The Dutchman beamed. ‘Could you ring Sean now? Find out how many are going on Monday?’
‘Bejasus, noo. They’ll be in bed, you see.’ The lilting cadence came easily. ‘And up before dawn, they’ll be. Cows lined up for the milking spree.’ He preferred to contact his farmer friend when he felt fresher.
Pike dropped the brogue. ‘They live in the only Irish village in the world without a pub.’
De Groote smiled magnetically. ‘You could get the whole population. What a tight-knit group that would be for you and Alex.’
‘And for you, mate. Do you know my great, great grandfather, like Irishtown’s founder Sean O’Halloran, came out here in chains?’
‘You told me.’
‘Only a bit of it.’ Pike eyed the wine resentfully. He decided to tell him more. ‘Liam Pike was transported, aged sixteen, for stealing a piglet from his English landlord, who in fact stole their whole family farm. That damned landlord was a former Pommie soldier, who was given the Pike land by Queen Victoria. Liam was a convict, mostly in Stanley, for seven years before he got his ticket of leave.
‘I’m descended, too, from Liam’s Aboriginal girlfriend, Ninginny, who was a sort of slave servant for Stanley’s VDL Company. It seems they never married. Liam died, grieving, a week after Ninginny, aged eighty.’
De Groote looked startled. ‘You’re part Aboriginal?’
‘And proud of it.’ Pike doubted that Richard De Groote would flaunt Pike’s Aboriginality, or the convict bit, to the masses. Or reveal that his protégé in Stanley was a descendant of a true bastard.
Pike excused himself to go to the toilet. He felt like a wimp and wanted to splash cold water on his face.
As soon as he was alone, De Groote phoned Jerry Bell. He reported with quiet pride that Pike had backed off. ‘But I could not get him to drink grog,’ he said.
Bell instructed him to drive his protégé harder, to ensure that the stories of corruption in Argo were killed.
Once Pike was seated, looking fresher, De Groote adopted a more serious demeanor. ‘I shall have a lengthy counselling session with you and Alex soon. I’ll conduct a SWOT analysis of your entire business. Blarney, it lacks discipline.’
Pike had heard enough. He nodded, repressing an urge to say so. SWOT: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. No bloody way. ‘Is the Czech Republic to be included in that?’ he taunted.
De Groote’s phone rang. After a pause he said gravely, ‘Oh dear, Alex! That’s appalling. Damned amazing. What a violation! I’ll put him on.’ He pressed the loudspeaker button.
CHAPTER 6
‘Blarn, love,’ she said, ‘we’ve been robbed! The study’s been ransacked. Our Argo papers are gone from the file cabinet. Other stuff is scattered everywhere.
‘I hadn’t been in there when Richard rang me. The study window’s been forced open and closed again. They took heaps. All our CDs and DVDs. But only Argo stuff, I think.’
Pike’s first thoughts were of Alex. She must feel violated. ‘You okay? Are your parents still there?… Good. ‘The computer?’
‘It’s still on the desk. I haven’t checked it.’
He decided to warn her in case she accused Argo. ‘This phone’s on the table, the loud-speaker on so Richard can hear you, too. With the book pinched in Prague, we really needed those files. Call Plodder. Tell him it’s the heart of our whole business.’ He glanced at his apprehensive leader. ‘Plodder will want your fingerprints, and mine. Don’t touch anything in there, of course. I’ll drive home tonight.’
‘No, Blarn!’ Alex protested. ‘With the jetlag and this bad weather—’
‘No,’ her husband interrupted. ‘I’ll be there in five hours. I’ll drive a bit slowly. Five and a half then. I’m feeling fine. And get Eva up there for the night… I’m baffled. Chin up, my lovely. And don’t you wait up for me.’
‘Well, I don’t think I’ll get any sleep. Drive really carefully. I love you, Blarn.’
‘Yeah, I’ll be careful. Bye, love.’
Pike glared across the table as he closed off the phone. ‘Who would break into our home in little old Stanley and do that, Richard? Someone who wants to wreck our business?’
De Groote shrugged as Pike quickly finished his coffee. ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Plodder’s the nickname of my mate who’s the local cop in Stanley, Sergeant Sam Bond. And you’ve met Eva. She’s Alex’s married sister; two kids.
‘I want to get back to Stanley and, with Plodder I suppose, find out who robbed us. Richard, make sure you and Jerry attend to the mess in the Czech Republic. If the Czechs are abandoned, I’ll blow the whistle on the whole fiasco.’
‘I do not take threats or blackmail kindly, Blarney.’
‘Nor do I.’
Pike checked his watch. 9.30. ‘Good night, Richard.’ He bought a packet of cigarettes on the way out.
Gale-driven rain pelted the Ford even more heavily an hour north of Hobart where the two-lane Midland Highway bypassed the old sandstone village of Oatlands. The night was as dark as soot, punctuated by lightning forking from rumbling confrontations of clouds above the Central Plateau in the west.
He imagined Bondy right now ferreting around the scene of the robbery. His policeman mate was a good cop. Precious little happened in Stanley that Plodder did not know about.
He had been a major in the Australian army’s elite Special Air Service, then a tough detective in Sydney and later in Hobart. He then declined a promotion to Inspector so he could settle for Sergeant First Class in Stanley. He and his wife had fallen in love with the wondrous place while on a holiday there.
Theft was rare in the town. People there seldom bothered to lock their homes or cars. The taking of the fifty or so Argo CDs and DVDs, along with the files, intrigued him. The thieves had been instructed to take anything to do with the network, it seemed. Even with a big sack, it was more than one man could carry. He fumed. If I get hold of those damned robbers…
Jetlag tiredness crept upon him like a gathering mist as he contemplated his remaining four hours on the road. His mood was as tenebrous as the weather. This home invasion, on top of Prague, could badly hit Alex, his wild rose.
Her mother Magda had told Pike of the couple’s frustrated helplessness when, crushed with depression, eighteen-year-old Alex returned home from halfway through her second year at the university.
‘Before then, Alex had such a, such a zest for life,’ Pike remembered Magda saying as he tried to focus through the torrent on approaching headlights. At home after her collapse, Alex sometimes woke in a silent, black despair lasting a day or a week. At these times, the doctor warned of suicide.
The Dvoraks told Pike with tight smiles that this had bewildered them. They thought the doctor was warning, in his nasal Australian accent, of a cut of beef Magda sometimes bought: silverside. It never graced the Dvorak table until sister Eva explained to them the devastating truth.
The pendulum had steadied. Alex returned to university and graduated with a brilliance that caused celebration in two cultures, 20,000 kilometres apart. The belle of Stanley. The brain of Petrov.
Pike, mentally scarred alcoholic and newly divorced Sydney newspaperman, had returned from Sydney a year later.