A bottle of cognac had been spared, and Jennifer Henderson had made a good start on it. She drank from the neck, and smoked, crouched over herself, not meeting his eye, not answering him. Was there someone he could call? Somewhere else she could stay? She shook her head, only responding when he told her he was going next door to call the police. He was shocked by the anger in her eyes. Anger and clarity.

  He went to the neighbours anyway, an older couple with identical white hair in matching red tracksuits, working out in a home gym. They hadn’t heard anything. They hadn’t seen anyone. But they would stay with her until the police arrived. The look on their faces when they saw the front room said it all. Swann gathered all the papers he could find in Max Henderson’s study, the maps of the Rosa Gold stake, the surveyor’s report, the aerial photographs and the primary geological indices.

  He left Jennifer and her neighbours amongst the wreckage downstairs. It was mid-afternoon, still time to get to Company House. He wanted to have a closer look at the people behind Rosa Gold.

  Swann parked on King Street and walked through the shadows to St Georges Terrace, the traffic stalled from Hamersley House all the way to Kings Park and down to the Esplanade, anniversary flags strung from building to building, snapping in the breeze. The city of Perth had started on this street, a collection of wattle-and-daub huts on a gentle hill overlooking the perfect mirror of Mounts Bay. Now it was a concrete canyon through which the sea breeze poured like floodwater in a gorge. Even so, it was stinging hot in the sun. Lawyers and business types in white shirts stalked the footpath in groups of two and three, clusters of flies on their backs. All around the sounds of construction, the thudding of pile-drivers and the yak-yak of jackhammers biting into the travertine capstone. The smell of diesel, the taste of limestone dust.

  It was cool and quiet inside Company House. The old colonial building with its Donnybrook stone colonnades and ornately carved wooden doors, studded with black iron spikes, had been built like everything else from the period with gold-rush money. Inside the entrance was a bronze statue of a malnourished old miner wielding a pick over a lump of rock. The miner’s eyes were sightless and his mouth was grim. His ribs showed through his tattered shirt, his hobnail boots cracked and split near the soles. Swann thought again of the quote on Henderson’s desk. I and my men suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured by gold.

  Swann had been stationed in Kalgoorlie as a junior detective in charge of Vice, and he had known plenty of miners. Odd breed they were. Some came out of hiding when the price of gold made prospecting worthwhile, while others had dedicated their lives to it. The Kalgoorlie dirt was hard and red and dug by hand. No cool rivers to pan for alluvial gold. Dry-blowing was employed instead, tossing red dirt into the dusty air. The sun was hot and the nights were cold. Flies crawled into your eyes, mouth and nose, just to get a bit of moisture. Most prospectors seemed touched in the head; bushies who came into town only when they had to. The hard-rock miners who worked underground were like miners everywhere else. Worked hard and played hard. Kept the Kal brothels and bars in money but kept the coppers busy too. More than your usual number of shootings and stabbings. Plenty of blokes went missing, as well. Plenty of abandoned mines around the place. Good to drop a body down, where it would never be discovered.

  He approached the counter where an old woman in a green serge skirt and jacket looked at him closely, tortoiseshell glasses over neutral grey eyes. Behind her was a bank of walk-in files. He pushed across the sheet of notepaper on which he’d written ‘Rosa Gold’, and waited while she drew across the concertinaed dividers and entered a corridor of files. She climbed onto a mobile stepladder and pulled down a rectangular cardboard box, peering closely at the label on its spine. She returned and passed the file and indicated with an open palm the carrels set against the opposing wall. She hadn’t spoken a word and when he thanked her, the sound of his voice echoed like his footsteps as he crossed the floor.

  He lit a cigarette and laid it in the ashtray fixed to the sheoak-veneer desk. He opened the file and saw that there wasn’t much inside, just a few sheets in a manila folder. He was looking for one thing in particular. By law, every company incorporated in the state had to list their directors in the file kept at Company House. The first page in the folder told him that Rosa Gold was incorporated in August 1978. The second page told him that the directors had planned to float Rosa Gold as a publically listed company in November 1978, but had not done so. That was curious.

  Next was a glossy broker’s sheet containing a small aerial photograph of the Rosa Gold stake and its location on a map of Western Australia. In small print beneath the map were a couple of paragraphs detailing promising assay results, naming Max Henderson as the ‘world-famous geologist’ responsible for the discovery of brecciated formations on the Rosa Gold stake, further exploratory drilling of which, he was confident, ‘would reveal considerable gold assets’. A date was given for the public listing, at an initial price of five cents per share. But the spruik sheet had obviously never been sent to private and institutional investors because Rosa Gold, as far as Jennifer Henderson had been aware, was still a privately listed company, all assets owned by the company directors, whom she hadn’t been able to name.

  The name of the brokering service, however, was familiar to Swann – Capitol Services, of Hay Street, Subiaco, written in gold at the bottom of the page. The name of the individual broker was also given – Dennis Gould. But over the page Swann found what he was looking for. Swann whistled as he read the names of the directors, typed simply on cheap paper, and the sharp sound curled around the ceiling of the large room and made the archivist look over her glasses.

  Leo Marrone. Tommaso Adamo. Bradley Farquarson. Ron Bevans. Bernard Isaacs. Benjamin Hogan. A who’s who of the North Perth mafia and the bentest of cops, plus two racetrack sharks. He’d had run-ins with all of them, most lately Bernie Isaacs, a horse trainer who’d sold a thoroughbred gelding entrusted to him by one of Swann’s clients. And a name he didn’t recognise. Gary Quinlivan. And another name crossed out, lost to the smudged black ink.

  Swann folded the spruik sheet and slipped it into his pocket. He wrote the names of the company directors on his notepad, flicked it shut. Took up his cigarette and inhaled, watched the blue smoke rise towards the ochre-rendered ceiling.

  It was Ben Hogan’s name that made Swann feel sick. Hogan was the new leader of the old purple circle. When a bent copper reached that high, he had a finger in everything. The presence of Hogan on the board gave Jennifer Henderson’s suspicions about Rosa Gold a deal of credence, not to mention the names of Marrone and Isaacs. Cut-throats, the lot of them.

  Swann now had his own reasons for wanting to pursue Rosa Gold, namely the possibility of getting some dirt on Hogan before he made CIB chief, before it was too late. But he wouldn’t be telling Jennifer that. She had best keep away from Rosa Gold.

  It was there in front of him, on the register sheets, the con that played itself out time and again. The classic penny dreadful, the standard pump and dump. On the day of listing as a public company, each of the directors would invest plenty of their own money by way of third parties. The share price would go up. A buzz would spread. Dodgy brokers would spruik it to gullible fools. The price would keep going north. At a certain point, having tripled or quadrupled their investment, the directors and their mates would sell, the share price would collapse, the conned left with worthless paper.

  It was the kind of share-market scam that had made so many Western Australians rich over the years, and had fleeced so many ma and pa investors. Perhaps Max Henderson had baulked at having his name associated with such a venture. Perhaps he’d made threats, causing the public listing to be delayed, or even dropped. Perhaps he wasn’t aware how dangerous his employers were, although that seemed unlikely. The state of the Henderson house suggested Max might have kept something in store, potential blackmail. If the men who’d trashed the house hadn’t found what they were looking for, then Jennifer was in danger.

  Swann approached the woman at the archive desk and pointed to the typed paper in the Rosa Gold portfolio. Specifically at the name that had been crossed out.

  ‘Know how I might follow up on this?’ he asked, friendliness in his eyes, although the woman’s were empty of expression.

  ‘Might I enquire in what capacity your enquiry is being made?’

  She looked him up and down, and even in his best kit he felt cheapened. No point lying. She had clocked him for an investigator. ‘I’m working for a client who’s doing due diligence on this company, at their invitation. It’s my understanding that it’s required by law that all directors —’

  She cut him off. ‘I’m already following up on this. At least, one of our most senior staff is. You’re the third such enquirer to make this observation, and I told the other two the same thing. The company will be contacted and asked to amend their record, and make it available. Although, if you’re doing due diligence at the invitation of the company, as you’ve suggested, perhaps you might like to ask them yourself?’

  The tortoiseshell glasses rising on her long nose. Her days made of such small triumphs. Caught out in the lie, Swann returned the interest with a quick smile, thanked her politely and left. He would need her again, of that he could be sure.

  The sun was bright in the hollow sky outside Company House. The vapour trail of a jet hung like a white feather over the hills to the east. Swann lit a cigarette and knelt to tie his shoelaces. He heard the swarming flies gather around his shoulders and shooed them away.

  It was only a short walk to where he was parked across the business district. He looked up at the anodised windows of the towers around him and wondered which of them contained the ghost offices of the shell company Rosa Gold, and whether or not they knew he was coming.

  14

  Peter Henning took out his stethoscope and put it at the horse’s heart. The gelding, Rum Punch, shivered and continued to throw its head. Froths of spit rained on Henning’s shoulders. Its heartbeat was suddenly through the roof, then gone, then starting again in slow palpitating spasms, firing beyond what he could count.

  The trainer, Bernie Isaacs, stood behind him, too close. Isaacs didn’t move when Henning stood back and dropped the stethoscope around his neck. The trainer just stayed there, fingers hooked through his belt, eyes set with childish amusement.

  ‘Your horse is clearly distressed, Isaacs. I’m going to have to swab him.’

  Isaacs smirked, cocked his head. ‘Course he’s distressed, Doc. He’s just won a 2400 by three lengths. Bad Boy always goes for broke.’

  Henning had watched the race from the steward’s box. Three lengths, with the jockey on the brake. A Tuesday meet, so no big stakes to claim. Henning had to assume it was a raid on the bookies, or the tote.

  Henning stepped around Isaacs and took a needle out of his Gladstone bag. Isaac’s face dropped all pretence of friendliness. ‘When you done that, I got something else to show ya. Something ya might’ve missed.’

  Henning drew blood into the syringe and corked the needle. Dropped it into a plastic specimen bag. Put it safely into the old leather Gladstone.

  ‘Go on.’

  Isaacs knelt and clutched the horse’s hind leg, worked his way down to the tendons in the fetlock, squeezed so hard that his forearms bunched. The horse threw back its head, tried to step away, its breathing laboured. Isaacs held it fast.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Look at this, Doc. Tendon’s gone in the back legs. Bad Boy run so hard he’s done himself in. He’s gotta be put down. A gelding’s no good to me in the paddock. Look . . .’

  Henning calmed the horse before putting himself in harm’s way. The poor animal was stamping again, beginning to tremble, kick against the two stablehands. Sensitive beasts, horses, but Rum Punch was genuinely distressed. Its eyes were rolling. Tongue lolling in its mouth. Whatever Isaacs had given it . . .

  He knelt and fingered the ropey length of tendon, from hoof to fetlock. ‘Nothing wrong with this horse, beyond . . .’

  There was no point saying it, not until he got the swab results. He would enjoy reporting Isaacs to the steward. The man was a curse on the game. Terrified his jockeys. Rumours of intimidated stewards. Long-odd betting plunges. In thick with Ron Bevans the bookie.

  Rum Punch had been backed from twelve to one to even money, in half an hour of frenzied pre-race betting. Average jockey. Plenty of handicap. No form. Winner by three lengths, and then some.

  ‘He’s gotta be put down, Doc. It’s inhumane. You can see how much he’s hurtin’.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with him, Isaacs. Take him away. The swab’ll be back tomorrow, then the steward’ll be in touch.’

  Isaacs leaned in close. Breath rotten. Eyes black with hatred. ‘Never had this kind of problem with old Doc Maloney. There’s a bloke knew his job.’

  ‘Sure he admires you too, Mr Isaacs. No doubt why he emigrated to Tasmania.’

  ‘Smart prick. You won’t last. I’ll see to that.’

  ‘You threatening me, Isaacs?’

  Isaacs broke into a slewed grin. Cocked his head again. Jack Russell without the intelligence.

  ‘Nah, I’m wrong, aren’t I. Not so smart. Just a prick.’ He turned to the two stablehands. ‘C’mon, Jimmy, Baz. Get Bad Boy out to the float. We got some celebratin’ to do before the eighth.’

  Henning patted the horse, stroked its neck. Scratched the nub of bone over its eye socket. Eyes still dilated, rolling. Struggling to focus.

  A bell trilled on the wall by the old clock. The speakers crackled as preparations for the next race began, leading the horses out into the crowd noise, bookies touting outside, the build-up of excitement that he remembered so well, standing in the concourse as a child. While his dad watched the pre-race showings, Henning would try to decipher the hieroglyphs in his father’s form guide, coded so that if he lost it no other punter would gain. Little chance of that. His dad was a smart man, ran his own chain of salvage and hardware stores, but his ‘system’, as far as Henning could see, even then, yielded little more than promise. Punting was an act of faith, his father had told him, that gleam in his eye that Henning so loved. ‘And one bloke’s faith is worth a hundred opinions.’ His father standing taller, trilby cocked and rollie burning, watching the bets laid and the cash change hands, looking out for the plunge, what his dad called the bit of strange, insurance against his own dubious system.

  If only his father had known what Henning knew now, after a month working at the track, schooled on the QT by some of the stewards, each of them cynical when talking about the game. Of late, unless you had the inside word, he’d been told, knew all of the trainers and jockeys, then you were a mug, destined to lose. There was no system or scholarship of form that could beat the inside word, the little arrangements made between owner and trainer and bookie and jockey. Because of men like Isaacs, the game was rigged.

  Still, that gleam in his father’s eye. He missed it. Looking up from under his father’s wing. ‘Eyes on the strange, son. I’m relying on you. You’re my good luck.’

  Henning picked up his Gladstone and made for the internal stairs that would take him up to the steward’s box in the stand. Rum Punch had been doped, no question about that. If he could get proof, it was one back for his father, for all the mug punters out there.

  ‘Doc, you gotta come quick. It’s Bad Boy – he’s gone lame. Please, Doc.’

  Henning looked around to Jimmy, Isaacs’ stable boy. There were tears in his eyes. His voice was breaking as he pleaded, led Henning out by the sleeve, down to the car park.

  He heard the horse long before they arrived at the float. Rum Punch leaned into the walls, unable to back up or lie down. Both its hind legs had been broken, at the fetlock. Clean breaks. Squealing and wheezing its pain. A piece of four-by-two leant casually on the rear wheel.

  Henning put down his bag and took out another syringe, drew up a vial of the brown liquid in the clear glass jar.

  ‘Where’s Isaacs?’ he asked the boy, who still had tears running down his face.

  ‘He’s up there.’

  Pointing to the rear of the stand, the members bar. Race eight under way now. Nasal caller droning through the speakers. Crowd beginning to shout. Isaacs toasting him with a glass of beer, grinning like a winner.

  15

  Reggie Mansell was precisely where Swann expected him to be – propped in the front bar of the Great Western Hotel, working on a gin and tonic and cryptic crossword. His short legs dangled off the barstool and his cigarillo released a vertical line of perfumed smoke towards the pressed-tin ceiling. Built during the gold rush of the 1890s, the Great Western once had the city’s biggest brothel running upstairs. The brothel was gone now but the pub remained the same, bar a few coats of paint and some European liqueurs in vivid blues and greens.

  Reggie’s freckled forearms were emaciated, and gave Swann a start. It had been many months since he’d seen his old friend. He placed a hand on Reggie’s once plump shoulder and felt the bones, had to hide his reaction.

  ‘Detective. Drinkies?’

  The first word pronounced too loudly, for the benefit of the barman hovering nearby. Swann nodded, and took a barstool. There was no use pretending. ‘Jesus, Reg. You’ve dropped a lot. What’s —’

  Reggie cackled, and Swann could hear the wheezing, the shortness of breath. The sudden red flush in his skin, the watering blue eyes. Swann immediately felt ashamed. During the Royal Commission, Reggie had stood by him when so many others walked away. As head of the Civil Liberties Association, his contacts had been crucial. Swann knew he could trust him with his life, that he could come to him with anything. And yet Reggie hadn’t come to him with this.

 

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