Digging Up Dirt

by Pamela Hart

  ‘Yep,’ he said eventually. ‘They think we both did it.’

  We stood for a moment, not quite looking at each other, not sure what to do next.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d better get back to work.’

  ‘Me too. Ms Prudhomme says we can get back to the dig next week.’

  ‘Great,’ I said glumly.

  ‘Cheer up. I’ll do my best to get you your house back as soon as I can.’

  As I went back to my car I decided that my attraction to Tol wasn’t just my hormones—he really was a lovely man. A lovely man who seemed to genuinely like me. Or a killer who was really good at schmoozing. Or just a man who wanted a fling before he went back to the rigours of archaeology in the Middle East.

  After all, would a really nice man be smoothing back the hair of a woman two days after his girlfriend was killed? Oh, bugger. Reluctantly, I put away a charming image of Tol and me on Bondi Beach at sunset and concentrated on the increasing traffic as I crossed Anzac Bridge. At least he was going to be around my house for the next week or so … If the police found the killer soon, I could forget my suspicions and enjoy his company for a while. A fling didn’t sound all that bad.

  And Stuart? my conscience whispered. Stuart, I told it, had better pick up his game. He hadn’t turned up last night, and he hadn’t even called me today. A tower of strength he was not.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maybe I’d been too hard on him. Stuart turned up after dinner (and the news) complete with flowers and lollies, suggesting we watch a movie. I wasn’t going to let him get off scot-free, though.

  ‘Where were you last night?’ I asked, arms akimbo, blocking the door.

  Surprised, he rubbed one hand over his hair as if for reassurance. ‘It was Wednesday!’

  Wednesday. Ah yes, Wednesday. Laundry night. Every Wednesday night Stuart did his laundry for the week. No matter what, apparently.

  ‘Laundry.’

  He smiled happily and kissed me on the cheek as though everything had been settled. What could I say? Your laundry is more important to you than I am? Any way you looked at it, that was ridiculous, and saying it out loud would make me ridiculous. I sighed.

  ‘Come on in.’

  And then we had a lovely night, watching a rom-com and eating popcorn and imperial mandarins, which Stuart produced like a conjuror, knowing they’re my favourite. He didn’t even complain about having been fingerprinted.

  I remembered, while kissing him goodnight, why I’d got involved with him in the first place. He might not make me shiver when he stood next to me, but he was kind and warm and clever and didn’t have any plans to disappear to the Middle East, which was a big plus.

  Even if he couldn’t lift one eyebrow.

  Friday

  I had a day off in lieu of a day filming at the beach we’d done two weekends before. That was the theory, anyway. Around seven-thirty, when I was still sitting in the kitchen in my pyjamas, I got a call from Tyler. Did that man live at the ABC?

  ‘Carter’s agreed to another interview with The Daily Report, but only if you do it,’ he said.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘In depth,’ Tyler said. ‘Taking you over the whole operation. Preselection committee, party headquarters, the lot.’

  ‘He’s going to use it to announce the new candidate.’

  ‘Sure he is. But he’s going to announce it first on the ABC.’

  A silence. What could I say? Let him take it to the commercial channels? Never!

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’ Tyler actually sounded relieved, as though he hadn’t been sure I’d agree. ‘I’ve got the researcher to dummy up your questions—like she’d normally do for the interviewer,’ he added in a hurry, as if he could sense me bridle even over the phone. I’d forgotten that the journos often didn’t do their own research for current affairs. No time, with their shooting schedule. It was different in kids’ TV.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Camera car’ll pick you up in half an hour.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said again.

  ‘You’ll be fine.’ He obviously thought I was nervous. ‘You delivered the other day. Did good, played hard.’

  Football metaphors. Do I look like a front row forward?

  ‘Thanks,’ I said through gritted teeth.

  ‘Half an hour,’ Tyler said. ‘Dress the part, sweetheart.’ He hung up.

  I really didn’t like that guy.

  At least he sent me Terry and Dave.

  We drove to party headquarters, at the other end of the business park from Carter’s office. As a start-up party, they didn’t need huge premises, but they didn’t seem to know that. They had two floors of a large office block: one of those ones with a lake and a waterfall in the courtyard and a food hall in the basement. The reception area had a glass wall so you could see through to the open-plan office beyond, where half-a-dozen people talked on phones and tapped at computers, just like in every other office in the country.

  Inside, everything was blue: pale blue walls, baby-blue office dividers, grey-blue desks, tastefully matching blinds. The long reception feature wall was painted in what my Catholic sensibilities always thought of as Virgin Mary blue. It looked like an incomplete shrine waiting for a statue. And the receptionist was the acolyte, sitting tall and proud under a sign which announced: AUSTRALIAN FAMILY—PUTTING FAMILIES BEFORE POLITICS. Tall, slender, red-headed, stylishly suited and shod, she gave new meaning to the phrase ‘well groomed’—the only odd note was the phone headset she wore like a tiara. She had an engagement ring the size of an almond glinting on her finger. I smiled to myself. The perfect female employee: not married, so not neglecting her husband or children for her career, but committed nonetheless to married life. As a subservient wife, no doubt.

  ‘How may I help you?’ she asked in hushed tones, as though she couldn’t see the camera on Terry’s shoulders.

  ‘The Daily Report. We’re here to see Mr Carter,’ I said cheerfully and loudly.

  The receptionist winced. ‘Please take a seat,’ she said, then pushed a button on the phone and murmured a few words into the headset. I was fascinated by her eyebrows, which were plucked into thin, perfect arches which reminded me irresistibly of Mickey Mouse ears. It was odd, when the fashion was for much thicker brows, and they gave her a perpetually surprised look. ‘Mr Carter will be with you in a few moments,’ she said in a congratulatory tone.

  While we waited, Terry got some footage of her at work answering the phone, which seemed pretty busy considering it wasn’t quite nine yet. She ignored him loftily, although she looked suspiciously at Dave when he started recording ambient sound, and when she spoke, her voice dropped even further, as though she thought he was spying.

  I could have told her differently—Dave certainly didn’t want to hear what she was saying, because that would constrain how he could use the atmos track. Besides, if he’d wanted to spy on her, he’d have used a different mike altogether.

  After he finished, I wandered over to the desk.

  ‘Have you worked here long …’

  ‘Samantha.’ It was a condescension on her part, no doubt, to give me her name, but anything for the party.

  ‘Samantha,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘I’ve only been in the party headquarters for a few months, but before that I worked for Mr Carter at his electoral office.’

  She was a real acolyte, all right, in the religion of Matthew Carter—her eyes gleamed as she said his name. I wondered if there was a reason other than hero worship.

  ‘He’s very attractive,’ I said casually, girl to girl.

  But that was the wrong tack. She frowned and sat up even straighter. ‘Mr Carter is an inspiration to us. It wouldn’t matter if he were—were completely ugly! We’d still support him.’

  ‘Oh, of course. Helps on television, though.’

  That mollified her. ‘It’s all media these days,’ she said disdainfully. Of course. All political parties hate the media. ‘We�
�re lucky that Mr Carter is so good at that side of the job.’

  Yes, indeed. And right on cue, the door opened to let in Matthew Carter, followed not by Eliza but by the party treasurer, Samuel Stephenson.

  Stephenson, the researcher’s notes had said, was a longtime elder of the Radiant Joy Church. He’d been raised Anglican, had run wild as a young man, and had become born again at one of Amos Winchester’s first Sydney missions. After studying accountancy at uni, he’d started his first bakery, Ruth’s Kitchen. Now, having franchised that and sold the business, he functioned both as paid party accountant and volunteer treasurer—a dubious if not strictly illegal situation. With a background like that, I’d imagined he’d be a middle-aged man in a crumpled suit, probably a bit stout and red in the face.

  Instead, he was as lean as a greyhound, dark-eyed, intense, his grey hair well cut. Not PR attractive in the way Carter was—the camera would make his nose look too big and his cheeks too hollow, turn the intensity into weirdness—but in person he was at least as impressive, maybe more. He had that trick that I’d seen in old police officers and experienced teachers, of looking at you very hard for a few seconds and then away, as though that was all the time he needed to assess and classify you. Arrogant. There was arrogance, too, in the way he wore his suit. He and Carter, both in tailor-made pinstripes, looked like models from a GQ article on the stylish older man.

  I was suddenly fond of Terry and Dave, who slouched around in jeans and polo shirts and whose sole concession to personal grooming was wearing deodorant.

  I smiled. ‘Matthew, how nice to see you again!’

  This was a useful trick. When I worked at the BBC, I discovered that in a hierarchical organisation, your status depended entirely upon whom you called by their first name. The person will start to treat you as an equal in order to justify to themselves letting you do it, because that’s how humans are. With enough brazenness, you can improve your status startlingly.

  I could see him think it through. Should he correct me and put me offside before the interview? He was tempted to, but Terry was already filming. So he turned to Stephenson and said jovially, ‘Samuel, this is Poppy McGowan from The Daily Report.’

  ‘How do you do, Poppy,’ Stephenson intoned. I remembered from my notes that he was also a deacon at the church and no doubt used to public praying.

  ‘How do you do, Samuel,’ I echoed sunnily. We shook hands.

  ‘Let’s go through and we can show you around the office,’ he said.

  So we got the guided tour, which was about as riveting as any office tour ever is, except that, unlike every other office, almost everyone here was lily white (which I’d expected after seeing the staff at Carter’s office). There wasn’t a single nose stud or eyebrow ring or brightly coloured strand of hair on any employee, not one pair of jeans, not even a shirt without a tie. No skirt above the knee, no blouse opened to the cleavage. And every hair was in place. Almost. I felt sorry for one young man, who had clearly tried to wet his hair down into submission like his colleagues, but whose curls sprang defiantly upwards.

  From what we overheard, the employees were either cold-calling potential supporters or fielding calls from the interested. I wondered where they got their list of potentials from.

  As the camera rolled, Carter gave us an anodyne commentary and I made supportive, interested noises. Stephenson followed a pace behind Dave and Terry, a brooding presence.

  Then we went into the conference room and there we found Amos Winchester, the founder of the Australian Family Party and still the pastor of the Radiant Joy Church.

  I don’t know what I’d expected. Either WC Fields or an eighty-two-year-old Colonel Sanders, I think. But Winchester was a small man, jockey sized, wrinkled and with arthritic hands, bright blue eyes and not much hair, who jumped up to welcome me with genuine enthusiasm. If he was as calculating as his two followers, it didn’t show. He grabbed my hands and pumped them with energy, smiling, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carter and Stephenson exchanging satisfied looks, and realised that they’d counted on my reaction. Everyone likes Amos, huh? How nice for you.

  ‘I’m glad to have this opportunity to interview you, Reverend Winchester,’ I said. The whole first-name thing has its place—but it doesn’t work with old ministers or priests; they’ll just put you in your place and smile while they’re doing it.

  ‘Call me pastor, child,’ he said, the faintest trace of his southern American drawl still (deliberately?) there. I almost expected him to say shucks.

  ‘We need lights in here,’ Terry announced. I nodded and he disappeared with Dave to get them from the car.

  ‘Are the rest of the preselection committee joining us?’ I asked brightly.

  ‘The only other member cannot, alas, make the time,’ Stephenson said.

  ‘That would be Wilfred Cooper?’ I asked, checking my notes. Interesting. The only member of the committee not from Radiant Joy. I reckoned they wanted to make sure they kept control of the party image, and I wondered how much power Cooper really had, with these three so tight.

  ‘Yes. Unfortunately, Wilf has other commitments.’

  ‘Isn’t he retired?’

  ‘Family commitments,’ Stephenson said admonishingly, as though no more had to be said.

  I duly shut up. It wasn’t worth pushing on—Tyler could always get Cooper’s views later on.

  ‘Disappointed you didn’t get the full bench?’ Winchester chuckled and I smiled back.

  ‘It’s always nice to cover all the bases,’ I said. ‘My news director can be a bit picky.’

  ‘Nature of the business. It’s a lot harder edged than it used to be.’ He sighed. I waited for ‘in my day’ and sure enough, out it came. ‘In my day there was a bit more respect paid to those who served their countries.’

  I deliberately misunderstood.

  ‘You served in the military?’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s not in my notes …’ I read through my briefing, as though looking for confirmation.

  ‘No, no,’ he said quickly, discomfited. ‘No, I couldn’t serve—bad lungs, bad lungs, you know. Tried for a chaplaincy but they wouldn’t take me, so I had to serve my flock at home.’

  He moved away to say something quietly to Carter, who glanced at me. They’d either think I was a bit dim or too sharp, I thought, so I smiled with as much air-headedness as I could summon on short notice. The more time I spent with these men, the less I liked them, and the more I wanted to skewer them publicly, for all to see.

  I’d gone over the game plan with Terry. We were going for a long interview, long enough so that they would relax with me. I’d warned him I was going to ask a lot of Dorothy Dixers first, to let them get the party line off their chests. Then, with luck, they’d relax enough so that I could sneak in some more difficult questions.

  But having Winchester there changed things.

  ‘Is there any chance I could do an interview one on one with you, pastor?’ I asked. ‘Since you were the founder of the party …’

  The great thing about sexism is that men who think women are stupider than they are truly believe it. So they are very, very reluctant to acknowledge that a woman may not be stupid. Thus far, I’d played to their expectations of a young woman who wasn’t really a reporter, and their own mindset predisposed them to believe I wasn’t a threat.

  ‘I don’t see why not, young lady,’ Winchester said, like everyone’s favourite uncle.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.

  Terry and Dave came back with the lights and began setting up.

  Winchester came over to me and spoke confidentially. ‘Now, just what questions did you have in mind to ask?’

  Hah! As if.

  ‘Well,’ I said, vaguely, ‘are there some you think I should ask?’

  Enthusiastically, he started dictating a list—exactly what you might expect: why did you set up the party, what do you think of the present party leaders, are you happy with the direction th
e party’s taking … I dutifully wrote them down, and when Terry was ready I politely ushered Carter and Stephenson out the door and sat down opposite Winchester and asked each one of his questions as though they made up the hardest-hitting interview in media history. He beamed all the way through. When we got to the end of his questions he relaxed and leant back in his chair, as though the interview was over.

  ‘Did you know Julieanne Weaver?’ I asked, still smiling.

  He went still, the way people who live in the public eye do when they’re asked something difficult.

  ‘Yes. Poor child. Yes, I met her a couple times.’ His accent was suddenly more pronounced.

  ‘More than a couple, surely, pastor? I believe that Dr Weaver met with the preselection committee for North Hughes quite a few times over the past months—and you are a member of the committee, aren’t you?’

  ‘We met a few times, maybe.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  He hesitated. ‘Dr Weaver wasn’t a member of my flock, you know, so I didn’t get to know her well … but she seemed like a very clever woman.’

  ‘Clever? That’s pretty faint praise for someone you were thinking of preselecting. She got through to the last round, didn’t she?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m not going to speak ill of the dead, child, and Matthew Carter is the person to ask about preselection. All I can say about Julieanne Weaver is that I’m praying for her soul and the soul of the poor misguided wretch who killed her.’

  I couldn’t ask the Heaven question again, he’d know I’d already asked Carter. I decided to play my trump.

  ‘You know, it was my house that Dr Weaver was found in, and from some things the police have asked me, there may be a political angle to her death. Who hates Australian Family enough to attack one of your members?’

  As I’d hoped, that brought him out fighting.

  ‘Now wait just a minute, child! There’s no suggestion that the girl was killed because she was a member of Australian Family. No suggestion at all.’

  ‘Not even though she was trying hard for preselection?’