‘Um,’ said the young man with car keys in his hand, ‘is it all right if we get our car? We were just going out.’
‘Sorry,’ said the commander, ‘crime scene. You’re going to have to manage without it.’
‘Happy New Year!’ slurred the girl. She said it American-style, with the emphasis on ‘new’. Wonder she didn’t pronounce it ‘noo’, the commander thought. He was fifty-five, due to retire the following year, and was known in the drug squad as a dinosaur. The intruders disappeared into the lift, all of them opening their phones.
‘Bugger. Media’ll be here in ten minutes,’ said the younger officer from the Mitsubishi.
‘No, they won’t. And you know why?’
‘No, boss.’
‘Because you’re going to be standing up there, keeping them out. Take a roll of tape with you, and use it.’
It was a long night. The video team arrived, and recorded a by-the-book cautioning of Mr Lee, his repeated insistence on production by the police of a search warrant, and the eventual (ninety-five minutes later) arrival of the said warrant — with a smear of tomato sauce on one corner. Thereafter two hours of evidence video were captured, covering the systematic search of every receptacle in the storage space and recording the production and individual labelling of seventy-two plastic bags that were proved, once the analysts were finished with them, to contain not just ice — a large commercial quantity of methylamphetamine — but also significant weights of cocaine, heroin and marijuana. The customary guns and cash were uncovered too. The Aladdin’s-cave-of-drugs cliché was going to wear thin by the time the court process was completed.
Mr Lee, who had no previous convictions but knew enough to answer no questions, was in due course to fall into the hands of a firm of criminal lawyers who persuaded him to conduct a committal hearing in the Local Court at great length and to no discernible purpose. What defence did he have? Six months later, his money had run out and his business — a legitimate mobile phone franchise operation in Pennant Hills — had closed its doors. He’d been left with little choice but to plead guilty, and take his fifteen-year sentence on the chin. Deportation to New Zealand awaited. At least he wouldn’t have to pay for that.
It wasn’t his defence brief that David Surrey was to offer Harry, but that of a young man of Vietnamese descent. Three days after Mr Lee was shown to his cell at Long Bay’s remand unit, bail having been applied for but refused, the commander of Operation Sirius and four of his Mosman team knocked on the door of the Nguyen family home in Carlingford at dinner time, and arrested the youngest son.
At the front door, Mrs Nguyen clung to the commander’s uniformed arm, trying to tug him back to explain this catastrophe or, better still, to change his mind. Craig Nguyen stared blankly at his mother from the back seat of one of the police cars parked outside the neat texture-brick house. Then he looked down at his hands, amazed to see them cuffed together.
‘Madam,’ said the commander, gently but firmly lifting the woman’s hand clear of his sleeve, ‘you should ring your solicitor. Get one of your other children to do it. You can tell the solicitor Craig’s going to be taken to Hornsby police station and he’ll be charged with supply of a prohibited drug. Methylamphetamine, we have reason to believe.’
Craig’s brother Ronald appeared from within the house in a Billabong T-shirt and football shorts. ‘I just spoke to Mr Surrey,’ he said. ‘He wants to know what’s the basis for the arrest? What’s your evidence?’
The officer paused as he left the house. ‘You can tell Mr Surrey that Craig’s fingerprints were identified on seven bags of drugs we located in a building at Mosman last week. On New Year’s Eve. We know he’s an associate of a man who calls himself Christopher Lee, who we’ve been watching for months, and who’s a major dealer on the northern beaches. He’s going down for a very long time.’
Ronald Nguyen was obviously shocked, his mother uncomprehending. Ronald was a far closer associate of Chris Lee than was his younger brother. The commander bent down and politely shut the wrought-iron gate behind him as he left the premises. Car doors slammed, and the small convoy headed for Hornsby. Silence returned to Camellia Close. The Nguyens’ neighbours retreated from their porches and front fences, some of them later re-emerging and gathering on the nature strip to compare notes. There’d been nothing as exciting as this in the street since the washing machine caught fire at number 17.
It had been pouring since about 4 a.m., and the view from the balcony at breakfast was obscured by what Maya Engineer thought was a monsoonal downpour. The Garden Island buildings to the west were desolate and dreary, and Clark Island was a mere suggestion ahead of them to the north. No boats moved on the pockmarked grey waters of the harbour. Arabella was still in bed, resting after an uncomfortable night, so Harry had proposed to her mother a look at the Asian collection at the Art Gallery. It was all he could think of.
‘We’ll be soaked to the skin,’ Maya protested. She was dressed in a crisp white linen shirt, long, over narrow black trousers and sandals. A superb lapis lazuli necklace, bought the previous winter in Marrakech.
‘There’s a nice café. We could talk.’
She looked at him, took a beat, and nodded. ‘You have umbrellas, Harry?’
Harry wasn’t surprised to hear that at home in London, Maya was a volunteer guide at the V&A. Inspecting the somewhat less voluminous Asian collection on show in Sydney, her clothes almost untouched by the rain since Harry had dropped her at the front of the building and gone off to find somewhere to park the LandCruiser, she reverently admired a plain white glass bowl — eighteenth-century, Indian, artist unknown — and explained its significance to Harry.
‘It’s probably Mughal,’ she said. ‘That milky colour’s very rare, and these items are usually very highly decorated. Gilt, mostly, or silver. Intricate and very beautiful. I’ve never seen one as plain as this.’
‘Likely to be all we could afford,’ said Harry. ‘We’re a pretty unadorned society.’
‘Perhaps, yes. The V&A bought a little green Mughal jar, decorated in gilt, last year, for a quarter of a million pounds. And glad to get it.’
She took him to some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century paintings — Rama enthroned, with Sita, and Kabir tending his loom, and explained them — but saw nothing else that impressed her. Harry suggested a look at the twentieth-century Australian paintings, or perhaps the Aboriginal art collection.
‘You did mention coffee, Harry.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘And a talk.’
Harry, who’d never had any inhibitions about taking the initiative in court or on the rugby field, didn’t know how to kick this one off.
‘Sorry about the disappearance of summer,’ he said. ‘Nobody can remember a wetter Christmas.’
‘The weather is neither here nor there, Harry. I’m more interested in my grandchild’s future.’ On her face, a formidable expression. Unblinking eyes, large behind her expensive glasses.
‘This won’t be your first grandchild, though.’ Harry looked around the near-empty café.
‘Do the judges have this difficulty getting you to stick to the point at issue, Mr Curry?’
‘It’s never this personal, Maya. Or this hard.’
A waitress brought their coffee. Harry, who never took sugar, emptied three sachets into his cup and stirred determinedly.
Maya was not about to take her foot off his throat. ‘Yes?’
‘What can I tell you?’
‘You can tell me about the following: marriage, name of baby, domicile, future arrangements. Family and professional.’
‘Right.’
‘And when I’m to meet your family.’
‘Dealing with the last point first: I assume Bella’s told you that my mother’s dead, has been for many years. Cancer, and unbelievably painful for her. I still don’t like to think about it, and you’ve made me do that. My father’s intermittently demented, but you shall meet him, and we can only hope it’s on on
e of his good days. My sister’s an extremely unpleasant lesbian, and we don’t talk. That’s the lot.’ Assertiveness, Harry thought, might pull her up.
It didn’t.
‘Your father — Saturday or Sunday?’
‘Probably not so soon. I’ll have to ring first and enquire as to his mental state.’ He paused and drank his coffee in one go. It made him feel sick, all that sugar. ‘Now, as to the balance of your concerns: I will marry Arabella the day she agrees to it, or as soon thereafter as the Family Law Act permits. The baby’s name will, I assume, therefore be Curry. That’s consistent with but always subject to the wishes of the child’s mother, need I observe?’
Maya nodded and lifted her cup. She looked over the rim. ‘When you marry —’ there was no ‘if’ in her scenario, ‘— where will you live? Not on this little farm of yours, surely?’
Harry rubbed his forehead vigorously. His untamed hair was rendered even more unruly.
‘That’s a bit more complicated. Her career’s everything to Bella, and the farm’s important to me. Maybe the best solution would be to spend as many weekends as we can down there. Weekends and school holidays. The child’s going to need space, dirt, water, grass, trees to climb, animals. The sky. The stars. A real horizon. We Australians tend to believe in all that.’
‘But she may be a girl!’
‘I’m assuming a girl.’
‘A farm girl in bare feet? As if she were a peasant?’ Maya’s eyebrows rose, as if she’d made a fatal point.
‘Exactly.’
Maya retreated. She left the table and crossed the room to stare down through the vast window at the deep green-black water of Woolloomooloo Bay, which had assumed the startling clarity of a photo-realist painting now that the rain had let up. Harry stayed where he was, and counted out small change to leave on the table for the coffee. He stared at Maya’s back for a full minute before going over to join her.
‘If it’s a boy, he’ll go to my old school. A girl, and she’ll go to my sister’s old school.’
Maya kept her gaze on the water. ‘Public schools?’
‘In the English sense, yes.’
Maya smiled, satisfied with that, and turned to face him. ‘I’m English enough not to ask about money, Harry.’
‘Then I’ll have to be Australian enough to tell you that it won’t be a problem.’ For probably the first time in his life, Harry’s mind went to the financial consequences of his father’s death. Wallace Curry QC had had a much-envied commercial/tax practice, and any number of good personal tax advisors. Money would really not be a problem, even with half of the estate going to Harry’s sister.
They turned away from the window, and Harry looked at his watch. ‘There’s one painting I want to show you,’ he said. ‘I’ve loved it since I was a boy of ten, when my mother showed it to me. She was like you — at least in the sense that she was a volunteer here, as you are in London.’
They walked upstairs, and Harry took Maya straight to a little still life of flowers in a basket.
‘That’s it. Margaret Preston.’
Maya looked at the name card. ‘1957, oil, Still life with national flowers.’ She studied it. ‘Lovely. Can you name the flowers?’
‘The white ones are flannel flowers. The bottlebrush things are banksia, and the orange-red ones at the top are kangaroo paws. I don’t know the rest. She didn’t do many oils.’
Maya smiled. ‘Tell me why this one’s so important to you.’
Harry thought about that. ‘Boys and their mothers. Men and their mothers. Flowers always remind me. Paintings in gallery windows, even florists’ shops when I pass. She used to arrange them — flowers like those. Native flowers, long before they were fashionable. We always had flowers in the house at Cheltenham. A vase of scarlet dahlias on the kitchen table — it had a checked blue tablecloth, and there’d be boiled eggs for breakfast, or Vegemite on toast. The radio on the ABC. Mum wrapping greaseproof paper around my school lunch and putting it in a brown paper bag with a banana. Home, I suppose, and what that word means. The closest friend I ever had. Until now.’
Maya reached up, stretching her arm, and put her right hand on the big man’s cheek.
‘I’ll talk to Pooh,’ she said, smiling. Almost shyly.
They stepped around the puddles on the rainswept black footpath on their way to the car. The Port Jackson figs dripped on them from their big leathery leaves, and currawongs were levering worms up from the wet soil with their horny beaks. Harry drove an extra circle to show Maya the view of the Opera House from Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, and then took the route downhill around the wharves and back up Macleay Street, turning down to Elizabeth Bay at the El Alamein fountain. When they returned to the apartment, Arabella was dressed and preparing to visit her obstetrician.
‘Which means you’re also going to chambers.’
‘Just for a minute. To check the post.’
‘To check for cheques, she means,’ Harry told Maya. ‘Do you want me to come with you to the doctor’s?’
‘Not this time, though you could drop me off on your way.’ She picked up her handbag and draped a raincoat over her arm. She looked at Harry.
‘On my way where?’
‘To Burragate. Ammaji and I have to talk.’
There was a nasty moment between the LandCruiser and a bullying container-laden semi-trailer in the airport tunnel, but Harry had the advantage of acceleration and left the problem behind. Teach me to use the Hume Highway, he thought. He had decided, at the last moment, that a wet freeway was a better bet than a wet coast road, given the lunchtime forecast of more thunderstorms. When the first green Goulburn sign presented itself, he decided — again on the spur of the moment — to see whether David Surrey would buy him afternoon tea at the Paragon, and rang him from the car. He parked outside the Commonwealth Bank in Goulburn under a lowering sky, but the rain was still holding off. The solicitor had been keeping an eye out for him, and came downstairs as Harry approached the door.
‘Well met, Harry. You’re a godsend. Can I just say if I never see another codicil, I’ll die a happy man.’
‘So I’m not interrupting anything important?’ They headed across the road to the restaurant, negotiating the central flowerbeds.
‘On the contrary — this will’s very important. It’s just that I hate doing the bloody things.’ A utility passed, and the driver waved at Surrey.
‘But you have to keep the clients happy.’
‘This client, yes. Big family, very important superfine wool merino stud.’
They entered the Paragon. ‘Rather you than me, mate.’ The patron, hovering near the front door, smiled at them and pointed with an expansive gesture to the closest booth, which they took. The tea didn’t take long to arrive.
‘And on the domestic front?’ Surrey added some milk to his cup.
‘Hopeful. Bella’s mother arrived just before Christmas, which turned everything on its head. Reasons for optimism, though.’
‘She’s here to supervise the birth?’
‘Christ, I hope not. That’s still months off.’
‘But that’s surely why she’s come?’
‘As I now understand it, her priority’s to settle the terms and conditions. Sees herself more as an arbitrator who’ll make rulings rather than a mediator who’ll facilitate consensual agreements between the parties.’
‘Formidable woman, I take it?’
‘Small, feisty, abrasive. Not without a sense of humour. I’m getting to like her.’
There was a period of agreeable silence between them, and Harry took the opportunity to study the other customers coming and going. Boys with oversized baseball caps sprawling at tables, the peaks perfectly flat and the sides covering their ears. Tattoos in sleeves on their arms. Obese girls buying cigarettes at the front counter, their unhappy babies in strollers. Trying to catch the boys’ eyes. South-central LA comes to the Southern Tablelands. A businessman in a white shirt and tie, passing the time of day with a farmer
in an Akubra, Gloster shirt and moleskins.
‘All human life is here, isn’t it? Any of your clients?’
‘Practically all of them, Harry. White shirt’s got a PCA next week, and it’s his third, so he’ll be rubbed out for six months. The bushie’s wife died last year, so he’s selling up and going into a retirement home. The girls and their offspring’ll be over at the Local Court next Monday for maintenance orders. Ladies’ Day, the staff call it … once a month. I’ll be looking after them for the Legal Aid Commission.’
‘It’s a living.’
‘As you say, Dud.’
Harry poured them each another cup. The tea was almost black in colour. ‘I got your email about the Vietnamese boy’s drug matter. How did you get that one, down here in the sticks?’
‘Quite a long story, Harry. I know the minister at their church. He was a pupil of mine, back when I was still teaching at Homebush Boys.’
‘The tentacles of the Surrey spread far and wide. But, to get to the point, I’d like you to give that to Bella.’
‘Happily, my friend. She’s a lot more pleasant than you to deal with, you grumpy bastard. But it’s a good earner, and you can’t be doing all that well lately. You’re always down at Burragate, fixing the pump or mulching the vegetables. I would have thought you needed something to start the year with.’
‘That’s another thing. Why’s it on so soon? If this was the normal process, you wouldn’t be getting a trial until the end of the year.’
‘A couple of reasons. I did a deal with the DPP to skip a committal hearing and go straight to trial, on condition that they reduce the charge from supply a large commercial quantity to supply an indictable quantity. The difference being ten years.’
‘What motivated that?’ Harry drank and made a face. He put his cup down.
‘Terminally ill witness, mislaid evidence.’
‘Please explain.’
‘Well, they found the boy’s prints on seven out of some seventy bags of ice. Plastic bags, the kind they sell for use in domestic freezers, and inside them were one-ounce deals, separately bagged up in little bags, knotted at the top. The principal, the Chinese bloke, is going down for the lot on the basis of possession, but my bloke’s charged on the basis that he handled a minor number of the outer bags.’
Harry Curry: Rats and Mice Page 24