‘How long has this been going on?’ I asked.
‘At its worst, a couple of years.’
Townsend said, ‘How was it kept under wraps?’
‘It’s the lower north shore and the harbour beaches, Lee,’ Jane said. ‘Nothing nasty is supposed to happen here, and a lot of bribery money gets spread around to keep mouths shut.’
We ordered coffee and I had to wonder if Townsend had a tape recorder on him somewhere. It was hard to imagine him letting all this just go out in the ether. As for me, I wished I could have taken notes, because some of the things Jane said chimed with what little I’d gleaned from Lily’s files-immigration fraud, the sex industry. The stuff about drugs to the well-heeled was new, but maybe Lily’d had a code for drugs that I didn’t know.
‘You look sceptical,’ Jane said to me.
‘No, not really. It’s just so big and… amorphous.’
‘Lily must have got wind of it somehow,’ Townsend said. ‘She never hinted…?’
I shook my head. ‘Never, but she was like that. She didn’t talk about her stories until they were nailed down.’
Townsend said, ‘The questions, as far as Cliff’s concerned, correct me if I’m wrong, are-who did she get the information from and who found out about it?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And what are the questions for you, Lee?’
‘How to write, broadcast, film, whatever, the story and get it out while protecting Jane.’
The coffee arrived.
I looked at Jane, who was spilling packets of sugar into her cup, stirring, adding more, stirring, until Townsend gently stopped her.
‘Jane?’ he said.
She stopped stirring, took a sip of the coffee and grimaced at the sweetness. ‘I grew up in Mt Druitt,’ she said. ‘We weren’t exactly welfare dependents, but not far from it. I got into the University of Western Sydney and did okay. I was pretty good at everything. Not brilliant, but okay. My mum drummed into me that what you needed was a secure job where you could get on. A police recruitment guy, and a woman, came out to the uni. I applied and got accepted, went to the Academy. There were no fucking HECS fees then at the Academy the way there are now and I knew it’d be a while before I earned enough to have to pay back the uni HECS. I sailed through, did a stint in the country and was told about the openings at the Northern Command.’
She picked up her coffee cup, but I pushed mine across to her and put one packet of sugar in it and stirred. She smiled her thanks, had a drink, and went on.
‘Do you two city types understand that I’d never really been to Sydney at all? You can’t imagine what growing up in the west is like. You know the water’s that way and the mountains are over there, but they don’t seem to have anything to do with you. I’d had a few fleeting visits as a kid-school outing stuff, the Olympics, something forgettable at the Opera House one night. I’d never properly seen the harbour, let alone the northern suburbs and beaches. I was knocked out when I saw how terrific the place was, after where I’d come from. The whole scene got to me, the beauty of it, and I was happy working here. Then I saw what was going on in the unit. I knew that they were- fuck, how to put it? — polluters, with their scams and deals and cover-ups. I just want this beautiful place to be made beautiful again.’
13
A while ago Lily and I had been to an exhibition of police photographs dating back to the early years of the last century and running through to just after the Second World War. The show was at the Police and Justice Museum-sepia and black and white stuff, very stark, very dramatic. The notes that would have put the photos in context had mostly been lost, so the images had to speak for themselves with a minimum of interpretation. They did. They showed the underbelly of a city founded by lawbreakers and their punishers which bore their stamp down the generations. I loved Sydney, but I never imagined it could be as beautiful on the inside as the outside. Not a single street of it. After working on the seamy side for as long as I had, and associating with police and others who did the same, I knew that corruption and violence were an inescapable part of the scenery.
‘You’ve got that sceptical look again,’ Townsend said.
‘No. I’m just trying to remember when I last thought a beautiful place was capable of being good as well.’
‘You think I’m naive,’ Jane said.
‘Maybe, but in a bloody nice way.’
‘I’m not naive. What I just said might sound that way, but I’ve seen people corrupted and destroyed.’
I nodded. ‘These people, these string-pullers, do you know who they are?’
She hesitated before replying. ‘Yes. I’ve got a list.’
‘In general terms?’
‘A big developer, two politicians-one local, one state- an owner and an operator of several clubs.’
‘No minister of religion?’ -
‘No, why?’
‘Doesn’t matter. What area does this unit cover?’
‘Not that much-North Sydney, St Leonards, Crows Nest, across to Greenwich, and to Mosman on the east and up to Balmoral.’
‘Lot of people there.’
‘All the more to exploit.’
‘All the more to get upset.’
‘Look, I’ll tell you how it works. Give you an example. A developer wants to take over a site, put up a block of apartments, but it’s zoned commercial. He funnels some money to the councillors and they get a zoning variation so the citizens don’t have to be consulted- commercial-cum-residential. Up go the flats, but the developer has a criminal record and shouldn’t be in business. That’s when my colleagues step in. They let him get on with his building on the understanding that a certain number of the units are set aside for the girls and that brings in the drugs, automatically. The same police talk to the girls’ suppliers and make arrangements for other people living in the flats, or nearby, to be serviced. The cops take a percentage. It’s all kept quiet. Everybody’s happy.’
Townsend looked worried. ‘Wouldn’t it change the character of an area? Wouldn’t someone notice and complain?’
Jane shook her head. ‘People are too busy to notice. Do you know what sort of hours they work to keep their jobs and meet their mortgages? But you’re right, some have complained. They’re either intimidated or bought off. For a few, like Rex Robinson and Lillian Truscott, the intimidation went all the way, as I said. Anyhow, that was just an example. The development scams, rezonings, kickbacks to councillors-no one cares anymore. Just like no one expects the politicians to accept that the buck stops with them. It does, but not the way whoever said it meant.’
‘Harry Truman,’ Townsend said.
I said, ‘The man who dropped the atom bombs.’
Jane shrugged. ‘There you go. The other thing is, it’s intermittent and spread out and happening on a large and small scale all over the place. Especially at the beaches. A fuss blows up over something, usually some conflict of interest within the organisation, as I like to think of it. It’s not like it’s a criminal syndicate. It’s a loose organisation with people operating on a nod and a wink and a brown paper bag-the way it was in Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen, I’ve been told. They settle it down and things go on as before, after a pause.’
‘What you say’s very convincing, Jane,’ I said, ‘but can you supply the evidence?’
She fiddled with the coffee cup. ‘This is the hard part. I’ve kept a detailed record of things I know happened- names, place names and dates. And I have personal knowledge of amounts of money involved in