Faces in the Rain

by Roland Perry

  I recalled falling into the back seat.

  ‘Martine ran the bath,’ Freddie added, ‘and I left. I can remember her standing near the bathroom door as the steam billowed out.’

  ‘Why did she do it? Did you have a fight?’

  ‘Nar. Never. She was like a mistress to me. You don’t brawl with ’em. Only your wife, right?’

  ‘But you still haven’t said why she did it.’

  Confident Freddie hesitated and the first mild hint of fear crept into his reassuring tone.

  ‘Look. She was a pretty wild chick. You know? Arguably the best lover I’d ever had. Crazy.’ He laughed, too eagerly, ‘They say you should comb the nut houses for the best screws. She had paranoias about someone in France, who was after her for some reason she never laid out.’

  ‘You’re saying she was suicidal?’

  ‘Well, she had to be, didn’t she?’

  ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘Nar. But not all of ’em do, the cops said.’

  The mention of her fears weighed on my mind and I didn’t know why.

  ‘I think I should see a lawyer,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be a waste of time, mate. You’re in the clear. Anyway I’ll bet any lawyer would say keep your nose – particularly your famous snout – out of it.’

  For the next couple of days I checked newspapers, watched TV and listened to the radio – even at work – and at night wandered my Edwardian mansion like a restless ghost. I was troubled. I didn’t think Freddie May had told me everything about those forgotten hours.

  On Monday night I was sitting alone after the evening meal in front of the fireplace in the downstairs reception room. I used the hours eight until midnight to read and plan Benepharm ventures, and always ended the night with yoga exercises. Others in the house – the kids if they were staying with me, and our Japanese housekeepers, Tomi and Fui Tashesita – knew not to disturb me. This monkish period had become more important than ever because the company was preparing the biggest research and development project in its fifteen-year history.

  I had become obsessed with being first to market drugs that would prevent or cure certain major cancers. The best way was to buy up all the research facilities we could in Australia and abroad. It was an operation costing tens of millions and included complicated financial deals involving American low-interest, high-risk bonds and other chancy resources. The calculated gamble was that at worst we would develop marketable spin-off drugs for cancer-related diseases that would eventually cover costs; at best we would find the big cancer drugs that would make Benepharm the most successful pharmaceutical group in the world.

  While I was mumbling thoughts and instructions into a small tape recorder for a secretary to type up and act on the next day, Peggy came into the room with a lemon herb tea. She had come to see the kids, who were staying with me while she had a week’s shooting on location in a TV play.

  She lingered and I looked up.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing – well, work.’

  ‘The kids remarked that you’ve been grumpy at the dinner table for the last few nights.’ Peggy smiled. ‘Sam said you were “reclusive” – she learnt the word yesterday and has been using it every second sentence.’ I laughed. It was the only time I’d smiled all day.

  ‘C’mon,’ Peggy persisted, ‘what’s on your mighty mind?’

  Our eyes locked. I flicked off the tape. Despite the break-up of our marriage I occasionally confided in her. She was the solid, upright, commonsense type. Very hockey sticks.

  ‘Sit down,’ I said, and told her the story. She insisted on me seeing a lawyer. She had that sort of tidy mind, not to mention the fact that she was the daughter of a Supreme Court judge. I resisted at first because it seemed trivial and embarrassing.

  ‘I don’t want anyone at Benepharm knowing about mishaps in my private life,’ I said, ‘rumours spread like wildfire.’

  ‘Then get Ted Bayes,’ Peggy suggested, referring to the family lawyer who’d handled our divorce with discretion and a minimum of fuss, ‘just see him and tell him what happened.’

  Ted’s father had been my father’s lawyer and he fixed things like wills and tax and trusts. I knew he had handled some minor matters for other clients/friends like me. He had kept spoilt teenagers out of court and the newspapers over such things as stolen cars and paternity suits. My little incident seemed to warrant that sort of attention, just in case, sensible Peggy said.

  The next morning, I dropped into the smart, expensive Collins Street offices of Bayes, Bayes and Burton. Ted, a nice, rather ineffectual man on the surface, had sandy, greying hair, thin, bloodless lips and watery blue eyes. But he was fit – a marathon runner. One wondered whether he kept running to get away from trusts and wills and a hectoring wife.

  While I told Ted my tale he looked out the window. When I pulled out a cheroot and offered him one, a secretary had to search for an ashtray at the back of a drinks cupboard, while he opened a window. Cigar smoke seemed to concern him far more than the story. He didn’t ask one question. At the end I said, ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Shouldn’t the police know I was there?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case Freddie May tells them I was there.’

  ‘You said he didn’t.’

  ‘What if he did?’

  ‘Then if the police got in touch you’d tell them to see me and I’d tell them your story.’

  ‘Simple as that.’

  ‘Simple as that. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘It’s not important that I was a witness to her behaviour?’

  ‘What was her behaviour?’

  ‘Friendly . . . normal.’

  ‘Not going to illuminate police investigations much, is it?’

  ‘I ’spose not.’ Ted dodged some smoke and took a breath.

  ‘Freddie May was right,’ he said, ‘no point in you opening yourself up to newspaper gossip.’

  I left Ted to fumigate his office.

  THREE

  DUDLEY, Alistair’s Bearded Dragon, was missing somewhere in the mansion grounds. The wire cage near the pool not far from the back door of the servants’ quarters had been pulled askew and there was a hole for the pet to escape. It had happened before and the cat next door had been accused of being the culprit, although no paw prints had been identified. Dudley made things more difficult by being a wanderer. Recently he had been found in the front garden of the mansion near the tennis courts, and the summer before he had several times been caught basking on the slate roof where he was very hard to find because of his chameleon tendencies, which allowed him to blend with the roof’s blue-grey colour. The household formed a search party with torches. The kids scoured the one hundred metres of rear garden, the Tashesitas looked in the tennis court and the front garden, while I was on hands and knees in the grass by the pool. Samantha screamed.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Come quick! Help!’

  I charged into the rear garden towards a bobbing torchlight until I reached her. She was trembling.

  ‘There . . . there was a man in the bushes!’ she screamed.

  ‘Where?!’

  She pointed and Alistair came to us.

  ‘I did see someone,’ he said, ‘he crashed into the pond area.’

  I led them to the back of the house where the Tashesitas had gathered. Three years ago Peggy and I had had to go through an elaborate plan to protect the kids from kidnapping. The police had warned we were targets because of my wealth and high profile.

  Someone once tried to impersonate Peggy at St Catherine’s school where Samantha was waiting to be picked up. The woman had been frightened off by an alert parent, who knew she wasn’t Peggy. Another time two hooded intruders had been seen in the grounds by neighbours and the alarm had been raised.

  I told the Tashesitas to secure all doors to the mansion and phoned the police. I ran upstairs to a bedroom safe where I kept a licensed Hec
kler & Koch semi-automatic handgun. I loaded it.

  I had had pistol training and found I was a fair shot, especially at close range. For the first time since school Cadet days I had a weapon. It was supposed to be used only as a last resort.

  I eased out the back of the mansion with torch in hand. Then I spotted the crouched figure on the wall at the rear of the garden. He was seventy metres away and appeared to have on black clothing and a rifle slung over his shoulder. He saw the torchlight, propped on the wall and fumbled for his weapon. I heard a police siren and fired my gun into the air.

  The figure on the wall dropped into the back neighbours’ garden and out of sight.

  The police radioed for more cars in an attempt to cordon off the area. They were concerned about the shot that was fired and I had to produce the gun and a licence because they had not been briefed on our special status as a kidnap target. Despite their efforts the armed prowler escaped, leaving me and the family uneasy.

  Peggy arrived and took the kids to her place. She reported the next morning that she hadn’t been able to sleep properly and that Samantha had had a nightmare. I made up my mind that Peggy, who had finished her shoot, would take the kids off earlier than planned on vacation at Noosa Heads where Benepharm had a beach resort with excellent security.

  ‘Go tomorrow if you can,’ I said, ‘and stay ten days.’

  After our previous experiences she and the kids were frightened and I wasn’t feeling too brave myself. We’d had armed guards for a while and I’d had to continually change all my work commuting routines and so on. At one point Australian Intelligence advised the police that the kidnap threat had come from an overseas terrorist group, and that I should have a false ID and changed appearance whenever I left Australia. The removal of my beard, hair dyes and blue contact lenses to hide brown eyes completed the transformation. I had done this three times and despite looking five years younger felt ridiculous. However, when a New Zealand financier was kidnapped and held to ransom (ten million was paid out) and then murdered, I decided to put up with the inconvenience.

  When things had settled down, a day or two later, it crossed my mind that the armed prowler might have been there for a reason other than kidnapping; But there was no other I could think of, so I dismissed the idea.

  FOUR

  ONE COULDN’T HELP admiring the principles of Dr Peter Walters at the Talbert & Magenta Research Institute. He wouldn’t budge one centimetre when I laid out a generous offer to take over the Institute’s cancer research program, reputedly the nation’s best. Walters was lean and unusually handsome with thick black hair, a long forehead, deepset eyes under black eyebrows, an eagle’s nose, surly sensuous mouth and a jaw set determinedly against everything that we – my vice-chairman Lloyd Vickers and I – wanted. Walters sat opposite us flanked by his eightperson board and we were in their boardroom, which was a psychological disadvantage. Our scheme was to develop cancer cures based on the use of drugs combined with tailor-made diets and yoga exercises designed to tap mind powers. But even before I explained the blueprint, Walters made negative remarks.

  ‘We are a professional group,’ he said in his oh-so-slightly arrogant voice that betrayed an English upper-middle-class accent base and an educated Aussie overlay. ‘Lose-fat fads and dumbbells are not our domain.’

  ‘I’m talking about proven diet and yoga routines,’ I said, bringing my hand down on thick folders of research, ‘they’re not gimmicks.’

  ‘Let me put it another way,’ Walters said, looking me straight in the eye, ‘I’m frankly not impressed by your approach to our science. You think you can use your dollars to usurp our decades of human research.’

  ‘The common aim should be to find the right drug to beat cancer,’ I said glancing at all the faces opposite. ‘Our management and financial expertise, together with your research knowhow, can achieve this. Little would change in the way you worked.’

  ‘Our fear with you people,’ Walters said, ‘is that you would be tempted, in your rush, to do something unethical.’

  ‘Such as?’ I said holding his gaze and leaning forward on the table.

  ‘You might put out an untested product that could be dangerous to the public!’ I shook my head in exasperation.

  ‘Name one Benepharm drug that has had dangerous side-effects,’ Lloyd challenged and drew a short silence as he drummed a chubby forefinger on the table. He was a dumpy little man with grey hair going prematurely white, and an owlish expression. Hunched shoulders added to, or perhaps were a consequence of, a grouchy disposition. Yet he was a financial genius. I was the entrepreneur who created the ideas and products and he was the wizard who funded them and placed them in the market profitably.

  We both reckoned that the Magenta Institute was just about indispensable in our plans for the ‘Big C Campaign’, as we called our cancer project, and we were both frustrated by this unexpected block. After Lloyd’s spirited remark some of the Magenta board shuffled papers and the meeting seemed almost over when Walters said, ‘Another thing we don’t like is the fact that you’re really speculating for profit over people’s lives.’

  ‘Utter rubbish,’ Lloyd said. I tapped his foot under the table to restrain him. We couldn’t afford to antagonise them.

  ‘Let’s examine what you do,’ Walters continued as if he was on to a winning point, ‘you buy up all these research groups and every now and again when there is a renewed stock-market interest in cancer or AIDS research you turn them over to another speculator for a profit just like a property developer.’

  ‘That may happen in the States,’ Lloyd said, ‘but that’s not our aim.’

  ‘Not your aim, but you may do it, right?’

  ‘We’ve carefully thought through this proposal, Doctor,’ Lloyd replied less aggressively, ‘and we would bank on getting some drug developments out of Magenta, even if they weren’t for cancer.’

  As they argued I took a few more seconds to examine the faces of the board. One of them – a Dr Cassandra Morris – seemed less inclined to agree absolutely with Walters. She was a closet beauty doing everything she could to look plain; her black hair was swept up in a bun and she wore glasses that looked as if they belonged in the laboratory. Her eyes were big, penetrating and so vividly green that I wondered if she was wearing coloured contact lenses, and she had a straight, attractive nose with a notch of imperfection right in the middle of it. Though she wasn’t making use of natural physical gifts, she dressed impressively in a dark business suit, with a red, grey and white striped cravat. Her body language divulged an independent mind; when the others nodded in support of Walters, her head was still. Once I caught her staring at me and I would have given quite a few pennies for her thoughts. The short bio on her in my notes said she was ‘chief research scientist, cancer division’. Morris was a freelance researcher with her own operation, and under contract to the Institute. She was highly thought of as one of the best in her field.

  I decided on a long shot.

  ‘Let me say this,’ I said, using a politician’s cliche, ‘we would inject massive funds over and above our offer to you into new equipment.’ I pulled out a chequebook and began to scribble. ‘I’m willing to write any figure you need to get the equipment for your push to find a cure.’ My eyes held Morris’s again. ‘Just tell me. How much would you need?’ No one seemed brave enough to answer. Morris’s eyes examined her fingers as she leant right forward on the desk.

  ‘Someone must have an idea,’ I added, looking at the other faces. ‘It’s only an offer. You can refuse it.’ I glanced back at Morris. ‘Dr Morris. You must have some idea.’

  ‘It’s difficult to calculate off the top,’ she said. I liked her voice. It had an assertive resonance.

  ‘A ball-park figure will do.’

  ‘Never was good at ball games,’ she said.

  ‘Roughly what would you need tomorrow to be shipshape for a proper research assault,’ I persisted, ‘four, five?’

  Walters sat back, arms fold
ed, his expression dark. He had not looked at Morris but the tension generated was tangible.

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded.

  I wrote out a cheque for five million and pushed it across the table at Walters.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I said, ‘the offer is on the table.’ Walters pushed it back. Morris reached down the table, held the cheque above the table and let it drop. Everyone watched it float and tumble.

  ‘At least it didn’t bounce,’ she said.

  ‘I really don’t think we need your style of company,’ Walters said. I stared at him. Surprisingly, he added, ‘but because the offer appears generous we will consider it and get back to you.’ As we left the Institute, Lloyd looked despondent.

  ‘We needed them,’ he said, ‘but that Walters bastard won’t give us a ghost of a chance.’

  ‘Wonder why he’s being so difficult?’

  ‘Maybe he thinks we’d give him the bullet.’

  ‘I doubt it, if he’s as good his reputation suggests.’

  Walters appeared confident and on his record of research management would find top work in the field anywhere. He also ran a small private practice.

  ‘It may not be such a lost cause,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you see Dr Morris’s reaction?’

  ‘Yes, she’s a bit of character, isn’t she? But Walters rules the roost there. We’ve been trying for months. He hasn’t ever looked like letting us in.’

  ‘I realise that. But we’ve got to speak with her again – alone.’

  It was lonely that night without the kids whom I had got used to having around the house in the previous week. I spent some time on the phone to Peggy who tried to persuade me to join them for the coming weekend at Noosa. I flirted with the idea of flying up, but couldn’t, because work, as ever, was pressing. At ten p.m. I received a call from a Senior Detective Benns.

  ‘Sorry to phone so late,’ he said. ‘Would it be possible for us to interview you?’

  My mind was on the intruder with the rifle.

  ‘You mean over what happened the other night?’