Little Horatio Hadley’s elation at bringing his bullying tormentor, and immediate boss, Gerry Ryan, to heel had long dissipated.
He was rostered, it seemed permanently, on the latest shifts. He knew it was pointless to protest.
He had received an official verbal rebuke for unauthorised use of the Force’s notice boards and a written warning that this behaviour would lead to serious disciplinary measures should it reoccur.
His allocated car park was moved to a distant part of the airport. It was a long trudge in bad weather before the drive to his commuter train station. He was banned from eating his mother’s sandwiches for lunch in the recreation room and told to use the cafeteria, where he had a cool reception for not buying its food or drink. He was seriously intimidated when ordered to conduct almost all the anal searches on suspected drug smugglers during his shift.
The late passenger arrivals were often half drunk, tired and aggressive. They were worse when his passport scanner failed and his repeated attempts to have it repaired were ignored. Life had become a drudgery, but he lived in hope someone, sooner or later, would listen to him.
A ray of sunshine broke through the personal gloom when he received a letter from Ms Audrey Tibble of the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office. It was a form letter thanking him for his letter and telling him someone would be in touch in due course. Weeks went by without any further correspondence. He invited a girl he met on his commuter train to the movies, but she was a no-show. He saw the film anyway and ate both ice creams.
He got off his train one day and saw a man on the platform addressing a small crowd. The man had run to fat and wore a tired blue suit and a loose tie. On his jacket was a red rosette.
It had large letters in its centre: ALP. He joined the crowd surrounding the man and listened. The man said he was an Australian Labor Party Member of Parliament and was urging everyone to join the people’s party to promote the rights of the exploited, underprivileged and low-paid workers. He said these people were important, forming the backbone of the country’s workforce. Horatio joined.
Jack Ramshaw, MP, thought the pimply-faced bloke was a dwarf. But he was not quite that small, and he was wearing what appeared to be a badly fitting Border Force uniform. Ramshaw watched him fill in the membership form and pay the five-dollar fee, demanding a receipt like all minor bureaucrats did. He was not the sort to strike in passport control after a long trip, Ramshaw thought. He shook the young man’s hand and thanked him. Gave him a pamphlet explaining when the next ALP branch would meet.
He had a posh name that slipped Ramshaw’s mind seconds after he heard it but seemed delighted to get the invite. An MP who had spent unnoticed decades on the back bench, representing a shabby working-class electorate, Ramshaw was about to be given an opportunity to make the national news media. The dwarfish guy, with the posh name, had taken his receipt and handed Ramshaw several pages of paper. One carried the logo of the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office. He took them home to read later.
Backbencher Jack Ramshaw spoke so rarely in Parliament, he was overlooked by the Speaker during Question Time. He had stood repeatedly and waved the sheaf of papers he knew were a wick to his political bombshell.
The priority to quiz ministers was given to senior party spokespeople. He could get on the list quicker if he put his question in writing, but that would divulge his allegations and alert the prime minister his career could be about to end.
Ramshaw was determined to be front and centre in the looming controversy. It would be the biggest moment in his career. He considered sharing his secret with his own frontbench leaders but quickly dismissed it. The glamour boys would want the publicity fanfare for themselves.
He accepted he would have to wait until the next Question Time to ask Border Control Minister David Hicks about battler Horatio Hadley’s treatment amid the secret sleaze and corruption that was rampant in the Stone administration.
Feeling dejected, he set out for the cab rank. He would taxi downtown and cheer himself up with a few beers with some mates at the Thirsty Ostrich.
The taxi pulled up outside the bar. Ramshaw paid the cabbie and stepped out on to the road thinking of the Horatio papers he was carrying. There was a shriek of locked brakes. Ramshaw’s body was hurled twenty metres up the road.
The impact stalled eighty-one-year-old Myrtle Dodgeman’s silent BMW EV when it struck the large man with his papers. People said the electric cars were too quiet, but the man had not been looking where he was going, she thought. And look at the front of her little car: it was all smashed in.
The man was lying still on the roadway. A small group of people talking on cellphones began to surround him. Some took photos of the victim. Mrs Dodgeman hoped she had renewed her insurance policy. Insurers were so nervy these days when dealing with old people.
The half a dozen sheets of paper Ramshaw had been carrying were scattered in the wind. Several were retrieved by onlookers. Others were blown into the dirty gutter and ignored.
One woman noticed the House of Representatives logo on the top of one of the flapping sheets. She knelt to pick it up. It was handwritten and the first line raised her eyebrows. The writing was a scrawl, but she made out the underlined words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘corruption’.
She saw the road victim was unconscious or dead. She could not hand his notes back to him. So, she tucked the sheet in her handbag. She would show it to Syd when he came home from The Telegraph. He only covered the league, but she was sure he would still be interested. The victim was probably an MP, and he may even have been an important man.
Horatio Hadley was having another depressing day at the Border Force’s Canberra airport anal-search cubicle. He wore an earphone and had listened, while attending his duties to protect the nation’s borders, to the national parliamentary coverage on ABC RADIO.
Question Time had come and gone and his new MP friend, Jack Ramshaw, had not raised his case as he had promised.
Only women officers were supposed to carry out internal searches of suspected female drug smugglers. But none had been rostered on this grave shift. It was all up to Horatio Hadley again.
He told the young woman he was searching to stand up straight again. The woman stood and turned to him. He held up a plastic-covered, gloved hand and showed her the two shiny, cylindrical steel capsules his anal search had discovered.
‘What’s in these?’ he said.
‘They’re not mine. They belong to my boyfriend. He got busted yesterday at Buenos Aires. He’d put them in my suitcase because he was already carrying four. I just thought I might as well bring them with me.’
Horatio could not work out her age, but she was young. She had none of the hideous tattoos the mules usually had. He glanced at her passport. She was a Glenda Stropeshire, age eighteen. She looked attractive even in her passport photo. The short black hair had gone. She now had shoulder-length blonde hair. Almost certainly a wig.
‘I didn’t ask you whose they were. I asked you, what’s in them?’
She looked exhausted and was fighting back tears as she looked down at him: ‘Just coke.’
‘Just coke?’
She nodded unhappily.
Horatio said: ‘Been busted before?’
She nodded again.
‘So it could be the slammer this time?’
Glenda paused and looked at the short little sap properly for the first time: ‘I don’t want to go to prison, not for just carrying a tiny bit of a recreational drug. Don’t you think…’ she looked at his name tag… ‘Horatio, I would be wasted in prison.’
Horatio gulped.
Glenda took his ungloved hand and stroked it gently: ‘I like to live life to the full, Horatio, and I’m sure you do too. And it’s not as if you don’t already know me … er … intimately.’
Horatio went to reply but was certain he would have stammered.
‘Come on, I’m not a cartel boss. And my dumb partner is in clink and out of action. Give a girl a break … we can go back to my place? There’s no one there at the moment. We can live a little, don’t you think?’
Horatio nodded. He felt his face flushing, his little legs trembling and … something else down there was trembling as well.
He handed the small steel capsules back to her: ‘You’ll have to wait here for an hour, till my shift ends.’
Glenda beamed a huge smile: ‘Of course, of course. Oh, thank you, Horatio. The last woman that busted me was a real bitch, just hard as nails. Not like you. Not like you at all.’
Horatio pointed to a chair: ‘Just take a seat over there. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I just have to make sure this camera on the wall is … um … rewound.’
Glenda almost squealed: ‘Oh, Horatio, you are so clever. You think of everything.’
Horatio smiled and his sunken chest swelled a millimetre. He left and went to the control room. It was empty, as it mostly was for the late shifts. He climbed on to a stool to reach the video cupboard, leaned in and flicked several switches. One was a delete on Camera Five.
Fuck the Border Force, he thought. And fuck Parliament. Horatio Hadley would take care of himself.