shouts, running footsteps. Torch beams probed the darkness. I didn’t care. I reached into my jacket pocket where I’d put the Walther, jerked it free. I hammered my knee into his chest to hold him while I used both hands to cock the pistol. I pressed the muzzle to his forehead.
‘Go ahead, cunt. Bet you haven’t got the guts.’
I heard a shout, ‘Cliff, don’t!’ Townsend?
I pulled the trigger.
26
The gun didn’t fire. Hands grabbed me, arms wrapped around me, and I was dragged away from the man on the ground. Someone tried to take the pistol from me but I chopped the hand down and pushed past people standing in my way. Who were all these people?
I wandered off towards the beach. Someone ran to outflank me but I pointed the pistol at him and he fell back. I went down the steps and across the sand. What I had almost done seemed to put my brain in a spin so that I couldn’t see, hear or feel anything until water lapped over my feet and the waves splashed up at me. The shock of the cold water snapped me out of the daze. I drew back my arm and threw the pistol out as far as I could towards the cable holding the shark net and screamed Lily’s name as I let it go. It felt like a signing-off of some kind.
They were waiting for me back on the grass. I saw the man I’d flattened being bustled into a car. Townsend was there, and Jacques, and two men I didn’t know and two I did-Matthews and Mattioli from Internal Affairs. They kept their distance but I held out empty hands to show them I wasn’t armed, just in case they hadn’t seen me throw the pistol away.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
Matthews said, ‘You almost committed murder.’
‘Didn’t though. Who’re these other guys? What’re you all doing here?’
Jane Farrow came close and touched my arm. ‘Thanks, Cliff. I think you saved my life. That guy had a sniper rifle with an infra-red scope, zoned in just right.’
‘What do you mean you think?’ Townsend said.
‘She means he might’ve been going to kill Perkins,’ I said. ‘With these bastards anything’s possible. I still don’t understand where everybody’s come from.’
‘I’ve been with Internal Affairs all along,’ Jane said. ‘We knew the unit was dirty and I was working my way to this kind of meeting with someone who’d do a deal against the others. We targeted Gregory, then had to switch to Perkins. Like you, we brought the technicians.’
‘But why did you recruit Cliff and me if you already had the plan?’ Townsend said, with pain in his normally controlled voice.
A light drizzle started.
‘Do we have to do this here?’ Mattioli said.
‘I didn’t trust them,’ Jane said. ‘ After what I’ve seen the past year or so, d’you blame me?’
It was all a blur of police cars, phone calls and interviews after that. Piecing it together later, I learned that Perkins had made certain admissions, captured on tape and film by both Townsend and Jacques and the Internal Affairs boys. Townsend’s results were the better ones.
Perkins implicated Kristos and others in the Northern Crimes Unit and they all started to do the dirty on each other. The man I’d tackled was Paul Henry Brewer, who’d been acquitted on one charge of murder and was suspected of several others. His motorcycle and. 22 pistol were located and DNA evidence placed him at the scenes of the murder of Williams and Gregory. Kristos implicated him in the killing of Lily, but he was only charged with the deaths of the two policemen. Stronger cases. I didn’t care. I’d heard his admission about Lily and wished I’d hit him a few more times, and harder.
All sorts of charges could have been laid against Townsend-concealing evidence, conspiracy-and me, the same, plus weapons offences. None were. In fact I was almost in good order with the police and they offered me counselling to help me cope with the rage I’d experienced when I’d intended to blow a helpless man’s brains out. I told them what they could do with it, politely.
I met with Pam Williams-who’d changed her mind about Sydney-and Hannah Morello after they got back from Queensland. They invited me to a barbecue-kids, in-laws, cousins, family. They thanked me for helping them find some sort of closure with the deaths of their husbands. I thanked them for their contributions in much the same terms. They told me that they’d each received two pieces of legal advice. One suggested that they had cases for compensation from the police service, the other was that their superannuation payments might be in jeopardy if they pursued the matters. Some things never change.
The story made big news for a while but, with the state government struggling in the wake of the resignation of the premier and various bungles, and the federal government in trouble over international embarrassments, politics pushed it aside. But Townsend kept in touch with it and told me that the Northern Crimes Unit business affairs were coming to light and unravelling. The media personality and religious figure turned out to be one and the same-an evangelical church pastor with a TV show. He was found to be blackmailing a church member over a murder with the connivance of the police. He misused substantial federal funds for money laundering ploys involving the cops, and gave confidential information to the police in return for protection by them from complaints as he feathered his nest. This was the main story Lily had evidently been pursuing, but not the only one. Last we heard, the prosecutors hadn’t got on to the politician working the immigration scam. Caught some councillors with money and connections they shouldn’t have had, though.
Townsend didn’t get his inside story. All the evidence was sub judice. I stayed in touch with him over the next few weeks as the police and prosecution wheels slowly started to turn. We drank a bit.
‘How’s Jane?’ I asked when we were sipping his single malt whisky on a cloudy day in his neatly bricked courtyard.
He shook his head. ‘It didn’t work out.’
‘Why’s that? You did everything she asked.’
‘That could’ve been the problem.’
I knew what he meant. Some women, not that many, want opposition, contest. I said something along those lines.
‘Yeah. That’s partly it, but she’s hooked on the undercover stuff, the covert, the deceptive. It’s like a drug. Remember telling me that there’s a gap in her service record?’
‘Yeah.’
‘She said-don’t worry, I didn’t let on that you’d told me-that she was doing a course to equip her for undercover work. She won’t surface when all this stuff comes out in the wash. She’ll be protected, and she’ll be able to go on and do something else under the covers. No pun intended. Shit, I’m pissed.’
‘You’re human,’ I said.
I had a loose end to tie up. I asked Phil Lawton to find out who the IT person for the Northern Crimes Unit was. I had no doubt he could do it and he did, muttering something about systems signatures, whatever that meant. Rodney St Clair, IT consultant with a PhD from MIT, had an office in Chatswood. I made an appointment, claiming to need advice about the installation and servicing of a computer network in my small but growing business.
The office was across the street from the wine bar where I’d met with Lee Townsend and Jane Farrow what now seemed like a long time ago. I promised myself a drink there when I’d finished my business.
St Clair Systems occupied half the building’s second floor. It boasted a secretary and several offices. I could hear the clicking of keyboards behind closed doors as the secretary led me to where the boss received his clients. St Clair was a middle-sized man, in his early thirties, neatly groomed. The office was well appointed without being flash. It inspired confidence, but didn’t suggest excessive expenditure on overheads. St Clair had risen and come around from behind his desk when I walked in and his hand shot out automatically.
