My brother wanted me dead. You might be wondering, interrogators, how I could have sat by passively in that snooker room and let someone else tell me how my life was going to be from now on. But you have no idea what it’s like to hear that your own flesh and blood has ordered your execution. Not that I ever doubted the truth of it. I was hurt and angry, and I didn’t understand right then why Bernard was doing this, but I never thought that it couldn’t be so. I didn’t wonder, for instance, whether this Harry person might simply be lying to me, for reasons of his own. I didn’t question whether the news footage I’d seen might have been an elaborate fake. I didn’t decide that I should put my trust in my brother rather than in a complete stranger. No. Deep down, it was all too easy to believe. After all, Bernard didn’t get to the top of Australian politics without being prepared to make the brutal decisions. It’s strange, though. If you look back to the dawn of Bernard’s career, there were few hints that he would rise so high.
