Silent Kill Page 4

  He invited questions and Pen, in her red suit, moving across the podium and pointing, nominated the questioners from the many hands raised. Two women and ten men got the call. The questions weren’t quite Dorothy Dixers but close enough. They enabled O’Hara to expand on certain points and slip in another couple of barbed jokes.

  I’d found his performance compelling, if short on substance as to how the changes he advocated might be brought about. But the question and answer session struck the first real false note: the five people Pen selected were those I’d seen with Long outside his door in the hotel. Set-ups.

  6

  O’Hara chatted to people after the talk, signed autographs and posed for photos. A camera crew had filmed the proceedings, including a moment when a heckler had stood and shouted something. He’d been pulled down by the people around him and O’Hara barely paused in his delivery.

  O’Hara leaned heavily on his stick as we headed back down to the car park.

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Chandry asked.

  ‘I’m fine. Just tired. How the hell did Jacobs . . . ? Never mind. Let’s just get back as quick as we can.’

  It didn’t seem like the right time to ask him about the staged questions, especially in front of the doctor. Tracey folded his newspaper as O’Hara opened the back door of the Beemer.

  ‘Anyone coming and going down here?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Not a thing.’

  O’Hara allowed Tracey to help him into the car and he sagged back in the seat. The vitality that had sustained him through the address, and through his restricted but smooth movements on the stage, seemed to have left him.

  Tracey deposited us at the hotel entrance and drove off.

  ‘I have to talk to Pen,’ O’Hara said. ‘That bastard . . .’

  He didn’t finish the sentence as he limped to the lift. Pen was waiting for us on our floor. O’Hara brandished his stick angrily and almost lost his balance. I steadied him. Before he could speak Pen had ushered us into O’Hara’s suite.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ she said. ‘Kelly’s missing.’

  ‘Missing?’ O’Hara said. ‘What d’you mean, missing?’

  ‘Missing. Not here. Gone. The nurse as well.’

  ‘Miss Kim,’ Chandry yelped.

  ‘Fuck Miss Kim,’ O’Hara roared. ‘How could she be missing? She was sick.’

  There was no sign of disturbance in the sitting room. I looked into the bedroom. The covers of the bed were turned back but, again, nothing seemed seriously out of place.

  Pen handed O’Hara a sheet of paper. He glanced at it and let it drop. I caught it. The message in large block capitals read: DO NOTHING. YOU WILL BE CONTACTED.

  Chandry read the words and reached for the nearest telephone. ‘We must have the police.’

  Pen bumped him aside. ‘We have to talk about this. Cliff, this is your territory. What d’you think?’

  Chandry was sweating heavily again. O’Hara had collapsed into a chair.

  ‘We’ll stay here and look around,’ I said. ‘Pen, see if Kelly’s clothes and bits and pieces are still here. Then do the same for Melanie Kim.’

  Chandry buried his head in his hands. After a few minutes Pen returned.

  ‘Kelly’s stuff ’s still here, minus a coat I’ve seen her wearing. The nurse’s clothes are gone, along with her bag.’

  Chandry raised his head and stared at me. His damp hair fell lankly across his forehead and sweat had wrinkled his neat collar.

  ‘Doctor,’ I said. ‘You have some explaining to do.’

  Chandry said that Melanie Kim wasn’t a nurse, or at least he had no proof that she was. A lonely, shy, inexperienced man, he’d been picked up by her in a Bondi pub where he’d gone to seek company and comfort. They’d had sex and, although he didn’t say so, I got the impression it was his first time, or close to it. She said she was a nurse and pleaded with him to allow her to accompany him on the exciting exercise Jack Buchanan had hired him for.

  ‘I could not resist her,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t ask for her credentials?’ Pen said.

  ‘He’d seen her fucking credentials,’ O’Hara said.

  ‘Please,’ Chandry moaned.

  O’Hara lifted his stick and for a moment I thought he was about to hit the doctor and moved to stop him, but O’Hara turned away with a disgusted snort.

  ‘You’re fired,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘No.’ O’Hara swung back towards me. ‘What do you mean, no? This man’s not a doctor’s bum-wipe and he’s brought along some fucking hooker who—’

  Chandry straightened in his chair. ‘I am a graduate—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Pen snapped. ‘Cliff?’

  I told them all to calm down. ‘This has been planned.’

  ‘Jack,’ Pen said. ‘Boosting publicity.’

  ‘Could be he hired the doctor as someone he could manipulate and he could have steered Miss Kim into her slot.’

  ‘But he also hired you,’ O’Hara said.

  ‘Right. Why? Because we’re old acquaintances and he could see I needed the work. He thought I was on the skids and wouldn’t give any trouble.’

  ‘Fuck,’ O’Hara said.

  ‘That’s not very helpful, Rory,’ Pen said.

  ‘I need a drink.’ O’Hara abandoned his stick, walked to the mini-bar with only the slightest of limps, pulled out a couple of miniature bottles of vodka and a glass and poured both bottles into it.

  ‘I would not advise—’ Chandry said.

  O’Hara silenced him with a wave of his glass that slopped vodka onto the carpet. ‘So did he arrange to kidnap Kelly for publicity or . . . ?’

  ‘Or what?’ Pen said.

  ‘To control me?’

  ‘Does he need to?’ I said.

  O’Hara took a slug of his drink and pressed his hand to his head. ‘I’m a chemical mess. I can’t think straight.’

  Pen took a bottle of wine from the fridge, poured a glass, took a mouthful and looked at me.

  ‘So you don’t think she’s in danger?’ she said.

  ‘Kidnap’s easy to fake. And it’s not exactly a threatening message.’

  O’Hara scowled at me. ‘What’re you saying?’

  ‘Nothing, yet, but this smells very fishy to me. Melanie Kim couldn’t abduct Kelly on her own even if she were sick. And Kelly wouldn’t go without a struggle if Kim had help.’

  ‘The nurse . . . Kim, could’ve drugged her,’ O’Hara said.

  ‘Even so. Sean Bright was here. Let’s see if he has anything to say.’

  O’Hara was halfway through his quadruple vodka, which seemed to have revived him. ‘Get Clive, Pen. We have to keep this under wraps.’

  Pen left. Chandry started to get up but O’Hara jabbed his stick at him. ‘You stay put. You’re in big trouble, Doctor.’

  ‘Easy, Rory,’ I said. ‘I think the doctor’s a victim here too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Chandry said.

  O’Hara backed off. ‘You implied that Kelly went willingly. That there’s no victims.’

  ‘We’re all victims,’ I said. ‘It’s just a question of whom and what of.’

  Pen returned with Long and Glassop in tow. She’d evidently briefed them.

  ‘Sean’s gone,’ Glassop said. ‘Bag and baggage, and he took my fucking laptop, the bastard.’

  Long popped a Nicorette. ‘You’re the security guy, Hardy. What do we do?’

  ‘Contact Jack,’ I said.

  O’Hara reached into his pocket for his mobile. ‘I’ll ring him.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. We go back to Sydney tomorrow as scheduled and we see him in person.’

  ‘Who does?’ Pen asked.

  She’d left the wine bottle on the coffee table. I took a glass from where the tea and coffee makings sat and poured. ‘We all do,’ I said.

  7

  O’Hara mumbled something about a sleeping pill; Pen argued with him and shepherded everyone out. Long and Glassop went dow
n to the hotel bar. Chandry refused their invitation and went to his room with his shoulders drooping. In my room I turned on the TV and watched a couple of news programs and a documentary without absorbing any of the information. It looked as though my hoped-for month of employment was only going to last one day. I had a lot of questions for Jack Buchanan and a few for O’Hara and Pen.

  In the morning we found that Chandry had vanished. At reception Pen somehow smoothed over the fact that nine had checked in and only five were departing. Tracey rolled up in the bus. Pen didn’t offer him any explanation and he didn’t ask. Not his problem. Taking our seats, we were all acutely aware of the absentees.

  I went back to where Pen and O’Hara were sitting in silence. The video camera Kelly had used was lying on a nearby seat as a mute reminder of everything that had gone wrong.

  O’Hara was visibly hungover and aggressive. ‘You should’ve kept an eye on that fucking doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, and you’ve got some questions to answer.’

  Pen drew closer to O’Hara protectively. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like why you had plants in the audience to ask the easy questions.’

  O’Hara shrugged. ‘Standard practice.’

  ‘Okay, this is harder—who is Jacobs, what was his interjection about and how come you had people there to shut him up?’

  Pen shot me an angry look. ‘Tell him,’ she said.

  ‘I’m too worried to think,’ O’Hara muttered.

  Pen drew in a deep breath. She was back in her casual clothes but with her hair and makeup perfectly in place. Although red-eyed, O’Hara was shaved and neatly dressed. I’d noticed that his suit was properly arranged in its bag, something I doubted he’d do himself. Not hard to guess that they’d spent the night together.

  ‘Harry Jacobs is opposed to everything Rory stands for,’ Pen said. ‘He’s a spokesman for every reactionary cause in the book. You must have heard of him.’

  ‘I don’t pay much attention to people like that,’ I said.

  Pen seemed to need physical contact with O’Hara, as if she was insecure about the relationship. She moved fractionally still closer to him. ‘You should, they’re dangerous.’

  O’Hara was one of those people who don’t like being left out of the conversation. He rallied. ‘Jacobs also used to be Jack’s partner in the agency.’

  ‘This is all news to me,’ I said. I was cursing myself for not looking more closely at Jack’s operation before signing on.

  ‘Jack had the contacts to book MOR types and radicals like me,’ O’Hara said. ‘And Jacobs booked the shock jocks and Nazis. There’s money both ways.’

  ‘You said they used to be partners.’

  ‘That’s right. Jacobs pulled out when Jack took me on. A bridge too far.’

  Pen was staring out of the window but I doubted that she was seeing anything. I asked her why she didn’t want O’Hara to have mentioned Jacobs. O’Hara opened his mouth to answer but she stopped him with a hand on his arm that was now more possessive than protective.

  ‘Jack doesn’t want anyone to know about the state of his affairs.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘He’s suing Jacobs and Jacobs is suing him. His finances are on a knife-edge.’

  ‘He paid me a solid retainer.’

  ‘Probably borrowed it,’ O’Hara said. ‘He’s borrowed a fair bit from me. This tour was supposed to get us both back on our feet.’

  ‘That looks like a washout now,’ I said. ‘Could this Jacobs have got to Kelly and Bright and the nurse?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Pen said. ‘He has bags of charm. There’s a rumour that he had an affair with Kelly back when she was acting. He was a backer for one of the pictures she was in.’

  ‘Just a rumour,’ O’Hara said.

  Pen patted his arm. ‘You put money into one too and look how you ended up. It’s her style, Rory. Her middle name is exploitation.’

  ‘Don’t,’ O’Hara said.

  I left them. Glassop was busy with his iPhone. I sat beside him and waited until he’d finished whatever he was doing. He looked up at me nervously.

  ‘How long have you known Sean Bright?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know him at all. Only met him a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘I thought you were a team.’

  He did his lip-licking thing. ‘No. Me and another bloke had worked for Rory for a while but he had an accident just before this tour got underway. I met Sean at a seminar and we got along. He was a fill-in.’

  ‘Was he good?’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  I opened my hands. ‘At IT and all that.’

  ‘Are you any good at it, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘Hopeless.’

  He took a long time before answering, as if he didn’t want to make a judgement. Good at computers, maybe he wasn’t much good at people. ‘He was all right, I think.’

  ‘That isn’t much of an endorsement.’

  ‘Like I said, I didn’t know him that well. Do you mind if I get on with what I’m doing?’

  It cost him a bit to be that forthright.

  ‘Why would he steal your computer? Did you lose anything?’

  ‘I don’t get you.’

  ‘Anything sensitive?’

  ‘Anything sensitive I encrypt.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He licked his lips again and didn’t answer.

  ‘So, did you lose anything?’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a bunch of keys with a thumb drive attached. He gave me a look of contempt, then blinked nervously at his temerity. ‘Anything important’s all here.’

  I went back to my seat to think things over. Duplicity comes with the territory, but the layers of it here were out of the ordinary—shaky finances, warring partners, old love affairs and a new alignment of the players. It was a lot to process.

  Traffic thickened after the freeway and we slowed to a crawl with delays at every set of lights and intersection so that the morning was well advanced before we went over the bridge adjacent to Tom Ugly’s. The Georges River was grey under a leaden sky.

  Long dropped into the seat next to me. His breath, hair and clothes smelled of tobacco smoke and his eyes, slits crinkled by a million deep draws and exhalations, were cynical and amused.

  ‘Anything I should know?’ he said.

  Why not? I thought. I told him what I’d just been told.

  ‘Knew it was too good to be true,’ he said. ‘I was going to write the fucking book. You’ll be out of a job, too.’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  ‘Harry Jacobs, eh? Maybe there’s a book in all this after all.’

  ‘Is he capable of orchestrating something like this?’

  ‘Harry? Sure he is. Some people think he arranged the—’ A strangled yelp came from the back of the bus. Pen, clutching her phone, was struggling to release her seatbelt. She unbuckled and lurched forward, grabbing at the back of the nearest seat for support. O’Hara reached for her, dislodged his stick and swore as it clattered to the floor.

  ‘What, Pen, what?’ he almost screamed.

  Pen, wild-eyed and trembling, was brandishing her phone. ‘It’s Kelly,’ she said. ‘She’s with the police. She says Sean Bright has killed the nurse.’

  8

  That was the end of the Rory O’Hara tour and of his high-visibility radical campaign. The police interviewed all of us who’d been on the trip and they were less than happy about no one reporting the abduction of Kelly Scott.

  I came in for some stick. ‘You should’ve known better, Hardy,’ one of the coppers said. ‘But I suppose it’s the sort of irresponsible behaviour we should expect from you.’

  I said the thing looked staged to me and part of some non-life-threatening, off-stage power play between O’Hara and Buchanan that had somehow got out of control. The officer was unimpressed.

  The newspapers and television made a meal of the kidnapped girlfriend, the Asian accomplice and the coc
k-up that ended in Melanie Kim’s death and her killer’s escape and disappearance. Kelly hadn’t been able to tell the police much about what had happened. Kim had drugged her and she and Bright had driven to Sydney that night to a motel, where they’d argued about, she thought, drugs and money.

  This came out in a paid interview she gave to a TV station. While still under the influence of drugs, she said she’d heard a scream, staggered out of the bathroom where she’d been sick and found Kim dead, with her throat cut and Bright gone. Doctors confirmed that she’d been given a heavy dose of two drugs and could not possibly have wielded a knife so efficiently. There was no blood on her or her clothing.

  The police and journalists dug deep but found nothing on Bright. It appeared that the name was an alias and that the credentials he’d offered Jack and others were faked. His true identity was a mystery. It was assumed he’d arranged the accident to O’Hara’s previous IT guy and established that he’d scraped an acquaintance with Glassop at an artificial intelligence seminar.

  Melanie Kim was a prostitute whom Bright had steered into Chandry’s path. Chandry had been hired by Jack Buchanan on the cheap. A photo of Bright lifted from Kelly’s video was published in the papers and circulated. It was a bit blurry and I didn’t think it was a very good likeness, but I hadn’t paid him a lot of attention. For fear of libel and contempt charges, the reporters steered clear of the dispute between Jacobs and Buchanan, which was headed for court. The story played for not much more than a week until it ran short of oxygen and died.

  ‘Not your finest hour, Cliff,’ my old friend ex-deputy commissioner of police Frank Parker said one night when we were having a drink.

  ‘Nobody’s,’ I said. ‘Jack Buchanan says he’s broke. I did hear that O’Hara’s split with Kelly Scott and taken up with his PA, but I’ve no idea what they’re up to. Probably licking their wounds in Bellingen or somewhere. Clive Long’s supposed to be doing a book about O’Hara and the whole thing, but he’d need an explanation and an ending.’