Peter Corris - Open File

That was typical of Tania. She loved the obvious, doubted the nuances, made assumptions and treated them as facts. It wasn’t worth your breath to correct her, she didn’t hear anyway. Anyway, she was right that I’d withheld information from Sarah but I didn’t feel bad about that.

‘I didn’t want to add to Sarah’s anxieties,’ I said. ‘She was very vulnerable.’

‘Does she look vulnerable to you now?’

‘What’s going on, Tania? What’s your interest in this?’

Tania took a cigarette from Sarah’s packet and lit it. They exchanged conspiratorial smiles. ‘The story, of course,’ she said. ‘Sarah’s story. There’s a book in this. A best-seller. A lot of money to be made.’

‘You’re a cold-blooded bitch, Tania. Sarah won’t need it. She’ll inherit her mother’s house. It’s worth a lot of money.’

Tania tapped off her ash. ‘Temper, temper. That’s where you’re wrong. Tell him, Sarah.’

‘Angela and I fought a lot. You knew that.’

I nodded.

‘One day we had a real beauty, over school and all the shit she made me put up with. We really slammed into each other. She showed me a copy of her will. She’s left everything to be equally divided between me and Justin.’

‘Who’s been missing for two years and a bit,’ Tania said. ‘But it takes a fair while longer than that to have the authorities declare someone dead, unless there’s some very solid evidence. Means everything would be tied up for quite a while.’

We hadn’t touched the coffee. I drank some now to ease a dry throat. ‘True,’ I said.

Tania smiled. ‘That’s where you come in, Clifford.’

It was bizarre. Tania and Sarah wanted me to continue to look for Justin, either to find him or provide good reason to have him declared dead.

‘The story needs an ending,’ Tania said.

‘You mean you need it to do this best-seller.’

‘Same thing. Damn, this coffee’s cold.’

‘Suppose I just chuck it, cut my losses?’

Sarah stubbed out her cigarette. ‘You won’t.’

‘Why did you take off like that, Sarah? I know Tania must’ve sweet-talked you over the phone, but…’

‘I went right off when I saw that fucking file on Hilde’s desk. Like I told you, that dirty bastard copped a feel a couple of times. I couldn’t believe that you’d have anything to do with him.’

‘Listen, I left him whimpering. Didn’t mention you by name, but I pressured him by threatening a charge of molesting an underage female. He was shit-scared. I stole the file because I hoped it might tell me something useful about Justin, but it’s in Dutch. Hilde reads German and she can manage Dutch. I was getting her to translate it for me.’

Sarah nodded. ‘Yeah, I see that now. But with everything going on, and feeling so good about being with the Parkers and then seeing that fucker’s name, I just flipped.’

Tania was wearing a triumphant smile. ‘I can take some of the credit,’ she said. ‘I told Sarah to bring anything she could that might have a bearing on the story. She was going to rip the file to shreds. I told her not to.’

‘Credit?’ I said.

‘Credit. Where d’you think I got the name Kramer from? My father was a German immigrant. I grew up bilingual. I can read Dutch as well as your ex-girlfriend.’

‘Knock it off, Tania. She was never that.’

Tania shrugged. ‘Who cares? The point is, you were right. There is something in that paedophile’s notes that could be useful.’

‘Where’s the file now?’

‘Safe,’ Tania said. ‘You nicked it once, can’t let you do it again. You could be in trouble over that-theft, menaces…’

‘Van Der Harr wouldn’t risk the exposure.’

Tania shrugged. ‘You never know, and it wouldn’t look good if I chose to write it up that way.’

I almost had to admire her. She’d missed her calling- should have been in ASIO or some other dirty tricks outfit.

‘Nothing to say, Cliff?’

‘You’re doing all the talking.’

‘Justin told the psychiatrist that he knew his father had enemies.’

‘I know that. Van Der Harr said so.’

‘Did he give you a name?’

That hit home. Tania and Sarah looked pleased with themselves and I thought back to my meeting with Van Der Harr. Something stirred in my memory. What had he said? At first I thought it was a delusion… I’d been so keen to get the file and get away from him that I hadn’t followed through on what his statement implied.

‘No names,’ I said. ‘I doubt Justin could’ve found out anything like that.’

Sarah gave me a dirty look. ‘Justin was very smart.’

‘Right,’ Tania said.

I was getting tired of the fencing. ‘There are a lot of people smarter than me in this world, Tania, but you’re not one of them. Why don’t you just come out with it and let me decide whether it’s worth anything or not.’

Tania shook her head. ‘No, we want to make sure you’re going to follow this up and give it all you’ve got. A lot depends on it-not just the book and Sarah’s inheritance, but other things as well.’

‘Like what?’

‘I hear there was talk of suspending your licence. You’re on thin ice, I’m told. Stealing a doctor’s files, threatening him, doing dodgy deals with the cops…’

It was time to try a bit of divide and rule. ‘You’ve already played that card, Tania. If Justin’s smart, so is Sarah. She knows that it was a good move for her to go to the Parkers. You won’t manipulate her into making life hard for them.’

Tania betrayed doubt for the first time by reaching for another cigarette. ‘I… we… just want to make sure…’

‘I want to find Justin as much as you do. I’ve done a lot of work on what threw him off beam and, believe me, what he found out was enough to shake anyone up. Particularly a youngster who’d been fed so many lies.’

‘What?’ Sarah said. ‘What?’

Tania could see what was happening and she tried to recover ground. ‘You should have looked through Van Der Harr’s notes more closely, Cliff. Sure they were in Dutch, but didn’t you notice the name Wayne Ireland?’

I hadn’t noticed. Monolingual, I’d been completely put off by seeing pages of handwriting in a foreign language.

Tania recovered ground well. ‘Some detective,’ she said.

I turned to Sarah. ‘You said you told Justin about Ireland.’

She nodded.

‘So he knew about him and your mother but why would he think that Ireland and Paul Hampshire could be called enemies? Hampshire knew nothing about Ireland.’

‘Now you’re talking like a detective,’ Tania said. ‘That’s what you’ve got to look into. Did Justin go to see Ireland and if he did, what happened next? See? This is the stuff the story needs and we need to know to find out what happened to Justin.’

‘You’re assuming a lot,’ I said.

Tania took a deep draw and blew out the smoke in a theatrical stream. ‘Fucking right I am.’

I hated to admit it, but she’d opened up a legitimate avenue of enquiry. It wasn’t like Tania to delegate, though. I asked her why she didn’t try to get to Ireland herself. She stubbed out her cigarette and looked uncomfortable, but just for a second.

‘That man is a complete arsehole,’ she said. ‘I interviewed him once about something to do with his portfolio. Talk about a sleaze. He was all over me. Those ALP shits are all like that-half pissed on beer most of the time, with their haitches and their somethinks and everythinks.’

‘Doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, or Angela Pettigrew’s, for that matter,’ I said.

‘Oh, he’d smoothed off a lot of the rough edges. Bit of a chameleon, really. One thing with the merchant bankers and another with the union brothers. He knew some heavy types, all right, and he told me about them. But he was always a pants man. A bit too pleased with himself for me. I was lucky to get away with my bra on.’