I answered as I got into the car. ‘Hardy.’
‘Frank, Cliff. Have you got over your petulance?’
‘That what you’d call it? Have you got over your protective instinct?’
‘Not doing so well on this, are we? But I’ve made a few discreet enquiries about… the person in question.’
That was Frank’s way of smoothing things down and I knew it. I drew in a breath. Time for reconciliation.
‘Thanks, Frank,’ I said, in as friendly a tone as I could muster. ‘I guess I came over a bit sensitive. The thing is, there’s another bloke I’m interested in now.’
‘Jesus Christ, you never back off, do you? Okay. Look, I’m in the city. Where’re you?’
‘At Moore Park golf course.’
His laugh blared in my ear and I moved the phone away.
‘You’re not! You despise golf.’
‘I don’t despise it. I’m just agnostic about it. I’m working, Frank.’
‘I understand. Why don’t I come to your place in, say, half an hour and we’ll have a talk. I’ll bring lunch.’
‘I don’t eat lunch, remember?’
‘Fuck you, you’ll eat lunch and like it. I’ll see you.’
After a certain point in life you don’t make many new friends, and you have to hold on to the ones you have if you can. Frank and Hilde were precious and their son, Peter, was my anti-godson. With Peter’s wife and twins they amounted to something close to family, with my sister in the Northern Territory and Megan flitting all over the place. I hadn’t quite realised what a deep hole Lily’s death had caused. Mending fences with Frank put me in a much better mood as I drove away.
That mood evaporated as soon as I got home. The gate was off its hinges and the front door was ajar. I can be slack about some things, but not about leaving the gate swinging and the house unlocked. Books, magazines and newspapers were strewn all over the living room floor. I went upstairs. Where the computer had been there was a space defined by dust marks. The filing cabinet had been jemmied open and ransacked. Books and other stuff were lying where they had been dropped or thrown. Lily’s clothes were in a heap on the floor in the wardrobe. The pockets in the pants and the jacket had been turned inside out.
I remembered that I’d dumped the doctored cigarette packet in the kitchen tidy, and I scooted downstairs. It was still there, among the coffee grounds, orange peel and other scraps. The first lucky break in this mess. I had the thumb drive and the disk with me.
There was a tentative knock at the front door. I found my neighbour, Clive, the taxi driver, standing there with a worried look.
‘Everything all right, Cliff?’
‘No, I’ve been broken into.’
‘Shit, I should’ve chased after him. Sorry, mate.’
Clive told me that as he’d pulled up a few doors away from his house ten minutes back, he saw someone hurrying down the street carrying something. He didn’t think anything of it until he saw that my gate was standing open. The gate is basically busted, and it takes a special touch to keep it on its moorings. I have that touch and I’d demonstrated it to Clive in the past. By the time he’d made the possible connection between the gate and the person carrying something away, the person had driven off. Clive had gone inside and looked for my mobile number but hadn’t found it. Then I’d turned up.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘I’m insured. Just for the record, what did the guy look like from the back?’
Clive shrugged. ‘Big. Dark.’
‘Big like tall, or big like fat? Dark like me or dark like Aboriginal or Islander?’
Clive is short, fair and plump. His only exercise is fishing. ‘Big like you and dark like you, only bigger, darker and younger. I’d almost say of Middle Eastern appearance, as the expression goes, except… yeah, no beard. Trouble, Cliff?’
In a way, Clive lives vicariously through me, or did when I was a licensed detective. He was bitterly disappointed when I got scrubbed and now he seemed to be a bit cheered up that there was some action.
‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Could be. Hope not. What was his car like?’
‘Shit. They all look the same these days, don’t they? White.’
‘Thanks, Clive. I might need a statement from you for the insurance.’
‘No problem. What’s missing?’
‘Computer.’
‘Fucker. Hey, he wasn’t a junkie or like that. You know-thongs and jeans. He wore a business shirt, pants and shoes.’
I thanked him again and went inside.
Frank arrived a few minutes later. Expecting him, I left the front door open, and he found me in the living room picking up books.
‘Untidy bugger, aren’t you?’
‘I had an uninvited visitor.’
‘I thought you had an alarm system.’
‘I do. So did Lily. You can get round them if you know how.’
‘That’s true.’ Frank set the plastic bags he was carrying on the stairs. ‘Lebanese,’ he said, ‘and a bottle of that plonk you like.’
‘Thanks. Just the job and just for you and this shit I’ll break my rule and hoe into the felafel.’
I dropped the book I was holding onto a chair and we went into the kitchen. Frank knew where the corkscrew and the glasses were. He opened the bottle of Houghton white and we spread the food out in its containers on the bench. Plastic forks, paper napkins-nothing flash about me and Frank. I hadn’t eaten much in the past few days and found I was hungry. The food was good and the wine was cold.
‘So,’ Frank said, after we’d lowered the level in the bottle and dug well into the food, ‘what was the object of the search, as we say in the courts?’
‘Clive next door saw the bloke scuttling off with my computer. The mess suggests he was looking for disks or drives-Lily’s. Someone must have nutted out that she worked here a bit.’
‘And?’
I pointed to my jacket hanging on the door handle. ‘I found it first and carried it on me. I wish he’d come looking for me’
Peter Corris
CH31 — Appeal Denied
‘Mmm, I can imagine. What did you learn?’
‘She was working on a few stories, the way she did. Two of ‘em look like possibles. Both seem to involve the police, one more than the other.’
‘So that’s why you want to know about Gregory?’
‘And a guy named Kristos.’
I’d never doubted that I could trust Frank. Although our differences regarding professional conduct and temperament surfaced from time to time, we’d been through too much together to ever call it quits. It amounted to him protecting the integrity of the police service, which he still fundamentally believed in, and me trying to stay within the confines of the law as much as I could. Volatile, but viable.
As I slugged down more wine and picked at the remaining food, I laid it all out for him-the removal of DS Williams from the investigation, Lee Townsend’s theories about the cleansing of Lily’s computer and drives, the apparent laxity of the official investigation. Frank listened in silence.
‘That it?’ he said as I poured the last of the wine.
‘Not quite. Lily’s solicitor tells me I’ve inherited half of her estate. Quite a lot of money. That seems to have sparked a new level of interest in me from this Kristos, whoever he is and whatever rank he holds. It reads like an excuse to me, seeing as how I didn’t kill her.’
Frank looked up from loading a fork with tabouli. ‘I know that, Cliff. I know that you’ve only killed two men, both crims and in self-defence.’
‘Three,’ I said. ‘You’ve forgotten one.’
Frank shrugged. ‘Same thing. Two for me. Fucking hated it.’
‘Too bad everyone doesn’t feel the same. Would this Kristos-’
‘Detective Sergeant Mikos Kristos.’
‘-be a big, dark bloke who dresses formally?’
Frank nodded.
‘There’s a fair chance he’s the one who nicked my computer and conducted this bloody search. Mate of Gregorys, is he?’
Franks expression spoke volumes of disappointment and disillusion. Until recently Sydney had been relatively free of revelations of police corruption. But riots in the western suburbs and on the southern suburbs beaches had tested police mettle and divided public opinion about the usefulness and commitment of the cops. A major scandal could only do serious damage. Even though Frank was out of the firing line he still had friends in the force and clung to a belief in it. I could see his desire to help me struggling inside him with other impulses.