Peter Corris - Appeal Denied

I drove to his house via a couple of sneaky streets, a route that’d let me know whether I was being followed. No tail. Phil’s street dead-ends at a set of steps leading down to Booth Street. I parked near the foot of the steps and walked up. Exercise wherever and whenever you can. I pressed the buzzer and didn’t need to speak. I knew Phil could see me in full colour from several angles. The house is nothing to look at, but the security is Fort Knox-like. A soft hum sounded and I was able to open the security door. A chime, and I could open the main door after that.

Once inside, I knew where to go and that I’d be tracked. The workroom door opened when I was two strides away and Phil had swivelled round in his chair to greet me as I stepped into the softly murmuring, light-blinking sanctum.

‘Hi, Cliff,’ Phil said. ‘Can you hang on a minute while I zap this fucker?’

I found a non-electronic place to sit while he spun around and tapped keys. He spun back.

‘So, healing cut and bruise on forehead. Slight stiffness of movement. Same old Cliff. Sorry to touch a nerve, but aren’t you out of business?’

He didn’t know Lily and I didn’t want to go into the details. ‘I’m sort of freelancing,’ I said. ‘Consulting, you might say.’

‘Good for you. So, whatcha want? If it’s in my power

Phil was in my debt. One time when he was pushing iron without a spotter, the upright he slotted the weight into gave way. I was there and managed to grab the weight and hold it until he scrambled out from under it. Otherwise, he’d have had a bar with 70 kilos attached coming down somewhere near his chest or head. Almighty crash when I let it go.

I told him I wanted information on a person who’d attended the University of Western Sydney and the Goulburn Police Academy and was a current member of the state police service.

He whistled. ‘Don’t want much, do you? The university’s a snap, but the police stuff. Shit, they’ve got all sorts of firewalls and cut-outs.’

‘Can it be done?’

He waved his hand at the banks of screens and printers and scanners and God knows what else. ‘That’s the beauty of it,’ he said. ‘Everything that’s out there is in here. It’s Aladdin’s cave, mate, and all you need is about a thousand and one ways to say “Open Sesame”.’

‘Right,’ I said.

He moved his chair along to another machine. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Name?’

I told him.

‘DOB?’

‘1980, approximately.’

‘Shit, that’s all? Okay, leave it with me.’

I’m no computer expert, but I’ve paid my fees and have access to the databanks of a few of the broadsheet newspapers. The computer in my office in Newtown is a laptop, even more of a clunker than the desktop one at home, but it can do the job if you’re patient. With cyber stuff, I am-let’s say still a bit amazed at what the bloody machines can do. I hadn’t been to the office in weeks, had given my notice to quit, and would have to clear it out very soon. It had been an okay place to work, hard to get a park though, and on this Friday afternoon I had to circle several blocks to get anywhere reasonably close.

Evidently whoever had broken in and stolen the computer from Glebe hadn’t known about the Newtown office or had reasoned that Lily wouldn’t have worked there. They were right; no self-respecting journalist would have used the old Mac with its antiquated operating system and floppy disks.

The office was grotty at the best of times, but when I was working there regularly I’d occasionally go over it with a broom, duster and a wet cloth. After the recent neglect, the cobwebs had gathered and the room and its small alcove smelled musty. A hundred years of dust sits in the building and filters down. There was a layer over every surface, and a few big cockroaches scuttled for cover from the shelf where I kept the coffee and sugar.

I opened the windows to let the petrol fumes compete with the mustiness and gave the chair, the printer, the mouse pad and space for a notebook a few wipes. I turned the computer on and let it plod slowly through its paces. The coffee was stale but I brewed it up anyway. While I waited for what I wanted to come up, I thought about the few years I’d worked here and some of the people who’d sat across from me with their troubles, their lies, their threats. Some of them I missed, others I wished I’d never laid eyes on.

I trawled through the papers looking for articles by and about the late Rex Robinson. He was an old hand, a freelancer who’d broken a lot of stories back in the seventies and eighties but seemed to have tapered off through the nineties and after. The occasional piece still turned up-crime reporting-but the material was thin and there was plenty of harking back to earlier days when he’d given evidence to enquiries of one sort or another into the police service. One thing was relevant: his later stories, bland though they were, focused on the area covered by the Northern Crimes Unit.

His last published piece had a little more muscle than the others and dealt with the death of an Asian prostitute in North Sydney. The very young woman, who’d overstayed her visitor’s visa, had been released from a detention centre, apparently by mistake. The official verdict was suicide by drug overdose, but Robinson had implied there was more to it. One sentence read: ‘A former police officer from the Northern Crimes Unit said that the coroner’s verdict was “unsafe”.’

Townsend’s recall on Robinson’s death was accurate. His fairly aged Volvo had gone through a railing and into Sailors Bay at Northbridge. Police divers recovered the vehicle and the body the next day when the broken rail was noticed. The inquest was held soon after and no significant evidence was offered other than the police opinion that the vehicle was in such poor repair that mechanical failure was the likely cause of the accident.

All this had happened when I was in the throes of my trouble with the Police Licensing Board and I was scarcely glancing at the papers. If there’d been anything on television I hadn’t seen it. Now, scanning the follow-up news coverage and somewhat perfunctory obituaries, I gathered, reading between the lines, that Robinson was an unpopular figure. He was an arrogant big-noter who others judged to have achieved, briefly, an eminence far above his merit. Tributes from the journalistic profession were dutiful rather than sincere. I didn’t recall Lily ever having mentioned him.

I printed out some of the material and highlighted bits of the printout, especially the stuff about the sex-worker released from detention and the ‘former police officer from the Northern Crimes Unit’. It had been a sad insight into what seemed like a sad life. No Walkleys, no books, no television spots. Robinson had two failed marriages, a bankruptcy and two DUI convictions. But at least it was some confirmation of what Jane Farrow had told us.

Talking to key-tappers and tapping keys is all very well, but it doesn’t feel like real work. I didn’t want to just sit around waiting for people to get back to me with information that might or might not be useful. I felt I owed it to Lily to do something.

I drove home, still cautious about a tail, made a stop at an ATM to draw out some cash, and investigated my closet. I had a blazer, worn but respectable. I had dark trousers and a burgundy shirt, both recently dry-cleaned. I had a matching pair of black socks and slip-on Italian shoes that only needed a touch of the Nugget brush to get rid of the white mould. After a shower, a shampoo and a shave, I reckoned I was ready for a Friday night out at the Lord of the Isles hotel in St Leonards where, according to Jane Farrow, the Northern Crimes Unit brass gathered.