37

I TRAINED MY Glock on the door while I upended the pack with my other hand. The contents spilt out onto the floor, and I used my foot to separate the congealed clothes from the mouldy towels and dog-eared novels. Then an opaque plastic sleeve slid into view from between two filthy T-shirts. The sleeve was a match for those that had housed Proctor’s dirt. I held my breath, and removed five sheets of paper from it and lined them up in front of me on the mattress.

Each sheet had the same header: ‘Mondrian’. It was the transcript of a meeting. The participants’ names were written in full when they first contributed to the discussion or asked a question; after that, they were simply noted by their initials. Those named as attending the meeting were Michael Lansdowne, Alan Proctor, Dennis Hanley, Susan Wright, and Lansdowne’s nephew, Mick Stanton. All of them were dead now of course, except for the prime minister. And even his fate was uncertain.

My first instinct was to pocket the document, race for the bike, and call in the cavalry — quick smart. But if I ran into Tom Hanley on the way, or even Penny Lomax, it might be handy to know what had been discussed at that meeting all those years ago. So I quickly scanned the pages.

According to the date on the transcript, it had been almost fifteen years since the meeting, so Lansdowne and Wright were shadow ministers at the time. The first couple of pages were taken up with Mick Stanton explaining the bed voucher scheme that was later to embroil the government in such controversy.

The rest of the transcript was mostly questions from Lansdowne, Proctor, and Wright. Stanton and Hanley supplied the answers. They all recognised that they were doing something highly illegal, but they were mostly focused on the rewards they’d reap if the scheme was implemented.

Those rewards included cut-price shares, which Stanton said would net each of them ten million dollars. They could also take up a directorship with a Mondrian-owned company within four years if they wanted. Stanton said directors were paid two hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year for attending quarterly meetings and for providing advice on request.

Towards the end of the meeting, Dennis Hanley had said he doubted Mondrian could keep its ownership of Dolman a secret. Stanton had dismissed his concerns, saying the bank would purchase Dolman using a shelf company, and that it was perfectly legal for it not to disclose the purchase.

Like Stanton, Wright had been very upbeat about the ‘opportunity’ that they’d all been given. And she said that the voucher scheme represented humane policy, and any party that embraced it should be congratulated.

So this was what had got them all killed. No wonder Susan Wright had been desperate to get her hands on the Mondrian tape on the night she disappeared. If this was a transcript of that tape, and I had no doubt it was, then it damned her, and Lansdowne, and everyone else who was in on the Mondrian conspiracy.

And it meant that even if we were to rescue the prime minister, it was not going to end well for him. He’d effectively go from one prison to another. I was dealing with that image when a car fired up down below. It could only have been Tom Hanley on the move.

I gathered up the document, shoved it into my jacket pocket, and dashed for the open door. A long, thin cloud of dust rose through the treetops below, marking the progress of Hanley’s BMW as it roared along the track towards Lake Road. I glanced up at the three cabins coming off the stairs above me, and then I jumped down the stairs, two and three at time, and sprinted through the trees towards the road.

My best chance of stopping Hanley was to get to him before he opened the gate. But by the time I emerged into the clearing that bordered the fenceline, the gate was already open, and Hanley was getting back into his car. He gunned the engine, his vehicle fish-tailed in the loose stones in the driveway, and then it rocketed down Lake Road like a car half its age.

When I got a direct line of sight on it, I raised my Glock and took a bead on the head behind the steering wheel. Hanley looked to be alone in the car, but if the PM was trussed up on the backseat, I might hit him. As I stood there, immobilised by this dilemma, the car rounded the corner a hundred metres away and disappeared behind a stand of conifers.

I lowered my gun and raced back to the bike, hoping that Hanley had been too concerned with his getaway to tamper with it. No such luck. Every exposed hose and cable on the machine had been severed. The microphone for the radio was gone. He’d even bent the aerial for good measure.

I tried kick-starting the bike, but couldn’t raise a spark, so I slumped onto the petrol tank and considered my next move. Just then, an old Monaro, blowing heaps of smoke, came around the same stand of trees that had swallowed Hanley.

I stood in the middle of the road and waved the car down, obliging the young woman driver to bring the thing to a shuddering halt a few metres in front of me. A fag hung from her mouth, and the dark rings under her eyes magnified the stress she was obviously feeling at being stopped by a cop in full leathers.

She wound down her window and I showed her my badge. That seemed to stress her out even more, so I assured her that she wasn’t in any trouble. I considered commandeering her car to pursue Hanley, but the old bomb looked too far gone for that. Instead, I told her I was dealing with an emergency, and that I needed her to drive me to her place so I could use her phone.

‘Sorry, I can’t help you there,’ she said, taking the fag from her mouth. ‘The lines along here went down yesterday, and they reckon they’ll be out for another day at least. You after that bastard in the Beamer? The one who nearly side-swiped me back there?’

She drew on her fag and eyed me expectantly. I ignored the question and tried to think through the situation. I knew now that Tom Hanley had been consorting with Joe, a fact that put him in the frame for the murders and the abductions. The transcript in his pack was another indicator of his involvement at a high level.

If Hanley was also in league with Lomax, as I strongly suspected he was, there might be something back at the huts pointing to Lansdowne’s whereabouts. In fact, that might be where they were holding him. I had no choice, really — I had to get back there in a hurry. But first I had to trust this raggedy woman with one of the biggest jobs I’d ever given anyone. She shrank back as I leaned in her window.

‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Jenny Smith,’ she said, more edgy now than ever.

‘Jenny, the life of the prime minister could depend on your doing exactly what I ask you to do right now. I need you to get into Bungendore as fast as you can, and get to a phone and call this number.’

I wrote McHenry’s name and number in my notepad, and jotted down a series of dot points that I wanted Jenny to read to the boss when he answered. Essentially, I told McHenry to send a SWAT team out to Tom Hanley’s place with extreme urgency. I knew this might not be warranted, but I wasn’t taking any chances.

I told him Hanley was armed and dangerous, and I supplied the details of his car. I said he might have vital information concerning Lansdowne’s whereabouts, and that he was on the road somewhere in the Bungendore–Lake George area.

I wrote my name at the bottom of the page, and ripped the page from my notebook and gave it to Jenny Smith. Then I gave her some coins, thanked her for her help, and waved her on her way. She did a perfect three-point turn on the narrow road and took off towards Bungendore, trailing a cloud of smoke and dust. When she was out of sight, I ran back up the track towards the cabins.

I was almost out of breath by the time I got to the foot of the stairs, so I gave myself a minute to recover before making my way up, step by step, holding my Glock two-handed in front of my eyes. I was ready for anything — or so I thought.

The first cabin off the stairs was as bare as it had been when I’d first visited with Smeaton and Bender. So was the next one up. And the one after that. I had another quick look in Hanley’s cabin, but it was unchanged from a few minutes before. I was closing the door to the cabin, and questioning the wisdom of trusting Jenny Smith, when I heard a loud grunt from somewhere above me.

I ran to the stairs just as the prime minister staggered from the shadows of the next cabin up. He was hunched over, his suit was filthy, and he looked sickly and weak. A hand holding a revolver came around the corner of the cabin. Another Cobra .38 Special, it was pointed at Lansdowne’s head. Lomax didn’t show herself. She simply shouted.

‘Throw your gun into the bush! As far as you can! Now, or he dies! Do it!’

I hurled my Glock at a tall tree about twenty metres away, and forlornly watched it bounce off the trunk and drop into the scrub below. Lomax stepped from the shadows, lowered her weapon to Lansdowne’s back, and prodded him forward a few steps.

‘What kept you, inspector?’ she said, looking down at me with a half-smile on her face. ‘I told Michael here you’d be back in five minutes. And that was what? Eight minutes ago?’

‘Are you okay, Prime Minister?’ I said, though the answer was obvious.

‘I …’ said Lansdowne, and he spluttered and clamped both hands to his mouth, attempting to suppress a cough. ‘I can’t …’

But before he could get anything else out, he was taken by a coughing fit that bent him over and wracked him so completely I thought he’d collapse. When he finally got his breathing under control, he spat out a gob of phlegm, then looked at me, his eyes begging for deliverance.

‘He’s fine,’ said Lomax, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘It was cold out here last night, wasn’t it, Michael?

‘What’s the prime minister done to deserve this?’

‘What’s he done?’ she said, as if it were the stupidest question in the world. ‘Don’t play with me, detective. You’ve seen the transcript. You know about the meeting — the one our friend here taped on the sly. What’s he done? Well, for a start, he killed my dad with his scheme. And that ended it for my mum. Then he set Proctor onto my brother, Tom, and look at poor Tommy now. Then there’s me — your worst nightmare. This guy can take credit for me, too. What’s he done? Well, he’s done quite a lot, hasn’t he?’

‘You’re Sylvie. Sylvie Hanley.’

‘Give the man a prize,’ she said.

Her gaze seemed to harden, and there was a tremor in her chin. I had to keep her talking, but I’d have to be careful. If she thought I was stringing things out, she’d bring our little chat to a quick end, and by the look of her that could happen at any moment.

‘So this was your objective, was it? To kill Lansdowne? Like you did the other two?’

‘We only wanted the tape,’ she said, patting the breast pocket of her jacket. ‘And we definitely never planned to kill Susan. But once we got her back to Rodway Street, she went all Catholic on us. You know — reckoned she had to confess everything and accept her punishment. I didn’t want to hurt her, but there was no talking her out of it. Proctor was a different matter. And this guy. But we didn’t want to hurt Susan.’

‘So why did Proctor have to die?’

‘Like I said, our friend here set him onto Tom, and once he got his claws in, he wouldn’t let go.’

‘But what did Proctor actually do to him?’

The very question seemed to provoke Lomax. She raised her revolver back to Lansdowne’s head, took a deep breath, and then squinted in anticipation. This was it. Lansdowne sensed it, too. His face creased up, then he bent over and spluttered as his body was wracked by another coughing fit. Lomax looked at him with contempt, and lowered her weapon. Then the anger went from her eyes, replaced by an almost sorrowful look.

‘Mum’s last mistake was to tell Tommy about Mondrian,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘And what it had done to Dad. She’d already told me. That’s why I went overseas — to escape the whole business. Then, when she died, Tom and I went through her things, and found Dad’s transcript. They all had one, but only Proctor had the tape. After we buried Mum, I went back to Thailand, and Tom shifted out here.

‘When I’d been gone a couple of weeks, Tommy phoned Proctor and abused him for what the scam had done to our parents, and he threatened to give the transcript to a journo. Well, Proctor knew how to handle that. He told Tom that these cabins and everything else we owned were proceeds of crime, and that if ever the Mondrian story got out, we’d lose the lot. And he told Tom that if that happened, he’d end up tied to a bed in a psych ward somewhere, covered in his own shit.’

‘That was cruel.’

‘Yes, but then Proctor started coming out here every couple of months, just to remind Tom of what he stood to lose. And he badgered him for the transcript, which Tom refused to hand over. By any measure, detective, Proctor was torturing my brother at that point. Of course, he denied it when we got him back to Rodway. He said he was protecting himself. And Michael here …’

She jammed the revolver into Lansdowne’s spine, and he grunted as he stumbled towards the edge of the landing. His hands were pressed to his mouth, ready to smother a cough. I had to keep her talking.

‘No doubt this all had a big impact on Tom,’ I said.

‘A very big impact,’ said Lomax. ‘I know this place doesn’t look like much, but it anchors him to the world. Especially the lake down there. And Tom knows it, too. That’s why he’d call me whenever Proctor visited. He was desperate for me to sort it out. And I couldn’t let it go on. Especially after what they did to Mum and Dad.’

‘So you decided to kill Sylvie and come back to Australia as Penny Lomax?’

‘Yes. I came home as Penny. And Penny had one aim — to do whatever it took to protect Tom. And I knew that, in the end, that would probably mean killing Proctor. And this guy.’

So, finally, here we had it — an explanation for the audacious crime spree that had already taken two lives and could soon take more, including my own. It was a vendetta that had overtaken an election campaign, shocking the nation and making Australia the centre of world attention. Was this what it was all about? A sister’s love for her vulnerable brother, and her determination to protect him, no matter what the cost?

‘But you worked with Proctor for a couple of years,’ I said. ‘You could’ve taken him out loads of times. Why’d you wait till now? ’

‘Lots of reasons. He’d pretty much stopped coming out here by the time I was working for him. And having me around made Tom feel much better about things. And while I hated these people, I enjoyed the job. But then Proctor’s tape appeared at the party.’

‘And you thought that if you could get your hands on the prime evidence of the Mondrian conspiracy, Proctor wouldn’t have anything to hold over Tom. So why’d you have to kill him?’

‘Because after we dumped Susan’s body, he came out here and accused Tom of killing her. It had moved beyond the tape for him by then, so I had no choice. Anyway, I hated Proctor, so it wasn’t hard to do him.’

‘But a gas chamber?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you just shoot him? Or hit him over the head with something?’

‘The room was Joe’s idea,’ said Lomax. ‘He’d already soundproofed it for his music, so converting it took no time. And he always said that if gassing cats was the humane thing to do, why would we do any less for humans.’

‘Ah, yes. The cats. What was their significance?’

‘Joe’s idea as well. He said the cats would confuse you. And he was right, wasn’t he?’

‘And was there a real Penny Lomax?’

‘Of course. She was an Aussie junkie I met in Chiang Mai. An only child, with dead parents like me. It was too hard to resist, so I helped speed things up for her. And once she was gone, I had her passport, so I got her face, too.’

‘In Bangkok?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And who was Joe?’

The question touched a raw nerve. Lomax’s eyes narrowed as she lifted her revolver over Lansdowne’s shoulder and aimed it squarely at my head. Then she squinted slightly as her finger tightened on the trigger.

‘Ahh! There you are,’ said a woman’s voice from below. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

I looked down, and there was the psych standing at the edge of the clearing. She had a big smile on her face, and she started walking towards the stairs. Then a loud crack rang out from behind me.

The bullet hit the psych in the chest, jolting her backwards a couple of steps. She looked up at us again, this time clutching the hole that Lomax had made in her. She lifted her hands away and studied the blood dripping from them. Then she dropped to her knees, saying nothing, her eyes wide with surprise.

I dived for the side of Hanley’s cabin as a couple of bullets whizzed past my back. I had to escape while I still had the cabin for cover, and the trees bordering the path below looked like my best chance. I leapt off the paving, landed in a stumble-run, and ran down the slope with my arms whirling, fighting to keep my feet, heading for the trees, and expecting a bullet in my back.

Lomax’s first shot cut down a sapling a few metres ahead of me. She cursed loudly. The next shot would have pleased her more. I heard it, and simultaneously felt the bullet tear through my side. I threw myself forward and seemed to fall forever. Then my shoulder hit the ground, and I went head over heels all the way down the rest of the slope. A third shot rang out, and I tumbled into a dark thicket at the bottom of my fall.