Open File (20 page)

‘Tania,’ Damien said quietly, ‘I want you to get up very slowly and put your sexy leather bag in my father’s lap. Gently. I see it as two very slow movements.’

Tania did as she was told and almost collapsed back into her chair, still staring at the unwavering pistol.

‘Reach in, Dad,’ Damien said. ‘London to a brick you’ll find a tape-recorder running.’

Similarly mesmerised, Wayne Ireland did as his son instructed and produced the miniature tape-recorder. He held it to his ear and must have heard the faint tape hiss.

‘You bitch,’ he said. ‘You were always going to fuck me over.’

‘Chuck it in the fire, Dad.’

Ireland did. The recorder landed in the middle of the burning logs and erupted in a display of blue and yellow flames as the plastic caught and flared. Tania hid her face in her hands.

‘I killed Angela Pettigrew,’ Damien said.

‘Jesus, son, no,’ Ireland Senior said. ‘It’s just a manslaughter charge. The lawyers’ll get me off. It’s all circumstantial. Worst comes to worst I’ll get a short sentence served somewhere soft.’

‘I know that, Dad. We’ll stick to the plan, but with your health the way it is that won’t be a cakewalk and we can’t trust this pair.’

Damien’s control was frightening. Big and boofy as he was, and apparently under his father’s thumb, I had underestimated him. Now I needed to unsettle him somehow. I took a sip of my drink.

‘But you wouldn’t get off it easily, Damien, would you? You’d go for murder, no worries. How and why did you do it?’

‘She was blackmailing Dad and threatening to expose him as an adulterer and—’

‘A corrupt thief,’ I said.

‘Shut your face. I followed him to the house and I finished her off after he left.’

‘I see. Then you told him and persuaded him to take the rap.’

‘No. He volunteered. That’s the sort of father he is. He’s giving up everything to protect me.’

Tania’s terror had given way to wide-eyed fascination. Ireland Senior was shaking his head, muttering, pleading for his son to stop talking.

‘That’s bullshit,’ I said. ‘You’re a mug if you believe that. This government’s been on the skids since Nifty resigned. The two blokes after him have been hopeless. They’re on the nose. You know as well as I do that Rex Jackson—the minister for prisons, for Christ’s sake—is on the way to jail. Wayne here could easily be next. It’s a corruption charge he’s worried about. A conviction for that and they go after the assets. He’s giving up less than he’s protecting.’

‘That’s not true. Anyway, you’re not going to be around to see how it plays out.’

Ireland shook his head. ‘You can’t kill them, son. There’ll be people who know where they were going.’

‘They never made it, Dad. They had an accident at Skinner’s Leap. I’ve got a few mates coming up to help me with that.’

‘No!’ Wayne Ireland half rose from his chair and then sank back, gasping for breath and clutching his chest. He slid down and sideways and hit the floor, grunting and shaking.

‘Dad!’ Damien yelped. I was up and on him in three strides and laid the best tackle since my school days. He was so big he stayed on his feet but stumbled and I drove him back with my bare feet slipping on a rug but still getting traction. His back slammed into the bar hard and the gun fell from his hand. I scooped it up.

‘Go and help him,’ I said. I pulled out my gun in case his was a replica or unloaded—a bluff.

Damien lurched over to where Tania was trying to administer mouth to mouth resuscitation. Damien pushed
her aside and took over. He was vigorous and seemed to know what he was doing. He was close to the fire and sweat poured off him as he pumped. He kept it up longer than I would have and was exhausted when he finally sat up.

‘He’s gone,’ he moaned. ‘Oh, God.’

He got to his feet, looked around wildly and began to cry. Tania tried to comfort him but he shoved her away and shambled out of the room.

Tania had had a couple of shocks too close together. Her face was white and she just managed to get back to her chair.

‘Heart attack?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘He was holding a full hand for it.’

‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you? Where’s Damien?’

The roar of a motor answered the question. I went to the deck and saw the Land Rover ploughing through the mud, slewing and skidding as Damien gunned it harder than he should. I put my socks and boots back on and went inside. Tania had a cigarette going and she’d been to the bar for a stiffener. I poured myself some scotch and looked around the room. I straightened the rug that I’d buckled up. The tape-recorder had become a mass of molten plastic well on the way to being charred out of recognition. Ireland’s cigar had landed on the brick hearth and was still burning. The only thing to suggest that Wayne Ireland hadn’t simply suffered a heart attack when being interviewed was Damien’s Beretta in my hand. It was loaded.

I went back to the deck and threw it as far into the bush as I could. I’d had a fair arm as a schoolboy cricketer and it disappeared deep into the misty greyness.

Tania joined me on the deck. ‘What now?’

‘We call an ambulance. This can’t cause us any trouble. No suspicious circumstances.’

She was recovering fast but still wasn’t quite there. ‘What about Damien?’

‘Nothing we can do there.’

It took an hour for the ambulance to arrive and the paramedics read it the only way they could. As they were placing Ireland on the stretcher one said, ‘We were held up. A car went over the cliff at Skinner’s Leap. Came from this direction.’

‘Oh my God,’ Tania said. ‘Damien.’

The paramedic looked at her.

‘Mr Ireland’s son,’ I said. ‘He was very upset at the delay. He went for help, not that there was anything to do except just what you’ve done.’

‘You’d better check in with the police at Katoomba about that, and we’ll need your names and contact numbers and some ID.’

We showed them our drivers’ licences, gave them the numbers and said we’d stop at the police station. They carried the heavy body from the house and loaded it into the ambulance. Dense rain was falling and the mist seemed to be rising up from the valley. We stood on the deck and watched the ambulance leave, the driver taking much more care than Damien had.

‘Are there other houses further up the track?’ I asked.

‘Maybe one or two but they’re weekenders. Wayne and Damien had their privacy. That had to be Damien who went over the edge. He was revving like crazy as he went. What are we going to do, Cliff?’

‘Nothing. If they’re both dead what does it matter who did what?’

‘This didn’t work out anything like the way we planned.’

‘Could’ve been worse. Damien could have shot us both.’

‘Oh, so you saved my life? Was he serious?’

I shrugged. ‘The gun was loaded and he’d already killed one person.’

‘Jesus, what about those friends Damien talked about?’

‘With ambulances and police cars around, I don’t think we’ll be seeing them. Still, we’d better leave. Better to go to the cops than have them come to us.’

She gathered her bag and scarf. ‘This is terrible.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the scoop.’

The fence at Skinner’s Leap was a tangled mess of wire and broken posts. We were waved down by the police stationed there and made a brief statement. We said we were going to report in at Katoomba and the office radioed that in.

‘How far is the drop here?’ I asked.

‘Far enough,’ the cop replied.

At Katoomba we gave a heavily edited version of what had happened at the Ireland house. The officers who took the statements didn’t like the look of either of us, especially Tania, who was showing the effects of stress and alcohol. They kept going in and out of the room and conferring in private.

After we’d been there an hour the vehicle that had gone over the drop had been identified and was in the process of being recovered.

‘You say he went for help,’ one of the cops said, ‘but the man was dead.’

I said, ‘He’d busted a gut trying to resuscitate his father. The ambulance was a long time coming, he thought. He was upset and confused.’

‘Drunk?’

‘No. We—Ireland, Ms Kramer and me—had had a drink or two but he hadn’t. Not that I saw. Tania?’

She shook her head. ‘Can I smoke?’

The cop pushed an ashtray across the table. ‘Sure.’

Tania fished in her bag and came up with an empty packet. The cop gave her one of his and she favoured him with one of her you’re-the-only-person-in-the-world smiles. It was a bit lopsided and didn’t work.

They got our details down in every last particular and let us go. Tania rushed to the nearest shop for cigarettes. I steered her to a coffee place and made her sit, eat a sandwich and drink a heavily sugared flat white.

‘I have to admit,’ she said, ‘you handled that okay.’

‘I’ve had the experience. We’d better get back so you can write your article.’

She was almost herself again now. ‘Fuck that,’ she said. ‘I’m phoning it in to the copy-takers.’

Tania’s story made a big splash in the afternoon edition and she strung it out over the next few days. Her articles were mostly factual with some speculation and some uncheckable lies. She didn’t name me so I had no complaint. She’d cornered the market on the Ireland–Pettigrew story and I had to admit that she treated Justin’s disappearance and Sarah’s circumstances with discretion—no mention of paternity doubts. Damien’s death was provisionally declared accidental and Tania presented herself as the last person to see him alive, leaving me out of it.

She speculated about whether Wayne or Damien Ireland had killed Angela Pettigrew, implying that her truncated interview with Wayne suggested he was the guilty party.

‘Why did you go that way?’ I asked her when we met up two days later.

‘Kept the cops and the DPP happy and made for better copy. First state minister of the crown to commit a murder since the ex-minister Tom Ley in the forties. Similar in some ways, with mistresses and all that, but better, Wayne being in office at the time.’

In a sidebar to one of her articles she’d made a play of the Thomas Ley affair and his nefarious dealings, including a murder, after losing his ministry and parliamentary seat in New South Wales when in England in the 1940s.

‘You don’t miss a trick,’ I said.

‘A woman in this game? Can’t afford to.’

That meeting took place after I’d had a talk with Sarah at Tania’s house. Tania told me that the girl wanted to see me to ask about Justin. I told Sarah that Wayne Ireland had provided him with a passport and some money—something Tania had only hinted at—and that he must have left the country.

‘Lucky bugger. That’s what I’d like to do. Where did he go, Mr Hardy? To do what?’

‘I think you know the answer to that question.’

‘To be a soldier.’

‘Yeah. I’ll try to get the records searched, but he could’ve gone almost anywhere with a passport and some money. Lots of jumping-off points to other places. Lots of wars going on with opportunities for mercenaries—Lebanon, Angola, Nicaragua . . .’

‘You think he got killed?’

‘No way to tell. If he’s alive and okay somewhere, eventually it’s odds on he’ll hear about what happened here. I never heard of an Australian overseas who didn’t check back in some way, sooner or later.’

Sarah was smoking furiously and she lit another immediately after stubbing one out. ‘If he hears about all this shit he probably wouldn’t want to come back. He didn’t care about me.’

‘You don’t know that. He was very distressed and not thinking clearly.’

She shook her head. ‘I told you—we had a fight and I told him about Angela. I wish I hadn’t.’

‘Sarah—’

‘Go away. Fuck off. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

We were right back where we’d started and now I was sure she wasn’t acting.

I was given a hard time by the coroner at the inquest on Paul Hampshire. Shouldn’t you have taken steps to safeguard your client given the earlier events of the day? Shouldn’t you have registered more details of the vehicle that struck him? Etc. Etc. The coroner was a soft-looking man in a tailored suit and my guess was that the only violence he’d ever have witnessed was from the sidelines in a Kings versus Shore rugby game.

Paul Hampshire’s body was unclaimed for a time until some members of his old unit heard of his death and organised a service and a cremation. I went along out of a sense of responsibility, but not guilt. It was a sad affair for a man whose life had been pretty sad.

Things didn’t improve. Tania didn’t write her book but her articles got her a full-time job on one of the tabloids and her career prospered. On legal advice she withdrew her application to have Sarah put in her care and an aunt—a half-sister of Angela’s—took over the job on the
understanding that they would live in the Church Point house until the seven year period needed to declare Justin dead was up. By then, Sarah would be an adult and able to claim and dispose of her inheritance.

It didn’t work out that way. Sarah and the aunt didn’t get on and Sarah linked up again with Ronny O’Connor. They took as many valuable items from the house as they could manage, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy a motorbike. They went to Queensland and two years later they both OD’d in a Fortitude Valley squat.

About the time I got that news, from a friend in the PEA game in Brisbane, I met up again with Sharkey Finn. In a pub. But Sharkey had gone badly downhill from the grog and being dumped by Wilson Stafford, and when he challenged me his mate held him back and persuaded him not to be stupid.

The one bright spot was that Kathy Petersen came to Sydney at Easter. We went to the Blue Mountains and to the Central Coast and wined and dined and made love in a variety of places, including my house in Glebe, the Newport Arms hotel (where we joined in a celebration of the ALP’s win in the federal election), and among the rocks at the south end of Maroubra beach. She went back to the coast and I visited her and it was still good, but she met another teacher and they transferred to a school further south and that was that.