father is listed as the sole director.”

He snorted with unamused laughter. “My father running a company? Don’t make me laugh! He was completely gaga for the last five years of his life and he’s been dead for three years, so somebody’s pulling your leg if they tell you my father is the director.”

The Sarge glanced over at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. “I wasn’t aware that ASIC had such a devilishly cheeky sense of humour, were you, Senior Constable?”

“No Sarge, I had no idea. You live and learn.”

We didn’t think we’d get much more from him after that so ended the interview, adding another charge of break and enter on Miss G’s place to his charge sheet.

“Do you think we’ve got enough ammunition to apply for a warrant for Murchison’s arrest on suspicion of fraud?” I asked doubtfully when we debriefed afterwards.

“We haven’t got
any
evidence that Murchison is the one behind Traumleben Pty Ltd. But one thing I do know is that the whole story about him wanting that other land title and diaries because he was afraid of being seen as incompetent is a load of horseshit as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Graham Mundy believed him, but I sure as hell don’t.”

“Yeah, Graham doesn’t strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed. He’s very trusting of his crafty lawyer uncle. But if Murchison’s the one behind Traumleben, then he probably wants to buy that land cheaply and sell it to the government for a massive profit as well.”

“Hmm,” he pondered. “If you think about it logically, Murchison has to at least be facilitating the sales because he’s the one with his hands on the titles and intimate knowledge of the properties. He’s acting fraudulently in some way.”

“Let’s try Google again and see if there is any mention of a government department being interested in land on Mountain Road,” I suggested, and bagged the use of one of the receiving area’s computers for a little while, typing a number of combinations of words into the search engine, hoping to hit the jackpot. I wasn’t that lucky but I did find an interesting little article from the
Wattling Bay Messenger
.

“Sarge, look at this. It’s an interview with the Minister for Defence discussing the government’s intention to build a new field training facility for army recruits. There’s a number of locations mentioned as being possible, including guess where?”

“A rugged parcel of land on Mountain Road, near Mount Big Town, by any chance?”

“No wonder you’re a sergeant!” I said cheekily. “You’re so clever.”

He pulled a face. “What date was that interview?”

“A couple of months ago.”

“So maybe the sale has come to the pointy end, which is why there’s been the mad scramble to find the title paper?”

“You think Murchison’s been negotiating already with Defence for Traumleben to sell the land when it doesn’t even own it yet?”

“He’s either working for Traumleben or he
is
Traumleben. Let’s ring someone in Defence and see if we can find out any more.”

Chapter 24

The Sarge rang the Defence media advisor mentioned at the end of the article. And after much professed ignorance, being transferred, and repeating of who he was and what he wanted, he was finally put through to the haughty head of the Department’s legal section. That man refused to tell him anything because “departmental contractual matters are commercial-in-confidence, Sergeant.”

“Look mate,” he said, getting stroppy. “I don’t want to know any confidential contractual information. I just want to know who the Department is negotiating with in relation to the land sale near Mount Big Town. Just a name, that’s all. It’s public information that this particular piece of land was being considered by the Department for the training centre – we just read about it in an online newspaper from an interview with the Minister.”

“Why do you want to know?”

The Sarge sighed, and replied through gritted teeth. “I’ve already told you ten times. It’s in relation to a current investigation.”

“Produce a warrant and I’ll think about it,” the lawyer said and hung up, and the Sarge spent the next half-minute pointlessly swearing at the phone.

“You’re starting to sound like the Inspector,” I teased. While he had been on the phone, I’d interrogated the land titles database again, accessing individual records for the two land sales that Miss G didn’t remember. When he had calmed down a smidge, he came to stand behind me and peered down at the screen over my shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“We know that Lionel Mundy is not the real director of Traumleben, but whoever is the brain behind it must have given some genuine information about their contact details when registering the sale of those properties with the various government departments. Otherwise how would he or she receive mail or phone calls in connection with the sales?”

“Great thinking, Tess,” he said, sounding genuinely impressed. “What do we have?”