by Roland Perry
Allen & Unwin’s House of Books aims to bring Australia’s cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation’s most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.
The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia’s finest literary achievements.
Roland Perry is one of Australia’s best-known authors. Born in 1946, he began his writing career at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, starting in 1969. After five years spent in the United Kingdom making documentary films, he published his first novel, Program for a Puppet, which was an international bestseller, in 1979. He has since written over twenty-five more books, many of which have gone on to become non-fiction bestsellers, including The Don, the definitive biography of Donald Bradman, Miller’s Luck, The Changi Brownlow, The Australian Light Horse and Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War.
ROLAND PERRY
Faces in the Rain
This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012
First published by Octopus Publishing Group, Melbourne, in 1990
Copyright © Roland Perry 1990
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: SUSPECT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PART TWO: FUGITIVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
PART THREE: HUNTER
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
EPILOGUE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For Christine Georgeff to be taken with coffee in Piazza Di S. Maria in Trastevere
The French, for their part, are almost compulsive exponents of dirty tricks. The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour and the killing of a member of the anti-nuclear group Greenpeace in the process was just an example where they were caught. The former head of the French secret service has revealed that they carried out about fifty successful operations in the Pacific between 1970 and 1981, including the mechanical sabotage of vessels seeking to monitor French nuclear test at Mururoa.
Brian Toohey and William Pinwill, Oyster
PART ONE
SUSPECT
ONE
TORRENTIAL RAIN swept over the Rolls. The windscreen wipers worked at top speed but my vision was blurred, until I found I was driving on the footpath. I slewed the car back onto the road and heeded the warning voice that told me to slow down to one rat power. There was no point in speeding through a flood, especially when I was inebriated after a twenty-year school reunion.
The conviviality at my table of six had been caused by Freddie May, who had regaled us with his adventures in the Pacific. Freddie boasted of riches gained and beautiful women conquered much as he had at seventeen, and then invited us to an apartment with the promise of French champagne and more of the same. In a rare state for me, I had been too far gone to refuse.
I parked the car, as if it was a Jumbo Jet with one wing, in Domain Road, South Yarra and followed a straight line which kept wobbling along Park Street to the address. It was a new apartment block, all glass and brick and hard geometric lines. It was painted red, and the green check window shades and awnings were unprepossessing. I fell into a lift that deposited me at apartment six on the third floor and was greeted by squat, muscular Freddie. His thick hair had been dyed to smother the greying at the temples, but he had found it more difficult to hide the age of his faded eyebrows.
His lopsided grin – the one I recall when he sprayed ink on the back of masters’ gowns – was mischievous as he pulled to him a stunning Polynesian woman in her late twenties. She was tall, with long, dreadlocked black hair. She wore a longish white dress that showed lean angles and flat model’s feet, no shoes. Her fine Eurasian features were vaguely familiar.
‘Martine, meet Duncan Hamilton,’ Freddie said, ‘the most likely new billionaire before the year two thousand.’
‘I read about you in a magazine,’ Martine said with a French lilt. She pushed out a fine-boned hand and I kissed it. She smiled and briefly touched my beard. They ushered me in and I sat in a lounge of soft pastels and pink. It wasn’t Freddie’s apartment, it was Martine’s. Freddie popped a champagne cork as Martine placed a compact disc in a player. She sat beside me.
‘He’s always in the news,’ Freddie said with a grin as he handed me a glass, ‘if it’s not a big takeover, it’s the release of a new “wonder” drug. High-profile stuff.’
‘The article I read was a couple of years old,’ Martine said frowning as she stretched her memory, ‘I think I was in a doctor’s surgery somewhere. You know ’ow they always keep ancient magazines.’
I nodded and readied myself for some probing. A few years ago my private life had become chaotic and public.
‘The story was about your separation from your wife,’ Martine said, ‘the cause was the strain put on your marriage because of kidnapping threats.’
‘That was really the last straw,’ I said, ‘the marriage was all but on the rocks when that kidnapping business started.’
‘Enough morbid talk about bloody marriage,’ Freddie said, turning the volume up.
Martine smiled.
‘I did some modelling for Benepharm advertisements,’ she said, dropping the name of my company.
‘Which ones?’
‘Beneherbs. You know, they tone the skin and muscles.’
I remembered seeing her at a screening of those ads.
‘How did you and Freddie meet?’ I asked.
‘In hospital,’ she said, ‘we both had lymphatic cancer.’
; ‘I didn’t know you’d been ill,’ I said to Freddie.
‘Yeah,’ he said flopping in a chair, ‘we’ve both been through it. Chemotherapy, hair dropping out, the whole catastrophe.’
‘We’re both out of remission now,’ Martine said.
‘Christ, darling!’ Freddie said, reaching across and kissing her, ‘you’ve had it so much tougher than me!’
They hugged.
‘She’s had six years of treatment,’ Freddie said, still holding her.
Martine looked sad.
‘Seven,’ she corrected him, ‘but it should have been a year at most, like yours.’
‘Yeah,’ Freddie said, ‘bloody incompetent doctors!’
Martine’s eyes welled with tears. Freddie played with the music disc. A Brazilian number began. He pulled her up for a dance and she was soon laughing as he clowned around. I finished my champagne and was thinking about leaving when Martine asked me to fill her glass. Then she took my arm and danced with me. Close. Freddie looked on approvingly and downed more drink. When the music stopped I wandered to a window and watched the rain. It was still heaving down.
‘The greenhouse effect,’ I said, glancing at Martine and then staring out at the sheets of water cascading over the apartment’s balcony overlooking Park Street.
‘Shithouse if you ask me,’ Freddie remarked irritably.
‘What about the others who were supposed to be coming?’ I asked.
‘Guess they wimped it,’ he said.
Water was covering the road and drains were blocked. There was little point in attempting to drive in it or in calling a taxi. I would have to sit it out. I planned to go as soon as the rain showed signs of clearing.
But it didn’t. One a.m. came and went and I had more champagne. Too much more, because I put my head back and fell asleep while the others were dancing.
Spears of light pierced my eyelids, went right through my brain and came out the back of my head, pressing me against the pillow.
‘What happened last night?’ my ex-wife Peggy said as she pulled back the curtains. Odd. She normally wouldn’t barge into my home without invitation. I opened my eyes and shut them again.
‘Uhhhh! What time is it?’
‘Time you drove Al to his footy match, and too late to take Samantha to hockey!’
‘What?’
Peggy was annoyed and it took a lot to rile her.
‘It’s one in the afternoon and I’ve already driven Samantha to hockey and back,’ she said, in an offended tone, ‘Where were you last night?’
My throat was dryer than the bottom of a birdcage. I felt queasy.
‘Where was I?’ I said, thinking it would come to me. But it didn’t. I screwed up my bleary face and tried to remember something. Anything.
‘I know you were at that old school reunion,’ Peggy said, ‘but I hear you didn’t get in until about four.’
‘Who told you?’ I said, groping for clues.
‘Your housekeeper.’
The reunion was coming back to me. But after it, what then? It was a void. I rolled off the bed, still in my socks and tuxedo pants. Imperious Peggy stood between me and the bathroom and I was blocked by those dark-blue eyes, lightly wrinkled for warmth.
‘It was so wet,’ I proffered unconvincingly, ‘made it difficult to drive.’
‘You stayed out until four? Don’t tell me you have a girlfriend at last.’
Peggy had been having an affair with a film director and hoping I’d find somebody too. Apart from a few minor flings, I hadn’t. Nor had it bothered me. Benepharm activities, especially a big current project, occupied my time.
‘No,’ I grinned sheepishly, ‘really can’t remember a thing. Had far too much to drink.’
‘I see. The old Hamilton family trick of not being able to recall anything after a binge. Is that it?’
I gave her a peck on the cheek and staggered for the bathroom. I stepped under the shower, took a deep breath and ran the cold water. The jigging round and sudden shock caused a memory cell to fire and conjure a vision of Martine. I remembered Freddie and her and bottles of champagne.
‘Are the kids ready for the footy?’ I asked.
‘They’re about somewhere, waiting for lazybones. How are you going to go?’
‘In the Roller. Why?’
‘You didn’t bring it home last night.’
‘Good parking, Dad,’ Alistair said with a cheeky twelve-year-old’s giggle as we spotted the Rolls perched on the sidewalk in Domain Road.
‘Great parking, Dad,’ nine-year-old Samantha parroted as I asked the taxi driver to let us out. The kids fought for the front passenger seat while I tore a parking ticket from the front windscreen just as a police car moved into Park Street. It stopped about one hundred metres away outside the apartment I remembered being in last night. Curiosity caused me to drive left into Park Street and past the apartment block. Two cops were carrying out a body on a stretcher as an ambulance arrived.
‘Look! A dead woman!’ Sam called from the back seat.
‘How do you know it was a lady and that she was dead?’ Alistair challenged.
‘It wasn’t a lady,’ she said haughtily, ‘it was a “woman”. “Lady” is sexist.’
‘How do you know it was a . . . female?’ Alistair persisted in the teasing tone reserved for his sister.
‘Oh, you’re just blind!’
I completed the block and entered Punt Road over the Yarra which was a murky grey after the flooding. There was a bottleneck as cars descended from all points of the city for the big footy game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Alistair continued to goad Samantha. Time for Dad to intervene.
‘I once found a dead man outside Grandpa’s pharmacy,’ I said, ‘I was three at the time and no one believed me. Then Grandpa went out and examined the body in the gutter and found he was dead. The man had had too much to drink in a nearby pub and had collapsed in the street.’
Samantha seemed to feel vindicated by my story.
‘Sam,’ I said gently, ‘you can’t be sure the woman was dead until a doctor or someone like Grandpa examines her.’
She began crying.
‘I know she was dead,’ she blubbered.
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, ‘did you notice anything about the woman?’
‘Yes,’ Samantha said, drying her eyes, ‘she had black hair, and it was tied a funny way.’
There was a good feeling in the Members’ stand as Melbourne, the team I had supported for thirty years, piled on the goals. The looks on Members’ faces confirmed my long held theory that a goal or a touchdown in any code was equal to a sporting orgasm. In Aussie Rules, even a losing team scores plenty, hence the fans’ satisfaction. Yet despite goal-fed goodwill of fans around me, I was dogged by the image of the woman on the stretcher in Park Street. Had it really been Martine? My good friend and stockbroker, Oliver Slack, noticed my discomfort.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said, ‘The Demons will bury them, but you don’t have to look like the undertaker.’
He was right. What was I worried about?
At half-time I volunteered to get pies for everyone. On the way to a stall I hesitated at a phone booth. Freddie May had given me the apartment phone number in case I got lost en route from the reunion to South Yarra. I still had the number scribbled on the reverse side of his business card that said: Frederick L. May, Vital Corporation.
I dialled the number. A man answered.
‘Hullo?’
My mouth went drier than Noel Coward’s joke book.
‘Who is this, please?’ the male voice said in the flat tone reserved for people used to saying ‘The suspect proceeded in a southerly direction.’ I put down the phone. My brain pole- vaulted. Was it really the police? Had Martine been on that stretcher?
TWO
AT THE OFFICE on Sunday, I found Freddie’s home number. A sultry-voiced female answered the phone.
‘Freddie’s asleep,’ she assured me.
‘Who is this?’
‘Danielle.’
‘Can you get Freddie to the phone please. This is important.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Duncan Hamilton.’
Her hand went over the mouthpiece and there was urgent whispering. Clearly Freddie was reluctant to speak, while Danielle seemed to be pushing him. He came on the line.
‘I know what you’re ringing about,’ he said in a defensive voice.
‘What happened last night?’ I said, ‘I saw a body being carried out of that block this morning. Was it Martine?’
‘Bloody oath!’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was Danielle who found her.’
I felt dizzy.
‘Dead?’
‘Nearly. She had a faint pulse but she gave out in the ambulance and was DOA.’
I fell silent.
‘Duncan?’
‘I’m still here. How did she die?’
‘Overdosed on a drug for her migraine. Champagne and pills. A trusted way out. Danielle found her in the bath, her mouth under water.’
‘Have you been to the police?’
‘Yeah. Made a statement.’
‘I’d better . . .’
‘You? Christ, no! Stay out of it. The papers will have a field day if they learn you were there. With me it’s different. “Ex-teacher at Suicide Scene” will hardly excite Truth. But “Billionaire Drug Industry Boss Spends Night With Suicide Beauty” would turn on every editor in the country.’
‘You didn’t tell the police I was there?’
‘No. As far as they’re concerned it was just me and Martine. We had a screw. I left. She had a bath and knocked herself off.’
‘Just tell me what happened?’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Not much.’
‘Yeah, I ’spose you were pissed.’
‘I thought I fell asleep on the sofa.’
‘You did, mate. When it began to flood outside you had to stay. Martine and I went to bed. At about four I woke you and piled you into a taxi.’