‘Nothing. If they’re both dead what does it matter who did what?’
‘This didn’t work out anything like the way we planned.’
‘Could’ve been worse. Damien could have shot us both.’
‘Oh, so you saved my life? Was he serious?’
I shrugged. ‘The gun was loaded and he’d already killed one person.’
‘Jesus, what about those friends Damien talked about?’
‘With ambulances and police cars around, I don’t think we’ll be seeing them. Still, we’d better leave. Better to go to the cops than have them come to us.’
She gathered her bag and scarf. ‘This is terrible.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the scoop.’
23
The fence at Skinner’s Leap was a tangled mess of wire and broken posts. We were waved down by the police stationed there and made a brief statement. We said we were going to report in at Katoomba and the office radioed that in.
‘How far is the drop here?’ I asked.
‘Far enough,’ the cop replied.
At Katoomba we gave a heavily edited version of what had happened at the Ireland house. The officers who took the statements didn’t like the look of either of us, especially Tania, who was showing the effects of stress and alcohol. They kept going in and out of the room and conferring in private.
After we’d been there an hour the vehicle that had gone over the drop had been identified and was in the process of being recovered.
‘You say he went for help,’ one of the cops said, ‘but the man was dead.’
I said, ‘He’d busted a gut trying to resuscitate his father. The ambulance was a long time coming, he thought. He was upset and confused.’
'Drunk?'
'No. We-Ireland, Ms Kramer and me-had had a drink or two but he hadn't. Not that I saw. Tania?'
She shook her head. 'Can I smoke?'
The cop pushed an ashtray across the table. 'Sure.'
Tania fished in her bag and came up with an empty packet. The cop gave her one of his and she favoured him with one of her you're-the-only-person-in-the-world smiles. It was a bit lopsided and didn't work.
They got our details down in every last particular and let us go. Tania rushed to the nearest shop for cigarettes. I steered her to a coffee place and made her sit, eat a sandwich and drink a heavily sugared flat white.
'I have to admit,' she said, you handled that okay.'
'I've had the experience. We'd better get back so you can write your article.'
She was almost herself again now. 'Fuck that,' she said. ‘I'm phoning it in to the copy-takers.'
Tania’s story made a big splash in the afternoon edition and she strung it out over the next few days. Her articles were mostly factual with some speculation and some uncheckable lies. She didn’t name me so I had no complaint. She’d cornered the market on the Ireland-Pettigrew story and I had to admit that she treated Justin’s disappearance and Sarah’s circumstances with discretion-no mention of paternity doubts. Damien’s death was provisionally declared accidental and Tania presented herself as the last person to see him alive, leaving me out of it.
She speculated about whether Wayne or Damien Ireland had killed Angela Pettigrew, implying that her truncated interview with Wayne suggested he was the guilty party.
‘Why did you go that way?’ I asked her when we met up two days later.
‘Kept the cops and the DPP happy and made for better copy. First state minister of the crown to commit a murder since the ex-minister Tom Ley in the forties. Similar in some ways, with mistresses and all that, but better, Wayne being in office at the time.’
In a sidebar to one of her articles she’d made a play of the Thomas Ley affair and his nefarious dealings, including a murder, after losing his ministry and parliamentary seat in New South Wales when in England in the 1940s.
‘You don’t miss a trick,’ I said.
‘A woman in this game? Can’t afford to.’
That meeting took place after I’d had a talk with Sarah at Tania’s house. Tania told me that the girl wanted to see me to ask about Justin. I told Sarah that Wayne Ireland had provided him with a passport and some money-something Tania had only hinted at-and that he must have left the country.
‘Lucky bugger. That’s what I’d like to do. Where did he go, Mr Hardy? To do what?’
‘I think you know the answer to that question.’
‘To be a soldier.’
‘Yeah. I’ll try to get the records searched, but he could’ve gone almost anywhere with a passport and some money. Lots of jumping-off points to other places. Lots of wars going on with opportunities for mercenaries- Lebanon, Angola, Nicaragua
‘You think he got killed?’
‘No way to tell. If he’s alive and okay somewhere, eventually it’s odds on he’ll hear about what happened here. I never heard of an Australian overseas who didn’t check back in some way, sooner or later.’
Sarah was smoking furiously and she lit another immediately after stubbing one out. ‘If he hears about all this shit he probably wouldn’t want to come back. He didn’t care about me.’
‘You don’t know that. He was very distressed and not thinking clearly.’
She shook her head. ‘I told you-we had a fight and I told him about Angela. I wish I hadn’t.’
‘Sarah-’
‘Go away. Fuck off. I don’t ever want to see you again.’
We were right back where we’d started and now I was sure she wasn’t acting.
I was given a hard time by the coroner at the inquest on Paul Hampshire. Shouldn’t you have taken steps to safeguard your client given the earlier events of the day? Shouldn’t you have registered more details of the vehicle that struck him? Etc. Etc. The coroner was a soft-looking man in a tailored suit and my guess was that the only violence he’d ever have witnessed was from the sidelines in a Kings versus Shore rugby game.
Paul Hampshire’s body was unclaimed for a time until some members of his old unit heard of his death and organised a service and a cremation. I went along out of a sense of responsibility, but not guilt. It was a sad affair for a man whose life had been pretty sad.
Things didn’t improve. Tania didn’t write her book but her articles got her a full-time job on one of the tabloids and her career prospered. On legal advice she withdrew her application to have Sarah put in her care and an aunt -a half-sister of Angela’s-took over the job on the understanding that they would live in the Church Point house until the seven year period needed to declare Justin dead was up. By then, Sarah would be an adult and able to claim and dispose of her inheritance.
It didn’t work out that way. Sarah and the aunt didn’t get on and Sarah linked up again with Ronny O’Connor. They took as many valuable items from the house as they could manage, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy a motorbike. They went to Queensland and two years later they both OD’d in a Fortitude Valley squat.
About the time I got that news, from a friend in the PEA game in Brisbane, I met up again with Sharkey Finn. In a pub. But Sharkey had gone badly downhill from the grog and being dumped by Wilson Stafford, and when he challenged me his mate held him back and persuaded him not to be stupid.
The one bright spot was that Kathy Petersen came to Sydney at Easter. We went to the Blue Mountains and to the Central Coast and wined and dined and made love in a variety of places, including my house in Glebe, the Newport Arms hotel (where we joined in a celebration of the ALP’s win in the federal election), and among the rocks at the south end of Maroubra beach. She went back to the coast and I visited her and it was still good, but she met another teacher and they transferred to a school further south and that was that.
Frank and Hilde got over the glitch I’d caused by roping her into my case. Peter got over Sarah, and by the age of fourteen he could beat Frank and me at pool and was pushing Frank at tennis. Taught by his mother, he became near-fluent in German and was studying Spanish and Italian.
Hans Van Der Harr’s file on Justin disappeared. Tania said Sarah had taken it and probably destroyed it. That might have been right, but Tania was always economical with the truth. In any case, a few years later Van Der Harr was prosecuted for raping a female client while she was under hypnosis. He was deregistered and jailed.