by JH Fletcher
‘Good.’ It had been a long session, the surface of the mahogany table obscured by a blizzard of papers, but Roberta was satisfied that they had covered everything. Her eyes assessed her assistant. Anthony Adam was young, eager beaver. Male, probably, but in other respects a mirror image of how she herself had been ten years earlier. ‘Anthony, I’m relying on you to check out the details.’
Anthony pushed back long blond hair. He had an air of innocence as well as youth. Roberta knew how deceptive that was. Just as well. He would have been no use to her had he been too soft but Anthony was tough as well as bright and would guard Roberta’s back as long as it was worth his while. After that, watch out but that was all right, too. Roberta watched everyone all the time. In politics the alternative to watchfulness was death and Roberta had a lot of living still to do.
Anthony said, ‘I’ll deal with it, Minister.’
She was sure he would; all the same, she believed in keeping her eye on things. ‘Battersby … Can we trust him to deliver on schedule?’
The development had to be constructed according to a rigid timetable; keeping contractors up to the mark was always an important part of these government-funded operations.
‘We’ve got those heavy penalty clauses.’
Which was true. Failure to meet deadlines could destroy him. Even so … ‘We’ll need to watch it.’
‘I shall.’
‘It will be the making of the Peninsula,’ Roberta said. ‘We owe it to the people down there to make sure that everything’s one hundred percent.’
And to avoid negative publicity if things went wrong. But neither of them would say such a thing, even to each other.
Roberta picked up a sketch showing the artist’s impression of the finished project. ‘Of course these things always look wonderful. But I take it the lie of the land is accurate? The main block does face down the valley to the sea, does it?’
‘Perhaps before we finalise things you’d like to walk over the site?’ Anthony suggested.
Roberta shook her head. ‘I do that and the media will be on to it in no time. The price of the land will go through the roof. No, the trick will be to keep the whole project under wraps until we’ve got the loose ends tied up. Then we go public, a proper launch with all the media there.’
She picked up another sheet from the jumble of papers on the table, a balance sheet with the photocopy of a press report clipped to it. ‘Millionaire pleads for time,’ she read. ‘If he was still a millionaire he wouldn’t need to plead for anything, would he?’ She looked back at the press clipping and resumed reading. ‘Facing huge trading losses, property magnate tells creditors, I will repay. If he’s half as broke as they make out we should be able to twist his arm pretty effectively when we come to talking land prices.’
Anthony nodded. ‘He’s got to sell, not just here but all over. He’s finished if he doesn’t. I don’t think there’s much risk in your going down there, Minister.’
‘All the same I won’t chance it,’ Roberta decided. ‘We’ve got a lot riding on this. We don’t want anything to go wrong at the last minute.’
‘As you wish.’ Anthony started gathering the papers together. ‘You want me to instruct the legal boys to start drawing up offer documents?’
‘I need Cabinet approval first.’
Anthony raised cynical eyebrows. ‘Do that, there’s no way we’ll keep it quiet.’
He was right.
‘Perhaps I should just have a word with the Premier, then. You know how he expects to be in on everything.’
Anthony went out. Behind him the heavy door sighed shut. Roberta was alone. She felt drained, as empty as the room. It was always the same. A plan occupied her. She thought it, breathed it, slept it. Suddenly it was gone and there was only a void to be filled again, as soon as possible. Roberta had never learnt the trick of idleness, was content only when she was busy. It was a useful quality in anyone aiming for the top and Roberta had never intended going anywhere else.
For a moment she allowed her mind to drift pleasurably over a landscape riven with the flame-shot lights of her towering ambition. Then she shook herself back to reality and began to read the first of the files stacked on a side table for her attention. It was after six. In the street below her window the evening traffic waged its nightly warfare but her concentration soon cut out all sound.
Some time later Betty Wells, one of her secretaries, stuck her head into the room.
‘Busy, Roberta?’
They went back a long way together; Roberta could not remember the last time Betty had addressed her as Minister. ‘So-so. Why?’
‘Your mother’s on television.’
‘Mother? What’s she been up to?’
‘You’d better come and see.’
They walked into the outer office where a large television set beamed its images from a corner of the room. Sure enough, there her mother was in conversation with the chat show host.
‘Digby White,’ Roberta said. ‘That idiot.’
‘Carries a lot of clout, though.’
‘Tell me about it.’
No one was more aware than Roberta of the media’s power.
Roberta parked an elegantly-clad buttock on the edge of Betty’s desk and stared at the screen. ‘What’s the old girl been up to?’
Betty turned up the sound in time to hear White say, ‘Facing an armed man in order to protect a helpless woman and two children you didn’t even know…’ He shook his head and laughed deprecatingly for the camera. ‘Perhaps your modesty prevents you from saying so, Ms Ballard, but I’m sure our viewers will all agree with me that really it was the height of heroism.’
The picture switched to Ruth, surprising an expression of irritation and embarrassment on her face. ‘The height of stupidity, more like. I heard a shot in the middle of the night and barged in. If I’d taken the trouble to think what I was doing —’
‘A woman and two children might be dead,’ White interposed smoothly.
The story changed to an oil slick off the Victorian coast; Betty got up and switched off the set.
‘What was all that about?’ Roberta wondered.
‘Hostage drama. A man kidnapped Kylie Flanagan and her two kids.’
‘Kylie Flanagan? You mean the —’
‘Cormac Flanagan’s wife, that’s right.’
Roberta whistled. ‘No wonder Digby White was rubbing it in. His own boss’s wife. How did Ruth get into it?’
‘They were shacked up in the cabin next to hers. Had some kind of row in the middle of the night and the bloke Kylie was with decided to hold the world off with a gun. Ruth talked him out of it, apparently.’
Roberta laughed. But was exasperated. ‘She went up there for a holiday. She’s seventy-three, for God’s sake.’
‘Pretty sprightly for seventy-three.’
‘But the man might have killed her.’
‘Exactly what Digby White was saying. As it happened he didn’t. Everyone came out of it all right.’
‘Except the kidnapper. He’s dead meat.’
‘For sure.’
Roberta got to her feet. ‘I’d better phone her, see how she really is. Did I give you her number up there?’
Roberta had never known Betty to be at a loss for a telephone number or an address. ‘I’ll get her for you.’
By the time Roberta reached her desk the phone was ringing. Betty the eighth wonder of the world. She picked up the receiver. ‘Mother?’
‘Hullo, dear.’
Betty had said she was sprightly; certainly she did not sound like a woman of seventy-three who had spent all the previous night in confrontation with an armed man less than half her age.
‘What on earth have you been up to?’
Their conversation lasted no more than three minutes; Roberta and her mother seldom spoke for long. Except in a professional context Roberta had never felt the need for small talk and with lives and interests so far apart they never seemed to have much to say to each
other. These days they were strangers who happened to be closely related. Roberta thought she should probably have felt sad about it but did not, too busy to waste time in futile regrets. You couldn’t be close to everyone in your life.
She decided she would have a drink. She was just putting the bottle back in the cabinet when Gavin Cornish stuck his head around the door. She smiled at him, gesturing with the bottle. ‘Join me?’
‘Thank you.’ The Premier came into the room, closing the door carefully behind him, and took the filled glass from her outstretched hand.
He sat in his usual easy chair, long legs stretched out. ‘I see your mother’s been making a name for herself.’
‘It seems so.’ Watching him, carefully. He was no more interested in small talk than she was. It was not Ruth’s Whitsunday escapades that had brought him here.
‘Very courageous. Perhaps we should look into the question of an award.’
‘She wouldn’t want it.’
‘Really?’ He was sceptical. In Gavin Cornish’s experience people seldom turned up a chance of glory, however transient. ‘Might not be a bad thing from our point of view, though.’
‘Why?’
‘Popular. And she is your mother, after all. Even second-hand glory never comes amiss.’ He tipped his drink down his throat and stared at her, all business. ‘We’ve got trouble.’
Her brain was at once razor sharp. ‘Why?’
‘Don Maltby.’ Maltby was the Treasurer, one of the Premier’s cronies and after Cornish himself the most powerful member of the Cabinet.
‘What’s he been up to?’ Concealing pleasure; in a world without friends, Don Maltby had been less of a friend than most.
‘Bloody fool’s been caught with his hand in the lolly jar.’
It was a sordid story. Bribes taken, campaign funds misappropriated, an alert journalist who had managed to fork over the dungheap.
‘Interfering bastard,’ Cornish said.
‘No doubt about it?’
Shook his head. ‘I’ve just come from him now. He’s admitted the whole sorry mess.’
Roberta’s lip curled. Don Maltby had always been a weakling. ‘As long as he doesn’t admit it to the media.’
‘Too late for that,’ Cornish said. ‘Unless we can head them off it’ll be a two-page feature all over the weekend papers.’ The Premier took his glass across to the drinks cabinet. He looked at Roberta. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead.’
He poured his drink — almost filling the glass, Roberta noted — and came back to his chair. ‘Corruption in high places,’ he said. ‘Government minister rorts the system. I can read the headlines now. It’ll be a disaster.’
But perhaps not for all of us, Roberta thought. ‘He’ll have to go, of course,’ she ventured.
It seemed the Premier was not yet ready to accept the implications of that. ‘It’ll be very damaging.’
An election was due before the year’s end. Already the government’s chances had been looking dodgy; revelations like this could finish them off altogether. It might mean the end of Cornish, never mind Don Maltby.
‘Bloody fool,’ Cornish said furiously. ‘If he had to steal he might at least have waited until next year.’
But Don Maltby, it seemed, had been on the make for several years already.
‘It certainly doesn’t look good,’ Roberta hoped. With both Cornish and Maltby out of the running her prospects of leading the party would be bright. Viewed from that angle, a spell on the Opposition benches might not be a bad thing.
‘On the other hand maybe everything isn’t quite lost,’ Cornish said. ‘If we can organise a cover-up —’
‘How do you plan to do that? If this journalist knows?’
‘It’s all supposition. There’s never any hard evidence in these cases.’ Cornish lifted his glass and toasted Roberta ceremoniously. With what might have been a smile he shafted her. ‘You’re the party treasurer. If you go round the State telling everyone that a full investigation has shown that everything’s been accounted for, that the allegations are rubbish, a pack of lies drummed up for political reasons …’
Dear God.
If she did it, and it worked, both Maltby and Gavin Cornish would be off the hook. If it failed it would be her fault. And if she refused she and not Don Maltby would have killed off the party’s re-election chances.
Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t.
‘You’re asking me to rake your chestnuts out of the fire?’ Unwise, but the words had burst from her before she could control them.
He smiled, razor-bright. ‘I would say our chestnuts, wouldn’t you?’
Damn and damn and damn.
She knew she had no choice. ‘Of course I’ll do whatever I can.’
A real smile, then. Heart-warming. If you didn’t know.
‘I’ll not forget this,’ he told her.
He would remember nothing. Slights, wounds, he never forgot. Favours he regarded as his due.
Mission accomplished, he left her. Now the empty room was peopled with apprehension and the demons of a suddenly uncertain future. Roberta crossed to the window and stared out. Below her, bunched streams of traffic formed columns along King William Street. Down the hill to her left the traffic lights kindled shimmering gutters of red, gold and green upon the surface of the river. For fifteen years she had worked her guts out to turn this city and the surrounding countryside into her personal territory. She had thought she was making good progress towards her goal. Now Don Maltby had been caught looting the till and everything was suddenly called into question. Instead of getting rid of him, Gavin Cornish had shown he would be willing to sacrifice Roberta to protect his favourite.
Expendable.
Her breath raised angry blooms upon the glass.
No.
Body on fire with resolution she strode purposefully to her desk. If Gavin Cornish wanted a sacrificial lamb he could look somewhere else for it. She would do what he wanted, speak up for Don Maltby, but from now on she would follow her own agenda. She was not going to throw away fifteen years of her life to prop up a cheap crook. No, she amended, thoughts pleasantly vicious, two cheap crooks.
The Premier wanted her to speak for the party? Good. She would travel the State, speak everywhere. She would have a word with her media mates, call in favours, get them on side. She would have maximum exposure for every word she said, everything she did. No one could complain. The Premier himself had asked her to do it. In the minds of the faithful she would become so identified with the party that no one would be able to get rid of her, whatever happened at the next election. She would have become indispensable.
The moment she came up with any hard evidence against Cornish or Maltby she would use it.
That was if things worked out. But Cornish and Maltby, side by side and fighting for their lives, would make tough opponents. They might prove too strong for her. Whatever happened she still had to live her life afterwards. What she needed was a contingency plan to cover her in case things went wrong.
For a long time, eyes blind to the room about her, she considered her options. She did not move or write a single note. Notes were dangerous. Luckily she did not need them; her mind was alert, motivated, her memory a shining sword. Over the years she had trained herself to use both to the best advantage. She knew how to organise her thoughts, prepare a complex plan in her head and remember every part of it.
As now.
When she had thought things out to her satisfaction she picked up the phone.
Halfway through the afternoon a header belt had snapped. It had taken two precious hours to get it running again. By the time Boyd Armstrong had delivered the last load of wheat to the silo and got back home to Mindowie it was long dark. Tractor headlights were burning in the paddocks on either side of the road as his neighbours worked on through the hot and dusty night but Boyd had had enough. He was a competent but by no means dedicated farmer and he reckoned that sixteen hours in one day was
enough for any man. Particularly since it looked as though he might lose the farm anyway.
Thoughts of banks and slaughter in his head, he parked the truck at the back of the farmhouse and clumped indoors. Sally had conditioned him years ago to beat the dust from his clothes before opening the kitchen door; he did so now, not even aware he was doing it, slapping with horny hands at shirt and shorts, kicking off his boots, flipping his filthy hat on to its peg before going into the kitchen.
Sally stood at the sink, shining blonde hair tied back, a woman over forty who in this light could have passed for twenty-five. Dogs and cats wound around her brown legs, the regular menagerie.
What do we do, Boyd thought, if we have to get out of here? What do I do? But knew that in the big things, as in everything, it would be Sally’s decision that counted and not his own.
She looked at him, those warm brown eyes. ‘You’re looking tired,’ she suggested.
‘Yeh.’
He had never been a conversationalist, especially after a long day on the header.
‘Your mother’s been on television,’ she said.
It did happen from time to time. ‘She won another award or something?’
‘Some bloke kidnapped his girlfriend, two kids. Something like that. I didn’t catch all the details.’
‘What’s Mother got to do with it?’
For years she had been after him to call her Ruth but he had never been comfortable with the idea. Out of an instinct for obedience he sometimes used her name when he spoke to her, if he remembered, but to himself she would always be Mother.
‘They said she went into the house and rescued them.’
‘At her age?’
There were times he despaired of her. She had no business getting involved in such crazy adventures. Having a lunatic mother had always been a burden to him. Lunatic or, at the least, extraordinarily unconventional, which in Boyd’s mind amounted to the same thing.
‘She all right?’
‘She looked fine in the interview. They said she was very brave.’
‘Or plain stupid.’
As always he was resentful, but mildly, not a man for powerful emotions. One of these days she would come unstuck. He had been threatening her with that thought for years but kept such notions from his wife, knowing how much she admired her mother-in-law. Just as well he had; it was he rather than his mother who seemed to have come unstuck now.