THE AIR TERMINAL BUILDING WAS SHIMMERING in the heat wave, and I was grateful that in my new Charlie 88 there were life-saving devices such as air-con. My car was nothing like the original Charlie 88, where I had been blooded in the crafty intrigues of that specialist squad - the Criminal Investigation Branch, or CIB. The original Charlie 88 was the squad car of which I had been the driver for a crew of reprobates and characters who preserved the peace and laws around the frisky port city of Fremantle. She had been a tired looking old tart back then, ragged around the trims, make-up askew with dust instead of rouge and a dent or two where a smoother curve had once attracted attention. In short, she was fairly bent, as were a great proportion of those who sailed in her. She was Charlie 88, the majestic conveyance of the local peelers.
It is now years later. Times, suits and cars have changed. But nothing has altered the power exerted across the community by the shysters, shylocks, hucksters and shoofty scoundrels of the Fifth Estate. That was the phrase I had coined to describe the secretive and selfish cabal of crooked cops, shifty lawyers, fearsome hacks and feckless judges. They combined with re-badged corrupt ex-cops masquerading as Private Inquiry agents, who provided the essential conduit for cash and favours between the indestructible miscreants who ran the shadowy government of the New Estate. It was the government inside the soft glove of public governance.