Wet Graves Read online

  All good clean fun, but it wasn’t funny, really. The licence was my meal ticket. Without it, I couldn’t earn Ms Madden’s thousand bucks or anyone else’s. I had a mortgage to pay and a Ford Falcon to support. I had bills on the noticeboard at home and I needed about 2000 calories a day to keep going. I folded the letter and put it in the pocket of my sports jacket which hung on the back of the chair I sat on. No doubt about it, I was neat and tidy today. I could drop in on my mate, Detective Inspector Frank Parker, and get a look at the missing persons file on on Brian Madden and talk over the Hardy licence lifting case at the same time. Maybe I’d meet a nice, friendly woman at police headquarters and bump into someone at the bottle shop who was looking for a clean, light room in Glebe—$80 a week, share the bills and feed the cat.

  I got up and put on my jacket. Then I saw the jury duty notice and bent over to fill in the form attached. I ran my eye down the fine print and discovered that licensed enquiry agents were ineligible to serve on juries. I crumpled the letter and scored a direct hit on the wastepaper basket.

  2

  The letter from Detective Sergeant Griffin had invited me to contact his office for more information about my court appearance, but I had something of Ms Madden’s caution about writers of official letters. “Bypass A Bureaucrat Today” is my motto. There ought to be a T-shirt.

  I set out to walk to the new police fortress in Goulburn Street, partly for the exercise and partly because I like to see how my law and order tax dollar is being spent. I went down William Street and cut up Yurong to Oxford. It was July but warm and dry after a few weeks of cold and wet, and the lightly dressed and briskly moving people seemed to be relishing the change. These days I feel like closing my eyes when I walk through the city. You can’t rely on a building you visited on Friday afternoon still being there on Monday morning, and most of the new stuff going up looks as if it has been designed by architects who stalled at cubism.

  As I turned out of Oxford Street I almost collided with a man who was so wide he almost took up half of the footpath. If the woman standing behind him had been at his side they would have had to erect a detour sign.

  “Say, buddy. Can you direct us to your Sydney Harbour Bridge?”

  I pointed and tried to use language they would understand. “Walk north,” I said. “It’s a mile or so.”

  His mouth dropped open and the fat on his cheeks sagged towards his neck. “Walk? Did you hear that, honey? We have to walk.”

  The woman, wearing a white sweatshirt and black trousers, looked like a two-tone bowling ball. “Isn’t there a bus or a streetcar?”

  I shook my head. “Better to walk. The buses are full of muggers.” I nodded, stepped onto the road to get around them and headed towards the police building. I regretted being a smartarse before I got there and turned around to make amends, but they were getting into a cab, him in front, her in the back. I made a mental note to be nice to the next tourist I met.

  From a distance, the Sydney Police Centre looks all right—a combination of grey shapes, more or less inoffensive. Up close the slim pillars and the boxy structures behind them look like a house of cards propped up by king-size cigarettes. The architects have inserted grass and bricks everywhere grass and bricks can go, and haven’t stinted on polished marble and automatic doors. I went into the lobby, which looks like a cross between a bank, heavy on the bulletproof glass, and a five-star hotel, heavy on the pile carpet and rounded edges. The place bristles with pamphlets emphasising community policing, and the lighting is soft to suggest that harmony and understanding begin here. The only thing to suggest that crime is being fought here too is that the cops in the glass and aluminium bunkers wear their caps.

  I presented my credentials to a series of interceptors who made phone calls and ran metal detectors over me. A young constable escorted me silently up two flights of stairs and along a corridor to Frank Parker’s office. We stood outside the door and I looked at the cop.

  “Am I allowed to knock or do you have to do it?”

  “You can knock, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  I knocked and I heard Frank say, “Yes.”

  “What now?”

  The constable opened the door. “Mr Hardy to see you, sir.”

  “Thanks, son. Come in, Cliff.”

  My escort had snapped back into a position resembling attention. I said, “At ease,” and went into the room. The door was closed quietly behind me.

  “Take a seat, Cliff,” Frank said. “What’s the matter with you? Why are you looking like that?”

  “I’ve been a prick to people twice in the last twenty minutes,” I said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” I sat in one of the two well-padded chairs and looked around the room. Frank’s office in the old College Street police building had looked something like a World War I trench and smelled like a snooker hall. This was all beige carpet, off-white walls and tinted glass. The old fixed squads in the police force—homicide, vice, fraud and so on—had been broken up in favour of units that drew on personnel as required and pursued cases as directed by policy-makers who weren’t always policemen. Unlike the old top cops, who had diplomas from rugby league clubs and testimonials from priests and master masons, these guys had LLBs and criminology degrees and used terms like “targeting” and “social worth”. Frank’s job was to liaise between the thinkers and the doers, so he got carpet and tinted glass. He liked the new honesty but missed the old sweat and dirt.

  “Can’t afford a conscience in your game, Cliff,” Frank said. “Maybe you can do a few good deeds and get even. Meantime, I hate to push you out of the confessional, but …” He gestured at his thick stratifications of paperwork.

  “I thought we might go out for a beer.”

  “No chance. I’ve got a meeting in fifteen minutes.”

  Frank looked greyer of hair and skin than he used to, but maybe it was the tinted glass. Then again, we hadn’t played tennis in months, or sat in a beer garden, so I suspected lack of sun was the cause. His nose was dipping towards his papers. Not the time to encourage him to take more exercise. I put my two requests to him, and he had the phone off the hook before I finished talking. He read while he listened, grunted and made notes through the two calls. He put the phone down and looked at his watch. I can take a hint; I stood and moved towards the door.

  “Hold on, Cliff. Let me think. Yeah, I reckon I can do it. What about a beer around about six tonight?”

  “I thought you didn’t have time to drink beer. I got the feeling that if you did drink beer, you wouldn’t have time for a piss afterwards.”

  “Don’t joke. This could be serious. You’ve been mentioned in evidence given in the Lenko trial.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what Griffin tells me.”

  Beni Lenko was an alleged hitman accused of shooting and killing the husband of Didi Steller. Didi was a society woman with much more money than sense who’d ordered the hit on her hubby and then taken a kilo of sleeping pills. Beni complained about being short-changed on his fee and had talked his way into a murder charge. I’d read about the case in the papers but, to the best of my knowledge, I’d never met Didi, Beni or the late husband, whatever his name had been. I stood on Frank’s beige carpet with my mouth hanging open. “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “I’ll try to find out more about it and fill you in at six. Meantime, you’d better get on to Cy Sackville.”

  “I will. Thanks, Frank. I don’t understand this.” An indifferent day had got worse, much worse, but I wasn’t going to drop my bundle. Not Hardy. “What about the Madden matter?”

  “You can collect a copy of the file and a few other bits and pieces from Room Ten, second floor.” Parker scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, came out from behind his desk and handed it to me. He straightened his tie and worked his shoulders inside his well-tailored suit jacket. “Give them this. Sorry, Cliff, I really have to go. Six tonight at the Brighton?”

  “Sure. Have a good m
eeting.” I went out of the room and was picked up by another fresh-faced constable at the end of the corridor and escorted to Level 2, Room 10. I handed in the chit Frank had given me and was directed to wait downstairs. The waiting room didn’t contain any magazines or ashtrays—they don’t really want anyone to wait there for very long. Like the man and woman already there I sat on a hard chair and stared at nothing. I didn’t know about them, but I had plenty to think about. I’d read about the Lenko trial and heard radio reports but the details weren’t clear in my mind. Had there been a mistrial or was an appeal pending? I couldn’t remember.

  I was getting more edgy by the minute. Having your licence lifted is no picnic. The procedures were swift, bordering on brutal. The wording of the Act had stuck in my mind. If you were disqualified at the court of petty sessions you could appeal, but, “Every such appeal shall be in the nature of a re-hearing and the decision of the district court thereon shall be final and without appeal”. Not even Cy Sackville could draw that out very far. There probably were procedures for reinstatement, but they were bound to be long and expensive.

  In short, this was real trouble, and I was on the point of getting up and phoning Sackville when my name was called. I almost didn’t answer. You don’t have time to investigate a bridge jumper, I thought. Your survival comes first. But I told myself the Lenko business was all a mistake anyway. Frank’ll probably have it sorted out by six. Who could resist a man from such an office wearing such a suit? I went to the desk and collected a large manila envelope from the female constable whose blonde hair flowed out becomingly from under her hat. She advised me to have a nice day.

  “You too,” I said. My positive attitude was working—I was being nicer to people. But just to show I wasn’t going soft, I got moving before an escort could be appointed and made a judicious selection of pamphlets in the lobby—they’d add a nice touch to my waiting room if I ever got one.

  It was close to three o’clock and I hadn’t had any lunch. Lately I’d been trying to make lunch an exception rather than a rule. Another rule was no drinking before six. Well, as the sportsmen say, you win some and you lose some. I walked up Riley Street and, instead of dodging through the traffic, I used the crossing to get over to the Brighton Hotel—all that community policing soft sell was having an effect. I bought a seven-ounce glass of red wine at the bar and obeyed the notice there by “stepping back once served”. Besides, stepping back helped me to ignore the big, fat, plastic-wrapped salad sandwiches that sat beckoningly on the bar.

  The pub was quiet; cops drink there and journalists and punters and second-hand dealers, but everyone over twenty is drinking less these days, and the Brighton doesn’t have slot machines and keeps the television turned down. My kind of place. I got a stool and a bit of shelf by the window where there was enough light to read by and ripped open the envelope. Inside was the sort of stuff Louise Madden would probably have been able to get under the freedom of information legislation, if she’d been prepared to wait until she turned forty.

  The photostat of the form Ms Madden had filled in when making her report didn’t tell me anything new. The notes of several police officers who’d made enquiries had been entered on a computer by a poor speller with an imperfect grasp of the computer’s working. Added to that, the dot matrix printer which had spewed out the papers had had a faded ribbon. It all made for difficult and uninspiring reading. Madden’s colleagues at the school had nothing useful to say; likewise his neighbours, doctor and bank manager. The man had disappeared. If he’d been beamed up into a spaceship, the aliens were looking at a fifty-six-year-old male Caucasian Homo sapiens, 180 centimetres tall, weighing 70 kilos, with salt-and-pepper hair, blue eyes behind spectacles, and wearing a red tracksuit with white Nike running shoes. He spoke French and German pretty well, was widely read in history, anthropology and golf. A valuable catch.

  I reproached myself for taking things too lightly. Maybe it was the rough red on an empty stomach, but it was more likely to be the effect of the face in the grey, grainy photostat copy of the photograph Louise Madden had supplied. A kind, gentle man, she’d said. He looked it, as well as humorous, slightly mocking and good-natured. More often than not, the picture you get of the subject in a missing persons case is of a sullen-looking teenager or an adult with a distracted, self-absorbed look that indicates something deeply wrong and makes disappearance seem almost the right answer. Not so with Brian Madden. He looked like a nice man to know, fun to be with, and I wanted to find him.

  I riffled through the notes and located a brief record of interview with one Peter Thornybush, who was a member of the foursome Madden used to play with at Chatswood. The others were Clive Wells and Carlo Calvino, schoolteacher, accountant and lawyer respectively. Thornybush couldn’t account for Madden’s disappearance and ventured the opinion that Wells and Calvino were similarly ignorant. The police hadn’t interviewed the other two, nor was there any trace of an interview with a woman connected with the golf course. House calls, possible leads—the weft and warp of the private detective’s business. Another thread to pull was the taxi driver who’d seen a man answering Madden’s description approaching the harbour bridge.

  I finished the glass of wine, put the papers back in the envelope and stuffed the police pamphlets in with them. I had two choices. To sit there drinking and worrying about the threat to my livelihood, or get out there and do some work. It was four o’clock and there was a good chance that someone I knew would wander in any minute and affect my decision. I got off the stool and left the pub, striking a blow for self-direction. I even knew where I was going.

  3

  Walking across the harbour bridge nowadays must be about as risky as street-marching in Beijing. The approaches—narrow paths, slender traffic islands, high-speed zones—were not pedestrian-friendly. Still, there were people, dwarfed by the huge grey metal superstructure and the big sandstone towers, walking across on both sides of the bridge. I drove. Trains rumbled past at twice the speed of the road traffic; only the motorcyclists, weaving between the cars, gave them any competition. I saw a jogger stop, pull off his Walkman headphones and tap the mechanism. All that metal must play hell with the radio reception.

  I drove across from the south side, necessarily slowly on account of the evening rush, turned in North Sydney and crawled back. I hadn’t asked which side of the road the person who might have been Brian Madden had been walking, but it didn’t matter much. The footpath on the west side was crammed between the train tracks and a two-and-a-half-metre-high fence. Same sort of fence on the east—solid metal to waist height, then cyclone wire stretched between uprights that curved over away from the gap for the last ten centimetres or so. Three strands of barbed wire on top. A reasonably active person could climb it and a strong man could get a 70-kilogram weight over it, but there the possibilities ended. Anyone going over that fence either wanted to or went because someone else wanted them to.

  The sun was going down as I stop-started along in the lane for drivers who didn’t have the right money to pay the toll. The sky was clear and the water turned red-gold. The ferries and sailing ships seemed to be skating across a sheet of beaten bronze. I was buying fifteen minutes of a hundred-million-dollar view for a dollar fifty—a bargain. I found it strangely disconcerting to think of the work going on to tunnel under the harbour. It seemed wrong somehow, a violation.

  The city skyline was impressive, irregular and cranky-looking, the way a skyline should be. A good many of the tall buildings were owned by insurance companies and housed insurance officers. They were the sorts of places I might have ended up in if I’d stayed in the insurance game. Even being stuck in the harbour bridge traffic was better than that. I turned on the radio to listen to the Law Report and got quite involved in a discussion on the niceties of defamation, remembering something about it from long ago. Before I was an insurance investigator I had been a soldier and before that a law student. Life’s twists and turns. I paid my toll and threaded my way back throug
h the city streets to Darlinghurst. Lawyer A said that the defamation laws were fine as they were; lawyer B said they should be changed to enhance the public’s right to know; lawyer C said they should be tightened to protect privacy. They were very polite to each other, which seemed to disappoint the program’s presenter.

  Frank was waiting for me in the hotel with a half-drunk light beer in front of him and a worried look on his face. The bar has a door onto Riley Street and one onto Oxford Street, and there seemed to be more people coming in through both doors than going out. Frank had reserved me a stool with a folded copy of the evening paper and no doubt the frequent use of his tough cop look. Frank had been a very tough cop when he was in Homicide, and a very smart one. I wasn’t sure just how tough he still was. I bought two middies of light and occupied the stool. The television was off, and the drinkers were talkers rather than shouters.

  “So,” I said.

  Frank folded the newspaper and stuffed it in the pocket of his jacket—okay in his Homicide days, no way to treat the sort of suit he wore now. “Contacted Sackville yet?”

  I drank some beer and shook my head.

  “Don’t take this lightly, Cliff. It’s big trouble.”

  “I hoped you’d have it sorted out by this.”

  “Forget it.” He leaned closer to me out of old habit, born of the days when he talked mostly to crims and fizz-gigs and other cops who liked to whisper. “A witness in the Lenko trial says you helped to set up the meeting between Didi Steller and Lenko, using Rhino Jackson as the go-between.”

  “That’s crazy. Who is this witness?”

  Frank took a sip of his beer. “When did you last see Jackson?”