Forget it. Didn’t have the faintest. And didn’t care. Who gives a stuff where you’re going if,
when you get there, you’re going to end up dead? I was terrified. Scared shitless, not to put too fine a
point on it The only reasonably logical question to
register in spite of my terror was whether my heart would pound itself to
pieces before I felt that muzzle on the back of my head for the last time. I suppose a prayer would’ve been in order,
even for me, but terror blanketed that option.
The closest I came to it was desperately hoping for the car never to
stop.
After what could’ve been
fifteen minutes, or fifty, the car slowed to almost nothing, and I heard the sound
of roller doors. Moments later, the car
stopped, and I heard the doors sealing me off from any possibility of
help. Then the car’s engine died. The only disturbance to the silence was the
rushing of blood. Mine. This, I surmised, was it.
Wrong.
Doors opened, people got out of the car, rough hands hauled
me upright. One of my captors grabbed
my arm with iron fingers and made it clear I was to follow wherever he led. I tripped up some timber stairs, passed
through a doorway into a room with a tiled floor, through another doorway, and
found myself brought to a halt on carpet.
I heard a new voice. Deep,
authoritarian.
“Take off the cuffs.”
They were duly removed but the bag over my head
remained. I went to rip it off but…
“Not yet.”
I hesitated and heard people padding around behind
me. Then a door closed. I reckoned two people, possibly three, had
left the room.
“Now,” said the voice.
I whipped the bag off – to be temporarily blinded by
an assault of light.
“Sorry for the...ah, dramatic invitation, Mark.”
The pupils were paining, but I recognised the voice’s
owner. I’d had cause to listen to him,
not all that willingly, on more than a few occasions in recent months. I was in the company of Assistant Commissioner Peter Neilsen, head
honcho of Internal Affairs.
The eyes returned to working order but the brain took
longer, needing to orientate itself before trying to make sense of my
situation. I was in a typical
middle-class lounge room – sofa, two lounge chairs, coffee table, sideboard,
standard lamp and TV set. The carpet
was gray and the walls were off-white, their severity softened by a couple of
Pro Hart reproductions in cheap frames.
There were no photographs.
I knew this place.
I was in a police safe house, one we used for the safe-keeping of
witnesses, usually the criminal sort who’d been persuaded to grass on their
former colleagues. I’d spent several
days in this house playing nursemaid to some pretty unsavoury types and
wondering if, should their erstwhile friends find them, I would bother trying
to protect them.
There was a third person present. Boyd Smith was Neilsen’s staff officer and a
bloody good operator, which accounted for him being three ranks above me twelve
years after we graduated together. No
envy. Smith was well-educated and in
the higher percentiles of intelligence and competence. His path had diverged from mine, but we were
still on nodding terms and I knew him to be a good cop. A high flyer, but a good cop. He was on his way to greater things, and the
best of British luck to him. But now
his hard grey eyes were regarding me with something close to distaste, as if I
had let the side down. I didn’t have
a clue why.
One thing was certain – Neilsen was no great fan of
the Commissioner. In the hierarchy
of assistant commissioners, Internal
Affairs rated lowly, not even beating out Transport. If the Commissioner wanted to put a
potential rival on hold, IA was his
destination. The posting had hurt the
ambitious Neilsen, denying him a seat on the Evans’s inner circle of deputies
and favoured assistant commissioners.
But, to his credit, he performed his task faultlessly, enhancing his
reputation in a job notorious for generating enmity. Certainly in my case, he had lived up to his
reputation – tough but fair. A certain
relief overtook me.
So, why the snatch?
Neisen waved me towards the sofa opposite the lounge
chair he occupied, a glass in one pudgy hand, a slim cigar in the other. Merriment twinkled in his green
eyes. “Drink? Scotch, isn’t it?” He turned to Smith, standing beside
him. “Get our guest a Johnnie Walker,
Boyd.”
Guest! Christ! I’d been shanghaied and had the shit scared
out of me and he calls me a guest!
My anger must have shown, because he held up a conciliatory hand.
“I’m sorry, Mark.
That levity was out of order. I
apologise.”
I think he meant it.
So I sat and waited until Smith fixed the drinks. Picking my mood, he made it a stiff one.
“The reason for all this cloak and dagger stuff,”
Neilsen began, “is Constable Aston’s videotape.”
Which was no news to me. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to
work out that I had nothing else worth being abducted for.
“How do you know about her?” I croaked, relieved that
I still had a voice.
He didn’t hesitate.
“There are some in this police force who believe our exalted leader is
not only incompetent but corrupt. Some
of us, officers for the most part, have formed a little...coterie, you could
call it. Our objective is to see him
removed, which is not easy with the political patronage he’s established. That, or see that he’s not
reappointed. Jodie Aston is, or was, one of us.”
“A bloody vigilante group! You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You, of all
people, must want to see him out.”
I did, but not by using a furtive dirty tricks outfit
and sleazy videotapes. I told him so,
and immediately felt ridiculously virtuous.
My old classmate rubbed it in.
“Come off it.
You spent three years in the CIU.
You know how the real world operates.”
He had a point.
The CIU, the Crime Intelligence
Unit, had a few techniques that worked a treat where sometimes the law
didn’t. You wouldn’t credit how quickly
some tough bad blokes turn to water when they see a videotape of themselves in
flagrante delicto with somebody else’s woman. The threat of giving a copy to the missus
usually put them out of business, or at least out of town. Where it didn’t, threatening to give it to
the cuckolded husband was as close to a guarantee as you could get.
“I know,” I conceded, “but Christ!...we have Internal
Affairs, the Commissioner has his Command Support Unit, and now this...this
coterie. Who else is in the spy
business?”
“To the best of my knowledge, which is considerable,
no one,” Neilsen replied, “and rest assured that my little group is totally
secure.”
“So far,” I shot back. “I suppose security was the reason for
snatching me?”
I was a fast learner. Firstly, he was not supposed to know the
tape existed. Secondly, it was
officially none of his business.
Thirdly, if I now refused to cooperate and blew the whistle on him, he
could deny it with complete equanimity.
Who the hell would believe such a cock and bull story? Especially coming from me.
“Correct.”
So much for procedure; now for policy.
“You put Jodie Aston across the minister?”
“No.” His
response was emphatic. “I wouldn’t ask
any woman to go that far. Never.” The chair creaked as he moved his considerable
bulk forward. “Aston was easy enough to
recruit, as you can imagine. Too easy, but
ultimately a mistake.” He rolled his
tumbler of scotch between his palms, reflectively. “She had a watching brief. Keep an eye on Onslow, report anything that
could be of interest. Anything that
indicated that Onslow might not be playing a straight bat for the
government. As to when she decided to
go into business for herself, I don’t know.
Probably as soon as she realised she had something that could hurt the
Commissioner. She hated the bastard.”
Time to find out how much Neilsen knew.
“Do you know what that something was?”
Neilsen nodded to Smith, who took a tiny tape player
from a pocket and clicked it on.
One voice on the tape was Neilsen’s, recognisable
despite the metallic timbre that the decrypting electronics imparted to
it. The other could only have been
Jodie’s, explaining that she’d got some interesting video of the minister and
his Italian acquaintances. But not, I
noted, how she had bought access to Onslow’s room in the first place.
“The next thing we knew,” Neilsen continued, “she was
dead and McDowell was leaning on certain people. Then, when poor Connie was killed and the
tape went missing...” He shrugged. “We thought a chat with you was in order.”
“I haven’t got it.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “I know.
I understand that Channel Nine woman’s got it.”
Calling Sandra “that woman” earned him no brownie
points with me.
“Somewhere,” I said.
I allowed myself a small grin at the thought of Evan’s minions tearing
around in ever-decreasing circles.
Smith misinterpreted, because his grimness intensified. His chin jutted forward.
“And you know where that ‘somewhere’ is.”
“I do?” Not
the most incisive repartee, but it gave me the opportunity to stick out my own
chin. It also gave me time for the
nasty realisation that if Smith believed I knew where Sandra was hiding, he
could re-summon his own minions and have them beat it out of me. And once I spilled the beans, I’d be of no
further use to him. A liability, in
fact. Neilsen interrupted my
contemplation of possibility versus probability.
“Do you know, Mark?”
“No,” I told him. “And even if I did, I’m not sure I’d let
on. So far, two people have had that
tape, and they’re both dead.”
Smith gave me his ‘you’re letting the team down’ look
again. “Two good reasons for getting it
out of circulation,” he snapped.
“For whose benefit?” yours truly snapped back. “The trouble is, I’m just not sure who’s
up who and who’s not paying. Anyway, I haven’t got the bloody thing. As your body-snatchers will discover when
they do over my house.”
Neilsen interrupted.
“Mark, Boyd...you’re arguing past the point. What’s important is not so much who’s got
the tape but who should not get it.”
He gave me his best intense stare.
“Evans must not get his hands on it.
He’ll have Onslow by the balls.”
The implication was that we’d be stuck with Evans
forever. “Not if Channel Nine runs it,”
I said, pointing out the obvious.
“That would be worse,” Neilsen said.
Worse?
I could feel the neurones go into
fibrillation.
“Christ yes,” Smith verified. “The shit would really hit the
fan...splatter over every one of us.”
“Exactly,” Neilsen re-confirmed. “We’re not talking here of Onslow quietly
resigning. The media will demand he be
prosecuted, along with the Romanos, and then God knows what other little
schemes he’s involved with will come to light.
Then you have Aston and Connie and the question of who killed them, who
ordered it and who else knows. We’re
talking royal commission.”
Sounded fair enough to me. “So?”
“So quite apart from what they turn up against Onslow,
it’ll come out that here you have two low-ranking members of the Force
murdered, probably by high-ranking members.
Policemen, for Christ’s sake!
Or if not by them, by people in bed with them. Can you imagine what the rank and file are
going to think? Trust will fly out the
window. The Force will self-destruct.”
He was laying it on a bit thick, I thought, but he had
a point. Relations between Command and
the rank and file were poor....had been for years, giving rise to increasing
dissatisfaction among the troops and a police union growing more militant by
the week. Disclosure would result in
fury, I reckoned. I could see protest
meetings, go-slows, demands for reorganisation, and lots of resignations by
those who felt betrayed. But a melt-down? Hardly.
We would hurt for a while, perhaps a long while, but we would heal.
“You would let Onslow off the hook, just to protect
the morale of the Force?”
“I would.”
“And the Romanos?”
He held my gaze.
“Even the Romanos.”
“You really think the outcome could be that bad?”
He nodded.
“There are times when sacrifices have to be made in order to protect the
common good. This is one such time.”
I considered this proposition and came to the view
that it was self-righteous claptrap. What
was that old saying about patriotism being the last refuge of the
scoundrel? I kept my opinion to myself
and instead asked the burning question.
“So what do you want from me?”
“Find that tape before Evans does.”
Was that all?
And why me?
“Because you are the best person finder the Force
has.” A benevolent grin creased his
features. “You reputation precedes
you, as the saying goes.”
He was right. You
don’t work in the CIU without picking up a few wrinkles, and it seemed I was a
natural. After all, I was the one who
found Albert “Boss Man” Masters.
Masters was a nasty piece of work who, among other bad habits, had a
penchant for taking money at the point of a gun. He’d been arrested after the Armed Robbery
Squad leaned heavily on one of his cohorts, but some judge with more leniency
than learning granted him bail. He’d
disappeared like mist on a sunny morning.
Two years later, I had the pleasure of arresting him, complete with
blonde hair and equally bogus identity, on the beach at Surfers Paradise. Even Commissioner Evans had been impressed.
“And how do I do that? I’m on suspension, remember?”
“Which means you won’t have other duties to get in the
way.” He grinned again. “I don’t think Rod Collinson will mind
overly much if you..ah, do your own thing, shall we say?”
So Rob was one of the coterie. I wondered who else.
“Besides,” Neilsen continued, “unless Evans is a
complete idiot – which he is not – he‘ll be expecting you to go after it. He’ll stand clear enough to let you try but
at the same time keep a surreptitious eye on you.”
“And if I recover the thing, what do you expect me to
do with it?”
He eyed me steadily. “Whatever your conscience dictates,” he
eventually said. “I only ask that Evans
doesn’t get it.” He frowned. “And Mark, watch your back..”
Given the events of the day, it was an unnecessary warning.