by Thomas, Paul
‘When did you find out about the murder?’
‘After I got back. I was talking about my weekend and someone said, “Were you at the party where that girl got murdered?” It was the first I’d heard of it.’
‘What did you think?’
‘Well, being philosophically opposed to murder, I took a pretty dim view of it.’
‘Then you were in the minority,’ said Ihaka. ‘Because, as far as I can tell, most people there didn’t give a shit.’
Smellie was finding out that if you sparred with Ihaka, you had to be able to take a counterpunch. ‘It was freaky,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I probably walked right past her and a couple of hours later she was murdered, right there in that swanky house with all those people around.’
‘You and Strick must’ve talked about it.’
‘Well, it came up, but only in the context of “Can you believe it?”’
‘That’s it?’
‘Yes, that’s it. And don’t look at me as if I’m a heartless bitch. The fact is Benny and I didn’t talk about anything very much from that point on. I only saw him another two or three times.’
‘What happened?’
‘The phone stopped ringing. And when I ran into him at some do, he looked straight through me. Call me a glass half-empty person, but I took that to mean I was past tense.’
‘Because he’d found out about you and Brightside?’ asked Van Roon.
Smellie looked to Ihaka, wanting him to tell Van Roon to butt out. He returned her pointed look, waiting for an answer.
Her mouth turned down. ‘Well, I don’t know that because we weren’t speaking, were we?’ she said. ‘But that’s what I was told.’
‘How would he have found out?’ asked Van Roon.
‘I guess someone saw us,’ she said. ‘As a friend of mine says, Wellington would be perfect if it wasn’t for the weather, the earthquake risk and the fact that it’s too small to get away with anything.’
Ihaka said, ‘How did you find Sydney in that respect?’
She gave him a drop-dead stare. ‘It’s umpteen times bigger than Wellington. Go figure.’
Van Roon asked, ‘How was Brightside when you saw him next?’
‘Not himself,’ she said. ‘Distracted.’
‘What did you put that down to?’
‘I assumed he was psyching himself up to dump his girlfriend.’
‘Were you putting the pressure on?’
‘He was putting it on himself,’ she said icily. ‘I’ve never put pressure on a man to ditch the other woman. She’s his problem, not mine.’
‘So you were happy to go on being the bit on the side?’
‘You need to get past the Rotary Club clichés, Mr Dick. In those days men were like buses at rush hour; it was just a matter of which one you caught.’
Ihaka cleared his throat. To Van Roon: ‘You can brief me on Brightside’s disappearance on the way to the airport.’ To Smellie: ‘What was your take on it?’
‘Eddie told me Benny had found out about us and was threatening to do everything in his power to put him out of business, so he was off overseas to check things out work-wise.’
‘Did that ring true?’
Smellie shrugged. ‘Benny was a rich guy with a big ego: I didn’t find it too hard to believe. And as I said, next time I saw him I got the big freeze.’
‘When did you next hear from Brightside?’ asked Van Roon.
‘This is where it gets complicated,’ she said. ‘I got work in Hong Kong at very short notice. When the gig finished, I went to London planning to do a quick jaunt round Europe but I met someone and, before I knew it, a year had gone by. Eddie eventually tracked me down, but by then I was married and living in Sydney. He actually came to Sydney just to gaze upon me from afar. Well, that’s what he told me, anyway.’
‘So when did you two reconnect?’
‘When I moved back here after my marriage broke up.’
‘OK,’ said Ihaka. ‘Where is he?’
She shrugged again, evasively this time. ‘Not here, I can tell you that much. He’s overseas. He travels a lot. No fixed abode, you might say.’
Ihaka leaned towards her. ‘I need to talk to him. ASAP.’
She nodded. ‘I’ll tell him.’
Ihaka stayed in close, peering into her face. ‘He doesn’t go by the name Eddie Brightside these days, does he?’
Smellie shook her head fractionally.
‘What does he call himself?’
‘I need to talk to him,’ she said. ‘It’s only fair.’
‘You do that,’ said Ihaka. ‘Today. And when I ring you tomorrow morning, all my questions will be answered.’
They were driving to Napier Airport, Ihaka on the phone organising a flight-risk alert on Ann Smellie. When that was done, Van Roon said, ‘You went pretty easy on her.’
‘No point doing otherwise,’ said Ihaka. ‘She’s going to pass on everything I said, so why spell out that Brightside’s the prime suspect in the Stenson murder? Not that it matters: he’s going to figure it out for himself.’
‘There’s no way he’s coming back.’
‘No,’ said Ihaka. ‘But one way or another, she’s going to give up his alias. Life’s about to get more complicated for Eddie fucking Brightside.’
‘You’re convinced he did it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, yeah,’ said Van Roon, ‘the disappearance sort of speaks for itself.’
When he dropped Ihaka off outside the terminal, Van Roon said, ‘Just like old times.’
Ihaka looked over Van Roon’s shoulder into the middle distance. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing like old times.’
As he waited for his plane, Ihaka rang the PR man Caspar Quedley to ask if Benjamin Strick was the client on whose behalf he’d hired Van Roon. When Quedley went into the client-confidentiality routine, Ihaka interrupted to say he’d take that as a yes. That being the case, Quedley should be aware that his client was now up to his eyeballs in a murder investigation. Keeping his name out of the original investigation had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it had come back to bite him on the arse.
Quedley took a while to digest this. ‘You obviously want me to do something about it, but I’m having trouble working out what that would be.’
‘How about you get hold of the prick and tell him I’m looking forward to getting the cooperation he refused to provide at the time. To get the ball rolling, I’d like answers to the following questions: did he run Brightside out of town for porking his girlfriend? Why is he after Brightside now? And who else was at the meeting that took place at Barton’s party?’
Quedley rang back as Ihaka was walking to his car. ‘I spoke to the client,’ he said. ‘He asked me to convey his assurance that you’ll have his full cooperation. As we speak, he’s racking his brains to remember who was at the meeting. As for your former colleague’s assignment, the short answer is that my client’s doing it for fun and because he can. He says he most certainly didn’t run Brightside out of town for porking, as you put it, his girlfriend. In fact, he only found out about that the day Brightside disappeared. And the reason he found out about it was that Brightside left a message on his answerphone saying, I just thought you’d be interested to know I’ve been fucking your girlfriend for the past two months.’
Twelve
Finbar McGrail’s secretary no longer bothered to protest when Tito Ihaka showed up with that bulldog glower which meant he was going to barge into her boss’s office without an appointment, explanation, excuse or, needless to say, an apology.
She’d learned from bitter experience that it was a waste of breath, like telling her Labrador not to belly-flop in muddy puddles when she let him off the lead at the local park. Bitter experience had also taught her that, while her
boss encouraged her to err on the side of obduracy in the role of gatekeeper, Ihaka was the exception to the rule, as he was to most rules.
McGrail justified this indulgence on the grounds that Ihaka rarely, if ever, barged into his office just for the sake of it, unlike certain officers who seemed to regard face-time with the Auckland District Commander as an achievement in and of itself. It was a source of constant irritation and occasional despair for McGrail that these officers were at their most creative and proactive when applying themselves to the challenge of getting past his secretary and into his office in order to lobby, undermine colleagues or simply brown-nose.
The secretary didn’t buy McGrail’s explanation. Over time and with great reluctance she’d come to the conclusion that McGrail didn’t put up with Ihaka’s unannounced visits; he enjoyed them.
She still found it hard to believe. Yes, she was aware that opposites can attract, but this was ridiculous. If it was a case of Ihaka marching to the beat of a different drum, or thinking outside the square, or even being a bit of a maverick, then fine, she could understand that. She’d read somewhere that organisations need that sort of person, and leaders need to have their thinking tested by them from time to time. But no one in their right mind would describe Ihaka in those terms. Different labels were called for: liability; loose cannon; rogue element; affront to everything McGrail stood for.
However, she couldn’t deny the evidence of her own ears. Whenever she put her ear to the door — not that she made a habit of it — she was shocked by what she heard. Oh, she knew Ihaka had a foul mouth — you couldn’t work in the same building as him without finding that out the hard way — but she’d taken it for granted that he minded his Ps and Qs around McGrail, who was renowned for being proper, as her mother used to say, or stitched-up, as quite a few people she worked with did say. Not a bit of it. Ihaka was his usual rude, crude and unattractive self, and McGrail didn’t seem in the least bothered by it.
So while it went against the grain, the secretary had revised her approach to dealing with Ihaka. Rather than bristle at his high-handedness, she now bent over backwards to be civil. She couldn’t bear the man, couldn’t for the life of her understand why McGrail had a soft spot for him and, from what she’d observed, so little time for certain other officers. Officers she liked; officers who went out of their way to be pleasant, to ask after her family, swap gossip, have a wee giggle about this or that. Unlike Ihaka whose idea of a pleasantry was a Neanderthal grunt.
But he was McGrail’s favourite, and that was that. She just had to wear it. She couldn’t afford to show her true feelings in case he had some sort of hold over McGrail. Because one thing was for certain: if Ihaka knew what she really thought of him, he’d be whispering poisonously in McGrail’s ear. That’s just the sort of nasty piece of work he was. Luckily she was a pretty good actress, even if she said so herself.
Ihaka entered McGrail’s office, firmly closing the door behind him. ‘When are you going to give that old dragon the arse?’ he asked.
McGrail peeled off his spectacles, taking his time, as if wanting to be sure there wasn’t a nugget of idiot-savant wisdom buried in the bluster.
‘Marcia? Now why would I want to do that? She’s loyal, highly efficient, very well-organised. Can’t fault her, really.’
Ihaka dropped heavily into one of the chairs in front of McGrail’s desk. ‘She hates my guts, the bitch.’
‘How can you tell? Doesn’t she respond to your friendly overtures?’
‘What friendly overtures?’
‘Precisely. Therein lies the problem. It actually doesn’t take much to get Marcia on side: a friendly word here and there; an occasional dollop of that charm you’re so miserly with. The golden rule doesn’t play much of a role in your interactions with the rest of the human race, does it, Sergeant?’
‘The golden rule would be fine if everybody followed it,’ said Ihaka. ‘But they don’t.’
‘So you’ve decided not to take any chances?’
‘Exactly.’
‘In fact, you go further than that: you get your retaliation in first.’
‘It works for me.’
‘Well, I suppose that depends how you define “works”. I can’t help but notice that no one else seems to have a problem with Marcia.’
‘Yeah, right,’ scoffed Ihaka. ‘As if any of those bum-suckers are going to bad-mouth your secretary. You want to know what really gives me the shits?’ He put on a grotesquely smarmy voice. ‘“Now you have a really nice day, Sergeant, and be sure to pass on a kind wish to your dear old Mum next time you’re talking to her.” What the fuck’s that about? She’s never met my mother.’
McGrail shook his head, bemused by Ihaka’s over-reaction to everyday unctuousness. ‘She has, in the past, been a little exercised by your tendency to bypass her and the appointment system in general. I’ve made the point that you only do it when you have something important to discuss. I hope that’s still the case.’
‘What do you want first, the good news or the bad news?’
‘You know the answer: let’s get the bad news out of the way. Then I’ll be in a position to judge how good the good news is.’
‘Actually that doesn’t work. You’ve got to have the good news first.’
‘Then why offer the choice?’
‘It’s just a saying: I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.’
‘I’m approaching the point at which no news would be good news.’
Ihaka smiled, appreciating McGrail’s tart rejoinder. ‘OK, we’ve got a suspect for the Stenson killing.’
‘Now, that’s excellent news — on the face of it, and bearing in mind the imminent disclosure of bad news.’
‘You know how you got stuffed around during the investigation? It was worse than you thought: some of Barton’s mates got him to keep their names out of it. And a bunch of them whose names weren’t on your list had a meeting — upstairs. So far I’ve got three names: Benny Strick —.’
‘I know who he is.’
‘Gerry Waitz, a mega-rich Yank, and a political fixer called Eddie Brightside.’
McGrail shook his head. ‘Those names certainly didn’t come up.’
‘Couple of interesting things about Brightside: one, he was rooting Strick’s girlfriend.’ Ihaka paused, waiting for McGrail’s reaction. There wasn’t one. McGrail’s blank expression gave no indication whether he was choosing to ignore Ihaka’s salaciousness or lacked a frame of reference and perhaps the vocabulary to do justice to it.
Ihaka continued: ‘Well, I thought it was interesting. Two, less than a fortnight after the murder, Brightside disappeared. As in vanished off the face of the earth; as in never been seen, heard from or heard of since. Until last week, when he popped up in Hawke’s Bay.’
McGrail had been swinging his spectacles by the arm. Now he put the tip of the arm between his lips, dangling the spectacles from his mouth. Ihaka had never seen him do that, or anything remotely like it. If he’d thought about it, he would have classified it as one of those things, like the Great Wall of China and the Siberian tiger, that, realistically, he would probably never set eyes on.
Noticing Ihaka’s incredulity, McGrail put the glasses aside, out of easy reach. ‘Now that is interesting, Sergeant. Fascinating even. So where is Brightside as we speak?’
‘Which brings us to the bad news,’ said Ihaka flatly. ‘He’s skipped the country. When the bloke who recognised him tried to talk to him, he took off. Ann Smellie, the woman he was with, Strick’s two-timing trophy girlfriend back in 1987, the one you weren’t interested in when I mentioned her just now, she knows where Brightside is. And as soon as we’re done here, I’m going to get her to tell me.’
‘She’ll either refuse, or she’ll lie.’
Ihaka nodded. ‘Then I’ll put the squeeze on her to give up Brightside’s alias. We’ve just got to h
ope the bastard hasn’t got more than one fake passport.’
‘So what’s your theory, Sergeant?’
‘Well, we were working on the premise that Polly saw or heard something she shouldn’t have, right? This is the timing: about eleven thirty Johnny Barton sent her upstairs; just before midnight Strick and co came back downstairs without Brightside. Something happened up there. According to Smellie, they were jumpy. Strick said “We’ve got to go” but wouldn’t say why. She’s absolutely sure they left Barton’s place just before midnight; time of death was between twelve and one. I’m thinking Polly walked in on them discussing something pretty bloody shady, so they got the fuck out of there leaving the fixer to fix it. Which he did.’
McGrail nodded. ‘It’s plausible.’
‘It would explain why Strick was so keen to keep their names out of it, and why Brightside disappeared and has stayed off the radar ever since. And it would kind of explain why Strick hired none other than Johan Van Roon to check out the Brightside sighting.’
‘Are you telling me Van Roon’s involved?’
‘He sure is. I ran into him in Hawke’s Bay yesterday.’
‘Is he going to be a problem?’
Ihaka laughed mirthlessly. ‘Come on, the guy’s trouble waiting to happen. You know that.’
‘Indeed I do,’ said McGrail a little testily. ‘But it’s one thing to have him down in Wellington ticking away like a time bomb; it’s another thing altogether for him to be involved in an investigation.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Ihaka. ‘I’ll keep him in his box.’
McGrail came out from behind his desk to sit next to Ihaka. He leaned forward, elbows on knees. ‘Sergeant, you know I’ve got great faith in you. You also know I’ve backed you if not quite through thick and thin then more often than not, and sometimes when it wasn’t in my best interests to do so.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So when you tell me not to worry, that you’ve got it under control, I’m reassured — up to a point. You don’t need me to spell out the scale of the PR disaster we’d have on our hands if the media were to discover the precise circumstances behind Van Roon’s resignation, and that we’d subsequently used him in an unofficial capacity in a murder investigation. I need an iron-clad guarantee that won’t happen.’