24 February 1973
Every morning for the last five months it had been part of Nigel Daltrey’s daily routine to collect the tapes recorded from the phone tap and the bug he’d planted in the upstairs room of the Hrvatska Restoran. Twice during that time, he’d had to break back into the place in the middle of the night to replace the batteries in the listening device hidden in a television set. It had not been possible to leave the surveillance van in place for such a long time—it was needed for other operations—so he had installed mini Nagra recorders, voice-activated and wired to a radio receiver, in the boot of an old clunker and parked it in the lane behind the restaurant.
Daltrey liked to say that an ill wind blows no good, but he’d had to admit that fat bastard Al Sharp had been as good as his word. It annoyed Daltrey that it had taken a Commonwealth copper to somehow convince the commissioner to cough up the funds for them to buy new top-shelf equipment.
The old car in the lane had solved their surveillance problems, but at least once a week some fuckwitted Brown Bomber gave it a parking ticket. It didn’t matter how many times the memo went out, instructing the council parking authority to leave the vehicle alone, it just kept happening. Daltrey became convinced it was a single culprit, most likely some disgruntled Mediterranean type, pissed off that the police had rejected him for a job.
‘I’m going to get the bastard one day,’ he told Bob McCafferty. ‘The prick has stolen hours of my life on all that fucking paperwork to overturn the fines.’
‘Maybe you should stake out the car,’ his partner responded. ‘I’ll get Armed Hold Up to lend you a gun.’
‘Don’t tempt me, Bob.’
‘Just remember how much paperwork you’ll be up for if you shoot him.’
‘I’ll give the tickets to you next time, smart-arse, see how you like it.’
This Monday morning, Daltrey collected the tapes from the old clunker as usual and returned to the old hat factory that housed the CIB. Climbing to the third floor and the metal door of the Electronics Unit, he fed in the access code.
There wasn’t much else on the floor so the Electronics Unit, with its half a dozen members and a few casuals, sprawled out across most of it. The Unit’s premises comprised a locked tape archive; a large equipment room with a workshop for modifying and repairing listening devices; playback machines on desks along one wall, set up with headphones for transcription typists and translators; and two offices for the bosses to maintain the semblance of strict hierarchy. Or rather, as Daltrey theorised, maintain the myth that managers actually worked behind their closed doors.
When Daltrey entered that morning the only person in the big open space was the formidable-looking woman who sat in front of one of the tape machines. Dusanka Andric was silhouetted against the tall windows that had once cast light on lines of hat blockers. In profile, she reminded Daltrey of an emperor’s wife on a Roman coin—until she ruined that illusion by placing a cigarette in her lips.
‘Dobra yoo-tro, Dusanka,’ said Daltrey.
The woman turned to him, revealing the large brown mole beside her nose, a flaw that he found perplexingly attractive. From the earliest days of her employment as a Yugoslav translator on the Croat operation, he remembered her name with the formulation: Doo-shanka is beautiful … And-Rich. He had kept it up even when he found out that she was struggling for a quid just like the rest of them.
‘Good morning, Roger,’ Dusanka replied, using his nickname, in her usual phlegmatic tone.
She was drinking the impossibly sweet, black Turkish mud that she made on the stove every morning in a beaten copper pot.
‘I’ve got the tapes from the Hrvatska,’ he said.
‘Dobra,’ she said. ‘Shall we find out what the fascists are up to now?’
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ he said, placing the boxes on her desk. ‘Have you seen Bob?’
‘Bob is in with boss. He called him into his office for a chat. He says “chat”, but I think is more than chat. Mr Heffernon was a little … argitated, yes, I think it is argitated.’
Dusanka shucked one of the boxes and fitted the tape on to the right hand of the machine, threading the tape backwards to an empty spool. Daltrey left her rewinding it. He looked at the closed office door, then he went over and knocked.
Inside he found the ursine Bob McCafferty crammed into a chair opposite the Unit’s chief, Detective Sergeant Tim Heffernon.
‘G’day, Roger,’ said Heffernon. ‘I was just telling Bob: Jim Kelly came in early this morning to warn me that the top brass are getting really antsy. The federal government’s sticking its nose into the Croat investigation. Attorney-General Murphy has got a former Commonwealth copper working as an advisor and he’s starting to ask some tricky questions.’
Daltrey ran his hands through his hair and groaned. ‘Oh, fucken hell. What sort of questions?’
‘He wants to assess our product.’
‘What do you mean?’ Daltrey demanded angrily. ‘He wants transcripts?’
‘Murphy obviously doesn’t know about the operation at the restaurant—he’d go off his dial if he did. He’s supposed to authorise all warrants for intercepts and bugs.’
McCafferty cut in. ‘Jim Kelly knows we never had a warrant. He signed off on this himself. You know we had that Commonwealth copper in charge of the op. Al Sharp.’
‘Of course I know that,’ said Heffernon. ‘He hasn’t spilled the beans.’
Daltrey gave a malicious laugh. ‘He’ll be fucked if he does,’ he said. ‘Anyway, we’ve got fuck-all from it in all these months. Except for a few new names. They’re just too cautious.’
‘I was just saying to Bob,’ said Heffernon tentatively, ‘the restaurant’s the last one. Maybe it’s time to quietly pull the bugs out and shut it down.’
McCafferty shrugged. ‘Like I said, I’ll let you break that news to Dusanka.’
Daltrey said nothing.
‘What do you think, Roger?’ Heffernon asked.
For a man who prided himself on being a no-nonsense bloke, Daltrey had a superstitious streak. When a knock came on the door he had a strange sense of predestination.
‘Come in,’ called Heffernon.
In came Dusanka Andric. She had her notepad in her hand and there was an expression on her face that Daltrey hadn’t seen before. Something had penetrated her usual stoicism.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘You must come and listen, all of you,’ she said urgently. ‘We have something. We finally have something.’