‘At a credit audit a week ago. It was plain to see. The stock balance and credit account ratios… but I wouldn’t expect you to understand the technical details.’
‘You’d be right. We private detectives don’t understand much. The whole of life is a voyage of discovery for us.’
‘Are you trying to be funny, Mr Hardy? I was told you were capable and close-mouthed, not that you were a humorist.’
‘I’m not trying hard. Give me the details you think I’ll understand, Mr Marr, and I’ll try to help you.’
I’m computer-illiterate, but Marr filled me in as best he could. The phony cards had been used mostly in the electronic sub-section of ‘Home’ but also in some luxury ‘Fashion’ sections and in ‘Out-of-doors’ which had lost a prefabricated garage. A lot of liquor had been liberated too but I couldn’t work out whether it came from ‘Style’ or ‘Recreation’.
I scribbled notes while Marr talked. When he stopped I tried to show how sharp I was. ‘I can see how they could walk out with the booze and the VCRs, but not a garage.’
‘No, that was odd.’ He consulted a file on his desk. ‘The garage was delivered to an address where the home owner had no knowledge of it. The home owner didn’t even shop in Partners.’ Marr said this as if it was a matter for deep regret.
‘I’ll need that address,’ I said. ‘Also all the names and addresses on the phony cards and details on the people who could have helped from the inside. You know it has to be something like that, don’t you?’
He sighed, ‘Unhappily, yes. It’s a terrible thing — Partners has the best employee record in the industry, bar none. Well, I’ve anticipated you.’ He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. About a dozen names were listed along with addresses and jobs-Electronics Manager; Credit 2IC; Sales amp; Stock (Liquor); Accounts etc. The names were in two columns, one headed hardware, the other software. I tapped the headings. ‘What’s this?’
Marr’s smile made him look schoolboyish. ‘Our little joke-the “hardware” is the selling staff, who interface with the customers; the “software” is the computing staff, who… ‘
‘Don’t say it. All right, this is the address of the home owner, is it? And let me guess, this is your private phone number at the top. You’ve got an efficient secretary, Mr Marr.’
‘Top computing facilities.’
‘Yeah, well that could be your problem. In the old days you just looked and waited until you could slam the till on the hand in it.’
‘Times have changed. At first we hoped it was just someone manipulating the programs, but it became clear that false cards were involved. That made it a hands-on situation. That’s why you’re here.’
I couldn’t have taken any more of that kind of language but my time was up anyway. Marr handed me over to Kelvin Lean, the internal security officer, who grudgingly took me on a tour so I could get a sly look at the ‘hardware’. After that I went to the Personnel section where Lean showed me photographs of the others.
‘This is a smooth operation,’ he said. ‘I’ll be blunt, Hardy. I can’t see why I can’t handle it myself.’
I didn’t say anything. What Lean didn’t know was that his name appeared on my list and it was entered under both headings.
My strategy was pretty simple-investigate the people on the list looking for changes in the patterns of their lives. Few people who suddenly come into money can resist displaying it, particularly when the money has been acquired dishonestly. And criminal association is not just limited to inarticulate phone calls between nicknames; it involves time and travel, changes in routines and rendezvous. It makes sense-if you suddenly came into a fortune would you keep on buying your fish fingers at Franklins? The hell you would.
Just to get started, I picked on Morris Guest, the fat, florid manager of the electronics section, as a subject. I followed him out of the store on his lunch hour. He went along George Street and took the underpass to the Queen Victoria Building. It was early February; the kids had just gone back to school and it was a little too early for the shops to be pushing Easter. A quiet time. Guest took the escalator to the top floor. From the close inspection he gave everything-the fancy paving, the polished brass, the stained glass-you’d have thought it was his money they’d used to fix it up.
On the Albert Walk he stood opposite a shop that sold imported rugs and wall hangings. He nodded with approval as customers entered and exited; then he went to the coffee shop and took a seat. I watched from fifty metres away. A large woman, almost as high-coloured as Guest himself, came from the shop. She joined Guest in the eatery; he rose from his chair and pecked her cheek the way a husband does when he’s hit the same spot five thousand times before. I left when they started on their lunch-double serves of frankfurts and sauerkraut, iced chocolates with whipped cream and a bushel of bread rolls. I’d check Morris Guest out a little further in Epping where he lived, but my tentative assessment was that he was too soft and comfortable to steal.
Over the next few days I plied my trade. I followed people home and watched them at night. I picked them up in the morning dnd went to work and lunch with them. I went to laundromats and the movies, McDonald’s and wine bars. I walked a lot, stood around a lot and didn’t get much sleep. After a week and a bit I’d eliminated all but three of the suspects for various reasons-some too timid, others too family-oriented, some too lazy, some too sporting and so on. The weekend was tough: I watched Kent Hayward (‘Software’) play golf at Royal Eastern; Colin McKemmish (‘Hardware’) went to the races and the dogs but didn’t bet much; Daphne Lewis went straight from her accounts department job at Partners into her role as freelance caterer. She worked non-stop through the weekend and looked more tired on Monday morning than she had on Friday night.
The garage had been delivered to an elderly widow who lived in a flat in Bondi, three floors up. She found it very funny.
‘Why didn’t they send me something useful?’ she said. ‘Like a waterbed? Tell ‘em I wanna waterbed next time.’
The break came when I was talking with Kelvin Lean in the Partners canteen the following week. Lean I’d eliminated early in the piece. He was obsessed with machismo and self-improvement- went horse-riding, pistol- shooting, took karate lessons, read Ayn Rand. If he’d caught himself being dishonest he’d have handcuffed himself and called the cops. Lean seemed better disposed towards me because I wasn’t making progress. I remarked that Kent Hayward seemed like an indoor type-he was tall and thin with a manner something like an art gallery director, part aesthete, part party-goer-and wasn’t much of a golfer despite the expensive equipment and membership of a club where the fees were steep.
‘Golf?’ Lean said. ‘That’s new for Hayward.’
‘How do you know?’
Lean fidgeted and made a train with the sugar cubes. I stared at him with my I’ve-got-my-teeth-in-your- ankle-and-I’m-not-letting-go look.
‘Staff file,’ he mumbled.
‘I saw them. They had work experience, references, financial stuff. That’s all.’
‘Private/Staff.’
‘Jesus! Look, Kelvin, I was supposed to have access to everything. Do I have to talk to Marr again about this?’
‘I don’t even know what this is. That’s my gripe.’
‘Okay. Maybe you’ll be flattered. Marr kept you in the dark because you were a suspect.’ I explained the way of it to him while he turned his sugar cube train into Stonehenge. When I finished he cracked his knuckles.
‘Maybe I can help.’
‘You can help by showing me these private files.’
‘Right.’
We went to his office and Lean transformed himself from ‘hardware’ to ‘software’ by switching on his desk computer and dancing his fingers over the keyboard. In a couple of seconds Kent Hayward’s private life was on screen. There was a lot of it. Hayward was divorced and paying maintenance and child support for three. According to the file he had no sporting interests.
‘Look at this,’ Lean said. ‘He goes on a pricy holiday last September. First time ever.’
Hayward had used the firm’s holiday service to book himself into the Tropicana Hotel at Surfers Paradise for six days. The holiday had upped his indebtedness to Partners Holiday Club but he seemed to be coping with the extra monthly instalments. ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘But people change. Take stock of themselves. Slow down.’
‘Come into money?’
