Fallout Page 16

  Being aware, courtesy of his ASIO contacts, that the Australian Government and defence/security apparatus were freaking out over New Zealand’s nuclear ships stance, Brightside had put Waitz in touch with like-minded people in Canberra. Kiwis tended not to fret over national security on the basis that isolation and insignificance were the best forms of defence. Scarred by their World War Two experiences — Japanese bombers over Darwin, Japanese submarines in Sydney harbour — Australians saw their place in the world in very different terms: a vast, empty, mineral-rich expanse of desirable real estate eyed covetously by the inscrutable, over-populated Orient. Defence wasn’t an issue across the Tasman: it was an article of faith for both major parties that the lucky country’s freedom, prosperity and security depended on the alliance with America.

  The political dimension came in the form of Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s fury at the awkward position he found himself in as a result of what he regarded as Lange’s naiveté and crowd-pleasing theatrics. Naturally ego was involved — the Labour leader from down under who happened to be the darling of the international left-wing intelligentsia wasn’t the bloke in Canberra — but Hawke also resented the way in which Lange had exposed him to pressure and invidious comparisons from his party’s left wing and the extra-parliamentary left. In a vernacular nutshell: what’s stopping us being an independent, principled nation with a Prime Minister who doesn’t have his nose permanently planted in Uncle Sam’s clacker?

  Waitz opened the meeting with an epic rant about how he wouldn’t stand idly by while that grandstanding tub of shit (Lange) undermined freedom and democracy. He even channelled Henry II — ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent fat fuck?’ — but the man from the US Embassy shut that thread down very smartly.

  The ASIO guy waited till everyone else had had their say — invariably long on doom and gloom but short on constructive suggestions — before delivering his glad tidings. ASIO had electronically eavesdropped on Lange at some international gathering. While they hadn’t overheard him touching base with the Kremlin, they had learned that he’d embarked on an adulterous affair with his speechwriter. The suggestion was that they should leak the story to a friendly journalist then stand back and enjoy the fun. At the very least, Lange’s saintly image would be tarnished; in the best-case scenario he’d choose — or be forced — to step down as Prime Minister. Even if he toughed it out, it would give the pro-ANZUS faction in cabinet an opportunity to rein him in and relitigate the anti-nuke stance.

  It was as if a genie had popped out of Barton’s antique inkwell offering to grant them their most heartfelt wish. There was much yahooing and backslapping — these were the days before high fives — and, as sometimes happens, everyone stopped yahooing at exactly the same moment. And into that sudden silence floated the unmistakable sound of female laughter.

  Cue pop-eyed consternation. The man from ASIO was the first to react, lunging for the door and yanking it open. Standing there looking embarrassed yet at the same time not quite able to keep a straight face was a teenage girl.

  Of course Waitz started bellowing, but the others hushed him up. The spooks fired questions. She told them she was a friend of Barton’s daughter; she’d got bored downstairs and decided to explore; she’d heard voices coming from the library and couldn’t resist being nosy.

  Waitz declared that he was getting the fuck out of there and advised the others to do likewise. He paused at the doorway, jabbing a finger at Brightside: ‘Deal with it.’ There was an exodus, leaving Brightside and the girl looking at each other wondering, ‘What now?’

  Having got over the shock of being caught with her ear to the keyhole and roared at by Waitz, Polly was remarkably unfazed. Brightside’s opening gambit ‘You’ve got nothing to worry about’ met with ‘Neither have you’. She found it all pretty hard to believe: that the roly-poly Prime Minister was a bit of a Romeo; that Brightside and his friends were planning to name and shame him; that they were so worked up because she’d overheard.

  Brightside tried pomposity: they were very important people discussing very sensitive subjects; if the nature of their discussions became public, it would cause considerable embarrassment.

  Polly got that, but why would she tell anyone? Besides, who would she tell? And even if she did tell, they could just deny it. Who was going to take her say-so over the word of a bunch of important men?

  That was all very well, said Brightside, but the reality was she would tell someone. That was just human nature. And whoever she told would pass it on to someone who’d pass it on to someone else. And so on and so forth until the tramps who lived under Grafton Bridge were the only people in Auckland who weren’t in the know.

  Polly thought that was over the top. Even if she blabbed to everyone she came across, most of them would dismiss it as just another of those far-fetched rumours about famous people that do the rounds from time to time, like the one about the TV personality turning up at A and E with a Marmite jar up his bum. And anyway, what was he planning to do: keep her locked up in his basement for the next five years?

  Well, when she put it like that . . . Brightside had done some questionable things in his time, but he drew the line at heavying a teenage girl to protect Gerry Waitz. And protect him from what? Polly didn’t have a clue who Waitz or any of the others were. All very well for her to claim she’d stumbled across a conspiracy to bring down the Prime Minister, but if she couldn’t name names, the media wouldn’t take her seriously. And if she spread the word that Lange was screwing his speechwriter, well, so fucking what? Wasn’t that their plan? Where, exactly, was the downside? He told her to forget everything she’d heard, just put it out of her mind. If she chose not to do that, she’d run the risk of bringing unwelcome attention on herself and her family. That wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.

  Polly got the message. Drawing attention to herself and her family was absolutely the last thing she wanted to do.

  Brightside believed her.

  He told her to hang around upstairs — somewhere other than the library in case one of the others came back to see what was going on — while he went downstairs to check out the state of play. He wanted to make sure the others had left so there wouldn’t be any drama and he could put off explaining how he’d handled it until Waitz had got his paranoia under control. If he hadn’t come back in ten minutes, that would mean everything was OK and she could rejoin the party.

  She left him in the library, saying she was going to do some more exploring. He waited a few minutes before going downstairs in case someone or something had delayed the exodus.

  And what had troubled him, haunted him even, ever since was this: if he hadn’t told her to stay upstairs, maybe she wouldn’t have been murdered.

  Brightside leaned back, hands behind his head. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Is that right?’ said Van Roon. ‘Unless my ears deceived me, you seemed to be saying you didn’t kill her.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Brightside placidly. ‘Nor did anyone else who was at that meeting. When I got downstairs they’d all left.’

  Van Roon nodded. ‘OK. I’ll report back to Ihaka, then it’s up to him. My guess is he won’t buy it. He’ll say you — the collective you — had motive and opportunity and conspired to obstruct the course of justice. That’s the basis of a pretty solid case right there. And at the risk of repeating myself, don’t assume Ihaka’s like other cops: if you think he’s going to go away, you’re kidding yourself.’

  ‘You obviously don’t believe me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. I’m just telling you how Ihaka — or any experienced detective, for that matter — is going to look at it. The bottom line is that what you’re saying now carries a lot less weight than what you actually did then.’

  ‘So you think I killed her?’ Brightside could have been asking if Van Roon took milk and sugar.

  ‘Not you necessarily. Maybe one
of the others suspected you’d baulk and went back to do what had to be done.’

  Brightside waggled his head. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree. Tell Ihaka he’d be better off trying to find out who else was upstairs.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We weren’t the only ones. There was a couple up there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I heard them. As I was heading downstairs, I heard a guy mumble something and a woman . . . I don’t know what you’d call it, it was halfway between a laugh and a moan.’ Brightside produced a wolfish grin. ‘The low, throaty, lascivious sound of a woman not being a lady.’

  ‘That’s a finely tuned ear you’ve got there.’

  ‘You’d better believe it.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be sure to pass it on.’

  ‘You do that. And be sure to tell Ihaka he’ll be wasting his time trying to find the phantom formerly known as Eddie Brightside. I’ve had twenty-seven years of being the invisible man; I’m really fucking good at it.’

  ‘Speaking of which, I take it you disappeared because you thought you’d be the prime suspect?’

  ‘Well yeah, but not in the sense you mean. I wasn’t worried about the cops; I knew Gerry would cover our tracks. I took off because I figured Waitz would assume I’d killed the girl. As I said, Waitz is paranoid. He would’ve thought, yeah, Eddie shut her up all right, but if the cops get hold of him, he’ll say it wasn’t his idea, he just did what he was told to do. You see what I’m saying? He would’ve decided that I represented a threat to him. And when Gerry Waitz feels threatened, he takes steps to nullify the threat.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Put it this way,’ said Brightside. ‘I wasn’t going to overlook the obvious.’

  ‘You thought Waite would have you whacked? Now who’s paranoid?’

  Brightside tilted his head like a boxer slipping a punch. ‘You’re being naïve, Johan. Waitz was — is — very rich and very well connected. When you’ve got that combination going for you, you can make pretty much anything happen just by picking up the phone. And while we’re on that subject, I hope you appreciate the risk I’m taking here, given who you’re working for.’

  ‘Strick?’

  Brightside snorted. ‘Are you shitting me? Benny’s an empty vessel, bobbing around in his little private pond. No, the guy who wants to get his hands on me now is the same guy who wanted to get his hands on me back then — and for exactly the same reason. Big Gerry.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  Brightside stood up. ‘We say goodbye and catch a plane. You go one way, I go another.’

  ‘What about Ann?’

  ‘Yeah well, you’ve fucked that up for me, haven’t you?’ said Brightside. ‘Thanks a million, pal.’ He stuck out a hand, his round face creasing into an uncharacteristically sunny smile. ‘But I’m the forgiving kind, unlike some others we know. Take care of yourself, Johan. I hope things work out for you.’

  They shook hands. ‘You too, Eddie.’

  Brightside pulled a mock frown. ‘You sure about that? I wouldn’t have picked you as the sort of guy who’d wish me well if you really thought I killed the girl.’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it,’ said Van Roon. ‘On the other hand, I’m a complicated guy.’

  ‘That makes two of us, brother.’

  Fifteen

  Johan Van Roon flew home via Auckland, rendezvousing with Tito Ihaka in the international terminal arrival’s area. Ihaka greeted him with an interrogative hitch of the eyebrows. ‘Well?’

  Van Roon, thinking two can play that game: ‘He didn‘t do it.’

  Ihaka turned and headed for the exit, throwing a ‘fuck’ over his shoulder.

  Van Roon delivered his report on the twelve-minute walk to the domestic terminal, Ihaka saying nothing, not even looking at him. Outside domestic Ihaka rounded on Van Roon. ‘Sounds like you swallowed every fucking word this prick said.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Van Roon.

  ‘So which bit don’t you believe?’

  ‘I don’t believe he’ll ditch Ann Smellie.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Would you?’

  Ihaka said, ‘That’s an interesting question. While I’m thinking about it, I might put a tap on her phone.’

  ‘You’re probably too late,’ said Van Roon. ‘I’d be amazed if Brightside hasn’t set up some sort of tricky back-channel by now. In fact, I’d put money on it.’

  Ihaka flared up. ‘You know what you sound like? You sound like a teenage girl who just presented her hymen to a guy in the next tent at Rhythm and Vines. She’s all starry-eyed now, but in a few days she’ll realise she’s been played. It’s not a summer romance; it wasn’t even a music festival hook-up. All that happened was she got rooted by some jerk-off she’d known for all of two hours and will never see again, and who right now is having a laugh with his mates telling them how he popped this dumb-as-fuck little bitch’s cherry by telling her she looks just like Miley Cyrus.’

  Van Roon nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, when you put it like that . . . And here was me thinking I’d done you a favour.’

  ‘I didn’t send you up there to bend over.’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Van Roon with slow emphasis, ‘you didn’t send me up there. I chose to go.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Ihaka. ‘You’re a private citizen these days. I keep forgetting.’

  ‘You could’ve fooled me.’

  Van Roon picked up his bag and walked into the terminal.

  Ihaka drove back into town cursing himself, the weather — it was raining — and the driver of any car that got within five metres. The catalyst for his dark mood was the thought of Miriam Lovell, brain shut down, suspended between life and death. He was pissed off with her for withholding information so she could play amateur Sherlock. While it looked as though the bashing was connected to her PhD research and possibly his father’s death, he was starting from a long way behind. Whoever bashed her had made sure there wasn’t much of a trail to follow.

  And he was pissed off with himself: for being pissed off with Miriam; for allowing her to withhold whatever she’d blacked out on that page from Ethan Stern’s diary; for making a pig’s ear of the meeting with Van Roon.

  The bottom line was that he didn’t really know what to make of Van Roon, or how to deal with him. Just seeing the guy was unsettling. Sometimes he saw the vulnerable young man — shy, pale, awkward, not remotely streetwise — he’d taken under his wing all those years ago. The one he’d put an arm around when murder victims, children with their throats cut, started appearing in Van Roon’s dreams; the one he’d trained and toughened up; the one who became a top detective and his best friend in the cops. Other times he saw a guy he barely knew and maybe had been wrong about right from the start: a corrupt cop who used the instincts and street craft he’d learned from Ihaka to make dirty money; who killed a man in cold blood, admittedly a lowlife piece of shit.

  Look at him that way, it should be black and white: never forgive, never forget, don’t have a bar of him. The trouble was Van Roon’s loyalty — even devotion — to Ihaka had contributed to him going off the rails. When Ihaka had his card marked for being too gung ho (but, as it turned out, right) in a case involving a suspect with friends in high places and was subsequently overlooked for promotion and exiled to the provinces, Van Roon felt betrayed by the organisation he’d idealised since childhood. The first casualty of disillusion was his sense of duty. With nothing to guide him, no faith, no lodestar, he got lost in the underworld.

  Even the hit came back to Ihaka. Van Roon swore he did it because the lowlife piece of shit was talking of having Ihaka taken out. In other words, he became a killer to save Ihaka’s life. Finbar McGrail, resolutely unsentimental and as sceptical as the polar day is long, thought it was more a
case of Van Roon fearing the lowlife piece of shit would sell him out: get himself off the hook by telling the cops who their rotten apple was. In other words, Van Roon became a killer to save his own skin.

  Finally, he was pissed off that Van Roon had cleared the prime suspect. Whether Van Roon was a fallen angel or bad to the bone, he was good at this stuff. If he was pretty damn sure Eddie Brightside was telling the truth, that was good enough for Ihaka. So instead of being able to tell McGrail he’d identified Polly Stenson’s killer, Ihaka would have to admit he had nothing to show for his efforts beyond closing down the most promising line of enquiry. Not the ideal prelude to informing McGrail that the Stenson investigation was going on the back burner while he focused on finding whoever had beaten Miriam into oblivion.

  It being a Sunday evening, the meeting took place at McGrail’s house, a gracious villa on a leafy section on the slopes of Mt Eden. Ihaka had got into the habit of dropping in there when he had something on his mind, usually turning up around nightcap time.

  These visits had become something of a ritual: McGrail calling Ihaka’s appearance ‘an unexpected pleasure’ or ‘a welcome surprise’; Ihaka saying he happened to be in the neighbourhood and hoped he wasn’t interrupting anything; McGrail not bothering to address Ihaka’s concern, instead ushering his visitor into the study and wondering if he could ‘interest him in’ or ‘tempt him to’ a drop of something; Ihaka being open to persuasion, but ‘only if you’re having one’; McGrail handing him a glass of vintage port with the recommendation that it be lingered over or savoured; Ihaka asking, ‘As opposed to swilled?’ — originally a McGrail line; Ihaka taking a sip, giving it the furrowed brow, saying, ‘I’m thinking ninety-four’; McGrail revealing the actual vintage — it was never 1994 — and venturing a little wine-snob parody, ‘An elusive wine, but not without its rewards.’ They were like an old comedy duo, thought Ihaka, reduced to amusing each other because their audience has died off or drifted away.