Man in the Shadows (17 page)

‘Us?'

‘I'm nearly married again.'

‘Don't do it.'

She laughed. ‘Maybe I won't.'

I had other things to do for the next few days and I did them. I didn't get in to the office for a couple of days and when I did I found the search had been rougher and more destructive than the one in Glebe. Papers were torn, things were broken and I got angry; my stomach was still sporting a dark bruise. I sat at my desk and brooded. Then I phoned Renshaw.

‘Here's what I've got,' I said. ‘A deposition from Mrs Guyatt that she was told her son was on leave. A taped conversation with the duty officer to the effect that Cash and Petersen are on leave plus taped conversations from their homes to say they're not. I've got a witness to my being assaulted in the car park and the licence number of a grey Corolla. I've got a video tape of your people searching my office. What d'you say, Captain? Are you going to tell me what's going on?'

Renshaw's short, barking laugh sounded far too confident for my liking. ‘You amuse me, Hardy. I'll tell you what you've got—nothing! You called Gundagai and Benalla from a public telephone. Neither of your phones, office or home, has a recording device so you've got no record of any call to the duty officer here. I've never seen you, of course.'

‘I've still got a client.'

‘Listen, Hardy, I'll talk freely since I know you can't record anything I say. I'll admit that clumsy mistakes have been made. That's all I'll admit.'

‘I don't think that'll satisfy Guyatt.'

Renshaw was calm, almost courtly. ‘I think it will. I think his good lady's satisfied too. Why don't you ask them? Goodbye, Hardy.'

I've heard that tone of voice before; it's the tone of the fixer, the smoother-out of things who feels that he's done a good job. I drove to Guyatt's place of business in North Sydney. It was a busy operation—warehouse, printery and machine division topped by an office space that seemed to be in the process of expanding. I fronted up to a reception desk and told the young woman in charge that I wanted to see Ambrose Guyatt.

‘Yes, he's . . . oh, have you got an appointment?'

Something about her manner and the bustle of the place suggested newness, innovation. ‘I've never needed an appointment to see Ambrose before,' I said. ‘What's up?'

She leaned forward confidentially. ‘You haven't heard?'

‘No,' I whispered.

The phone rang and she fumbled uncertainly with the buttons on the new-looking system. When she got the call properly placed she smiled at me. ‘New contract. Big one.'

I felt a lurch in my stomach, just below the bruise. ‘Oh, the army thing?'

‘Yes, isn't it wonderful? Hey!'

I walked past the desk and pushed open the door she'd been guarding. Ambrose Guyatt sat with a phone at his ear in front of a paper-strewn desk. He was smiling as he spoke into the instrument. The smile faded as he saw me come into the room. He spoke quickly and hung up.

‘Hardy.'

‘Mr Guyatt.'

He reached into a drawer of his desk and took out an envelope. ‘What's that?' I said.

He beckoned me closer. ‘Cash instead of the cheque,' he said softly.

I was standing beside the desk now, looking down at him. His thin, dark hair was freshly cut and he was wearing a new suit. I took the envelope. ‘Congratulations on the army contract.'

He nodded.

‘Want to tell me where Julian is?'

‘I can't.'

‘Secret mission? Something like that?'

‘I can't say a word.'

‘I understand his mother's a proud and happy woman?'

His eyes widened as a faint doubt crept in. ‘I think you'd better go.'

‘I will. I'm sorry for you, Mr Guyatt. You're going to be a very unhappy man.'

‘What . . . what d'you mean?'

I leaned close to him. I could smell his expensive aftershave and the aroma of cigar smoke. ‘They don't make these arrangements for things that go right, Mr Guyatt. They do it for things that go wrong.'

He gaped at me as I walked out of the office.

I was right. Ailsa reported to me several days later. The information was fragmentary, hardly to be relied
upon unless you had something to support it as I had. Julian Guyatt was part of a small task force that had been infiltrated into New Caledonia to operate against the Kanaks. It had been wiped out in the first exchange. Piecing it all together, the onetime Under-17 100-metres champion had been dead for twenty-four hours when his father first stepped into my office.

Byron Kelly's Big Mistake

T
HE newspaper Byron Kelly dumped on my desk carried the headline DECOMPOSED BODY IN PARK. That made it a fairly ordinary day in Sydney, but Byron hadn't come to talk about bodies or parks or for help with the crossword.

‘I've got to get it back, Cliff,' he said. ‘or she'll ruin me and a lot of others. This time, she doesn't know what she's doing.'

It was late on a Tuesday morning in March. We were in my office in St Peter's Lane, Darlinghurst. Byron was looking a bit crumpled in his expensive clothes. He moved restlessly from the chair to lean on the filing cabinet and try to look through the dirty window. I sat behind my desk; I was less expensive but less crumpled and I knew there was no point in trying to look out the windows.

‘What exactly are we talking about, mate?' I said. ‘A letter, a memo, a rocket fuel formula, what?'

‘A letter, no, a draft letter,' Byron said. ‘Michael roughed out a letter to . . . one of the money men who'd approached him about getting the all-clear for a development. Two things, no three. One, Michael was pissed at the time; two, he thought he was going to get the Department of the Environment and three, it was a bloody joke anyway.'

‘And you showed the letter to Pauline. I suppose you were pissed at the time too?'

‘No. Just angry. It was a bad time for us. The point is, she took it and she's been saying all over town that she intends to fry me and this had to be the way she's going to do it.'

‘What do you want me to do?'

‘Talk to her.'

‘I'm a private detective, not a marriage guidance counsellor.'

‘You're also my friend.'

‘And hers. Don't forget that.'

‘Jesus! You know what it's been like with us, Cliff. We love each other and all that but it's impossible. She's done this before, used stuff I've shown her against me but . . . '

‘Why d'you show her?'

‘I don't know. Rage, I guess. But this is bigger. There's some very heavy people behind this development and it's going through for better or worse.'

‘Where?'

‘Albion Reef, up north. Lovely spot. Was. This'll fuck it but there's jobs and money at stake. It just squeaked through an environmental impact study—took some modifications and some palm greasing. You know how it is.'

I grunted. ‘What was in Parsons' letter?'

‘Enough dirt on the developers and the graft to sink it. The silly bastard really let himself go. If it gets out the development's gone, Parsons is gone and I'm gone. The government'll probably survive.'

‘Does Pauline know all the ramifications?'

‘Probably not. She certainly wouldn't know exactly who's putting up the real money.'

‘You're sure she's got the letter?'

‘Has to be. She's got a key to the flat I moved into.'

‘Why's that?'

Byron pushed his thick brown hair back and looked boyish although he's in his thirties and has knocked around. ‘I didn't want anything to look too final.'

‘You want her back?'

He shrugged. ‘It's fantastic with her when it's good. Unbelievable. Then these things come up and it's hell. I don't know.'

‘Have you tried to talk to her about the letter?'

‘She hangs up. I tried to catch her in at the
News.
She went into the women's dunny. I waited, then I went in. She'd left by another door. Look, I'm not only worried about the flak. That letter's dangerous. The big noise is . . . '

I held up my hand. ‘Don't tell me. I don't want to know. Let me think.'

I'd known Byron and Pauline Kelly for eight years. For most of that time they'd been married, that is, all except a few months at the beginning and the last few weeks since they separated. They fought. At the beginning they were known as Rocky II; that was before the movie came out. Since then they've been Rocky III, IV, as the movies caught up with them. They'd called it off several times but the current separation looked final. Rocky V, at least their version, seemed unlikely.

Byron was Michael Parsons' political adviser cum press secretary cum bodyguard cum drinking companion. Parsons was rising fast in the state political zoo. He was currently a Minister but I wasn't quite certain what for.

Pauline was a journalist, an in-demand freelance who appeared in print, on radio and on television. Byron was a pragmatist, Pauline an idealist; they agreed on almost nothing but the superiority of red wine over white. Pauline had once told me why they stayed together.

‘Because of King Arthur.'

‘What?' I said.

‘We come a lot.'

Pauline was a small woman, blonde, untidy and energetic. I liked her. Byron was a foot taller, more careful of his appearance but somehow always in her
shadow. I liked him too so it pained me to see him looking strained and underslept. ‘How come you kept this letter?' I said. ‘Why didn't you get rid of it when your boss was sober?'

‘You don't understand what it's like working for these blokes. Pauline didn't understand either. They're like . . . shit, I don't know. Have you ever been to a really even fight, where the fighters slugged it out all night and finished up square?'

‘Sure. Rose and Famechon.'

Kelly scratched his head. ‘They never fought.'

‘That's what it would've been like if they had.'

‘Okay. Well, these politicians get off a lot of shots; they torpedo people and humiliate them but they're sitting ducks themselves. Real targets. If they make the wrong move at the wrong time, they're history.'

‘My heart bleeds all over their superannuation cheques.'

‘You sound like Pauline. I find it sort of exciting. Parsons's not a bad bloke. Compared to the guy on the other side he's a genius and a saint rolled into one, but he's got his faults. He gets pissed at a certain pressure level. I kept the letter to scare him, to show him what political suicide looks like. I didn't get around to doing that. I showed it to Pauline when we were having one of our blues and that's it.'

‘Does Parsons know the letter's floating around?'

‘Christ no!'

‘Why me, Byron?'

‘You like Pauline. Not everybody does. She likes you and . . . '

‘Not everybody does,' I said.

Byron grinned. ‘You'd know. Look, Cliff, I have to play this close to the chest. Almost everybody I know has a word processor. They write everything down. They're all keeping diaries, for Christ's sake. It needs . . . discretion.'

‘She'll know I've talked to you. She might be hard to catch up with.'

‘Right.'

‘A hundred and fifty a day and expenses.'

‘Jesus!'

‘Discretion guaranteed.'

Kelly grimaced and put on his very good American accent, a legacy of his time at UCLA. ‘You got it.'

After he left I spent a few minutes thinking about how unwise it was to get involved in a separated couple tangle.
Certain disaster, bound to lose one friend if not two.
But business was business, angry men exaggerate and Pauline might have calmed down. I gave myself enough reasons to pick up the phone and ring the house in Willoughby where I assumed Pauline was still living.

The voice in the answering machine was breathy and cigarette-choked: ‘This is Pauline Lyons. I'm out at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep and I'll get back to you. If it's Byron Kelly calling or anyone connected with him . . . don't bother!'

A challenge. I said: ‘Pauline, it's Cliff Hardy. I want to talk to you. Please ring me—you know the numbers.'

I hung up and waited. The call came through in about as long as it must have taken her to ring my home number before the office one.

‘What do you want?' she said.

‘Aha, you leave your machine on broadcast and listen to the messages.'

‘Who doesn't? What's on your mind, Cliff? If you want a fuck I might be interested. In fact that's the only reason I'm talking to you.'

‘At least you're talking.'

‘Make it quick, I'm on my way out.'

‘I want Michael Parsons' letter.'

‘Shit, that again. I don't know anything about it. I barely glanced at it. I was too pissed to take any notice. I told Byron a hundred times.'

‘He's worried about you, he . . . '

‘Bullshit!'

‘How about the fuck then?'

‘I think I'll wait for someone keener.' She hung up hard.

It isn't that Pauline tells lies exactly, it's just that she regards journalism as one of the highest callings and the freedom of the press as a sacred human right. She'd say Joh Bjelke-Petersen made sense if she had to in defence of her trade. I've met people like her before—stiff-necked lilywhites. There's only two ways to go—front up and convince them that what
you
want is really best for them, or sneak behind their backs and steal it.

I used a credit card to buy a tank of petrol because I don't like to carry that much cash and drove out to Willoughby. The house was a medium-sized, middle-aged timber and glass job that was usually as messy as a garden shed. Byron and Pauline used to say that the dullness of Willoughby was just what they needed after the excitements of politics and journalism.