Seven Mile Beach, page 4
A middle-aged woman emerged from a red door behind the tasting counter, carrying a plate of antipasto. Without looking at her, Grogan said, ‘Thank you, Estelle.’ He picked up the bottle of Grogan Estate pinot noir that was standing in the middle of the table. ‘You’ll have some wine?’
‘Why not?’
Danny’s father poured two large glasses. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘About Danny?’
‘Isn’t that why we’re here?’
‘I know what I read in the paper,’ said Nick. ‘A camera caught Danny speeding on Moore Park Road.’
‘Is that all?’
It was obvious that Danny’s father knew more. ‘Pretty much,’ he said.
‘You know Danny is serving a suspended sentence?’
‘Yes.’
‘If he’s convicted of another offence he’ll go to jail.’
Nick didn’t say anything. Danny had been lucky until now but his luck had run out. Some people never had any luck to begin with. Maybe Danny deserved what was coming to him.
‘Danny’s mother is under sedation, Nicolas.’
Nick had never met Mrs Grogan face-to-face. She was as reclusive as her husband was ubiquitous. Apart from a handful taken at the Dreamland opening, the only picture in the Star’s photographic library was nearly fifteen years old: the developer’s wife in silk headscarf, white raincoat and dark glasses scurrying into a Paddington boutique. The shot reminded Nick of Jackie Onassis—or Princess Diana. As a child Danny rarely spoke about his mother. Nick had the impression she was often ill. Of course the rumours of her husband’s infidelities couldn’t have helped. If the gossip was true, Harry Grogan had a whole harem of mistresses installed in penthouse units around the city. None of the mistresses had ever come forward, of course. Still, it wasn’t hard to see why Mrs Grogan shunned the public gaze.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It would kill her if Danny went to jail.’
‘If you want me to speak on Danny’s behalf in court,’ said Nick, ‘I’ll do it.’
‘That’s kind of you, Nicolas. But it’s not exactly what I was thinking of.’
‘What were you thinking of?’
Danny’s father picked up his glass and swirled it around, his eyes fixed on the wine. Half a minute passed before he lifted his gaze. ‘I want you to say you were driving Danny’s car.’
‘That’s absurd,’ said Nick. ‘They have him on camera.’
‘They have the car on camera. It was nearly midnight. In such cases, I’m told, it is all but impossible to identify the driver.’
‘Why should I have been driving Danny’s car? And if I was driving Danny’s car, why would I have been doing ninety kilometres an hour on Moore Park Road? I know that road. There are speed cameras all over the place.’ He paused. ‘No, Mr Grogan. I’m sorry. It’s a crazy idea. I’d like to help Danny but… not like this.’
Grogan waited for some time before speaking again. ‘Danny will nominate you as the driver at the time of the accident. He will say you offered to drive him home. At some point he changed his mind and asked you to take him back to the nightclub. All you have to do, Nicolas, is agree. Danny’s lawyer will obtain a formal statement to that effect. The case against Danny will be dismissed. I believe I’m right in saying that you have recently experienced the break-up of a long-term relationship. The magistrate will take into account your emotional state at the time of the incident, together with the fact that it happened on New Year’s Eve, and let you off with a fine.’
Nick studied his face over the table. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘No, Nicolas. I’m not joking.’
‘What makes you think the police will believe I was driving the car?’
‘Can you suggest any reason they might have for not believing you?’
‘I’d be committing perjury,’ said Nick. ‘I could end up in jail.’
‘Nobody would be able to prove it,’ said Grogan. ‘Not if you were careful. Not if you stuck to your story.’
Nick thought about the sequined handbag he’d seen in the front seat of the Audi. ‘Someone was with Danny that night. A girl.’
Grogan’s expression hardened. ‘Danny was alone, Nicolas. He wasn’t with anyone.’
‘No, Mr Grogan. I’m sorry Danny’s in trouble. But I’m not getting mixed up in this.’ A few seconds passed before Nick heard himself say, ‘It’s not worth the risk.’ Those last few words took him by surprise—as if they had been spoken by someone else. ‘What I mean is, it’s too dangerous. For Danny as well as me. Lying will only get Danny into more trouble than he’s in already.’
‘Danny has always been a good liar,’ Grogan said. ‘It’s the one thing I can always trust him to do.’
Nick didn’t say anything.
Grogan finished his wine and cradled the empty glass in his hand. ‘What do you think the risk is worth?’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘A few moments ago you said that doing this little favour for Danny wasn’t worth the risk.’
‘So?’
‘So, I’m asking you what would make it worth the risk?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You know what I’m talking about, Nicolas. You’re an intelligent man. And like an intelligent man, you’re pretending not to know.’
‘You’ve lost me, Mr Grogan. I thought we were talking about helping Danny.’
‘We are.’ The older man paused. ‘I’m just waiting for you to tell me the price.’
‘The price?’
‘Your price.’
‘I’m not with you.’
‘Of course you are. The course of action I’m urging carries a degree of risk. It’s only fair to put a price on that risk. I’m asking you to name the price.’
‘In terms of what?’
‘In terms of money, Nicolas.’
‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Is it?’
‘You think money will persuade me to lie for Danny?’
‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’
Nick hesitated. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’
‘Come on, Nicolas. You must have some idea. Twenty thousand? Fifty? A hundred thousand? Would it be worth a hundred thousand dollars to you to tell the police you got carried away by the excitement of driving Danny’s car and broke the speed limit?’
Grogan made it sound trivial—a game almost, like stealing traffic cones or defacing road signs. Maybe it was a game, Nick thought. After all, nobody had been hurt. Nick thought about the money. A hundred thousand dollars was roughly ninety-five thousand more than he’d managed to save after a decade of full-time employment. He thought about the timing. He’d left the Judgment Bar around 10 p.m. and stood outside the Supreme Court for a while smoking a cigarette before deciding to try his luck at the Crypt. The speed camera had clocked Danny’s Audi at 10.27 p.m. on Moore Park Road. Between leaving the Judgment Bar and joining the queue outside the nightclub just before 11 p.m., he hadn’t spoken to a soul.
Nick waited a long time before answering. Once he might have said yes without thinking. He might even have felt he owed it to Danny, as a friend, to give him the alibi he needed. Maybe, deep down, he still felt that. Or maybe he didn’t. He thought about the money. He thought about himself thinking about the money. The money wasn’t his idea. It wasn’t as though he’d asked for it. Maybe, after all, he would have done this thing for Danny without the money. Maybe.
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Nick. ‘I’m not promising anything.’
Grogan scribbled a mobile phone number on a lined page torn from his diary. ‘In case you need to call me.’
Nick glanced at the last four digits—7777—before folding the page and slipping it in his pocket.
Looking at Danny’s father, Nick knew that the last thirty minutes had been a charade: of patience and humility on Grogan’s side, and of integrity, or at least discretion, on his. If he hesitated it was because he wasn’t sure of being able to pull off his side of the bargain. He could imagine lying impulsively—or even cunningly and deliberately—to save his own skin. In fact he didn’t need to imagine it. He’d done it countless times, in greater or lesser ways. But what would it take to stand up in court and perjure himself—to coolly take the blame for something he hadn’t done?
He watched Harry Grogan put out his hand and he watched himself take it. For an instant he had the weird sensation that this wasn’t him, that the person shaking Grogan’s hand was a stranger. He used to get the same feeling on death-knocks, speaking to the parents of teenage boys who’d driven into power poles or jumped in front of trains: the momentary feeling of not recognising himself, of listening to a voice that wasn’t his, of knowing and somehow not knowing what he was doing there. There was something hard and sarcastic in Grogan’s smile, as if he knew exactly what Nick was thinking, as if he’d witnessed such moral spasms before and always seen them overcome.
‘You’ll need to speak to Danny’s solicitor. His name is Roy Bellamy. He’s expecting your call.’
After leaving the circulations department of the Sun, Nick’s father had taken a job in insurance. He became an adjuster: he adjusted people’s claims to fit their losses. Nick’s father understood loss and the effects of loss—grief, anger, the need to recover what was not recoverable. He was generous in his adjustments. He liked to think of himself as fair, although fairness was not his business.
Mr Carmody was well known in Sydney’s hailstorm belt: a balding cheerful little man who never said no to a cup of tea. And further afield, in flood-prone towns up north and hamlets in the Blue Mountains where bushfires raged every few years. Nick had seen photographs of his father standing in his shirt-sleeves among the ashes of burnt-out homes; bending down among the charred timbers to rescue a brooch or a teapot. People still spoke of him in Bellingen, Taree, Mount Victoria, Medlow Bath, towns famous for their disasters. He was the fellow who arrived in the wake of hailstorms and whirlwinds and set about putting a price on what was lost.
Nick thought of him as he sat in the Jaguar, watching the scenery fly past the darkened windows. His father had never accepted a dollar he hadn’t earned. But the world had changed. In his father’s day money was the means of acquiring essentials: a car, a house, a two-week holiday at the coast every summer. Now money was the essence, and Nick felt the lack of it. By Harry Grogan’s standards a hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a big sum, but it felt like a big sum to Nick—enough to change his life. When the driver handed him a small package from the Jaguar’s glove box, he took it.
It was 2.15 p.m. as Nick climbed the steps from Town Hall station. He had an hour to kill before his meeting with Roy Bellamy. There was a big red ‘Sale’ sticker in the window of the Rubicon bookshop. The Rubicon was where Nick and Carolyn had met—upstairs, among the second-hand shelves. Nick had lost count of the afternoons they had spent in the coffee shop, reading books they had no intention of buying, and afterwards buying books they had no prospect of reading.
He went inside. The upstairs section was even more cluttered than usual. Scattered around the walls were hundreds of distressed paperbacks: concave airport thrillers and dog-eared romances bought by the kilogram or by the metre and displayed in pink plastic baskets, like offal in a Chinese market.
Near the window overlooking the street was a trestle table marked ‘Crime’. Nick circled the table, picking up books and then putting them back: long-out-of-print detective novels by Fergus Hume and Frederic Dannay; obscure psychological thrillers by Frances Iles; the odd Father Brown mystery, smelling of must and Mortein. This was the sort of literature Nick liked to read, the sort he wished he had the talent to write.
Among the leaning towers of broken-spined paperbacks were publishers’ remainders and dumped foreign editions, never opened, let alone read. These held no interest for Nick. There was something abject, he thought, about an unread book in a second-hand bookshop. He picked up a well-thumbed Simenon and took it downstairs to the counter.
* * *
Roy Bellamy had rooms in Macquarie Street overlooking the Mint in a building pregnant with obstetricians. He was a short fleshy man with a comb-over that looked as if it had been painted on with a calligrapher’s brush.
The solicitor waited for his elderly secretary to close the door before signalling for Nick to sit down. ‘Mr Carmody,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming.’
After shaking hands Bellamy removed his glasses and began polishing the lenses with a corner of his white cotton handkerchief.
‘Are you related to George Carmody, by any chance?’
‘Not that I’m aware of.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it.’
‘Who’s George Carmody?’
‘He’s a barrister. An unscrupulous one. I had a fleeting suspicion that you looked like him.’ He replaced his glasses and steepled his plump fingers on the desk. ‘You’ve come forward, I understand, to give evidence on behalf of Daniel Grogan.’
The formal way he said it made Nick suspect for a moment that Bellamy might be recording the conversation.
‘Are you taping this?’ he asked.
‘Would it matter if I was?’
‘It might.’
Bellamy smiled and produced a small tape-recorder from the top drawer of his desk. Nick could see that the spools were not turning. ‘Satisfied?’ Bellamy studied him across the table. ‘You’re the man who tracked down Mr Milhench.’
Nick shrugged. ‘It didn’t do me much good.’
‘Don’t undervalue yourself. Mr Milhench and I have had intermittent professional dealings over the years. I’d have to say he is one of the more ingenious criminals I’ve had the pleasure of representing.’
‘It was a lucky tip,’ said Nick. ‘It could just as easily have gone to someone else.’
‘But it went to you.’
‘Yes.’
The solicitor took off his glasses. The act of polishing them seemed to clarify his thoughts. ‘In my experience, Mr Carmody, life rarely happens by accident. The purpose is not always obvious, I admit. But luck seldom offers a satisfactory explanation.’
Nick didn’t speak. He hadn’t come here for a philosophical discussion. His own experience, at any rate, told him exactly the opposite: most of the time luck offered the only explanation.
Bellamy put the glasses back on his face. ‘You and Daniel have known each other for a long time?’
‘About twenty years.’
‘Old friends.’
Nick wondered whether the solicitor knew that he was only here because he was being paid. He remembered something a criminal barrister had once told him: a good lawyer never asks a question to which he doesn’t wish to know the answer.
‘You understand,’ said Bellamy, ‘that I am acting as Daniel’s solicitor. You have been brought to my attention as a material witness to an incident involving my client. Daniel has informed me that you were the person driving his car when it was photographed speeding on Moore Park Road on the night of New Year’s Eve. If you are prepared to corroborate Daniel’s statement then I am prepared to advise a course of action. Is that why you are here?’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘The court will require a signed statement explaining how you came to be driving Daniel’s car at the time the offence was committed. Are you willing to provide that?’
‘Just tell me what to write.’
* * *
Nick had expected the case to be dealt with summarily: a summary admission of guilt followed by a summary punishment. But the police smelt a rat. They had a confession but it wasn’t the one they wanted. Now Nick was frightened. Danny’s case would go to court, with Nick as the principal witness. The prosecution would try to catch him out. The process had probably started already. Somebody would be checking Nicolas Carmody’s driving record, his criminal record—they might even investigate his mobile phone records. Thank Christ he hadn’t made any attempt to contact Danny.
It was too late to back out. He couldn’t withdraw his statement without admitting to perjury. Besides, there was the money. The money made it conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. So far all he’d taken was the five thousand dollars in cash given to him by Grogan’s chauffeur. The envelope, opened and hurriedly re-sealed, was sitting in the bottom drawer of a locked grey filing cabinet at work—a radioactive presence he could feel glowing in the corner of the newsroom. It was the safest place he could think to hide it, buried beneath piles of notebooks. No cleaner had gone near those filing cabinets for years—decades, even. An air of cultish superstition hung over them. There were locked drawers belonging to reporters who’d left the paper, who’d been sacked, who’d died. A drawer, once assigned, could never be reassigned. The faded name tags were like a memorial. If you dug deep enough you’d find shorthand notes of interviews with every prime minister since Menzies.
Sitting by himself in the staff canteen, picking at a Caesar salad consisting of nothing but iceberg lettuce and mayonnaise, Nick read about an amateur skydiver in Sauk City, Wisconsin who fell twelve thousand feet into a suburban carpark, suffering only bruised ribs, a fractured collar bone and a broken jaw. Passers-by watched in horror as the skydiver hurtled silently out of a cloudless sky and landed face-down on the tarmac. According to Real Life magazine, Laura-May Holmes lay rigid for several seconds before realising that she was still alive, then sat up and asked for a drink of water.
Roy Bellamy was wrong. At some elemental level, Nick knew, survival was purely a matter of chance. If his father had driven a single kilometre per hour faster for the last forty-five minutes of his life, then the semitrailer that swung across the road, killing him and Nick’s mother, would have slid harmlessly into a ditch.
Nick remembered, at twenty-one, stepping carelessly between two parked cars, hearing the blast of a horn and the rush of air as a delivery van hurtled by, centimetres from his face. Had he stepped out a fraction further, or had the delivery van been travelling a fraction faster, his short career at the Daily Star would have been over.
Two years later, as he stood outside the Glebe Coroner’s Court, a butcher’s van had left the road and struck a bus shelter, killing an old man from whom Nick had just cadged a cigarette.
