‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘I’m a friend of Lela Somosi; I’d like to talk to you.’
‘Is Lela there?’ The voice was young, quick and excited.
‘No. Can we meet?’
‘You are not the police?’
‘No.’
‘Immigration?’
‘No. I took Lela away from the house in Woollahra today.’
‘Where is she?’
I drew a deep breath. ‘I don’t know.’
‘They have taken her back?’
‘I think so, yes.’
There was a sob in the voice. ‘Then she is dead.’ The sound of weeping, deep and racking, came over the line. I held on to the phone, feeling useless and guilty, until he composed himself. I told him what had happened. He wept again. He told me that he had met Lela at the house where he had gone in the company of his boss. He named him, a union leader I had read about. Luis had tried to persuade Lela to get away from da Silva. She was afraid and had resisted. He’d written out his name and number for her.
‘How do you know she’s dead, Luis?’
‘I know. I can show you.’
He named a place. I met him there. The rain had started again and it kept up, slashing through the dark night sky, while a quiet little Latin American showed me how murder and disposal were done, Sydney style, 1984.
The next day the harassment began. A cop stopped me and went over the Falcon with a microscope. He found the unlicensed gun and declared the car unroadworthy. I got a three month suspension of my investigator’s licence for the gun. I got unpleasant phone calls and the clicks and rattles that punctuated calls I made from my home and office phones practically drowned out conversation. Winslow was showing me what he could do. I hated it, but I got the message.
Halfway through the suspension I was sitting in my office writing out cheques of doubtful authenticity when Barbara Winslow walked in. I looked at her and so far forgot my manners that I didn’t even ask her to sit down. She looked ghastly, pale and thin; her fashionable suit hung on her like an op-shop rag.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘I know that Ian has been giving you a bad time.’
I shrugged. ‘He’s a murderer. It could be worse.’
She shuddered and dropped into the chair. ‘He promised he would stop seeing her. He said he could get clear of all that… mess. He hasn’t done… anything.’
I put a cheque in an envelope and didn’t speak. I searched the desk for a stamp and didn’t find one.
‘A murderer,’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ I looked out the window. The sky was dark and threatening; by the time we got there it’d be raining for sure. I stood. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
On the way I filled her in on the Winslow-da Silva connection and what had happened the night she’d told me I had a wrong number. I took her to the building site on the edge of the Darling Harbour development. The rain started to slant down and the light dimmed. We stood where Luis and I had stood a few weeks back and I pointed things out to her. ‘See the crane there? You get the body, in this case it was a Filipino girl named Lela. She’d have been, oh, maybe twenty, and you attach it to this mechanism at the end of the crane. You can release it from the cabin.’ I traversed the muddy landscape with my finger. ‘See the dark smudges, beyond those mullock heaps? They’re holes for foundations and underground installations. They go down a long way. Lot of water in them now. You can’t approach them on foot; it’s all honeycombed under there, not reinforced yet. Are you following me?’
Her face was wet with rain and tears. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Okay. You swing the crane out over the hole and you drop the body. You have to be good at it but the men who do it get some practice, courtesy of animals like your husband. Eventually a million tons of concrete and steel complete the job.’
We walked away, both coatless and hatless and soaked to the skin. I hailed a taxi and Barbara Winslow got into it, moving like a shocked accident victim. Abruptly, she wound the window down.
‘I can divorce him,’ she said fiercely, ‘and pull the political plug on him.’
‘Do it,’ I said. ‘Please.’
A month later the Winslow divorce was in the papers. A little after that, Winslow was sacked from Cabinet for misleading the Parliament. An election was coming up and one of the party bright boys, a favourite of the Premier’s, was nominated for preselection in Winslow’s seat. The rain had stopped and the patches of mould that had begun to sprout and spread on my walls retreated and dried out. My suspension period expired and I went back to work.
High Integrity
George Marr was the Credit Comptroller at Partner Bros which, if it wasn’t the biggest department store chain in Sydney, was rapidly getting that way. To me, he looked absurdly young for his job, but that might have been because I was feeling a fraction too old for mine. He was a slightly built, fair character with a fresh complexion. His hair was cut short and I suspected that he put something on it to keep it as neat as it was. His white shirt was as crisp and fresh as if he’d just put it on a few minutes before, although it was 11 am.
‘Mr Hardy,’ Marr said, ‘have you got a Partner Card?’
‘No. I’ve got a Medicare card and MasterCard. I was hoping to limit my card-holding to them.’
Marr raised one fair eyebrow and looked younger still. ‘You don’t approve of cards?’
‘These days I might have a couple I don’t even know about, the way things are going.’
‘Cards are the future.’
‘They’re all right for poker.’
He digested that while I looked around his office. It was neat, stocked with everything he’d need. His secretary was holding his calls and the boldly written entry in the appointments diary open on the desk in front of him showed that I had twenty minutes.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose that attitude will help keep you objective.’
‘What is the objective, Mr Marr?’
His expression showed that he didn’t like jokes that early in the day; perhaps he didn’t like them at all. ‘The Partner Card enables you to credit shop in any of our stores with a minimum of fuss. The system is completely computerised-high integrity, the most sophisticated data base and… ‘
‘Hold it. You’ve lost me.’
‘It doesn’t matter. There are more than 20,000 card-holders, state-wide.’
‘That’s more than members of the Liberal Party. It sounds wonderful for your… merchandising. What’s the problem?’
‘The card is being forged. The system is being used fraudulently.’
‘Ah.’ I sat back in the comfortable seat and thought about what I’d seen on the way to Marr’s office. I’d passed several million dollars worth of electronic junk on the way to a lift which had flashed by three floors crammed with ‘Home’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Style’ and ‘Recreational’ junk. Partners was organised in ‘Lifestyle Themes’; you set out to buy a box of matches and you ended up with a barbecue.
‘It’s serious,’ Marr said. ‘We’ve lost close to a hundred thousand dollars at last count.’
‘When did you notice it?’
