Noel Mealey

Noel Mealey

Noel Mealey skilfully blends well researched true stories and compelling characters to create entertaining and captivating fiction. From dealing with mega-rich entrepreneurs to associating with wanted criminals, crooked police and corrupt politicians, Noel has lived an varied life that allows him to build characters like bent clergy, wily journalists, gangsters and murderers. An Engineering graduate, Noel was inspired to write by his father, who had a wonderful talent for storytelling. Those stories, told under the stars on humid summer nights, focused on the eccentric personalities he knew and encouraged Noel to create characters that share some traits with his real life associates. Noel’s first books Murder and Redemption and The Icon Murders were published by HarperCollins.

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from Chapter 1
1.
Dudley, NSW. Monday, December 28, 1953.

The game kicked off in fading daylight three days after Christmas ’53 when Becker fled, leaving the police sergeant bleeding out in a dark alley between towering silos at Newcastle’s coal wharf. I’d never heard the name Franz Becker. But, within a week, he would burst into my life like a firecracker in the henhouse, and I would emerge from the explosion, battle-stained and hardened, a wanted outlaw with a target on my forehead.

If you believed the sensationalised stories spun by Sydney’s newspapers, I was the notorious Sunni Sinclair, a glamorous escort catering to the wicked desires of the wealthy and powerful. While that may have held some truth four years ago, it was no longer the reality. I escaped Sydney and invented a new identity—the hard-working publican up to her glamorous elbows in soap suds or serving beer to sweaty coal miners and tradies in overalls or grimy singlets. They flocked in at first, moths to the limelight glow, but lingered on, contented puppies basking in the radiance of the empty stage.

Ten miles from where the sergeant lay dying in torrential rain, The Dudley was alive, with Happy Hour in full swing below the same thundercloud racing south. Behind the bar, I bustled about, lively, animated, cheeking my regulars, flirting with the unattached, flattering the timid, topping up empty schooners and offering impromptu marriage counselling to those in need. But, while my feet and fingers danced to the tune of taps and glasses, my mind sometimes took off on a different trail away from the routine daily grind.

The batwing doors squealed open and click-clacked shut, and a tall, lanky stranger stepped into the cigarette-smoke haze. Lightning behind glass window panels advertising Toohey’s ale wreathed him in their multi-coloured glow and held his face in shadow. He wore a brown wool fedora with the brim snapped down, a pinch in front and a tiny blue feather nestled in its golden band. The gorgeous hat knocked me over, and he pushed through to the bar before I registered the polished tan shoes, the crisply starched blue and white check dress shirt and the sharply creased beige wool trousers.

A hush spread through the crowded bar as it does on those rare occasions when a furious wife bursts in to drag her husband home, and I swear the crush of coal-lined and grease-stained miners opened before him as if Moses himself had parted the Red Sea in little old Dudley.

Hesitantly, he fronted the bar and said quietly, ‘Hello, Sunni. Remember me? Lou?’

He was late forties, tallish, with a good body, and, up close, I recognised him from Sydney, where sometimes I would see him in one dark hangout or another consorting with Kitty Balushi. Upright citizens knew nothing much about the goings-on of Kitty’s razor gang, preferring to live like the three monkeys. But nasty stuff happened in the dark lanes of Sydney’s Kings Cross, and Lou was often somewhere nearby. From time to time, the police would arrest someone close to me—a client or a gangster of repute, and the papers would paint a bleak picture, darker than the truth. We blamed the war and carried on.

Lou’s face appeared pale, his high cheekbones casting him as the scary twin to Jack Palance. He put out a nervous, jittery energy and wanted to stay for a week or two, and I wondered about that. However, he sparked my curiosity, and I sensed his loneliness, so I slid him a Tooheys Old, ran a cloth over the bar, and acted out a show, bustling about nearby.

Evenings can be dreary in a country town, so I gave him the key to a ground-floor room across the hall from my suite. After my customers packed and headed home to wife and family, I appreciated a man’s company.

I closed and tidied up. The bar grew silent, but Lou lingered on a stool, staring at his beer, watching the head fade. I stayed on, hoping to get the latest scuttlebutt on Kitty. The war had changed everything for Lou. It worked him over well and truly. Like many returned soldiers, he relived the murders and mutilations of his war but couldn’t handle the peace, and, with no one to love him, he turned to crime.

‘Troubles?’ I asked, sensing his mood.

‘You’ll read about it in the paper. Sergeant Moran is dead, and Albie Fowler killed him. Becker drove the car, and now they’re after me because I witnessed the murder. Fowler and Becker. I need to lie up for a week or so. Until things quieten.’

And so it began.

I’m no stranger to trouble. It’s like those old friends you invite home for dinner, and they stay on until their feet are permanently beneath your favourite chair, and your journey is their journey, and they think they own your future. I should have kicked Lou out that night and lost the key.