Freefall

by Mark Furness

  Moments later I received a text from Jack: “Do you still have your father’s gun?”

  IV

  STEELE helped me find a criminal lawyer that afternoon, and in the lawyer’s office we scripted and rehearsed my story for police consumption.

  Two days later – most of which I spent flushing my liver with water and bingeing on TV crime series, movies and football replays – the lawyer and I went to the concrete and steel vault of the Sydney Police Centre in Goulburn Street in Surry Hills where, inside a room with carpet on the walls which cleverly suggested sinister possibilities, I gave them my version of events. I’d been in a room like it years ago; the bad cop had said that if I screamed, no one would hear, before he smashed his fist into a phone book which I assumed was meant to mimic my head. The good cop said all I had to do was sign the statement they had helpfully typed to save me time and trouble.

  This time I had a lawyer by my side and I was more than twenty years older. I used the drunk’s defence, arguing I had been speaking metaphorically about killing Charles East.

  During the interview, I told the detectives about the dead carp on my door and the life insurance and career advice I had received from the silver dog. I signed a statement that my lawyer checked. The detectives said they’d be in touch. We left.

  Over a subsequent coffee with my lawyer, ironically in the same café where I had eavesdropped on Henry East and his lawyer, my man said that if the police proceeded with criminal charges - which was likely because of the pressure being applied by East - and the Director of Public Prosecutions agreed they had enough evidence and went forward, it could be four to six months before my day in court, maybe longer. Plenty of time for East to make me stew. My lawyer agreed that the police and complainants often got pleasure from dragging things out to make the accused roll around their beds at night wet with anxiety.

  Walking home alone, I had visions of Charles East and Silver Dog sitting on Tamerlane’s back veranda clinking fine china tea cups in celebration, or guzzling whiskey and puffing on cigars. I’d knocked myself out with a superb own-punch. I figured they were now working on a plan to snap my mental hinges, holus-bolus. They weren’t the types to let a hit man climb up off the mat. No, they’d go in hard now, boots and all.

  It was a long walk, past bustling pubs that called to me like sirens to ancient sailors, before I turned into my street, more sober than I’d been for years, and plodded up the front steps of Sue’s house next door. When her door opened, Fish bounced all over me with that strange thing called unconditional love. Corny stuff, but I lapped it up.

  My phone rang as I was opening our front door. I hated the little electronic bastard right then, the filthy snitch, but I couldn’t ignore my mother-in-law, Kate Halliday. This might ice the day. Was Hugo in trouble?

  “Malcolm has had a bad turn, Gar,” Kate said. “The doctors are saying a couple of weeks at best.”

  “It will take me a day or two to organise,” I said. “Tell him Alice and I are coming.”

  Kate sobbed. She put Hugo on the phone. He said little. I told him things were fine in Sydney and that we’d see him soon.

  “Love you, mate,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  Malcolm’s illness yawned before me like a serendipitous porthole I could dive through to escape from where I was, and I had an excuse to take Alice with me that didn’t require me to frighten her, or disappoint her with my latest lapse, which I would keep under wraps. I phoned her and told her about Malcolm. After the call, I booked online flights for our departure in 48 hours. I would contact Jack in the morning and tell him my plans because right then I couldn’t bear to hear any more of the disappointment in his voice. Jack had thrown me several lifebuoys over the years. I had been unemployed when he dragged me up onto the deck of The Citizen about a year ago.

  I went back next door to talk with Sue. She would look after Fish while Alice and I were in the UK.

  I made a glass of soda water with ice and a slice of lime, and sat in the back garden with Fish under the frangipani tree. Then I remembered Jack’s text message about my father’s gun. After stating to the police that my threat to kill East was a hollow metaphor, what would happen if the police arrived with a search warrant and found the unlicensed, loaded Mr Browning in my house, or car? I re-trawled the house and searched the car to no avail. I concluded I’d left it somewhere at Moon Hill. I wished Hughie would put the phone on. Tania was god-knows-where overseas, so she couldn’t scour the hill for me. I was in no state for a long drive to the bush tonight. I’d go in the morning, do a quick in-out day trip and hide the gun before Alice and I flew to London.

  Steele’s envelope with the printed emails between Henry East and Bart Hills sat on my office table. I read them again with a pleasingly clear mind. They related to the takeover bid by China’s Double Happiness Co. for Australia’s Austar Gold. Henry and Bart had used email pseudonyms – lame, uncreative ones.

  There was advice written by hand in pencil on the first page of the emails: check the dates against the court transcripts...look for the name ‘Christ’.

  Someone was providing me with guidance, and it wasn’t Steele’s handwriting. His style was doctors’ cursive: in other words unreadable, like mine. This writing was neat and careful. Feminine was my guess.

  The emails said:

  From: GMan

  To: Lisa Simpson

  Sent: Wednesday, 12 July 11:05AM.

  Austar Gold. Pin your ears back and go in hard. Christ says the Chinese are coming.

  `````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

  From: Lisa Simpson

  To: GMan

  Sent: Wednesday, 12 July 12:16PM

  Done.

  ``````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

  From: GMan

  To: Lisa Simpson

  Sent: Wednesday, 12 July 1.00PM

  Good girl. This will double happiness.

  I figured Lisa was Bart Hills, GMan was Henry. The email exchange occurred on Wednesday 12 July. I wrote the date in my notebook.

  I went to Henry’s court transcripts that were saved on my laptop and opened the pages where Henry described the meeting he attended inside the offices of his employer, Hagerman Brothers, in which Henry told the court he discovered that a takeover bid was coming from Double Happiness for Austar Gold. He swore to the court he had placed his inside trades from home on the night of that meeting.

  I wrote in my notepad: Hagerman Bros meeting = Friday 14 July.

  Those dates sparked me up. So Henry East had advised Bart Hills by email that a bid for Austar Gold was on its way - two whole days before Henry participated in the Hagerman Brothers meeting.

  I now had hard evidence, unless the emails were faked, that Henry had not been acting alone in doing the inside trades for which he was jailed. He had lied to the prosecutors and the court about the source and timing of his inside information.

  Further, Henry had been advised by somebody named Christ that the Chinese bid was coming. Who the hell was Christ? I had a fresh trail, but then I remembered I was out of a job.

  V

  A YOUNG WOMAN opened the door of a front-loading clothes washer in the basement laundry of her apartment building. She began pulling damp clothes out and placing them in a basket. She heard a click behind her; the ceiling light went out, plunging the room into darkness.

  “Who’s there?” she called, grasping for the side of the washing machine to get her bearings, her heart racing.

  “Shhh ...”

  Hands grabbed her: big hands, strong hands. One of the hands grabbed her by the hair, hurting her scalp. She tried to grab the hands, but her wrists were dragged behind her back and pressed together by someone vastly more powerful. Her scream was stifled by cloth being stuffed into her mouth, causing a gagging reaction when it grated against the back of her throat. Something tight was being wound around her mouth, around her head. She smelled glue. Tape, masking tape? She cou
ldn’t get enough air. Slow, slow down, she told herself, use your nose, use your nose!

  Her attackers – a wiry man, a girl, and a burly man – did not speak. The wiry man slipped a black velvet sack over the young woman’s head. The burly man kept hold of his captive’s wrists with one of his hands, forcing his other hand under her armpit to keep her standing upright on her wilting legs.

  The girl took a torch from her bomber jacket pocket and switched it on. She ran the beam over the woman, starting on her bare feet, tracing her bare legs, moving across her short denim skirt and pausing upon her heaving breasts under a white tee-shirt. The girl put the torch between her teeth, picked up a damp tee-shirt from the washed clothes basket and wiped the insides of the woman’s shuddering legs clean of the body fluids released by her shock.

  The girl took a folded plastic carry-bag from her other jacket pocket and stuffed the tee-shirt inside the bag while the wiry man tied the woman’s wrists together with a stocking. He worked carefully, determined not to break her skin or cause lasting ligature marks.

  Placing her torch and the plastic bag in the same hand, the girl used her spare hand to lift a pistol from a shoulder holster inside her jacket. She released the safety catch and led them out of the laundry, pointing her barrel along a short, dark corridor. The men followed, one on each side of their captive with a hand under her armpits, letting the woman regain strength and carry her own weight forward as they headed toward the basement carpark.

  The wiry man smiled; the woman he was gripping started to feel to him as light as a feather. It always amazed him how quickly captive people co-operate when in motion, even though they have no idea what lies ahead. It must be hope that carries them, he thought.

  The girl made sure the carpark was empty of people, then hand-signalled for the men to follow her into it. She clicked the remote car-key and unlocked a large, black sedan with tinted windows. She opened a back door and the wiry man pushed the woman into the middle of the bench seat. The burly man entered the car from the other side and the two men wedged the woman between them. He put a lap belt on their captive.

  The girl holstered her pistol, climbed behind the driver’s wheel and began motoring slowly out of the carpark. Before entering the road, she paused and looked in the rear view mirror at the trio: in the angular beam of a streetlamp, the wiry man winked at her before making a show of sucking the tip of his middle finger and sniffing it.

  The car cruised the street; the men snapped the wrists of the latex rubber gloves they were wearing loudly against their skin a few times, the wiry man doing it close to where the woman’s ear would be inside the sack. He reached into the pocket of the seat-back in front of him and withdrew a long brown feather. He stroked the rooster’s plume over the woman’s bare outer thighs. She bucked and jostled. The burly man tightened her lap-belt. When the girl pressed her legs together, the wiry man traced the feather up and down the line where her flesh met. The burly man put a clamping arm around her shoulders and the wiry man lifted her tee-shirt above her bare breasts and applied his feather. After a few minutes, the wiry man returned the feather to the seat pocket.

  The men nodded at each other and trailed their gloved fingers gently over her outer thighs. The woman crossed her ankles and squeezed her legs together, trying to shrink herself. The wiry man grinned and wiggled a hand in behind her knees. The burly man forced his hand in, and both men slowly, and with great but gentle power, pulled her legs apart.

  The girl drove, block-after-block and suburb-after-suburb, glancing occasionally into the rear-view mirror. She chewed on gum and remembered what the wiry man had told her: Fear is a prison best built brick by brick.

  VI

  I LOOKED up from the emails between Henry East and Bart Hills and saw through my home office window that night had fallen. My joints ached but I couldn’t drink the pain away, not tonight. A hot bath, that might work. As I stepped into the hallway, there was a knock at the front door. I looked through the peephole. Claire Styler buckled over and vomited into the planter box of bright red geraniums on the front porch.

  I threw the door open. “What’s wrong?” I said, going to her side, putting a hand on her shoulder. Claire wiped her glistening mouth on her tee-shirt sleeve. Her pupils were dark pools, her face was grey, her hair knotted, her body shaking. She clung to me.

  I’d never seen her without trousers on. And bare feet? I thought she was bleeding down one outer thigh and calf. It looked like paint had spilled from under her short skirt. I realised it was a long, purple birthmark.

  We shuffled through the door along the hallway and down to the kitchen-lounge where I sat her on the sofa. I fetched a glass of water that she sipped. Fish sat beside her while I found a couple of blankets.

  “Do you have something stronger?” she said as I put the blanket around her shoulders and another over her legs. I poured a large glass of red wine. She gulped it.

  “What’s happened?”

  She put her head in her shaking hands.

  “I’ll ring an ambulance.”

  “No!” She drank more wine.

  I waited, sitting on a chair opposite her. It may have been a minute or two before her body stilled a little.

  She said: “They were in the laundry under our flat.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t see. They switched the light off. Someone headlocked me.”

  She stroked her throat. I looked for bruises, couldn’t see any from where I sat.

  “They stuffed a sock in my mouth and taped it. Then put a bag over me, my head.”

  She started shaking again. She said she was put into a car, bodies smelling of sour sweat squeezed either side of her. She was held inside the moving car for about half an hour, maybe an hour, stopping, starting, accelerating, cornering. She was confused about time.

  “I will take you to hospital, call the police.”

  “No, Gar. What am I going to say?”

  “You’ve been abducted, assaulted.”

  “I need to use your bathroom.”

  “Claire, it’s evidence.”

  “I just want to look.’

  When she returned, she had some colour back in her face and had straightened her hair. She sat and reached for the wine.

  “There’s no evidence,” she said. “Nothing to show.”

  She must have seen my puzzled look.

  “They used gloves. They were very gentle. There is no evidence, for god’s sake.”

  I wanted to say look in the mirror, there’s the evidence, but I didn’t.

  “How do you know they used gloves?” I said.

  “I could smell the latex. And they made sure I heard them putting them on.”

  “Did they ...”

  “No. Only their hands.”

  They had released her in an empty children’s playground at the end of my street and told her not to look back or they would put a bullet in her head.

  “What did their voices sound like?”

  “There were no voices. They did everything in silence. Until the end, just at the end.”

  “What happened at the end?”

  “I heard a voice. Not a real voice. Not a man or a woman. A robot. You know those machines, an electronic mask.”

  “Do you remember what it said?”

  Claire looked into her wine as if she was reading the words on the purple surface: “You are at the crossroads, Claire. Choose wisely. Don't make us come back.”

  “They told me to tell you what happened,” she said, helping herself to the wine. “And before you say you are sorry - don’t!”

  It had to be Silver Dog. He’d knocked me out of the ring. Now he was trying to knock out my replacement.

  “We must be close to something big, Gar,” Claire said.

  “Do you want to pull out?”

  “Have you ever been burgled, Gar. Do you know what it feels like?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then you’ll know why I’m not backing off.”

&
nbsp; “Where’s Carl?”

  “Overseas. On business.”

  “You should call him.”

  “I will in the morning.”

  “You can stay here, in Alice’s room.”

  I explained that Alice and I were flying to England to see a dying Malcolm Halliday. Claire and I agreed we would phone Jack Darling together in the morning and brief him. One regurgitation of events was enough for her tonight.

  We also agreed Claire would need special protection from The Citizen - if we were to keep probing East’s affairs.

  “What about you?” said Claire. “They might come for you again too.”

  “I’ve lost my job, I’m facing criminal charges. I’m a laughing stock. And I’m leaving the country. You’re the boss of The Citizen in Australia now, so your head’s the one above the trench.”

  “There was one other thing,” said Claire, as I gave her a towel for the shower and some of Alice’s pyjamas. “I couldn’t see them, and they didn’t show their voices - but I could smell something else in that car.”

  “Such as?”

  “Perfume. A woman’s perfume. Roses.”

  VII

  CLAIRE AND Fish were in the kitchen when I came downstairs the next morning. She was wearing Alice’s long-john pyjamas and making a pot of tea. I resisted the urge to comfort her with touch. She suggested we call Jack and get it over with. I dialled him on my house phone on open speaker on the kitchen table and Claire retold the events of last night in abridged form.