The Dying Diplomats Club

by Matthew Benns

  ‘So you think Charlie was poisoned?’ asked Monaro.

  ‘Yes. But it was a spur of the moment thing and not a premeditated murder,’ said Nick. ‘I don’t believe the killer knew he or she was going to kill Australia’s top envoy to China until tonight.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The type of poison that was used,’ explained Nick. ‘It was the only thing conveniently to hand.’

  Taylor groaned and groggily came to. She tried to sit up, but her husband put a gentle paw on her shoulder and held her down. ‘Easy, honey, you had a funny turn. You are safe now. Nick is just explaining what he thinks happened to that second dead diplomat.’

  The influencer looked as though she wanted to vomit.

  ‘Right on cue,’ said Nick. ‘Taylor, you may recall my wife asking you a couple of times tonight if you were chilly? Even though it is a hot summer night.’

  She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  ‘That’s because you are an advocate of the ancient remedy of colloidal silver and take it regularly,’ explained Nick. ‘That is, of course – and I am happy to defer to Dr Ngo on this point – absolute, gold-plated, premium-rated poppycock.’

  ‘I am afraid that’s correct,’ said Charlotte gently, addressing her comment to Taylor as she lay wanly on the sofa. ‘There is no medical evidence whatsoever that it confers any of the health benefits you think it does. You are correct however in saying that it was used as an ancient remedy to counter infection before the invention of antibiotics.’

  ‘Which is why they had to invent antibiotics,’ said Nick. ‘Because it didn’t work. What it does do, apart from slowly poison you, is turn your skin blue. Hence my wife thinking you are chilly when really you are just a funny colour because you are drinking liquid silver.’

  Charlotte was nodding now and looking at Nick with a new level of respect. ‘A little bit of colloidal silver, a little blue tinge,’ she said.

  ‘A big dose taken quickly and you end up looking like a dead Smurf,’ said Nick. ‘Just like poor Charlie Johnson.’

  Taylor was up one elbow now and scrabbling for her purse.

  ‘What is it, honey?’ asked Hayden.

  ‘My bag. Give me my bag,’ she said urgently. He handed her the small sequined clutch and she went through it frantically. ‘My colloidal silver is gone. The bottle is missing. There was enough there for six months.’

  ‘My guess is that whoever wanted Charlie Johnson dead decided that tonight and put the nearest thing to hand, your bottle of colloidal silver, into his red wine. Hence the red tint to the saliva on lips. He would have frothed and choked that up as he died,’ said Nick. ‘A pretty painful way to go.’

  ‘Who on earth would do such a horrible thing?’ said Taylor, pale with shock beneath her own light blue pallor.

  ‘Someone who knew that you keep colloidal silver in your purse,’ said Nick. ‘And someone who perhaps wanted something from Australia’s top man in China. Someone who, by his own admission, has his entire business resting on a restoration of relations between the two countries.’

  ‘You cannot be serious?’ said Monaro. ‘I know he’s desperate but —’

  ‘Someone who would benefit greatly from having a new Australian diplomat in China who may be more amenable to his requests to get the high rollers rolling in again,’ said Nick, looking directly at Hayden. Baxter had appeared by his side and was growling menacingly.

  The casino mogul scrambled to feet, staring wildly about him. ‘Now ease way back a minute,’ he said, backing away himself towards the doors. His wife, horrified, stared at him in disbelief from the sofa. Hill took another step and bumped into a coffee table. He put down his hand to steady himself and it came back up holding a marble standard lamp. ‘I admit I may have wanted him replaced but there is no way I would kill him to do it.’

  ‘You admit you have motive and means,’ said Nick, on the balls of his feet and closing imperceptibly the distance between them. ‘Put down the lamp, Hayden.’

  ‘Listen, son, if I wanted someone dead, I wouldn’t be dumb enough to do it with my dippy wife’s goddamn own poison while I’m sitting in the same room,’ he fired, his florid face bright with anger. ‘Let’s get the proper cops in here and see what they say.’

  Nick took another step towards him and the overweight casino mogul swung the marble lamp at his head. Nick leaned back, allowing the lamp to swing harmlessly past his nose, the momentum throwing Hayden off balance. Instantly Nick was forward as Baxter pounced, tangling himself in the casino mogul’s legs and sinking his teeth into Hayden’s right ankle, keeping him off balance. The right hook Nick threw, which started at waist height, smacked into the angry man’s jaw with an audible crack and the poleaxed tycoon crashed, comatose, on top of his wife on the sofa.

  ‘Get him off me!’ she yelped.

  ‘Yes, tie his hands and perhaps secure him to a chair before he comes ’round,’ said Nick. ‘I may have that martini now and see if I can actually finish one.’

  CHAPTER 12

  The Mystery Guest

  Ten minutes earlier La Contessa had slipped into the kitchen, unnoticed in the commotion, as the other guests raced outside in search of the missing diplomat Charlie Johnson.

  ‘Well, Nick said wait for a distraction and that certainly looks like a distraction to me,’ La Contessa whispered to herself. ‘Oh, dear Mama did say that was the first sign of madness . . .’

  She peeped her head through the kitchen door again and watched as the last of the guests, Anne-Sophie and Karen, stepped off the verandah and into the relative darkness shrouding the lawn of Kirribilli House. She became suddenly aware of how quiet the empty house was, the silence magnified by the boat horns, canned music and occasional shouts of the New Year’s Eve revellers on the harbour – the sound carrying easily across the water. La Contessa headed back across the dining room and into the foyer. She looked at the door to the toilet where the body of Alexander was lying and shuddered.

  ‘No, not there,’ she told herself. ‘How about that one?’

  Opposite the guest bathroom, on the other side of the main entrance, was another closed door. She could hear the ice dripping from the carved winged horse as she padded quietly across the marble floor and rested a tentative hand on the brass handle. It opened easily and she found herself in a small book-lined study. There was a mahogany desk against the wall underneath the window, looking out onto the neon-lit gravel driveway. There were two phones on the desk – one red and one blue. ‘One for Liberal Prime Ministers and one for Labor, I presume,’ she said to herself.

  She picked up the blue phone and a voice on the other end said, ‘Parliament House switchboard, how may I direct your call?’ The phone rattled back into its cradle, the question unanswered. More tentatively, her breath coming in short pants to match her racing pulse, La Contessa then picked up the red phone and was met with the reassuring buzz of a good old-fashioned dial tone. Quickly she pulled out the card Nick had given her with Cleaver’s new number and dialled. It was answered on the fourth ring.

  ‘Happy New Year to you, one and all,’ came the slightly slurred voice of the Detective Inspector.

  ‘Cleaver, are you drunk?’

  ‘Ah, La Contessa, how goes the Prime Ministerial party?’ he said, before adding, ‘Certainly not. Brian and I were just enjoying some eggnog. Weren’t we, Brian?’

  ‘Detective Inspector, Brian is a bulldog and should not really be imbibing eggnog, which I am sure is more than liberally dosed with brandy,’ La Contessa whispered down the phone. ‘Listen . . .’

  ‘Well I would love to but you are whispering,’ said Cleaver, the last word of which seemed to register in his fuddled brain and he snapped into focus. ‘And why are you whispering? What is wrong?’

  ‘There has been a murder – I can tell you the details later – but earlier tonight the Prime Minister ordered all police and security staff to form an outer cordon around the perimeter of Kirribilli House. They have no idea what has happened.’
>
  ‘I see,’ said Cleaver, as if this was the sort of call he received every day.

  ‘Nick asked me to find a phone and call you – all of our phones have been confiscated – and to tell you to try and get here as discreetly as possible. He said not to come knocking on the front gate.’

  ‘Got it. Tell him “message understood”,’ said Cleaver, his voice now crisp and clear. ‘La Contessa, take care of yourself.’

  ‘Oh Cleaver,’ said La Contessa with a sudden worried thought, ‘what about your nephew Glen? Will he be all right there on his own? He is only twelve.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Cleaver before quickly recovering. ‘Ah yes, he’s OK. His eighteen-year-old brother just came out of the cupboard to keep him company.’

  ‘It’s “closet”,’ said La Contessa. ‘Just came out of the closet. That’s nice they can be together. Anyway, as long as Glen will be OK then hurry up and get here as soon as you can.’

  La Contessa carefully replaced the handset, relieved the first part of her mission was complete. She looked around the room and then pulled back the leather office chair next to the desk to sit down in front of a silver laptop on the writing surface. She tentatively opened it and the screen lit up, blue light bathing her face.

  ‘That looks tricky,’ she murmured, surveying the Australian crest with the kangaroo and emu and the words Robert Monaro, Prime Minister of Australia written underneath. There was a line of 12 white boxes that clearly required a numerical passcode. La Contessa typed in Robert’s and Patricia’s birthdates and pressed enter. A warning flashed up indicating there were two tries remaining. She sighed and closed the screen, not wanting to raise the alarm. Idly she sat back and opened the drawers of the desk, which were unlocked. Pens, stationery, paper for the printer, nothing of interest . . . apart from an old Dell laptop in the bottom drawer with the power cable coiled on top of it.

  ‘I wonder . . .’ said La Contessa. She pulled the laptop out, stretched the cable across the desk to a double power point that already had one socket filled with a desk lamp and powered it up. After what felt like an eternity, the screen creaked into life with the instruction to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to continue. When she did, it came up with the request for a password. La Contessa sat back and rubbed her temples before letting out a triumphant ‘ahh’ and typing Scout into the box. The screen went black and her heart dropped before it then opened up gloriously into life with a few familiar icons on the old Microsoft blue screen: email, Explorer, Word. She started with the personal email, which had been recently used.

  ‘Hmmm, I thought so,’ she muttered to herself after opening the first one and reading through to the bottom of the email trail. She clicked on the sent icon and scanned through. They were all to the same Gmail address. La Contessa opened one and her eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘Oh Robert, you rascal. Still, a woman’s intuition is never wrong.’

  She moved from the email file and clicked on the Microsoft Office icon. Checking the dates she could see that an Excel spreadsheet had been edited two days previously. She clicked on the file and, brow furrowed, read carefully the headings for the tabulated columns and the numbers they contained alongside dates in the far left column. La Contessa pressed the print icon and the printer on the desk next to her whirred into life. After what seemed an anxious eternity a single sheet of paper rolled out. As La Contessa took it, she heard voices approaching the house.

  She slammed the laptop shut, jerking out the power cable and ramming both back into the drawer. In two steps, she had grabbed the printout from the tray and was back at the door. A quick look across the foyer into the still empty living room and she was out, closing the door carefully behind her, across the marble foyer again and heading towards the stairs.

  ‘No, it’s OK, I can get it from here,’ called out Patricia.

  La Contessa opened the door to her right and found herself in another small downstairs sitting room. The drapes were open and she could see the driveway again outside. There were two overstuffed armchairs and a couch in front of a bulky, very early model flat screen Sony Bravia television – the public purse that had funded the extensive renovations clearly not stretching to high-end electronics. Patricia’s feet were clicking quickly across the marble of the foyer. La Contessa closed the door quietly, moved swiftly around the closest armchair, dropped to her knees and crawled behind the sofa as the Prime Minister’s wife opened the door. Patricia stepped into the room, grabbed the tartan blanket that was folded across the back of the sofa and headed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Phew, that was close,’ La Contessa said to herself. ‘Damn, I’m stuck. How am I supposed to get out of here?’

  After a great deal of groaning, complaining and muttered oaths she managed to reverse out of the narrow space behind the sofa and once again stand upright. She looked at the crumpled paper in her hand, carefully folded it into a rectangle the size of a matchbox and tucked it into her bra. She checked her reflection in the blank screen of the television, adjusted her hair, and cracked the door open. A quick peek revealed the coast was clear; the voices were back outside and barely audible from inside the house. She had a little more time. La Contessa slipped out of the door and silently made her way to the staircase.

  The steps creaked but not too loudly as she ascended, sticking to the side and running her hands up the wall in the semi darkness. Works of art lined the space and a family portrait of Robert, Patricia and their two grown-up daughters took pride of place at the top of the stairs. The landing was in darkness. La Contessa cracked the first door at the top of the stairs and peered in. Open curtains allowed in light from the driveway below to reveal an unoccupied guest bedroom.

  The door on the opposite side revealed a similar room, but lit with twinkling lights from the harbour. She moved down the corridor and found two more bedrooms exactly the same. On the front, road side of the house, she found two bathrooms; and at the end of the corridor, the Prime Ministerial bedroom. La Contessa slipped inside. The bed was neatly made and the curtains were drawn with just a chink of light coming in from the streetlamps on Kirribilli Avenue. Robert clearly slept on the right side of the bed as, stacked untidily on the bedside table, were political and military histories including the first two volumes of Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s autobiography, A Bigger Picture, which clearly had not been opened, and Blanche D’Alpuget’s biography of her husband, Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke. The bedside table on Patricia’s side held a slim volume of The Prince by Machiavelli and a well-thumbed copy of Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin. A cursory look through the drawers of the cabinets revealed nothing and La Contessa was reluctant to turn on the light and advertise her whereabouts. As she emerged from the Prime Minister’s bedroom and eased into the hallway she noticed a pale-blue flickering light coming from the door opposite – the only room she had not explored. Almost on tiptoes, she glided across the hallway, put her hand on the handle and gently cracked the door open. Peeping in, she could see the arm of a sofa, backlit by the lights of the bridge and harbour beyond, and the edge of a bookcase. Gently she eased the door open and slipped inside what was obviously the Prime Minister’s private sitting room. La Contessa pushed the door shut and a hand clamped across her mouth. Her left arm was pinned in a vice-like grip that thrust her wrist painfully up her back and between her shoulderblades.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ a male voice hissed in her ear. He smelled of Old Spice and the bristles on his chin rasped against her neck. A bank of computer screens where the man had obviously been sitting before she opened the door were the source of the flickering light she had seen from the hallway. ‘Now what brings a nosy little girl like you up here to the Prime Minister’s private quarters?’ said the man, propelling La Contessa across the room. Outside she could see the other guests walking back across the lawn from the fig tree.

  ‘If I let you go, do you promise not to scream?’

  La Conte
ssa tried to nod but could only just move her head with the hand holding her head so tight. With a sudden jerk the man released her, using her pinioned arm to spin her onto the floral patterned sofa. The backs of her knees smacked against the cushions and she sat down with a whoosh of air that she had inhaled in preparation to scream. The man leaned forwards and put his finger on her lips. It felt very menacing.

  ‘Who,’ La Contessa began but it came out as a squeak so she tried again, attempting to put more authority into her voice. ‘Who are you?’ she demanded.

  ‘I think that was my question to you,’ said the man. He was dressed in a black polo shirt and black jeans. His salt-and-pepper hair was tightly cropped to his scalp and matched the designer-cut stubble on his face. La Contessa’s eyes flicked to the bank of screens behind him, which showed black and white security camera footage of the dining and sitting rooms downstairs. She could see the guests gathered around someone lying prone on the sofa. A handgun sat on the desk next to a pair of wireless headphones beside the keyboard.

  ‘You are spying on us!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Brilliant,’ said the man sarcastically. ‘Yes, I have snuck up here and set up this complex network of cameras and screens in the sitting room opposite the Prime Minister’s bedroom without anyone noticing. Try again.’

  ‘Oh,’ said La Contessa sheepishly. ‘You are some kind of security backup for Prime Minister Monaro.’

  ‘Bingo: give the nosy lady a cigar,’ said the man. ‘And now, given that you are not about to tell me what I already know from my checklist and confirm who you are, even though I have been watching you and your annoying little dog all evening, I had better take you back to your friends.’

  ‘Wait, did you kill Alexander Brown?’ demanded La Contessa.

  The man grabbed her firmly by her arm, easily lifted her to her feet and propelled her in front of him along the hallway and down the stairs. They crossed the foyer, through the doors and turned left into the sitting room where the guests were gathered around the sofa. The French Ambassador was just straightening up from tying Hayden’s hands behind him as he sat on a dining chair. Taylor was lying pale and shocked on the sofa next to him. Every face registered surprise at the appearance of La Contessa in her scarlet gown being shoved into the room by a black-clad stranger.