Crucifixion Creek

by Barry Maitland

  He wheels about and marches off, and a grumble of discussion breaks out across the room. Deb gestures to Harry.

  ‘You can help me write the coroner’s report,’ she says, stiff with anger and hurt pride.

  ‘I guess he’s just doing what he’s told,’ he says.

  ‘It’s a bloody mess. It’s my first time to lead a strike force and it falls apart in my hands.’

  ‘Not your fault. You just have to roll with the punches.’

  ‘Don’t give me your bloody platitudes, Harry,’ she snaps. ‘You’re not going to come out of this unscathed either. Come and see me in an hour with your notes and records.’

  They work through the report for an hour, then Harry says, ‘You know about the attack on Kelly Pool’s flat last night?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘I went to the hospital this morning.’

  ‘Good of you.’

  ‘Her flatmate was beaten half to death.’

  ‘Yes, that’s terrible, but there must have been quite a few people wanted to do that to Kelly.’ She snorts a laugh. ‘Me included. I was going on about her last night to Damian, and he offered to go out there and do it himself.’

  Harry stares at her, shocked. ‘And did he?’

  ‘What? No, of course not. It was a nice thought, though, that he’d kill someone for me. It’s his sensitive side. You’re touchy about her, aren’t you Harry?’

  He just shakes his head, looking down at the pages in front of him without focusing.

  ‘Who’s handling it?’ Deb asks.

  ‘Local area command.’

  She shrugs.

  ‘It’s unfinished business, Deb. We should be dealing with it.’

  ‘Of course we should, we should be dealing with all of this. But we’re not.’

  Harry says, ‘There are a few loose ends that we should tie up in order to finish this report.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘I want to interview the minister. Oldfield.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it’s vital that we find out if he’s had any recent dealings with Kristich.’

  Deb looks at him, trying to read his mind. ‘What are you fishing for?’

  ‘If Kristich was supplying drugs to people powerful enough to prevent us accessing his records, Oldfield may be one of them. Kelly’s photograph of the three kings gives us the excuse. We have an obligation to the coroner to clear this up.’

  ‘Oldfield won’t see us.’

  ‘Remember his last words? “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with the good work.” I think we can put it to him that we’re doing it for him, to make sure his name doesn’t have to appear on our report to the coroner. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t want.’

  ‘Waste of time.’ Deb taps her pen on the desk, thinking. ‘But okay, I’ll try him.’

  She picks up the phone and eventually is put through to a staffer at Parliament House who tells her that Mr Oldfield has gone from the building and has left instructions that he is not to be contacted except in an emergency.

  ‘I think the minister would feel that it is very much in his interests to speak to me. Why don’t you call him now and give him my contact number?’

  She draws squares and spirals on her pad as she waits. When her phone rings she speaks deferentially, very polite, anxious to do the right thing as she lays it out for him. Eventually she makes a note on the pad and hangs up. ‘He’s at home. He’ll see us.’

  Home is on Point Piper. Not far, they discover, from Maram Mansur’s huge mansion overlooking the inner harbour and the city skyline. The Oldfield house is a more modest affair but still highly desirable, a stylish modern home on one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the country. Large areas of glass survey those prime city views, and Harry wonders how a public servant could afford this.

  ‘Couldn’t this have waited? You know what sort of a day I’ve had,’ Oldfield says as he shows them in. He leads them to a large table that looks as if it belongs in a boardroom more than a dining room. The whole space has a spare, efficient, workplace feeling that reminds Harry of Kristich’s nest in the Gipps Tower. He wonders if there is a Mrs Oldfield; there’s no sign of a feminine touch.

  ‘Of course,’ Deb says. ‘We do apologise, but we’re under a lot of pressure now to wrap up our enquiries and complete our report to the coroner concerning the Kristich and Lavulo deaths. We just want to be quite certain that we don’t need to mention your name in the report, minister.’

  ‘My name? Good heavens no, certainly not. Why on earth should you?’ He looks amazed. His manner now is aloof, patrician. Far from the team player he projected in the strike-force briefing.

  ‘It’s the photograph in the Bankstown Chronicle,’ Deb says apologetically, ‘On the yacht.’

  ‘Oh!’ Oldfield’s face clears. ‘I see. Well that was taken years ago, in Vanuatu. I was high commissioner between ’04 and ’06, and of course I had to socialise with Australian businessmen out there from time to time, people like Kristich.’

  ‘What was his business out there?’ Harry asks, and Oldfield looks slightly put out.

  ‘I really can’t recall. Import-export? I’m not sure.’

  ‘And did you maintain contact with Kristich when you both returned to Australia?’ Deb continues.

  ‘No. I may have attended functions where he was present, I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you ever visit his offices in the Gipps Tower?’

  ‘No, certainly not.’

  Harry clears his throat. ‘So…’ he looks puzzled, pointedly underlining something in his notebook, ‘…you say you didn’t visit Mr Kristich in the Gipps Tower recently?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Gipps Tower.’ He smiles apologetically at Oldfield. ‘Perhaps it slipped your mind.’

  Oldfield stares at Harry for a moment. ‘I see. Anything else?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘A visit to the Gipps Tower?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Oldfield sighs, as if suddenly overcome with fatigue. ‘Politicians need two essential qualities, sergeant. It is nice if they have more, but these two are essential—ambition and paranoia. Ambition to drive you forward,’ he smiles without humour. ‘And paranoia to cover your back. Political life is littered with obstacles and traps that derail people who don’t have those two qualities. Sandy Kristich was one of those traps. I’d heard vague rumours about him since he returned from Vanuatu, but I hadn’t bumped into him. Then he contacted me out of the blue last month and asked me to call in to his office to discuss a proposal. He was always a persuasive character, and against my better judgment I agreed.’

  Another sigh, Oldfield pointedly consults his watch. Deb prompts, ‘A proposal?’

  ‘Yes, well, after a couple of drinks, jolly reminiscences of the Vanuatu days etcetera, he got around to what he wanted, which was to engage me as a confidential advisor. To find out the thinking of the working party on the preferred route for the south-west underground rail project, he said, and to
identify ways to, ah, gain input into that decision. I gathered that he saw himself as an intermediary between myself and a third party he didn’t name. I made it clear to him of course that I wasn’t prepared to bend the rules, and that if I ever was to enter into such an agreement with anyone, I would have to disclose it to the parliamentary register. He didn’t like that idea, and that’s where our conversation came to an end. In effect, I felt that he was proposing to bribe me to subvert the planning process, something I neither could nor would contemplate. But he never framed it in such a way that I could make a formal complaint to the police or anyone else. So that’s it.’ Oldfield fixes Harry with his patrician gaze. ‘May I ask how you learned of the meeting?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Well, I was quite wrong to lie to you, but it was the paranoia kicking in. To be associated in any way with Alexander Kristich at this moment would be political suicide. I hope you’ll accept my sincere apologies.’

  Harry turns to Deb, who is looking at him with an odd expression. ‘Anything else, ma’am?’

  She clears her throat, examines her notes and says tightly. ‘No, I don’t think so. We’ll leave it at that. Thank you for your cooperation, sir.’

  She waits until they are in the car before she explodes. ‘Where the hell did that come from, Harry? Why didn’t I know about his meeting Kristich?’

  ‘It was just a punt, Deb. I reckoned he was lying to us and I thought I’d call him on it. I just got lucky. But if he lied about that I’ll bet he’s covering up other things too.’

  Deb takes a deep breath, snaps her lighter and drags deeply on a cigarette. ‘Okay,’ she says at last. ‘And if Kristich took notes of their meeting, the wiping of his computer was very convenient for Mr Oldfield.’ The cigarette has calmed her. ‘Now what?’

  ‘That’s the problem, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll report this to Bob, but without further evidence I can’t see it going anywhere. There must be people all over town scuttling around erasing emails, diary references, file notes on meetings with Kristich. Soon he’ll be the man who never was.’

  22

  Over dinner Jenny tells him about her progress. ‘It’s like…’ she struggles for an analogy, ‘reconstructing sheets from a shredded document, or disentangling a ball of dozens of cables.’ But neither quite captures it. She has been concentrating on a cache of notes made, presumably by Kristich, over the previous twelve months, recording cryptic transactions of various kinds with other nicknamed players, along the lines, ‘18k to Rooster’, ‘told Pol to contact Chocky sap’, ‘Chippy panic, spoke to Tubby’.

  More of these nicknames have cropped up. A lover of word games and crossword puzzles, she has entertained herself trying to decipher them, and has printed off a list of her guesses for Harry:

  47 = Kristich

  Crystal = Waterford

  Bells = Oldfield

  Chippy = Greg

  Rooster = Bebchuk

  Chocky = Mansur

  Pol = ?

  NRL = ?

  Tuba = ?

  She waits while he studies it.

  ‘Okay…’ He tells her about seeing Oldfield today with Deb, and of his reluctant admission that he had met Kristich, which suggests that he is Bells. ‘And I had an idea about Pol. I wondered if he could be the local councillor that Kelly Pool keeps going on about—Potgeiter, Pot as in Pol Pot.’

  ‘Yes, that could work.’ She whispers an instruction to her computer.

  ‘How do you get Mansur for Chocky?’

  ‘Maram Mansur, M&M, chocolate drops.’

  He laughs. ‘Right. The last one’s new, Tuba.’

  ‘Yes. It crops up a few times. He sounds like an intermediary of some kind.’

  Harry thinks, then says, ‘The lawyer, Horn—Tuba.’

  ‘Okay, yes. That just leaves the football player, NRL.’

  She has been mapping the connections between the different names. She brings up the diagram of nodes and links the computer has created to illustrate this, a picture she can only imagine. It shows some of them—Rooster, Pol, Bells, Chocky and Tuba—having strong interactions with Kristich and with each other, while others—Chippy, Crystal and NRL—are more peripheral.

  ‘I’ve found some pictures, but you’ll have to tell me what they are—here.’

  This is the most frustrating thing, that she can’t see these. All the computer can tell her is that this is image number X and this is number Y. It can’t describe them. It is a limitation of the program she will have to see about fixing.

  He tells her there are photographs of people, buildings, documents. They look like a kind of visual diary of events, but to interpret them they will have to correlate the pictures, which only Harry can see, to the text documents that only Jenny can navigate. They sit side by side at her table and begin to go through them.

  ‘This one looks interesting,’ Harry says. ‘It’s four blokes standing drinking at a bar…There’s Kristich, and Oldfield. I don’t know who the other two are.’

  He gives her the reference number of the document and she gets to work on her computer. ‘6.4.13/1’ she says at last.

  ‘What’s that, a date?’

  ‘I suppose so. And there’s another document titled 6.4.13/2.’

  She gives him its computer number and he flicks through the images. ‘Got it. A hotel bill for six nights beginning 6 April this year at the Le Meridien Hotel, Jakarta, Indonesia, in the name of Mr Joost Potgeiter, paid for with Alexander Kristich’s credit card. Do we know what Potgeiter looks like?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got all their pictures.’

  She brings them up and he says, ‘That’s him. The other two men in the bar are Potgeiter and Mansur. This is brilliant, Jenny.’

  He hugs her and they both laugh, and then the front door bell rings.

  ‘Probably Nicole,’ he says. He gets to his feet and goes out to see.

  Jenny hears the door open, then Harry’s voice. ‘Sir?’

  Her heart stops. Have they come to arrest him? Then she hears a voice she recognises. Bob Marshall.

  ‘Sorry to drop by without warning, Harry. I’ve been in meetings in Goulburn Street, and not having seen Jenny for so long… Is it a bad time?’

  Jenny gets over her surprise, remembering how Marshall visited her in hospital after the crash. He’s known for it, his personal contact with the families of injured officers.

  ‘No, not at all. Come in, sir. Let me take your coat.’

  ‘Bob, please. Can’t be saying “sir” in your own home for
God’s sake.’

  Panic seizes Jenny. She quickly exits the file and tries to gather up the papers on the table and shove them in the drawer. A couple drop to the floor, and she’s bending down to find them when she hears Harry again.

  ‘It’s Bob Marshall, Jenny.’

  ‘Oh!’ She rises to her feet and turns to him, smiling. ‘Bob, what a lovely surprise!’

  She feels him gently take hold of her hands and kiss her on the cheek. He makes his apologies again and offers her the box of chocolates he’s brought with him as she leads him away from her desk. Harry says, ‘Let me get you a drink, Bob.’

  ‘Well, I have got the luxury of a driver waiting out there, and after the day I’ve had a drop of scotch would go down a treat.’

  Jenny leads Bob to the seats in the bay window on the far side of the room from the computer. He goes on, ‘I was sitting in this meeting, Jenny, listening to these people droning on about best-practice this and benchmark that, and my mind wandered off and it came to me that it must be three years since your terrible accident. And now you’ve had another tragedy with your brother-in-law. How’s the family coping? Your sister’s husband, is that right?’

  As they talk Harry returns with the glasses. Jenny takes hers, and Bob proposes a toast to happier days. Then he says, ‘But tell me, Jenny, if it’s not an intrusive question, I saw you sitting over there at the computer and…well, I know you used to be an expert in that field but you surely can’t use it now, can you?’

  So she tells him about the accessibility programs that allow her to interact with the machine and he shakes his head in amazement. ‘What, you can use emails, all that?’

  ‘Enough so I can do a bit of work from home.’

  ‘Big law firm, wasn’t it? Research?’

  ‘Yes.’