Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  She gave me a hug and then held me at arm’s length to inspect me. ‘Are you all right? You look like death warmed up. Come on, come and have a coffee.’

  We went across the road to the little café in the park opposite. I wasn’t sure I could deal with yet another cup of tea, but an ice-cold ginger beer seemed like a good idea. I needed the sugar hit.

  ‘Tol told me what happened. Give me your version,’ Annie said, so I did.

  She listened with that particular focus that has allowed her to climb to the top of her profession so young, and then drew in a long breath and let it out again. It was hard to read her expression, but she patted my hand as she might have patted her cat, Mycroft, and I felt marginally better.

  ‘Murder.’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘You poor sausage,’ she said.

  ‘Poor Julieanne.’

  Shaking her head, Annie downed the last of her latte. ‘Yes. Poor Julieanne, which is something I never thought I’d say. I can’t quite believe she’s dead. This is going to be a dog’s breakfast. I’d better get back and get the Minister’s office up to speed.’

  I walked out with her and waved as she went back into the museum. But before I could get back in the car, my phone rang.

  ‘Meet me in the lobby at Ultimo. I’m leaving now.’ Jennifer Jay’s voice was crisp.

  Although I was very tired, I was oddly glad to have something to do, and someone to tell me to do it. It would take me much less time to get there, so I read some of the texts on my phone. I answered Alex first, of course. He was delirious with curiosity.

  Tell me everything!!!!!!!

  I told him everything and left it to him to spread the news to the fifteen friends who’d sent me the same message, then drove to the ABC.

  Jennifer Jay arrived with her normal haste and I joined her to go through security.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked as we swiped our staff cards.

  ‘NewsCaff have decided that you should be involved in the planning on this story. Maybe do some of the reporting.’

  NewsCaff is short for News and Current Affairs.

  ‘I’m not a reporter!’ My voice rose in a squeak.

  Jennifer Jay cast me an amused glance. ‘You did all right this afternoon. NewsCaff was very pleased with the police doorstep.’

  I swallowed and tried to get my voice under control. ‘Let me rephrase: I don’t want to be a reporter.’

  ‘Tell that to Tyler.’

  I did, when we reached NewsCaff, which looks a lot more upmarket than our production office, but no tidier. The NewsCaff boss, Tyler Haddin, sat me down and congratulated me on the interview I’d done with Chloe. Tyler was mid-fifties, balding (and shaved to conceal it), pinkskinned as though he had regular facials, and dressed in the behind-the-scenes TV uniform of jeans and polo shirt. He had sharp little eyes that missed nothing and a mouth like a trap, but he was smiling at me.

  ‘I don’t want to be a reporter,’ I said. ‘I’m quite happy as a researcher.’

  His smile disappeared. I guess he has a lot of people beating on his doors, wanting to be reporters, and it took him by surprise that I wasn’t one of them. He changed tack.

  ‘We need you.’

  ‘Why? It’s not like I can get into the house or anything. The police are still there. And when they go, I can let your crew and one of the regular reporters in.’

  ‘It’s a scoop, sweetheart,’ he said, immediately putting me offside. I don’t like being called sweetheart by people I’ve only just met. Patronising bastard. ‘Having the inside straight only happens once in a lifetime. And having an insider in a murder investigation—that’s fabulous! We’re planning a series of stories—not just the news segments, but stories on The Daily Report, the Australian Story people are interested, maybe an hour-long documentary … we need you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because everyone’s going to talk to you. What about the boyfriend, this Lang guy?’

  ‘Tol,’ I said automatically.

  ‘Tol, okay. Will he agree to an interview?’

  ‘I’m not going to interview Tol.’ My tone that time must have got through to him. He raised his eyebrows. I clarified: ‘I’m not going to interview anyone I know.’

  ‘But maybe you can set it up for one of our other reporters?’

  I felt very reluctant to involve Tol in any media scrum, but then I realised that if we had an exclusive, the others would leave him alone.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘And we have exclusive interviews with you—we’ll get you down to wardrobe and make-up soon, so Toby can talk to you for tonight’s program—and access to the house—’

  ‘Hold on!’ I objected. ‘I didn’t say I’d do an interview with Toby.’

  Both Jennifer Jay and Tyler looked at me in complete astonishment.

  ‘Jennifer Jay, talk some sense into her.’

  But she didn’t have to. This was TV, and TV news at that. Forget sentiment, forget reticence, forget shyness. Even at the ABC, ratings mattered, and an interview with me would be good for ratings. As an ABC employee, I was expected to be loyal unto death. That’s only barely an exaggeration—ABC people are fanatical about the organisation.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘But—’

  ‘Great!’ Tyler said, clapping his hands. ‘And then maybe we can get you to cover the Australian Family side of things. You don’t know them, do you?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t mind that—I was much more interested in finding out about the political stuff.

  ‘I could start with Eliza and Matthew Carter. They were her main contacts there, I think.’

  ‘Great!’ Tyler said, and clapped his hands again. That could really get on my nerves. ‘I’ve got someone getting their contact details. We’ll do your interview with Toby and then you can go right out with a crew. We’ve got to move quickly on something like this. If they make an arrest the whole thing’s sub judice and we won’t be able to say anything.’

  I might not have been a news reporter but I knew that once someone was arrested, the media had to stop reporting on the crime until it came to trial.

  I hoped Chloe would make an arrest soon.

  ‘What do we know about a Detective Sergeant Chloe Prudhomme?’ I asked.

  Tyler whistled. ‘Is she in charge? She’s on the fast track. Some insiders are saying she’s heading straight for commissioner in a few years. Honors degree in politics and criminology, very connected family. Her mother is a Highmark: they have half-a-dozen QCs, two judges, three MPs, you name it. Apparently the family took it badly when she decided to be a cop, but she went for it anyway. You be careful of her, sweetheart. She’s a very smart cookie.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That much I could tell.’

  They hustled me off to wardrobe and make-up and I was tarted up to look respectable. I sent Jennifer Jay out to the car to get my good shoes, but they wouldn’t let me wear the nice skirt and blouse I kept in the boot. Instead they gave me a newsreader’s power suit from the wardrobe stock.

  ‘Sweetheart, you’re representing us now, not the kiddies,’ Tyler said, although he made sure first that Jennifer Jay couldn’t hear him. He really was a patronising sod.

  While I was in make-up, a press release came through from the cops to say the coroner had declared Julieanne’s death officially suspicious. That hit me with a thump. I’d been hoping they’d decide it was an accident. I felt unclean, and for the first time I understood Lady Macbeth’s exclamation, ‘What, in our house?’ Of course, she was covering up murder, but she’d known what emotion to counterfeit—bloody Shakespeare always knew what the real feelings were. I had a sense of my sanctuary being defiled, and it made me angry. Someone had killed Julieanne on my turf. That made it personal. I wanted them caught.

  I said as much to Toby, who was chatty and charming right up to the point the cameras rolled, and then morphed into a hard-hitting interviewer determined to get to the truth.

  ‘What’s it li
ke, being a murder suspect?’ was his first question.

  ‘Uh—I hadn’t really thought about that,’ I said stalling for time. I couldn’t let him get me on the back foot. ‘I’ve been thinking more about Julieanne and how sad her death is.’

  Chew on that, hardliner. I’d seen and done enough interviews to know how to turn the conversation. I wasn’t going to let him control it all. Perhaps that sounds cold, but anyone who’s been involved with the media develops a thick skin and a calculating mind in situations like this, and I was thankful for it. I’d seen interviewees who didn’t really understand that the host’s job was to get shocking revelations and tearful confessions, and who’d ended up sobbing, feeling ambushed and betrayed.

  ‘You knew her well?’

  ‘I worked with her at the Museum of New South Wales,’ I explained, and went into the story of how she came to be digging in my living room. I skated over any conflict between us, and clearly Toby’s researchers hadn’t talked enough to Terry and Dave, because he didn’t bring it up.

  ‘And now your home is a crime scene,’ he prompted.

  My eyes filled with tears at the thought of my poor little house invaded by police and cut off from me. But I knew better than to actually say so. I had to excuse the tears in some other way.

  ‘It’s terrible to think of Julieanne just lying there …’

  ‘Losing a friend must be very hard.’ Toby was all sympathy, building the moment for the audience.

  ‘I wouldn’t say we were close friends,’ I said, walking a fine line between truth and appearances. ‘More colleagues. But it’s a terrible thing to have anyone you know cut down by violence.’

  He nodded, encouraging me to say more, but I shut up while I was ahead.

  ‘The police are investigating anyone who might have had contact with Dr Weaver in the last few days,’ he prompted.

  ‘So I understand.’ Out of the corner of my eye I could see the floor manager giving Toby the wind-up sign, saying we were out of time, so I thought I’d give them a nice emotional grab to finish on. ‘I just hope the police can arrest the monster who did this and let Julieanne rest in peace.’

  ‘Thank you very much for talking to us,’ Toby concluded, and the floor manager yelled, ‘Cut!’

  ‘Great ending, Poppy, thanks,’ Toby said, detaching his lapel mike and getting up.

  I joined Jennifer Jay where she was waiting with a manila folder. She handed it to me.

  ‘Details on Australian Family,’ she said. ‘Some interesting stuff in there. I’ll see you later. Good luck.’

  Tyler sent the work experience girl to the canteen to grab lunch for us while we looked through the folder in one of the screening booths.

  The Australian Family Party had been started ten years ago by an evangelical preacher, Amos Winchester, who had come out from America twelve years before that to set up a mission of the Radiant Joy Church in Sydney. The church itself was doing fine—growing fast, like a lot of the Pentecostal churches, pulling in young people and donations with lively services and good singing and an absolute certainty about right and wrong. The Radiant Joy Church believed that homosexuality was evil, women should be subservient to men, and only Christians would be let into Heaven—pretty standard stuff that reminded me of the Catholicism of my parents’ youth.

  A few years ago, Winchester had teamed up with an unexpected mover and shaker: Samuel Stephenson, a businessman who had parlayed a family bakery into a multi-million dollar franchise operation, before selling it all to concentrate on church and party. He was a true believer, obviously.

  The party had fielded a few candidates in local elections in the suburbs of the major cities, but they’d only had one elected: Matthew Carter, who’d taken over as leader of the party when Winchester retired from everything except church work. Carter was MP for Cumberland, a new seat in Sydney’s north-west created when an existing electorate had been split in two to allow for the huge population growth in that area. He had benefited from the long-term sitting member choosing to stand for the other half of the seat, and by a domestic violence scandal involving the Liberal candidate. The incident gave Carter the perfect soapbox to espouse family values. It had worked. He didn’t have a landslide, but he got a clear majority.

  Now a by-election was coming up because a state government MP had dropped dead in a brothel—a fact known to most journalists but firmly denied by everyone else involved. The government had only had a majority of one, so if Carter could get an Australian Family candidate elected, they’d have the balance of power. No wonder Julieanne had wanted to be preselected.

  Tyler showed me some archival footage of Carter in full electioneering mode. I could see why the voters had fallen for him: he was good-looking and charming: about forty (not too old, not too young), energetic, a perfect toothpaste advertisement smile, wavy brown hair, strong jaw—lord, you could sell just about anything with this guy as your rep. He was clever too, I had to give him that. He spoke reasonably, rather than preaching, and he used phrases like ‘moral common sense’, to avoid actually saying the word ‘God’ out loud, in case he scared off the non-Christian voters.

  ‘Yeah, they’re trying to distance themselves from the church,’ Tyler confirmed. ‘That’s still where they’re getting most of their money, but Carter’s realised he won’t get the votes if the electorate know he’s a God-botherer.’

  I already disliked Matthew Carter. Was that fair? I believed in God, after all. I’d even been going to church again since I moved back in with my parents. (‘If you live in our house, you live by our rules,’ they said, which I thought was fair enough when you realised that they honestly thought I’d go to Hell if I didn’t attend Mass.) Why should I think the worst of Carter because he was evangelical? On the other hand, our archbishop was the same kind of hardliner, who lumped every gay person, everyone who’d had pre-marital sex and everyone who used contraception into the same pit of Hell, and I didn’t like him either. It made me feel better to think that I was even-handed in my prejudice, rather than sectarian.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pausing the tape to point at a woman standing behind Carter as he made his victory speech on election night.

  ‘Keep it going,’ Tyler said, so I pressed play.

  Carter beamed at the adoring audience of supporters and said, ‘And of course, the person on this earth I most have to thank—’ (oh, very smooth, implying God’s help without claiming it) ‘—is my wonderful wife, Eliza.’

  She came forward for the obligatory kiss and smile. She looked like a blonde, slightly more conservative, Jackie Kennedy in the White House days: little pastel suit, pearls, perfect make-up. And she was good-looking. Not Julieanne’s brand of sex appeal, but the smooth, controlled prettiness that’s a combination of good bones, perfect grooming and rigorous self-discipline when the dessert cart goes past.

  Their children joined them on the platform: twin boys, eight or ten, short-haired like their father, in navy jackets complete with ties, and a blonde teenage girl who looked so wholesome she could be in an ad for milk. How did they get a fifteen-year-old to wear a Laura Ashley dress like that? Bribery or threats of eternal damnation?

  I shrugged. The kids all looked proud of their dad, although I noticed the girl stepped behind the others so she’d be out of the spotlight. Shy? Embarrassed? Everything’s embarrassing at that age.

  Someone knocked at the door of the screening booth and I stopped the tape. Terry and Dave.

  ‘We’ve been seconded for the interim.’ Terry looked happy, an old warhorse back in armour.

  ‘I’ll meet you outside,’ I said, and they waved and left. I turned to Tyler. ‘Because you’re not sure if you’ll be able to use any of the material I get?’

  He didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed. ‘It’s a risk,’ he admitted. ‘Don’t want to tie up one of our crews if we’re not going to get anything. Besides, Terry’s good. He just slowed down a bit too much for us. But getting interviews—none better. He’ll show
you the ropes.’

  I sniffed and put on my borrowed respectable blue jacket. I felt like one of those poor little boys, stuffed into uncomfortable clothes just so the grown-ups could have a nice show.

  ‘What if they won’t talk to me?’

  ‘Then we’re no worse off than we were.’ He patted me on the shoulder. ‘Go put the boot in, sweetheart.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Carter’s electoral office was a fifty-minute drive away, out in the suburbs, at the retail end of a business park located across a highway from a huge sprawling suburban development full of McMansions. Perfect for him: sponsors and voters both within spitting distance. The church, discreetly, was more than a kilometre away, but still within easy reach.

  We pulled up in the car park and considered our options. Carter had one of the shops that faced out but the door had a CLOSED sign that was visible from where we sat. There were several other news crews camped out on the footpath. Carter either hadn’t arrived or hadn’t left yet, but clearly he was planning to give no more than doorstep grabs.

  Should I take the crew in or go in by myself first?

  Terry was sure. ‘You head in, they’ll talk to you because it was your house. Then you establish yourself as sympathetic, and mention you were coming past with a camera crew on your way back from a shoot and dropped in. See if you can get them to suggest an interview.’

  I drew in a deep breath, feeling like an undercover cop about to go into a gang stronghold. Which was ridiculous. I was a professional, doing my job, and these were politicians—they loved media. In fact, I was doing them a favour by giving them air time.

  I got out of the car and walked across to the office, trying hard to look competent but not a journo. When I got to the door, one of the reporters—a Channel 10 junior reporter, one I’d seen on kids’ TV—said, ‘They’re not giving interviews. They say he’ll be out when he’s finished his electoral business and we can get a grab then.’