Freefall Read online

  “Let’s step through what we have.” I said.

  I walked off the terrace, sat at the dressing table in my room and put my phone on open speaker. I opened a writing pad. Jack and I talked while I made notes:

  • Emails between Henry East and Bart Hills point to Christ. Christ gives tip-off to Henry about the Double Happiness takeover bid = proof Henry lied to the court about acting alone. Who/ where is Christ?

  • The Easts don’t appeal Henry’s sentence. Aim = avoid further scrutiny? Did Henry buck against that deal? Did someone attack Henry in jail to shut him up?

  • Bart Hills death - self-inflicted? Or arranged to shut him up?

  • Bruce Tyson, Henry’s nurse, is murdered. Did THEY discover he was talking to The Citizen? Did Tyson overhear things in the prison psych hospital we don’t know about? Why was he trying to talk to Cavalcade’s chairman, John K. Baker? Was Tyson a blackmailer?

  • Charles East and Baker/Cavalcade linked in China – and via the polo in London. But East denies/plays down links. Why? What is their history? Current status? TIGA?

  • Who is Oscar Petersen? Did he kill Tyson for East? Who abducted Claire?

  “You know how many question marks I just counted?” I asked.

  “Look,” he said, “take a trip to the London office. You know Cliff McDonald. I’ve had a chat to him. You two have a sniff around Baker and see what you can find. Claire’s following the Tyson murder in Sydney. My guys in Shanghai are having a look at the connection between Cavalcade and East here. And now we’ll look at your tiger.”

  “Oh, last thing,” said Jack. “Your threat to kill charges; we’ve had some legal advice.”

  Jack’s words sparked a recall that I kept to myself: Mr Browning must be lying somewhere at Moon Hill, carelessly abandoned after my mushroom trip. What if the coppers drop in to the Hill and find the gun while I’m over here?

  “What sort of advice?” I said.

  “Do you think East really wants a court case, a public shit fight with a global media company, albeit small, shining lights up his arse so the world can see what’s up there? His clients would hate it. Our advice is that he’ll back off before any trial. And if he does, the police will drop the charges. So he’ll try to string this out, and we need to be patient. And you need to count to ten whenever you feel like throwing wild punches.”

  XIV

  THE NEXT morning, Hugo went to school, and Alice and Kate caught the train to London to visit Alice’s godmother, an astronomer who worked at the planetarium near the home of Greenwich Mean Time. Alice once believed her godmother was a fairy who set the world’s clocks from a magic cupboard in her office. I walked to the hospital to visit Malcolm.

  I spoke to the nurse before I went in.

  “He’s just had a bath. He’s bright, but a little delirious: a lot of morphine for the pain,” she said.

  When I entered the room, a brown stain was slowly expanding through a bandage around Malcolm’s torso.

  I sat beside his bed. “How are you doing?”

  “Been on a trip.”

  “Where to?”

  “The Apollo Club in Harlem. Listened to Miles Davis going solo. Then I ate spare ribs and collard greens with mashed potato, washed down with an icy cold Rolling Rock.”

  “Nice,” I said. “When did you get back?”

  “Just opened my eyes.”

  “Been anywhere else you want to talk about?”

  “Morocco last night, playing a flute with some snake charmers.”

  “I’d join you for the next ride but I don’t have any of that fine morphine they’re feeding you.”

  “There’s a few barriers to leap before you can get on board,” said Malcolm. “I wouldn’t recommend the crossing.”

  I felt a faint squeeze from his hand.

  “What are you working on?” he said

  “Just some global conspiracy.”

  “Cracking it?”

  “Got some interesting emails, some death threats, a couple of bodies. Plenty of Qs and no As. I’m on probation for insulting a captain of industry. I made a death threat, if you really want to know.”

  Malcolm smiled: “I’d take you to The Rock for a pint and some expert counsel, but I’m a bit tied up.”

  The Rock Hotel in Kemp Town, East Brighton, was a regular hideout for me and Malcolm on our family holidays over the years. “Only exercise I get these days,” Malcolm used to say with a boyish grin, flexing a chicken egg-sized bicep as he touched a pint glass to his lips.

  “Now,” he said, “this conspiracy. Anyone I’d know involved?”

  “There is one shifty Pom.”

  “Always is. Name?”

  “A big investment banking kahuna in London named John K. Baker.”

  “More a name you would associate with donuts,” said Malcolm. “Got a company name?”

  “Cavalcade.”

  “Cavalcade ... sounds like a merry-go-round. Do they do property?”

  “It’s in their repertoire, I believe. Why?”

  “Never met him, but I did put his picture in my newspaper.”

  “On a polo pony?”

  “We never did toffs’ sports. It was a marina. Big deal for Brighton. Five hundred million quid’s worth. That’s what they promised the city.”

  “Promised?”

  “They were going to build a five-star resort, super yacht marina. The visionary Mr Baker wanted to connect Brighton into the Eurostar line to Paris too. Big story for us at The Morning Sun. Then it all went as flat as a dropped beer.”

  “What happened?”

  “You did hear about the Global Financial Crisis?” said Malcolm, who had perked up with the smelling salts of a yarn in his nostrils. “Almost sunk him. But he bounced back and dumped Brighton in the process. He chased fatter fish in foreign seas. Tell you what; you ought to talk to my old business editor, Bill Crewes. Kate knows where he is. Runs a vintage bookshop in Lewes.”

  “What’s he know?”

  “Bill followed that Baker development like a dog with a bone. He owned a chunk of land where Baker said he was going to build. Bill got cranky as a bull with cut balls when it fell over.”

  Malcolm’s eyes started to flicker. He reached for a kidney dish on the bedside cabinet. I helped him spit some dark fluid into it and gave him a handful of tissues.

  “I’ll let you have a rest,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I stopped at the door on the way out of the room. “Where are you going tonight?”

  “Don’t know. Ideas?”

  “Try that Christmas. Remember the family photo we took on your stairs? Charlotte arranged us like a tree and you sat on top like the bloody star.”

  “Cheers, son.” Malcolm closed his eyes. “Gar,” he called, eyes still shut.

  “Yes, mate?”

  “Stay in touch with Kate and the boys when I go.”

  I went back and sat with him until he fell asleep.

  Back at the Halliday’s, I sat on my bed and read new emails on my laptop.

  Steele had sent me a scanned document with a cover note: FYI, this is a letter from Henry East to Bart Hills sent from Silverwater Prison before he was cut/cut himself. Handwritten. I have the original. Best, T.”

  Henry wrote:

  I can feel Charles crawling inside me. He will never let me go. Millions of him are coming out of my pores, I can see them now. Charles is an infection. Now I know what to do. If I chop off my hands, I chop off his. When are you and Christ coming to visit?

  XV

  ALICE DROVE me to the town of Lewes in Kate’s car to visit Malcolm’s old business editor. She steered us into a pretty village tucked into a cold slope behind some evergreen hills off the coast, about thirty minutes’ drive east of Brighton. We parked near the drawbridge entrance to a little grey-stone castle off the main street. Alice and I agreed to meet later in the pub next to the carpark and she went off to browse the clothes shops. I liked the place for about five minutes, until I walked
into one of the countless antiquarian bookshops that populate the town.

  The address for Bill Crewes that Kate gave me took me to a grocery store, so I thought I’d seek Crewes through one of his fellow book sellers. A pinched-face woman behind the counter could have been the twin sister of the lemon-sucking Justice Tobias Tanner who sent Henry East to prison. When I asked if she knew of Bill Crewes Rare Books, she bared her teeth and said, “Out there,” pointing to her front door. I tried a few other shops and discovered the fine burghers of Lewes had a common taste for bitter fruit, or a distaste for foreign accents such as mine.

  I eventually found Crewes’s name printed in gilt lettering above the glass-panelled entrance to a Tudor-era building. A life-sized human skeleton stood just inside the door. On the black-painted shop counter there was a large quill pen with a matching inkpot. Three cobwebbed, stuffed ravens were suspended in flying formation on chains from the low ceiling. A handsome woman behind the counter unbalanced me with,what I read as a genuine smile. She was tall and wore no make-up. Her long hair was streaked with grey and tied in a ponytail. She wore a dark, clingy, full-length dress. Mid-forties, I guessed. She was busy with a customer.

  “I’ll be with you shortly,” she told me.

  I strayed to the back of the shop and walked down a handful of steps into a musty room filled with faded hardback books stacked into floor-to-ceiling shelves. A man was sitting in the middle of the room on a church pew at a long oak table.

  He had a big head and curly, white, shoulder-length hair roughly parted in the middle. Rosy-faced, he was clean-shaven with lots of spare skin hanging under his jaw. He wore a three-piece, moss-coloured tweed suit, a cream shirt, brown tartan-check tie and peered through a magnifying glass at the spine of a large book opened cover-side-up.

  “Bill Crewes?”

  “I think that’s me,” he said, looking up and putting me in his magnifying glass.

  I explained to Crewes my referral from Malcolm. Crewes was strangely vague on the existence, let alone progress of Malcolm’s illness.

  “Mal just needs some piss and vinegar in his veins,” said Crewes. “This is the stuff.”

  He walked over to a small, wooden barrel of cider resting on its side in a cradle on a bench against a wall. He collected two pint glasses from the shelf above and filled them with cloudy fluid.

  “Mal says you know about the Cavalcade company and a Mr John K. Baker,” I said.

  “He’s a treacherous bastard,” said Crewes, handing me a pint and beckoning me to sit on a wooden chair that wobbled.

  “How so?”

  “Know much about yachting, young man?”

  “Not much.”

  “I’ll give you a tip. It’s dangerous if you walk around on deck in your underwear in the middle of the night.”

  “Not sure I’m with you, Bill.”

  “John Baker’s partner, Jean-Paul Marais, was an experienced yachtsman. What’s he doing falling into the Atlantic at midnight while Baker is on watch?”

  “So Baker pushed him overboard?”

  “Not what the investigators found.”

  “What do you think, Bill?”

  “He should be doing porridge for life.”

  Crewes was clearly thirsty. He poured himself another pint. Mine was half empty. He topped it up.

  “Why would he kill Marais?” I said.

  “Cavalcade was in debt; the whole thing was about to go under. I heard they had an offer to bail them out and Marais didn’t like the people who were offering.”

  “And who were they, Bill?”

  Crewes’s eyes widened. He looked full of fear. “Keep your voice down, son; these walls have ears.”

  Crewes grabbed my right hand, pulled me close to him, and whispered in my ear. He had terrible breath.

  “Who is that woman in the front of my shop?” Crewes was bug-eyed. He had a powerful grip on my hand.

  “I don’t know, Bill”

  “Get her out of here,” he said. “She’s a spy! She’s Baker’s spy!”

  The woman emerged from the front of the shop and stood in the doorway at the top of the steps.

  “Dad, it’s me, Joanne. Everything is okay.”

  “Who’s this?” said Crewes, pointing at me.

  “He’s a friend of mine,” she said. “Now can you please repair that book?”

  Crewes went back to examining the spine of the tome on his table. Joanne nodded for me to join her in the front of the shop.

  “I apologise for Dad. He has Alzheimer’s. Early stages but accelerating.”

  “Sorry to hear that. My father had something similar.”

  I explained my relationship with Malcolm and his suggestion that Bill may have been able to help me with background on the old marina project. Joanne broke the news that Bill had destroyed all his old work files from The Morning Sun by burning them with petrol in the back garden in a fit of paranoia that nearly destroyed the bookshop.

  “I don’t think Malcolm knows how bad Dad is. The drink sets him off sometimes, but if we don’t have it here, he wanders the pubs and all hell breaks loose in the town.”

  “You can’t chain him up, can you?”

  “I’ve had advice on that. It’s against the law unfortunately.”

  I gave Joanne my business card in case she found anything of Bill’s that mentioned Cavalcade, Baker, or the Brighton marina project, or if she had any afterthoughts.

  Darkness was falling and sleeting rain whipping in from the coast as Alice and I climbed into the car to drive back to Brighton. She plunged us into a blurry stream of cars and trucks, diamond-white headlamps and red tail lights. I dozed, warm and dry, feeling safe in Alice’s hands. My phone startled us both with its whistle. I didn’t recognise the incoming number, but the caller wasn’t hiding behind a blocked ID, so I answered.

  Joanne Crewes said: “Dad worked with a woman named Sarah Kerr at the Morning Sun. I think she helped him on the marina thing. Sarah sent dad a birthday card recently.”

  Joanne had thrown away the envelope with Sarah Kerr’s name and address on the back flap. “She told Dad that she is now a lecturer at Bath University.”

  XVI

  SITTING in the lounge room at Kate’s flat, with my laptop on my thighs, I searched for a Sarah Kerr on the Bath University website. There was a lecturer of that name in politics and international studies. I dug through some university press releases and found her mobile phone number. It was about 8pm when I stepped into the kitchen and dialled. Wherever Sarah Kerr was, it was rowdy and she was friendly.

  She found a quiet place and told me she’d met Malcolm Halliday and Bill Crewes around the year 2000 when she was teaching at the University of Brighton. She started working with them by writing an occasional newspaper column about Brighton’s history and architecture. She was interested in town planning, and working alongside Bill, crossed paths with Cavalcade’s marina proposal.

  “Let’s meet,” she said in a husky voice. “This conversation could get interesting.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Not over the phone, my love.”

  She had me hooked. We agreed to have lunch in two days’ time at a pub in Bath called the Crystal Palace on Abby Green near the Roman Baths. I liked that she’d chosen a pub. We might get along.

  THE NEXT MORNING I dressed in a suit and caught a train in the dark to central London and The Citizen’s headquarters at Covent Garden to meet Cliff McDonald.

  On the train, I received a text sent from Claire in Sydney: Call me. Don’t email.

  Claire was agitated when I phoned.

  “I’m getting strange emails,” she said. “Emails sent to me at The Citizen - from my work email address. And I didn’t send them.”

  “What do they say?”

  “Nothing. The subject line and text box is blank. I received one from you too,” she said. “Yesterday.”

  I scanned my sent items box. I’d not sent an email to Claire since I left Sydney days ago.

&n
bsp; Claire said: “It’s like we are talking to each other, but we’re not the ones doing the talking. If that makes any sense.”

  “May just be a glitch in the system,” I said. “Get the tech guys to have a look. But let Jack know.”

  An hour later my train arrived at London Bridge station and I joined the stony-eyed legions descending into the city’s underground where we packed ourselves into carriages and fumed against each other like half-cooked sausages.

  The Citizen was HQ’d a few hundred metres from the Covent Garden tube station in a modest 1970s brick building on cobblestoned Floral Street. My reflection in the windows of the high street clothes shops, pitched against the mannequins and the natty workers inside, made me think I needed a new suit and haircut, a view that was reinforced when I entered The Citizen’s open plan office.

  Jack had told me our London staff had an average age of 25. He didn’t mention the IQ. I reckoned he’d seriously overshot the runway on age. Cliff McDonald, one of the senior hands, didn’t have a decent facial furrow in sight. As he ushered me past quad-pods of desks peppered with obviously creative people, I calculated he was in his early thirties and trying to hide a silver spoon up his skinny backside. At least he was losing his hair early; his beard reminded me of the downy underbelly of a female crab.

  Cliff took me into his glass-walled office and sat at a desk behind a computer screen that was only a tad smaller than my Defender’s front window. I figured he had eyesight issues, or did a lot of video work, because was wearing thick-framed reading glasses, though they may have been props. I sat in a Scandinavian-style 1950s chair next to a matching coffee table.

  Cliff opened: “So you’re working under Claire Styler in Sydney?”

  Not bad, I thought. His first ball was a bumper bowled at my head. I ducked and let it go through to the keeper. “You know her well?” I said.

  “She’s a smart operator. I went to university with her.”

  “What about her husband. Do you know Carl?”

  “A chameleon.”