Get Even

by Peter Corris

  Krabbe removed his glasses again and jiggled them, stressing the arms. 'Could be. Dave was into all that sort of shit pretty early. He videoed his fucking boats, his golf swing, all that.'

  'You knew him pretty well in the old days. If he had something like that, something that important— where would he hide it?'

  'Safety deposit box?'

  Dunlop shook his head.

  'You check his boat?'

  'Tore it apart. Nothing.'

  'Which one?'

  'How do you mean?'

  'There's an old boat, the first one he had. Couldn't bear to sell it. Last I heard it was in a slipway at Balmain. He paid money just to keep it there, high and dry. Fucking crazy, these boat nuts.'

  'What's its name?'

  Krabbe looked tired and old. 'Jesus, I dunno. I'm going to have to tell my wife about Phillip. What am I going to say? Why couldn't he have . . . Shit, don't look at me like that, I tell you I don't know. What's his wife's name?'

  'Lucille. Lucy.'

  Krabbe shook his head. 'No, that's not it. Mirabelle. Yeah, his kid's name. Mirabelle.'

  The slipway was at the bottom of Duke Street in East Balmain. The boatyard had seen better days and was in danger of being extinguished by a combination of foreshore reclamation and town house development. Dunlop used his by now highly questionable Federal police credentials to get the attention of the senior of the two boat builders at work among the vessels. He was shown a small, weatherbeaten sailing boat, sitting on supports in a corner of the yard.

  'Belongs to a cop,' the boat builder told him. 'Was a nice boat once. Mate of yours?'

  'Sort of,' Dunlop said. 'He died a few days ago. This isn't a police matter. I'm thinking of buying it.'

  'Needs a lot of work. Be glad to help. Well, take a look and see what you think.'

  'Can you lend me an overall? I might want to crawl around a bit.'

  Dunlop's ex-wife, Katarina (or, rather, Frank Carter's ex-wife), had been an enthusiastic sailor. Dunlop had tried to share her enthusiasm and had crewed for her in several harbour races, but he found the sport unsatisfying. The periods of inactivity followed by frantic, hectic outpourings of energy did not suit his temperament. Nevertheless, he had picked up enough knowledge about boats to understand their construction and the function of the different sections and compartments. The sail locker, the most obvious hiding place, held a tool chest but, as he expected, nothing else. Likewise the recess where the life jackets were stored and the space around the first aid chest.

  He crawled around, tapping, probing and measuring, trying to find hollownesses, discrepancies between internal and exterior dimensions, blank spaces, anything out of place in the tight, economical construction of a small sailing boat. He found nothing and sat in the stern with his hand resting idly on the tiller. He remembered Katarina's instructions—'reef', 'furl', 'tack', but no longer recalled exactly what the terms meant. It was a long time ago, all packed up and deposited on a memory shelf. Dusty. Almost forgotten and better so. He stared down the length of the boat, letting his eye run along the mast which lay, unstepped, out of the well where it would lock in and be held firm when it carried sails and invited the wind.

  Moving like an automaton, Dunlop went forward, bent and put his hand into the slot where the mast would sit. He felt an obstruction, a metal barrier. He scrabbled around its edges and found it a tight fit. He took the tool kit out and used a thin-bladed screwdriver to prise up an aluminium oblong. He lifted it free. He let his fingers feel around in the space below and they encountered a smooth, greasy surface, then a different texture—plastic wrapping and insulation tape. His heart was thudding and he was sweating freely inside the hot overall. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and pulled up the package. Allowing for the taping and heavy wrapping, it measured approximately 190 by 100 centimetres—the right size for a VHS video cassette. Dunlop kissed it and then spat away the taste of the grease that had been applied thickly over the whole surface.

  'Good on you, Dave,' he said.

  23

  'My name is David Rodney Scanlon and I was formerly an officer in the New South Wales police force with the rank of Detective Inspector. In January 1983, I conspired with Walter Loomis and Ian McCausland, also police officers, and Thomas Kippax, a magazine publisher, to murder Louis Kippax, who was then the co-head, with Thomas, of Kippax Publishing.

  'McCausland, who is an expert mechanic, tampered with the brakes of Terence Kippax's Daimler so that they would fail when a certain pressure was applied on a certain gradient. Loomis spent time with Louis Kippax on the night of his death, ensuring that he became drunk and persuading him to drive home by a particular route, one of two Kippax normally took.

  'My role was to make sure that no inconvenient inquiries were made into what was judged to be an accident and to coordinate Thomas Kippax's payments to McCausland, Loomis and myself. For these services, McCausland received fifty thousand dollars and Loomis and myself thirty thousand

  'What follows is a videotape record of McCausland explaining to Kippax how the accident was to be arranged The sound quality is poor owing to the necessity of muffling the camera's electric motor.'

  Dunlop stared, fascinated, at the screen as the clearly focused and lit image of Scanlon sitting quietly in shirtsleeves in what looked like the den of his house, was replaced by a grainy picture of two men standing in a garage. A vehicle was parked by the opening and the camera zoomed in briefly on its licence plate. The car was a Jaguar, presumably Kippax's. Dunlop recognised McCausland, a short, wide man with a snub nose and aggressive manner. He had only ever seen photographs of Kippax, and had one by him now at the head of a letter from the publisher in a copy of Business Daily. The tallish, austere-looking person, whose skin had an unhealthy pallor, fitted the bill. McCausland held up two pieces of cable and a length of tube. His Belfast boyhood was still in his speech patterns:

  McCAUSLAND: You cut through this here, just so far, and you make a hole just below the brake fluid cylinder. It's fuckin' delicate work to do it properly. That's why it's worth fifty.

  KIPPAX: I see.

  McCAUSLAND: He comes down that hill, heavy car, and he's a bit pissed if Walter's been on the job properly—goin' too fuckin' fast, most likely. He pumps hard to get braking, doesn't get enough and pumps harder. The cable gives and he's history on that road

  KIPPAX: And you can do this tonight?

  McCAUSLAND:It's fuckin' done, and I've given you a bonus.

  KIPPAX: I don't . . . understand

  McCAUSLAND: Don't worry about it. I can't fuckin ' see why you wanted to know this much, but that's all you need to know.

  KIPPAX: Very well Thank you.

  McCAUSLAND: I'll thank Dave and he'll thank you. Okay?

  The screen went blank and then Scanlon appeared again.

  'McCausland had made sure that the petrol tank would leak and cause a fire when the car rolled or when it came to a stop. That's what more or less happened and the evidence of the tampering with the brakes was destroyed One of the insurance investigators who inspected the vehicle raised some technical questions about the accident and prepared a report. I was informed of this and exerted pressure on this man to change the document Copies of the original and revised report are enclosed in this package along with banking records and two audio tapes. That is all I have to say.'

  Dunlop watched the flickering on the screen for a few minutes before hitting the STOP button on the remote control. He rewound the tape and hooked up the second VCR with a blank tape inserted and two others ready to hand to make copies. He listened to the audio tapes—conversations over the telephone and face to face between Scanlon and the other policemen—as he leafed through the documents. The revised insurance inspector's report was clear enough but the banking records meant little to him. Both Loomis and McCausland mentioned Kippax. Dunlop photocopied the documents and made copies of the audio tapes, so that he ended up with the originals and two duplicates of each piece of evidence. />
  'Should do it,' he said. He went into the kitchen and opened a bottle of white wine. He poured a glass, drank it straight off, poured another and took it through to the telephone, where he rang Keith Krabbe.

  'Got it. It was on the boat. The lot. The man's finished.'

  'Good. I've been doing some digging. Not much doubt about it. They rented a car. The girl identified Phil. Fuck, I want Edgar Georges.'

  'I'll get him if I can,' Dunlop said. 'Can you back me up on Kippax? You must have something on him.'

  There was a pause and Dunlop thought he could hear Krabbe sobbing through a string of high-pitched obscenities. Then the policeman coughed and the grit was back in his voice. 'Yeah. I've got a few things I can say. You going to the SCCA?'

  'That's right. Thanks, Keith, and for what it's worth, I'm sorry.'

  Krabbe hung up and Dunlop slowly drank his wine as he leafed through the business paper.

  Dunlop sat quietly in the conference room of the WPU building in Redfern. Burton had finally shuffled enough paper, made enough notes, sipped enough water. 'Thomas Kippax has been arrested,' he said.

  Dunlop said, 'Good.'

  'Loomis too, McCausland would have been, but he's hospitalised with only weeks to live, perhaps less.'

  'That's good too. What about Edgar Georges?'

  'Extradition procedures under way. Could be tricky and protracted. He might be more meat for the SCCA. Keith Krabbe's levelled some extraordinary accusations against him.'

  'True, every one—bet on it.'

  'But you're going to be the main witness against Kippax. He got bail of course. The lawyers are going to string it out to hell and gone. It's going to take a lot of time and you're going to need our services, our protection, Lucas.'

  Dunlop leaned back in his chair and thought about the last few years of his life, spent in the service of the WPU. The name change, the people he'd steered to survival and the casualties. He thought about Cassie May Loew and the man he'd killed to get her. And how she'd slipped away. He thought about Ava Belfante and Ann Torrielli and Roy Waterford who dressed as a woman and was as brave as any man he had ever met. He thought about his two brief intimacies with Maddy Hardy, both aborted by 'the job'. And it seemed to him that the world of identity change, re-documentation and relocation was as false and dangerous as the world people called real.

  'My name's Frank Carter,' he said. 'And I think I'll take my chances.'