The Dying Diplomats Club

by Matthew Benns

  ‘I am afraid I can’t do that, Trevor,’ said Monaro evenly.

  ‘Cannot or will not?’ said Saunders. ‘You know that money does not belong to you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I cannot give it to you either,’ said Monaro.

  Saunders fired, the bullet shattering a framed glass picture just behind the Prime Minister’s head. Taylor screamed, and most of the guests jumped, but the Prime Minister did not move. His gaze never left Saunders’s face.

  ‘Give me the money,’ Saunders yelled.

  ‘He can’t,’ said Nick. ‘He doesn’t have it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The money has been transferred back to Iraq.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Saunders, giving his head a quick shake to clear it. ‘He wouldn’t bring it all the way here, go to all that trouble to have it made into a cage and then melt it down, just to send it back where it came from.’

  ‘I am afraid so,’ said Nick, taking care not to look at Baxter, who was edging closer. ‘I imagine it was the only way he could achieve what he wanted.’

  ‘What he wanted?’ said Saunders, the frustration finally causing the gun to waiver as he wrestled with what was being said. ‘You are talking in riddles. What did he want?’

  ‘The money was never ours,’ said Monaro. ‘It belonged to the Iraqi people. I did not trust our government, or our men, as you have just so ably proven, with it. So Alex, Charlie and I came up with the plan to get the gold here and then give it back to the Iraqi people. One bar at a time.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Saunders. ‘You are giving the money back?’

  ‘Oh it’s true,’ said La Contessa. Saunders’s eyes swung to her angrily. ‘I saw the accounts – the money is being transferred to orphanages in Iraq. Quite a number of them.’

  ‘Orphanages?’ said Saunders in disbelief. The gun barrel dipped slightly as he tried to process the information. ‘Orphanages. You idiot. That’s a life-changing fortune. Orphanages.’

  ‘Now would be a good time, Detective Inspector,’ shouted Nick.

  Detective Inspector Cleaver burst from the kitchen to the soldier’s right, tugging at an old Webley Revolver that seemed to be stuck in the elastic of his still-damp cummerbund. His mouth was full of what appeared to be trifle, the cream lining his top lip.

  ‘Pwllees,’ he shouted in a spray of custard. ‘Dwp yurr wpnn.’

  ‘Baxter!’ shouted Nick as Saunders spun to level the 9mm handgun at the portly policeman still tugging to free his weapon. The injured beagle had reduced the distance while the men had been talking and now leaped up, his jaws clamping onto Saunders’s wrist, pushing his arm up and sending the shot he fired into the ceiling.

  ‘Get him!’ yelled Nick, his legs firing like pistons and sending him off his chair and cannoning into the ex-soldier. The force of Nick’s charge took the three of them careening into the hallway, where they slid across the tiles, only coming to a halt when Saunders’s head crashed into the base of the table holding the remains of the ice sculpture. The dripping pegasus shuddered and crashed onto them, dislodging Baxter’s grip from Saunders’s hand, and shattered into thousands of tiny pieces.

  ‘Damn dog!’ growled Saunders, rolling lithely to his feet and giving Baxter a kick that sent the beagle flying into the corner with a yelp. Saunders scrabbled for the gun that he had dropped, but Nick, still lying where he had sprawled from his flying charge, kicked it away towards the study. A sturdy crystal decanter came flying into the hallway and struck Saunders on the temple, sending him staggering in the direction of the stairs.

  ‘That’s for Baxter, you brute,’ shouted La Contessa, looking around for something else to throw. Saunders shook his head, looked at the three former soldiers – Monaro, Armand and Sir Aiden – rising from their chairs in the dining room, and belted up the stairs. Nick rolled to his feet and took the carpeted stairs two at a time in hot pursuit.

  ‘Be careful, darling,’ shouted La Contessa after him. ‘He may have another gun.’

  Nick turned on the landing at the top of the stairs and saw Saunders fly into the upstairs sitting room. Without pausing, Nick sprinted after him, barging through the doorway, his eyes half closed and braced for the shot. It did not come. Nick opened his eyes fully and saw Saunders’s leg disappearing through the open window.

  The former soldier glanced back at him triumphantly. There was no chance Nick could catch him now. Two steps across the verandah roof and a parachute landing roll on the soft well-tended grass below and he would be clear while the attention of everyone below was still focused back into the house. Saunders gave a grin back at Nick and jumped off the roof.

  There was a mighty bovine bellow followed by an agonised groan.

  Nick turned away from the window and raced back along the landing, down the stairs through the hallway and dining room and out onto the verandah, where the others had already gathered.

  ‘Oh darling, it’s horrible,’ said La Contessa, burying her head into his jacket.

  Trevor Saunders was impaled on the twin horns of the larger of the two Arabian oryx, the male, which had been grazing on the lawn by the verandah. The weight of the former soldier’s landing had flattened the beast to the lawn and then driven the two horns straight through his abdomen. Unlike Saunders, the beast was still alive; it kicked and thrashed, nodding and pushing its head. Slowly it managed to work its way free from the dead soldier, the body edging down its horns as the horrified guests looked on, dumbfounded. The oryx struggled to its feet and shook its head, blood from Trevor Saunders dribbling down its horns and over its head, and trotted over to join its mate. Together they ambled across the Kirribilli House lawn, framed by the harbour and silhouette of the bridge in the background, and headed towards their favoured corner near the fence with Admiralty House. Charlotte went over to Saunders’s body, checked his pulse and shook her head. With her right hand she closed his staring eyes.

  ‘Brett,’ she said, ‘can you fetch me a blanket to cover him, please?’

  Nick felt a nudge against his leg and glanced down to see Baxter, blood congealing in a line across his head from the bullet wound and over one side of his face, looking back up at him with one big brown eye. Nick broke from La Contessa’s embrace and kneeled down to scratch the dog behind the ear.

  ‘Good job, Baxter my boy,’ he said as the beagle’s tail thumped on the verandah. ‘We might need to get that head looked at – you could end up as the canine equivalent of Harry Potter with a scar like that.’

  ‘Great bit of teamwork,’ said Detective Inspector Cleaver delightedly. ‘Got the jump on that devil. Did you see his face?’

  ‘He seemed taken aback to be under attack from a man with a mouthful of trifle and his pistol stuck in his pants,’ observed La Contessa.

  ‘Aha, that’s the element of surprise.’ Cleaver nodded wisely. ‘Lull them into a false sense of security. And the trifle was awfully good – the blathering was going on in there for so long I thought it couldn’t hurt to try a little. Of course I needed my hands to do that so I tucked the old Webley into my cummerbund and would you believe it . . .’

  ‘That was the very moment I called your name,’ said Nick. ‘But you didn’t let us down.’

  ‘No, you came through that door like George Custer at the head of the Seventh Cavalry,’ said La Contessa admiringly.

  ‘Although things didn’t end up quite so well for him,’ observed Nick. ‘Now Detective Inspector, I think you had better pull out that old revolver of yours again and get everyone back to their places at the table.’

  ‘Very good,’ said the Detective Inspector. ‘But isn’t everything wrapped up now? Surely the killer and blackmailer are one and the same man lying dead there on the lawn?’

  ‘Far from it,’ said Nick. ‘We still have a blackmailer to unmask and two murders to solve.’

  ‘We must be close to that now, darling,’ said La Contessa, who was bending down and dabbing at Baxter’s cut head with a wet line
n napkin. She had cleared the congealed blood from his eye, which was now open, bright and uninjured. ‘I’m getting awfully tired.’

  ‘Absolutely, my Demonte dynamo,’ said Nick. ‘It’s time we ended this bloody little party once and for all.’

  CHAPTER 19

  Unmasked

  ‘There you go, Baxter,’ said Dr Charlotte Ngo, giving the appreciative dog a scratch under his chin. ‘A little unorthodox to use super glue to tack that wound together but it is the same theory as we use in hospital emergency departments all the time.’

  ‘Will he be all right?’ asked La Contessa, who was sitting on the floor, cradling the dog as the surgeon worked. ‘I was so worried about him.’

  ‘Yes, the bullet creased a line across the top of his skull but did not penetrate the bone. He was temporarily stunned but will recover fully with nothing but a headache and a scar to show for his exertions,’ Charlotte said as La Contessa buried her head into Baxter’s neck and he thumped his tail appreciatively. ‘He is a very lucky dog.’

  The familiar tapping of metal against the side of a Champagne flute silenced the hubbub of conversation in the room. Detective Inspector Cleaver gave the glass one more tap with the sight on the end of his revolver for good measure and ran a cold eye over the group.

  ‘There have been three deaths tonight. The most recent may be classed as misadventure but there have been two murders and one blackmail attempt. Alexander Brown, Australian Ambassador and former SAS veteran, is lying dead in the bathroom. His colleague Charlie Johnson, a fellow diplomat and SAS veteran, has been poisoned and his body rests under the tree in the grounds outside.’ Cleaver nodded through the open verandah doors, where the inky night sky underlined the lateness of the hour. ‘The killer or killers and the blackmailer have to be in this room. Outside I have a team of detectives ready to get to work, but before I do, my good friend and former colleague Nick Moore has asked me to indulge him in one last stab, er shot, er crack at resolving what happened. Please take your seats.’

  The tired guests, looking a lot less glamorous than at the start of the evening in their crumpled clothes and with their careworn faces, returned to the table. ‘And one other thing,’ Cleaver said, the guests clearly unaware of his bluff about the team of detectives waiting in the wings. ‘I have my pistol out this time. I will be standing right here by the kitchen door and if anyone tries anything dodgy or attempts to run I assure you I will not hesitate to shoot.’

  ‘I say, this is all very melodramatic,’ protested Sir Aiden. ‘There have been three deaths now, all former soldiers who served under me, and at the risk of repeating myself for the umpteenth time, I think it is frankly time we allowed the full weight of the New South Wales Police Force to bear on this evening’s events.’

  ‘I will take your suggestion under advisement, if you don’t mind,’ Monaro said. ‘I put this little shindig together to sort it out and I invited Nick and La Contessa along because I hoped they would have the necessary skills and be impartial enough to get to the bottom of what was going on without it hitting the newspapers.’

  ‘Good luck with that. I think three deaths in Kirribilli House on New Year’s Eve may merit more than a news-in-brief paragraph on page two,’ said Sir Aiden.

  ‘Yes, but when we began it was only a blackmail attempt; I had no idea it would lead to murder,’ said the Prime Minister.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Nick, who had finished shaking and pouring two martinis and now walked from the shattered remains of the ice sculpture to the table. He placed one in front of La Contessa and then took a sip of his own, giving an appreciative sigh. ‘And neither did the blackmailer, I suspect.’

  ‘With the number of martinis you have drunk this evening, I am amazed you are still standing, let alone thinking,’ said the Foreign Minister. ‘I am not sure we should be wasting our time on the musings of a drunk.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said La Contessa. ‘Martinis make him more lucid. Sometimes they are the only way I can get him to see reason.’

  ‘Thank you, my Chieti champion,’ said Nick. ‘Would anyone else like a drink before we start?’

  From his position standing with his back to the entrance to the foyer and facing the verandah doors Nick could see everyone in the room. Outside the lights had been extinguished on the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and most of the boats and noisy partygoers had headed for home. The subdued lights of the city reflected on the harbour’s jet-black surface. To his right, Detective Inspector Cleaver stood watchfully, gun in hand, behind Monaro, who was sitting at the head of the table. The former soldier looked grey and haggard. He shook his head at the offer of a drink. From the Prime Minister’s right, Karen watched him anxiously, ignoring Nick completely, while next to her Sir Aiden remained ramrod straight, restrained anger pulsating from every pore. La Contessa smiled at him encouragingly and gave him a wink. Next to her, Hayden was slumped in his chair, hands tied and still ashen from his experience with the kambo. Brett gave Nick what he clearly hoped was his most honest and innocent face. It was well practised and had precisely the opposite effect. At the opposite end of the table from her husband, Patricia sat round-shouldered staring at her hands in her lap, her eyes red from weeping. She was flanked by the empty chairs of the two dead diplomats.

  The guests on the other side of the table had all turned to face Nick. Taylor gave a theatrical yawn and looked at her watch. Charlotte’s face had the weary look of a doctor at the end of a busy shift in an emergency department, which was effectively what she had just had. Nick noticed Anne-Sophie and Armand were holding hands as they waited for him to go on.

  ‘Why not?’ said the remaining ambassador. ‘This seems the perfect time for French Champagne.’

  Nick smiled and ducked back into the entrance hall, returning moments later with a bottle of Dom in an ice bucket that contained mostly cold lumpy water. He handed it to the former Legionnaire, who expertly ripped off the foil, unwound the wire and released the cork with a gentle hiss. He poured two flutes, for himself and his wife. They raised them to Nick in a toast and drank. Baxter gave a loud sigh, stretched and then circled into position on the rug just behind Nick. He lay down and his good eye remained watchful, scanning the guests.

  ‘The Prime Minister is right: everybody has a reason to be here,’ said Nick. ‘This is not a random party. Everyone here, or their partner, has knowledge of or has played a part in the disposal of the Iraqi gold.’

  ‘I knew you would get there, darling,’ said La Contessa excitedly. ‘After Robert found it with his SAS team, Charlie and Alex, Armand and his Legionnaires were there in Iraq and said nothing. His commanding officer, Sir Aiden, told him to bury it and failed to file the report.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nick. ‘And . . .’

  ‘And then Charlie and Alex went back to get it,’ continued La Contessa. ‘They had it fashioned into a cage to ship over the Arabian oryx and then used Brett to take the melted-down bars into Hayden’s casino.’

  A silence filled the room as La Contessa looked from Karen to Taylor and then to Charlotte. A silent question mark hung over them.

  ‘I invited them because they were the partners of people involved and may have had knowledge of what was going on,’ said the Prime Minister as his wife let out a tiny sob at the end of the table, darting a glance at the Foreign Minister upon the use of the word ‘partner’. ‘No loose ends.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Nick. ‘Yes, most of you knew the Prime Minister by his nickname as Scout, which was written on the blackmail note. But more importantly, some here had knowledge of the gold and therefore were in the frame for sending the blackmail note and trying to get it all for themselves.’

  ‘Darling,’ interrupted La Contessa, rather timidly half raising her hand. ‘I’m sorry but I just can’t see anyone here being that mean. Apart from Hayden, of course, but really there are some very good people here. And we have tied Hayden up because he poisoned Charlie with his wife’s silver.’

  ‘Ah, my Oliveri optim
ist,’ said Nick, ‘you are, of course, completely correct. There are some very good people here, except Hayden, as you rightly point out. But while being morally bankrupt may make him a blackmailer I don’t think it makes him a killer. And don’t forget this is a room filled with more trained killers than you find at your average dinner party.’

  ‘But if this is a room full of good people,’ said La Contessa, her brow creased in a frown, ‘how can we be looking at a blackmail attempt, two murders and a rather unfortunate skewering?’

  ‘Lack of faith,’ said Nick. ‘A couple of minor indiscretions that led to a loss of faith in the basic good of people we know and love.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ exploded Karen, angry red dots lighting up her cheeks. ‘Get on with it. This is just first-year philosophy mumbo jumbo. We might as well get Mystic Medusa in here for all the sense you are making. Say what you are going to say or let’s get the proper police in so that we can all go home.’

  ‘Well Foreign Minister, I am afraid it is you who is the catalyst for this whole thing,’ said Nick, sharply. ‘If you had not had an affair with Rob, your colleague and Prime Minister, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she fired, clearly startled at the love affair being mentioned as a fait accompli. Quickly she rallied. ‘Besides, the affair is over and I am resigning from the cabinet. I cannot remotely see how that led to two good men being murdered tonight and another dying on the lawn of Kirribilli House.’

  ‘The blackmail note,’ said Nick. ‘When Rob read that out, both Charlie and Alex knew immediately that one of the three people in their inner circle had breached their trust. Only those three knew the details of where the gold was buried and how it got to Australia, because they were the ones who did it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said La Contessa. ‘And they knew it couldn’t be Robert because he was the one who was being blackmailed. So, you mean . . .’ She faltered and looked at Nick imploringly. ‘No, darling, I can’t believe that.’