By Peter Corris
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ou play tennis, right, Cliff?’ Sydney Featherstone said.
‘After a fashion,’ I said.
‘Come on, your mate Frank Parker told me you played at White City. Schoolboy championships.’
‘Yeah, got to the third round of the doubles. Newk and Roche had nothing to worry about.’
‘But you know the difference between a topspin backhand and a lob?’
I nodded. We were in the bar of the Woollahra Golf Club. Featherstone was a senior partner in a sports management agency with top level clients in a variety of sports. They had men and women on their books, Australians and internationals. Doing well, Frank had told me when he arranged the meeting. An old mate putting business my way.
‘We’re thinking of signing this kid, Cameron Beaumont. He’s just turned eighteen.’
‘I read about him,’ I said. ‘Reached a hundred in the world the other week.’
‘That’s him. Stands about one eighty-five, ideal for tennis, weighs eighty kilos. Leftie, quick; held the New South Wales junior one hundred metres record. Bench-presses his weight plus quite a bit more. Looks like Tom Cruise with legs.’
‘Sounds like money in the bank. What’s the problem with the superstar-to-be?’
‘He goes missing for days at a time. No one knows where or why.’
‘A girlfriend.’
‘Nothing wrong with girlfriends on the tennis scene. Within reason. If that’s it, fine. But why the secrecy?’
‘A boyfriend, then?’
‘Those who know him say not.’
‘When he comes back is he out of shape, distracted?’
‘No. Plays just as well as ever or better. It’s a mystery we need to solve.’
‘Why? Let him have his privacy.’
‘Are you kidding? There’s no such thing in elite sports.’
‘Is one hundred in the world elite?’
At his age, potentially.’
‘Lleyton Hewitt won an ATP event at sixteen, I seem to recall.’
‘He had the background. This kid’s a battler, up from nothing—local courts, no support. Both parents dead. He was fostered out as a kid. Pillar to post. You know how it is. He got on the satellite circuit at sixteen through a sports master at school and he’s been going through the opposition like a dose of salts. It’s a hand-to-mouth living but he’s come on strong just recently.’
‘Why hasn’t he been picked up before this?’
‘That’s a funny thing. A couple of sponsors and management mobs have approached him but he’s pissed them off. Must be waiting for a top drawer offer.’
‘Have you approached him?’
‘Not yet. There’s one thing I haven’t told you. He takes off on these jaunts from time to time over the last year or so, but always after he wins a tournament or comes close. He’s playing in an event next week that he’s got a shot at winning. A few of the top players have pulled out injured and Beaumont’s in really good form. Got in on a wild card. He’s bound to take off—should give you a chance to see what’s up.’
‘Why is it important that I know something about tennis?’
‘You’re going to have to watch him play. Be bloody boring if you didn’t like the game. Plus, Frank said you were a good judge of character. That comes out on a tennis court, win or lose, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said.
* * * *
Beaumont was playing late in the afternoon of the first day and I arrived in time to watch him. Just as well. He was up against a veteran who’d beaten a lot of top players in his time. He had a good serve and a wide variety of shots plus experience. It didn’t matter. Beaumont blew him away in under an hour with a mixture of power and guile.
Featherstone turned up at my shoulder as I was loading sun-dried tomato and cheese onto a biscuit. The second glass of white wine, out of a bottle with a label, had gone down well. ‘Impressive, huh?’
‘Definitely. I’d like to see him up against someone his own age, especially a runner.’
‘Not next time up. He’s got a qualifier who can scarcely believe he got through the first round. But if the other matches go according to the seeds and he keeps on like he started, he’ll meet Rufus Fong in the semi. He can run.’
Cambo, as the papers had decided to call him, advanced to his semi-final with Fong. I went along, found a seat in the shade, and witnessed the most devastating destruction of a top-liner by a newcomer since the unseeded Boris Becker won Wimbledon. Fong hadn’t won a Grand Slam event but he’d come close, and had more than a dozen other titles to his credit. He could run all right, but he couldn’t hide. Other players made the mistake of giving him angles. Fong’s speed allowed him to run the balls down and his strength permitted him to return the angles with spades. Beaumont hit straight at him with extraordinary power. Fong had to either get out of the way or play defensively, moving back and off balance. No contest. Beaumont volleyed away Fong’s weak returns with ease, dispatched his serves, and never went to deuce on his own serve.
Beaumont was demonstrative on court, lamenting his occasional misses—never on crucial points—and giving himself the odd triumphant fist. But he had charm. He applauded his opponent’s few successes with sincerity and shrugged off the several bad line calls he got. At the net, having won, his handshake appeared genuine, and he chatted with Fong all the way to the umpire’s chair. No chucking away of sweatbands, just a courteous wave to the crowd and the signing of a judicious number of autographs.
In the final, Beaumont played an American hardcourt specialist who gave him some trouble. The American dropped the first set but came back strongly to win the second in a tie break. Beaumont served some double faults and appeared rattled. But he was his old self in the third. He broke serve early, held his own easily, broke again and held and the American wilted. Beaumont won the match 6-1 in the third and that’s when I started to go to work.
Beaumont must have checked out of his hotel in the morning because, after the victory ceremony was over and he’d had some obligatory interviews and photos taken, he changed his clothes, loaded his tennis gear into the back of a beat-up 4WD, and took off. Thanks to my pass, I was close by in the privileged parking area and I dropped in behind him as he left the car park, picked up the motorway and headed west. Not the coast then, but there was nothing wrong with the mountains at that time of year.
Beaumont drove fast but well. His 4WD laboured a bit on the hills and I had no trouble keeping tabs on him in my recently serviced and tuned old Falcon. Daylight saving was a week or so away and the light started to fade quickly in the late afternoon. He stopped in Katoomba, went to an ATM for money and then spent up big on groceries. The carton of cigarettes surprised me, as did the bottle of brandy and the six-pack of beer he bought at the pub after showing his ID. I didn’t have to show mine to buy a half-bottle of Bundy. I had a sleeping bag and a donkey coat, but if I was going to spend a night in the mountains I thought I might need some internal heating as well.
Beaumont drove as if he knew the back roads well. We were soon on dirt, winding through the bush. There was no traffic and I had to hang well back, keeping tabs by the flashes of his brake lights. Eventually, after a hill climb, a descent and another climb, he pulled up outside a cabin set back from the track and shielded by a long stand of she-oaks. By then I was on foot watching this from a sheltered place. I’d stopped a hundred metres away when I heard his noisy engine turn off.
We were at a decent elevation and it was cold. I wrapped the coat tight around me and watched as Beaumont came back to his car to unload the supplies. The cabin opened and a tall man stood in the dim light—at a guess from a Tilly lamp—inside. Beaumont handed him a box and scooted back for another. The two went inside and the cabin door closed. The windows were curtained but I could see another light coming on and silhouettes of the figures moving inside.
It was cold but quiet, and I managed several hours of fitful sleep with a few periods of wakefulness in between. The extra chill just before dawn woke me and I got out to piss, stamp around and get the stiffness out of my limbs. No mail, no neighbours for kilometres—a perfect hiding place. For what? For whom?
I had gym clothes in the car—sweat pants and top, T-shirt, sneakers. I changed into them and equipped myself with a couple of the tools of my trade—binoculars and a good camera with a zoom lens. I’d had nothing to eat since some canapés back at the tennis while Beaumont was accepting his horrible crystal trophy and his no doubt very welcome cheque. My stomach was growling as I took up my position and saw wisps of smoke from the cabin chimney drift up into the clear blue sky. I could smell the eucalypts and the scents of all the other trees and bushes whose names I didn’t know. One of the names for us PEAs is snooper. I was one now and, in this setting, quite happy about it.
They came out around eight o’clock. I got a good long-range shot of the man. He was fortyish, shorter than Beaumont but more strongly built. Both men carried tennis rackets and Beaumont had a string bag full of balls. Keeping under cover I followed them to where there was a clearing about half the size of a tennis court. Beaumont’s companion was smoking. He puffed away while Beaumont did some stretches and warm-up exercises. For the next thirty minutes Beaumont had balls belted at him, aimed high, low, left and right, at very close range. He missed only two, getting his racket solidly onto them and knocking them clear of the other man—except one which caught him on the shoulder and spun him round. He dropped his racket and a spasm of coughing erupted from him. Beaumont comforted him with an arm around his shoulder. When he recovered the session began again. They must have had fifty balls in the bag and Beaumont darted around picking them up from the ground and in the thin scrub around the clearing when they’d all been used. Then they started over again.
After that Beaumont chopped wood at the back of the cabin for an hour. There was a pile of old railway sleepers in a lean-to shed. He carried them out, chopped through them, making half-metre lengths, and then split the lengths with a block buster. I’d done something similar as a punishment fatigue in the army, and I knew how hard that old weathered wood could be. It made me tired just to watch him.
The day warmed up and the insects buzzed and birds sang. I snapped a few more photos in a better light and with a better background. As a city man born and bred, a few hours in the country goes a fair way with me and I was getting tired of holding my position behind a tree. Beaumont’s host brought out two mugs of tea or coffee. They squatted companionably near the chopping block. The man smoked and spiked his mug with brandy. He also had another coughing fit.
Beaumont changed into shorts and a singlet and set off along a fire trail into the bush. He was away an hour and came back moving at the same speed as when he’d left. I was about ready to call it quits. The relationship appeared to be somewhere between fraternal and professional. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t going to do the boy’s tennis career any harm.
I ducked down suddenly when I saw the man moving towards where I was hiding. I was working mentally on a paparazzi story when he stopped a few metres away. He looked quickly back at the cabin, sucked in several deep breaths, bent over and vomited heavily into a pile of leaves. He recovered, used a stick to clean up, and went back to the cabin. I got a much better look at him then and he was somehow familiar. I’d seen him before, or his photograph, but I couldn’t remember where or when.
* * * *
I went straight to the office, hooked the camera up to the computer and printed out copies of the photographs. I picked out the best shot of the mystery man and made a couple of blown-up copies. I studied the face intently: square jaw, thin mouth, heavy brows, straight nose, thick grey hair worn long. No scars. I looked at it too long so that in the end the feeling of familiarity had gone.
The FBI or the CIA could no doubt have run it against the millions of other faces they have digitally recorded and search for a match. Not an available facility for a one-man operation in Newtown. My best bet was Harry Tickener, a journalist who has worked the streets, boardrooms, courts and parliament in Sydney longer than he likes to recall. Harry’s up with the technology, but he receives so many emails a day you’re lucky to hear back from him within a week. I took one of the photos and went to see him in his Surry Hills office where he runs an online newsletter that prints stories others are afraid to touch.
Harry groaned when he saw me walk in the door carrying two styrofoam cups of coffee. ‘Jesus Christ, there goes an hour’s work,’ he said.
‘But here’s the best coffee in Sydney.’
Harry grinned, took the top off his cup and flipped it towards the bin. Missed. ‘Thanks, Cliff. Always good to see you. What’s up?’
I put the photo on his desk, keeping it covered with my hand. ‘Take a quick look at this. Just get an impression and see if a name springs to mind. I felt I knew the face but I’ve studied it too long.’
I uncovered the image. Harry looked at it, blinked and snapped his fingers. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘I’d swear that’s Daniel Murphy twenty years down the track. You’ve found him. Where is he?’
I shook my head. The name triggered the recollection I’d been searching for. Daniel Murphy was an international hockey player who’d killed his wife’s lover. The couple were separated at the time with a young child and Murphy had been told that the lover had a record of child abuse. He shot him, went on the run and wounded a policeman before he was captured. His counsel stressed the mitigating circumstances, but the wounding of the cop counted heavily against him and he was sentenced to eighteen years to serve twelve before being eligible for parole. Murphy had escaped from Goulburn goal four years into his sentence, injuring an inmate and a guard, and had never been recaptured.
I said, ‘It wasn’t quite twenty years back, was it? What happened to the wife and child?’
‘The wife committed suicide when Murphy was convicted. That’s all I know.’
Usually, when Harry helps, I promise him the story if it can be told when everything sorts out, if it sorts out. The strike rate isn’t that good, but there wasn’t a chance of it happening this time. I thanked him and left him grumbling.
Using the name I had, I trawled through the Sydney Morning Herald database and came up with the information in detail. My recollection was confirmed, with additions: Murphy had emigrated from Ireland to Australia when he was barely more than a youth and had no relatives here. His wife’s maiden name was Wexler. She’d been a street kid with emotional problems and when found dead in her flat from a drug overdose the infant was dehydrated and suffering from various illnesses to do with malnourishment and neglect. It was odds on that the child had been put in care and fostered out to become, in time, Cameron Beaumont.
* * * *
I emailed Sydney Featherstone that I was on the job, making progress and that the omens were good. I drove straight back to the mountains and pulled up outside the cabin early in the afternoon. I approached the building and a dog, tethered near the steps to the front porch, began barking loudly. I stood where I was and waited.
Cameron Beaumont opened the door and looked me over suspiciously. Despite my jeans and leather jacket I might still have been a cop. Can’t tell these days.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘To talk to you and Daniel Murphy.’
That rocked him. He looked over his shoulder and his body language directly contradicted what he said: ‘There’s no one here of that name.’
I held up the photograph. ‘Was yesterday.’
Like all great tennis players, he had vision like a jet pilot and he didn’t need to come any closer to see the picture. ‘Who are you?’
‘We can talk about that and a few other things.’
The dog kept barking. I heard hacking coughs coming from inside and then Murphy appeared in the doorway.
‘He’s sick,’ Beaumont said.
I nodded. ‘I know. I saw him chuck his guts up yesterday. You didn’t.’
Beaumont turned his head. ‘Dad?’
Murphy shrugged. ‘Don’t worry, this had to happen some day. You a reporter?’
‘No, I’m a private detective and right now I’m thinking about all this staying private. That is, if you’ll talk to me. You could start by calling the dog off.’
‘Quiet, Max,’ Murphy said. Raising his voice caused him to start coughing again. When he recovered his breath he invited me in. I went past the dog and Beaumont into the cabin. It was a mobile home that had been put up on stumps and ceased to be mobile. It was cramped but everything appeared well ordered and arranged. Several windows were open and there was a fresh eucalyptus scent mingling with the smell of cigarettes. Everything was spotlessly clean except for an ashtray brimming with butts.
‘Make some coffee, Cam,’ Murphy said, ‘and we’ll let the man tell us who he is, first off.’
Beaumont moved towards the back of the room and ran water. Murphy sat on one side of a built-in eating bench and indicated to me to sit opposite. I put the photo on the surface and showed him my PEA licence.
Murphy lit a cigarette. ‘I met a few blokes in your game inside.’
‘You would,’ I said. ‘Hazard of the job. I’ve been there myself.’
I told them my story and then Daniel Murphy told me his. After he escaped from gaol he’d made his way to Queensland, where he worked on fishing boats, and then to Wollongong and into a plastics factory.
‘Little show,’ he said. ‘No one cared who you were or where you came from. I got a driver’s licence in a false name, Medicare card—the works. One day there was a chemical spill—Dioxin—and I got two lungs full, thank you very much. Like inhaling that Agent Orange shit. Fucked my lungs first and then it spread. I took a payment to keep quiet about it. Didn’t like doing it, but I couldn’t afford to make a fuss.’
By the time we’d finished the coffee Murphy had worked his way through a few more cigarettes. He asked Cameron to get him a drink and the young man set a couple of cans on the table.
‘Doesn’t drink himself,’ Murphy said as he cracked a can. ‘Smart.’
‘How did you end up here?’
‘I had some money. Went to Sydney and tracked Cameron down. I always meant to do it but I didn’t have the chance till then. Wasn’t easy, couldn’t go through official channels, but I had a few names from people who’d written to me in the early days in gaol. I found him. Doesn’t look much like me, but he’s the spitting image of my dad as I remember him. Show him the photo, Cam.’
Cameron produced a faded, slightly creased photograph of a man in football togs with a 1950s look to them. Murphy was right—the resemblance was striking.
‘That’s all I’ve got of him. He was a champion Gaelic footballer. He was IRA and the Brits killed him.’
Cameron had hardly spoken a word. Now he handled the photograph like a precious relic, smoothing it in his big, strong hands.
‘Anyway, when I found out that Cam was a tennis champ I was that proud. I’d had a pretty useless life up to that point and I decided I’d do something with the time I had left.’
‘Dad’s a natural sportsman,’ Cameron said quietly.
‘Was,’ Murphy said. ‘Any ball game, I could play it.’
‘We met up about eighteen months ago when I was battling away in the satellites. His training and help got me to where I am now.’
‘You’ll be well inside the top one hundred after that win,’ I said. ‘I saw it.’
Murphy stubbed out another cigarette and looked at me. ‘I wish I had. I’d give anything to see him play, but it’s too big a risk. Too many people who’d pick me.’
‘You could wear a disguise,’ I said.
Cameron smiled. ‘Yeah, we thought of that, but Dad hasn’t got the breath to get up stairs and that. And he needs to smoke all the time, and
‘Couldn’t handle it, Hardy,’ Murphy said, ‘and the way the fucking world’s going with the pricks in charge now, they’d come down on him like a shit shower for having a crim for an old man and harbouring him. Cam’s been seen around here. They’d put it together.’
Murphy and I drained our cans. He fiddled with a cigarette and then put it down. ‘I’ve had chemotherapy and it only made me worse. I haven’t got long. I know how to take myself out peaceably and I’ll do it when it gets too bad. We’ve talked about it—Cam and me. He’ll help me to disappear.’
Cameron’s eyes were wet. ‘And every fucking thing I win’ll be dedicated to him in my mind and in my heart.’
‘The question is, Hardy,’ Murphy said, picking up the cigarette and lighting it, ‘what are you going to do?’
* * * *
I reported to Featherstone that his intended client was merely doing some specialised training on his own in a bush location. No girls, no boys, no drink, no drugs. Featherstone was edgy about it, but when he heard that a pitch from another management group had fallen on deaf ears, he agreed to go along.
Daniel Murphy died six weeks after our first interview. I’d seen him a few times subsequently, did a bit of ball collecting. Cameron contacted me when his father died and I went up there and helped him with the burial. We put Daniel Murphy deep in the ground in the national park at a place where the birds sing and the insects buzz and the leaves fall softly.