Good Money (31 page)

‘Tania had to impress him?'

Jimmy nodded. ‘He was pretty tough on her.'

‘How?'

‘Well he did threaten to cut her out of his will once.'

‘For what?'

‘She stuffed something up. I don't know what. But she was really upset, she thought she'd let him down. But the inheritance thing was no big deal to her. She totally didn't care about his money — she said the way Crystal spent money made her sick.'

The night at the Screaming Goat, Brodtmann acted like it was all Crystal's fault that Tania had run away, that it was Crystal who had made life difficult for her. It was a pretty big omission, failing to mention his threats to Tania's inheritance.

Jimmy scratched her cheek, staring out the window at the sky. Outside, a woman in a blue uniform dress was hanging a sheet on a long clothesline. The act had an anachronistic quality, like sitting and listening to a radio. I gave Jimmy a soft squeeze on the shoulder. The bones moved under my touch. ‘I better get going.'

She whispered. ‘Hey, Stella. Can I come with you?'

‘But …' I hesitated to state the obvious.

She pulled out the drip, held up both arms to show me. ‘All they give me is tablets for the pain.' She swallowed; it was difficult to watch. ‘I'm going crazy in here. Just for a few hours.'

In the garden, the woman had finished hanging out the washing. I thought for a moment. ‘Let's go find a doctor.'

Jimmy stood up. ‘The doctor will say no. Come on, Stella, help me get out of here.'

With a sigh like a deflating tyre, I agreed. I popped my head in the corridor, no pink cardigan woman, no one at all. I went down the corridor, away from the main entrance. More wards. At the end of the corridor was the cleaners' cupboard, then the laundry, and an exit door that led to the backyard and the clothesline.

Back in the room, Jimmy was waiting by the bed in a hoodie and runners, a bag over her shoulder. The drip line dangled from the stand.

‘Come on.'

The exit door opened easily. In the back garden area an elderly patient was sitting on a wooden bench, uninterested in us. We rounded the building and came to a lane on the other side enclosed by a brick wall and lined with wheelie bins. A wrought-iron gate at the end was unlocked. After we walked a couple of blocks I pulled out my phone and called a cab to take us to a restaurant in Cottesloe.

‘Jemima Slattery, I presume.'

‘Jimmy.' She held out her hand and Vince shook it, but his eyes were on me. I smiled sweetly at him.

We pulled up an extra chair as a waiter took our order. Jimmy and I ordered martinis.

Vince waved a USB stick. ‘My contact at the department just gave me a list of all the Brodtmann company tenements.'

‘It's all on the public record,' Jimmy said. ‘You can look up who's got what, any time you like.'

‘He didn't tell me that.' Vince looked disgusted. ‘I bought lunch for that prick.'

‘Anything happening at Mount Percy Sutton?' I asked.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘CC Prospecting are mining the site — iron ore. Making a bloody fortune, because the price of iron is through the roof, record highs. Not paying tax.'

I took out the Bailey Range documents that Rosamund had printed out for me. ‘According to this bankruptcy declaration, Bailey Range Metals, a private company, had claim to half of the Mount Percy Sutton area and capital in excess of thirty million. Bailey Range entered into a joint venture with Blue Lagoon, but it failed.' I eyeballed Vince. ‘We know that Blue Lagoon Corp is basically a front for CC Prospecting. Seems like now they're sitting pretty with Percy Sutton all to themselves because Bailey Range went under in 2010 and their tenements went up for grabs.'

Vince cocked an eyebrow. ‘Why'd the joint venture fail?'

‘Stella, you want to go get a manicure later?' Jimmy asked, picking at a nail.

‘Sure.' I turned to Vince. ‘They were trying to find gold, but there wasn't any. Bailey Range realises they're in big trouble. But all the samples come back saying that there isn't any gold and oh by the way, there's
tonnes
of iron ore.' I glanced up at Vince.

He had a wry smile. ‘Interesting.'

‘By now the banks want their money; Bailey Range is broke. In order to recover their investment to this point they must switch to iron exploration, but Blue Lagoon are taking their time. They stall, say that the terms of the joint-venture agreement must be explicitly changed from gold to iron. They keep fussing over the wording. Any variation to the joint-venture agreement by one party and compensation must be paid to the other. They pay Blue Lagoon ten million dollars. The Bailey Range directors say that at least they can recoup their money once they start mining the iron ore.'

Vince nodded. ‘Go on.'

‘Bailey Range runs out of time. The bank calls in the liquidators.' I sat back and finished my martini.

‘The Brodtmann's take over and now they have almost double the original size of their tenements. Double the profit on the ore, presumably,' Vince said.

‘Yes,' I said, seeing what he was getting at. ‘And now they have permission to mine from the traditional owners. It might have taken Brodtmann and Crystal years to get a new agreement, but the liquidators transferred the Bailey Range arrangement to the new operators.'

We sat in silence for a moment.

‘So all the initial sample testing they did of the area was wrong?' Vince said.

‘Yes, but wait, there's more.' I pulled Tania's DVD, back in its pirated
The Blue Lagoon
cover, out of my bag and slid it across the table.

‘What's this?'

I knew the title by heart. ‘It is the Report on the quality of Mount Percy Sutton alluvial samples for Blue Lagoon Corp and Bailey Range Metals. August 2010.

He stared at me. ‘How did you get this?'

‘Tania. It's proof that someone knew there was more iron ore than gold at Mount Percy Sutton before the joint venture.'

‘Fuck me,' Vince said. ‘That's devious.'

‘You've been looking into their business activities, is it that surprising?'

‘That's the first report, the proper one from the geologists,' Jimmy said, casually. ‘Tania rewrote a whole new one. Had to forge it, put names of the geologists on it. She said it had to be way more positive about gold.'

We both looked at her. ‘Why did she do that?'

‘Crystal.'

33

TWO DOORS
down from the pub was the Fancy Fingers Nail Salon. I selected a shade of crimson and I handed over my fingers, all ten. Jimmy seemed to be enjoying the experience. But I found it tedious and unsettling. I kept thinking about Tania and how I'd completely misjudged her.

When it was over I did not recognise my own hands. With our talons shining, Jimmy and I crossed the road, to where Vince was waiting for us.

We sat in the shadow of a late-nineteenth-century pavilion, watching the Indian Ocean; the slow repeat of waves as they smacked, retreated, curled, and smacked again into the sand. Though it was winter, and the breeze off the water was nippy, people were everywhere, walking, playing ball games, lounging on blankets spread out on the grass. Some game souls were jumping in the waves. Couples jogged together.

I stared at the horizon. ‘Why call the mining company Blue Lagoon?'

‘Crystal's choice,' Jimmy said. ‘Her pet project, so she chose the name. She saw the movie as a kid — that's what Tania told me. The movie was banned in Croatia or Poland or wherever she's from. The communists didn't like Brooke Shields, I suppose. Anyway, she saw a smuggled-in video and after that the fantasy of total freedom in a tropical paradise became a kind of obsession for her.'

She went quiet and her head began to droop down to her chest.

‘You okay? You look a little worn out.'

‘I'm fine,' she said, snapping back upright and gazing at the waves.

‘Time to go back to hospital, I think,' Vince said.

Back in Vince's shack, he handed me one of his lethal mugs of tea.

‘Crystal asked Tania to procure a fraudulent mineral analysis.' Vince stabbed a finger at the DVD on the table. We'd been going over it together in the car since we dropped Jimmy off back at the hospital.

‘Asked, or maybe coerced,' I said, wanting to give Tania the benefit of the doubt.

‘Okay. Coerced. And Brodtmann made a fortune from the deal.'

‘Correct,' I said.

‘But Tania kept the original mining report. Why?'

‘Insurance?'

‘God, would her own parents —'

‘I doubt it. But what about the Bailey Range directors and all those investors? They'd be interested to see that original report.'

Vince was attacking his laptop. ‘Got the names of the directors of Bailey Range. You check them out — I've got to see a man about a horse.' Vince went outside and started to cough. A disgusting hacking, followed by gross spitting. He may have coughed up a lung. I heard a fart that lasted the better part of a minute. Then somewhere in his yard another door creaked open and closed. Now that was quaint, an outside toilet. I suspected he'd be there for some time.

I studied the list of Bailey Range directors. Three mega-rich, middle-aged white men. I imagined it would be easy to discover their movements in the last four years. They probably had publicists. You make the BRW rich list and get little puff pieces in the paper about your nice house in the country, your beautiful wife, your fucking cute dog.

After half an hour I was ready to give up. I'd tried all manner of business websites and not one of them was a director of anything anymore. And I was beginning to worry about Vince. Perhaps he'd died.

I was trawling through endless hits — they all had boring common names, and a basic Google search picked up half the western world: Colin Cartwright, John Billings, and Trevor Michaels. I finally tracked
Colin down. A piece on NGOs said he was now a volunteer working in Africa. Okay, so maybe he wasn't such a bad guy. But he'd be impossible to contact. John turned up in an institution for the catatonic. He, too, was effectively unavailable for comment. Trevor was a greater challenge. My searches yielded no likely candidate. It seemed that he had dropped off the grid. I wondered if he had joined a hippy commune or something.

I switched to reading a news website while I waited for Vince to come back from the loo. That's when I found him — Trevor Michaels had been found dead in the car at Mount Percy Sutton.

When Vince returned, I gave him the bad news. No former Bailey Range director would be able to confirm our theory.

After my tea, I needed to venture outside, myself. The facility was a little tin shed down the back of the yard and it stank like a corpse flower. I pulled a rope by the door and the single bulb shed a dirty yellow light on a nightmarish scene: cobwebs, a wet concrete floor, a roll of paper on a stick protruding from a hole in the wall, dodgy magazines in a bucket. I propped myself on the toilet, shivering, ever on the lookout for spiders. I hoped it was too cold for them. When I finished I stood in the dark and cold McKechnie backyard. I could smell the sea in the air. I pictured Brophy in the empty gallery and felt sad.

Inside, McKechnie was pointing to his laptop. ‘A full list of the investors,' he said.

‘And?'

‘Company names mostly.'

‘Makes sense.'

‘And a few of individuals. I checked a couple of names: Rodney and Ida Lloyd.' Vince looked up at me. ‘They're interesting. I found a newspaper article that says they tried to force their way into the Blue Lagoon office after Bailey Range folded. Didn't get far. Tackled by security. I could have told them, the Blue Lagoon head office is like Fort Knox. They use thumb-print recognition.'

‘Impressive. But if a couple of old people tried to storm into Blue Lagoon, wouldn't that be on the evening news?'

Vince winced at me. ‘Seeing conspiracies again?'

‘Just asking.'

‘I gather Crystal kept it discreet; she came out and spoke to them, sorted it out before any camera crews arrived.'

‘Of course.'

‘Then later she slapped them with a restraining order.'

Vince snorted and went back to jabbing at the keyboard like it was an old typewriter. He looked at the screen, read silently, and bashed the keys some more. ‘God bless them, they're in the
White Pages
. Nedlands.'

‘Where's that?'

‘Not far,' he said, picking up his keys and heading out to the car.

I felt uneasy in McKechnie's house when he wasn't home. I hung around in his front room, decorated in the same spartan theme as the rest of the house: green vinyl couch, bookshelf, circular glass-topped coffee table. Outside, a large, black four-wheel drive pulled up in front of the house. The driver, in a black suit and chauffeur's cap, opened a rear door. Crystal unfolded her legs from the back seat, sheathed in black leather, the front zip straining to contain her breasts, across which the designer's label appeared in gold letters.