CHAPTER FOUR
Persephone
At 48 years old, Persephone had never been in the police, but in her early career she had served in the British military, joining what was a bit of a ‘family business’ all bright eyed and bushy tailed and excited at the prospect of serving her country in order to bring peace and justice to the world. This desire to do the right thing had surprisingly survived all the horrors that her military service had thrown at her, despite her realisation fairly early on that she was probably unsuited to a life as an Army Officer, being far too disruptive and irreverent for this historically rigid and conservative organisation.
The Army probably should have spotted this on their first encounter with the young Persephone. In the UK, to be considered as a suitable candidate for a commission in the Army, you had to attend a three-day ‘camp’ called the Regular Commissions Board. This involved staying in a small Army base where you and about 50 other young people were put through your paces with physical tests, intellectual exercises and opportunities to demonstrate how socially acceptable your behaviour was. Persephone had been a keen and successful sportsperson throughout her school life and had achieved very high academic results as well as having been involved in a range of musical, theatrical and community activities, so she found most of the tests a bit of a breeze. So much so that by day two she was getting bored. Having spent the morning ensuring that her fellow candidates actually applied the rules about cantilevers to pass the obstacle course test (three people on the fixed bit for every one person hanging out over the ‘crocodile infested pit’), they were split up into small syndicates to debate some world-altering issues. This was intended to demonstrate how eloquent each person was in expressing their views and also provided a bit of an insight as to how right-wing the young people actually were (as the Army was keen not to bring in too many socialists into its hallowed officer corps).
Persephone was more than used to vigorous debate. Both her parents had been school teachers and throughout her childhood, she and her brother and sister had been actively encouraged to debate current affairs at the family dinner table each night, with extra helpings of dessert for properly presented dialectic. It had mostly been fun as her father held very firm left-wing views on most topics (which is why he was the black sheep who didn’t join the military), so Persephone, who tended more towards her grandmother’s views (Gran being a personal friend of Enoch Powell), had developed a good understanding of the many varied ways of looking at any given situation.
The first topic up for debate was the old chestnut of the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence. As you could chose which side you argued, Persephone chose the argument in favour of it. It helped that her grandfather had been a submariner, and the Royal Navy’s submarines were Britain’s sole strategic nuclear defence platform. After 5 minutes letting everyone know that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) had kept the planet from having a nuclear war for the past 35 years, she discovered that nobody in the group was prepared to stick their neck out and argue that it was a bad thing. Frustrated at the intellectual and moral inferiority of the other kids, Persephone then decided to offer the counter-argument, using the socialist derived propaganda that her father had thrown at her for years. Listening to her lecture on the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the risks that these weapons could fall into the hands of regimes less principled than NATO or the USSR, the staff members at the Board were stunned and more than a bit taken aback. So much so, that the moderator immediately stepped in and stopped the debate, taking Persephone outside and letting her know that this was absolutely not the sort of thing they were looking for in future officers. Chastened, and being quick on the uptake, Persephone returned to the room and kept very quiet as the argument ranged from whether eighty thousand or ninety thousand nuclear missiles was enough for each side. For some reason the staff completely forgot about her appalling lack of judgement in expressing left-wing views and passed her for attendance at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst – the school that produced army officers for the British and large numbers of African and Middle Eastern states.
So despite a natural tendency to bolshiness, Persephone was still a person who had high standards about her own and other people’s behaviour and how we treat each other in the society in which we live. Persephone remembered the first big executive role she had landed. She had just been appointed to the Divisional manager for a major multinational and had inherited a team of over 2,000 people. On day two, she was sitting in her office when a young woman from the projects team stuck her head around the door. “Can I have a minute?”
Persephone waved her in and the woman sat down and promptly burst into tears. Persephone handed her a tissue and asked the woman to tell her what was the problem. Over sobs and sniffles, it transpired that the woman had been out on a team lunch the previous day to celebrate finishing off a difficult project. After lots of food and wine, her boss had propositioned her and when she had turned him down, had grabbed her, ripped open her blouse and laughed at her in front of the rest of the team. Persephone was horrified, but it got worse. Apparently she had gone to HR to lodge a complaint and the HR people had dismissed her, telling her that she shouldn’t go out drinking with the boys if she couldn’t handle it. She was only coming to Persephone because she was now really scared of retribution from her boss (who she now knew was in a relationship with the HR manager) and was going to quit. She just wanted to let Persephone know because this stuff was happening a lot and she thought that perhaps with a woman in charge, something might be done about this.
Persephone had immediately started a formal investigation and when she met with the perpetrator, he sat back in his chair, laughed and admitted that he had torn the buttons off her shirt, but excused it by saying “She asked for it, stupid drunken tart, she was all over me.” Persephone fired him on the spot. HR then tried very hard to get him reinstated and despite legal advice that she had acted properly, Persephone was labelled as a troublemaker. The CEO told her that he wished she hadn’t fired the man, as he was very well liked across the company and she had now made lots of enemies. A couple of long serving senior women who worked with Persephone dropped by to let her know that she was making way too much fuss over this incident. She never recovered from the results of her actions and after a couple of years she resigned, unable to change the attitudes and behaviours of the rest of the company towards harassment, even among the women.
The sad thing was that now she couldn’t even remember the young woman’s name.
Persephone had seen enough of this activity and the devastating effects on employees, customers and their families. She had met too many victims of these greedy, evil people and their heartless crimes, and had seen the relentless cover-ups and whitewashing by the guilty corporates, which ensured that the crimes never came to light and were never investigated or prosecuted. It had been sheer luck that had sent her new friend Chief Superintendent Reg Blake across her path, but the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. She had become determined to never again work to the benefit of this corrupt and evil part of society, when the opportunity fell into her lap to right at least one of these terrible wrongs.
Neither she nor Reg knew how momentous their meeting would be, and how it would change everything.
It was clear to Persephone as she sat in that pub in inner Sydney that something very dodgy was going on at the insurance company. Whether this had anything to do with Alice’s death or Brad’s disappearance was yet to be determined. Even though Reg was now fired up about this case and burbling about assigning it to one of his detectives, Persephone was determined to make sure that this didn’t happen. She wanted the chance to fix it herself.
First things first – more grog. Persephone waved Tom over again. “Up for another one Reg?”
“Sure thing” mumbled an increasingly incoherent Reg, “might make it a small one though”
“No worries,” replied Persephone, “schooner of Reschs and a small
G&T, Tom please.”
Persephone was keen to get started, but first she had to hook Reg. She whipped out her phone and took photos of the pages in the file. Now she had evidence of Reg’s indiscretion just in case he got cold feet.
“Ok Reg, you’ve told me a little bit about your job. Before we go any further, I should tell you a little bit about me.”
Reg drank his beer and eagerly waited to find out more about this exotic and interesting woman who had barrelled into his life. Persephone decided that there was no point in hiding much and her real goal was to convince Reg that she was a suitable ally, but also a formidable enemy. She realised that she needed to get the relationship onto a businesslike footing, but wasn’t sure how to handle the sexual attraction that Reg clearly felt for her. She had no intention of sleeping with Reg, but you never know when his infatuation might come in handy, so she decided not to rule anything out at this point. Anyway, he wasn’t all that dreadful for a 58 year old man – God knows she had slept with older men than him when she was much younger. So, her first tactic was to establish the common ground that they could use to justify her emerging plan.
Persephone started by telling him she was originally English but had moved to Australia in the late eighties following a brief time in the Army. She knew that even though police work and military work were quite different, officers of sworn services typically had some affinity and mutual respect for each other. Reg was quite surprised. After all, Persephone didn’t look much like a typical female soldier, or at least not like Reg imagined one would look.
Persephone leaned forward, crossed her legs and told him about her first trip to Beirut.
Reg was appalled that not only did this stuff go on, but also that the army had thought fit to send a young woman into that situation. Having been a police officer for nearly 40 years, he thought he had seen pretty much everything that bad people can do to each other when they are sufficiently motivated, but this was a new one. She followed up with a couple of choice stories about the IRA and some of the things they got up to, then paused for effect.
“I guess we have it pretty good here in Australia, don’t we?” he asked, “it’s easy to forget how privileged we really are here.”
Persephone agreed and decided to take it up a notch.
“And that makes it worse, don’t you think? You can almost understand why people in desperate situations do such awful things. But what excuse do we have - here, now?”
Reg nodded. He was well aware of how badly behaved people can be in big business when they see an opportunity and aren’t stopped. He smiled at Persephone, “I don’t think I’ve told you about my brother Steve, have I?”
He sipped at his beer as he told her his sorry tale.
Reg and Steve had been inseparable as kids. Steve was a year older than Reg and a very different person. Where Reg was solid, hardworking, dependable and diligent, Steve was quick witted, creative and a bit of a dilettante. As they grew up, they took very different paths. Reg joined the Police Force and made his way up through the ranks, serving in a number of areas, from general duties through drug squad, child protection, local command, strategy and policy and now heading up the Fraud Squad. Steve went off to university where he studied mathematics, then followed that with a masters degree in applied quantum mechanics. He took these qualifications to the major computing companies and landed himself a job in one of their labs in the USA. After several years working his way up through the engineering ranks, he got homesick, came back to Australia, and set himself up with his own business developing and selling specialised devices to the Australian security industry.
Steve’s business became quite successful, and just as he was about to make some serious money, the company he had worked for in the states made him an offer to buy him out. Steve was initially tempted, and started negotiations. Following an extended period of due diligence, the company made a ridiculously low offer, which Steve declined, and the deal was pulled. About a month the company in the States sent later Steve a letter, informing him that he had infringed the intellectual property clauses of his employment contract with their company and that the devices that he had invented in Australia were theirs. They alleged that Steve had invented these devices whilst he was in their employ, and according to the contract he had with them, they therefore had full intellectual property rights over his invention. Furious that these people wanted to steal his invention, Steve instructed his lawyers to write back to them and inform them that this was indeed his intellectual property and he had every intent of strongly defending his rights.
Within 6 months the US company launched a product onto the international market that was identical to Steve’s. They didn’t even try to hide the fact that they had obtained the information on the product during the due diligence process on Steve’s company. Steve couldn’t believe that such a large and heretofore reputable company would stoop so low as to blatantly steal his invention. He was determined to fight it.
After nine years in the courts Steve was almost bankrupt, and even though he finally won his case, he never managed to recover either the costs of running it or his business, which had foundered over the years as Steve spent his time flying backwards and forwards to the US, ignoring the needs of his own people and his own customers. Suffering the same amount of neglect, Steve’s wife (who he had met and married whilst living in the US) left him, taking the children and moving back to her family home in Arizona.
Steve finally suffered a nervous breakdown, and spent months in hospital fighting depression. When he came out of hospital he decided to get out of the rat race and moved to a small town on the south coast of New South Wales. Luckily for Steve, winning the court case had established that the product the US company had been selling was based on Steve’s invention, and the US company was forced to pay Steve a royalty on all their sales. That left Steve a tidy nest egg, which he used to buy himself a small property just outside town where he continued to live his reclusive life, continuing his ongoing battle with depression and anxiety. Reg tried to visit him as often as he could but given his busy police career, this was never as often as he would have liked, and every time he saw Steve, who was a shadow of his former self, Reg became more and more angry at the cynical unprincipled bastards who ran these large corporations.
By the end of the story, Reg’s head was bobbing around like a car dashboard ornament. He really was feeling a bit drunk now. He was sure that he should take control of this situation as it was getting a bit out of control, but Persephone seemed like such a decent person and really, she was only trying to help. Persephone, sensing that she was winning, went for the close.
“And this is why you need to let me have a go at sorting it out. After all, the useless slackers at your work have already shown they don’t care. I have all I need to work out what is going on and I can get to the heart of this much quicker than you, once you have re-prioritised your budgets and wound up your people to actually care. I care. I care a lot that people are being hurt by some smartarse who thinks that he can just rip them off, or worse.”
Reg nodded. This all sounded stupid, but he was far to drunk to worry at this point. He was still hoping for a mercy shag.
“Ok, ok, you can stop now. I’ve got it. You can have the bloody case. Go fix it. Just tell me when it’s done. Now, can we please go home?”
“Great – let’s go then”
Persephone grabbed the file and put it in her handbag. She took hold of Reg’s hand and helped him stagger unsteadily to the door. “Gotta have a piss” mumbled Reg.
“Ok, I’ll just wait here for you”
Reg weaved his way past the drinkers at the bar to the men’s toilet. When he came back, Persephone was nowhere to be seen.
“Bloody Hell!” he shouted at Tom, “Did you see her go?”
“Sure mate, she left you this.” Tom handed Reg a business card. “Persephone Stone, Corporate Fixer and Consultant” was embossed
on a heavy cream business card. He turned it over and found her phone number and email. Well at least she hadn’t vanished completely with the official police file, even if he clearly wasn’t going to get a shag tonight. Reg reckoned that he was in no fit state to sort this out that night, so he decided to go home, sleep off the beer and work out what to do in the morning.