Swann edged into Derek’s place at the crowded bar, got an elbow up but shook his head at the barman. Cooper only came up to his chest, and Swann had to peer down at him.
‘Not drinking with me?’ Cooper asked, the derision in his voice responding to Swann’s unspoken insult.
A surge further along the bar caused the line of drinkers to move and flex like a snake. The suit behind Cooper buckled at the knees, then pulled himself up by grabbing the lawyer’s arm. With startling speed Cooper turned and shin-kicked him.
The drunk reared up out of instinct but just as quickly backed down. Nothing was said, but the apology was accepted. Cooper brushed cigarette ash off his sleeve.
Swann lit one of his own. ‘Got to be advantages to hanging out with gangsters, I suppose.’
Cooper tried to smile. Sharp little teeth. White tongue.
‘You have something on me, use it. Otherwise —’
‘Not something on you, Cooper. Something for you.’
Cooper was looking at him hard, trying to read him. ‘Subtle distinction, in my experience.’
‘With friends like yours …’
‘No need to trade insults. We’re on opposite sides of this one, but we were both friends of Ruby. You know, she wanted to call you at one point, just before it happened. She said you were the one bastard left who could be trusted.’
‘So why didn’t she?’
‘Don’t know. Might have been better if she had,’ he said ruefully. ‘Things might be different.’
‘Not sure what I could have told her. World’s changed since I was last in town. But what about you? What sage advice did you pass on?’
‘I told her I’d handle it, I’d deal with her tax problem. Genuinely thought I had it covered.’ Cooper sucked down the ice in his glass, tried to catch the barman’s eye. ‘Ruby never talked about getting out of the game but she did say that you and Marion had done the right thing – taken your family and got away from all the palaver.’
It was true Cooper had always been a friend to Ruby, but only because there was something in it for him. And while he represented Ruby Devine and her girls, he also took care of the Italian gambling barons in Northbridge, men he was always in debt to, men who owed favours to the Liquor and Gaming bagmen who turned a blind eye. Despite all the money involved, information was the real currency of the black market, and nobody had been closer to Ruby Devine than Cooper. If she’d had information that might have harmed his associates and had threatened to use it, he’d have dropped her like a hot coal.
‘So what is it, then,’ Cooper said. ‘This something for me?’
‘Quid pro quo, Cooper. Where are you on the settlement of Ruby’s estate? I’m interested to know what’s happening to her investments.’
The lawyer put up a tired hand. ‘That’s some ways off, I’m afraid. Problems with the probate. Her affairs were a mess, as you can imagine.’
‘I’m an impatient man, Cooper.’
‘In any case, as I’ve told you before, only family members are privy to the conveyancing arrangements. Her children are under legal age and you’re not family.’
The set mouth, the fierce green eyes, the sharpness in his voice – Cooper had been working himself into a state, which told Swann he had him.
‘You’re an arsehole, Swann, coming after me in this place.’
Swann nodded with satisfaction. ‘Settle down,’ he said, ‘it’s too noisy for eavesdroppers. I know it was a local who dobbed Ruby in to the tax office – got a friend in Canberra. I want to know who you think it might have been.’
Cooper shrugged, glad to be let off with such an easy one. ‘Could have been anyone, you know that. A pissed-off girl. Some john. Moral crusader. Brought down Al Capone, didn’t it?’
‘In your opinion.’
Cooper’s eyes darted left, then set on Swann’s collar and rose to his neck. ‘What do I get out of it? Especially when you’re liable to quote me in court.’
Swann had to laugh at that. ‘This is something I intend to settle out of court. My word doesn’t mean a bloody thing on the record.’
Cooper’s expression became less wary. ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame there. If you’d listened to your mates, let this thing go. I don’t have kids myself, but I can imagine. What I’m saying is you’ve cut yourself off from a lot of help.’
Swann ignored him. ‘What you get out of it is that my friend in Canberra is a good friend. So answer the question.’
Cooper considered, then leaned in confidingly. ‘Well, I’d be looking at one of the other women. The competition.’
‘What’d you hear? I want to know exactly.’
‘Just that. Nothing specific.’
‘Nothing specific’s not going to stop the tax office getting ideas about your bookkeeping.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Cooper said quickly. ‘I just heard that either Pat or Annie or both, I don’t know, has hooked up with Mick Isaacs, brought him in as a silent partner.’
Mick Isaacs bought and trained racehorses. It was known around town that he and Cooper had fallen out over a gelding that Isaacs had trained for the lawyer and then refused to hand back.
‘Come on, why would the women bring a thug like Isaacs into it? Why would Casey allow it?’
‘I don’t know.’ Cooper’s voice was tinny as he tried to make himself small, insignificant. ‘He’d still get his cut, wouldn’t he? Maybe Isaacs was the one Ruby was going to hand to the tax people. Maybe she’d heard that he dobbed her in. Like I said, if you hadn’t burned your bridges with Casey, he’d be the one to ask.’
Swann tried to pass off a satisfied look. ‘Well, you hear anything else about it, you let me know.’ And having solicited the bullshit from Cooper, it was time to return the favour. ‘This friend in Canberra – reckons the audit into Ruby’s finances went further. Says you’re being looked at too. Some of her money seems to have gone missing – this is where it gets confusing. They’re following up on your trust funds, some of your other clients, transactions done in their names.’
Swann was reluctant to push it further. He slid a trusting tone into his voice, warmed his eyes to match. ‘Some wider taxation thing. The guy couldn’t be specific. But it was something big.’
Cooper waited a beat before lifting his face, outrage there in his small, lemon-sucking mouth.
‘That’s it? Did I hear you right?’
‘Like I said, quid pro quo. I learn any more, I’ll —’
‘I’ve got nothing to hide – what the hell are they looking at me for?’
Swann shrugged. ‘Look, I’ve gotta go, but you hear anything …’ He broke out of the line of drinkers and turned to the door, suppressing his smile. Michelle’s story about Cooper had legs, was the first promising sign in a long while. He nodded to Derek, waiting there with a brandy sidecar in each hand, then pushed through the double doors and out into the street.
Henry Barth, Liberal Premier of Western Australia for the past year, was, Partridge noted, a Master Mason like himself. He was a large man, and handsome, with the softened features of a matinee idol. The two had been introduced in the anteroom of the lodge shortly before the meeting, and in the premier’s eyes and handshake and carefully arranged smile, Partridge saw the marks of a seasoned politician.
It was a small lodge in one of Perth’s better suburbs, a suburb which had been largely bush during the premier’s childhood and which his father, he claimed, had helped clear with an axe and a saw. Partridge was seated beside Barth as the guest of honour. He wore a borrowed apron of white silk and blue trim with a single emblem of a compass and square. It bore the traditional seven chained tassels, three rosettes and a gold-stitched, all-seeing eye.
The business part of the evening had been blessedly short; the secretary and treasurer read the minutes of the previous meeting, and this was followed by the confirmation of a candidate to the second stage of Fellow Craft. The Master of the Lodge held aloft each of the stonemason’s tools – the gavel, the rule, th
e compass, the level and square – and solemnly described the moral lessons attributed to them, exhorting the young man to make manifest in every area of his life the Masonic tenets of brotherly love, charity and truth-seeking.
The candidate knelt with bowed head to accept his confirmation. He was in his mid-twenties, about the age Partridge was when he achieved his second degree. Partridge’s father, watching from the pews, was already a Grand Master despite his relative youth, his own father a Master Mason before him, and one of the founding members of the Grand Lodge of Victoria. Partridge remembered the glow of warmth he’d felt as the Master intoned these same words he listened to now, and the look from his father – devout and proud – but also the strange regret peculiar to a young man of Partridge’s background, with his future laid out there before him, his privilege such that he would never know defiance or struggle or hardship, merely the rituals of initiation.
As soon as the Master of the Lodge resumed his seat, the festive meal was announced, bottles of beer and wine were produced, and the formal atmosphere was replaced with the sound of conversation and laughter. Partridge allowed his glass to be filled with beer, hoping it might lessen his headache and accompanying sense of unease. He hadn’t attended a lodge meeting for decades, but it befitted him to behave in a manner appropriate to the occasion.
The Master of the Lodge rose again and tapped his wineglass with a teaspoon. A hush fell over the tables. ‘Brothers, before I open the floor to your toasts and songs, I have here a special personage, a distinguished visitor to our beautiful city. As you are no doubt aware …’
Partridge took a deep breath and another sip of beer, surprised to find himself anxious in the company of brothers. He even felt the old urge for a cigarette, something he had given away seventeen years ago, on the death of his father. He rose to respond to the toast, smoothed down his apron and raised his glass.
‘Master, I thank you for your kind words of welcome to this inviting lodge. My father, who as you have just heard was a Grand Master, always preferred his humble suburban lodge, the same lodge attended by his lifelong friend Sir Robert Menzies, to the greater splendour of the Grand Lodge, which some of you may have visited in East Melbourne.’
He looked across the tables at the respectful smiles, and for the first time saw Wallace, seated in a far corner by the door to the kitchens. The QC’s smile was rather less genuine.
‘Like Sir Robert’s family, the Partridges hail from Scotland, and I hope I’m able to do justice to the accent of the great Robert Burns.’ He took a sip of beer to lubricate his throat and prepared to recite. ‘ “Ther’s mony a badge that’s unco braw;/Wi’ ribbon, lace and tape on;/Let Kings an’ Princes wear them a’ –/Gie me the master’s apron!” ’
A cheer went around the tables as he finished the first stanza, his Scots accent finding its measure as the volume and tempo increased. ‘ “The honest craftsman’s apron,/The jolly Freemason’s apron,/Be he at hame or roam afar,/Before his touch fa’s bolt and bar,/The gates of fortune fly ajar,/’Gin he but wears the apron!” ’
Partridge held his glass higher, the sound of happy laughter egging him on through the rest of the poem. Amid the cries of approval when he was done, the brothers accepted his toast and drank deeply from their glasses. He bowed, then slumped in his seat, exhausted but buoyant.
Even the dour Master of the Lodge was smiling with pleasure, leaning across the premier towards him. ‘Wi’ a Scotsman’s lilt and delivered like a poet.’
The premier nodded in agreement, dabbing wine from his mouth with a napkin and taking up his spoon for the bowl of oxtail soup that had just been placed before him. He seemed about to say something when a burst of song rose from one of the tables. When he finally spoke it was from the side of his mouth in a firm whisper. ‘You really broke the ice there.’
‘The lasting influence of the Melbourne Grammar revue, I suspect.’
The premier’s charming smile didn’t waver for a moment but his voice became hard and blunt. ‘We’re among men here. Speak your mind.’
Partridge had been anticipating this. He leaned closer. ‘The terms of reference appeared sufficient from a distance; however —’
‘They are more than sufficient.’
‘They are narrow, to say the least.’
The premier laid down his soup spoon, gently pushed his bowl away. ‘Only if the superintendent in question is reliable. And believe me, he is not.’
‘His accusations may yet hold water. Mrs Devine’s murder was —’
‘Regrettable, but in no way linked —’
‘Without an investigative arm, it is very hard for me to determine that.’
Premier Barth smiled as though Partridge had made a joke. He clapped his hands together and sat back in his seat. ‘There is no need to bring investigators into this matter. Superintendent Swann has made his claims; it’s up to him to prove them. It is our – your – job to determine the credibility of his claims.’
‘For a royal commission to dispense with investigative powers is unprecedented. It verges on the —’
‘Now look here.’ The premier’s voice was quietly acidic but he was still smiling. ‘Before we announced this royal commission we had investigators interview all of the people who had come forward.’
‘But that was before I was appointed. And where are their statements? Why aren’t they listed to appear in person?’
‘Well, that’s my point. Having been interviewed, all these self-proclaimed witnesses decided against appearing. They withdrew their allegations. Every one of them.’
‘That is significant in itself, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Indeed it is. And it should tell you something about Superintendent Swann’s credibility – that there’s not a man or dog in Perth willing to stand beside him in court under oath. It’s one thing to spread rumours, quite another to substantiate them.’
Partridge felt the pressure of blood in his neck, and in his temples, which ached. The premier returned to his soup.
‘Who were these investigators, exactly? In what capacity were they employed?’
Barth’s eyes narrowed. ‘They were trained investigators. Professionals.’
‘You don’t mean they were detectives, surely? Policemen interviewing potential witnesses about the administration of the law that they themselves are charged with carrying out? That would amount to a clear conflict of interest.’
The premier placed his spoon on the surface of his soup, where it collected liquid and sank. His eyes never left Partridge’s but there was a new, considered tone in his voice. ‘Admittedly, we don’t always do things here as you might over your way. However, it can be said beyond a doubt that every one of the witnesses appearing at your commission is doing so because they feel they have something important to say.’
Aware they might be interrupted at any moment, Partridge pressed on. ‘None of this was made known to me before I accepted the commission. So I will say it again: without an investigative arm, this commission is toothless.’
The measured look in the premier’s eyes evaporated. His response was abrupt, changing the subject. ‘You took a very hard line today.’
‘I felt that QC Wallace’s questions were inciting and improper.’
The premier shook his head. ‘Wallace’s reputation, his experience and knowledge, cannot be faulted. Not to mention that he’s lately a brother. You can trust him.’
‘It is not a matter of my trusting Wallace, Premier. It is a matter of public trust.’
Barth scoffed. ‘The public? As far as the public goes, need I spell it out? It’s something I learned in the army, and which has held me in good stead ever since.’
‘You don’t set an inquiry unless you know the result,’ Partridge finished for him.
‘Quite so. Officially, our resources are limited. That is the end of it.’
‘We shall see. There’s always the governor.’
‘Given what has just happened to Prime Minister Whitlam, I would a
dvise against it. My opinion is that the governor would be very unlikely to intervene, in the circumstances. He is, however, an honourable man and I’m sure he will hear your complaints. I know this because we served together in the Intelligence Corp.’
The premier continued to stare evenly at Partridge. ‘Alternatively, I understand that you are unwell. That is unfortunate. If you prefer to retire hurt, as it were, I will be happy to accept your resignation.’
A great roar went around the room as the Master of the Lodge began to lead one table in song against the other. It was an old school song that Partridge had heard on the rugby field as a boy. ‘Scotch, Scotch, who are we? Scotch, Scotch, we, we, we …’
The premier nodded in amusement as the opposing table began their rejoinder amid hoots of laughter. ‘Deus Dux, Doctrina Lux. We are Christchurch, Dux Dux Dux …’
Swann followed the Stirling Highway away from the city and down to the coast, crossed the traffic bridge south over the river into Fremantle and parked the EK by the hamburger bar near the docks. He walked along the wharf, where shark fishermen were unloading their catch, humping gutted bronze whalers on their shoulders up the ramp. A customs launch berthed with a thud against the stays, and masts whined and flags cracked in the southerly breeze. A V8 Valiant chugged past in the direction of the junkyards.
He called Marion to let her know he was coming by, then dropped another coin to dial Terry. It wasn’t the agreed time to call but on the third attempt Terry picked up, back from a patrol. Swann asked him to check on Jacky’s story about the two murdered prostitutes then hung up. Working girls were notorious rumour-mongers, and while Jacky mightn’t have started this one, that she was shit-scared and on smack didn’t exactly fill him with confidence.
He returned to his car and drove through familiar streets, and within minutes pulled up outside his home. It was in a quiet suburb not a hundred yards from South Beach, only a block from the house where he’d grown up.
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