CHAPTER THREE
Reg
Brad’s disappearance didn’t go totally unnoticed. One of the girls had been looking forward to seeing him again at the welcome home drinks, as the last time she had seen him was a sweaty one-nighter just before he left and she had been on a bit of a dry spell since. Actually a bit more like a four-year stint in the Kalahari. After he failed to front at the party, Tracey Jane decided that she would report Brad’s disappearance to the Police at North Sydney.
Constable Ian MacNamara was watching the clock. It was only 11 minutes until his scheduled break when he could nip out the back of North Sydney Police Station for a sly ciggie. He had sworn off the smokes for the fiftieth time as he left for work that morning, grinning desperately at his girlfriend Kylie as she glared at him, crossing her arms over her heavily pregnant belly.
“It’s for the baby, you know,” she called out as he ran for the car, trying to escape her whining, “we don’t want to give her cancer before she is even born!”
Ian watched the clock hands moving ever more slowly as his nicotine addiction made him more and more irritated with every passing minute. It was just poor timing that Tracey Jane summoned up her courage and walked into the front desk area, almost as desperate to tell her story as Ian was for a smoke.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to report a missing person.”
Ian’s heart sank. He knew this was going to take ages. If Tracey Jane had been a bit better looking, he might have had a chance to pass her off onto Dan, the bloke who was due to take over while he was on a break, but she was a bit of a dog, and she had that needy pathetic look about her that makes most men run a mile. No help from that corner, then. Diane the lezzer clerk, who was supposed to look after this sort of stuff was off sick and in any case, Tracey Jane needed a few more tattoos and a bit less hair to get Diane enthusiastic.
“Yes madam, can we please start with your details?” Ian smiled faintly, “Name and address?”
“Brad Jones, but I’m not sure about his address.”
Ian sighed. This was not starting well. “I meant your name and address, madam, we need this information to lodge the report. We will get onto Brad’s details shortly.”
Tracey Jane was embarrassed. “Oops, sorry” she giggled, “I’m a bit nervous – I don’t make a habit of visiting Police stations normally. It’s Tracey Jane”
“Tracey Jane what?” asked the exasperated constable, “and where do you live?”
“Tracey Jane Dunlop and I live at unit 15, 275 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills. Do you want my phone number?”
“In just a minute, let me write this down first.” Ian painstakingly wrote in his notebook.
“You’d think I was used to men asking me for my phone number, wouldn’t you?” said Tracey Jane, flirting with the good-looking young man.
“You’ve gotta be joking,” Ian muttered to himself, “only if they’re deaf and blind”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that”
“Sorry madam, just talking to myself. Phone number?”
“0457 349 213. I don’t have a landline, is that ok? I just think that it’s an unnecessary thing these days, none of my friends have home phones, just mobiles. I mean, who stays home much anyway? These people with landlines clearly don’t have a life.”
Ian’s head was starting to really hurt. He was fanging for a cigarette, but this silly fat cow was going to drag this out as long as she could. He was considering shooting her when Dan poked his head around the corner.
“Mate, are you busy? We have just had a call to duck next door to the Union – some local suits reckon it’s funny to get full of piss and wind up a couple of bikies. It’s not particularly urgent – I reckon they deserve all they get, but the landlord is screaming something about the suits being regulars and they keep him afloat in winter.”
Normally the thought of busting up a fight in a bar filled Ian with dread – these days you never knew who was going to be armed with knives or guns and what substances they were taking to drive all reason out of their thick skulls, but today was an exception.
“I’ll be right there mate” he said and turned to Tracy Jane, “Can you please just jot down your friend’s details on this sheet of paper here?” He grabbed a form at random off the desk, not worrying about the form that bore the title of ‘Application for Apprehended Violence Order – Spouse’.
“You can just leave it on the desk here and I’ll get to it as soon as I get back. No need to wait, I have your phone number if I need more information. Thanks.” He reckoned that even though the Union Hotel was less than a block away, he would still have time for a quick drag or two as he joined his fellow officers at the punch-up.
Tracey Jane was a bit surprised, but as Ian dashed out the back, she sat down and got to work. She ignored the instructions on the form and put down all the details she had, which weren’t much. The problem was that she had only the vague drunken recollection of a nice flat somewhere in Neutral Bay with a comfy bed and spa bath. Brad had somehow forgotten to give her his number and had left for the UK with what had seemed at the time to be unseemly haste. She put down the name of a couple of his friends who she thought might have better information and, feeling a bit foolish and embarrassed, signed it at the bottom in the space marked ‘complainant’.
All finished, she leaned over the counter and deposited the form on the desk as requested. She was a bit frustrated, as she had some serious concerns about Brad’s disappearance that were clearly not shared by the Police, but at least she had done her civic duty – and that’s all you can do, she rationalised to herself. That night at the pub, she met a pudgy lawyer who was on the rebound from a recent breakup with a vicious harpy who had dumped him for someone with a larger pay packet. Tracy Jane was instantly besotted and all thoughts of Brad disappeared from her mind as she pursued her new target.
About 20 minutes after Ian had left, which had been enough time to get to the pub, stand around as Dan took a brief statement from the landlord about the long-departed bikies and smoke three cigarettes, he returned to the station. He was relieved to see that Tracey Jane had left and had deposited the form on the desk. He put Brad’s details into the computer system and noted with mild interest that his sister had already reported an alleged insurance fraud and the report had her address in Neutral Bay. It was work a bit of a look, he reckoned – maybe it would be something a bit more interesting than the usual drug-related thievery and domestic mayhem that made up his normal day. He decided to check it out himself when he next had the area car before he handed it over to the detectives, maybe they would let him stay involved if turned out to be a serious matter.
The following day, Ian drove round to the unit to see if either Alice or Brad were at home and got no reply. Writing it off as Tracey Jane's over-reaction to being dumped, as there were no suspicious signs at the unit, he went back and wrote his report. At the weekly team update, he told everyone what he had done. He also mentioned that there was an alleged fraud on the system that had been reported to the Fraud Squad. As luck would have it, the Superintendent in charge of the North Sydney Police Station was a good mate of Reg Blake, who ran the Fraud Squad in the city, so he said he would give him a call and let him know. He congratulated the young bloke on his initiative and they all moved right along to the far more exciting multiple fatal stabbing outside the Victoria Bar the previous night.
Chief Superintendent Reg Blake ran the NSW Police Fraud Squad. He had joined the force at the age of 18, 40 years ago because he wanted to catch criminals. He had managed to survive all the purges that had come out of the corruption scandals and had risen to the very senior ranks of the force. He was a not just an old-fashioned cop, he took the time to understand modern technology and how it can apply to law enforcement and was considered an expert in the area of modern fraud. Reg was uncompromising in his pursuit of criminals, and became frustrated that the law seemed to treat white-collar crime as a ‘
soft’ crime, and he was constantly annoyed that the victims of this crime were often forgotten in the headlines that were all about how many zeros were involved.
Like a lot of policemen, Reg was divorced and his life therefore revolved around work, drinking and becoming competent at golf in preparation for his retirement in seven years. He tried hard to keep fit and has fought a constant and losing battle with his weight.
That morning, as he shaved himself standing naked in the bathroom, he sucked in his gut for a second or so, then reluctantly let his belly flop back out, realising yet again that he is going to have to rely on wit, good humour and possibly dollars to get his sex life back.
“You handsome man, you.” he remarked to his reflection, “What woman wouldn’t want a piece of this?”
Being the eternal optimist, Reg was convinced that he will find himself the perfect partner for his retirement, and there was certainly a steady stream of reasonably attractive although somewhat desperate middle-aged women passing through at his local.
“How about this week you find a woman whose reading habits extend beyond ‘No Idea’ and who doesn’t talk to an oversized pampered rat wearing a dog collar as if the bloody thing can understand perfect English!”
He showered, dried himself, wrestled himself into his largest suit and drove into the office.
Later that afternoon, sitting at his desk in his enormous office in the city, surrounded by the usual collection of commendations and tacky photos, the phone rang. The display showed ‘CSprNSyd’ - his mate from long-gone footy days.
“Reg, mate, how’ve you been? Must have that beer some time before we are both put out to pasture.”
“Sure Stu, a beer would be great. Do you get over this way much? Or have the blue-bloods of the Lower North Shore converted you to pinot gris?”
“Piss off, still can’t beat a cold Reschs, you just can’t get one round here. All the suits at the locals drink hand-made boutique micro-shit. Anyway, I was just calling to give you a quick heads up on a report that one of my young layabouts actually took the time to get off his arse and follow up. Apparently there’s a link to some fraud case that has your name on it. You might want to check it out, may come to nothing but you never know, the young bloke has a bit of an eye for dodgy stuff. Will probably head up internal affairs one day!”
Reg took down the details, thanked his friend, hung up and with a spark of interest, set out to track down the file on Brad’s alleged fraud. Hunting through the outer office, he found a couple of scrappy pieces of paper in a dirty manila folder at the bottom of a pile of pending investigations that looked as though they were going to be dealt with shortly before hell froze over. As he read through the half-baked incomplete and careless report, Reg experienced the familiar taste of disappointment that yet again, the prioritisation approach based on only chasing frauds with large dollars and hopefully large headlines had effectively relegated this case to the garbage tip.
He looked around for someone to give the file to, but the office was empty.
“Must be beer o’clock” he muttered to himself. Tucking the file under his arm, he turned back into his office, picked up his jacket and headed purposefully for the pub. Perhaps tonight would be his lucky night.
Persephone was truly over her latest consulting job. “I don’t care about the money, I will NEVER work for these pricks in financial services again!” she muttered as she left the boardroom of the latest financial institution to engage her to “rationalise our customer-facing activities to focus on areas that will provide better service whilst improving long term shareholder value”, which was code for, “get rid of as many of the customer service staff as possible without pissing off too many customers and send the rest of the jobs offshore to somewhere we can pay less than a living wage to some third world country’s child labour. Just make sure that this year’s margins stay high so we can all get our bonuses and don’t worry about long term growth or risk.”
Persephone was used to this level of hypocrisy, but this time they had really crossed the line. Along the way to ‘rationalising customer service’, she had discovered that the head of the customer service division had been taking substantial bribes from the operator of some very dodgy call centres based all across Asia so that they would be awarded the contract. This was despite their having been featured on a recent current affairs program in Australia for brutality towards their workers, who even in these third-world countries were being paid so little it was almost slave labour. Persephone had brought this to the attention of the CEO in an email requesting a meeting to discuss the matter.
The reaction from the CEO and the rest of the management team had been swift and brutal. Persephone was asked to wrap up her analysis and present only the numbers and potential cost savings to the Board, who had been expecting her full report including recommendations on how to manage any transition the following week. No mention of any possible inappropriate management behaviour was to be included in the report, as Persephone was unable to substantiate her ‘ridiculous’ claims. She was to complete her report working from home and her access to the company’s email systems and offices was removed from that very moment.
Vague threats about reputational damage to Persephone were made should she consider raising her concerns with anyone in any form. She was offered a payout that was nearly twice the agreed fee for the original work, should she agree to this early finish. Left with very little she could do under the circumstances, Persephone agreed to their terms. They were going to sack her anyway, she realised. In any case, she had copies of all her records at home, so she agreed to their offer and headed out of the office towards home to write the piece of fiction that was going to be her final report.
She decided to walk home to try to burn off some of her frustration and anger, but as she was walking along the street, she noticed an old pub with big signs offering ‘happy hour every day from 2pm to 6pm’ next to a promotional poster stuck to the wall with an enticing picture of a Tanqueray gin and tonic set against an idyllic scene of palm trees and sunshine. She took a sharp left turn. Bugger walking home, this was what she needed.
As she sat in the bar nursing a very large gin, she raged silently. Why did these bastards keep getting away with these nasty corrupt antics? I hate all this corporate hypocrisy, she thought. How can I stop them?
Pausing in her fury, she glanced over at the man sitting to her right who appeared to be having similar thoughts.
At the Royal, it was a bit early for the nightly beauty parade, so Reg settled on a schooner of Reschs and a more thorough read of the file. This did nothing for his mood as he realised the lack of interest that everyone had shown in the matter, right down to his detective not even following up the claims manager at the insurance company who predictably hadn’t bothered to call back. Consequently he didn’t even notice the woman who took up position next to him at the bar whose stylish dress and confident air bore no relation to the normal patrons of The Royal. He continued to mutter under his breath about what he wanted to do about the level of incompetence and lack of commitment to the job that his team was exhibiting.
“Bloody useless pack of idiots!” he exclaimed upon getting to the last page and reading that the matter was now too hard to progress due to the drug related death of the reporting person, Alice Jones and was about to be closed.
“Is joining the dots too hard for the useless dickheads? What do I have to do to make these bloody idiots get off their fat arses and actually use their pea-brains for anything other than picking the bloody footy results?” He slammed the folder on the bar and stared morosely at the dregs of his beer.
“Well, I’m bloody sure none of us know.” was the answer from his left.
Reg hadn’t realised that he had spoken out loud. He snapped the file shut and tried to apologise.
“I..I..I’m very sorry,” he stuttered “I don’t usually talk like that.”
“Really?” she raised one eyebrow,
“Sounded like it was exactly how you normally talk.” She gave Reg an enormous grin and stuck out her hand.
“Persephone Stone.”
Reg was gobsmacked and unable to answer. Where had this woman come from? Had she gotten lost on the way to one of those trendy wine bars that were popping up all over the neighbourhood? He looked around the pub, spotting a couple of locals who were pretending unsuccessfully to concentrate on their beer whilst they waited to see what would happen next. He quickly got a grip of himself. For goodness sake, he thought to himself, you are a senior officer of the law. A halfway decent bird talking to you in a pub shouldn’t leave you looking and sounding like a teenager caught with his hands in his pants! He recovered some semblance of control, reached out his hand to shake hers and smiled.
“Reg Blake. Pleased to meet you.”
The locals all relaxed and went back to their conversations and card games.
“Persephone?” Reg asked, “Where does that name come from?”
“Actually my father was a bit of a classical nut. He decided that I should be named after a Greek goddess. Persephone is the goddess of The Underworld; kidnapped by Hades and rescued by her mother Demeter after an indecently long interval. I reckon I got off lightly; my sister was called Pandora! She has had to bear the stigma of being the person who released all the evils of humanity. Mind you, she didn’t have to spell her name to all the uneducated peasants every time they wanted to fill in a form.” Persephone caught herself, “Not that you’re a peasant, of course.”
Reg laughed, not at all offended.
“Luckily for my brother, by the time he turned up, my mother had a bit of a say in his naming, so he got Matthew. It was just another reason for my sister and I to hate him though.”
“So tell me Reg, what’s made you so angry?” Persephone asked with what she hoped was a friendly smile. She had read the file over Reg’s shoulder when he had been absorbed in coming to terms with the incompetence and laziness of his staff and was intrigued. Perhaps this might be something she could get her teeth into. It certainly looked like there was something very bad happening and the Police were clearly not interested in pursuing it with any enthusiasm.
“I had a bit of a squiz at the file while you were reading it, but I don’t really know what it’s all about.” Persephone reckoned that honesty was the best policy if she was going to get anywhere with Reg. “Can you tell me about it? Tell you what, let me get you another Reschs and let’s go over there and have a chat”. Persephone pointed at a table away from the bar and the other drinkers.
Reg was again flabbergasted. Nobody is as forthright as that. Well, actually lots of people are. It’s just that they don’t casually admit to it and then act like it’s perfectly normal for him to share information on a confidential police investigation.
His initial reaction was to refuse, but just as he was summoning up the words to politely decline, he spotted one of the blue rinse set coming in the door of the pub.
“Yoo hoo Reg!”
Reg quickly reassessed his choices, smiled, picked up the file and moved towards the table. Persephone leant over the bar, flashed her considerable assets at the barman and called out, “A Reschs and a large Tanqueray and tonic please. We’ll be sitting over there, thanks sweetheart.”
“I’m not sure they do table service here,” offered Reg.
“Don’t worry Reg, I’m sure they’ll make an exception for us.”
Reg plonked his backside down on the bench, inviting Persephone to sit next to him. She looked a bit taken aback, so he reassured her it was only so that they could both read the file together.
Once they sat down, and their drinks were delivered to them by Tom the barman, who delivered a warning to Reg under his breath that he was only doing this for the bird and that Reg shouldn’t get used to this service, Reg sat back and had a better look at Persephone.
On second look, she was striking rather than classically beautiful with an open face and what looked like a great set of tits. Although she was a fair bit younger than Reg, he could now see that she was not young woman and looked to be at least in her late thirties. She was dressed in a black figure-hugging dress covered in small strips of what looked like leather, with a neckline that was not at all out of place in the pub, but would have been pushing it a bit in an office. Her long blonde hair was roughly clipped back with a few curly tendrils framing her slightly square-jawed face. Reg had already been struck by how tall she was, but now he noticed that she was wearing knee-high black shiny boots with heels that had to be at least 4 inches high. He looked up at her face again and encountered an ear-splitting grin framed by a blood red mouth.
“Oops, I guess she noticed me ogling her.” He thought
“Gotcha.” Was Persephone’s simultaneous silent opinion.
“So,” Persephone started “I’m absolutely fascinated to find out what on earth can get under the skin of a clearly decent and self-possessed man such as yourself. Why don’t you tell me all about it?”
Reg realised that as he had come this far, he might as well keep going.
“Well, Persephone, I wouldn’t normally share information like this, but as you’ve already read the file, I can at least put you straight on what this is all about. I trust that you can keep this to yourself though, I really shouldn’t be talking to you about confidential police investigations.”
Persephone laughed. “Yeah, well if there actually was an investigation going on then I guess you might have a point, but my reading of your file and your reaction to it suggests that nothing of the sort is actually happening. You look like you are pretty senior, so if even you can’t get it happening, then not much is going on in the ‘confidential investigative’ sense, don’t you reckon?”
Embarrassed, Reg tried to recover. “Look, I have a very large case load and when you run a high profile squad like mine, you have to prioritise cases. Not every little fraud gets our attention; we have to concentrate on the serious ones. It’s not how I would like it, but that’s the reality of the situation.” Even as he spoke, he realised how defensive he was sounding. Notwithstanding Persephone’s cynical look, he kept digging himself into the hole. “I have a very dedicated team of conscientious officers who I am sure will investigate this matter as soon as they have completed other, more critical, cases.”
“Yeah, right Reg. I can see how this case wouldn’t be anywhere near as important as your current high-profile investigations into corrupt banking practices. I mean, it must be incredibly difficult to spot criminals in the big banks – who would have thought that there were bad bastards there?” Persephone laughed, diffusing the tension that her overly aggressive sarcastic retort was starting to generate. This was not the way to get her ingratiated with this person. “Sorry, I guess I was just feeling some of your frustration and pain there. So you run the Fraud Squad? That must be a fascinating job.”
Reg nodded, “It is, but not a lot of people see it that way – they think the only interesting cases are ones where people die. Most people don’t think about the victims of fraud and the lifelong damage that these crims cause.” He paused, feeling like he was regaining some control, “Most murders are boring anyway, they are either the sad and sorry end to a violent marriage or one crim shooting another over a drug deal. Any mug could work out the culprit and after a few years, most homicide detectives get totally bored and cynical. Give me a complex fraud any day. At least I feel like we are actually using our brains to figure it out rather than waiting for somebody to rock up and tell us who did what to who, why and how.”
Relaxing, he explained the background to the case as far as he knew it. Persephone was impressed that she had fallen across the path of such a senior police officer, but as Reg recounted his frustrations about why this had so far died as an investigation, she became far more interested. This looked like something that she could help solve. From her reading and Reg’s explanation, she reckoned that not only
was there something clearly going on at the insurance company, but also there were at least one if not two deaths. Reg went up to the bar to get a round in (he tried to get Tom to come to the table, but received the international signal that let him know he was unlikely to get table service) and while he was away, Persephone casually picked up the file and re-read the full contents. This didn’t take her long as there were only five sheets of paper in the file, and Reg was too captivated by her charms to worry about this latest breach of security to worry.
“So what do you think, Persephone?”
Persephone paused. “This needs another drink.”
Despite Reg having just brought beer and gin over to the table, Persephone waved at Tom for another round. Tom gaily waved back that he would be right over with them. “Drink up Reg, I reckon this will take a while.”
Reg decided that this was a woman after his own heart and settled back to enjoy the ride.
Persephone was enjoying herself. Despite outward appearances, she was not a woman who normally went around picking up strange men in bars, but for some reason Reg had struck a chord with her when she sat down and saw his anger and frustration at the injustice that was being done to the victims of this crime. She was totally in tune with this sentiment, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that there were still decent people high up in the police force who still held true to their values and hadn’t become completely cynical about crime and criminals.