Collingwood beanie. How can you wear a Collingwood beanie?’
‘Ensures that I’m not recognised,’ I said. ‘Got a moment?’
We went upstairs to his office. It was the same mess I remembered: books, papers, journals, student essays, styrofoam cups, newspapers, bits of clothing everywhere. Two computers had been added to the chaos.
I cleared away a briefcase and a pile of files from a chair and sat down. ‘You were looking very pleased with yourself,’ I said.
He scratched his woolly grey head. ‘One of the better days at the pearl–swine interface,’ he said. ‘Some days I come back and headbutt the door. To what do I owe this visit?’
‘Do you remember Anne Jeppeson?’
‘Sure. Got run down. She was a spunk. Politically loony but a spunk.’
‘Would the Special Branch have watched her?’
He put a thumb behind his top teeth, took it out. ‘It’s hard to say. Who says so?’
‘She said something to her mother.’
‘There was a lot of paranoia about the Branch. If you believed all the people who said the Branch was watching them, it wouldn’t have been a branch, it would have been the whole bloody tree.’
‘But it’s possible?’
He shrugged. ‘More than most, I suppose. She was into a whole lot of stuff the Branch would have had an interest in—Roxby Downs, Aboriginal rights in Tasmania, East Timor. You name it.’
‘East Timor? The Special Branch? I thought it was only interested in local stuff?’
Barry shrugged again. ‘The Branch, ASIO, ASIS, you can’t separate them. They scratched each other’s backs. So it’s possible, yes.’
I told him what else I needed to know.
He groaned. ‘Where some Branch goon was at a certain time in 1984? Jesus H. Christ, Jack, you don’t have modest requests, do you? When in ’84?’
I told him.
‘Not long before Harker got the boot and the new government closed the Branch down.’
‘That’s right. There’d be records somewhere, wouldn’t there?’
Barry shook his head. ‘Shredded. On orders from the highest authority. All records to be destroyed.’
‘So there’s no record of what they were up to?’
He clapped his hands. ‘Shredded,’ he said. ‘But not before being copied.’
‘Shredded? And copied?’
‘What do you expect?’ said Barry. ‘I think it was something the cops and the new Opposition found themselves in agreement on. Think about it. The files represent about five billion hours of coppers standing around in the rain dying to have a piss. You shred them and a couple of years later another government gets elected and wants you to start all over again, spying on the same bunch of harmless sods. They say they went through three copiers. Twenty-four hours a day for days.’
‘Who’s got the copy?’
‘What copy? No-one’s ever admitted the files were copied.’
I said, ‘Barry, I’m talking life and death.’
He did another big head scratch, rolled his chair back till it hit a pile of books. The pile toppled, slithered to become a ziggurat.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise you anything, though. I’ll ask a man who might be able to ask another man, who might know someone.’
I stood up. ‘I need to know today. It’s that bad.’
Barry stood up. His eyes were level with my middle greatcoat button. He looked up at me. ‘You serious?’
I nodded.
He nodded back, sadly. ‘I’ll go after my tutorial. You can’t phone him, this bloke. Paranoid. Give me the date and the name, anything that’ll help.’
‘God loves you, Barry,’ I said.
‘There is no God and you know it. Ring me at home after five. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t know if they copied this kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘I’m only doing this because of your old man’s record for Fitzroy, you know. I wouldn’t do it for you.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’
31
I found Linda at a laptop computer in a long, narrow room off the kitchen. A bench down one wall held three computers, one with a huge monitor, and two printers. The other wall was covered in corkboard, with dozens of computer-generated colour images stuck up. They seemed to be tryouts of the landscape paintings.
‘Cam’s woman’s a computer freak,’ Linda said. She was scrolling text on her screen. ‘She’s got enough power here to run the tax system.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Tell you when I’ve done it.’ She was tapping keys.
I went into the vast sitting room. It was 4.30 p.m. Both the fire in the fireplace and the day outside were dying. I brought in a log from the woodpile in the entrance hall, put it on the steel dogs and scraped all the embers together under it. Then I did an inspection of the premises. Apart from the sitting room, computer room and kitchen, there were two huge bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a studio the size of a pool hall. Next to the steel front door, another steel door opened on to the building’s internal staircase.
When I’d done the tour, I sat down in front of the fire, put my hands in my pockets, stared into the flames and tried to work out how we could come out of hiding safely. All I could think of was to have Drew negotiate with the police. Negotiate over what, was the question. The bombing of my flat was certainly proof that I needed protection. Or was it? People had been known to boobytrap their own houses. After all, it wasn’t me who was blown up. Maybe I’d set a trap for someone else.
What about the men with the sub-machine gun on the motorcycle? We hadn’t reported it. We’d had the car spirited away. By now, the body was probably crushed to the size of a tea chest. Cam’s friend who took it away wasn’t going to jump up and testify for me.
As for Linda, what exactly was she in hiding from, they would ask? No-one had tried to kill her. She’d been burgled, that’s all. Everyday occurrence.
And the Minister? The Minister wouldn’t recognise my name.
It was 5.30 p.m. before Linda emerged, carrying a printout.
‘Hey, let’s get some light here,’ she said. ‘It’s like a set for Macbeth.’
I realised with a start that the room was in deep gloom, the firelight playing on the unfinished landscapes around the walls.
Linda found a panel of switches next to the kitchen doorway. ‘Fuck. Like a Boeing.’ She hit several switches. Concealed lighting came on all over the room.
‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘Save the firelight for later. I’ve got something. Remember all the companies in the Yarrabank buy-up turned out to be owned by other off-shore companies?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I’ve been searching all the finance databases for anything on the offshore companies and one database turned up three of the companies at once. The Jersey companies. They were suspected in 1982 by the Securities Commission in Britain of warehousing shares for an Irish company that was trying to take over a British construction group.’
‘I’m lost already,’ I said.
‘Wait. It becomes clearer. The three companies were all run from Jersey by an accountant. The securities people forced him to disclose where the money had come from to buy the shares in the construction group. It didn’t come from the Irish company. It came from the company that owned the Jersey companies. This one was registered in the Cayman Islands. It’s called Pericoe Holdings. That’s where the story stops. The Securities Commission lost interest in the inquiry.’
She paused.
