Open File Read online

  ‘What did Frank say?’

  ‘He called us both fools, but more me than you.’

  She was close to tears. ‘Peter wants to know where she is. Jesus, Cliff, this is affecting a lot of people.’

  ‘It’s always like that,’ I said.

  I knew Tania Kramer. A couple of years back she’d written a series of articles about a case I’d been involved in. She pestered me for information and, when I wouldn’t come through, she made all sorts of wild assumptions about my role in the matter. Viv Garner advised me to sue her and the paper she’d published in and walk away with big damages.

  ‘You’ve heard of the Murdoch boat and the Fairfax beach house,’ Viv had said. ‘She’s libelled you. You could clean up.’

  ‘And get the whole thing a new run in the papers,’ I said. ‘Let it go. It’ll all be forgotten by next month, next week.’

  Tania was an attractive woman and she’d tried to use that. She’d invited me to her place for a drink and I’d gone, had the drink and that was all. She lived in Newtown in a big house overlooking Hollis Park. She’d come away with the house from a marriage to a stockbroker. She had a mortgage, she’d told me, and took in tenants, but she was doing well as a freelancer and sitting comfortably in a very desirable place to live. I found her card in the box I keep for such things, rang the number and got her answering machine. I didn’t leave a message.

  Hollis Park was like a London square, with big houses flanking the grass and gardens on two sides. The houses were smaller and more modest on the other sides. The terraces hadn’t been changed too much aside from the odd built-in balcony. The park itself was a bit scruffy and could have done with a thorough renovation.

  After my visit to Tania Kramer, I’d looked Hollis Park up in a directory because I was impressed by the place. Apparently it was designed and built by a magistrate in the 1880s. I wondered how he’d made the money. It was a fair bet that he’d occupied the best of the biggest houses himself.

  Tania’s place wasn’t the biggest but it had been well maintained and didn’t let the elegant layout down. I parked in a side street and walked through the park. I opened the gate and climbed the impressive sandstone steps to the tiled front porch. The garden was lush and showed signs of being well-planned and cared for. I rang the bell and heard it sound inside the house. I’m a knocker man myself; easier to ignore than a bell.

  Tania opened the door. It had been a few years but she was ageing well. A touch of grey in the sleek, dark hair, a few lines, but she still had a lean, upright figure and knew how to dress—white blouse, dark pants, heels.

  ‘Cliff,’ she said, ‘how nice to see you. Come in.’

  I followed her down the broad passage with its carpet runner and wood-panelled walls.

  ‘Not a bit surprised, are you, Tania?’

  ‘Not at all. I was expecting you, although you’re here a little sooner than I thought. That was you ringing and not leaving a message, right?’

  ‘Right. Is Sarah here?’

  ‘She certainly is, and doesn’t she have a story to tell. You’ve gone out on a limb here, my friend, you and a few others.’

  There was no arguing with that. We reached the end of the passage and went up the stairs.

  ‘A few changes since you were here last,’ she said. ‘I have the top floor all to myself.’

  ‘I’m the same,’ I said. ‘With the bottom floor as well.’

  ‘In a grotty little dump in Glebe.’

  ‘Water view.’

  ‘Glimpse—through apartment blocks. How’s your wind?’

  We reached the third level and there was ample evidence of renovation and money spent. Polished floors, skylights, a living area that had been opened out by the removal of a wall or two.

  ‘You’ve won a lottery,’ I said.

  ‘Paid off the mortgage, darling. It’s downhill all the way. Take a seat. I’ll get Sarah.’

  The room featured well-stocked bookshelves, a cane lounge suite with padded cushions, big screen TV with VCR and an elaborate hi-fi set-up. No bar, that’d be vulgar; no drinks tray, that’d be pretentious. Tania had taste to equal her ambition and ruthlessness.

  ‘Hello, Mr Hardy.’

  Sarah appeared as if from nowhere. The angry schoolgirl and the tough teenager had vanished. She still wore her denims but at a guess she’d been at Tania’s makeup kit. She looked older, more composed. At least superficially, she’d achieved a new level of sophistication. It didn’t surprise me that a few hours in the company of Tania could produce that. Sarah sat opposite me on the couch and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I trusted you,’ she said. ‘I don’t anymore.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Why not?’

  Tania came in with a coffee pot, cups, cream and sugar on a tray. ‘You know why, Cliff.’

  ‘Van Der Harr’s file on Justin. I can explain that.’

  ‘I’m sure you can.’ Tania gave Sarah an encouraging smile as she poured the coffee. ‘But it’s more than that. I got a leak of your statement to the police. You knew Paul Hampshire doubted that Sarah was his daughter, but you didn’t say anything about it to her when you spirited her away to live with your mate and your ex-girlfriend.’

  That was typical of Tania. She loved the obvious, doubted the nuances, made assumptions and treated them as facts. It wasn’t worth your breath to correct her, she didn’t hear anyway. Anyway, she was right that I’d withheld information from Sarah but I didn’t feel bad about that.

  ‘I didn’t want to add to Sarah’s anxieties,’ I said. ‘She was very vulnerable.’

  ‘Does she look vulnerable to you now?’

  ‘What’s going on, Tania? What’s your interest in this?’

  Tania took a cigarette from Sarah’s packet and lit it. They exchanged conspiratorial smiles. ‘The story, of course,’ she said. ‘Sarah’s story. There’s a book in this. A best-seller. A lot of money to be made.’

  ‘You’re a cold-blooded bitch, Tania. Sarah won’t need it. She’ll inherit her mother’s house. It’s worth a lot of money.’

  Tania tapped off her ash. ‘Temper, temper. That’s where you’re wrong. Tell him, Sarah.’

  ‘Angela and I fought a lot. You knew that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘One day we had a real beauty, over school and all the shit she made me put up with. We really slammed into each other. She showed me a copy of her will. She’s left everything to be equally divided between me and Justin.’

  ‘Who’s been missing for two years and a bit,’ Tania said. ‘But it takes a fair while longer than that to have the authorities declare someone dead, unless there’s some very solid evidence. Means everything would be tied up for quite a while.’

  We hadn’t touched the coffee. I drank some now to ease a dry throat. ‘True,’ I said.

  Tania smiled. ‘That’s where you come in, Clifford.’

  18

  It was bizarre. Tania and Sarah wanted me to continue to look for Justin, either to find him or provide good reason to have him declared dead.

  ‘The story needs an ending,’ Tania said.

  ‘You mean you need it to do this best-seller.’

  ‘Same thing. Damn, this coffee’s cold.’

  ‘Suppose I just chuck it, cut my losses?’

  Sarah stubbed out her cigarette. ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Why did you take off like that, Sarah? I know Tania must’ve sweet-talked you over the phone, but . . .’

  ‘I went right off when I saw that fucking file on Hilde’s desk. Like I told you, that dirty bastard copped a feel a couple of times. I couldn’t believe that you’d have anything to do with him.’

  ‘Listen, I left him whimpering. Didn’t mention you by name, but I pressured him by threatening a charge of molesting an underage female. He was shit-scared. I stole the file because I hoped it might tell me something useful about Justin, but it’s in Dutch. Hilde reads German and she can manage Dutch. I was getting her to translate it for me.’

  Sarah nodded.
‘Yeah, I see that now. But with everything going on, and feeling so good about being with the Parkers and then seeing that fucker’s name, I just flipped.’

  Tania was wearing a triumphant smile. ‘I can take some of the credit,’ she said. ‘I told Sarah to bring anything she could that might have a bearing on the story. She was going to rip the file to shreds. I told her not to.’

  ‘Credit?’ I said.

  ‘Credit. Where d’you think I got the name Kramer from? My father was a German immigrant. I grew up bilingual. I can read Dutch as well as your ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Knock it off, Tania. She was never that.’

  Tania shrugged. ‘Who cares? The point is, you were right. There is something in that paedophile’s notes that could be useful.’

  ‘Where’s the file now?’

  ‘Safe,’ Tania said. ‘You nicked it once, can’t let you do it again. You could be in trouble over that—theft, menaces . . .’

  ‘Van Der Harr wouldn’t risk the exposure.’

  Tania shrugged. ‘You never know, and it wouldn’t look good if I chose to write it up that way.’

  I almost had to admire her. She’d missed her calling—should have been in ASIO or some other dirty tricks outfit.

  ‘Nothing to say, Cliff?’

  ‘You’re doing all the talking.’

  ‘Justin told the psychiatrist that he knew his father had enemies.’

  ‘I know that. Van Der Harr said so.’

  ‘Did he give you a name?’

  That hit home. Tania and Sarah looked pleased with themselves and I thought back to my meeting with Van Der Harr. Something stirred in my memory. What had he said? At first I thought it was a delusion . . . I’d been so keen to get the file and get away from him that I hadn’t followed through on what his statement implied.

  ‘No names,’ I said. ‘I doubt Justin could’ve found out anything like that.’

  Sarah gave me a dirty look. ‘Justin was very smart.’

  ‘Right,’ Tania said.

  I was getting tired of the fencing. ‘There are a lot of people smarter than me in this world, Tania, but you’re not one of them. Why don’t you just come out with it and let me decide whether it’s worth anything or not.’

  Tania shook her head. ‘No, we want to make sure you’re going to follow this up and give it all you’ve got. A lot depends on it—not just the book and Sarah’s inheritance, but other things as well.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I hear there was talk of suspending your licence. You’re on thin ice, I’m told. Stealing a doctor’s files, threatening him, doing dodgy deals with the cops . . .’

  It was time to try a bit of divide and rule. ‘You’ve already played that card, Tania. If Justin’s smart, so is Sarah. She knows that it was a good move for her to go to the Parkers. You won’t manipulate her into making life hard for them.’

  Tania betrayed doubt for the first time by reaching for another cigarette. ‘I . . . we . . . just want to make sure . . .’

  ‘I want to find Justin as much as you do. I’ve done a lot of work on what threw him off beam and, believe me, what he found out was enough to shake anyone up. Particularly a youngster who’d been fed so many lies.’

  ‘What?’ Sarah said. ‘What?’

  Tania could see what was happening and she tried to recover ground. ‘You should have looked through Van Der Harr’s notes more closely, Cliff. Sure they were in Dutch, but didn’t you notice the name Wayne Ireland?’

  I hadn’t noticed. Monolingual, I’d been completely put off by seeing pages of handwriting in a foreign language.

  Tania recovered ground well. ‘Some detective,’ she said.

  I turned to Sarah. ‘You said you told Justin about Ireland.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So he knew about him and your mother but why would he think that Ireland and Paul Hampshire could be called enemies? Hampshire knew nothing about Ireland.’

  ‘Now you’re talking like a detective,’ Tania said. ‘That’s what you’ve got to look into. Did Justin go to see Ireland and if he did, what happened next? See? This is the stuff the story needs and we need to know to find out what happened to Justin.’

  ‘You’re assuming a lot,’ I said.

  Tania took a deep draw and blew out the smoke in a theatrical stream. ‘Fucking right I am.’

  I hated to admit it, but she’d opened up a legitimate avenue of enquiry. It wasn’t like Tania to delegate, though. I asked her why she didn’t try to get to Ireland herself. She stubbed out her cigarette and looked uncomfortable, but just for a second.

  ‘That man is a complete arsehole,’ she said. ‘I interviewed him once about something to do with his portfolio. Talk about a sleaze. He was all over me. Those ALP shits are all like that—half pissed on beer most of the time, with their haitches and their somethinks and everythinks.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, or Angela Pettigrew’s, for that matter,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, he’d smoothed off a lot of the rough edges. Bit of a chameleon, really. One thing with the merchant bankers and another with the union brothers. He knew some heavy types, all right, and he told me about them. But he was always a pants man. A bit too pleased with himself for me. I was lucky to get away with my bra on.’

  Sarah thought that was funny and laughed. Tania didn’t and scowled at her. Divide and rule. Tania’s politics and class prejudices were showing. Always useful to know. Time to go, nearly, with one important thing to clear up.

  ‘What’s Sarah going to do?’

  Tania smiled sweetly. ‘I’ve already spoken to Sarah’s aunt on her mother’s side. Sort of half-sister, half-aunt. She doesn’t want to be involved but she says she’ll endorse my submission to social services for Sarah to stay here.’

  ‘What about school?’

  ‘There’re plenty of schools around here.’

  ‘I want to stay with Tania,’ Sarah said.

  I got up. ‘I’ll make your excuses to Hilde.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah said. ‘I . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll see myself out, Tania, and be in touch. Tell you what—better get in a pool table.’

  It was a cheap shot but they’d irritated me. Tania’s agenda was plain to see and she didn’t give a shit about finding Justin except as a chapter in her book. Sarah was a different proposition and difficult to read. Growing up with an indifferent father and a mother leading a double life had to have an effect on a young person’s outlook and behaviour. She appeared to be coping well with the pressures, but that only raised the question of when she might crack.

  I stood outside the house looking over the park as two kids threw a frisbee around with considerable skill. I hadn’t seen a frisbee in a while. Another fading fad.

  19

  When I got back to the office I found that Tania had faxed through a brief translation of the relevant passage in Van Der Harr’s notes: Subject says intends to contact father’s enemy named Ireland to cause father harm. Agitated, disturbed, delusional? That was pretty much in line with what the psychiatrist had told me. It could prove useful or be a dead end, but one question persisted: how did Justin come up with the idea that Ireland was Hampshire’s enemy?

  I sat down with my notebook and went through my usual routine of referring to the notes of interviews and scribbled comments, writing down names, boxing them in, joining them with arrows or dotted lines according to the strength or weakness of the connections. It usually ended up like a dog’s breakfast and wasn’t helpful, but this time it was. The connection between Justin and Ireland ran through Ronny O’Connor and his father, Michael. Not strong, but there.

  Tackling Wayne Ireland was going to be difficult and it was important to test Van Der Harr’s suggestion that Justin was delusional. Was he just mixing up his mother’s adultery with his father’s many failings? Or had he come across something solid? Michael O’Connor was scheduled to be a witness against Ireland when he came to trial. That could be a lo
ng time off. If Ireland was acquitted, O’Connor was a sitting duck, up for a perjury charge. He must have lost his job. Couldn’t be happy, maybe willing to talk, but there was no chance the police would tell me where he was.

  Contacts are everything in this line of work and, while I didn’t know anyone in charge of the government car pool, I did know the boss at the place in Paddington where they were serviced. He was a fan of old Falcons and I’d been referred to him when it looked as though the state of mine might be terminal. It wasn’t: Todd Hawker brought it back to life at a cost almost equal to its value overall.

  I bought a six-pack of Reschs Pilsener and drove to Paddington, parking in one of the bays reserved for cars being worked on.

  ‘Hey!’ a mechanic working close by shouted.

  ‘I’m here to see Todd,’ I said. ‘Won’t be long.’

  He ducked his head back under the bonnet and fiddled with something. The workshop was busy, with three cars up on hoists and machinery running. To get to Todd’s office you have to step over tyres, gear boxes and other car parts and try to keep yourself clear of grease and oil slicks. Todd wasn’t a desk wallah; he wore overalls and got them and himself dirty. He was sitting at his desk totally absorbed in a batch of invoices. I entered quietly and put the beer down in front of him.

  He looked up. ‘Oh, Christ, Cliff Hardy with baksheesh. What is it, a master cylinder again?’

  ‘Nothing mechanical, mate,’ I said. ‘A tiny scrap of information.’

  He broke the plastic wrapping, pulled out two beers and pushed one towards me. We took the tops off and touched bottles.

  ‘Information?’

  ‘You know Michael O’Connor—drives for Wayne Ireland, or did.’

  Todd drank a third of the beer in a gulp. ‘I know him. A real prick. What’s he done?’

  ‘This and that. I need to talk to him. Got an address?’

  Another gulp lowered the level. ‘Why would I have an address? I don’t send him any fuckin’ invoices. The government pays for the work on the cars—you and me, that is. I’ve got a home phone number, but.’