UNDER EDEN

Part 1:

The

EBOLA CONSPIRACY

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“Gar Hart is a journalist with a gun. It might help him live long enough to break this story: Why would a billionaire’s son mutilate his lips in a prison cell?”

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MARK FURNESS

Table of Contents

Title Page

About UNDER EDEN

I | THE BLACK CIRCLE

II | 93 days earlier ...

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VIII

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XXI

UNDER EDEN. Part 1: The Ebola Conspiracy

About UNDER EDEN

Why would a billionaire’s son mutilate his lips in a prison cell?

The family blames mental illness and begs for privacy. Journalist Gar Hart might have swallowed the PR line – if the people he’d quizzed about the incident weren’t being murdered.

Now Hart’s scaling the fortress walls of a politically powerful group of business leaders. He aims to crack open the murky, global underworld of the super rich. But there’s a catch.

Hart has children, Alice and Hugo, and death threats are being delivered. And there’s another problem.

Hart finds it impossible to back down from a fight.

Hart and his protégé Claire Styler link several mysterious deaths to the billionaire Charles East, his son, and a British banker. Blackmailers, mind-benders and assassins also have their snouts in the trough of a secret empire that’s coming into focus. Hart dubs the empire ‘Ebola’.

The journalists agree on two things: they’re a long way from the whole truth; and they need to catch and expose it before it kills them – and dives back into the dark.

UNDER EDEN is a three-part series of thrillers that follow Hart and his colleagues from The Citizen online news service across the world as they try to expose secrets that the wealthy and powerful will kill to keep.

Tom Flood, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s foremost literary prize says of Under Eden:

“Gar Hart, a bloody-minded press hack twisting the tail of a leviathan as submerged as le Carré’s dark webs. Furness crackles out fire and ice in a wry voice, piles on inventive and ingenious mysteries, body-slams action like it’s hot type, and bleeds characters as damaged and compromised as any Child, Connelly, or Grisham.”

The author of Under Eden, Mark Furness, was a foreign correspondent who lived and worked in the US, the UK, Australia, and East Asia. He’s also been a corporate spin doctor and political lobbyist. He claims his novel is a work of fiction. The good characters are based on real people. The black hats are purely fictional. Truly.

I

THE BLACK CIRCLE

I’VE DONE a nice job of wrapping Mr Browning in cling-film, but it’s not workmanship I intend to show off. I do a three-sixty-degree turn, scanning the forest that surrounds the paddock. The only witness I can see is a red-bellied black snake which slides out of sight over the far edge of the dam beside me. I get the feeling the snake sensed things coming, but it clearly wasn’t a talker. When I stab the blade of my shovel into the earth to bury Mr Browning, the toots of an old-style police whistle send my heart clattering like a boxer’s speed bag.

I dig my phone from my jeans pocket, vowing to get rid of my son’s ringtone gift before it kills me, and spit out the smouldering tail of a pretty good joint of cannabis. It’s my boss on the line.

“What’s up?” I try to sound sharp.

“Where are you?” says Jack Darling.

“Moon Hill.”

“You alone?”

I know he’s angling at workplace health and safety issues, but he reminds me I’m missing my kids. And Claire.

“I needed peace and quiet to work on the yarn. I’m nearly finished.”

“Listen to me, Gar, you ...”

“Jack? ... Jack?”

Reception is as patchy as a granny quilt at the southern end of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. My signal is lost. Jack is in China. I guess he wants me back in the city office of The Citizen to co-ordinate the exposé we are writing about a network of thieves we’ve code-named Ebola. My laptop and boxes of research are in my four-wheel-drive at camp on top of the hill. But I have to finish the job with Mr Browning first. He doesn’t need a big hole. He’s a handgun I had the brainwave of naming after its maker when my father left it to me, along with a note. After seeing that slithering red-belly, my old man’s words are blazing upon my retinas like neon lights: ‘Dear Gar - I still sometimes wonder if a bullet in the head might be in order, but whose head would I choose? Why stop at one? Only kidding. I’d rather shove a snake in your bed. Metaphorically speaking. So you’ll know what I’m dealing with.’

I try to switch off my father’s brilliance and place Mr Browning in a cake tin which I drop in the hole and backfill, topping it with a divot of grass that could double as a toupee for a bald man with a sense of humour, or mental health issues. I resist the urge to try it on and trudge uphill towards my camp.

After crossing a gravel road, I walk the shadow of an overhead wire attached to a timber pole behind me. The wire stretches a hundred metres uphill to the centre of my camp, where it’s tied to a giant pine tree. I’m impressed the flying fox I built for Hugo is still intact. We laughed ourselves to tears the last time we rode it, until he threw me a question that stirs inside me now like a restless sleeper.

“Remember when Mum flew down hanging by one hand like a monkey?”

“Yeah. She was strong,” I said, smiling, thinking I had the quizmaster covered.

“Then why did she die?”

Responses had collided inside my skull like crazed atoms: an unlucky roll of the dice; predisposed genetics; the chemotherapy was too late.

“She’s still in here,” I said eventually, placing my palm upon his skinny, trembling chest, trying to absorb his agony.

“I hate life,” he said, pushing me away. He grabbed the handlebar of the fox and leapt from the tree before I could catch him.

I TAKE A BREATHER LEANING on the handle of my shovel next to a handful of steel pegs banged into a pentagon shape around a patch of grass. The pegs are linked by blue-and-white-checked police tape, marking the spot where a man fell dead a few weeks ago. I was in London at the time. His passing put me in a relieved state of mind, given he was a psychopath who was on the payroll of Ebola. But right now I’m as relaxed as a drunk without a drink because the homicide squad wants to have another poke around on site, with me in tow. They’re due in the morning. The deceased took a rifle bullet in the head from long range, not a shot from the unlicensed, nine-millimetre semi-automatic I’d just buried. But I’m due in court next week on charges of threats to kill the psycho’s employer, so burying Mr Browning is a no-brainer as far as my defence strategy is concerned.

On the clearing atop the hill, I suck hard to extract oxygen from the thin air and climb a handful of steps to a timber deck I’ve built around the old pine’s trunk. A black-painted circle on the deck marks the spot where I get the best of the mostly rotten phone reception. Right now it’s as rotten as it gets.

I pocket my phone and stroke the pine’s bark, which is dark as chocolate and rutted like croc skin. The tree’s like me, the offspring of seed transported from Great Britain with settlers who felled the native forest and the local people who’d been caretakers here for over fifty thousand years. The new landscapers grew grass to feed sheep, but their children retreated to towns and cities a few decades ago, leaving the place to tree huggers and star gazers.

The pine’s limbs cradle a timber-clad room in which I’ve installed a couple of single beds. The sheets need changing. A window faces east to the mountains via an opening I’ve chain-sawed through the branches. They need a trim. I tug on a rope and drag down to the deck a folding ladder that connects to a trapdoor in the cabin floor. But I’m called by hunger and thirst, and cross to the opposite side of the deck into a ground-level cabin clad with corrugated iron. Through an open window of my kitchen-cum-sitting room, I hear an engine revving in the forest, followed by a faint squeal that sounds like a child in pain. It’s probably pig hunters cornering a terrified animal, but it makes me feel for Mr Browning like an amputated limb. I strap my hunting knife to my belt and decide to drive to town and phone Jack after I’ve eaten here. Our unfinished call gnaws at me. I wrestle a rising desire to call Hugo and Alice too, to check that they’re still okay in their safe house in Ireland. I decide to fry a steak in a pan on the gas cooker. When it’s sizzling, I open a bottle of red and quaff a glass.

In twilight, I light a fire inside a ring of rocks beside the deck and settle into a camp chair, eating and drinking by a crackling orange blaze. Above me, a slit-eyed moon floats beside the Milky Way. Faces form in the flames of my bush telly  ... white lights interrupt the show, criss-crossing my face from inside the forest.

“Hughie?” I call, squinting, hoping it’s my neighbour from the next hilltop south. The torch bearers approach under the cover of smoke windswept from my fire. They don’t run, so nor do I. Three dark figures close me inside a triangle.

Black stocking masks over their heads are holed at the eyes and mouths. One points a shotgun at me. Single barrel, lever action. The smallest probes my campsite with a flashlight. The third figure, more gorilla-shaped than man, tugs a chain and drags someone into the firelight.

It’s a lean woman with a big ball of dark hair, dressed in a white tee-shirt and body-hugging black pants. Her face is scratched and filthy and her arms are buckled behind her back. A band of silver tape is wrapped around her head, covering her ears and mouth. Mucous bubbles under her nostrils. I recognise Sandy Wallace.

The last time I clapped eyes on her she’d knocked on my front door at home in the city, smiling like she meant it, wearing most of a black cocktail dress, droplets running down her angular cheeks from a dash through the rain. Now, the droplets are tears, or look like them. Her eyes lock on mine, their whites glistening, almost popping from their sockets. The shotgun spits a fireball into the sky. The percussion hurts my ears and draws my full attention. The gorilla-man sticks a finger inside the tape near Sandy’s mouth and rips it down. I wait for the theatrics.

“Gar,” Sandy blurts, gulping in air, “they want ... want your stuff on Baker. Just give them ... tell them what you have. Then we’ll be okay. All okay.”

If she’s acting, it’s A-grade. I eye a run-line into the forest.

“What stuff?” I say.

“Do you think we are here for a pantomime, Mr Hart?” The smallest figure has a female voice with an Afrikaans twang. She turns her light on Sandy, whose handler takes his cue and pushes Sandy to her knees. She yelps as he straddles her and squeezes his knees into her ribs. He grabs a fistful of her frizzy hair, jerks her head back, and puts the point of his knife to her windpipe. A hideous squeal rips from inside the forest.

A black pig staggers out into the mongrel light of the fire and flashlights. It is as tall as a man’s thighs with pale tusks curling either side of its snotty snout. Gone mad from a poison bait, I guess. It stumbles forward, like a drunk looking for a fight. The man trapping Sandy roars a strange warrior cry, dropping her chain as he points his knife at the pig. Click-clack. Bam! The shotgun strike sends the pig shrieking and dragging its shredded hind towards the trees. Another click-clack. Bam!

If the second blast was meant for the pig, the shooter was a shithouse shot. Not even close. I hear the tinkling of chain and turn towards the sound. Sandy is running towards the trees. Click-clack!

Ms Afrikaans seems to yawn. Moving like a shadow, she gives the shooter a thumbs-down ...

The blast hits Sandy’s back, somewhere around the neck. She glides, briefly airborne, arms swinging, her body tumbling to earth near the edge of the forest. I’m frozen. Sandy murmurs.

The shooter steps coolly towards her, levering another cartridge into the chamber as he goes. Arriving at her side, he pulls a flashlight from a pouch on his belt and examines his work. It doesn’t take long. He slots the light back in its pouch and gives Ms Afrikaans a thumbs-up as he strolls back to us. I choke on some lumps that rise in my gullet. I feel like I’ve dropped LSD. Fuck the consequences: I pick my line into the forest, trying to hide the thoughts from my face. Whack! Yellow and blue flashes blur my vision. The shotgun carrier lifts the barrel, ready to crack me again.

“We have your family, Mr Hart. We will trade,” says the woman.

I picture Alice and Hugo. Does she know where I’ve put them into hiding? Does she really have them? I hear my old psychologist: ‘You’ve just got fear of fear, Gar. Think your way out.’

“What ... what do you want ... about Baker?”

“All you have,” she says.

I have no idea of the current whereabouts of John K. Baker. But I know what they want from me: my knowledge. He owns real estate, cash, gold bullion, shares, boats, businesses. Football teams, for god’s sake. Baker holds the keys to an international network of stolen wealth which The Citizen has discovered - but not yet exposed.

“I have a laptop. In my treehouse. Everything’s in there.” I point to the ladder to the treetop cabin.

“Kojo,” the woman says to Sandy’s killer. “Get it.”

“It’s in the ceiling,” I say. “A hidden panel.”

“Follow him,” she orders Kojo.

Climbing the ladder gives me seconds to think. Inside the cabin, the trapdoor is leaning on its hinges against a wall. It’s dark. I ignore the flashlight on the bedside table.

“I need a torch,” I tell Kojo, who is standing on the ladder below me.

“Light,” Kojo yells down. Only his head and shoulders are inside the room. When he reaches for the torch, I snatch the pick handle I keep under the bed - the one I thought I’d never need because my world would never get this crazy - and smash it on his stockinged skull with a double-handed grip. His head falls forward, his nose cracking on the rim of the hatch, but he catches the rim’s perimeter with his hands. His head starts rising. I smash his skull, again and again. One’s for Sandy, even though I’m sure she dragged them here. It’s like hitting a rock that won’t break. I work on his hands. He crashes to the deck. I’m shaking, slow to move. The nose of the shotgun rises through the hatch hole, then the pale fingers of an unbroken hand fold over the rim. I slam the trapdoor down. A severed fingertip twitches on the floor. I hear shrieking. I bolt the trapdoor.

I fling the cabin window open, climb through the frame, and haul myself on to the corrugated iron roof by grasping a branch. Vroom! Shotgun pellets wallop the cabin’s walls.

The woman yells: “Don’t be a fool, Gar. You’ll kill your children this way.”

I pull my phone from my pocket. I’m almost above the black-painted ring on the deck. It’s worth a try: I speed dial Ireland. It rings.

“Hi, Dad,” says Alice.

“You OK?” I hiss.

“Yeah – why?”

“Get Hugo. Get Nanna. Go to a police station. Now!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Killers at Moon Hill. A woman’s dead.”

Flashlight beams strafe the space around me. My signal is lost.

I use the moonlight to walk a thin line of floorboards joined end-to-end through the tree. It takes me to the platform of the flying fox. The handlebar is hooked to a branch by the wire’s tie-point to the tree. I release the bar and launch. Light beams cross my path. I brace for flak. A shotgun thunders. Nothing hits me. I’m riding fast, a few body lengths above the ground ... the wire whistles and whips. It snaps. I fall. A wet summer has made the open pasture thick, but there are sharp, man-sized boulders in the mix. I hit the grass feet first, let my body roll, find myself standing. No pain; nothing broken, nothing big enough to notice. A dog barks. I run. I see my feet thumping grass, arms flashing. I hear my breathing. My body is working by itself, letting my mind think ahead. I need to get to Mr Browning.

I cross a white-gravel road and roll under a barbed-wire fence. I sprint through a paddock of knee-high grass. Pop! A flare casts me in violet light. Near the lip of the dam, I fall low and slither over gravel and grass to where I think I buried the pistol.

On the hill above me, two white eyes, side by side, are moving. The car rolls down the road. A third white eye pops on. A dark figure stands on the back tray of the ute, probing the paddock with a spotlight. A dog bounces on the tray, barking, furious.

The flare drifts into the treetops and its light dies. I dig for Mr Browning with my hands. My fingernails scrape the metal box. I flip it open and rip Mr Browning from the wrap, slam the loaded magazine into the hand grip and release the safety. The spotlight sweeps the paddock. I wade into the dam, staying low, backing into tall reeds at the far edge. The spotlight catches my face. I shuffle left, then right, slowed by the muddy bottom, holding Mr Browning out of the water. The spotlight sticks to me.

A figure appears at the edge of the dam, side-lit by the spot beam from the ute, aiming a crossbow at me with one hand. His other, cloth-wrapped, restrains the snarling white dog on a rope. The animal leaps at me, swinging its arse in mid-air before thumping back to earth, desperate to break its tie. The dog’s body is as thick as a tree stump, with bandy legs for speed and power.

“Get out of the water,” calls the woman from the back of the ute, holding me in the spotlight, “or we let the dog go.”

The dog doesn’t wait. It breaks the man’s weakened grip. The manic hunk of meat and teeth and electricity goes airborne, belly-flops, sinks, surfaces, churns towards me. I stand tall, grip Mr Browning with both hands and fire. The bullet smashes the dog’s mouth. It keeps coming. I fire into the top of its head. It floats into me. I knee it away. Three bullets left by my count.

The woman is calling from the ute in a new language I don’t understand. Instructions for the crossbow phantom, I guess. I aim at him, part-blinded by the spotlight. I think about his head and then focus on his chest because it’s bigger. I squeeze: a burst of gold and white. The arrow and the bullet cross each other inside the flash. Searing cold flares inside my thigh, like I’ve been shot with ice.

My bullet should have hit him square in the breastplate. I can’t see more than his outline. He staggers, drops on one knee. I fire again into his chest. He falls on his side, not backwards as I expect. I hope Mr Browning is powerful enough. The spotlight stays on me. I move from its glare. It doesn’t follow me. A shadow jumps from the back of the ute.

I limp fast from the dam and push into trees beside the paddock, falling on my side behind a trunk. The ripped nerves in my thigh scream. I finger the arrow shaft: the tip is protruding from the back of my leg, the feather fletching in front.

“We will never stop coming for you, Gar,” she calls, spraying light from her hand-held torch, scanning the edges of the paddock. “Come out now and save your children. Or be a coward.”

I check my phone; the dam water has killed it. I lift my jumper at the neckline and bite it to help me do the job in silence. Using the heel of my hand, I punch the feather-end of the shaft into my leg and pull the arrowhead from behind. It slides through, burning like yanked rope as I wrench the whole shaft out. I rub my fingers over the wounds and hold the fingers up to a shard of moonlight. There’s not enough blood to suggest an artery is split. I take off my jacket and jumper and tie the jumper against my wounds using the sleeves, then limp into the forest, following the groove of a kangaroo track, careful not to tread on fallen branches and break the silence. I glance behind me, looking for pursuing light ...

II

93 days earlier ...

ACCORDING to the café clock, I had an hour to wait for courtroom 7C to open in the building next door. I sipped a latte and returned to a newspaper story titled Snow White and the Seven Dunces, a moralising tale about some teenage boys and a girl who got rat-faced on one of their father’s yachts and flashed their naked bums at ferry passengers on Sydney Harbour. One of the cleverest boys posted photos of the outing on Facebook, adding to evidence discovered by police upon the yacht that nostrils full of cocaine cut with laundry powder, and bellies full of vodka, are sure-fire sources of A-grade ideas.

What kept me reading was the fact that the boys attended the same illustrious school that had educated Henry East, who was due to appear shortly in 7C. Accompanying the ferry tale was a story noting that Henry, 26, was about to be sentenced for his guilty plea to using ‘inside information’ that he stole from his employer, a global investment bank, to profit from buying and selling shares in companies listed on the public stock market. He pocketed just over one million dollars – and faced up to ten years in prison.

What the newspaper didn’t say was that Henry had more than his freedom and fine young body on the line. He had a few hundred million dollars waiting for him if he could survive this day and outlive his father. I wasn’t putting my money on him achieving either when I read his body language as he walked into the café. After listening to his trial for days on end, I still didn’t get why he’d risked so much for what amounted to pocket money to a human being born with his ancestral gifts. Simple greed didn’t cut it for me.

Henry, who had been released on bail pending his sentencing by the judge, moved like an injured athlete and towered over his lawyer, a squat man with a pimply, pink forehead framed by wispy fair hair. The man o’ law sported a red necktie with its tongue swept back over the shoulder of his dark suit. I cupped a hand to my brow to make a visor as Henry and his swashbuckler passed my table. They sat at my back, so absorbed in their tête-à-tête I doubt they’d have noticed if I was starkers. I looked in a wall mirror. Henry’s face was in it.

He had a thick, dark mane framing a perfectly symmetrical face that was as pale as candle wax, inset with large brown eyes and offset by a long but not-protruding nose. He was cleverly dressed in an unfashionably roomy, single-breasted navy blue suit, white shirt and dull blue tie; it maintained the sensibly conservative image he’d aimed at the judge throughout his trial. I wondered if his wan complexion this morning was a ruse, a bit of make-up applied in the law chambers on legal advice before the walk to court, to squeeze any last juices of sympathy from the judge. But it seemed a bit late for that. Justice Tobias Tanner, who now waited for him next door, looked like he sucked lemons prior to every courtroom curtain rise that I had witnessed

In the café, Henry’s lawyer was perky as he ordered an espresso, and why wouldn’t he be? Unlike his client, he knew that whatever happened in court, he would be sleeping at home this night on his king-sized mattress and fancy sheets.

“What if I go to prison?” hissed Henry.

Now in my game as a journalist, I only have a couple of rules when it comes to speaking the truth you’d rather hide. Rule number one: never do it within earshot of strangers. Rule number two: capitalise on people breaking rule one. I slipped my notepad and pen from my jacket pocket, kept my head down, and casually scribbled.

“You won’t go to jail,” said the lawyer. “You’ll be fined at most.”

“You can’t guarantee that. They can come after me in there.”

I circled ‘they’ in my notebook. Henry shuffled in his seat like a racehorse trapped in a barrier gate, like he could smell the testosterone-rich sweat of the men waiting for him inside the razor-wire fences of Silverwater Prison.

The lawyer’s volume lifted: “Listen. We’ve agreed the strategy with your father. Whatever happens today, this ends it, Henry. Right?”

The lawyer, who was facing the café entrance, looked up past my right shoulder and went wide-eyed.

“Hello, Edgar,” I heard behind my back. I turned around. Charles East, who had snuck quietly in to the café, was grinning like he’d found something nasty stuck to his shoe. He was more obviously horse-faced than his son, but then Charles’s skin and bones had spent nearly seventy years succumbing to gravity and the waning reproductive capacity of his body cells.

“Good morning, Charles,” I said, closing my notebook. I returned his grin with equal sincerity.

He had gone for a grey pinstripe suit, white shirt and royal blue tie. The grey leftovers of his hair were clipped tight against his narrow head and his irises were smoke-coloured and barely visible inside the watery whites of his pink-rimmed eyes. He had the mouldy air of a funeral director. I guessed that spectating the fruit of your loins being battered in court for days on end would do that.

The three of them wandered away whispering, Henry in the middle of the huddle. Charles glanced back at me and then poked his lawyer in the chest with a stiff finger. Henry’s head and shoulders slumped. He looked like an overgrown toddler who’d been smacked. I felt sorry for him. I followed them.

As Henry waited on the footpath for the building’s revolving door to meet him, he glanced at me. I got the feeling he wanted my help. I sensed a young man who had botched an escape plan. What he was running from, and where he had wanted to go, intrigued me. They entered the building, passed through a security checkpoint, and opened a door to a private room reserved for lawyers and their clients.

On my way up to 7C in the lift, a couple of male television reporters who were wearing corsets – their flesh-coloured, spandex belly-flatteners were visible through their white shirts when their jackets weren’t buttoned up – explained to each other, and therefore the rest of the passengers in the lift, with great eloquence why Henry, the son of a man worth just south of a billion dollars according to the latest published rich list, would steal a million dollars through insider trading and ruin his young life. They didn’t buy the defence team’s submission about Henry succumbing to gambling addiction and depression. In the reporters’ summation: “He’s a greedy fuckwit.”

I found a seat near the front of the courtroom in the row behind Charles and skimmed background notes I’d made so I could file my report quickly after the outcome was known. Charles had groomed his only male seed for great things, sending him to Sydney’s prestigious Cranbrook School, then to Oxford University in England where he studied international law and politics, and met the right people. But I’d found a brighter jewel. Henry’s late grandfather, Sir Arthur Allan East, had been fond of parroting the even longer dead American President, Theodore Roosevelt, on the subject of eugenics: The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population ... Criminals should be sterilized ... Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind...

Room 7C was a soundproof, windowless theatre illuminated by hard, white ceiling lights and occupied by about thirty, mostly sober-looking men and women wearing dark suits. They were the usual mix: friends, enemies pretending to be friends, hired legal help licking their lips at the minutes they were billing their client, and yawning reporters. I looked for Henry’s mother, the Family Court Judge Victoria East, but couldn’t spot her in the settling crowd.

A wiry man wearing a pinstripe suit squeezed past several people in my aisle and sat beside me, so close our hips touched. I moved out of contact but I needed to have a look at him. He had silvery, Caesar-cut hair and stared at my notes. When I closed my pad, he grinned at me with a face that reminded me of a saw-toothed greyhound in need of a muzzle. Charles turned, staying seated, and shook the man’s hand. They said nothing.

“Very theatrical, Charles,” I said.

“All rise,” interrupted the court officer.

Henry stood, chin up, buttoned his jacket and crossed his hands over his crotch like a choir boy about to sing solo.

Justice Tanner strode, white-wigged and black-robed, into the room through his private back door, spittle glistening on his lips. He sat and the rest of us followed, except the defendant, who saved the court officer the trouble of ordering him to stand.

Tanner knew his words this morning would echo through corporate boardrooms, airport Chairman’s Club lounges, and the plushest homes in the land for days on end, even rippling overseas. So he spoke from notes.

“Insider trading,” the judge said, “is a cancer eating the flesh and bone of our society. It amounts to the privileged acquiring secret knowledge and using it to cheat others. The defendant, because of his position, had a crystal ball to future events in our financial markets. The law prohibited him – not from having that crystal ball – but from using it for personal gain.”

Tanner paused for effect. Charles tilted his head down and pressed his temples with his middle fingers. His pet greyhound polished some of his own teeth with the pad of a middle finger.

“When a young person enters the workforce, do we want to teach that person to value honesty and fair play, or do we want to encourage them to develop skills of deception and manipulation for personal gain at the expense of others? I have taken the defendant’s background into account. I have also taken account of his guilty plea. Justice knows no favour. I do not believe a simple fine is appropriate in this case.”

I turned to Henry. It looked as if his neck snapped; his head fell and he faced his feet, keeping his body stiff and straight.

The judge swung his axe: “I therefore sentence the defendant to two years’ imprisonment, with a minimum of twelve months to be served before eligibility for parole. Additionally, I impose a fine equal to two times his illegal benefit.”

Henry grasped the railing in front of him, looking at his father. I turned an ear to them and prepared to scribble their conversation into my notepad.

“You’ve got to move forward now,” Charles called, not bothering to stand. “Be strong. This time will pass.”

Charles’s version of that ‘be a man’ codswallop rang a bell; I saw myself at the age of six. My father and I were fishing from a dinghy with rods. He cast his line with one hand, the other locked, as usual, on a can of beer. A glint of steel whizzed near my eye and I threw up a hand in self-defence. His hook embedded itself deep inside my middle finger. “There’s only one way out of this, Garsy,” he said. “If we go backwards, the barb will rip your finger to shreds.”  So he grabbed my hand, cut the line with a knife, and nipped the tie-end off the hook with a pair of pliers. Then he pushed the body of the hook out, barb first. “Sometimes in life,” he said, as he knotted his hanky around my bleeding wound, “the only way out of the shit is to forward ho!” My mother took me to the doctor for a tetanus shot and stitches. Bert went to the horse races.

When Henry was led through a side door to begin his term, the chatter started like thickening rain. I too had expected Henry to get mates’ rates - community service or a suspended sentence.

“For God’s sake,” someone chirped in the hallway outside the courtroom, “the judge lives just a few doors down from the Easts.”

I got the chirper’s point: The judge’s family and the Easts were birds of similar feathers. But I reckoned Tobias had a smaller house without the harbour frontage of the East’s 100-year-old family home, Tamerlane. And maybe he’d never been invited to the East’s parties, or not the right ones. Their big charity events attracted the chauffer-driven: government ministers, foreign ambassadors, corporate chairmen, Hollywood actors. That sort of herd.

Charles’s greyhound joined me in the crowded courtroom lift. He followed me into the street. I walked for almost a block and saw reflected in shopfront windows that he was keeping just a few steps behind me. I didn’t fancy being tailgated all the way to my office. At a red pedestrian light, I turned to face him. He looked about forty: fit, tanned, clean-shaven. The outdoors type. As we went eye-to-eye, I worked out why he had made me feel so uneasy in the courtroom, and it wasn’t his fondness for rubbing hips with strangers. The pupils inside his grey irises were big, far too big and black for the amount of midday light, and his mouth had white spittle stuck in the corners. Anti-depressants, I guessed: maybe anti-psychotics.  I gambled he was still taking them, or wasn’t long off the last dose.

“I already have a dog,” I said.

“I know,” he said.

I did have a real dog.

“Are you the East’s new errand boy?” I countered.

Shaping the fingers of his right hand into what looked like a gun, he smiled, pointed at me from his hip and said, “Ka-Pow!” He grinned and walked away.

He turned a corner into a shopping arcade and disappeared before I had the brilliant idea of taking his photo with my mobile phone. I wished I could draw as well as my daughter, Alice. My hands were sweaty when I massaged my neck, and it was a cool day. I figured Charles was in severe pain right now, but he was employing some strange tactics to share it around and try to keep my reporting on his son’s imprisonment inside the rails.

I hailed a taxi to go to my office, pondering on exactly how I’d report Henry’s imprisonment to the global readers of The Citizen. Charles East was a corporate marriage broker. He had business tentacles across the world, but he was best known among a clique of the internationally wealthy for plugging Western businesses into China, and helping the richest Chinese plant their money and children overseas as insurance, in case they fell afoul of the revolving rulers of the Peoples’ Republic.

For publication, my editors chipped out my side-commentary about Henry’s grandfather wanting to sterilise criminals. They also removed my speculation that Henry may not have acted alone, and my open question: did he really just stumble across his inside information in his workplace? The Citizen’s editorial hierarchy – supported by jelly-backed defamation lawyers – stuck with the facts accepted by the court: Henry was a rogue, a one-man-band. On the upside, I guessed my editors’ approach would keep Charles and his new dog feeling relaxed and cocky while I sniffed around their affairs in private.

MONTHS PASSED. I KEPT my eyes open for a legal appeal by the Easts against Henry’s jail sentence, but it didn’t come. That wasn’t the Charles East I knew, letting his only son go down for the count. I took a punt that after this long in a prison, Henry’s mind might be a pressure cooker full of fear. I decided to offer him an outlet valve.

The New South Wales prison system is delightfully quaint. To contact a prisoner you need to use snail mail. No emailing or cold calling, either in person or by phone. So I wrote Henry a letter asking if we could have a chat. In case someone unpleasant intercepted my correspondence, I thought it wise to hire myself a post office box to help filter any reply. The post office was next door to my local pub, so it was easy to check it every evening. I wasn’t sure if it was common sense or paranoia, but I purchased a pocket mirror so I could look behind my back whenever I opened the box.

III

A NAKED, wiry-limbed man relaxed against a built-in bench seat in a baking hot sauna room, barely a bead of sweat visible upon his cashew-nut-coloured skin. He spread his arms across the top of the wooden-slat seat and eyed the younger man sitting opposite him. “Are you sure about this? Absolutely sure?”

The man to whom the question was aimed shaped his long fingers into a make-shift comb and swept straw-coloured hair from his glistening forehead. “One hundred per cent.”

The wiry man smiled and browsed his companion’s sun-tanned skin which was streaked with rivulets of sweat and reminded him of crackling emerging on a side of roast pork. Wiry-man licked his lips and said, “You look good enough to eat.”

The young man grimaced: “Do we have to meet like this, every time?”

“I need to know you are playing straight with me, my lawyer friend. From the look on your face, you may have a transmitter stuffed up your arse. Maybe I should check.”

The lawyer shifted uncomfortably on the bench. “How do I know you are being straight with me?”

“What the fuck did you just say?”

“No offence. Jesus, I’ve told you what Henry is threatening to do. If we don’t get him out of Silverwater, he is going to make a fresh statement to the Crown prosecutor and drop us all in the shit.”

The wiry man leaned forward and scooped a ladle of water from a wooden bucket that was sitting on the floor. He tossed the water over a tray-table of hot rocks, triggering an angry hiss of steam. He felt like a wizard setting up a magic trick.

“I can’t take any more of this,” said the lawyer, sweat dripping into his eyes, the salt of it turning the whites pinker. He stood, the crown of his head scraping the wooden-slat-lined ceiling. “I’m out.”

The wiry man threw another ladle of water on the rocks, using the resultant mist to obscure his face as he spoke. “I’m sensing you mean, out. As in, you don’t want to work for me anymore.”

“Correct,” said the lawyer, trying to see his companion’s eyes through the mist. It cleared. The lawyer’s heart banged harder and faster. He eyed the sauna door. His penis retreated even further.

The wiry man wiped a strand of spittle from the corner of his mouth. “That’s a shame, my friend, because if you do leave me, I am going to have to take something from you.”

“You mean a refund? Sure. You can have all the money back.”

“You misunderstand me.”

Staying seated, the wiry man rolled onto his left buttock and kicked his right leg in a fierce, sweeping motion, slapping his foot and shin into the standing lawyer’s lower calves. The lawyer’s feet flew up and he fell onto his back, the rear of his skull whiplashing the wooden floor. The lawyer groaned. Seconds later, he began screaming: “Help! Help me!”

“Go for your life,” the wiry man said. “Squeal away.” He didn’t expect anyone would hear the cries from the sauna room in the garden of Tamerlane. It was a weekday mid-afternoon. The property’s owners - Charles East, his wife, and their daughter - were at their various workplaces.

The wiry man stood, plucked a towel from a wall hook, dunked a corner of the towel in the water bucket, withdrew it and swizzled the cloth around itself. He flick-whipped the lawyer’s rump. The lawyer yelped and curled into a ball.

“Lay on your guts,” the wiry man ordered, “legs and arms straight. Imagine you are diving into a pool.”

The lawyer stayed balled. He was whipped harder. The lawyer rolled onto his stomach, stretched his arms and legs, and whimpered: “Please. Don’t.” The lawyer couldn’t help himself: he covered his anus with a hand.

“You are joking, kaffir,” said the wiry man, who unfurled the towel and laid it like a blanket over the lawyer’s lower back. Leading with his knees and shins, the wiry man dropped at a right angle upon the towel and the lawyer. The lawyer huffed. The wiry man reached with his right hand between his squirming victim’s legs and grabbed. The lawyer groaned.

“Easy, boy. Easy,” said the wiry man, as if he was calming a spooked horse. “Now, do you feel that?” He rolled the twin fibrous knots that he held in his hand against each other. “This is the nature of our relationship for the rest of time, literally and metaphorically. Comprende?”

The lawyer groaned.

The wiry man yanked his greasy captives to punctuate each sentence. “You live in a nice house. You have a nice job. You sleep safe in your bed at night. Don’t mess that up.”

The wiry man rolled the knots again. But as he tormented the lawyer, the wiry man had to fight the flickering of his own arousal. He slowed his breathing and said, “Now, I’m going to let go of these little baby-makers. But if you disappoint me, I will cut them out, dry them like walnuts, and wear them as a necklace.”

When his manhood had relaxed into what he regarded as a dignified posture, the wiry man stood and looked down at the lawyer, who curled up on his side and pulled the towel over his buttocks, tears dripping from his eyes.

“You can find your own way out.” The wiry man bent his neck like a bird of prey until he had eye contact with the lawyer, whereupon he smiled and pretended to roll something in his right hand: “This is our little secret, darling. Okay?”

HENRY EAST SLEPT POORLY, as usual, on the top bunk in his two-man cell. He rolled on to his right side, then back on to his left.

“For fuck’s sake,” said his cellmate, “will you settle down?”

“Sorry.”

“Here,” said his cellmate, “take one of these. In fact, take two.”

“What are they?”

“Sleeping pills.”

“Thanks,” said Henry, who sucked saliva from his tongue and used the fluid to wash the pills down his throat.

Henry had a dream. He felt like he was leaking: into his pillow, into his sheets, down the sides of his bunk bed. He woke in the gloom with a terrible pain in his face, gurgling, coughing, drowning in warm fluid that had the taste and texture of tomato juice. He spat it out, but it kept coming. His wrists burned.

His cellmate was screaming through the bars into the corridor: “Help! Help! Medical Emergency. Help!”

IV

I WOKE sitting on the floor, back to the wall inside my home office, first room off the hallway from the front door of our two-level, Victorian-era terrace house. My trilling phone was the waker. Tom Steele, the screen said.

“He’s cut his wrists,” said the Crime Editor of The Sydney Daily News.

“What?” My headache from last night’s bar-crawling with Steele returned for a second bout as I stood and almost knocked over an open tin of house paint that I’d been smothering the walls with before the urge for a nap sent me sliding to the floor.

“Henry East. He’s an innovative young man. Used the peel-off lid of a tuna can.”

Steele added that Henry was flat-backed in the Silverwater Prison hospital’s psychiatric wing, sedated and strapped into a bed that was anchored to the floor.

“You sure he did it to himself?”

“You’re a cynical character. Wait ‘til you hear the rest.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Where are you?”

“Darlinghurst.”

“Good. I’ll home deliver the next exciting episode of The Strange Life of Henry East. I’ve also got something tasty in my pocket for afternoon tea.”

I smiled at the idea of home. At the time of our purchase, ours was advertised as a renovator’s delight in the inner-Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Now the agents might say once beautiful old lady in need of a facelift. To the man or woman in the street, it was a century old building made out of decent bricks, handy to schools and public transport. And at night, I could throw a stone from my front porch across the street through the front window of the nearest pub if I felt like it.

Steele was chirpy for a bloke with whom I parted company at around 4am on a footpath up the street outside the Pickled Pig.

“Are you with me?” said Steele. He seemed to detect that a fair-sized lump of my brain was astral travelling. He’s got extra sensory perception, I’ve always thought, but he just calls it awareness. He’s been my psychological counsellor since primary school when we nicked our thumbs with his mum’s veggie knife and shook hands under his bed on a Friday night sleepover. Our secret club was just that, until a burning candle set fire to the mattress.

While I was revisiting old flames and smoke, Steele hung up. I time travelled back to now and leaned on a stack of cardboard boxes, sending the top one toppling. It spewed stuff I’d just stripped off the walls: photos of the Easts, newspaper clippings about Henry’s case and its lead-up, and glow-pen-highlighted pages of court transcripts. I intended to cremate the past in a bonfire in the back garden and celebrate my East-free future. The tins of Summer Mint paint were going to refresh my mind as well as my walls.

I scooped a photo from the floor and sat on a sofa against a wall. It showed Henry towering over the Australian Prime Minister. Charles wedged the PM from the other side. The three of them were parading in tuxedos in the winner’s circle at a political fundraiser held about a year ago, smiling at the camera with effortless insincerity. Henry had the sharpest suit, the TV newsreader’s smile.  That’s when newspaper gossip writers started saying he was set for a career in politics, and that he had the savvy and connections to make PM one day, given his smarts, his pedigree, and his grandfather being a former foreign minister. My theory was that Charles’s PR people leaked the idea to a toadying scribe, sweetening it with a box of real French champagne sent to the toad’s home address.

I found a red marker pen and scrawled ‘why?’ on Henry’s photo, putting the word in a thought bubble and connecting it to his lips. Then I had a cleverer idea; I reviewed the notes that I’d made of the café conversation outside court the day Henry was sentenced. A line from his lawyer stuck out like a fractured bone: We’ve agreed the strategy with your father. Whatever happens today, this ends it, Henry.

It had taken Henry about three months to disagree. I almost cheered for him. The brass ship’s bell with a clapper on a rope attached to our front door donged with a mellow tone for which my senses were grateful.

A bald-headed Steele clutching a six-pack of beer grinned at me when I opened the door. His body strained the seams of a slim-fit powder-blue suit. A tee-shirt and board shorts were his natural second skin. But he was a professional man, being a journalist, and always dressed up-to-the-minute, even though his body hated the idea. His white business shirt had unbuttoned itself at the neck, making his black tie look strangely tight.

In my office, Steele passed me the beers and sat on the sofa where he worked his mobile phone with big, fast thumbs. I opened a bottle, took a decent slug, turned my office chair to face him and sat down. My headache began dissolving.

“You know,” I said, “why do we bother with this stuff?”

“You mean throwing light into society’s darkest corners?”

“What’s the point?”

“That’s too deep for a daylight discussion.” He shook his head in frustration at my high-mindedness. “Just read, will you.” He handed me his phone. “Go to page two, the stuff highlighted in red. I’m holding it as draft copy for now.”

“Shit. He cut his lips?”

“Slashed them back to the teeth and gums in the shape of an X. I can’t publish yet because the coppers won’t confirm, but they won’t deny either. Can you imagine what a mess that makes?”

“I thought he was under special protection.”

“They moved him out three weeks ago.”

“Why would you slice your lips?”

“Makes you pretty unattractive to other inmates.”

“You reckon that stuff was happening to him?”

“Maybe.”

“Or someone was trying to shut him up?”

“That’s a very poetic interpretation,” said Steele, glancing at my office door. “Anyone home?”

“Hugo and Fish are upstairs.”

“Lock the door.”

I obeyed. Steele pulled a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket, tapped some white crystals onto the coffee table and started chopping them with his credit card.

“Not good timing,” I said. “It’s Hugo’s farewell dinner tonight.”

“Small,” he said. He put his card at one end of my line and compressed it, making it shorter but fatter. He took a banknote from his shirt pocket, rolled it into a tube and hoovered his. He handed me the note and I followed suit. High quality cocaine: that cleared my head, though my heart went for a gallop which prompted me to open a fresh beer to calm things down.

“You want to stay for dinner?”

“Naa, thanks. Time for some repair work at home. And you guys should have your private time. Give the nipper my best for his travels.”

He tapped another pile of crystals onto the coffee table, patted me on the shoulder and said, “For Ron.” He left.

I scraped the coke onto a piece of paper, folded it and tucked it in my wallet. For Ron, my father used to say; for later on. It was like having a spare tyre in case of a flat.

I looked at a photo of Charles and Henry East, but I thought about a different father and son. And about that son standing alone in a hostile, alien world inside which the father could not protect him. The longest time Hugo and I had been apart was his week at high school camp. In just over twenty-four hours, fate willing, Hugo would be on the other side of the planet for a year on a student program. Uninvited chemicals worked my insides; I wiped my eyes. My phone pinged. Steele: Update. A third party might have done the job on Henry East. Keep you posted.

Steele sparked an idea. I went back through my notes of the café conversation between Henry and his lawyer.

Lawyer: You won’t go to jail. You’ll be fined at most.

Henry:  You can’t guarantee that. They can come after me in there.

It’s funny how people over the years change their friends and spouses more often than their mobile phone numbers. I had one of Charles East’s numbers from a time when he offered me a job. I chanced it and dialled. Someone picked up; I heard classical music far away in the background.

“Charles, it’s Gar Hart here. I want to talk to you about Henry.”

Whoever had picked up didn’t utter a thing. They waited a few seconds and hung up. So I fired off a text message: Who was Henry afraid would come after him in jail?

Maybe it was the cocaine and beer doing my thinking, but firing a shot into Charles seemed like a cracking idea: poke the nest, see what happens. I leaned back in my chair, grinning with admiration for my slick tactical manoeuvre, and glanced out my window in time to see my daughter climbing out of a car I didn’t recognise. Alice had a red and white beach towel over a shoulder. I hid the beer bottles in an empty box by the sofa, stepped from my office into the hallway and opened the front door for her.

“What’s that around your nose?”

I scraped the rim of my nostrils with a thumb. “I must have missed some shaving cream.”

“Come on, Dad. It’s Hugo’s last night.”

She walked along the hallway to the bathroom and calmly closed the door. I stood outside, clenched a fist and poised to knock. I heard the shower start. I went to the kitchen and rinsed my nose under the tap in the sink.

It was Hugo’s idea to go to his mother Charlotte’s birthplace in seaside Brighton, England, to stay with his grandparents, Malcolm and Kate Halliday, on a student exchange for a year. Another boy from Sydney was joining him at the same school. Clancy was a bit shifty, I thought, but a companion made of flesh and bone instead of digital bits was a good thing for Hugo. They were flying out the next morning. I trudged upstairs to Hugo’s bedroom and knocked on his door.

“I’m packing, okay,” he grizzled from behind the locked door. I heard Fish scratching at the door and Hugo let him out, then he shut his door again. Fish had been a rolling ball of grey wool when he crawled over his sleepy rivals in a puppy box to lick the kids’ hands and join our pack, not long after Charlotte died.

Fish followed me as I walked back to the stairwell, moving as elegantly as a dog with three legs can. He lost his left back prop in a steel-jawed hunting trap at our place in the bush a few years ago.

Alice was still in the bathroom as we passed it, so I went back to my office, sat on the sofa and pulled a faded newspaper clipping out my East box.

The headline read: China Behind ‘Made in Australia’ Media Bid - by Business Editor, Gar Hart. It was dated about ten years ago. Charles East was heading a syndicate of local businessmen who’d launched what they dubbed a patriotic ‘Made in Australia’ takeover bid for the Mirror News Group that owned the collection of television stations and newspapers that employed me. I’d been trying to prove anonymous tips from other businessmen that claimed Charles and his mates were a front for Chinese industrialists backed by the Communist Party in Beijing, who wanted to use their money and our media to exert power and influence over Australian business, politics and foreign policy. The problem that Charles appeared to be fixing for the Chinese was that foreigners were not allowed to own and control Australian media companies. The Poms and Yanks would have been bad enough in the public eye, but China was a bogeyman like no other. In the midst of my investigations, I received a call from Charles, who invited me to dinner, over which he offered me a job as a public relations man for his family company at twice my reporter’s salary. We had a big home mortgage, so the bribe to stop me stuffing up his bid and damaging his reputation was tempting. A few days after rejecting his offer, another businessman gave me a document, following which I phoned Charles.

“Mr East,” I remember saying a tad too gleefully, “I have a letter that says you are being retained by China’s Golden Bell Corporation to buy the Mirror News Group on their behalf. It is signed by GBC’s chairman. If this is true, you would be in breach of our foreign media ownership laws, as well as faking your patriotism. Are you a Trojan horse for the Chinese?”

East said: “That letter’s a fake, Edgar; you’re being had. Forget about it. Listen. What you should be focusing on is your long-term career and your family’s future.”

“Why would you care about my family?”

“Don’t be paranoid. I’ve been pondering our dinner conversation. I really do want someone on my PR team with fire in their belly. So why don’t you come on board with us on a consultancy basis? We can pay you a very decent monthly retainer and you can help us with our press releases, strategy, that sort of thing. And you get to keep your journalism job as well. It’s a win-win.”

“Do you think that is ethical?” I said, holding a straight face, even though he couldn’t see it. Secretly tape recording our conversation would have been illegal if I had done so without telling him. Inconveniently my recorder had jammed when I commenced the call.

“It’s simply an employment offer,” he said. “It’s up to you.”

“Can you answer my question about GBC?”

East said: “On the record? The letter is a fake. Off the record? Remember what happened to Humpty Dumpty.”

I paused for a second or two. “Thank you for taking my call, Mr Dumpty.”

After my story was published, Charles and his PR team publicly denounced the letter as a fraud, and I did not have the original to prove otherwise, but he did not sue us for defamation. A few weeks later his ‘Made in Australia’ syndicate withdrew from the bidding for Mirror News Group, saying the price had gone too high. I empathised with Charles in a way; his wasn’t the only house perched upon the nob hills of the city inside which ethics were as popular as bottled water from a Mumbai sewer.

In a lowlands street, I purchased a new tape recorder with a cord to link it to my phone.

I TUCKED THE NEWS CLIPPING back in the box to the sound of fierce chopping coming from the kitchen. Fish led me down the hallway. Alice was stony-faced, slicing tomato and cucumber salad. Fish nudged her leg and licked her hand when she patted him. She smiled. That was his job in our house. Dr Fix-it.

I turned the oven on, got ready-made pizza bases out of the fridge, along with a block of cheese, and started grating. Alice went to her room with Fish.

The smell of cooking pizza drew Hugo from his room. He shuffled into the kitchen roughing up the mop of dark hair on top of his lanky body. His skin rarely saw sunlight. I made him take vitamin D tablets. He was barefoot, wearing skinny black jeans and an old white tee-shirt of mine which made me a little dizzy: its front was printed with a red hypnotic wheel. The words Look into your Morning Sun were printed in an arc above the wheel. The tee-shirt was a gift from my wife’s father, Malcolm, who had owned The Morning Sun newspaper in Brighton for decades.

I called Alice and Fish down for dinner. My phone rang as we sat at the long kitchen table. The handset was face-up beside my plate. Alice saw the Shanghai phone code and the caller’s name on the screen: Jack Darling.

“I’ll be five minutes,” I said.

Alice shook her head in silence, staring at her plate. Hugo fed Fish his pizza crust. I walked down the hall towards my office.

Jack said: “I just read about Henry East’s suicide attempt on the wires. What do you know?”

“He might be a victim, not suicide. You remember what I overheard in that café near the courtroom? The kid was shitting himself about people coming after him if he went to prison.”

“Go back at it hard,” said Jack. “Charles East has just partnered in China with a former British Prime Minister, Tim Winter. They announced it today in Beijing. There’s a smell about Winter in London, suggestions he took bribes to get the kids of Communist Party bigwigs into top UK schools and flash finance jobs in the city.”

“While he was PM?”

“He’s not quite that stupid. It was when he knew he was on his way out. Talk is that the Chinese bought his wife a holiday house in the Bahamas, and then good old Timmy returned ball by pressing the puffy flesh of his chums in the city for old favours to be repaid.”

“Hard evidence of this?”

“Not a cracker.”

“Excellent start.”

“I tell you what,” said Jack. “Get Claire to help you. You need to give her more to do. We’ll have another nose around East’s businesses here at the China end.”

Claire Styler was a recent arrival at The Citizen’s Sydney office from our London headquarters. She came with a freshly minted Master of Business Administration in her briefcase and a husband-come-public-relations-flak on her arm. I didn’t like that combination, a journalist and a PR. I’d seen it before, with the PR feeding his spouse spin about his high-paying clients. It was especially shifty when they went by different names in public like Claire Styler and Carl Cousins did. I reckoned their type did the dual-name thing so casual observers wouldn’t connect them. They had the potential to be what Charles East tried to turn me into: an independent journalist on one hand, a corporate spin doctor on the other. I knew reporters who were in on this racket, taking backhanders of cash or kind from people they wrote nicely about. Jack reckoned I was reading too much into the Styler-Cousins name thing. So I’d decided to let Claire’s work do the talking. It had spoken in monosyllables so far.

I phoned Claire at home and briefed her about Henry East. I asked her to gather some background on the former British PM and to review the transcripts and news clippings of Henry’s court case to bring her up to speed. As we were talking, Alice appeared in my office doorway and waved. She had a bulging bag over her shoulder. I watched through the front window as she climbed into a taxi. I guessed she was going to her boyfriend’s.

After ending the call with Claire, Hugo and I finished packing his bags in readiness for his early morning take-off. Then he sat on his bed and fired up his laptop. I saw he now had three bolts on his door.

“Wasn’t one bolt enough?” I said. “What if there’s a fire?”

“I’ve got a window.”

“I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll call you when I land.”

I went to bed. Fish whimpered until I lifted him up. He put his head on the pillow beside me and was snoring within minutes. I closed my eyes but there were too many weird shapes moving in there. I slid out of bed. Fish is great at unaided descent and followed me down to my office. I kept the light off. The streetlamps shining through the part-closed window shutters covered us in zebra prints. I fired up my laptop and sent Steele a text by phone: “You awake?”

My laptop clock said 2:17am. In the nearby streets, night clubs were spewing out their customers. Sirens howled. I can never tell the difference between police, firemen, ambulances. Not from the sounds alone. They just remind me of the myriads of shit humans get into. Fish has a beautiful voice and howled in tune with the sirens, like he was singing in a choir with his mates. That bucked me up.

My phone rang. Steele.

“So was he attacked?” I said.

“Everyone’s clammed up again. Coppers are sticking with the attempted suicide line.”

“How about the sources who tipped you off. Can I talk to one of them?”

“Now?”

“Sure.”

“You’re obsessed.”

“How about downgrading that charge to tenacious? Anyway, what else am I going to do at this hour?”

“Have a drink, abuse yourself, or nip around the corner to the Scarlet Garter if your memory of the female form is impaired.”

“And in the morning?”

“Get a proper job, something useful like a golfer. In the meantime, I’ll come back to you if one of my snouts is prepared to break cover.”

I dozed off sitting at my office table. Fish’s furious yapping woke me; he was front paws-up on the edge of the table, balancing on his back leg, barking at the window. The leafy branches of a tree backlit by streetlights were moving shadows around the room. Wind rattled the window glass. I looked outside into a haze of rain and could see neither human nor animal. Fish relaxed; whatever had unsettled him, he had chased away.

I checked that the front and back doors were locked, and climbed the stairs to bed. It was almost 3:30am when I put my head down. Fish was unusually restless.

V

THE WIRY man sat alone in the front seat of a parked four-wheel drive, working under the dull glow of streetlights through the car’s rain-spotted windows. Using a small towel, he wiped fresh blood off the blade of a hunting knife.

He glanced in the rear view mirror, then the wings. He checked the car’s clock. Why hadn’t she returned his calls?

He inserted the blade of his knife into a leather sheath that was strapped to his chest, over which he wore a business shirt and jacket. He sniffed his fingers, enjoying the salty, ammonia smell of what he had just killed. He wiped his fingers with the towel and tapped the screen on an encrypted phone that sat in a cradle on the dashboard. The handset speed dialled.

Leave a message, said a computer-generated voice - again.

He admired the girl’s craftiness, but it infuriated him too. “When I call, I expect you to answer,” he barked. “I’ve made my delivery. Call me. Now!”

He hit the ignition button and motored away, fighting the urge to drive past the scene of his very funny crime.

THE GIRL HAD RECOGNISED the incoming caller’s number. Six times. He could wait. She was busy. Her assignment may take hours to complete.

She looked around the sitting room of the Hong Kong high-rise apartment. Coloured lights blinked outside in the towering Kowloon cityscape. She crossed to a glass screen that was fixed to the wall near the entrance door. With her hands protected by wafer-thin, white leather designer gloves, she used an e-stick to tap the screen: floor-to-ceiling curtains began closing across all of the room’s windows. She turned up the luminosity of the ceiling lights so she could get a better look at a dozing, plump, grey-haired Englishman sitting slouched on a three-seat sofa in the middle of the room. A red tie was loose around the unbuttoned collar of his white shirt; his hairy belly was exposed, and his trousers and underpants were piled around his calves.

The stench of his breath and his searching, scum-coated tongue had made her want to vomit when he had tried to kiss her. She went to the sink in the open plan kitchen-living room and knocked the arm of a mixer tap with a gloved hand.  She put her mouth into the stream of cool water and lapped it up, careful not to touch the stainless steel with her lips. She knocked the tap off and checked her black-haired wig in a kitchen wall-mirror. Her real hair was tucked inside it as carefully as a surgeons’ in an operating cap.

The man murmured. She grimaced, hoping she had stuffed enough pink grains of heroin into the tip of the cigarette that sat smouldering in the ashtray beside a glass of Scotch whisky on the coffee table alongside the sofa. After two thirds of a bottle and a few tokes on the secretly loaded cigarette, he had now fallen upon his side with his face turned into the back of the sofa. He snorted and snored. She looked at the rectangular glass tank on a stand behind the sofa. The creatures inside it were as still and dozy as the man.

She wiped her lips dry on the hairless skin of her foreman, huffed on it and sniffed, enjoying her odourless breath. That’s how she saw herself: as traceless as clean air, when she wanted to be. And tonight she wanted to be.

She stepped to the sofa and pulled up the man’s trousers and underpants by rolling his bulky frame. She stuffed his shirt tails into his trousers, buttoned the waist with difficulty, tightened his belt and zipped up his fly. She considered removing his diamond-studded, gold cufflinks and rolling up his shirtsleeves, but decided to simply tug the cuff up a little on his left wrist to expose the puffy white flesh of his palm.

The man’s liquid-sounding belch interrupted her. She chuckled. Porky might drown in his own vomit and save me a lot of time and effort. But that would not do, not really. This job must be performed with symbolism and ritualism; her employer liked that sort of thing. Moreover, she liked it.

The fat man had bragged to her earlier in the Kowloon bar tonight about his snake collection. The Indian Cobra, a North American diamond-backed Rattler, and an Australian inland Taipan lived side-by-side in separate compartments of the display tank in his home for all his visitors to see. She guessed it was his superego speaking to those who might take him on in a fight. I’m a tough guy, the man was saying, a strange guy, so don’t fuck with me.

This type of guy proved easy prey for the girl, playing the pretty young stranger in the bar who said she had a soft spot for trouser snakes in fancy apartments, and a thousand US dollars in cash. She did not tell him that she had learned to handle venomous snakes at a paramilitary training camp in South Africa. Nor did she tell him that his employer was also her employer.

She lifted his metal snake-handling hook from a shelf under the tank and flipped open the lid of a compartment. The choice was obvious; a few drops of Taipan venom were enough to kill a hundred men. Its body felt heavy on the hook, but the animal was dozy and she soon had it gripped by the tail, its body dangling, its head swinging to and fro beside her calves

“Wakey, wakey,” she said to the snake, the beast becoming angrier with each of her shakes and gentle knocks of its head against the legs of the coffee table.

She turned her attention to the snoring blackmailer and said to him, “When you bite the hand that feeds you, you might get a dose of your own medicine in return.”

She grinned at her mangled metaphors and tapped the snake’s head against the man’s bulbous, blue-veined thumb muscle. The snake bared its fangs and struck: once, twice, three times. At the third strike, the snake’s mouth stayed fixed upon the muscle. She wanted several strikes because the creatures are not fools. Often, they won’t waste venom on a first strike, using it as a warning shot for a foe to leave it alone or face the consequences. And the girl had to be sure of the consequences.

When the man’s hand was dotted with weeping red spots, she laid the exhausted creature on the tiled floor and watched it muster enough energy to slither slowly under the skirt of a curtain that flanked the room’s main windows.

The girl looked at her phone for the time. It could take hours to be sure this exercise had worked, or it may only take thirty minutes or so for the venom to shut down the man’s nervous system, for his muscles, including his heart, to become paralysed, and for internal bleeding to start.

Ninety-three minutes passed before he stopped grumbling and writhing, and his breathing ceased. His obesity, the girl calculated, had probably hastened a cardiac arrest. Blood trickled from his nose; pink foam bubbled from his lips. She speed-dialled the wiry man.

“What if the shit had really hit the fan?” he yelled at her. “I’ve been in the dark here for over two hours. Not good enough.”

“Take a pill,” she said. “I’ve got to clean up and get out of here before the hired help arrives with orange juice and the morning papers.”

“What’s the headline going to read like in a day or two?”

“Lone drunk smokes heroin and plays with killer snake. Something like that.”

“I need you here.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“So the lawyer and that journalist are not for turning?”

“I want to be set, in case we need to drop a bomb on the pricks.”

VI

MY RADIO alarm went off with the 5am news bulletin. I banged on Hugo’s bedroom door until he unbolted it, and let Fish in to finish the job of rousing him while I carried his bags downstairs and put them in the hallway, ready to pack in the car for the drive to the airport. When I opened the front door, the sight hit me first - the blood and guts - followed by the ammonia stink.

An orange-and-white speckled carp as big as my forearm stared at me. The fish had a single steel hook through both its eyes. The hook was tied with green twine to the black-painted, steel frame of our security door. The carp’s gut had been slashed and its entrails dangled like glistening purple streamers, its blood pooled on the doorstep.

I thought about calling the police, but then remembered my call to Charles East last night. Had we just been visited by the they Henry East feared, or by Mr Greyhound from courtroom 7C? That would take some explaining, and possibly inside a cop shop. Get Hugo out of here was my overriding thought. Get Hugo to the airport. And don’t frighten him. We were already behind schedule.

I managed to cut the fish down and use a bucket of soapy water and a rag to clean away the evidence before a sleepy Hugo clumped down the internal stairs into the hallway, stuffing his earmuff-sized headset into a shoulder bag, Fish hopping alongside him.

Fish could smell the carnage and snuffled madly around the door. I put him on his lead and knocked on our neighbour’s door. I apologised for the hour. Retired Sue Sinclair owned Fish’s four-legged brother, who bounced beside her. She took Fish in without question, as she often did.

My old Land Rover Defender was parked in the street a few doors down. Hugo and I threw his bags on the back seat and we jumped in the front.  I phoned Alice. She didn’t answer. Why would she? It was 5.45am. My insides churned. I lifted my hand to press the car’s ignition button.

“Mate,” I said to Hugo. “I think I left your passport on the kitchen bench. Can you get it?”

He grumbled. I gave him the house key and he went inside. I looked in the rear view mirror and checked the rest of the street was clear. Surely these lunatics wouldn’t put a Baghdad Surprise under my bonnet? There were lots of ways for me to find out, but given my schedule, and a quick calculation of the odds, I chose the fastest.

VII

THE ENGINE coughed, then growled into life, but they’d got what they wanted: me thinking about the possibility of things.

Hugo opened the passenger door. “There’s nothing on the kitchen bench.”

I tapped my jacket pockets and pulled out his passport. “My mistake.”

He shook his head like I was the village idiot, if further proof was needed.

An hour later, we waved to each other and he disappeared behind the barriers into the passport checking hall of Sydney International Airport, en route to London Heathrow via Dubai.

Standing in the airport hall, in a line of vacant-eyed people waiting for their take-away coffee, I phoned Steele.

“Someone left a calling card on my door overnight. A dead fish.”

“Serious?”

“Incoming missile.” I forwarded him a photo I’d taken on my phone of the gutted carp and confessed to Steele that I’d tried to contact Charles East about Henry’s mutilation.

“Mm,” said Steele, “making good use of your vast intellect as usual. My guess is that the carp is a note, telling you to keep your nose out of their business. Quite crudely written, though.”

“Genius deduction,” I said, collecting my latte off the café counter and taking that glorious first sip, my taste buds telling me I’d been dudded with just a single shot of beans for a double-shot price.

“What are you going to do?” said Steele.

“Take it back.”

“What?”

“Sorry.” I binned the coffee. “The coppers will laugh at me, won’t they?”

“Nice photo, but you pulled the fucking thing down. If I was a copper, I’d put you in the nutcase file under Kamikaze Carp: oddball claims Jap fish attacked his door.”

“I want to know what happened in Henry’s cell. Can you put me on to one of your prison sources?”

“I’ll twist some fins and get back to you.”

I phoned Jack in Shanghai. It took a while to clarify with him that it wasn’t our dog I found gutted and hanging off the front door. He reminded me it was 4.30am where he was.

“You want to back off?”

“Are you serious?”

“Watch your back,” he said, “and keep your head screwed on. Don’t let East provoke you into doing anything stupid.”

I phoned Claire. It was just after 8am. She was at The Citizen’s office at Circular Quay, overlooking the main ferry wharf in the city. She liked to walk to work early and watch the sun rising over the harbour and ferry docks we can see from our tower on the northern edge of the CBD.

Claire hadn’t attended the East trial, nor had she been in Sydney to read the publicity or hear the rabid speculation before it. She was fresh eyes and ears on an old landscape.

“How’d you go running your eyes over the court transcripts?” I said.

“That takeover bid by the Double Happiness Trading Company that Henry made one of his inside share trades on. Remember it?”

“Vaguely. Tiny, wasn’t it? Barely worth his trouble.”

“What did you tell me when I started here? Stand back, close my eyes, open them, look for the odd man out.”

“And?”

“Double Happiness was the only trade he did that involved a totally foreign company.”

“Okay,” I said. “Find out who’s behind them. I’ll be in the office a bit later. Doctor’s appointment.”

As I walked to my car, I tried to make sense of the dead fish. Charles East’s speciality was terrorising people with his lawyers and his PR people. He attacked people’s money and their reputations, and he did so in public to maximise the impact. Nothing physical, no direct violence, so apart from Henry, did he have unusual problems? Or new advisers? Mr Greyhound’s spittle-mouthed antics outside the courthouse were a twist on East’s psychological tactics.

Hugo would be okay on the far side of the world with his nana, I told myself, but maybe I should move Fish next door long-term - and persuade Alice to move to her boyfriend’s house for a while.

My head ached with possibilities, so I put my mind to work on the tangible lunacy of the freeway traffic and drove into the city. I couldn’t find a car space near our house, or anywhere else on the nearby streets, so I rolled into an underground carpark a couple of blocks from home. I parked and walked towards the stairwell that led up to the street. The route took me past bay B9. It was empty, so I couldn’t miss a stain on the concrete floor that looked like an old oil spill. Nor could I stop the flooding recall of an image of my father sitting on his arse, with his back leaning against the front wheel of my parked Defender in that bay, his head hanging sideways and his brain matter splattered against my driver’s side door, his right hand holding the gun. That’s when I found the letter in his pocket about wanting to put a snake in my bed, metaphorically speaking, along with instructions about where to find the twin Browning 9mm he’d left for me and buried in my garden at home beside the frangipani tree.

I walked quickly up the stairs and out to the street. My phoned pinged. A text from Steele: Got someone. Where RU?

I replied: About to hit The Pig.

VIII

THE PICKLED PIG’S owner locked his horse-sized black eyes on me. Mick O’Hara was grinning inside his permanent five o’clock shadow, hands on his narrow hips, dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, button-down pockets sporting mother-of-pearl buttons. He wore grey woollen britches held up by braces and ankle-high riding boots in matte black. A grey homburg cocked at a slight angle topped him off.

“Looks like you need a drink,” he observed.

“And coffee,” I said, studying him back. “Let me guess. Gold miner, not cattle hand.”

“Correct,” he replied.

I like that subtlety about Mick, who’s a regular theme dresser and does great German lederhosen on Mondays. He headed to his glistening coffee machine, gave it a couple of pats and milked its hissing pipes. I looked around the Pig’s dozen worn booths. The old leather suitcases stacked on high shelves around the walls reminded me of a steam-era railway carriage. The occupants were just me and three lean young women in matching orange spray-on tans with bleached teeth sucking juice from straws in jam-jar glasses.

I opened my iPad and browsed the newspapers online. Mick plonked a latte on the table, a shot glass of bourbon by its side. I sipped the coffee and pondered the shot. Steele walked in.

He had a red welt on the bridge of his nose. I said nothing. He may have stumbled, or told a bad joke to another reveller somewhere last night. But I knew things were getting crazier between him and his wife, and she wasn’t the shy type.

“It’ll cost you,” Steele said.

“For what?”

“I can hook you up with a prison psych nurse who’s looking after Henry East, but he wants $500 for the privilege.”

“When?”

“This afternoon. You take the cash with you. I’ll text you time and place.”

“What do I get for five huge?”

“My man’s at the kid’s bedside most nights.”

“You coming with me?”

“Sorry: got other work. Someone’s wonderful son has just hurled his girlfriend off the 25th floor. Apparently he didn’t like the way she did the dishes.”

Steele took a few steps to leave and turned. He picked up my bourbon and threw the contents down his throat. “You want us to take the dog?”

“I think he’ll be okay next door for now.”

“Alice?”

“I have a plan.”

Steele winked and walked.

Mick plonked another shot of bourbon, a cup of iced water, and a plate of thick, hand-cut raisin toast, butter on the side, on my table. He insists that I eat breakfast. I applied a smear of butter.

“You’ll die with a fine heart one day,” he said before looking at my iPad and shaking his head. “You know, Gar, the human mind creates some sad things.”

“Such as?”

“Take that fancy electric mat you have there.”

“They’re called tablets.”

“Magic mats to me. You can fly on ‘em all over the world without leavin’ home and peep into people’s windows twenty-four-seven. It’s just that you miss the bloody point.”

“What point’s that?”

Mick shook his head again, slowly: “Human contact. Smellin’, touchin’, tastin’. You’re married to that fuckin’ thing.”

“It works for us.”  The truth was I got his point. I stood up and headed for the toilet.

When I pushed the door open, one of the young women with the orange-stained skin was standing over the bowl, panties mid-thigh, using one hand to hold her dress up. A stream of urine was arcing into the toilet. She turned sideways and smiled.

“Sorry,” I said. She was holding a substantial penis with a silver ring through its hole. I closed the door and walked back to my table.

A few minutes later, Mick came over. He pulled a business card from behind my ear like he used to pull magic coins from behind my kids’ ears, and out of their noses.

“The girls over there asked me to give this to you. If you need some R and R,” he said with a mighty grin. The card read: Seahorse Club. Saddle up for the most exciting rides in town.

He couldn’t know I’d found one of Charlotte’s old dresses in Hugo’s wardrobe last week when I was looking for a travel case. Hugo had black eyeliner pencils and jacaranda-coloured lipstick in a drawer. And a magazine article about a male super model who walked the world’s most famous catwalks in women’s clothes.

I drained my coffee, walked home, had a nap to make up for last night, showered and headed to The Citizen’s office wearing a suit and tie to tell the world, and myself, that I was a serious man.

In the taxi, I checked my wallet for the paper packet of cocaine  I was saving for Ron. I put the Seahorse Club card in beside it.

IX

MY PHONE pinged in the taxi as we closed in on The Citizen’s office building clustered with other towers along the harbour-front stretch of the central business district, or CBD as the occupiers called it to save a bit of breath and sound hip. A text from Steele read: “Fly Half Hotel, East Sydney. 4pm. He will be wearing a Sydney Swans cap.” I had over an hour to burn.

Our news bureau was perched about halfway up a sixty storey, white-marble-entranced monument called Gunnaroo Tower. It was smack bang in the middle of a postcard cliché, flanked by the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. If strutting was an Olympic sport, the occupants of Gunnaroo would win medals every time they crossed the lobby.

The tower wasn’t my choice of local HQ. Most of the new-media HQs were located in cheaper low-rise on the other side of the CBD in the inner urban grime around Central Railway Station and Surry Hills. But a German pension fund owned Gunnaroo and Jack Darling assured me we had got a good leasing deal through Ailsa Dusseldorf, a half-owner of The Citizen. The family of the Frankfurt-born industrial heiress made its fortune crafting engine cogs for luxury cars, before the Chinese and Indians worked out how to copy them at lower cost. She had partnered with a Californian named Zac Werner eighteen months ago to fund our start-up global media operation. Zac made his pile by creating computer security software.

Online-only media, like The Citizen, was cheap on technical infrastructure – there was no paper, no printing presses and no costly physical distribution. Journalists didn’t cost much either, not these days, but managing them was like herding monkeys and consumers didn’t want to pay for news, not much anyway. Advertising was thin too, so The Citizen ran at a loss. Some of our competitors called it a vanity project for the owners. I didn’t give a shit about that – ninety-nine percent of media workers are mirror gazers, the bigger, the better. I was gambling that the tax benefits to our founders, enabled by global money shuffling by smart accountants - legitimate, of course - would keep Dusseldorf and Werner pouring money into the hopper for a while yet. My mortgage repayments depended on it, Alice was in art school, and Hugo in high school. Moreover, job offers were thin on the ground for a man with my reputation.

Claire was sitting at her desk, one of four butted together in our mostly open-plan space, talking on the phone. There was one desk for another reporter we were yet to hire. The other two were for our subscription-come-advertising-sales person, and the office administrator who worked two days a week. Neither of them were in. As the bureau chief, I got a glass-walled private office with a harbour view through a window the size of a modest wardrobe.

I glanced at a TV screen fixed to a wall in the main room. It was turned to a twenty-four-hour news channel where half a dozen journalists and politicians were spread along a desk in a studio, clucking at each other like over-coiffed roosters and lip-sticked hens.

Claire brushed the liquorice strands of her Cleopatra haircut away from a milk-coloured cheek. I glimpsed a purple mark on her throat next to her white shirt collar.  She always wore long sleeves and trousers and I’d begun to wonder why.

“Tell me about Double Happiness,” I said.

“It’s a Shanghai stock exchange listed company that made a takeover bid for an Australian mining company named Austar Gold. Henry made about $25,000 by buying Austar shares before the bid was announced and selling them afterwards when the price almost doubled.”

“And?”

“Double Happiness is 30 per cent owned by a group of Hong Kong investors, but none of them own more than 5 per cent. Another 20 per cent is owned by a Chinese steel mill boss from Guangdong Province. The biggest shareholder is a London-based firm named Cavalcade Investment Group with 38 per cent. Rats and mice own the rest out of Singapore and South-East Asia.”

“So,” I said, “pursuing the odd-man-out idea, why would one Western investor be sitting among all those Chinese?”

Claire tapped her keyboard. I pulled a chair next to hers and we looked at her screen.

The Cavalcade Investment Group is a privately owned, UK-based asset management and financial services company. We work with individuals and financial institutions to invest internationally in growth industries including banking, telecommunications, property development and travel.

Cavalcade is headquartered in London, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai and Dubai.

“Let me see that logo,” I said.

Claire zoomed in. The Cavalcade logo on the company’s home page was the shape of a heraldic shield.

“Very Game of Thrones,” she concluded. “House of Lannister, don’t you think?”

I had to agree. “Memory test,” I said. “Mine.”

Claire followed me into my office. I sat at my desk and opened the photos file on my laptop. I clicked on a picture of Henry East swinging a polo mallet atop a pony. Hooray Henry was wearing a black peaked cap, cream jodhpurs, and a short-sleeved black shirt with the collar turned up. I magnified the left breast of Henry’s shirt, focussing on the place where the sponsors put their mark, and there sat the Cavalcade shield logo, slightly distorted in the folds of the cloth, but there nonetheless. The photo caption said Henry was playing at the Ascot Park Polo Club in Surrey outside London.

“Find out who Cavalcade’s key people are,” I said, “and any other links between them and the Easts.”

“Henry East,” said Claire. “Do you think maybe someone was trying to extort money from him?”

“Why extortion?”

“He knew how to play the financial markets, didn’t he? Maybe someone in the prison wanted him to do the same for them - to make him their puppet - and so he cut himself to get away.”

“That’s possible. Maybe they wanted to terrorise some cash out his father too. But let’s just probe Cavalcade for now. I have a meeting with a man in a hat.”

“An interesting hat?”

“I hope so.”

Claire’s mobile phone rang as I passed her desk on the way to the main door. Her husband’s name was on the screen. She stroked her throat and let it ring out.

X

THE MAN in the hat was late.

So I perched on a stool at the front bar of the rundown Fly Half Hotel. Happy Hour ran from 4-6pm and building workers in fluoro vests rubbed shoulders with office workers. I recognised the solo types in suits who drift around the CBD hoping that if they change pubs every drink or two and keep their neckties done up, their dependency will stay secret.

“What are you having, love?” said the barmaid, whose appearance was worthy of a long look. She was in her late twenties, I guessed, and handsome with a red crew-cut. She had cat-like, green eyes and what appeared to be black-painted champagne corks stuffed in her drooping ear lobes. That was the least interesting part of her. Her nipples stood proud from her chest, which looked more hard muscle than soft breast, over which she was wearing a tight white singlet with the words ‘wife beater’ stencilled on it in black.

I ordered a Happy Hour beer which tasted like cooking oil and soda water. I was thinking about how you get what you pay for when the Swans cap arrived on the head of a large man. He wore a red-and-white-checked shirt tucked into blue jeans with a crease ironed down the middle of each leg. I figured he lived with his mum, or he had done so for too long. He had white running shoes on his feet: new ones. I waved and he came over. His face was so freshly shaven there was soap and whiskers stuck to the rims of his ears. This man was dressed for business.

“Gar Hart,” I said, extending my hand. His hand was big enough to hold a man’s head comfortably, which I concluded was an asset for a psych nurse in a prison hospital.

“Bruce Tyson,” he said. “Tom says you’re okay - most days.”

I let him have that one without a fight. He dug his fingers into a bowl of free Happy Hour crisps that was sitting on the bar and ordered a craft beer not on the Happy Hour menu. The barmaid winked at him as she pulled the beer, flexing biceps that were magnificent, being tattooed with red and blue veins that made it look like her skin had been stripped away for anatomy study.

“Drink here often?” I said to Tyson.

“My local.”

That was good information. I knew where to find him if he worked out. I pointed at a table next to a wall and we sat down.

“Mind if I take notes?” I pulled a pad and pen from my jacket pocket.

“Tom said you’d pay.”

I gave Tyson the envelope with the cash. He didn’t count it. He stood up and stuffed the envelope into the back of his jeans. That was weird because he had two perfectly good back pockets, though this was a rough part of the city at night, and I guessed it would be late by the time he headed home, or somewhere else. If I was a mugger, I wouldn’t look inside Tyson’s bum crack either.

“So you are looking after Henry East at Silverwater?” I said.

“He’s a fucking mess. Not much looking after I can do.”

“Badly cut?”

“His head. Inside his head.”

“Tom says Henry might have been attacked, not self-inflicted. Is that true?”

“That’s what I’m hearing. But the prison plods are going for the suicide line.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. Suits someone up top.”

“What does Henry say?”

“Fuck all. He won’t talk.”

“Because of his mouth? The wounds. Can’t talk?”

“His lips are full of stitches, but he does all right in his sleep.”

“So what are you hearing?”

“From Henry? Gibberish. Goes on and on about Christ. Asking for help.”

“What’s the talk around Silverwater?”

“The kid’s cellmate did it.”

“Why would Henry’s cellmate want to cut him up?”

“No idea. You’re the journalist.”

“Who’s visiting him?”

“His sister and mother. Not many others,” Tyson sneered. “Great friends he’s got.”

“Not his father?”

“Not that I know of, but I’m mostly not there during the day. I’m doing four to midnight. Day off today.”

“Anything else catching your attention?”

“There’s a book he‘s got next to his bed. About a kid who turns into a cockroach. A fucking weird read.”

“Metamorphosis? Franz Kafka?”

“That sounds like it.”

“Do you know who gave it to him?”

“Naa. But there’s some words written inside the cover: Stay cool, buddy. I’m with you, Bart.

“Bart?”

“That’s it.”

I gave Tyson a $20 bill and he went to the bar for another round. I checked my notebook.

Tyson came back. “Carol likes your eyes,” he said, handing me a schooner, but no change.

“Is that a good thing?”

“She’s an eye reader: character analysis.”

“So can I have your mobile phone number then?”

“Early days,” he said. “Go through Tom. He said you won’t quote me. No prison sources or any of that crap either. I could lose my job.”

I gave Tyson my business card. It just had my mobile number, email, and the office address.

“Ed-gar Hart,” he said, studying my card. “Why don’t people call you Ed?”

I told him the truth. “Apparently I was born arse-about, so my father started calling me by the arse-end of my name and it stuck.”

As I walked home, I figured I knew who “Bart” was. But to be certain, I needed to check a file. That could wait until morning. I picked Fish up from our next door neighbour. Sue was a godsend. All that the regular doggy day-care cost me was a box of mid-priced chardonnay now and then, the occasional box of cigars, a not-too-long chat at the door, and filling an extra shopping list at the supermarket once in a while. This night, I agreed to pay her later with a marijuana joint to smoke on the occasion of her 73rd birthday in three weeks’ time.

I scanned the street for shifty strangers before putting the key in my front door. A girl holding a lead attached to a black cat dressed in a pink waistcoat counted as strange, but not shifty. The hallway was as lively as a morgue at night, and the wall-light failed when I flicked the switch. Fish charged fearlessly into the gloomy kitchen. I started to wonder if someone had been fiddling with the fuse box, but the kitchen lights worked. On the bench, there was a note from Alice. She was staying the night at her boyfriend Fred’s. I calculated that Hugo should be wandering around Dubai Airport on his stopover to London. I tried his phone but it went to voice mail.

I opened a beer and sat on a bench in the courtyard under the frangipani tree, enjoying the honey-salt scent of its flowers, and tossed around ideas about how to persuade Alice to move in with Fred without causing alarm. My ideas were unconvincing, whatever way I shaped them, so I took them to bed with a glass of red and turned them to mist.

XI

I TRACKED Hugo down the next morning from my taxi on the way to the office. He’d arrived at his grandparent’s home in Brighton without incident, or so he said, and answered every question with ‘good’.

“I have to go. Nanna’s waiting to take me to hospital.”

“What for?”

“To visit grandad.”

“Of course, mate. Sorry. Give him my love.” Hugo’s words had activated fast-moving chemistry that I wiped from my eyes, but I couldn’t wipe away my imagining of little Malcolm, hooked up to a morphine drip, his skin the colour of egg yolk. We’d known for months that the chemo for his liver cancer had failed and it was too late for a transplant because the tumours had spread. I’d dubbed it the Halliday Curse because of the melanoma that took his daughter, Charlotte, but I was keeping that piece of wit to myself.

I hung up on Hugo and swam gladly into the shallows of my frontal lobe. My first task this morning was to find the Bart who had given Henry East the copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis to read in prison. If he was a friend, Bart had a weird sense of humour, because the ending was not happy for the protagonist.

At my desk, I typed ‘Bartholomew Edmund Hills’ into the search bar for the East files I kept on my laptop. His name was mentioned several times in the court transcripts. He was a childhood friend of Henry’s who provided the court with a written testimonial about Henry’s fight against gambling addiction and teenage-onset depression. The testimonial was legal haute cuisine: a delicate carpaccio of logic lightly peppered with pathos. No doubt written by lawyers, and Hills was one of them.

When I phoned Hills’ firm, Greenhill Partners, the receptionist put me through to a chirpy young man. I guess he sniffed a potential client.

“Oh, you’re that Hart,” he sneered when I revealed I was a journalist, and that I wanted to talk about Henry East.

“I’m hearing that someone attacked your friend - maybe his cellmate - that it wasn’t a suicide attempt.”

“You know nothing, Mr Hart.”

“What is there to know?”

Hills went silent.

“I think he’s in danger,” I said.

Hills hung up, but I had him thinking, seed planted. My next attempt at contact might be more fruitful.

Claire was standing in my open doorway, listening.

“That’s an interesting twist,” she said. “If Henry wasn’t a self-harmer, what would drive his cellmate to do it?”

“A motive.”

Claire smiled. I felt mean.

“Our friends at Cavalcade,” she said, stepping into my office. “I found a photo of their co-founder and chairman, a Mr John K. Baker.”

She grinned as she put the large photo on my desk. When I looked at the picture, I saw why. Baker had wavy, shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, set off with a goatee beard and long moustache with upward curls at either end. The business-suited musketeer, whom I guessed was aged in his fifties, was standing between a smiling Henry East wearing his polo kit, and Charles East sporting a brass-buttoned navy blazer with a polka-dot cravat tucked into his white shirt. What was it about the Easts sandwiching powerful people? And a fucking cravat?

“I found this too,” she said, handing me a printed copy of a newspaper story from The London Business Examiner. It was dated more than five years ago.

Cavalcade Founder Lost at Sea

Jean-Paul Marais, 52, the co-founder of the global private equity pioneer, Cavalcade Investment Group, is lost at sea, presumed dead.

He fell from the company’s ocean yacht, Electra, during a leg of the MarcoP Classic race between Newport, Rhode Island in the US and Portsmouth, UK.

Mr Marais disappeared during the night in calm weather about 200 nautical miles west of Portsmouth. The crew on board included Cavalcade’s other co-founder, John K. Baker.

Cavalcade recently denied reports it is under financial stress.”

“Talk to the London office and copy Jack in Shanghai,” I said. “See what they know about Baker and Cavalcade.”

Claire left my office. I phoned Alice and arranged to meet her at a nearby pub. I was still tossing up whether to mention the mutilated fish, but I had become sure of one thing: I didn’t want her staying at home in Darlinghurst until I had solved the mystery of the speckled carp.

“DAD,” ALICE SAID, LOOKING me in the eye across a table at the Ship Inn Hotel opposite Circular Quay, gripping a beer glass with both her hands. “I want to tell you something.”

“Fire away.” I feared she was pregnant.

“I want to move out and live with Fred. His parents have gone overseas for a year and we can have their house.”

I looked down at my beer to hide my face.

“I trust your judgement,” I said, swirling the dregs. “I like Fred. I think it’s a good idea. When?”

“As soon as we like.”

“I’ll drive your stuff over when you’re ready.”

Alice seemed offended that I didn’t put up more of a fight, but she was already spending most nights of the week at Fred’s. I just hoped she wasn’t already being tracked by the fish butchers. I told myself not to be paranoid as she left the bar. I used my phone to look up Bart Hills on the Greenhill Partners’ website. I found his portrait photo and made a screenshot. It was odd, I thought as I studied his features; I couldn’t recall seeing his face in the courtroom during Henry’s trial.

Later, back at the office, as the sun was approaching the horizon, I approached Claire, who was at her desk tapping on her keyboard. I invited her for a drink at the recently opened Babel Bar. I figured I would be less conspicuous with a partner. She agreed to meet me after she’d filed a story to the London office.

After walking a few blocks from Gunnaroo, I ascended white marble steps towards a towering sandstone building fronted by a Gothic arch over glass doors big enough to swallow a bus. The Babel Bar was housed inside a heritage-listed cathedral owned by a multi-national corporation called the Catholic Church. With their old customers dying and new recruits rarer than bleu steaks, the local cardinal and his advisers had come up with an inspired money spinner: leasing church buildings to private enterprise. As I stepped under the arch into the roaring booze hall, I wondered how much of the cash being poured into the place each night ended up in the coffers of the lawyers and PR people the church had hired to shade it from the light of a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse.

God should have been impressed by the cheerful assembly inside his old digs, though he would have found it hard to get a word in, or find a seat. I recognised many of the preening stockbrokers and lawyers, political hacks, investment bankers and sports stars, journalists, PR flunkies and other hangers on paying $20 for drinks worth $2. But most of them were paying with corporate credit cards, passing the cost on to their shareholders, taxpayers or clients, so this mob showed no sign of pain as Babel’s owners milked them.

I leaned against the long island bar in the middle of the room, browsing for my prey, sipping slowly on a tall glass of obscure Belgian beer. I was grateful when Claire arrived and lifted my tone. I bought her a glass of wine.

“On the house,” I said, handing her the glass before putting the drink receipt in my wallet so I could charge it later against The Citizen’s research budget. “I’m looking for this guy.”

I showed her the screenshot of Hills on my phone. It was a long-odds gamble coming here, but I was thirsty and figured we might kill two birds with one stone.

“I’ll take a stroll,” said Claire.

I was an owl on a branch. She was a hawk on the wing. I started to think we might make a team. She returned a few minutes later.

“Up there,” she said, pointing at a babbling group of men and women on the mezzanine floor above. They were standing against a giant mural of Adam and Eve sans fig leaves. Eve was wet-nursing a golden baby with a strangely adult head. Adam had the serpent knotted around his neck like a business tie. What looked, from my distance, like a stack of French fries, encrusted with rubies and diamonds, was sitting on Adam’s shoulder.

I arrived on the mezzanine level and leaned against a wall to study my photo. Bart Hills, in the flesh, was tall and athletic, with a lightly freckled face and plenty of straw-coloured hair. He could have been Henry East’s fair-skinned doppelganger. I tucked my phone in my jacket and stepped a few metres into the vocal range of my man.

“Bart Hills?” I asked.

Hills examined me quickly from feet to forehead and gave me that should-I-know-you look that important people learn at school.

“Gar Hart,” I said, extending my hand. “We spoke earlier on the phone.”

Hills ignored my paw. He was holding a glass of white wine by its lower stem. He ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair and nodded for me to follow him to an empty spot beside a wall.

“Jesus,” he said. “I told you. I have nothing to say. Leave me alone. Okay?”

“I don’t want to quote you. We’re off the record. But if someone has hurt your friend, it does him no good to hide it.”

“The police are handling it.”

“Do you trust the police? They’re saying it was a suicide attempt, but that’s not what I’m hearing.”

Hills’s face drained of colour. “Fuck off,” he hissed, glancing over my shoulder.

I felt a gentle tap on my arm and turned.

Sandy Wallace had the same frizzy Afro hair, bee-stung lips, honey-coloured skin, and athletic build that had dazzled both sexes at high school. She was a fine fit for Babel in her three-piece business suit and dagger heels. A thick-knotted necktie, patterned with silver fishhooks on blue water, hung loose around the unbuttoned neck of her steep-collared, white shirt, its tongue tucked into her waistcoat.

Hills used the interruption to put his drink on a table and pluck an un-ringing phone from his jacket pocket. He held it against an ear and exited Babel.

“Sorry,” said Sandy, placing her hand on my arm. “Was that important?”

“Just saying hello to someone.”

“Do you know Bart Hills?” she said.

“Not really. Seems you do, though.” She was standing so close I could smell she’d been drinking for a while.

“Our firm does a bit of work with his.”

Her brown eyes gleamed. She took hold of my free hand. “It’s been too long.” Her touch reminded me of Saturday nights, the rush of riding with her drunk and groping in the boot of an overcrowded car to a party with even madder teenagers at the wheel.

Sandy resumed course. “Sorry, Gar, I have big ears. I heard you asking Hills about Henry East. That poor boy. What’s your angle?”

I tugged my hand away from hers and pretended to zip my lips, as in no comment, then tried not to blink at my clumsy Freudian slip. There was no way I wanted to divulge Steele’s unpublished info about Henry mutilating his mouth, as opposed to simply cutting his wrists.

I hadn’t seen Sandy for several years, but I had no doubt she remained a serial leaker who banked favours with journalists by giving them anonymous tips about business deals, as well as gossip she picked up about the private lives of the titans of industry. I didn’t want her spilling our lines of inquiry on the Easts to our media competitors. Claire arrived at my side, by chance or intuition, and helped me duck Sandy’s question. I introduced them.

“Let’s find a seat,” said Sandy, hooking her arm around mine, leading us to a big sofa against a wall near the Adam and Eve mural. I manoeuvred Claire in between us as we sat. Sandy flagged a waiter and focussed her attention on acquiring a bottle of champagne, so I glanced at Claire and placed an index finger over my lips for a moment. Sandy could be a useful source of information, but only if carefully managed.

While we waited for the champagne, Claire answered Sandy’s questions. I discovered Claire’s parents were divorced, that she had a younger sister with autism, and she and Carl were still on their learner plates as a married couple.

Claire reversed the tables as the waiter filled three flutes with Dom Perignon. Sandy revealed she and I had gone to the same university, and after graduation, she had worked as a journalist in the US, Europe and Asia. To the crunching sound of the waiter tucking the bottle into an ice bucket on the table in front of us, Sandy talked as modestly as she could about her stint as press secretary to an Australian Treasurer.

Claire dragged us all into the moment: “So what are you doing now?”

“Investment banking.”

“You must be a wizard on the share markets then.”

“It’s more algorithms than magic.”

“Can you explain something to me?”

“If I like the question.”

“What was Henry East’s big mistake?”

Sandy’s response was PR text book. “Breaking the law.”

Claire furrowed her brow, apparently troubled. “How could he have got away with it?”

“Are you trying to trap me?”

“Just curious.”

“Well, he traded in his own name and he did it onshore. A rookie’s error.” Sandy’s eyes showed more than a hint of growing irritation.

“So how would a pro do it?”

“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

Claire smiled. It was a nice smile, at least from my point of view.

“Claire, please don’t think I’m rude, but could I have a private word with Gar?”

“Of course.” She took her glass and walked to the mezzanine railing to look down on the main room.

Sandy shuffled along until we were thigh-to-thigh and whispered in my ear, “She’s a saucy little thing.”

“She’s married,” I said.

“So?” said Sandy, raising her eyebrows at me.

I sipped champagne and thought about Sandy, the taste of her. She seemed to sense she’d flicked my switch. We looked into each other’s eyes; Sandy was shuffling her large pack of characters behind hers.

“Gar,” she said, without warmth or humour, “be careful with Charles East. His son made a mistake. That’s it. Don’t forget what happened the last time you went after the old guy.”

“Thank you for your concern.”

I tried not to show it, but she had pierced me with a tiny but un-ignorable splinter.

“Anyway,” she said, reverting to kind-and-sensitive-Sandy, patting my hand. “Do you still have that delightful terrace in Darlinghurst?”

“Yes.”

“And what about that place in the Blue Mountains? That old farm?”

“That too.”

“You must take me back there sometime.”

“Sure.”

“And your children? How old are they now?”

“Alice is twenty. Hugo is sixteen. And you?”

She smiled and waved her ring-less fingers at me. If she had a ring, it was probably in her pocket. Her phone pinged; she looked at the screen.

“Must go. Lovely seeing you again, Gar.”

Sandy kissed me on the cheek, stood and walked over to Claire. They exchanged business cards and shook hands. Sandy walked down the curling staircase towards the main bar, chatting on her phone, hurling a hand about with fury in her eyes. It looked like one of her business deals had gone sour.

Claire returned and sat beside me. “A bit of history there?”

“Ancient,” I said.

Claire topped our flutes from the waiting bottle. “It’s on Dankebank,” she said, showing me Sandy’s business card. Her job title was Vice President – Strategy – Asia-Pacific. I knew a little of Dankebank; it was a giant German-based investment bank and pension fund manager.

“She has an unusual handshake,” said Claire.

“How so?”

“She stroked her fingers on the inside of my wrist.”

“She must like you.”

Claire smiled that great smile again. I wanted to bottle it. I wondered if I should tell her that I had lived with Sandy before I married Charlotte, and that a few weeks after we moved into a flat, Sandy started staying out all night with other men - and women. She thought it was a perfectly acceptable lifestyle; after all, she came home eventually. When I objected, she said I could take it or leave it. I tried it for a couple of weeks before I left it. The last twenty minutes with Sandy in Babel reminded me I’d never properly unpacked after leaving.

Claire’s phone beeped.

“Carl’s getting cross,” she said. “We’re having dinner with some of his firm’s clients. I have to pretend I care about shopping malls. Oh, and the Catholic Church; his firm’s doing their PR for the Royal Commission. Do you want to come?”

“Thanks, but I’m already booked.” I wasn’t, and despite the delicious prospect of knocking a flaming Sambuca over a bishop’s cassock, I didn’t intend to become another tick on Carl Cousins’ journalist scorecard so he could fatten his next invoice to his clients.

“Have a good night,” she said.

She reminded me of someone who was about to fall backwards without confidence that anyone would catch her. I nearly called her back to say I’d come, but the police whistle on my phone trilled, startling some nearby drinkers, a couple of whom bolted for the toilets. I chuckled at the thought that Hugo’s ringtone was sending some decent drugs down the Babel’s drain, but it wasn’t him calling.

“Gar, it’s Bruce Tyson here, the psych nurse. I might have something for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Not over the phone. Can we meet in the morning?”

“Why not now?”

“I’m trying to shake a tail.”

“Seriously?”

“Dance lessons, mate!”

“You know the Pickled Pig in Darlinghurst?” I said.

“I can find it.”

“See you there at 8am.”

When Tyson hung up, I realised I still didn’t have his phone number. His call showed on my handset register as No caller ID.

He didn’t have the body-shape for boogying. Whatever he was up to, I hoped he’d survive the night.

XII

“YOU LEAD a charmed life,” the girl called behind her. She leaned upon a stainless steel railing atop a glass-walled balcony overlooking Bondi Beach, drawing air through her nostrils, searching for salt. But the line of cocaine she had just consumed with her new-found friend had numbed her sense of smell. Her sense of light, however, had sharpened. Sunset had come and gone, but the white caps of breaking waves were visible in the dark. She liked nights, the cool of them - the shadows. She closed her eyes; the cracking surf reminded her of artillery fire. It excited her.

Bart Hills opened his fridge and extracted another bottle of Vintage Krug champagne. This girl was worth it. He could have sworn she was an English actress he had seen on the Game of Thrones TV series, the blond mother of dragons, when she had tapped on the window of his Uber outside the Babel bar and asked the driver if he was in fact her ride. When she said her destination was Bondi, and smiled at him in his back seat, Hills didn’t hesitate to offer to share his car. During the drive, the girl had tried to phone her flatmate, telling Hills she had lost her house key, but the friend did not answer. “Would you like to come to my place while you wait for your friend to call you?” Hills had asked.

Inside his apartment, mid-way through their first bottle of Krug, after she broke out a packet of what turned out to be A-grade cocaine, well, Hills figured his stars were aligning. He wanted to forget about that sneaky bitch, Sandy Wallace, and that sleazy journalist, Gar Hart. And most of all, he wanted to forget about the breaking mind of his friend, Henry East. Good drugs and fine alcohol, and the chance company of a beautiful stranger who knew nothing about him, and expected nothing of him but a good time – yes, that would do the trick.

Hills filled two flutes and joined the best piece of luck he’d had all day on the balcony.

“You haven’t told me your name,” he said, handing her a glass.

She reached up and put a hand around his neck, drawing his ear towards her mouth.  “I ... am the white witch,” she whispered with warm breath.

Her lips brushed his ear. Hills stiffened inside his trousers.

The girl stroked his cheek and turned his face gently towards hers. She put her lips upon his and opened her mouth, letting his searching tongue inside her, using her eyes to search the insides of the apartment for more clues about his home life. The only items that held her interest were two things she’d already noticed on the coffee table: an antique-looking book titled The Occult World, and a Ouija board, the items which had inspired her hastily constructed line about the white witch.

“Is that a wand?” she said, smiling, letting her hand fall upon his hardness. He was a proper stallion, this one, the girl thought. What a shame.

The apartment’s entrance door opened and a young man, shorter and stumpier than Hills, and wearing a suit and tie, stepped inside.

“Shi ... ,” she hissed.

“I beg your pardon?” said Hills.

“Sorry. I think my phone is ringing.” She stepped from the balcony into the sitting room and retrieved it from her handbag on the sofa. Looking at her screen, she said, “My flatmate is having a relationship breakdown. I need to go. But can we have dinner?”

“When?” said Hills.

“Tomorrow night. By candlelight.”

“Where?”

“Here. Alone.”

XIII

I FOUND Bruce Tyson waiting for me inside a booth at the Pig, feeding his alleged dancer’s body with bacon and fried eggs, sausages, mushrooms, fried tomatoes and toast coated with finger-thick butter. I was pleased that he’d lived through the night, but breakfast looked a fifty-fifty bet.

“So what’s your oil?” I said, sitting opposite Tyson, waving my hand at Mick for a latte.

“There was a bloke visiting Henry East yesterday. Tall feller, Henry’s age. Didn’t hear his name.”

“Freckled? Sun-bleached hair?”

“Sounds about right.”

It had to be Bart Hills.

“Hear what they talked about?”

Tyson dabbed a finger on some egg yolk that had escaped from his lower lip and was dripping down his chin. He eyed it, licked it off. “What’s it worth?”

“You’re costing me a fortune, mate.”

“Same as last time?”

“Let me hear it first.”

“I heard your name mentioned. And they talked about some bloke called Jeff, or Zeff. I’m pretty sure it was Zeff.”

“And?”

“They’re shitting themselves about this Zeff.”

“Okay. Get Henry to talk to me and I’ll double your salary.”

“Fat chance, but I’ll try. By the way, I’d watch your back. It’s the way that blond kid was talking about you today.”

“How?”

“This Zeff is on to you.”

“Okay, what else have you got?”

Tyson reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a scrap of paper. He handed it to me. It contained a mobile phone number. “It’s mine”

I keyed it into the contact list on my phone. Tyson mopped up the scraps on his plate with toast and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. The plate looked like it had just stepped out of the dishwasher.

“I know what you are thinking,” said Tyson, who drained his coffee.

“What’s that?”

He winked and tapped the plate. “That I’m the sort of guy who doesn’t like to leave a trail of evidence”

I started to like him. As he walked away, I wondered:  was Zeff  Mr Greyhound? Did he deliver the dead fish to our home? How might he escalate, now he knows that I’ve been chasing Bart Hills?

THAT EVENING, I PICKED up takeaway sushi on my way home from The Citizen and collected Fish from next door. We shared the food and watched TV in the lounge room. On our way up to bed, I stopped at Alice’s bedroom and peered inside. There was a pencil sketch in a frame hanging on the wall behind her bed. The single red poppy had delicate folds of petals, upon which were intricately-drawn, rainbow-coloured ladybirds having a tea party. It was drawn by my father. This was the man who walked out on my mother when I was Alice’s age and phoned me at work to say I should go home because Mum needed me. I walked into the house and found her drunk to vomiting, slumped against a hallway wall, hysterical, smeared in her own shit, spilled pills by her side. I called an ambulance and cleaned her up. Bert had packed his bags that afternoon and moved in with 30-year-old twin sisters. House sharing, he called it. “You’ve only got one life,” he explained to me later over the phone, “and I’ve wasted enough of it.”

I looked into Hugo’s room and studied his three door bolts. My resistance was broken. I went back downstairs to my office.

I used some specialist software provided to me by the IT expert who set up The Citizen’s network at Gunnaroo Tower to browse the websites that had been visited from our home internet in the last few days. It had to be Hugo’s trail to a porn video showing simultaneous penetration of a tiny, pubescent girl by three heavy men with eastern European accents. What the hell did Hugo make of that? What was it with Hugo and his dead mother’s dress and the eye make-up? What was I going to do about it? Anything? I closed my eyelids and massaged my eyeballs. Inside that dark space, I saw Charlotte, like a mime artist behind a glass wall, pleading with me, but I couldn’t understand her sign language. I just felt her frustration.

I pulled from my wallet the packet with Steele’s cocaine inside, prepared it and sniffed the lot. I went to the kitchen, poured a large glass of red wine and sat beside the frangipani in the garden. It had been Charlotte’s favourite tree when in flower. A few sips in, the police whistle trilled. It was a call from the Tangleton Hotel on the southern fringe of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.

“Garsy, it’s Hughie Jones here, mate.”

“Good to hear from you, Hughie. What’s up?”

“You haven’t forgotten, have you? The council officer is coming tomorrow to inspect the factory site at the Hill. We’re booked for 2pm.”

“Of course not,” I lied.

My Moon Hill neighbour, Hughie, and I were seeking a permit from the local council to build a factory shed for our joint venture business: Black Snake Organic Bush Foods. It was my plan to escape from journalism. A long shot, I knew. Hughie and I had already planted Bunya Nut and Quandong fruit tree saplings on the sunny slopes to produce native herbal flavouring for our meat range. Our first recipe for wild suckling pig and yabby sausages, spiced with native lemon myrtle, had tested well with customers in a city restaurant. We had the little freshwater crayfish growing in our dams, and the baby pigs were roaming in the forest, free for the picking. All we needed was the council OK to build our food processing shed so we could hit commercial scale for the gourmet market.

I agreed to meet Hughie and the man from the Canterwell Shire Council tomorrow at mid-afternoon as planned.

Fish and I went to bed. The doorbell woke us. It was just after 12am. Mr Browning was in my bedside dresser. I clipped the magazine into the handgrip, flipped the safety catch off and tip-toed downstairs dressed in my shorts. Fish broke the peace by yapping at the door. I kept the lights off and looked through the security lens at a lone figure standing on the porch.

XIV

SANDY WALLACE’S meerkat eyes peered back at me through the security lens.

She said nothing when I opened the door. The air was damp and her hair and skin were glistening from a rain shower. Her clingy, sleeveless black cocktail dress was slit from the collar to just above her navel, revealing a ribbon of flesh. She carried a pair of black dagger-heels in one hand and a glittering clutch bag in the other.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I’m locked out.”

She looked at the gun in my hand.

“Since when have you had one of those?”

“Family heirloom.”

“Alice and Hugo at home?”

“Why?”

“Can I come in? I’m wet.”

Fish knew what was happening before I did. He disappeared into my office.

I closed the front door. When I turned around, Sandy put her damp palm on my naked stomach in the shadowy hallway. Her hand slid down and she led me upstairs like she was tugging a bull gently by a nose ring.

I LAY SOFT AND SPENT inside her, keeping my weight on my elbows and knees.

“Stay still,” she whispered. “Dead still, or I’ll stop.”

I guessed right about what was coming. She began squeezing me from her inside, rolling her vaginal muscles in waves upon the quickly expanding length of me. Neither of us moved our outer bodies; I fought the urge to thrust and buck. With her fingers she fondled my scrotum, pressing my hardness inside her to the hilt, where she held me tight and rolled her waves over me, and in time she milked me.

I WOKE TO SUNLIGHT through the dormer window, rolled to face the inside of the bed, and was disappointed for a moment. I licked the tip of a middle finger and mopped crumbs of cocaine off a small china plate on my bedside table. All that was left of Sandy was a trace of salt-caramel scent and a smear of cherry-coloured lipstick on my pillow. The bitter taste on my finger helped get me out of bed. Sandy had left her business card on the table, next to my phone and Mr Browning.

Fish followed me about as I packed clothes for the drive to Moon Hill to meet the council inspector and Hughie.

I made two phone calls while I had tea and toast in the kitchen. Alice and Fred were flying to Melbourne for the weekend. Hugo had finished his first day at school in Brighton; he was going to bed when I called. I told him to beware of who he talked to on the internet, to be careful what he looked at, and reminded him that everywhere you go, you leave a digital trail. If Hugo understood what I was getting at, he didn’t let on. He passed the phone to his nana and after talking with her I began mentally preparing for an earlier visit to England than I had anticipated only days ago. Malcolm’s final deadline was approaching fast.

I walked to the local supermarket, tugging a shopping bag on little wheels that Alice bought me for Father’s Day, and purchased fresh fish, fruit and vegetables for my trip to the Hill. I had plenty of beer and wine at home that I could plunder. It was a Friday so I would spend the weekend there. Fish had never liked the bush after he lost his leg in that trap, so I delivered him next door to Sue, along with a box of Cuban cigars I’d been saving since my last overseas trip.

Claire was at her desk when I arrived at The Citizen’s office. She cocked a green eye and put a long index finger to her chin. “Can I ask where you’re off to?”

I was wearing a black tee-shirt and jeans and hiking boots.

“Bush business: just overnight, maybe two.”

“Branch office, is it?”

“I do have a treehouse, as a matter of fact.”

“You contactable?”

“Sure. Phone and email, but reception’s patchy. The atmosphere can be strange.”

“Sounds like another planet.”

“Feels like it at times.”

I packed some files on the East case in my briefcase and downloaded some related documents onto my laptop, then checked my emails at my desk. Jack had copied me and Claire a new press clipping from the latest English edition of The Shanghai Business Journal:

Former Australian Ambassador to China, Ms Kathy Throsby, has joined the Shanghai office of the Trust8 investment advisory firm, the company’s chairman, Mr Charles East, announced today.

Trust8 provides advice to overseas companies seeking to invest in China. The firm’s clients include some of the world’s largest pension funds, as well as individual investors.

Claire appeared in my doorway, excited, waving a sheet of paper.

“You need to see this,” she said, handing me the document. It was a copy of Trust8’s client list. “Cavalcade isn’t just sponsoring Henry’s polo ponies. They have East working for them in China. And there’s another client of East’s that might interest you.”

I scanned the list. It was the name DankeBank, Sandy Wallace’s DankeBank, made my eyes open wide.  I put my phone on open speaker, so Claire could hear, and hand-signalled her to stay a silent witness. I pulled Sandy’s card from my wallet and dialled her private line.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you are a client of Charles East?”

“What?”

“DankeBank. You are one of East’s clients in China.”

“You are paranoid, Gar. You need to take a cold shower. I’ve got nothing to do with the bank’s China business. I didn’t even know the bank was employing him, if that’s even a fact. For god’s sake, we have over a hundred offices worldwide and five thousand staff. I don’t keep track of every movement.”

“You know Bart Hills,” I said, “and he’s Henry East’s best buddy. Hills shit himself when he saw you at Babel last night.”

“Gar, watch your imagination. I met Hills once through work. I don’t know the Easts beyond chatting at a charity ball; you know what happens when you leave the ground. You’re sounding mentally unhinged. I’ve got to go. Call me when you want to be sensible.” She hung up.

Claire looked baffled.

“Stay away from her,” I said.

I collected my briefcase and laptop and left the building.

I’ve always thought Sylvia Plath nailed electrocution of the brain in her poem ‘The Hanging Man’. I can only ever recall the first couple of lines: By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

I don’t remember agreeing to my electroconvulsive therapy. I refused to see Sandy when I was in the psychiatric unit. The LSD we took together triggered my psychosis, so the doctors speculated. It was more than twenty years ago. My BC period: Before Charlotte.

As I got behind the wheel of the Land Rover to drive to Moon Hill, a sick-making thought flashed inside my skull like one of Plath’s blue volts. Had Sandy been poking around at home last night inside my office while I, the dopey bull, slumbered?

XV

IT WAS late-morning when I hit the Hume Highway, heading south-west under clear sky towards the Blue Mountains. Claire phoned me and I put her on speaker.

“I did those background checks on Henry East and Bart Hills that you asked for,” she said.

“Impressions?”

“Henry’s parents must be very cold.”

“Why?”

“They sent him to boarding school, all through junior and high.”

“It’s pretty standard in their world.”

“When you live a stone’s throw across the street from your school?”

“You have a problem with boarding schools?”

“I went to one for a while, when my parents split.”

“Didn’t like it?”

“Better than home at the time.”

I left the ball in her court. She hit it. “I had a friend at boarding school. She could see her home behind the sports field. Her parents only took her out on school holidays, when they had no other choice. It broke her heart.”

“What’s she like now?”

Claire paused, then served with confidence.

“A mother hen: happily married, five children.”

“I went to boarding school,” I said. “I was seven and eight years old. I got to sleep with a nun.”

“Lucky you; at least it wasn’t a priest. Oh, one other thing. There was a fire at Redleaf Pool next to Tamerlane when Henry was a teenager. Vandals set fire to the boardwalk with petrol. The local paper reported Henry and Bart tried to put it out with another boy. One of them burnt his hand. There were suspicions they’d actually started it. Nothing proved, but Charles East paid for the pool repairs.”

“Okay. Let’s reconvene on Monday.”

About an hour later, I rolled off the bitumen onto a pale grit track inside a tall forest and wound down the windows. Overnight rain had drawn out the sharp scent of eucalyptus leaves and earthy aroma of humus-rich soil. The track narrowed and sliced into the midriff of a mountain, sending me into a concertina of relentless hairpin bends. A feral goat scurried up a slope, sending stones tumbling, forcing me to swerve to the edge of the track where I eyeballed a sheer rock-face drop of a few hundred metres to the valley floor. On the cliffs above, rivers of stones were frozen between the trees. Somehow it all held together, as it had done for thousands of years, as I hoped it would for a few seconds more while I passed by.

Several thousand seconds later, I opened the wire-mesh gate to Moon Hill and drove the dirt road to my camp, stopping near a timber deck under the branches of a giant pine.

I stepped out of the car and looked into a massive canyon, its sides carpeted by eucalypt forests, its middle split by a tannin-brown river. Mountains either side of the canyon stretched the entire width of the horizon. The place I called Moon Hill was cleared of forest a century ago, planted with pasture for raising sheep, then abandoned. The old bush was fighting back which was fine by me. I just wanted a patch to play in.

I carried my food bags from the car up a handful of steps onto the deck and looked up at the cabin of my treehouse in the lower branches. The drop-down ladder that tucks into the floor of the sleeping cabin was secured. I turned around to face the ground level cabin which functioned as a kitchen-living room, with a fridge, a stove, and a sink fed by a rainwater tank. It also housed a wooden dining table and chairs, an armchair, and a wood-burning heater for the freezing winters. The door was intact.

There was no sign of Hughie Jones and the council man for our meeting. I carried my food bags over to the kitchen cabin. On inspection, a piece of folded brown paper was tucked under the door. Hughie Jones had left me a yarn written in pencil on a gravy-stained pie bag: Accident! Councillor Sims did his fetlock. I’ve took him to Canterwell Hospital. My fault. I shouted him early lunch at the pub. The big man went in hard. Cost me plenty. You wouldn’t believe it. Soon as we get here, he jumps out of my truck and sticks his hoof in a wombat hole and tips over. Nasty. Bones sticking out. I’ll be back in the morning. H”

Hughie lived with two dogs on the next property to the south.

As I walked back across the deck to collect my laptop and briefcase from the car, I crossed through the black painted circle on the deck. The phone gods were working; my handset bleeped as emails and text messages dropped from space. Steele’s message alarmed me more than Claire’s.

XVI

STEELE: Have you heard from Bruce Tyson? I got a garbled voice message from him. He’s gone AWOL from the psych hospital. No-one at his home. Phone not answering.

Claire: Feedback from London on Cavalcade and John Baker. Cavalcade was on the financial brink a few years ago, but now in rude health. No evidence of more connections with East beyond polo ponies and Trust8. Sandy Wallace has asked me out to dinner. Just ‘us two girls’. What should I do?

I sent Claire a quick reply: Postpone.

I phoned Steele’s number; I wanted a live voice call to flesh that one out. It started ringing but the signal bars disappeared. I looked around. I could have been isolated in worse places.

A handful of sulphur-crested white cockatoos spun across the sky at twelve o’clock high. They wrestled and shrieked like schoolkids after the home-time bell. A wedge-tailed eagle landed on top of a dead tree on a far hill to survey the valley. Kangaroos scratched their backs and nibbled the sweet tips of grass downhill by the dam.

It was sunny, so I stripped to my shorts and dragged the armchair from the ground cabin onto the deck. The chair had handy wooden drink rests on the tips of its arms, so I opened a cold beer and placed it one. The chair was an old art deco thing that had seen some life, heard a lot of stories. It had been my mum’s.

I felt a presence near the deck and turned slowly in order not to spook it. The male kangaroo I call Buck was nearly as tall as my car. I recognised him from a scar on the white fur of his chest, maybe ripped by barbed wire, the teeth of a dog, or a bullet. The Eastern Grey had arrived quietly with his mob of half a dozen females and joeys for a late afternoon picnic. He got my attention with his big brown eyes and long lashes, leaned back on his huge tail and put his little front paws up, rotating them like a boxer at a speed bag. I got the message about who the boss was.

“It’s going to be a cracking night,” I called to him. “Milky Way as far as you can see.”

The big feller winked at me, scratched his bum with a paw, then set back to eating grass like I was boring him. Moments later, he bounded down an old path pounded out by his ancestors, followed by his mob.

I opened a bottle of red and poured a glass. A burst of wind whistled around the rusty wire of the flying fox in the pine tree. I had hoped it might entice Hugo to spend more time here with me, and it did for a while. But with Hugo, I have a knack of arriving in a place just as he is leaving it behind. I closed my eyes, tired from the drive and the night with Sandy, and its aftermath.

I woke shivering in the dark. A white light was strobing behind the trees in the forest. I leaped to my feet, trying to remember where I’d put Mr Browning. Bruce Tyson’s voice echoed inside my skull: Watch your back...there’s a bloke called Zeff.

XVII

I DARTED into the kitchen cabin and pulled the pistol from its holster on the table. I backed against the cabin wall as the torchlight scanned my car and the treehouse. The flashlight wouldn’t be Hughie’s – his dogs would have been upon the deck by now. My other neighbours, the Watsons, were travelling overseas. They had given me a set of house keys and asked me to check on their place if I was visiting.

“Gar?! You here?”

I lowered my gun and stepped outside into the gloom.

“Jesus,” said Tania Watson as she climbed up to the deck carrying a flashlight and a shoulder bag. “You alright?”

“Fell asleep,” I said, hugging my arms around my naked chest, clutching Mr Browning.

Tania and I embraced, kissing each other on the cheek. Her skin was a shock, rough and dry like I was kissing bark. I saw in the moonlight that her skin was indeed rutted, cracked. I reached inside the cabin and turned on a deck light. It took me a few seconds to grasp. Her cheeks, temples, nose, and neck were streaked with red, blue, green and yellow. Her long hair was pulled into a top knot speared with white feathers. Her face was covered with thick layers of paint; acrylics or artist’s oils of some sort, I guessed.

“Bird of paradise?” I asked.

“If that’s what you see.”

Tania was an uncertified nutcase, but also a fine illustrator of animals and a decent landscape painter. She had a strong following in Japan and China, getting stronger from what I read in the media. On a wall at home, I had her painting of five hundred galahs coiffed with thinning chestnut-coloured hair, dressed in blue suits, white shirts and red ties, seated soberly in straight lines in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

She explained to me that she and her husband, Steve, had returned early from their overseas trip.

While Tania built a campfire, I dressed in warm clothes in the ground cabin. Steve, she called to me, had gone to the south coast to do his carpenter’s job.

I collected folding chairs from my car and we sat by the fire with glasses of wine. Tania rummaged in her big bag.

“Got something for you.” She pulled out a thin, hand-made cigarette, lit it with a stick from the fire and released the sweet smoke of hashish. She passed it to me. Then she pulled another object from her bag. A kangaroo’s head!

“Relax,” said Tania.

It was a mask. Just to cover the wearer’s forehead, eyes and nose, with an elastic strap at the back. It had large eyeholes with great dark eyelashes lining the rims, and large ears pointing up and alert. I saw the face of Buck.

“You can join the mob,” she said, handing it to me.

The mask’s base was made of papier-mache so it was lightweight, she explained, then it was covered with fake fur and its nose painted black. I put it on and wondered what the real Buck would make of the weird bird and kangaroo sitting around the fire.

“Steve did a great job,” I said, nodding at the treehouse. I had handed him the tools, banged in a few nails, made the tea, chilled the beers, cooked the BBQ.

“Can I have a look? I’ve not been up since you painted and put the beds in.”

I followed her up the ladder. Inside, she lit a candle in a glass lantern on the windowsill, sending light prancing around the walls and ceiling, adding shadows to her face.

“How does it go in a storm?” she said as a gust rocked the branches. The cabin swayed and then steadied, like a boat bouncing over a wave into clear water.

“You know you’re alive up here.”

I was sitting on one of the two single beds. She stepped across the floor, gently lifted my mask away, and put her arm around my shoulder. We both looked at the candle inside the lantern. Tania and Charlotte had been close.

“I still miss mine too,” she said. “I walk with him in the forest sometimes. Like tonight.”

The Watson’s six-year old boy, Dizzy, slipped off his father’s sunscreen-oiled back at the beach into a freak wave that pounded the boy’s head into a sand bar and snapped his neck.

Tania and I climbed down. We sat around the fire, saying little, staring at the flames, then looking at the stars, Tania telling me a little about Aboriginal dreaming in the sky. Her veins flowed with the blood of the local Gandangara people, though I couldn’t tell to look at her. I wondered how she felt purchasing her rural plot from a white farmer whose family took it from her ancestors with a gun. She never mentioned it, so nor did I.

An hour or two later, she walked back into the trees and home. I cleaned up around the fire. I found a flat bottle of tequila under Tania’s chair where her shoulder bag had been. Angels Tears was a typically exotic Tania item, a brand I’d never heard of. The night was cold and the fire was almost out. I took a few hefty swigs and carried the bottle and my rubbish bag up the steps. I passed back through the black circle on my way to the kitchen. My phone beeped. I pulled it from my pocket. An email from Steele had downloaded.

Subject: “Celebrity Doctor’s Son Dead from Heroin” by Tom Steele, Crime Editor.

“The son of a prominent Sydney obstetrician has died from a heroin overdose in his luxury Bondi Beach flat. Bart Hills was 26.

“Hills’ flatmate called an ambulance when he discovered Hills unconscious in bed. Hills, a corporate lawyer, was pronounced dead on arrival at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst.

“His father, Maximilian Hills, is known as the ‘Doctor to the Stars’ after delivering the children of some of Australia’s most famous families....”

I dialled Steele’s number; the screen went black. Dead battery. I realised the phone had exhausted itself by constantly searching for a non-existent network connection, trying to find something that wasn’t there. I chuckled; it was a bit like journalism at times - a lot of times.

I took another swig of Tania’s tequila against the cold and searched my car and the cabins for my phone charger. After about half-an-hour of fruitless endeavour, I concluded that I’d left the charger in Sydney. I stood on the deck tossing up whether or not to drive back to the city in the night to talk to Steele about Hills.

The wind whistled like panpipes through the needle-leaves of the pine. I made out the silhouette of a roosting crow on a branch. Moonlight shimmered on the painted ring of the black circle on the deck. The black ring uncoiled into a snake ...

AS I STAGGERED BACKWARDS from the writhing serpent, shrieking burst from the canopy of the pine. A black blotch shot out and was sucked into the sky and torn apart. The branches began squirming. Snakes: a tree full of black snakes.

I jumped off the deck, bouncing as if landing on a trampoline by the campfire. I threw dry leaves and twigs on the dwindling flames and kick-started the blaze. The fire surged. Flaming dogs jumped up at me. I stumbled back. The frenzied animals tried to bite me.

Squealing, terrible squealing from the forest; I turned. A line of bedraggled figures had gathered at the forest’s edge. The blackened shapes of deformed people swayed drunkenly, edging towards me. I bounded up the steps and found Mr Browning on the kitchen table. I heard my father’s voice as I picked it up: “That’s it. Do the world a favour, you fucking waste of space. Put it in. Go on. Put it in, you weak cunt!”

I put Mr Browning’s muzzle inside my mouth. It would get me out of this place. I’d been here before. Plath’s blue volts flickered around the cabin.

“Get the angle right, you moron. Ah, I get it. Half a job by half a man. That’s you, Gar. End up in hospital. A fucking veggie. People blubbering over you. That’d be right. A fucking burden.”

I turned to the door. Outside, someone was sitting in my mother’s armchair; they beckoned me with a hand. The deck rose and fell like an ocean swell as I traversed it, stumbling. I saw that I held Mr Browning in one hand and a flashlight in the other. My mother pointed at the hillside by the deck. I followed her line with my light to the opening of a cave. I stepped downstairs from the deck, across grass, up to the mouth of the hole. I lay on my stomach and crawled in, pushing my torch on the dirt in front of me. It was tight upon my chest. The earth was breathing, expanding and contracting, suffocating me. I pushed past its sphincter into a massive, glistening chamber. In a corner, Charlotte, Alice, and Hugo squatted naked and filthy around a fire. I tapped Charlotte on the shoulder. My fingers travelled through her flesh, but I felt her bones and took comfort that she had substance of some sort. She scratched the spot where I had touched her like it was an itch.

“His mind is shot,” said Alice.

“I’m here!” I screamed. None of them noticed me.

Alice was missing an arm and a leg. There was a red hole in her face where an eyeball should have been. Hugo’s ears and nose were missing.

“My turn,” said Charlotte, who pulled off one of her arms and threw it in the fire in a crackle of flames.

A black snake slipped out of Charlotte’s anus. It wormed into Alice’s and I tried to catch it, but I failed. The snake’s head appeared in Alice’s mouth, flicking its tongue, dot-eyes fixed on mine. I opened my mouth and the snake wriggled slowly in. I put Mr Browning’s muzzle in after the snake and pulled the trigger ...

“GAR. GAR!” A DULL, distant voice.

My eyes hurt. There was grit in them. Dirt in my mouth. Rays of light flickered from behind my right ear. Thirsty. So thirsty. Cramp knifed my right thigh, a sadist stabbing me and twisting the blade. I howled.

Something had me by the ankles and was tugging. More light came from behind me. My legs straightened and the cramp cleared. I expanded my chest, sucking in air, blinking into sunlight. Dogs’ faces came at mine. Big, hot tongues licked me. Hughie’s dogs, Spike and Clive.

“What the fuck are you doing in a wombat hole?” Hughie looked down at me. I rolled on the grass away from the dogs. He was leaning on a long-handled shovel. He held out a leathery-skinned hand. I grabbed it and he pulled me to my feet, steadying me with his arm around my waist.

“Here,” he said, handing me a water bottle. He scraped Mr Browning and my flashlight out of the hole with his shovel.

“You go hunting in there?” he said, scraping dirt from the gun with his fingernails, then a twig, before blowing on it.

“Rough night,” I said, gulping the water. “Sleep walking.”

“You ought-a chain ya-self to ya bed at night.”

I checked my flashlight. The batteries were dead.

“Do you want a beer?” I said.

“Na, mate. How ‘bout you have a wash and we both have a nice cuppa tea?”

I followed Hughie up the steps to the deck. He put the kettle on. I had a cold water bucket-bath on the deck and dressed in fresh clothes.

I found my phone in my jeans pocket, still dead, but the black circle was no longer a snake. It was a painted ring. The pine tree looked like a pine tree.

“What the fuck has she just dragged out of your wombat hole?” said Hughie, standing from his seat in a folding camp chair.

I looked at the hillside. Spike had something in her mouth that she was snapping from side-to-side. It looked like floppy liquorice rope. It took me a few seconds to register the dead snake. An inspection revealed its head had been shot off.

“What the hell is that?” Hughie eyeballed the wall as we walked into the kitchen to examine the contents of the fridge for possible breakfast. He lifted my Buck-mask off a hook and gave it a close inspection. I explained its origins

“You and your friends get up to some weird shit, Garsy,” he said, putting it back on the hook.

I needed to talk to Tania about what was in her bottle of Angel Tears tequila which sat on the bench by the sink. I’d phone her from the city when I had it re-charged. If that conversation didn’t throw a light on the events of last night, I figured I might need a doctor of some sort again.

After several cups of tea, a plate of bacon and eggs, and a discussion about how long it would take for the council inspector’s broken shinbone to heal, Hughie washed the dishes and left me to pack up to go home.

XVIII

IN MY HOME office in Darlinghurst, I plugged my phone into the charger and called Steele.

“Was Hills a regular heroin user?”

Steele replied: “That’s what I’m told by the investigators.”

“He didn’t look it to me.”

“It takes all types.”

“Any sign of Bruce Tyson?”

“One of my copper mates has done some background work as a favour. Big Brucie cleared out his bank accounts and took it all in cash. We visited his flat. No sign of forced entry. But his phone hasn’t answered for nearly three days and we can’t get a trace on it either - looks like he’s pulled the battery out, or someone has. His psych unit boss says Bruce hasn’t had a sickie in ten years, and now he has just missed a weekend shift with penalty rates.”

“Theories?”

“Someone’s put the frighteners on him, or buried him.”

“No kidding. Was he a gambler?”

“Na. That money you gave him was to sponsor some kids in Africa he looks after. They’re on his Facebook page.”

“Got time for a beer?” I wanted to tell Steele about my night in the bush.

“Sorry, mate, no can do. Karen’s on the warpath. Her parents are here, brothers and sisters: the whole catastrophe. Carnival Day at the Steele’s.”

It was Saturday afternoon and warm. I could almost smell Steele’s sizzling barbecue sausages and tiger prawns, and see his well-upholstered clansmen belly-flopping into the pool under the palm trees to the delight of his nieces and nephews.

Steele said: “Lunch. Monday. You book.”

I PHONED TANIA WATSON but the mobile reception at her property next to Moon Hill was worse than mine. I left a message asking her to call me. I hoped it would land, but I couldn’t be sure when. She hated technology. Sometimes she didn’t reply for weeks.

I had a hot bath and dressed in a tee-shirt and pyjamas. Fish and I settled down in the lounge to watch a football game. It was a recording of the previous day’s Sydney Swans vs Collingwood Magpies in the AFL. I fast-forwarded to the start of the last quarter, knowing my Swans come-from-behind victory was on its way. I figured I had a crystal ball, a bit like Henry East had when he placed his bets on his inside share trades.

As the game came to a close, I flicked through the contact list on my phone. All Charles East could do was tell me to fuck off. I dialled him using my new spare phone with a new number to sneak up on him.

“Yes?” said Charles.

I figured displaying a bit of reverence would be the smartest play to get me where I wanted. “Mr East. It’s Gar Hart here. From The Citizen.”

“Oh ... look, I’m sorry, Edgar. I can’t speak. I’m expecting a call.”

“I wondered if we might meet.”

“It’s done, Edgar. It’s over. We have nothing more to say.”

“I’m sorry, Charles. But I’ve heard someone might have attacked Henry. That he didn’t hurt himself. And now his best friend Bart Hills is dead.”

Seconds passed.

“Charles?”

“Who told you that? About my son.”

“I can’t say who. I’m sorry if I shocked you,” I lied.

“I’m horrified.”

”Can we meet? I am happy to discuss what I know with you face-to-face. If you can answer some of my questions.”

East took a few seconds. “When?”

“How about now? I can come to you.”

“Yes. I suppose here at Tamerlane would be best. I’ll let security know.”

Tamerlane was a ten minute taxi ride from my place and as distant as Mars.

The Easts two-man-high, sandstone front wall was topped with wrought iron spearheads, giving the impression there was a legion of Roman soldiers marshalled behind it. The fuck-off wall stretched along one hundred metres of Old South Head Road. It was interrupted by double wrought-iron gates for vehicle entrance and a solid steel security door that was cut into the stone for pedestrian-only access. I walked to the door under the gaze of a swivelling CCTV camera mounted on a metal post inside the wall. I pressed the buzzer. The door opened on hydraulic hinges. I stepped inside and it clunked behind me like a bank vault.

Tamerlane’s main residential building looked even more like a stone church than I remembered. It had twin, timber, gothic-arch entrance doors, tall and wide enough to accommodate an African elephant, if one should chance by. I got that idea because there was a small stone elephant standing beside a garden wall with some petunias growing out of a chair on its back.  I crossed a circular, white-gravel driveway, in the middle of which stood a naked boy made of marble who was pissing into a pond. A showroom-shiny, royal blue Bentley sat smugly on the driveway.

Tamerlane had over a dozen intersecting roofs, by my quick count, with gargoyles on every corner, mostly goblins and dragons. At least one of the ancestral Easts had a sense of humour; some wit had added a local touch by commissioning a couple of gargoyles with kangaroos’ bodies upon which sat the heads of eagles.

One of the twin entrance doors opened. Charles’ lanky frame was dressed in a buttoned-up, single-breasted navy blue suit with an open-necked white shirt, a pair of bifocal reading glasses hanging by a gold chain from his neck. His black shoes reflected light. It was Saturday afternoon. I was wearing navy corduroy jeans, copper-coloured, elastic-sided boots and a black sports jacket over my black t-shirt. I resisted the urge to quickly polish my boots against my jeans. At least I’d brushed my teeth, had a shave, and cleaned Moon Hill’s dirt from under my fingernails and out of my ears. I had my phone in my jeans and a notebook and pen inside my jacket.

“Please. Come in, Edgar,” he said.

As I closed in on him, he extended a hand, giving me more fingers than palm. He winced, so I eased the pressure. His knuckle joints were swollen. I guessed arthritis. The old king was weakening, at least physically.

I stepped through the entrance hall onto a chessboard-tiled floor, each tile big enough to accommodate two feet. Human chess seemed an option. The hall had high-vaulted ceilings and multi-coloured, leadlight windows that were doing pretty things with the afternoon sun. The tiles led to a staircase that went up a dozen or so steps before curling both left and right to the upper storeys. Charles ushered me at ground level to the right side of the stairs into a hallway past several large rooms behind floor-to-ceiling, glass-panelled doors. One had a long dining table and chairs for about twenty people; the next had puckered leather sofas arranged in a four-piece pod, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Glancing inside the reading room, I was impressed by a globe of the world that was too big for any man to stretch his arms around. Now maybe if Charles and Henry held hands...

“First of all, Edgar,” he said as we walked, “we’re off the record. Agreed?”

“Yes.” I knew I’d be bounced if I objected.

“And two: in the past, you and I have misunderstood each other. Let’s put away the hatchet, as they say.”

Charles made it sound like he was putting the weapon in a drawer for later, rather than burying it in the earth for good, as was the practice of the native Americans who gave birth to the expression.

“Consider it buried,” I lied.

On my only previous visit to Tamerlane, about ten years ago, Charlotte and I had dinner with just Charles and his wife, Victoria, on a clear-skied, summer Saturday evening. After a waiter served us rock oysters and crayfish salad on the upper terrace, followed in the dining room by roast beef and vegetables, Victoria sponge cake and a cheese platter, Charles and I sat alone in cane armchairs on cream cushions on the garden-level veranda at the back of the main building. The sweet perfume of jasmine vines had mingled with salty harbour air and the smoke of Cuban cigars the size of baby cucumbers that we puffed on. We sipped old Scotch whisky, with no adulterating ice, from crystal tumblers while he pointed across his lawns through old trees to his twinkling new yacht in the bay, prattling on about its Italian makers and talking about visiting cities I’d only read about. “Welcome to my Garden of Eden,” he’d proclaimed. Then he’d tried to bribe me with that job as his PR man at double my reporter’s salary. I didn’t dismiss the offer out of hand. With a young family, I was looking for a step up society’s ladder - more money, a better chance at financial independence one distant day - but he gave his real game away that night by instructing the waiter with snaps of his fingers and flicks of his hands, like he was shooing around a fly wearing a bow tie.

“I’ll think about it,” I said. At my baulk, his smile vanished and he appeared puzzled, studying me like a specimen in a jar. He’d already grilled Charlotte and me over dinner, very politely, of course, about our family background, schooling, what suburb we lived in, what type of house we lived, and most importantly of all, whether or not we owned it. Before dinner started, I had sipped champagne and watched the teenage Henry doing wild, somersaulting bombies into the swimming pool by bouncing off a trampoline beside the pool. He was playing with another skinny boy. There was something soft about the other kid, who hopped off the trampoline into the pool, rather than bounced, and pinched his nose as he slipped into the water.

This afternoon, I wondered what had happened to that soft kid as Charles led me back to the garden-level veranda and directed me to sit in similar outdoor furniture to that which we shared years ago. Beyond the tiered acres of trees, flowering shrubs and fresh-cut lawns, sailboats drifted on the green water off Tamerlane’s white beach under blue sky. It was some showroom.

East put his knobbly hands together, like he was praying, and bounced his index fingers on his chin: “What you told me about Henry being attacked. Are you sure?”

“It’s what I’ve heard.”

“We need to know who told you, Edgar. So we can take it to the police.”

“We?”

“Our legal team.”

“I can’t tell you who told me, Charles. But you can ask the police to investigate the claim. I’m told he was attacked by his cellmate.”

“If someone tried to kill or harm my son, and you are withholding evidence, it’s a crime.”

“It’s speculation, Charles. I’m not a witness. Frankly, I still don’t know why he did the insider trading in the first place. Why would he ruin his life like that?”

“Have you ever mucked up, Edgar?”

East fixed his eyes on me and waited. I wondered if he had found my old court records.  I wasn’t giving him easy points, so I said nothing.

He said: “Yes. We all have. Now, I’m asking you to leave Henry alone. He is a sick young man. You pursuing him is simply cruel. I know you’ve been bombarding him with interview requests.”

“Do you believe he acted alone?”

“Of course I do.”

“It’s all very neat, isn’t it?”

“You are very cynical, Edgar. Sometimes things are exactly as they seem.”

“Why didn’t you appeal his jail sentence?”

“There was no point. Henry made choices and now he is paying the price.”

“What about Bart Hills? Did you know he was a heroin user?”

“Of course not. I know Bart’s parents. They are shattered, like I am.”

“Can I talk to Henry?”

“Edgar, I am asking you. Please leave us alone so we can make our son healthy again. You have children, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“A boy and a girl, isn’t it? How old are they now?”

I didn’t like his tangent but I figured he could get the basic information easily enough if he wanted to. He probably had it, and more, on my file already.

“They are young adults,” I said.

There was a jug of water spiked with sliced lemon and ice on a side table. East poured two glasses. He spent a few moments focussing on the glasses.

“Please, help yourself,” he said.

As I picked up a glass and took a sip, he smiled. There was a weird sense of satisfaction on his face like he’d made a smart chess move.

He said: “The choices you make will affect your children’s wellbeing, Edgar. Sometimes in ways you can’t imagine. You need to be wise on their behalf.”

“Are you threatening us?”

East looked hurt. “Please. You misunderstand me. Your children need you. My son needs me. We can waste a lot of time chasing things that turn out to be wrong for our children.”

East stood up. He looked away from me, across his garden towards the harbour, and dabbed an eye. Maybe I’d misjudged him.

“Do you know where your son and daughter are right now, what they are doing? Their state of mind?”

I thought of Hugo in Brighton, the internet porn, the old scars on Alice’s wrists.

I said: “It’s the examples we set as parents that matter, that guide them in adulthood.”

“Yes,” he said. “Monkey see, monkey do. Do you believe, ergo, that I am to blame for Henry’s situation?”

“You didn’t have him on reins, Charles, did you? He had his own head at twenty-six years of age.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I lost him some time ago.”

East seemed very old. I felt sad for him, like I did for Henry when he entered the revolving courtroom doors for sentencing. I decided to leave. Then East turned back towards me and tugged an eyelid like he just had a piece of grit in there he’d been trying to wash out. He’d almost got me.

I said: “What is the nature of your relationship with the Cavalcade Investment Group and its chairman, John Baker?”

He tugged an ear lobe as he turned to face me. A lie was coming, or pretty good chance of one.

“We gave them some advice once,” he said, bending down to pick up his glass of water and moisten the slits of his lips.

“Gave?” I said. “As in the past tense?”

“That’s right.”

“Your China subsidiary, Trust8, lists Cavalcade as a current client.”

“That is outdated.”

“It was on a press release Trust8 put out a few days ago.”

“There must have been an error in our China office,” he said. “Translation can be a major problem. Look, I have some business to do. If there’s nothing more you can tell me in relation to Henry, I must go.”

“Who are They? The people Henry was worried would chase him down in prison. The ones he talked about the day he was sentenced.”

“You must have misheard, Edgar. There were no such people. If, on the other hand, someone has subsequently decided to attack Henry in prison, as you say, then we can press the police to follow your line. So I thank you. But please, don’t inflame things by pursuing Henry. I’m asking you, as a father to a father.”

I heard a splash of water beside the veranda, then another as water drops spattered the chessboard tiles. I walked to the edge of the veranda and looked into a pond. It teemed with fat, orange and white speckled carp.

The words just shot from my mouth. “Did your goons hang a dead fish on my door?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Those fish of yours,” I said, nodding at the pond. “They get around.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. You need to take a few breaths, Edgar. You are sounding mentally unhinged.”

Mentally unhinged? The words hit me like a hammer.

“Is Sandy Wallace working for you?” I said. I had no doubt she would give him dirt on me if it would help her get ahead with the big end of town.

“Who?”

“She works for DankeBank. They’re clients of yours in China.”

“Never heard of her.” He touched his ear lobe again.

“You’ve become very clumsy, Charles. Or your people have.”

“You should go, Edgar, before you do something you regret.”

“You’re dead right,” I said.

We walked in silence through his house towards the front door. Even though East was in front of me, I wanted a hard shell on my back. Tiny cameras, tucked in ceiling corners, blinked green lights and swivelled as we passed by. In the entrance hall, near the base of the staircase, I glanced down a corridor and saw a figure in a wheelchair. They rolled back into a room.

East held the front door open. “With your history of mental illness, I’d tread very carefully before making any more wild accusations about me,” he said. “See yourself out.”

Inside the stone wall, the pedestrian door to the street opened automatically, beckoning me. East stepped back inside Tamerlane house and closed his door.

As I stepped onto the gravel driveway heading for the open door, the whiff of cigar smoke stopped me. I turned and felt a chill when I saw the source.

Leaning inside the archway of a sandstone wall to an inner garden was silver-haired Mr Greyhound, sans his courtroom pinstripe suit. He looked even wirier clad in a white singlet tucked into black trousers, bare-footed, his hands inside his trouser pockets. I nodded at him; it was polite instinct, rather than intention. He stood still as a statue, eyeballing me with no expression, unblinking. The only thing moving was smoke wafting out of the cigarillo hanging from one side of his skinny lips.

I stepped happily out of the insane asylum and flagged a taxi on the street.

“Fly Half Hotel,” I said to the driver.

I was pleased that Carol was behind the bar. She was wearing her wife-beater singlet but I was drawn again to her tattooed biceps. Blood seemed to pulse through the tatts when she flexed to pour beer. As she filled my schooner, I saw her photo featured on a stack of leaflets on the bar, headlined Carol Cougar – Cage Fighter. I folded one and put it in my pocket. It might be a fun night, though I wondered where she tucked those drooping ear lobes with the black corks in them when she was belting the hell out of someone.

After downing most of my glass and feeling feisty, inspired by visions of Carol confronting her challengers inside a cage, I pulled out my phone and eyed Charles East’s number. I was ninety-nine per cent sure I’d just seen Bruce Tyson’s “Zeff” inside that garden arch, and I was just as sure he had left the calling-card carp, but I wondered if Charles had ordered it, or even knew about it. If he was Charles’s house dog, he didn’t look like he’d been to obedience school. I keyed his numbers into my phone, but hesitated over the dial button because Jack Darling’s voice started echoing inside my skull: never dial in anger. Instead, I sent texts to Alice and Hugo. Only Alice replied; she was shopping in Melbourne.

“Seen Bruce Tyson?” I asked Carol.

“Nup,” she said. “But you’re not the only bloke asking.”

“Police?”

“Nup. No ID. Shifty as a rat, this bloke, with eyes to match, so I told him fuck all.”

“When?”

“A few days ago.”

“Physical description?”

Carol described a man who sounded remarkably like the saw-toothed string bean I’d just seen inside the arch at Tamerlane. My spine fizzed and I didn’t like the feeling.

XIX

THE WIRY MAN stepped along a gravel walkway through the flowering rose garden of Tamerlane. He flicked the smouldering butt of his cigarillo into a pond and snapped a white flower from its thorny stem, drawing sweet perfume from its petals through his long, narrow nostrils. The smell reminded him of his mother. He walked on, under an arch of pink rose vines, up to the front door of a sandstone cottage. He opened the door without knocking. The girl was sitting on the king-sized bed, her back propped on pillows piled against the bedhead which butted against a wall in the open kitchen, sitting, and sleeping room. Her slim, muscular figure was dressed in a white tee-shirt and underpants. There was a purple bruise around a vein weeping a little blood on the top of her right foot.

An empty syringe sat in a dish on the bedside table. He guessed she had mixed a cocktail again, probably a combo of cocaine and heroin, because she appeared alert and dopey at the same time, jigging her head to the sound of something, probably music, pumping through a wireless headset clamped over her ears. Her eyes were open. He signalled for her to lift off the headset. She hung it around her neck like a high-tech horseshoe.

“You’ve seen the movie Scarface,” he said with his back to her, placing his fresh rose with a handful of others in a vase on the kitchen table. He turned to face her. “Now read my lips: ‘never get high on your own supply’.”

“Fuck you, Seth!”

“Do you mean it, girl?”

“Sure. Why not? That’s all you men ever want to do, unless it’s watch football. And I’m bored.”

He stepped into the bathroom and returned carrying a black briefcase, which he put on the bed beside her. He began taking his clothes off, folding each item neatly and stacking them upon the seat of a chair with military precision.

“Aren’t you going to close the shutters?” she said. “That old perv, Charlie, will be knocking on the door next, wanting his turn.”

The naked man smiled and closed the window shutters.

She opened the case and extracted a strap-on black dildo, the size of a cucumber, rippled with veins. Thank God, she thought, it’s just a one-way, not a two-way piece.  She lifted a short-sleeved, camouflage-patterned army shirt from the case that she put on over her tee-shirt and buttoned up to just below the collar, then she removed her underpants.

The naked man reached for a small, pink-glass bottle that sat on the bedside table,  sprayed some of the rose scent on his wrists and rubbed them together. Then he lay on his back on the bed in the female missionary position with his knees bent. The standing girl strapped the device around her waist, buckled its belt and reached for her phone to wirelessly turn up the volume on her headset, which she replaced over her ears, listening to the sound of surf at the beach. She did not like the sounds he made when she did what she was about to do - the pathetic moaning – although she did like the way it contorted his face.

He opened his legs and she climbed in between them, kneeling on her shins. The flat, hand-sized base of the black proboscis was pressing firmly over her pubic bone, transmitting a faint, not unpleasant sensation to her clitoris.

“Can I have oil?” he said.

“No,” she replied.

He used a hand to position the knob of the proboscis upon the sweaty rim of his anus, then gripped her small, muscular buttocks with both his hands. She plunged into him as brutally as she could, looking into his eyes for the impact of every thrust.

XX

FISH AND I strolled along the foreshore of Rushcutter’s Bay Park on the edge of the harbour a short walk from home. We rested on a bench under a hazy, mid-morning sky.

A young woman in a motorised wheelchair pulled up alongside us. She controlled the chair with her bony hands from joysticks at the end of the armrests. Fish jumped off the bench and put his front paws in her lap. She patted him.

“Just say if he’s annoying you,” I said.

“Mr Hart,” said the woman, removing her cat’s-eye sunglasses, “my name is Ellen East. I am Henry East’s sister. You were at my home yesterday.”

I looked around the park for her sidekicks. No sign of the silver dog.

“I’m alone, Mr Hart.”

I rolled my eyes, unable to prevent a snigger.

“You might be surprised at what you can do in my condition if you put your mind to it.”

“And you found me how?”

“Your home address is on the electoral role: a public record.”

“I meant how did you find me here.”

“Your neighbour said you were walking your dog.”

“How can I help?” I made a mental note to caution Sue about talking to strangers in these increasingly unusual times.

“You wish to talk to my brother?”

“Your father doesn’t approve.”

“I can help you.”

“Why would you do that?”

“So that you can understand Henry’s situation and we can all have some peace.”

“Good by me.”

“I can’t get you into Henry’s hospital, but I can do a video call. And it has to be off the record. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

Off the record, always off the record, but any contact with Henry was better than none. I could test the depth of his injuries, for a start. I gave Ellen my phone number. She was fair-haired, pale-skinned and round-faced. No trace of the equine profile of Charles and Henry, and she did not look like her mother either. I took her on her word that she was the East’s daughter.

“Ellen,” I said, “there was a man smoking a cigar in your garden yesterday.”

“Mr Peterson? He just drives Dad around.”

“Does he have a first name?”

“Oscar.”

“Has he been working for your dad for long?”

“About a year.”

“Where’s he from?”

“I suggest you ask him.”

WHEN ELLEN’S VIDEO call came a few hours later, I was seated in my home office with recording software running on my laptop, and a notebook and pen at hand.

On screen, a poor quality colour picture of Henry East emerged. He was propped up in bed on a stack of pillows. Ellen held her camera phone so I could see the top half of his body and his head. His lips were bloated and criss-crossed with dark stitches; the rim of his mouth was stained yellow with what I assumed was antiseptic. His eye sockets were dark. Henry’s hair was shorter than when he was in court, as if it was just growing back after a shave. I glimpsed a thick bandage on one of his wrists as he stroked an itchy stitch on his lip. It didn’t look like fake theatre.

Henry’s voice was groggy and the tone deep: “Mither Hart, I have chosen ... to speak. Please do not tell ... do not say to my father.”

“I will not tell Charles we have spoken,” I said. “Did you act alone, Henry, with the insider trading?’

“I confessed ... all that to the court.”

“That’s a lawyer’s answer. I don’t believe you did act alone.”

“The court believed. Are you ... are you smarter than the court?”

“Were you inside trading with Bart Hills?”

“Bart is dead.”

“That is not an answer, Henry.”

“No is an answer,” he said.

“Bart died a few days after I spoke with him,” I said. “Did someone kill him because of that?”

“That’s why, Mr Hart ... I am speaking with you ...You are hurting people ... I made some very bad mistakes. I am paying now ... Bart had an accident ... a terrible accident.”

I pressed on. “Did someone attack you in your cell?”

“No. Why ... would someone do that?”

“Who hurt you, Henry?”

“Mither Hart! Don’t put words in my mouth. Ellen and I are asking you ... asking you ... leave our family alone. There is none ... no mystery.”

“Who is John K Baker? What is your father’s relationship with the Cavalcade Investment Group?”

“I have ... no idea, no idea.”

“You rode Mr Baker’s polo ponies, Henry.”

“He rode me, Mr Hart.”

“What do you mean, Mr Baker ‘rode you’?”

Henry’s eyes rolled in their sockets and he clutched his head with both his hands as if it might fall off his neck. “You ... you are mad, Mr Hart. Give us some peace, please.”

I didn’t feel peaceful. “Do you know Sandy Wallace? The woman from DankeBank?”

My phone screen went black. I phoned Ellen East back. The message said the phone number was not in service.

Bruce Tyson hadn’t hammed things up for his $500. Henry was a mess. Did Ellen East want me to see he was a gibbering wreck? To persuade me to back off? If so, it was a fail.

I spent the afternoon transcribing notes from my interview with Henry and drawing on a whiteboard the characters and their places in the picture puzzle that was emerging: Henry East, Charles East, Ellen East, Bart Hills, Oscar Peterson, Bruce Tyson, and Sandy Wallace.

In the early evening, Steele returned a call I had made to him earlier, and I recounted my interview with Henry.

Steele said: “If he was a threat to anyone, sounds like they’ve neutralised him now.”

“He might be foxing.”

“He’s a pretty good fox then.”

I told Steele I’d booked lunch at his favourite restaurant the next day. We hung up. I’d tell him about Oscar Petersen then. I reckoned the only real Oscar Peterson I knew of was a dead, black jazz pianist from America. I put one of his albums on the music player in my bedroom which helped to mask Fish’s snoring. I wanted Mr Browning handy beside me when I climbed into bed beside Fish. I scoured the house but couldn’t find him anywhere. I slept, tried to, with a hunting knife under my pillow.

XXI

I WOKE with daybreak and headed to the Pickled Pig dressed in a suit to have breakfast before work. As I walked, the image of Henry East’s yellow-stained mouth and stitched lips flashed on and off in my skull. I phoned Hugo.

It was early evening in Brighton. He was going to the movies with a girl from his school. That was the first date that I’d ever been told about. He sounded happy so I felt almost serene as I ended the call and sat in a booth at the Pig and watched Mick work his hissing coffee machine. My calm lasted about thirty seconds ... my brain became a city, not a nice one ... it was overcrowded, crawling with thoughts. A bunch of lunatics with jackhammers started doing demolition work ... Oscar Petersen had appeared in front of me.

He unbuttoned his navy pinstripe suit jacket, fingered his blue tie and sat opposite me, sliding his lean frame deep into the booth so his back touched the café wall. Clearly he didn’t want anyone stabbing him from behind, which was my first instinct.

The say-cheese smile didn’t shift on his pointy, tanned face. Up this close I noticed his bony nose was buckled. Maybe he boxed; either too often, or not too well, although he didn’t look like a man who lost many fights. He stroked what was available of his silver hair, dragging it forward across his temples.

“Mr Hart,” he said in his Afrikaans twang, “do you want to tell me why you are harassing Mr East?”

“I’m not.”

“Oh yes you are.”

“I hear you’re a chauffeur for Mr East. You’ve stepped out of your box, haven’t you?”

“I am an adviser.”

“To which Mr East?”

“To the whole family. I want you to show them some respect, my friend. They have had a family tragedy.”

“Yes. I understand. I just want to know the facts.”

“What right. Do you have. To know. Private facts?”

I started reaching for my mobile phone. I would take his photo, record the threats I knew were coming. “You don’t mind if I check your bona fides with Mr East, do you?”

His eyes glanced left and right, checking for eavesdroppers. The other customers were engrossed in their own conversations. “Do you think I am an idiot, Mr Hart?”

“I can’t tell.”

He leaned over the table towards me and hissed: “You touch that phone and I will smash your face.” He bared his teeth as if he was showing a dentist his bite.

I weighed up testing him. I kept my phone in my pocket.

“I have some advice for you, Edgar Albert Hart, otherwise known as Gar: forty five years old; father of a boy and girl with a dead mother; resident of Darlinghurst in some shitty terrace house; owner of a three-legged poodle; playschool farmer at Moon Hill. You stick your beak inside my wall again and I will cut it fucking off. Are we clear?”

“Is this coming from Charles East or you?”

“Listen carefully to what I say, kaffir. Go back to chasing fire engines, or whatever you people do.”

“If I don’t?”

Mick arrived with my coffee and looked at the silver dog.

“He’s not staying,” I said to Mick, who put my coffee down, acknowledged my nod, and returned to his other customers.

“Strange chap,” said the silver dog, stroking his tie, sneering at Mick who was wearing a bowler hat and a white cricket outfit with the trousers held up by braces. With his trousers tucked into calf-high, black Doc Marten boots, Mick was looking very Clockwork Orange droog, and my world was feeling just as surreal.

The silver dog slid out from the booth, stood up and rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. He bent and put his mouth close to my ear. I felt his breath. He whispered: “I hear you are not the sharpest knife in the block. Or the most mentally stable. If you are going to play games with people’s lives, get some life insurance. Do the right thing by your family. Insure the lot. Your poodle can spend the money, if he lives long enough.”

He smiled and walked into the street, lit a cigarillo and winked at me through the window before strolling out of sight.

Mick studied me. “You don’t look well, Gar. Who was that?”

“He was an errand boy - I think.”

“See that ring on his finger? Engraved with crossed daggers,” said Mick. “Military, by the look. And he had a knife strapped inside his jacket.”

“What?”

“I saw it when he slid from the booth.”

I phoned Alice. She didn’t answer. My international call to Hugo went to his grandmother, Kate’s answering machine.

There was a poster tacked to one of Mick’s walls; a matador with a cape was dodging a bull. Mick had been to bullfights in Mexico where he purchased it. He had told me that in the first act of a bullfight, the banderillos, or flagmen, jab barbed sticks into the bull’s back to set them up for the kill.

I massaged a pain in my knotted shoulder muscle and wondered when and how the matador might make his next move ...

End – Under Eden. Part 1

THANK YOU FOR READING UNDER EDEN. Part 1: The Ebola Conspiracy.

If you enjoyed it and could leave a book review in your Amazon store, I would be very grateful. Reviews are vital to spreading the word to other readers – and helping authors like me to earn a living and write more stories.

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Part 2: Freefall will be published in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 21 November. You can pre-order here: US     Canada     UK     Australia

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In Freefall ...

Gar Hart travels to London to farewell his dying father-in-law, Malcolm Halliday. A former newspaper editor, Halliday provides an unexpected lead in Hart’s quest to uncover links between Charles East and the shadowy British tycoon, John K Baker – links that Hart has dubbed ‘The Ebola Network’. But Hart soon learns that flying close to Baker can be as hazardous to him and his children as the real Ebola virus ...

The first chapter of Freefall follows:

THE RED Emperor restaurant on the King Street Wharf corporate eating strip on the western edge of the Sydney CBD was a roaring waterfall of voices. The glass and steel box was chock full of men and women in suits, with bigger waistlines and blander faces than the younger, finely chiselled mob that frequented the Babel Bar. Steele was already seated, with a bottle of white wine half consumed and a few heavily pecked starter dishes littering the table.

“Nasty,” I said. I couldn’t miss the parallel red and yellow scratch marks on the skin near his left ear.

“It wasn’t Karen,” he said, stroking the scratches, sliding his wine glass over the tablecloth so the waiter could get an easy pour. “One of my nephews in the swimming pool.”

I wasn’t convinced. Karen Steele was, on balance, a tolerant wife: volcanic at times. Steele, on the other hand, cruised through life like a basking shark, feeding opportunistically on stray delights. I was waiting for the right moment to talk to Steele about Karen’s appearance. The last time I saw her, her muscles were toned like she’d been going to the gym, she’d cut her hair shorter and dyed out the grey. She looked good and so did her clothes. My father displayed similar signs, including teeth-whitening, before he walked out on my mother.

“How’s Beth?” I said. I’d not seen his teenage daughter since her birthday almost three months ago.

“Karen reckons she needs counselling.”

He must have noticed the quizzical look on my face. “Beth,” he clarified.

Steele gazed blankly from our balcony table over the flashy wharves stocked with charter sailing catamarans and multi-story fibreglass cruisers. He clearly found the seas of family rough going, so I changed course.

“So what do you know about Bart Hills death? True he was a regular heroin user?”

“Ah,” he said, brightening. “The story’s changing a little. His flatmate says no. Apparently he was with a stray woman that night; they were playing magic shit with a Ouija board in his room, but she’s disappeared off the radar. She may have been the supplier. Cops say he got knocked by some extra pure. There were half a dozen other deaths around the city via the same gear. Of course none of the other corpses had a neon name like Hills and his dad, the baby whisperer, so there hasn’t been any publicity on that wider point - yet. No-one at my paper gives a shit about Jack Nobody and his girlfriend. But I’ve managed to squeeze in a comment piece for tomorrow. A community service announcement. Hopefully the weekend users will read it. ‘A little dab’ll do ya’ - that’s our message. Though the smack-head food chain should have twigged by now and diluted it for economic purposes.”

“I tell you what,” I said, “the Easts have thrown so much at me in the last couple of days, there’s got to be a serious cover-up. Problem is I can’t get a clean line on anything. Charles is kissing my arse one minute, then threatening me the next. His kids are working behind his back, or appear to be. Then the old fucker’s lunatic chauffeur turns up at the Pig this morning, dressed like a banker, with a stiletto in his jacket and tries to terrorise me.”

I told him what I knew about Oscar ‘Silver Dog’ Petersen.

“Tricky,” said Steele, swirling the dregs of pale wine in his glass, holding it up to the sunlight like he was trying to discern the future.

“What can you see?”

“Grief. Infinite grief.”

“You’re perking me up.”

“Ah,” he said, putting his glass back on the table and reaching across to pat the back of my hand. “Petersen’s probably just a run-of-the mill psychopath who’ll self-destruct. Unlike you, mate.”

I told Steele about the Easts’ murky links to John K. Baker and Cavalcade, and that something smelled around the drowning of Baker’s partner a few years ago, the event that put Baker on top of the Cavalcade heap in London.

“That’s great,” he said. “But you’re just telling me a story about some apex predators who like to share horses and yachts, and one fell in the water.”

“What? You reckon I should call it quits and go back to chasing fire engines like the silver dog says?”

“Let’s face it. You might be barking up a tree without a cat in it. And now you’re just annoying the tree’s owners.”

Steele’s phone rang. He walked outside to take it. Maybe Steele was right about the empty tree. I felt tired, flat as a dropped beer, as my father-in-law likes to say.

A whole roasted snapper was lying on a plate on the table of the diners beside us. I could swear it winked at me. I saw myself back in the bush with my head stuck in the wombat hole. I crossed my fingers that the fish wouldn’t start talking.

Steele returned from his phone call, ruffled my hair and sat down. He bared his teeth and pretended he was curling an invisible moustache with his fingers. He’d either scored some stimulating drugs, some information, or he was on a promise with a stray feline. Maybe all three at once, he looked that pleased.

“Cheer up. Just got something for you, hand-delivered a moment ago.” He pulled a white envelope out of his pocket. “I might have found the cat that’s up your tree.”

I took the blank-faced envelope. It was gummed and closed.

“Don’t read it here,” he said, pouring himself another glass. “We’ve knocked off for the day.”

“I need a hint.”

“It ties Henry East and Bart Hills together in a right nefarious little caper. But you’ll need a clear head to decipher it.”

We ate and drank, and in their absence, we verbally savaged most of the people we knew. It was a large list of names which took time to get through, so we were forced to consume several bottles of white then red.

“You know what I don’t get?” said Steele, filling his glass. “Your mate Charles East owns a billion bucks, give or take a hundred mill. Why wouldn’t he just put it all in the bank at five per cent interest per annum - I’m talking on average - and make what? Fifty million a year, like fucking clockwork! He pays the same price for a coffee as you and me. How much does someone want, for fuck’s sake?”

“Some people can never have enough,” I said, waving my empty glass at him.

My phone pinged. It was a text from Tania Watson: Just got your message. Angels Tears = my magic mushroom potion. Fell from my bag. Help yourself, but proceed with caution. I’m heading OS. Xx, T

“Hallelujah!” I blurted.

Steele grinned, like he knew I’d just got some good news, and then he waved like the queen at four fat men seated at the table beside us who appeared disapproving of my lowbrow religious outburst.  “Pop your teeth back in,” he advised them.

Tania’s text had me feeling like I did when my parachute popped the only time I went skydiving. Now, in a hushed voice, I told Steele about my night at Moon Hill. The punchline, just received, was that Tania’s tequila was infused with hallucinogenic psilocybin from some Blue Mountain’s toadstools, meaning my brain had not stuffed up of its own accord. Steele wanted to drive straight out to the bush for a celebratory swig.

I pointed out that neither of us was in the best shape for driving. Steele countered that we could give it damn good crack. But I came up with a better idea.

“Call the Drug Squad.”

“Excellent thinking.” Steele hit speed dial on his phone. Nancy Cross, the Personal Wealth Editor of The Sydney Daily News, semi-secretly known as the head of the paper’s in-house Drug Squad, could get the best cocaine in the city. He left a voice message.

We decided to proceed to a newly opened bar named The Present, mainly because it was a short walk and would limit the wasteful gap between drinks. Soon we were clumping down stairs into the underground venue, gripping the handrail for which we were grateful, passing a neon sign that read: Welcome to The Present. No Past. No Future. Steele added bourbon shots to our opening order of red wine and cigars.

I remember clicking my jaw with the ambition of making a set of Olympic rings from the smoke. Through the resultant fog, I tried to explain to Steele the feeling I had about the East case, of sticking my hand through a hole in a wall into an invisible place and not being able to pull it back because something had grabbed me ...

THANKS AGAIN FOR READING. If you could leave a book review in your Amazon store, I would be very grateful. Reviews are vital to spreading the word to other readers – and helping authors like me to earn a living and write more stories.

Please click on your store’s link to post a review: US    Canada    UK    Australia

If you would like to read the Complete Edition of UNDER EDEN (Parts 1-3), it will be released worldwide in Amazon Kindle bookstores on 30 November 2018. You can click on your store to learn more or pre-order: US   Canada   UK   Australia

Part 2: Freefall will be published in Amazon Kindle bookstores worldwide on 21 November. You can pre-order here: US    Canada    UK    Australia

UNDER EDEN. Part 1: The Ebola Conspiracy

Copyright © Mark Furness 2018

Published by Liquorice Light Publishing 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or retransmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the copyright owner.

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.