The Kalgoorlie Skimpy

By Martin Roth

How do you go about solving a murder when no one – including even the victim’s wife - is telling the truth? For Brazilian geologist and financial analyst Feisty Ferreira, it means a journey to the rugged Australian outback, where mystery surrounds a massive new gold discovery.

There she meets a strange cast of characters that include a gold mining entrepreneur with a dark secret, a church pastor on a mission to stop the gold from being mined, and a young woman graduate student who serves beer in a pub in her underwear – one of the town’s famous skimpies.

And in the background is a mysterious Chinese woman who seems to be trying to buy up the entire output of the new goldmine.

This novella (32,000 words) is the second in the Feisty Ferreira financial mystery series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Roth
• Release date: Feb 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301169405

Martin Roth

Martin Roth is a veteran journalist and foreign correspondent who lived in Tokyo for seventeen years and whose reports from throughout Asia have appeared in leading publications around the world. He now lives with his family in Melbourne, Australia, where he enjoys walking his black Sarplaninac mountain sheepdog and drinking coffee in the city’s many wonderful cafés.

Book preview

Chapter One

It was an early February afternoon in Melbourne. I was sitting in my swivel chair gazing into the Mac. It was too hot to walk outside to Dancing Goat to pick up one of their specialty coffees, so I’d traipsed to the company kitchen and poured myself a brew from the percolator there. It would suffice. Of course, in the scorching Melbourne summer it was probably not wise to be drinking hot coffee at all, but with a five-cup-a-day addiction like mine you sometimes have little choice.

I took a long sip, and then a bite of my doughnut. Laura, one of the secretaries in the dealing room, had been over in Toorak during her lunch break and had picked up a dozen salted caramel doughnuts from MoVida, the hot - as in fashionable - new bakery run by the tapas restaurant of the same name.

They were delicious, but small - little bigger than golf balls - and I had been allocated just one. Still, hot coffee and a doughnut. Life in the office doesn’t get much better. Normally.

Except that John Melber had just walked over. Feisty, he said, his icy blue eyes drilling through me. Then, right away. At the same time he jerked his thumb in the direction of his office, down at the other end of the research department. I followed.

Melber is my boss. Where his thumb points, I go. Immediately. So do all the others here at Baund Major. We’re a posh British investment bank, wheeling and dealing on stock markets around the world. We often joke that our clients are ruled by fear and greed, in about equal measure. Yet it is little different for all of us minions working here. John Melber keeps us in line through our greed for the mega-salaries and bonuses available to those who bring in business, and terror that he might abruptly sack us, which he certainly will if we aren’t making the company money.

I took a seat in one of the leather-backed chairs in his office. He sat on the edge of his mahogany desk, right before me. A large window divided his office from the research department, where I worked, and I could see several of the other analysts watching us.

Melber was a tall, lean man, with pale skin and blonde hair. From a distance he looked handsome, with a chiseled, Roman face, but up close you could see that something was wrong - the nose a little too flat, the chin slightly sunken, the forehead too tall, the hair a little too blonde: almost bleached in appearance. Usually he walked around the office in tailored trousers and striped, monogrammed shirt. But now he was still wearing his jacket, and I guessed he had just arrived back from another long lunch with a client at one of Melbourne’s upmarket restaurants.

We have an emergency, he said simply. He was British, and he had apparently been to a good school back there - a public school, as the British insist on calling their expensive private schools - but his voice was neither plummy nor posh. Rather, it was crisp and clear, like his military bearing. Like the blue sky outside. Once over drinks at the Black Pearl bar in Fitzroy - I don’t drink alcohol, so was sipping a lemon and lime, he naturally had ordered a gin and tonic - he explained that his father was a humble librarian and his mother a clerk in a publishing house. They had both struggled to put him through his school.

I decided I would never struggle. Two million. That was my goal.

Two million?

Two million pounds. I could retire on that. Trouble, is once you enter our business, investment banking, and see the homes and the lifestyles of some of the people, you realize that two million isn’t enough. Nothing is really enough. You’re always wanting more.

And when the company sent him to open the new Melbourne office, eighteen months ago, he had gone about recruiting people with the same mindset - always wanting more.

An emergency? I now enquired, glancing at the rows of empty bookshelves behind him, testimony to his lack of interest in anything except making money.

It’s Edwin.

Oh, Edwin’s not that bad. A little quiet, perhaps. A bit slow on the uptake. But he’s a top analyst…

He’s missing.

Oops. That’ll teach me to try humor with the boss. Missing? He’s still over in Western Australia, isn’t he?

Kalgoorlie. For the Plateau Gold Mines float.

I knew that now was the time to remain silent. This was important. Plateau is the company that made that massive gold discovery out in the hills around Kalgoorlie a while back. And then when the Plateau bosses decided to list the company on the stock market they came to us, thanks to our reputation as one of Britain’s swankiest investment banks, and a network of offices around the world. I work in the Baund Major research department with Edwin, who is our gold analyst. He was sent to Kalgoorlie to write an in-depth report on Plateau.

Something mysterious has been going on, continued Melber. About six days ago Edwin phoned in to say it was huge.

What was huge?

Exactly. That’s the point. He didn’t say exactly. But he implied that the company was a lot more exciting than we realized. Melber moved his long, bony hands in circles in the air, as if trying to provide an illustration of excitement. He said he knew something that would send the share price soaring. He said he was just finishing up his report.

And…?

Melber rearranged a couple of ballpoint pens on his desk. Then I had the impression he was trying to avoid us.

Easy to do when you’re on the other side of the country.

Melber’s blue eyes drilled into me again. I mean avoid having to report back. Whenever someone phoned him - me or Les - that was Leslie Crater, head of the research department - he’d suddenly get very vague about everything. Said he needed just another day or so to get a few more figures, then we’d have the report.

He’s meant to be taking off to America in a couple of weeks, isn’t he?

Precisely. We have a major roadshow planned. He’s meant to be meeting all the top fund managers. America. Europe. Hong Kong. We need the report urgently. And now things are looking bad.

What’s looking bad?

He paused. A wave of anger seemed to pass across his pale face, and for an instant I thought he was offended by the question. We couldn’t get hold of him last night or this morning. He wasn’t answering his cellphone. Wasn’t answering his hotel phone. So Les called someone at Plateau this morning to see if they knew anything. We got a call back an hour ago. It came while I was at lunch. Police have found a body.

What…? I stared up at Melber. A body? Edwin? He’s dead?

Unofficially, yes. They’re still waiting for someone to formally identify him, but it seems from the documents he was carrying that it’s him. He stood, and was now staring down at me. This is a major kick in the guts for us. Edwin was one of our stars. Now he sat in the chair at his desk. They’re wondering who’s the next of kin.

Dead? I felt in shock. I couldn’t think what to say. I think my brain might have said a silent prayer. He was divorced and living with some Asian woman, wasn’t he? I muttered helplessly.

That’s right. I doubt that she’ll be counted as next to kin. But there’s an ex-wife and some kids. And there have to be parents, or siblings. Les is looking into that. But I need to talk to you.

I braced and waited.

That report is absolutely crucial. It needs to be done urgently and sent out to the clients. There’s huge interest all around the world in this float. Feisty, you’re a geologist. You’re going to have to drop everything and take over.

Take over? But I cover the energy stocks - oil and gas and uranium - not gold or…

Doesn’t matter. It’s an emergency. We could fly in one of our gold analysts from New York or London or wherever, but it would be several days before they arrive. We need the report urgently. You’re a trained geologist. That’s why we hired you. You’ve worked for top mining companies in the States and here in Australia.

I nodded.

So, Feisty Ferreira, you’re the woman on the spot. And once you write your report you’ll be on the first airplane out of here, to visit all the clients.

You mean overseas?

You know as well as I do that Plateau is enormous. It’s the biggest stock market launch of a gold mining company anywhere in the world in the last half-dozen years. Probably the last major one for quite a few more years, too. The clients are lining up to buy. It was a huge coup for Baund Major that we got appointed as lead manager. We’re not going to screw it up. We’re putting you on a flight first thing tomorrow.

To Kalgoorlie?

Kalgoorlie.

That’s a long way. The other side of Australia. Are there direct flights from Melbourne?

I doubt it. It’ll probably be four hours to Perth and then switching to another flight to Kalgoorlie. My secretary is booking the tickets. You’re going to have a long day tomorrow. Get a good night’s sleep.

After I finish studying up on Plateau.

Melber actually smiled. He relished solving tricky problems. Yes, after you’ve done that. Which may take you all night.

Chapter 2

I walked back to my desk in the research department and thought about Edwin. Tall, lanky Edwin - not unlike tall, lanky John Melber, expect that Melber cut a relatively dashing figure with his blue eyes, blonde locks and tailored apparel, whereas Edwin, who sported oily black hair and pimples, rambled around the office with his shirt hanging out and a look of perpetual angst on his furrowed brow.

Yet he was one of Australia’s top gold analysts, hired by Baund Major for mega-bucks when they set up shop in Australia eighteen months ago. And he was worth it. He brought in the big dollars, thanks to his expertise in the crucial Aussie gold sector, which attracted investors from around the world.

And now he was probably dead.

We were never especially close, but, well, the sudden ending of a life like that, it had left me shaken. I sat at my desk, bowed my head and briefly I prayed.

But my job beckoned, more urgently than ever before. I was to take over Edwin’s work, at least temporarily. And even in my present somewhat befuddled state of mind I could recognize that I had just been handed a major opportunity. This was a make or break moment. It was up to me now to grab the chance and run with it.

Like Edwin I am a trained geologist, though he studied here in Australia, while I went to university first in my native Brazil - where I acquired the nickname Feisty; in fact, my real name is Faustina Ferreira - followed by post-graduate research at MIT in the US. Then work in San Francisco and a disastrous marriage that left me wanting to get as far away from my ex-husband as possible. Melbourne,