‘Bet your ass you will,’ Hank said after the call finished.
Then we got a surprise. About an hour after the call to Dimarco, the door buzzer sounded. Megan, research assistant-cum-receptionist, was away coaching Patrick Fox-James. I opened the door and stepped back in surprise.
‘Hello, Mr Hardy,’ the woman said, holding up her warrant card. ‘Remember me? DS Roberts?’
‘I do. Come in.’
She moved past me, put her card away in her bag and spun around. ‘I’m here under instruction from Chief Super Dickersen whom I’m sure you also remember.’
Hank came out of his office. ‘We remember him,’ he said.
‘I’m here to talk, and if the talk isn’t satisfactory, to arrest you both for obstructing the course of justice, and conspiracy to commit a crime of violence.’
‘Why didn’t the chief super come himself?’ I said.
‘He was too busy and too angry. Just not sure you were worth his time. Can we get down to it?’
The wires or the satellite or both had been doing their thing. As we expected, Dimarco had contacted Wells. There was so much competitiveness within the police service that I’d expected Wells to take a personal interest and make the running himself. He’d have had the rationalisation that the Double Bay shooting was his case. But I’d been mistaken. Wells had contacted Chief Superintendent Dickersen who was overseeing the McKinley investigation-hence the presence of DS Roberts.
We had no choice. We gave her the outline of our plan-minus the time and place of the crucial meeting-to flush out the people responsible for Henry McKinley’s death. She listened with scepticism and impatience written all over her. The impatience was understandable-she’d have got most of this from Wells. The scepticism made sense, too. As we laid it out for the fourth time (counting the versions to Megan, Crimond and Dimarco), it began to sound less and less feasible. That’s the way it is with plans. The best chance for their success is to state them once and carry them out.
DS Angela Roberts, crisp and comfortable in her lightweight suit, now wore an expression you’d have to call amused. ‘That would be the dopiest idea I’ve heard in a long time,’ she said. ‘How could you hope to pull it off?’
‘There’s a lot of dopiness about this case, Detective,’ I said. ‘We’ve got three big companies all angling for this information that they’ll probably never get. All with a mind to screw the public for profit. Two of them prepared to resort to violence, and one looks to have gone too far with it.’
She nodded. Didn’t speak.
I went on, ‘You know what it’s like, with their lawyers and commercial confidentialities shields. They’re hard to penetrate by conventional methods. Our client wants to know who’s accountable. We can’t see any other approach than the direct one.’
‘You’re involving people who aren’t accountable-your stand-in witness and your employee, Mr Bachelor, who you’ve more or less entrapped.’
‘It’s messy,’ Hank said.
‘It just got more messy. You were counting on back-up from Global and Inspector Wells. Where are you now on that?’
Hank put his hands on the desk. They were big, powerful hands, but the way he placed them indicated his professional impotence. ‘I guess we’ll have to do some rethinking,’ he said.
I hadn’t mentioned Phil Fitzwilliam’s second coming to Hank or Megan, out of a long habit of keeping tricky things to myself. That made it loom as even more tricky. To reveal it at this point would surely increase DS Roberts’s doubts. She’d been taking notes as we spoke. Now she tapped her pen against her big white teeth.
‘And where and when is this bloody gunfight at the OK corral going to take place?’
Hank and I exchanged glances before Hank shook his head. ‘I’m afraid we’re not at liberty to reveal that.’
‘I said I could arrest you.’
‘The meeting’d still go ahead,’ I said. ‘Just that our side would be undermanned.’
‘You’re bluffing.’
I shrugged. ‘If you say so. Why don’t you put it to Ian Dickersen that he’s got a chance to close out a high profile murder case and drop some corporate creeps in the shit.’
‘Ian’s not a big noter.’
‘You don’t get to his level without making a name for yourself,’ I said. ‘And there’re always more steps to take.’
She chewed that over, and she wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t been thinking about her own part in the scheme of things. She closed her notebook and tucked it into a smart black leather bag that had a discreet Aboriginal flag medallion attached.
‘I’ll report to him and we’ll be in touch.’
‘Make it soon,’ I said.
‘You know what your great talent is, Mr Hardy?’
‘
She stood, ready to go. ‘Almost, but not quite, pissing people off.’
Good exit line and she took it.
Hank was grinning and I gave him the bird. ‘What she means is, my style leaves space for charm.’
So it was a waiting game-us waiting for Dickersen; Crimond waiting for us; Lachlan waiting for Crimond; Patrick Fox-James waiting for Megan; Phil Fitzwilliam waiting for me. In all this I’d almost forgotten about Margaret and I wasn’t ready for her call at home that night.
‘Cliff, this is Margaret. Please pick up if you’re there.’
I hesitated and I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t know anymore whether the relationship was professional or personal or a mixture of both. Confusing. While I hesitated, I had a flash of us making love in the motel. Over the years, so many motels, and a few of them, with similar scenes playing out. Mostly signifying nothing. I grabbed the phone.
‘Margaret.’
‘Cliff.’
There was a pause and then she laughed. ‘What is this, a scene from Noel Coward?’
I laughed, too. ‘I was deep in thought.’
‘About me?’
‘And other matters.’
‘You know that old joke about the girl who falls in love with the gorilla, but he doesn’t call, he doesn’t write. These days you could add-he doesn’t email, he doesn’t text.’
‘I’m sorry. A lot has been happening, some of it good, some not so good. I was holding off until we had a result.’
‘Are you close to that?’
‘We could be, but it might all still go wrong.’
‘Well, I’ll leave that to you and Hank and Megan, but I was really calling about. . us. I miss you.’
A statement like that should warm the heart, but it caught me on the hop. With a string of failed relationships behind me I was never confident the next time at bat. My wife Cyn had provided the diagnosis long ago. ‘You live in your head, Cliff,’ she said, ‘with your clients and victims and perps. Everyone else just flits in and out.’ It hadn’t been a problem with Lily, possibly because we both did the same thing, but it had brought things unstuck in the past. It was time to snap out of it, if I could.
‘Margaret,’ I said, ‘don’t give up on me.’
‘Give me something not to give up on.’
I tried. I talked. I gave her a version of where things stood with the investigation, but I could tell that wasn’t what she was asking. I knew I was deliberately misinterpreting what she said. I suspect she knew it as well. I had a sense that she was involved in some kind of decision process, involving me, perhaps, but without telling me the terms. It all made for a very unsatisfactory phone conversation.
