still burning. The only thing to suggest that Wayne Ireland hadn’t simply suffered a heart attack when being interviewed was Damien’s Beretta in my hand. It was loaded.
I went back to the deck and threw it as far into the bush as I could. I’d had a fair arm as a schoolboy cricketer and it disappeared deep into the misty greyness.
Tania joined me on the deck. ‘What now?’
‘We call an ambulance. This can’t cause us any trouble. No suspicious circumstances.’
She was recovering fast but still wasn’t quite there. ‘What about Damien?’
‘Nothing we can do there.’
It took an hour for the ambulance to arrive and the paramedics read it the only way they could. As they were placing Ireland on the stretcher one said, ‘We were held up. A car went over the cliff at Skinner’s Leap. Came from this direction.’
‘Oh my God,’ Tania said. ‘Damien.’
The paramedic looked at her.
‘Mr Ireland’s son,’ I said. ‘He was very upset at the delay. He went for help, not that there was anything to do except just what you’ve done.’
‘You’d better check in with the police at Katoomba about that, and we’ll need your names and contact numbers and some ID.’
We showed them our drivers’ licences, gave them the numbers and said we’d stop at the police station. They carried the heavy body from the house and loaded it into the ambulance. Dense rain was falling and the mist seemed to be rising up from the valley. We stood on the deck and watched the ambulance leave, the driver taking much more care than Damien had.
‘Are there other houses further up the track?’ I asked.
‘Maybe one or two but they’re weekenders. Wayne and Damien had their privacy. That had to be Damien who went over the edge. He was revving like crazy as he went. What are we going to do, Cliff?’
‘Nothing. If they’re both dead what does it matter who did what?’
‘This didn’t work out anything like the way we planned.’
‘Could’ve been worse. Damien could have shot us both.’
‘Oh, so you saved my life? Was he serious?’
I shrugged. ‘The gun was loaded and he’d already killed one person.’
‘Jesus, what about those friends Damien talked about?’
‘With ambulances and police cars around, I don’t think we’ll be seeing them. Still, we’d better leave. Better to go to the cops than have them come to us.’
She gathered her bag and scarf. ‘This is terrible.’
‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the scoop.’
23
The fence at Skinner’s Leap was a tangled mess of wire and broken posts. We were waved down by the police stationed there and made a brief statement. We said we were going to report in at Katoomba and the office radioed that in.
‘How far is the drop here?’ I asked.
‘Far enough,’ the cop replied.
At Katoomba we gave a heavily edited version of what had happened at the Ireland house. The officers who took the statements didn’t like the look of either of us, especially Tania, who was showing the effects of stress and alcohol. They kept going in and out of the room and conferring in private.
After we’d been there an hour the vehicle that had gone over the drop had been identified and was in the process of being recovered.
‘You say he went for help,’ one of the cops said, ‘but the man was dead.’
I said, ‘He’d busted a gut trying to resuscitate his father. The ambulance was a long time coming, he thought. He was upset and confused.’
'Drunk?'
'No. We-Ireland, Ms Kramer and me-had had a drink or two but he hadn't. Not that I saw. Tania?'
She shook her head. 'Can I smoke?'
The cop pushed an ashtray across the table. 'Sure.'
Tania fished in her bag and came up with an empty packet. The cop gave her one of his and she favoured him with one of her you're-the-only-person-in-the-world smiles. It was a bit lopsided and didn't work.
They got our details down in every last particular and let us go. Tania rushed to the nearest shop for cigarettes. I steered her to a coffee place and made her sit, eat a sandwich and drink a heavily sugared flat white.
'I have to admit,' she said, you handled that okay.'
'I've had the experience. We'd better get back so you can write your article.'
She was almost herself again now. 'Fuck that,' she said. ‘I'm phoning it in to the copy-takers.'
Tania’s story made a big splash in the afternoon edition and she strung it out over the next few days. Her articles were mostly factual with some speculation and some uncheckable lies. She didn’t name me so I had no complaint. She’d cornered the market on the Ireland-Pettigrew story and I had to admit that she treated Justin’s disappearance and Sarah’s circumstances with discretion-no mention of paternity doubts. Damien’s death was provisionally declared accidental and Tania presented herself as the last person to see him alive, leaving me out of it.
She speculated about whether Wayne or Damien Ireland had killed Angela Pettigrew, implying that her truncated interview with Wayne suggested he was the guilty party.
‘Why did you go that way?’ I asked her when we met up two days later.
‘Kept the cops and the DPP happy and made for better copy. First state minister of the crown to commit a murder since the ex-minister Tom Ley in the forties. Similar in some ways, with mistresses and all that, but better, Wayne being in office at the time.’
In a sidebar to one of her articles she’d made a play of the Thomas Ley affair and his nefarious dealings, including a murder, after losing his ministry and parliamentary seat in New South Wales when in England in the 1940s.
‘You don’t miss a trick,’ I said.
‘A woman in this game? Can’t afford to.’
That meeting took place after I’d had a talk with Sarah at Tania’s house. Tania told me that the girl wanted to see me to ask about Justin. I told Sarah that Wayne Ireland had provided him with a passport and some money- something Tania had only hinted at-and that he must have left the country.
‘Lucky bugger. That’s what I’d like to do. Where did he go, Mr Hardy? To do what?’
‘I think you know the answer to that question.’
‘To be a soldier.’
‘Yeah. I’ll try to get the records searched, but he could’ve gone almost anywhere with a passport and some money. Lots of jumping-off points to other places. Lots of wars going on with opportunities for mercenaries- Lebanon, Angola, Nicaragua
‘You think he got killed?’
‘No way to tell. If he’s alive and okay somewhere, eventually it’s odds on he’ll hear about what happened here. I never heard of an Australian overseas who didn’t check back in some way, sooner or later.’
Sarah was smoking furiously and she lit another immediately after stubbing one out. ‘If he hears about all this shit he probably wouldn’t want to come back. He didn’t care about me.’
‘You don’t know that. He was very distressed and not thinking clearly.’
She shook her head. ‘I told you-we had a fight and I told him about Angela. I wish I hadn’t.’
‘Sarah-’
