Fallout Page 24

  ‘Weapon?’

  Brightside mopped up the remnants of his stew with a piece of bread, then sat back chewing contentedly. ‘That’s your department. Shit, man, I can’t do everything.’

  Van Roon pushed aside his plate. ‘I accept you’ve done all the work so far, but that still leaves the hard part.’

  ‘Hard but well-rewarded,’ said Brightside.

  ‘It’s almost thirty years since you had eyes on that safe. What if Waitz has changed his MO? What if there’s nothing there?’

  ‘Trust me, there will be. But in the extremely unlikely event the cupboard is bare, you hand me the weapon and go on your merry way. Then it’s up to me. Either way, it won’t affect you.’ He poured the last of the wine. ‘So, Johan, do we have a deal?’

  Van Roon didn’t answer straight away because he was thinking of the pistol that wasn’t at the bottom of Lake Taupo. The one he’d helped himself to when he and his partners in crime turned over a couple of ram raiders who’d cleaned out a Queen Street jeweller. The one he’d carefully wrapped in plastic and buried at one of his stashes dotted around rural Wairarapa. The question was: which one?

  ‘I’ll think about it on the way home.’

  Brightside kept his expression neutral, not wanting to telegraph that he knew what the answer would be. ‘I’ll call you tonight.’

  After the phone call from his father, James Best used a stepladder to get his double-barrelled shotgun and a box of cartridges down from the top of the wardrobe. He scribbled a few lines on the back of a begging letter from his old school (he hadn’t read far enough to find out what they wanted money for this time), folded the piece of paper and slipped it in his hip pocket. Then he went outside and got in his ute.

  He drove to the edge of his property where a deep, wooded ravine separated flat pasture from bush-covered hills. He stopped the ute on the lip of the ravine. He spread the note out on the passenger seat. He loaded the shotgun, put the butt on the floor between his feet and the muzzle under his chin, hooked his thumbs over the triggers and jammed down.

  They found him next morning. The note said:

  Every day of my adult life I have reflected on the irony of our family name.

  My father was a rotten husband.

  My mother was a rotten wife.

  I was a rotten son.

  I killed an innocent person. I meant to kill someone who wasn’t innocent but was entitled to think I’d be the last person on earth to do her harm.

  I should have done this years ago.

  Twenty Two

  The next morning, Saturday, Ihaka went to Auckland Hospital to see Miriam Lovell. As he approached her cubicle, the voice he hadn’t expected to hear again floated over the plastic curtains, a murmur of mock-protest prompting warm male laughter. He peered through a chink in the curtains. Miriam’s bare ankles and feet protruded from a blue smock but the rest of her was obscured by her partner, Barry Shanklin.

  Ihaka backed off and sought out the red-headed registrar who looked less exhausted but no older. She said it was too early to tell whether Miriam would have ongoing issues as a result of her injuries, but the indications were positive.

  ‘How’s her memory?’ he asked.

  ‘She doesn’t remember anything about the attack itself, but that’s to be expected. Otherwise it seems to be intact.’

  ‘Can we talk to her?’ The registrar made a discouraging face. ‘It’ll only take a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Well, all right, but please take it very gently. If she doesn’t want to do it, don’t start. If she becomes disoriented or distressed, don’t continue.’

  ‘Her partner’s with her now,’ said Ihaka. ‘I’ll send Detective Constable Pringle over this afternoon. It’ll be short and sweet. One question, one answer, then we’re done.’

  It had been brightening up since early morning. As Ihaka drove over the Harbour Bridge the remaining cloud broke up. Suddenly the sun glowed in an empty sky, turning Waitemata Harbour from battleship grey to chemical blue.

  Ihaka parked in the courtyard in front of Willie Smaile’s house. The garage door was up and the garage was empty, but as he got out of the car Smaile called down to him from the first-floor balcony: ‘Go and harass someone else, copper. It’s over. I’ve got nothing more to say.’

  Ihaka smiled up at him. ‘I have.’

  Smaile turned his back and disappeared from view. Ihaka let himself in, climbed the stairs and went out onto the balcony where Smaile was stretched out on a recliner with a rug over his legs even though it was pleasantly warm.

  Ihaka took in the scene: the sun-trap balcony, the privacy, the sea view, the old man taking it easy.

  ‘What do you want, Ihaka?’ said Smaile, barely glancing up from his newspaper. ‘My time is too precious to waste on you.’

  ‘Well, we might have to get a second opinion on that. I mean, it’d be embarrassing all round if you’re still kicking back out here three years from now.’

  ‘That’s a pretty transparent bluff,’ said Smaile, not entirely confidently. ‘I’ve no doubt you’d do it in a flash if you could get away with it. But you wouldn’t, I’ll give your superiors that much credit.’

  ‘We’ll see. Did you have my father killed?’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what this is about?’ Smaile fast-forwarded through the paper. ‘I thought he had a heart attack — apparently he was a prime candidate. That’s all I have to say on the subject.’

  ‘That’s what we all thought. But Miriam Lovell showed me something she found in Ethan Stern’s papers. I know you got the diaries, but you missed some other stuff. Like a note saying he wouldn’t be surprised if Jimmy Ihaka met with an accident, in inverted commas, one of these days. And guess what? A few days later he did. And guess what else? A few days after that, so did Stern.’

  Smaile’s derisive laugh came out as a dry rattle. ‘That has no legal weight whatsoever. Like many of his kind, Stern had a flair for the melodramatic. But if we’re going to talk about deaths, mysterious and mundane, let’s talk about Wayne Mowbray’s. That reeked of the old “died while attempting to escape police custody” manoeuvre as practised by fascist regimes the world over. Why don’t you tell me what happened to him?’

  Ihaka leaned against the balcony rail. ‘I can, as it happens, because I was there. He certainly wasn’t trying to escape — he was absolutely poked — but he wanted to go down swinging. He hit me, I gave him a shove, he fell over and hit his head. Goodnight, nurse.’

  Smaile propped himself up on his elbows. ‘You killed him, didn’t you? I know you did. I can see it on your face. And you have the bare-faced gall to come into my house —.’

  ‘Well, the thing is, Willie, your boy Wayne went out of his way to piss me off. He bloody near killed Miriam, who’s a friend of mine, and he was all set to kill me. That’s fairly provocative, wouldn’t you say? But it raises the question of who sent Wayne out to do that shit, because we both know he was a fucking wind-up toy. And if the bloke who did that is the same bloke who had my old man knocked off, well, all I can say is I wouldn’t want to be in that old cunt’s slippers.’

  Smaile’s eyes darted to the mobile phone on the side table. He made a grab but Ihaka beat him to it. Smaile joined the long list of those who’d found out the hard way that, measured in reaction time, Ihaka’s appearance was deceptive.

  Ihaka tossed the phone aside. ‘Let’s just keep this between the two of us. As I was saying, Willie, you’ve gone right to the top of my shit-list. And as if I didn’t have enough reasons to give nature a hurry-up, your little bitch Tom Murray came up with another one. You’ve got some dirt on him, right? That’s the only thing keeping him from telling me everything. The minute you croak, he’ll blab his head off. When I think of all the years you took from my father and I look at you sitting here in the sun like a good citizen in well-earned retirement, I say fuck it. Time’s up, old
man.’

  Smaile threw off the blanket and struggled to his feet. ‘You stay away from me.’

  In one fluid, effortless movement, Ihaka grabbed Smaile by the scruff of his neck and the belt holding up trousers that were now too big for him, hoisted him off his feet and launched him head-first over the balcony. Smaile hit the concrete forecourt like a sack of old bones.

  Ihaka wiped down Smaile’s phone and the balcony rail and went downstairs. Smaile was face down in a pool of blood, a jumble of oddly angled limbs. Ihaka took a photo of him on his phone, then rang Central.

  On his way back to town, Ihaka rang Tom Murray to say something had come up and they needed to talk. They arranged to meet at Murray’s office that afternoon.

  Ihaka did some shopping and made himself lunch. As he was on his way out to meet Murray, Pringle rang. Miriam Lovell had confirmed that Stu Boyle had taken her to Karekare on the pretext of meeting an ex-SIS man and left her to Wayne Mowbray’s tender mercies. Ihaka told him to bring Boyle in.

  Murray was waiting in the ground-floor foyer. He let Ihaka into the building and they took the lift to his floor, Murray at ease in country-club casual: dark-green corduroys, Argyll sweater, tasselled loafers. When they were sitting down in his office, Murray said, ‘OK, so what am I giving up my round of golf for?’

  ‘Willie Smaile’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Murray shuffled expressions from shock to disbelief to hope. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since this morning. I found his body. Looks like he took a swan dive off his balcony. Sorry, off your balcony. I took a snap for you.’ He passed Murray his phone.

  Murray glanced at it and handed the phone back. ‘How can I tell if that’s him? I can’t see his face.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to. If you don’t believe me, check the Herald website. There’s probably something up by now.’

  Murray went to his computer. After a minute or so, he said, ‘Well, happy days. The wicked wizard is dead.’

  Ihaka looked over Murray’s shoulder.

  BROWNS BAY MAN IN FATAL FALL IDENTIFIED

  Police have confirmed the identity of a man who fell to his death at his Browns Bay home this morning. He was Wilfred ‘Willie’ Roy Smaile.

  A retired trade union official, Smaile was a significant figure in the union movement and left-wing political circles from the 1960s until the dissolution of the Workers’ Vanguard Party, which he founded and headed, in the early 1990s.

  Police are still at the scene and refusing further comment, but the Herald understands Smaile, who was 82, was seriously ill with an untreatable condition.

  Murray glanced up at Ihaka. ‘That’s two down in a matter of days. You’re a health hazard, Sergeant.’

  Ihaka went back to the sofa. ‘I’m a cop. We go where the bodies are.’

  ‘Yes, but those two were alive until —.’

  ‘Until they weren’t,’ said Ihaka. ‘That’s how it works: one minute you’re alive, next minute you’re not.’

  ‘You make it sound like they died of old age.’

  ‘No, they died of karma. You want to die in bed, don’t get blood on your hands. Now you made me a promise: the day Smaile died, you’d tell me the whole story.’

  Murray squinted suspiciously. ‘How do I know you haven’t got some sort of gadget on you, like the other night?’

  Ihaka held out his arms. ‘Feel free to search me. I’m not trying to catch you out here. I just want to know what happened. For personal reasons.’

  Murray patted him down, Ihaka obligingly peeling off his hoodie and lifting his T-shirt.

  ‘What about indemnity?’ said Murray.

  ‘What about it?’ said Ihaka. ‘You said you couldn’t talk while Smaile was alive. Well, he’s dead, so whatever he had on you doesn’t matter a fuck any more. And anything you say now, it’s not like an official statement in front of witnesses. You can just deny you ever said it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Murray. ‘I guess you’re entitled to know.’

  Smaile saw possibilities in the young Tom Murray. Between them, Smaile and his KGB handler at the Soviet Embassy came up with the idea of turning him into a sleeper.

  The first step was to get Murray out of the WVP and set the stage for his ideological conversion, hence the stage-managed falling out with Smaile and expulsion from the party. Step two was for Murray to establish his capitalist credentials. The KGB provided start-up capital and a business plan concocted by some closet Marxist money-maker in the UK. Murray often wondered how many other members of the Moscow Millionaires Club there were, and what had become of them.

  The master-plan was supposed to unfold this way: Murray would become an active member of the National Party, get selected as a candidate, enter Parliament, specialise in defence/security issues (the handler would tutor him on that stuff), and work his way up to Cabinet level where he’d have access to classified information of interest and value to Moscow. Murray was sceptical but Smaile assured him they were following a blueprint that had worked in several West European countries. The key was patience: they were playing a long game.

  But before he was cut loose, Murray had one final assignment that doubled as a test of his commitment: getting rid of Ethan Stern, who had undermined the cause and betrayed Smaile’s trust by leaking information to the obstructionist saboteur Jimmy Ihaka.

  Smaile and Jimmy had been at loggerheads for years, but in 1986/87 it went to another level of bitterness. Someone inside the WVP fed Jimmy details of the Soviet Embassy’s funding and tactical support for the campaign being waged by the unions and their left-wing allies to keep the US navy out of New Zealand waters. There were confrontations, Jimmy threatening to tell the media that the anti-nuke movement was being manipulated by an unfriendly foreign power for its own geopolitical ends. He didn’t have an issue with the campaign itself or with New Zealand getting offside with the Yanks, but he wasn’t going to stand by while the Soviet Union, the other nuclear-armed superpower, used Kiwi working people as useful idiots in pursuit of strategic goals that had nothing to do with nuclear disarmament.

  Smaile’s handler supplied potassium cyanide, a poison used in the 1982 Tylenol murders in Chicago, which caused cardiac arrest. The task of administering the poison was given to the one WVP member Jimmy wasn’t averse to eating with, drinking with and generally letting his guard down with: Stu Boyle.

  ‘Stern was the leaker?’ said Ihaka. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he was privy to that sort of stuff.’

  ‘That was the word that came down from on high,’ said Murray, ‘but Smaile was adept at putting a big-picture gloss on his self-interest. If you want my opinion, Smaile hated your old man’s guts and wanted him dead, end of story. But he needed his handler’s buy-in. My guess is Smaile leaked it himself, then went to his handler and said, this guy Ihaka knows what we’re up to, he’s got to be stopped before he exposes us. Stern had to go because the leak had to be plugged, but again it suited Smaile to make Stern the fall-guy. He knew too much, which was Smaile’s fault for allowing him inside the tent.’

  ‘So to sum up: Boyle poisoned my old man, you shoved Stern down the bank, and Mowbray beat the hell out of Miriam — all on Smaile’s say-so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to the sleeper operation?’

  ‘Oh, that went out the window along with everything else when the Soviet Union collapsed,’ said Murray. ‘I didn’t hear a peep from Smaile for ten years. The business took off and my political views changed accordingly. As they say, a neo-conservative is a lefty who’s been mugged by reality. Then one day, out of the blue, Smaile came to collect: either I became his private ATM or he told the world that my business was built on red roubles. So there was the house, which you know about, the trips to various people’s paradises — Cuba, Venezuela — and lately some very expensive medical treatment. So however you managed it, Sergeant, I’m extreme
ly grateful to you for getting that evil old monkey off my back.’

  Johan Van Roon walked up the seashell drive, his footsteps crunching in the echoing silence of the countryside at night. He felt detached, almost disembodied, as if he was perched in one of the hundred-year-old oak trees that lined the drive watching his double trudge through the moonlight towards the point of no return.

  He rounded a corner and there was the house, a great, graceful, wooden relic of a bygone era, like the sailing ships that brought the first Europeans to New Zealand. As Eddie Brightside had promised, no sensor lights came on as he crossed a wide stretch of lawn and negotiated formal gardens on his way to the rear of the house.

  He went up the steps to the veranda on tiptoe. The illuminated display on his digital watch said 20:59. As it switched over to 21:00, the back door quietly opened. Brightside, wearing surgical gloves, held an index finger to his lips as he beckoned Van Roon inside with his other hand.

  They were in the kitchen, a state-of-the-art fit-out in a nineteenth-century space.

  Brightside whispered, ‘Stay close and stay quiet. We don’t want to spook him. I probably don’t need to say this but don’t touch anything. Are you ready?’

  ‘I’m ready now,’ breathed Van Roon, ‘but I don’t know how long I can stay that way. Let’s get it done.’

  ‘Roger that,’ said Brightside. ‘But there’ll have to be a bit of banter.’ He flashed a cold grin. ‘I mean, we can’t just hit and run.’

  He led Van Roon down a long wood-panelled corridor, plush rugs muffling their footsteps. They came to an octagonal entrance hall dimly lit by wall-mounted lamps. Brightside pointed to the crack of light at the foot of a door. Crossing the hall, they could hear the feigned ecstasy and heaving exertion of performance sex.