The Marmalade Files Read online

  They’d been exposed to the worst excesses of the human spirit, seen enough senseless killing and brutality to make them question the essence of mankind, and lain awake wondering, ‘Is this the night I die?’ Yet when they returned to Australia, they were met by another vicious enemy: the cult of public opinion. At home they were treated like shit by anti-war bigots who’d lost faith in the campaign against Communism.

  It was all too confusing for battle-hardened young men who’d expected sympathy and comfort, not the cold glare of an angry country at war with itself.

  Doug Turner had tried to retreat into normality, moving to the west, where he scored work on the same Perth building sites as another tearaway, Bruce Paxton. The two had forged a close bond, chasing women around Perth’s seedy nightspots and watching each other’s backs when their wild ride threatened to spiral out of control.

  And what a wild and exhilarating ride it had been! Paxton had looked after his mate as he climbed the greasy pole, securing Turner a junior organiser’s role at the UMF while Paxton reached for the stars.

  The work had been therapeutic, helping Turner cope during those long nights when he’d lie awake for hours, sweating blood and cursing, unable to shake off the memory of Vietnam and its deep unspoken terror. He knew he was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder but was equally keen to cover it up, afraid he would be deemed unfit for work. He’d descend on the weekends into a suburban funk, struggling to play out the role of loving husband and caring father.

  He’d held it together as long as possible, even after Bruce Paxton announced that he – the union’s great white hope – was being parachuted into a relatively safe Labor seat, bound for Canberra and a life of pampered civility. Their partnership, it seemed, was over.

  The past decade had been particularly harsh. Turner had fallen out with his family after lapsing into routine depression mixed with alcohol-fuelled bouts of aggression, his torment not helped when he was sacked by the CFMEU for failing to turn up to work five days in a row.

  And that prick Paxton? Why, he’d scooted off to Canberra with barely a farewell. Thanks-for-all-your-help-mate-now-fuckoff. A friendship sacrificed on the altar of one man’s out-of-control ego. Well, Paxton could go and stick his political ambition where it fitted.

  Turner had severed ties with Perth, escaping north to try and avoid prying eyes. He had tried to start afresh, working first on a pearl lugger in Broome, before drifting to the tourist-laden islands of south-east Indonesia, where he hoped to hustle a decent living.

  But the torment of Vietnam – the memories of what he and his comrades endured – kept flooding back. The Department of Veterans Affairs had been miserly, offering him only a partial pension. The mere thought of those bureaucrats playing god with his life sent Turner into spasms of rage and alcohol abuse. After everything he’d done for this country …

  He’d retreated into the semi-paranoid world of cyberspace, searching for similarly minded folk who’d been through hell. With a few mates found over the internet, Turner established Vets for Justice. The group had grown several hundred strong, a diaspora of fed-up Australian veterans who wanted nothing more than their dignity restored and their story heard.

  They had delivered demands to successive governments in Canberra, always meeting the same response: ‘Case closed. Next.’

  ‘I tell you, Mr Dunkley, sometimes I get so mad, I want to take a plane ride down to Canberra and blow the place up, but then I figure I don’t want to go down in history as Australia’s Timothy McVeigh.’

  ‘Very sensible too, Doug. I’m sorry to hear that you and your mates have been mucked around so badly. The disgrace of Vietnam … it’s a sorry chapter in our history, I agree.’

  ‘It is that, son. And as for Paxton … well, when he became Defence Minister, I finally thought, here’s a bloke I can trust to set the past right, to look after those who’ve been fucked over. I sent him a long letter, you know, a few weeks after he was sworn in, congratulating him … and I meant it, too. Of course I mentioned the veterans’ issue, asked him if he could personally intervene and help us out, give us some recognition, that sort of thing. You know what I received back from him? A fucking form letter sent by his chief of staff … not even a personal note. That’s when I thought, mate, you’ll get yours one day, you will get yours …

  ‘So, let’s cut to the chase. You want info about Paxton, right? Well, no one knows more about his past than me, I reckon. I played the loyal fucking lieutenant for him and that other pack of bastards in head office. Did everything they asked me to do, and then some. I can give you chapter and verse–but first there’s a few things I need.’

  ‘We aren’t in the business of paying for stories, Doug.’

  ‘Nah, I ain’t talking about your money, son. I don’t want Rupert’s cash, although I reckon he’d have a few shekels to spare. There’s something far more important to me, a job that you could do to bring our campaign into the public eye. Tell me, Harry, does the Battle of Nui Le mean anything to you?’

  August 1, 2011

  Jonathan Robbie stood by the window gazing out at Sydney’s racing streets, a stiff whisky cupped in his left hand, the television remote dangling from his right. Oh shit, he thought.

  The half-hour Australian Story profile on Opposition leader Elizabeth Scott had been as bloody as one of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries.

  Self-reflection wasn’t a large part of Robbie’s character, but he realised he had completely overplayed his hand in the gore-fest. What he’d assumed would be a cameo appearance instead came across as a narration – and a highly critical one.

  The profile would have been sold to Scott as an in-your-own-words half-hour of soft-soap, a chance to humanise the Liberal leader and play down her image of immense privilege. Instead it had been a horror show. The first, and biggest, problem was timing. It had largely been shot during the Michael Hamilton ‘Bank-gate’ scandal. The producer had even been shooting in Scott’s office when Nine News went to air to reveal Hamilton’s lies about the Prime Minister and his links to the Liberal Party.

  Among many unfortunate moments immortalised on video was Scott’s press secretary’s priceless response to the news item. ‘How the fuck did that shallow bastard Robbie find that out?’ muttered Justin Greenwich. ‘I’ll bet my right ball there’s a rat in our ranks.’

  Robbie had no problem with that. It was his own reflection on the affair that was making him uneasy. He should have known better than to participate in anything to do with the bloody ABC. Those pinko bastards had flattered and beguiled him into doing an interview for the show, saying what a great job he had done in breaking the political story of the year when he’d first aired Hamilton’s accusations.

  He had learned a lot about the cost of making TV and never shot interviews that ran for more than six minutes. The Australian Story producer had asked him questions for an hour. And, towards the end, she’d invited him to comment on Scott’s character. Finally he had offered that he thought Scott was ‘heartless and cold-blooded’ in her dealings with the deluded public servant Michael Hamilton.

  Robbie had worried about that statement ever since and had even raised it once with Scott, asking whether she had considered what would happen to Hamilton. She had been adamant that he was a more than willing participant and she had seen him as a whistleblower on what she honestly believed was an enormous scandal. She had no sympathy for Hamilton and was enraged by the damage his lie had done to her.

  The call came at 8.34 p.m. Robbie knew without looking who was on the line. Elizabeth Scott. He was used to confrontations with politicians after his stories. But he suspected, after this one, that he was in for rougher than usual treatment.

  ‘Okay,’ he murmured to himself, ‘she just needs a few minutes to calm down.’ And he hit the red ‘decline’ button.

  About thirty seconds later his mobile lit up again with a text: Call me … NOW!

  Robbie sat at the hotel desk and composed a few defensive
notes. He needn’t have bothered. Before he could say ‘Elizabeth’, the tirade began. She was calm at first, but there was a cold fury in her voice.

  ‘Jonathan, you complete moron. You are such a moron it’s hard to know where to begin. “Heartless? Cold-blooded? Expendable?” He came to us, you dumb bastard. He came to us. He was a suicide bomber.

  ‘And I warned you. I told you there was more information to come. That when the police investigation was complete, the correspondence would show he was responsible for it all. That he alone fabricated information and wilfully misled me. He wanted to testify before the committee; it was his idea. I never forced him to do anything. He imagined himself a hero in a deluded fantasy he penned himself.

  ‘And you, you dumb prick. You had to parade your so-called scoop. To stand in judgement of me and impugn my character and pretend you’re something more than a third-rate hack who screwed his way into a yarn. Yes, Jonathan, I know. Don’t think I’m blind to who’s making the bullets you fire. Do you honestly believe that I think you’re smart enough to have worked that story out for yourself? Or done some real journalism?

  ‘It will all come out in time. And your judgement will be shown to be completely fucked. And it won’t be a matter of opinion, it will be a matter of fact.’

  And so it went for fifteen uninterrupted minutes as Scott unloaded. She worked herself into a rage and unpicked every element of his character with expletive-laced flourishes. Robbie could not help but be impressed. He had been on the receiving end of outrage before, but it was usually clumsy, like a drunk swinging at you in a pub: frightening, but as likely to miss the target as connect. This was different. Here was a great mind at work, someone who had identified all her opponent’s weaknesses and then crafted arrows to hit every mark.

  But as Scott’s stream of invective began to run dry, she became introspective, mournful and self-pitying. Not knowing how to rebuild her shattered political capital was clearly tearing her apart.

  ‘I don’t know what to do. Why is the police investigation taking so long? Why don’t they release some of the information they have? If people could only see it they’d realise I’m telling the truth, that he came to us. I’ve half a mind to hold a press conference and release the emails … but then I’d probably be accused of interfering with a police investigation.’

  Scott paused for the first time. ‘What do you think I should do?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t ask me,’ Robbie spat back. ‘Because some people think my judgement’s pretty fucked.’

  The phone went dead.

  Scott dropped her BlackBerry on her kitchen table and stared blankly out the window, oblivious to the beauty of the ocean beyond it. Her thoughts were turned inwards.

  For the first time she felt her life was beyond her control and it terrified her. Business success had come easily, but politics was an alien land full of unexpected dangers. Her mind wandered back over the horror of the past months, but her memories always ended at the same bitter encounter.

  It was early April and she was standing in the Prime Minister’s office in front of an enraged Martin Toohey.

  ‘I respected you,’ he said in a low and menacing tone.

  ‘I never asked him to lie,’ Scott said. ‘He had good information about big problems in your bank finance scheme; you know he did because you’ve been trying to hide it. That’s fair game.’

  ‘We were trying to save an entire industry and hundreds of jobs threatened by a financial crisis,’ Toohey said. ‘Yes, it was flawed but there is no perfect solution. And you wine and dine this attention-seeking partisan. You flatter him. You get him to overwind his story and then he publicly accuses me of being corrupt.

  ‘You know me. You know that’s a lie. But you let it stand for three days before it was blown out of the water. Mud sticks. You know that.’

  Scott’s voice had a slight quaver. ‘I didn’t … know for sure. He said he had an email that would be a bombshell. And then … well. How could I be sure?’

  ‘You knew. You saw advantage. You didn’t care if it was true or not. And you were willing to let what little dignity I have left in public life be shredded because you saw a chance of charging back to an election.’

  ‘Martin, I–’

  ‘Get out. I am done talking with you. Anything I ever have to say to you again you can read about in the papers, watch on TV or cop in the parliamentary chamber.’

  ‘I apologise.’

  ‘Save it, you spoilt, selfish Tory bitch. Get out.’

  Scott remembered being surprised as she turned to leave; she was used to confrontation but Toohey’s words had cut deep.

  Her personal standing in the polls had collapsed. And that meant that she was vulnerable. Her blood was in the water and the sharks were circling.

  Now, four months later, on the back of the Australian Story profile that had been meant to save her, they looked set to feed.

  August 6, 2011

  Carved from solid oak, the Louis XVI table could extend up to three metres in length and was embossed with a four-leaf motif. On a quiet weekend with the sun streaming in, Ben Gordon loved to relax with a cloth and containers of polish and oil, smoothing the table’s 1790s perfection and admiring the artisan toil that had transformed rough lengths of timber into a work of elegance and beauty. He liked to recall his favourite Keating story: the Labor PM would keep his Cabinet colleagues and advisers waiting for hours if he’d got into a groove with one of his Napoleonic artefacts. Ah, the sheer bloody indulgence of it all.

  Gordon’s table had cost a packet, but he considered it the soundest of investments. ‘You don’t put a price on something of exquisite beauty,’ he would sniff to those friends who questioned the price.

  The table served a practical purpose too, when he hosted dinner parties for his small coterie of friends. He loved whipping up culinary celebrations, experimenting with something he’d seen on MasterChef, with its marvellous tang of faux celebrity. But this Saturday afternoon, gourmet experiences were not on the menu. Instead, Gordon was seeking a breakthrough in an increasingly complex project.

  Harry Dunkley had been in Perth working on a hunch that he hoped would deliver solid results. ‘I’m making steady progress, I reckon,’ he’d told Gordon, less than convincingly, the last time they’d spoken. The two friends had split the workload and while Dunkley was off chasing shadows in the west, Gordon was focusing on the links between Paxton and Catriona Bailey.

  He’d arranged a series of papers on the table in careful order, short bios and other material he’d prepared on Paxton and the two Chinese men in the photo.

  Somewhere in this jumbled maze were clues – but to what? He still wasn’t sure.

  Okay, he told himself, think logically. Bailey had been in Beijing at the same time as Paxton, perhaps when the Defence Minister had first met Zhou Dejiang. Was it a chance meeting? Unlikely. The Chinese were masters at placing the right person in the right place at the right time, hoping to trip up their international visitors. But the only clue was pictorial evidence from thirty-odd years ago. What was it about the past that was now shaking the present?

  Just lately, the intelligence wires had been buzzing with news of a secret bust in Beijing – a woman named Lillian Chan had been recruited to entice Western diplomats into her lurid web, but instead was caught allegedly selling classified Chinese intel to the West. She faced a lengthy stint in one of China’s stinking rural gulags – a shameful end to what had been a promising career.

  Had Paxton succumbed to the soft skin of some other Chinese temptress? There was nothing firm in the files that Gordon had seen, just the odd suggestion here and there of a man whose moral compass had been shipwrecked for many a year.

  Gordon was tossing theories around but they all seemed to lead nowhere. His agile brain was blasting out a steady stream of possibilities, but just as quickly he was ruling them out, one by one. He’d come to a roadblock, the dreaded point that every security analyst feared. If Gordon was g
oing to find out what it all meant, he would need help. And that raised an immediate problem.

  He knew who to turn to – Charles Dancer, a senior DFAT official, the Department’s under-the-radar troubleshooter with access to the very best in intelligence. Dancer was the complete professional and Ben knew him well. The problem? Perhaps Ben knew him a little too well …

  It had started as a brief fumbling encounter, a Thursday night, late, at the National Press Club in the heart of Canberra’s bureaucratic district. The regular blues crowd had shuffled in, joining a throng of public servants, to hear the Wah-Wahs, a decent outfit steeped in Buddy Guy licks, with a small but loyal following. Gordon had shown up around nine, hoping to meet up with some friends, including Annie the Trannie, who was as fond of people-spotting as she was of music. That night did not disappoint – a senior Liberal MP, an appalling man from Queensland, appeared to be drunk in a corner, canoodling with a young male staffer in an embrace that Gordon suspected would find its way onto Facebook or YouTube within days. Or into that special file held by the Liberal Party Whip.

  The NPC was rocking despite the lack of journalists – a fact that never ceased to amaze the management, who’d tried just about every trick imaginable to entice the press gallery into the club.

  Three songs from the end, during a solid four-to-the-floor version of ‘Little Queenie’, Annie had grabbed Ben and marched him onto the dance floor and straight into the arms of Charles Dancer.

  ‘Bugger you, Annie,’ Gordon thought, though he was secretly pleased to have been introduced to the suave, older Dancer. Even though, despite his name, the man appeared to have two left feet.

  A flirtatious relationship had ensued, the two bonded by their unusual lifestyles and penchant for French period furniture. But after a number of years the magic had died and they’d agreed to go their separate ways. There was no hostility, but the few times they had bumped into each other – once at the Dendy during Canberra’s annual film festival and another time at the home of a mutual friend – they’d felt awkward.