Port Vila Blues

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Carlyle Street, Double Bay, 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, the air clean and cool. Behind closed doors in the big houses set back far from the street, people were beginning to stir, brewing coffee or standing dazed under showers. Wyatt imagined the smell of the coffee, the sound of the water gurgling in the pipes.

But not at 29 Carlyle Street. According to Jardine’s briefing notes, the house would be empty for the next few days. It was the home of Cassandra Wintergreen, MP, Labor member for the seat of Broughton, currently in Dili on a fact-finding mission. ‘Champagne Marxist and ALP head-kicker from way back,’ Jardine had scrawled in his covering note. That meant nothing to Wyatt. He’d never voted. If he read the newspapers at all it was with an eye for a possible heist, not news about political tussles. His only interest in Wintergreen lay in the fact that she had $50,000 in a floor safe in her bedroom: a kickback, according to Jardine, from a grateful developer who’d asked her to intervene in a planning dispute regarding access to a strip of shops he was building in her electorate.

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