31

MY COLLEAGUES STOOD and applauded when I walked into the room that morning. I automatically backed away towards the door, but that prompted them to rush me, and pat me on the shoulder and slap my back. ‘Well done, Glass,’ said one. ‘You beauty, Dazza,’ said another. Dazza? No one had ever called me that. And I certainly wasn’t comfortable having my workmates all over me.

I couldn’t help thinking of my reception the week before, when Rolfe had revealed Lansdowne’s thoughts on Wright, and quoted me as his source. Everyone had avoided eye-contact with me that morning, as though I was the human incarnation of Sodom and Gomorrah. How things had changed.

Given the pressure of the case, the glad-handing was mercifully brief, and everyone was soon back at their desks, either on the phone or focused on their screens. I got myself a coffee, and looked up the latest log on PROMIS. It turned out to be an upload from Brady’s forensic accountants. While I was ‘away’, they’d scoured Mondrian Bank for anything that linked the prime minister’s nephew, Mick Stanton, to the bank’s purchase of Dolman Holdings and its youth hostels.

The accountants had had access to all Mondrian files, but they’d found little concerning the Dolman purchase, other than the titles, and no one at the bank knew of any other documents relating to the matter.

I scrolled through the tasks the team had completed as they’d tried to find me. As well as searching my desk and my apartment, they’d spoken to everyone who knew me, which didn’t take them long. They’d done the same with Rolfe and Jean. I hesitated before looking at the summary of what they’d found at her place, but letters from old boyfriends were as close to bad as it got, and the latest was more than a year old.

The team had also completed title searches for the Rodway and Beagle Street places. Both of them were in Joe’s name. His full name had been Jozef Jankowski. According to Immigration, he’d emigrated from Poland eleven years before as a business migrant. To qualify under the program, he’d deposited half a million dollars into an Australian bank account, which had effectively bought him a passport. The money had stayed put for the required four years, and then he’d withdrawn it.

Efforts to track down Joe’s other bank details and his work history had so far come up empty. His prints were all over the painting gear and the landscapes I’d seen at Rodway Street. Interpol was chasing up his relatives in Poland.

Next, I went to the search of the two houses. It had turned up a few old toothbrushes and some dirty plates and cutlery, and the DNA from these was already being analysed. I hadn’t exactly searched the Rodway Street place — if I had, no doubt I would have looked under the double bed upstairs and spotted the two briefcases that had been found there.

According to the report, the cases belonged to Wright and Proctor. I saw this find as jaw-droppingly significant, so I was surprised that PROMIS only carried a summary of the cases’ contents. All it revealed was that Wright’s briefcase contained an exercise book in which she’d listed her achievements in the environment portfolio, and what she saw as her ‘future challenges’. From the challenges on the list, it was clear that Wright didn’t see a place for Ron Sorby in her future. He’d lost her trust. She wrote that he was ‘too close to Lansdowne’s people for comfort’.

There was also a parcel of documents in Wright’s briefcase. The PROMIS summary simply said that they ‘pertained to the Mondrian Affair’. McHenry no doubt had his reasons for applying this nondescript summary to these documents, and I was keen to hear it.

According to the summary for Proctor’s briefcase, most of its contents related to the electorate he’d visited just before he went missing. There was also a USB drive on which he’d kept a campaign diary, a contact list of party operatives, and a dirt file on opposition candidates in twenty-four marginal electorates.

The final item listed in the briefcase was a document with the mobile-phone numbers and email addresses of twenty New Zealanders, all of them males. The document also detailed a flight schedule for the men, Auckland to Sydney and return, plus an overnight booking for them at an airport hotel in the harbour city. I was mulling these details over when McHenry came in with a couple of takeaway coffees.

‘Back in harness?’ he said, placing a cup on my desk.

‘Like the workhorse I am,’ I said, raising the cup in salute. ‘Now, tell me. These briefcases from Joe’s house — the summary for them’s a bit brief, isn’t it? Especially the Mondrian stuff. Is it really that sensitive?’

McHenry bent over and put his mouth uncomfortably close to my ear.

‘You can have a look, Glass,’ he said, in a voice barely above a whisper. ‘But a word. Ruth and I are the only ones who’ve seen it all, and I can tell you, some of it’s positively radioactive. So you know what I’m saying. Any leaks, and we’ll know who to talk to.’

McHenry had the contents of the briefcases locked in a drawer in his desk. It was where he kept confidential material and any items of evidence that we might need to access during the case. I took the bundle tagged ‘Susan Wright’ to an empty interview room and locked the door. When I opened the bundle, I understood why the summary had been so brief.

As well as Wright’s hand-written assessment of her office, the bag contained a big red box file bearing an Australian coat of arms embossed in gold. It was the file that Wright had nicked from Proctor on the night she disappeared. I opened it very slowly, somehow needing to extend the moment.

The file contained three evidence bags, each of which held a thin set of documents. The bags were stacked on top of each other, and there was a note from Forensics on top of the stack. The note said that the documents, when recovered, had been inside plastic sleeves, and the sleeves had been removed when an impression of a cassette case had been found etched into one of them.

That impression had subsequently been matched to the one on the sleeve that had contained Jean’s leaked documents. What had the killers done with the cassette itself? Maybe the documents held the answer. I lifted the three bags out of the box and lined them up on the table.

The document inside the first bag was almost fifteen years old. It was headed ‘Share Options Offer’, and it informed an unnamed beneficiary that they’d receive 25 per cent of Mondrian Bank’s shares in Dolman Holdings once they’d completed an unspecified task. The second bag contained a memorandum of agreement on the Dolman shares. It had been signed about six months after the options offer, and it stipulated that the shares would be signed over to ‘Beneficiary A’ for the same price that Mondrian had paid for them.

In the third bag was a page from Mondrian’s accounts, dated eight months after the introduction of Susan Wright’s voucher scheme. This document noted that ‘Beneficiary A’ had paid the bank four million dollars for an unspecified number of Dolman shares. It wasn’t clear if all three documents were talking about the same beneficiary, or the same shares. If they were, the voucher scheme would have boosted the value of those shares from four million dollars to something like sixty million.

These were the documents that the accountants had been looking for when they’d raided Mondrian. So how did Proctor get his hands on them? Maybe Lansdowne’s nephew had stolen them from the bank and given them to him. But why would he do that? And why had Proctor shown them to Wright on the night she disappeared? Was it to remind her that she was complicit in some deeper way in the Mondrian affair? Or was it to keep her in line on matters we didn’t know about yet? And how did the cassette feature? The only thing we knew for sure was that Wright had been desperate to get her hands on this file. And it also seemed clear that the material it contained had got her and Proctor killed.

McHenry was on the phone when I took the bags back to him. He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece, and handed me a photocopy of Proctor’s New Zealand file and asked me to look into it.

I phoned Major Crime in Auckland and spoke to Detective Adam Stowe. Stowe had been following our investigation and was keen to talk about it. I batted his questions away, and asked him to get me everything he could on the Kiwis who had featured in the file.

Then I called Jean. She was in Sydney working on a prime-time special with the network’s current-affairs unit. She said it was a ‘drippy’ little tabloid effort they’d titled ‘Canberra: Australia’s Capital of Fear’. As well as interviews with Wright and Proctor’s relatives, the production team had spoken to the dead pair’s friends and staff, including Ron Sorby. Jean said Sorby had become quite emotional when he’d been interviewed. The thought of him crying on camera had me returning to Susan Wright’s assessment of him.

Jean rang off and I got my mind back onto the mystery Kiwis. I called the Sydney hotel where they’d overnighted, and spoke to the duty manager. He agreed to dig out the records of every expense they’d racked up, including their incoming and outgoing phone calls. If anyone had asked me where I thought this effort might lead, I would have told them it was just another loose end from a dead man’s briefcase that we needed to tidy up.

I was thinking about another coffee when Ruth Marginson suddenly shot out of her seat. Her eyes were wide with alarm, and her mouth quivered as she struggled to speak.

‘C-comms just got a call from the PM’s office,’ she said, a piece of paper trembling in her hand. ‘From Adam Davies. Close Protection. It’s unbelievable, but Davies says the prime minister’s been taken. Or rather, he’s been abducted. And it seems that Penny Lomax is involved.’