The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11) Read online

  That rocked them both. The girl — she wasn’t much more than that, around twenty-three — looked really dazed at first, but she got her balance back before the old man. Wainbridge, who was tall and thin like a beanpole, fizzed and spluttered a good deal at first and eventually said, “Well, I’m damned! Surely someone would have had the common decency to tell us before now? After all — my daughter’s still his wife, isn’t she?”

  “Until the divorce, yes,” I said, and I could see he didn’t like the word. “Possibly in the circumstances the authorities didn’t feel it was quite so pressing — and in any case there are other considerations. This is being treated as a matter of state security.” I put on my pompous voice. “I’m afraid I must ask you both not to mention this to anyone at all. Is this understood?”

  “You mean,” Wainbridge asked abruptly, “you’re hitting us with the Official Secrets Act?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Well, you can certainly rely on our discretion,” he said, and frowned. “This is a pretty nasty business for us to face,” he went on, “as I’ve no doubt you do realize. It’s — well, a shock, naturally. What? Mind you, I never did like the feller, couldn’t see what my daughter saw in him, quite frankly. Very rough diamond — if diamond’s the word. Of course, he had ability and drive, no doubt of that …”

  And money, I thought, lots and lots of money — that would have counted. I’d noticed the flat wasn’t exactly affluent and West Kensington wasn’t the best address in the world. I said, “Mrs Dunwoodie … he was a good deal older than you, I imagine?”

  “Thirty-three years,” she said, giving me a direct look. She was damned attractive, with long, honey-coloured hair that curled up below her chin on either side, and a kind of tawny look about her tanned skin. As a name, ‘Dunwoodie’ sounded all wrong for her. Her clothes were beautifully made and definitely — though discreetly — very expensive, but I’d have thought just slightly way out for these days; there was a suggestion, just a suggestion, of tweed skirt, twin-set, and mummy’s pearls about her — not that it mattered. I wasn’t here on her account and I’d better remember it, I told myself, though I knew I wouldn’t find it all that easy. “It didn’t seem to matter at first,” she went on, referring to Dunwoodie’s age.

  “But in the end it caught up with you?”

  Wainbridge coughed; I’d overstepped the bounds of good taste, I suppose. Anyway, the daughter nodded. “Yes,” she said with a touch of defiance, and looked across at her father, who was probably little older than her husband.

  There was a silence after that, and then the general coughed again, on a different note this time. “If you can be precise as to what you expect from us,” he said, “we’ll both do what we can to help.”

  “To find him again?” I asked casually as I lit a cigarette from the box he passed across.

  “Of course.” His voice was sharp. “I’ve already said I didn’t care for him — shouldn’t have said that, I know — but I don’t wish him that sort of harm. In any event, my daughter won’t be going back to him,” he added, using the kind of tone that made her look as though one day she’d say, “Oh, won’t I!” The elderly, I thought, not for the first time, can be so goddamn stupid on occasions.

  I turned to the daughter. I said, “You’re the only person I can talk to in this country who knows him intimately, Mrs Dunwoodie. What do you think could have happened?”

  “I simply don’t know,” she said. She had a little trick of taking an end of that honey hair and twisting it up between her upper lip and her nose. She used it now. I found it sexy, somehow.

  “Had he enemies?” I asked, knowing very well he had.

  Again there was that glance at her father who said abruptly and surprisingly, and with his voice suddenly full of a hard bitterness, “Oh, tell him the facts, Flair, it’s no good holding back now and I suppose we’ll have to make up our minds to that now this thing’s hit us.”

  The girl nodded. “He had enemies all right,” she said quietly. “Men in government and out of it.”

  “Political enemies?”

  “Yes, and private ones too. My husband’s a difficult man, Commander Shaw. He — rides people hard and he gets their backs up as only an Australian can, especially one with Scottish ancestry. He’s tough. He’s rude. He’s —”

  “Vulgar,” Wainbridge snapped, and immediately reddened. “Sorry, my dear,” he said. “Shouldn’t have said that either.”

  “Oh, but it’s true, daddy. I’d have said it myself if you hadn’t. He’s awfully coarse,” she said, turning to me again. “Coarse and insensitive and at times abusive. He’s often told me I’m a bloody little bitch and sometimes he’s used another word —”

  “Flair,” the general said appealingly.

  “Well, anyway! He’s like that. He’s broken a good many good men’s careers simply because they disagreed with him and his ideas.”

  “What are his ideas?”

  She swept her hair up and it trailed through her fingers. It was very fine in texture, I noticed. “Oh, he has big ideas of revolutionizing Australia, speeding up the process of change from an agricultural economy to a highly industrialized one — which is why he got that particular ministry, of course.”

  “He has those ideas even though he’s a sheep man himself?”

  She laughed. “No, he’s not. Not a sheep man. You’re thinking of the Andaratta property, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you see, that was our home. But we only lived there because of the peace and quiet, you know, to get away from Canberra now and then. Jake was never a sheep man and one day he’ll sell Andaratta to one of the new industries for any price he cares to name. He has fingers in plenty of pies, and apart from Andaratta itself they’re all in heavy industry. He means to bring nuclear power to Australia in a big, big way — and the conservative element doesn’t like that at all. Sheep made Australia, they say, and for God’s sake let’s keep it that way!”

  “And you?”

  She shrugged again. Her jade-green eyes flickered away from mine. “I’ve always preferred the country life,” she said. I didn’t believe her for a moment; she didn’t look like a country girl to me in spite of the tweed-skirt, twin-set, mummy’s-pearls aura — which was why it was wrong for her: it was a lie. She went on, “There’s something about a big sheep property you don’t get in an industrial area,” and in that at least I could agree with her.

  I smiled and said, “True enough.” All she had told me I could have found out in Sydney and I knew that; I was just getting her to talk really, to loosen up so that the real gold would come rolling out, if there was any. And still not expecting anything to emerge directly as a result, I asked the next question. I said, “I suppose you don’t know of anyone else who’s disappeared out in Australia, do you, in anything like similar circumstances … or even anyone who’s disappeared for a while and then come back, and known nothing about what happened while they were out of circulation?”

  Something happened to her face; I think she’d been about to frame a ‘no’ and then decided to change it. I think also she was dead surprised. She said, “It’s funny you should have said that about not knowing. It did happen, as a matter of fact … oh, about six months ago, to a friend of Jake’s, oddly enough. Have you second sight, or something?”

  “I wish I had,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose it would make your job easier. Well — I don’t know if this man disappeared or not, but I do know he had a total blank covering a period of I think six days when he should have been at work.”

  “Uh — huh.” I pulled at my cigarette. “Who was this, Mrs Dunwoodie?”

  She said, “A man called Learoyd, Tracy Learoyd. He’s the ADG — administrative director-general — of Lifeforce, that’s the nuclear-powered industrial complex off the Northern Territory. It’s near Darwin. You may have heard of it.”

  Well, I had. Lifeforce had been big news when it had been no more than a
set of blueprints and it had hit the headlines hard when it had first gone into operation. Every now and again since, there would be an article in the press about the enormous benefits the desalinating plant in particular had brought to Australia. Already the economy was feeling the buoyant effects. The sheep stations had grown enormously in terms of stock and the ready availability of fresh water had brought all kinds of technical advances in its train. It had practically opened up a whole new country for the Australians and a good slice of the population had moved out into the bush from overcrowded cities like Sydney and Melbourne and Adelaide. So I could scarcely help hearing about it. And suddenly I felt I might have hit that gold after all and quite without aiming at it by intent. This feeling could have been due to another fact I happened to know: since UK had pulled out from East of Suez and abdicated her worldwide military role, the rejuvenated heart of Australia now housed one half of the Western world’s nuclear strike-back. I said, “Yes, I’ve heard of Lifeforce, Mrs Dunwoodie. It’s big, and it’s important, isn’t it?”

  “My God,” she said with a short, sardonic laugh, “you can say that again, just as many times as you like! It’s the most important single thing in all Australia.”

  “Yes,” I said. “So why, I wonder, hasn’t my chief been told about what happened to its ADG … now that Mr Dunwoodie’s had something similar happen to him?”

  She smiled, then laughed outright. “What’s happened to Jake may not be quite the same, might it, but I can answer your question very simply. No-one knew — not outside the Lifeforce complex, that is. My husband saw to that! Tracy Learoyd was an old friend, they’d been at school together, they’d been in the army together in the war, right through. Jake was generous as well as hard when he chose to be. He could be as good a friend as the other way round. He never let the word about Tracy being absent go any farther than his own office, and he threatened instant dismissal and blacklisting for all future employment to anyone who, as he put it himself, opened his big yap. Does that answer you, Commander Shaw?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Just one thing more, though. Where did this Tracy Learoyd stage his disappearance, or absence if you like?”

  “Brisbane,” she said, and I think she got the point when I let on to her that Jake Dunwoodie had also used Brisbane as his departure point.

  *

  If that was the gold I’d come for, I had to make it last. There wasn’t any more. Flair Dunwoodie gave me a pretty vivid picture of her home life with the minister for scientific and industrial research and though she didn’t go into the sordid details themselves I could supply my own mental image. It wasn’t an unprecedented situation by any means. The gently born young girl and the moneyed, elderly, vulgar, go-getting public figure had come together too many times before now for me to feel any surprise. But it was always an unhappy mixture in varying degrees. Nevertheless, I still couldn’t see the connection — yet — between Dunwoodie’s disappearance and anything sinister developing from our old friends the communists — if that was what Max had meant, and obviously he had. Maybe there wasn’t anything. But, because the Lifeforce complex seemed to come into this thing in some way, even if only in connection with the Old Pals Act perhaps, I did feel there was just a little more to it than just Jake Dunwoodie being, say, donged on the head in a Brisbane brothel and cast into the winding Brisbane River from the meat wharves.

  3

  In the end I did make that Sydney flight as originally booked because there seemed no point now in my remaining in London; and I was intrigued by what I’d heard about this Learoyd. I felt it was certainly more than just a coincidence, somehow, that both Dunwoodie and Learoyd should have come up against trouble in Brisbane. That could bear investigation. Maybe Dunwoodie’s wife thought so too, because when I got to Heathrow the next morning and obeyed the summons for the Sydney flight, I found her among the passengers going through the departure routine.

  “Surprise, surprise,” I said. My feelings about having her along with me were rather mixed. “Why the rush back to Australia all of a sudden, Mrs Dunwoodie?”

  She flushed a little at my tone but said, “After what you told me, I felt I ought to be more on the spot. Daddy didn’t like it but I got him to use a bit of pull all the same, and he got me on this flight. I didn’t know you’d be on it,” she added.

  I said, “Well, since you’re here, we may as well keep together on the journey,” and she seemed, I thought, quite pleased at the prospect. She was looking even more attractive today, really sexy, and the tweed-skirt look had gone. She was much more the ‘in’ person. She was wearing very clinging tight slacks with a low-slung waist and they didn’t leave much to the imagination; she told me later, when we’d got to know one another better, that she dressed more or less demurely in London to please her father. I didn’t say anything more while we all went through the customs and immigration control and then carried on out to the jet, but once we were airborne and away for Zurich and Rome on the first leg of the long flight south we chatted about this and that and I tried to pump her, but without any success. I don’t believe she was holding back on anything, it was simply that she hadn’t anything helpful to offer. But I did get an extension of the picture of life with Jake Dunwoodie, etched in in much more detail than back in her father’s flat. Reading as it were between the lines, Dunwoodie emerged to me as a thorough bastard — vicious, self-indulgent and mean. Maybe, I thought, her view was biased; a man doesn’t usually get as far as Dunwoodie unless he has a few saving graces.

  Flair Dunwoodie was only going as far as Darwin. When I asked her why, and what she meant to do up there on the edge of civilization, she said rather vaguely that she wanted to talk to Tracy Learoyd and after she’d seen him she would take an internal flight on the Qantas net to Hay and the old homestead at Andaratta. I said, apropos of the visit to Learoyd, “Just remember one thing, won’t you? You don’t know about your husband’s disappearance and neither does Learoyd — not officially. From what I’ve been told I’d doubt if he’s been informed unofficially either.”

  She gave me a quick sideways look and said, “Actually, I do know officially now.”

  “You surprise me,” I said, and meant it. “How did that happen?”

  “Daddy rang the high commissioner and said I was worried because I hadn’t heard from Jake for some time.”

  “But would that be so surprising, considering you’d left him?”

  “One can always change one’s mind, can’t one, and I could have written to him?”

  I said, “Sure — but have you?”

  She shook her head. Light danced in the thick honey of her hair. “No, I haven’t. But the high commissioner wasn’t to know that, was he? Daddy left a hint in the air that I might go back and they asked him to come round and he was told in confidence what had happened. He and I were hoping to get a little more than you’d told us, as a matter of fact.”

  “And did you?”

  “No,” she said. “It was a wasted journey, really.”

  I warned her, “You’ll have to go on treating it in confidence, won’t you? You still don’t know — so far as Learoyd is concerned, for instance.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But whatever I don’t know, I can still think things, can’t I? I can be worried and suspicious and come close to the truth, without ever letting on that I know. Don’t you see?”

  “I see that all right. What I don’t see is what you expect to achieve. Or why you’re going to so much trouble over a man you’ve left anyway.”

  She frowned, and did that little twisting trick with the ends of her hair. “Tracy Learoyd was a very old friend of Jake’s — I told you. It’s only a hunch but I feel he might know something.”

  I fancied I’d cottoned on. “About the Brisbane set-up?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He just might.”

  “You’re after evidence that your husband might have been carrying on with another woman?” I asked brutally.

  Again she nodded and when I
looked at her, outlined against the window and the brilliant blue of the sky, her face had gone white. She said in a brittle voice, “Yes, frankly I am. Does it matter to you?”

  I said, “You might wait till we know what’s happened to Dunwoodie.”

  “If he comes back,” she said with a tense deliberation, and I saw the way her hands were balled into small tight fists. “I’m tied to him till the law says different, aren’t I? If he doesn’t come back … well, I’m not sure how long it is before a wife can presume her husband dead in those sort of circumstances, but I imagine it’ll be a long time.”

  “And meanwhile there’s someone else you want to marry?”

  “No,” she said, and suddenly her voice was dreary, flat, miserable. “No, there isn’t. It’s not that at all. It’s just that I want to feel free again. Things haven’t been too good. I’d have thought you’d have realized that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then I added, “Flair, just bear in mind what my job is. I’ve already told you, state security’s involved. This thing mustn’t be allowed to bog down in a hunt for enough dirt to bring a divorce action for adultery.” I wasn’t quite so happy now to have Flair Dunwoodie along with me, but I tried to console myself with the thought that Australia was a big enough place for me to lose her in when necessary. The stewardess came along at that moment and I got her to bring us some drinks and I steered the conversation away from Jake Dunwoodie.

  *

  We touched down at Darwin in the very early hours and before we did so I’d seen, away to the south-west, the blaze of light that Flair said would be the offshore man-made island containing Lifeforce. Flair left the plane after I’d given her one more pep talk about the need for discretion, and we took off again forty-five minutes after touchdown and as the jet carried me on over the dark heart of the continent, I slept. We came down at Mascot at 0645 hours and the airport coach ran me in the six miles to Castlereagh Street. 6D2’s Australian HQ was only a few doors down from the BOAC offices but I guessed G. K. Slattery wouldn’t be around at that hour, so I took a taxi and checked in at the Australia, where I left my bag. I’d washed, shaved, and breakfasted on the plane, so I had time to fill and I walked around Sydney, which was bright and fresh in that early morning before the full day’s heat of the Australian summer hit the concrete blocks of skyscrapers. It was becoming more and more like New York in outline, I thought, as I wandered down to Circular Quay and watched the ferry clear away across the blue water of the harbour for Manly. It was a few years now since I’d been out this way; in fact the last time had been when I’d come in aboard the New South Wales when she’d been about to blow right inside the Heads with that damned Radio Regulator Equipment for Defence Co-Ordination Atomic Powers — REDCAP for short — deep down inside her towering decks. A hell of a lot of water had flowed under the harbour bridge since then, but basically, and in spite of the new buildings, Sydney had the same feel as ever to me. There was still that sense of freedom, of being on the doorstep of wide open spaces, of great highways where you could really drive a fast car so that she enjoyed it, a feeling of freshness and re-invigoration, a release from the shut-in life of Britain, from the controls and restrictions and the state interference in every goddam thing. Jake Dunwoodie must have really been a right bastard to have made Flair want to give all this up and go back to London …