What the Light Reveals Read online

  Mrs Lacey appeared at the door. ‘Everything organised?’ she said. ‘And your poor wife! She was probably very worried.’

  What had she heard? He couldn’t let Ruby’s paranoia rub off on him. ‘She’s a strong one, my Ruby.’

  ‘Your tea is waiting for you in your room.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Lacey.’

  ‘Claire!’

  They stood in the doorway to the sitting room, uncomfortably close to each other. ‘Claire,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’ He side-stepped through the door, grabbed his bag and headed for the stairs.

  The room was every bit as fine as he’d been promised. A double bed, sheets folded down, with wide-shaded lamps on polished tables either side. Two reading chairs sat beside a coffee table, upon which rested his tray of tea and milk and sugar. Double glass doors led to a wide balcony flanked by a magnolia tree, whose creamy white flowers spilt softly across the railing. Conrad opened the doors to let in the warm air and lemony fragrance. In the bathroom, a broad shower rose hung above a claw-foot bath. He showered quickly, as he always did, then drank a cup of his perfectly prepared tea while taking in the view of the garden and the passing world on Bellevue Street from a cane chair on the balcony.

  With the evening light fading, he took a walk down Elizabeth Street, through Hyde Park to the Supreme Court, to measure the route and plan his arrival time for the next day. As he walked he thought again about what he’d say before the commission – if he had any control over it – and how he’d conduct himself when confronted with the bias and self-righteousness of the government-appointed commissioners and Queen’s Counsel. Ruby was right to remind him not to trust them. They were all hand-picked for the job, to assume that those who came before them were guilty until proven innocent. And he couldn’t afford to be as unprepared as he’d been with Claire Lacey and Dominic Lowry.

  The courthouse, closed and quiet, was much smaller than he’d imagined, much less imposing. But he couldn’t look at the sandstone, so common for old Sydney, without thinking of the working conditions of the forgotten men who had cut and shaped the stone, who had assembled each massive block, one-by-one, into such fine buildings. He turned his back on it and walked towards the Botanic Garden, where he followed narrow footpaths cooled by lush vegetation and the evening calls of unseen birdlife, until he found an empty park bench above Circular Quay where he could sit and watch the ferries dock and depart.

  It had been thirteen years since he’d last been there, if not on the same bench then one very much like it. The same time of year, a clear night, thinking about what the next day might bring. Back then he was set to embark for Portsmouth. Only a year out of Queensland University yet already a major in the Australian army and part of a small team reviewing and honing the design of armed tanks for the allied forces. The university had put him up for the position, ahead of others with many more years of academic and practical experience. He’d been proud to be honoured with their faith, although it was the work rather than the cause that most excited him. But the cause was still important, still right, and he remembered standing on the wharf at Woolloomooloo, his kit bag at his feet, with a strong sense of commitment to his country and the war effort and his role in it.

  He pulled the summons from the breast pocket of his jacket. On Commonwealth of Australia letterhead, Attorney General’s Department, dated 1 November 1954, it was addressed to Mr Conrad John Murphy and signed by Justice William Redmond O’Brien of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, the chairman of the Royal Commission on Espionage.

  In accordance with the Royal Commission on Espionage Act 1954 you are directed to attend the Commission on the 10th day of November 1954 for the purpose of giving testimony relevant to the proceedings of the Commission. You will attend the Commission from day to day unless excused by the Chairman of the Commission or until released from further attendance by the Chairman.

  Failure to comply will result in the issue of a warrant authorising your apprehension for the purpose of being brought before the Commission, including any necessary detention in custody and until released by the Chairman.

  During your appearance at the Commission, refusal to be sworn or to make an affirmation, or refusal or failure to answer a question relevant to the inquiry put to you by a member of the Commission will result in a penalty of five hundred pounds or imprisonment for not less than six months, or both.

  It was identical to Fergal Donnelly’s letter, but Fergal had been summoned right back at the start. Since then there’d been six months with no one directed to stand trial in a court of law, so pressure had mounted. The government wanted more. The newspapers wanted more. The public wanted more. Someone had to be guilty.

  Major Murphy, those goons had called him. The summons had to be connected to his wartime service. Major Murphy. Was he guilty? Was he that someone?

  He refolded the letter, slid it into his breast pocket and straightened his back against the bench.

  * * *

  Conrad rose early and skipped breakfast, heading straight out to buy the newspaper and drink a cup of tea at the railway station. Sitting at a counter he read the latest accounts of the adversely judged who’d appeared in the same courtroom. Reports of their testimonies, follow-up stories on those deemed more scandalous, expert analysis, letters, opinions, editorials. There was so much of it he didn’t finish. He threw the paper in the bin.

  He watched as commuters hoofed with blind purpose from the station’s platforms, heading for the city streets and their well-trodden routes to work. He felt separate, cut out from the herd, and wanted nothing more than to be one of them, to rejoin them and jostle along in the crowd, occupied by the everyday certainty of their routine.

  At eight-thirty he called his lawyer, Frank Powell, from a public phone on the station concourse and arranged to meet him on the steps of the Supreme Court in forty-five minutes, a quarter of an hour before the day’s proceedings were due to begin. It was all Mr Powell seemed to think they’d need.

  Conrad immediately set off for the courthouse. It calmed him, this show of confronting the thing he feared. The knot of anxiety which had tied tight inside his chest was loosened with each cycle of air in and out of his lungs as he strode through Hyde Park. But all too quickly he arrived, and as he stood and fidgeted on the steps outside the courthouse the knot began to squeeze again. Every few minutes he’d check his watch and walk to the corner of King and Elizabeth streets, cast glances up and down the footpath in search of his lawyer who he knew was not yet due, before walking back to the courthouse steps. He’d wait there a moment then do it again.

  Conrad had never met Frank Powell, but the lawyer had come well recommended by people from the Party he’d represented at earlier sittings of the commission. Still, Conrad wanted time to measure him, to listen to what he had to say, to observe him. To get some kind of idea about who he was, if that was possible in fifteen minutes.

  He climbed the four bluestone steps and crossed the verandah, his heels clipping sharply against the black and white tessellated tiles. Inside the entrance foyer, each footfall echoed against the wide wooden floorboards and the high white walls. On the back wall a glass-fronted noticeboard listed the day’s schedule, typed on a plain sheet of paper and affixed to the cork with a single pin. Items 3 and 4 noted that in Court 1 Mr FW Powell would assist in hearing the testimony of CJ Murphy – not Mr, not Major – along with the tendering of exhibits 276 and 277.

  Items 1 and 2 related to the appearance of Vladimir Petrov himself, no doubt the provider of exhibits 276 and 277. But stories in the morning paper told of Petrov’s non-appearance all that week, so Conrad prepared himself for the possibility he’d be called straight away. There were no other items listed. Just CJ Murphy in Court 1. For the whole day. He hoped the commissioners weren’t paid by the hour.

  He stood in front of the noticeboard, fingers jingling loose coins in his trouser pocket. What, he wondered, was in those exhibits? Who wrote them? Why was he mentioned in them? He peered across the
foyer to the magenta-carpeted hallway where, ten more yards away, stood a pair of doors with Court 1 embossed in gold across their rich, clean grain.

  Outside again, he walked up the hill and found a small bench to sit and wait for his lawyer. He fumbled a cigarette to his lips, drew long and slow, dragging the smoke inside himself and holding it there, sour and sharp and good. Sandwiched between the side wall of the courthouse and a flight of stairs leading up to the entrance of St James’ Church stood a solitary plane tree, its trunk pencil-thin and as blotchy as the skin of an old man’s arm. Conrad placed his fingers against the mottled cream and grey bark, as if trying to feel for a pulse.

  ‘Conrad Murphy?’

  A tall and disturbingly young man advanced towards him with hand outstretched. Conrad drew on his cigarette, took it reluctantly from his lips and moved to greet the man whose voice he recognised from the telephone.

  ‘Frank, is it?’

  ‘It is, Mr Murphy,’ the younger man replied, wrapping his hand around Conrad’s. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  Frank Powell was confident in the way of most tall men, a trait Conrad was acutely aware of since he was one of the few whose own height didn’t grant him that ease. Powell’s double-breasted, faintly pinstriped suit hung comfortably from his broad shoulders. Charcoal grey, wide lapels, matching waistcoat, the works. A bit flashy for a lawyer appointed by the Party, but it was probably best his counsel didn’t dress like a subversive.

  ‘Pleased to meet you too,’ Conrad said.

  ‘This will be,’ said Powell, one hand raised as if swearing on the gospel, ‘a bloody doddle.’

  ‘I don’t get that impression from what I read in this morning’s papers.’

  Powell spread his large hand across the middle of Conrad’s back, sand and gravel crunching under heel as the two men trod slowly across the courtyard. ‘We’ll play our cards right, Mr Murphy,’ Powell said. ‘We’ll treat the proceedings with all due solemnity and we’ll have you on your way.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ They continued down the slope towards the courthouse and stood on the footpath together. ‘What’s in these exhibits to be tendered?’ Conrad asked.

  ‘I understand they have a copy of a letter. An original and a translation.’ Powell tucked in his chin. ‘Written about you.’

  ‘By who? Petrov?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Haven’t you seen them?’

  ‘I haven’t. No.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you have? Shouldn’t I?’

  ‘This is a royal commission, Mr Murphy, not a court of law,’ Powell said. ‘They have the power only to make recommendations on what they find. They can’t pass legally binding judgement on you or anyone else.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’ Conrad pressed his palm against the summons letter in his pocket, with its threats of detainment, detention and fines, all at odds with the lawyer’s claim this hearing would be a doddle. ‘But why can’t we see these documents?’

  ‘We’ll see them when we get in there. There’s been no need until now.’

  Conrad craned his neck to examine the hard stone of the building. ‘It just seems so … prejudiced.’

  ‘They’re fishing,’ Powell said. ‘But they have no bait on the hook. Not even a hook, often enough.’

  Conrad scanned about the courthouse entrance. In the half-hour since he’d arrived, a knot of newspaper reporters had gathered, hovering on the steps like pickpockets. But he was more concerned about his lawyer’s apparent lack of preparation. While Powell’s rhetoric left his mouth boldly enough, it ran out of puff before it took hold inside Conrad’s head. He hoped his words would be more convincing when speaking in his defence in front of the commissioners.

  ‘Your job,’ Powell said, ‘is simply to go in there and tell it like it is. Without fear. And at the end of it, which I expect will come sooner rather than later, you’ll be free to go back to your family and your work and your life.’

  Conrad didn’t answer.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ the lawyer said, with one hand encouraging Conrad up the steps. But after a few seconds’ leaden hesitation, he pressed firmly against Conrad’s shoulder.

  * * *

  Half a grapefruit, two boiled eggs with buttered toast and a thorough reading of The Courier Mail. In silence. That was Bill Murphy’s breakfast routine. But on 11 October 1930, with the Depression biting hard, Bill leaned back heavily in his chair and pointed at the newspaper. ‘This is not right,’ he said. ‘I know this lad. He was sacked from the yard through no fault of his own and it is not damned right.’

  Conrad had never seen his father angry. Never heard him raise his voice.

  Bill Murphy gripped the table edge as if it were kindling he intended to snap, lifting its legs from the ground a little as he stood, so that Conrad had to grab his glass of milk to keep it from spilling. His father strode from the kitchen and out of the house, Conrad staring at the surprise and concern in his mother’s face. He ran to the gate and watched Bill march down the footpath towards work – Brisbane’s Roma Street railyards – Gladstone bag in one hand, brown felt fedora in the other.

  Frances Murphy’s touch was light on her son’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, following Conrad’s gaze. ‘Your father’s going to be fine. He’s upset that so many have lost their jobs, but he’s going to be fine. We all are.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Conrad that they’d be anything but fine. He was missing out on something he couldn’t name, that’s what bothered him. He salvaged the paper from the kitchen floor and found the story of Robert Smith, a 26-year-old sheet-metal worker from the railyards, who’d been caught stealing.

  It was only as a last resort I broke into those places, Smith was reported as saying. I knew I was doing wrong and it worried me greatly, but I had to feed my wife and son. I was relieved when I was arrested.

  Conrad couldn’t understand how being arrested could bring relief. Would Smith have money to pay a fine? Or would he go to jail? And how could someone be so poor they had to steal? Didn’t everyone’s father have a job?

  A week later a second story, just two paragraphs, reported that Smith had hung himself in Boggo Road Gaol.

  At the age of ten, Conrad stood with his father at union picket lines and rallies. He joined the Communist Party before starting his engineering degree at Queensland University, spoke often for the Communist Youth Rally and was president of the university’s Radical Club. But no event affected him more than the plight of Robert Smith, the sheet-metal worker from the Roma Street railyards, sacked, driven to theft, caught and jailed, and then found hanging by his neck. Next to that, a few hours in front of the commissioners would be nothing.

  Frank Powell at his side, Conrad joined the crush of people waiting to squeeze through the door of Court 1. With its rows of wooden pews, oppressively dark, and the surrounding high white walls, the room resembled an amphitheatre. The gallery was raised above everything: the lawyer’s tables, the judge’s bench and the witness dock, small and low and exposed beside it. He took a seat next to his lawyer, twisting back to the steady stream of people passing through the courtroom’s oak doors. The temperature seemed to rise with the arrival of each additional body, while high above his head, a single ceiling fan rotated sluggishly, its blades unable to stir the heavy and viscous air.

  ‘All rise,’ said a uniformed man. Frank Powell slid an elbow across the table to nudge Conrad to his feet as the three commissioners entered the court through a door behind their bench. Their pale horsehair wigs – three stiff curls stacked like pipes against each temple and a squared-off fringe that resembled the edge of a cheap rug – made them look ridiculous. Black gowns draped loosely across their shoulders, over close-fitting black vests buttoned to the neck. The white collars with rounded, cut-away wings were tight enough to redden their necks, the effect compounded by the long, flat bow ends hanging from their throats like turkey wattles. Conrad wondered whether the point of all the fancy dress was to differentiate the com
missioners from ordinary people but not from each other.

  O’Brien, the chairman, sat in the middle, his high-backed leather chair a fraction taller than the neighbouring two. There was something calculating about his face. Roth, his nose and jaw and forehead thin and angular, sat between the chairman and the witness dock; Littlejohn, whose expression revealed a hint of openness, sat to the chairman’s right. At their elevated bench, they arranged unseen papers, until the counsel assisting the Crown stood.

  ‘May it please Your Honours, today’s first witness, Mr Petrov, is still unwell.’ Xavier Cringely, Queen’s Counsel, rocked back on his heels and forward again. While his wig appeared identical to those worn by the commissioners, his black robes were of silk rather than cotton. ‘And is likely to be so, by his own estimation, until the twenty-fourth of the month.’

  In the silence that followed, Cringely turned to Conrad, but looked straight through him. ‘It would appear, Your Honours,’ he said, ‘that the absent witness is capable of far greater clarity in the matter of his recuperation than he has been able to muster in giving testimony before this commission.’

  A silent chuckle rippled in the flesh at the QC’s neck, but the grim faces of the chairman and his fellow commissioners seemed to convince Cringely to continue. ‘Accordingly, if Your Honours please, I call Conrad John Murphy.’

  Frank Powell stood, wigless and gownless, apparently not in their club. ‘I ask leave to appear on behalf of this witness.’

  Chairman O’Brien glanced from Powell to the empty dock and back to Powell. ‘Yes, Mr Powell, yes,’ he said, waving his hand dismissively.

  Powell nodded at Conrad to take his place in the shadow of the commissioner’s bench. Conrad walked to the dock. A Bible was pressed in front of him and he placed his hand upon it – he thought twice about it, but decided to save his dissent for more important battles – was affirmed and stood quietly, awaiting their Honours’ pleasure.

  ‘You may sit if you wish,’ Chairman O’Brien eventually instructed.