by Tara Moss
Jack stood up and took to pacing in front of his window, drink in hand. White continued to watch him, not liking what he saw. He was using all his contacts and considerable influence to keep the situation under control, but the truth was, Jack himself seemed to be in a worrying state. Paranoid. A little erratic. After White’s suggestion he’d recently hired a bodyguard, but he’d done it on his own. The man was not of White’s choosing. Security was vital, but it could be handled invisibly. A bodyguard like the one Jack had chosen didn’t look good. It was a problem that his client had not hired according to his recommendations. Damien Cavanagh had hired a mate to hang out at the house and play bodyguard: that was the reality.
‘Have you heard from Beverley?’ he enquired.
Beverley Cavanagh had been in Europe for several weeks. A gossip columnist had got hold of the story. It could have been innocuous — wife of Jack Cavanagh enjoys a European holiday — but it looked bad to have her travel alone while her husband was in Sydney, the subject of rumours of investigation for criminal activities, his historic transport deal on hold. It did not present the solid family front The American was hoping to see. Anything that suggested instability was bad at this point, from a professional standpoint. There were whispers that the long-standing Cavanagh marriage was in trouble.
‘No,’ Jack said simply. He sipped his drink and stared out at the cloudless sky. The American wondered what he saw.
‘Perhaps you could take a bit of time off?’ he gently suggested. ‘Perhaps join her?’
‘Do you think so?’
‘It would be good to be seen together,’ he added. ‘Val d’Isère is lovely this time of year.’
Jack turned, eyes downcast. ‘Perhaps I’ll take a few days at the beach house and think it over.’
‘Good idea.’
‘Yes.’
‘I could arrange for more experienced security if you like. You remember I mentioned a candidate?’ White ventured, still trying.
‘That won’t be necessary.’
The American nodded. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll let you know if there are any important developments,’ he said evenly.
Inside, he was already planning for contingencies. A man like White always had an escape plan. When things went wrong, they did so quickly. It appeared he was rapidly losing control of his client and he knew from experience what that could mean. Increasingly, he was of the feeling that he wanted out.
Before Cavanagh risked taking him down with him.
It was around midnight when Damien Cavanagh fetched his black Diablo from the bowels of the Cavanagh building in Sydney’s CBD, having taken a frustratingly long taxi ride in from Palm Beach. Passing the security guard — who gawked when he realised who he was — Damien wondered briefly whether his father would be told he’d been there, and at what time. Obviously he was not going to just hang out at Palm Beach, like he was under house arrest. Grounded like a child. That was never going to happen. His father would know that.
Damien’s car was one of only two left in the parking lot at this hour, and the only one under a protective cover. He pulled the dusty silver cover off and nodded to himself as he clapped eyes on the vehicle beneath. The alarm switched off with a chirp and he got in, ducking under the driver’s door, which raised itself for him like the elegant wing of a bird. The ignition turned over easily, and minutes later the security guard was watching him with interest, and not a little jealousy, as he slunk past in the low-slung Lamborghini, paint gleaming like black enamel under the parking lot’s fluorescent lights.
He pulled up outside the back door to Le Chat nightclub to find a dark-skinned, thickset man in a black T-shirt and pants guarding the door, his arms folded. He was heavily muscled and he evidently recognised Damien, or his car. He’d been expected.
The car door raised itself again and Damien stepped out, closed the door and flicked the alarm on. The alley was tight and filthy. Music poured out of the club, the beat pounding the walls.
‘Your car is good here, man,’ the meaty bouncer said and put his palm out, but Damien did not give him the keys. He didn’t want some westie muscle-head trash taking his Diablo out for a joyride while he was inside. Fuck that. He breezed past, and the man opened the door for him at the last moment. Inside, the odour of cigar smoke filled his nose. Paul, the proprietor, appeared instantly, smiling broadly with teeth that glowed blue under the black lights.
‘Good to see you. Won’t you come this way?’
Damien was escorted into a small private room with plush red couches and curtains. A cheap-looking chandelier hung in the centre, and a bar lit with neon glowed in one corner, champagne bottles lined up neatly before a bevelled mirror.
He looked around, disappointed. ‘Where is she?’ Damien asked impatiently.
‘You want a drink, man? Veuve?’ He clicked his fingers and gestured to a young woman in a miniskirt and short leather top. She disappeared behind a red curtain. ‘It’s good to hear from you. It’s been a while,’ he went on.
Damien didn’t like the club owner’s smile. It was a bit too easy, too try hard. ‘I’ve been away,’ he said vaguely and looked around the room.
It was just a tacky red square room, candle wax stuck to the gaudy carpet. Worse than he remembered.
The pink pill had really set in now. He wanted to fuck.
‘Where is she?’
‘Have some champagne. Relax. You’ll like her. Don’t worry. I knew you’d like her as soon as you called …’
Damien didn’t know this man Paul very well — he’d even forgotten his last name — but he had some reputation in certain circles. And Damien had got desperate. Now the small talk was beginning to put him on edge. He didn’t want to be jerked around. If he was going to take a chance, it had to be worth it, right? He didn’t care to be manipulated. Too many drinks and the lighting too low, and you didn’t know what you were getting. They could make them look younger than they really were. Some of them know the act.
In Monaco, if you know the right people, everything was easy. It was no problem. Australia irritated him. Small cities, small minds. Everyone so fucking boring and straight. He wouldn’t have come back except that he’d run out of cash.
The curtains moved and an attractive blonde appeared. She held a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice, and she smiled at him, hopeful. She set the bucket down and popped the cork, then passed him a fresh glass of champagne. Damien took it without giving her a second glance. She was not at all his type.
He waited impatiently for the entertainment he’d been promised, and when she arrived, she did not disappoint. She was beautiful, small. Big brown eyes. Heart-shaped mouth. Her hair was straight and black, her skin a deep, glossy olive.
‘This is Maria,’ Paul said. That wouldn’t be her real name. ‘Like I said, she’s new here. She doesn’t speak a lot of English.’
Damien smiled at her, his mind already ticking over what he wanted to do to her, and how. ‘What’s your name? Maria?’
She just looked at him with those big eyes.
‘How old are you?’
She looked nervously to Paul. ‘Go on,’ he told her.
‘Eighty teen,’ she said slowly. She was trying to say eighteen. And she was lying.
Good, he thought. Good.
‘We want to be alone now,’ Damien told Paul, without looking at him.
‘You’ve got as long as you like. I can bring you some —’
‘I don’t want anything. Just leave.’
He heard the door close. Maria stood nervously in front of him. Perhaps Damien shouldn’t have underestimated Paul. This was going to work out fine.
He heard the door open again.
‘Hey, I said I didn’t want —’
The look in the girl’s eyes told him to turn, and when he did, the words froze in his throat.
Holy shit.
The American.
His father’s security man appeared through the doorway, and in a flash Damien found himself being taken f
orcibly by the arm away from the girl and out of the small private room of Le Chat.
‘Your services will not be required,’ The American told Paul, who looked red-faced and panicked. He slipped him an envelope as they went past and Paul closed his hand around it.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
Before he knew it, Mr White had extracted the keys to Damien’s car, and was placing him in the passenger seat. Damien was too mortified to protest.
‘Put your head down,’ Mr White told him as he got into the driver’s side and closed the door.
‘Hey, I —’ he began to protest.
‘Put your head down now.’
Finally he complied. He slid down in the passenger seat and bent his head low.
‘Lower, please.’
He shifted sideways and covered his face with his hands.
‘Better.’
Mr White pulled out onto Bayswater Road with Jack’s son. He immediately spotted the white car of a known paparazzi going the other way. He didn’t want to be photographed driving Damien’s car. He didn’t want to be photographed at all. Mr White avoided photographs and video recordings whenever possible, as a matter of habit.
‘Stay down. There is paparazzi following,’ he informed Cavanagh Junior.
Damien took a sharp, audible breath. ‘Have you been watching me?’ he asked.
‘It is my job to look after your father’s interests,’ he replied coolly. Of course he’d been watching him.
He shot a look to the passenger seat. Damien appeared slack-mouthed. He’d sat up again. ‘Stay down, please.’
‘You … He’s having me spied on? You are spying on me? Hey, what happened to the bouncer guy?’ he said, belatedly realising that no one had been next to his car.
‘He could identify you.’
‘Holy shit! What did you do to him?’ Damien was freaking out. Mr White wondered what he was on. Ecstasy? Something else?
‘Nothing has happened to him. He just needed to have a talk with one of my colleagues. You should know that Le Chat nightclub has CCTV cameras in every room. The toilets. And the private rooms.’
Damien fell silent.
He didn’t say another word on the drive back to Palm Beach.
CHAPTER 33
Ringing, ringing …
Andy woke with a heavy head to the irritating alarm ring of his mobile phone. He reached over to grab it off the hotel bedside table and accidentally knocked it onto the floor, where it continued to chirp and vibrate amongst his scattered clothes until it finally lay still.
Mak.
Andy sat up and observed the covers on the left side of the bed, pulled back and still showing the faint indent of a sleeping body. Had she really been there? No note. No sounds from the bathroom. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at the clock. One minute past six. He swung his legs off the bed, walked to the shower in a daze and started the water, which hit him in a cold spray at first, before warming. He stepped inside and let it pour over his face. It was far too early to ponder all that had happened the night before. That would require a lot of thinking, he knew.
First thing, coffee, he thought. Second, he had to get to the hospital and speak to someone about Jimmy’s wounds. What was the trajectory of the bullet? If Mak’s story checked out, and Jimmy was shot from close range or from level height and not above, how would Hunt explain that? Who was the third witness with Hunt? What did the two other officers see?
Showered and dressed in a dark blue suit that needed pressing, tie hanging loosely around his neck, Andy left his room and stalked the corridor towards the elevator.
Andy Flynn got out of his car and squinted against the increasingly intense sun, having forgotten his sunglasses in his race to leave the hotel room. He made his way to the small side entrance for the emergency department of St Vincent’s Public Hospital in Darlinghurst, pretending not to notice the press already camped on the footpath beyond the stretch of green terraced gardens, looking for a scoop. If Jimmy died, he would be the two hundred and fifty-second NSW police officer to be killed in the line of duty. Andy was not state police any more. He would be making no comments.
He passed an overweight woman in a wheelchair and a thin gentleman in a hospital gown clutching a cigarette and his IV drip outside the elevator for the car park — the sad unofficial smokers’ corner. Kelley had texted him to say Jimmy was out of surgery and he could go up to ICU.
Hospitals.
Relatives were scattered around the waiting area, reading the Daily Telegraph, the front page facing out to show the face of his dying friend. And on the cover of the Tribune was another familiar face. It made him stop in his tracks.
The front page held a picture of Jimmy, but also one of Mak — golden-haired and smiling in a photograph from her modelling days.
SOCIALITE SUSPECTED IN COP SHOOTING.
Oh fuck.
One of the copies of the Tribune had been discarded on a chair. Andy snatched it up. There she was: Mak — Jimmy’s accused shooter, the woman Andy had spent the night with. And though he now knew she was alive, he still had no way to reach her.
There’d been a time, before they’d lived together, when they would regularly leave notes for each other in the morning, after bouts of intense lovemaking. The urge to find her now, with everything going on, was almost overwhelming. Still, she’d made it clear that she was not going to frequent the same places, was not going to make it easy for herself to be found by the police or by Cavanagh’s men or by anyone. He just hadn’t realised that also meant him. He had no number for her. No address. Nothing. It had been a shock to have her in his bed and a worse shock to find her gone again, without a trace.
He flashed his badge to the triage nurse behind her bulletproof glass, and was told to head up to the Intensive Care Unit. He knew the way. He walked the hospital corridors in a funk. Nurses passed him, some nodding hello. Carol Richardson, an ex-girlfriend he was on good terms with, worked at Prince of Wales. He wouldn’t run into her here; still, some of the nurses seemed to hold Andy’s gaze, he noticed, as if they knew him.
He approached the frosted-glass goldfish bowl of the ICU waiting room, with its grey carpets and red and blue chairs, beneath a crucifix.
‘Andy …’
He whirled around. It was Angie Cassimatis. She was out of breath.
‘I saw you walk in and I couldn’t catch you. He’s gone into surgery again,’ she said. Her eyes were red-ringed and large, and turned down in the corners like a sad puppy. He almost couldn’t bear to look into them. ‘His heart hasn’t been coping,’ she said.
Jimmy had been on Warfarin to thin his blood. That meant his internal bleeding was worse than it could have been.
‘How are you? How are the boys?’ he asked, putting a hand on her delicate shoulder.
‘They’re with my mother. They’re … coping. I don’t think Jackson understands what’s happening. Edmond doesn’t, of course.’
‘When is he due to come out?’
She shook her head.
‘Is there anything I can do?’
He had been distant in recent months, he knew. Geography had separated them, but worse, Andy’s obsession with Mak’s disappearance had separated them. In a way he’d been a poor friend of late.
She shook her head again. ‘Oh, Andy.’
She pulled herself into his chest and wept while Andy stood helplessly.
‘It’s Nic, from the Electronic Evidence Branch.’
Nic Joseph. ‘I can’t really talk right now.’ Andy was waiting for news of Jimmy with an increasingly shaky Angie. ‘What’s up?’
‘Look, I thought you should know that something happened. With the laptop you gave me.’
He now had Andy’s complete attention.
‘It’s been destroyed.’
‘Destroyed? Since I called you last night?’ After what had happened to Jimmy, Andy had called to make sure that the laptop was still secure.
‘There was a fire overnight
. They think it was arson.’
‘But what was on the hard drive?’
‘I didn’t get to find out. We hadn’t begun with it yet.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘There’s a backlog.’
‘Well, you have some sort of copy, don’t you? Of the contents?’
Joseph didn’t answer.
Andy’s mouth went dry. This could not be a coincidence. It seemed to mean that the Cavanaghs and their reach went further than he could have imagined.
‘You must have a copy. Isn’t that what you guys do?’
‘Like I told you, we hadn’t started on it yet. We were going to get to it this morning. I told you last night. It was safe here, I thought. I mean, nothing like this has ever happened before. The place is always locked.’
‘Who else knew what this was about? The case it was attached to?’
‘Only two of us, I swear. Like, me and Garner. You know we are used to dealing with sensitive material. Nothing like this has happened before. I just don’t understand it.’
Andy understood it. Someone had got to Garner. Either that or …
The call.
Andy had called Joseph about it only hours before the fire. That’s how they knew. His phone was being tapped.
‘Christ. This line isn’t secure. I have to go,’ Andy said and hung up.
CHAPTER 34
Makedde Vanderwall looked at the pads of her fingers, wrinkled from a long soak in the cramped bath of her hotel. Curious, she thought, how a little thing could change so much. She cast a sideways glance at the object on the edge of the bath — a thin and fairly flat object about five inches long, housed in plastic.
Such a tiny little big little thing.
She’d woken in Andy’s hotel bed before sunrise, barely believing where she was. And when the queasiness hit once more, the penny had finally dropped.
A thin line. Such a tiny little big little thing.