34

THE NEXT big town south of Woolburn was Warracknabeal. Brophy drove us there in the van, the three of us squashed in together on the front seat. Random items rolled around in the back. The engine roared, everything rattled, vibrations numbed our arses, and mysterious fumes sedated and nauseated us. Marigold wore headphones and bopped her head and sometimes sang a few off-key words. Brophy squinted at the highway for want of speed-dealer sunglasses. I offered him mine, but he wasn’t interested. For my part, I was in the throes of miserable indecision. Was he right for me? Should we continue?

We passed a sign that said: Caution, soft shoulder

We passed a sign that said: Open your eyes

We passed a sign that said: Seek alt route

We had dinner in a crowded pub on the main road, near the creek. People talked and laughed around us, while I studied Brophy for signs of withdrawal — both emotional, and the other kind. All I could say was that he was distracted, and that was a kind of withdrawal. That lapse into hope I had suffered earlier passed. The pendulum swung to despair, and I found myself wondering what items of mine I’d left at his place.

Later, in the motel, the three of us sat on one of the beds and played Uno. When Marigold went to fetch another glass of water, I shifted closer to him and held his hand. He squeezed mine back. I smiled at him; he gave me a sad half-smile.

My phone buzzed, I did a Loretta and took the call in the bathroom.

Bunny: ‘That Mount Isa cop, Jason Costa, he agreed to let me do a story on him. In the middle of our face-to-face interview, he gets a call about missing cattle. He goes, Not another theft. Says he’s been getting calls on a daily basis, a thousand head of cattle vanished from one station, next day, two thousand gone from another station. So far, he reckons he’s upwards of forty thousand missing, from all across western Queensland.’

I was stunned. It confirmed all my suspicions, and yet I couldn’t quite believe it.

‘It’s huge, Stella. One old bloke called it the biggest duff of all time. The cops are pulling over every cattle truck on every highway west of Longreach.’

‘They might like to inspect the cattle stations owned by Allyson Coleman.’ I tried to remember the names. ‘Costa will know them. They’re huge. There’s two near the port at the Gulf of Carpentaria and the third is Fly Hole Station. It’s a finishing property — whatever that means — near Mount Isa.’

‘I suggested that to him. He’s doubtful. The Coleman name is pretty big up here. Need a pretty good reason to go marching up onto her land and demand to check the cattle tags.’

It was extremely frustrating to me that some people were considered above scrutiny.

‘I better go,’ Bunny said. ‘I’ve sent you my story on Costa.’

I heard the ping as Bunny’s video file finished downloading. I clicked on the file, and the video opened on a mob of Brahman cattle. Her voice over the image.

‘I’m speaking to a cop whose beat covers almost a quarter of Queens-land. From the Gulf of Carpentaria to the South Australian border.’

Cut to a man in a Queensland Police uniform walking into a police station.

‘I spoke to Detective Sergeant Jason Costa about his role in the stock squad, dealing with all manner of rural crimes, from trespass on mine sites to the theft of stock.’

Costa: ‘The trouble with investigating stock thefts is they’re often not reported until months after they happened.’

Cut to Bunny walking alone in a paddock, cattle grazing behind her. Voice over: ‘The detective sergeant, with over twenty years in the Queensland Police Service, remembers one incident in 2010 in which five hundred head of cattle were stolen.’

Costa: ‘Never found the thief, nor the cattle for that matter.’

I shut the video, turned my phone off, and went to look in on Marigold and Brophy. They were in the middle of another game of Uno. I made a mug of tasteless tea. I took it outside to the landing and thought about all those cattle, snatched even with their ridiculous iDrover collars on. They had to be somewhere.

BS12 managed prison farms all over the country — maybe they were being held on one of those. Amazing how it was going on right under the nose of Ranik at Athol Goldwater. But he was a simpleton, coasting to retirement.

I thought about Marcus Pugh. His prison inspection team was a cover. ‘My office is concerned that some off-the-books enterprise has been going on under the radar,’ he’d said to me that day in the café. What a liar! It wasn’t his office, it was him. And he was being blackmailed. He was using me to find out who was working with Joe. He’d just wanted me to ask Ben. ‘Just ask him if he knows of any prison employee taking extravagant holidays, or turning up with a new car.’

And I did ask Ben. God help me, I was in league with Pugh and his corrupt cronies.

Ben hadn’t known any guards who were living large, but he’d helped me get Joe’s phone. And that was even better for Pugh. I’d set up and delivered. Almost.

It dawned on me then. That phone call Colin Slade had made after Velvet Stone had drugged me, I presumed, was to Pugh. Slade might have killed me that night, but Pugh had wanted to wait.

That was Pugh’s mistake. Phuong had the phone now. And the evidence was mounting. I tipped the dregs of my tea into a dead pot plant and went inside.

The town was shrouded in drizzle in the morning. We ate cold toast in the motel room. After we packed up and checked the room for phone chargers, we filed into the van once more.

Brophy sat behind the wheel. I looked out at the grazing cattle on the green hills. Marigold put her earphones in. Brophy tried calling her name, and when she didn’t answer, he looked at me. ‘We need to talk,’ he said in a whisper. ‘When we get back to Melbourne.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Good.’

I then spent the next hour and a half wondering what Brophy was planning to say. Maybe he planned to drop me pre-emptively. ‘You’re dropped.’ Did people say that anymore? All this angst was exhausting. My ears were ringing from the endless roar of the motor. When we stopped at a service station for a toilet break, I went into the cubicle and cried my heart out. I couldn’t say why, exactly. Everything, everything, everything, everything.

Then it was back in the van. So what if the syndicate had hired another BlackTack operative to wait outside my building, I had bigger fish to fry. I spent the rest of the journey wondering if Brophy and I could work this out. If not, life would go on. Autumn would turn to winter, fog and frost and cold wind. I’d go to work, as usual, and come home in the dark. The pain would subside, winter would turn to spring.

Two hours later, a bit after midday, Brophy pulled up outside my flat. He and I looked at each other.

‘Meet me later this arvo?’ he said.

‘Yes. This arvo would be good.’

He gave me directions to a new café/bar in Footscray. I said I’d let him know when I finished my meeting with Verity Savage.

Marigold took her head phones off and shouted after me. ‘Bye, Stella!’

‘Bye!’ I waved back. That girl would leave a gaping hole in my life, too, if it came to that.

Once they’d left, I made a careful sweep of my street looking for replacement BlackTack operatives. I probably wouldn’t know one if I saw one, but it made me feel in control. Once upstairs, I searched my flat and found it operative-free. Being vigilant was exhausting. I had a therapeutic fifteen-minute shower and dressed in preparation for my meeting with Verity Savage.

The reading matter for customers in Jar Jar Drinks was a mix of light-weight and impenetrable. I picked up a magazine and glanced at an article on how the handbags-that-resemble-fruit trend was stupid. Handbags that resembled vegetables, however, were bang on trend. I left the magazines, picked up a copy of Australian Financial Chronicle, and took it to a booth at the back of the café.

A woman entered the café in a rush. Early fifties, tall, slim, with grey hair in a ponytail. She wore a tan trench over a print dress, and slung over her shoulder was a large bag the shape and colour of a watermelon. She scanned the room, settled her gaze on me. I waved and she waved back.

‘Verity Savage.’ She hung her watermelon handbag over the seat and took off her coat.

‘Stella Hardy.’

She beckoned the waiter and asked for chai.

‘Two,’ I said.

‘So, Allyson Coleman, what’s your interest in her?’

‘Call it a hobby,’ I said. ‘An obsessive hobby.’

Verity nodded and gave me a gentle, non-threatening smile. ‘Fair enough.’

‘You’ve profiled her various previous business ventures, what’s up with this cattle-grazing project?’

‘Well, all I can say is, she’s done it again,’ Verity said, appearing baffled. ‘It takes a lot of front to convince new investors, but she’s got some Asian backers to buy into her Taurus Beef Trust. From what I’ve read of the deal, they provide the money, and she holds the titles, despite making no investment herself. The investors get a huge slice of Australia while fooling the Foreign Investment Review Board.’

‘Why does she need to fool them?’

‘There’s limits on foreign ownership of Australian agricultural land.’

I nodded, like I understood. ‘Why would these investors do business with her, given her reputation as a scam artist?’

Verity frowned. ‘The news of her past doesn’t seem to have travelled. She trades on the appearance of wealth and her family name. It sucks them in, but it’s all a sham. The Karmann Ghia is a rental.’

‘The family name — it implies old money and a solid business?’

‘Probably. She sold it to them as a win-win, but the investors are exposed to take the hit, while she’s in complete control. The properties are in her name. But that’s how she operates: on a grand scale. Coleman says this deal makes her Australia’s biggest cattle baroness.’

‘She has the cattle station, but where are the cattle?’

‘I don’t know about the cattle,’ she said.

Two glass jars of chai arrived. Verity stirred honey into hers. ‘Your email implied you think she has found a potential market,’ she said, as we both wrapped our serviettes around the jars in order to grip them.

‘If by “market” you mean a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars’ worth of Australian cattle for immediate live export, then yes, she has.’

Verity nodded, not convinced, not surprised, not outright derisive. She took a spiral-bound notebook and a pen from the watermelon. She placed them on the table with manicured hands, a silver ring with large stone on the left index finger.

‘Do you believe me?’ I asked.

‘As a journalist, I couldn’t say without more evidence. But with my PAWPAC hat on …’

I brought the jar of steaming hot tea to my lips. ‘PAWPAC, the animal rights outfit?’

‘Yes. From that point of view, I believe it is possible because it’s happened before.’

My jar of chai hovered in mid-air. ‘What did you say?’

‘That’s right. Everyone will tell you — the industry, the various governments — that there are checks, and that accountability is built into all steps along the export chain, but standards are not enforced. We know that the bureaucrats are in cahoots with the exporters. The ships are appalling, and vets are complicit. There’s so much profit to be made that everyone lets bad practices slide.’

‘What about tags? They say they keep track from paddock to plate.’

She gave an audible snort. ‘You can game the system quite easily. There was a famous case of a bloke who — this was discovered quite late in the process — had fitted false National Livestock Identification System devices to the cattle, made false declarations on waybills, and transported the cattle for sale. That’s deliberate deception, but there’s also the sheer incompetence side of things. On one ship, over fifty per cent of the cattle tags were lost. No accountability, no traceability.’

She sipped her chai. I put mine down. This was a stunning disclosure to me, but she seemed so matter-of-fact.

‘Some big cattle stations are using extra tags,’ I said, ‘more like bulky collars. Satellite GPS tracking technology. The collars force the cattle to move in certain directions using audio signals.’

‘That’s new.’ She clicked the pen and started writing in the notebook.

‘It’s all public information. But I believe that someone inside the BS12 organisation, who is also someone involved with Coleman’s group and who is familiar with the technology, has found a way to hack it.’

‘Whiz-bang system turns out to be vulnerable to hacking,’ she muttered as she wrote. ‘Who would have thought? Got a name?’

‘No. Well, it might be an employee at the Athol Goldwater prison.’

‘Who else? You said it was a conspiracy.’

I paused, not sure how she would react. Laugh in my face and walk out? ‘Marcus Pugh.’

She noted the name. ‘Go on,’ she said without looking up.

‘A man in Pugh’s department who handles prison contracts, Mark Lacy.’

She looked up. ‘A senior public servant?’

‘Yes. Where I work, if you accept a bag of lemons, that’s corruption, but awarding contracts and ordering services without oversight …’

She jotted down the name, while issuing a world-weary sigh. ‘What’s the smoking gun?’

‘I have a metric fuck-ton of smoking guns.’

She leaned back in her chair and clicked the pen back into itself. ‘Like what?’

‘A recording of Pugh talking about getting Allyson to help him “acquire” someone else’s bull for his daughter.’

She frowned. ‘Can I hear it?’

‘Actually, I gave it to someone. But I’ve heard it. It’s legit.’

‘Who made it? How did you get it?

‘A prisoner at Athol Goldwater had it, he tried to blackmail Pugh. That prisoner later died in a freak nail-gun accident at the prison. BS12 cronies have been trying to get hold of it ever since.’

Two hands undid and redid the ponytail, pulled it tight. ‘Good Lord.’

‘A cop in Queensland reckons large numbers of cattle are unaccounted for across multiple Queensland cattle stations.’

‘You think Coleman plans to stock her properties with stolen cattle?’

‘She’ll claim they’re hers and take them directly to port. Use her Taurus Beef Trust ID on the fake tags.’

‘Makes sense, I suppose,’ Verity said. ‘Once sold to the live trade, it’s all profit. She gives the investors a tiny cut, claiming massive overheads, and keeps the rest.’ She picked up her jar of chai and drank the rest in one go.

‘Seems like a lot of trouble to get the cattle on a ship,’ I said. ‘Even if the system is easy to game. Why not just slaughter the cattle and sell them as meat?’

She sighed, like she was sick of arguing the obvious. ‘Live exports get a much higher price than packaged and frozen meat. The industry is worth over a billion dollars. That’s why no government has the guts to shut it down. Public opinion is clearly against it.’

That said, she stared into the distance for a moment.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Just thinking about what I’ll say if I have to front another Senate inquiry.’

She shook herself and gathered her coat and watermelon. ‘Metric fuck-ton of smoking guns.’ She almost laughed. ‘You had me there for a while, Stella Hardy. You’re entirely in the dark, aren’t you?’

I neither confirmed nor denied. ‘What would convince people?’

‘Find the cattle, obviously. And also, if you can present the tags and any signs of tampering or changing them. If you can provide the GPS collars. That’s a smoking gun. Payments for the stolen cattle, bank accounts, money laundering through off-shore accounts. That’s a smoking gun.’

‘Find the cattle. No worries.’

She shrugged. ‘If they catch Allyson Coleman with a stolen cow in the boot of her Karmann Ghia, let me know.’

‘Where is Allyson now?’

‘Somewhere in Asia, I think,’ Verity said, getting out her wallet. ‘I’ll get this, shall I? You’re probably broke as well.’

I finished my chai. I wasn’t short of a quid, but I was kind of broke.