Dreamland by Gilling Tom

Author:Gilling, Tom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC050000
ISBN: 9781921834431
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2008-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

It was still dark when he crept out to the panel van with two supermarket bags full of dye-soaked newspaper. The dog stared at him wanly as he opened the car door: the sort of disappointed, reproachful morning-after look that reminded Nick of unhappy nights with Carolyn. He sat behind the steering wheel while the dog sloped off towards the waste ground, then clambered in beside him.

He’d told the old man he was on his way to Sydney, so he set off in that direction, then turned round and drove back, dipping his lights as he passed.

The sun was coming up. Before he came to Batemans Bay a road sign pointed to the Kings Highway. Beyond lay Braidwood; beyond that Queanbeyan and Canberra.

Nick pulled a copy of the Daily Star from a rack outside a service station. The splash said, OVERDOSE KILLS TYCOON’S SON. Beneath the headline was a picture of a body being removed from the back of an ambulance. Someone had tipped off the press: a switchboard operator, probably, or somebody at the hospital. An almost identical photograph was on the front page of the Herald. Nothing in the picture identified the corpse as that of Danny Grogan except, perhaps, the two bruised feet protruding from the blanket. Nick remembered the scene in the toilet cubicle at Central Court, which seemed now like a grim rehearsal for the final act of Danny’s life.

The front page story carried Michael Flynn’s byline under a banner that said STAR EXCLUSIVE, although most of what he’d written had been taken from the files. The police, for once, were keeping their suspicions to themselves and for all Flynn’s efforts his story added nothing to what had been on the radio a full twenty-four hours earlier: Danny had been discovered lying in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Bondi. The ambulance team had been unable to revive him. A used heroin syringe had been found with the body. Danny didn’t appear to have been visiting anyone in the block and no witnesses had come forward to say who Danny might have been with on the night he died. Insofar as the evidence supported a theory, it was that Danny had simply walked in off the street and given himself a fatal shot of heroin.

Turning the page, Nick saw a photograph of himself under the headline: POLICE PROBE MISSING REPORTER LINK. It was the picture on Nick’s staff ID card. Was that Perger’s idea of a joke? If so, he’d done Nick a favour. The picture desk could have chosen from a selection of more or less flattering byline photographs, but Perger had picked a wild-eyed scowling mug shot that made Nick look like a fugitive on a ‘Wanted’ poster. The chances of anyone—even Carolyn—recognising him from that photograph were slight. Strangely, there was no byline. It crossed Nick’s mind that maybe Perger had bullied Sally into writing the story:

Daily Star reporter Nick Carmody, who testified on Danny Grogan’s behalf after Grogan’s Audi TT coupe was caught speeding in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, has gone missing.

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