Peter Corris - Comeback

I accepted cracked pepper and ate fish. It was good. O’Grady took some time with the dressing on his salad. He started on his fish.

‘Phil Tyson,’ I said. ‘What can you tell me about him?’

‘Nothing good. A thug. You know he sacked me.’

I nodded. ‘But I want you to be objective.’

‘Hard to be objective about Phil.’ He ate a couple of large mouthfuls of the fish followed by a considerable number of chips and some salad in rapid succession. He chewed slowly and bowed his head reverently. ‘Beautiful food, don’t you agree?’

‘It’s fine. Thuggish how?’

‘In every way-the people he hires, the pressure he exerts, especially on his clients.’

I stopped eating. ‘On his clients?’

‘I assume you’re working for one of them. Not surprising. You should never tell your secrets to Phil. He’ll handle your problem all right, but then he owns you and you have to dance to his tune.’

‘Blackmail?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Do you happen to know whether he did any work for a bloke named Ray Frost?’

O’Grady ate and drank in his measured, appreciative way. He dabbed at his mouth with the napkin. ‘I believe he did, yes.’

‘Do you know what it was?’

He poured more wine and inspected the level in the bottle. ‘Another, d’you think?’

‘No. Tyson and Frost?’

‘Sounds like a comedy team but I doubt there was anything funny about it. I don’t know the details; it was after my time, but I imagine Phil straightened out Frost’s problem in his usual direct manner and then extracted his pound of flesh.’

He compiled a forkful of food. ‘Poor choice of words.’

‘Direct manner?’

‘Phil has a phalanx of heavies and they run about in a fleet of cars. I once saw the entire executive fleet turn up at the one place at the same time. Very intimidating. You’re not eating.’

The fish was succulent and the vegetables were crisp but I was losing interest in the food. Something about O’Grady’s rapid consumption and absolute enjoyment put me off. I toyed with what was on my plate for a while before putting my knife and fork down and taking a decent swig of wine.

‘Disgusting,’ O’Grady said. ‘Sip it, man, sip it.’

‘Why did you leave Sterling Security, Dom?’

‘I blew the whistle on Tyson in 2003. I’ve got a flexible conscience but enough was enough. I thought everyone knew that. You disappoint me.’

I’d been in a fugue state for some time after my partner Lily Truscott had been killed, and then I’d gone overseas for a year or so. I’d missed a lot.

‘And were there reprisals?’

‘Oh, yes. Physical at first, now more or less just harassment. Unsettling. Tiresome.’

His plate was clean and he poured the last of the wine into his own glass.

‘Doesn’t put you off your food.’

‘It did for a time, I can assure you. But it’s an ill wind. I’ve got a comfortable spot now with Harry’s rag. Will there be anything for me in this matter you’re pursuing?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Thought so. Oh well, better make the most of this. Now I wonder what’s best for dessert.’

I thought over what he’d told me as a way of fixing the information in my memory- thug. . heavies. . pound of flesh. . pressure. . fleet of cars. .

‘How many cars in the executive fleet?’

‘Six.’

‘What kind of cars, Dom?’

‘White Commodores. Phil never uses anything else. Creme caramel, I think.’

Sterling Security Inc’s website listed six senior associates: five men and one woman. No photographs. I thought it unlikely a woman would drive around disguised as a bearded man. I faced the prospect of getting a look at the five men to see if one was bearded. Not a strong line of investigation, beards come and go, but it was the best I could come up with.

I was back in the office. Frost’s money had been deposited so that the balance in my account that took a heavy hit from the cost of the restaurant lunch was nicely topped up. I wrote down the five names and did the routine checks to find out more about them, particularly their addresses. No luck with the telephone directory; they were just the kind to have silent landline numbers if they had landlines at all. Mobile phone types for sure. But there are other ways. I’d lost my valuable RTA contact, which isn’t much use for checking on people driving leased company cars anyway, but I still had one in a big credit checking outfit. The information was costly but reliable.

A phone call got me addresses for three of the names: Arthur Pollock, Blacktown; Stephen Charles, Randwick; and Louis Salter, Clovelly. Anton Beaumont and Ralph Cochrane were proving more elusive. But persistence paid off. Beaumont turned up in a newspaper report on a traffic accident in which he was involved and his address was given as Alexandria. He’d been taken to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital for observation. I was pretty sure Hank could be persuaded to hack into the hospital records.

They say that there’s nowhere to hide these days, but Ralph Cochrane was doing a pretty good job of it. He didn’t appear on any of the databases I had access to and some discreet inquiries among people I thought might know yielded nothing. I could give him some thought. The procedure was going to mean a lot of driving around and trying not to be seen by people who presumably were good at not being snooped on.

There are people who do the easy stuff first. I understand the impulse but I’m the reverse. Get the hard stuff out of the way first. I’d always been like that-at school, in the army and in the profession I’d followed for so long. In the army it passed for keenness and efficiency. My reports spoke of ‘diligence’ and ‘initiative’. It wasn’t really, it was more a matter of doing the hard stuff while my energy level was high. I was easily bored and could get sloppy when I lost interest. As a detective the habit sometimes had benefits and sometimes not. Sometimes hard turned out to be easy and hard. You could never tell.

I wasn’t sleeping well. A matter of loneliness and a feeling that I wasn’t accomplishing as much as I should. So I was happy about making an early start. They say everyone is working longer hours these days and I assumed it applied to people in the security business, especially senior people if they wanted to stay senior. And why not me as well? I drove to Blacktown, setting off at 5 am, picking up the Great Western Highway at Five Dock and cruising through light traffic to arrive at the address a bit before 6 am.

Pollock’s place was on the fringes in a street that featured large houses on big blocks with lightly timbered scrubland not far away. It was a short street and every house had a driveway but there were three cars in some places that looked to have two-car garages and a couple had a car in the driveway and another out on the street. Kids still living at home. One extra car wouldn’t stand out too much. I parked on the opposite side of the street and about fifty metres away so that I’d get a clear view of Pollock as he backed out and swung around to face me before driving off.

The house was a two-storey job with white pillars, liver-coloured bricks and no eaves. Freezing in winter and stinking hot in summer, but presumably air-conditioned with a heavy carbon footprint. At 6.30 a roller door slid up and a white Commodore backed out. The driver obliged me by stopping before he reached the street, getting out and collecting the newspaper from the cylindrical holder beside the letterbox. He was small to medium sized with fair, thinning hair. No jutting jaw, no beard. He tossed the paper onto the passenger seat, got in and drove off without looking at me.