Open File

by Unknown

  ‘He’s gone,’ he moaned. ‘Oh, God.’

  He got to his feet, looked around wildly and began to cry. Tania tried to comfort him but he shoved her away and shambled out of the room.

  Tania had had a couple of shocks too close together. Her face was white and she just managed to get back to her chair.

  ‘Heart attack?’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘He was holding a full hand for it.’

  ‘You’re a cold-blooded bastard, aren’t you? Where’s Damien?’

  The roar of a motor answered the question. I went to the deck and saw the Land Rover ploughing through the mud, slewing and skidding as Damien gunned it harder than he should. I put my socks and boots back on and went inside. Tania had a cigarette going and she’d been to the bar for a stiffener. I poured myself some scotch and looked around the room. I straightened the rug that I’d buckled up. The tape-recorder had become a mass of molten plastic well on the way to being charred out of recognition. Ireland’s cigar had landed on the brick hearth and was still burning. The only thing to suggest that Wayne Ireland hadn’t simply suffered a heart attack when being interviewed was Damien’s Beretta in my hand. It was loaded.

  I went back to the deck and threw it as far into the bush as I could. I’d had a fair arm as a schoolboy cricketer and it disappeared deep into the misty greyness.

  Tania joined me on the deck. ‘What now?’

  ‘We call an ambulance. This can’t cause us any trouble. No suspicious circumstances.’

  She was recovering fast but still wasn’t quite there. ‘What about Damien?’

  ‘Nothing we can do there.’

  It took an hour for the ambulance to arrive and the paramedics read it the only way they could. As they were placing Ireland on the stretcher one said, ‘We were held up. A car went over the cliff at Skinner’s Leap. Came from this direction.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Tania said. ‘Damien.’

  The paramedic looked at her.

  ‘Mr Ireland’s son,’ I said. ‘He was very upset at the delay. He went for help, not that there was anything to do except just what you’ve done.’

  ‘You’d better check in with the police at Katoomba about that, and we’ll need your names and contact numbers and some ID.’

  We showed them our drivers’ licences, gave them the numbers and said we’d stop at the police station. They carried the heavy body from the house and loaded it into the ambulance. Dense rain was falling and the mist seemed to be rising up from the valley. We stood on the deck and watched the ambulance leave, the driver taking much more care than Damien had.

  ‘Are there other houses further up the track?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe one or two but they’re weekenders. Wayne and Damien had their privacy. That had to be Damien who went over the edge. He was revving like crazy as he went. What are we going to do, Cliff?’

  ‘Nothing. If they’re both dead what does it matter who did what?’

  ‘This didn’t work out anything like the way we planned.’

  ‘Could’ve been worse. Damien could have shot us both.’

  ‘Oh, so you saved my life? Was he serious?’

  I shrugged. ‘The gun was loaded and he’d already killed one person.’

  ‘Jesus, what about those friends Damien talked about?’

  ‘With ambulances and police cars around, I don’t think we’ll be seeing them. Still, we’d better leave. Better to go to the cops than have them come to us.’

  She gathered her bag and scarf. ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the scoop.’

  23

  The fence at Skinner’s Leap was a tangled mess of wire and broken posts. We were waved down by the police stationed there and made a brief statement. We said we were going to report in at Katoomba and the office radioed that in.

  ‘How far is the drop here?’ I asked.

  ‘Far enough,’ the cop replied.

  At Katoomba we gave a heavily edited version of what had happened at the Ireland house. The officers who took the statements didn’t like the look of either of us, especially Tania, who was showing the effects of stress and alcohol. They kept going in and out of the room and conferring in private.

  After we’d been there an hour the vehicle that had gone over the drop had been identified and was in the process of being recovered.

  ‘You say he went for help,’ one of the cops said, ‘but the man was dead.’

  I said, ‘He’d busted a gut trying to resuscitate his father. The ambulance was a long time coming, he thought. He was upset and confused.’

  ‘Drunk?’

  ‘No. We—Ireland, Ms Kramer and me—had had a drink or two but he hadn’t. Not that I saw. Tania?’

  She shook her head. ‘Can I smoke?’

  The cop pushed an ashtray across the table. ‘Sure.’

  Tania fished in her bag and came up with an empty packet. The cop gave her one of his and she favoured him with one of her you’re-the-only-person-in-the-world smiles. It was a bit lopsided and didn’t work.

  They got our details down in every last particular and let us go. Tania rushed to the nearest shop for cigarettes. I steered her to a coffee place and made her sit, eat a sandwich and drink a heavily sugared flat white.

  ‘I have to admit,’ she said, ‘you handled that okay.’

  ‘I’ve had the experience. We’d better get back so you can write your article.’

  She was almost herself again now. ‘Fuck that,’ she said. ‘I’m phoning it in to the copy-takers.’

  Tania’s story made a big splash in the afternoon edition and she strung it out over the next few days. Her articles were mostly factual with some speculation and some uncheckable lies. She didn’t name me so I had no complaint. She’d cornered the market on the Ireland–Pettigrew story and I had to admit that she treated Justin’s disappearance and Sarah’s circumstances with discretion—no mention of paternity doubts. Damien’s death was provisionally declared accidental and Tania presented herself as the last person to see him alive, leaving me out of it.

  She speculated about whether Wayne or Damien Ireland had killed Angela Pettigrew, implying that her truncated interview with Wayne suggested he was the guilty party.

  ‘Why did you go that way?’ I asked her when we met up two days later.

  ‘Kept the cops and the DPP happy and made for better copy. First state minister of the crown to commit a murder since the ex-minister Tom Ley in the forties. Similar in some ways, with mistresses and all that, but better, Wayne being in office at the time.’

  In a sidebar to one of her articles she’d made a play of the Thomas Ley affair and his nefarious dealings, including a murder, after losing his ministry and parliamentary seat in New South Wales when in England in the 1940s.

  ‘You don’t miss a trick,’ I said.

  ‘A woman in this game? Can’t afford to.’

  That meeting took place after I’d had a talk with Sarah at Tania’s house. Tania told me that the girl wanted to see me to ask about Justin. I told Sarah that Wayne Ireland had provided him with a passport and some money—something Tania had only hinted at—and that he must have left the country.

  ‘Lucky bugger. That’s what I’d like to do. Where did he go, Mr Hardy? To do what?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that question.’

  ‘To be a soldier.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll try to get the records searched, but he could’ve gone almost anywhere with a passport and some money. Lots of jumping-off points to other places. Lots of wars going on with opportunities for mercenaries—Lebanon, Angola, Nicaragua . . .’

  ‘You think he got killed?’

  ‘No way to tell. If he’s alive and okay somewhere, eventually it’s odds on he’ll hear about what happened here. I never heard of an Australian overseas who didn’t check back in some way, sooner or later.’

  Sarah was smoking furiously and she lit another immediately after stubbing one out. ‘If he hea
rs about all this shit he probably wouldn’t want to come back. He didn’t care about me.’

  ‘You don’t know that. He was very distressed and not thinking clearly.’

  She shook her head. ‘I told you—we had a fight and I told him about Angela. I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Sarah—’

  ‘Go away. Fuck off. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

  We were right back where we’d started and now I was sure she wasn’t acting.

  I was given a hard time by the coroner at the inquest on Paul Hampshire. Shouldn’t you have taken steps to safeguard your client given the earlier events of the day? Shouldn’t you have registered more details of the vehicle that struck him? Etc. Etc. The coroner was a soft-looking man in a tailored suit and my guess was that the only violence he’d ever have witnessed was from the sidelines in a Kings versus Shore rugby game.

  Paul Hampshire’s body was unclaimed for a time until some members of his old unit heard of his death and organised a service and a cremation. I went along out of a sense of responsibility, but not guilt. It was a sad affair for a man whose life had been pretty sad.

  Things didn’t improve. Tania didn’t write her book but her articles got her a full-time job on one of the tabloids and her career prospered. On legal advice she withdrew her application to have Sarah put in her care and an aunt—a half-sister of Angela’s—took over the job on the understanding that they would live in the Church Point house until the seven year period needed to declare Justin dead was up. By then, Sarah would be an adult and able to claim and dispose of her inheritance.

  It didn’t work out that way. Sarah and the aunt didn’t get on and Sarah linked up again with Ronny O’Connor. They took as many valuable items from the house as they could manage, sold them, and used the proceeds to buy a motorbike. They went to Queensland and two years later they both OD’d in a Fortitude Valley squat.

  About the time I got that news, from a friend in the PEA game in Brisbane, I met up again with Sharkey Finn. In a pub. But Sharkey had gone badly downhill from the grog and being dumped by Wilson Stafford, and when he challenged me his mate held him back and persuaded him not to be stupid.

  The one bright spot was that Kathy Petersen came to Sydney at Easter. We went to the Blue Mountains and to the Central Coast and wined and dined and made love in a variety of places, including my house in Glebe, the Newport Arms hotel (where we joined in a celebration of the ALP’s win in the federal election), and among the rocks at the south end of Maroubra beach. She went back to the coast and I visited her and it was still good, but she met another teacher and they transferred to a school further south and that was that.

  Frank and Hilde got over the glitch I’d caused by roping her into my case. Peter got over Sarah, and by the age of fourteen he could beat Frank and me at pool and was pushing Frank at tennis. Taught by his mother, he became near-fluent in German and was studying Spanish and Italian.

  Hans Van Der Harr’s file on Justin disappeared. Tania said Sarah had taken it and probably destroyed it. That might have been right, but Tania was always economical with the truth. In any case, a few years later Van Der Harr was prosecuted for raping a female client while she was under hypnosis. He was deregistered and jailed.

  There was no satisfaction to be had from the case and for a time I considered giving the game away, just for a while. No one had ended up happy except perhaps Tania. Was Damien a suicide or an accident victim? Sometimes it’s like that—you don’t know what’s really going on until it’s all over. And not even then.

  My usual practice was to put all my notes and other documents on a case in a manilla folder and, when it was over, seal it with masking tape. Detective Sergeant Gunnarson at Missing Persons got onto the Immigration records and discovered that a Justin Pettigrew had left Australia for Singapore one week after Justin Hampshire’s mother reported him missing, and there the trail ended. My case file on Justin Hampshire remained unsealed, open . . .

  Epilogue

  I rummaged in the box holding the bits and pieces I’d collected in the office, pulled out a roll of masking tape and sealed the file. I sat down and couldn’t help thinking about Justin Hampshire, someone I never met but who had occupied a corner of my mind for years. I hated to think of him dead under a thorn bush in Africa or rotting away in some South American jungle, but that was the likely outcome.

  I dropped the folder into the box with the others and took a last look around the room. I hadn’t been there very long but it had grown on me. Hard to say how long Hank would be able to stay. This stretch of King Street was being tarted up quickly, and someone was bound to take over the shop below, spend money up here and raise the rent or need the space.

  The wife, who’d prevailed upon Hank to give up PEA work in favour of installing security devices and providing computer upgrade services, had left him for greener pastures, and getting back to the kind of work he liked and did well was a good idea. I’d managed to transfer to Hank a couple of cases I’d been keeping warm while my licence cancellation was still under review. That would give him a start. Best I could do. I left the fax machine—hardly ever used these days—and the clunky old Mac laptop for his use. I suspected the Mac would find its way into the council clean-up service.

  I locked the door and carried the boxes and a bag of garbage down to the car. Call me sentimental, but I’d arranged to have the Falcon put up on blocks in a friend’s unused garage. He promised to start it up from time to time. I knew I’d be back, but I didn’t know when, or what I’d be doing.

  No time to think about that now. Frank and Hilde were waiting at Glebe to drive me to the airport. I had a plane to catch.