An Iron Rose

This Saturday was different. We were playing Bentham. I arrived about thirty seconds before the start, missing Mick Doolan’s tactical briefing and inspirational rev-up. He got his motivational material from studying a six-pack of videos called Modern Meisters of Motivation bought for $2.50 at a trash and trivia market. The players, many having their last cigarette before quarter-time, found messages such as Sell the SIZZLE not the STEAK and Don’t SEE to BELIEVE, BELIEVE to SEE extremely powerful: aflame, the Brockley side would stroll out, tugging at their jocks. The usual result: five goals down at quarter-time.

Not today. Either a new video found or Mick had fed the men elephant juice. Billy Garrett was, without effort, leaping free of the earth’s grip. Players who routinely handballed into the ground or to the other side were sending the ball to within metres of team-mates. Even Flannery seemed fresh from a Swiss rejuvenation clinic, backing into packs and coming out with the ball. From all over the field, players were kicking the ball in my direction. It was unnerving but I took four marks, kicked two goals and a behind. At quarter-time, we were four goals up.

As we trooped off, I saw Allie on the bonnet of her truck, leaning back against the windscreen, legs crossed at the ankle. She was wearing a red quilted jacket and a scarf, and you could see the colour in her cheeks from thirty metres. There was a man lounging next to her, floppy dark hair, sallow, young. She gave me the thumbs up, hand cocked forward. Three things went through my mind. One, she’d come to watch me play without being asked. Two, she’d come with another man. Three, don’t be a stupid prick.

In the second quarter, Bentham put a man called String Woodly at fullback. He consisted almost entirely of thin rubbery arms that he wound around you like pipe cleaners while pretending to be interested in taking a mark. No-one had ever seen him take a mark, but very few opposing players had got one while wrapped in String. Carrying him around was exhausting. Billy complained to the umpire. This didn’t work. I resorted to falling over in his embrace, trying to land on him with an elbow in some painful spot. This didn’t work either. I kept landing on my elbow with String on top of me. Finally, I had Flannery sent over and we had a chat.

The next time the ball came our way, coming down through the mist, Flannery got close behind the two of us, pulled out the back of String’s shorts. Using the waistband elastic as a step, he ran up String’s back and plucked the ball from the sky. String let me go, falling over forward, clutching at his shorts, now around his knees.

‘That’s not in the bloody game,’ he said, offended, as Flannery landed on his right shoulder.

‘Stick around, beanpole,’ Flannery said, getting ready to kick. ‘Show you lots not in the game.’ He took two paces and kicked the ball through the middle. He looked around at me, astounded by his feat. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Haven’t kicked a goal since school.’

‘That long,’ I said. ‘Since you were twelve.’

String wasn’t the same after his experience, and Flannery and I saw off a few other Bentham spoilers before the day was over. We ran out ten-goal winners. No-one could remember Brockley winning by ten goals. We went back to the Oak in a state of high excitement, singing one another’s praises. Nothing disturbed our joy until only the hard core remained.

‘Was a time,’ said Trevor Creedy, ‘when Brockley won by bloody ten goals every second week.’ He was a small man with close-set eyes, now murky, the kind of supporter who finds victory deeply unsatisfying. ‘That was,’ he said, ‘before they starting pickin girls. And makin blokes coach never kicked a footy.’

‘Trev,’ Mick said, ‘been meanin to ask ya. How’d ya like to share the coach’s job? I mean, with a view to takin it over?’

Creedy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘Tryin to bloody buy off ya critics. Won’t bloody work with me.’

He left, now a happier man.

‘Lovely fella,’ said Flannery. ‘Fixed his car for him, took it for a spin, see how it goes. When I give him the bill, he takes off fifty cents for petrol. Don’t expect me to pay for your joyridin, he says.’

Mick’s mobile trilled. He had a brief conversation, then he said, ‘Vinnie, me own Gestapo’s on the way. Let’s have a lightnin round for the survivors.’

The dog joined me as I stepped out of the door, suddenly aware that no area of my body was without its own dull pain. A full moon gave a pale and cold daylight when the clouds parted. Both limping a bit, the dog and I walked down the road and down the lane.

I was in the office, going through Allie’s work diary and writing up invoices, when I heard the car. Marcia Carrier was getting out of her BMW when I reached the door. She didn’t look like an Olympic dressage contestant today. Today she looked like an Olympic skier, apres ski: dark hair loose, big cream polo-necked sweater, camel-coloured pants. She looked healthy and fit, like someone who ran and swam and had a lot of wholehearted sex in front of open fires, followed by yoghurt milkshakes.

‘Mac,’ she said, ‘I rang the number you gave me, no reply. So I drove over on the off-chance.’

‘Nice to see you,’ I said.

‘Got a few minutes?’

‘Hours. Days. Kitchen’s the only warm room in the house.’

‘I was hoping for the forge.’

‘Forge’s having a rest today. Sunday is forge’s day of rest.’

The kitchen didn’t look too bad. Spartan but clean. I pulled another captain’s chair in front of the stove. Mick Doolan had sold me six for two hundred dollars: ‘To you, Moc, a gift. What I paid for them. Less. I think about it now, less. Much less.’

‘I’ll make coffee,’ I said.

‘Mac, sit,’ she said, lacing her fingers. ‘I have to tell you something and I’m embarrassed about it…’

I sat down.

‘When you came to see me about Ned Lowey, I think I said it was going to nag at me.’ She was studying her left hand on the arm of the chair. It was older than her face.

‘I remember.’

A spray of rain, like gravel thrown, hit the window. She tensed. Our eyes met.

‘Well, it did. I went back to the files, looking for something that might have happened while Mr Lowey was working at Kinross. I found something. About an hour ago.’

‘Happened to a girl?’

She nodded. ‘Two girls.’

‘When you were in charge?’

‘I was new. Took over in 1983, into a nightmare. The place was run like a mini-kingdom, all these places were, minimal record-keeping, incompetent staff, all sorts of kickbacks with suppliers and contractors, ghosts on the payroll, you name it. My predecessor might have been a wonderful man but he was completely out of touch with what was going on around him. And to make things worse, Kinross wasn’t even getting the funding it was entitled to. So I cleaned up the obvious rorts and got a proper reporting system going. Then I left the day-to-day running to my deputy. He seemed to be an honest person. I devoted most of my time to working on the department and the minister to get Kinross’s funding up to speed.’

‘The girls,’ I said.

She clasped her hands, face unhappy. ‘Mac, I found a report in Daryl Hopman’s confidential file. He was my deputy. I’ve never seen the file before, didn’t know it existed. And I only found it by chance.’

‘What kind of report?’

‘It involves two girls. I should have been told about it and I wasn’t.’

She paused. I waited.

She sighed again. ‘It also involves Mr Lowey. I’m sorry to tell you that. I know how much he meant to you.’

‘Involves?’ I could feel the blood in my head.

Marcia put her hands through her hair. ‘I’ll just say it. The girls were caught coming back into the Kinross grounds shortly before four am one night in November 1985. They said they had been at Ned Lowey’s house and had been given drugs, amphetamines, speed, for sex.’

I stood up. ‘Not possible, a mistake. Not Ned. Absolutely not.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Marcia said. ‘I’m really sorry. I felt I had to tell you.’

I went to the window, looked out, saw nothing. ‘What was done?’

‘Nothing. It’s unbelievable. Nothing was done about a serious allegation of criminal conduct. Nothing. It says everything about the way Kinross was run in the old days. I shudder to think what else may have been ignored like this. In the maintenance supervisor’s file I found a note from Daryl saying that Ned was not to be employed again. I presume Daryl wrote the report as some kind of insurance if word leaked out.’

‘Insurance?’

‘He may have planned to say that he had made a report to me and that I was the one who failed to act.’

‘The girls said Ned gave them drugs?’ Ned having anything to do with any drug other than a stubbie of Vic Bitter was inconceivable. But my treacherous inner voice said: What do you really know about Ned?

Marcia unclasped her hands, pushed back her hair, started to speak, hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Mac,’ she said, ‘but that’s not the whole story.’

I shook my head in disbelief. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to hold on to the Ned I loved.

‘The girls said Dr Barbie was at Ned’s house and had sex with them. Violent sex.’

Ned going to see Ian Barbie in Footscray.

Ned and Ian Barbie, both dead, hanged.

The girl’s skeleton in the mine shaft. The newspapers Ned kept.

Melanie Pavitt, naked and bleeding in Colson’s Road. About four kilometres from Ned’s house.

‘What are you going to do?’ I said.

Marcia got up, tugged at her sweater. ‘Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. They’re dead. Both men. What’s the point of doing anything now? The families have had enough pain.’

She came over, put her hand on my arm. I could smell her hair, a rose garden far away.

‘Mac, I’ve destroyed Daryl’s report,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I think you and I are the only people who know about this. The two of us and the girls. They probably don’t even remember it. I’m protecting myself, I can’t deny that. I was in charge, I’m responsible for the girls’ welfare. But I’m a victim here too. I knew nothing about what happened. Daryl left this thing behind like a time bomb.’

I didn’t say anything.

Marcia squeezed my arm gently. ‘Mac, I think I’m doing the right thing for everyone. Is it the right thing? If you think it isn’t, I’ll go public, take the consequences. If you think it is, we never speak of the matter again. To anyone.’

What else was there to say? ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘It’s the right thing.’

At her car, engine running, window down, she said, not looking at me, ‘God, I’m glad that’s over. Would you like to have a drink some time, dinner? Anything?’

I pulled myself together. ‘Drink, dinner, followed by anything. And everything.’

‘I’ll call you,’ she said, hint of a smile.

I watched the car go down the lane, turn, heard a little growl of acceleration. I didn’t want to go inside, didn’t know what to do with myself, got into the Land Rover and drove.

Stan Harrop and his son, David, were in the northwest corner of the field nursery on Stan’s property, talking to the driver of a tip truck carrying a load of stones. I parked at the gate and made my way along the paths between raised north-south beds. David gave me a salute. He was about twenty-five, thin and sandy, with Stan’s big hands. Stan had waited until he was nearly fifty to take his shot at immortality with David’s mother.

‘A wall, Mac,’ Stan said. ‘A drystone wall. Twenty metres of wall. Know anything about drystone walls?’

‘Been a while,’ I said. When I was sixteen my father and I built two hundred metres of drystone wall on a property called Arcadia near Wagga. In my mind I saw a man and a boy and a pile of stones in the burning day, and heard my father say: Stone you need’s at the bottom of the bloody pile. That’s the way nature works. In bloody opposition to man.

‘So where d’ya want ’em?’ the driver said. He was a fat, sad-looking man in overalls and a baseball cap with ‘Toyota’ across the front.

Stan scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose they can go just here.’

‘Want my advice?’ I said.

‘Quick,’ Stan said.

‘What’s the line of the wall?’

‘North-south,’ David said. He pointed. ‘In line with that post.’

‘Take it slow and tip ’em out down the line,’ I said to the driver. ‘You don’t want any piles. Do that?’

‘At the limit of the technology,’ the man said. We got out of the way and he went into action.

‘The right stone,’ I said. ‘Finding it’s the problem. Much easier if they’re spread out.’

‘What about the footing?’ said Stan.

‘How high’s the wall supposed to be?’

‘Not high,’ said David. ‘Metre and half.’

‘High enough,’ I said. ‘Needs a trench about half a metre deep, metre and a quarter wide. Then you taper the wall to about fifty centimetres at the top. Put a bit of cement in the bottom layers. Purists don’t like that.’

‘Purists be buggered,’ Stan said. ‘Get the machinery, lad.’

I got gloves out of the Land Rover, put on boots. David ripped the footing in half an hour. We shovelled out the earth, hard work, and then we got the strings up. I showed Stan how to arrange the bottom rocks, then David and I carried and Stan laid. It was punishing work, moving heavy objects not created with human hands in mind.

‘Wanted to give the women a surprise,’ Stan said. ‘Gone to Melbourne. To shop. What kind of bloody activity is that?’

‘I could learn to shop,’ I said. ‘Can’t be that hard.’

I was glad to be there, glad that there was somewhere I could be, glad to be doing something that prevented me from thinking about Ned. I desperately didn’t want to think about Ned.

We stopped when the light was almost gone, cold biting the face.

‘I think I see a drink in your future,’ Stan said, patting my shoulder. ‘Thought metal was the area of expertise. Now you turn out to know a bit about stone.’

We sat in Stan’s office next to the low whitewashed brick house he had built in the lee of the hill. A fire was burning in a Ned Kelly drum stove. David drank his beer and went off to feed the chooks. Stan took two more bottles of Boag out of the small fridge in the corner and opened them.

‘Something on your mind,’ he said.

I drank some beer out of the glass mug and looked at a botanical print on the wall. ‘Heard a story about Ned today,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He was lighting his pipe with a big kitchen match.

I told him what Marcia had said.

Stan blew out smoke, drank beer, put the mug and pipe down. He didn’t show any sign of shock.

‘Ned. Drugs. Sex with teenage girls.’ He looked at me over the big hairy knuckles of his clasped hands. ‘Go to my grave not believing it.’

‘Who’d invent something like that?’ I said.

‘You believe it?’

‘Rather not think about it. Wouldn’t have had to think about if I hadn’t gone poking about.’

‘What poking about?’

I told him about Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall, how my questioning of Marcia Carrier had led to her finding of Daryl Hopman’s report.

‘Just her word for it, then,’ Stan said. ‘Could be trying to shift the blame from the doctor to Ned.’

‘Then why mention the doctor at all?’

We sat in silence, Stan generating smoke. For a moment I had been going to tell him about the other things that haunted me: the skeleton in the mine shaft, Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road, Ned’s visit to Ian Barbie in Footscray. But Daryl Hopman’s report offered an explanation for all of them that was too chilling to speak about.

‘Better get moving,’ I said, getting up. ‘Boy’s at home without food.’

‘Boys find food,’ Stan said. He walked to the vehicle with me. When I’d started it, he said: ‘Learned a lot about men in the war. Scoundrels and saints, met ’em both. Don’t believe this about Ned, so it’s not going to change anything.’

We looked at each other, united in our desire to hold on to the Ned we knew.

‘Another thing, Mac,’ said Stan.

I could barely see his face.

‘Ned was like a brother to your father. Something like this, he would have known. See you tomorrow.’

As I drove away, I thought perhaps my father did know. Perhaps that was what he wanted to tell me on the night he shot himself.

We’d put in five hours in the grounds of Harkness Park- me, Stan Harrop, Lew and Flannery-before Francis Keany’s Discovery murmured down the driveway. What we were trying to do was uncover paths, using a large-scale plan Stan and I had drawn from exploration and aerial photographs and the old photographs I’d found.

‘They’re bloody there,’ Stan said. ‘Get the paths, we’ve got the garden.’

It was hard going: the place was one big muddy thicket. The elms in particular had embarked on world conquest, sending out armies of suckers, densely colonising large areas. Some of the suckers were mature trees, now spawning empires of their own.

‘Dutch elm disease might be the answer,’ Stan said. ‘Nature’s way of saying fuck off.’

Stan had assembled us at 8.30. We were armed with two chainsaws and a new thing, a brushcutter with a circular chainsaw blade. Flannery liked the idea very much.

‘Tremble, jungle,’ he said.

I said, ‘The point is, Flannery, we apply the technology with some purpose in mind. We don’t apply it simply because we like laying waste to large areas of nature and seeing big things fall over.’

‘Wimp,’ said Flannery.

Stan went for a long walk through the muddy paddocks around the house. We were on smoko, sitting on Flannery’s ute, when he came back. ‘Major thing,’ he said, hitching his buttocks onto the tray, ‘major thing is, gardens like this, they’re designed for vistas. Looking from the house and the garden, looking at the house and the garden. But if the bloody vista’s gone, all brick-veneer slums crowding it, you can’t see what the designer saw.’

‘So you got it worked out,’ Flannery said. He was eating a pie. A viscous fluid the colour of liquid fertiliser was leaking down his unshaven chin. This and the Geelong beanie pulled down to a centimetre above his eyebrows gave him a particularly fetching appearance.

‘More or less,’ Stan said. At that moment, Francis Keany’s vehicle came into view.

Francis got out, the picture of an English country gentleman. He nodded to the peasants and said to Stan: ‘Good morning, Stan. So what do we now know? Enough research to write an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Paid by the hour. Photographs taken from a great height. At a cost of about five dollars a metre. Charged both going up and coming down, as far as I can tell. So what do we now know about this garden?’

Francis had clearly been working on his opening lines during the drive from Melbourne.

Stan was patting pockets for his pipe. ‘Not much,’ he said, sadly.

Francis’s face went tight. He pursed his full lips, lifted his chin and slowly turned his face away from us until he was in full profile. This was a mistake. Stan had a clipping of a magazine article in which Francis’s profile was described as that of a Roman senator on a coin.

‘What Roman senator do you think that magazine twat had in mind?’ Stan said in a musing tone. ‘Pompus? Was there a Priapus? What about Fartus?’

Francis came back into full face. He blinked several times, willing himself to remain composed. ‘In a few minutes,’ he said, voice edging on the tremulous, ‘Mr and Mrs Karsh are going to drive. Through that gate. I’d like to have something to tell them. If that’s at all possible.’ Pause. ‘Stan.’

Stan found the battered and blackened object resembling a piece of root rescued from a bonfire. He applied a yellow plastic lighter with an awesome flame. Smoke gathered around him until he looked like a smouldering scarecrow. Francis took two paces backwards to get away and was starting to speak when a black Mercedes station wagon with tinted windows nosed around the corner of the drive.

‘Oh shit,’ he said.

The car stopped next to Francis’s Discovery. The front doors opened. The driver was a tall woman, thirties, lightly tanned, sleek dark hair to her shoulders, minimal make-up. She was wearing a camelhair donkey jacket, thin cream sweater, jeans and walking boots. The passenger was in his late fifties, stocky, pale, small features, dark suit, tired eyes. He ran fingers the colour of chicken sausages through his thick grey hair and loosened his striped tie.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Why isn’t it snowing?’

Francis coughed. ‘Leon,’ he said. ‘Anne. Good to see you. Filthy weather, I’m afraid. I’d like to introduce Stan Harrop. He’s one of my associates with a special knowledge…’

Leon Karsh ignored this and came around to shake hands with all of us, starting with Flannery. ‘Leon Karsh. Thanks for your help here.’ Soft voice, unusual accent, upper-class English over something else. When he got to Stan, he said, ‘My wife tells me you were responsible for Faraway in Bowral. I knew the family. Wonderful garden.’

‘Responsible, no,’ Stan said. ‘I was the maintenance man.’

Leon Karsh smiled. ‘Excellent maintenance, then.’

‘Thank you,’ Stan said.

‘What I’m trying to do here, Leon,’ Francis said, ‘is to recapture the essence of the original garden without necessarily being constrained by the more obvious limitations of the original designer’s vision. To do that…’

‘What limitations are those?’ said Stan.

Francis gave him a look, a laser beam of hatred. ‘To the trained eye,’ he said, ‘it’s obvious that the absence of a central axis…’

‘To the trained eye,’ Stan said, ‘there is a central axis. Mac, explain. I’ve got to get these expensive craftsmen back to work.’

It was amazing to me that Stan had managed to work for other people for so long. I fetched the plan and the copies of the photographs from the truck and laid them out on the tray. Anne Karsh was at my left elbow, Leon Karsh at my right. I could feel Francis behind me, trying to see over my shoulder. Anne smelled faintly of rosemary and cinnamon, a clean smell.

I said, ‘The garden was designed around 1885 by an Englishman called Robert Barton Graham for the Peverell family. The Peverell brothers were on the Ballarat goldfields until they realised there was more money in supplying timber and then flour to the miners. They built a mill on the creek here in 1868 and the house later. It was in the family till the 1950s. Lots of them are buried down the road here, next to the church.’

I found the right photograph. ‘This is dated December 1937. Two gardeners clipping a low circular hedge. It’s box. If you look carefully, you can see there’s a circle of hedge inside another circle. Paths run to the centre. A cross of paths.’

Anne Karsh leant forward to look at the photograph. ‘A sort of double mandala,’ she said. ‘One path’s wider than the others.’ A breast touched my arm.

‘Exactly,’ Francis said. ‘Mac has been very useful…’

‘The luck here is the sundial,’ I said, pointing at the photograph. ‘It tells us this picture was taken looking north.’

‘That’s important,’ Francis said. ‘Obviously…’

‘It also tells us the time of day,’ I said. ‘It’s late afternoon. This dark at the top left of the photograph-we couldn’t work that out. That’s because we assumed that the wide path would be the key to the long sightline. You can see the path runs north-south, and that puts the house behind the photographer.’

‘It’s the shadow of the house,’ Anne Karsh said, the pleasure of discovery in her voice. ‘That’s the big chimney.’

I said, ‘That’s right. It made Stan think that perhaps the long axis of garden ran across the front of the house.’

‘Odd thing to do, isn’t it?’ Leon Karsh said. ‘Not that I know anything about garden design.’

‘You have an instinct for form, Leon,’ Francis said. ‘It’s a gift.’

‘It is odd,’ I said, ‘and unlikely, according to Stan. Then we got the aerial photographs.’

‘I insisted on aerial photography,’ Francis said. ‘One of the most valuable tools in the armoury of the garden restoration architect.’

‘Tools in an armoury, Francis?’ Anne Karsh said. Stan was going to like her.

I unrolled the big enlargement. ‘Here’s the house. Here’s the creek. Here’s the old mill. Now, from the length of the house shadow in the old photograph…’

‘You can pinpoint the sundial,’ Anne Karsh said, pointing. She had strong hands, no rings. ‘God, it’s just jungle.’

‘We’ve found it,’ I said. ‘Box and yew trees now. Something else puzzled us.’ I pointed to a large area, bare in comparison with the rest of the garden, to the right of the house.

‘Not a natural shape,’ Anne Karsh said. She bent over the photograph and her hair swung like a silk curtain and touched my cheek. I flicked a glance at her. I wished I’d shaved.

‘Not at all natural, Anne,’ Francis said. ‘Very perceptive of you.’

‘No-one had mentioned,’ I said, that the original house burned to the ground in 1904.’

‘The shape of a house,’ Leon Karsh said. ‘You fellows have done well.’

‘Thank you, Leon,’ Francis said, modestly.

‘The mark of the house still shows because, for some reason, they didn’t finally demolish the ruins until the late 1940s,’ I said. ‘They built the new house as a replica of the old one, but it was too late to change the main axis of the garden. You’ll also have to live with it.’

‘A pleasure,’ Anne Karsh said. I didn’t look at her. I wanted to.

‘Stan’s worked out the focal point of the main axis,’ I said. ‘The main sightline leads the eye to the church steeple in Brixton. You can’t see it now because of those pines planted about forty years ago. Stan found out that while Graham was working on the garden, he also designed the church. Colonel Peverell paid for it.’

‘One cheque satisfied both man and God,’ Leon Karsh said. ‘In that order. Things don’t change much.’

‘So,’ Francis said, ‘you can now appreciate the enorm… the magnitude of my task here.’

‘Can we see what’s happened so far?’ Leon Karsh said to me. I looked at Francis. He was not a pleased person.

‘Go ahead, Mac,’ he said. ‘I have planning to do.’ He turned to Anne Karsh. ‘My dear, you have no idea-the logistics of a project like this resemble fighting the Gulf War.’

The Karshes put on gumboots and I showed them what we’d found so far, including paths, a sunken tennis court and a pond that was gravity-fed through a stone aqueduct from a spring on the hillside behind the house.

‘Where does the water go from here?’ Anne Karsh said.

‘Haven’t got to that yet,’ I said. ‘Probably channelled down to join the creek above the pond that feeds the millrace.’

‘There’s a millrace?’ She checked herself, delighted. ‘Well, since there’s a mill, I suppose there is.’

‘In good shape,’ I said. ‘Locals say the mill produced flour until World War II. The creek’s dammed down there to create a millpond. You open a sluicegate to let water into the headrace.’

‘I’d like to see that,’ Anne Karsh said.

‘Next time,’ Leon Karsh said. ‘The architect should be here. Should have been here before us.’ He turned his weary eyes on me. ‘So you’re a landscape gardener?’

‘No.’

Leon looked at me. Not a glance. A look. In his eyes you could see instinct and intelligence. I was being evaluated. God knows what he saw in my eyes. Attraction to his wife perhaps.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m a blacksmith. I work for Stan when things are slow. Which is quite often.’

‘But you haven’t always been a blacksmith.’

‘Leon,’ Anne said, ‘you’re prying.’

‘That’s right,’ Leon said. ‘I’m prying. My whole life is spent prying.’

‘I’ve done a few things.’

‘And you’re not easily pried. We’ll need an estate manager here when we’re finished. You might be interested.’

‘Bit too independent these days,’ I said. ‘But that might change. I’ll show you what’s left of the walled garden on the way back.’

The architect was waiting at the house, a thin middle-aged man, wispy chicken-feather beard, dressed for an Atlantic crossing in an open boat. With him was a clone, cloned smaller, presumably the assistant architect. In my days among the rich, I’d observed that nothing they paid for came in ones: not lawyers, not gardeners, not architects, not whores. Even their women came with a mother or a sister or a friend, usually fat, often ugly, always resentful.

I excused myself to rejoin the labourers, to go back to my place. Leon shook my hand. Anne said, ‘I’d like to see the mill some time if that can be arranged.’

‘Any time you want to see it, it’s down there,’ I said. ‘It’s your mill.’

‘Mac,’ Leon said, ‘I’ll tell Francis to build in the time for showing Anne the mill. Keep her away from the dangerous places. These old buildings, everything’s rotten.’

‘Any time,’ I said.

I found Flannery and Lew on their hands and knees looking for a path. ‘Glad to see you’re safe,’ Flannery said. ‘Thought you’d slipped over onto the managerial side. Notice that woman’s mouth? Very powerful. Suck the grips off your handlebars. She give you an indication of anything?’

‘Said she found the bloke with the pie gravy running down his chin irresistible. Turned her on.’

‘I’ve heard it can do that,’ Flannery said. ‘Chittick’s pie.’

At the end of the day, we had a few beers at the Heart of Oak and then I went home, dog-tired, still hurting from Saturday’s football, sick at heart about Ned.

It was Lew’s turn to make the meal. I poured a big glass of red wine and went out to the office to finish making out Allie’s invoices. There was a note from her on the desk:

You are my № 1 football hero. Can I wash your jumper, anything that has been close to you? On second thoughts, perhaps not anything. To business. You’ll see I’m booked up tomorrow but can give you a hand with the, um, gateposts on Wednesday. See you tomorrow evening. Your devoted fan, Allie.

Something was nagging at me as I worked. November 1985. Ned and Dr Barbie. The depressed Dr Barbie. Barbie the skier.

Skiing.

I stopped writing mid-invoice and looked up Irene Barbie’s number. She answered on the second ring.

‘Irene, Mac Faraday. Sorry to bother you at night.’

‘That’s all right. I’ve been thinking about our conversation.’

‘I want to ask you about Ian and skiing.’

‘Yes.’ Puzzled.

‘When did he give it up?’

‘When? Oh, I’ll have to think-um, it would have been around 1986 or ’87.’

‘You said he went to Europe or Canada every year. What time of the year?’

‘Usually from mid-November. He’d get back in time for the start of the school holidays.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to say whether he went in November 1985, would you?’

‘I’m sure he did. I can find my diary if you want to hold on.’

‘Take as long as you like.’

I drank some wine and waited, feeling the tension in my neck and shoulders.

Irene Barbie was back within three minutes.

‘Mac? Still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘One second while I…’

I held my breath.

‘Left for Canada on November 13, came back December 5.’

I breathed out. ‘You’re sure that’s 1985?’

‘Oh yes. This is from my diary. Can you tell me why you want to know this?’

‘I’d like to talk to you again,’ I said. ‘If that’s possible. And I’ll tell you then.’

‘Ring me,’ she said.

I set off to get another glass of red. The pain had left my body. I felt a sense of relief and elation.

Marcia Carrier was lying about Ned and Ian Barbie.

Berglin traced Melanie Loreen Pavitt to an address in Shepparton, out where the neat town begins to fray. You drive past the restumped houses, disciplined yards, steam-cleaned driveways, tools hung on pegboard in swept garages, retired men in caps, full of empty purpose. Then the brick veneers, low, brown, ugly, lawns shaved, big windows blinded. At the end of the concrete drive, fixed to the two-car garage, a hoop. It waits for the sad boy to come home and throw the meaningless ball, pass the time until summoned to eat the processed food, watch the manufactured world, sleep.

Further out, on bigger blocks, windswept, treeless, beyond mowing, stand exhausted weatherboards, at the end of their histories, all hope gone, boards sprung, stumps rotten, roofs rusted.

Melanie Pavitt’s weatherboard house stood in a sea of long yellow grass, leaning with the prevailing wind, bright junk mail blowing around. The brick chimney on the right was bulging at the bottom and swaying inwards at the top. The windows’ sashcords had disintegrated and pieces of weatherboard fallen off the side of the house held up the top panes. I felt the verandah boards, grey, eroded like Ethiopian hillsides, sag under my weight. Next door was a work in progress, a long brick-veneer train carriage of a house with two window openings blocked with plywood and the end wall half-built. Silver insulation foil caught the light. Behind the house was a huge shed, more factory than garage. A newish red Nissan, dusty, stood at the end of a paved section of driveway facing the shed across a riverbed of bluestone dust.

There was no response to my knocks. Inside a radio was on at full volume. Country and western. I thought of going around the back, then a vertical blind in the unfinished house moved. I went over and knocked on the unpainted front door. It opened instantly, on a chain. A woman in her forties, pretty face, plump, long dyed auburn hair, sleep in her eyes, lipstick a little smudged, said, ‘Yes.’

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Melanie Pavitt. Does she still live next door?’

There was a wary silence. Finally, she said, ‘Police?’

‘No. I’m not selling and I’m not collecting either. It’s a personal matter.’

She put a finger to the corner of her right eye, pulled the skin back. ‘Yeah, she’s next door.’

‘She doesn’t seem to be home. Any idea when she might be back?’

The woman closed the door briefly to take off the chain. She was wearing a purple dressing gown. ‘Didn’t hear her go,’ she said. ‘The car makes a helluva noise, exhaust shot. She might be in the back. Let me put something on, I’ll come with you.’

I waited on the verandah. It was quiet here, just a faraway hum of traffic. The woman came out wearing tight jeans, a fluffy blue mohair-like top with three-quarter sleeves and black pumps. She had repaired her make-up. She walked ahead of me, buttocks jiggling.

‘Doesn’t go out much, Mel,’ she said. ‘Not since the boyfriend moved in. Nice bloke. Used to be in and out of my place. Not anymore.’

We tried knocking again. Nothing. Just the music.

‘Try the back,’ said the woman. ‘By the way, my name’s Lee-Anne, two words with a hyphen.’

‘John,’ I said. We walked down the car tracks beside the house. The kitchen was a lean-to at the back, younger than the main house.

Lee-Anne knocked on the back door. The music was louder here. ‘Stand by Your Man’.

‘Won’t hear anything over that racket,’ Lee-Anne said. She tried the doorknob. The door opened. She took a step inside.

‘Mel? You there? Someone for you.’

Nothing. Just the music.

Lee-Anne took another step in. I followed. The kitchen was neat, a smell in the air of something burnt. ‘Mel!’ Lee-Anne shouted. ‘Barry!’

The door to the rest of the house was closed. Lee-Anne opened it and called out again.

We went down a short, dark passage, past a door on the left, towards a closed door and the music. At the door, Lee-Anne paused, turned to me. ‘You go first,’ she said. She bit her lower lip.

I opened the door.

It was a sitting room, also dark, curtains drawn, old blond-wood furniture, a big television, radio on top of it. A fairground barker’s voice was saying, ‘Wangaratta Ford. Where the best deals are waiting for you.’ The burnt smell was gone now. Replaced by something else.

I knew what it was. Before I saw the man.

Lee-Anne came in behind me and screamed.

He was sitting in the chair facing the television. A big part of his face was missing, a black, congealing cavity, and his whole chest was dark with dried blood. Behind his head what looked like a gallon of blood had seeped into the chair upholstery.

That was the other smell: the salty, sickening slaughterhouse smell of blood.

I stepped forward for a closer look at the man. He was holding a revolver in his right hand.

‘Barry?’ I said.

Lee-Anne nodded, face chalk-white, lipstick startling against it.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ I said.

Two other doors, closed, led from the room. I opened the left-hand one: a small bedroom, empty.

I turned. Lee-Anne was looking at the floor. ‘Through there?’ I said, pointing.

‘Mel’s bedroom,’ she said softly, without looking up.

I opened the door. Double bed, made. Wardrobe, dresser. No-one there.

I went back, down the dark passage, to the other door.

‘Bathroom,’ said Lee-Anne from close behind me.

I opened the door.

The bath was directly in front of me. A woman was in it, naked, floating in dark water. Shot once, through the left eye. She had been sitting upright and the bullet had sprayed the contents of her head over the wall behind and beside her.

‘Don’t look,’ I said. ‘Call the cops from your place.’

I heard her run down the passage. Then I had a look around. An old suitcase was on top of the wardrobe in Melanie’s bedroom. I took it down, gripping the handle in a tissue from the dressing table, and opened it on the bed: perhaps a dozen letters, an empty perfume bottle, a pair of gold high heels, a gold chain belt, three packets of photographs, a bead purse with some Fijian coins, a small velvet box that had held a ring, a black-covered book.

I opened the book. On the first page was written large: My Life. By Melanie Loreen Pavitt.

I put the letters, the photographs and the book into my shirt, replaced the suitcase, left the house. At the car, I made sure Lee-Anne wasn’t watching and put the stolen goods under the front seat. Then I drove the car into Lee-Anne’s yard, over the bluestone dust and parked behind the house. I found the emergency cigarettes and went round the front and sat on the front step.

‘Get a smoke off you?’ she said from behind me, voice tremulous. ‘I’m shakin.’

‘Natural,’ I said, offering her the packet and the matches. She lit up and sat down beside me. We sat there smoking, not saying anything, waiting for the sirens and the police. When I heard the first wail, I said, ‘Inside’s better. There’ll be television people and other journos coming. They tip them off.’

We went in and stood at the breakfast bar in Lee-Anne’s kitchen. This room was finished, all pale gleaming wood and stainless steel.

‘Nice room,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ll explain afterwards but I’m going to arrange it with the cops that they tell them the bodies were found by a neighbour. They’ll want you on camera. You want to do that? It’ll get rid of them.’

She nodded. The idea didn’t displease her.

‘Okay. Don’t say anything about what you saw. Don’t mention me. Just say something like, “I’ve lost a good friend and neighbour and I’d appreciate being left alone to grieve”.’

She nodded again, eyes brighter. Then the cops knocked.

I was lucky. I got an intelligent plainclothes cop straight off. He listened to me, wrote down my name and the number I gave him to ring, rang his station commander, gave him the number. The superior rang back inside five minutes, they exchanged a few words, the cop came over.

‘That’ll be in order, Mr Faraday. Mrs Vinovic’s giving a statement in the sitting room. I’ll take yours here.’

We heard the sound of a helicopter. ‘Vultures here,’ the man said. I looked out of the window. The helicopter was above Melanie’s house, camera protruding like a gun.

It was dark before the circus was over. We stood in the sitting room. ‘Helluva way to spend an afternoon,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s over. Time to get moving.’

‘A drink,’ she said. ‘Have a drink.’ The high colour brought on by the television appearances was fading. She tried out the name. ‘John.’

‘I’ve got a long way to go.’

‘Just a drink. One drink. What d’ya drink? Beer? I’ve got beer. Wine? Lots of wine. Bobo didn’t drink anything except wine. All kinds of wine. There’s a cellar y’know. Proper cellar. Bobo had to have a cellar.’

‘Beer would be good.’

‘Beer. I’ll have a beer too. Don’t often drink beer. Fattening. What the fuck.’

At six thirty, we watched the news on television. Melanie’s house from the air, the voice-over. ‘A thirty-two-year-old Shepparton woman and her de facto husband were found dead of gunshot wounds in their house outside the town today.’ We saw a lot of police coming and going and a young male reporter with receding hair identified the dead man as Barry James Field, twenty-seven, an unemployed building worker. Lee-Anne came on and said her dignified piece. The camera liked her.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Just right.’

‘Police are treating the deaths as a murder-suicide,’ the reporter said.

At eight o’clock, I rang Lew. ‘I’m held up here,’ I said. ‘Back tomorrow.’

Lee-Anne came into the kitchen with a bottle of champagne. The heating was on high, she’d taken off the fluffy top to reveal a Club Med T-shirt strained to its limits, her colour was back. ‘Perrier Something,’ she said. ‘Fucking case of it down there. All right, y’reckon?’

‘I reckon.’

I opened it gently. I’d have to get a cab to a motel.

‘Bobo had the cleaning contract at my work,’ Lee-Anne said. ‘Clean, clean, clean, it was like a religion. First place we lived in, rental, you won’t believe this, he used to get in the roof with this industrial vacuum. Huge fucking thing, noise like a Boeing, suck a rat out of a drain.’

I poured. Lee-Anne drank half a glass.

‘Dust in the ceiling. Couldn’t bear the idea. Can you credit that? I mean, who cares you don’t even know it’s there? Mind you, look at this place now. Bobo’ll be spinning.’

‘Looks fine,’ I said. Somehow I’d forgotten that we were twenty metres from a house where we’d found two people dead.

‘Light’s too bright.’ She went to the door and turned a knob. ‘Better. Dimmers in every room. Toilet, even. I thought dimmers were about bloody romance. Shouldn’t talk like this about Bobo. Drove the ute under a semi outside Wang. Horror crash, the paper said. Could’ve posted it. What I want to know is what the fuck he’s doing outside Wang when he tells me he’s in Bendigo overnight, big cleaning contract coming up?’

Lee-Anne came back to her seat opposite me. She put her elbows on the counter, held out her glass and looked into my eyes. She was looking startlingly attractive. ‘Bobo was number two. First was Steve. Don’t even think about him. Photographer. Just a kid when I met him. Coburg girl. Very strict family. My God, strict. You don’t know strict. You have to be Coburg Lebanese to know strict.’

I filled her glass, added Perrier Jouet to mine. Very good drop. Howard James Lefroy liked Perrier Jouet. Not the drink you’d expect to be having outside Shepparton on a freezing night in June, wind coming up outside, silver foil insulation on the unfinished wall vibrating like a drum skin, blood still on the tiles in the shaky weatherboard next door.

‘Not that it kept you fucking pure,’ said Lee-Anne. She put her hands on the counter. They were good hands, long fingers, nails not painted. ‘Not when you met a photographer. Called himself a photographer. Not what a lot of people called him.’

Lee-Anne put an arm up her T-shirt to adjust her bra. I was hypnotised.

‘Wedding pictures. Half the time they didn’t come out. Whole fuckin weddings, excuse me. Vanished like they never happened. Steve was always on the run from fathers, brothers, uncles. I donta wanta my money back, I wanta my daughter’s pictures, watta fuck you do with them? Not a street he could walk in safety, Steve, that many people lookin for him.’

We opened another bottle of the French. It seemed to last five minutes.

‘Listen, Lee-Anne,’ I said. ‘Reckon we can get a taxi out here? Take me to a motel?’

She put her glass down, got up, took off her T-shirt, threw it over her shoulder, put her hand behind her back, unclipped her virgin-white bra, tossed it away. It landed in the sink.

‘I don’t suppose you’d have a spare bed,’ I said, mouth dry.

‘It’s been four years,’ she said, coming around the counter. ‘I’ve still got Bobo’s condoms.’

In the night, she woke me and asked, ‘You seen dead people before?’

What do you say?

I left before dawn, kissed her on the mouth.

The title of Melanie Pavitt’s handwritten autobiography promised more than it delivered. It didn’t go beyond the age of thirteen. She stopped in the middle of a page with the words: I did not see Mum again. I herd she went to Perth with a man but I dont no if its true. She never loved me so it dosent matter.

All the letters except one were from a man called Kevin, written from Darwin and Kalgoorlie, never more than a page: weather, job, miss you, love. The most recent one was five years old.

The other letter was brief, too, in a sloping female hand, signed by someone called Gaby, dated 12 July 1995. No address. It read:

Mel!!! You rememberd my Mums adress!!! She sent the letter to me here in Cairns. Im living here with a man called Otto, hes a German mechanic and very nice and kind altho a bit old. Still you cant have everything can you. I was really shocked to see the things you wrote. The barstards shoud be locked up!!! You are pretty lucky to be alive I reckon, its like those backpackers mudered near Sydney, Otto new one of them, a girl. Id never have said that Ken woud do something like that, they are people you are suposed to be abel to trust!!!I suppose they think there money makes it alrite. Now you now where I am come and stay, theres lots of room. Otto wont mind. Its hot all year here. To warm a lot. Write soon.

Love Gaby.

I read the letter twice.

Ken?

That was the name Dot Walsh said the naked girl in Colson’s Road had said over and over.

…saying the name Ken over and over again.

I read Gaby’s letter a third time. I was in the kitchen, sitting near the fired-up stove, but I felt a chill, as if a window had been opened, letting in a gust of freezing air.

I opened the stove’s firebox and fed in the letters from Kevin. If he was Melanie’s killer, he was probably going to go unpunished, courtesy of me. Then I went out and got the Kinross Hall records. They listed a girl called Gabriele Elaine Makin, age sixteen, at Kinross Hall at the same time as Melanie Pavitt in 1985.

I found the staff list and went through it. No Ken.

At least two people knew who Ken was and what happened on the night Sim Walsh, World War II fighter pilot and drunk, found Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road.

One of them was dead, one bullet through the left eye from a.38 Ruger from at least two metres away. If my judgment was worth anything, Melanie Pavitt had not been shot by her boyfriend, Barry James Field, unemployed building worker. Lee-Anne described Barry as a calm, sensible person who was the best thing that had ever happened to Melanie. He also seemed an unlikely owner of a weapon the cops had in ten minutes identified as stolen from a Sydney gun shop in 1994.

The other person who knew what happened to Melanie in 1985 was Gaby Makin.

I went over to the pub and rang inquiries. Then I rang Berglin. I gave them my name, we went through the rigmarole and they connected me.

‘Wanting to ask you,’ he said without preamble. ‘What is it with you and dead people?’

‘Raised the subject of Bianchi?’ I could see Flannery at the bar, hunched, staring into a glass of beer, just a shadow of Saturday’s hero.

‘I mentioned it, yes.’

‘So what’s going to happen?’

‘Don’t think it’s going on the priority list.’

‘It should.’

Berglin sighed. ‘Mac, listen. We talked about this before. Things blow up on you, it happens. The smack lost, the woman in the wrong place. Lefroy, that was a plus. Nailed him, he’d own the whole fucking prison system now, living like King Farouk, meals from Paul Bocuse, hot and cold running bumboys. Do a line anytime he likes. You’ve got another life now. Forget about the shit. Any brains, if I had them, I’d ask you can I join you out there in chilblain country, making candlesticks, whatever the fuck it is you do.’

I let the subject lie. ‘I need another trace.’

‘Jesus, I don’t know about you.’ Pause. ‘Who?’

I spelled it out: Gabriele Elaine Makin, born Frankston 1967, juvenile offender last known in Cairns. Not in the phone book.

‘Hope she survives your interest in her,’ Berglin said. ‘Don’t call me.’

‘Something else.’

Silence.

I changed my mind. I had been going to ask about Bianchi’s widow.

‘Forget it, not important.’

‘I’m glad.’

I went to the bar and sat down next to Flannery.

‘I like the next day more when we lose,’ he said. ‘Whole week more. I don’t think we should win again this Satdee.’

‘Three in a row?’ I said. ‘In another life.’

‘Beer’s on the house,’ Vinnie the publican said. ‘Few more Satdees like that, I’m takin the place off the market.’

‘Didn’t know it was on the market,’ Flannery said.

‘Pub without pokies?’ Vinnie said. ‘Pokieless pub is on the market.’

‘Tabletop dancers,’ Flannery said. ‘That’s the go. Uni girls shakin their titties, showin us the business. Have a pickin-up-the-spud competition.’

Vinnie looked over to where two elderly male customers were grumbling at each other. ‘Tabletop dancers? Need a bloody ambulance on standby outside. Mind you, that fuckin’ cook’ll need an ambulance if he doesn’t come in the door in two minutes.’

When the cook arrived, Flannery and I ate steak and onion sandwiches. From where we were sitting, I could see the wet road and the entrance to my lane. I was washing down the last bite when Allie’s truck turned in. We had work to do on the gateposts.

I woke early, stood in the shower thinking about the heft of Lee-Anne’s breasts, the sight of Allie naked. Then I thought about being fifteen, digging out rotten stumps from grey rock and unyielding clay, face down in fifty centimetres of damp and cold crawl space, breathing the dank, dead air under a farmhouse near Yass. Crawling out, hearing footsteps on the boards above me, turning over and looking up through a gap between old floorboards, parched boards, tongues shrunk, parted from their grooves, unmated. Seeing from below a woman, a naked woman, mature woman, my eyes going up the sturdy legs, parted legs, pink from the bath, seeing at the junction the secret hair, the dark, curly, springy, water-beaded hair that marked the place, the little folds of belly, the plump wet undersides of breasts, a glimpse of chin, of nose. Of seeing her move her buttocks against a towel, run it over her breasts, breasts swaying, long nipples, of seeing her open her legs, wipe the towel casually between the thighs, wipe the dark, intimate folds of skin…

Time for breakfast. I was sitting in a patch of weak sunlight eating breakfast, grilled bacon and a poached egg, when the phone rang. It was Berglin.

‘That inquiry,’ he said. ‘Party’s no longer with us. Motor accident in 1993, dead on arrival.’

I swallowed my mouthful. ‘Sure about that?’

There was silence, then he said, ‘As sure as one can be on the basis of the information supplied and the absence on all available records of anyone else with identical particulars. Yes.’

‘Sorry. Thanks.’

‘One more thing. The person in the Vatican we spoke of. You with me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Extremely resistant on a number of grounds to revisiting the matter in question.’

‘So?’

‘So the future of this course of action is uncertain.’

I went back to my breakfast. A cloud extinguished the sunlight like a door closing on a lit room.

When I’d finished, I got Gaby Makin’s letter out again. It was dated 12 July 1995.

Written from beyond the grave. Either that or Berglin was lying to me. Everything was starting to remind me of the old days.

I drove into town and consulted the Cairns Yellow Pages. I tried the Mercedes dealership first, asking for the workshop.

‘Have you got a mechanic called Otto?’ I said. ‘German?’

‘Otto the Hun. Otto Klinger. Not any more. He’s at Winlaton Motors in Brissy. Couple of years now. Miss him, too.’

He gave me a number.

The workshop office at Winlaton Motors got Otto Klinger on the line inside a minute.

‘Ja, Klinger,’ he said.

‘Otto, I’m a friend of Gaby Makin…’

‘Gaby and I are no longer together,’ Otto said. ‘She has gone with another person.’

‘I heard she was killed in a car accident in 1993.’

‘Gaby? Incorrect. She has only gone approximately one year.’

‘Any idea where?’

‘No. It is no concern of mine.’

‘Do you know anyone who would know?’

Otto sighed. ‘I suppose her girlfriend down the road would know. This is important, yes?’

‘Otto,’ I said, ‘it could be a matter of life and death, yes.’

He sighed again. ‘Give me a number for you and I will speak to the woman today if I can find her.’

I gave him a name and number. On the way home, I thought about how I’d got Melanie Pavitt’s address from Berglin. Would Melanie be alive now if I hadn’t? It wasn’t a thought I wanted to entertain. Why would Berglin lie to me about Gaby? He had never heard of Kinross Hall until I rang him to trace Melanie.

But, before that, why had Marcia lied to me about Ian Barbie and Ned?

Allie was dampening the green coal in the forge when I came in the door. The dog was watching her. She was wearing jeans, a leather apron and one of her shirts with canvas sleeves.

‘Okay to fire it when you’re not here?’ she said. ‘We didn’t discuss that.’

I gave the question some thought. It had meaning. Significance. ‘You mean, can you play with my toy when I’m not here. Is that it?’

‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘I should have raised it. Some smithies are like petrolheads, only the forge is the car. One vehicle, one driver. One toy, one boy.’

‘The toy can be played with,’ I said. ‘Day and night. And the bits in between.’

She gave me her slow, one-sided smile. ‘Day’ll be fine. I’ve got till four. Reckon we can get these giant wangers out of the way?’

We finished the things just before three pm, no feeling of achievement, just relief. I made corned beef and cheese sandwiches and we ate them sitting on the office step, reading bits of the paper, not saying much.

‘That vet,’ I said. ‘Rottweiler or Jack Russell?’

Allie frowned. ‘Labrador, it turned out. Nice but not too bright.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, standing up and taking her plate, ‘that’s what you want in a dog.’

She looked up at me from under her straight eyebrows. ‘Maybe it’s a mongrel I’m looking for.’

‘Flannery’s between engagements.’

‘Then again, maybe it’s not. Do we have to deliver these monstrosities?’

‘No. Spared that. He’s picking them up. Feel like a beer later?’

She pulled a face. ‘Would be good but I’m heading way over the other side of town. Tomorrow?’

I suddenly remembered it was Friday. Football tomorrow. No, thank God, we had a bye. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘I’ll ring,’ she said.

I worked on a chef’s knife until the drink called. Mick Doolan and Flannery were at the bar.

‘Tactics, Moc, we’re talkin tactics,’ Mick said. ‘Just a couple more wins and we’ll be bookin a finals berth. Wouldn’t that be grand?’

Flannery groaned. ‘Extra games,’ he said. ‘We’ll be playin on cortisone. Can they test for that?’

I was watching the Saints beating the Eagles in Perth when the phone rang.

‘Klinger,’ Otto said. ‘This stupid girlfriend of Gaby’s wishes to telephone Gaby and to tell her why you wish to speak with her, and to get permission to give you Gaby’s telephone number. I think she thinks that it is I who wishes to find out Gaby’s number. That is a very foolish thing to think, I can tell you.’

‘Thanks, Otto. Can you tell the friend I want to talk to Gaby about someone called Melanie Pavitt.’ I spelt the name.

‘I will call again,’ Otto said.

He rang back in twenty minutes.

‘That is all okay. Here is Gaby’s telephone number.’

I thanked him, wrote it down. It was in Victoria. I dialled it. A woman answered: ‘Yes.’ Wary.

‘Tony Mason,’ I said. ‘I sent you the message through Otto. I’d like to talk to you about Melanie Pavitt.’

‘What about her?’

‘About her experiences after leaving Kinross Hall. Immediately after she left.’

She thought about this for a while. ‘Who are you?’ she said.

‘Investigator for the Department of Community Services.’

‘Why doesn’t she tell you?’

Gaby didn’t know that Melanie was dead. This wasn’t the time to tell her.

‘She has, but I’d like to talk to someone who was at Kinross at the same time and who heard about what happened directly from Melanie. It won’t take long.’

‘On the phone?’

‘No. I’ll come and see you. Or we can meet somewhere, whatever suits you.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I suppose so. But I’m out in the country.’

‘That’s not a problem.’

I left long before dawn in the freezing and wet dark, trees stirring in the wind, huddled sheep caught by my lights on the bends. By 9.15 am I was in the high country, in Mansfield, eating a toasted egg-and-bacon sandwich and drinking black coffee. It was cold up here, hard light, pale-blue cloudless sky. The coffee shop was full of people on their way to ski, groups of rich-looking people: sleek but slightly hungover men, just edging pudgy; women with tight smiles and lots of blonde hair; vicious children, all snarls and demands, woken early for the trip. The women had a way of tossing their heads and flicking their hair from below with their fingertips as if it were tickling their necks. In the street, it was all four-wheel-drives, BMWs and Saabs.

I wasn’t going towards Mount Buller. I was going northeast. On the way to Whitfield, following Gaby’s instructions, I turned right onto a dirt road, turned again, again, thought I’d missed the place, found it, a brick, stone and weatherboard house, low, sprawling, expensive, a long way from the road, at the end of a long curving avenue of poplars, bare. Off to the right was a corrugated-iron barn and beyond that what looked like stables. Gaby had done well for herself.

Going through the gate either triggered something or sound travelled long distances in this air. A woman was waiting near the barn when I came around the final bend. She pointed to the road that led to the stables and turned to walk in that direction. She was big, tall, not fat yet, pale hair in a ponytail, dark glasses, sleeveless quilted jacket.

There was a house beyond the stables, an old stone building with a weatherboard extension. It said Manager’s House. Gaby hadn’t done as well as I’d thought. I parked next to a clean Toyota ute and got out.

Gaby took her dark glasses off. She was reaching the end of pretty, face not sure what to become. No make-up, eyes that had seen things. You wouldn’t want to mess with her.

‘Tony Mason,’ I said, putting out my hand.

She shook, no grip, ladylike. No smile.

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said. ‘I have to be in town in an hour.’

She took off her boots at the front door. ‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Been in the stables. You smell it in the warm.’

The house was warm, uncluttered, smelling pleasantly of something I couldn’t recognise.

I followed her down a passage lit by two skylights into a sitting room full of light, foothills in the windows, pale grey hills beyond.

A baby cried, small sound, pulling power of a regimental bugle.

Gaby said. ‘Feedin time. Sit down.’ She was taking off her waistcoat as she left.

I sat down in the most upright chair in the room. She came back with something wrapped in a pink blanket, sat down opposite me, unbuttoned her checked shirt, fiddled and produced a breast, aureole the colour of milky instant coffee and the size of a small saucer. She revealed the baby’s head. It was a big head, covered in fuzz.

‘Never thought I’d just take out a tit in front of a stranger,’ she said, no expression. The child ship docked with the mother ship. Gaby’s expression softened.

‘Well,’ she said, little smile, not looking at me. ‘Not just one tit anyway.’

I laughed. She looked at me, her smile opened and we were both laughing.

I said: ‘Melanie’s dead. I think she was murdered.’

The smile went. We sat in silence for a moment. Gaby had the look of someone who’d had a new and untrue and malicious charge levelled at her.

‘Dead?’

I told her how.

She pulled the baby closer. ‘You’re not from the fucking department,’ she said, matter-of-fact, not alarmed. ‘That was all bullshit.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Gaby, I’m a friend of someone who sometimes worked at Kinross. They’re trying to shaft him with molesting girls.’

‘Who?’ she said.

‘He was a handyman. Ned Lowey.’

She said, ‘No, I never heard that. Barbie, yes.’

‘Tell me about Melanie’s letter. What happened to her?’

She shifted in the chair, adjusted the baby. ‘Didn’t keep the letter. She came to see me, y’know? In Cairns.’

‘No, I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. After the letter.’ She tilted her head, thoughtful. ‘How’d you get my letter?’

‘I found it in her bedroom.’

‘Before she…’

‘After. I found the body. Me and the woman next door.’

She nodded.

‘So she came to see you?’

‘In Cairns. Stayed for a week. Was going to be longer. Otto started playin up, so she left.’

‘You talked about what happened?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Someone called Ken was involved. Who’s he?’

Gaby looked down at the suckling. ‘I don’t want to get in any trouble,’ she said. ‘Had enough trouble.’

‘There’ll be no trouble,’ I said. ‘No-one’s going to hear anything you tell me.’

‘Well.’ She sighed. ‘We were pretty pissed when she told me. Don’t remember all that much. Couldn’t hear a lot of what she said anyway. Cryin and sniffin.’

‘Ken,’ I said. ‘Who’s he?’

‘The doctor.’

‘Dr Barbie?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why do you call him Ken?’

‘The dolls? Barbie and Ken. There was Barbie and Ken.’

‘Right. Barbie and Ken. How was Ken involved?’

Gaby sighed again. ‘Day Mel was leavin, he examined her. Said he was goin to Melbourne, he’d give her a lift, save her goin by train. Only she mustn’t tell anyone cause he’d get into trouble. She thought he was a nice bloke. We all did. Anyway, they took her to the station and dropped her and Ken picked her up. Gave her a can of Coke.’

She stopped and fiddled with her breast, shifted the baby. ‘Mel said she remembered drivin along, gettin dark. Next thing she woke up, she was bein dressed in schoolgirl clothes, y’know, a gym and that.’

‘Who was doing that? Ken?’

‘She wasn’t sure. Two men. They did all kinds of sex things to her. Not normal, know what I mean? Tied her up. Hit her with something. Made her do things to them. She cried when she told me.’

‘She saw their faces?’

‘Not properly. They didn’t hide their faces. That’s why she knew they were going to kill her. But she didn’t get a real good look at them. The room was dark and she felt dizzy. And they had a light in her eyes all the time.’

‘She couldn’t describe them at all?’

‘Not really.’

‘So one could have been Dr Barbie?’

‘Well, he’s the one gave her the Coke.’

‘How’d she get away?’

‘They went off. The one man goes, “Back soon, slut, with a friend for you. She’s been looking forward to this.”’

‘She?’

‘Yeah. She. Anyway, Mel’s in this room, stone room, bars on the window, it’s upstairs. There was a bed and she stood it up on its end, got on it and she ripped a hole in the ceiling. There was a small hole and she made it bigger. Got into the roof, pulled off some tiles and got out onto the roof and climbed down a drainpipe. Pretty incredible, hey? She’s just a little thing but really strong. Barbie liked the little ones.’ She stopped. ‘She was. Really strong.’

‘And she got away.’

‘She said she ran for ages, like through some kind of forest. Pitch-dark and she was dead scared they were coming after her. She got to a road and she hid from cars. Then it was so cold she thought she’d die, so she started walking along the road. Naked. Then an old man stopped and took her to his house.’

‘I know what happened from then,’ I said.

I went over the story with her. There wasn’t any more to tell. Outside, cold a shock after the warm house, Gaby said, ‘I don’t want any trouble. Really. I’ve got a good bloke now and the baby.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You won’t hear anything about this again. But if you remember anything else, ring me.’

I wrote my number on the back of an automatic teller machine receipt.

In the rear-view mirror, I saw her watching me go, standing in the universal stance of mothers, baby on hip, pelvis tilted, knees slightly bent. I thought, what right have I to give her any assurances?

The last person I had given assurances to was Carlie Mance.

Driving back, my mind drifted over what I knew and what I didn’t know. The two men who assaulted Melanie could be the killers of the girl in the mine shaft. Who were they? Ian Barbie and someone else.

Barbie the delivery man. Had he delivered other Kinross Hall girls? How could he do that without the girls being reported missing?

And that raised the issue that I didn’t much want to think about. Had my inquiry about Melanie led to her death? How could that be? I ask Berglin to trace someone and then I find the person shot dead. Melanie Pavitt, not shot dead in the messy way of domestic killings everywhere. No. Shot dead with fussy precision. One shot in the eye. Was this the work of her gentle unemployed builders’ labourer? This I could not believe. Then Berglin lies to me about Gaby Makin. Why? What conceivable interest could Berglin have in my inquiries? He was a federal drug cop and drugs didn’t seem to enter this puzzle.

Berglin lie to me? Of all the things he said to me over the years, when I thought of him, two sentences spoken in his hoarse voice at our first meeting always echoed in the mind: How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life.

In the shitstorm after the Lefroy and Mance killings, when all fingers pointed at me, Berglin had been impassive. He never said the words I wanted him to say, never patted my arm, never invited me to confide in him. You could read nothing in his eyes. One morning, suspended from duty, wife gone, unshaven, hungover, I went to his office. He looked at me with interest while I shouted at him: abuse, recriminations, accusations of betrayal. When I ran out of things to say, Berglin said, no expression, ‘Mac, if I think you’ve moved across, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll come around and kill you. Enjoy the vacation. Now fuck off.’

I left, feeling much better.

Now I’d have to see him, confront him with the lie he’d told me. I hoped very much that he could explain it away, but I couldn’t see how.

I was still brooding on this as I drove down the damp and overgrown driveway at Harkness Park. Stan had rung to say that Francis wanted him to put on extra hands, presumably so that he could send out his bills sooner. Stan was reluctant: he didn’t like big crews. I’d suggested that instead of bringing in more workers we draw up a work schedule that provided incentives for meeting targets early. Flannery and Lew liked the idea. They were to have spent the morning clearing the main path down the sightline. Stan had estimated hours for the job and I wanted to see how far they’d got.

They’d done well, pushing at least thirty metres beyond Stan’s expectation, neat work, greenery piled ready for chipping. I was admiring the elaborate brick and cut stone path uncovered, thinking about where to establish the compost heaps, when I heard a vehicle in the driveway, just a hum. I didn’t think about it, backed into the dense overgrown box hedge beside the path, looked back towards the house. A month earlier, I wouldn’t have done this. Fear had come back into my life, uninvited.

I waited.

Anne Karsh, hair pulled back today, jeans, battered short Drizabone, looking around. I stepped out of hiding. We walked towards each other down the path, eyes meeting, looking away, coming back.

‘Checking on progress,’ I said when we were close enough.

‘You or me?’

‘Both?’

‘No, not me,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Just wanted to be here, really. In love with it. What were you doing in the hedge? If that’s a hedge.’

‘Hedge examination. How about this path?’

‘This is an unbelievable path. It’s so ornate.’

I turned and we walked to the edge of the known garden. Beyond was wilderness. ‘It’s like archaeology,’ she said. ‘For the first time, I can understand the thrill.’

‘Thrill time next week,’ I said. ‘The pines come down. Then we see the steeple. See what the man wanted us to see.’

‘Who cuts them down?’ We were on our way back.

‘A professional. The biggest one’s nine metres around at the base. Death to amateurs. We could bring in a portable sawmill, turn them into planks. You could have something made out of them. Terrible waste otherwise. All those years of growing.’

She looked at me. ‘Leon’ll like that. Could you do it?’

‘If you tell Francis that’s what you want.’

She held out her right hand. We stopped. ‘I’ll tell him now.’ She took out a small leatherbound book, found a page, took a mobile telephone, minute, from another pocket, punched numbers. After a short wait, she said. ‘Francis, Anne Karsh…Well, thank you. Francis, the pines blocking the view to the church steeple are coming down next week. Can you arrange to have them turned into usable timber?…Leon will be thrilled. Stan will arrange it, I’m sure. Thank you, Francis…I look forward to that too. Bye.’

We walked, explored the thicket around the site of the original house, forced our way through to the old orchard, desperate-looking fruit trees but the least overgrown place because of the deep mulch of fallen fruit.

‘You can prune these buggers back to life,’ I said. ‘If you want them.’

‘I want them,’ she said. ‘I want everything the way it was.’

I looked at her.

‘I’ve got a flask of coffee,’ Anne said. A thorn had scratched her cheekbone, delicate serration, line of blood like the teeth of a tiny saw. ‘Drink coffee?’

‘Got enough?’

‘I’ve got enough.’

The Mercedes boot held a wicker basket with a stainless-steel flask and stainless-steel cups. We sat side by side on the front steps of the house, huge, dangerously aged poised portico above us, drinking coffee, talking about the garden. She had an easy manner, sense of humour, no hint of rich lady about her. A weak sun emerged, touched her hair.

‘Nice,’ she said.

‘Good coffee.’

‘The day, the place, the moment.’

‘Those too.’

We didn’t look at each other, something in the air. Then our eyes met for a moment.

‘Mr Karsh working today?’ I said, regretted the question.

‘No. He’s in Noosa for the weekend. His new girlfriend goes to Noosa for the winter.’

I looked at her. ‘I understand it’s wall-to-wall girlfriends in Noosa.’

She leaned sideways, studied me, smiled a wry smile. ‘I’ve been a girlfriend. There’s no moral high ground left for me.’

‘Not for any of us,’ I said.

‘Leon’s a charming person,’ she said. ‘His problem is chronic envy. Non-specific envy. His greatest fear is that he’s missing something, that there’s something he should be doing, that there’s something he doesn’t know about or hasn’t got that will make him happy and complete. If he saw a man leading a duck down the road on a piece of string and looking at peace, Leon would send someone out to buy a duck and give it a try for fifteen minutes. Then he’d say, fuck this duck, why’s that woman on the bicycle look so pleased?’

‘Why did you?’

‘What?’

‘Look so pleased?’

‘So,’ Anne said. ‘Blacksmiths are not without insight. I worked for a merchant bank that was hired by a company to fight off a takeover bid by one of Leon’s companies. Very messy business, went on for months, working seventeen, eighteen hours a day, seven days. One Sunday I got home and my husband had gone off with my best friend. Anyway, we fought off Leon and we had a no-hard-feelings drink with the other side and Leon showed up. I think he then began to see me as a substitute for the company he couldn’t have. Anything Leon can’t have leaps in value in his eyes.’

‘So he took you over.’

She smiled. ‘Well, as I said, he’s a charming person. He has the gift of charm. It was a totally uncontested takeover. But as I found out, for Leon, you conquer the peak, another peak beckons. More coffee?’

‘Just a drop.’

‘There’s plenty.’ She poured. ‘That’s me. And I’m not complaining. What about you?’

‘My wife didn’t like my hours either.’

‘Blacksmiths work long hours?’

‘Pre-blacksmith.’ I stood up. ‘Time to go. Thanks for the coffee.’

She stood up too. Standing on the step above me put her eyes level with mine. We looked at each other. ‘Let me know when you’d like to see the mill,’ I said.

Anne nodded. ‘Can you give me a number?’ She wrote it in her leather-bound book.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘See you soon then.’

She put out a hand and straightened my shirt collar, pulled her hand back. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I thought she blushed a little.

‘Terrible urge to straighten pictures,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you. Next week.’

I drove home in the waning day. Towering dark clouds on all horizons made it seem as if I were crossing a valley floor. It was dark by the time I stopped outside the Heart of Oak to see if Flannery was there. He wasn’t.

‘Car went in your drive just before dark,’ Vinnie said.

I left the vehicle where it was, walked up the road, climbed the paddock gate in the far corner and crossed the sodden field so that I could come at the house from the back, from behind the smithy.

The caller was still there: a car was parked in front of the office. I went across the gravel, slowly, my gravel, gravel put down so that I could hear it crunch. All senses on high-beam, I looked into the kitchen window.

Something touched my leg. I froze.

The dog, puzzled.

Inside, Lew was feeding the stove. He turned and said something to someone out of my field of view. The person laughed.

I let out my pent-up breath and opened the back door.

Berglin was in my favourite chair, long shoes on the table, cigarette dangling from a hand.

‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ he said. ‘Home is the hunter.’

There was no other way to do this. ‘Lew,’ I said, ‘I need to talk to this gentleman alone.’

When he’d gone, I said, ‘You lied to me.’

‘Come again?’ Berglin’s eyebrows went up in the middle.

‘That trace. Gabriele Makin.’

‘Yeah. Dead.’

‘Not dead. Undead. Not a million fucking kilometres from here.’

He blew smoke towards me, eyes narrowed. ‘You sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

‘How’d you find her?’

‘Phone book. What the fuck did you use?’

‘Contractor.’

‘Why?’

He blew smoke. ‘Why? I’m going to put some personal request through the system? I’m going to do that? I put that Melanie Pavitt through the system, Canberra’d be asking me why I wanted to find a person turns up dead. Make sense to you? Fresh air’s slowing the brain out here.’

‘Who’s the contractor?’

Berglin mashed his cigarette into the ashtray Lew had found for him. ‘It’s my worry. I’ll talk to him. Believe me, I’ll talk to him.’

From nowhere the thought came to me. ‘Alex Rickard,’ I said. ‘You’re using Alex Rickard.’

Berglin was lighting another cigarette, lighter poised. He lowered it. ‘I’ll stand on the cunt’s head,’ he said. ‘We’ll know why in quick time.’

‘What about a beer?’ I said, slack with relief. Not Berglin to blame but Alex Rickard.

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

I opened two Boags, found two glasses, sat down at the table.

Berglin took a big draught from the bottle. ‘Listen,’ he said, two reasons I’m out here in the fucking tundra. One is, from your time on the Lefroy fuck-up, the name Algie mean anything?’

‘Algae? As in blue-green slime?’

‘Don’t know. Could be. Not likely. Could be A-L-G-I-E. Could be two parts: Al G, like a first name and a surname initial. Maybe Al Gee.’

‘No. Never heard it. It’s someone’s name?’

‘Calls himself that, yeah.’

‘How’s this come up?’

‘Run-through last night, Bulleen of all fucking places. Nothing’s sacred. Person we had an interest in last year. Local jacks turned over this low-level garbage in Footscray, he tells them this weed bloke’s grown overnight. Now he’s a smack supplier, found some fucking original channel-big, not your arse full of condoms at all. Scully’s cockbrains wire the place up like a recording studio, move in across the road. Nothing to report. So they say. Stereo-quality farting, got the man mango-kissing his sister-in-law, very vocal performance, that’s about it. Waste of public money.’

He drank some more beer. ‘This is good,’ he said, looking at the bottle. ‘The pointyheads can make beer. Anyway, subject closed until last night. Then the serene Bulleen household is severely disrupted. Man alone at home, wife at the Chadstone shopping centre. He’s beaten, badly knocked about, teeth dislodged, flogged. Worse. Throat cut.’ He paused. ‘Don’t say anything, the thought occurs.’

We sat in silence for a few seconds. Berglin drank most of his beer, wiped his thin lips. I got out two more.

‘Good dog,’ he said. ‘Now the reason for all this unpleasantness might have remained obscure, MacArthur. But for one thing. False wall in the back of the house, space about a metre between the kitchen and the laundry. Get into it through the ceiling. Up the ladder in the garage, through the inspection hole. Last night, half the fucking kitchen wall kicked in.’

Berglin put out the cigarette, more gently this time, found another one, looked at it, put it down on the table. ‘Christ knows what these cunts went off with,’ he said, ‘but they left behind, down there in a corner, up against the plasterboard, a quarter kilo of outstanding, medal-winning-purity product. Melbourne Show quality.’

‘How come?’

‘Just bad light, they reckon. Pricks in a hurry, got plenty, never saw it.’

‘Algie,’ I said. ‘Where’s that come in?’

‘The wife says, she is a very scared person, that the deceased said to another man, person she doesn’t know, she was near them in a public place, he said, “Algie’s on, the lot”.’

‘That’s it?’

‘She heard that. Algie.’

‘Four words. What public place? Street? Shopping centre? Lots of noise?’

‘Noisy, but Algie, yeah. She says, she said to him in the car, who’s Algie? He said, just a bloke I’m doing business with.’

‘Could have been clearing his throat. Said it fast? Algiesonthelot. Native English speakers these Bulleen people?’

‘Since your departure,’ said Berglin, ‘we find ourselves bereft of ideas. But we stumble on. He’s Turkish, old man’s a Turk. We’ve run Algie by umpteen Turks. More Turks than Gallipoli. Doesn’t make sense in Turkish.’

‘But it’s come up before.’

‘What?’ He was studying the beer bottle again.

‘Algie. Algie-the word in question.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s been around.’

‘Around? Well, familiar word. Algie. Since when? Since before Lefroy?’

‘No. That’s why I’m here. Asking you.’

‘So when’s it come up? How long after Lefroy?’

‘Not long. Soon. On some drug bug, these spiders are talking. Appears to be about Lefroy. The one says, heard it was Algie.’

‘I’ve never heard that,’ I said. ‘How come I don’t know that?’

‘Mac, no-one needs to know everything.’

‘What does that mean? Exactly?’ I said.

‘What it says.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Soon after Lefroy I had a definite need to know about anything like that, Berg,’ I said. ‘But moving on, you’re here because you’re in some kind of shit, second Lefroy-style run-through, new boys in Canberra think it’s time you kicked on to that block at Batemans Bay. That it?’

‘Third,’ said Berglin.

‘Third?’

‘Third Lefroy-style run-through. There’s lots of them go on but not killing. Three years ago, we had two Chinese blokes, property investment advisors for Hong Kong syndicates, that’s the story. Rent a flat in St Kilda, ground floor, beachfront, big flat, four bedrooms, gold taps, that sort of thing. They come and go, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok, Hawaii, Sydney, Brisbane. Never stop for more than a few days, real estate people show them around buildings. Hong Kong clears them, Scully’s people give them a clean bill. Operation terminated. I had a bad feeling, but we couldn’t go on without the local jacks.’

Berglin lit his cigarette. ‘About eighteen months ago, the lady lives upstairs looks down from her balcony, sees a pool of blood on the balcony below. From under the door. It’s all tiles, inside and out. Blood runs free. She calls jacks. Chinese bloke’s taped up, throat cut.’

He looked at me in silence for a while.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Woman there too. A hooker. In the bathroom. Same treatment as the bloke. And worse. Much worse. We kept the details quiet.’

I swallowed. ‘This means what?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Stuff, money, probably money. Pick-up, pay off. Someone knew.’

‘Algie?’

‘Yesterday was a big day for shit floating up. There was another hooker these Chinese blokes liked. Hired by the day on other visits. Woman called Lurleen. We couldn’t ever find her. Yesterday she rings a number we gave this other hooker, her friend, back then. Lurleen’s back in town and she’s scared. I had a little walk and talk with her. Guess what?’

‘No.’

‘She’s in the flat too on the night. She’s got a key, been there all afternoon. Now she’s in the kitchen, hears the doorbell, hears the Chinese open the door, he says something and then she hears him scream. She doesn’t fuck around, knows shit when she hears it coming, out the door to the garage, gone. Next day she reads the bit in the paper, moves interstate. Wollongong. She reckons anyone looking for her, they won’t look there. I reckon she’s right.’

‘How does she help?’

‘Algie,’ Berglin said, ‘That’s what the Chinese said at the front door. He said, “You are Algie?” A question.’

‘She heard that from the kitchen?’

‘He had a high voice, the Chinese, she says. Clear voice. And there was a half-open door to the hallway and the sitting room. Open-plan place.’

‘You give her the name before she told you what she heard?’

‘Don’t be a dork. This woman’s kosher. Lefroy and the Chinese, same visitors. And if this Algie in Bulleen is Lefroy’s Algie…’

I finished my beer, fetched two more. ‘So that would just about get you to the second thing that brings you here,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Berglin. ‘Bianchi and Mance at the pub in Deer Park. You need to tell me who told you that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘My telling days are over. Anyway, person can’t take it any further. Just heard it.’

Berglin nodded, drank some beer, scratched his head. ‘Need a pee,’ he said. ‘Let’s go outside. I like an open-air pee when I’m in the country. Pee, a cigarette and a look around. The stockman’s breakfast.’

We went into the night, over to the paddock fence and pissed on the weeds.

‘Wouldn’t want to expose the pork out here too long,’ Berglin said. ‘Lose it to frostbite. Listen, should be clear to you if Mance was playing both you and Bianchi, the idea came from Scully. Bianchi was just a cockbrain, messenger, fetch the hamburgers, get us a pie.’

‘And then,’ I said, ‘you have to begin to think the unthinkable.’

He zipped his fly. ‘A possibility, no more.’

‘Here’s another possibility. Three separate surveillance operations, three targets dead, stuff gone. And it’s all got nothing to do with the surveillance.’

‘Odds higher there,’ Berglin said. ‘It gives me the same worry you had and that makes doing anything very difficult.’

‘And I hear the surveillance records vaporised.’

Berglin looked at me, head tilted. ‘For a bloke way out of the loop, you hear a lot.’

‘What about the spring cleaning after I left?’

‘Did that, but houses get dirty again. Christ, let’s get inside.’

At the back door Berglin stopped, tapped my arm, took out a cigarette. ‘Mrs Bianchi, she went on protection, new name, new everything, new tits even if I read the expenses right. Got a bloke looking for her now, reliable bloke, one hundred percent, reports only to me. He says he’s warm. We find her, you want to talk to her?’

‘You know an expression I always hated in the old days?’ I said. ‘The loop. Well, I don’t want to be back in the loop.’

Berglin lit the cigarette, flame cupped, eyes narrow in the flare. ‘This loop is you and me, Mac,’ he said. ‘You don’t come into it, you want to think about sending that nice young fella away, put the dog in the kennels, sleep under the bed with the big gun. The old days aren’t over yet.’

Alex Rickard was a creature of habit and that is not a wise thing to be when people you may not want to see want to see you. The habit meant he would be at Flemington Racecourse on Wednesday afternoon. On another day, it might have been Moonee Valley or Caulfield. What was certain was that on a Wednesday afternoon Alex would be at the city races.

I got there early and found a place where I could watch the turnstiles. It wasn’t going to be hard to spot Alex in the crowd. There wasn’t a crowd, just a trickle of depressed-looking men in jail-release clothes. Ten minutes before the first race, Alex and a short, bald man in a raincoat who looked like Elmer Fudd came through. Alex raised the standard of dress by a few hundred points. He was very Members’ Enclosure: grey flannels, a grey tweed sports jacket, blue shirt, red tie.

The pair stopped off for a quick hot dog and read their race books. Elmer Fudd had two quick hot dogs. He talked a lot, waving the race book and the hot dogs around. Alex found him amusing, smiling as he ate, and then carefully wiped his lips and hands on the little paper napkin.

I kept a good distance from them in the betting ring. They favoured different bookies. Alex knew his firm well: he got a pat on the arm from the man with the laptop computer and the slip writer whispered something in his ear. Alex had a good laugh, Fudd came over and the pair went onto the grandstand. I found something to lean against and settled

After the first race, the two came down, pleased with themselves, visited their bookies. Same after the second race, not as pleased now. It was going to be difficult to talk to Alex if he went everywhere with Fudd.

I almost missed Alex after the third race. He was alone and I was looking for the pair of them.

He wasn’t going to his bookie this time. When I realised he was heading for the toilets, I picked up speed, got too close to him, prayed he wouldn’t look around.

But he didn’t. And there was more luck in the toilet. Only one cubicle door was closed and Alex was alone at the urinal, in the right-hand corner, getting his prick out.

He didn’t see me coming.

I ran the three steps, slammed him into the stainless steel with my left shoulder, punched him in the kidneys three times, one full shot with everything, two short chops.

Alex made a vomiting noise and sagged. I held him up by his left shoulder, took a handful of his smooth hair at the crown and smashed his head into the wall several times.

I let him go and he dropped to his knees. There was blood on the stainless steel at head height. I put a knee between his shoulder blades and jerked his head back by his long front lock until he was looking up into my eyes.

‘Alex,’ I said. ‘Didn’t keep my inquiry confidential. Who’d you tell? Quick, they’ll find you dead here.’

He opened his mouth wide. Blood from his forehead ran into it and he coughed, spraying red onto the stainless steel. ‘No, Mac, no…’

I heard a sound behind me. A tall man with black rimmed glasses had come out of one of the cubicles.

‘Back in the dunny or I’ll kill you,’ I said.

He went back like a film in reverse. The lock clicked.

‘Quickly, Alex,’ I said, banged his head against the urinal again. Blood dropped onto the white disinfectant balls in the trough.

‘Mac, no…’

I banged his head again, took his ears in my hands, small ears, not easily grasped, and began to twist them off. It was difficult. They were slippery.

‘Last chance, Alex. Who?’

‘Bobby Hill,’ he said, barely audible. ‘Didn’t think it mattered, thought you were out of it.’

I let go of his ears, pulled his head back by the hair, strong hair, and looked into his eyes from close range. ‘Alex,’ I said, ‘who told you to tell Berglin that Gaby Makin was dead?’

‘I’m dead.’

I bounced his head off the urinal again, once, twice, blood spattering. ‘Right, you prick,’ I said. ‘Dead now if you don’t tell me.’

Alex groaned. I gave him one more smash. Harder.

‘Bobby.’

‘Why? Quick.’ I pulled his head back again.

‘Anything you or Berglin wanted to know, pass it on.’

‘Listen carefully, Alex,’ I said, jerking his head back again so that he could look at me. ‘You’re a little man in deep shit. Tell Bobby Hill you’ve told me, Bobby kills you. Then I dig you up and kill you. Repeatedly. Then it’s Berglin’s turn. No matter what happens, you tell Bobby, you die. Painfully. Understand me?’

I let him go. Alex’s head hit the urinal again and he collapsed sideways, slowly. I pushed his head into the trough with my right foot and pressed the flush button. A gentle spray of water dampened his face and hair. Trickles ran down his bleeding forehead and the trough turned bright pink.

‘ ‘‘Let the water and the blood from his riven side which flowed be of sin the double cure’’,’ I said. Was that the way it went? It just came to me.

Four men, different sizes, all wide-eyed, were blocking the passage.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘an emergency. Need St John Ambulance here. This man has had a serious pissing accident.’

They flattened themselves against the walls. I passed between them, left the racecourse, went home, fed the dog, made supper, played Scrabble with Lew, got beaten again.

I was washing up, thinking: open another bottle, go to bed. Lew appeared in the door.

‘Mac,’ he said, moved his shoulders, looked at the floor. ‘Think I’ll go back to school. That’s what Ned wanted.’

I looked at the boy: father unknown, mother unknowable, grandfather allegedly something I didn’t want to think about. And nothing bad in this quiet and gentle person.

I wished I could hug him.

‘I’ll take you to the bus,’ I said. ‘That’s easy.’

He did a ceiling examination.

‘Down the road,’ he said. ‘The girl. They go in every day. I asked. Will you talk to the school? And tell Stan I’ll work at weekends?’

‘Sure. Talk to them tomorrow.’ There was a new family down the road. I’d seen the girl on a horse from a distance. Perhaps both Ned and I and the girl all wanted Lew to go back to school. I had a feeling dawning about which one had had the deciding influence.

Before I went to bed, I put the Colt Python, safety catch off, in a Blundstone boot next to the right back leg of the bed.

I lay on my back for a long time, thinking about Bobby Hill, thin and handsome Bobby Hill, straight dark hair combed back, metal-rimmed dark glasses. Of the trio of Scully, Hill and Bianchi, Hill had been the watchful one, little disbelieving smile never far from his lips. He was Scully’s offsider but managed to give the impression without saying anything that pudgy Scully worked with him.

Bobby’s making lots of money in the baboon hire business. Those were Brendan Burrows’s words. What interest would Hill have in my Kinross Hall inquiries? Something Berglin once said came to mind: He who says Hill says Scully. Would that still be the case? Could it be Scully who was interested in me? I was history, he was about to be made deputy commissioner.

Was I history? What had Berglin said?

The old days aren’t over yet.

Not a thought to fall asleep on.

I dreamt I was in the old factory in Footscray, Dr Barbie’s point of exit. It was cold, dark in the corners spreading out. I was walking from cavernous space to cavernous space, looking for something in the gloom, uneasy. I pushed open a huge sliding door and I was in a room filled with light, the ceiling seemed to glow, one huge skylight. People were standing in groups, talking and drinking, laughing. The nearest group had their backs to me. As I approached, one by one they turned, smiling, greeting me: my father, that shy smile, Ned, Alex, forehead bloody, Brendan Burrows, Berglin, Scully, Hill, Bianchi, Lefroy. The group parted and Carlie Mance appeared, radiant, took my arm, tucked it under hers. We walked together to the centre of the chamber and she pointed. A body, elongated, was dangling from the roof, slowly turning. I waited, full of dread, to see the face. It came around slowly, slowly, familiar profile…

I woke, sweating, still filled with the dream’s apprehension. Just like the old days, I thought.

It was almost five am. I got up, no point in staying in bed, washed my face, revved up the kitchen stove, made a pot of tea, read The Plant Hunter till it was time to shower, cook, eat and start work. Today was committed to finishing Frank Cullen’s contraption, long overdue. But Frank was a patient man. He never hurried the realisation of his inventions because it gave him time to think about modifications. Not big ones: tweaks of the brilliant concept.

I was tidying up the welds with the anglegrinder when Allie arrived. I switched off and lifted the helmet. She knew about the contraption.

‘What I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘is why you wouldn’t simply put whatever it is you want to load onto the back of the ute. Why would you put it on this thing and haul it up with a winch?’

‘The idea, as I understand it, and I may be utterly wrong here, is that you can take this thing where utes fear to go. Reach the parts ordinary utes cannot reach. Then you haul it back and wham! It’s on board.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Haul it back? How much cable is there going to be?’

‘Brilliant idea or scrapmetal in the making,’ I said, ‘the man doesn’t blink at the bill, writes out the cheque right here in front of me, very neat and legible hand, and the bank doesn’t blink either. Which is a lot more that can be said for many of our clients.’

‘Which is why I’m glad I don’t have to send out my own bills anymore.’

‘Not gladder than I am,’ I said. ‘Listen, this extensive training of yours equip you to make a knife blade?’

‘You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar,’ she said, ‘to make a blade. All you have to do is take pains.’

I put up my gloved hand. ‘Point taken, to the hilt. I’m weeks behind with the knives. Fit it in? I’ll show you what’s needed.’

‘Let’s look at the diary,’ she said. ‘Has to be time this week.’

I was fitting the wheels when Frank Cullen and Jim Caswell arrived, today in full squatter’s uniform. Jim took his seat on the bench, Frank came over to inspect the work.

‘Nice wheels, Mac,’ Frank said. ‘Where’d you get ’em?’

‘Place in town sells bearings,’ I said. ‘Cost a fair bit.’

‘Quality,’ Frank said. ‘Remembered when price is forgotten.’

‘Very true,’ I said. ‘Motto of this workshop.’

‘Now these tracks,’ Frank said. ‘Bin givin ’em some thought, woke up this mornin with the answer.’ He took a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket and carefully opened it. ‘This diagram shows what I’ve come up with.’

I looked at it. The tracks now had angled projections at each end.

‘Beauty of it,’ Frank said, ‘is these top bits. They slide into these housings you bolt to the tray. What d’ya think?’

‘Like all the best ideas,’ I said, ‘you wonder why you didn’t think of it earlier.’

Frank took a seat, lit a cigarette, had a good cough.

‘Don’t know how you can do it,’ Jim said, shaking his head.

‘Do what?’ Frank said.

‘Smoke. You know what the doctor said.’

‘Bloody doctors,’ Frank said. ‘What do they know? Know buggerall, that’s why they blame the fags. Could be somethin else entirely. Could be-could be bloody potatoes kills ya. Carrots. I read where everybody in China smokes, from babies upwards, they don’t bloody die any more than anyone else. Look at that Mao Tsebloodytung, used to smoke in his sleep, couldn’t get him to die. Same with the other bloke, whatsisname, thingummy, shot them students, eighty fags a day, still runnin the place at ninety, whatever.’

‘The Veenes,’ I said. ‘What do you know about the Veenes?’

‘Veenes,’ Frank said. ‘Don’t talk to me about Veenes. I know Veenes. Worked for bloody old Clarrie Veene, the most miserable bastard ever to walk God’s earth, bar none. Used to look at you like you were a sick dog he wouldn’t waste a bullet on, kill it with a spade. Little bastard used to come up to me, didn’t reach my top button, course I was six-three then…’

‘You were never six-three,’ Jim said.

‘You bloody dwarf, what would you know? You couldn’t see that high. Come up to me, the old bastard, wasn’t all that old then either, come right up to me, under me nose, say something like, whining bloody voice, “Cullen, when you going to do something about that slate you’re running over at Meagher’s?” Coulda killed him right there, one blow.’

‘A Veene had some land near Milstead,’ I said. ‘Pine forest now.’

‘That was Ernest’s,’ Frank said. ‘Clarrie’s brother. Another miserable bastard. Went to his son. Donald.’

‘Some Melbourne company owns it now,’ I said.

‘Rick Veene’s got a share in the company,’ Frank said. ‘Heard that. He’s Donald’s boy. Looks a lot like Ernest. Rick’s tied up with that Stefanidis from over near Daylesford. RSPCA went there, heard he was shooting pigeons. Bloke behind a wall throws ’em in the air, Greek shoots ’em with a twelve bore from about four yards. Sticks it up their arses practically. Couldn’t prove it. Not a feather to be found.’

‘What’s on the land apart from trees?’

‘Old house. Bluestone place. Solid. Never lived in I don’t think after Donald moved to town.’

‘When was that?’

‘Oh, donkey’s. Died about twenty years ago.’

Just before noon, I finished the contraption. We fitted the housings to Frank’s ute, attached the tracks and ran the tray up them, not without difficulty.

‘Good work,’ Frank said. ‘Excellent work. Craftsmanship of the highest order.’

We went over to the pub for a sandwich. I had a beer. Jim had a glass of milk. Frank had three brandies.

The phone was ringing as we came up the lane. I ran for it.

Irene Barbie.

‘Mac,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a call from my daughter. From London. She’s just got back from Italy and Greece and she found a letter from Ian waiting for her. It’s been to about five of her previous addresses.’

I was still panting.

‘Are you all right, Mac?’

‘Fine. Been running. Go on.’

‘Well, I think it puts Ian’s suicide beyond doubt. Alice was in tears and the letter sounds a bit disjointed, but Ian says he’s leaving a note explaining everything and apologises for the pain he’s caused.’

‘Leaving a note where?’

‘He doesn’t say.’

‘Police ever mention a note to you?’

‘No. Well, they asked me if I knew of any note Ian might have left. They didn’t know of one.’

Ian’s wristwatch. Brendan Burrows on the station platform.

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

Could they have taken anything else?

‘It’ll probably turn up. Thanks for telling me, Irene.’

‘About Ian and pethidine…’

‘Yes.’

‘You were right. Andrew Stephens told me. I never knew. Must have been blind.’

‘Most of us are blind some of the time,’ I said. ‘Some of us most of the time. There wasn’t anything you could have done.’

‘No, well, I suppose not. Thanks, Mac.’

I went out to see Frank and Jim off. Frank said: ‘Gettin the winch tomorrow. Big bugger. More pull than a scoutmaster. I’ll come round, you can bolt it on for me, we’ll settle up.’

Frank and Jim had to wait at the entrance to the lane to let another vehicle in. A silver Holden. I stood where I was outside the smithy and Detective Sergeant Shea drove the car to within twenty-five centimetres of my kneecaps.

Detective Shea was alone, the lovable Cotter presumably engaged in bringing cheer elsewhere. He got out of the car, looked at me, looked around, not approving. ‘Bloody freezing as usual,’ he said.

‘I’m stuck here,’ I said. ‘You on the other hand are free to leave for warmer parts any time you like.’

‘Don’t take it personal,’ he said. ‘Talk inside?’

We went into the office. It wasn’t much warmer there. I sat behind the desk, Shea looked at the kitchen chair disdainfully and sat on the filing cabinet.

‘Suppose you thought we weren’t doin anything,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Thought you weren’t achieving anything.’

He smiled his bleak smile. ‘Takes time,’ he said. ‘You’d know. That complaint you told me about. One Ned made. About Kinross Hall, 1985. I looked that up. Investigated and found to be without substance. No further action taken.’

‘What was the complaint?’

Shea looked awkward. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘y’know I’m not allowed to divulge this kind of stuff. Lots of complaints, they’ve got no basis in fact, cause innocent people harm if the word got around…’

‘Ned’s dead,’ I said. ‘And it’s a long time ago.’

He rubbed his jaw with a big red hand. ‘This’s off the record, I never told you this, flat denial from me.’

‘I never heard it from you.’

‘Ned said a girl at Kinross told him the director, her name’s Marcia something…’

‘Carrier.’ A sick feeling was coming over me.

‘That’s right. The girl said this Marcia got her alone and made sexual, y’know, advances to her. She didn’t want to and the woman slapped her up, blood nose, hit her on the body with somethin she said, stick, cane.’

I kept my voice neutral. ‘This was investigated?’

Shea nodded. ‘Oh yeah, two officers investigated. No substance. Girl said she’d made up the story to get some smokes from Ned. Marcia whatshername, she said the girl was always makin up stories, been to her with wild stories, fantasy artist, something like that.’

‘Fantasist.’

‘That. So end of story. Scully and the other officer said no grounds to do anythin.’

The light from the window seemed suddenly brighter. I had difficulty seeing Shea’s features. ‘Scully?’ I said.

‘Yeah. Big noise now. You’d know him. In drugs. They say he’s going to be deputy commissioner. Stationed here for three, four years in the eighties.’

‘I know him,’ I said. ‘Who’s the other officer?’

Shea got out his notebook, found the place. ‘Bloke called Hill,’ he said.

I nodded, got up. We went out into the rain. At the car, I put out my hand. We shook.

‘Not finished with Ned,’ he said. ‘There’s stuff I’m workin on. Be in touch.’

I went back to the office, sat down, stared at the desktop: Scully and Hill at Kinross Hall investigating Ned’s complaint about Marcia Carrier.

I thought about the paintings in Marcia’s office, small paintings of what looked like primitive sacrifice or torture.

The skeleton in the mine shaft. A girl. Around sixteen.

Ned’s work diary, that was where it all began. I got out the box holding everything from Ned’s desk: the newspapers, the marbles, the old wooden ruler from the grocer in Wagga, the big yellow envelope full of stuff.

I read the diary again. It was 1985 that had started me on Kinross Hall. As I went through it, I was thinking about Berglin. Berglin on making sense of scraps of information, on knowing people:

What you ask yourself is: what will this stuff I’m hearing about look like in hindsight? What kind of sense will it make then? You’ve got to think like an archaeologist, digs up this bit of something, fragment, could be bit of ancient pisspot, could be bit of the Holy Grail. The archaeologist’s got to see the whole pot in the fragment. It’s called using your imagination. They don’t pick you people for this kind of ability, so we’re working against type.

Same thing with targets. You think you know them. Seen the pictures, maybe watched them in the street, public places, read the file, know their histories. But you don’t know them until you can predict what they’ll do in given circumstances. Till then, they’re just cardboard people to you. That’s why you’ve got to listen to the tapes. Everything. Every boring word, never mind it’s about who’s picking up the kids from school or who did what at fucking golf. You don’t know a target until every grunt has meaning for you. And lots of it, it’s just grunts. People just grunt at each other. Grunts with meaning.

It came out of the page in Ned’s diary, lifted out at me, 1987: March 12. Veene house, Colson’s Road. Fix gutters, new downpipes. Six hours. $100.00. Materials $45.60. Found silver chain.

Under this entry, Ned had written: Forgot to put with invoice.

Silver chain. I remembered something about a silver chain. In the newspapers from Ned’s drawer. I got them out. Page three, a Thursday in June, a photograph of a chain with a small silver star and a broken catch. An ankle chain.

Was the chain Ned found at the Veene house an ankle chain? He hadn’t returned it with the invoice. Had he handed it in later?

Perhaps he forgot to. Perhaps he still had it when he saw the picture in the newspaper.

My eye fell on the big yellow envelope. I’d looked in that.

Hadn’t I? I remembered seeing staples and string. I took the envelope out of the box and tipped its contents onto the desk.

Staples, a bulldog clip, box of rubber bands, neatly coiled length of string, small penknife.

And then the chain slid out like a thin silver snake. A silver chain, broken catch.

I shook the envelope.

Something dropped out, fell onto the newspaper, bounced, came to rest a few centimetres from the photograph.

A small silver star, the twin of the one in the picture.

I hadn’t noticed the message on the answering machine, left while we were having lunch at the pub. It was Anne Karsh.

Mac, hi. Anne Karsh. I’ve got nothing on this afternoon. I’ll be at the house from about three pm if you’re free to show me the mill. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, we’ll do it another day.

Ned thought he knew where the girl in the mine shaft was killed: the Veene house, where he’d found the ankle chain. He didn’t trust the police, so he went to see Marcia. Then he went to see Dr Ian Barbie. And then he was murdered.

Marcia Carrier, Dr Marcia Carrier, Director of Kinross Hall, attacking a girl…blood nose, hit her on the body with somethin she said, stick, cane.

One of the men who abused Melanie Pavitt told her: Back soon, slut, with a lady friend for you. She’s been looking forward to this.

Was it possible?

I thought about these things, dark things, on my way to Harkness Park, slit-eyed streamlined dog face in the outside rear-view mirror, wind baring the fangs.

Anne Karsh’s small black Mercedes was parked in front of the house and she was sitting on the steps where we’d sat drinking coffee. She got up at my approach, walked to meet me. Not the outdoor look today: hair down, long black and green tartan skirt with pleats, green shirt, black V-necked sweater.

‘Mac,’ she said.

We were close. I moved back.

‘Thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said. ‘I had business things, they fell through. Suddenly couldn’t bear the city. I’m on my way to becoming a country person.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said.

‘Are you? Ripped away from the blazing heat of the forge?’

I hadn’t registered her eyes before. Hazel.

‘Not blazing today,’ I said. ‘Today was welding, grinding and fiddling.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, is that the blacksmith’s burden? To weld, grind and fiddle.’

‘By and large,’ I said, ‘I’d rather blaze.’

Silence for a moment, looking at each other. I wished I was better dressed.

‘Have you seen the house?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What entrance do I have to go in?’

She appraised me, serious face. ‘Take your boots off, you can come in the front.’

We went through the front door, boots and all.

‘Almost everything’s here except the clothes and the pictures,’ she said. ‘It’s as if they went on holiday and never came back.’

We started downstairs, went from huge room to huge room, looked out of the dirty windows at a dim day growing duller. Everywhere, we bumped into each other; in big spaces, we bumped into each other, sorry, sorry, hands unsure of where to go.

Upstairs. More bedrooms than a country pub, beds in all of them, clean coir mattresses, striped, some with neatly folded blankets on them.

In a large bedroom, not the master bedroom but big, wooden double bed, we looked out of the window, down at the newly cleared garden.

‘It’s going to look beautiful from here,’ Anne said. We turned inward at the same moment, looked at each other.

‘Beautiful,’ I said. She was beautiful.

There was a moment of decision, indecision.

I put out a finger and touched her lips, in the centre.

‘Oh Christ,’ she said, reaching up and taking my head in her hands.

I put my hands on her waist, long, strong waist, drew her to me. As our mouths and our bodies met, she tilted her hips and pushed her pelvis against me. My hands slid down over her buttocks, lifted her, pulled her.

When our mouths parted, I said, close to her skin, ‘Terrible urge to take off your clothes.’

‘Terrible urge,’ she said, ‘to have you take them off.’

Kissing again, lost in her mouth, my hands on the bottom of her sweater, pulled it up. We broke free just long enough for it to pass over her head. I started unbuttoning her shirt from the collar, she took her fingers out of my hair and unbuttoned her cuffs, pulled the shirt over her head.

White lacy bra. I held her by the shoulders, looked, kissed the round tops of her breasts, put my tongue into the half cups, felt the nipples, risen, insistent.

‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ she said. Her hand went behind her back and the bra fell away, trembling breasts, not small, not big, lolling in my hands, mouth torn between three places, more, nipples, hollows of the throat, ears, eyes.

She loosened my belt, waistband, silky hand sliding over my stomach, gripping me, chamois grip, pulling, squeezing. I groaned.

The bed drew us, shoes, socks, pants, underpants went. I was naked first, five-limbed. Cold, hot. Anne was on her back, mouth open, loose, lovely. I pushed up her long skirt, pulled her pantyhose down her legs, over the long thighs, tense, the curve of calves, delicate ankles. Small white lace knickers, dark and springy promise beneath. Off. Pale stomach, hollow. I rubbed my face against it, kissed it, felt a pulse against my lips, buried my face in her dense pubic hair, thighs opening, sweet musk, the place, moist, salty, impossibly delicate rose petals of flesh, my hands under her buttocks lifting her, feeling the muscles clench, her hands in my hair pushing me down, hips moving.

Anne brought me up, my tongue tracing a line to her bellybutton, tip pushing into the whorl, turned me over, tartan skirt off and in the air, floating to the ground, knelt above me, pushing her hair back with one hand, holding the engorged thing with the other, leaning forward, shoulders, breasts bigger, flushed with blood, kissing me, sucking my lips, her lips pulling mine in, her hand drawing the thin foreskin back, down, slowly, tight, drum tight, edge of pain, exquisite. And then the instant beyond pleasure, the touch, the warm, wet, tight, yielding, nipping, teasing, enfolding, gripping.

‘Yes,’ she said, sliding down, sitting on me to the hilt, ecstatic pubic junction. Beautiful, abandoned, impaled jockey, grinding, bending backwards, breasts flattening, nipples, ribs, hipbones, tendons in her neck sticking out, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh fuck, Jesus Christ, yes.’

We didn’t do the mill inspection; it would have to wait. We kissed goodbye outside, against her car, lingering kiss, kisses, almost started the whole thing up again.

I was about ten kilometres from home, happy, at peace for a moment, driving in the dark down a winding lonely stretch without farmhouses. A siren came on behind me, harsh, braying sound, happiness disrupted, rear-view mirror full of flashing orange light.

I slowed, went onto the verge, stopped.

The car pulled up close behind me but much further off the road.

I rolled down the window, waited.

A middle-aged cop, moustache, leather jacket, no cap, appeared at the window.

‘Licence,’ he said, tired voice.

‘What’s this about?’ I said. ‘I wasn’t speeding.’

‘Licence, please,’ he repeated.

I found it in my wallet, handed it over.

He shone his torch on it. ‘MacArthur J. Faraday?’

‘Yes.’

‘This your current address?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mind stepping out of the vehicle. Sir.’

‘Jesus,’ I said, got out. Bitter cold outside, no moon, north wind humming in the trees. The dog made his warning sound.

‘Quiet,’ I said ‘Stay.’

‘Turn and face the vehicle, please, hands on top,’ the cop said.

‘What’s going on here?’ I said. ‘There’s no…’

‘Do as I say, please. This’ll only take a minute. We’re looking for stolen goods.’

I turned and assumed the position.

‘Pace back, please.’

I took the pace, weight on my hands, unbalanced, leaning on the freezing vehicle.

A second cop came around the back of the Land Rover, short, pale hair slicked down, head just an extension of his thick neck. He had no visible eyebrows and a nose like the teat of a baby’s dummy.

He walked straight to me, swung his left leg, kicked my left leg out backwards, hit me in the back of the neck with a round side-on swing of his fist.

Everything went red, black, white, unbearable pain behind the eyes, in the bones of my head. I didn’t even feel myself fall, land on the wet tarmac.

The next thing I registered was a heavy weight, a foot between my shoulder blades, something cold and hard pressing against the cavity under my left ear.

The muzzle of a revolver.

The pain seemed to dissolve. Cold and rough tarmac against the face, chill wind down here at ground level, smell of Anne on my shirt, French perfume, delicious Anne. I registered that but all I felt was sad. Sad and stupid. The watchful years, the looking for the signs, the ingrained disbelief about everything. For nothing. This is a stupid way to go, I thought. Careless. What would Berglin say?

‘Bobby said to say goodbye,’ said the middle-aged cop. ‘Be here to say it himself, only he’s got better things to do.’

He pulled my head back by the hair, painful, changed the angle of the muzzle to make sure he blew my brain away.

Headlights. Coming the way I’d come.

‘Fuck,’ said the man. ‘Don’t move.’ He took the barrel away from my ear, pushed down harder on my spine with his foot.

A vehicle slowed, slowed, almost stopping. Went past us. Stopped.

I turned my head, saw the driver’s door of a ute open, stocky frame come out, curly hair.

Flannery. On his way to the pub.

‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘What the fuck’s this?’

‘It’s an arrest, sunshine,’ the neckheaded cop said. ‘Get back in your vehicle and drive on immediately. Now. Or you’re under arrest for obstructing a police officer.’

I couldn’t see the expression on Flannery’s face but I could see the shrug.

‘Okay, okay, I’m going,’ he said. ‘You could’ve asked nicely.’

He got back into the ute. Trouble getting it into gear, clutch grating.

‘He ID us?’ the middle-aged cop said.

‘This light?’ Neckhead said. ‘No fucking way. He gets round the bend, buzz this cunt.’

Flannery revved his engine.

Hope gone.

And then Flannery’s ute was coming at us in reverse, engine screaming.

‘Jesuschrist!’ the cop standing on me shouted.

His foot came off my spine.

I tucked my legs in, rolled to my right, heard Flannery’s ute hit flesh and bone, brakes squeal, shouting.

I got around the front of the Land Rover, stood up. Flannery in first gear, coming back past me.

The cop he’d bumped was up, walking towards the police car, holding his left arm up by the elbow, screaming, ‘Kill the fucking cunts!’

Neckhead, where?

I was backing off in Flannery’s direction.

Neckhead popped up behind the Land Rover tray, revolver combat grip, two-handed, steadied himself to shoot me.

The dog jumped three metres onto Neckhead’s outstretched arms, jaws lunging for his throat, silent.

Neckhead made a shrill sound, went over backwards, rolled, knocked the dog off with the revolver barrel, tried a shot at it, two shots, missed, lead singing off the tarmac.

I screamed for the dog, ran for Flannery’s ute, wrenched open the door, ute moving, half-in, foot dragging, heard the dog land on the back.

Flannery put his foot flat.

There was sound like a hard doorknock on the back window, followed by a smack on the roof above the rearview mirror.

I ducked, looked at the window: neat bullet hole, spider-web of cracks around it.

‘Fuck,’ said Flannery. ‘Couldn’t they just give you a ticket?’

I breathed heavily for a while, got my breath back. ‘One tail light out,’ I said. ‘Attracts the death penalty. They coming?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Reversed over, attacked by dog, probably think, shit, let him off this time.’

I got out the mobile phone Berglin had insisted on leaving with me, found the number he’d written on a blank card, punched it in. Berglin answered immediately.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘that loop you were talking about.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Count me in. Two blokes in cop uniforms just tried to kill me. Told me Bobby said to say goodbye.’

‘Bobby? That’s our Bobby, is it?’

‘I only know one Bobby.’

‘Yeah. One Bobby’s enough. Bears thinking about this. Good timing though. We’ve found the lady in question. Today. This afternoon.’

‘Far?’

‘From you? Five, five and a half hours.’

‘Let’s have it.’

When I’d put the phone away, Flannery said, ‘What was it you said you did before you took up the metal?’

You couldn’t lie to a man who would reverse over a policeman for you.

‘I didn’t say. Federal cop. Drug cop.’

‘That’s was, is it?’

‘Very was. But there’s stuff left over, unfinished stuff. Some stuff’s never finished. Glad you came along then. Thanks.’

‘Done it for a blind bloke,’ Flannery said. ‘What now?’

Home wasn’t safe anymore. The only real home I’d ever had. My father’s house, his workshop, his forge, his tools. The only place he’d ever felt settled, his demons banished. For a while at least. And bit by bit, over the years I’d lived there, I’d banished my demons too. Found a life that wasn’t based on watching and lying and plotting, on using people, laying traps, practising deceit. But I’d brought a virus with me, carried it like a refugee from some plague city, a carrier of a disease, hiding symptoms, hoping against hope they would go away. And for a time they had. And I was happy.

But that life was over. Men in police uniforms came to execute you on the roadside beside dark potato fields. That was a definite sign the new life was over.

‘Reckon you could drive me and Lew over to Stan’s? I want him to stay there. We can pick up the Land Rover on the way back?’

‘If I get a drink after that.’

‘For you, Flannery,’ I said, ‘it’s a possibility. I’m considering rewarding you with a few bottles of Boag’s. Tasmania’s finest.’

‘Foreign piss,’ Flannery said.

I didn’t go into the house until I’d stood in the dark and watched Lew moving around, making supper, normal behaviour. Then I went in and made the arrangements.

Beachport in winter would be a hard thing to sell: dirty grey sky, icy wind off whitecapped Rivoli Bay whipping the tall pines, seven cars, two dogs, and a man on a bicycle in half an hour. But no-one had to sell the little boomerang-shaped town to Darren Bianchi’s widow. She chose it.

I slept in a motel in Penola, little place out on the flats, vine country, turning on the too-soft mattress, half-awake, feeling the gun behind my ear, hearing the man say Bobby said to say goodbye.

I got up early, feeling as if I’d never been to bed, put on a suit and tie, ate eggs and fatty bacon at a truck stop, got to Beachport in time to see the former Cindy Taylor, former Mrs Cindy Bianchi, present Marie Lachlan, open her hairdressing salon. It was called Hair Today and it was a one-person show.

Marie was dressed for the climate: red ski pants, boots, big red top with a hood. I gave her twenty minutes to settle in, walked across the road, opened the door.

It was warm inside, clean-smelling, hint of coffee. Marie was in a sort of uniform now, pale pink, talking on the phone, back to me, didn’t seem to hear me come in. She put the phone down, half turned and caught sight of me in the mirror. Her head jerked around. She was in her late thirties, short dark hair, pretty in a catlike way, little too much make-up.

Her eyes said Oh shit.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘Do men’s haircuts? Got a meeting in Adelaide this afternoon, looking pretty scruffy.’

She was going to say no but she hesitated, changed her mind. ‘Sure do,’ she said. ‘Come and sit down at the basin.’

I went over and sat in a low chair, back to a basin.

‘You’re out early,’ she said.

‘Too early. Drove from Geelong yesterday, stayed over in Mount Gambier. Thought I’d come down, have a look at the coast along here. First time I’ve been this way.’

‘Pretty ordinary in winter,’ she said. ‘Lean your head back.’

She wet my hair with warm water, began to shampoo it, a kind of scalp massage with fingertips, soothing.

‘Mind you,’ she said, ‘it’s pretty ordinary in summer too.’

She was relaxing. I could hear it in her voice. People who come to kill you don’t take time out for you to give them a shampoo and haircut first.

‘So what do you do?’ she said.

‘Liquor rep,’ I said. ‘Well, wine rep these days. Mostly wine. Like wine?’

‘Don’t mind a few wines,’ she said, fingers working in my hair. ‘Like champagne. You carry champagne?’

‘We’re agents for Thierry Boussain, French. Terrific drop. No-one’s ever heard of it, small firm. All people know is the Moet, Bollinger, that stuff, produce it in the millions of bottles. Thierry’s exclusive, few thousand cases.’

‘Never heard of it,’ she said. ‘Might try it one day.’

She dried my hair with a towel. ‘Cutting time. Sit in the first chair. Warmest place.’

I changed chairs.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘how do you want it?’

‘Actually,’ I said, looking at her in the mirror, ‘I think I’ll give the cutting part a miss, Cindy.’

Cindy froze. Terror in her eyes, tiny step backwards.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not bad news. Bad news doesn’t have a shampoo first, anyone can come in, see me in the chair, get a good look at me.’

‘Who are you?’ she said, voice controlled, scared but under control.

‘A friend,’ I said. ‘Someone who wants you to stay alive. We want to talk to you about Darren. You talked to the police, I know. This is different.’

‘How different?’ She wasn’t looking at me, looking towards the door, possibly calculating her chances of reaching it.

‘Cindy,’ I said. ‘Look at me, look at me. Don’t be a dork, think you can run out the door, that’ll save you. Nothing to fear from me. I’m your best chance of staying alive. Forget witness protection, that number they gave you to ring. Rang it now, you’d be saved, would you? Batman, out of the sky, saves you?’

She swallowed. ‘That’s Superman. Batman comes in the Batmobile.’

‘Superheroes. Can’t get my superheroes straight. Darren had a big trust in cops, did he? Did he?’

‘No,’ she said, meeting my eyes in the mirror. ‘Didn’t trust anyone. Specially not cops.’

‘Wise man,’ I said. ‘Wisdom of an ex-cop.’

‘So wise he’s dead.’

‘No-one’s wise enough. Unfortunately.’

Cindy hugged herself. ‘What more can I tell?’

‘Things you didn’t tell the cops, right?’

‘Maybe. Some. I don’t know?’

‘Darren ever talk about someone called Algie?’

‘Algie? Didn’t say it like that.’

‘Didn’t say it like what?

‘Algie. Said it like El G.’

‘El G?’

‘Yeah, y’know, like El Torro?’

‘I get it. El G. Darren talk about El G?’

She shrugged. ‘Well, after the burg…’

‘What burg’s that?’

‘More like a hurricane than a burg,’ she said.

‘Place destroyed. Fifteen grand’s worth of damage.’

‘Darren said what?’

‘I dunno, El G. He said, fucking El G.’

‘He said, fucking El G. Like El G did it? You tell the cops that?’

‘No.’

‘What else didn’t you tell them?’

She hesitated.

Two cars went by in quick succession. Rush hour in Beachport.

‘Cindy,’ I said, ‘they’ve done the show. This is the tell.’

‘He said-Darren said-don’t worry, what they want, the lawyer’s got.’

‘The lawyer. Who’s the lawyer?’

‘In Melbourne. Fielding something, they used to write. I don’t know. I was out the house so quick. Fielding, three names. You want some coffee?’

‘Coffee would be nice, Cindy,’ I said. ‘Black.’

‘Sugar?’

‘Just the one. Thank you.’

There was a glass percolator on a warmer at the back of the room. She came back with coffee in glass cups.

‘Want to move?’ she said.

‘This is comfortable. Nice chair. You happy standing?’

‘Stand all day.’

We drank coffee. ‘Good, this,’ I said.

‘Real coffee,’ Cindy said. ‘Miss coffee places. Nescafe, that’s what they give you around here.’

‘Darren ever talk about someone called Lefroy?’

She didn’t hesitate. ‘Yeah. Saw him killed. Throat cut.’

My skin seemed to shrink, pull tight around my mouth, eyes. ‘Darren saw him killed?’ I said.

Cindy had a sip of coffee. ‘Video. This bloke showed them a video. Girl killed too.’

Never change your tone. Berglin’s rule. Start with it, stay with it. Want another tone, get someone else. ‘What bloke is this?’

‘El G. Took them to this place, big house, with like a little cinema.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘I dunno. Darren and his mates, I dunno. Cops. We stayed in a hotel after the burg, Darren got so pissed, just talked. I didn’t ask questions. Didn’t know about that part of his life.’

‘So they saw a video of a man called Lefroy and a woman being killed? That’s what you’re saying?’

‘Yeah. Darren told me that. Said it made him sick. The man laughed.’

‘El G?’

‘Yeah. El G laughed. Showed it twice, Darren said. Funny name that. Stuck in my mind.’

‘El G?’

‘No. Lefroy. Spell it how?’

‘Wouldn’t have a clue,’ I said.

A customer came in the door, elderly lady, head wrapped in a woollen scarf.

‘Not late am I, Marie?’ she said. ‘Lovely and warm in here.’

‘Have a seat, Gwen,’ Cindy said. ‘Won’t be a moment.’

‘On the night,’ I said, ‘Darren went out to the boat, never came back. That’s it?’

‘Where’d you hear that?’ Astonishment. ‘Cop said it must’ve gone on for an hour, more. Cut his ears off, burnt his hair off, don’t you know that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Just testing. The lawyers-Fielding, Something, Something?’

‘Yes.’

She picked up a comb and combed my hair. ‘Nice hair.’

‘My father’s hair,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t give him anything back.’

I had plenty of time to think on the trip back. El G, Scully, Hill and Bianchi watching a video of the killing of Howard Lefroy and Carlie Mance. A quick video, home movie really. Made while I was telling Mackie there wasn’t any point in tailing Howard’s brother when he left. El G enjoying it, laughing, showing it again. Did it show the moment of Carlie’s execution? The man in rut behind her, between her legs, her head pulled back, blood squirting up the tiles?

One to do the killing, one to film it. Was that the way it had worked? Was the killer the driver, the man made up to look like Dennis Lefroy? Or was it the man who must have been in the boot when Dennis drove into the garage? Perhaps there were two men in the boot?

Years later, Bianchi burgled, then tortured and killed. Tortured for what? Pleasure? Something else?

Don’t worry, what they want, the lawyer’s got.

The killers Bobby sent had come up behind me on a country road. How could they know where I’d be?

I had a hamburger at a McDonald’s on the outskirts of Geelong, read the Age I’d bought in Hamilton, rang inquiries for the Law Institute of Victoria on Berglin’s mobile. An obliging woman took about two minutes to find the only three-name law firm in Melbourne beginning with Fielding: Fielding, Perez, Radomsky. She gave me an address in Rathdowne Street, Carlton.

I found a park across the street, outside a bookshop. As I crossed, the sun came out, took the edge off the wind. The gang of three had a shopfront office, two women behind a little counter. I said I’d like to see one of the lawyers. A five-minute wait produced a man who looked like the young Groucho Marx.

‘Alan Perez,’ he said, hand outstretched. ‘Come into my office.’

It was a very basic office, desk, computer, two client chairs, degree certificate.

‘Now. How may I help you?’ he said. ‘Mr…?’

‘Bianchi,’ I said, ‘Craig Bianchi. I’m helping my sister-in-law tie up the loose ends of her husband’s estate. He was a client of your firm.’

‘Who was that?’ he said, furry black eyebrows coming together.

‘Darren Bianchi.’

‘Not a client of mine. I’ll just look him up. Spell it how?’

He swivelled his chair, did some computer tapping, peering at the screen. He needed glasses. ‘Bianchi. Yes. Client of Geoff Radomsky’s.’ He swivelled back to look at me. ‘Deceased, did you say?’

‘Dead, yes.’

‘Well, both of them.’

‘Both of them?’

‘Geoff’s dead too. Here, in his office.’

‘Heart?’ I said. But I knew what was coming.

‘No. Abducted at his house, just around the corner, Drummond Street. Parking his car, garage’s off the lane. They, well, no-one knows, could be one person, brought him here, made him open the safe. Shot him. In the eye.’

Melanie Pavitt, lying there in her bath, gaping wound where her eye had been.

‘Nothing of value in the safe,’ Perez said. ‘Druggies, they think. Thought we kept money here.’

‘Things taken from the safe?’

Uncomfortable, pulling at a ring on the little finger of his left hand. ‘Don’t think so. Safe’s register of contents wasn’t up to date. Oversight, happens in a busy office. Everything thrown around, of course.’

‘When was this?’

‘More than a year ago now.’

‘And you wouldn’t know if there was anything concerning Darren in the safe. Right?’

Perez gave me a reassuring smile. ‘We can check that. I’ll get Mr Bianchi’s file.’

He went away. I got up and looked out the window. Two men, both balding and bearded, expensive clothes, were leaning on cars, BMW, Saab, parked next to each other on the median strip. They were talking across the gleaming metal, lots of gestures.

Alan Perez came back with a folder, sat down, went through it, eyebrows again trying to merge. There were only two pages as far as I could see.

‘Yes,’ he said, eyes down. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘What?’

‘File’s confidential, obviously, but there is a record here of a tape, audio tape, left with Geoff for safekeeping.’

‘Where would that be kept?’

‘Well, in the safe I imagine. In the absence of other instructions.’

‘Are there other instructions?’

Perez drew his furry upper lip down. ‘No. So that’s where it would have been put. I’m sure.’

‘Still there?’

‘I’ll check,’ he said, left again.

He was back inside a minute.

‘No. Not there. No tapes.’

‘So it could have been taken?’

Eyebrows again, black slugs trying to mate. ‘If it was in the safe. Where we would expect it to have been. But we don’t know. Yes. It could have been.’

I tried him on. ‘My sister-in-law says my brother left clear instructions with you about something. That would be about the tape, would it?’

He wasn’t happy. ‘Client’s instructions are confidential, we can’t…’

‘Client’s dead,’ I said. ‘And you don’t know what you had in your safe. Followed his instructions, have you? I’m happy to have the Law Institute take this up.’

I got up.

Perez said, ‘Mr Bianchi, you’ll appreciate our problem here. With Geoff dead, no-one was aware of his client’s instructions. We could hardly go through all his files to see…’

‘He’s my brother,’ I said. ‘All I want to know is what he wanted you to do. There’s something says you can’t tell me that?’

Pause. Perez shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose not. He wanted the tape handed over to the Director of Public Prosecutions. With copies to the media.’

‘In the event of what? When was this to be done?’

He couldn’t back off now.

‘In the event of his death from other than natural causes.’

‘He’s dead. Of unnatural causes.’

‘We didn’t know that. Unfortunately.’

‘Followed the instructions?’

He shrugged, crossed his legs. ‘You’ll understand our position, Mr Bianchi. The circumstances are such that we find ourselves…it would be unreasonable…we didn’t even know he was dead.’

‘Okay, I’ll accept that. Is there a Mrs Radomsky?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to talk to her. He may have said something to her about the tape.’

‘Very unlikely. And I’m not sure that she…’

‘Alan,’ I said, ‘you owe this to Darren’s widow. You were negligent in your handling of a client’s affairs. You did not have procedures for ensuring that a client’s instructions were followed and…’

‘I’ll ring her,’ he said. ‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’

I went out and sat in the waiting area for a few minutes. Perez came out and beckoned me back into his office.

‘Helen Radomsky says she knows absolutely nothing about any tape. Geoff never talked about clients’ affairs- never.’

‘What about his secretary? She here?’

‘No. She took Geoff’s death badly. Both secretaries did. They both resigned. You can understand…’

‘Got a number for her?’

Perez looked unhappy again.

‘Ring her,’ I said. ‘Explain what it’s about.’

I didn’t have to leave the room this time. He got out the phone book. ‘I got a call from some solicitors in Hawthorn asking about Karen,’ he said. ‘Blandford something. Here we go.’

He dialled a number. ‘Alan Perez, Fielding, Perez, Radomsky. Do you have a Karen Chee? Yes, thank you… Karen, Alan Perez. Good thank you. You’re well, settling in?…It was a pleasure. Karen, we’re trying to find out about a tape that should have been in the safe. Audio tape.’

He listened for several minutes, saying ‘Yes. Right’.

Finally, he said, ‘Didn’t see them again. Sure about that?… Yes. Well, thanks. Look after yourself…I’ll certainly pass that on. Bye.’

He put the phone down.

I held my breath.

‘She says Geoff asked her to get the tape copied, two copies. There was some urgency about it. The copying was done by DocSecure-they do confidential copying. She went into the city by taxi, the job was done, she came back and put the master tape in the safe.’

‘She had a key?’

‘No, there’s a slot. Anyway, she then dropped the copies off at Geoff’s house. It was after five. The arrangement was for a courier to pick up the package at Geoff’s to deliver to Darren Bianchi in Noosa. She assumed both copies were being sent.’

‘I’d like to talk to Mrs Radomsky.’

Perez sighed, hesitated, caught my look, dialled. ‘Helen, Alan, sorry to disturb you again. Look, it really would be a great help if Mr Bianchi could talk to you for a few minutes…I know, I know. It’ll put his mind at rest. I’d appreciate it…Great, fine, yes. Thanks, Helen.’

The Radomsky house was a minute away, a freestanding brick two-storey, lace ironwork in need of paint. But not for much longer: a panel van with Ivan De Groot, Painter written on the side was parked outside. I pushed a brass button on the front door. It was opened by a short blonde woman, chubby, in her early forties.

‘Mr Bianchi? Helen Radomsky. Come in. We’ll have to go into the kitchen, everything else is being painted.’

We went down a wide passage and turned left into a kitchen, a big room with windows looking onto a walled garden.

‘Sit down,’ she said. I sat down at a scrubbed table. She leant against the counter under the windows.

‘I’m sorry about your husband,’ I said.

‘Thank you. The most senseless thing.’

I nodded. ‘Mrs Radomsky, Alan Perez may have explained. My brother left an audiotape with your husband and it’s gone, not in the safe.’

She nodded.

‘His secretary says she had the tape copied late one afternoon and dropped off two copies here. A courier was going to pick them up.’

‘I remember a courier coming one evening. About six thirty. That’s two or three weeks before Geoff…I didn’t see what Geoff gave him.’

I put my elbows on the table, palms together. ‘It’s most likely Geoff sent off both copies. But I’d like to ask you something, just to be certain.’

‘Yes?’

‘If Geoff didn’t give the courier both tapes, where would he have put the second one?’

She smiled. ‘Well, he’d have put it on the side table in the study to take to work, forgotten all about it, put a newspaper on top of it the next day. Six weeks later there would be a panic search and we’d find it under sixteen copies of the Age, three books and four old Football Records.’

‘Is it possible?’

She pulled a face. ‘I haven’t been into the study for more than ten seconds since the night. Actually, I haven’t been into it for more than ten seconds in years. And Geoff wouldn’t let the cleaning lady near it. He attacked the mess himself about twice a year.’

‘Could you bear to…’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Come.’

We went back down the passage. She opened the second door on the left, went in, pulled open heavy red curtains. It was not the study of a tidy person: books, newspapers, files on all surfaces, two bags of golf clubs leaning against the fireplace, a filing cabinet with the bottom drawer pulled out, two full wastepaper baskets, a team of old cricket bats meeting in a corner, empty wine bottles and several wine glasses and mugs on the mantelpiece.

The side table was to the left of the door, no centimetre of its surface visible under a haystack of printed material.

I looked at it. ‘So far the hypothesis holds,’ I said.

Helen Radomsky began clearing the table, dropping the material on the carpet. She got down to a final layer of newspapers.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it was put here…’ She lifted the stack.

A Game Boy, paperback entitled The Mind of Golf, gloves, set of keys, dictation machine, coins, ballpoints, two Lotto tickets, window envelopes, dark glasses, a small silver torch, a pocket diary, small dark-coloured plastic box.

Helen Radomsky picked up the box. It had a sticker on the side. She read: ‘DocSecure.’

I said, ‘Anything in it?’

She shook it. It rattled.

She opened it: one tape.

I said, ‘ “And when it seemed that destiny sought them slain/Came from the legion’s throat one joyous sigh/All eyes gazed up from that bloodstained plain/To see a white dove beneath a salamandrine sky.” ’

‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘Some poem,’ I said. ‘All I remember. It’s about salvation.’

I fought against it and then I did it: I rang Anne Karsh. If Leon answered, I’d say Francis wasn’t answering and we needed instructions about the pine trees at Harkness Park.

It rang and rang. I was about to give up when she said, ‘Hello. Anne Karsh.’ Short of breath.

I didn’t have much breath either. ‘Mac. If this is a bad idea, for any reason, say wrong number and put it down.’

She laughed. I knew the laugh. ‘It’s a good idea. It’s the kind of idea you desperately hope someone else will have because you’re too uncertain to have it yourself. And you’re walking around feeling like a schoolgirl with a crush. A thirty-four-year-old schoolgirl.’

‘I’m in the city,’ I said. ‘Business.’

I could hear her breathing.

‘Is that in the city staying over or in the city going back?’

‘In the city staying over. Not sure where yet.’

‘I can suggest somewhere,’ she said.

‘I’m open to suggestion.’

‘I still have my flat in East Melbourne. It could use an airing. We could meet there, cook something, eat out, order a pizza, not eat anything.’

‘I think eating’s important,’ I said. ‘Not so much what but the social act.’

‘So do I. I think social acts are very important. We’ll think about the social act when we’re there. Make a joint social act decision.’

‘You’re free this evening then?’

‘I’m free for the next two hours, then I’ve got a brief engagement, then I’m free again. Leon came back from Queensland last night, flew to Europe this afternoon. In hot pursuit of something. Possibly a small European country. Smaller than Belgium, bigger than Andorra.’

‘So we could meet quite soon?’

‘I think we should get off the phone now,’ she said, ‘and make our separate ways to East Melbourne at the maximum speed the law allows. Slightly over the maximum speed. When you get there, press the button for A. Lennox.’

‘Give me the address,’ I said. It was unusual for me to become aroused while talking on the telephone in a car parked outside a newsagency.

The address was a Victorian building, a huge house, three storeys, converted to apartments. I parked across the road, waited. Quiet street. It began to drizzle.

The black Mercedes took ten minutes to arrive, went down the driveway beside the house. I waited two minutes, got out.

I pressed the button next to the name A. Lennox. Anne Lennox. Her name before she took Karsh. There was a lift to the third floor. I walked up, glad to stretch after a day of driving, found the elegant door.

Before I rang, I unsnapped the shoulder-holster button under my right arm. The door opened instantly.

Anne was wearing a trenchcoat over jeans and a camel-coloured top, hair pulled back, dark-rimmed spectacles. I hadn’t seen her in glasses.

She brushed my lips with the fingertips of her right hand.

‘Suit,’ she said. ‘Sexy in a suit, Mr Faraday.’

Inside, door closed, we looked at each other.

‘Sexy in the glasses,’ I said.

‘Thank you. For driving.’ She took them off, put them in an inside pocket.

I touched her hair. ‘Wet,’ I said.

‘Everywhere. I was in the shower.’

‘Rang and rang. Almost gave up.’

‘Pays to wait the extra second.’

‘Pays like Tattslotto,’ I said.

She took off the trenchcoat, hung it on a hook behind the front door, adjusted the central heating dial on the wall.

She kicked off her shoes, unbuttoned her top at the throat and pulled it over her head.

‘Pays better than Tattslotto,’ she said.

She was naked underneath, nipples alert. She cupped her breasts for me. I bent to kiss them, feverish.

‘Didn’t have time to get dressed properly,’ she said.

‘Like you dressed improperly. Very much.’

Kissing, undressing, touching, we found our way down the passage and into a bedroom. I managed to get my jacket and the shoulder holster off together.

‘First in quick time, I think,’ Anne said, voice blurred. ‘Then in slow. Very slow.’

Later, lying naked, sated, in the warm room, Anne side on to me, head on my chest, my hand between her thighs, she said, ‘Leon tells me you have an unusual background for a blacksmith, Mr Faraday.’

I felt the sweat on my neck chilling. ‘What does Leon know about my background, Ms Karsh?’

She laughed. ‘When you turned down Leon’s job offer, you became an unobtainable object. And therefore an object of interest.’

‘A man with a duck on a string.’

‘Exactly.’ She bit my right nipple gently, worried it, put her fingertips in my pubic hair, scratched gently.

‘And so he made inquiries about me. Is that it?’

‘That’s it. He couldn’t bear not to know.’

‘What did he say about my background?’

‘Unusual. That’s all. Leon never reveals everything he knows. Not at once. He likes you to know he knows and to tell you what he knows when it suits him.’

‘And how does Leon find out what he knows?’

‘Oh, I think Leon could find out what toothpaste the Pope uses.’

‘Would you say,’ I said, ‘that Leon was a jealous man?’

‘No, not jealous. Envious. Of everything he doesn’t have.’

‘If he thought you were having an affair, would he want to know the details?’

‘Probably. Not out of jealousy. Just for the knowledge. Knowledge for its own sake.’ She moved her lips onto my ribs. ‘Talking of knowledge,’ she said, ‘carnal knowledge of you is nice. And not just for its own sake.’

She reached over and got her watch off the bedside table, looked at it with her head on my stomach. ‘Christ!’ She sat upright. ‘Have to postpone the learning for a while. I’m due to represent Leon at this charity thing…’

I lay on the bed and thought while she showered. She came back into the room, unselfconsciously naked, walked around, found clothes.

‘Suspender belt tonight, what do you think? Black or white?’

‘White. I like the virginal associations.’

She was wearing just the suspender belt and stockings, towelling her hair, breasts jiggling, when she said, ‘Leon’s got a man called Bobby who can find out anything. I think he called in Bobby to give the once-over when he decided he fancied me.’

I went cold everywhere now. ‘What’s Bobby’s full name?’

‘Never heard it. Leon calls him Bobby the Wonder Dog.’

I swung my legs off the bed, reached for my clothes.

‘Mac? What? What’s wrong?’ Alarm in her voice.

I said, ‘Anne, it’s complicated. Leon’s Bobby is likely to be a man called Bobby Hill. After I left you last night, two men sent by Bobby tried to kill me.’

‘Kill you? Kill you? Why?’

‘Goes back a long way,’ I said, putting on my shirt. I sat down to put on my shoes. ‘Sordid stuff. Couldn’t work out how they knew where I’d be last night. Now I think I know.’

Anne came around the bed, put her hands on my shoulders, kissed me on the lips. ‘I’m out of my depth here, Mac,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

I kissed her back. ‘When it’s over,’ I said, ‘tell you the whole sad story. I have to get out of here. The best thing is for you to leave and then I’ll wait a while and go. Is there a back door?’

‘To the building? Yes.’

‘To this flat?’

‘To the fire escape. Yes.’ She sat down next to me, put her hand on my thigh. ‘Going to be all right, isn’t it?’

I kissed her again, soft, hard, hand on her silky neck. ‘Has to be. Haven’t got to the very slow part yet.’

I stood, found the shoulder holster in my jacket and put it on.

Anne looked at the revolver, looked at me, bit her lower lip. ‘Tell me I shouldn’t be regretting this,’ she said.

I touched her lips. ‘No regrets,’ I said. ‘I’m flying with the angels. Scout’s honour.’

While she was putting on lipstick, I said, ‘If I’m right, the flat is being watched. If you leave alone, they’ll wait for me to come out, jump me outside. If I don’t come out and there’s still a light on in the flat, they’ll think I’m planning to stay here overnight and they’ll come to get me later. So I’ll leave a light on when I go.’

She was ready. I took her face in my hands, kissed her. She kissed me back, took a hand and kissed it. ‘It isn’t just lust-you know that, don’t you?’

I nodded. ‘Yes. I know that. This thing, it’s almost over.’

I didn’t believe that. Not for one instant.

Anne went out the front door. In the kitchen, by the light from the passage, I found a dark dishcloth, tied it around my neck like a napkin to hide my white shirt. I went out the door, quietly closed on the latch, stood against the wall on the steel fire escape landing and looked down on the parking area.

It was dark, half moon hidden by cloud, the only light coming from a long open-fronted tenants’ garage at the back of the property. There were only a few lights on in the building, most people not home yet. In this area, they’d all be working fourteen hours a day to pay for the flat and the BMW and the holiday in Tuscany.

Music coming from one of the flats: Miles Davis.

Anne came into sight briefly, long legs, walking briskly towards her car. Moments later, she reversed out, bathing the yard in blood red light, drove around the corner of the building.

Bobby’s boys would not touch Anne, had no reason to. It was me Bobby wanted.

I unclipped the holster, drew the Colt. Time to go.

I took a step towards the stairs, hesitated, moved to the landing rail, back and right cheekbone against the wall, looked down at the landing below.

Nothing. I leaned my head a little further over…

The tip of a shoe, a black running shoe, in the doorway.

Can’t go down. Can’t go back. The man below’s partner would be in the building now, possibly already in the flat.

I opened the back door, thankful that I’d put it on the latch, backed into the kitchen.

No sound in the flat.

I looked around. Espresso machine on the counter. I holstered the Colt, unplugged the machine, picked it up, solid, heavy, cradled it in one arm, stepped out the door again, closed it quietly.

I stepped carefully to the front edge of the landing, coffee machine held above my head, leant forward until I could see both shoes below.

‘Hey,’ I said, gruffly, urgently.

He came out of the doorway fast, in a crouch, looking up, silenced weapon coming up in the two-handed grip.

Neckhead. I saw his face for a split second before I threw the coffee machine at him with all the force I could muster. He fired, just a ‘phut’ noise, no louder than a clap with cupped hands.

But I was already on my way down, one jump to the intermediate landing, painful contact with the railing, left turn…

Neckhead was on his knees. The coffee machine appeared to have struck him full in the face, blood down the right cheek, the appliance lying in front of him.

He brought the pistol up-one-handed now, not fast, puzzled look on his face-as I dived at him.

Another phut.

I felt nothing, just the impact of crashing into him, knocking him backwards. I was feeling for his throat, found the hand holding the pistol, forced the barrel back towards him, back, back, tried to find the trigger. He was making a strangling noise, I could smell his hot breath: cigarette smoke and meat.

Close up, the sound was loud, I felt the heat, smelt the acrid cordite. His body went limp instantly.

I pulled away, stood up. The bullet had gone in under his left nostril, the back of Neckhead’s head was gone. Even in the dark, I could see the blood spreading out from him onto the steel deck.

It had all taken a few seconds. No-one was shouting. Miles was still playing. Probably a tape on a time switch to deter burglars.

Above me, I heard Anne’s kitchen door open.

I took the silenced pistol out of Neckhead’s hand, shrank back against the door of the second floor flat. Where Neckhead had waited.

Waited.

Heard the soft feet on the steps. Rubber soles.

Saw the shoes, big, the trousers, dark, the waistband of the ski jacket.

No more.

The legs stopped. He had seen Neckhead’s legs.

‘Jesus,’ he said, came down the steps in a rush, swung onto the landing, sawn-off shotgun in his right hand, its ugly pig-nostril muzzles coming around to face me.

I shot him in the chest, twice, a third time. His eyes registered something, he bounced against the railing, mouth open, made a sound, cheerful, surprised sound, fell over sideways, slid.

I stood there, pistol in hand, feeling sick. The dishcloth was still around my neck. I took it off, used it to wipe the pistol, put it back in Neckhead’s hands again, pressed his fingers, utmost care.

I listened. Nothing but the growl of traffic on Hoddle and Victoria and Wellington Parades, and Miles Davis.

I left the scene of the crimes. Left carefully, in case Bobby had sent more than two people to get me. Not that taking care would make any difference in the long run, the short run even.

He who says Hill says Scully.

I couldn’t kill armies of people.

I went out on the Tullamarine freeway, suddenly hungry, bought a hamburger in the drive-through at a McDonald’s in Keilor, sat in the car park, appetite gone, system flooded with adrenalin, mind lurching between clear and blank.

I hadn’t listened to the Bianchi tape.

I didn’t want to listen to it. I’d left the Radomsky house with it in my hand and what I had done was to telephone Anne Karsh. All the effort to find it, lying to decent people, and then I put it in my pocket, put it out of my mind.

I took the slim plastic box out of my coat pocket, took out the cassette, slid it into the tape player, hit the buttons.

A voice, counting, humming, whistling. Darren Bianchi’s voice.

Silence.

What was he doing?

Testing a wire, that’s what he was doing.

Noise, traffic noise, tinny music, scratchy sounds.

So what’s she supposed to know, I mean, what do I…Bianchi’s voice again. Barely audible against the background sounds.

Know the absolute fucking minimum, anything goes wrong, she knows close to fuckall. Scully’s voice.

Bianchi is wearing a wire, sitting in a car with Scully. His boss, Scully.

Dennis will ring…Bianchi’s voice.

Then Scully: If Howie goes for his walk, only if he’s out of there. Doesn’t go, we wait till he goes somewhere. He goes, we see him, Dennis rings, says he’s coming round. At eight thirty. Now she’s got to wipe that from the tape, get it? Howie hears it, we’re fucked. It’s for fucking Faraday’s benefit.

So Howie doesn’t know. He’s gonna think, who’s at the door?

Darren, don’t worry about that, right? My department. Just one thing the bitch’s got to do, right. Open the garage door at eight thirty on the fucking nail. You make sure she understands that. No fucking margin for error.

Yeah, eight thirty.

Yeah, eight thirty. It’s just a run-through. She keeps her mouth shut, she gets wrapped up, they’ll be out of there, five fucking minutes, less. No way Dennis will know she’s not as surprised as he is. Okay?

Okay.

Something else. You make sure she knows, change of mind now, she’s meat. Too fucking late for that. She’s fucking in. Doesn’t want to do it, she’s seen fucking Daimaru for the last time. She’s fucking sushi. Doesn’t do it right, same thing. Applies to you, too. And me. And fucking Bobby. You don’t know this fucking El G, fucking mad. I know him from way back, kill anything, kill anyone, come in his pants while he’s doing it. Totally fucking crazy, makes snuff movies. Fuck it up, we’ll be fucking snuff stars.

Scuffling noises, car door slamming, Scully saying something inaudible.

The next five minutes of the tape were recorded somewhere noisy with background voices, laughter, scratchings, scrapings, bangings. The pub in Deer Park? Bianchi, low voice, giving Carlie Mance her instructions.

I listened with my head back on the seat, mouth dry, wishing I had something to drink, a cigarette.

Carlie showed no signs of fear, no desire to call it off. Bianchi told her what would happen to her anyway. Her last words were: Darren, tell ’em make sure they don’t put anything over my nose-can’t bear that, can’t even have a pillow over my nose.

Bianchi said: Not a problem. Won’t happen. I’ll tell ’em.

I ejected the tape, put it in its box, put it in my pocket.

Scully. The bastard. Scully and El G. Scully, the deputy commissioner-to-be. Scully, the man who investigated Ned’s complaint. Sitting in that car, talking to Bianchi, he knew that someone-El G, someone-was going to murder Lefroy and Carlie. Murder them, rape Carlie, enjoy it. Film it for future pleasure.

The tape might be enough to nail Scully, but I doubted it. I sat motionless for a while, uneaten hamburger on my lap, staring sightless.

Unfinished business.

I shook myself. Ian Barbie’s suicide was unfinished business. His letter to his daughter said he’d left a suicide note. Where? At his surgery? He hadn’t. Where he lived? He hadn’t. Where he committed suicide? People often did.

I got out the Melways, put on the inside light and found the quickest way to Footscray.

Varley Street, Footscray: one streetlight, icy wind pinning the newspaper pages against the container depot fence, somewhere a door banging in the wind, lonely sound.

I thought I heard them as soon as I stepped into the old loading bay: the sound of a classroom where the teacher has stepped out for a minute, not loud, but unruly, a jostling of voices.

I knew where the sound was coming from. I went across the loading bay, out into the courtyard, turned right and walked towards the glow coming out of a big doorway.

There were four of them upright, around a smoky, spitting fire. Other bodies lay as dead outside the circle, one face down. The fire cast a cruel russet light on wrecked faces, shapeless clothes, a swollen blood-filled eye. Two men who could have been a hundred years old were fighting weakly over the silver bladder of a wine cask, speaking incomprehensible words, neither strong enough to win possession. Someone who could have been a woman was nursing another person’s head in her lap, drinking beer from a can, golden liquid running down a cracked chin, dripping onto the long, greasy grey hair.

‘Robbo here?’ I said.

Only two heads turned, looked at me without interest, looked away.

I went a few steps closer. The smell was overpowering, smoke, wet clothes, other animal odours.

‘Boris here?’ I shouted.

This time a figure to the right of the fire looked at me, dirty bearded face under a beanie, filthy matted jumper like an animal skin. He was drinking a can of Vic Bitter, two more held between his thighs.

‘Fuck you want?’ he said.

I went over to him. No-one paid any attention to me. ‘You Boris?’

He drank some beer, looked into the fire, spat. It ran down his chin. ‘Fucksit you?’ he said, rocking back.

‘You found the bloke hanged himself here?’

He looked at me, trouble focusing. He wasn’t more than thirty years old. ‘Course I fuckin did,’ he said. ‘Fuckin hangin.’

I knelt down. ‘Boris, you took his watch.’

He blinked, looked away, put the can to his mouth, half missed it. ‘Fuckin,’ he said.

‘Boris,’ I said, ‘I don’t care about the watch. Did you take anything else? From the man? From the car?’

His eyes came back to me. ‘Whar?’

‘Did you take anything else from the hanging man? Understand?’

‘Fuckin,’ he said, looked away, head lolled.

I stood up. Some other time perhaps. Not tonight.

I was on my way out when Boris said, quite distinctly, ‘Pay me.’

I stopped and turned, went back. ‘Pay you for what?’

He was holding himself together with great effort. ‘Pay me ’n’ I’ll show you.’

I got out my wallet, found a twenty-dollar note, waved it at him. ‘Show me and I’ll give you this.’

Boris focused on the note, craned his neck towards it, fell back. ‘Fiffy,’ he said. ‘Gotta be fiffy.’

I offered him the twenty. ‘Show me and I’ll give you another thirty if it’s worth it.’

He put out a hand, black with dirt, fresh blood on the inside of the thumb, and took the note, stuck it somewhere under his jumper. Then he lost interest, studied the beer can.

‘Boris!’ I shouted. ‘Show me!’

His head jerked around, some life in his eyes, drained the beer can, threw it over his shoulder, put the other cans under a coat on the floor. ‘Gimme hand,’ he said, trying to get up.

I gripped the shoulders of his jumper and lifted him onto his feet. He weighed as much as a six-year-old.

‘Over there,’ he said and began to stumble towards the dark left corner of the big space.

I walked behind him. He fell once. I picked him up.

There was nothing in the corner except a rusted sheet of corrugated iron lying on the concrete.

‘Under,’ Boris said, swaying. He put out a hand to steady himself against the wall, misjudged the distance and fell over onto the corrugated iron.

I picked him up again, propped him against the wall.

‘Lift,’ he said, waving vaguely.

I bent down and lifted the corrugated iron, shifted it. Under it I could make out some clothes, two Coles plastic bags, a pair of shoes.

‘Bag,’ Boris said. ‘Gimme.’

I picked up both bags, offered them to him. He focused, put out a hand and knocked one away, almost fell over, took the other one.

He couldn’t get it open, fumbling at the plastic. I helped him. ‘Thangyou,’ he said, put his hand in, couldn’t get hold of what was inside, turned the bag upside down and tipped the contents onto the concrete.

An envelope, A4 cartridge envelope.

I picked it up. It was unsealed. I walked back to the ambit of the firelight. Behind me Boris was making sounds of protest. I opened the flap, took out four or five pages, paperclipped, top page handwritten. I held it up to the light. It began: I am writing this because I can no longer bear to go on living…

I put the pages back in the envelope, went back to Boris, found two twenty-dollar notes, gave them to him.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Gennelman,’ said Boris.

I was in the pub in Streeton, in front of the same fireplace where I’d talked to Ian Barbie’s wife. A tired and dirty man who began the day coming out of fitful sleep in a motel in Penola, out there in the flat vine country, far from home. Sitting in the warm country pub, I could smell myself: sweat, sex, cordite, wood smoke. All curdled by fear. I drank three neat whiskies, dark thoughts.

‘Listen, Mac, I’m closin.’

It was the publican. I knew him, welded his trailer for nothing.

‘Finish this,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, coming over and putting a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker on the table. ‘Just closin the doors. Sit long as you like, fix it up later. Put the light out, give the door a good slam when you go. Lock doesn’t go in easy.’

‘Thanks, mate.’

‘Back roads, right.’

‘Back roads.’

I drank some more whisky, thought about Lew, Ned asking me to look after him. Lew and the dog, my responsibilities. Lew: mother gone, grandfather gone, just me now. I thought about my life, what it had been for so many years: the job and nothing but the job. Utter waste of time. I didn’t even remember whether I’d loved my wife. Couldn’t remember what it felt like to love her. Remembered that she could give me an erection with one look. What I did know was that all the self-respect that I had lost with one bad judgment had been slowly given back to me by my ordinary life in my father’s house. A simple life in a simple weatherboard house. Working with my father’s tools in my father’s workshop. Feeling his hand in the hammer handles worn by his grip. Walking in his steps down the sodden lane and across the road to the pub and the football field. And knowing his friends. Ned, Stan, Lew, Flannery, Mick, Vinnie-they were all responsible for giving me a life with some meaning. A life that was connected to a place, connected to people, connected to the past.

But now I was back in the old life, worse than the old life because then it wasn’t just me and Berglin. It was me, Berglin and the massed forces of law and order.

It was highly unlikely that my life was connected to the future.

For an hour or so, I slumped in the armchair, drinking whisky, clock ticking somewhere in the pub, lulling sound, sad sound. Fire just a glow of gold through grey. Putting off reading Ian Barbie’s last testament in the same way I’d put off listening to Bianchi’s tape.

Berglin. I needed to talk to Berglin. I got up, stretched, moved my shoulders, pain from tackling Neckhead on the fire escape. I got out the mobile, switched it on, pressed the numbers.

‘Berglin.’

‘Mac.’

‘Mac, where the fucking hell have you been? Point of having a mobile is to have the fucking thing switched on.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Been busy. This line secure?’

‘Well, as secure as any fucking line is these days.’

‘Got a tape. Bianchi, Scully, Mance. Before Lefroy. Bianchi had a wire on him. Insurance.’

Berglin whistled. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

‘In the sticks. People are trying to kill me.’

‘Again?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Must be learners. I’ll meet you. Where?’

I thought for a while, gave him directions. It was as good a place as any.

I took cigarettes, matches from the bar and the bottle of whisky.

Back roads, route avoiding anything resembling a main road.

As I turned the corner of the drive, the clouds parted for a few seconds, the half moon lighting up the house at Harkness Park. It didn’t look ghostly or forbidding, looked like a big old house with everyone asleep. I parked around the side, settled down to wait. It would take Berglin another half an hour. I had a sip of whisky, hunched my shoulders against the cold. Tired.

I jerked awake, got out, yawned, stretched, lit a cigarette. It tasted foul, stood on it.

Car on the road. Berglin? Quick driving.

Stopped. At the entrance to the drive.

Typical Berglin. I’d told him to drive up to the house. But Berglin didn’t do the expected. He didn’t drive the same way to work two days running.

I went to the corner of house, looked out between the wall and the gutter downpipe. Hunter’s moon, high clouds running south, gaps appearing, closing, white moonlight, dark. Waited for Berglin.

He was no more than fifty metres from me when the clouds tore apart.

A coldness that had nothing to do with the freezing night came over me.

Bobby Hill, slim and handsome as ever, dark clothing, long-barrelled revolver, man wants a job done properly, has to go out and do it himself.

And behind him, a few paces back, another man, short man, wearing some sort of camouflaged combat outfit, carrying a short automatic weapon at high port, big tube on top.

Clouds covered the moon. Too dark to see the man’s face.

Moonlight again.

Beret on the second man’s head. Turned his head.

Little pigtail swinging.

Andrew Stephens. My visitor in the Porsche.

How did he fit in?

No time to think about that.

The car door was open. I found the box of cartridges under the front seat, moved into the heavy, damp, jungle-smelling vegetation beyond the rotten toolshed.

How many? Just Hill and Andrew Stephens?

It wasn’t going to be only two again.

Escape. Which way?

Down to the mill would be best. Cross the stream above the headrace pond, follow the stream down to the sluicegates. Go around behind the mill, up the wooded embankment. Places to hide there, wait for dawn, ring Stan.

The mobile. I’d left it on the passenger seat.

No going back. I was moving in the direction of the site of the house that burnt down, the first house. But the growth here was impenetrable, I’d end up like a goat caught in a thicket.

I had to veer left, pass in front of the sunken tennis court. But to do that I would have to cross the top of the area we had so painfully cleared. In darkness, that wouldn’t be a problem. But if moonlight persisted, I’d have to wait. And they’d be coming…

Steady. They didn’t know which way I’d gone. They’d have found the car by now. It was coal dark. I could be anywhere.

Scully’s words on the tape came into my head:

You don’t know this fucking El G, fucking mad. I know him from way back…

Way back? How far back? From Scully’s days in the country?

El G? El Torro, The Bull. El Greco, The Greek.

The Greek? Who had said something about a Greek recently? Greek. Recently. In the past few days. The past few days were blurred into one long day.

Frank Cullen, man of contraptions: Rick’s tied up with that Stefanidis from over near Daylesford. RSPCA went there, heard he was shootin pigeons. Bloke behind a wall throws ’em in the air, Greek shoots ’em with a twelve bore from about two yards. Sticks it up their arses practically.

Andrew Stephens. Andrew Stefanidis?

Andrew’s father was a good man, fine man, fought with the Greek partisans in the war. Dr Crewe, walking around the lake, talking about Ian and Tony and Rick and Andrew.

Sudden chilling clarity. Andrew Stephens’s father was Greek. He’d anglicised his name.

Andrew Stephens was El Greco, The Greek, close-range shooter of pigeons, maker of snuff movies, organiser of murderous run-throughs.

And then the realisation.

Berglin had always known who El Greco was. Berglin had toyed with me. Berglin had given me to Scully, Hill and El Greco.

Naive. You only know about naive when it’s too late.

Absolute silence.

I walked into something, old fence, some obstacle, small screeching noise.

Something landed in the vegetation near me, sound like an overripe peach falling. And then a thump, no more than the sound of a hard tennis forehand.

Whop.

The night turned to day.

Blinded.

Flare grenade. I backed away, left arm shielding my eyes.

The bullet plucked at my collar, red hot, like being touched by an iron from the forge.

I fell over backwards, twisted, crawled into the undergrowth, hands and knees, through the thicket, thorns grabbing, scratching face and hands, reached a sparser patch, got to my feet, ran into the dark, into something solid, forehead first.

I didn’t fall over, stood bent, stunned, looked back. The flare was dying, white coal.

‘Mac.’ Shout.

Bobby.

‘Mac. Deal. The tape, you walk. Don’t need you dead.’

What hope did I have?

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’m coming.’

I ran left, northeast, hindered by wet, clinging, growing things, hampered but not blocked. I reached the fringe of the cleared area, exhausted. Knew where I was.

Clouds opened. Moonlight.

The bullet hit something in front of me. Something solid, tree trunk.

Night-vision scope.

That was the fat tube on El Greco’s rifle. Light-enhancing nightscope.

He could see in the dark.

I threw myself into the denser growth to my right, crawled deeper, deeper, desperate, no breath left, ten metres, fifteen, more. Into, over plants, roots, through ditches of rotten leaves, mud, scrabbling, don’t want to die like this…

I fell into the sunken tennis court, fell a metre, head over heels, got up, dazed, winded, pitch-dark, sense of direction gone, ran, ran a long way, length of the court perhaps, knee-high weeds, swimming in porridge, fell, crawled, a barrier, a wall, the other side of the court, bits of rusted wire, hands hurting, sodden soil, tufts of grass coming away in my hands.

I was out of the court, on my stomach, all strength gone.

The end.

Fuck that.

I was being hunted. I was their victim. They’d had lots of victims. They knew about victims: they run, you find them, you kill them.

Dangerous is what you want to be. Go mad. Nobody wants to fight a mad person. Nobody wants fingers stuck up his nose.

A father’s words to a small and scared ten-year-old son.

Yes. I found the strength, crawled around the perimeter of the sunken court, turned north. Waited in the undergrowth.

Whop.

Fireball. In the tennis court. Night sun. Cold, white night sun.

I buried my head in the dank, wet weeds. Flare thrown from the edge of the tennis court, somewhere near where I’d toppled into the court.

Flare dying, fading.

Dark.

Dark.

And then light, cold silver moonlight through the flying clouds.

Bobby Hill, ten metres away, moving through the knee-high weeds, long-barrelled revolver at his side, not anxious, not hurrying, man out for a walk in difficult conditions.

Dark again. Lying on my face, I reached under my chest, found the gun butt, comforting feel, drew the Colt from the shoulder holster. Safety off. Hammer back.

Whop.

In the air, above me, intense sodium-like light.

I cringed, pushed myself down, didn’t move, Mother Earth, breathed wet soil, waited for the pain. You bowl these things, I realised, throw them, they float for a few seconds. Not parachute flares.

No pain. White glare dying away. Slowly, slowly. Dark.

I got up. Walked to the edge of the sunken court, slid down on my backside, stayed down, drew up my knees, rested my outstretched arms on them. Waited.

Look down. Another flare goes off, don’t look at the light.

Pitch dark.

The clouds tore, moon revealed.

Bobby Hill.

The length of a ute from me.

I saw him.

He saw me.

Handsome man, Bobby Hill: dense black hair combed back, nice smile, standing in knee-high weeds on a forgotten tennis court.

He was smiling as he brought the long-barrelled revolver up.

I fired first, at his middle, big bang.

The bullet hit him somewhere near the bottom of his fly, massive punch in the groin. His lower body went backwards, feet leaving the ground.

For an instant, I saw the expression on his face. It said: This is odd.

In my head, I said, Goodbye, Bobby.

From close by, from the thicket above the tennis court, El Greco said, ‘Bobby. Got him?’

I went up the side of the court again, crawled through the vegetation, Colt in hand, dark again, ground sloping, stopped for a second, heard the creek below me, full this time of year.

Flare behind me, to my left. El Greco had misjudged my direction. He was looking further up, thought I’d turned north. I holstered the Colt, lay still, crawled again, mud in my mouth.

Creek close, few metres, rushing water, making a noise no problem. I was in the thicket of poplars that lined the creek, dead branches poking at me, cheek torn open.

I fell head-first down the bank into the stream. Freezing water, couldn’t find my feet, taken downstream, banged into a fallen tree trunk, turned around, use of only one hand, swallowed water, Jesus Christ, I couldn’t drown after all this…

My feet found the oozy bottom, I got a hold on a branch stump, pulled myself along the tree trunk. Island in the middle of the creek, some moonlight. Hid behind the trunk until it went.

Another flare, even further over. El Greco thought I was trying to get back to the house, to the car.

Relief. I lay on a cold carpet of moss and caught my breath: I could get out of this.

I waded the second half of the stream, much shallower there, up the bank, into another poplar jungle, blundered into a barbed-wire fence, sound of sleeve ripping, climbed through it, caught, jacket ripped.

I knew where I was. I’d walked down here from the mill. The millpond was about two hundred metres downstream and there was a path of sorts along the creek. I could walk upright. El Greco couldn’t see me here, poplar thickets on both banks too dense.

It took me about five minutes to reach the brimming millpond. The moon came out and I could see what I had been hearing: water spilling over the dam wall, small waterfall.

Panting, I went over to the rusting sluicegates, looked down into the empty brick-lined millrace. It ran straight to the old mill, slight fall, disappeared around a corner to where the millwheel was.

If I dropped into it, I could run the hundred-odd metres to the shelter of the mill unseen, climb out, cross the bluestone-paved loading area and climb the embankment, get deep into the trees.

Safe.

Whop.

Sodium daylight.

In the poplars on the other side of the race pond, not thirty metres away.

El Greco.

Changed direction, come back. Probably seen me in the nightscope.

Frozen, I couldn’t move, reflexes not working. Tired. Tired.

I sank to the ground slowly, lay full length, felt for the Colt.

Gone. No Colt. In the stream. Oh Jesus.

The flare died. The millrace. Get into the millrace. I said this to myself. Get into the millrace and run.

I crawled to the edge of the sluicegate.

Just do this and you’re safe. He’ll have to go upstream or downstream to cross.

I turned and put a leg over, found a foothold, looked to see how far the drop was…

Whop.

Flare over the middle of the race pond, white light intensified by the reflection.

El Greco in the poplars, weapon at the shoulder, looking through the nightscope.

Drop. About to let go, fall into the millrace.

Bang, wink of red light at the mill end of the race. Bang on the metal sluicegate, felt the tremor of the metal in my hand.

Someone in the millrace. Shooting at me. Of course, two down the drive, two come from below. I knew there’d be more than two.

Bang, red wink, sound of bullet over my head.

I heaved myself back over the top.

Trapped. Finished.

My hand was on the sluicegate lever. Jesus. Heard Flannery’s voice in my head: Sluicegate’ll still work. Someone’s been greasing it.

I grabbed it with both hands, pulled.

Nothing. No give.

Pulled. Oh Jesus.

Moonlight. Two men in the millrace, thirty metres from me. Bang, barrel flame.

Pull!

The lever gave, I fell to my knees. Sound of rushing, falling water, sluicegate half a metre open.

Not caring where El Greco was, I watched the wall of foaming water barrel down the millrace. The men were on either side, trying to climb out, when it hit them, ripped them off the walls, tumbled them down towards the wheel, sweet Jesus…

‘Hands in the air, Mr Faraday.’

El Greco, behind me, five metres away, pear-shaped head behind the fat nightscope. I raised my tired arms. Berglin, you treacherous bastard. All those years.

‘I think we have to do a deal,’ I said.

He laughed, delighted.

‘A deal. What a wonderful idea. Selling something, are we? Gates? Fighter aircraft?’

Laugh again, the girlish laugh.

‘Haven’t got the tape on me,’ I said. ‘Somewhere safe.’

‘That’s not true, John. For telling me lies, I’m going to punish you. Before I kill you.’

The bullet hit me in the left thigh, like a hard blow from a stick, spun me around, knocked me over.

Pain. Intense, burning pain.

I could see him from where I lay. He came closer, weapon still at the shoulder.

‘That was the first part of the punishment, John,’ he said. ‘Now I want you to ask me not to punish you any more.’

Has to be some dignity at the end.

‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘You disgust me.’

El Greco lifted his eyes from the sight. ‘That was a mistake, Johnny. This is going to take much longer now…’

He sighted again.

He was going to shoot me low down in the body.

Moon free of cloud, silver light, sound of water. You bastard, Berglin.

How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life.

What would you know, Berglin, you worthless, faithless bastard?

‘Wait for it, Johnny,’ El Greco said. He laughed, the light, little-girlish laugh. ‘It’s going to hurt, really hurt. And there’s more. Much more.’

A shot. Close. Loud. Another shot.

El Greco looked up from the rifle. His mouth opened. I could see his tongue lolling in his mouth.

He fell over forward, rifle barrel digging into the ground, chest resting on the butt, slowly toppling sideways.

Someone came out of the shadows, wet to the waist, arms at his sides, big automatic pistol pointing at the ground.

‘Fuck,’ Berglin said. His long foot moved El Greco’s rifle away from the body. ‘Flare grenades, night sight. Think bloody technology’s the answer to everything.’

I tried to get up, got to one knee. Pain. Whole left thigh on fire. ‘Why’d you do that?’ I said. ‘Just going to leap at him, knock the rifle away, strangle him.’

‘Got bored waiting,’ Berglin said. ‘Who’s he?’

‘Algie. El G. El Greco.’

He reached down, turned the body over, licked fingertips, held them to El Greco’s nostrils. ‘Won’t be standing trial,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Just as well. Guilty fuckers get off half the time.’

I was in the smithy getting ready to temper a knife blade when Detective Michael Shea drove up, again without Cotter. He came in and sat on the bench.

I had a thick iron plate on the fire, just about ready, almost red.

‘Can’t talk,’ I said. ‘Got to get this right.’

It was red enough. I took tongs and moved it to the cooler side of the fire, picked up the knife blade and put it on the plate. The important thing now was to quench the blade when it showed the right colour.

Shea came over to watch. The blade absorbed heat from the plate, turned strawy yellow, went through orange into brown, began to turn a redder brown.

I picked it up with heated tongs and put it in the quenching bath of water under a layer of clean olive oil, moved it about.

‘What’s that do?’ Shea said.

‘Hard steel’s too brittle, snaps. Get rid of some brittleness this way,’ I said. ‘First you have to harden it, then you temper it like this. What’s happening?’

‘Big morning. They found more bones. Marcia’s rolled, Veene’s decided to give us Crewe.’

‘That’s big.’

‘Crewe got pulled this morning. Steps of Parliament. Do it that way down there. Tip off Channel Nine, get your face on camera. Excellent for the career. They ran Marcia through the Canadian databases. No Marcia Carrier. But a Marcia Lyons did time for assaulting girls at a girls’ home in Montreal. Turns out it’s her. That’s her married name, Lyons. She says Crewe found out before she got the job, didn’t say a word, made sure she got it. Then he had her.’

‘Took part?’

‘Admits. Very distressed. Blames her old man. Says he used to beat her and her sister. Says she didn’t know the girls were killed after she left. Guilty only of assault.’

Gaby Makin had said something. She was talking about Melanie Pavitt, how strong she was for a small person. What was it?

Barbie liked the little ones.

She hadn’t been talking about Ian Barbie, she’d been talking about Marcia. Marcia was Barbie to Barbie’s Ken.

‘What’s Rick say?’ I said.

‘Gone to water. Says he had sex with the girls at the farm, left them with Andrew and Tony. Only found out later that Andrew killed them. On video. We got the videos. In the basement at Andrew’s mansion. Safe buried in the floor. Found it with a metal detector. Make you puke, tell you.’