Lapel: Lest Assumed Power Ends Liberty by Trevor Trigg

Author:Trevor Trigg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby

16 – Grave concern.

On Monday morning, bright and early, Peter was cock-a-hoop and on the phone to Dunedin, cajoling for the motorcycle.

‘I can’t give any guarantees. The “firm’s” very tight you know…’

‘Then I’ll keep the rented car and tick up the bill on your plastic money. Your tight firm may see the funny side of that.’ This gave impetus for Dunedin to endorse the lesser of two evils.

Dunedin’s superiors could make common-sense decisions quickly, it seemed. Peter picked up the motorbike mid-morning—the last one in for dispersal—the only one still registered for the road. He rode into the city, resplendent in new leather jacket and helmet—again, courtesy of the firm’s plastic.

By eleven thirty, he had back issues of the daily newspapers, spread out in the Melbourne Library, looking forward to reading the press’s slant on the story over the past weeks. The publication that covered his close shave at the hands of the bikie thugs seemed a good place to start. It dealt with the horror of the linked terrorism and the ride-by crime and the journo’s dismay that it could happen and continue to happen here. Peter read of the supposed vendetta against him and how he may very well not survive.

They wished. A good story would have become a better story if there were to be another crack at him. He thumbed through the paper slowly and carelessly; there was the rest of the day to kill. Thankfully the newspapers weren’t yet two months old and therefore not on microfiche.

He relaxed into another copy of the Sun News-Pictorial. Page eleven had a photograph of the inside of the cab of an ambulance with a vandalised dash panel. It had been stolen from its base in the resort town of Torquay. Peter’s idle curiosity changed to riveted interest as he read the short item.

Within minutes he embarked on the ride that would take over an hour, to Torquay.

*

By four in the afternoon, he had completed his round trip, parked his motorcycle and was walking into the apartment block that had been his home for a while. He stopped and gazed at the window from where the assassin’s bullet had been fired into Sir Beddoe Raper—and then at the window one floor above, from where Sylvester Socatazzi, alias Gerald Hatrick, must have surveyed his killing field. The apartment from which he planned and orchestrated it, perhaps in collaboration with the neighbour below, Angela Wright.

Peter looked around at the stunted trees standing in their forlorn patches in the concrete; at the copied fences and set back polyester and pebble porches and he swallowed a lump in his throat. What the hell twists of fate had put him in that apartment, and now, had him brooding outside it? He took a last look at the window that he had looked through many times, squared his shoulders and went inside.

*

‘C’mon for Christ’s sake. Games are for weekends. I’m supposed to be doing something else right now, not chauffeuring you about, playing games.’ Dunedin’s displeasure was also apparent in his impatient handling of the car in the morning traffic.

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