by Chris Krupa
The line went silent for a while before Reggie said, ‘Tell me everything you know about the book.’
I gave him the author’s name and the title.
‘It’ll help if I know what I’m looking for,’ he murmured. ‘I suppose people have been known to put injunctions on books, suppression orders and the like. I’ll check Caselaw and see if there’s anything in local and district. I’ll let you know.’
‘Thanks, Reggie, appreciate it. Sorry for calling so late.’
‘Now he apologises. Go to bed!’ He hung up.
I didn’t sleep well. A matter of loneliness, and a feeling I wasn’t accomplishing as much as I should, made me anxious. If the book mentioned Jeff in any way, my obligation sat with him, and I needed to maintain his confidentiality and find out what he knew. I had to think of ways of circumventing Evelyn.
***
In the morning, I called a subsidiary Lyons Media office in Redfern, and in a moment of irrationality thought Evelyn might answer. A woman named Melinda eventually picked up.
‘Melinda, Matt Kowalski, Evelyn Turner’s associate. Would I be able to speak with Jeff Lyons about a particularly sensitive issue?’
‘I’m sorry. Mr. Lyons will be out of the office for most of the morning.’
‘Melinda, would you have any idea where I could reach him urgently? It’s in relation to his daughter.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Mr. Lyons is at the stables, inspecting the weanlings.’
It didn’t surprise me Jeff had interests in horses, the so-called ‘sport of kings.’ I wondered how the horses behind the screens at race tracks felt about that phrase.
She said, ‘I can take a message and have his personal assistant call you back?’
I took a punt. ‘I know how close he is to his horses. Is it possible I could meet him out there?’
Wherever ‘there’ is.
Her higher educated voice went into overdrive and pronounced each vowel distinctly. ‘Unfortunately, The Birches won’t grant access to the general public without a prior appointment.’
I heard the familiar beeps of someone else trying to get through to me on another line. ‘Then I’ll make sure to see him personally at the office this afternoon,’ I said. ‘Thanks again.’
I hung up before she could say another word, and let the other call come through.
‘Bingo! I got a hit. Or what do you guys say? ‘Housie’?’
‘Either, or Reggie.’
‘Okay, listen to this. A publishing house in North Sydney called Capital Letter were all set to publish a non-fiction book called Broken Trust, written by Heather Morrison, three weeks ago. It features nine first-hand accounts from Australian women sexually abused by someone they love. For reasons not specified in the court documents, Lyons Media got wind of it, filed legal proceedings against Capital Letter, of which the magistrate issued a court-ordered injunction against the publishing of the book.’
‘What does all that mean?’
‘It means Lyons is scared shitless and willing to pay good money to block the book from getting into the hands of the public for an indefinite amount of time.’
‘Sounds expensive.’
‘The costs wouldn’t be outlandish, but not exactly a kick in the pants, either.’
‘Do you have any idea if Lyons is mentioned by name?’
‘I got bupkis. The manuscript’s under lock and key at a very expensive law firm.’
‘Good job, Reggie. It gives some weight to Gav’s threats.’
‘Yeah. Stay away from the psycho, you hear me? Call Ivers if you run into him. I’ll see you.’
‘Hey, wait. Reggie? Who appeared for Capital Letter in court?’
‘Guy called Warwick Fripp. He’s a production editor, whatever the hell that is.’
I made a note of the name and the publishing firm. ‘Reggie, you the man.’
‘I’ll be the man on your ass if my incomings stay neutral.’
I hung up.
***
The Birches was situated on eighty acres of land an hour’s drive northwest of The Gong. As the two-lane blacktop changed to a single lane, bullet-sized raindrops cracked against my windscreen and blurred my vision. I flicked the wipers to high speed as evergreens stooped and bowed against the strong southeasterly gusts.
The road ended in a cul-de-sac, at the end of which a large sign adorned a tall gate listing rules and regulations, none of which were discernible through the blurred windscreen. I pulled up next to a rusted intercom, wound my window down, and pressed the squeaky button. It got stuck, and I prodded it several times until it popped back out with a snap.
Rain dotted my arm and spattered the door interior when a crackly voice said, ‘Yes? Do you have an appointment?’
I explained who I was and that I had vital information relating to Jeff Lyons’ missing daughter. Discovering my client blocked the publication of a book played against his interests, but desperate times called for desperate measures, as they say in the classics.
After a minute of silence, I considered pressing the button again, when the same voice came back. ‘Follow the road on the left about half a click, until you reach the weanling stables on your right.’
The gate opened with a buzz. I wound my window up and followed the directions as given. The rain eased a little as I slowly guided my ute across muddy potholes, careful to protect the suspension. Various brick outhouses covered in ivy dotted the tree-lined track, and swaying birch trees lined the perimeter of the property.
The only thing I knew about horses was that rich people got richer by making them run in circles.
After what seemed to be the right distance, a white stable house appeared on the right, and I parked off the road. It resembled the house in The Amityville Horror, and I hoped it wasn’t an omen.
I got out, careful to avoid literal steaming piles of manure, and trudged up a muddy incline until I reached the open doorway. Inside, the smell of damp hay and wet hide steamed the air. Horses shuffled in their pens and the rain intensified on the roof. Standing at the opposite end of the barn, Lyons, in a long black coat, stood hunched with a man dressed in white jodhpurs and a navy jacket. As I approached them the man in the equestrian get-up regarded me with a haughty look, and Jeff straightened.
‘Good God, Matt,’ Lyons murmured. ‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’
I shook my head. ‘Not as yet. I’ve tracked her last known movements to Wednesday, 11 March, and after that it’s a blank. But it’s not what brings me here, Jeff. Tamsin’s roommate was found murdered Friday night. Another woman’s body was found Saturday morning in Camperdown Park. Both were stabbed with the same knife. I believe the two are connected, but how they relate to Tamsin, I have no idea just yet.’
Lyons stood still, and his face gave nothing away.
I said, ‘Do the names Renee Prestwidge or Pavali Singh sound familiar to you?’
Lyons didn’t flinch. ‘No. Should they?’
‘No, I didn’t expect they would. I’m just covering some bases.’
‘You keep doing that. You have any interest in thoroughbred brood mares, Matty?’
I shook my head. ‘I lost two big ones on the ninety-eight Melbourne Cup, and swore I’d never gamble again.’
‘Two grand’s nothing to cry over.’
‘Two hundred.’
Lyons swapped a look with the Jodhpur man and smirked. ‘Mind giving us a minute, Fred?’
Fred nodded and made himself scarce.
‘It’s not so much how you play,’ Lyons said, ‘but how you work it—less punt drunk, more entrepreneurial. You want to make some serious dinero? You put in eighty hours a week. You walk the track, you watch trials, you check track work, you study race tapes, and you scrutinise every horse in the mounting yard. Stick to fixed odds and you won’t go wrong.’
He opened his umbrella and tramped over uneven ground to a fenced-in pen.
I joined him at the gate as heavy rain pelted my head. A stunning-looking
mare stood with a foal sheltering in a far corner, wearing matching blue turnout rugs.
Lyons pointed with a gloved hand. ‘That’s my two-point-four-million-dollar baby. Bred from racing stock. She won’t be a Winx, but I’ll make damned sure she’ll run Rosehill. I’ll keep her here in the upper paddocks now she’s weaned from her mother. In a month, she’ll be in the lunging yard and straight onto the walking machines to get her ready for next year. Her mother’ll be in-foal by then, and I’ll buy that one too.’
‘Jeff, how much do you know about the security guard who worked the door Friday night at the Peekaboo launch?’
‘Which one?’
‘The bald Pommy one, Gav. Three-day growth? Built like a whippet?’
He furrowed his brow and looked out over a paddock. ‘HR hire the temp staff. I’ve got nothing to do with that.’
‘I’ll need some background information on him.’
‘Tell me, Matty. What did you do for a crust before you started snooping around women’s underwear drawers?’
I ignored the blind hook and smiled. ‘I worked a stint as a bouncer for five years, a long time ago. And I did some stunt work for TV. Nothing major, just soaps, mainly.’
He eyed me carefully. Water from the ends of the umbrella dripped in patterns around him.
‘My old man became a millionaire when he was twenty-two. He got lucky with property, bankrolled it into stocks and got lucky again. Bought a ranch, stables, horses, the whole lot. He gave me a white Arabian for my tenth birthday, born March the 20th, 1971, 4:28 in the morning—fourteen hundred pounds of stallion. I trained that horse to do everything. I could let that thing lie right down flat, when you get on it. When I turned fifteen, he said I had to get my hands dirty and earn money. He made me work the doggers in Echuca, used to be the biggest knackery in the state. All the old race horses ended up there. Those beasts were shadows of their former selves—fat legs, busted hooves, bones sticking out of ‘em like Kampucheans. They were put up for sale, and if a horse didn’t sell, I’d have to walk ‘em to the killing box and shoot ‘em through the head.’
He sniffed and stared at the foal. ‘If that didn’t work, I’d slit their throat and cut off the tail. Flay the hide, grind ‘em up for export—the Russkis and the Japs love ‘em. Every time I led ‘em down, you could see the whites of their eyes rolling around in their skulls—mad eyes, as if they knew. They may have won a few bob for a bunch of drunks back in the day, but those horses did more for the world dead than they ever did alive.’
He shifted his feet. ‘I worked ten-hour days for seven years straight. It was like a process line: they came in, they went out. And the damndest thing happens. The whole concept of a horse leaves your brain. They became these things that you have to cut up. They weren’t good for anything, not breeding stock, nothing. Then one summer, a car hit my horse’s back leg. Can’t repair a knuckle. I killed it in 1977, December the 21st, first day of winter.’
His pale face seemed to dull in the light, and when he turned and fixed me with his eyes, they were as cool and clear as the oceans. ‘Tamsin used to call me a fascist and a nihilist. Always made me laugh. Evelyn tells me you talked to some Muslim who knows Tamsin.’
‘He’s an executive with Alliance. So far he’s the last one who had any contact with Tamsin.’
‘Is she sleeping with him?’
Rain dripped off my nose and I wiped it. ‘Our agreement extends to finding Tamsin, not exposing her dirty laundry.’
‘I’m the one lining your fucking pockets, sunshine.’
‘I’ll provide you with detailed reports at a time when all reasonable lines of enquiry have been expired.’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t sow the seeds of doubt with me, son. My gut’s telling me I made a mistake. Did I make a mistake?’
‘Jeff, if you have real concerns for Tamsin, you’ll give me all the information you have on file on Gav. He may be involved with Tamsin somehow, and it may involve a book of some kind.’
He turned to face me squarely. ‘What fucking book?’
‘I thought maybe you’d know.’
His face reddened, and his gaze didn’t leave my eyes. ‘For the last forty years, I’ve had maggots crawling out of the woodwork trying to box me into a corner for a chunk of my money over some bullshit story. Fucking ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome.’ Those bastards would love nothing more than to drag my name through the fucking mud. In this day and age, you’re guilty before proven innocent.’
He cupped a hand to his mouth and faced the stable house. ‘Fred!’
‘I think the book might point me in the right direction,’ I said. ‘If I can find out why the book is so important—’
Lyons flared. ‘Get it through your fucking Pollack head! I’m not paying you to look for a fucking book! Fred!’
Fred appeared at the barn door and cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘Mr. Lyons?’
Lyons reached into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar notes. ‘I hired you to find my daughter.’ He threw the money to the ground. ‘Fucking find her!’
He turned away from me. ‘Fred! Mr. Kowalski and I have concluded our business.’
I looked down at the flurry of notes in the mud, then heard a crash.
Lyons had fallen heavily against the pen gate.
I ran over to him. ‘Jeff?’
He groaned and clutched his chest as he fell to his knees. Then he collapsed, face down in the mud.
Chapter 17
Evelyn arrived at casualty, pale and flustered, and I gave her an account of everything, from the moment Jeff went down, the stupid look on Fred’s face, following the ambulance to St. Vincent’s, to the doctor telling me Jeff had suffered a major heart attack.
Evelyn gave the nurse her details, and we waited together in the designated area.
Half an hour had gone by when a male nurse appeared from a large admittance door and introduced himself as Mitchell. ‘We conducted an angiogram and found two blockages in the blood vessels around his heart. We went ahead and put stents in to open the vessels. He’s been stabilised and, so far, he’s doing very well. The stents are so good these days, we don’t need to proceed to heart bypass surgery unless there’s no option.’
‘He’s scheduled for an operation in two weeks,’ Evelyn said. ‘Does this affect that in any way?’
‘I’ll consult with Dr. Lim, and consult with Mr. Lyons’ specialist. We’ll put him into the cardiac rehabilitation unit overnight, and depending on how successful the stents are, he could be going home as early as tomorrow morning.’
I tried to focus on Mitchell, but my eye kept wandering to Evelyn. She wore a black pants suit, expertly applied makeup, and her hair was packed into a tight bun. Two strands framed her face, and she wore black-rimmed reading glasses.
She said, ‘Can we see him?’
‘Absolutely. He’s sitting up, happy as Larry.’
Evelyn turned to me, but I cut her off. ‘It’s okay, you see him. I’ll get going. If you need anything, give me a call.’
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes.
***
My clothes were still damp, and I felt a chill seeping into my bones. I took the ute out of the car park, shoved it down the back of a little laneway, and walked up to Oxford Street, home to the Sydney Mardi Gras, and ordered an extra hot tall black in a hole-in-the-wall café.
Jeff’s overreaction didn’t instill much confidence in me. If a man suffered a heart attack at the mere mention of a book, something bigger was going on behind the curtain.
The barista served the coffee, and I called Reggie. I gave him the same rundown I’d given Evelyn, and he sucked air in through his teeth. ‘Jesus tap dancing Christ.’
‘Murphy’s Law says I find his daughter and he kicks the bucket.’
‘Murphy’s Law says our highest paying client kicks the bucket before you find his daughter.’
‘Did anyone ever tell you you’re a pessimist and a money-hungry bastard, Reggie
?’
‘It’s not my fault. My wife desires a particular lifestyle.’
‘Don’t pin your materialism on Brenda. She’s one of the thriftiest people I know. One of her commandments should be ‘thou shalt not pay retail’.’
‘Fine. My bad. But that’s why we’re made for each other. How close are you to finding Mr. Lyons’ daughter?’
‘I’ve got a lead I need to follow up—a stripper Tamsin knows—and I’m going to get in touch with Capital Letter publishing.’
‘Woah, woah. Tread careful, Matt, d’you hear me? Do not mention Cash and Hendrix. In fact, I advise against you calling them altogether.’
‘Forget I said anything.’
‘Matt? I said leave it alone. I do not need a lawsuit on my hands.’
‘I’ll see you Reggie.’
I hung up.
The coffee took the chill away, but I needed something more substantial. I found Santorini Bar and Grill and ordered the grilled Cypriot cheese with a house red, looked up the number for Capital Letter Publishing, and called.
A male intermediary answered.
‘Matt Kowalski for Warwick Fripp,’ I said in my hardest tone.
‘Just a moment.’
Fripp came on the line within seconds.
I said, ‘It’s about the Heather Morrison manuscript, the one called Broken Trust.’
The line went quiet before he said, ‘Who are you? Are you with Malone?’
I freewheeled it. ‘I’m the new guy. We need to talk.’
‘Please, you have to understand. It is categorically impossible to meet you today. You have to believe me. I’m sorry, I just can’t. It’ll arouse too much suspicion.’
I said, ‘Okay, then. When?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow? The usual place?’
I hesitated and racked my brains. ‘No. Somewhere different. The Knox Street bar in Camperdown... you know it?’
He said he didn’t, but he’d look it up. Judging by the way he sounded, and the way he was speaking, Fripp appeared to be dealing with people way out of his comfort zone. It put weight against the threats made against Tamsin, so it stood to reason that maybe Fripp was being threatened about the book, too.