Death By Diamonds: Bromo Perkins crime fiction, #3

By Tony Berry

The third book in the ongoing crime fiction series sees former agent Bromo Perkins  joining the battle to stem the evil trade in blood diamonds. His past comes back to haunt him as a group of Sri Lankan mercenaries  coerce him into their struggle to reveal the Mr Bigs using Australia as their backdoor into an international network where murder is the rule of law. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tony Berry
• Release date: Oct 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781916460546

Tony Berry

Tony Berry is a lifelong career journalist who has worked on national magazines and daily newspapers in his native Britain and in Australia, where he has made his home for several decades. He has written four previous crime fiction books featuring disgraced secret service agent Bromo Perkins, and a family history based on numerous research trips exploring the places where his ancestors once lived. His first novel, Done Deal, was short-listed for the New South Wales Genre Fiction Award. So, too, was the sequel Washed Up, which also secured him a mentorship with the Australian Society of Authors. Since then he has written three more tales of Bromo Perkins’ adventures. In 2017 he was one of eight writers chosen worldwide for the inaugural crime fiction residency at the Banff Centre for Excellence in Canada. As an accredited professional editor in Australia and the UK Tony also edits fiction and non-fiction in a wide range of genres. He is completing his second memoir, Celtic Skeletons. For recreation he battles the curse of ageing as he tries to maintain his status as an elite masters’ athlete at national and international level over distances from 3000 metres to the marathon.

Book preview

ONE

THE gardens are a small and secret place, known to very few locals and rarely stumbled upon by strangers. They are dotted by tall alien trees and hemmed in on three sides by a low hedge of deep green shrubs. Instead of grass there is an uneven surface of bluestone pavers, relics of the suburb’s glory days as a thriving industrial hodgepodge of factories, tanneries and breweries.

The woman was alone in the gardens, seated placidly on a metal bench beside a small ornamental pond. She seemed mesmerised by a continuous flow of water streaming from the sculptured cherub poised on a moss-covered plinth in the centre of the pond. She took no notice of the birds scrabbling at her feet for the crumbs of the lunchtime muesli bar she had dusted from her skirt. One hand listlessly fondled the furry white shape nestled at her side. The unexpected balmy warmth of the springtime day was making her drowsy and listless but she dared not risk nodding asleep. There were other places to go, appointments to keep. Today was a milestone; an end and a beginning. For a few seconds, however, she briefly lost the battle against the drowsiness. Her eyes closed.

The man seized the moment. He took three rapid strides in from the garden’s iron gate and snatched the ball of fluff squeezed hard up against the woman’s hip, one hand throttling hard around the dog’s neck, the other drawing a long thin blade from his waistband and slashing viciously into the animal’s belly.

The woman pushed up off the bench, her mouth open wide to let loose a scream that never came, arms stretching out to the dog, now being dangled high out of reach by her assailant. The man slashed again, severing head from body, oblivious to the woman, confident her petite frame and light weight were no match for his height and bulk. He tossed the dog’s head into the pond and plunged the blade into its body, carving a single neat incision along its length before dangling it centimetres from the woman’s outstretched arms.

His frenzy stopped as suddenly as it had begun. As the woman later recalled, all the man’s power and rage seemed to evaporate. He looked bewildered. It was like a balloon being pricked, she said. He appeared deflated and confused. The woman shrunk away from him. Her assailant continued staring at the ripped open pile of limp fleece as he calmly folded his blade back into his waistband. Briefly he looked at the woman. She remembered his eyes as light blue, glazed and watery, like some pale icy drink. Chilling. Sparse hair receded on either side of a widow’s peak. There was a dark blue T-shirt showing under a grey V-neck jumper. She recalled him as wearing jeans and light tan desert boots that scuffed up gravel as he ran. His voice surprised her with its gentleness, and by its accent. Germanic, she thought.

‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Wrong fucking dog. Bloody things all look the same. They’re everywhere, all over the place.’

The ice-blue eyes focused on her frightened face. He raised one hand to his chin, fingers clenched except for a single unfolded digit pressing against his lip. He loomed over her.

‘Shush,’ he said. ‘Don’t even think of opening that pretty little mouth. Say nothing. Not now, not later. Stay safe and tell no one.’

He departed even faster than he had arrived, running through the iron gate and out into the street beyond. The woman spun round in his direction and took a few tentative steps as if to follow. She shouted after him in a thin soprano voice that carried no threat. ‘You’re a monster. You should be locked up.’

No one heard. She was alone and the man had gone. Her words bounced into the high brick wall shielding the garden’s northern edge, lost and ineffective.

She sank back on to the bench, the shock of the past few minutes suddenly hitting home. She looked at the dog’s head bobbing among the leaves on the pond, rippled by the cupid’s stream of water. Its body lay at her feet.

She decided there was nothing she could do. The remains could stay there. Someone would be along to sweep up the leaves and empty the litter bins. They could take care of it. Her problem would be explaining the dog’s disappearance – and finding the time and money to buy a replacement.

TWO

THE woman’s five-minute walk back to the office passed in a blur. She was unaware of the lunchtime crush of people on Bridge Road, with its footpath narrowed by the intrusion of an endless line of café chairs and tables.

Idling shoppers bumped and nudged her but she was oblivious. She stepped on to the road to avoid a woman aggressively trundling twin girls in a double stroller and the blast of a motorist’s horn briefly startled her out of her daze. As always, she glanced up to check the town hall clock high on its glowing white tower, the Australian flag fluttering at the top of its mast and the Aboriginal flag standing out above the portico. Today the time showing on the clock’s face failed to register. Her head was overflowing with visions of the man slashing at the dog’s lifelike form.

The woman turned down a narrow side street and pushed through the wooden front door of a low brick building identified only by a small brass plaque etched with the words Global Products and Marketing. She walked down the corridor into her cubicle, speaking neither to Natalie Cordoza glaring at her from the front desk nor to her fellow sales consultants whose heads were visible above the sound absorbing partitions. She sat motionless, staring at papers on her desk. Her distress was obvious yet it made the other women wary. Tamsyn Chong was the quietest member of their team and the one who revealed least about her life beyond work. To venture into her space might be taken as an intrusion; going where they were not wanted.

Natalie took the initiative. She picked up a couple of folders from her in-tray and used them as a quickly contrived excuse to slide quietly into the woman’s workspace. Tamsyn Chong looked up, a slight frown creasing the otherwise smooth skin between her thinly plucked eyebrows. Natalie noted her watery eyes, awash with tears not yet fully formed.

‘What’s wrong, Tam? What’s happened?’

Tamsyn plucked a tissue from a box on her desk. She wiped her eyes, sniffed and dabbed at her nose.

‘Nothing. I’ll be fine. Just had a bit of a shock, that’s all.’

Natalie placed the folders gingerly on the desktop. She stayed and said nothing. Her presence and her silence were asking the questions for her, urging Tamsyn to expand beyond what was already obvious. Tamsyn continued to resist the unspoken demand for more information. The demonic look and threatening words of the man in the garden dominated her thoughts. She shuddered. Her voice emerged as a whisper.

‘Leave it Nat,’ she said. ‘Please. I can’t talk about it.’

‘Oh.’

Natalie bridled and smoothed a tight black skirt over long slim hips. Again the silence hung between them. Tamsyn reached for the folders.

‘Are these for me? I didn’t expect to be working on my last afternoon but they’ll give me something to do. Take my mind off it.’

Natalie stood her ground. Her stolid presence and long silences demanded answers. As office manager she maintained it was not only her duty to know what her staff was up to, but also her right. She stepped closer to the desk and lowered her voice. It had the hacking timbre of a lifelong pack-a-day addict.

‘It’s the dog, isn’t it? You’ve lost it, haven’t you?’

Tamsyn stared down at the folders, looking but not seeing. She took a deep breath to still the quiver in her voice.

‘It’s dead.’

Natalie’s reaction almost achieved the impossible – a silent screech. Then words tumbled out, rasped and rough at the edges, the volume down but the intensity at top pitch. Anger in a whisper. The words were for Tamsyn alone. Natalie could sense the other women straining in their cubicles to hear every word. For once her tantrums were not for sharing.

‘Dead? Dead? What do you mean, dead? It’s a bloody fluffy toy we gave you as a going-away present because you can’t have the real thing in that flat of yours. That’s why I suggested you take it for a walk on your lunch break and ...’

She came to an abrupt stop, a juggernaut out of gas. Tamsyn looked at her, aghast, shaken by the outburst, puzzled by the aggression, hurt by Natalie’s lack of sympathy. This wasn’t how she had envisaged spending her last day at Global. There was a rigid formula for such occasions – a cake for morning tea, a collection for a gift and a card signed with weak witticisms. Later there would be the formal handing over of keys and security pass and an after-work gathering for drinks in the back bar at Dargo’s.

Everyone had enjoyed the cake – a spongy high mound of chocolate and cream from the bakery in the Plaza. The frail and ageing man they knew only as The Boss had emerged grudgingly from an upstairs room to utter a few barely sincere words of farewell to this staff member he hardly knew and Natalie and the girls had laughed and giggled at the presentation of the card and the fluffy white dog.

The dog was no surprise. There were boxes of them in the warehouse out the back. They were sent to all customers whose order for the parent company’s pills and potions exceeded a hundred dollars. But it was what Tamsyn wanted. She didn’t care if Natalie had simply taken one out of stock or put it through the books at a heavily discounted price: she valued it immensely. It was the nearest she could get to what she cherished most. So many girls of her background and generation were accompanied by small white dogs. She pined after them in the street, watched them cuddling them on their laps, toting them in their shoulder bags. She yearned to have a bichon frise or a lhasa apso as a loyal companion. Her second choice would be a spitz or Bolognese terrier. Even a highland white would suffice. She knew them all, had pictures in books and on the walls of her apartment where the real live version was strictly banned. She had never understood the landlord’s attitude to dogs and couldn’t even attribute it to a difference between his Western and her Asian culture. All landlords were the same. ‘Dogmatic,’ said one of the girls, but Tamsyn didn’t get the joke.

‘Where is it?’

Natalie’s curt question shattered Tamsyn’s reverie. At first she didn’t understand.

‘Where’s what?’

‘The dog.’

‘In the park. In the pond.’

‘What were you doing in the park? I thought I told you to go to Domo’s and take the dog with you.’

Tamsyn shrugged her shoulders and frowned. Natalie’s questioning puzzled her. It was insistent, demanding. Of course Natalie had told her to go Domo’s, even suggested there would be people there wanting to stroke and admire her new friend. She thought it slightly odd at the time, patronising even; but that was Natalie’s way - always commanding, domineering, claiming she knew what was best. Tamsyn felt as if she had disobeyed orders rather than taken a break for lunch. She was being put on the defensive.

‘It was too nice a day to be indoors. Domo’s was crowded. I got a takeaway. Lots of people were. The park was lovely and quiet. Until ...’

Her voice trailed off. She resisted going into detail. It was too close to reality. The toy was too lifelike. The incident too fresh in her mind. Yet it was only a toy and she struggled to understand Natalie’s outburst. There was no concern for the fright she’d had; only anger over the dog. Natalie leaned into her, expelling peppermint fumes from the pastels she sucked to disguise her nicotine breath.

‘Until what?’

‘A man grabbed it, slashed it ...’

Tamsyn sobbed at the memory. Her head drooped forward, her brow resting on her palms, her elbows propped on the desk. Natalie waited as the sobbing eased. Her voice suddenly softened.

‘I think we’d better keep this to ourselves. You must have had a shock, Tam. Say nothing more about it.’

Tamsyn was surprised by Natalie’s shift in tone. She tried to adjust. The show of concern was more welcome than her earlier anger but too confusing. She replayed Natalie’s words. They echoed those of her attacker. She looked up at Natalie.

‘Say nothing,’ she repeated. ‘That’s what the man said. He told me to keep quiet.’

‘Yes, well he would, wouldn’t he? He doesn’t want the police getting on to him.’

‘Perhaps you could tell the police, Nat, then it won’t come from me.’

‘Yes, perhaps I could. Probably a waste of time though.’

Natalie turned to leave the cubicle, again smoothing her skirt’s tightly stretched linen. She patted a few errant strands of her precision-cut brown hair back into place. She oozed complacency. Tamsyn felt abandoned by her sudden lack of concern, unable to cope with the past hour’s whirlpool of emotion. She willed herself to speak.

‘Natalie, you must do something. He said it was the wrong dog. Seemed to think it was real. That could mean someone’s pet could be in danger.’

Natalie looked back at Tamsyn. She allowed a brief smile to cross her face, highlighting the furrows a thick layer of make-up had failed to fill.

‘God, Tam, you really are weird. Get it into your head, it’s a bloody toy. Stop fretting. I’ll take care of it.’

Her smile faded as quickly as it had appeared. Her lips curled down. Her eyes narrowed.

‘It’s not the dog you’ve got to worry about.’

THREE

Bromo Perkins wondered what the hell eight down could be. He looked around the tram. No one else had the paper open at the crossword. Fellow puzzlers were in short supply. Passengers’ preference was to plug their ears with headphones, gaze blankly into the distance and let the aural senses be bombarded with endless music. He felt he’d been trapped into riding the Zombie Shuttle on a jerky stop-start journey into a land of torpor and listlessness. No one spoke, no one smiled or even looked at those around them.

He consoled himself with the thought it wasn’t always like this. Often he caught the Number 75 during the day when the hordes of shoppers were out and about, or when there was footy at the MCG, and would be embraced by a mobile party full of chatter and chiacking. It was then that community lived and the iPod could go to hell.

But not tonight. They’d hardly left the Spring Street stop on the city fringe when Bromo decided his twenty or so fellow passengers riding the last tram out to the suburbs were welded by a common denominator. All were at the end of a long day and wearied by work, study or booze. Not a spark of life or interest glimmered among them. The tram driver announced each stop over the intercom but no one seemed to be listening even though tonight the information could be understood. Her voice was strong and clear. Not like those of the linguistically challenged imports who spoke in Chinglish or the thick rapid notes of the sub-continent and made each stop a conundrum. Yet why complain about their poor pronunciation? At least they were willing to do a shit job that brought more abuse in a day than their passengers would expect in a year.

Bromo wished he’d left the after-party when Liz decided to go. At least he would have had some lively conversation on the journey home. She announced she’d decided on an early night just as a waiter topped up his glass. Why waste a good red – or even one of the Arts Centre’s mediocre bulk-buys? Liz noted his hesitation, gave him a peck on the check and said, ‘Give me a call sometime.’

He’d certainly do that. Liz Shapcott sent his libido soaring every time their paths crossed. Which wasn’t often enough for his liking and too often in the past it had happened in strained circumstances. Yet there was hope. Tonight she had invited him. And that was a first. A spare ticket, she said. His reaction was to assume he was second best, an also ran to some other lucky sod. What the hell, it was one step in the right direction. Liz’s reasoning had been that he should get out more. So much truth in a trite phrase. Put some culture back into your life, she added. Maybe even more truth. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone to the theatre solely for the pleasure it brought.

Bromo had one stop to go. He gave a final look at eight down: ‘Goodman right! Speaks for the arrogant walkers’. Of the nine letters, he had filled in five and still couldn’t work it out. He put the paper to one side, leaving it on the seat. Maybe someone further down the line would pick up the challenge. They had all the way to East Burwood to think about it.

The tram juddered to a stop at the intersection. Bromo waited for the doors to open and bent in towards the driver’s cabin.

‘Thanks a lot. Goodnight.’

She smiled back, eyes deeply shadowed, grateful for any positive words. A shift-worker’s weary face. Bromo stepped down into the road. A low white saloon whooshed past, centimetres from his left foot, forcing him back against the tram as the car accelerated through traffic lights turning from yellow to red. Bromo gave a two-finger salute and yelled uselessly at its tail-light, illuminating the yellow licence plate of a New South Wales vehicle.

‘Fucking idiot. Go back to Sydney with the other morons.’

No use. The tram’s warning bell clanged, but it was all too late. The road rules had been broken but no one would be brought to account. Bromo looked towards the tram driver and held his arms out in a gesture of despair. She shrugged, too, and waved back. They both knew it was another skirmish in a losing battle.

Bromo looked around, alert, always guarded, the habits of a lifetime. The street was almost deserted. Mid-week, midnight and mid-winter created a poor recipe for outdoor revelry, although a few hardy souls were clustered beneath the gas warmers outside Kicking On, a bar the size of a lounge room that had angered residents when it morphed into a venue for live music, complete with amplifiers.

Bromo peered through the windows of the all-night pub. Six people were resting their elbows on the bar, two more sat in the corner craning their necks at a motor race on Foxtel and one lone desperate was working her arm muscles on the poker machines. Gym work for the financially desperate. Both tables in the pool room were busy, two quartets of players leaning on cues and lining up shots.

He took another look behind him and across the road before turning into a narrow laneway lit only by a solitary street light high on the side wall of an office block. The wall had become a graffiti artist’s palette, decorated with brazen swirls of luminous colour. Home was at the laneway’s far, darkened end, beyond a parking lot and past the terrace of three low cottages squatting hard up against the footpath.

Bromo saw the shadowy figure resting against a parked car before it made its move, easing up off the car and taking two steps forward towards the lane. Bromo balled his hands tight inside his coat pocket and moved over to the left, away from the parking lot. Briefly he thought of turning back and making his way to the police station. Let the cops deal with it. The idea went as quickly as it came. He braced his shoulders, making a conscious effort to stand tall and step out confidently. It was the weak and cautious who attracted attention.

Bromo kept his head pointed forward but his eyes flicked to the right. He saw the person moving out of the shadows, coming slowly in his direction. He got the impression of someone lean and tall wrapped in tight, dark clothing, probably a tracksuit, with a hooded top pulled tight up and over the head. Their movement was languid, almost cautious.

Bromo relaxed slightly. This was not an assailant. A beggar maybe, someone wanting a cab fare or simply assurance they could doss there undisturbed, but not a mugger or a druggie. They were more tentative than aggressive.

‘You Bromo? Bromo Perkins?’

Bromo slowed. The voice was male, soft and unfamiliar, with a hint of an accent he couldn’t define. The man stood on the edge of the footpath, keeping a distance between them. Bromo stopped.

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I am.’

‘And you are?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me. I like to know who’s creeping up on me in the middle of the night.’

‘I do not creep, Mr Perkins, and I think you were well aware I was here. They tell me you are not easily surprised. Anyway, I have a message for you, a package.

The darkness cloaked Bromo’s surprise. Midnight messengers were a thing of the past and occurred in foreign lawless places. He concentrated on the voice. It was all he had to go on. The accent teased him, one he felt he knew but couldn’t immediately define. The man’s face stayed hidden, his body a vague thin shape. There was no identity clue. Bromo needed to whittle down the options.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘About two hours. In case you came home early. Did you enjoy the play? And the after-party?’

Bromo noted the implication. He was being watched. His movements, even something as ordinary as going to another godawful David Williamson play, were known and monitored. He chose to ignore the message and push for an identity.

‘I meant in Australia.’

The man gave the faintest ripple of a laugh. The crossed wires unravelled.

‘A long time, Mr Perkins. I’m as Australian as a Pommy import like you.’

Bromo shuffled his feet, inching at snail’s pace in the man’s direction, twisting and pushing his shoes forward on the gritty road surface. Keep the stranger talking and maybe he wouldn’t notice how much the gap between them had narrowed.

‘A formality. A piece of paper doesn’t change our past. You are not originally from here.’

‘As I said, Mr Perkins, we have similar stories.’

Bromo concentrated on the voice, the intonation, the accent. He thought he had nailed it. He kept his feet moving, nearer, nearer. The man gave no sign of noticing. Bromo made a wild guess.

‘Been back to Mumbai lately?’

‘Enough.’

The voice came from behind. It was the same accent, but deeper, sharper, more defined and almost in his ear. Two massive arms enfolded him, crushing his chest, forcing his breath into short gasps. The man in the car park took two steps backwards, deeper into the shadows.

‘Sorry about that, Mr Perkins,’ he said. ‘Too many questions. We are simply doing a favour for a friend, delivering an important message and making sure it gets into the right hands. We had to check. Now we know you are here alone you will find it at your door. You don’t have to know who we are or where we come from.’

The speaker moved quickly, further back into the car park’s darkness. Bromo’s assailant released him with a hefty push, sending him stumbling into a low brick fence, and ran back down the laneway. A car sparked into life and reversed out of the parking lot without lights. It stopped briefly and a rear window wound down. Bromo caught a glimpse of a dark, swarthy face. It was the same soft voice as before.

‘Go home, Bromo. Take care. Be warned, don’t shoot the messenger.’

Bromo watched the car go sedately down the laneway. It stopped briefly to let the man with the bear hug climb aboard before easing gently into Bridge Road. Whoever they were, there was little prospect of them being picked up by patrolling police.

Bromo brushed himself down and walked slowly towards the security door of his apartment block. Too many bottomless glasses of red wine sunk at the after-party were starting to take effect. He pondered which was affecting him the most: the wine, sub-continental bandits delivering urgent messages or the mental weariness inflicted by a latter-day Williamson play. He bent and picked a small package up off the doorstep, unlocked the door and decided it was probably a triple heat.

FOUR

BROMO took the stairs slowly and quietly. It was Do Not Disturb time. Most of his fellow residents were early sleepers and early risers, starting work at times Bromo had long decided didn’t exist. He fingered the quarto-size buff envelope as he climbed, wondering at its contents as he ran his thumb over a bumpy raised object about the size of a fifty-cent coin midway along the envelope’s bottom edge.

He was in no hurry to open the envelope. He had long ago learnt gifts and good news did not come in packets delivered at dead of night by hooded vandals. Bad tidings and threats were a safer bet. Why rush to spoil a good night’s sleep?

He took his time over pouring a generous shot of peaty Lagavulin. He slipped a CD of Gregorian chants into the player and settled back into his old winged armchair, a comforter salvaged from a second-hand shop and restored at great expense. Maybe now he could cope with whatever his messengers had brought.

Bromo eased the envelope open. He extracted a single fold sheet of A4 paper and a chunk of bubble wrap, tightly Sellotaped to seal whatever small object it enclosed. The writing on the paper was unusually elegant. The letters were formed in an almost perfect copperplate and penned with a fine inked point. Bromo viewed it as the handwriting of his grandfather’s generation, painstakingly learnt from repetitious lessons under unforgiving teachers. The message was formal and concise:

Dear Bromo:

If you are reading this I will know you are alive and well.

Bromo smiled. The sentence evoked memories of an outrageously radical politician who claimed opponents were out to kill her and recorded a video message for posthumous viewing. ‘If you are watching this you will know I’m dead,’ she ranted unnecessarily. Bromo pondered the line again. How weird to have people sufficiently concerned to inform he was still alive and well. Especially as they were apparent strangers and wrote with a formality and grace from another era. He sipped his malt and