Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Senate, 30 September 2015

He wore the wrong suit. Everybody who was there says so.

It was an excellent suit. That was the problem. It was a Gold Coast suit — too sharp in the shoulder, too good a lapel, the kind of suit that announces itself — and he walked into a Commonwealth committee room in it and sat down in front of two senators, and the suit did more damage in four seconds than an hour of questioning.

The committee had before it evidence about paid celebrity appearances used to attract investors who were then sold options at up to forty thousand dollars each.

XENOPHON: Mr McIntyre, how much was raised across the five schemes?

McINTYRE: Senator, I'd have to take that on notice, the entities are—

XENOPHON: An approximate figure.

McINTYRE: It's not really my area. I'm the education side.

XENOPHON: You're the education side.

McINTYRE: I'm an educator, Senator. I've educated over five hundred thousand Australians—

DASTYARI: Mr McIntyre—

McINTYRE: —and I'd say to you the mainstream media in this country has a vested interest in—

DASTYARI: Mr McIntyre, you're a conman.

And here is the thing the transcript cannot carry, and the thing a novel exists for.

He wasn't hurt.

For one half of one second — a flicker, caught by one camera operator and never used — Jamie McIntyre's face did something that looked, to the two or three people who noticed it, almost like pleasure.

Because he had just been made interesting.

A conman is a figure. A conman has a coat and a history. A conman is somebody. A conman is not a boy on a coach out of Glen Innes with three hundred and forty dollars and a duffel bag, and he is certainly not his father at a kitchen table nodding at a document he cannot read.

Xenophon, later, for the record: in seven years in the Senate, the most evasive witness he had had to deal with — and that's saying something.

He rang Dennis from the car park.

"Went alright," he said.

Dennis, who had watched the stream, said nothing for a while. Then:

"He called you a conman, Jamie."

"Yeah." He was already looking at his phone. The clip was moving. "On the record. In Hansard."

A pause.

"Mate. Do you know what that's worth?"