Wet Graves (3 page)

“You can collect a copy of the file and a few other bits and pieces from Room Ten, second floor.” Parker scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, came out from behind his desk and handed it to me. He straightened his tie and worked his shoulders inside his well-tailored suit jacket. “Give them this. Sorry, Cliff, I really have to go. Six tonight at the Brighton?”

“Sure. Have a good meeting.” I went out of the room and was picked up by another fresh-faced constable at the end of the corridor and escorted to Level 2, Room 10. I handed in the chit Frank had given me and was directed to wait downstairs. The waiting room didn't contain any magazines or ashtrays—they don't really want anyone to wait there for very long. Like the man and woman already there I sat on a hard chair and stared at nothing. I didn't know about them, but I had plenty to think about. I'd read about the Lenko trial and heard radio reports but the details weren't clear in my mind. Had there been a mistrial or was an appeal pending? I couldn't remember.

I was getting more edgy by the minute. Having your licence lifted is no picnic. The procedures were swift, bordering on brutal. The wording of the Act had stuck in my mind. If you were disqualified at the court of petty sessions you could appeal, but, “Every such appeal shall be in the nature of a re-hearing and the decision of the district court thereon shall be final and without appeal”. Not even Cy Sackville could draw that out very far. There probably were procedures for reinstatement, but they were bound to be long and expensive.

In short, this was real trouble, and I was on the point of getting up and phoning Sackville when my name was called. I almost didn't answer.
You don't have time to investigate a bridge jumper
, I thought.
Your survival comes first
. But I told myself the Lenko business was all a mistake anyway.
Frank'll probably have it sorted out by six. Who could resist a man from such an office wearing such a suit?
I went to the desk and collected a large manila envelope from the female constable whose blonde hair flowed out becomingly from under her hat. She advised me to have a nice day.

“You too,” I said. My positive attitude was working—I was being nicer to people. But just to show I wasn't going soft, I got moving before an escort could be appointed and made a judicious selection of pamphlets in the lobby—they'd add a nice touch to my waiting room if I ever got one.

It was close to three o'clock and I hadn't had any lunch. Lately I'd been trying to make lunch an exception rather than a rule. Another rule was no drinking before six. Well, as the sportsmen say, you win some and you lose some. I walked up Riley Street and, instead of dodging through the traffic, I used the crossing to get over to the Brighton Hotel—all that community policing soft sell was having an effect. I bought a seven-ounce glass of red wine at the bar and obeyed the notice there by “stepping back once served”. Besides, stepping back helped me to ignore the big, fat, plastic-wrapped salad sandwiches that sat beckoningly on the bar.

The pub was quiet; cops drink there and journalists and punters and second-hand dealers, but everyone over twenty is drinking less these days, and the Brighton doesn't have slot machines and keeps the television turned down. My kind of place. I got a stool and a bit of shelf by the window where there was enough light to read by and ripped open the envelope. Inside was the sort of stuff Louise Madden would probably have been able to get under the freedom of information legislation, if she'd been prepared to wait until she turned forty.

The photostat of the form Ms Madden had filled in when making her report didn't tell me anything new. The notes of several police officers who'd made enquiries had been entered on a computer by a poor speller with an imperfect grasp of the computer's working. Added to that, the dot matrix printer which had spewed out the papers had had a faded ribbon. It all made for difficult and uninspiring reading. Madden's colleagues at the school had nothing useful to say; likewise his neighbours, doctor and bank manager. The man had disappeared. If he'd been beamed up into a spaceship, the aliens were looking at a fifty-six-year-old male Caucasian
Homo sapiens
, 180 centimetres tall, weighing 70 kilos, with salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes behind spectacles, and wearing a red tracksuit with white Nike running shoes. He spoke French and German pretty well, was widely read in history, anthropology and golf. A valuable catch.

I reproached myself for taking things too lightly. Maybe it was the rough red on an empty stomach, but it was more likely to be the effect of the face in the grey, grainy photostat copy of the photograph Louise Madden had supplied. A kind, gentle man, she'd said. He looked it, as well as humorous, slightly mocking and good-natured. More often than not, the picture you get of the subject in a missing persons case is of a sullen-looking teenager or an adult with a distracted, self-absorbed look that indicates something deeply wrong and makes disappearance seem almost the right answer. Not so with Brian Madden. He looked like a nice man to know, fun to be with, and I wanted to find him.

I riffled through the notes and located a brief record of interview with one Peter Thornybush, who was a member of the foursome Madden used to play with at Chatswood. The others were Clive Wells and Carlo Calvino, schoolteacher, accountant and lawyer respectively. Thornybush couldn't account for Madden's disappearance and ventured the opinion that Wells and Calvino were similarly ignorant. The police hadn't interviewed the other two, nor was there any trace of an interview with a woman connected with the golf course. House calls, possible leads—the weft and warp of the private detective's business. Another thread to pull was the taxi driver who'd seen a man answering Madden's description approaching the harbour bridge.

I finished the glass of wine, put the papers back in the envelope and stuffed the police pamphlets in with them. I had two choices. To sit there drinking and worrying about the threat to my livelihood, or get out there and do some work. It was four o'clock and there was a good chance that someone I knew would wander in any minute and affect my decision. I got off the stool and left the pub, striking a blow for self-direction. I even knew where I was going.

3

Walking across the harbour bridge nowadays must be about as risky as street-marching in Beijing. The approaches—narrow paths, slender traffic islands, high-speed zones—were not pedestrian-friendly. Still, there were people, dwarfed by the huge grey metal superstructure and the big sandstone towers, walking across on both sides of the bridge. I drove. Trains rumbled past at twice the speed of the road traffic; only the motorcyclists, weaving between the cars, gave them any competition. I saw a jogger stop, pull off his Walkman headphones and tap the mechanism. All that metal must play hell with the radio reception.

I drove across from the south side, necessarily slowly on account of the evening rush, turned in North Sydney and crawled back. I hadn't asked which side of the road the person who might have been Brian Madden had been walking, but it didn't matter much. The footpath on the west side was crammed between the train tracks and a two-and-a-half-metre-high fence. Same sort of fence on the east—solid metal to waist height, then cyclone wire stretched between uprights that curved over away from the gap for the last ten centimetres or so. Three strands of barbed wire on top. A reasonably active person could climb it and a strong man could get a 70-kilogram weight over it, but there the possibilities ended. Anyone going over that fence either wanted to or went because someone else wanted them to.

The sun was going down as I stop-started along in the lane for drivers who didn't have the right money to pay the toll. The sky was clear and the water turned red-gold. The ferries and sailing ships seemed to be skating across a sheet of beaten bronze. I was buying fifteen minutes of a hundred-million-dollar view for a dollar fifty—a bargain. I found it strangely disconcerting to think of the work going on to tunnel under the harbour. It seemed wrong somehow, a violation.

The city skyline was impressive, irregular and cranky-looking, the way a skyline should be. A good many of the tall buildings were owned by insurance companies and housed insurance officers. They were the sorts of places I might have ended up in if I'd stayed in the insurance game. Even being stuck in the harbour bridge traffic was better than that. I turned on the radio to listen to the
Law Report
and got quite involved in a discussion on the niceties of defamation, remembering something about it from long ago. Before I was an insurance investigator I had been a soldier and before that a law student. Life's twists and turns. I paid my toll and threaded my way back through the city streets to Darlinghurst. Lawyer A said that the defamation laws were fine as they were; lawyer B said they should be changed to enhance the public's right to know; lawyer C said they should be tightened to protect privacy. They were very polite to each other, which seemed to disappoint the program's presenter.

Frank was waiting for me in the hotel with a half-drunk light beer in front of him and a worried look on his face. The bar has a door onto Riley Street and one onto Oxford Street, and there seemed to be more people coming in through both doors than going out. Frank had reserved me a stool with a folded copy of the evening paper and no doubt the frequent use of his tough cop look. Frank had been a very tough cop when he was in Homicide, and a very smart one. I wasn't sure just how tough he still was. I bought two middies of light and occupied the stool. The television was off, and the drinkers were talkers rather than shouters.

“So,” I said.

Frank folded the newspaper and stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket—okay in his Homicide days, no way to treat the sort of suit he wore now. “Contacted Sackville yet?”

I drank some beer and shook my head.

“Don't take this lightly, Cliff. It's big trouble.”

“I hoped you'd have it sorted out by this.”

“Forget it.” He leaned closer to me out of old habit, born of the days when he talked mostly to crims and fizz-gigs and other cops who liked to whisper. “A witness in the Lenko trial says you helped to set up the meeting between Didi Steller and Lenko, using Rhino Jackson as the go-between.”

“That's crazy. Who is this witness?”

Frank took a sip of his beer. “When did you last see Jackson?”

The question surprised me, not because it was tricky in any way but because Frank was playing the copper rather than the friend. It was my turn to drink beer.

“Cliff?”

“I'm thinking. I'm wondering whether you really reckon I'd help to set up a hit, or whether you're puzzling over who'd be trying to frame me.”

Frank rubbed his chin and the hard, day-old bristles rasped like Scotchbrite. “I'm sorry. All the crap I'm processing these days leaves me wondering if there's an honest man left in the world.”

“Apart from yourself.”

Frank took another drink and stared up over my shoulder at the TV set, which showed film of some uniformed men using batons and fire hoses on young people wearing jeans and T-shirts. The street where this was happening looked hot and dusty; it could have been anywhere. “You know how they send the apprentice jockey for the left-handed whip, that sort of thing?”

I nodded.

“When I made it to plain clothes they put me in Vice. First job was go around the brothels picking up the take. Do it right and get a good mark. Don't do it right and your papers get marked ‘not suitable for plain clothes' and you can look forward to ten years in Woop Woop. Of course, once you've done it the sergeant's got something on you, just as the senior sergeant's got something on him and so on up.”

“Nice. How did you handle that?”

“I found out what the senior had on the sergeant and used it against him to avoid the job. My papers got marked ‘not suited to this squad' and I went over to Homicide.”

“They didn't get you to kill anyone?”

Frank grinned. “I was lucky I wasn't sent to armed holdup.”

“This is fun, Frank,” I said, “shooting the breeze. D'you want to talk about Hilde and my namesake next?” Hilde Stoner was a former tenant of mine who'd married Parker a few years back; they had a son named after me.

“No. Let's get back to it. The witness hasn't got a name. She's in a witness protection program.”

I looked at a clutch of men drinking at the bar—rebels who'd ignored the step back order. “I don't understand what you're saying.”

“All I can tell you now is that the witness is a woman. She made a very brief appearance in court during Lenko's first trial. I'm told she wore a wig and dark glasses—her own mother wouldn't have known her. Since then she's gone into witness protection, as I say.”

“Why?”

“You haven't been keeping up, Cliff. A witness didn't show up and couple of jurors were suborned, or attempts were made to suborn them. Threats, you know. So, mistrial, and Lenko goes up again in a couple of weeks.”

“Who didn't show?”

“Rhino Jackson.”

“Shit. Are you telling me you can't find out who this witness is?”

“No. I can find out, given time. But I'd be putting my job on the line if I told you. And I'm sure Sackville'd advise you not to see her. There's probably been an injunction issued to that effect anyway.”

“Great. So I can't even know who's trying to put me out of business. Christ, Frank, this could lead to a conspiracy charge or something, couldn't it?”

“I said I'd help you. I …”

I took a drink of the light beer, wishing it was whisky. “No. I'm not going to ask you to risk your job for me. You've got responsibilities. I haven't. I'll handle it somehow. You're right, I should've called Sackville the minute I got the letter. He must be able to throw a few punches for me.”

“That's right. If he runs into trouble tell him to call me. I'll do everything I can.”