DUDLEY, Alistair’s Bearded Dragon, was missing somewhere in the mansion grounds. The wire cage near the pool not far from the back door of the servants’ quarters had been pulled askew and there was a hole for the pet to escape. It had happened before and the cat next door had been accused of being the culprit, although no paw prints had been identified. Dudley made things more difficult by being a wanderer. Recently he had been found in the front garden of the mansion near the tennis courts, and the summer before he had several times been caught basking on the slate roof where he was very hard to find because of his chameleon tendencies, which allowed him to blend with the roof’s blue-grey colour. The household formed a search party with torches. The kids scoured the one hundred metres of rear garden, the Tashesitas looked in the tennis court and the front garden, while I was on hands and knees in the grass by the pool. Samantha screamed.
‘Daddy! Daddy! Come quick! Help!’
I charged into the rear garden towards a bobbing torchlight until I reached her. She was trembling.
‘There . . . there was a man in the bushes!’ she screamed.
‘Where?!’
She pointed and Alistair came to us.
‘I did see someone,’ he said, ‘he crashed into the pond area.’
I led them to the back of the house where the Tashesitas had gathered. Three years ago Peggy and I had had to go through an elaborate plan to protect the kids from kidnapping. The police had warned we were targets because of my wealth and high profile.
Someone once tried to impersonate Peggy at St Catherine’s school where Samantha was waiting to be picked up. The woman had been frightened off by an alert parent, who knew she wasn’t Peggy. Another time two hooded intruders had been seen in the grounds by neighbours and the alarm had been raised.
I told the Tashesitas to secure all doors to the mansion and phoned the police. I ran upstairs to a bedroom safe where I kept a licensed Heckler & Koch semi-automatic handgun. I loaded it.
I had had pistol training and found I was a fair shot, especially at close range. For the first time since school Cadet days I had a weapon. It was supposed to be used only as a last resort.
I eased out the back of the mansion with torch in hand. Then I spotted the crouched figure on the wall at the rear of the garden. He was seventy metres away and appeared to have on black clothing and a rifle slung over his shoulder. He saw the torchlight, propped on the wall and fumbled for his weapon. I heard a police siren and fired my gun into the air.
The figure on the wall dropped into the back neighbours’ garden and out of sight.
The police radioed for more cars in an attempt to cordon off the area. They were concerned about the shot that was fired and I had to produce the gun and a licence because they had not been briefed on our special status as a kidnap target. Despite their efforts the armed prowler escaped, leaving me and the family uneasy.
Peggy arrived and took the kids to her place. She reported the next morning that she hadn’t been able to sleep properly and that Samantha had had a nightmare. I made up my mind that Peggy, who had finished her shoot, would take the kids off earlier than planned on vacation at Noosa Heads where Benepharm had a beach resort with excellent security.
‘Go tomorrow if you can,’ I said, ‘and stay ten days.’
After our previous experiences she and the kids were frightened and I wasn’t feeling too brave myself. We’d had armed guards for a while and I’d had to continually change all my work commuting routines and so on. At one point Australian Intelligence advised the police that the kidnap threat had come from an overseas terrorist group, and that I should have a false ID and changed appearance whenever I left Australia. The removal of my beard, hair dyes and blue contact lenses to hide brown eyes completed the transformation. I had done this three times and despite looking five years younger felt ridiculous. However, when a New Zealand financier was kidnapped and held to ransom (ten million was paid out) and then murdered, I decided to put up with the inconvenience.
When things had settled down, a day or two later, it crossed my mind that the armed prowler might have been there for a reason other than kidnapping; But there was no other I could think of, so I dismissed the idea.