An Iron Rose

‘Mac,’ the voice said. ‘Ned’s dead.’

I couldn’t take it in. I screwed up my eyes and tried to focus, head full of sleep and beer dreams.

‘What?’ I said.

He said it again.

‘Jesus, no. When?’

‘Don’t know.’ There was a pause. ‘He’s hangin in the shed, Mac. Can you come?’

Dead? Ned? What time was it? Two forty-five am. Sunday morning. I pulled some faces, fighting the fog and the numb incomprehension. Then I said, ‘Okay. Right. Right. Listen, you sure he’s dead?’

There was a long silence. Lew sniffed. ‘Mac. Come.’

I was starting to think. ‘Ambulance. You call the ambulance?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Cops?’

‘No.’

‘Call them. I’ll be there in ten,’ I said.

In the passage, Drizabone off the hook, straight out the door. Didn’t need to dress. I’d fallen asleep in a cracked leather armchair, fully clothed, half-eaten pie on the arm, television on.

I didn’t see the dog but I heard him land on the tray. Little thump. Short route through Quinn’s Marsh, saved a few minutes by bumping open the gate with the roobars and putting the old Land Rover across the sheep paddock behind Ned Lowey’s house. You could see the house from a long way off: all the lights were on.

I slewed around the corner and Lew was in my headlights: arms at sides, hair wild, stretched tracksuit top hanging over pyjama pants, barefoot.

I got out at a run. ‘Stay there,’ I shouted over my shoulder to the dog. ‘Where?’

Lew led me down the path between the garage and the chook run to the big machine shed. The double doors were open and a slab of white light lay on the concrete apron. He stopped and pointed. He didn’t want to go in.

‘Wait for the ambulance in front,’ I said.

For a moment the light blinded me or I didn’t want to see. Then I focused on Ned, in striped pyjamas, arms neatly at his sides, hanging against the passenger side of the truck. His head was turned away from me. When I got close I saw why Lew had not answered my question about whether he was sure Ned was dead.

I looked up. The rope was tied to a rolled steel joist about two metres above the truck cab. Ned had climbed up onto the cab roof, tied the rope to the joist, slid it along, tied a slipknot around his neck. And stepped off the cab roof.

‘Mate, mate,’ I said helplessly. I wanted to cry and be sick and run away. I wanted to be asleep again and the telephone not to ring.

Lew was sitting on the verandah step, shoulders slumped, head forward. I found the makings I kept in the Land Rover for when I needed a smoke, rolled a cigarette, walked the fifty metres to the gate. The night was black, absolutely silent. Then, far away, a speeding vehicle crossed the threshold of hearing.

I walked back, went into the house, down the long passage to Ned’s bedroom. It was neat, like a soldier’s quarters, the bed made drum tight.

Why was Ned in pyjamas?

On the way out, I paused in the sitting room, looking around the familiar space for no good reason. It was warm, the wood heater down low and glowing.

My eyes went to the photograph on the mantelpiece: Ned and my father, two big men in overalls, laughing, each with a king brown in hand. Between them the camera froze a thin boy in school uniform. He had a worried look. It was me.

I went outside and sat down beside Lew, looked at his profile. He was a mixture of Ned and his mother: long face, high cheekbones, strong jaw. ‘How’d you find him?’ I said.

He shivered. ‘I came back about eleven. He’s always asleep by then. Went to bed. Woke up, I don’t know, half an hour ago, went to have a leak. Then when I got back into bed, I thought: he didn’t say anythin.’

‘Say anything?’

‘You can’t walk past his door without him saying somethin. Doesn’t matter the time. Middle of the night. He hears everythin. And he didn’t say anythin either when I went to the bathroom before I went to bed. But I didn’t think about it then. So I got up and he wasn’t in bed.’ He paused. ‘Then I went to look for the car and it was there, so I went to look for the truck. And…’

He put his head in his hands. I put my arm around his shoulders, gave him a squeeze, helpless to comfort him, to comfort myself. We sat like that until the ambulance arrived. The police car was about a minute behind it. Two cops. By the time Lew and I had given statements, it was after 5 am and there were two police cars and four cops standing in the warm sitting room, smoking cigarettes and waiting for someone from forensic to arrive.

I brought Lew home with me. He couldn’t stay there, in that familiar house made strange and horrible. We drove in silence in the silver early dawn, mist lying in the hollows, hanging in the trees, dams gleaming coldly. The first smoke of the day was issuing from farmhouse chimneys along the way.

I felt that I should speak to him, but I couldn’t. He’s just a kid, I said to myself. Two weeks from now he’ll be over it. But I wouldn’t be over it. Ever. Edward Lowey had been part of my life since I was ten. He was the link with my father. There were lots of questions I wanted to ask Lew, but this wasn’t the time.

At home, I made scrambled eggs, but neither of us could eat. We sat there like people in an institution, not saying anything, looking at the table, not seeing anything. Finally, I shook myself and said, ‘Let’s get some wood in. They say it’s going to get colder.’

I fed the dog the scrambled eggs and we went out into the raw morning, low cloud, spits of rain. While Lew walked around, hands in pockets, kicking things, I found another axe and put an edge on it on the grindstone. Then we chopped wood solidly, an hour, one on each side of the woodpile, not speaking, pausing only to take off garments. Chopping wood doesn’t take your mind off things but it burns off the adrenalin and it sends you into a trancelike state.

Lew had just turned sixteen, but he was lean and muscled in the upper body and he matched me log for log and he didn’t stop until I did. He was fetching a drink and I was standing there, leaning on my axe, sweat cooling, when an old red Dodge truck came up the driveway.

A tall woman, around thirty, dropped down from the cab: slim, long nose a little skew on her face, some weight in her shoulders, crew-cut dirty-blonde hair, overalls, pea jacket, no make-up.

‘G’day,’ she said. ‘Allie Morris.’

I’d forgotten about our arrangement for today. I walked over and shook hands. ‘Mac Faraday.’

Lewis came out the house carrying two glasses.

‘We’ve had a bit of a shock,’ I said. ‘His grandfather…’ I didn’t want to say it. ‘He found his grandfather dead this morning.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s terrible.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, the other thing. I don’t suppose this is the day for it…’

I said, ‘It’s the day. Never a better day.’

I introduced Lew and we left him to stack the wood and went into the smithy. I’d cleaned out the forge on Saturday morning and laid the fire: paper and kindling over the tue hole, coke around that and green coal banked around the coke. I lit the paper and started the fan blower. Allie Morris came over with the watering can and dampened the green coal. She’d taken off her coat. Under her overalls, she was wearing a shirt with heavy canvas sleeves.

‘Useful shirt,’ I said.

‘Blacksmith’s wife in England makes them. Got tired of looking at all that burnt skin.’

‘It’s not a good look.’

‘Sure you know what you’re doing here?’ she said. ‘Never heard of anyone doing it.’

‘People did it for hundreds of years.’

‘Well, maybe they didn’t have any choice. You could get a new one. Stick this thing in a museum.’

‘Making things on this when Queen Victoria was a baby,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s outlived its usefulness. Might as well hang on to your old underpants.’

I thought about this for a moment. ‘Wish someone else would hang on to my old underpants,’ I said. ‘While I’m wearing them.’

Allie was pushing coal towards the glowing coke. She looked up, bland. ‘Surprised to hear that position’s vacant,’ she said. ‘Give it a blast. We’ll be here all day.’

I gave the fire a blast. Allie Morris was a qualified farrier and blacksmith, trained in England. For a long time I’d been looking for someone to do the horse work and help in the smithy. Then I saw her advertisement in the Situations Wanted.

‘I’d be in that if the terms were right,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not keen on the business side.’

‘You mean extracting the money?’

‘In particular.’

‘You want to come around on Sunday? Eight-thirty? Or any time. Give me a hand with something. We’ll talk about it.’

I’d explained what I wanted to do.

It took a good while to get the fire right: raking and wetting until we had a good mass of burning coke that could be compacted.

‘What I had in mind,’ I said, ‘you do the horse work, I take the bookings, keep up the stores, send out the bills, and get the buggers to pay.’

‘Last item there,’ said Allie. ‘That’s the important function. That’s where I fall down.’ She shook her head. ‘Horse people.’

‘Tight as Speedos,’ I said.

‘I had to tell this one bloke, I’m coming around with two big men and we’re going to fit him with racing shoes, run him over the jumps. And he still took another week to pay up.’

‘I’ll need your help with some general work too,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I can’t cope. And I’m not all that flash on the finer stuff.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Allie, banking coal around the coke. ‘Got to get even heat for a job like this. Get the heat to bounce off the coal, eat the oxygen. Reducing fire, know the term?’

‘Use it all the time,’ I said.

Lew and the dog came in to watch. The dog went straight to his spot on a pile of old potato sacks in a corner, well away from sparks and flying bits of clinker.

Finally, Allie said, ‘All right, let’s do it.’ She was flushed from the heat. It was an attractive sight.

I had a sliding block and tackle rigged from the steel beam in the roof and a chain around the battered anvil’s waist. Lew and I pulled it up, an unwieldy 285 pounds of metal. You could tell the weight from the numbers stamped on the waist: two-two-five, standing for two hundredweights, or 224 pounds; two quarters of a hundredweight, fifty-six pounds; and five pounds. To get it under the smoke hood and onto the coke bed, Allie slid it slowly down a sheet of steel plate.

When it was in place, I unshackled the chain.

‘Got any tea?’ Allie said. ‘This’ll take a while.’

‘I’ll make it,’ said Lew. He looked glad of something to do.

It took about an hour in the intense heat to get the face of the anvil to the right colour. We put on gloves and I got the chain around its waist, pulled it to the lip of the forge and Lew and Allie hoisted it. The day was dark outside and we had no lights on in the smithy. But when the anvil came out and hung in the air, turning gently, the room filled with its glowing orange light and we stood in awe for a moment, three priests with golden faces.

Carefully, we set the dangerous object down on the block of triple-reinforced concrete I used for big heavy jobs.

‘Well,’ said Allie, ‘the thing will probably break in half. Put your helmet on.’

I handed her a six-pound flatter and a two-pound hammer and we went to work, hammering, dressing the face and edges of the anvil, trying to get the working surface back to something like its original flatness.

‘Lew’s grandfather found this anvil,’ I said. ‘In the old stables at Kinross Hall. Bought it off them for twenty dollars. Gave it to my old man.’

Allie Morris had just left when they arrived, two men in plainclothes in a silver Holden. I heard the car outside and met them at the smithy door. The dog came out with me. His upper lip twitched.

‘Lie down,’ I said. He turned his head and looked at me, lay down. But his eyes were on the men.

‘MacArthur John Faraday?’ the cop in front said.

I nodded.

‘Police,’ he said. They both did a casual flash of ID.

I put out my hand. ‘Look at those.’

They glanced at each other, eyes talking, handed over the wallets. The man who’d spoken was Detective Sergeant Michael Bernard Shea. His offsider was Detective Constable Allan Vernon Cotter. Shea was in his forties, large and going to flab, ginger hair, faded freckles, big ears. He had the bleak look men get on assembly lines. Cotter was dark, under thirty, neck muscled like a bull terrier’s, eyes too close, hair cropped to a five-o’clock shadow. Chewing gum.

I gave them the wallets back.

‘Lewis Lowey here?’ Shea said.

‘Yes.’

‘Like a word with you first, then him. Somewhere we can sit down?’

‘What kind of word? We’ve given statements.’

Shea held up a big hand. ‘Informal. Get some background.’

I put my head back in the door. ‘Police,’ I said. ‘Don’t go anywhere, Lew.’

I took them over to the shed that served as the business’s office. It held a table, three kitchen chairs, and a filing cabinet bought at a clearing sale. I sat down behind the table. Cotter spun a chair around and sat down like a cowboy.

Shea perched on the filing cabinet behind Cotter. He looked around the room, distaste on his face, sniffing the musty air like someone who suspects a gas leak. ‘So you been here, what, five years?’ he said.

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘And you know this bloke?’

‘A long time.’

‘First on the scene.’

‘Second.’

‘You and the kid. First and second.’

I didn’t say anything. Silence for a while. Shea coughed, a dry little cough.

‘You, ah, friendly with the kid?’ This from the offsider, Cotter. He was staring at me, black eyes gleaming like sucked grapes. His ears were pierced, but he wasn’t wearing an earring. He smiled and winked.

I said to Shea, ‘Detective Constable Cotter just winked at me. What does that mean?’

‘I’ll do this, Detective Cotter,’ Shea said. ‘So Lewis rang you at…?’

‘Two forty-five. It’s in the statement.’

‘Yeah. He says you got there about two fifty-five. Looking at his watch all the time.’

‘About right.’

‘Clarify this for me,’ Shea said. ‘It’s twenty kilometres from here. You get dressed and drive it in ten minutes. Give or take a minute.’

‘It’s fifteen the short way,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get dressed. I was dressed. I fell asleep dressed. And I didn’t obey the speed limit.’

Shea rubbed the corner of his right eye with a finger like a hairy ginger banana. ‘Old bloke worth a bit?’

‘Look like it?’

‘Can’t tell sometimes. Keep it under the mattress. That his property?’

I nodded.

‘Who stands to benefit then?’

‘There’s just Lew, his grandson.’

‘Then there’s you.’

‘I’m not family.’

‘How come you inherit?’

I said, ‘I’m not with you.’

‘We found his will,’ Shea said. ‘You get a share.’

I shrugged. This was news to me. ‘I don’t know about that.’

Cotter said, ‘Got any gumboots?’ Pause. ‘Mr Faraday.’

I looked at him. ‘Dogs got bums? Try the back porch.’

Cotter got up and left.

‘We’ll have to take them away,’ Shea said.

I got up and went to the window. Cotter had the Land Rover passenger door open and was poking through the mess inside.

‘Your man got a warrant?’ I said.

‘Coming to that,’ Shea said. He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket pocket. ‘Here’s your copy.’

‘Got something in mind?’ I said.

It was Shea’s turn to say nothing, just look at me, not very interested.

I heard the sound of a vehicle, then another car nosed around the corner of the house. Two men and a woman.

‘The gang’s all here,’ I said. ‘Go for your life.’

Shea coughed. ‘I’m going to ask you to come into town for an interview. When we’re finished here. The young fella too. Don’t want you to talk to him before. Okay? So you can’t travel with him. He can come with me or you can make some other arrangement, get a friend. You’re entitled to be represented. Kid’s gotta have someone with him. You don’t want to come of your own accord, well, we do it the other way. Believe me.’

There wasn’t a way around this. ‘Let me explain this to Lew,’ I said.

Shea nodded. We went over to the smithy. Lew was where I’d left him, puzzled and frightened. I sat down next to him.

‘Lew,’ I said, ‘listen, mate. They’re going to search the place. Then they want us to go into town so they can ask us some more questions. They’ll record everything. You’ll have a lawyer with you, just so everything’s done right. All right?’

‘We told them,’ Lew said.

‘I know. It’s just the way they do it. I’ll tell you about it later. I’m going to arrange for your lawyer now. We can’t talk to each other again before the interviews. I’ll be there when you finish.’

He looked at me, looked away, just a child again in a world suddenly turned from stone to water. He was on the edge of tears. I gave him a little punch in the arm. ‘Mate, this’ll be over in next to no time. Then we can have a feed, get some sleep. Hold on. Right?’

He moved his head, more tremble than a nod. He was exhausted.

I rang the lawyer who’d handled my father’s estate. ‘You’re better off with someone who specialises in crim,’ he said. ‘What’s your number?’

I waited by the phone. A tall cop came in, opened the Ned Kelly stove and poked around in the ashes. When he’d finished, he started on the chest of drawers, working from bottom to top like a burglar.

The phone rang.

‘Mr Faraday?’

I said yes.

‘I’m Laura Randall.’ Deep voice. ‘Mike Sherman said you had a matter.’

I told her what was happening.

She said nothing until I’d finished. Then she said, ‘Ring me just before you leave. I’ll meet you there.’

The search took nearly two hours: house, smithy, all the outbuildings. When they’d finished, the five of them had a conference outside. Shea came into the office and said, no expression, ‘Firearm on the premises.’

I nodded.

‘.38 Colt Python.’

I nodded again.

‘Licence?’

‘No.’

‘Unlicensed firearm?’

I savoured the moment. ‘Special permit.’

‘Special permit. That’s for what reason?’

I said, ‘See if they’ll tell you, Detective Sergeant.’

He didn’t like this. ‘I will. I will.’

When they’d bagged the gun we set off for town, Shea and Cotter in front with Lewis, then me in the Land Rover, then the other car. It began to rain as we crested the last hump of the Great Dividing Range, all sixty metres of it.

I parked behind Shea and Cotter in front of the police station, an old two-storey redbrick building with an ugly new annexe. The other cops drove through an entrance marked of f icial par king onl y.

As I got out, the door of a BMW on the other side of the narrow street opened and a tall woman with dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail got out. She took a leather briefcase out of the back seat and came over.

‘Mr Faraday?’ she said. ‘Laura Randall.’ Her breath was steam in the cold afternoon. She was in her thirties, thin, plain, pale skin, faintly amused twist to her mouth. The clothes were expensive: brown leather bomber jacket, dark tartan trousers over gleaming boots.

We shook hands. Shea, Cotter and Lew were out of the car, standing on the pavement. Cotter had his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth. He looked like a bouncer on his break.

I moved around so that I had my back to them. ‘That’s your client,’ I said. ‘The young fella. He told them the story this morning. He doesn’t know anything. The fat one over there, Shea, he’s hinting he thinks the kid and I might be in it, killed Ned for the inheritance. Maybe more than just friends, too.’

She looked me hard in the eyes. ‘Sexually involved?’ she said. ‘Are you?’

‘Only with the opposite sex,’ I said. ‘And that infrequently.’ She didn’t smile.

I said, ‘There’s nothing like that. Lew’s a good kid, been messed around by his mother. His grandfather was my father’s best friend.’ I paused. ‘He was my best friend too.’

Laura Randall said, ‘You need to understand, if he makes an admission in this interview, they’ll call me as a witness. I won’t be able to represent him.’

I shook my head. ‘Can’t happen. Nothing to admit. I just want someone with him, make him feel he’s not alone with these blokes.’

‘You’ll need someone with you too,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not with this lot. I’ve been on fishing trips with pros.’

She gave me an interested look. ‘Talk to you later,’ she said. ‘Mr Faraday.’

‘Ms Randall.’ To the dog, I said, ‘Stay.’

It was dark before we got home and we were both staring-eyed with fatigue. After I switched off the engine, we sat in silence for a while. Finally, I shook myself into action. ‘Okay. Lew, that’s over. There’s two big pies in the top rack of the freezer. Bang them in the microwave, twenty minutes on defrost. I’ll get the fire going.’

We ate lamb pies, made for me by the lady down the road, in front of the fire, watching football in Perth on television. Lew drank half a glass of beer. I drank half a bottle of red. He had barely stopped chewing when his head fell onto his shoulder. I made the bed in the spare room, put a pair of pyjamas on the pillow, woke him and pushed him off to bed. Then I started work on the second half of the bottle.

In the night, far from dawn, I sat up, fully awake, swept the blankets from my legs. Deep in sleep, some noise had alarmed me. Not the wind nagging at the guttering and the loose tiles, shaking the windows, making the trees groan like old men being massaged. Not the occasional slash of rain hitting the panes like pebbles. Not the house timbers creaking and ticking and uttering tiny screeches, not the plumbing gargling and knocking, not the creatures moving in the roof.

Something else.

When I’d first come from Melbourne, to my father’s house at the crossroads, the old life’s burden of fear and vigilance heavy on my back, I’d sat in the dark in every room in turn, eyes closed, listening, pigeonholing sounds. And I had slept fitfully for weeks until I knew every night noise of the place. Only then was I sure that I would hear the sounds that I was always listening for: a vehicle stopping on the road or in the lane, a squeak of the new gravel I’d put around the house, the thin complaint of a window being forced.

Now I heard the sound again: the flat, hard smack of a door slamming.

It was the smithy door. Once or twice a year I’d forget to slide the bolt. The wind would gradually prise the door open, then slam it triumphantly and start prising again.

I got up and went into the black, wet night. The dog came from nowhere to join me, silently.

Francis Keany was waiting for us in front of the dilapidated mansion called Harkness Park, sitting in his warm Discovery, smoking a panatella and listening to La Traviata on eight speakers. When the window slid down, the warmth and the aromatic Cuban smoke and the music floated out to us where we stood in the cold and the rain and the mud.

‘Boys,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like to wait around when you’re on my time.’

Stan Harrop cleared his nose and spat, a sound like a blow dart being fired. The missile hit the right front hubcap. ‘We’re not on your fucking time, Frankie,’ he said. ‘We’re here to look at a job. Don’t like it, off we fuck.’

Francis’s eyes narrowed. Then self-interest clicked in and he cocked his head and smiled, the smile that had won many a society matron’s heart. And the rest, so the word went. ‘You’re absolutely right, Stan,’ he said. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me show you the magnitude of the task.’

He got out of the vehicle, put a Barbour hat on his sleek head to complete his Barbour outfit, and led us down the driveway and into the wilderness. We couldn’t get far: this was a garden gone feral. Francis started down what was once a path and was now a dripping tunnel that narrowed rapidly. He wrestled with branches for a few metres, gradually losing confidence. Finally, faced with an impassable thicket, he gave up. We reversed out, Lew in front, then me, then Flannery, then Stan, then Francis.

Francis pushed his way past us and tried another matted and sodden avenue. A few metres in, he missed an overgrown step, fell forward and disappeared into a dank mass of vegetation. His shriek hung in the cold air, wild enough to send hundreds of birds thrumming skywards.

We all stopped. Stan began to roll a cigarette one-handed as we waited for Francis to emerge. ‘Hurt yourself?’ he said, no trace of sympathy in his voice, as the wet figure struggled upright, cursing.

‘Course I fucking hurt myself,’ Francis said, each word a small, distinct explosion. ‘Look at this shit on my trousers.’

‘On?’ Stan said. ‘We know there’s a shit in your trousers. What are we looking for here, Frankie? Don’t have to hack my way with a bloody machete to see it’s a jungle.’

Francis was examining the slime on his palms, mouth pursed in disgust. ‘My clients want it restored,’ he said. ‘I was trying to show you the enormity of the task.’

‘Enormity? That’s not the word you want, Frankie,’ Stan said. He was a pedant about language. ‘Try enormousness. And if they want it bloody restored, what do they want it bloody restored to?’

‘I don’t know,’ Francis snarled. ‘Don’t fucking care. Its former fucking glory. That’s your department.’

‘Francis Keany doesn’t know and doesn’t fucking care. You should put that on your business cards.’

Stan took pleasure in giving Francis this kind of needle. The only reason Francis tolerated it was because without Stan he wouldn’t be able to take on jobs like this. Francis had started out as a florist and conned his way into the garden design trade. He apparently wasn’t too bad at doing little squares of box with lollipops in the middle and iceberg roses lashed to dark-green trellis. But then one of his satisfied society matrons commissioned him to do a four-acre garden from scratch near Mount Macedon. Francis panicked: you couldn’t fill four acres with little squares of Buxus sempervirens. You couldn’t copy another big garden. People would notice. And then, somehow, he heard about Stan Harrop.

Stan had started work at twelve as a garden boy at Sefton Hall in the south of England. Four years later, he lied about his age and went off to war. When he came back, five years on, he was all of twenty-one, sergeant’s stripes on his arm, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest, and a long bayonet scar on his right forearm. It was twenty years before he left Sefton Hall again, this time to catch the P amp;O liner to Sydney to be head gardener on an estate outside Mittagong. Over the next twenty years, he ran four other big gardens. Then he bought fifty acres with a round hill on it down the road from Ned Lowey and started a nursery. That was where Francis Keany found him. It was the luckiest day of Francis’s life. And for Ned and Flannery, and later for me, it meant fairly regular work at a decent rate of pay.

‘There’s a little clear bit over there,’ Lew said. We followed him through a grove of plane trees into a clearing. For some reason, rocky soil perhaps, nothing had grown here. You could at least see some way into the jungle. Overgrown shrubs were everywhere. Mature deciduous trees-oaks, ashes, elms, planes, maples, birches-stood in deep drifts of rotting leaves. To the left, what might once have been a tapestry hedge of yew and privet and holly was a great impenetrable green barricade. Rampant, strangling holly had spread everywhere, gleaming like wet plastic. All trace of the garden’s form, of its design, had been obliterated by years of unchecked growth.

‘These clients of yours,’ Stan said, ‘they understand the magnitude of what they’re getting into here? Financially speaking.’

‘Leon Karsh,’ Francis said. ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. Leon and Anne Karsh.’

Stan looked at me. ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. How do you suggest we approach this thing, Mac?’

I said, ‘Food. Hotels. Travel. From the air. We approach it from the air. Aerial photography.’

‘My feelings exactly,’ Stan said. ‘Francis…?’

‘Aerial photographs?’ Francis said. ‘Are you mad? Can you imagine the expense? Why don’t you just poke around and…’

‘Aerial photographs,’ said Stan. ‘Aerial photographs and other research. Paid by the hour. Or we fuck off.’

You could see Francis’s fists clench in the Barbour’s roomy pockets. ‘Of course,’ he said through his capped teeth. ‘Whatever it takes.’ Pause. ‘Stan.’

Before we left, we went down the road and looked at the derelict three-storey bluestone flour mill on the creek at the bottom of the Karsh property. Flannery went off to look at the millrace pond. He was obsessed by machinery, the older the better. When he came back, he had a look of wonder on his face, the face of a naughty thirty-five-year-old boy. ‘Sluicegate’ll still work,’ he said. ‘Someone’s been greasing it.’

The wind had come up and, while we looked at the building, a slate tile came off the roof and sailed down into the poplar thicket along the creek.

‘Dangerous place to be, down the creek,’ Flannery said.

We drove back via the country cemetery where we’d buried Ned. It was a windblown acre of lopsided headstones and rain-eroded paths on a hillside above a weatherboard Presbyterian church. Sheep grazed in the paddock next door, freezing at the sight of the dog.

‘I’ll just pop this on,’ Stan said. He’d made a wreath out of ivy and holly for Ned’s grave. He hadn’t come to the funeral. ‘I can’t, Mac,’ he’d said on the phone. ‘I can’t go to funerals. Don’t know what it is. Something from the war. Ned knew. He’ll understand. Explain to the boy, will you?’

We all got out, into the clean, biting wind. This was my third visit to the place. My father’s grave was here too. You could see for miles, settled country, cleared, big round hills with necklaces of sheep, roads marked by avenues of bare poplars. Ned’s grave was a bit of new ploughing in the cemetery. Two magpies flew up angrily at our approach, disturbed at the rewarding task of picking over the rich new soil for worms.

Stan put the wreath on the mound. ‘Sleep well, old son,’ he said. ‘We’re all better for knowing you.’

I walked around to my father’s grave. It needed weeding and the silver paint in the incised inscription was peeling. Colin MacArthur Faraday, 1928–1992, it said. Under the date, a single line, Ned’s choice: A free and generous spirit come to rest.

Ned had made all his own arrangements for his burial: plot, coffin, picked and paid for. It was typical. He was organised in everything, probably why he got on so well with my father, who made life-changing decisions in an instant at crossroads and regarded each day as the first day of creation.

‘You ask yourself why,’ Stan said as we neared his gate.

‘You ask yourself who,’ I said.

Allie Morris had just arrived when we parked next to the smithy. She was wearing her bluey and a beanie and yellow leather stockman’s gloves. Although she hadn’t known Ned, she’d come to the funeral.

‘I saw your legs at the funeral,’ I said. ‘First time.’ She’d worn a dark-blue pinstripe jacket and skirt and a black shirt and black stockings. Ned would have approved. All the other men at the funeral did, many of them sober.

She scratched her forehead under the beanie with a thumbnail. ‘Legs?’ she said. ‘You only had to ask. What’s happening today?’

We went over to the office to look at the bookings and check the answering machine.

‘You’ve got two over at Miner’s Rest, then the Shetland lady wants you. After that, there’s a new one at Strathmore. In the badlands.’

‘Badlands,’ she said. ‘Take the badlands before the Shetlands. Last time one of the things tried to bite my bum.’

‘The Shetland,’ I said. ‘A discerning creature. Knows a biteworthy bum when it sees one.’

‘I’m not sure how to take that.’

‘The right way. Leave you free on Thursday? Bit of hot work here.’

After she’d gone, I got the forge going, got to work on some knifemaking.

We had the reading of the will the day after Ned’s funeral. He’d made it soon after I reopened the smithy opposite the pub in the potato country, an hour and a half from Melbourne. It was the year Lew came to live with him following his mother’s drowning off Hayman Island. Monica Lowey tried a lot of strange things in her time but scuba diving on speed was the least well-advised. The property was Ned’s main asset. He wanted it sold and the proceeds divided 60:40 between Lew and me, Lew to get his share when he was twenty-five. I got the tools and the backhoe. Lew got everything else. And then there was a little personal matter: he asked me to use some of my share to look after Lew.

I was working with the file when I heard the vehicle. I went to the door. Silver Holden. Shea and Cotter. Shea got out, carrying a plastic bag.

‘They say you can have this back,’ he said.

I took the bag. I’d forgotten how heavy the Python was.

Shea looked around as if contemplating another search. ‘Buy any rope recently?’

‘Fuck off,’ I said.

He gave me the look. ‘Not helpful, the Feds,’ he said. ‘Fucking up themselves.’

‘That right?’

Shea put both his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders, shuddered. ‘Jesus, how d’ya live out here? Santa’s dick. Fella down the road here, he can’t sleep. Knows your noise. Puts a time on you goin past. Good bit after the kid called the ambulance.’

‘Amazing what best practice detective work will reveal,’ I said. ‘What’s forensic say? There’s no way Ned would top himself.’

He sighed, moved his bottom jaw from side to side. ‘Listen, I asked before. In his background. Anything we should know? Old enemies, new ones, anything?’

I shook my head. ‘I never heard anything like that.’

‘Well,’ Shea said. He took his hands out of his pockets, rough, ruddy instruments, and rubbed them together. ‘It’s not clear he done himself or there’s help. Anyway, doesn’t look like he had health worries. Ring me you think of anything.’ He took out his wallet and gave me a card. As he was getting into the car, he said, ‘So there’s life after, hey?’

‘After what?’ I knew what he meant.

‘After being such a big man in the Feds they let you keep your gun.’

‘You’ve got to have life before to have life after,’ I said.

He pursed his lips, nodded, got in.

I went back to work on the knife, thinking about Ned. Suicide? The word burned in me.

It took me three days to clean out Ned’s house. I started outside, working my way through his collection of sheds, carting stuff back to my place. On the morning of day three, I steeled myself and went into the house. There had been no fire for more than a week now and the damp cold had come up from under the floorboards and taken hold.

I did Ned’s room first: there was no other way. I packed all the clothes into boxes, put the few personal things in Ned’s old leather suitcase. Then I started to pack up the rest of the house. It wasn’t a big job. Ned’s neatness and his spartan living habits made it easy. I left the sitting room for last. It was a big room, made by knocking two rooms into one. There were two windows in the north wall, between them an old table where Ned had done his paperwork. There were signs that the cops had taken a look. Both drawers were slightly open.

I took the deep drawers out. One held stationery, a fountain pen, ink bottle, stapler, hole punch, thick wads of bills and invoices held together with rubber bands, a large yellow envelope, Ned’s work diary, a ledger. The other one held a telephone book, a folder with all the papers relating to the purchase of the property and the regular outgoings, three copies of the Dispatch, string, a magnifying glass, a few marbles, and a wooden ruler given away by a shop in Wagga Wagga. The yellow envelope was unsealed. I looked into it: staples, rubber bands, string, assorted things. I stuffed the newspapers into a garbage bag and packed everything else into a box.

At the end of the day, I had all the things to go to the Salvation Army in one shed, the things to keep in another, and the contents of Lew’s room and Ned’s personal things on the back of the Land Rover. I also had two large bags of stuff to be thrown away.

I drove home via the shire tip and dumped the bags. Then it was all speed to the Heart of Oak, the pub a few hundred metres from the smithy. I was parked outside, taking out the key, taste of beer in my mouth, when the question came to me.

Why would Ned keep three copies of a newspaper in his drawer? All the other papers were in the shed, tied in neat bundles for the recyclers.

Forgot to throw them out.

No. Everything else in that drawer had a purpose.

I turned the key. Back to the tip. The man was closing the gate as I arrived.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘You want it back.’

The bags were where I’d left them, and the papers were on top of the one I opened.

I took them into the Heart of Oak with me. It was just me and Vinnie the publican and a retired potato farmer called George Beale. Vinnie and George were playing draughts, a 364-day-a-year event contested in a highly vocal manner.

‘Now that’s what I call a dickhead move,’ George was saying as I came in. ‘Told you once, told you a thousand times.’

‘Funny how I keep winnin,’ Vinnie said.

‘Sometimes,’ said George, ‘the Lord loves a dickhead.’

They said Gidday and Vinnie drew a beer without being asked.

The papers were about six weeks old, the issues of a Monday and Tuesday in April and a Thursday in June. The front-page lead in Monday’s paper was headlined: Body in OLD MINE.

I VAGUELY REMEMBERED READING THIS, PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT IT IN THE PUB. THE STORY READ:

Police are investigating the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of an old mine shaft at Cousin Jack Lead in the State forest near Rippon.

The macabre find was made by Dean Meerdink of Carlisle, whose dog uncovered the shaft entrance and fell about ten metres, landing on a ledge.

‘We were out with the metal detector,’ Mr Meerdink said. ‘Deke was off looking for rabbits and he just vanished. I was calling his name and I heard a faint bark. Then I saw this hole and I thought: he’s a goner. I didn’t want to get too close in case there was a cave-in, so I went back and rang the shire.’

Three CFA firemen with a ladder went to the scene and shone a spotlight down the shaft.

‘The shaft goes almost straight down and then branches off parallel to the surface,’ said CFA fireman Derek Scholte. ‘The dog was fine and I was about to go down when I saw the skull. We called in the police.’

A police spokesman said the remains were human and had been taken to Melbourne for forensic examination.

I turned to Tuesday’s paper. The follow-up story was also on the front page, under the headline: Mine Body Is Young Woman.

It began:

The remains of a body found in an old mine shaft near Rippon yesterday have been identified as those of a young woman.

Melbourne forensic scientist James LaPalma said yesterday the skeleton was that of a woman, probably under twenty. It was at least ten years old. The cause of death had not been positively ascertained but an initial examination suggested that her neck had been broken.

A spokesman for the Victoria Police said the discovery was being treated as a murder. An inquiry was underway.

The third paper, published on a Thursday in June, didn’t have a front-page story on the skeleton in the mine. The story was on page three, under a photograph of a chain with a broken catch. On the chain was a small silver star.

Man’s Chain Find Near Deat h Mine A man fossicking for gold with a metal detector near the mine shaft where the remains of a young woman’s body were discovered last month yesterday found a silver ankle chain police say may belong to the woman.

The man, who does not wish to be identified, found the broken chain about one hundred metres from the entrance to the mine shaft and two hundred metres from the track through the State forest near Rippon.

The story went on to repeat the information in the two previous ones. The police asked anyone who recognised the chain to come forward. I read all three stories again, finished my beer and went home.

I rang the newspaper and asked for Kate Fegan, the name on the stories about the skeleton.

‘Kate, my name’s Milton, Geoff Milton. Canberra Times. I wonder if you can get me up to date on a story you handled about six weeks ago?’

Lying comes easily when you’ve lived my kind of life.

‘Well, sure. If I can.’ She was young, probably just out of her cadetship.

‘The body in the mine shaft. Has that been identified?’

‘No. The teeth are really all they’ve got to go on and they’re no help. She had all her teeth, no fillings. She probably never saw a dentist, so there wouldn’t be any dental records. They’re pretty sure it isn’t someone local. That’s about all.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘There’s no-one missing from around that time. No-one that age.’

‘They’ve put a time on it?’

‘Within a year, they reckon. Around 1985.’

‘How’d they do that?

‘The shire put a track in there in late 1984. Before that you had to walk about five kilometres through dense bush to reach the mine. Then there’s the decomposition. There’s a scientist in Sydney who specialises in that. Reckons no later than 1985 to ’86. Firm on that.’

‘And her age?’

‘Around sixteen. They can tell from the wrist bones.’

I said, ‘So there’s nothing with the remains? Clothes, stuff like that?’

‘Nothing. No trace of clothes or shoes, no jewellery. She was probably naked when she was thrown down.’

‘And the cause of death?’

‘Difficult to say. Her neck was broken. But that might have happened after death. That was in another story I wrote. Are you doing a story?’

‘Just a general piece on missing girls,’ I said. ‘So they don’t hold out much hope of identifying her?’

‘It would be pure luck, they say. I could fax you the clippings.’

‘Thanks, but I think I’ve got everything I need. You’ve been a big help.’

As I put the phone down, Lew came in, tracksuit and runners, hair wet with rain, sallow skin shining.

‘You play in this?’ I said.

‘Just the short game. He made me hit about a million.’

‘He’s a hard man. Hope it’s worthwhile. Listen, I want to talk to you about school.’

Lew had dropped out of school at the beginning of the year. I knew Ned had tried everything to prevent it happening but the boy became withdrawn and Ned gave up. I think his fear was that Lew would end up running away, as his mother had.

‘School.’ Lew took on a wary look. ‘I’ve got to shower.’

‘Hold on, mate,’ I said. ‘Ned asked me to look after you. That doesn’t give me any rights. But I want you to know what I think, okay?’

He didn’t look at me. ‘Okay.’

‘Leaving school at sixteen is for people who for some reason don’t have any choice. That’s not you. I want you to think about going back.’

He screwed up his face. ‘Mick says I could be a pro.’

‘Millions of kids want to do that, Lew. Maybe it’ll happen. But give yourself some other options.’

He looked at me for a moment, in his dark eyes something I couldn’t read. ‘Got to shower,’ he said and left the room.

I’d done my duty. Ned would have wanted me to try, but pushing it wouldn’t work. I wasn’t much and I wasn’t family but I was all Lew had now and he was at the age when the testosterone and the self-doubt turn some boys into unpredictable explosive devices. I couldn’t be a parent to him. The best I could hope for was that he would value my friendship, trust me. I had always been comfortable with him, liked the dry sense of humour he’d got from his grandfather’s genes and example. From the moment he came into my house to stay on that grim early morning, he’d fitted into the routines of the place. He helped out without being asked, washed clothes, vacuumed, made fires, cooked. By Ned’s account, Lew’s life with his mother had been anything but easy. You could read some of that in his self-contained manner, but he was still just a boy in most ways.

I started work on supper: beef and vegetable stew. Open freezer door, take out two portions of beef and vegetable stew, made two weeks before. Place in microwave to defrost. Open bottle of beer. All the while I was trying to recall myself at Lew’s age. But I couldn’t remember where I’d been then, the places came and went so quickly.

I took the beer to the sitting room, lit the fire and switched on the early television news. A man with a face immobilised by cosmetic surgery said: Heading tonight’s bulletin: Victoria goes to the polls in five weeks. The Premier, Mr Nash, today called a snap election fourteen months before the end of the government’s term.

James Nash appeared on the screen seated next to his deputy, the Attorney General, Anthony Crewe, who was the MP for these parts. Nash was short and balding, with a worried expression. His suits had an inherited look. Crewe, on the other hand, looked like the advocate you want to plead your case to an all-female heterosexual jury: sharp features, smooth hair, dimpled chin. He had a wry, knowing smile and his suits lay on him like a benediction.

‘The Nash government hasn’t been afraid to take the hard decisions,’ the Premier said. ‘We’re confident that the people of Victoria value that and want us back for a third term of office.’ He didn’t look at all confident.

‘Premier,’ said a male voice, ‘how do you react to allegations within your own party that this election is designed to stave off a leadership challenge from Mr Crewe, the Attorney General?’

Crewe smiled his wry smile and said, ‘I’ll answer that if I may, Premier. Mr Nash has my complete support and loyalty. There is no leadership challenge, election or no election. I’m happy to repeat that as many times as you want me to.’

The rest of the news was the usual line-up of accidents, strikes, bomb threats and businessmen in court, concluding with the heartwarmer: a man had rescued a guinea pig from a burning house.

Lew was silent during our meal but I couldn’t feel any tension in him, so I didn’t make an effort to talk. When we’d finished, he said, ‘Good stew. Gotta show me how to do it. I’ll wash.’

I left him washing up and went out to the office, picking up the dog on the way. The night was still and clear. I heard a car door slam down at the pub and a woman’s laugh. I thought about the naked girl falling down the mine shaft, into the absolute blackness of the earth. Was she still alive when she was stuffed into the opening in the ground?

I’d put the boxes with Ned’s papers and personal things in a corner. The one holding the work diary was on top. I took the old ledger over to the table and leafed through the pages recording about twenty years of Ned’s working life. In his neat, slanting hand, he had noted every job he did: date, client, type, number of hours worked, amount charged, expenses. The last entry read: July 10. Butler’s Bridge Nursery. Rip subsoil approx acre. Four hours. $120.00. Fuel 36 km.

I turned back to 1985. The first half of the year had been lean, sometimes no more than three or four small jobs a week, entries like: Mrs Readshaw. Fixed garage door. Half hour. $5.00. 14 km.

In July, things began to pick up. He had three weeks fencing a property at Trentham, then he did a big paving job, demolished a house, spent five weeks putting in a driveway, gates and fences on a horse property. In October, he built a wall at Kinross Hall, the first of a series of jobs there that took up most of his time until late November. That was where he had found the old anvil. December and January were quiet, but from mid-February, for most of 1986, Ned worked on an old school being turned into a conference centre.

I read on, through 1987 and 1988, 1989, 1990. I went back and read 1982 to 1984. Then I sat back and thought. About fifteen employers’ names occurred regularly across the years, people who gave Ned jobs big and small. I looked at 1982 again. Two employers appeared for the first time: J. Harris of Alder Lodge, the horse property, and Kinross Hall. I read forward. Alder Lodge became a regular source of work, most recently in May when Ned repaired a kicked-about stable. Kinross Hall employed him three times in 1982, for two long periods in 1983, for almost three months in 1984, and in 1985 he did five separate jobs there, the last a three-week engagement ending on 22 November. That was the end of Kinross Hall. Ned never worked there again.

I told Lew where I was going and the dog and I walked over to the pub. Half a dozen or so regulars were in place, including, down at the end of the bar talking to Vinnie, Mick Doolan. He was a small man, chubby, florid, head of tight grey curls and eyes as bright and innocent as a baby’s. Everything about Mick was Australian except his Irish accent. I sat down next to him.

‘Well, Moc,’ he said, ‘just sayin to Vinnie, can’t get over Ned goin out like that. No sense in it. Not Neddy.’

‘No,’ I said.

He drank some stout. ‘Had these police fellas around today. Murderers roamin the countryside and they’re out makin life difficult for small businessmen such as misself.’

Mick was a dealer in what he called Old Wares, mostly junk, and the police took a keen interest in the provenance of his stock.

I said, ‘Small businessman? The police think you’re a small receiver of stolen property.’

He sighed. ‘Well and that’s exactly what I’m sayin, Moc. They form theories based on nothin but ignorance and then they devote the taxpayers’ time to provin them. And naturally they can’t. Vinnie, give us a coupla jars and a bag of the salt and vinegar. Two bags.’

‘One, Vinnie,’ I said. ‘Mick, what’s Kinross Hall?’

‘Kinross Hall? It’s what they used to call a place of safety. For naughty girls. They won’t let you in, Moc.’

‘Did Ned ever talk about working there? Late ’85?’

He scratched his curls. ‘Well, you know Ned. Not one to gossip.’

Vinnie arrived with the drinks and the chips. I paid.

I persisted. ‘Did he ever say anything about the place?’

Mick munched on chips, washed them down with a big swallow, wiped his mouth. ‘From what I could gather,’ he said, ‘he thought the place should be closed down. He said he wouldn’t work there again.’

‘Why?’

‘He heard some story. Went to see the police about it and they told him basically piss off, mind yer own business. That’s how I remember it.’

‘What kind of story?’

‘I couldn’t tell you. He never said. You know Ned. Y’had to read his mind.’ He offered me the chip packet. ‘Now you’re a cert for Satdee? And you’d be settin an example to the young fellas by attendin Wednesday trainin. I’ve bin workin on a new strategy, could be revolutionary, turnin point in the history of the game.’

I said, ‘New strategy? What, we kick a goal? That’ll shock ’em rigid.’

A girl with a broken neck, a naked girl, thrown down a mine shaft and the entrance covered. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

I thought about these things all through the morning as Allie Morris and I worked at the forge on an order for four dozen garden-hose hooks. It was pleasant enough work once we had forty-eight lengths: heat the flat steel to glowing red, use jaws in the anvil hardie hole to put a bend in one end, bend sixty centimetres down to make a flap, squeeze the top half in the vice to make a doubled length. Then curve the rest into a three-quarter circle over the anvil horn. The job was finished by putting a stake point on the end that went into the ground. Two people working with red-hot metal can be awkward, but we found a rhythm quickly, taking turns at heating, bending and hammering, Allie’s deftness compensating for my occasional clumsiness.

We finished just before one pm: four dozen hose hooks, neatly stacked on Allie’s truck to be dropped off for priming and painting.

‘That’s a day’s work,’ Allie said. ‘Does the pub do a sandwich?’

We took turns to clean up in the bathroom I’d built on to the office so that I didn’t have to traipse into the house in a filthy condition, and walked down the road in silence. The dog appeared ahead of us: taken a short cut through the neighbour’s paddock. The sky was clearing, the cloud cover broken, harried fragments streaming east in full retreat. Suddenly the world was high and light and full of promise. I hadn’t talked much to Allie since she started. She had a reserved way about her, not rude but not forthcoming. And I didn’t have any experience of working relationships like this. Man and a woman working with hot metal.

At the pub, it was just us and Vinnie and two hard-looking women in tracksuits playing pool. The fat one had a lipstick smear at the edge of her mouth. It looked like a bruise when she bent her head. Allie put the beers down and said, ‘Know someone called Alan Snelling?’

‘Know who he is.’

‘What’s he do?’

‘Runs a few horses. Nice house. Nice cars. Gets married every now and again.’

‘He asked me out.’

‘Available to be asked out?’ I instantly regretted the question.

She smiled, drank some beer, wiped away a thin tidemark of foam on her upper lip with a fingertip. ‘I’m between engagements. He was at Glentroon Lodge yesterday, looking at a horse. Asked my opinion.’

‘Who wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘An older man. They can be attracted to capable young women.’

She put her head on one side. ‘Older man? He’s about your age.’

‘That’s what I mean.’

She laughed. Vinnie arrived with the toasted sandwiches.

‘That was quick,’ I said.

‘Cook’s day off,’ said Vinnie. ‘Everything’s quicker on his day off. Including the time. Passes too fast.’

We talked business while we ate. On our way back, I said, ‘About Alan Snelling.’

‘Yes?’

‘You want to think.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Alan’s lucky,’ I said. ‘His old mum popped off. Nobody thought she had much, just the house, falling-over weatherboard. Not so. She had lots of things. Jewellery, coin collections, stamp collections, and a box with about $100,000 in cash in it. All up, worth about $400,000.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s an explanation,’ said Allie.

I said, ‘Also, Alan had a business partner, ran their little video hire business in Melbourne. Top little business, big as a phone booth, cash flow like Target. Then the partner was working out in his home gym and the machine collapsed on him. Fatal.’

‘That’s not lucky,’ Allie said.

‘They had key executive insurance,’ I said. ‘Half a million.’

We were going down the lane, when Allie said, ‘What’s that about his mother mean? I don’t get it.’

‘People could think Alan was parking invisible earnings with his mother.’

‘Invisible? You mean illegal? Like drugs?’

I shrugged. ‘Among the possibilities.’

‘Jesus,’ Allie said. ‘How do you know this stuff?’

‘I forget where I heard it,’ I said.

Allie went off to a job. I should have worked on the knives but instead I rang the library at Burnley Horticultural College and asked them if they had any information on Harkness Park. The woman took my number. She rang back inside half an hour.

‘I’ve tracked down a dozen or so references to it,’ she said. ‘There’ll probably be more.’

‘Any pictures or drawings?’

‘No. It was designed by a man called Robert Barton Graham, an Englishman. It’s not clear but he seems to have been brought out by a Colonel Stephen Peverell in 1896 to design the garden. He designed other gardens in Victoria while he was here, but they’re all gone as far as we know.’

‘Anywhere else I could try?’

She sighed. ‘Our collection’s pretty good. The State Library doesn’t have anything we don’t have. Not that you can get to, anyway. I’ll keep looking.’ As an afterthought, she said, ‘Sometimes the local history associations can help. They might know who has information.’

I drove over to Brixton, the town nearest Harkness Park. I knew where the local history museum was, a brick and weatherboard building near the railway station. It had once been a factory with its own rail siding. Two elderly women sitting behind a glass display counter in the front room of the museum looked surprised to see a visitor.

‘G’day,’ said the smaller of the pair. She was wearing a knitted hat that resembled a chimney pot. Wisps of bright orange hair escaped at the temples. ‘You’re just in time. We’re just having a cup of tea before we close.’

A hand-lettered sign said: Adults $2, Children $1, Pensioners Free. I put down a coin.

The second woman took the money. ‘On your own, are you?’ she said. She looked like someone who’d worked hard outdoors: ruddy skin, hands too big for her wrists.

‘I’m interested in gardens,’ I said. ‘Old gardens.’

The women looked at each other. ‘This is a local history museum,’ the smaller one said apologetically.

‘I thought you might be the ones to ask about old gardens around here,’ I said.

They exchanged glances again. ‘Well, there’s a good few that open to the public,’ the taller one said. ‘The best’d be Mrs Sheridan’s, wouldn’t it, Elsie? Some very nice beds.’

‘You don’t know of a place called Harkness Park?’ I said.

‘Oh, Harkness Park,’ she said. ‘Mrs Rosier’s house. I don’t think that’s ever been open. She had nothing to do with the town. Didn’t even come to church. People say it was a grand garden once, but you can’t see anything from the road except the trees. It’s like a forest.’

‘Old Col Harris used to work there,’ the other woman said. ‘Him and that Meekin and another man-I can’t remember his name, lived out on Cribbin Road. Dead now. They’re all dead.’

‘There wouldn’t be photographs, would there?’ I said.

The taller woman sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Don’t talk about photos. There’s a whole room of unsorted photos. Mr Collits was in charge of photographs. Wouldn’t give anyone else a look-in, would he, Elsie?’

‘He’s not around anymore?’

She shook her head. ‘Blessing, really. Had a terrible time.’

‘I told the committee we needed to appoint someone to sort the photos,’ Elsie said. ‘But will they do anything practical?’

‘These men who worked at Harkness Park,’ I said, ‘do they have family still here?’

‘Why don’t you just go out there and knock on the door?’ Elsie said. ‘It’s still in the family. Some cousin or something got it.’

‘They sold it. I’m interested in knowing what it was like twenty or thirty years ago.’

‘Col Harris’s boy’s here,’ the taller one said. ‘Dennis. Saw him a few weeks ago. Wife went off with the kids. Shouldn’t say that. He works for Deering’s. They’re building the big retirement village, y’know.’

I said thanks and had a look around the museum. It was like a meticulously arranged garage sale: nothing was of much value or of any great age, but assembling the collection had clearly given the organisers a lot of pleasure.

Finding the new retirement village wasn’t a problem. It was at an early stage, a paddock of wet, ravaged earth, concrete slabs and a few matchstick timber frames going up.

A man at the site hut pointed out Dennis Harris on one of the slabs, a big man in his forties with long hair, cutting studs to length with a dropsaw. At my approach, he switched it off and slid back his ear protectors. Dennis’s eyes said he didn’t think I was the man from Tattslotto.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘Ladies at the museum thought you could help me.’

‘Museum?’ Deep suspicion, stiff shoulders.

‘They said your father worked at Harkness Park. I’m trying to find old photos of the place.’

Dennis’s shoulders relaxed. He nodded. ‘There’s pictures in his old album. Lots. He used to work in the vegie garden when he was a young fella. Before the war. Huge. Wall around it. There was five gardeners there.’

We arranged to meet at the pub after knock-off. Dennis brought the album. ‘Take it and copy what you want,’ he said.

‘I could give you some kind of security for it,’ I said.

‘Nah. What kind of bloke pinches old photos? Just bring it back.’

I bought him a beer and we talked about building. Then I drove home and rang Stan.

‘Research,’ I said. ‘Paid for by the hour. I’ve got photographs from the 1930s.’

‘No you haven’t, lad,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Not enough hours.’

Ten minutes into the last quarter, it began to rain, freezing rain, driven into our faces by a wind that had passed over pack ice in its time. We only needed a kick to win but nobody could hold the ball, let alone get a boot to it. We were sliding around, falling over, trying to recognise our own side under the mudpacks. Mick Doolan was shouting instructions from the sideline but no-one paid any attention. We were completely knackered. Finally, close to time, we had some luck: a big bloke came out of the mist and broke Scotty Ewan’s nose with a vicious swing of the elbow. Even in the rain, you could hear the cartilage crunch. Scotty was helped off, streaming blood, and we got a penalty.

‘Take the kick, Mac,’ said Billy Garrett, the captain. He would normally take the kick in situations like this, but since the chance of putting it through was nil, he thought it best that I lose the game for Brockley.

‘Privilege,’ I said, spitting out some mud. ‘Count on my vote for skipper next year. Skipper.’

I was right in front of goal but the wind was lifting my upper lip. I looked around the field. There were about twenty spectators left, some of them dogs sitting in old utes.

‘Slab says you can’t do it,’ said the player closest to me. He was just another anonymous mudman but I knew the voice.

‘Very supportive, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You’re on, you little prick.’

Squinting against the rain, I took my run-up into the gale, scared that I was going to slip before I could even make the kick.

But I didn’t. I managed to give the ball a reasonable punt before my left leg went out under me. I hit the ground with my left shoulder and slid towards goal.

And as I lay in the cold black mud, the wind paused for a second or two and the ball went straight between the uprights.

The final whistle went. Victory. Victory in round eight of the second division of the Brockley and District League. I got up. My shoulder felt dislocated. ‘That’ll be a slab of Boag, Flannery,’ I said. ‘You fucking traitor.’

‘Brought out yer best,’ Flannery said. ‘Psychology. Read about it.’

I said, ‘Read about it? Psychology in Pictures. I didn’t know they’d done that.’

We staggered off in the direction of the corrugated-iron changing room. On the way, Billy Garrett joined us. ‘Pisseasy kick,’ he said.

‘That’s why you didn’t want it, Billy,’ I said. ‘Not enough challenge.’

After we’d wiped off the worst of the mud and changed, we drove the hundred metres to the Heart of Oak. Mick Doolan had about twenty beers lined up.

‘Magnificent, me boyos,’ he said. ‘Out of the textbook. And good to see you followin instructions, Flannery. Hasn’t always bin the case.’

‘Instructions?’ Flannery said. ‘I didn’t hear any instructions.’

The outside door opened and the big bloke who’d broken Scotty Ewan’s nose came in. Behind him were four or five of the other larger members of the Millthorpe side, just in case. He came over to Mick.

‘Bloke of yours all right?’ he said. ‘Didn’t intend him no harm. Sort of run into me arm.’ He looked down at his right forearm as if inquiring something of it.

‘Perfectly all right,’ Mick said. ‘Hazard of the game. Nothin modern medical science can’t handle. Won’t be out for more than three or four. Shout you fellas a beer?’

‘Thanks, no,’ the man said. ‘Be gettin back. Just didn’t want to go short of sayin me regrets.’

‘You’re a gentleman, Chilla,’ Mick said. ‘There’s not many would take the trouble.’

After they’d left, Flannery said, ‘There’s not many would have the fuckin front to come around here afterwards. Might as well’ve hit Scotty with an axe handle.’

‘Think positively,’ Mick said. ‘Some good in the worst tragedy. Got the penalty. And we won.’

‘Bloody won a lot easier if you’d play Lew,’ Billy Garrett said. ‘Be the only bloke under thirty in the side.’

I said, ‘Also the only bloke who can run more than five metres without stopping for a cough and a puke.’

Mick took a deep drink, wiped the foam from his lips, shook his head. ‘Don’t understand, do ya lads? Young fella’s pure gold. Do ya put your young classical piano player in a woodchoppin competition? Do ya risk your young golf talent on a frozen paddick with grown men, violent spudgrubbers and the like? Bloody no, that’s the answer. Boy’s goin to be a champion.’

‘Speakin of champions,’ said Flannery. ‘Reckon I’m givin away this runnin around in the mud on Satdee arvos, big fellas tryin to bump into me. All me joints achin.’ He scratched his impossibly dense curly dog hair. ‘Could be me last season.’

Mick’s eyes narrowed. He rubbed his small nose. ‘Last season? That so? Well, Flanners me boyo, get to the Grand Final, I’ll point out a coupla fellas ya can take into retirement with ya.’

I took the next shout. Then Vinnie came in from fighting with the cook and sent the beers around. Flannery’s younger brother came in with the lovely and twice-widowed Yvonne and shouted the room. Things were good in trucking. Other rounds followed. In due course, Mick broke into ‘The Rose of Tralee’ and Flannery’s voice, shockingly deep from the compact frame, joined him. The air warmed, thickened, became a brew of beer fumes, breath, tobacco smoke, cooking smells from the kitchen. The windows cried tears of condensation and my shoulder was healed of all pain. It was after ten, whole body in neutral, when I decided against another drink. I was saying my farewells when Mick put his head close to me and said, ‘Moc, other day. That Ned thing we were discussin. Met the fella today, works on the gate at Kinross Hall. Says Ned was there a coupla days before. Before he-y’know.’

I wandered out into the drizzle, cold night, black as Guinness, smell of deep and wet potato fields. The dog appeared and we found our way across the road. I stopped for a leak beside the sign that said Blacksmith, All Metalwork and Shoeing. Flannery had done it for me in pokerwork and it wasn’t going to get him a place in the Skills Olympics. Down the muddy lane the two of us went home, both happy to have a home. Homes are not easy to come by.

The sign saying Kinross Hall, Juvenile Training Centre directed you down a country road. Five kilometres further, another sign pointed at a long avenue of poplars. At the end of it, huge spear-pointed cast-iron gates were set in a bluestone wall fully three metres high. Above them, an ornate wrought-iron arch held the words Kinross Hall, the two words separated by a beautiful wrought-iron rose. Through them you could see a gravel driveway flanked by bare elms. An arrow on the gate took the eye to a button on the right-hand pillar. A sign said: RING.

I got out of the vehicle, admired the craftsmanship of the iron rose on the arch, and pushed the button. After a few minutes, I rang again. Then a man in standard blue security guard uniform came walking down the drive-moon face, fat man’s walk, not in any hurry.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I’m trying to find about someone who was here about two weeks ago,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at the Land Rover and looked back at me blankly.

‘Bloke called Ned Lowey,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I heard about him. He was here. Hold on, tell you when.’ He went off to my right, out of sight. When he came back, he had a black and red ledger, open. He riffed though it, then said, ‘Tuesday 9 July, nine twenty am.’

I said, ‘What was it about?’

Still expressionless, he said, ‘Wouldn’t know, mate. Had an appointment with the director at nine-thirty am.’

‘How do you get to see the director?’

‘Ask. Want me to?’

I nodded.

‘Name and purpose of visit.’

I gave him my name and said, ‘Inquiry about Ned Lowey’s visit.’

He wrote it in the book and went off again. He was away no more than two minutes. ‘Better put the dog in the cab,’ he said. ‘Park in front of the main building. Turn right as you go in the front door. Down the passage. There’s a sign says Director’s Office.’

I opened the passenger window and whistled. The dog jumped onto the cab roof. His back legs appeared, scrambled their way over the windowsill, and then the whole animal dropped into the cab. The guard shook his head and opened the gate.

No inmates were to be seen, only a man on a ride-on mower in the distance. The main building was stone, someone’s house once, a mixture of castle and Gothic cathedral with a hint of French chateau, set in immaculate parkland. It could have been an expensive country hotel but it had the feeling of all places of involuntary residence: the silence, the smell of disinfectant, the disciplined look of everything, the little extra chill in the air.

The secretary was a pale, thin woman in her thirties with very little make-up. Her bare and unwelcoming office was cold and she had her jacket on.

‘Please take a seat,’ she said. She tugged an earlobe. Blunt nails. ‘Dr Carrier will see you shortly.’

It was a ten-minute wait in an upright chair, probably an instructional technique. The secretary pecked at the computer. There wasn’t anything to read, nothing on the walls to look at. I thought about Ned. Had the director kept him sitting here, too? On this very chair? Finally, the secretary received some kind of a signal.

‘Please go through,’ she said.

The director’s office was everything the secretary’s wasn’t, a comfortable sitting room rather than a place of business. A fire burned in a cast-iron grate under a wooden mantelpiece, there were paintings and photographs on the walls and chintz armchairs on either side of a deep window.

A woman sat behind an elegant writing table. She was in her mid-forties, tall, and groomed for Olympic dressage: black suit with white silk cravat, dark hair pulled back severely, discreet make-up.

‘Mr Faraday,’ she said. She came around the table and put out her right hand. ‘Marcia Carrier. Let’s sit somewhere comfortable.’ There was an air of confidence about her. You could imagine her talking to prime ministers as an equal.

We shook hands and sat down in the armchairs. She had long, slim legs.

‘I understand it’s to do with Mr Lowey,’ she said. ‘What a shock. A terrible thing. Are you family?’

‘Just a friend,’ I said. ‘I wonder if you can tell me why he came to see you?’

She smiled, put her head on one side in a puzzled way. ‘Why he came to see me? Is this somehow connected with what happened?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It was about work,’ she said.

I waited.

‘He’d done some work for us before. A long time ago. I confess I didn’t remember him. He was inquiring about the prospect of future work.’

‘You hire the casual workers yourself?’

‘Oh no.’ She shook her head. ‘Our maintenance person does that. But Mr Lowey asked to see me.’ She smiled, an engaging smile. ‘I try to see anyone who wants to see me.’

‘So he was looking for work?’

‘Basically.’

‘He did quite a lot of work here in 1985. Can you tell me why you didn’t use him again?’

She shrugged, puzzled frown. ‘I really can’t say. Lots of people work here. The maintenance person may have had some reason. Then again, we didn’t use many outside contractors from ’86 to ’91. Budget cuts every year.’

I looked out of the window. You could see bare trees, gunmetal clouds boiling in the west. ‘Did you know that he went to the police about something to do with this place?’ I said.

Her eyes widened. ‘No.’ She appeared genuinely surprised. ‘You mean in 1985 or now?’

‘In 1985.’

‘Do you know what about?’

I shook my head.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘he certainly didn’t mention anything a few weeks ago. I can’t imagine what it could have been.’

‘You had no inquiries from the police in 1985?’

‘The local police? I’d have to check the records. I can’t recall having anything to do with them.’

‘There wasn’t anyone missing?’

‘Missing?’

I said, ‘I presume some of your charges do a runner occasionally.’

She laughed. It brought her face alive. She was very attractive. ‘They do from time to time, and we notify the Department of Community Services and they handle the business of looking for them. They generally find them in a few days, back in their old haunts.’

‘And you didn’t have one like that in late ’85?’

She clasped her hands. ‘Mr Faraday, I’m happy to answer your questions but I’m not sure what this is about.’

I wasn’t sure either but I said, ‘I had the vague thought that Ned’s death might be connected with something that happened here in 1985.’

She was looking at me in a way that said she had grave doubts about my grip on reality. ‘I’ll find out,’ she said. ‘It’ll take a few minutes. Can I offer you coffee? Tea?’

I declined and she left me. I walked around the room looking at the pictures. The paintings were all oils, small, signed by the same hand-B.I. or B.L. From a distance they looked like bush campfire scenes. Close up, they had the power to disturb. Something unpleasant seemed to be happening in them, primitive sacrifice or torture, people in poses of prayer and supplication and indistinct flesh-toned objects in the flames. There were six of them, not markedly different, not hung in any order I could detect.

Marcia Carrier was in most of the photographs, family scenes with another dark-haired girl and a couple who might have been their grandparents. The man was stern-looking, handsome, hair intact, cleft chin. The woman was overweight, dowdy. I went back to looking at the paintings.

‘Painted by my father,’ Marcia Carrier said. ‘Just a weekend painter.’

‘Very dramatic weekend painter,’ I said.

She laughed again. ‘I must say I don’t quite understand them. Now. There was no-one absent without permission from here in late 1985. In fact, no-one strayed in 1985. Two girls took unofficial leave in 1986, both returned to us within a fortnight. Is that helpful?’

I said, ‘Thanks. I won’t waste any more of your time.’ ‘Coffee’s on its way,’ she said. ‘I insist.’

I sat down. The secretary came in with a tray holding a silver coffee jug, big French coffee cups, warm milk, shortbread. Marcia Carrier poured.

‘What sort of work do you do, Mr Faraday?’

‘I’m a blacksmith, metalworker.’

‘Really? I’ve never met a blacksmith. How do you become one?’

‘Years of training under a master craftsman. Intensive study of the properties of metals. Also, you have to be able to hit hot things with a really heavy hammer. How do you get to run a place like this?’

Her serious look did not leave her. ‘Well, you have to be a public-spirited person, utterly selfless, with an abiding faith in the essential goodness of human beings. You also need a deep understanding of psychology. Then you have to be a superb administrator who thinks nothing of working long and unpredictable hours.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘basically anyone can apply.’

She had an engaging laugh. ‘Your inmates…’ I said.

‘Clients.’

‘Clients. How do they get here?’

She was serious now. ‘The courts send us all sorts of girls-rich kids, poor kids, kids you can help, kids you can’t. They’ve all got one thing in common. No-one wants them except for the worst reasons. They’ve usually landed up on the street and someone, sometimes a number of people, is pushing them towards drugs and prostitution. If no-one intervenes, most of them won’t see twenty. If the department can convince a court that a girl’s in significant danger, she might get sent here.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘We try our best to help them. You have to understand, some of these girls have had no childhood. Shunted around, never felt wanted, sex at an early age, often raped. They’re fifteen going on forty. Our aim is to convince them that their lives have worth and that they can live worthwhile lives.’

I had the feeling she’d said all this before. Many times. ‘Doesn’t sound easy,’ I said.

‘No.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Mostly we’re too late. And for some girls I sometimes think it’s always too late.’

I didn’t say anything.

She turned her eyes on me. ‘Do you believe in evil, Mr Faraday?’

I thought about this for a while. It wasn’t the kind of question people often asked me. Finally I said, ‘I don’t doubt that some people are evil. I’m not sure there’s an evil that’s independent of evil people.’

Marcia Carrier nodded. ‘Have you noticed,’ she said, ‘that evil people have a kind of force about them? A kind of independence? It’s a very powerful thing to have. It’s a stillness, an absence of doubt, an indifference to the world. It draws people to them. The moral vacuum sucks people in. The weak go to the strong. We see girls like that here. Some of them come on like victims, like wounded creatures. But sooner or later the other side shows through. The side that’s the predator, the side that inflicts wounds. The evil side.’

She shook her head, quick self-chastising movement. ‘But that’s all too serious,’ she said. ‘We do what we can for the girls. They can study if they want to. Some do. For others, it’s too late. For now anyway. For them, we have a range of programs. Self-esteem. Life skills. Job skills. That sort of thing.’

That was the end of talking about Kinross Hall. She moved the conversation over to the possibility of spring ever coming. We talked about coffee-making, her ignorance of football, the effects of sun deprivation. It was an easy exchange. When I got up to go, she said, ‘This is going to nag at me. I’ll have another look at the records, see if there’s anything I didn’t spot that might have worried Mr Lowey. What’s your phone number?’

At the door, we shook hands. She had a nice, dry grip and she held it for a second.

‘I’m pleased to have met a blacksmith, Mr Faraday,’ she said.

‘Mac.’

‘Marcia.’

The security man had the gate open when I rounded the corner. He gave me a little wave.

I went home, lit the Ned Kelly in the forge and got back to work on the knives. I had made my first knife for George Tan, a chef friend of Vinnie the publican. He’d lost the index finger on his chopping hand to a boat winch. When he got back to work after two months off, he found his knives unbalanced in his hand. George showed me the problem in the pub one Monday night, and I drew a knife shape that might compensate for the missing finger. It took four or five versions to get the distribution of weight right. George was ecstatic. He rang me to say he wanted a full set. Another chef in his kitchen, a ten-fingered one, tried the knives and ordered three. He showed them to a chef in Sydney, who ordered a full set. I now had orders for about thirty knives.

Filing and fitting, stove gradually warming the room, I thought about my visit to Kinross Hall.

I couldn’t believe Ned had gone to see Marcia Carrier about work. Ned never asked anyone for work. And leaving aside Ned’s nature, he had no need to drum up work. His diary showed an almost full workload of bookings for two or three months.

Marcia Carrier had not told me the real reason for Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall the day before he died. Why? I kept turning my meeting with her over in my mind. Then I went to the office and rang Detective Sergeant Michael Shea. He was out. They would pass on a message. I left my number. I was sorting out Allie’s appointments when the phone rang.

‘Shea.’

I said, ‘There’s something. Ned Lowey complained to the cops about Kinross Hall in late 1985. November. Can you check that?’

Silence. He cleared his throat. ‘November ’85? Why the fuck would I want to check that?’

‘You might find out something.’

There was a long silence. I could hear traffic noises. Then he said, ‘I’m the policeman.’

‘Trying to help,’ I said. ‘Don’t want that, fine.’

Silence again. Someone said something in the background. Probably skinhead Cotter. ‘Get back to you,’ Shea said.

In the half-awake dawn, rain hissing in the downpipes, I lay on my back and, for the first time in years, thought about the old life. When I’d come to my father’s house and the smithy to stay, I had schooled myself to shy away from thinking about my recent past until the people in it seemed unreal and unimportant, as if I’d created them or seen them in a film. In my mind, I called that the old life. I wanted a new life, a life among ordinary people, people like Ned and Stan Harrop and Flannery. Now Ned’s death had shaken everything loose and I didn’t try to fight the thoughts.

The old life. It had been my life for thirteen years. The old life. The Job. The endless, seamless job that had no clear beginning and was never finished. ‘Your job!’ Susan had screamed one night. ‘Don’t call it your fucking job! It’s not a job. It’s your fucking life! It’s your fucking personality! It’s you. It’s what you are. You don’t exist without it. There isn’t anything fucking else in your world, don’t you understand that?’

I did understand that. And then again I didn’t. Not that it made any difference. She left me anyway. I came home one day and she was on the pavement putting suitcases into her car. It was a sunny day in early spring and, from a full block away, I saw the gold of her hair catch the light. A flash, like sun on a helmet.

Another departure. My whole life seemed to be about departures. My father and I changing towns every year or two, the two of us packing everything into the truck, sometimes no-one to say goodbye to, driving away from some forlorn fibro house in the grey dawn. I used to put myself to sleep thinking about the towns, trying to picture the few friends I’d made. Wal in Cunnamulla who gave me a Joseph Rodgers pocketknife. Sleepy-eyed Gibbo in St George whose mother always wanted to feed me. Russell in Baradine whose dog had spotty pups. For many years, I had the feeling that it was vitally important to keep the memories of these and other people and places alive. To let them fade away would somehow be an act of betrayal, of disloyalty. Perhaps this was because I had no recollection of my mother, and I felt that this was somehow my fault, as if I had not cared enough about her, as if I had cast her off, thrown away her memory. Your mother. Other people’s mothers ask you about your mother. The fathers ask: ‘So what’s yer father do?’

Why did we keep moving? I never really understood. I asked my father once, one night in my first university vacation, watching him work in the smithy. He didn’t stop what he was doing. After a while, he said, ‘Never wanted to stop anywhere long after I lost your mum.’ There was a long silence, then he said, ‘Nothin’s forever, John. Enjoy what you can and don’t be scared to move along.’

Before I was in my teens, I could tell when we were going to move. My father became morose, pacing around at night, not fishing, not reading, saying things like: ‘Jesus, imagine endin up in a dump like this.’ Once that started, it was over. Mentally, he was already somewhere else. It only remained for me to tell the teacher and get my sealed envelope. And prepare myself for the fight.

That’s the thing I remember most clearly about the string of tiny towns that looked as if they’d been dumped on the site from the air. The fight in the first week. They trailed you after school like mongrels following a bitch on heat. Big boys, small boys, fat boys, thin boys, all aroused by the prospect of violence, strutting, jostling. You walked on, whole body tense, heart like a piston in your chest, feeling them getting closer, half hearing the taunts through the blood noise in your head. Then someone would try to trip you, usually a small one, over-excited, wide-eyed, flushed. Or a few would run past you, turn and block your path or dawdle along, finally stopping. That was the moment.

By the time I was twelve, I’d learned to short-circuit the process, stop, turn, issue the challenge, draw out some pale-eyed, mouth-breathing boy, spitty lips, hands too big for his wrists. You couldn’t win these fights. Some bigger boy always dragged you off if you got the upper hand. But what my father taught me was that you had to show the whole baying mob that you were a dangerous person, a person prepared to kick, bite, pull hair, tear ears, gouge eyes, squeeze testicles, anything. ‘Don’t worry about fair,’ he said. ‘Dangerous is what you want to be. Go mad. Nobody wants to fight a mad person. Nobody wants fingers stuck up his nose.’

He was right. He also taught me the barfighters’ tricks: the quick chest shoves to get the opponent off balance, the heel scraping down the shin and stamping on the instep, the Adam’s apple punch, the thumbs pressing under the ears, the chop under the nose, the many painful uses of the elbow, the double ear slap, the protruding knuckle in the chestbone. I learned these things and I survived.

Ned Lowey. In all this movement, this rootlessness, this life in shabby houses and scuffed caravan parks and shearers’ quarters that smelled of sweat and ashes, Ned Lowey was the still point. We were on our way to another town, another fight, another departure, when I met him for the first time. It must have been some time after my ninth birthday, but I had been hearing about Ned as far back as I could remember, things like ‘We need bloody Ned Lowey for work like this’, or ‘Here’s a little trick Ned Lowey showed me’, or, at picnic races, ‘Back Ned Lowey ridin sidesaddle against this lot’. We drove into Ned’s backyard and he came out and shook hands with my father. They stood there smiling and slapping each other’s arms.

‘This is the young fella,’ my father said. ‘John. We named him for the wife’s father.’ I remember my surprise at two things. One was that Ned was Aboriginal. My father had never mentioned it. The other was that Ned Lowey was not a giant. I remember that he took me by the shoulders, picked me up and held me to his chest. Then we went into the house to meet his wife. She was sitting in a patch of sun in the kitchen, not doing anything, a gaunt woman with faded blonde hair. I knew without being told that there was something wrong with her.

Ned Lowey. I shook the thoughts away and got up. By seven am, I was in the smithy getting ready to start work on Frank Cullen’s latest contraption. Frank inherited the huge property that had been in his wife’s family, the Pettifers, for generations. That was the end of farming. Now he spent all his time designing strange and usually counterproductive devices. Every six months or so, he came in with a set of plans for another machine that was going to change the face of rural life. The first one I made for him was designed to help elderly farmers mount horses. It featured a hydraulic piston and was said to have enabled the test jockey to mount a tree. The latest one was a sort of tray on wheels that fitted on the back of a ute. By fitting tracks, the tray could be run off the back and loaded. A winch operated by the driver then pulled it back up.

‘Came to me in a flash, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Can’t think why no-one’s ever thought of it.’

‘Takes a special kind of mind,’ I said.

It was almost noon and I had just finished welding the heavy-gauge steel mesh into the angle-iron base when Frank and Jim Caswell arrived. Jim was rumoured to be old man Pettifer’s illegitimate son. Frank was somewhere in his seventies with a big, bony head, patches of hair, exploding eyebrows and ears like baseball mitts. Jim was about fifteen years younger, full head of grey hair cut short, small-featured, neat. He looked like a clerk in some old-fashioned shop. Usually they both wore the squatter’s uniform: tweed jacket, moleskins, blue shirt and tie. Today Jim was in a dark suit, white shirt and navy tie.

They sat down on the bench against the wall and watched me marking the position of the axle mountings. These visits were a feature of the construction period.

‘Nice job so far, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Paying attention to the plans? Worked out in every detail.’

‘Like I was building a Saturn VI,’ I said.

‘Good man.’ He turned to Jim. ‘So who was there?’

‘Langs, Rourkes. Carvers, Veenes, Chamberlain, Charlie Thomson, Ormerods, Caseys, Mrs Radley, Frasers. Just about everyone. Old Scott.’

‘Old Scott?’ Frank said. ‘Danny Wallace hated the miserable old bastard. What did he want?’

‘Same as everyone else, I s’pose. Came to pay his respects.’

‘Anybody ask after me?’

‘No.’

Frank scratched a moulting patch of hair. ‘Not a word? What about old Byrne? He must’ve noticed I wasn’t there.’

‘Didn’t say anything.’

‘Well,’ said Frank. ‘That’s that bloody mob for you. I knew Danny Wallace since ’47, day I king-hit him in the Golden Fleece. Used to put him to bed. That drunk he’d get on a horse backwards.’ He patted his jacket. ‘What happened to my smokes?’

‘I though he was cryin a bit at the end,’ Jim said. ‘By the grave.’

‘Who?’

‘Old Kellaway.’

Frank found his cigarettes and lit one with a big gold lighter. He coughed for a while, then he said. ‘Old Kellaway? Bloody crocodile tears. Sanctimonious old bastard. Spent his whole life crawlin up the cracks of the rich. You know where the bastard was in the war? Y’know?’

‘I know,’ Jim said.

‘Chaplain in the Navy, bloody Australian Navy, two pisspots and a tin bath. Hearin the bunnyboys’ confessions.’ He put on a high voice. ‘ “Forgive me, father, I cracked a fat at Mass.” ’ Then a deep voice: ‘ “My son, the Lord forbids us to lust after petty officers’ bums. Say fifty Hail Marys and, report to my cabin after lights out.” ’

‘He’s all right,’ Jim said. ‘Hasn’t been much of a life for him.’

‘All right?’ said Frank. ‘All right? He’s far from bloody all right. If he was all right he’d never have landed up here so he wouldn’t have much of a life. He’d a been a bloody cardinal, wouldn’t he?’

Frank took a small leather-bound flask out of his inside pocket. ‘Just thinkin about bloody Kellaway gives me a need for drink,’ he said. He took off the cap and had a good swig.

Jim muttered something.

‘What’s that?’ Frank said, wiping his lips. ‘You say somethin?’

‘Nothin.’

‘Don’t bloody nothin me. Somethin to say, spit it out.’

‘Bit early for the piss, innit?’

Frank nodded knowingly. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘don’t come the fuckin little prig with me. I’ve had disapproval from a whole family of disapproval experts. I feel like it, I’ll give myself a whisky enema for breakfast.’

I was looking at the plan. ‘What’s this twisty thing you’ve drawn here, Frank?’

He eased himself up and came over. ‘It’s a spring, Mac. A shock absorber.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘That horse mounter needed a shock absorber.’

‘I need a bloody shock absorber,’ Frank said. ‘Shares goin down like the Titanic and the bastards call an election. This country’s buggered, y’know that, Mac. Get butchered for bloody king and country twice, then it’s for the Yanks. Now everythin’s for sale. Power stations. Telephone. Bloody airports. Negative gear this bloody Parliament buildin chock-a-block with liars, thousands of bloody bent police thrown in. Buy the whole country.’

‘What about Crewe?’ I said. ‘Going to get back, is he?’ I went over to the cabinet to look for some suitable springs for the shock absorber.

‘Anthony Crewe,’ Frank said. ‘Lord only knows how they made that bastard attorney-general. Bloody miscarriage of justice if ever there was one. Done that shonky will for old Morrissey.’

‘That’s enough, Frank,’ Jim said.

Frank turned his big head slowly. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

Jim looked away. ‘You know what Mr Petty always said about repeatin gossip.’

A look somewhere between pleasure and pain came over Frank’s face. ‘Little man,’ he said, ‘don’t quote The Great Squatter to me. I’ve told you that before. I had those sayins straight from the horse’s arse for thirty-five years. Now a miniature ghost of the old shit follows me around repeatin them. Is that what they mean by everlastin life? You’re dead but your miserable opinions linger on to haunt the livin?’

He turned back to me. ‘Now, as I was sayin, the bastard Crewe shoulda been in jail over that will.’

‘What will?’ I was looking in the box for springs.

‘Will he produced after old Morrissey turned up his toes. Half the bloody estate to the physiothingamajig. Who happens to be Mr Shonky Crewe’s current rootee. Lorraine was her name, I recall. Latest in a long line. Once he got his cut, he was into that Kinross Hall warder. Dr Marcia somethin or other. All legs and hair.’

I looked up. ‘Crewe had an affair with Marcia Carrier?’

‘That’s what they say,’ Frank said. ‘He’s the boss cockie out there, y’know. Chairman of the council, whatever. They should take a bloody good look at that place. God knows what goes on there. I see the quack switched off his lights the other day. Hanged himself down there in Footscray. Least he picked a place with a decent footy team.’

‘Frank,’ Jim said. He had a habit of sitting with his hands clamped between his knees, palms together.

‘Shut up,’ Frank said. ‘Dr Barbie. Good name, eh? I’d take the wife rowin, though. That Irene.’

‘What’s he got to do with it?’ I said.

Frank lit another cigarette. It started a coughing fit. When it ended, he wiped moist eyes and said, ‘Where was I?’

‘Dr Barbie. Where’s he fit in?’

‘Kinross quack. Inherited the job from old Crewe. Looks just like old Crewe, too. Now Dr Barbie’s mum, she was the receptionist for umpteen bloody years.’

‘You never bloody stop, do you?’ Jim said.

‘Take that girl Sim Walsh picked up,’ Frank said. ‘Now where did she come from? Naked as your Eve. On Colson’s Road. Out there in the middle of the night. Covered in blood. Been whipped like a horse.’

‘That’s serious,’ I said.

‘Bloody oath. Told me about it one night he’d pushed the boat out to bloody Tasmania.’

‘Drunk talk,’ said Jim. ‘Sim Walsh was drunk for forty years. Most likely made the whole thing up.’

I said, ‘When was this?’

‘Good way back,’ Frank said. ‘Around ’82, could be ’83. Thereabouts.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothin. Said he took her home, cleaned her up. Girl wouldn’t go to hospital, wouldn’t go to the police. Scared out of her wits. Put her to bed. Next day, gone.’

‘She tell him what happened?’

‘No. Kept talkin about a bloke called Ken. You got springs, then?’

‘I want the right springs,’ I said. ‘Not any old springs. Who was the girl?’

Frank stumped over to the door and flicked his cigarette end into the yard. ‘Juvenile harlot from Kinross Hall,’ he said.

‘She told him that?’

Frank thought about this. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘near enough. Sim said she was ravin. Drugs, he reckoned. Mind you, he was ravin a bit himself that night.’

‘Never reported it?’ I said.

‘Don’t know,’ Frank said. ‘Come round the next day, eyes narrer as bloody stamps side-on. Said, do me a favour, what I said about that girl, forget it. Load of rubbish I made up.’

‘And here you are doin it,’ said Jim. ‘He told you it was a load of rubbish. What more d’ya want?’

‘I want you to keep your mouth shut,’ Frank said. ‘Sim didn’t make it up. He could bloody bignote himself-me and Douglas Bader and Sailor Malan saved the world from the bloody Nazis-but he wouldn’t make anythin up. Not out of nothin. Not in his nature. Oh no, it happened. Believe you me. He never came near me after that. Saw me comin, he’d cross the street. Another bugger I wouldn’t go to his bloody funeral.’

Alex Rickard was ten minutes late but that was a misdemeanour by his standards. ‘Mac, Mac,’ he said, sliding onto the plastic barstool seat. ‘Back from the fucking dead. Where you been, mate?’

‘Here and there,’ I said. ‘What is it with you and these grunge pits?’

Alex looked around at the pub: yellow smoke-stained walls, plastic furniture, scratched and cigarette-burnt formica-topped bar, three customers who looked like stroke victims. It was on Sydney Road and John Laws was braying at full volume to overcome Melbourne’s worst traffic noise. The house smell was a mixture of burnt diesel, stale beer, and carbolic. ‘I dunno,’ he said, shrugging his boxer’s shoulders in the expensive sports coat. ‘It’s the kind of bloke I am. True to my roots.’

‘That’s the thing they all value most about you,’ I said.

‘You drinking?’ said the barman. He’d modelled his appearance on the barmen in early Clint Eastwood westerns.

‘Beer,’ said Alex. I ordered a gin and tonic. I wasn’t going to drink anything that came up from this pub’s cellar.

‘No tonic,’ said the barman. ‘No call for it.’

‘What do they drink gin with?’ I said.

‘Coke,’ said the barman. ‘You drink Coke with gin.’

‘Whisky and water,’ I said. ‘You got any call for water?’

He muttered something and left.

Alex rubbed the tip of his long nose between finger and thumb. ‘Y’know a Painter and Docker got it right where you’re sitting?’ he said. ‘Bloke walked in the door, up behind him, took this big fucking.38 out the front of his anorak. Three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Back of the head, two in the spine. Walks out the door. Gone.’

‘They get him?’ I said.

‘No witnesses,’ Alex said. ‘Sixteen people in the pub, no-one saw a fucking thing.’

‘Funny that,’ I said. ‘You get so wrapped up talking footy, they shoot someone next to you, covers you with blood, you don’t notice a thing.’

The drinks arrived. Alex paid, keeping his wallet well below the counter. ‘So they say you looked the other way on Lefroy,’ he said, not looking at me.

‘Who’s they?’

‘I done a few jobs for Scully.’

‘Scully tell you?’

‘Nah. The offsider.’

‘Hill? Bianchi?’

‘Hill. Bianchi’s dead. Went to Queensland and drowned.’

‘Wonderful news,’ I said. ‘Saves me killing him. Listen, your boy any good on the Human Services Department?’

He flicked his eyes at me, away, back. ‘Human Services? What the fuck you want with Human Services? They dealing now?’

‘It’s a private thing. I need the records of a place called Kinross Hall for 1985. It’s a kind of girls’ home. Who went in, who came out. All that.’

Alex drank some beer, took out a packet of Camel. ‘Smoke?’

I shook my head.

He lit up, blew plumes out of his nostrils. ‘Could be easy. Could be fucking hard. It’s in the database, my boy’s probably in there like a honeymoon prick. Not-well, there’s ways. But it’ll cost.’

‘How long to find out?’

Alex took out a grubby little notebook and a pen. ‘How d’ya spell this place?’

I told him.

‘Eighty-five. What’s the mobile?’

I gave him my number.

‘He can probably get in and look at the database inside an hour. Not there, I’ll have to think. I’ve got this sheila in the archives, knockers absent but Jesus, the arse on her. She can get all kinds of stuff. Thinks it’s sexy. Like I’m a spy.’

‘In your special way, Alex,’ I said, ‘you are. Want to talk about money?’

He gave me a long look, drawing on the cigarette. There was something of the fox about him. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Maybe if we have to go the next step.’

I was looking at the military history shelf in Hill of Content bookshop when the phone rang. I went outside into Bourke Street. It was lunchtime, street full of smart people in black.

‘That thing we were talking about,’ Alex said.

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t have to go the next step. Where are you?’

‘Bourke Street. I’m parked in Hardware Lane.’

‘The one on the corner?’

‘Right.’

‘I’m closer than you are. See you outside the side door.’

I spotted him from a long way away, across the lane, back to the car park, brown packet under his arm. When I got close enough, I saw him watching me in the shop window. I gave a spy-type wave, close to the hip. He turned and came over.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Fucking phone book of stuff. Boy downloaded all the ’85 material in the file.’

I took the packet. ‘How’d he get in?’

Alex smiled his foxish smile. ‘They’ve got a link with Social Security. He reckons their data protection’s good as a knitted condom.’

‘What’s the bill?’

‘I’ll put it in the bank,’ Alex said. ‘Day will come.’

We shook hands. He looked at me for a while, deciding something. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. He walked off, hand in pockets, chin up, at ease with himself.

It was just before dark as I entered the home straight, the long avenue of bare poplars, the light turning steely blue-grey, the wet road shining like a blade. I was thinking about the girl in the mine shaft. Could she have been brought from far away? Whoever pushed her into the hole in the ground had to know that it was there: you wouldn’t travel a long distance with a dead body unless you had some burial spot in mind. Perhaps a local person, someone who knew the area, had murdered the girl in Melbourne. Had the police eliminated all the girls missing in Melbourne around that time? Surely not.

But why would Ned be interested in the finding of her body? Why did he go to Kinross Hall?

Allie was still working in the smithy. Face shining, she was making curtain poles, bending and twisting the red-hot iron into shepherd’s crook shapes with smooth, economic movements. I stood in the doorway watching her. She reminded me of my father at work. I was never going to be that good.

‘Looking smart,’ she said, putting the last pole in the rack. ‘Debonair, even. That’s the first time I’ve seen you wearing a tie.’

‘You only had to ask,’ I said, taking it off and putting it in a jacket pocket. Everything all right here?’

‘Booming,’ she said. ‘Woman over at Kyneton wants two sets of gates. She saw the ones you made for Alan Frith.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Frith doesn’t pay for his inside a week, I’ll take them round to her.’

‘And a man called Flannery was here. He put a case of beer in the office.’

‘That’s nice too,’ I said. ‘How many did he drink?’

‘Just one.’

‘Must be Lent,’ I said. ‘You in a hurry?’

She looked at me speculatively. ‘No.’

‘Mind helping me read something?’ I told her about Ned working at Kinross Hall in 1985, Mick Doolan’s story about the complaint to the police, Ned’s visit four days before his death, and my meeting with Marcia Carrier.

‘Pretty weird,’ she said. ‘What’s the reading matter?’

‘Kinross Hall records.’

‘How’d you get them?’

‘Some bloke gave them to me. I forget who.’

She scratched her short hair, face impassive. ‘Maybe it was the same bloke who told you about Alan Snelling and you’ve developed a block about remembering him.’

I tore the continuous print-out Alex had given me into pages while Allie showered. She came back in jeans, a grey polo-necked sweater and her half-length Drizabone, and we walked down the road. Her skew nose and wet and shiny crew cut gave her the look of a boxer. A rather sexy female boxer. She caught me looking at her.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

The pub was empty except for Vinnie and George Beale playing draughts and a farmer reading the Weekly Times at the bar. We got two beers and went into the small lounge where a fire was dying in the grate. I fed it some kindling and a log from the bin.

‘I’m hoping there’s something that’ll jump out at you,’ I said, giving her half of the print-out pages.

‘Like what?’

‘Christ knows. Something happening to a girl. Trouble of some kind. Anything out of the ordinary.’

We settled down in the sagging armchairs and started reading. I’d taken the first half of 1985 and it quickly became clear that the department liked paperwork. Kinross Hall filed monthly accounts, fortnightly pay sheets, weekly lists of admissions and discharges, and reports by Dr Ian Barbie on medical visits. Every three months, it produced a budget operating statement and a report card on each inmate. The department filed full personal dossiers on all new admissions. Once a month, Kinross Hall was visited by two senior department staff and they filed a report.

It took us more than an hour to skim through the printouts. Midway, I fetched more beer. Finally, Allie said, ‘Well, nothing sticks out to me. I mean, here’s a major event. The inspectors had four written complaints about the food in October. Dr Carrier says the reason was the cook was off sick and the second in charge was having domestic troubles and basically couldn’t give a bugger about the food.’

‘No-one jump the wire in November?’ I said.

‘No. There were five admissions and three discharges in November. The three had all turned seventeen. They don’t seem to be able to hold them after that.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘The hot water system broke down.’

‘You hungry?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got a farm chook, raised on insects and berries in the wild.’

‘Now you tell me. I’m going out.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘hot date with Alan Snelling could be better than a hot chook.’

‘It’s not Alan Snelling. You took the shine off Alan Snelling. A vet.’

‘Pure animal, some vets,’ I said.

She smiled at me. ‘This one comes on like he’s got a Rottweiler stuffed down the front of his jeans.’

‘Probably a Jack Russell thinks it’s a Rottweiler.’

‘It’s not the size of the bite that counts.’

‘What counts?’

‘How long they gnaw at you.’

At home, Mick Doolan and Lew were watching a golf video. As I came in the door, Mick was saying, ‘It’s all that wantin to hit the ball to kingdom come, lad. Bin the ruination of many a great talent. What I’m tryin to do is to get you to play the game backwards.’

‘But drivin’s where the game starts,’ Lew said.

‘And ends fer a lotta the fellas. We’ll get to the drivin. We’ve got the puttin down flat. Now we’ve got to get the approach right. Not twice outta ten, not three times. Ten outta ten. Lookit this fella on the screen here. Ya can’t putt like that. See. Bloody country mile.’

‘Can’t you watch porn videos like everyone else?’ I said.

Mick looked around. ‘When I’m done coachin this lad,’ he said, ‘they’ll be askin us to star in the porno videos.’

‘Golf porn,’ I said. ‘There could be a market for that.’

I went to work on the chicken. My father’s recipe, made a hundred times: rub the skin with butter, stuff with a mixture of breadcrumbs, finely chopped onion, Worcester sauce, grated lemon rind, chopped raisins, half a cup of brandy. Stick in oven until brown.

I opened a bottle of the Maglieri. Mick came in to say goodnight and had a glass. He studied the label. ‘Lay this drop on,’ he said, ‘they’d be fightin to get in for communion.’ 74

After supper, Lew and I played Scrabble. He was good with small words, quick to see possibilities.

‘ “Zugzwang”?’ I said. ‘Two zs. What kind of a word is “zugzwang”?’

‘You challengin it?’

‘Zugzwang? I am most certainly challenging zugzwang.’

‘We playin double score penalty for failed challenges?’

‘We are. And we are playing minus-score penalty to a player who doesn’t take the opportunity to withdraw when challenged. Are you withdrawing zugzwang?’

‘Surprised at you, Mac. Everybody knows zugzwang.’

‘Withdrawing, Lewis? Last chance.’ I put my hand on the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

‘Open it,’ he said. ‘At “z”.’

I did. ‘Zugbloodyzwang,’ I said. ‘You little…’

There was no recovering from zugzwang. We were packing up, when I said, ‘Think about what I said about school?’

He didn’t look at me. ‘Thinkin about it,’ he said. ‘Thinkin about it a lot.’

When Lew went off to bed, I put another log on the fire, fetched a glass of the red, got out a book Stan had lent me called The Plant Hunter: A Life of Colonel A. E. Hillary. I was on page four when Lew came in wearing pyjamas.

‘Forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘I was lookin in Ned’s Kingswood for my stopwatch. He used to take me out on the road and drop me for my run and I left the watch in the car one day.’ He held out a piece of paper. ‘This was on the floor.’

I took it. It was a ticket from a parking machine, a Footscray Council parking machine in the Footscray Library parking area. It was valid until 3.30 pm on 11 July. That was two days before Ned’s death.

‘Make sense to you?’ I said.

Lew shook his head. ‘Ned had to go to Melbourne, he started complainin a month before.’

‘Must be some explanation,’ I said. ‘Sleep well.’

When he’d gone, I got out the Melways street directory and found the Footscray Library parking lot. Then I got the Melbourne White Pages and looked up Dr Ian Barbie.

I put the Melways and the phone book away, refilled my glass in the kitchen, slumped in the armchair staring at the fire.

Ned had parked within two hundred metres of Dr Barbie’s consulting rooms. Two days later, Ned was dead. Hanged. Two days after that, Dr Barbie was dead. Hanged.

The wind was coming up, moaning in the chimney, sound like a faraway wolf. The dog and I went out to the office in search of a telephone number I hadn’t used in years.

I saw Brendan Burrows from a long way away. He had a distinctive walk, his left shoulder dropping as his left heel hit the ground. Even from fifty metres, I could tell that he’d aged about twenty years since I’d last seen him. You could count the straw hairs he had left, deep lines ran down from the thin, sharp nose. It’s hard to be a policeman and an informer on your colleagues. The days are cold, the nights are worse.

‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting down next to me. ‘Used to be able to do this stuff on the phone. How ya goin? Fair while.’ We shook hands. The country train platform at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne held us and a fat woman, exhausted, and two small children bouncing off each other like atoms in some elemental physical process that produced tears.

He put his hand into his leather jacket and took out a sheet torn from a notebook. ‘Ian Ralph Barbie, forty-six, medical practitioner, 18 Ralston Street, Flemington, hanging by the neck in disused premises at 28 Varley Street, Footscray. Your man?’

I nodded.

‘Got this on the phone in a hurry. Body found approx eleven am, 16 July. Estimated time of death between nine pm and midnight, 15 July. Cause of death, a lot of technical shit, but it’s strangulation by hanging. Significant quantity of pethidine. Lots of tracks. No injuries. Last meal approx eight hours before death.’

‘On him?’

‘Wallet. Cards. No cash. Car clean like a rental. Jumped off the top. Drove inside the building, got on the roof, chucked the rope over a beam.’

‘Don’t you need some special knot for a noose?’

‘Something that’ll slip. Must’ve looked it up. There’s nothing isn’t in books.’

‘Note?’

‘No.’

‘Any interest?’

Brendan’s head turned slightly. A shaven-headed man in an anorak carrying a bulging sports bag was coming down the platform. His eyes flicked at us as he passed. You could hear Brendan’s jaws unlock.

‘They look at you,’ he said, ‘they’re not on.’ But he watched the man go down the concrete peninsula. ‘Need a break. You get para. You bastards owe me. No, no interest. Another medico on the peth, can’t take the lows anymore, goes out on a high. Happens with the quacks a lot. Guilt. Feel a lot of guilt. Pillars of fucking society sticking stuff up the arm. Don’t call peth the doctor’s drug for nothing. Still, dangling’s a worry. Unusual. Needle, that’s the way they go. You got it, you use it.’

‘That’s it, then?’

‘Well, watch’s gone, clear mark of watch on left wrist. Probably nicked by the deros.’

‘Deros?’

‘They found him.’

‘Right. Brendan, listen. Scully-what’s happened to him?’

‘Been livin in Queensland? Outer space? Good things only for the man. Next deputy commissioner. To be anointed soon.’

‘I’ve been away. How’d he do that?’

‘Plugged a bloke into Springvale, suburb of smack. Smackvale. Three years in the making. Had to import this cop from Vietnam. Any day now they’ll announce he’s delivered half the Vietcong and a fucking mountain of smack. Scully’s going to be the hero of the day. Course, most of the stuff’ll be back on the street by dark. Catch the upward move in price.’

‘He’s a lucky man.’

‘Blessed.’ Brendan looked around, scratched his scalp. ‘You heard the shit’s flying sideways about surveillance records? About ten years’ worth gone missing in Ridley Street.’

‘They’re on disk, right?’

He made a snorting sound, like a horse. ‘They scanned everything onto a hard drive, three sets of backup floppies. But the bloke taking the floppies over to Curzon Street for safekeeping, he got hit from behind by a truck. And while they’re sorting it out, his briefcase gets nicked. Can you believe that? Oh well, there’s always the paper. But no, all the paper has vanished. Fucking truckload. Well, this is bad, but thank Christ there’s the hard disk.’

Brendan paused, looking as happy as I’d seen him.

‘Guess,’ he said.

I’d guessed. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Hard drive’s like the Pope’s conscience. Not a fucking thing on it. Hacked into, they reckon. Supposed to be impossible.’

‘So?’

‘Lots of people happy.’

‘You reckon what?’

‘Dunno. People don’t get together to make something like that happen. More like one very big person got together with some friends. Couldn’t just take out the bit the person wanted, they took the lot.’

I said, ‘And you take the view one friend could be Scully. How come the Commissioner doesn’t think that too?’

Brendan gave me a long, unblinking stare. ‘Yeah, well, the view’s different from the thirtieth fucking floor. Ground level’s where you smell the garbage. They’re all overdue, that mob.’ ‘I hear Bianchi drowned.’

‘A fucking tragedy. Cop resigns, buys waterside mansion in Noosa with modest pension and savings. Found floating in river. New wife says he went out for a look at the new boat, she falls asleep. Exhausted from a marathon dicking probably. Next morning the neighbour sees poor Darren bobbing around like a turd.’

‘What about Hill?’

‘Bobby’s making lots of money in the baboon hire business. Calls himself a security consultant. Need muscle for your rock concert, nightclub, anything, Hill Associates got baboons on tap, any number. Also provides special security services for rich people. Drives this grey Merc.’

‘I knew the boy would amount to something.’ We shook hands. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’

‘I only do it because you can get me killed,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘You go first. I’ll just have a smoke, watch the trains a bit.’

I was a few paces away when he said, ‘Mac.’

I turned.

‘The Lefroy thing,’ he said. ‘I heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then.’

‘Yes?’

‘Mance was there too. That’s all I heard.’ He looked away.

‘Much maligned creatures, chooks,’ said Dot Walsh, frisbeeing out another precise arc of grain to the variegated flock of fowls. ‘Quite intelligent, some of them. Unlike sheep, which are uniformly stupid.’

She pointed to a large black-and-white bird. ‘That’s Helen, my favourite. After Helen of Troy.’

By her voice, Mrs Walsh was English, in her seventies, deeply lined but unbowed and undimmed, with hair cut short and sharp. I’d told her my business at the front door. She’d shown no interest in why I wanted to know more about the story her husband had told Frank Cullen.

‘I’m surprised Frank remembers it,’ she’d said. ‘I used to make a special trip to the tip with bottles after one of their sessions. Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters now that Simon’s gone. Come through. It’s chook feeding time.’

When she’d exhausted the grain, we went on a tour of the garden. Even in the bleak heart of winter, it was beautiful: huge bare oaks and elms, black against the asbestos sky, views of farmland at the end of long hedged paths, a pond with ducks, a rose walk that narrowed to a slim gate just wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

‘How big?’ I said.

‘Two acres,’ she said. ‘All that’s left of nearly a thousand. From a thousand acres to two in a generation. That was my Simon’s accomplishment. Simon and Johnny Walker Black Label. The old firm, he used to say. Still, he was a lovely man, lovely. Just unfirm of purpose.’

She moved her head like her hens as she talked, quick sideways jerks, little tilts, chin up, chin down, eyes darting.

I got on to the subject. ‘You never saw the girl that night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was in Queensland with Fiona, our daughter. She was having domestic trouble. Temperament like Simon, I’m afraid. Forty-six and still thinks that responsibility is something for grown-ups.’

‘Could you put a date on that trip?’

‘Oh yes. October 1985. My granddaughter had her tenth birthday while I was there.’

‘May I ask you what your husband told you happened?’

‘Simon ran out of cigarettes at about ten o’clock. It often happened. It was a Thursday night I think, my first night away. He drove down to the Milstead pub. He used to take the back roads. He was coming back down Colson’s Road, do you know it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, he came around a bend and there was this girl by the side of the road. Not a stitch on. Naked. She’d been beaten. He got her into the car and brought her back here.’

‘He didn’t think of going to the police?’

‘The police? No. He thought she needed medical attention.’

‘She was badly hurt?’

‘He thought so at first. Lots of blood. But most of it had come from her nose. That was swollen. Simon thought it might be broken. There were red puffy welts all over her body as if she had been whipped, he said. And she had scratches everywhere and dust and what looked like cement stuck to her. But he didn’t think she was seriously hurt.’

‘Why didn’t he take her to casualty?’

She gave me her sharp little look. ‘Simon was a drunk, Mr Faraday,’ she said, no irritation in her voice, ‘but he wasn’t a fool. It was half past ten at night. He would have had at least half a bottle of whisky under his belt by then. He’d already had his licence suspended once. The safest thing for both of them was to bring her here and get someone else to take her to hospital.’

‘Did he find out how she got her injuries?’

She didn’t answer for a while. We were walking between low walls of volcanic stone towards the back of the old redbrick farmhouse. The sky had cleared in the west and the last of the sun was warming an aged golden Labrador where it sat watching us, fat bottom flat on the verandah boards.

‘In the beginning, in the car, Simon said she was crying and babbling and saying the name “Ken” over and over again. He couldn’t get any sense out of her. He thought she was on drugs. When they got here, he gave her a gown to put on and he went to the telephone to ring Brian. That’s his nephew, he farms about ten minutes from here. He wanted Brian to take her to casualty. That’s when the girl attacked him.’

‘Attacked him?’

‘Tried to get the phone away from him and punched him.’

‘He’d told her what he was doing? Phoning someone to take her to hospital?’

‘I suppose so. He said she shouted, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll say you raped me”. Her nose was bleeding again and her blood got all over him. I saw his jumper when I got back.’

‘So he didn’t phone?’

‘No. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to, Mr Faraday. Went into shock, I imagine.’

We’d reached the verandah. The dog came upright by sliding its forelegs forward until they went over the edge and dropped to the first step.

‘This bloke’s in worse shape than I am,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘Needs two new hips. Can I offer you a beer? I have a Cooper’s Sparkling this time every day.’

We sat on the side verandah in the weak sun and drank beer. I had a pewter mug with a glass bottom and an inscription. I held the mug away from me to read it: To Sim, a mad Australian, from his comrades, 610 Squadron, Biggin Hill, 1944.

‘He was in the RAF,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘He was in England doing an agriculture course when the war broke out, so he joined up. He was billeted with my aunt for a while. That’s where I met him.’

I said, ‘Biggin Hill was a fighter station, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at the sky as if expecting to see a Spitfire come out of the sun. ‘He never got over the war. None of them did, really. All that expecting to die. Every day. For so long. And they were so young.’

A silence fell between us, not uneasy, until she said, ‘The girl calmed down after that, said she was sorry. Simon found some of Fiona’s pyjamas and a pair of her riding jeans and an old shirt. She showered and went to bed in the spare room. The bed’s always made. Simon said he brought her a mug of Milo but she was asleep. The next day, she asked if he could take her to a station and lend her the fare to Melbourne. Simon said she looked terrible, swollen nose, black eyes. He took her to Ballan, bought her ticket and gave her fifty dollars. And that was that.’

‘Did he find out her name?’

‘No.’

‘And he never reported it to anyone?’

‘No. He should have. It was too late by the time I got back.’

‘Did he think she was from Kinross Hall?’

‘Well, she wasn’t a local. You get to know the locals.’

‘But there wasn’t any other reason to think that?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever think about how she might have found herself in Colson’s Road?’

She shrugged, took a sip of beer. ‘Simon thought she might have been pushed out of a car.’

I finished my beer, got up, said my thanks. At the front gate, Mrs Walsh said, ‘Things left undone. Sins of omission. Most of us err more on that side, don’t you think, Mr Faraday?’

Howard Lefroy’s apartment, the blood up the tiled walls, came into my mind.

‘Amen,’ I said.

A naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. A naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in October 1985.

Ned worked at Kinross Hall in November 1985.

And never set foot there again. Until a few days before his murder.

I took the long way home, down Colson’s Road to Milstead in the closing day. There was a pine forest on the one side, scrubby salt-affected wetlands on the other. Dead redgums marked the line of a creek running northwest. The last of the light went no more than four or five metres into the pines. Beyond that, it was already cold, dark, sterile night. Nothing cheered the heart on this stretch of Colson’s Road.

Neither did anything in the bar at the Milstead pub. An L-shaped room with a lounge area to the right, it had fallen in the formica wars of the seventies. The barman was a thin, sallow man with greased-back curly hair and a big nose broken at least twice. A small letter J was crudely tattooed in the hollow of his throat. As an educated guess, I would have said four or five priors, at least one involving serious assault, and a degree or two from the stone college. He hadn’t studied beer pulling either.

‘Helpin out,’ he said, putting down the dripping glass. ‘Owner’s on the beach in fucking Bali, regular bloke got done this arvo, wouldn’t take the breathie, the bastards lock him up.’

‘Thought you had some rights,’ I said. ‘You local?’

He gave me a long look and made a judgment. ‘Wife,’ he said. ‘Well, ex, pretty much. Bitch. Fuckin family swarm around here. Get the motor goin, I’m off to WA. Bin there? Fuckin paradise.’

He took my five-dollar note and short-changed me without going near the till.

‘Who owns the pine forest down the road here?’ I said.

He was pouring himself a vodka. Three vodkas, in fact. ‘Wooden have a fuckin clue, mate.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ya breathin there, Denise? Who owns the pine forest?’

‘Silvateq Corporation,’ a husky voice said from around the corner. ‘S-i-l-v-a-t-e-q.’

I took my glass and made the trip. A woman somewhere out beyond seventy, face a carefully applied pink mask matching her tracksuit, was sitting at a round table playing patience. She was drinking a dark liquid out of a shot glass.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘John Faraday. What’s Silvateq Corporation?’

She looked me over and went back to the cards. ‘A company,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Is it local?’

‘Collins Street,’ she said. ‘They sent me a letter tellin me not to use their road. Their road. It’s bin a public track since God was in nappies. Wrote back, told ’em to bugger off. Not another word.’

‘They backed off?’

‘No. Put a bloody great barbed-wire fence across the road and dug a trench behind it. Looks like the bloody Somme.’

She took a sip of the black liquid and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Course the shire’s bought off. Only takes about ten quid.’

‘This was when?’

She flipped a card. ‘More than ten years. When did that Hawke get in?’

‘In ’82.’

‘Round about then. Bought it from old Veene. He planted the trees along the road. Twenty rows, I remember. This other bunch planted the rest. Know what they call bloody pine plantations? Green graveyard. Nothin lives in ’em.’

Green graveyard. I thought about that on the trip home. The mine shaft the girl was thrown down was in a pine forest near Rippon. How far was that from Colson’s Road?

On the way home, gloomy, I stopped at Flannery’s place, a small village of dangerously old sheds surrounding a weatherboard house. He lived with a cheerful nurse called Amy who wouldn’t marry him. ‘Marry a flogged-out backyard mechanic whose first wife walked off with a water diviner?’ she once said. ‘I’d need time to think about that. A lifetime.’

‘Just as easy been the fence bloke,’ Flannery had said, ‘but then I’da had a new fence. This bugger’s got a bit of wire, coathanger wire, picks three spots, bloody wire’s vibrating like a pit bull’s chain. Down we go, drillin halfway to the hot place, fifty bucks a metre. Two holes bone dry, third one a little piddle comes out, takes half an hour to fill the dog bowl. Still cry when I think about it.’

Flannery was in one of the sheds working under the hood of a Holden ute by the light of a portable hand lamp. The vehicle was covered in stickers saying things like Toot to Root and Emergency Sex Vehicle and Bulk Sperm Carrier.

‘My cousin’s boy’s,’ he said. ‘Virgin vehicle. Never had a girl in it.’

‘I can see he’s waiting for someone special,’ I said. ‘Listen, you know of Ned ever going around asking for jobs?’

Flannery was wiping his large hands on his jumper, a garment that qualified as a natural oil resource. ‘Ned? Ask for a job? You smokin something?’

‘Second question. He ever talk about a doctor called Ian Barbie?’

‘What’s this? Doctor? Ned wouldn’t know a doctor from a brown dog.’

I looked into the engine. ‘Dirty.’

‘Clean inside that matters,’ Flannery said. ‘Let’s go a beer. Got some in this little fridge over here, bought it off Mick.’

‘I can see the dent.’

‘What dent?’

‘Dent it got falling off the truck.’

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Making knives would be easy if all you wanted was a good knife. But you don’t. You want a perfect knife. And so, in the endless grinding and filing and fitting and buffing, the mind has plenty of time to dwell. Today, moist Irish day, sky the colour of sugar in suspension, I dwelt on Brendan Burrow’s parting words. All I wanted from Brendan were the details of Ian Barbie’s suicide. And then he said: The Lefroy thing. Heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then. And I said: Yes? And he said: Mance was there too.

Mance was there too.

The feeling of missing a step, of walking into a glass door, of being shaken from deep sleep. With Bianchi? At the same time as Bianchi? I knew the answer. Just before noon, I finished polishing a small paring knife and the dog and I went over to the office.

The file was at the back of the cabinet, not looked at for years. I sat down at the table and took out the record of interview. I didn’t want to read it again. I read it.

RECORD OF INTERVIEW

DATE: 5 June 1994.

TIME COMMENCED: 3.10 pm.

TIME TERMINATED: 3.25 pm.

NAME: MacArthur John Faraday, Detective Senior Sergeant, Australian Federal Police.

OFFICERS PRESENT: Colin Arthur Payne, Inspector, Australian Federal Police. Wayne Ronald Rapsey, Detective Inspector, Internal Affairs Division, Australian Federal Police. Joseph Musca, Detective Inspector, Victoria Police.

SUBJECT: Matters relating to the surveillance of Howard James Lefroy.

D-I RAPSEY: For the record, this is a resumption of the interview with Detective Faraday terminated at five forty-five pm yesterday. Detective, do you have anything to add to your statements yesterday?

DSS FARADAY: No. Sir.

D-I RAPSEY: I want to go over a few things. The decision to wait for Howard Lefroy to dispose of the heroin. You made it.

DSS FARADAY: Yes.

D-I RAPSEY: Did you inform your superiors that Lefroy was in possession of the heroin?

DSS FARADAY: No.

D-I RAPSEY: Why was that?

DSS FARADAY: I was afraid it would jeopardise the operation.

D-I RAPSEY: Reporting something to your superior officer would jeopardise an operation. Serious statement, detective.

DSS FARADAY: Yes, sir. As I said last time and the time before, it was not my superior officer I was worried about but other officers.

D-I RAPSEY: Equally serious. What was your reason for waiting?

DSS FARADAY: I believed Lefroy was dealing with a top-level distributor. We had no idea who. Just take Lefroy out, some other importer takes his place. Nail everyone at the pick-up, we at least have a chance of finding out who’s buying. Small chance, but a chance.

D-I RAPSEY: You say you discussed this with Inspector Scully.

DSS FARADAY: I told him. Correct.

D-I RAPSEY: What was his view?

DSS FARADAY: I don’t recall him offering a view.

D-I RAPSEY: Did he disagree?

DSS FARADAY: I don’t recall that he offered an opinion.

D-I RAPSEY: What if Inspector Scully says that he made it clear to you that he strongly opposed waiting for Lefroy to dispose of the heroin and wanted to…?

DSS FARADAY: He did not.

D-I RAPSEY: So he’d be lying?

DSS FARADAY: Draw your own conclusions.

D-I RAPSEY: Moving on. Howard Lefroy’s flat. Visual contact?

DSS FARADAY: Three windows. Only the dining room blinds were left open at night.

D-I RAPSEY: And audio?

DSS FARADAY: All rooms except the hall. Sitting room was weak. Had been for a couple of days.

D-I RAPSEY: Why didn’t you fix it?

DSS FARADAY: Too risky. Too close.

D-I RAPSEY: Too close to what?

DSS FARADAY: The pick-up.

D-I RAPSEY: There was going to be a pick-up at Lefroy’s place?

DSS FARADAY: According to my information.

D-I RAPSEY: Source?

DSS FARADAY: I had information.

INSP. PAYNE: Answer the question, Mac.

DSS FARADAY: Lefroy’s woman, Carlie Mance.

D-I RAPSEY: She was a registered informant?

DSS FARADAY: No. I believed registering my informant would endanger her.

D-I RAPSEY: You going to stick with this line?

DSS FARADAY: Yes, sir.

D-I RAPSEY: We’ll come back to it. Believe me, we’ll come back to it. Moving on. So Lefroy had five kilos of heroin in the flat and you were waiting for someone to come along and collect it?

DSS FARADAY: That’s correct.

D-I RAPSEY: How long were you going to wait?

DSS FARADAY: As I said before, I had reason to believe that we didn’t have long to wait.

D-I RAPSEY: How long had you been waiting?

DSS FARADAY: It’s on record.

D-I RAPSEY: Tell me.

DSS FARADAY: Two days.

D-I RAPSEY: According to Inspector Scully, you initially informed him that the pick-up would take place within four days of the heroin’s arrival at Lefroy’s flat. Is that correct?

DSS FARADAY: Yes.

D-I RAPSEY: How did you know?

DSS FARADAY: Informant.

D-I RAPSEY: Ms Mance? The unregistered informant?

DSS FARADAY: Correct.

D-I RAPSEY: We’ll revisit this. Moving on. Let’s talk about the night.

DSS FARADAY: This’ll be the third time.

INSP. PAYNE: Don’t be an arse, detective. You’re in serious trouble here. This isn’t about dry-cleaning on the house or free screws.

D-I RAPSEY: What time did Ms Mance arrive?

DSS FARADAY: Just before Howie went for his walk. Around noon.

D-I RAPSEY: What did they talk about?

DSS FARADAY: The usual. Nothing. Howie didn’t talk business to her.

D-I RAPSEY: So how did she know his business?

DSS FARADAY: She didn’t. All she knew was that the pick-up was going to be at Howie’s.

D-I RAPSEY: So Howard’s on his walk? What then?

DSS FARADAY: Dennis rang. Said he was coming around. Eight-thirty sharp.

D-I RAPSEY: You were listening?

DSS FARADAY: It sounded like Dennis. It still sounds like Dennis.

D-I RAPSEY: Dennis been to Howard’s place before? DSS

FARADAY: Not while we were on him, no.

D-I RAPSEY: Didn’t think it strange Dennis suddenly decides to visit Howard?

DSS FARADAY: They’re brothers. Their mother needs to go into a home and she doesn’t want to. Howie takes her side. Dennis is on the phone to Howie for weeks trying to talk him round and he’s getting nowhere. No, I didn’t think it was strange he wanted to see Howie.

INSP. PAYNE: Your people made a positive ID of Dennis when he showed up?

DSS FARADAY: Good as they could. Mackie knew him. His car. Tinted glass. We took pictures. We’ve enhanced them. Looks like him.

INSP. PAYNE: But they didn’t get a good look at him.

DSS FARADAY: They saw him for about thirty seconds. He drove up, the garage door opened, he drove in.

D-I RAPSEY: Opened?

DSS FARADAY: It’s a high-security building. You need a remote control with your own code to open the garage door. Or someone in the building can press a button and open it.

D-I RAPSEY: So someone was watching for Dennis?

DSS FARADAY: They knew when to expect him.

D-I RAPSEY: Who was on duty?

DSS FARADAY: Mackie and Allinson.

D-I RAPSEY: You didn’t think this was important enough for you to be there?

DSS FARADAY: No. Mackie knew Dennis. He knew Dennis better than I did. What would me being there help?

D-I RAPSEY: And with hindsight?

DSS FARADAY: With hindsight, I should have spent twenty-four hours a day on the job instead of just twenty.

D-I RAPSEY: Let’s go on. Mackie rang you.

DSS FARADAY: Correct. I was asleep.

D-I RAPSEY: What did he say?

DSS FARADAY: He said Dennis’d turned up.

D-I RAPSEY: And you said?

DSS FARADAY: I said: So?

D-I RAPSEY: Mackie suggested a tail on Dennis when he left. What was your response?

DSS FARADAY: I said no.

D-I RAPSEY: Didn’t even consider it? Five kilos of smack up there, brother shows up on short notice.

DSS FARADAY: Dennis is clean, no history, no connections. Rotary clean. In the time we covered him, he did nothing. He thinks Howie made his money on the stockmarket. He’s not going to courier smack for Howie.

D-I RAPSEY: So Dennis drives off. When did Mackie call you again?

DSS FARADAY: Nine o’clock. Just after.

D-I RAPSEY: The reason?

DSS FARADAY: He was worried about a call Howie made as Dennis came out.

D-I RAPSEY: Listened to it?

DSS FARADAY: I’ve listened to it.

D-I RAPSEY: Howard’s voice.

DSS FARADAY: Howie’s voice.

D-I RAPSEY: Sound a bit stagey?

DSS FARADAY: Yes.

D-I RAPSEY: Know the person on the other end?

DSS FARADAY: As you know, the person doesn’t say anything.

D-I RAPSEY: One-way conversation.

DSS FARADAY: Not unusual for Howie. They pick up the phone, he talks.

D-I RAPSEY: Never raised a doubt in your mind?

DSS FARADAY: Not when Mackie described it, no.

D-I RAPSEY: What did you tell Mackie?

DSS FARADAY: Told him I’d listen the next day.

D-I RAPSEY: Ten minutes later, he rings you again. What did he say this time?

DSS FARADAY: Someone rang Howie. Howie didn’t make any sense, didn’t answer questions, said goodbye in the middle of something the guy was saying.

D-I RAPSEY: That didn’t alarm you? Didn’t interest you?

DSS FARADAY: No. Sounded like vintage Howie.

D-I RAPSEY: And when you listened to the tape?

DSS FARADAY: I had the benefit of hindsight.

D-I RAPSEY: Would you have picked it if you’d been there?

DSS FARADAY: Yes.

D-I RAPSEY: And exactly when did you listen to the tape?

DSS FARADAY: The next day.

D-I RAPSEY: Mackie says he asked you to come back and listen. Is that right?

DSS FARADAY: He did.

D-I RAPSEY: And you didn’t.

DSS FARADAY: I didn’t see any reason to.

D-I RAPSEY: So let’s get this straight. Lefroy is sitting in his flat with five kilos. You believe that a pick-up could take place at any time. He gets a visit from his brother. Something that hasn’t happened before. Your man calls you to suggest a tail because he didn’t get a good look at Dennis. You say no. Howard makes a phone call to someone who doesn’t talk back. Your man calls you. Forget it, you say. Then someone calls Howard. and it sounds weird to your man. He calls you. You say, I’ll listen tomorrow. Is that a fair account?

DSS FARADAY: You have to understand, Mackie was new on Howie. I’ve listened to hundreds of Howie’s conversations. This stuff wasn’t weird for him.

D-I RAPSEY: Nothing else happened that night?

DSS FARADAY: No. Loud music. Stopped about midnight. Often that way.

D-I RAPSEY: No more calls.

DSS FARADAY: No.

D-I RAPSEY: Let’s go to the morning. What kind of routine did Lefroy have?

DSS FARADAY: Call to his broker. Six forty-five, Monday to Friday.

D-I RAPSEY: This Thursday he didn’t.

DSS FARADAY: No.

D-I RAPSEY: What else did he always do?

DSS FARADAY: Open all the curtains. Make coffee. Walk around naked. Phone people.

D-I RAPSEY: Didn’t happen either.

DSS FARADAY: No.

D-I RAPSEY: Who was on duty?

DSS FARADAY: O’Meara. Stand-in.

D-I RAPSEY: Briefed on Lefroy’s habits? Knew what to expect? Shown the log?

DSS FARADAY: He was a stand-in. He was covering for two hours.

D-I RAPSEY: What time did you show up?

DSS FARADAY: Just after seven am.

D-I RAPSEY: Was that late?

DSS FARADAY: Depends. I had a flat. Happens.

D-I RAPSEY: What did you do when you finally arrived?

DSS FARADAY: Listened to the tape. Two minutes. We went straight in.

Howard Lefroy was in the wide hallway, near the sitting room door. He was wearing one of his big fluffy cotton bathrobes, the one with navy blue trim. The carpet was pale pink, the colour of a sexual blush. Except around Howie’s head and upper body, where it was dark with his blood. He’d been killed where he lay, his head pulled back by the ponytail and his throat cut. More than cut. He was almost decapitated. The bathrobe was bunched around his waist, displaying his short hairy legs and big buttocks.

Carlie Mance was in the bathroom, naked. She had tape on her mouth and her wrists were taped to the chrome legs of the washbasin. The man had been behind her when he cut her throat, kneeling between her legs, a fistful of her dark, shiny hair in his right hand, dragging her head back.

Her blood went halfway up the mirror over the basin, a great jet that hit the glass and ran down in neat parallel lines.

I should have stayed to ID Dennis. Or I could have put Mackie in a car right outside the garage to ID him. Or we could have had Traffic Operations pull him over nearby and had a good look at him. Carlie would have been alive. Lefroy too, not that I cared about that: cheated, that’s all I felt when I saw him.

But I didn’t do any of those things…And I didn’t put a tail on the car. Thirteen years on the job and I didn’t do any of those things.

The portable phone had a device that looked like a dictation machine attached to it. Howard Lefroy was on the tape, the two phone calls that had made Mackie suspicious. They were composites.

D-I RAPSEY: Tell us about this lockup of yours.

DSS FARADAY: As I’ve said about twelve times, it’s not my lockup. I hired it for my wife. I took some of her stuff there. Once. I gave her the key.

D-I RAPSEY: We’re assuming here that it would be out of character for your wife to keep 100 grams of smack and $20 000 in cash in her lockup. Fair assumption?

DSS FARADAY: I’d go with it.

D-I RAPSEY: So it would belong to someone else. Right?

DSS FARADAY: Jesus, charge me, why don’t you?

D-I RAPSEY: In good time. You’ve had dealings with Howard Lefroy, haven’t you?

DSS FARADAY: Dealings? I don’t know about dealings. I was on a job where we tried to get in touch with him. Seven, eight years ago.

D-I RAPSEY: You tried to roll a bloke. One of Lefroy’s runners.

DSS FARADAY: We rolled him.

D-I RAPSEY: But it didn’t work out.

DSS FARADAY: No. We put him in a safe house and somebody came around and took him away.

D-I RAPSEY: Dead, would you say?

DSS FARADAY: I would say.

D-I RAPSEY: You aware the talk was Lefroy was tipped off?

DSS FARADAY: That is what generally happens in Sydney. People get tipped off.

D-I RAPSEY: By you?

DSS FARADAY: I’ll say yes? I’m supposed to say yes, am I? Trick question, is it?

D-I RAPSEY: So first Lefroy gets lucky with you around and then he gets unlucky.

DSS FARADAY: I’m sorry, is that a question?

D-I RAPSEY: It’s the central question on my mind, Detective Faraday. It’s the central question on many people’s minds. And we’ll answer it before we’re finished. Interview terminated at three twenty-five pm.

That wasn’t the last interview, not by a long way. But as I had sat there, looking at the men who weren’t looking at me, I had known without doubt that I wasn’t one of them anymore. It was the end of that life. Thirteen years. Thirteen years of belief and self-respect. Pride, even. Come to an end in a grubby little formica-lined office reeking of disbelief.

I could have lived with that. What I couldn’t live with was that my negligence, my confident negligence, killed Carlie Mance.

I put the file away, made a phone call and set off for Melbourne to look for the scene of Dr Ian Barbie’s end.

It took me the best part of two hours to get to Varley Street, Footscray. And when I got there, I didn’t want to be there. It was a short narrow one-way street that ended in the high fence of some sort of container storage depot. Newspaper pages, plastic bags, even what looked like a yellow nylon slipper had worked their way into the mesh.

The right side of the street was lined with the high rusting corrugated-iron walls of two factories. The steel doors of the first building appeared to have been the target of an assault with a battering ram, but they were holding. At the end of the street, one of a pair of huge doors to the second building was missing, leaving an opening big enough for a truck.

The left side of Varley Street consisted of about a dozen detached weatherboard houses, small, sad structures listing on rotten stumps behind sagging or collapsed wire fences. Several of them had been boarded up and one was enclosed by a four-metre-high barbed-wire fence. About a tonne of old catalogues and other pieces of junk mail had been dumped on the porch of the house three from the corner.

My instinct was to reverse out of Varley Street and go home. There was nothing to be gained here. But I parked at the end of the street outside a house that showed a sign of being lived in: a healthy plant was growing in a black nursery pot beside the yellow front door. I got out, locked the door, put on the yellow plastic raincoat I kept in the car, and crossed the street.

The missing door had opened on to what had probably been a loading bay, a large concrete-floored space with a platform against the right-hand wall, which had two large sliding doors in it.

Opposite the entrance was another doorway with both doors open. Trucks had once driven through to the tarmac courtyard visible beyond.

I walked out into the courtyard. There was a blank corrugated wall to the left, a low brick building that looked like offices to the right and ahead a high cinder-block wall. The day of the weeds had come. Everywhere they were pushing contemptuously through the tarmac and their reflections lay in the cold puddles in every depression.

To my right, about twenty metres along, there was another doorway, big enough for a vehicle.

I walked over and stood on the threshold.

It was a big space, dimly lit from small windows high in the street wall. People had been using it recently: there were deep ashes in a corner, surrounded by empty cigarette packets, beer cans and the ripped cartons and wrung-out bladders of wine casks. In the air was the chemical smell that comes from burning painted wood.

I walked into the middle of the space and looked up. The beams were low.

A voice said, ‘Not there, mate. Over to ya right, that’s where.’

There was a man standing in the doorway, a dark shape against the light. He came towards me, his details emerging as he moved into the gloom: long, unkempt grey hair, grey stubble turning to beard, thin body in a black overcoat over a tracksuit, battered training shoes, one without laces.

‘Ya come to see where the bloke strung hisself up, have ya?’ he said, stopping about five metres away.

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘Not a cop,’ he said. It was a statement of fact.

‘No.’

‘Got a smoke on ya?’

I shook my head.

‘Should be chargin admission. See that beam up there?’

He pointed at the roof to my left, to one of the trusses. The crossbeams were about four metres up. ‘Rope went over there. Jumped off the car roof.’

‘How d’you know that?’

‘No other way, mate. He was hangin there right up against the car, bout three feet off the ground. Head looked like it was gonna pop.’

‘Did you find him?’

‘Na. Me mate Boris. But I was right behind.’

I took a short walk, looking up the beam, looking at the floor, looking at the campfire zone. I came back and stopped a short distance from the man. The skin under his eyes was flaking.

‘The bloke’s mum asked me to take a look,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Be a bit upsettin, rich bloke an all.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robbo, they call me. Robert’s me proper name.’

‘Robbo, how do you know he was a rich bloke?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Had a tie on, y’know. Funny that.’

‘Anything else catch your eye?’

‘Na. Tell ya the truth, I’d had a few. Went down the milk bar to call the cops.’

‘You and Boris know this place well?’

He looked around as if seeing it for the first time. ‘I reckon,’ he said. ‘Make a bit of a fire, have a drink.’

‘You do that often? Every night?’

‘When it’s warm we just stay in the park.’

‘Must have been pretty cold that night. How come you weren’t here?’

‘When?’

‘The night the bloke hanged himself.’

‘Dunno. Can’t remember.’

‘So you came here the next day. In the morning?’

Robbo fingered the skin under his left eye. ‘I reckon,’ he said. ‘Boris’d know. He’s a youngster.’

‘I might like to talk to Boris,’ I said. ‘Is he going to be around some time?’

Robbo looked off into the middle distance. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘ya see him and ya don’t.’

I took out my wallet and found a ten-dollar note. ‘Where do you buy your grog?’ I said.

‘Down the pub. Geelong Road. Just near the park.’ He waved vaguely.

‘They know your names there?’

He thought about it. After a while, he said, ‘Reckon.’

I gave him the ten dollars. ‘I’ll leave a message for you at the bottle shop. Be sure you tell Boris. I’ll give you another twenty each when I see him.’

He gave me a long look, nodded and shuffled off.

I carried on with my look around. The wood for the fire came from cupboards and counters in the office building. Only bits of the carcasses remained. Ripping up of the floorboards had started. To the left of the office building was a laneway ending in a gate, its frame distorted and with large pieces of mesh cut out.

There wasn’t anything else to look at, so I left. As I was driving away, I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw a boy of about twelve, one foot on a skateboard, watching me go. I hoped he didn’t have to do all his growing up in Varley Street.

The Streeton pub. Solid redbrick building, twenty metres long, small lounge on the left, bar on the right, standing at a skew crossroads on a windy hill. I made a hole in a steamed-up pane of a bar window and watched a Volvo pull up outside: Irene Barbie, short red hair lighting up the sombre day like the flare of a match. What daylight was left was retreating across the endless dark-soiled potato fields. She was wearing a tweed jacket and jeans, didn’t seem to notice the thin rain falling, took a small black suitcase from the front passenger seat and locked it in the boot. Vet’s bag, full of tempting animal drugs. It wasn’t an overly cautious thing to do: there were men drinking at the bar who looked capable of snorting Omo if it promised a reward.

I drained my glass and went through to the empty lounge to open the door for her. She was medium height, slim, nice lines on her face. It was hard to guess her age-somewhere in the forties. There was no grey in the springy red hair.

‘Mac Faraday,’ I said. ‘Irene?’

We shook hands.

‘I’ll take a drink,’ she said. ‘Double scotch. Just had a horse die on me. Perfectly healthy yesterday, now utterly lifeless. Massive bloody things go out like butterflies. Thank God there’s a fire.’

When I came back, she had her boots off and her feet, in red Explorer socks, warming in front of the grate.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Disgusting to take off your shoes in public, but I feel like I’ve got frostbite.’

‘I’d join you,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure my socks match.’

‘I changed mine at lunchtime,’ she said. ‘I had a gumboot full of liquid cow shit.’ She moved both sets of toes, waving at the fire.

We drank. I’d spoken to her on the phone. Allie knew her from working around the stables and that got me over the suspicion barrier.

‘She’s a real asset around here, Allie,’ she said. ‘District’s full of self-taught farriers.’ She had another large sip, put the glass on the floor beside the chair. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the pain is receding. I’ll tell you straight away, I had very little to do with Ian in the last two years.’

‘Something involving Ian puzzles me,’ I said. ‘A friend of mine, man called Ned Lowey, not a patient of Ian’s, went to see him in Footscray. Now they’re both dead. Both hanged. Ned, then Ian. Two days in between them.’

She was silent. Then she said, ‘Well, that’s hard to explain.’

‘I’m not convinced Ned killed himself,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you whether you could see Ian killing himself?’

She considered the question, looking at me steadily, grey eyes calm under straight eyebrows. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I could.’

‘Why’s that?’

Sip of whisky, audible expulsion of breath, wry face. ‘It’s not easy to talk about this.’ She looked into my eyes. ‘Are you married?’

‘Not any more. Does that disqualify me?’

‘People who haven’t been married have trouble understanding how things can change over the years. I was married to Ian for nearly twenty years and I knew less about him at the end than I did at the beginning. Yes, he could kill himself.’

Now you wait.

‘If you ask around about Ian, you won’t hear anything but praise. Everywhere I went, people used to tell me how wonderful he was. It’s worse now that he’s dead. People stop me in the street, tell me how they could ring him in the middle of the night, never get a referral to a duty doctor, never get an answering machine. How he’d talk to them for twenty minutes, calm them down, cheer them up, make them feel better, traipse out at two am to comfort some child, reassure the parents, hold some old lady’s hand. And it’s all true. He did those things.’

‘Sounds like the old-fashioned doctor everyone misses,’ I said.

She smiled, without humour. ‘Oh, he was. Like his partner, Geoff Crewe, seventy-nine not out. And Ian wasn’t just a good doctor. He was wonderful company. Mimic anyone, not cruelly, sharp wit. He noticed things, told funny stories, good listener.’

She looked around the room, looked into her glass.

‘But,’ I said.

‘Yes. The But. That was Ian’s public face. Well, it was his private face too. In the beginning. There was an unhappiness in Ian and it got worse over the years. After about five years, it was like living with an actor who played the part of a normal human being in the outside world and then became this morose, depressed person at home. He’d come home full of jokes, talkative, and an hour or two later he’d be slumped in a chair, staring at the ceiling. Or in his study, head on his arms at the desk, or pacing around. He cried out in his sleep at night. Almost every night. I’d wake up and hear him walking around the house in the small hours. He used to love skiing, one thing that was constant. Went to Europe or Canada every year for three weeks. Then he just dropped it. Stopped. If he’d been drinking, he’d try to hurt himself, hitting walls, doors. He put his fist through a mirror once. Forty stitches. You couldn’t reason with him. All you could do was wait until the mood swung. It happened a few times a year when we were first married. I was in love. I sort of liked it. It made him a romantic figure. In the end, we didn’t speak ten words a day to each other. I stuck it out until our daughter left home and then I left him.’

‘Did he have treatment?’

‘Not while I was with him. I’d try to talk to him about it but he wouldn’t, he’d leave the house, drive off, God knows where. And I was always too scared to push it for fear he’d do something in front of Alice.’

‘He wasn’t like that when you met him?’

‘You had to live with him to see that side. People who’d known him for donkey’s years had no idea. I met him at Melbourne Uni. He was fun, very bright, near the top of his class. We went out a few times, but I didn’t impress his friends and he dropped me. Then I met him again here when I started practice.’

‘He was a local?’

‘Oh yes. Part of a little group from here at uni. Tony Crewe, Andrew Stephens, Rick Veene.’

‘Tony Crewe-is that the MP?’

‘Yes. All rich kids. Except Ian. His father was a foundry worker. Left them when Ian was a baby. His mother was Tony’s father’s receptionist for about forty years. I think Geoff Crewe paid Ian’s way through St Malcolm’s and through uni. They ended up partners.’

‘And the group? Did Ian stay friends with the others?’

Irene had a sip of whisky, ran a hand through her hair. ‘It’s not clear to me that they ever were friends. Not friends as I understand friends. Mind you, I’m just a Colac girl. Ian was sort of…sort of in their thrall, do you know what I mean?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Andrew Stephens was a golden boy. Clever, rich, spoilt, got a sports car when he turned eighteen. Scary person, really. Completely reckless. His father was a Collins Street specialist, digestive complaints or something, friend of Geoff Crewe’s from Melbourne Uni. They were very close once, I gather. Andrew was sent to St Malcolm’s because Geoff’s boy went there. The Stephenses had a holiday place outside Daylesford called Belvedere. Huge stone house, like a sort of Bavarian hunting lodge. Andrew lives there now. With the gorillas. Sorry. Shouldn’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

She emptied her glass. ‘I’m going to risk another one. What about you?’

‘I’ll get them,’ I said.

She shook her head and went to the serving hatch. I was admiring her backside when she turned and caught me at it. We smiled.

‘The gorillas?’ I said when she came back with the drinks.

‘Doesn’t do to talk about valued clients. I’m due out there to look at a horse tomorrow. Still. Andrew’s got two large men with thick necks living on the property. We call them the gorillas.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Nothing as far as I can see. Well, except take turns to drive the girls around.’

‘His children?’

She laughed. ‘Right age. No. He doesn’t have children. Two marriages didn’t take. There’s always a new girl at Belvedere, two sometimes. Some of them look as if they should be at school. Primary school, my partner once said.’

‘What’s Andrew do for a living?’

‘It’s not entirely clear. Developer of some kind. They say he owns clubs in Melbourne. His father apparently left him a heap. He used to talk shares with Tony Crewe-shares and property and horses.’

‘So you’ve been with them?’

‘Oh yes. We’d go to dinner with Tony and current woman and Andrew and sometimes Rick Veene and his wife two or three times a year. I have to say I hated it. I think Ian did too. He turned into a kind of court jester when he was with Tony and Andrew and Rick. I once suggested we turn down a dinner invitation and Ian said, “You don’t say no to Tony and Andrew”. I said, “Why not?” and he said, “You wouldn’t understand. They’re not ordinary people”. Anyway, Andrew and Tony had some kind of falling out and the dinners stopped.’

‘Did Ian ever talk about Kinross Hall?’

‘No. Geoff Crewe was the place’s doctor for umpteen years and I think it sort of passed on to Ian. The director came with Tony Crewe to dinner a few times. Marcia Carrier. Very striking. Ian didn’t get on with her so he gave up the Kinross work.’ She swirled her drink around and finished it. ‘Night falls,’ she said. ‘None of this helps in finding out why your friend went to see Ian, does it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why did Ian give up his practice and move to Footscray?’

Irene shrugged. ‘No idea. Seems to have happened overnight. About a year ago, he phoned Alice, our daughter, and gave her a new phone number. She rang me.’

‘Thanks for taking the time,’ I said, getting up.

She gave me a steady look. ‘If you want to talk again, give me a ring.’

We went out to her car in the deepening dark. There was a house across the road and I could see into the kitchen. A man in overalls was staring into a fridge as if he had opened a door on hell. As she was getting in, I said, ‘Ian’s pethidine habit. How long did he have that?’

Irene closed the door and wound down the window. The light from the pub lit half her face. ‘What makes you think Ian had a pethidine habit?’

‘Heard it somewhere,’ I said.

She looked away, started the car. ‘News to me,’ she said. ‘Give me a ring. We’ll talk about it.’

I watched the cheerful Swedish tail-lights turn the corner where the ploughed paddock ran to the road and nothing interrupted the view. The line between night and day was the colour of shearers’ underwear. Far away, you could hear the groan of a Double-B full of doomed sheep changing gear on Coppin’s Hill. In the pub, a hand grenade of laughter went off.

The man across the road slammed the fridge door: hell contained. For the moment.

‘Well, get on with it. What d’you want to know about Ian Barbie?’

‘Why would he kill himself?’

Dr Geoffrey Crewe, age seventy-nine, gave me a sharp look from under eyebrows like grey fish lures. He was a big man, parts of whom had shrunk. Now the long face, long nose, long ears, long arms did not match the body. The body was dressed in corduroy trousers, what looked like an old cricket shirt, an older tweed jacket, and a greasy tweed hat. What had not shrunk was the value of his house. He lived across the road from the lake, redbrick double-storey facing south. I’d arrived as he was leaving on a walk. He set a brisk pace, even though his left leg buckled outward alarmingly when it met the ground. It occurred to me to ask him whether he fancied a game of football on Saturday. He could certainly outpace Flannery over a hundred metres.

‘Don’t know if there’s a sensible answer to the question,’ he said. ‘What’s it matter anyway? Made his choice. You make your choice. Serious choice, but just a choice.’

‘His wife says he was often depressed.’

He gave me a look that said he’d met smarter people.

‘Could be said about half the people in the line of work- more. Not shuffling bloody paper, y’know. Pain and suffering and bloody dying.’

A fat pink woman in a lime-green towelling tracksuit, large breasts swaying and bouncing out of control, lurched around a corner. ‘Gidday, Dr Crewe,’ she panted.

Dr Crewe touched a finger to the brim of his tweed hat. ‘Don’t know what they think they’re doing,’ he said. ‘Do herself a lot more good jumping up and down naked on that miserable bloody shopkeeper she’s married to.’

I rolled up my right sleeve. The day was clear, almost warm. I’d left my jacket in the car. ‘Didn’t surprise you?’

‘Too late for surprises. Precious bloody little surprises me. What’s that on your arm?’

I looked down. ‘Burn.’

‘Burn? What kind of work d’you do?’

‘Blacksmith.’

He nodded. ‘Reasonably honest trade.’ Pause. ‘This interest in Ian Barbie, say it again.’

I told him about Ned’s visit to Footscray.

‘Sure he went to see Ian?’

‘The receptionist remembered him. He didn’t have an appointment, said it was a private matter. She told Ian and he saw him after the next patient. He was with Ian for about ten minutes.’

Dr Crewe didn’t say anything for a while. Out on the calm water, a man in a single scull was sitting motionless, head bowed, shoulders slumped, could be dead. Then he moved, first stroke slow and smooth, instantly in his rhythm, powerful insect skimming the silver surface. At the end of each stroke, there was a pause, missed in the blink of an eye.

‘This Ned,’ he said. ‘Any drug problem there?’

‘No.’

We walked in silence for perhaps fifty paces. ‘Ian had a drug problem,’ I said.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t look at me. We passed a scowling group of seagulls on a jetty, identical commuters waiting in anger for an overdue train home.

‘I left the practice on my seventieth birthday,’ said Dr Crewe. ‘Nine years ago last month. Saddest day of my life. Second saddest. Nobody feels seventy, y’know. Not inside the heart. Always twenty-five inside.’

More silence. Two runners came from behind, short chunky men, hair cut to stubble, big hairy legs. Footballers. Then a tall blonde came into view, white singlet, tight black stretch shorts, hair pulled back. She was at full stride, moving fast, balanced, arms pumping. As the balls of her feet touched the ground, her long thigh muscles bunched above the knee. Her legs and torso were flushed pink, her head was back, mouth open, eyes slits.

We both turned to watch her go. Our eyes met.

‘Always twenty-five inside,’ he said. ‘And sometimes you feel you could be twenty-five outside too.’

‘Eighteen,’ I said. ‘Eighteen.’

He gave a snort and picked up the pace. We were going up an incline between two huge oaks when he said, ‘You don’t want to accept your friend’s suicide.’ A statement.

‘No.’ It came out sharply.

‘I won’t talk psychological bullshit to you, but some questions you have to leave alone. They didn’t do it to hurt you. They did it because something hurt them and they wanted to put an end to that pain.’

‘Dr Crewe,’ I said, ‘I don’t know about Ian, but Ned wouldn’t kill himself.’

He stopped. I was taken by surprise, went a pace further.

‘They don’t end up hanging by accident,’ he said. ‘So I don’t know what you’re saying.’

I said, ‘I think Ned’s suicide was staged. I think he was murdered.’

He put his head back and looked at me down the long nose. ‘Police think what?’

‘Investigating officer seems to think it’s a possibility.’

‘Probably humouring you. You reckon the same might hold for Ian?’

‘If I’m right about Ned, it’s possible.’

Dr Crewe sighed and started walking. After a while, he said. ‘Loved the boy, y’know.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘Loved his mother, too, might as well tell you. People say he’s mine, but he’s not. Often wished he was. Instead I’ve got Tony-every inch a Carew, not a trace of Crewe in him. Mean-spirited, selfish, whole bloody clan’s like that. Mean-spirited and selfish genes pass on to every generation, doesn’t matter who they marry. Tony’s mother was a prime example.’

A small, round man in a tracksuit overtook us, wobbling as he ran. ‘Doc,’ he gasped. It sounded like an appeal for help.

‘G’day Laurie. Walk, you bloody fool.’

The man gave a feeble wave.

‘Three Carews joined up the same day I did,’ said Dr Crewe. ‘Wife’s brother, two of his cousins. You’d think one of ’em would see some action. Hah. Whole war in Canberra, fighting the paper, all three. More than luck involved, I can tell you. Tony’s the same. If there’s an easy way, he’ll find it.’

‘Ian was at Melbourne Uni with Tony,’ I said. ‘Little group of local boys, I gather.’

Dr Crewe looked at me, shook his head. ‘Done anything to keep Ian away from Tony and Andrew Stephens and the Veene boy. Andrew’s father was a good man, fine man, fought with the Greek partisans in the war. Good doctor too. Andrew. Young Andrew’s just rubbish. Too much too soon. Like Rick Veene. Rick’s got Carew in him somewhere down the line. His mother’s Tony’s mother’s third cousin or something. Poisonous breed. Buy their way through life. Bought off bloody Carew, that was easy enough.’

‘Carew?’

‘Carew College, University of Melbourne. Tony’s mother’s grandfather paid for it. Out of ill-gotten gains. Unjailed criminal. College. Place you stay in. Know about that?’

‘Only just,’ I said.

He gave me a look and an appraising nod. ‘Blacksmith. Name again?’

‘Mac.’

‘Mac. I remember. Mac.’

There was a sound like sandpapering behind us and a group of male runners split to pass us, came together, all one physical type, a big pack of brothers sent out to run until supper time.

‘So,’ I said, ‘Carew.’

‘Carew?’

‘Bought off. Carew.’

‘Bought off?’

‘The college.’

‘Oh. That’s right. Bought off. Andrew Stephens, Carews and the Veenes. Bloody Carew family trust gives the college some huge sum every year. Clive Carew and Bob Veene were on the council then. Bob Veene. Bloody rabbit. Pathetic. Rick’s the only son. Four girls. Nice things, bit on the big side mark you, but nice, healthy girls, never heard a bad word about them. One’s married to a carpenter. That’d make the bloody Veenes’ foreskins curl.’

‘Why did they buy off the college?’

‘Business with a girl. Didn’t hear about it till years later. Tony’s mother and the rest of them did the dirty work. Kept me in the dark ’cause they knew me. I’d have let the buggers take the consequences. Jail if necessary. Never been any consequences for Tony and Andrew. Never. Not in their lives. Now Tony’s the bloody attorney-general. Unbelievable. Makes you think even less of politics. Never thought that’d be possible. Not an ounce of respect for anything. Went into politics because he saw it was easy money. All talk and some bloody public servant does the work. Or doesn’t.’

He shook his head. ‘Shocked me that old Andrew’d get involved in something like that. Doted on that bloody boy of his. We had a big blue, not the same after that. Friends for going on thirty years. Still, bribery’s bloody bribery. Can’t brush over it.’

‘So Ian was involved in this Carew business?’

‘Don’t know. Suppose so. Time I found out, it was pretty pointless to ask.’

We had reached a marker that said two kilometres. Dr Crewe said, ‘Turnaround time.’

‘Kinross Hall,’ I said. ‘Why did Ian stop being Kinross Hall’s doctor?’

His shoulders seemed to sag a little at the mention of the place.

‘Don’t know. Gave me the brushoff when I asked him. That Carrier woman, probably. Picked her for a cast-iron bitch moment I laid eyes on her. Another brilliant piece of work by Tony.’

‘Tony?’

‘Chairman of the management committee. Got her appointed instead of Daryl Hopman. He was deputy when old Crosland retired. Good man, sound. Well, he didn’t last long after Carrier arrived. Took early retirement, died. Inside a few years, all the old staff gone.’

‘Did you know about Ian’s pethidine problem?’

He glanced at me. ‘Ian had a lot of problems. Not a well man.’

‘Physically not well?’

‘Mind, body, all the same. Not a well man.’

I had a stab in the dark. ‘Someone said he might have had some sort of sexual aberration.’

He didn’t reply. We walked in silence. At his gate, Dr Crewe said, ‘Big word for a blacksmith, aberration. Well, Mr Blacksmith, I’d like to think that Ian didn’t kill himself. But I can’t. For your man, maybe you’re right. I’ll say good day.’

I said thank you.

He nodded, opened the gate and went down the path without looking back.

On the way home, in minutes, the day darkened and it poured, solid sheets like a monsoon rain. A freezing monsoon rain. Then it stopped, the clouds broke, the sun came out and all along the road the shallow pools were full of sky.

Ken Berglin was in his mid-thirties when I went to work for him, but to me he seemed to be of my father’s generation. He was tall and gaunt, bony-faced, with colourless thinning hair combed straight back, and he always wore a dark suit with a white shirt and dark tie.

On my first day back from training in Chicago, waiting to go undercover, we met at the War Memorial at opening time. It was autumn in Canberra, cold, the flaming leaves changing the colour of the air. We were looking at a World War I biplane in a towering near-empty gallery when he said to me in his hoarse voice, ‘So you seen all the shooting galleries and the crack shops?’

I nodded.

‘They tell you you can’t do this work without a sense of moral superiority?’

‘They mentioned it in passing,’ I said. ‘Few hundred times. I’m shit-scared to tell you the truth.’

‘Always will be. That’s the job. Listen, Mac, this moral superiority, holding the line against the forces of darkness stuff, that’s useful out there. Like a swag full of arseholes. Believe me. I know. I’ve been there. Let’s have a smoke.’

We went out into a courtyard. I offered him a Camel.

‘There’s some good comes from the Yanks,’ he said. The air was still and the blue-grey smoke hung around us like a personal mist.

Berglin studied his cigarette. ‘You live with the scum,’ he said. ‘One of them, in their world, they can buy anything, buy anyone. You forget what you are. Some of them you even like after a while. Then you start to think like them. The whole thing starts to look normal. Like a business, really. Ordinary business. Like being a man buys and sells fucking meat. So the vegetarians don’t like the business. They don’t even like to look in the shop window. Half a chance, they’d put you out of business. You think, what the fuck does that matter? There’s plenty who want a thick, juicy steak. And all these friends of yours are doing is selling it to them. Should that be a fucking crime?’

Berglin paused and looked at me inquiringly. ‘Making sense to you, this?’

‘So far.’

Something caught his eye. He pointed. ‘Eagle,’ he said. We watched it for a while, bird all alone in the vast blue emptiness, dreaming on the high winds.

‘Anyway,’ Berglin said, ‘when you start thinking like the other side, you’re on the way to changing sides. And that will make you a worthless, faithless person. Agree?’

It was hard not to. I nodded.

Berglin took a deep drag and blew a stream of perfect smoke rings, like a cannon firing tiny grey wreaths.

‘Worthless, faithless, that’s bad,’ he said. ‘But there’s worse. Dead is worse.’ He stood on his cigarette butt. ‘Let’s have a look at Gallipoli. My favourite.’

He led the way to a gallery that featured a huge diorama of the disastrous Gallipoli landing. Two young Japanese tourists in expensive ski wear were studying it, faces impassive.

‘Always have a look at this,’ Berglin said. ‘Bloody marvellous, not so?’

We admired the huge scene.

‘You think you’re scared?’ he said. ‘Consider these poor bastards. Boys led to the slaughter.’

It occurred to me that our meeting place was more than a matter of convenience.

The Japanese left. They were holding hands. ‘Dead, Mac,’ Berglin said again. ‘One inkling that you’ve moved across, you’re just a picture in an album. And we’ll know, believe me. You cross over, you can’t go home anymore. Know that line? American book. This is like marriage except that when we say “Till death do us part”, we mean it. And it’s you who’s dead. You religious?’

I shook my head.

‘No. Me neither. They say it can help with the fear. I deeply fucking doubt that. Well, we’ve got to talk some details. Got a little room here I sometimes use.’

Later, before he sent me off, Berglin said, ‘How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life. The work, the job, it’s on the side of the fourteen-year-olds. Get a few free tastes-two years later, they’re in the cold filing cabinet, tracks all over ’em like a rash. This scum, they are way over on the other side. Across the dark river. Keep it in mind, Mac. Won’t, of course. Wouldn’t be any fucking use if you did.’

He was absolutely right. I never gave it a thought over the next few years, living under the gun, sweating on the moment of discovery. But I often thought about that meeting with Berglin later. And I thought about it again, driving home from talking to Dr Crewe.

I parked outside the smithy and went to have a piss in the bathroom alongside the office. Still thinking about Berglin, I was in the room before I heard the shower.

Allie was in the big open shower stall facing me. She had her head back under the spray, arms raised to shampoo her hair. Before I backed out, I registered sleek pubic hair, flattened breasts with prominent nipples, defined ribcage, long muscular thighs.

I was in the smithy, shaken, lustful, looking at a sketch of gateposts a hobby farmer outside Wallace wanted when Allie came in, shiny clean, spiky, no make-up.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘No truck. Didn’t occur to me you’d be showering.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said without a trace of embarrassment. ‘They told us at school to lock the cubicle. I was feeling filthy. Alarm didn’t go off this morning, twenty minutes to get to the job.’

‘Where’s the truck?’

‘Lent it to Mick. Met him in the pub at lunchtime. He’s broken down other side Newstead.’

‘Overloaded with furniture ripped off the rural poor,’ I said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen you naked.’

She smiled. ‘You only had to ask.’

We looked at each other for a moment, a trace of awkwardness.

‘You working?’ she said.

‘Gateposts for a bloke at Wallace.’ I handed her the sketch the man had given me.

She whistled. ‘Gateposts? These are gateposts? What is the place? Some kind of agribrothel?’

‘Hardiplank house on two acres. He says his wife saw gateposts like this in America. Went to Disneyland with her first husband.’

Allie scratched her head. ‘Disneyland and Cape Kennedy, Cape Canaveral, whatever it’s called. Does he see that they look like two giant wangers?’

‘Wanger? That’s the current term is it?’

She nodded. ‘This week’s term. Wanger.’

‘He’s under no illusions,’ I said. ‘I suggested to him that they looked like a pair of pricks and he said, there’s been two of us. When my wife marries again, she can come around and get you to make a third prick.’

‘No illusions,’ Allie said.

‘Any idea how you’d make something like this?’

She shrugged. ‘You work behind closed doors. Then you transport them at night, under a tarp. And you don’t have anything to do with their, ah, erection.’

When we stopped laughing, we went over to the office and worked out how to make the posts and what to charge.

‘Add twenty percent to cover embarrassment and possible prosecution,’ Allie said.

‘We may have priced ourselves out of the market here,’ I said.

‘For this kind of work,’ Allie said, ‘we are the market.’

I rang the man and gave him the quote. When I put the phone down, I said, ‘Didn’t blink. Wife wants them up in time for the Grand Final. They have a big gathering every year.’

Allie frowned.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop now.’

We went out into the rapidly chilling day to inspect the steel store.

‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ Berglin said. ‘Nothing for four years, then twice inside a month.’

I could picture the long, sardonic face, the narrow black shoes on the desk, the cigarette dangling from the jaundiced fingers.

‘Twice?’

‘Had your local jacks on the line about that special permit. Been firing the cowboy gun at the neighbours?’

‘What’d you tell them?’

‘Piss off. How’ve you been?’

‘Fair. You?’

‘So-so. Creeping age. What’s on your mind?’

‘Two things. One’s a favour.’

‘ “And every favour has its price/paid not in coin/but in flesh/slice by slice.” Know that poem?’

‘Engraved on the mind,’ I said. ‘After two hundred hearings. I need to find someone.’

‘We all do. It’s the human condition.’

‘Melanie Loreen Pavitt.’ I spelled the surname. ‘Born November 1966. Discharged from Kinross Hall November 1983. No known family. No fixed address after 1979.’

I’d gone back to the Kinross Hall print-out after talking to Dr Crewe. It said that in October 1983, in the week that Simon Walsh found the naked girl on Colson’s Road, a girl called Melanie Pavitt turned seventeen and reached the end of her two-year stay at Kinross Hall. It was a straw.

‘Thirty-two now,’ Berglin said. ‘What’s Kinross Hall?’

‘Place of safety, girls’ juvenile detention centre, whatever they call them now.’

‘Out your way?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what line you in now? Blacksmith and missing persons?’

‘It’s personal.’

‘And the second thing?’

‘I hear Carlie Mance was in that pub in Deer Park with Bianchi close to the day.’

There was a long silence. I could hear smoke expelled. Then Berglin said, ‘Bianchi’s dead, you hear that?’

‘Carlie’s dead too.’

‘I think this thing’s pretty much closed, Mac.’ Berglin’s voice was as close to sympathetic as it got.

‘Closed? Someone cuts Lefroy’s throat, rapes Carlie Mance, cuts her throat, walks away with a few million bucks in smack. On my watch. It’s closed? It’s a fucking unsolved crime. How does it get to be closed?’

Silence again. Then he said, ‘Where’d you hear this Deer Park stuff?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Jesus. And you want me to what?’

‘Tell them to get out the file and start looking at Bianchi. Nobody looked at Bianchi.’

Berglin blew smoke. ‘Mac, you look at Bianchi, who else are you looking at?’

‘That’s what I mean. I hear he’s about to make deputy Pope.’

‘You hear right. And you’re suggesting I dump a bag of fresh dog shit in the Vatican airconditioning. I’ll have to think about that. Give it a little thought. What’s your number? This Pavitt, I’ll tell you in the morning.’

I gave him the number. Then I said, ‘I’m clean. You know that, don’t you?’

Silence. A sigh. ‘In so far as I can be said to know anything,’ said Berglin. ‘Yes.’

I was cutting twelve millimetre steel rods with the power hacksaw when the nose of a red Porsche appeared in my line of sight through the open smithy door. I cut the power, took off the helmet and went outside.

A big man, in his forties, overweight, bald, little ponytail, dark beard shadow, corduroy bomber jacket with leather collar, was getting out of the car. Another man was in the passenger seat. ‘Afternoon,’ he said. ‘Mac Faraday?’

I said yes. He came over and put out a big hand. I shook it. Soft hand, gold chain around his wrist.

‘Andrew Stephens,’ he said. ‘Sorry to butt in. Passing by. Can we talk for a minute?’

It took a second for the name to register. ‘It’s warmer inside,’ I said.

We went into the smithy. He looked around like someone seeing for the first time a place where people worked with their hands.

‘So what do you make here?’ he said.

‘Anything. Gates, fences, fighter aircraft.’

Stephens laughed, a girlish giggling laugh showing perfect teeth, capped. His head was pear-shaped. ‘That’s funny,’ he said. He went over to the bench, took out a white handkerchief, wiped the bench, sat down, thighs wide apart.

‘Saw Irene Barbie this morning,’ he said. ‘She told me you were interested in Ian’s death, whether it was suicide.’

I nodded.

Stephens pulled at his ponytail. ‘Great friend of mine, Ian,’ he said. ‘Can’t believe he’s gone.’

I didn’t say anything.

He took a packet of cigarettes out of his jacket, waved it at me inquiringly, lit one with a slim gold lighter, blew smoke out of his nose. He was wearing a Rolex wristwatch. ‘I’d like to think he didn’t commit suicide,’ he said. ‘Irene said you asked about pethidine. What made you ask that?’

‘Heard it somewhere,’ I said.

Stephens took a drag, sighed smoke. ‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard. Irene didn’t know. Ian suffered from depression, came on him in his twenties. We all tried to help, all his friends. Wasn’t anything you could do. Nothing. Out of anyone’s control. Pethidine’s the only reason he didn’t kill himself years ago.’

He took out the handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I gather a friend of yours was found dead recently too,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. You don’t know what it’s like until you lose someone like that. Rather bloody not know.’

‘Yes.’

He stood up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was coming this way, thought I’d stop and say, you find out anything that makes you think Ian didn’t kill himself, I’d be grateful if you’d tell me. We all would. I know Tony Crewe-y’know Tony Crewe, the Attorney General? Close friend of Ian’s, of mine. Tony would appreciate hearing anything like that.’

‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘But I think he killed himself.’

‘Yes. That’s what’s most likely. Wonderful bloke, lovely. Well. That’s life.’

We went outside. The other man was out of the Porsche now, leaning against it, smoking a small cheroot. He was big, thick-necked, face like a ten-year-old on steroids.

‘While I’m here,’ Stephens said, ‘I’m thinking of getting someone to look after the maintenance on my properties. Big job, mainly supervision. Well paid. Think something like that would suit you?’

‘Not really,’ I said.

He nodded, put out his hand. ‘Anything makes you think Ian’s death’s other than the way it looks, you let me know. I mean first. Before you tell anyone else. That way, we make sure everything’s properly investigated. Quickly, too, I can guarantee that. Tony Crewe will see to that. Okay? And I’ll make sure you’re not out of pocket for any expenses. My duty to the family.’

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ I said.

‘Good man.’ He took out a wallet, gave me a card, tapped me on the arm.

They got into the car and drove off. I heard the engine note turn to a howl as they took the first hill.

I started at full forward, a position in the Brockley side where the ball was seen so rarely that a full forward had once gone home at the end of the third quarter and no-one noticed until the team was in the pub.