Line of Sight

by David Whish-Wilson

  ‘Meaning that, as you have claimed, it was the practice of other detectives to solicit such favours?’

  Swann nodded. ‘As you know, I am already on the record as saying that there has never been a time in the history of this state when prostitution and some of the policemen who controlled it haven’t come to a financial understanding. I can only assume this is still the case today.’

  Well put, thought Partridge.

  ‘But do you offer us any proof of this nefariousness, Superintendent Swann? Given the alleged extent and duration of this illegal activity.’

  Swann couldn’t stop a smile at the ridiculousness of the question. ‘Mr Wallace, the detectives of the Criminal Investigation Bureau are well versed in the art of evidence, in what constitutes it and how to avoid it. However, there is one aspect of this matter that cannot be explained away. I have here …’ And he raised a sheath of documents in the air.

  The room buzzed with anticipation. At last, something tangible. Wallace looked pale. Partridge glanced across to the Minister for Police, whose eyes flashed. The QC stepped forward and took the papers, rifled quickly through them.

  ‘Superintendent Swann, this is a royal commission. All evidence must be tended prior to the commission’s commencement, to establish whether or not the evidence falls within the terms of reference. I’m afraid, in this case…’

  Wallace walked the papers over to Partridge, passed them up to the bench, a satisfied smile on his face. Swann was shaking his head. Partridge flicked over the first page; the noise from the gallery was rising fast.

  ‘Silence in the court!’ he bellowed, and when it had become quiet resumed his examination. Land titles, dozens of them, in the names of a Juliet Casey, a Rosemary Webb, a Deborah Sherving. He returned the top sheet and leant towards the microphone. ‘Mr Wallace, you are quite correct that all documentary evidence needs to be examined prior to the commencement of the royal commission. However, in this case I will allow it. You asked Superintendent Swann whether or not he had evidence to support his assertions. Given your specific request, his tendering of the evidence is appropriate. Superintendent Swann, you may resume your statement.’

  QC Wallace’s face dropped as he recognised his blunder. He blurted, ‘No further questions, your Honour,’ and made for his seat, face averted.

  Partridge stopped him in his tracks. ‘No further questions, perhaps, Mr Wallace. But Superintendent Swann has not finished answering your current question. And I, for one, would like to hear his answer.’

  Wallace returned reluctantly to his place by the witness. He nodded his head for the clearly surprised Swann to continue.

  ‘As I was saying, I’m sure you might imagine a situation whereby a harm-minimisation system of the kind I just described could end up serving the interests of those who administer it.’

  Wallace had recovered his composure enough to inject a steely tone into his voice. ‘You’re talking about graft. That is a very serious allegation. I would take this opportunity to remind you that just because you are a witness in a royal commission doesn’t mean you are immune from the laws that govern defamation.’

  Swann ignored the threat. ‘I’m talking about tithing, as we call it, a sort of levy. Specifically with regard to Ruby Devine and the financial arrangements that existed between her and some of the detectives now investigating her death. I resigned my position in the CIB, transferred to a lesser position in the uniformed branch and took a posting to the country. I will leave people to draw their own conclusions about my motivations for doing that. What I’ve just given you are the accumulated assets of just three CIB officers, who between them own sixty-five properties in the metropolitan area. In their wives’ names, I might add, who are all unemployed as far as I can tell.

  ‘Now, before you tell me that it’s not within the terms of reference of this commission to pursue this matter, for reasons that many people find mysterious, let me just say that there’s plenty more to know – about investment companies, trust funds, rural properties, mining leases owned by officers inferior in rank to my own, as well as by those higher up the chain. Much higher. What I’ve given you is just the beginning.’

  Swann turned very deliberately to stare at Sullivan. A silence had descended on the courtroom and the stunned Wallace let it sit there, until it was broken by Swann.

  ‘A brothel owner is viciously murdered in a public place, CIB detectives on minimal salaries own riches beyond the dreams of any ordinary man, and yet this royal commission is unwilling to draw the obvious conclusions. Instead —’

  Uproar from the gallery now, which Partridge felt hit the cork wall behind him. He beat his gavel and called for order.

  Police Minister Sullivan sat staring impassively.

  The briny smell of the river was carried by the sea breeze right into the heart of the city. Partridge paused at an intersection to retrieve the scrawled address from his shirt pocket: 37 William Street. The dramatic day in court had rejuvenated him, prompting him to take Carol’s advice and walk to the GP’s, rather than make use of the driver and car allocated to him.

  There were no street signs, but above his head a building name was legible enough to make out the Chung Wah Association Hall, 25 Francis Street. The lights changed and the traffic broke past him, raising a faint veil of dust that he could taste but not see. He tugged down the edge of his fedora and raised a hand to protect his eyes from the glare shearing off the rooftops across the street.

  He became aware of somebody next to him, and turned to find an elderly man and a dog waiting for the lights. The man appeared to be a darker version of himself, similarly taut and compact, his white terrier barely the size of a loaf of bread. Partridge held up the scribbled address and the man squinted at it, then broke into a smile and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder in the direction he had come.

  Carol had assured him he couldn’t possibly get lost in Little Italy, repeating this twice in the expectation that he probably would. The GP was her husband’s cousin, and while his surgery was on William Street, a seedy part of town after dark, during the day it was perfectly safe. Partridge had been prescribed Dispirin by his own GP in Melbourne, as a way of keeping the fever down and easing his headaches, but the pills were no longer effective. His doctor had told him that his blood pressure was high, possibly as a result of the influenza, and that he should consider having it checked in Perth if the symptoms did not improve.

  Partridge nodded his thanks to the old man, who stepped off the kerb with the cambered walk familiar to those with bad hips. The sight of him limping in pain reinforced Partridge’s second reason for walking to the doctor’s. Ever since his retirement he had taken long daily walks with Margaret, regardless of the weather, and he suspected that his recent lack of exercise was contributing to his sleeplessness. He turned and began to walk back down into the valley of stalled traffic and Italian restaurants and nightclubs and travel agents, green, white and red flags fluttering in the breeze.

  Number 37 was an avocado-green, double-storey weatherboard with a corrugated-dirt lane running down one side. Fronting the lane was a placard declaring ‘Private yard no Parking’, which had been crudely crossed out and replaced with ‘Casual Parking 20 cents per Day’.

  On the other side of the lane was the Zanzibar Nightclub, a concrete affair painted in black-and-white zebra stripes, the footpath by the front door littered with cigarette butts and broken glass. This was the fifth or sixth nightclub Partridge had passed in as many minutes, all of them behind darkened windows and garishly named in neon signs – the Glamarama, the Klondike, the Glass Slipper, the Love Seat – and all of them smelling of yeasty carpet, even from the street. Between the nightclubs and the adult bookshops and the Italian restaurants and greasy spoons were massage parlours, whose purpose was betrayed by the naked red globes lighting the doorsteps and by the hard-faced men in miner’s dungarees smoking as they waited outside.

  It occurred to Partridge that he didn’t feel in the least bit self-cons
cious, which wouldn’t be the case were he to find himself in such a location in Melbourne. He wondered whether this was a feature of being out and about in the cooling amber dusk, but on looking around at the men of varying ages drifting along the street, their eyes trawling, unafraid and cheerful, he realised that his cocktail-hour mood was more likely the result of his anonymity, his distance from the awkwardness that would define his presence in a red-light district on his home turf.

  He paused at the foot of the gloomy wooden stairs of number 37, with their threadbare carpet, loose nails and ancient musty reek, and he smiled, pleased at having embarked on this curious adventure. He took his wrist and felt for his pulse – it was insistent, invigorated by the walk.

  The stairs creaked under his step, the noise startling in the narrow space within the floral-wallpapered stairwell. But more surprising was the weightlessness he felt as he continued to climb, as if something heavy had seeped out of him while walking, like a trail of sand from his pockets, the lightness bearing him up the stairs a clear dizziness now, a rising above himself and a floating there, trying not to topple back. And then the sudden pain, burning in his chest, as he clambered up the final steps towards the door.

  Swann waded until the backwash carried him under towards the reef. He held his breath and kept his eyes closed. The current quickened as the channel deepened but he didn’t lunge for the surface. He let himself be dragged across the bottom, sand scraping on his belly.

  It was only when red lights appeared out of the darkness and the current finally let him go that he opened his eyes. He sat on his haunches, feet ready to spring, until he couldn’t take the thudding in his head any longer and drove himself up to the surface.

  The light was soft and clear over the ocean, the land alive under its tender glow. A gull sitting nearby regarded him suspiciously. The distant sound of traffic was a measure of how far he had been carried from the shore. Before him the sun was sinking into the waterline, and an orange blush spilled across the sea. Now came the best part – the stabbing light of the day having gone, the water and sky and reef, and the succulents on the dunes behind were all startling and new, like after a rain.

  He rolled onto his stomach and crawled across the water, peering down at the weedy ocean bed. He felt refreshed but not clean. A residual anxiety he had hoped to purge with breathlessness remained deep in his lungs.

  He had won his morning in court, no doubt about it, but releasing the land titles of Casey, Webb and Sherving was going to cost him. The countless hours he’d spent in court observing lawyers had taught him well, and he’d been ready for Wallace. He knew the QC would assume he didn’t have any evidence – had wanted him to assume just that, which was why Swann hadn’t given the titles to the media. And Wallace had walked right into it.

  But the repercussions were going to be harsh. Swann had broken the code all over again – he had named names.

  His satisfaction had indeed proved to be short-lived. The morning in court might have gone his way but the afternoon seemed an eternity of disgrace. The trick cyclist Wiener was called to document Swann’s alleged breakdown. Swann hadn’t seen the shrink for months, by choice rather than mutual agreement, and this appeared to have angered the man. Professor Wiener, Head of Psychiatry at the University of Western Australia, reminded Swann of the old man in Twelve Angry Men, but he was nowhere near as polite. He was a Jewish refugee from Budapest, a ferocious lover of his new country but for the matter of his children, one of whom was in jail for fraud and the other dead by her own hand.

  In their three sessions, Wiener had probed Swann with questions he tried not to resent. He was on extended special leave and eager to get back to work. The one obstacle in his way was Wiener and his questions.

  Now Swann regretted telling him anything at all. Wiener had sat in court with his hands on his walking stick, speaking directly to the gallery. Some witnesses were like that. The majority looked to the judge when they talked, others stared up at the ceiling, but Wiener made sure the gallery didn’t miss a word, the journalists in particular. He repeated himself on occasions, like a patient lecturer, making sure they got it all down. His mild accent gave his words added authority, as though Freud himself were in the room.

  The psychiatrist’s discretion extended only as far as the rules of his employment. He did not relate Swann’s actual stories, as told in his consultations, but described Swann’s ‘illness’. He spoke in strong terms and lurid tones, as if he were an inspector gazing over the rotten wares of a fishmonger, pointing out the grey flesh, the rouged gills, the oily scales.

  His discussion of Swann’s symptoms had led to a diagnosis: a clear case of clinical depression with evidence of paranoid episodes. It was the paranoia that was troubling to Wiener, because depression wasn’t unusual in men of Swann’s age and occupation. Wiener testified that the human nervous system inevitably deteriorated with years of strain and hard drinking: he presented this opinion with an air of tolerance and objectivity. But paranoia, stated Wiener, amounted to nothing less than a plot against oneself, a self-destructive projection of one’s guilt onto those that most resembled oneself, a projection of all the worst characteristics found in oneself which one was too cowardly to acknowledge.

  Having said as much, Wiener made eye contact with Swann for the first time that afternoon, just before delivering the final nail in Swann’s credibility. Such persons, claimed the doctor, not only made unreliable witnesses, they could also be highly dangerous. As the psyche continued its struggle to reveal the truth to itself, it sought also to destroy itself in order to bring the conflict to an end.

  Without raising his eyes, Swann sensed that the swell had increased as he neared the beach. Any moment now a wave would break over him. If he was in the wrong place it would spear him down into the sand and hold him under until it passed; if he was in the right place he would ride it until his weight dissolved and he found himself delivered gently onto the shore.

  Brushing the sand from his legs he felt strangely earthbound. The exercise had done him good. But when he’d towelled off he glanced up to see Marion further down the beach. She was looking for him among the sunbathers on the slope facing the departed sun, where he usually was. The only person who knew Swann was at the beach right now was Reggie, and Marion wasn’t dressed to swim. When she spotted him she didn’t wave, and he felt something lurch in his chest.

  On reaching each other she removed her sunglasses and he saw the tears on her face, her red eyes. Her mouth an open maw. He couldn’t bring himself to ask, because he already knew.

  ‘They’ve found someone,’ she got out finally.

  ‘Oh.’ It was all he could manage. ‘Not …’ He couldn’t say his daughter’s name, even though they’d both rehearsed this moment a thousand times, waiting for the call they knew would come.

  ‘Come with me,’ was all she said, and set off in the direction of the clubhouse.

  There was no question of his following in the Holden. He went instead to her Datsun and stood waiting by the passenger door while she got in. He couldn’t rid his head of the image of Louise laid out dead. Or worse, those moments before her death, waiting for him to find her, her eyes pleading.

  ‘Light me a cigarette,’ she said as the engine fired.

  He lit one for himself as well and didn’t ask where they were headed. Didn’t want to hear the name spoken.

  There was violence in the way Marion worked the gears, even though she wasn’t driving quickly. She waited patiently at stop signs and lights and allowed traffic to cut in before her. She wasn’t normally such a courteous driver.

  ‘I’ve left the girls alone,’ she said. Then broke. ‘I don’t want to see this.’ Her tears started again, spreading across the stains left by the earlier ones, dropping down onto her shirt.

  Swann could put a name to every corpse he’d ever seen. He had never become jaded about murder, like some of his colleagues. He had been to victims’ funerals and held the hands of their loved ones and had t
hought he understood.

  He’d understood nothing. The pain that he felt now – there were no words for it.

  She pulled into the forecourt of the Park Lane Motel.

  ‘Oh no,’ he whispered. He’d assumed they were driving to the Gnangara pine plantation, where the bodies of the murdered were routinely dumped. He had been called there countless times, through the eerie spaciousness between the rows of trees, symbols of a violent order that drew murderers to it.

  But the Park Lane Motel was right in the heart of the city, not far from Swann’s own hotel. It was also the last place Louise had been seen alive.

  There was a terrible familiarity about the way they climbed the stairs, moving soundlessly towards the room that Louise had stayed in, and had disappeared from, leaving nothing behind but an unpaid bill and her name in the ledger.

  Swann knew they were headed for her room. And he knew his wife knew it. The hotel manager who greeted them knew it. And perhaps her murderer was even now watching as Swann approached the semicircle of uniformed police and detectives and forensic staff gathered around the door.

  They didn’t see him until he was right behind them, then they turned as one, taking in his swimming trunks and thongs, and Swann saw in their faces that the dead girl in room 83 wasn’t his daughter.

  They let him through and Marion followed. The window was open to the traffic below and all the lights in the room were on. The girl was in a kneeling position on the bed, propped against the window, the sea breeze blowing her hair. As he stepped forward a gust slammed the door shut behind them.

  Her face and breasts were pressed down onto the sheets. Her arms were stretched out in front of her, palms up. She looked to be in prayer, except that she was naked. A needle remained in her left arm, beneath a cord tied round her lower bicep. Her hand was purple with trapped blood.

  Michelle.