The Fix (14 page)

I waited while he read through it again. I could picture Frank with the bandage, his composed recounting of events.

‘I know this is jumping to the end,' I said, ‘but what about afterwards? Were you part of the nominating process? Part of writing the nomination?'

‘Oh that was all Frank,' he said. ‘I wasn't even aware of the system. We were all right behind him, of course.'

‘So, all Frank, despite his head injury?'

‘Yeah. He can be pretty determined.'

‘Did he talk about which award he was putting Ben up for?'

‘Yeah, a bravery award. I don't think you get to specify which one. You just put down the details and I guess they rate it against some criteria. I don't know. Frank came in the day after the siege, after he got out of hospital. He wasn't supposed to. He'd downloaded the forms.'

‘How's Frank viewed within the firm? I'm just thinking of how he comes across, his manner. You said he's pretty determined. I'm wondering how he'll come up on TV. Obviously he's crucial for some parts of the story, but . . .' I needed the seam not to show. I hoped it looked like thoroughness, and not like trespass onto another subject.

‘How's Frank viewed?' He stopped, to give it some thought. ‘You could probably say he's seen as a tough negotiator. No nonsense. Old school. Some people go well with that. Not everyone. But no one's style is right for everyone. He'll be good on TV. He's got good coverage of the details. Better than Ben even. Sometimes it seems more like Ben's the one who got the whack on the head.'

‘So, how long have you been at the firm, and what made you come here?' I hoped it sounded like nothing, background research.

‘I've been here about two years. A couple of the partners left not long before that. One of them had been doing quite a bit of business involving China. The firm wanted to keep that going so they started looking
everywhere for someone who was the right fit with the work and who could speak Chinese. I got a call from a recruitment firm. They made me a good offer. I was in Sydney at the time.'

‘So what made the partners leave?'

‘You're very thorough.' He looked uncertain about where I'd taken it. ‘People leave. Do you really think Australian Story's going to want this much detail?' He said it affably enough, but then he waited to see if I'd let the topic slide. It made me more determined not to. ‘Frank's style doesn't suit everyone,' he said eventually. ‘I think that might have been part of it. Some people also want to go out on their own. Firms can be pretty fluid arrangements. But I'm South African. Frank wouldn't rate as a hard arse in South Africa. He tells it like it is. That's not a problem for me.'

‘Okay, tell me about Ben.'

He looked happier about the prospect of that. ‘I've got some notes,' he said, looking back at his screen and clicking to open another document. ‘I put them together when I got your email earlier. I've got a story or two about Ben ready to go.'

* * *

WHEN I WAS BACK
in my office, I googled the journalist who had written the article about the complaints. He had moved from the Courier-Mail to Sydney, where he was a senior feature writer for the Daily Telegraph. There was no sign of him following up the story.

I went to the Law Society website and searched using
Frank's name, but there were only mundane details. There was no mention of the complaint. I googled ‘“Randall Hood Beckett”+foul-mouthed'. A website called firmspy.com took the story a step forward: ‘Word is that, over at Randalls, Foul-Mouthed Frankie Ainsworth has been talking tough but reaching for his wallet to hand out the FOM (that'd be go-away money, for you non-Randalls types).'

The original Courier-Mail article had more detail, so I read it again to see if I had missed anything. I knew Frank could be abrasive and I could see him being intimidating, but the world was full of people who could match him and it rarely provoked someone to run amok with a gun.

Rob Mueller was psychotic. The reports had said that. Perhaps there didn't need to be another reason.

I still had the article open on screen – ‘Law partner “foul-mouthed and aggressive”' there in bold text – when Frank appeared at my door.

‘Didn't mean to surprise you, Josh,' he said. Something must have shown on my face when I'd looked up. ‘How's it going?'

I couldn't touch my computer, couldn't minimise the article. It glowed brightly in front of me.

‘Good. It's going well.' His picture was on screen, an out-of-date head shot with Frank scowling as he looked into the sun. He was a step away from being able to see it. ‘I've just got to get some information to Australian Story –' I took a look at my watch – ‘in the next couple of minutes, and then I think everything's sorted out. I'll email you the final interview schedule as soon as it's done.'

‘Good,' he said. He looked at his watch too. It was a nothing time, not two minutes to any normal deadline. ‘That's good. Well, I should leave you to it then. Oh, and . . .' He changed his tone to sound as if we were colleagues, and close. ‘There's no need for you to be concerned about the Mueller file. Some of it's confidential, as you'd probably expect, and I'm sure you've got enough to do already.' It was nonchalance that he was attempting, but there was nothing nonchalant about it.

‘Just being thorough,' I said.

‘Yeah, good. Good for you. There's nothing useful in it, though.'

‘No problem.' Still the story glowed on the screen – ‘foul-mouthed', ‘aggressive', ‘stupid slut'. ‘I'd better get back to Australian Story.'

‘Good. Next Thursday, then,' he said, as if we had made a plan about golf, and he was looking forward to it.

With that, he was gone. I shut the article down. I wondered what Thursday was, and then I remembered I had booked some time in his diary to talk through his Australian Story interview, which would happen on the day of the lunch.

I stood up and checked the corridor. He had almost reached his office.

I went back to my computer and I tracked down the number of the journalist at the Telegraph in Sydney. I called him and pitched Ben's story, in the same way as I had every other time, and I kept the firm's name out of it, and Frank's.

‘Yeah, look,' he said, taking it exactly at face value,
‘we'd probably be more interested if he was New South Wales. Or is this like a big deal? Do they hardly ever give these out?'

‘It's the second-highest level,' I told him. ‘They don't give out many of them.'

‘Yeah . . .' He was giving it more consideration than I'd expected. ‘It doesn't exactly sound like a VC, does it? I think you'd be better off trying closer to home.'

‘Yeah, they mainly operate here,' I said. ‘The firm. Randall Hood Beckett.'

I waited. There was a noise as something bumped against his phone.

‘Randall Hood Beckett,' he said. ‘I used to be up in Brisbane, you know. Did a story on them, on one of the partners. Nasty piece of work. Can't remember his name. He called me up and abused me afterwards. He sounded like the “I know where you live” type. There was some issue with the staff.'

‘Really? What happened with that? I've only been here this week so I'm not sure who I should avoid yet.' Someone walked past my window, an admin person I didn't know. ‘I just got back from a few years in London. And needless to say, that story's not one of the big topics around the office.'

‘Ainsworth,' he said. ‘Or Hainsworth. Frank. That was it. Something like that. Ainscough. It seemed to go quiet. I think some money changed hands. That's usually what happens. They probably withdrew the complaint for some nice quiet cash. But if you can find out more, do let me know.' He laughed. ‘In the meantime, good luck with your hero. I'd better get back to the villains of New South Wales.'

* * *

I NEEDED TO BE
at least two blogs ahead before the medal presentation and the trip to the coast, and I had one more to bank over the weekend. Late on Friday night, it was ranking third in my priorities behind staring at my phone in the hope that Hayley would call and scrutinising every appearance of Frank's on the siege DVDs.

I had a cookie fortune somewhere telling me that a feather in the hand was better than a bird in the air. Hayley would or wouldn't call. Ben might truly be a hero and Frank just an irascible man, caught on the spike of someone's psychosis, then trying to do good by seeing courage recognised. Whatever the truth, whatever would happen, I needed five hundred words on the business of toothbrushes, a half-smart idea I had once had that was now under pressure to amount to something.

With an output of three blogs a week, not every one could be driven by a great idea or by genuine enthusiasm. The job was about crafting the veneer of enthusiasm, but a wholly convincing veneer on top of a big, broad, solid plank of toil, thumping one clause in after another, building it like a gang building a rail track, all the way from word one to word five hundred.

Toothbrushes, I told myself. Go. Toothbrushes and marketing. Toothbrushes and the research that said chewing on a stick was slightly better, despite the swivel-headed chubby-grip tongue-scraping gadgetry now on offer.

I was halfway there, 273 words, and I hadn't even mentioned toothpaste – multi-function plaque-busting, enamel-whitening, anti-bacterial toothpaste, or the perennial riddle of how they got the stripes into stripy toothpaste. Okay, perhaps it wasn't such a perennial. It might have fascinated generations of eight-year-olds – or just me – but did stripy toothpaste still exist? Who knew? I wasn't going to let my blogging be contaminated by any real-world research. If I had to get out of my seat, I was trying too hard for the money. That was now the benchmark.

She hadn't called. It was late and Hayley would be in the Silver Spur, stripping again for a crowd who had no appreciation of how smart she was, or her true charm. And Frank was a prick and I didn't trust him, and Ben was holding something back too.

Two hundred and seventy-three words, and the toothbrushes had gone. Was there five hundred words in stupid crushes? No, there were novels in that, for too many of us.

* * *

BEN HAD AGREED TO
come over to my side of town for breakfast on Saturday morning. He had ducked and he had weaved and he had gone away for work, and the time had come to talk properly. The investiture was two days away and so far I had prepared him only to play the role of a deer in headlights.

‘Have you checked out the table art?' he said, as we sat in Café Checocho with our second coffees in front of us.

I had walked him through the interview itinerary once we had put our orders in, but he had called a halt when our food arrived. The café was styled with a mixture of found furniture and a few matching pieces, and our particular tabletop had been ruthlessly decoupaged with pictures of chessboards and Aztecs and lutes.

‘It's all chess, I think,' he said, moving his plate to reveal more of the surface. ‘Chess games and pieces throughout the centuries.' He looked around the café, at the people dressed like poets who were working on wireless laptops and at the shelves behind me selling second-hand books. I knew from previous visits that they were grouped into categories, and the categories included ‘faeries', ‘occult/magical/shamanism' and ‘esoteric'. ‘So this is your life every day?'

‘Grand, isn't it?' I didn't want the place deconstructed, and I could see that coming. ‘No, it's not my life every day.'

‘This and daytime TV.'

‘Since when did this get to be about my life?' He had me with the TV. ‘I do happen to have breakfast here from time to time once the rush has gone, and maybe the TV does get turned on occasionally at odd hours. I'm sure you're more than adequately compensated for being at the office instead, with your lawyer's eye view of the eastern suburbs. And I do write, you know. That takes up some time.' Wikipedia had given up the secret of stripy toothpaste in a second, but that had never been the point and the blog was still just as stuck. ‘I've cleared for us to do the walk-through tomorrow morning. So could you have a think today about what we should take a look at?' He didn't give me any kind of answer. ‘I'll
need you to take me through it step-by-step, from when he arrived on the floor, to the others going down the fire exit . . . all the way to the bathroom. And I'll need you to think through what was on your mind and how you felt at each stage of it.'

‘Sure.'

‘I want us to get it all clear now. It's a chance for us to work out how we tell it. How you'll tell it on Friday.' He was nodding. ‘It's the one time we'll have a TV crew there. And they'll want to walk through it too, and that'll be it. Okay? TV's all about the pictures, and tomorrow is when we get to work out what pictures we give them. So how about nine o'clock?'

‘Nine? AM? How about ten? Some of us have a life and might do something on a Saturday night.' He had shown no signs of a life. His entire apartment looked as if it had just been unwrapped from plastic. ‘Of course, maybe you've got a life now . . .' He made his hands into two imaginary six-shooters and fired them at me, then straightened the stetson that went with them.

‘You would make one ugly cowgirl stripper,' I told him. ‘Or maybe you're just androgynous enough to pull it off. I really hope you're going to give some straight answers in these interviews.'

‘Of course. What other kind is there? But in the meantime . . .' He pulled out the six-shooters again and put a pantomime-style quizzical look on his face. ‘Got a life now?'

‘I can't say that I exactly have a life, but we did have coffee. And she did take my number afterwards.' And didn't call.

‘And you took hers as well, presumably.'