A nurse standing in an open doorway said her name, smiling but admonishing.
‘It’s okay. I’m going back now.’ Anthea returned the nurse’s smile.
FORTY-FOUR
The lights at the railway yard seemed brighter than they should be. They swung like the lighthouse beam across the Rip, or searchlights out at sea.
Chris had been following Griffin for some time. He’d lost any precise sense of it, but time seemed to be elongated, stretched out like an old piece of elastic.
Sometimes he felt that the hotel manager was aware of him, that he was leading him on this long, circuitous route for his own amusement; at others, that Griffin was intent on his own purpose, and unaware of, or no longer caring, who might be behind him. For once, he hadn’t brought the German Shepherd.
As they neared the railway yard, Chris had no clear sense of approaching the place where it had all begun; he had no sense of beginnings or endings, except for one thing. He’d been chasing shadows for weeks. Now there would be no more prevarications or denials. He wondered if this was what it felt like for men going into battle.
Griffin had not so far used a gun, and Chris did not think he was carrying one now. Chris had left his own firearm in the car. The decision seemed a long way back. He’d hesitated, stretching his hand towards the glove box, then withdrawing it. He’d never been any kind of marksman. He’d shot a seal in the head at close range, but hitting a moving target at night was beyond him: more likely his quarry would turn the weapon back on him.
The lights swayed and Chris swayed with them, slowly moving forward.
Perhaps the hotel manager was mentally re-visiting the dawn mist over Swan Bay, that all-encompassing pearly light and Bobby’s slight, curved body. Had he been watching to see who found the boy and when? Chris was suddenly sure that the answer to this was yes.
Griffin would have approached Bobby openly on the night of his death. Perhaps he’d owed Bobby money, which Bobby would have asked about. A quick step behind him, the lead around his throat, and that would have been that.
Chris stopped and listened. The figure moving ahead of him was gone. The wind seemed louder. He drew level with an engine’s bulk. Huge in the darkness, it seemed like some kind of giant rumbling out of the history books. He heard no noise except for the suck and whistle of the wind.
He didn’t see the blow that felled him. The engine spouted blood, or perhaps it was the spark of guns. Chris fell forward, conscious of throwing out his hands. He knew he must stay upright because on the ground Griffin’s kicks would be aimed for his head. He cried out as his hands were kicked away.
‘You’re pathetic,’ Griffin hissed.
Chris raised his head and Griffin kicked it down. He was carrying a length of rope. Expertly, he tied Chris’s arms and legs, then pulled out his phone and began pressing numbers. He held the phone to his ear for a moment before cursing softly.
Chris tried rolling and Griffin shoved him back. Tentatively, Chris raised his head again.
‘You arranged to meet Bobby here.’ His voice seemed to him to be coming from somewhere on the bay. ‘You were watching from the hotel. You saw Olly walking Bobby home. Max wasn’t with them. You figured you had enough time to run up to the cottage and get the lead. You’d seen it hanging on the back of the door when Olly and Bobby were out with their kayaks and you decided to have a snoop around. You’d made friends with Max, so you knew he wouldn’t bark.’
‘You’re mad, Blackie. I told them you were mad, but they wouldn’t listen.’
‘Inspector Ferguson?’
‘Boys playing a man’s game. You wouldn’t last a week against real men.’
‘You wanted to pin the murder on Olly, but why would he leave the lead beside the body? It pointed directly to him.’
Griffin shook his phone and cursed again, louder this time.
‘You hadn’t paid Bobby earlier that day even though he was expecting it. You knew he’d come to the railway yard. But what would you have done if Olly hadn’t walked Bobby home, if you hadn’t been able to run back and get the lead?’
Griffin kicked out with his good leg, indifferently, using half his strength.
‘Why didn’t you kill Anthea when you had the chance?’
‘Women.’
‘Minnie Lancaster?’ Chris found it hard to say her name and immediately wished he hadn’t.
‘That bitch needed warning. And the young one was asking for it.’
‘Did Max scare you off?’
‘You know it’s a funny thing. I wasn’t expecting you or that damned dog. I followed you around for weeks, but that night you were the last thing on my mind.’
Chris said, ‘Bobby wasn’t asking for it.’
‘The little shit got greedy.’
‘Greedy?’ Chris thought of the diary, and how he’d noticed that the sums Griffin paid him didn’t increase.
‘He should have known which side his bread was buttered. We were a good team.’ Griffin squinted at his phone. ‘Where the hell are they?’
‘No one’s coming,’ Chris said. ‘Those child’s underpants in Olly’s cottage, you put them there. Was Shaw meant to find them?’
‘What idiots you are.’
‘It was your idea to plant evidence against Olly, but it backfired.’
Griffin gave his phone another shake. ‘The kid brought washing to the hotel sometimes, when his machine at home broke down. I did favours for him and his snotty brothers. See where it got me?’
Right here, Chris thought, and then, you still have a choice. You can kill me and run, or leave me and run. You must know by now that you’re on your own.
He said, ‘Charleston knew about the cocaine before you killed Bobby. He didn’t want a scandal. One more, and they might have closed the base down.’
‘You’re right there, Mr Plod.’
‘Couldn’t you have let Bobby off with a warning?’
Griffin didn’t bother to reply, but Chris thought he knew the answer. For Anthea and Minnie, the hotel manager had felt nothing but contempt, but he’d liked Bobby. They had indeed been a team.
‘Why did Yates jump off the pier?’
‘The idiot panicked.’
‘You were threatening him.’
‘He bolted. I had to find out what the stupid shit was planning.’
‘Swimming to Mr Yu’s boat?’
Griffin laughed. ‘He was going to blab to your inspector.’
‘But you managed to convince him that wasn’t such a bright idea. How did he know Yu’s boat was there?’
‘I told him.’
‘You told him Yu would pick him up?’
‘By then he was way past thinking straight.’
Chris wondered if Griffin had felt a moment’s remorse for the young man’s death. He hadn’t known about the cigarette packet, though. If he had, he would have made Yates give it to him.
Griffin bent down and grabbed Chris round the neck.
Chris twisted, kicking out with his tied legs. The lights were inside his head, pulsing and beating. He shouted with the pain of an enormous explosion.
He came to thinking he was still in the railway yard. Lights swung. Instead of one figure bending over him, there were three figures, then ten.
A familiar voice said, ‘Blackie.’
Sick and disoriented as he was, Chris didn’t miss the irony.
‘Tom?’
‘What were you doing? I thought you had more sense.’
‘You had a gun. Why —’
In spite of the fact that he was still seeing multiple versions of the coastguard officer, Chris knew part of the answer. Tom had been keeping his own vigil at the railway yards; he’d done so since the night Bobby was killed.
Another rescuer would have taken him straight to Geelong’s accident and emergency, but Tom hated hospitals.
‘Where’s my phone, Tom? Can you check it for me, please?’
‘It’s busted.’
‘Anthea will be waiting.
I’m supposed to pick her up in the morning. Is it morning?’
‘I’ll phone her,’ Tom said. ‘Do you want something to eat? How about I make some toast and a cuppa?’
Chris felt touched by the show of domestic concern. He couldn’t recall Tom ever having offered him food before.
Nor had he ever been inside Tom’s house. He couldn’t see much of the room he was in, just that, from the light coming in through an east-facing window, it was a clear day. He was lying on a couch opposite a fireplace full of ash and cigarette butts, but the pillow case beneath his aching head was clean.
The left side of Chris’s head felt like it was expanding and contracting at an alarming rate. A plan began to crystalise in the middle of his headache.
He’d followed Griffin to the railway yards like a man on his last, symbolic journey, telling himself he was doing it for Bobby. If he got himself killed in the process, well then, so be it. Tom had been right to mock him; but Tom’s mockery no longer mattered now.
There are some mistakes you go on repeating, and others you grow out of, Chris said to himself while Tom dropped things and muttered curses in his kitchen.
‘Where did you get your gun?’ he asked, when Tom came back with only slightly burnt toast and two mugs of tea.
‘Snakes,’ Tom said. ‘Blacks and tigers. Under the office. Couldn’t have Bobby and Max there, could I? Shot two tiger snakes last summer. I’ve got a licence.’
Chris digested this in silence. So Tom, that mild on the surface man, had bought a shotgun and had deliberately not told him. Well, he hadn’t told him Bobby and Max were sleeping under the coastguard office either. The one omission followed from the other.
‘Drink up,’ Tom said gruffly.
Chris stared at the steaming tea, but his right arm wouldn’t work, and neither would his left one.
Griffin would leave Queenscliff; perhaps he’d already gone. The only thing holding him up might be the German Shepherd. He could steal a car, but a man with a dog like that could not help being noticed.
This brought Chris to the question of where the dog had been last night. He’d been more or less a match for Griffin — two men on their own — at least this had been part of his thinking when he’d watched the hotel manager leave the Esplanade and decided to follow him.
Tom held the mug and Chris took a few small sips before looking up and saying, ‘You wouldn’t have shot him.’
‘Why not?
‘An eye for an eye?’
‘Why not?’ Tom repeated.
He looked angry and Chris, who, a moment ago, had believed what he’d said about Tom not shooting Griffin, felt a layer of doubt opening beneath them.
‘You let him get away.’
‘I didn’t —’ Tom began irritably. ‘l didn’t know how badly hurt you were.’
Chris said thank you, and then, ‘Here’s what I need you to do.’
FORTY-FIVE
Chris’s head still hurt, but his brain went on piecing things together. They talked in fits and starts while Tom drove. Every now and then, Chris glanced over at the back seat, where the cocaine and diary sat on Anthea’s clasped knees as though on a makeshift throne. They’d picked Anthea up from the hospital on their way through Geelong. She’d hugged them both, then looked away so they wouldn’t see her tears.
Anthea sat in silence staring through the window for a while before she said, ‘You know, I still don’t understand about Edward Yates’s ID.’
Tom snorted in the driver’s seat.
Pain shot through Chris’s right shoulder when he turned his head to look at Anthea. ‘I think it fell out,’ he said.
‘Fell out?’
‘Yes. Picture it. The swell, the current.’
Tom shot Chris a swift, unsympathetic glance.
Chris said, ‘He had the cocaine, hidden, though it would have been discovered as soon as he was searched.’
‘He was still hoping to make it to Yu’s boat?’
Chris put his hand up to his swollen cheek. ‘When he threw away the “evidence”? I think so. But it was a battle out there, and he was already floundering. He got the cigarette packet out of his pocket, but the other things came too.’
‘What about his car keys?’
‘They were heavier, in another pocket. It could have happened that way. On the other hand, we only assumed he had his wallet and his phone with him when he jumped. He might have left his ID in the car.’
‘Then why search me?’ Tom demanded.
Anthea said, ‘Maybe when Yates knew he wasn’t going to make it, he — well he thought his body might never be found. He wanted — he wanted someone to find the cigarette packet and the other things.’
Someone who wasn’t Yu, or Griffin. That fitted too, Chris thought. It fitted as well, or as badly, as his explanation. Yates’s parents might have been informed that he’d been killed on a training exercise. The identity of the foolish young man who’d jumped off the pier might never have been released. The public would have concluded that it was a suicide, and that the dead man’s name had been withheld to protect his family.
Tom said, ‘Why did he believe Griffin? Why believe that Yu was a better option?’
‘Yates had run out of options. As Griffin said, he panicked.’
‘Why not run away?’ asked Anthea.
‘Escape was never an option,’ Chris said quietly. ‘Not for Yates, and not for Bobby either.’
Tom dropped them off outside the police commissioner’s office. At the last moment, he seemed reluctant to leave them. He shook Chris’s hand, then Anthea’s, and told them to stay away from spies.
Chris was aware of the curious stares of people on the footpath. He managed the steps without help, but only just. Anthea hovered close by, ready to stretch out a hand.
The police commissioner shook their hands. With him was a man in a dark suit whom Chris had never seen before.
‘Well, Blackie. That swelling looks nasty.’
The commissioner’s voice was level, but he was clearly angry.
Chris handed over Bobby’s diary, feeling a strange reluctance to doing so. He explained where the cocaine had been found without referring to Brian Laidlaw.
‘I’ve a witness who will testify that Bobby McGilvrey left cocaine in the men’s lavatories at the Esplanade hotel. He was working for Tony Griffin, the hotel manager.’ Chris felt strange saying Griffin’s first name aloud. He couldn’t recall ever having done so.
The commissioner made a noise of mingled disgust and disbelief.
‘Griffin strangled Bobby at the railway yard, with a lead belonging to Bobby’s dog, Max. After the murder, the hotel became too risky a place to use, but that didn’t mean Griffin had any intention of stopping, or that his customers wanted him to. Stellar and his group were out of it, but a new supply chain was being put in place, involving Major Briggs. There’s CCTV film of Briggs boarding the supplier’s boat at Queenscliff harbour. The supplier is a Mr Yu, who has an import business based in Brighton.’
The dark-suited man spoke for the first time. ‘Who hit you, constable?’
Chris said, ‘Griffin didn’t have a gun with him. Luckily for me, a friend was passing by.’
The commissioner blinked rapidly.
Chris said, ‘The death of a combat trainee might have been covered up. Accidental drownings aren’t unusual down our way. Even the murder of a young boy. But not a major in the Australian army trafficking cocaine. That’s why the Director of Training on Swan Island became involved. No doubt we gave the trainees plenty of practice in surveillance.’
The man in the suit said smoothly, ‘We’ll get the details from you later, constable.’
Chris raised his eyes. Unlike the commissioner, the ASIS representative, for that’s who Chris assumed he was, was in perfect control of his facial muscles. From a distance, he could have been Leonard Charleston’s brother. Close up, his grey hair framed a craggier, less symmetrical face.
‘A watching brief is one thing,
interfering with a homicide investigation another. The Director of Training and Inspector Ferguson have worked together before. Ferguson made sure the fall-out from the debacle in Autumn Street was kept under control. Leonard Charleston knew who to ask for when Bobby was found.’
The commissioner frowned at the name, but did not ask Chris how he’d come by it. He reached across his desk for several stapled, closely typed pages.
‘These are for you and your assistant to sign.’
‘Why —’
‘Sign them if you want Parkinson released.’
Chris and Anthea exchanged a look, then both of them turned towards the desk. Chris found that his right arm wasn’t working. Anthea helped him wield the pen.
‘Congratulations, constable.’
Chris bit back a sharp retort. He would have liked to believe the broom he wielded might sweep Charleston off his perch, but instead he told himself to be thankful for small mercies. Anthea and Minnie had survived. His own injuries would heal. Olly would be free.
He glanced in Anthea’s direction. She was staring straight at the tall man, who had not greeted, or acknowledged her in any way.
‘You knew who’d killed Bobby and yet you did nothing,’ she said.
‘Constable Merritt.’ The commissioner’s voice was sharp. ‘The evidence against Parkinson was —’
‘A load of lies.’
‘You were unwise to entrust the boy to him.’
‘That was my doing,’ Chris said.
‘Be thankful if you don’t lose your job for it.’
Chris had been afraid the interview might end in disaster, but not that he would feel so flat. To speak even the simplest words seemed too much of an effort. He lay back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes.
Anthea remained pale and silent for the entire journey home. Chris felt surprised, then not surprised at all, that no one had asked her about her injuries.
They weren’t kept waiting long. Two days later, Chris was summoned back to Melbourne, to a brief interview where he was informed by the commissioner’s assistant that Griffin was going to be charged with Bobby’s murder and that Olly Parkinson would be released. Chris was required to sign a further statement detailing his own part in the investigation, and declaring that he would never speak about the case to representatives of the press, or to anybody else.
The Swan Island Connection Page 23