The Tower

by Michael Duffy

  ‘A present for you,’ Randall said, walking over to his desk.

  Out came a black bag with a long strap.

  Harmer smiled. ‘Christmas is early this year.’

  As Troy opened a drawer in his desk and took out some latex gloves, Randall said, ‘A carpenter working on the store came in on Monday morning and put everything on the shelves into a bag, just like the owner had asked him to. An employee picked it up and took it out later in the morning, and it’s been sitting in her boot ever since.’

  Troy opened the handbag and removed a large wallet.

  ‘Margot Teresi’s?’ said Harmer.

  There were credit and charge cards in Margot’s name, but nothing else. He up-ended the handbag but there wasn’t much there: a key ring and a small pack of tissues fell out, some throat lozenges and a few receipts.

  ‘At least we’ve got the bag,’ Harmer said. She sounded unusually excited for a woman with her experience, but this investigation was having that effect on people. Media attention could change the way you saw a case.

  ‘It’s not much,’ he pointed out.

  ‘What do you want?’ Randall said.

  ‘A diary would be nice. And her address book.’

  ‘I suppose you were hoping for a lead on Mr A, her phone?’

  ‘We don’t need the physical phone, we go through her records,’ Harmer explained. She seemed to trust Randall.

  Troy said, ‘Mr A doesn’t seem to be anyone Margot called that we can identify. But one number she’d rung a lot is a mobile that was purchased under a false ID.’

  ‘Could be her drug dealer,’ said Randall.

  ‘We’ll follow up all possibilities,’ Troy said a little abruptly. ‘Thanks for finding this. It’s a help.’

  ‘We’re here to help,’ Randall said. ‘All you need to do is ask.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Harmer said, glancing briefly at Randall then back to Troy. ‘Sergeant Stone is still at The Tower. He seems to have interviewed a lot of the workers on the site. People are wondering why.’

  ‘People?’ said Troy.

  ‘We have a good relationship with Warton Constructions. They’re not happy.’

  ‘I’m sure the sergeant has his reasons.’

  ‘This is serious,’ Randall said. ‘Let me make it official. He’s asking questions and speaking to people totally unrelated to the investigation. For a while it was just irritating, but now the union has expressed its concern to my boss. I’ve been given a day to sort it out. He’s asking questions that some blokes say concern industrial relations. But it’s not just that. He had a strange conversation with one of the structural engineers this morning. Insisted he keep it confidential.’

  Troy looked at both of them, trying to hide his unease. ‘What about?’

  ‘About shift rosters. From last month.’

  Shift rosters.

  ‘I’ll look into it.’

  Shift rosters.

  Harmer nodded goodnight to them both and left the room.

  Randall stretched and yawned. ‘Feel like a bite?’

  ‘Sure.’ He felt too excited to go home, and wanted the chance to find out more about Teresi and The Tower. ‘Is there anything more you want to tell me about Stone on a formal basis?’

  ‘No. The union don’t muck around. They’ve been pretty good on this job, and we don’t want to put that at risk.’

  Troy called Anna and told her he’d be home late. As he spoke, he remembered the emptiness of their conversation last night. But she sounded cheerful, even perky, rattling on about what she’d done that day and her plans for the weekend. It was the way she was most of the time they were together, as though there was nothing wrong between them. He’d never seen it before, but he realised now that this was the worst thing about his marriage, this lie. If he and Anna fought more, at least talked about it, there would be more honesty. But on top of the problems they had, he was expected to put up with this pretence that everything was okay. And he had, he’d gone along with the lie.

  He hung up, and Randall said, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Let’s eat.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re okay? No problem getting the night off?’

  ‘No problem at all. Where will we go?’

  ‘There’s a place I know, a club. Some of the Morning Star people go there and they’ve made me a temporary member.’

  Troy told him he had to make a call first and went out into the corridor. He rang Stone and got his voicemail, left a message about the union complaint. When he hung up he looked at his phone angrily, thinking back over what Harmer and Randall had told him. If Stone reacted to the message he’d just left in his normal manner, nothing would happen. That meant the union might walk off the site tomorrow. If the police were blamed, the repercussions would be enormous.

  Reluctantly, he dialled Kelly’s number, hating Stone for leaving him with no choice. Kelly answered and started to explain the arrangements for the imminent press conference, as though that was what he must have called about. At last she said she had to go as she was being called by the media officer. Quickly Troy explained about the union, but she didn’t want to know. She sounded uninterested, unsympathetic, impatient.

  ‘I’ll call you back after the conference,’ he said.

  ‘That won’t be necessary. These things happen, Nick, and we sort them out. In this case, you sort them out.’

  ‘But Stone’s the OIC—’

  ‘You want to go to Florida, I expect you to be able to handle something like this.’ As though he’d already been bought and repriced. Maybe I don’t want to go to Florida, he was about to say, but she had already said goodbye and hung up.

  This was new, to be dismissed by her quite so thoroughly. He couldn’t understand why she’d done it.

  He went back into the office and found Randall waiting for him.

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Troy nodded, realising it would be good to have a long talk with Randall. If he was going to sort out this union business as Kelly wanted, he would need the engineer’s help.

  Twenty-three

  They left the station and walked until they reached the arcades beneath one of the city’s latest and most expensive developments, the International Centre. As they went, Randall said, ‘I’ve been having nightmares.’

  ‘You should see someone.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I had my debrief today.’

  ‘You reckon they can fix you up in one session?’

  Troy looked to see if he was joking, but the man seemed genuinely worried. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, more gently now. ‘The guy suggested I do some more exercise. You ever done any boxing?’

  He bunched his fists and did a few jabs as they walked, looking at Randall for a response.

  Randall laughed uncertainly. ‘I didn’t know people still boxed.’

  Troy explained how he’d once fought as an amateur.

  ‘You look too intelligent for that,’ Randall said.

  It was about testosterone, not intelligence. Troy explained how boxing had helped when he was younger.

  ‘Why didn’t you keep it up?’

  ‘I joined the police force.’

  The police had been the beginning of a new life. He recalled his training at the academy in Goulburn, how he’d taken to it so intensely that he’d stopped thinking about his life to that point. The past had become irrelevant, the rubble on which something better had been erected. He hadn’t thought about it in a long while.

  They waited to cross George Street, watching the crowd all around them.

  ‘You like this city?’ Randall said.

  Troy had never felt like he had any choice, he saw Sydney as the world. It was a limitation, he knew, but not one that worried him.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘It’s a fine place,’ the engineer said. ‘A fine place.’

  He led them to a modest doorway with a sign on a small brass plate in English
and Chinese lettering. The English version read FORTUNE CLUB. They climbed the red-carpeted stairs inside and came to a wood-panelled lobby where a tall Eurasian woman greeted them from behind a glass counter. She was in her forties and beautiful, and as they reached her a door to the right opened and a Thai woman appeared. She was much younger and also beautiful, and like the older woman wore a long silk dress with bare shoulders and plunging neckline. Troy wondered what sort of club it was.

  Randall told the women they had a booking and a moment later they were shown through another door into a big, noisy restaurant. As they made their way between the tables, Troy saw that most of the diners were older Chinese men, usually in large groups and with a fair scattering of women he took to be their wives. He adjusted his idea of what was going on here. The waitresses were all extraordinarily attractive, dressed like the woman who was leading them to their table, but otherwise it looked like a normal restaurant.

  When they were seated, the woman took their orders for beers and Randall smiled. ‘Are we happy?’

  ‘What’s not to be happy about?’ Troy said, looking around.

  Not all of the waitresses were Asian. A young Scandinavian woman was serving lobster at a table nearby.

  ‘I thought this might help your education in things Chinese,’ Randall said. Then, wriggling his body slightly, ‘Aren’t these chairs comfortable?’

  Troy wondered if he was being serious. The chairs were padded and had gilt arms, but they were hardly worthy of mention. Yet Randall had closed his eyes and looked incredibly relaxed, as though for a moment he was experiencing the height of luxury. Then he came back, eyes wide open and laughing again, saying something about the need to chill out. Troy nodded. Maybe Randall was, as Anna put it, a man who listened to his body.

  Their beers came, along with menus almost as padded as the chairs, and the waitress said someone would be along to take their orders shortly.

  Randall drank half his glass in one swallow. ‘The point of this place,’ he said, ‘is for men like Henry Wu to be waited on by the most gorgeous women. These men are seriously wealthy, they’re gradually taking over the world, and this is part of it for them. It’s not about sex. It’s about power.’

  Troy watched a Mexican woman whose body was composed entirely of curves glide by with a tray of drinks.

  ‘Sex,’ he said, ‘comes into it.’

  ‘Strangely not,’ Randall said. ‘It’s very important that this not be a knocking shop. The girls get paid a great deal to be waitresses, and if they get caught with customers out of hours they’re sacked.’

  ‘You know a lot about it.’

  ‘Henry is an interesting man; he’s behind this. I worked with him in China for a while. The money sloshing around up there is unbelievable. Once you’ve been to some of the nightclubs in Shanghai, this place doesn’t look so unusual.’ He shrugged and finished his beer quickly. As soon as he put the glass on the table, a waitress appeared to remove it.

  ‘Henry explained this place to me when he signed me up,’ he said. ‘He knows I like women. The Chinese are pretty pragmatic about that sort of thing, but you have to obey the rules.’ He ordered some more beers, and when the waitress had gone said, ‘What about Indian women?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Troy said.

  ‘Not much action lately?’

  ‘My wife’s had postnatal depression.’ Troy grimaced. It was not the sort of thing he wanted to share with other people. But something about Randall, this place, was relaxing him. Maybe it was the padded chair. He felt better now than he had in a long time. Maybe he’d been keeping things bottled up for too long.

  If Randall was surprised by what Troy had said, he didn’t show it. ‘Bad luck,’ he said, looking at the menu. ‘What are you going to have?’

  In the end Troy let Randall order for both of them. He seemed to care about his food, and obviously knew his way around a Chinese menu. For the next hour, as they worked their way through a banquet and two bottles of wine, Randall did most of the talking, telling Troy how he’d worked for Warton in Shanghai, one of thousands of Western architects and engineers across Asia. As he spoke, Troy found himself warming to the man. He mightn’t appreciate boxing, but beneath the easy manner there was earnestness and ambition and curiosity, all qualities Troy valued. He asked why he’d become an engineer, and Randall told him about his father.

  ‘What about you?’

  Troy explained how his parents had died.

  ‘Were you in the car?’ Randall asked.

  ‘No.’

  He remembered the two uniformed police who’d come to the front door and told his grandmother, remembered her collapsing on the floor.

  Randall said, ‘Fourteen would be a hard time to lose both your parents.’

  Troy looked away. Sometimes it seemed as though his whole life had been a response to the searing pain of that separation. But of course, most of the time he didn’t think about it.

  His grandmother had looked after them for a few months, but she’d been affl icted by premature senility. Georgie had recognised it first but said nothing. The penny didn’t drop for Troy until the day he found her purse in the kettle.

  ‘I was a handful,’ he said. ‘Didn’t help gran at all. Georgina, my sister, was very angry at me for a long time.’

  They’d been made wards of the state, and Georgie had blamed him for that. After a few months in a boys’ home in Liverpool, where he’d been in fights almost every day, he’d been fostered by a big family in Guildford. Catholics, but not happy people. Troy had never been sure why they’d taken him in. The father was an electrician with a government department. Georgie had gone to a solicitor and his wife in Killara, on the other side of the city geographically and socially. They hadn’t seen much of each other after that.

  ‘The guy at Guildford used to get drunk about once a week,’ he recalled. ‘Really hammered. After I’d been there a year he was laying into his wife one night—this woman was a saint—I subdued him with a frying pan.’

  ‘Subdued?’

  Troy shrugged. ‘It was only aluminium.’

  ‘Still, you’re a strong bloke.’

  ‘I wasn’t so big then, but I had to do something pretty drastic. It knocked him out.’

  He could recall the awkward weight of the pan, how hard it had been to wield. He’d used more force than he’d intended.

  ‘That’s why I got into boxing,’ he said. If you’ve got that anger in you, Troy thought, you need to learn how to control it. He really should take up boxing again.

  ‘He didn’t tell the cops about the assault?’

  ‘Wouldn’t have done his reputation with his mates much good.’ Troy smiled at the memory. ‘I was lucky, over the next few years I did a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have. Picked up a few times, but never charged.’

  It was just as well, or he’d never have got into the police.

  ‘Hard times?’

  ‘Not really.’

  After the frying pan incident, he’d lived on the streets. Actually, it had been in a shed at the back of an old railway yard. In those days, western Sydney was full of recently closed industrial sites. The authorities had come looking for him, but a month later he’d turned fifteen, and never saw them again. There’d been a government payment for homeless kids in those days; they’d called it the running-away-from-home allowance. At the time it had seemed a bearable sort of existence.

  The hard thing had been losing his parents. Sometimes, gathered around a bong with other homeless kids, in the shed or some squat, he’d look at them, go over the little he knew of their backgrounds. Most had come from single-parent homes, some had been abused. They had parents who were drug addicts and crims. He felt like saying, There’s been a mistake. I shouldn’t be here. But he hadn’t known who to say it to.

  ‘Street kid,’ Randall said, sounding impressed.

  This was why Troy rarely talked about those times.

  ‘It was what I did,’ he said. ‘Not who I am.’
r />   He’d tried God. Never went to church, but sometimes, at night, lying there in a sort of loft at the top of the shed, feeling scared and clutching his mother’s rosary beads, he would pray. He got into speed and dope, nicked things to make it possible. On balance he felt God had looked after him. A few years later he’d met Luke, and gradually the priest had turned him around. He’d got a job, gone to TAFE to finish his schooling and achieved a reasonable pass.

  ‘I wanted to be a priest for a bit,’ he said. Most people were surprised at this, but Randall just nodded. Troy recalled him saying earlier he was a Catholic too. It was something else they had in common. ‘I was all for it, but one day Luke told me I was only doing it to please him. He said I wasn’t cut out for that, but still needed a family. It was either the army or the police.’

  ‘Why the cops?’

  ‘Luke said it was like the priesthood. Having an unhappy past could be a help.’

  ‘So this is why you’re so self-controlled.’ Randall added quickly, ‘I’m not saying you’re a loner, but you’re independent, aren’t you?’

  He was going deep too quickly. But Troy was in the mood. He finished his wine and waited impatiently as a waitress refilled his glass. ‘I guess. After something like that, both parents at once, you don’t want to take any chances.’

  It was a long time since he’d talked about himself, and he remembered now how useful it could be. Some things do not exist until they are said. Things can die unless they’re said again.

  He was feeling good. And it wasn’t just the wine.

  Randall’s attention had been distracted by something behind Troy. ‘Don’t turn around,’ he said, ‘but Henry Wu is over there.’

  From the corner of his eye Troy saw two Chinese men in expensive suits approaching them. They’d eaten already and were on their way out. One of them, the taller one, stopped a few times to speak briefly with other diners. Troy recognised him as the man he’d seen in Siegert’s office on the first day of the investigation, arguing to have the site kept open. He saw that the men Wu was talking to made an effort to rise, but he would indicate by a hand on their shoulder that this was not necessary. They seemed deeply grateful for this.