Follow the Money Read Free

the other leads and see where I get. I’ll charge you what I think the work’s worth.’
    ‘That’s not businesslike.’
    ‘Right,’ I said, ‘look where businesslike has got us. I’ll need your email address and a mobile number where I can reach you twenty-four seven.’
    He slumped down in his chair. ‘See May Ling in the office.’
    I dealt with May Ling, who seemed to have everything at her perfectly manicured fingertips. I went down the stairs to the street feeling strangely buoyant. It wasn’t just the prospect of recovering some money or avoiding bankruptcy. High enough stakes to start with, but it was more than that. It was because I was working again and about to be useful in a way I hadn’t been for too long. Maybe.
    They told me that after the heart operation I’d have a new surge of energy, feel ten years younger. I did some days, not others. Some days I worried about little things that never used to bother me and some days I didn’t let quite big things concern me at all. And I couldn’t predict the way it’d go. For the moment I was feeling younger because of the prospect of interesting work. I decided to walk back to the city for the exercise and to plan ahead. I was looking forward to studying the material Standish had given me and interviewing Stefan Nordlung, who’d claimed to have seen Malouf. He was a retired marine engineer, an acquaintance of Malouf’s. A drive to Seaforth tomorrow morning was a pleasant pros- pect after all the sitting about and time-filling I’d been doing.
    I’d covered several kilometres briskly and was feeling good when my mobile buzzed. For some reason I have an aversion to walking along with the thing cocked up at my ear the way so many people do. I stopped and stepped out of the way to take the call.
    ‘Cliff, it’s Megan.’
    My daughter. ‘Yes, love?’
    ‘Good news.’
    ‘Always welcome. Tell me.’
    ‘I’m pregnant.’
    I said ‘What?’ so loudly people in the street gave me an alarmed look.
    ‘I said I’m going to have a baby.’
    ‘I can’t believe it.’
    ‘Why? Didn’t you think Hank and I were fucking?’
    That was pure Megan—direct. ‘Yes, but . . . Well, that’s terrific. When?’
    ‘Six months. We waited until we were completely sure. We phoned Hank’s people in the States and you’re the first to know here.’
    I mumbled something, said I’d see her that night and walked on in a sort of daze. Fatherhood had been sprung on me; I hadn’t known of Megan’s existence until she was eighteen. Now this. I didn’t know what a grandfather’s credentials were, but I was pretty sure they didn’t include bankruptcy. I thought about it as I moved on. Megan was young, who knew how many kids she might have and what help she might need? The stakes just climbed higher.

The happy couple were so involved in what they were doing—and they behaved as though they’d achieved some- thing no one else in the world had ever done—that they didn’t ask me what I was up to. That suited me. Like them, I wanted to be sure before making any announcements. I was happy for them and myself: I’d missed out on the real experience of fatherhood, a big thing to miss out on, and now I was getting a second chance at a version of it.
    I went home from their flat with two-thirds of a bottle of champagne inside me. Megan wasn’t drinking and Hank was almost too excited to drink. The walk from Newtown to Glebe sobered me and it wasn’t late. Time to work.
    I transferred Standish’s list and his brief comments on the people on it into a notebook. I had names—Stefan Nordlung, Felicity Standish, Rosemary Malouf, Prospero Sabatini, Clive Finn and Selim Houli. Sabatini was the journalist who’d written on the Malouf matter; Finn and Houli were gamblers. Finn was the manager of a casino at Parramatta and Houli ran a nightclub and a high stakes card game at Kings Cross. Both men had told police that Malouf had lost heavily but both denied having anything