Crucifixion Creek (18 page)

‘Local area command.'

She shrugs.

‘It's unfinished business, Deb. We should be dealing with it.'

‘Of course we should, we should be dealing with all of this. But we're not.'

Harry says, ‘There are a few loose ends that we should tie up in order to finish
this report.'

‘Like?'

‘I want to interview the minister. Oldfield.'

‘What?'

‘I think it's vital that we find out if he's had any recent dealings with Kristich.'

Deb looks at him, trying to read his mind. ‘What are you fishing for?'

‘If Kristich was supplying drugs to people powerful enough to prevent us accessing
his records, Oldfield may be one of them. Kelly's photograph of the three kings gives
us the excuse. We have an obligation to the coroner to clear this up.'

‘Oldfield won't see us.'

‘Remember his last words? “Let me know if there's anything I can do to help with
the good work.” I think we can put it to him that we're doing it for him, to make
sure his name doesn't have to appear on our report to the coroner. Which I'm sure
he wouldn't want.'

‘Waste of time.' Deb taps her pen on the desk, thinking. ‘But okay, I'll try him.'

She picks up the phone and eventually is put through to a staffer at Parliament House
who tells her that Mr Oldfield has gone from the building and has left instructions
that he is not to be contacted except in an emergency.

‘I think the minister would feel that it is very much in his interests to speak to
me. Why don't you call him now and give him my contact number?'

She draws squares and spirals on her pad as she waits. When her phone rings she speaks
deferentially, very polite, anxious to do
the right thing as she lays it out for
him. Eventually she makes a note on the pad and hangs up. ‘He's at home. He'll see
us.'

Home is on Point Piper. Not far, they discover, from Maram Mansur's huge mansion
overlooking the inner harbour and the city skyline. The Oldfield house is a more
modest affair but still highly desirable, a stylish modern home on one of the most
expensive stretches of real estate in the country. Large areas of glass survey those
prime city views, and Harry wonders how a public servant could afford this.

‘Couldn't this have waited? You know what sort of a day I've had,' Oldfield says
as he shows them in. He leads them to a large table that looks as if it belongs in
a boardroom more than a dining room. The whole space has a spare, efficient, workplace
feeling that reminds Harry of Kristich's nest in the Gipps Tower. He wonders if there
is a Mrs Oldfield; there's no sign of a feminine touch.

‘Of course,' Deb says. ‘We do apologise, but we're under a lot of pressure now to
wrap up our enquiries and complete our report to the coroner concerning the Kristich
and Lavulo deaths. We just want to be quite certain that we don't need to mention
your name in the report, minister.'

‘My name? Good heavens no, certainly not. Why on earth should you?' He looks amazed.
His manner now is aloof, patrician. Far from the team player he projected in the
strike-force briefing.

‘It's the photograph in the
Bankstown Chronicle
,' Deb says apologetically, ‘On the
yacht.'

‘Oh!' Oldfield's face clears. ‘I see. Well that was taken years ago, in Vanuatu.
I was high commissioner between '04 and '06, and of course I had to socialise with
Australian businessmen out there from time to time, people like Kristich.'

‘What was his business out there?' Harry asks, and Oldfield looks slightly put out.

‘I really can't recall. Import-export? I'm not sure.'

‘And did you maintain contact with Kristich when you both returned to Australia?'
Deb continues.

‘No. I may have attended functions where he was present, I don't know.'

‘Did you ever visit his offices in the Gipps Tower?'

‘No, certainly not.'

Harry clears his throat. ‘So…' he looks puzzled, pointedly underlining something
in his notebook, ‘…you say you didn't visit Mr Kristich in the Gipps Tower recently?'

‘What?'

‘The Gipps Tower.' He smiles apologetically at Oldfield. ‘Perhaps it slipped your
mind.'

Oldfield stares at Harry for a moment. ‘I see. Anything else?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘A visit to the Gipps Tower?'

‘Yup.'

Oldfield sighs, as if suddenly overcome with fatigue. ‘Politicians need two essential
qualities, sergeant. It is nice if they have more, but these two are essential—ambition
and paranoia. Ambition to drive you forward,' he smiles without humour. ‘And paranoia
to cover your back. Political life is littered with obstacles and traps that derail
people who don't have those two qualities. Sandy Kristich was one of those traps.
I'd heard vague rumours about him since he returned from Vanuatu, but I hadn't bumped
into him. Then he contacted me out of the blue last month and asked me to call in
to his office to discuss a proposal. He was always a persuasive character, and against
my better judgment I agreed.'

Another sigh, Oldfield pointedly consults his watch. Deb prompts, ‘A proposal?'

‘Yes, well, after a couple of drinks, jolly reminiscences of the Vanuatu days etcetera,
he got around to what he wanted, which was to engage me as a confidential advisor.
To find out the thinking of the working party on the preferred route for the south-west
underground rail project, he said, and to identify ways to, ah, gain input into that
decision. I gathered that he saw himself as an intermediary between myself and a
third party he didn't name. I made it clear to him of course that I wasn't prepared
to bend the rules, and that if I ever was to enter into such an agreement with anyone,
I would have to disclose it to the parliamentary register. He didn't like that idea,
and that's where our conversation came to an end. In effect, I felt that he was proposing
to bribe me to subvert the planning process, something I neither could nor would
contemplate. But he never framed it in such a way that I could make a formal complaint
to the police or anyone else. So that's it.' Oldfield fixes Harry with his patrician
gaze. ‘May I ask how you learned of the meeting?'

‘Sorry.'

‘Well, I was quite wrong to lie to you, but it was the paranoia kicking in. To be
associated in any way with Alexander Kristich at this moment would be political suicide.
I hope you'll accept my sincere apologies.'

Harry turns to Deb, who is looking at him with an odd expression. ‘Anything else,
ma'am?'

She clears her throat, examines her notes and says tightly. ‘No, I don't think so.
We'll leave it at that. Thank you for your cooperation, sir.'

She waits until they are in the car before she explodes. ‘Where the hell did that
come from, Harry? Why didn't I know about his meeting Kristich?'

‘It was just a punt, Deb. I reckoned he was lying to us and I thought I'd call him
on it. I just got lucky. But if he lied about that I'll bet he's covering up other
things too.'

Deb takes a deep breath, snaps her lighter and drags deeply on a cigarette. ‘Okay,'
she says at last. ‘And if Kristich took notes of their meeting, the wiping of his
computer was very convenient for Mr Oldfield.' The cigarette has calmed her. ‘Now
what?'

‘That's the problem, isn't it?'

‘I'll report this to Bob, but without further evidence I can't see it going anywhere.
There must be people all over town scuttling around erasing emails, diary references,
file notes on meetings with Kristich. Soon he'll be the man who never was.'

22

Over dinner Jenny tells him about her progress. ‘It's like…' she struggles for an
analogy, ‘reconstructing sheets from a shredded document, or disentangling a ball
of dozens of cables.' But neither quite captures it. She has been concentrating on
a cache of notes made, presumably by Kristich, over the previous twelve months, recording
cryptic transactions of various kinds with other nicknamed players, along the lines,
‘18k to Rooster', ‘told Pol to contact Chocky sap', ‘Chippy panic, spoke to Tubby'.

More of these nicknames have cropped up. A lover of word games and crossword puzzles,
she has entertained herself trying to decipher them, and has printed off a list of
her guesses for Harry:

She waits while he studies it.

‘Okay…' He tells her about seeing Oldfield today with Deb, and of his reluctant admission
that he had met Kristich, which suggests that he is Bells. ‘And I had an idea about
Pol. I wondered if he could be the local councillor that Kelly Pool keeps going on
about—Potgeiter, Pot as in Pol Pot.'

‘Yes, that could work.' She whispers an instruction to her computer.

‘How do you get Mansur for Chocky?'

‘Maram Mansur, M&M, chocolate drops.'

He laughs. ‘Right. The last one's new, Tuba.'

‘Yes. It crops up a few times. He sounds like an intermediary of some kind.'

Harry thinks, then says, ‘The lawyer, Horn—Tuba.'

‘Okay, yes. That just leaves the football player, NRL.'

She has been mapping the connections between the different names. She brings up the
diagram of nodes and links the computer has created to illustrate this, a picture
she can only imagine. It shows some of them—Rooster, Pol, Bells, Chocky and Tuba—having
strong interactions with Kristich and with each other, while others—Chippy, Crystal
and NRL—are more peripheral.

‘I've found some pictures, but you'll have to tell me what they are—here.'

This is the most frustrating thing, that she can't see these. All the computer can
tell her is that this is image number X and this is number Y. It can't describe them.
It is a limitation of the program she will have to see about fixing.

He tells her there are photographs of people, buildings, documents. They look like
a kind of visual diary of events, but to interpret them they will have to correlate
the pictures, which only Harry can see, to the text documents that only Jenny can
navigate. They sit
side by side at her table and begin to go through them.

‘This one looks interesting,' Harry says. ‘It's four blokes standing drinking at
a bar…There's Kristich, and Oldfield. I don't know who the other two are.'

He gives her the reference number of the document and she gets to work on her computer.
‘6.4.13/1' she says at last.

‘What's that, a date?'

‘I suppose so. And there's another document titled 6.4.13/2.'

She gives him its computer number and he flicks through the images. ‘Got it. A hotel
bill for six nights beginning 6 April this year at the Le Meridien Hotel, Jakarta,
Indonesia, in the name of Mr Joost Potgeiter, paid for with Alexander Kristich's
credit card. Do we know what Potgeiter looks like?'

‘Yes, I've got all their pictures.'

She brings them up and he says, ‘That's him. The other two men in the bar are Potgeiter
and Mansur. This is brilliant, Jenny.'

He hugs her and they both laugh, and then the front door bell rings.

‘Probably Nicole,' he says. He gets to his feet and goes out to see.

Jenny hears the door open, then Harry's voice. ‘Sir?'

Her heart stops. Have they come to arrest him? Then she hears a voice she recognises.
Bob Marshall.

‘Sorry to drop by without warning, Harry. I've been in meetings in Goulburn Street,
and not having seen Jenny for so long… Is it a bad time?'

Jenny gets over her surprise, remembering how Marshall visited her in hospital after
the crash. He's known for it, his personal contact with the families of injured officers.

‘No, not at all. Come in, sir. Let me take your coat.'

‘Bob, please. Can't be saying “sir” in your own home for God's sake.'

Panic seizes Jenny. She quickly exits the file and tries to gather
up the papers
on the table and shove them in the drawer. A couple drop to the floor, and she's
bending down to find them when she hears Harry again.

‘It's Bob Marshall, Jenny.'

‘Oh!' She rises to her feet and turns to him, smiling. ‘Bob, what a lovely surprise!'

She feels him gently take hold of her hands and kiss her on the cheek. He makes his
apologies again and offers her the box of chocolates he's brought with him as she
leads him away from her desk. Harry says, ‘Let me get you a drink, Bob.'

‘Well, I have got the luxury of a driver waiting out there, and after the day I've
had a drop of scotch would go down a treat.'

Jenny leads Bob to the seats in the bay window on the far side of the room from the
computer. He goes on, ‘I was sitting in this meeting, Jenny, listening to these people
droning on about best-practice this and benchmark that, and my mind wandered off
and it came to me that it must be three years since your terrible accident. And now
you've had another tragedy with your brother-in-law. How's the family coping? Your
sister's husband, is that right?'

As they talk Harry returns with the glasses. Jenny takes hers, and Bob proposes a
toast to happier days. Then he says, ‘But tell me, Jenny, if it's not an intrusive
question, I saw you sitting over there at the computer and…well, I know you used
to be an expert in that field but you surely can't use it now, can you?'