Choices. Jeff Edwards
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to add that the spy’s conduit appeared to be a well-known private investigator by the name of Liam Ryan, and that Ryan had confirmed under oath that he had been dealing with me, but denying emphatically that he and his company had dealings with ASIO.
‘The media don’t know what to make of the whole thing,’ said Rick. ‘That’s why they’ve been sitting around waiting for you to get home.’
‘I’m surprised that they aren’t knocking on the door,’ I commented.
Sandy commented dryly, ‘They’ve been ringing the phone constantly. I’ve had to take it off the hook and leave it off. Sammy let me use his mobile to ring Mum and Dad, otherwise they would have been down here as well. Your message bank is probably full of calls as well.’
‘It was when I checked it.’
‘The only reason that they’re keeping their distance out there is because Rick “removed” a couple of them from the front porch by force.’
Sandy came over and stood behind my chair, placing her hands on my shoulders. ‘Now we have all that out of the way I think it’s time for you to tell us how you came to be in such a mess.’
I took a long swig at my beer before beginning. I didn’t know exactly where to start, so I began as far back as I could. ‘You know I was a bit tight with my money when I was in the army?’
‘Tight?’ laughed Rick. ‘You even tried to get us to contribute toward the cost of the surfing magazines you had sent over to you.’
‘Yeah, well anyway, with our overseas allowances and the rest, by the time we decided not to re-enlist I had a fair nest egg stashed away in the bank. It was the money I had set aside for our overseas surfing trips each year.’
‘I always knew you didn’t earn too much as a public servant. Rick and I always had our little cash jobs on the side that the tax-man didn’t know about so we were fine. We wondered how you managed to find your share of the expenses.’
‘Well that’s where, except running this place was getting to be more and more expensive over the years, and more and more often I was having to dip into my “cunning kick” to get the regular day-to-day bills paid.’
‘You should have told me!’ exclaimed Sandy. ‘I could have helped out. I could have gotten a job.’
‘At that time Brook was still a baby, and you were pregnant with Josh,’ I explained, ‘besides, it would only have meant that I couldn’t go on the trips anymore.’
‘So what happened?’ asked Rick.
‘My boss, Peter Clarke, decided to retire to the Gold Coast, and I applied for his job. I thought the increased pay might help, but the pay scale was so small that it barely made any difference at all.
‘Then when he had finished teaching me his job and was just about to leave for good, he invited me to the pub. “I have someone I think you’d like to meet,” he told me.
‘Over lunch that day, surrounded by I don’t know how many other people from the police, I was introduced to Liam Ryan.
‘Peter Clarke pointed him out to me when he walked in, and I saw him greet a few of the other officers in the room before he sat down at our table.
‘Over a steak and a beer, Peter explained that he and Liam Ryan had had a “working relationship” for some time, and asked me if I would be interested in continuing it. I was totally shocked when Peter explained what Liam wanted from me, and I wanted to get out of there and leave the two men to their dirty deeds.
‘Peter Clarke could see what I was thinking and asked, “Do you believe that everyone should be able to have a fair trial?”
‘“Of course,” I said.
“‘Well, what happens if you have a matter before the court and it takes a few years to be heard? That happens in a lot of both civil and criminal cases. By the time you’re ready half your witnesses have moved house and you don’t know where they went. Without the witnesses your case will fail, and you won’t get fair hearing that you should be entitled to, so your solicitor has to try to find the missing witnesses on your behalf, and hires Liam here to do that work. Now Liam can do a lot of legwork and run up a large bill to try and find your witnesses, or he can come to someone like me and spend a little bit to find out exactly the same thing.”
“‘But you can’t do it! It’s wrong!”
“‘If it were a criminal case and one of their witnesses went missing, the police would use their computer to find the necessary information so what’s the difference? We’re only trying to give people the chance to a fair hearing.”
If I hadn’t had an unpaid phone bill in my pocket at that very moment, I might have said no to his proposal, but I convinced myself that I only had to do it for a short time till our finances picked up again and then I would tell Liam to go away and find someone else to do his dirty work.’
‘But you never did,’ said my wife.
‘No. I never did. There was always another bill to pay or something else we needed to replace around here. Now it has all come out and I’m out of a job. I’ve completely stuffed our lives.’
There was silence around the table as my friends considered my confession.
‘And what have you been up to since you left?’ asked Sandy.
‘I don’t know what came over me, but I panicked when I was in the dock. I tried to deflect their questioning by saying that I couldn’t answer because of the Official Secrets Act, and intimated that what I had been doing came under the heading of national security.’
‘Which is where the story of spying for ASIO came from?’
‘Yeah. They added two and two and came up with six, and I let them.’
‘You still haven’t said where you’ve been.’
‘I thought that if they dug further and found out that I was spinning them a yarn it would be worse than if I had told them everything they wanted to know, so I tried to make it look like I really was working as a spy.’
‘What did you do?’ asked Sandy.
I took another drink of beer, and told them all that had happened to me from the time I left until the time I arrived back home.
The three of them sat in wrapt silence until the very end, not daring to interrupt my story. Even after I had finished they remained quiet, digesting all the information I had told them.
Finally, Rick downed a large mouthful of beer and exchanged a very strange look with Sam. He said quietly, ‘Danny boy, I don’t know if you’re the dumbest person I have ever met, or a bloody genius, but I think the first option is probably the one I’d go for.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I nodded, ‘but I was desperate.’
‘You must have been to try something like that,’ commented Sam.
‘I convinced myself that the more bulldust I spread around out there, the more likely it would be that they would start to believe some of it.’
‘What will happen now?’ asked Sandy.
The answer to that question was suddenly placed on hold, as the back door crashed open to whoops of joy from my children, Brook and Josh, as they arrived home from school to find that not only had their father returned, but that their two most favourite people in the world were also present.
Throwing their schoolbags into their rooms with complete disregard for their contents, my son and daughter then dragged their uncles outside to show them all that had been done since their last visit some months before, and it was not until Sandy called them all in for supper that some semblance of calm finally descended on our home.
* * *
Later that evening when Brook and Josh had finally been exiled to their rooms