Freefall

by Mark Furness

  “You have reached the office of the Cavalcade Investment Group. Our opening hours are 8am to 6pm. If your enquiry is urgent, please call our toll free 24-hour investor line on....”

  X

  I WISHED I could sleep like Fish. I picked up my phone and checked its world clock. It was early morning in Sydney, but just after midday in London. Tyson’s handset was recharged and sitting on my bedside table. I hit redial on the London number. This time there was no out-of-hours call diversion.

  “Good afternoon. Cavalcade Investment Group. Mr Baker’s office.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Could I speak to Mr Baker, please?”

  “Who can I say is calling?”

  “It’s Mr Tyson - from Australia.”

  “Mr Tyson, as I explained to you, Mr Baker is not available to take your call. I have passed on your message and contact details. There is nothing we can do to assist you. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay. Thanks for nothing,” I said and hung up.

  I gulped down the last of a glass of red that was on my bedside table and stared at the ceiling for a few seconds. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I muttered. I used my own phone to take photos of the contact list from the screen of Tyson’s phone and then pulled his battery and SIM card out. I took off my pyjamas and dressed for the street, stuffing the pieces of Tyson’s handset in one of my jeans’ pockets. I put my own phone in the other.

  “Quick trip to the shop,” I said to Bat as I left the house. He was not impressed.

  I walked for about fifteen minutes and stopped near a public rubbish bin. When I was sure no-one was watching, I threw Tyson’s battery in the bin. A block further on, I dropped the SIM down a drain. I dumped the handset in a rubbish skip outside a building site.

  How brilliant I was, I thought as I turned the key in my front door. Only half an hour ago, I was lying in my bed, phoning the Cavalcade head office in London on Tyson’s phone from the inner sanctum of my own home. I didn’t know how accurate the tracking systems of phone companies were at picking up the exact geographic coordinates of originating calls, but I’d just dialled out from my bedroom using a phone that belonged to a murdered man. If the homicide squad wasn’t tracking his phone and phone records already, then they were as knuckleheaded as I was.

  XI

  IN THE mid-morning, Claire and Bat drove me and Alice to the airport in Bat’s car.

  After checking in and moving through passport control, I went to a newsagency inside the retail hall and purchased the biggest folding map of the world I could find, and a packet of felt-tipped pens. We found a bar while we waited for boarding and I spread the map on a table and circled Sydney and London. I added Shanghai, where Double Happiness Trading Co. was based. Then there was the spot in the Atlantic Ocean about 200 miles off the coast of Portsmouth, south of England, where John K. Baker’s business partner, Jean-Paul Marais, had fallen off a yacht and drowned.

  Alice leaned over. “Is this to do with the trouble you told me about, why you didn’t want me coming home the other night or walking alone?”

  “We’re getting on top of it,” I said.

  “Then why does Claire need a bodyguard?”

  “It’s temporary.”

  “You just tugged your ear,” she said, smiling. “You told me what that means.”

  It was a relief to board the plane with Alice and switch off my phone. No-one could get between us for at least the twelve hours of the first leg between Sydney and Abu Dhabi Airport in the United Arab Emirates, but I didn’t count on Vladimir Nabokov.

  When the jet reached cruising altitude, Alice plugged her earphones in for a musical backdrop and opened a paperback of Nabokov’s Lolita. What happened to Alice in Wonderland?

  I dozed. Alice tapped my arm as the crew started serving meals.

  “I have news,” she said as we unwrapped the airline caterer’s imagining of butter chicken with saffron rice. “Fred asked me to marry him.”

  “You’re twenty years old.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a big call,” I said.

  Alice smiled. “He’s too clingy. I said no.”

  “How’s he taking it?”

  “He’s offended. He wants to end it.”

  “C’est la vie. There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

  “So why are you still alone?”

  “Too scaly, I guess.”

  Alice lowered her brow and looked at me like a schoolteacher addressing a student who’d lied about his homework. “Who was the woman I saw leaving our house a week ago?”

  “What?”

  “Afro hair. Tall. Pretty.”

  “That was a mistake.”

  “Yes,” said Alice. “She got into a car with a man in it.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I couldn’t see much. It had tinted windows. BMW. Four-wheel-drive.”

  “Plates?”

  “Shot off before I got that close.”

  I took my notebook from my pocket and looked at the words of Tyson’s text message: chase tigre.

  Alice leaned across. “Bad speller?”

  “I think the author was under time pressure.”

  “How many ways can you spell tiger Phonetically, you’ve got T-I-G-E-R, or T-I-G-R-E, or T-I-G-A. Or you can drop in a ‘Y’ instead of an ‘I’ in all those words.”

  I wrote the possibilities down in my notepad. Tyson had indisputably been under extreme pressure in his shed; the shit all over his bathroom floor attested to that. Maybe he didn’t mean to send me a text about a tiger of any sort.

  A dust storm shrouded Abu Dhabi Airport on the edge of a cream desert as our jetliner rolled across the tarmac for a two hour stopover. We could have landed on the surface of the moon. At least its communications satellites worked. I used the airport’s Wi-Fi to Google each of Alice’s ‘tigre’ possibilities. It only took five minutes to find TIGA on the register of the Australian Companies and Securities Commission. Tamerlane Investment Group Asia Pty Ltd was a subsidiary of the keystone company Tamerlane Investment Group, controlled by Mr Charles Arthur East.

  TIGA, the records said, had an office on the 51st floor of the Jin Mao Tower in the financial district of Shanghai. I knew Jin Mao from visiting Jack Darling. It made the Gunnaroo Tower in Sydney look like a corner shop.

  Abu Dhabi Airport erupted with shouting and running people.

  Soldiers in camouflage uniforms waving snub-nosed machine guns charged up the escalators towards us in the small, upstairs food hall. They went from table to table demanding to see passports. There had been a bomb threat. The airport authorities instantly crashed the airport’s Wi-Fi and telephone system. The chaos ended after fifteen minutes, during which Alice and I did crosswords together and I cracked under the pressure and drank a beer with her at a bar.

  I unfolded my world map and added “TIGA” to Shanghai, adding a cross-line to Bruce Tyson’s tombstone in Sydney.

  On the last leg of the flight to London, when the cabin lights were dimmed and passengers had draped themselves in tiny blankets, I drifted into Bert Hart’s world. His voice came after me: “Your grandfather was a split personality, Gar. Like me and you.”

  My grandfather, according to the legend Bert gave him, was a labourer on the Glasgow docks who was sullen and sober Monday to Friday, got drunk and boxed bare -knuckle in a hall on Saturday nights for cash before he got more drunk, then sang his hangover off the next day as a tenor in the church choir.

  Bert had given me the drum on my grandfather after making one of his regular calls home just after I got my driver’s licence at seventeen, and demanded that I collect him by car from the local Tattersalls Club where, he said, the big wheels of the city come to turn - which was why he was there. The chamber of truth was in that car, just him and me inside. I heard about his girlfriends and his clever business scams, like the time he and one of his mates, who managed a big hotel, poured an industrial drum of detergent down a drain at the back of the hotel so the owners would have to buy mo
re from Bert’s chemical company. The stuff foamed up as big as a car and took a day to clear. It was an accident, they told the fire brigade’s hazardous chemicals team. They got away with it. Bert closed that ride home from the Tattersalls with the observation that my mother was insane. Nothing to do with him, he insisted. “Some people are just like that.” He closed his eyes when we pulled into the driveway and said: “You’re a weak cunt.” I was still trying to like Bert then, so I put the remark down to him parroting my grandfather talking about his disappointing son.

  XII

  DICK Callahan, a retired printer who once pressed the buttons on the presses that published Malcolm Halliday’s Morning Sun, picked us up from London’s Heathrow Airport just before dawn. Callahan should have been a reporter for the London tabloids because his home-based chauffeur service was an excellent source of juicy, mostly unreliable gossip.

  On the run south with the motorway herd to Brighton, under a dirty pink and grey sky, we were reminded that Charlotte’s younger brothers, Trevor and Ryan, were joint owners of Brighton’s most successful real estate agency. Sales were improving and the lettings side was strong from commuters fed up with London rents. Neither Trevor nor Ryan drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes, gambled, used obscene language, or raised their voices in anger. The boys’ marriages, which included three young children each, were ‘substantially intact’. His breaking news was that one of the wives ‘is struggling with her weight and some connected psychological disorder’. Callahan believed it was brought on by the boys’ recent religious conversion. Trevor and Ryan had become Buddhists.

  Not only that, they were now vegetarians ‘who don’t even eat eggs because they contain the young of other animals’. The egg thing, according to Callahan, was ‘a descent into madness’. He couldn’t imagine life without bacon, let alone eggs.

  As we pulled off the A23 freeway under drizzling rain and cruised into the suburbs of Brighton, the footpaths began filling with head-down commuters in water-proof jackets marching to the trains and buses. I wound my window down a little and enjoyed a few spits of rain on my cheek. The air smelled of greasy salt, traffic fumes, and the chronic damp that lives in the walls and basements of the Regency and Victorian-era buildings that dominate the inner suburbs of the seaside city.

  “Sodom and Gomorrah, this place,” said Callahan as a handful of neo-punks littered with face-piercing, including a girl trying to rein in a pit bull terrier on a rope, stepped in front of his car at traffic lights, spilling beer from long cans. One character of indeterminate sex bongo-drummed a decent tune on his bonnet.

  We eventually stopped outside a four-story Regency apartment building on Marine Parade overlooking the ruffled waters of the English Channel. Kate Halliday, thin and pony-tailed, was standing in the front bay window of the penthouse. Her canary-yellow cardigan stood out. She waved as we unloaded the bags from the boot.

  The tough old building showed few scars from the regular fury unleashed by the sea upon its white masonry columns, curves and rectangles. At the top of the handful of steps that led to the front door, I paused and turned around. The air was hazy but I found the long neck of Brighton Pier about a kilometre away, propped on its spidery steel legs in brown water. A Ferris wheel stood rigid but sparkling with lights in the dull daylight at the pier’s carnival ride end. Brighton is an old lady who never forgets to put her lippy on for the tourists.

  Kate and Hugo opened the front door, and after a round of quick hugs, we lugged the bags into the cage lift and rose slowly to the top floor. In the lift I had a proper look at Hugo’s new haircut. Razor short on one side, long on the other, with a fringe that hung over an eye.

  “Nice look,” said Alice. Hugo flushed red. I said nothing because I knew I’d be hammered by Hugo whichever way I went, but the half-masculine, half-feminine haircut triggered my recall of the dress I found in his wardrobe at home.

  Inside her flat, Kate dragged Alice by the hand to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. “Tell me about Fred,” she said. Alice rolled her eyes at me.

  Hugo helped me put our bags in the bedrooms.

  “How’s school?”

  “Boring.”

  I didn’t have the stamina for further interrogation. Our reunion had that misty quality that comes with twenty-four hours of fitful dozing in a sealed can breathing bottled air. We drank hot, milky tea at the kitchen table and ate Kate’s curried egg sandwiches on white bread rectangles denuded of their crusts. No-one mentioned Malcolm, but I felt his presence. Alice and I showered and dressed in fresh clothes.

  Kate drove us to the hospital, and in the car, Alice told us a fine tale about the bomb threat at Abu Dhabi Airport. In her version, a black African man in a kaftan with a backpack was machine-gunned and fell backwards over the railing of an escalator into a duty-free perfume counter, causing an eruption of sickly fumes, shattered glass, and shredded flesh. Kate was horrified. Hugo was busy with his phone. I thought she had the makings of a thriller writer.

  My imagining of Malcolm as a yellow Michelin Man was frighteningly true. Entering his private room, we were confronted by a small, bug-eyed barrel figure lying on a bed weeping black fluid in patches through his blue pyjamas. It was blood, the nurses said. There were no significant splits in his jaundiced outer dermis, but his cells were breaking down and large tracts of his skin were little more than blood-soaked sponges. The hospital disinfectant, and a vase of fragrant orange roses, made the setting more surreal.

  “I’m not dressed for the races, I’m afraid,” he said, his eyes flickering with the strain of conversation.

  I did most of the talking. Alice held one of his hands. I held the other. He soon closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  On the way back to Kate’s, I sat in the back seat of the car with Hugo. His skin was paler than ever, his eyes more distant, though he looked well fed.

  “I’m going to ask Malcolm if he wants to see a priest,” said Kate.

  “He’s not religious,” I said.

  Kate glared at me through the rear-vision mirror. Charlotte hadn’t wanted a priest. We held her funeral service in our garden at home under the frangipani tree at her written request – and to Kate’s everlasting horror.

  XIII

  KATE installed me in a double bedroom with French doors opening on to the roof-top terrace of their three-level flat. The Hallidays had purchased in the early 1980s during a recession, when it was part of a seedy boarding house. Over the ensuing years, a few licks of paint, a heritage listing, and some dedicated fellow owners lifted the tone and the value exponentially. The view from the tiled terrace at the south side of the building took in the coast and the roof tops of the city for miles. I tightened my coat, scarf and beanie and put my gloved hands on the terrace railing to look out to sea. Kate appeared, waving the wireless handset of her home phone at me. “Jack,” she said, passing it to me.

  “You’re being careful,” I said to him, stepping off the windy terrace into my room.

  “Just in case East subpoenas our phone records,” he said. “If anyone grills me, I called Kate to check on Malcolm. How is he?”

  “His body’s not much chop, but his sense of humour’s alive and kicking.”

  “Give him my best.”

  “Will do.”

  Jack knew the elder Hallidays well because he and Charlotte were lovers when I met them on a beach in Thailand over twenty years ago. I was traveling with Sandy Wallace. One morning, while Jack, Charlotte and I swam in the surf, Sandy was in a beach hut, with a local man named Maday, inserting a dozen drinking straws filled with pink rocks of pure heroin into the covers of a photo album. Sandy didn’t tell me about Maday, but did ask me to carry our precious memories back to Australia in my suitcase because her case was full. If I’d been caught at Bangkok Airport, I may have been hanged. Instead a handsome beagle at Sydney Airport sniffed my case on the baggage carousel and I served six months in prison. Sandy apologised and offered me a hand-job in the taxi on the way to court on sentencing da
y. Charlotte visited me in jail when she moved to Australia to work as an English teacher. Jack sent me weekly letters from Hong Kong.

  “Now this shit with Charles East,” said Jack, “I can’t believe you’ve kicked an own goal there. You gave up the booze, you did all that counselling. We paid for some of it, for god’s sake, and that’s pissing off our top brass in London. I really believed you had your act together.”

  “I’m sorry. It was a lapse.”

  “Look,” said Jack. “Fuck knows what drives us with the drink and whatever else. I’m sick of looking under my hood too. But these are dangerous people we are dealing with. So you need to get sharp and stay sharp.”

  “Are you saying I’ve ducked a bullet?”

  “HQ would have fired you from here to Mars if those scumbags in Sydney hadn’t monstered Claire and given your version of events some cred. So the deal is this; you are on three months’ probation. One stuff-up and you are gone. And it’s not just you, mate. I brought you in the first time and I’ve hauled you back again. You and I are roped. I have that in writing.”

  “So what now?” I said.

  “I’m not interested in East: not on his own. We want the whale. There has been a smell around Baker and Cavalcade for years. They almost go bust during the Global Financial Crisis, his partner, Marais, dies, and then Baker’s back on top of the world. The miracle man.”

  I told Jack about the call register on Bruce Tyson’s phone taking me straight into Baker’s Cavalcade head office in London, and about Tyson’s text tip to chase the tigre that lead me to East’s Tamerlane Investment Group Asia office in Shanghai.

  “Number one,” he said. “Neither you, nor I, nor Claire know anything about the murdered man’s phone. Number two. We have a lot of pieces, but I can’t see a decent picture, not one we can publish.”