35

EVERYONE WAS GLUED to the TV when I entered the room early next morning. Justice Minister Simon Black was on some news program. The caption at the bottom of the screen said it all: ‘Lansdowne Abduction: Centre takes charge.’

Black was being asked if the decision represented a vote of no confidence in the Australian Federal Police. No, he said, the AFP enjoyed his full confidence, and they’d still be working on the case. So why hand the investigation over to the Centre, asked his interrogator. Because the abduction of the prime minister threatened the security of the nation, said the minister, and national security was the province of the Centre, especially given its experience in large-scale logistics. The last part of his response could mean only one thing. Black had approved Bolton’s plan for a blanket search of the city — to enter every house and building, and to interrogate every citizen.

When the interview ended, Smeaton came over and gave me the latest. Bolton had established a Major Incident Room over at the Centre’s Northbourne Avenue offices, he said. And Brady had agreed to the AFP handling any overflow, and for us to assist Bolton’s people as required. So that was it — we’d been officially sidelined. It was a bastard of a decision, but fully expected. I clapped Smeaton on the shoulder and headed out to the kitchen for a coffee.

When I returned, I ignored all the huddles that had formed around the room and headed straight to my desk. We’d have plenty of time for post-mortems and hand-wringing once we’d been reassigned. Until then, I intended to stay focused on the case. I grabbed a bunch of newspapers and flipped through them while I drank my coffee. They’d all thrown the kitchen sink at the story, with wrap-around editions and special supplements detailing the abduction. ‘The crime of the century’ they were calling it, and most front pages featured the same smiling photo of Penny Lomax.

Other pictures featured uniformed cops from Victoria manning a checkpoint in the city centre. Another had a flight of army choppers taking off from Ainslie Oval. And there was an aerial shot of the Hume Highway with a massive convoy of police vehicles heading south towards Canberra.

Lomax’s boltholes had all been close to Parliament House, so leads mentioning the inner south were being pursued with maximum vigour. I was reading about a raid in Forrest when a call came through on my desk phone. It was Adam Stowe from Major Crime in Auckland. He sounded like he was bursting with big news — which, as it turned out, he was.

‘When I looked at the names you sent,’ he said, ‘the link between them jumped straight out at me. They’re all Special Brethren, and by the looks of it they were up to something very curious over your way.’

‘Just a minute will you, Adam,’ I said, and I cupped my hand over the receiver.

The thing was, I knew I should be transferring Stowe straight to the Centre, yet that didn’t seem right somehow. I’d asked him for this information, so why shouldn’t I take his call? I could transfer him to the Centre if it seemed warranted.

‘Okay, mate,’ I said. ‘What have you got?’

‘Well, after I got your list,’ said Stowe, ‘I contacted the local Brethren, and as expected they claimed ignorance of any jaunts to Sydney involving their people. But, as luck would have it, I’ve got this nephew who’s been seeing a Brethren girl. On the sly, of course. So I got him to raise it with her, discreetly like. And he came back with a very interesting tale.

‘It seems the girl’s brother and twenty other young Brethren men flew to Sydney on the date you mentioned. They spent a day at a hotel near the airport, and, while they were there, they learned a spiel from some spiv, and got fitted out in new suits. Early next morning, they were split into pairs, and each pair flew to one of your state capitals.’

‘And what were they up to?’ I said, completely gripped by the yarn, but expecting a letdown somewhere before the end.

‘Each of the pairs had been given a list of major office buildings they had to visit. Their job was to go into those buildings first thing in the morning, get into a lift full of people, and go through the spiel they’d been taught in Sydney.’

‘And that was?’

‘Ohh, very nasty stuff. Essentially, they had to pretend they were having a chat, and one of them would tell the other that your leader of the opposition over there, Mr Feeney, was a paedophile, that he was involved in sexual stuff with little boys during his school days — something about a dance he’d done in front of them — and that he wasn’t fit to run Australia.’

I thanked Stowe for his good work, and, after he gave me contact details for his nephew, I transferred him to a liaison officer over at the Centre. Then I thought through the implications of his story. Essentially, it was confirmation that Proctor had hatched the paedophile rumour against Feeney. He’d had the authority, the ruthlessness, and the necessary dirt to get it off the ground. And he’d had the list of Brethren members in his briefcase, of course.

However, there was one other possible rumour-monger in the mix — Penny Lomax. What if the ‘Fire Dance’ had been her little project? If Proctor had given it to her to manage, she would have kept a file on it. He would have insisted that she did. The thing was, if she had managed that file, she would have been working on it at around the same time that she and Joe were planning their crime spree. In which case, that file might contain more than just the government’s attempts to brand Feeney a kiddy fiddler. Not that Lomax would have written anything specific in it about her crimes, but if she had worked on it, her words might tell us something about her state of mind at the time. She might even have made an oblique reference to her intentions, or pencilled in an aside. There was even a chance she’d slipped up in some way when she’d had the file open.

I’d once nailed a blackmailer because she’d leaned on the cover of a cookbook to pen her demands. What if Lomax had stuffed up in a similar way with the rumour file? And what about the other files she’d worked on in Proctor’s dirt collection? Might she not have inadvertently left a clue in one of them? It was a cardinal rule that an investigation should turn over every stone, yet those files remained undisturbed. And Bolton wouldn’t be going there. The government would whack him down if he tried, and Redding certainly wouldn’t have appointed him if he was anything less than compliant.

It meant that the Centre’s handling of the investigation would be dogged by the same handicaps and roadblocks that had held us back. As I saw it, that left us with only one option. Given the extreme turn in events, the Australian Federal Police, as the original investigating agency, had to lead the charge to open up all of Proctor’s files — even if that meant raiding the prime minister’s office.