Freefall
Page 3
He urged her to go to the police. She refused until Jack argued that for him to put the case to our London HQ for a budget for 24-hour private security for Claire, he first needed Claire to make a police report to cover the internal paperwork. Jack added that without such security in place, he could not allow Claire to keep working on the East-Baker story. She agreed to file a report when I volunteered my lawyer to accompany her to the police station.
I told Claire I wanted a word with Jack in private about my police charges. She took her tea into the back garden with Fish.
“Help me here,” said Jack. “My Australian bureau chief has self-destructed, his replacement has been assaulted and terrorised by invisible people - and we’ve not got one line of copy we can publish. My practical side says we are pulling a whole lot of grief upon ourselves for no good purpose. What do you suggest we do?”
I explained to Jack my ‘discovery’ of the emails between Henry East and Bart Hills proving that Henry had lied to the court about acting alone, and that his inside information had come from a third party codenamed Christ.
“That’s not a story,” he said. “That’s an opening paragraph.”
I said: “Some people are going to a lot of trouble, and doing some very nasty things, to stop us digging around in their dung heap. There must be something in there.”
“You are off the case. Remember?” said Jack. “There are people in our London office who want you fired because you are a liability. A loose cannon were the words they used.”
“I can work through Claire,” I said.
“You remember when we climbed that glacier in New Zealand?” said Jack.
“Pure instinct,” I said.
We had been roped together when he slipped. I smashed an ice pick into the outer lip of a crevasse as he pulled me in after him and I dislocated a shoulder hanging on. But we got out.
“I’m using my instinct now,” said Jack. “Can you get Claire?”
I opened the door to the garden and called her in. The phone was still on open speaker.
Jack said: “Gar, I want your fingerprints on nothing more to do with East inside our database. You work through Claire. Be aware - both of you be aware - his lawyers, or the prosecutor’s office, will likely subpoena our emails, phone logs, all sorts of internal shit if these charges against Gar proceed. So let’s keep our noses clean - on our records at least. Let’s not let them see what we have.”
Claire asked: “Do you think that’s what East is after now, Jack? To get a look inside our database?”
“That would be my strategy if I was him,” said Jack.
My mobile phone pinged. A text message: “chase tigre.”“Interesting,” I said as the name of the text sender flashed on my screen.
“Am I missing something?” said Jack.
“Just got a message from an old friend,” I said.
I showed Claire my phone. She rolled her eyes. It was sent from the disappeared Bruce Tyson, and included a street address near Sydney Airport.
VIII
“BRUCE-EE. Oh, Bruce-ee. Are you in there?” the wiry man called through the locked bathroom door.
Bruce Tyson stayed silent, sitting on the toilet seat.
“You’ve been a naughty boy, Brucie. Ringing my boss. Trying to squeeze money out of him. You should have stuck to handing out the pills and washing prisoners’ bottoms, shouldn’t you? But oh, no. Brilliant Brucie starts putting his big ears to conversations that are none of his business.”
The burly man stepped through a doorway into the cheaply furnished kitchen in which the wiry man was standing. He carried a dinner-plate-sized reel of raw copper wire. He nodded at the wiry man and said, “All set.”
The wiry man nodded back. “Now, Brucie. Are you going to come out, or am I going to have to play the Big Bad Wolf?”
“Who are you?” Tyson groaned. He stayed seated on the toilet because the chemicals of fear kept flushing his insides out. His stomach cramped again.
Boom! The bathroom door smashed around the lock. Boom! The wiry man crashed through the door. “Oh, my. God,” he said, putting his jacket sleeve over his nose to mask the stench.
Tyson stood, pants around his ankles, and screamed, “Help! Help!”
The burly man dropped his reel of wire, stepped into the bathroom and clubbed Tyson in the face with a right-cross. The blow stunned the psychiatric nurse and stopped his cries. Tyson stumbled back and shattered the glass shower screen.
“Quick,” said the wiry man. “Don’t let him fall into that shit. He might cut an artery.”
The burly man grabbed the staggering Tyson by his shirt, spun him around and locked his captive’s neck into the crux of an elbow.
“Easy, easy,” said the wiry man. “Let him breathe. Now,” resumed the wiry man, “we need to have a chat, Brucie. But not in here. Phew!”
The burly man dragged Tyson into the kitchen and followed his leader through a door into a workshop with a concrete floor littered with cardboard boxes. In a corner there was a folding bed with a thin mattress on a metal frame.
“This will work best if you’re relaxed, Brucie. So you lay down on the bed and we’ll have a nice, friendly chat. Okay?”
Tyson gurgled. His captor dragged him to the edge of the bed and released his head-lock. Tyson quickly pulled up his pants and sat on the bed.
“No, no. Not sitting, Brucie. I want you to lie down, like you are going to sleep. And get those filthy clothes off.”
Tyson’s stomach cramped again. “Look. I’m sorry. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll disappear. You won’t hear from me again.”
“Clothes off,” insisted the wiry man. “And lie down.”
Tyson complied. As he did so, the burly man stepped into the kitchen and returned with his reel of wire.
“Just for security purposes,” said the wiry man as his companion pressed Tyson onto his back and wound copper strands around Tyson’s wrists and ankles before starting to fix them to the corners of the bed.
“So, Brucie, who have you been speaking to, apart from young Mr East and his friend Mr Hills, sadly deceased?”
“Nobody.”
“Is that so? A little birdie told me you had been speaking to a journalist. What have you told him?”
“Nothing, truly. I just scammed some money from him.”
“Okay, Brucie. If that’s how you want to play.”
The wiry man nodded and his companion stood next to the head of the bed, hovering over Tyson’s face. He began unwinding a long strand of copper.
The wiry man sat on an upturned crate next to the bed and pulled a crescent-shaped butcher’s knife from the sheath that was strapped over his chest inside his suit jacket. He waved the knife at Tyson. “Brucie, I want you to stay very still while my friend does his work. He’s a pro, so relax. If you fuck around, I’ll have to poke this into you and extract a kidney. Now, that’s a thought, isn’t it? Organ donation. You could use a better brain, Brucie. Because if you had a good one, you wouldn’t be here.”
IX
AFTER THE CALL with Jack about Claire’s assault, I phoned Alice and told her Claire was staying at our home until we left for London the following day.
“Stay with Fred today,” I said. “Do not walk anywhere alone and do not come home until I contact you. There’s been some trouble and we are sorting it out.”
Alice must have been sensitive to the tone in my voice because she didn’t question me.
I phoned my lawyer and arranged to meet him at his office in the city in two hours with Claire.
“You up for a drive first?” I said to Claire.
Tyson’s text had directed me to an address in the industrial suburb of Mascot near the airport.
“It read like an invitation, didn’t it?” I figured some diversion therapy would be good for us both. Fish bounced around. He was up for it too. I gave Claire some of Alice’s clothes to wear.
“Did you call Carl?” I said, after she came downstairs dressed.
It didn’t take long to drive to Tyson’s. It was a low-rise industrial park with a concrete driveway off the street that flowed into the middle of two matching strips of workshops and storage sheds with roller doors at their fronts. The place was busy with cars and trucks and utes backing in and out. I reversed into a parking bay on the opposite side and a few doors along from Tyson’s shed. There was a panel-beater’s shop on one side of Tyson’s place and a surfboard maker on the other. All the shopfronts had a standard wood-panel-door entrance on the left side and a metal roller door in the middle. Both of Tyson’s doors were closed. We sat in the car for a while and studied the scene. There were no CCTVs that we could see. Even so, I started the Defender and drove back into the street and around the corner, parking next to the curb in sight of a laneway behind the workshops. I phoned Tyson but it went straight to voice mail.
“Why don’t you stay in the car with Fish while I see if we have the right address?” I said. “Tyson mightn’t appreciate extra company - if he’s even in there.”
There was a woollen beanie on the back seat which I put on. I found a pair of sunglasses in the glove box.
As I stepped out, I said to Claire: “How about you jump behind the wheel and keep the key in the ignition, in case we need a fast getaway. The horn works a treat too.”
“Yes, Dad,” she said, shooing me away. Fish jumped in her lap and watched me walk.
I stepped into the laneway behind the sheds on Tyson’s side. Each of the rear doors was numbered. I found Tyson’s and knocked. Nothing. I put my hand inside my tee-shirt to keep my fingerprints off the door handle and tried it, but it was locked. So I walked into the street and turned into the main driveway towards the front of his shed.
A coffee van had arrived and parked a few doors from Tyson’s. About a dozen workers were queued in a loose line, engrossed in the screens of their mobile phones. The electronic bastards were on my side for a change. There was no response to Tyson’s front door buzzer. I tried the roller door with my boot and it came up. I ducked under quickly and closed it behind me with my foot. There was a stench of burnt meat, like an oily barbeque, and a pall of light smoke in the upper air of the workshop. I caught the unmistakable whiff of burnt hair and I dry-retched.
The workshop was dark, apart from a squeeze of light coming through a part-opened door to a backroom. I flicked on the light switches inside a fuse box attached to the workshop wall. Two big halogens in dome shades on the ceiling threw a harsh, white blaze on the scene.
The first thing I noticed were stacks of large cardboard cartons, the ones used for moving house. There were piles of folded clothes on the concrete floor, blankets sealed in plastic bags, boxes labelled as powdered milk and noodles. And there were stacks of books, mainly children’s titles. I guessed Tyson used the shed to store and send stuff to his kids in Africa.
The smoke was nauseating. I walked past some cartons towards the rear of the shed, staying bent under the smoke layer to breathe the cleanest air. Bruce Tyson – I guessed it was him mainly from the Swans cap lying on the floor – was lying naked on his back on a folding bed. This time I vomited wet. His head was wrapped with what looked like copper wire, multiple strands of it. It made a rough X shape across his face, bound from the left side of his jaw to above his right ear and vice versa, squashing his nose. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to wind that pattern. There was white electrical cord, heavy-duty, peeled back to expose its copper cores, trailing from the back of Tyson’s head and plugged into a power board on the wall. His ankles, wrists and neck were secured to the frame of the stretcher with more copper wire. I saw from the wall switch that the killer, or killers, had turned off the power before they left the shed. Very thoughtful. Tyson’s visible face was a hideous black and purple. Most of an ear had burned off and fallen as a scrap of charcoal on the floor. His fingers and toes were black, the rest of his body pink and purple. I wondered why the fire detectors hadn’t gone off, until I saw a couple of them had been ripped out of the ceiling.
I wanted out, but not through the front door. With my foot, I pushed open a regular door that led to a separate back room. It was a kitchen. A near-empty plastic bag of bread sat on the bench. I shook out the left-over slices and used the bag as a glove. The air was clear and I could breathe okay. From the contents in the kitchen bin, it looked like he’d been hiding here for days. The bathroom door, on the right-side of the kitchen, was busted at the lock. Inside, underpants and socks were soaking in a bucket in the shower recess. I smelled shit. Brown was smeared on the floor.
Maybe Tyson had fired off the text to me before the killers trapped him in the bathroom. I couldn’t see a phone anywhere. From the smoke and the stink in the main room, the killers hadn’t been gone long. Why such a spectacular execution? Why didn’t they take him away by pointing a gun in his back and dispose of him in secret? That could have been easily done.
There was banging on the roller door. Someone was trying to pull it up. Had I locked it down?
“For fuck’s sake!” said an angry male voice. “What the fuck are you doin’ in there? Fuckin’ stinks.”
I froze. The man outside kicked the door a couple of times, then it went quiet.
I picked a rag up off the floor and used it to rub all the light switches and door handles I’d touched. I slipped the bolt on the back door with my hand inside the bread bag and turned the handle. As I stepped into the laneway, I heard a crunch underfoot and looked down. I’d stepped on the shell of a mobile phone. The screen was cracked, like it had been dropped. Tyson’s bathroom window opened onto the laneway. Had he fired off the text to me, then slipped his phone out of the window to cover his tracks as his killers kicked the door in? I put the phone in the plastic bag and walked fast down the laneway, resisting the urge to run.
I climbed into the Defender and Claire drove us several suburbs away while I explained what I had found. I asked her to park in a hotel carpark. I went inside and chanced upon one of the rarest creatures in the city – a working public phone.
I dialled Crime Stoppers and gave them an anonymous tip about a dead body in a Mascot shed.
CLAIRE, ALICE, FRED and I ate Thai take-away that night at our home and watched the TV news about the police finding a dead man in an industrial park. The circumstances were described by a police spokesman as suspicious. I scored them one-out-of-ten for deductive genius.
The TV reporter interviewed a glassy-eyed surfboard shaper from the shop next door who said he’d not seen movement at Tyson’s place for days. Alice reckoned the shaper had the glazed look of someone who’d been on the bong. I hoped the other tenants of the business park were equally astute at the time we visited.
Steele phoned me just after the TV report with his professional analysis: “It’s a display killing. Whoever did this wants to send a message far and wide. The audience is not just you, mate. They’re warning other people not to fuck with them too.”
“Really?” I said.
“Fuck you too,” said Steele.
Claire made a phone call, then told me her concerned husband was finishing off an assignment in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, to be precise. Carl would be back in town in a couple of days. He was advancing the human condition by issuing media releases about an Italian fashion company selling ten-thousand-dollar handbags to the womenfolk of oil sheiks. I offered Claire the use of Hugo’s bedroom for the night which I had, by a stroke of luck, cleaned, and replaced the bedclothes, after he left for Brighton.
Claire phoned Jack on her work phone, given I was suspended, and briefed him on Tyson. Jack had obtained approval for Claire’s private security.
A BEEFY, EX-ARMED ROBBERY squad detective from Belfast named Billy Kelly arrived at our door as we were finishing dinner. “Call me Bat” Kelly was clearly uncomfortable in his suit and tie.
When I did the last rounds of the house about 11pm, Bat was reading a book about the Islamic States of Iraq and Syria on the sofa bed in
my office. He’d rigged a mini-camera on the front porch and one in the back garden, all hooked up wirelessly to his laptop which was propped on a table by his bed, next to his Glock pistol.
Fish was in heaven bobbing from room to room, running the fences of his freshly populated estate. Alice and Fred eventually sent him up to me. I enjoyed the full house too, despite the circumstances, and looked forward to sleeping knowing our Irish guard was on watch. In bed, to the sound of Fish snoring, I recalled the afternoon’s drive back to the city from Mascot for Claire’s rendezvous with my lawyer to make her police statement. Claire had fiddled with the broken phone I found in the lane behind Tyson’s shed.
“They’re truly like hunting dogs, these people,” Claire had said. “Look what happened to Tyson. If you run from them, it just draws them to pounce.”
“Are you saying we hold our ground? Stare them down.”
“Yes. And Tyson was alone. We have a team.”
I had got her point, but as I drove I kept smelling Tyson’s putrid, burnt skin - the smoke particles seemed embedded into my nostrils - and I kept seeing his copper-wired and incinerated face, the effort that had gone into it. It was a work of art in a Francis Bacon sort of way. There was no escaping the fact these people enjoyed their work; they liked to play before they killed. Psychopaths who’d studied the craft of bullfighting.
“What now?” she had asked.
“Get the IT guy from the office to run Tyson’s SIM card through a reader. If it is his handset, we need to know who his contacts are, who he talked to recently, and when. When we are finished, we can flick it anonymously to the cops.”
“No need for the IT guy.” Claire was triumphant. I heard the handset beep into life. “Tyson used the factory default as his PIN. 1-2-3-4.”
I had pulled over to the kerb. We scrolled through his most recent dialled numbers. One stood out. The +44 20 prefix was a London UK number. I nodded. Claire hit redial and put the handset on open speaker. We heard three rings, a click, and the call diverted to a pre-recorded message: