Bad Debts

BAD DEBTS

a Jack Irish thriller by Peter Temple

Copyright ©2005 by Peter Temple

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For Anita and Nicholas: true believers

1

I found Edward Dollery, age forty-seven, defrocked accountant, big spender and dishonest person, living in a house rented in the name of Carol Pick. It was in a new brick-veneer suburb built on cow pasture east of the city, one of those strangely silent developments where the average age is twelve and you can feel the pressure of the mortgages on your skin.

Eddie Dollery’s skin wasn’t looking good. He’d cut himself several times shaving and each nick was wearing a little red-centred rosette of toilet paper. The rest of Eddie, short, bloated, was wearing yesterday’s superfine cotton business shirt, striped, and scarlet pyjama pants, silk. The overall effect was not fetching.

‘Yes?’ he said in the clipped tone of a man interrupted while on the line to Tokyo or Zurich or Milan. He had both hands behind his back, apparently holding up his pants.

‘Marinara, right?’ I said, pointing to a small piece of hardened food attached to the pocket of his shirt.

Eddie Dollery looked at my finger, and he looked in my eyes, and he knew. A small greyish probe of tongue came out to inspect his upper lip, disapproved and withdrew.

‘Come in,’ he said in a less commanding tone. He took a step backwards. His right hand came around from behind his back and pointed a small pistol at my fly. ‘Come in or I’ll shoot your balls off.’

I looked at the pistol with concern. It had a distinctly Albanian cast to it. These things go off for motives of their own.

‘Mr Sabbatini,’ I said. ‘You’re Mr Michael Sabbatini? I’m only here about your credit card payment.’

‘Inside,’ he said, wagging the firearm.

He backed in, I followed. We went through a barren hallway into a sitting room containing pastel-coloured leather furniture of the kind that appears to have been squashed.

Eddie stopped in the middle of the room. I stopped. We looked at each other.

I said, ‘Mr Sabbatini, it’s only money. You’re pointing a gun at a debt collector. From an agency. You can go to jail for that. If it’s not convenient to discuss new arrangements for repayments now, I’m happy to tell my agency that.’

Eddie shook his head slowly. ‘How’d you find me?’ he said.

I blinked at him. ‘Find you? We’ve got your address, Mr Sabbatini. We send your accounts here. The company sends your accounts here.’

Eddie moved aside a big piece of hair to scratch his scalp, revealing a small plantation of transplanted hairs. ‘I’ve got to lock you up,’ he said. ‘Put your hands on your head.’

I complied. Eddie got around behind me and said, ‘Straight ahead. March.’

He kept his distance. He was a good metre and a half behind me when I went through the doorway into the kitchen. There were about a dozen empty champagne bottles on various surfaces around the room—Perrier Jouet, Moet et Chandon, Pol Roger, Krug. No brand loyalty here, no concern for the country’s balance of payments. The one on the counter to my right was Piper.

‘Turn right,’ Eddie said.

I turned right very smartly. When Eddie came into the doorway, the Piper bottle, swung backhand, caught him on the jawbone. The Albanian time-bomb in his hand went off, no more than a door slam, the slug going Christ knows where. Eddie dropped the gun to nurse his face. I pulled him into the room by his shirt, spun him around and kicked him in the back of the right knee with an instep while wrenching him backwards by his hair. He hit the ground hard. I was about to give him a kick when a semblance of calm descended upon me. I spared him the grace note.

Eddie was moaning a great deal but he wasn’t going to die from the impact of the Piper. I dragged him off by the heels and locked him in the lavatory along the passage.

‘Mate,’ he said in a thick voice from behind the door, ‘mate, what’s your name?’

I said, ‘Mr Dollery, that was a very silly thing to do. Where’s the money?’

‘Mate, mate, just hold it, just one second…’

The freezer had been stocked for a two- or three-week stay, but all the recent catering had been by Colonel Sanders, McDonald’s and Dial-a-Dino. Dessert was from Colombia. There were dirty shirts and underpants all over the main bedroom and its bathroom. The mirror-fronted wall of cupboards held three suits, two tweedy sports jackets and several pairs of trousers on one side. On the other hung a nurse’s uniform, a Salvation Army Sally’s uniform, a meter maid’s uniform, and what appeared to be the parade dress of a female officer in the Waffen SS. With these went black underwear, some of it leather, and red suspender belts. My respect for Mrs Pick, florist and signatory to the house’s lease, deepened. By all accounts, she had a way with flowers too.

I was passing the lavatory on my way back from looking over the laundry when Eddie Dollery said, ‘Listen, mate, you want to be rich?’

He had excellent hearing. I stopped. ‘Mr Dollery,’ I said, ‘meeting people like you is riches enough for me.’

‘Cut that smart shit. Are you going to do it?’

‘Do what?’

‘Knock me.’

His was not a proper vocabulary for someone who had been an accountant. ‘Don’t be paranoid,’ I said. ‘It’s that marching powder you’re putting up your nose.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Eddie. ‘Give me a chance, will you?’

I went into the sitting room and telephoned Belvedere Investments, my temporary employer. Mr Wootton would return my call, said Mrs Davenport. She’d had twenty years as the receptionist for a specialist in sexually transmitted diseases before joining Wootton. J. Edgar Hoover knew fewer secrets.

I looked around some more while I waited. Then I sat down next to the phone and studied what I could see of Mabberley Court. Nothing moved except a curtain in the house opposite, a building so sterile and with surroundings so perfectly tended that it could have been the Tomb of the Unknown Suburbanites.

The phone rang.

‘Jack, my boy. Good news, I hope. Speak freely, old sausage.’ Wootton was in a pub.

I said, ‘Dollery thinks I’m here to kill him.’

‘Got him, have you? Bloody spot on.’

‘I expect to be warned about the armed and desperate, Cyril. There’ll be an extra five per cent deduction to cover my shock and horror at having a firearm pointed at me.’

Wootton laughed his snorting laugh. ‘Listen, Jack, Eddie’s a disloyal little bugger with lots of bad habits but he wouldn’t actually harm anyone. People like that think the worst about everything. It’s the guilt. And eating icing sugar with their noses. What’s on the premises?’

‘Ladies’ uniforms,’ I said.

Wootton laughed again. ‘That’s one of the habits. He’s got the stuff on him, hasn’t he?’

It was starting to rain on Mabberley Court. Across the road, an impossibly white cat had appeared on the porch of the Tomb.

On my way out, I stopped to speak to Eddie. You can’t help admiring a man who can get the local florist to dress up in Ilse Koch’s old uniform over crotchless leather panties.

‘Mr Dollery,’ I said outside the lavatory, ‘you’re going to have to be more cooperative with people whose money you have stolen. Pointing a firearm at their representatives is not the way.’

Eddie said, ‘Listen, listen. Don’t go. Give me the gun back and I’ll tell you where to find ten grand. Go round the back and put the gun through the window. Ten grand. Notes. Old notes.’

‘I know where to find ten grand,’ I said. ‘Everybody keeps ten grand in the dishwasher. And everybody keeps seventy grand in the airconditioner. Wootton reckons you’re short twenty. I’m pushing a receipt for eighty grand and a pen under the door. I want you to sign it.’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Mate,’ Eddie said, ‘every cent. Tell him every cent.’

‘You tell him. Just sign,’ I said.

The receipt came back, signed.

‘The pen, please.’

The pen appeared. ‘Thank you. Goodbye, Mr Dollery.’

Eddie was shouting something when I closed the front door, but he’d stopped by the time I reached the car. Across the road, the white cat was watching. I drove out of Mabberley Court. Two hours later, I was at Pakenham racecourse watching a horse called New Ninevah run seventh in a maiden.

The next day, I went to Sydney to talk to a possible witness to a near-fatal dispute in the carpark of the Melton shopping centre. It was supposed to be a six-hour quickie. It took two days, and a man hit me on the upper left arm with a full swing of a baseball bat. It was an aluminium baseball bat made in Japan. This would never have happened in the old days. He would have hit me with a Stewart Surridge cricket bat with black insulation tape around the middle. Except in the old days I didn’t do this kind of work.

2

It was 5.30 p.m. on Saturday before I got back. I listened to a summary of the football on the radio on the way from the airport. ‘Fitzroy started in a blaze of glory…’ said the announcer. I felt like switching off. The only question left was: By how much? By 114 to 78 was the answer.

I turned off at Royal Park and drove around the university and through Carlton to the Prince of Prussia. It was one of the few pubs left in Fitzroy that still made a living out of selling beer. Most of the proud names had been turned into Thai–Italian bistros with art prints in their lavatories.

I parked a block away, two wheels on the kerb in a one-way street, and made a run for the Prince. I could have found it by smell: a hundred-odd years of spilt beer. My grandfather used to drink there. So did my father. His dark, intense face is in the faded photographs of the Fitzroy Football Club sides of the late 1940s on the wall near the door marked GENTS.

There are only a few dozen Fitzroy supporters left who remember my father; to them I represent a genetic melt-down. Three of these veterans were sitting at the bar nursing glasses of beer and old grievances. As I stood brushing rain off my sleeves, they looked at me as if I were personally responsible for Fitzroy’s 36-point loss to despised Carlton on Saturday.

‘Three in a row, Jack,’ said Eric Tanner, the one nearest the door. ‘Played like girls. Where the hell were you?’

‘Sorry, men,’ I said. ‘Business.’

Three sets of eyes with a combined age of around 220 examined me. They all held the same look. It was the one the boy in the gang gets when he is the first to put talking to a girl ahead of kicking the football in the street.

‘I had to go to Sydney,’ I said. ‘Work.’ I might as well have said I had to go to Perigord for truffles for all the exculpatory power this statement carried.

‘Should’ve taken the team with you,’ said Wilbur Ong.

‘What kind of work does a man have in Sydney on Satdee arvo?’ said Norm O’Neill in a tone of amazement. These men would no more consider being away from Melbourne on a Saturday in the football season than they would consider enrolling in personal development courses.

I caught the eye of Stan the publican. He was talking in undertones to his wife, Liz, at the serving hatch to the kitchen. Only half of her face was visible, her mouth a perfect Ctesiphon curve of disgust. Stan said a last word and floated over, a big man, thinning head of pubic hair, small nose like an afterthought pinched out by the divine sculptor. His eighty-six-year-old father, Morris, owned the pub and wouldn’t sell it. To Liz’s disgust, he also wouldn’t die.

‘The boys missed you today,’ he said.

‘They told me how much,’ I said. ‘Cleaned these pipes yet?’ The beer had been tasting funny for weeks.

Stan looked at me pityingly. ‘Jack, you could give a baby milk through these pipes. I had the bloke in. Nothing come out ’cept clean steam. Clean steam in, clean steam out. Chucking my dough away, he reckons.’

He put the first full glass on the counter. ‘Your Mr Pommy Wootton’s been ringing. The old bat said to give him a tinkle when you came in, quick smart.’

‘He’s about as pommy as you are,’ I said. ‘His old man taught welding at Preston Tech.’

‘Wish my old man’d taught welding at Preston Tech,’ Stan said with controlled venom. ‘Then I wouldn’t be standin here till all hours listenin to old buggers fartin on about footie games sixty years ago.’

I rang Wootton from what Stan called his office, a midden of old bills, junk mail, newspapers, telephone directories. Under the telephone was a Carlton & United Breweries page-a-day diary. The year was 1954.

‘Mr Wootton has made a number of attempts to contact you,’ said Mrs Davenport. ‘Please wait while I see whether he’s free.’

‘Free, free, like a bird in a tree,’ I said. I don’t know why.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Mrs Davenport, not startled.

‘It’s a line from an American poet, E. A. Presley.’

There was a silence of precise duration. It told me my flippancy had been noted. Then Wootton came on the line, querulous.

‘What’s the point of having an answering machine if you don’t plan to respond to messages? I even resorted to ringing that filthy hole you drink in.’

‘Even as we speak I am in that hole.’

‘Well, see if you can get out of it by Monday to do a small task for me.’

‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘do I detect a hint of the master-servant relationship creeping in here? Let’s start with a nice thank you for the parcel I dropped off on Thursday. And then we can talk about the possibility of future dealings.’

‘Thank you,’ he said ungratefully. ‘I notice that you remunerated yourself rather lavishly in excess of the agreed fee.’

‘The agreed fee didn’t cover uniform fetishists armed with dodgy guns. I explained that on the phone.’

‘Perfectly harmless little turd.’

‘There’s no such thing as an armed harmless little turd.’

We went on like this for a while. Then I went back to the bar, drank a beer with the lads, ate a toasted cheese sandwich crafted out of recycled sawdust and polyvinyl by the reluctant hands of Liz. I was at the door when Stan said, ‘Another bloke looking for you. Thursday, I think it was. Said he’d been round your office.’

‘Name?’

‘Didn’t say. Didn’t ask. Said he’d come back.’

‘What’d he look like?’

Stan thought for a while, squinting slightly. ‘Short,’ he said. ‘Dangerous.’

‘That’s half the people I know.’

I went home. The flat smelled of musty books. It took me back to the start of my legal career, searching through document boxes stacked like tin coffins in a crypt. I put my bag in the bedroom and opened the sitting room windows. The cold came in like a presence. At the end of the lane cars flicked by. The rain held in the streetlight’s cone seemed to rise from the sharkskin pavement.

I made a drink of whisky, ice and tap water and slumped on the sofa beside the telephone. In the gloom, the little red light on the answering machine blinked nervously. I went to push the button and thought, bugger it. Tomorrow.

I finished the whisky, made some Milo and took it to bed, feeling tired and lonely. It took six pages of a Bolivian novelist to put me away.

3

On Sunday I fiddled around, doing nothing, restless, vaguely sorry for myself. I spent an hour writing a letter to my daughter in Queensland. Claire was cooking on a fishing boat out of Port Douglas. In my mind, I saw her, a beautiful stick with wrists the size of some men’s knuckle-bones. She was circled by large males, blond men with permanent sunburn and the eyes of dead sharks. I thought about the first time I saw Claire’s mother, on Bells Beach. She had been surrounded by testosterone-crazed surfers, all lying belly down to hide their erections.

I reread Claire’s most recent letter. It made too many mentions of the boat’s skipper, a man called Eric. I ended my letter with some delicately phrased warnings about the distorting effects of propinquity on judgment. Still, at least Eric had a job.

I walked to the corner to post the letter. The sky was low, the colour of misery, wind whipping the naked trees. There was no-one in the park except a man and a small boy sitting at a table near the playground. The boy was eating something out of a styrofoam box, his eyes on the table. The man was smoking a cigarette. He put out a helpless hand and touched the boy’s hair.

I went home and the winking light on the answering machine caught my eye as I came in the door. I pressed the button and slumped on the couch.

Jack, Andrew. Thought you’d be back by now. Listen, I’ve pushed a little lease thing your way. Bloke called Andropolous. I just got his cousin off a couple of obtaining-by-deceptions. Andy’s all right. Cash in hand. Pause. By the way, Helen’s fucked off. Give me a ring when you get back. Cheers. Oh, my secretary says a guy called McKillop was around here today looking for you. Ex-client, I gather. See you.

The machine’s deep voice said: Thursday, July 23, 6.20 p.m. Andrew Greer, former law partner.

Jack. Mate, it’s Danny McKillop. Pause. Danny, y’know, the hit-and-run? In ’84? I’m out. You said ring you, like if there was something? I’m in a bit of strife, mate. You reckon you can give me a ring? It’s 9419 8432. Tonight if you can. Cheers.

The machine said: Thursday, July 23, 7.47 p.m.

I stopped the machine. Danny McKillop. Y’know, the hit-and-run? It meant nothing. A former client? A client who went to jail. Plenty of those around. I pressed the button again.

Jack, Laurie Baranek. Look, this agreement needs a bit extra, know what I mean? Can we stick in a coupla other penalties? I just want it so he understands he don’t deliver, he’s in big shit. Get my meaning? Ring me. Not at work, I’m on the mobile.

Friday, July 24, 2.28 p.m. Laurence Baranek, vegetable merchant and property speculator.

Jack, it’s Danny. McKillop. Get my message? Listen, ring any time, doesn’t matter what time. Pause. Jack, I’m in deep shit. Can you meet me in the carpark of the Hero of Trafalgar in Brunswick? It’s off Sydney Road. Seven o’clock tonight? I wouldn’t ask only I’m shitting myself, okay? Cheers.

The man said it was Saturday, 25 July, 3.46 p.m.

There were no more messages, just a lot of silences and disconnections. Danny McKillop? The name still meant nothing. I rang the number. No answer. I put on Mahler, made a beef stew, opened a bottle of wine, rang my sister and listened for half an hour. The day passed.

On Monday, Cameron Delray, the small man’s enigmatic footsoldier, picked me up at Taub’s Cabinetmaking in Fitzroy. It’s in Carrigan’s Lane, a grubby one-way that runs down to Smith Street, Collingwood. Cam blocked the street with his Kingswood. I was at the back of the shop making myself useful, ripping some ash for a bureau carcass. I switched off the machine with my knee and took off my helmet.

Cam gave me a nod and walked over to where Charlie Taub was fine-tuning some clamps on a George III writing table.

‘G’day, boss,’ Cam said. ‘How’s the apprentice coming on?’

‘Not bad,’ said Charlie, taking the long-dead cheroot out of his mouth and looking at it. ‘Five, six years, he’ll make a joint that fits. Then I’ll sell him the business and retire.’

I was taking off my leather apron. ‘Retire at ninety?’ I said. ‘Premature, that’s what they’ll say. Best work still ahead of him.’

Cam said, ‘Get along without the boy for a bit?’

‘I’ll try,’ Charlie said. ‘Fifty years on my own, if I’m ready yet I don’t know.’ He gave me his appraising look from under the exploding grey eyebrows. ‘I blame myself,’ he said. ‘Introducing you to Harry Strang.’

I said, ‘Don’t torture yourself, Charlie. People have introduced me to a lot worse than Harry Strang. By a factor of about three thousand.’

‘Horse business,’ Charlie said. ‘Never met a man it didn’t ruin.’

‘I should be so lucky to be ruined like Harry Strang,’ I said. ‘I’m scared Harry’ll die before he ruins me.’

‘Material possessions,’ Charlie said. He lit the cheroot with a kitchen match and coughed for a while, waving the smoke away with a hand the size of a tennis racquet. ‘Material possessions he’s got. Otherwise, a ruined man. Ruined.’

Cam’s Kingswood smelt faintly of expensive perfume. The radio was on. An ABC voice, rich with authority, was saying:

The Premier, Dr Marcia Saunders, today defended the six hundred million dollar Yarra Cove project.

Approving the project, which will transform a large section of the west bank of the Yarra, was one of the new government’s first acts.

Dr Saunders said she and her party had for years in opposition called for a number of large Melbourne developments to be given the go ahead.

The Premier’s voice, hoarse, slightly too loud, the voice of someone you interrupt at your peril, followed.

The previous government was so obsessed by its hatred of anyone who made a profit and created jobs that it allowed this State to stagnate. Well, the people of Victoria have had enough of social engineering. This government is trying to get this State moving again. We’re unashamedly pro-development and so are the people who voted us into office.

The announcer came back.

Opposition leader David Kerr said the Yarra Cove project had no merit whatsoever.

David Kerr’s gravelly voice said, This government would like to hand the whole State over to their pals the developers. Yarra Cove is bad enough, but it’s just the beginning…

‘Yarra Cove?’ said Cam. ‘What the hell is Yarra Cove?’

‘Sounds tropical,’ I said. ‘Topless girls in grass skirts swaying by the banks of the Yarra, that sort of thing.’

‘In this climate,’ Cam said, ‘they start topless, they’ll end titless.’

We were on Johnston Street. I closed my eyes as Cam aimed the Kingswood at a gap between two vehicles that had to grow about two metres before he reached it. It obviously grew. I opened my eyes. Cam punched over to 3MP Easy Music. They were playing ‘The Way We Were’, probably for the fifth time since breakfast. He screamed and punched over to a man talking about public transport.

Harry Strang lived in Parkville, in a huge Victorian house behind high red-brick walls. Cam spoke into the voicebox in the studded street door and the door unlocked itself. The house was fifty metres away, at the end of a stone path that wound through a two-gardener garden.

Lyn Strang let us in. Harry’s wife was in her forties, sexy in a bush-hospital nurse way: short hair, snub nose, legs-apart stance. She had a generous mouth, big knowing hands and broad calf muscles. Lyn had been married to a small-time country trainer called Ronnie Braudel. Ronnie lucked on to a horse called Fiery Continent, a little thing with no more breeding than the average can of dog food. But the horse was more than the sum of his parents. He was an equine freak, a once-in-a-lifetime horse.

Ronnie Braudel was just smart enough to keep his mouth shut and look for help with the horse. His old man knew Harry Strang, and Harry knew what to do with Fiery Continent.

It took just under twelve months to set it up, but it was the mother of all paydays for Ronnie. He transferred his operations to Queensland, taking with him a new friend, eighteen-year-old Valma, a highly qualified nail technician from Wangaratta. Harry extended his sympathies to the deserted wife and Lyn Braudel ended up the fourth Mrs Harry Strang. She gave Harry about thirty years’ start and he conceded two hands in height but there was an electricity between them.

Harry was waiting in the study. The room was the idea of a study that is stored up in heaven. It had a full wall of mahogany bookshelves, probably five metres high and ten metres wide, opposite the windows. The upper shelves were reached by four teak and brass ladders that moved on rails. On the shelves was what seemed to be every book ever written on horse racing. The other walls displayed a collection of racing paintings and prints. Between the windows hung a set of photographs in walnut frames of Harry Strang winning English and French races in the late 1940s and early 1950s: the English and Irish Derbies, the King Edward VII Stakes, the Queen Alexandra Stakes, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Grand Prix de Deauville, the Prix de Diane, the Grand Prix de Saint Cloud.

Harry could ride at about the same weight now as when he was in the photographs. He was tall by jockey standards and looked taller because of his shoulders-back, chin-up carriage. He had a full head of short hair, dark with some unscented oil, a small-featured face barely lined. Today he was wearing a Donegal tweed suit, dark-green silk tie on a creamy shirt, russet brogues. I could never help staring at his feet. You can’t buy handmade brogues to fit ten-year-olds in the shops, so Lobb’s in London made Harry’s shoes: $400 a shoe.

‘Jack, Cam,’ he said. ‘Sit.’

Harry liked to get on with it.

We sat down in leather club armchairs. Harry went behind the desk, a classic piece in the style of Eugene Harvill made by Charlie Taub. Almost everything in the apartment was made or restored by Charlie.

Harry put his hands on the desk. They were the hands of someone half his age and twice his size: square-tipped, tanned, strong-looking. There was nothing wrong with his eyes, either.

‘Crook arm, Jack?’ he said.

I hadn’t been aware of touching it. ‘Just a strain,’ I said.

Harry cocked his head. ‘Give it the balsam three times a day. Now. Business. A bloke I’ve done some transactin with across the years, he reckons he’s got somethin for us.’

The years spent in Europe had done nothing to take small-town Victoria out of Harry’s voice.

There was a knock at the door and ancient Mrs Aldridge, Harry’s housekeeper for thirty-odd years, came in, followed by Lyn Strang carrying a tray of coffee things. At the table, Mrs Aldridge took command, shooing Lyn out of the room. When we had each been served a cup of hell-dark brew from the silver pot, plus a chocolate biscuit, business resumed.

‘This fella’s name is Tie. Rex Tie,’ Harry said. ‘Trains a few cattle out in the bush.’

Cam said, ‘Time Urgent.’

‘That’s the one,’ Harry said.

‘You do that Time Urgent thing?’ Cam asked.

‘What’s past is past,’ Harry said. ‘I want to have a little look, see if Rex Tie’s brain’s still workin. We’ll have to get on the Drizas, motor out to the bush next week. Suit, Jack?’

I nodded.

‘Good. Cam, let’s step over and look at the movin pictures.’

We went across the passage into Harry’s wood-panelled cinema and sank into the plush armchair seats. Cam plugged in the video cassette I’d given him, pressed some buttons on a remote control, and moist Pakenham appeared on the wraparound screen. Harry had been at Pakenham. I’d seen him up near the back of the stand, on his own as always, grey felt hat, undistinguished raincoat, eyes stuck to the X15 binoculars. You never went near Harry on a racetrack, that was the rule. You didn’t talk to Cam either if you saw him. My job had been to video New Ninevah’s run with about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of small video camera. For this and a bit of legal work, I got paid a retainer.

‘Take the start in slow, Cam,’ said Harry.

We watched in silence.

‘Again,’ Harry said. And so it went on. It took nearly ten minutes to watch a race that was over in 1 minute 24.20 seconds. When Cam put the lights on, Harry looked at me and said, ‘Did he or didn’t he?’

I shrugged. ‘Looked like he was trying to to me. Didn’t miss the start this time.’

‘No,’ Harry said. ‘No, he came out fightin. Cam?’

‘Clean, I’d say,’ Cam said. He was putting a label on the video cassette. ‘Reckon he just don’t like the wet.’

Harry got out of his chair. ‘Course we could be pissin on the wrong campfire again.’ He walked over and looked out the window, hands in his jacket pockets. ‘Doubt it though.’ He sighed. ‘Well, that’s it for today, gentlemen. Ballarat on Wednesday. Freeze our arses off as usual. Come round nine for a bit of sustenance. Suit? Jack, Cam’ll drop you back. Then he’s got some computin to do. That and clean the gutterin and prune the roses.’

‘After that I’m going to put on my burglar suit and give the dogs savaging practice,’ said Cam.

‘I forgot,’ Harry said. ‘They’re getting rusty.

4

Cam dropped me at my office, which is down the lane from Taub’s Cabinetmaking. The sign outside said ‘John Irish, Barrister & Solicitor’ but I didn’t do much that resembled law from the place. Apart from the odd lease or conveyance for Harry Strang, most of my income came from collecting serious debts or finding witnesses. It was something I’d drifted into doing when I stopped being a criminal lawyer.

The office was just one large room on the street, with a small room and a toilet behind it. It had once housed a tailor, and I used the large table he’d left behind as my desk. The man at the corner shop told me the tailor used to sit cross-legged on the table to do his handstitching. I sat down and switched on my Mac, got out my notebook and started work on the statement I’d got from the witness in Sydney.

When I’d finished, I got a salad sandwich from the corner shop and ate it at my table. Then I drove around to the offices of Andrew Greer—my old offices—at the city end of Drummond Street, Carlton. You could walk to the magistrate’s courts from there, that was why we’d bought the old terrace house and spent months fixing it up ourselves.

Andrew’s filthy old Saab was outside.

There was no sign of his secretary. I was walking down the passage when he appeared at his door.

‘Nice bit of cloth,’ I said. Drew was wearing a navy-blue suit.

He looked down at himself. ‘Bought it with the tip Mrs De Lillo gave me,’ he said. ‘From Buck’s. Nine hundred dollars.’ He pointed at a lapel. ‘There’s a puke stain here you can barely see.’

‘Nearly invisible,’ I said. ‘From about a hundred metres in bad light. I got Mrs Brierley.’

‘You beauty. What does she say?’

‘She puts your bloke about five metres from the deceased at the vital moment. She says she knows him by sight. Used to buy fish and chips at the shop.’

A smile grew on the long face. He shook his head. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘thou art merciful, even unto him who hath sinned. Let’s have a drink on this.’

‘It’s 3 p.m., Andrew.’

‘Pre-dinner drink. We in the law eat early.’

‘Her boyfriend hit me with a baseball bat.’

‘What? Didn’t break anything? No?’

I shook my head.

‘Good, good. Your suffering won’t be in vain. I’ll get you something for pain and suffering. This bloke’s loaded. Dudded plenty of insurance companies.’

I followed him down the passage into the kitchen at the back of the building. We sat at the formica-topped table. Drew opened two bottles of Coghills Creek lager. I had a sip, put the bottle down and put my hands in my pockets. Reformed binge drinkers know how things start.

‘What’s this about Helen?’

Andy drank about a third of his bottle, held it up to the light and gave a little laugh. ‘Gone, mate. Gone to live in Eltham with a painter. Left me with the kids.’

‘House?’

‘She doesn’t get the house. Not if I can help it.’

‘The painter. Does he paint houses?’

‘Oh. No fucking way. This is a romance. With a serious artist. Though no-one’s ever heard of the cunt. Bruce Seal. You ever heard of Bruce Seal?’

‘I hate to say this, but yes.’

‘You’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say never heard of the cunt.’ He drank more beer and wiped his moustache. ‘What have you heard about him, anyway?’

‘Just your normal Eltham bloke. Hugely talented artist. Speaks five languages. Plays classical piano. Two-handicap golfer. Fourteenth dan in karate. Twelve-inch dick. Why?’

‘Forget it. I don’t think I’m going to get the sympathy I’m looking for.’ He drained his beer and opened another one.

‘How’s Lorna?’

Drew looked at me suspiciously. Lorna was a public prosecutor he’d been having a desultory affair with for a long time. ‘Lorna’s fine. This has got nothing to do with Lorna. Helen doesn’t know about Lorna.’

‘What do the kids think?’

He held up his hands, palms outward. ‘I don’t know what Michael thinks. Only five billion people on the Internet know what Michael thinks. Vicky thinks it’s cool. She was probably the only girl in her class living with both her parents.’

I had a small sip. ‘What’s Helen say?’

Drew looked at the ceiling. ‘She says she’s fallen in love with a wonderful man and it wouldn’t have happened if I’d found a little more time for her over the last twenty years. Does she think I’ve enjoyed working my arse off?’

I said, ‘She might. Everyone else does.’

‘You prick. This is what I get in my hour of need.’

‘Sounds like that’s what Helen got in hers. If it’s a consolation, it probably won’t last. They say Bruce is more of a hunter than a farmer.’

‘They say that, do they? Your artistic friends.’

‘You’ve got to broaden your social horizons, mate,’ I said. ‘There are people out there who aren’t lawyers, cops or crims. Listen, what did you do with my old files?’ I had a final swig of beer, got up and poured what was left into the sink.

It took me about twenty minutes to find Daniel Patrick McKillop’s file. He’d pleaded guilty in the County Court on 22 November 1984 to a charge of culpable driving. The victim was a twenty-year-old woman called Anne Elspeth Jeppeson, knocked down in Ardenne Street, Richmond, at 11.40 p.m. on 18 June 1984. She died instantly. The Crown called a witness who saw McKillop driving the car minutes after the collision and later picked him out of a line-up. McKillop was found asleep at the wheel of the vehicle about an hour after the collision. He had a blood alcohol count of 0.1. Blood and clothing fragments on the vehicle matched those of Anne Jeppeson.

The headline on a clipping dated 23 November 1984 said: WITNESS SAW JEPPESON DEATH CAR.

The story read:

The car that knocked down and fatally injured public housing campaigner Anne Jeppeson was seen swerving almost out of control three blocks from the scene, a court was told yesterday. The driver, Daniel Patrick McKillop, had a blood alcohol reading of 0.1 more than two hours later, according to evidence.

Mr McKillop, 24, of Zinsser Street, Richmond, pleaded guilty in the County Court to a charge of culpable driving on 18 June.

Anne Elspeth Jeppeson, 27, of Ardenne Street, Richmond, was killed instantly when she was struck by a vehicle outside her home on 18 June.

Mr Ronald Bishop said he was driving along Freeman Street, Richmond, at 11.40 p.m. on 18 June when a yellow car came weaving towards him.

‘It almost hit the parked cars on my side of the street then it swerved across in front of me over to the other side and almost crashed into the cars there. The driver had to brake to avoid hitting them. It was almost out of control.’

Mr Bishop said he saw the driver’s face clearly. He noted part of the car’s registration number and telephoned the police when he got home.

Senior Constable Ivor Wilkins said Mr McKillop was found asleep behind the wheel of a yellow Ford Falcon belonging to him in the garage of his home. Mr Bishop later identified Mr McKillop as the driver of the vehicle he saw in Freeman Street.

Senior Constable Lauro Martines, of the traffic alcohol section, said Mr McKillop’s blood-alcohol content was 0.1 per cent more than two hours after the accident.

Dr Alfred Hone, of the police forensic laboratories, said blood and fragments of cloth found on Mr McKillop’s vehicle matched those of Miss Jeppeson.

Mr McKillop was remanded for sentencing until 4 December.

I found the clipping on 5 December under the headline: JEPPESON DEATH: DRIVER GETS TEN YEARS.

The story said that Daniel McKillop had a previous conviction for driving under the influence and had just emerged from his licence suspension at the time of the accident. He had been drinking in two hotels earlier that evening and had no recollection of the accident. The judge said some harsh things about drunken drivers, expressed regret at the loss of a ‘courageous young woman with her life ahead of her’ and complimented Mr Ronald Bishop on his public-spirited behaviour. McKillop got ten years in spite of his lawyer’s plea that he was as much a victim as Anne Jeppeson: ‘an unloved boy who has drifted into multiple addictions’.

I looked for his previous convictions. They took up half a page, mostly juvenile stuff. He had two convictions for drunken driving and was on a two-year suspension at the time of the accident. Somehow he’d never been to jail. The judge made up for that: McKillop got a non-parole period of eight years.

All of this was complete news to me. I looked at the date again: November 1984. It was at the beginning of the forgotten zone, the year or so I spent drunk and semi-drunk after my wife’s death.

I looked through the other files for 1984 and early ’85. There were only five or six after McKillop. I didn’t remember any of them either.

I went back to Drew’s office. He was reading something, beer on the desk.

‘When I went off the rails back then,’ I said, ‘after Isabel’s death…Did you try to keep me out of court?’

He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘I think you could say that,’ he said. ‘If it’s worrying you, I hijacked all the defended matters between that day and the day you quit. I don’t think you did any damage. Except to yourself.’

‘And the firm,’ I said. I felt a rush of gratitude towards this gangling, unemotional man.

He put his glasses back on and reached for the beer. ‘Nothing permanent,’ he said. ‘We had a fair bit of goodwill to live off.’

‘This McKillop who was looking for me. Remember him?’ I offered him the file.

He took a minute to look it over. ‘No, not him. The woman was a bit of a name on the left. Used to drink at the Standard with the free housing push.’ He handed the file back. ‘Danny got what was coming to him, Jack. Probably just in the shit again.’

At the front door, Drew said, ‘I think I might take up seriously with Lorna.’

I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Mate, first look up “holiday” in the dictionary. It’s an experience you might want to try. Want to come to the football on Saturday?’

He screwed up his face. ‘We haven’t been to the football for a bit, have we?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘A lot of the same names still around though. Only it’s the sons.’

‘Fuck off. We’ll go. Have a steak afterwards. At Vlado’s.’ He paused. ‘Or Vlado’s son’s.’

Why did Danny McKillop want to see me so badly? I’d again put off ringing the number he’d left on the machine until I had him placed. The phone rang for a long time before a woman answered. I asked for Danny. There was a long silence. I could hear heavy traffic.

‘Danny’s not here.’ The phone went down. I dialled the number again. The woman picked it up straight away.

I spoke quickly. ‘Danny rang me. Left this number. Can you give him a message?’

Again, I listened to the traffic for a while before she spoke. ‘Danny’s dead,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in ringing here.’ Click.

I went to the window and watched the women from the pressing sweatshop across the lane on their smoko. They leant against the wall, laughing a lot, taking deep drags on their cigarettes. Then I looked up McKillop in the phonebook. There was a D. P. McKillop in Windermere Street, Northcote. I put my hand out to dial several times and withdrew it. Danny McKillop comes out of a black hole in my past, looks for me everywhere, and a few days later is dead. I opened the file I’d brought from Drew’s. Danny would have been in his late thirties. Died of what?

When I finally dialled the number, a child answered, a girl, four or five perhaps.

‘This is Kirsty McKillop speaking,’ she said in precise tones. ‘Mum’s hanging up the washing.’

‘Could I speak to her please, Kirsty,’ I said.

‘Hold on. I’ll call her.’

I heard her shouting, ‘Mum, a man’s on the phone, a man’s on the phone…’

When she came on, the woman was out of breath. ‘Hello, Sue McKillop.’

I said, ‘Mrs McKillop, sorry to bother you. Is that the home of Daniel Patrick McKillop?’

I could hear her breathing. ‘Danny died, was killed on Friday night.’ Her voice was flat, slightly hoarse.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jack Irish. I was his lawyer once. He was trying to get hold of me last week, but I was away…’

‘Yes, well, thank you for ringing, Mr Irish.’

‘Forgive me asking, but how…’

She didn’t let me finish. ‘A policeman shot him. Murdered him.’ She was making a statement of fact.

‘Where did it happen?’ I asked the question without thinking, and as I did a chill came over me.

‘In a pub carpark. In Brunswick.’

‘What pub was—’

‘The Hero of Trafalgar.’

5

I never blamed myself for my wife’s death. Not then or now. A client of mine, Wayne Waylon Milovich, shot and killed Isabel in a parking garage in La Trobe Street. When he’d done that, he taped a letter addressed to me to her forehead and went back to his car, a 1974 Ford Falcon with one hundred and thirteen unpaid parking tickets against its number. He then detonated two or three sticks of gelignite on his lap. The letter went: ‘Mr Judas Lawyer Did You Now My Wife Run Away And Took My Kids While I Rotted In Jail Were You Sent Me Because You Wood Not Listen To What I Was Telling You As Your Clynt You Bastard.’

Deranged clients. It’s a risk you run. Isabel knew that. She practised family law, where practically all the clients are deranged to some degree. I didn’t blame myself. I just raged against fate. I couldn’t get that through to people. They kept telling me to stop torturing myself. They wanted me to blame myself. I wasn’t walking around drunk, crying in pubs, getting into fights with strangers because I was blaming myself. I was in a state of incoherent rage. I had lost someone who had cast a glow into every corner of my life. I was entitled to my feelings. Loss. Hate. Hopelessness. Worthlessness. Only the return of Isabel would have been enough.

Isabel and I were very different. Her childhood was the opposite of mine: she grew up in a fierce tribe of children, all lovingly neglected by their parents, a musician and a painter. She had emerged from the chaos clever, funny, diligent, dreamy, sensuous, and with an affection and concern for other people that descended indiscriminately like warm summer rain. She came into my habitual gloom and dispelled it, dissolved it, with one endless, helpless laugh.

After her death, I lost control for months. I would have put Wayne together again fragment by fragment just to tear him apart with my hands and teeth. I could not be still. I could hardly bear to sit down. I could not listen to music, read, exchange more than a few words with anyone. I slept only when hopelessly drunk; I woke within minutes, slick with cold sweat. All food tasted like dry oats and I did not eat for days on end. After I walked out on Andrew Greer, I drifted for months, driving without aim, drinking all day in sour little country pubs, lapsing into unconsciousness in the car or in some paper-walled motel room. I got arrested eventually in a sodden town in Queensland called Everton. Someone went through my wallet and got word to Andrew Greer. He pulled strings with a relative, a Cabinet Minister in the Queensland government, to get me off a variety of charges without a conviction. My car had vanished. We flew home together. I’d been in the cells for six days, hadn’t had a drink, was over the worst. I stayed at home for weeks, going out only to buy food, and then I began slowly to resume some sort of normal life.

Sitting in my office, elbows on the tailor’s table, thinking about Danny McKillop brought the darkness of those times back to me. I wasn’t over Isabel. I would never be over Isabel. She had made things complete, and they would never be complete again without her. I felt the pang of her absence every day, and at those moments I sometimes uttered an involuntary groan and shook my head like a dog.

Danny McKillop had been shot dead outside the pub where he was hoping I would come to meet him. I couldn’t just leave the matter there. I knew I should leave it there, but I couldn’t. At the worst time in his life, Danny had needed a sober lawyer. He had got me. Years later, he had turned to me again. And I didn’t show up. I must have got home around 6.45 p.m. Would I have gone to the Hero of Trafalgar if I’d listened to the messages on the answering machine instead of going to bed? Probably. I’d have cursed a lot, but I’d have got there by 7 p.m. Sydney Road was only minutes away at that time on a Saturday night.

The phone rang. It was Drew.

‘Seen the Herald?’

‘No.’

‘Daniel McKillop’s on page three.’

I got the paper at the corner shop. A small item on page three said:

Police have identified the man shot dead by police in the carpark of the Hero of Trafalgar hotel in Brunswick on Saturday night as Daniel Patrick McKillop, 34, of Northcote.

Assistant commissioner Martin Doyle said the fatal shots were fired after Mr McKillop pointed a pistol at policemen who saw him behaving suspiciously in the hotel carpark shortly after 7 p.m.

‘A full inquiry into the circumstances of Mr McKillop’s death is in progress, but we have no reason to believe that the officers acted improperly, Assistant Commissioner Doyle said. ‘They feared for their safety.’

Mr McKillop was released from prison several years ago after serving eight years for killing a woman in a hit-and-run accident.

There wasn’t anything to do except see Danny’s widow.

Sue McKillop was on the plump side, with short dark hair and an open face made to smile. Her eyes were red. She was wearing a green tracksuit.

‘You mind coming in the kitchen?’ she said. ‘I’m in the middle of Kirsty’s tea.’

We went down the passage into a large, warm room that had a kitchen on one side and lounge chairs and a television on the other. The girl was in pyjamas with small roses on them in front of the television, watching a game show.

‘Kirsty, this is Mr Irish. Say how do you do.’

Kirsty said it.

I sat at a pine kitchen table and watched Sue McKillop cut toast into squares and pile on scrambled eggs from a pan.

She found a small fork in a drawer.

‘You can eat in front of the TV tonight, darling,’ she said, taking the plate over to the girl and kissing her quickly on the forehead.

When she came back, she sat down opposite me. ‘My dad’s coming from Queensland tonight,’ she said. ‘He’s nearly eighty. I told him not to. We’ll be all right.’

I said, ‘What about Danny’s family?’

She smiled, a wan lip movement. ‘We’re it. He was brought up by his nanna. She died while he was inside. There’s just a cousin.’

‘Danny left a message for me to meet him at the Trafalgar on Saturday night,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get it until Sunday. Why did he want to see me?’

She moistened her lips. ‘He was scared. They waited for him outside here on Thursday night, but he parked around the corner and when he was walking towards the house he saw them.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. Men. It’s from the accident. Something, I don’t know.’

‘The accident Danny went to jail for?’

‘Yes. He didn’t do that.’

‘Why do you say that?’

She shrugged. ‘Someone told him he was fitted up. Someone who knew.’

‘Do you know who the person was?’

‘No. It was a woman. Danny said something about her husband dying.’

‘When was that?’

‘About a month ago. He changed all of a sudden. Got upset easily. Why do you want to know?’

I hesitated. ‘I may be able to do something.’

She hugged herself. ‘You can’t do anything. You can’t bring Danny back.’

‘You said the police murdered him.’

‘Danny never had a gun. And if he’d had one, why would he threaten the police?’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know they were police.’

She ran a hand through her short hair. ‘The policeman who came here said the men identified themselves to Danny as police.’

‘Danny been okay since he came out?’

She looked me in the eyes. ‘Danny wasn’t a crim. He finished school in jail. He worked with a friend of mine at Marston’s. That’s how I met him. It’s a car part company in Essendon.’

‘He used to be on smack.’

She shook her head. ‘In another life. He wouldn’t even drink more than two stubbies.’

I believed her. One thing practising law gives you is a feeling for some kinds of truth.

‘When he saw the people waiting for him outside,’ I said, ‘what did he do?’

‘He went to a callbox and rang Col Mullens next door and Col came over and called me to the phone.’

‘Why didn’t he ring here?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he couldn’t come home because the house was being watched and he’d stay somewhere else for the night and sort it out on Friday. He was scared. I could hear it.’

‘Why didn’t he go to the police?’

She shook her head and took a tissue out of her sleeve. ‘Danny reckoned the cops were in on it.’ She blew her nose. ‘Had to be the cops fixed him up for the accident, didn’t it? Did you know they gave him pills and stuff to take every day before the trial? Danny said he didn’t hardly know where he was.’

‘No, I didn’t know that. So the men outside could have been cops?’

‘Suppose so.’

‘He didn’t say they were cops?’

‘No.’

‘Have you told all this to the cops?’

‘Yes. Friday night when they come around here.’

The girl came over with her plate. ‘Cream, please,’ she said, eyes fixed on me. Sue got up, took a tub of ice cream out of the fridge, put two scoops in a bowl and handed it to her daughter.

‘Would you like some?’ the girl said, showing me the bowl.

‘No thanks, Kirsty,’ I said. ‘I haven’t had my tea yet.’

She nodded and went back to the television.

Sue said, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t offered you anything…’

I shook my head. ‘That’s fine. What did Danny do after this woman phoned him about being fixed up for the hit and run?’

‘He said he was going to get the case opened again. The person who told him said there was evidence.’

‘And did he find any?’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t know. He wasn’t a big talker, Danny. He’d sort of plan things in his head for weeks, just sit thinking, and then one day he’d just start doing something and he wouldn’t stop until it was finished.’ She looked around in pride and wonder. ‘Like this room. Danny built the whole thing in two weeks in his holidays. I didn’t even know he could knock a nail in.’

‘Great piece of work,’ I said. ‘Does this phone number mean anything to you?’ I read out the number Danny had left on the answering machine.

‘No. I don’t know that number.’

I had other questions but suddenly I wanted to be out of the snug room that Danny McKillop had built for his little family and out in the cold, streaming evening. I gave Sue my card and left. The child came to the front door and waved at me.

6

‘I should’ve taken the fucken package, Jack,’ Senior Sergeant Barry Tregear said.

We were sitting in my car in the carpark of the Kensington McDonald’s, eating Big Macs. Barry Tregear also had two large French fries and a large Coke. He was a big man with a pear-shaped head, its summit and three upper slopes thinly covered in greying blond stubble. He always looked two slabs of beer away from fat, even when I’d first met him in Vietnam, but nothing moved when he walked.

‘You could’ve gone back to Hay,’ I said.

Barry grew up somewhere out on the endless plains around a town called Hay in New South Wales. His father hadn’t come back from World War II, along with half of the other fathers of the kids in his school.

‘Fuck Hay,’ said Barry. ‘Bloke offered me half a motel outside Lismore. Was in Licensing with me. Turned it down like a stupid prick. He sells out a couple of months ago, doubles his money. And I’m still driving around in the fucken rain, member of an elite group. Number eight on the new Commissioner’s Top Ten shit list. Is that judgment or fucken what?’

He took a savage bite of his Big Mac.

A lot of work had drifted my way in the old days because of Barry. He’d been in Consorting and then Major Crimes, squads closed down now but once home for hard men all but indistinguishable from the criminals they spent most of their time with. I’d had plenty of clients who’d come in and said variations on ‘Barry Tregear reckons y’might get me a fair shake’.

I said, ‘You’ve got an ex-cop for a Police Minister now. He’ll see you old blokes right, won’t he?’

Barry took in about eight chips and chewed thoughtfully. ‘Garth Bruce is a cunt. And he’s got selective amnesia. You hear him sprouting all that shit about getting rid of the old culture in the force? Mate, I’m part of the old culture and fucking proud of it,’ he said around the potato.

‘What exactly is the old culture?’

‘The dinosaurs left over from when it didn’t count if you took an extra ten bucks for the drinks when you put in for sweet for your dogs. When you had to load some cockroach to get it off the street. Public fucken service. We’re the ancient pricks think it’s okay to punch out slime who dob in a bloke who’s walked out on the wire for them to fucking Internal Affairs. That’s us. That’s the old culture.’

I said, ‘They got all of you on armed robbery now?’

Barry finished the chips, drained the Coke, put everything away neatly in the recyclable brown paper bag, opened his window and threw the bag out into the carpark. ‘The ones they’re hoping will take a bullet,’ he said. ‘We’re out there doing the in-progresses. When I done this line of work years ago, only the mad dogs fired on you. Now it’s all fucken mad dogs. They all fire on you. Chemical war’s going on inside their heads. The stuff come in the nose is fighting with the stuff come up the arm. Cause for concern, I can tell you.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Shit. I’ve gotta get moving. What’s your interest in this McKillop?’

‘Ex-client of mine. Wife reckons he thought someone wanted to kill him.’

Barry sighed. It triggered off a burp. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’m all wind. Listen, short story is this Quinn, drug squad, he got a call just before seven Saturday night, there’s a handover set for the yard of the Trafalgar, 7 p.m. There was a bit of stuffing around, they didn’t get there till quarter past.’

He burped again and patted his pockets. ‘Never got a bloody Quikeze when you need one. Anyway, they hang around for a bit, no-one in sight, reckon they’ve missed the boat. Then they take a stroll through the cars, one from each end, and this cunt pops up with a .38 pointing at Martin, Quinn’s offsider. So Quinn, who’s behind this guy, puts four in him. Dead on arrival. There’s about five hundred bucks’ worth of smack in his car. End of story.’

‘And McKillop?’

‘Form.’

‘Not since.’

‘Well shit’s shit.’

‘Wife can’t believe it. Kid, job. Says he’s been absolutely straight.’

Barry gave a snort. ‘That’s what Mrs Eichmann said.’ He rubbed his stomach.

‘What if Quinn went out, knocked him and planted the gun and the shit?’ I said.

Barry gave me a long look, shaking his head. His eyes were light green, with little dark flecks. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Jack, he’s an officer with sixteen years’ service. You take my meaning?’

‘No.’

He got out of the car and leaned in. ‘He’d have knocked him somewhere less public. Mate, I got to go. I’m further up shit creek if I don’t get to town in about five minutes.’

‘I’ll be in touch. Buy you a drink,’ I said.

Barry put his head back in the window. ‘Drinks, mate, drinks. You’re dealing with the old culture here.’

‘Danny’s dead,’ the old woman said through the small opening. ‘Who’re you?’

I was standing on the leaking porch of a weatherboard house in Richmond. I’d got the address from a prison officer I knew from the days when I visited clients in Pentridge. The prison records had Mrs Mary McKillop, aunt, as Danny McKillop’s next of kin. I looked her up in the phone book: it was the number Danny had left on the machine. Sue McKillop hadn’t known the aunt was alive and had no idea how to find the cousin she’d mentioned.

‘Mrs Mary McKillop?’ I said.

‘He’s dead,’ she repeated. ‘Whad’ya want?’

‘I’m a lawyer. I’d like to talk about Danny.’

‘Danny’s dead. Bugger off.’

The two-inch opening closed with a crack. I stared at the door’s peeling green paint for a while, thinking about trying again. I could still smell the ancient fumes of boiled cabbage and cat piss and decaying ceilings that had leaked out when the door opened. That decided the issue. But as I turned the door opened a sliver.

‘Try next door.’

The door closed again.

I tried the house to the right. A thin woman in her forties with lank, dead hair answered my knock. She blinked at me as if unaccustomed to light.

‘I’m making inquiries about Danny McKillop,’ I said.

She looked at me for a long time, then she put her hands in the pockets of her pink housecoat. ‘He’s dead. Was in the paper.’ Her voice was toneless.

‘It’s his cousin I’d like to talk to.’

She looked at me in silence.

‘It’s about the accident Danny went to jail for. It’s possible he didn’t do it.’

She waited.

‘There might be some compensation.’

She cleared her throat. ‘You’d better talk to Vin. He’s Danny’s cousin. He’s not here.’

‘Is he Vin McKillop?’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Do you know where I could find him?’

She thought for a while, then said, ‘Suppose he’s working. Only time he gets up before twelve. Dennis Shanahan in Edge Street’ll know.’

I found Dennis Shanahan in the phone book. A woman said he was demolishing a building in Abbotsford, Joseph Street.

There were three middle-aged men, a teenage boy and a lean brindle dog with a studded collar on the site. I could see them all from across the road. One man was sitting in the cab of a truck behind the shell of the single-storey building, the second was prising out a window with a crowbar, the third was feeding a fire of old timbers in the back corner. The teenager was cleaning bricks with a hammer and chisel. The dog was watching him. A portable radio somewhere in the ruin was putting out ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ at full volume.

I crossed the road and walked along a plank bridging the exposed floor beams to the first doorway in the passage. A smell of poor lives hung over the place: cooking fat, yellow feet, burnt ironing boards and blocked drains.

‘I’m looking for Vin,’ I shouted to the window remover. He made a gesture with his thumb without looking around.

I guessed the man in the truck would be the boss, so I tried the man at the fire. I couldn’t get close: the heat was intense. It didn’t seem to bother the man feeding it. He was short, heavyset, with dark curly hair and sideburns, probably in place since Elvis. The same could be said for his jeans and the grime on his hands and under his nails. His nose was flattened and slightly askew and a big piece of right eyebrow was gone.

‘Vin McKillop?’ I said.

He had a length of two-by-four hardwood in his right hand, poking the fire. He looked up at me without expression. Boxer’s eyes. ‘Who wants him?’

‘I’m a lawyer,’ I said. ‘It’s about Danny McKillop. I know he’s dead but I need to talk to someone who knew him.’

The man threw his two-by-four into the flames.

‘What about him?’ he said.

‘It’s about the accident. The woman’s death.’

He picked up another splintered piece of wood. ‘He done the time,’ he said flatly.

‘I’m trying to find out if he done the crime.’

The man spat into the flames. ‘What’s it to you if he done it or not done it?’

‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘Can you spare me a bit of time? There’s an interview fee.’

‘I’m on the job.’

‘Take half an hour unpaid. I’ll pay you for that too.’

Vin McKillop positioned the wood carefully on the fire and rubbed under his nose with a forefinger. ‘There’s a pub around the corner,’ he said. ‘Cost you twenty bucks.’

The pub was empty except for two old men sitting at a formica table in a corner looking at nothing. The place smelt of stale beer and carbolic. I got two beers and sat at a table near the door. Vin came in and went straight through the door marked GENTS. When he came back, he stood at the bar. He was making some kind of point. I picked up the beers and went over to him.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

Vin didn’t say anything. He just picked up the glass and drank three-quarters of the beer. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what’s the fee?’

I had a fifty-dollar note ready. I put it on the bar. Then I put a twenty on top of it.

Vin put the money in his top pocket. He took a cigarette out of the same pocket without revealing the pack and lit it with a plastic lighter. He took a deep drag and let the smoke run out his nostrils. I felt like asking him for one. ‘You a Jack?’ he said.

‘No.’ I took out a card and held it up for him to read. He looked at it.

‘Need glasses,’ he said. ‘What’s it say?’

‘It says I’m a lawyer.’ Vin couldn’t read.

‘Danny don’t need a lawyer now.’

‘There’s his wife and child,’ I said. ‘Had you seen him recently?’

‘Seen him when he come out. Didn’t know him. Lost about a hundred pounds.’

‘What kind of work did he do before he went in?’

‘Nothin.’ Vin drained his beer and signalled the barman with a big, dirty finger.

‘Surprise you when he hit the woman that night?’

Vin flicked his cigarette stub into the trough at our feet. It lay there smoking. He lit another one. ‘Yeah, surprised me.’ He held his cigarette hand just above the counter and drummed with his thumb.

‘Why’s that?’

‘What’s it matter? Cunt’s wormfood now.’

Vin’s beer arrived. I paid.

‘It matters. Why were you surprised?’

He drank half the beer and wiped his mouth on his cuff. ‘Hadn’t been near the car for months. He was on a year suspended for pissed driving. Fat prick was shit-scared of doing time.’

‘But he could’ve forgotten all that, he was so pissed.’

Vin scratched an armpit. ‘Yeah, well, that could be right if you can work out how a bloke that’s so legless he’s passed out in Punt Road about quarter past eleven can get sober enough to go home and get his car and drive about thirty blocks to cream some bitch at twenty to twelve.’

‘Danny didn’t mention that before the trial.’

‘Fucking right.’

‘How do you know where he was at quarter past eleven?’

‘Mate of mine saw him.’

‘You didn’t tell the cops?’

‘Didn’t hear about it till after Danny was inside.’

‘Why didn’t your mate tell the cops at the time?’

Vin blew two flat streams of smoke out of his nostrils. ‘Cause he was hoping Danny’d get about fifty years. Danny was a dog. There’s lots of people hoped they’d throw the fucking key away.’

‘Dog for who?’

‘Drug squad. He’d dob anyone, every little twat he heard big-noting himself in a pub. Jacks’d pay him off with a couple’ve hits.’

‘He was on smack?’

‘On anything.’

Two men in donkey jackets and woollen caps came in from the street. Vin looked them over carefully while draining his glass.

I signalled for two more beers.

‘One of his Jack mates was talking to him near the pub that night,’ Vin said.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Same way. My mate. Saw Danny with this cunt Scullin in a car down the road. Danny come in, full of dough, drinking Jim Beam, in and out of the pisshouse, gets off his face. They kicked him out round eleven. Then my mate sees him lying behind a bench, he’s drunk another half of JB.’

‘That was a quarter past eleven?

‘Thereabouts.’

‘You reckon your mate would talk to me? For a fee?’

‘No.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Dead. OD’d on smack.’

‘The cop’s name’s Scullin?’

‘I forget.’

‘Where did Danny keep his car?’

‘Garage behind his nanna’s house.’

‘That’s in Collett Street?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Fair way from Clifton Hill.’

‘Fucking A.’ He finished his beer. ‘Got to go.’

I said, ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘You got nothing from me, mate. Is that right?’

‘It’s right.’

Vin McKillop looked back at me before he went out the door. There was still nothing showing in those boxer’s eyes but he wasn’t going to forget my face.

7

We went to Ballarat in the big BMW, Harry driving through Royal Park and on to the Tullamarine Freeway like the late James Hunt on cocaine. The day was fine, thin cloud running west. In ten minutes we were passing through Keilor, the beginning of a huge sprawl of brick veneers nominally divided into suburbs with names like Manna Gum Heights and Bellevue Hill. These were the places where teenage dreams came to die.

‘Heights,’ said Harry in wonder. ‘Flat as the paper under the lino.’

I was in the back, reading the Age. Cam was in front, fiddling with the laptop.

‘Wootton tells me you put the squirrel grip on one of his commissioners, Jack,’ Harry said.

‘Not without difficulty,’ I said. Harry knew Wootton well. He used him for big jobs.

‘More buggers doin a runner these days, seems to me. Probably time for another Happy Henry.’ Harry turned to look at me while accelerating passed a tradesman’s ute with two cattle dogs on the back, barking into the wind. I paled.

‘You know about Happy Henry, Jack?’

‘No.’

‘Hidden history of the turf,’ Harry said. ‘Commissioner called Happy Henry Carmody. Happy shot through on a big punter, Baby Martinez, came from Manila, Hawaii, somewhere like that, got into a few duels with the books. Silly bugger, really. Happy did a bit of work for him, came highly recommended too. Then one Satdee Happy had a kitbag of notes owed to Baby, thought bugger it, Baby’s just some dago’ll cop it sweet, go home and weep under the palm trees.’

Harry looked around again.

‘Baby’s friends come on Happy up in Brisbane. The dickhead, it took so long to get there in his Falcon, he thinks he must be in a foreign country. He’s tossin Baby’s dough around, whores, cards, buyin drinks for the cops and politicians and the like.’

There was a pause while Harry groped for the Smarties box. In the interests of self-preservation, Cam found it for him.

‘Anyway, next thing Happy’s up in the little hills they got there, nailed to a blue gum. Five feet off the ground, they say. Six-inch nails. Like Jesus Christ.’

‘Fuck,’ said Cam.

‘Not again either,’ Harry said. ‘Cut it off, put it in his shirt pocket like a little cigar. Was a while before any of your commissioners’ minds went wanderin again, can tell ya.’

Harry chuckled to himself for a while. Then he said, ‘Give us a rundown on the field in this Topspin bugger’s race, Cam.’

While Cam talked, consulting the laptop, Harry kept a steady thirty kilometres over the speed limit and we covered the 110 kilometres in sixty-five minutes. It wasn’t raining in Ballarat and the locals were standing out on the pavements, looking at the sky in amazement. Many of them had the pale, staring look of people newly pushed out of institutions. Someone once said that nobody went to live in Ballarat; you had to be committed by a magistrate.

Dowling Forest is on the other side of town, at the foot of a round, bald hill. By the time we got there, thin and steady rain was falling.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Harry. He’d said nothing since the Happy Henry story, listening to Cam in silence. He parked well back from the gate and took over my newspaper.

Cam locked the laptop into its housing under the dashboard.

‘Well?’ he asked, big hands on his thighs.

Harry reached into his Donegal tweed jacket with his right hand and came out with an envelope about a centimetre thick. ‘I’ll give you the nod,’ he said. ‘Yokels lined up, I take it.’

‘Better be,’ Cam said. He put the envelope in the inside pocket of his trenchcoat and set off briskly.

I got the Sakura Pro FS100 out of the boot, loaded it, hung it around my neck, put on my Drizabone and followed. Harry was on the car phone.

We were in Ballarat for two reasons. The first was a three-year-old filly called Topspin Winder running in the third. She had started five times and her best run was a seventh place at her first outing. After four runs, she’d been given an eight-week rest. When she’d reappeared at Pakenham the week before, she’d run eighth.

I bought a race card and wandered into the huge barn of a betting ring. Most of the city bookmakers were fielding, trying to keep afloat until the Spring Carnival could rescue them. It was five minutes before the second race and there was a fair amount of action by country standards. I went out onto the grandstand. Over to the right, the members were snug behind glass. Out here it was all streaming eyes and snuffling noses.

The second looked a mediocre affair on paper and it proved to be one of those races where it’s a pity something has to win. Or come second. Or third.

‘Not much pace in that,’ said the caller.

‘Putting it bloody mildly,’ said the man next to me. ‘First time I’ve seen the whole field trying to throw a race.’

I went back through the betting ring to the mounting yard.

Cam was near the hot dog vendor, eating something wrapped in paper. As I looked around, Harry rounded the corner of the stalls. The small man stopped and patted his raincoat pockets, looking down.

When he looked up, he nodded briskly to himself, as if he’d found what he was looking for. Then he set off in the direction of the carpark.

Cam crumpled up the greaseproof paper and shot the ball into a bin a good three metres away. He set off for the betting ring. As he entered the large opening, he patted a thickset man in a greasy anorak on the arm.

I didn’t waste any time checking the odds. Topspin Winder was showing 40-1 with the book nearest the entrance and I took it. I invested a modest $50, not enough to scare anybody. By the time I’d finished my circuit, Cam’s team of punters had struck terror into the numbers men: Topspin was down to 15-1.

Then the second wave hit the bookies—a panic rush of Topspin’s connections, caught napping by Cam’s troops and now jostling with the dumb money that was always on the alert for a plunge. The market went into freefall, ending up on 6-1.

On my way to have a look at the beast concerned, I passed Cam, leaning against the mounting yard fence. He was smoking a little cigar and reading the card. Nothing in that Aboriginal/Scottish/Italian face suggested anything other than mild boredom.

Topspin was equally impassive. I’d seen her at her previous three appearances and had grown rather fond of her. She was small, calm, unprepossessing. Her form to date had not prepossessed the racing press either; in the Age that morning, Ron Pevsner assessed her odds at 50-1 and Bart Grantley gave her a rating of two out of ten.

Topspin Winder had come to Harry’s attention in her first outing, over 1600 metres in pouring rain at Moe. The small horse missed the start completely, then appeared to stumble about ten metres out. By the time the jockey got things organised, the closest horse was twelve lengths away, vanishing into the mist. Cam was out on the fence and for some reason he put the watch on Topspin at the 200-metre mark. About 500 metres out, there was a bad fall, two horses going down in the mud. Topspin was too far back to be affected and ran seventh out of the remaining thirteen, about eight lengths behind the winner. What interested Harry was Cam’s estimate that she took under 60 seconds to cover the 1000 metres to the 1200 mark. And that in the excitement over the fall, no-one said anything about it.

We hadn’t seen that speed again. In her next three races, all 1600s, Topspin was ridden by another jockey, a leather-faced veteran of the inland circuit called Marty Bacquie. The horse seemed to be trying but she kept getting caught in the middle of the herd, boxed in half a dozen lengths off the pace, and flagging badly over the last two hundred or so. At her last appearance, at Pakenham, I filmed Bacquie talking to the trainer after the race and Harry brought in his trusted lip-reader to look at the video. The trainer was saying nice things to Marty. And that was why we were in Ballarat.

There were twelve horses in race three, 1200 metres. The best performed, Quigley’s Pride, had one win and nine places from nineteen starts. Second best was Extension Date with one win from five. After that it was winter. There were no more than a hundred people on the grandstand. I took my usual place out on the eastern edge. Harry was down in the front row, undistinguished in his elderly raincoat and hat. No sign of Cam.

They came out of the gate in a good line. Topspin had a new jockey today, Lance Wallace, a New Zealander in his second season in the big time, rider of several upsets in the past year.

A horse called Denaderise took the front and opened up a two-length lead. I knew Denaderise. This was her role in life. She had about 500 metres in her.

At the 600, Quigley’s Pride, specialist placegetter, was a length off Denaderise. There was no pace in it. Topspin was lying well back, perhaps eighth or ninth, nothing outside her.

At the 700, Wallace moved the horse further out, almost to the centre of the track. Denaderise was gone, slipping backwards. Extension Date took over the lead, on the rails, moving well. Quigley’s tucked in behind, losing a little ground as they approached the 800. Outside them a horse called Under the Gun, a 15-1 shot, came into contention.

With 200 metres to go, Under the Gun’s jockey used the whip and the animal surged past Extension Date, seeming to draw Quigley’s Pride along. At the 150, Under the Gun was the winner, stride lengthening, towing Quigley’s Pride away from Extension Date.

The race caller was saying, ‘It’s Under the Gun now coming away, Quigley’s Pride hasn’t got the finish to stay with him, Extension Date being left…’

Something had gone badly wrong in our calculations. And, presumably, in the connections’ calculations, too.

And then, very smoothly, no whip, hands and heels, Lance Wallace and Topspin Winder began their run down the outside. The little horse gave no great impression of speed; the other horses seemed to slow down.

The caller went into overdrive, ‘Down the outside Topspin Winder, she’s mowed down Extension Date, fifty metres to go she goes up to Quigley’s Pride, no resistance there for the plunge horse. It’s Under the Gun and Topspin Winder, Under the Gun Topspin Winder, metres to go it’s Topspin Winder pulling away, Topspin Winder by three-quarters of a length…’

I looked across at Harry. He was having a little swig of Glenmorangie from the flat silver flask he took to the races on cold days.

I filmed the fourth race, a Class 1 handicap over 1600 metres. This was the second reason we were in Ballarat. My attention was on Red Line Value, a new object of Harry’s attention. It went well early, weakened and finished in the middle of the field, making a little ground in the closing stages.

Cam and Harry were in the BMW when I got there. Harry gave me a small smile. ‘I think we might have a look at the Dom when we get home,’ he said.

We parked a block away from the Peter Lalor Hotel in the middle of Ballarat. Cam went off. He had a date with the commission agent who had organised the team of punters.

‘Collectin’ can be the hardest part,’ Harry said. ‘Still, the boy’s got a look about him keeps the buggers honest. They know a bare-knuckle man when they see one. What’d ya make of that Red Line?’

Cam was back inside fifteen minutes. On Harry’s orders, we stopped at McDonald’s on the way out. Harry ordered two Big Macs.

‘Take over the helm,’ he said to Cam. ‘Got to get outside these snacks. Man gets weak up here in the glaciers.’

The second hamburger didn’t make it to the city limits. ‘Now that’s what I call food,’ Harry said. ‘Not a word to the wife. She reckons you eat the stuff, you end up needin one of them coronary overpasses or whatever.’

He found a Willie Nelson tape and pushed it into the system. ‘Give us the sums, Cam,’ he said, tilting his seat back. ‘Moonlight in Vermont’ flooded the car.

‘Well,’ Cam said, ‘we unloaded it, but it’s no great average. Round 10-1. Some of these books see a go coming if you put down fifty bucks. It’s getting hard to find someone in the bush’ll take a decent-size whack.’

‘Tens are fine,’ Harry said. ‘Thing didn’t require millions. You don’t want to nuke the bastards. We want ’em there next time.’

I had no idea how much money they were talking about. I’d been part of five betting plunges with Harry and Cam and I had no idea of the sums involved. I was happy that way too.

Harry’s head peeped around the side of his seat. ‘Get that fifty on at something decent, Jack?’ He set the figure for personal bets.

‘At the top,’ I said.

‘Goodonya.’

In Parkville, joined by Lyn Strang in a black dress, not small but rippable, we drank two bottles of Dom Perignon. Harry excused himself for a while early on and when he came back said, ‘Fair bit of satisfaction in the combinations.’ This meant he had done well in the coupling of Topspin Winder with other horses in other races.

Cam and I left at 7.45 p.m. At the door, Harry shook hands with both of us and slid an envelope into my jacket pocket. I opened it at home: $6000 in fifties. I went downstairs in search of company. Dom Perignon excites the blood.

8

The next day wasn’t productive. I did a lease for a landlord who had come in off the street and put a couple of extra penalty clauses in Laurie Baranek’s agreement. At home, I slumped on the old leather sofa in the everything room with the Danny McKillop file and a bottle of Huon Falls Lager. I lived in half of the top of a small converted boot factory near Edinburgh Gardens. I’d owned the whole building in the good times and had managed to hold on to a quarter. No, to be accurate, a suburban lawyer, the fittingly named Prudence Webb, of Moloney, Hassan & Webb, had held on to a quarter for me when I was bent on liquidating all my assets, including myself, after Isabel’s death.

The answering machine played two clicks from callers who didn’t want to speak, a message from a lawyer about a witness, and my sister, Rosa, twice. She is the only woman named for a communist heroine ever to live in the old-money belt of Toorak. Impregnating my mother with her was one of the last things my father did on earth. What Bill Irish, stonemason, footballer, socialist, would make of Rosa is hard to say. She grew up in total privilege in my mother’s parents’ mansion in Toorak, doted on by four adults, one of them my mother’s nanny, recalled to service at sixty-five.

I read the whole file again. What was clear was that the evidence against Danny at his trial was overwhelming. A witness put him about three blocks from the scene within minutes of the collision. He was found asleep behind the wheel of the car that killed Anne Jeppeson: there were blood and clothing fragments on it belonging to Anne Jeppeson. The witness had taken the registration and the police had identified it as belonging to Danny and gone to his house. The witness had later picked Danny out of a line-up.

In his statement to the police, Danny said he had started drinking at around 3 p.m. on the day. He remembered nothing after about 10 p.m., when he was still in the Glengarry Arms in Punt Road. He had no idea how the evidence of the collision came to be on his car. He said the same in his interview with me at Pentridge.

I put the file down and stared at the shadows on the ceiling. From my notes, it appeared that I’d had no hesitation in advising Danny to plead guilty. I’d certainly made no effort to establish whether there was any other possible explanation for the circumstances. Why should I have? Danny didn’t offer any alternative account, his record was terrible and the police case was a prosecutor’s dream.

I was fetching another beer when the phone rang. It was my sister.

‘Aren’t you ever at home?’ Rosa said. ‘Doesn’t that machine of yours work? I need your advice. Phillip wants to marry me.’

‘Who?’

‘Phillip. Phillip? How many men do you think I’m seeing?’

‘It’s not a question of number,’ I said, ‘it’s a question of sequence. Which one is Phillip?’

She sighed. ‘Jack, you met him at dinner. The investor. With the sexy mouth. You brought that Sydney tart.’

‘She speaks warmly of you too. What sort of advice were you after?’

There was a pause. ‘Do you think I should?’

‘Marry him?’

‘Yes. Marry him.’

‘No.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘I think you should hold out for a less than one hundred per cent shit. What happened to Kevin? He seemed to have a lot of decent Catholic guilt. For a currency speculator, that is.’

She sighed again. ‘Jack, Jack, Kevin is a two hundred per cent shit. He’s got a little computer thing, you can see what’s happening to the dollar and the yen and the fucking zloty. He goes to the toilet in restaurants and looks at it. Can you believe that? I know it for a fact. The rest of them are in there snorting and admiring each other’s cocks and Kevin’s drooling over his little money meter. His wife left him for a nightclub bouncer, all of twenty-two, I believe. Can you blame her?’

‘I can’t find it in my heart to, no,’ I said.

‘The men I meet,’ she said, ‘if they’re not married and on the prowl, they’re gay or they’re going to a group to come to terms with their female side or they can’t shut up about their inner child. I suppose that’s why Phillip looks like such a find.’

I said, ‘It’s Phillip’s inner shark that worries me.’

I gave her some more excellent advice and we arranged to meet for lunch. Then I made some grilled ham and tomato sandwiches and got back on the couch. I clicked on the box and caught the end of the last segment on ‘This Day’. An ABC-type person with fair hair, spots and little round glasses was standing in front of a high diamond-mesh fence with a suave-looking man in a dark suit. Behind them you could see what looked like the beginnings of a vast gravel pit and beyond that an expanse of greasy water and the city skyline.

‘Mr Pitman,’ the spotty man said, ‘as the Minister responsible for seeing the Yarra Cove development through the Cabinet, how do you react to some people’s unease over a six hundred million dollar development being approved without public consultation?’

The Minister smiled. He had a thin, sly face with high cheekbones. Something about it said cosmetic surgery. His full head of dark hair was the kind that doesn’t move in the wind. ‘Well, Andrew,’ he said, ‘I don’t know who these people are you’re referring to. Perhaps your colleagues at the ABC. Or at the Age. There are always some people who want to knock anything the government does. But they’re not the people who elected us to government.’

‘But—’ said Andrew.

‘The people who elected the Saunders government to power,’ Pitman went on, ‘want this State to come back to life. They lived in the Gulag created by the previous government quite long enough. It’s projects like this they want to see come to pass. Projects like this that inject huge amounts of capital and energy into this State.’

Andrew made a few other feeble attempts to put Pitman on the defensive. Pitman ignored them and kept to his line about what the people wanted.

Finally, Andrew gave up and said, ‘Within twelve months, this,’ he pointed at the gravel pit, ‘will be Yarra Cove, a huge six hundred million dollar marina, waterfront shopping and entertainment precinct and, arguably, Melbourne’s smartest new address. But will the Saunders government’s lack of concern for public consultation over projects that change the face of the city set a precedent for future developments? Andrew Leonard for “This Day”.’

After that I had a choice between television entertainment on the themes of a) child abuse, b) parent abuse, and c) tree abuse. Failing these, there was a documentary on the drinking problem in Lapland. I failed all of these, killed the telly and fell asleep over chapter three of Eugene Marasco’s In the Absence of War.

Some time in the small hours, startled by something in a dream, I awoke and staggered to the bed proper. But sleep had fled. I lay and thought about Danny, one-time police informer, addict, convicted hit-and-run killer, born-again model employee, husband and father. If his cousin’s mate, dead of smack, had told the truth, a policeman could have given him an alibi. And therefore the star witness was lying. The witness’s name was Ronald Bishop.

I put on the light, got the file from the lounge, and read Ronald Bishop’s statement again. It was a model of its kind: Ronnie Bishop didn’t have any doubts about what he saw. I put off the light and fell asleep with the strange career of Danny McKillop turning in my mind.

In the morning, I rang Barry Tregear at home to catch him before he left for work. A woman said he’d left but she would pass on a message. I gave her my name. About ten minutes later, he rang. From the noise, he was on a mobile phone.

‘Ronald Bishop?’ he said. ‘Morton Street, Clifton Hill. I’ll see what I can do.’

I had breakfast at Meaker’s on Brunswick Street, a street which boasted trams and, at each end, a church spire. Sometimes, when a freak wind lifted the pollution, you could see the one from the other. Brunswick Street had been a grand thoroughfare once and a long passage between rundown buildings and hopeless shops for a long time after that. In the eighties, the street changed again. Youth culture happened to it. The old businesses—clothes-pressing sweatshops, drycleaners, printeries, cheap shoe shops, the gunsmith, dim central European coffee and snooker cafes—closed down. In their place, restaurants, coffee shops, delicatessens, galleries and bookshops opened. Suddenly it was a smart place to be.

Meaker’s had been in Brunswick Street since before it was smart. It had changed hands several times and moved once but nothing had really changed. Well, nothing except the appearance of the customers. And the staff. There was a new waitress today. She was probably in her late twenties, tall and raw-boned with scraped back hair and an amused, intelligent look.

‘I’m Sharon,’ she said when she put down the tray holding the Cholesterol Supercharge: eggs, bacon, sausages, fried tomato. ‘The cook says you’re Jack.’

‘So what do you do?’ I asked her when she brought the coffee. It was assumed in Brunswick Street that waiting on table was not one’s vocation.

‘I’m an actor,’ she said. ‘In the theatre. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘but I don’t get to the theatre much these days.’

‘What about you?’ she said, wiping the table.

‘I’m a bishop.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Is that a crook you’ve got in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’

I could see she was going to be an asset to the place. Not as religious as one would have liked, but an asset.

I didn’t have anything in the legal line to do, so I put in five hours at Taub’s. Charlie was making the boardroom furniture for a Perth mining company’s new Melbourne office. It was what the business pages call an ‘emerging miner’. Usually, your emerging miner wants a table shaped like Australia minus Tasmania, chairs like breaking waves. This outfit hired a decorator who convinced them that big business in Melbourne favoured a more traditional look. A Charlie Taub look, in fact. The decorator was married to Charlie’s grandson: the extended family has its uses.

I spent the early part of the day trying to get Charlie to tell me what I was doing. He’d got out of the habit of doing drawings. ‘What for do I need drawings?’ he said. ‘I don’t make anything I haven’t made before.’

‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘I haven’t made this table before. All I’ve got is some measurements on this piece of paper torn off the side of the Age. I’d like to have some idea of how what I’m doing fits into the plan you’ve got in your head. That’s a lot to ask?’

He went off grumbling to the office and came back in ten minutes with several school exercise book pages. On them were detailed working drawings of an armoire designed to contain bottles, glasses and television and video equipment, a boardroom table, very severe, and a chair, equally spare.

‘You want drawings, I give you drawings,’ he said.

I went around the corner to Flash Advanced Telecommunications, prop. G. Bertoli, former telephone-repair person, and made two copies.

Barry Tregear rang at noon while I was reading the Age and eating the corned beef and gherkin on rye sandwich I’d brought from home. He couldn’t find any trace of a Ronald Bishop.

I knocked off at 1.30 p.m. and drove around to the address in Clifton Hill, no more than a few kilometres away. Morton Street was close enough to Collingwood Football Ground to hear the sobbing when Carlton beat them. Fitzroy used to beat them once upon a time but it would take divine intervention these days.

The bourgeoisie had long since occupied most of this once deeply working class area pinched between two main roads and a freeway. Morton Street, however, had the unloved look of a trench fallen to the rentiers.

Ronald Bishop had once lived at number 17. But not even the house still lived at number 17. It had been extracted like a tooth, its earthly remains some blackened broken bricks where a fireplace had stood and a mound of damp ashes that had saved the demolishers the trips to the tip. I knocked at number 19. No-one was home or admitting to it. I trudged off to number 15.

The bell didn’t work. I tried tapping and then gave the door a couple of thumps. The door was wrenched open and a large red-faced man in his sixties glowered at me. He was wearing a dirty blue nylon anorak zipped up to the neck and black tracksuit pants with a stripe, possibly white once, up the side.

‘Don’t fucken hammer my door,’ he said. ‘Whaddafuck d’ya want?’

I apologised and gave him my card.

‘So?’ he said, not noticeably impressed.

‘I’m trying to find out about someone who used to live next door,’ I said. ‘About twelve years ago. Were you living here then?’

‘Depends,’ he said. He ran both hands through his long, greasy grey hair.

‘We have a standard fee of twenty dollars for useful information,’ I said.

‘Who’s the someone?’

‘Ronald Bishop.’

‘Come inside,’ he said.

I followed him down a passage dark as a mineshaft into a kitchen that smelled of sour milk and burnt fat. All surfaces were covered in dirty plates, open tins, takeaway containers, empty cigarette packets. The gas stove had a baked and blistered topping of spilt food.

‘Garn!’ the man shouted at a huge tabby cat walking on tiptoe across the littered table. It floated its flabby body across to an impossibly small perch on the sink.

‘Wanna beer?’ he asked.

‘That’d be good.’ There was no knowing how he would take a refusal.

He took two cans of Melbourne Bitter out of an old fat-bodied fridge. The light inside wasn’t working. We sat down at the table. I couldn’t find anywhere to put my can down so I held it on my lap.

‘So what, he’s inherited some dough?’ he said. He gave the can the suck of a man who measures out his days in tinnies.

‘Not that I know of,’ I said. ‘His family’s trying to get in touch with him. Did you know him when he lived next door?’

‘Fucking poof,’ he said. ‘Bloody lucky he got outta here alive. We was just about to give him a hammerdrill up the arse when he pissed off.’ He wiped spit from his lower lip with his thumb and took a packet of Long Beach Lites out of the anorak. ‘Smoke?’

‘No thanks. What made you like him so much?’

He gave me a suspicious look over the flame of the plastic lighter. ‘Bloody house was fulla kids. Sleepin all over the place. He used to come back here in the bloody middle the night, half a dozen kids in the car. Street kids they call ’em now. Bloody drug addicts. Should lock ’em away. You wouldn’t believe the bloody racket they made.’

‘So Ronald was trying to help them, was he?’

He looked at me with utter scorn. ‘Where the hell’ve you been? He was tryin to root ’em. Tryin and bloody succeedin. Half of them’s so off their faces they wouldn’t know if a gorilla rooted ’em.’

He took another measure of beer, dragged on the cigarette and tapped ash into a catfood can.

‘And how long was he here?’

‘Would’ve been about a year. Been a bloody lot shorter if I hadn’t been…’ He scratched his neck. ‘I only come back a coupla weeks before he pissed off. Bloody Moira put up with him, Christ only knows women. Used to talk to the little cunt over the fence.’

‘He just left, did he?’

‘Showed up one day in a white Triumph sports. Y’know the kind? They don’t make ’em any more. TR something. Just packed his case, buggered off. Left the old Renault standin out there. Coupla them kids took off in it. Never come back, neither.’

‘He didn’t leave because of you?’

He shook his head. ‘I hadn’t got round to him yet. He just pissed off. Reckon the cops were on him.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Two come round there a couple times.’

‘What, uniform cops?’

‘No. Plain clothes.’

‘You sure?’

He had another suck on the can. ‘I know the one,’ he said.

‘You know his name?’ I had a big swig of my beer.

‘Scullin. His name’s Scullin. He grew up round Abbotsford.’

‘So the cops came around twice and then he left?’

He nodded. ‘More than twice. Coupla times. Told Moira before he pissed off some bullshit about he’d won some money, something like that. I reckon it was drugs.’

‘Anyone else around here know him?’

He thought about it, smoke seeping out of his nostrils. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bloke on the other side’s dead.’

I drained the can. ‘This is helpful,’ I said, getting up. ‘Much obliged.’ I took out my wallet, found a twenty and offered it. He took it and put it under the catfood can.

At the front door, I said, ‘Well, thanks again.’ He gave me a little wave.

I was at the gate when he said, ‘I’m just thinkin. Remember the bloke on the other side, Greek he was, tellin me one day he read where Ronnie dobbed in some hit-and-run bloke.’

I paused. ‘When was that?’

He spat on to the path. ‘Dunno.’

‘Was it while he was living here?’

‘Must’ve been. Bloke said he remembered Ronnie gettin in a car all smartened up. Then he read where he dobbed this other fella. That’s what the Greek said. Don’t get time to read the paper myself.’

‘That’s useful,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

9

I went back to my office, made some black tea and sat in the client’s chair. Where was Ronnie Bishop now? Last seen tooling off in his Triumph, fresh from doing his civic duty in the matter of R. v. McKillop. And where was a policeman called Scullin, whose circle included the accused and the star witness?

Barry Tregear didn’t need to think about the name Scullin.

‘Martin Scullin. I know Scull,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘No problem. He might be able to help me with something.’

‘You still farting around with that McKillop business?’

‘On and off.’

‘You’ve missed Scull today. By about six years. He took the package. Gone fishing.’

‘What about a number or an address?’

‘Big ask. I’ll have to talk to the man. What do you want to see him about?’

I thought for a moment. ‘Tell him it’s about an old dog of his, Danny McKillop.’

‘Where’d you get that?’ Tregear asked.

‘Widely known at the time.’

‘I’ll get back to you. Where are you?’

I gave him the number.

I gave the R. Bishops in the phone book a quick run-through. There were only two Ronalds and neither of them had ever lived in Morton Street. I rang an estate agent called Millie Vincent I’d had dealings with and asked her to check the Landlords’ database for Ronald Bishop. She rang back in twenty minutes.

‘They’ll drum me out of the trade for doing this,’ she said. ‘A Ronald Arthur Bishop rented a house in Prahran in 1984–85. Then a Perth agent ran a check on him for a property in Fremantle in late ’85.’

She gave me the name of the agent.

I got through to a man called Michael Brooke. He got the impression I was a fellow real estate agent and told me a Ronald Bishop had been the tenant of a house in Walpole Street, Fremantle. ‘Then he bought it at auction in, oh, ’86 or ’87. Paid a bit over the odds then but it’s turned out to be a smart buy. By the way, he calls himself Ronnie Burdett-Bishop now. Moved upmarket.’

R. A. Burdett-Bishop was in the Perth phonebook.

No-one answered at the first two attempts. The phone rang for a long time before a low-voiced male answered on the third try.

‘Could I speak to Ronnie, please,’ I said.

‘Who is that?’

‘An old acquaintance suggested I call him.’

There was a pause. ‘Ronnie’s in Melbourne.’

‘That’s where I’m calling from. Is there some way I can get in touch with him here?’

There was another pause. ‘Who did you say you were?’

‘My name’s Jack Irish,’ I said. ‘I’m a lawyer. You’ll find me in the Melbourne phone book.’ For some reason, this statement sometimes had a reassuring effect on people.

‘Well, I’d like to help you,’ the man said. ‘My name’s Charles Lee. I’m a friend of Ronnie’s. I’m keeping an eye on his house. No-one seems to know where Ronnie is at the moment…’

‘You don’t have a Melbourne address for him?’

‘Um, you could try his mother. Would you like her number?’

I wrote it down, said thanks and goodbye, then dialled it. No-one at home.

It’s nice that there’s a special occupation for the anal retentive. It’s called librarianship. The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper’s hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the assistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early ’80s I’d got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I’d been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I’d obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta’s.

Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I’d corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.

The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I’d already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne’s death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.

Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants. At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.

I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn’t sound like Ronnie Bishop.

I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I’d asked for a colonic irrigation.

‘Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?’ I said sweetly.

‘It’ll take half an hour,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anyone to do it now.’

I said I’d come back and went looking for a caffeine jolt.

I came upon the drinks machine without warning, which made it impossible to avoid my former client Gavin Legge. He looked up from stirring his styrofoam cup. The smile of a professional greeter appeared on his face.

‘Jack Irish,’ he said. He put down the cup and stuck out a small hand. ‘Great to see you. Who’s in the shit this time?’

Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking. He also dropped a lot of names. At the time I was defending him, one of his mercifully unneeded character witnesses said of him, ‘For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you’re selling into the paper.’

‘Using the library,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can help.’

‘My pleasure.’ He was eager to please. As well he might be, given that it had taken me a year to get any money out of him.

I put the coins in the machine and pressed for white coffee. I got out my notebook and found the three bylines on the Jeppeson stories. ‘These people still around? Sally Chan? Matthew Lunt?’

‘Jeez, you’re going back a bit. Chan went to Sydney about ten years ago and Lunt’s dead.’

‘Linda Hillier?’

‘Return of the starfucker. Came back to Melbourne a few months ago. She works for PRN, Pacific Rim News, it’s a financial news outfit. Just around the corner. Want to meet her?’

‘Wouldn’t mind. I saw your byline on a story about Yarra Cove.’

Legge whistled. ‘Now those boys know how to treat the media,’ he said. ‘Nothing but the French at the launch. Non-vintage but the French. Like the good old days. It’s been local pissfizz at these things for years.’

‘Only the fittest have come through,’ I said. The machine started spitting out my drink.

Legge took a sip of his coffee and pulled a face. ‘This stuff tastes like piss too. Bloody machines. Christ knows why we put up with it. Fucking useless union. Follow me.’

We left the building and walked up two blocks towards the city centre. Pacific Rim News had the fourth floor of a small office block. A security man gave us labels and we went into a huge room full of formica desks and computer terminals.

Legge said, ‘I still owe you that lunch. What about tomorrow? It’s on the paper. I’m reviewing a new restaurant. They fall over themselves.’

‘Don’t you do these things incognito?’

‘Certainly do. But I gave them an anonymous tip-off.’ He laughed, an unpleasant gurgling sound.

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’m out of town tomorrow. Some other time would be nice.’

Linda Hillier was in a corner of the room where several desks seemed to have formed a huddle. She had been alerted and watched us coming, a pencil crosswise in her mouth between toothpaste-commercial teeth. When we got to her, Legge said, ‘Linda Hillier, I want you to meet Jack Irish, the lawyer who kept me out of jail for punching that food bitch.’

Linda Hillier removed the pencil from her mouth. She was in her mid-thirties, shiny brown hair, a full mouth, dark eyes and a scattering of faded freckles. She wasn’t good-looking but she was handsome.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Next time tell us what you’ll take to throw the case.’

‘Jack’s interested in something you covered when you were a young groupie,’ Legge said.

‘That far back?’ Linda said. ‘When you were still married to that nice plump girl from Accounts? The one who was sweet enough to blow all the Age copyboys at the Christmas party?’

‘Touché,’ said Legge. ‘I can’t stand around all day talking about old times. Jack, I’ll ring you about lunch.’

We watched Legge walk off. I noticed that all the men in the room were frozen into poses suggesting deep concentration while all the women seemed to be typing. Could it be that the men were transmitting thoughts to the women, who were typing them up? I suggested this to Linda Hillier. She looked at me speculatively.

‘Thoughts?’ she said. ‘Most of these guys couldn’t transmit herpes. What’s your interest in history?’

‘I’m interested in the Anne Jeppeson hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘Remember her?’

She nodded.

‘I saw your byline on some stories in her file.’

She said, ‘Is this a legal matter?’

‘No. I don’t practise much anymore.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Live off my wits,’ I said. ‘Gamble. Drink.’

She smiled, an attractive downturning. ‘Then you’ll be keeping much the same company as before. Well, what can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson?’

‘Did it cross anyone’s mind at the time that she might have been deliberately run down?’

‘By that drunk? Was he capable of forming an intention?’

‘What I mean is, did anyone think he might have been used to kill Anne Jeppeson?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suggest that.’ She paused and looked at me intently. ‘Hang on a minute. It’s just come back to me. Didn’t you appear for the driver?’

I nodded. ‘Not with any distinction. He came out of jail a few years ago. New person, good job, wife and kid. Then a cop shot him dead in Brunswick last Friday.’

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I read that the bloke’d done time for hit-and-run. I didn’t make the connection.’

The phone on her desk rang. She talked to someone in monosyllables for a while, then put the phone down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m under the gun here for a while. I’ve got to file a story for Hong Kong in about eight minutes.’

I took a chance. ‘Can we talk outside hours?’

She gave me a questioning look. ‘You mean tonight?’

I hadn’t had a date in two years. ‘If you’re free,’ I said.

There was a pause. We looked at each other in a new way.

She said, ‘Ring me here at seven. We can fix something.’

It was raining outside. I didn’t mind much.

10

Linda Hillier said she’d be finished by eight. We agreed to meet at Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. It was owned by Patrick Donelly, an Irishman who wanted to be an Italian and who owed me money.

Linda was wearing a tailored navy jacket. I watched her hanging up her raincoat. She was taller than I remembered. Then I remembered I’d never seen her standing up. She felt my eyes on her and turned her head to look straight at me across the crowded room. For some reason, I felt embarrassed, as if I’d been caught looking down her dress. She came across and I stood up and pulled out a chair.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This is a nice way to end a real pain of a day.’

I poured her some of the house white, the menus came and we inspected them for a while. When we’d ordered the same things, she said, ‘Gavin Legge rang up and told me about your wife. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what else can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson? I’ve been thinking about her since you left. I talked to her the morning before she was killed. She was like a happy attack dog. “I’m going to get the bastards,” she kept saying.’

‘You weren’t one of her admirers?’

She thought for a moment. ‘There were things about her I admired. But, no, I wasn’t one of her admirers. She had this deep contempt for the media and this equally deep need to be the subject of its attention.’

‘You had dealings with her before the Hoagland business?’

‘Long before. She cultivated me when she was trying to market herself as a barefoot paralegal in Footscray. It wasn’t enough for justice to be done. Anne Jeppeson had to be seen to be doing it.’ Linda drank half her glass. ‘Hoagland was her chance for real fame.’

I said, ‘My memory’s pretty vague about that period. I read the clippings today. It’s not clear how she got into the limelight.’

‘She was a natural for the part from the moment it leaked out that the government was going to knock down the Hoagland Housing Commission flats. Do you know Yarrabank?’

‘Vaguely. I had a client from there once. Stabbed someone in a park. His best friend, I think it was.’

‘That’s what Yarrabank friends are for,’ said Linda. ‘It’s shitsville. Maybe it’s going to be Venice when the Premier’s mates are finished with it, but it was darkest shitsville then.’

I suddenly connected. Yarra Cove—the new development I’d seen the sly-faced Planning Minister, Lance Pitman, and the spotty ABC reporter going on about on TV—was on the site of the old Hoagland housing estate. There was a freeway on one side and once there’d been collapsing warehouses on the riverbank, filthy docks all around. There was a munitions factory there in the forties, a battery factory burnt down there in the early sixties. Christ knows what the soil pollution level was.

‘How did a Housing Commission block ever get there?’ I asked.

‘One of the great mysteries of our time. They’ve shredded the files and composted the bits. People say the land was bought from a mate of the then Housing Minister for about ten times its value and the buildings were put up by another mate for about five times the going rate. The story goes the three of them bought half of Merimbula with the proceeds.’

‘How did they get anybody to live there?’

‘No choice for some people,’ she said. ‘That or under a bridge. And the Commission shunted in their problem cases from all over. Move to Hoagland and we’ll forget about the three years’ rent owing and the fire and the explosion and the missing hot water system. That sort of thing. It was a hellhole. The cops called it the Leper Colony, LC for short.’

‘Small, though?’

‘Couple of hundred inmates. Small by Housing Commission standards, fifty flats, three three-storey walk-ups. When it leaked out that the government planned to close it, the Ministry said the place was so wrecked it was cheaper to build new flats than to fix it. But Yarrabank was not the place to build them. The place to build them was on land the Commission had bought on the outskirts of Sunshine.’

‘Not from the same mate?’ I said.

‘One day we’ll know.’

‘What did the residents think?’

‘Well, you’d have thought that even Sunshine would look like Surfers Paradise from Hoagland. But we don’t actually know what the residents thought because Anne Jeppeson came on the scene like Batwoman and after that all we knew was what the Fight for Hoagland action committee thought. Well, what Anne Jeppeson said the committee thought. All the media attention was on her. It was the Anne Jeppeson Show.’

‘What was her background?’

‘Strictly middle class. Deep suburbia. Volvo in every drive. Private school. Did politics at Monash. Worked for the Footscray Legal Service for a while. Tried to organise pieceworkers in the rag trade, then she got together a bunch of leftier-than-thou people and founded Right to a Roof. She organised a lot of squats in empty mansions in Toorak, that sort of thing. Great TV pictures.’

Linda finished her drink. I poured some more. ‘Anyway, when Hoagland turned up, she stitched together a big coalition of left groups. Christ knows how. They were people who hated one another. She got about five thousand people out for a demonstration, got the Building Workers’ Alliance to black-ban the Sunshine site, talked the public service unions into running stop-works. She was all over the papers, TV. The camera liked her. Joan of Arc come back in tight jeans and boots.’

‘And then she got killed.’

Linda nodded. ‘Without her, the whole Hoagland protest fell apart. Fight for Hoagland didn’t actually exist without her. No-one really gave a shit about Hoagland, least of all the tenants. They came out and said: “Please God, can we move somewhere else?” Suddenly the Housing Commission discovered it had empty flats all over the place. Hoagland got flattened inside a month.’

I said, ‘So it wouldn’t be likely that she was killed to stop her obstructing Hoagland’s closure?’

Her eyes flicked around the room and came back to me. A little smile. ‘Bit of an extreme step for the Housing Com-mission to take, don’t you think?’

I told her how the witness against Danny had abandoned his old Renault and taken off in a sports car for a new life in Perth after the trial.

She listened with her chin on her hand. ‘What does that suggest to you?’

‘I don’t know. I’m told Danny was unconscious near a pub miles from his car about half an hour before the car hit Anne Jeppeson. I’m groping around.’

‘Why would anyone pay Ronnie Bishop to tell the lies that sent McKillop to jail?’

‘Well, maybe it was the only way they could get the verdict,’ I said.

‘Are we talking about the cops?’

I poured some more wine. You don’t get much waiter-pouring at Donelli’s. ‘It’s possible. A drug squad cop called Scullin knew both Danny McKillop and Ronnie Bishop.’

Linda said, ‘Let me get this straight. Someone wants a conviction for Anne Jeppeson’s death. They use Bishop to frame McKillop. Is that right?’

‘That’s my extremely vague line of thought.’

‘Let’s move over to the “How”. As I recall, Ronnie gave the cops the car rego that night and they ran the number and went to McKillop’s place and found him asleep in the car. Blood all over the front.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And then Ronnie identified McKillop in a line-up.’

‘Yes.’

‘So if McKillop is innocent, someone else drove the car? And planted him in it later?’

Our first course arrived: honey-cured salmon with a mild peppercorn sauce. This was very fast for the establishment. People had eaten their shoe-leather while waiting for their first courses at Donelli’s. Donelly was obviously feeling some remorse about his outstanding debt and had given our order priority.

We talked about other things as we ate. Television, newspapers, the law. Linda had a sharp eye for a target and a spare, funny delivery, but she didn’t give away much about herself.

There was no pause between dishes. Donelly himself, head like a sculpture in Virginia ham draped with seaweed, white jacket tight as a bandage on his fat torso, came out of the kitchen with the main course.

‘If I may say so, Irish, it’s impeccable taste you’re showing dining with this lady, and she with you,’ he said, eyes never leaving Linda. ‘Not to mention your choice of establishment.’

‘It chooses itself, Patrick,’ I said. ‘For many reasons.’

‘All of them sound,’ he replied. ‘And you’ll do me the honour of accepting a little libation I’ll be sending over with the young fella.’

It was an old-fashioned Italian dish, chicken and veal risotto, the kind of thing you might cook yourself on a Sunday if you had someone to eat it with. Donelly’s libation arrived, a bottle of Barolo by Giuseppe Contratio, ten years old.

Linda tasted it. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘They know you here.’

‘Carnal knowledge,’ I said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

We got back to Ronnie Bishop over coffee. Linda came back from the women’s room, slid into her seat and said, ‘Listen, Jack, let’s say that the driver, let’s say that McKillop was the target. Someone wanted him in jail and they framed him. So Anne was just unlucky.’

‘Chosen at random, you mean?’ I said.

‘Yes. They had to knock someone down at a certain time of night, in a certain area. And she was there. Could’ve been anybody.’

‘It’s hard to see why anyone would go to that trouble to put Danny inside. Easier to knock him off.’

She nodded. Tips of hair slipped around and touched the corner of her mouth. She was faintly flushed from the wine. I found her very attractive and she knew it. ‘Maybe the Hoagland tenants saw their chances of escaping from the ghastly place slipping away and put out a contract on Anne Jeppeson,’ she said. ‘And whoever did the job decided to give Danny the credit.’

We laughed. I poured the last of the wine. ‘Can we do this again?’ I said. ‘Are you free to do this kind of thing?’

She looked at me with a half-smile still on her face. ‘You mean eat and drink?’

‘That or whatever else takes your fancy.’

‘You’re asking me if I’m involved with someone else?’

‘In my awkward and out-of-practice way.’

‘I’m free to do this kind of thing but I don’t think I’ve been much use to you,’ she said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Sure.’

‘Why are you going over all this ancient stuff?’

It was the question I’d been putting off thinking about. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said after a pause. ‘Part of it’s guilt. I’m not sure that I gave Danny a fair shake when I represented him. I was either drunk or monumentally hungover for all that time. It was just after my wife’s death. That’s not an excuse. That’s just the way it was. I didn’t ask any questions about the evidence against Danny. The cops got the bloke to trial in an amazingly short time, jumped all the queues. His wife tells me he told her they fed him pills from his arrest onwards. I didn’t know that. But I wouldn’t have noticed at the time.’

I stopped talking. I could have gone on for a bit but I was just thinking aloud.

Linda smiled at me. ‘Sounds like a good enough reason,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got a running engagement at 6 a.m. Call me next week. I’ll think about Anne Jeppeson.’

11

‘Noise? I’m in Hoddle Street. In the mother of all fucken jams, that’s the noise. What’s the name of that fucken street you’re in?’

I told Senior Sergeant Tregear.

‘Be there in, I don’t fucken know. I’ll hoot for you. Gimme a word outside.’

Ten minutes later, he hooted. I went outside. He was in a blue Falcon fifty metres down the street, half on the kerb. When I got close I saw his eyes in the rear-view mirror. He raised his left arm and pointed to the passenger side. I got in. The car was warm and smelt of cigarette smoke and Chinese food.

‘Jack,’ Barry Tregear said. He was wearing a blue suit, a green shirt and a violet tie, all tired looking. ‘What’s with the fucken overalls? Joined the working class now?’

‘Helping out,’ I said. I didn’t feel like explaining.

Barry took a packet of Newport off the dash and extracted a cigarette with his teeth. He lit it with a throw-away lighter.

‘I got two minutes,’ he said. ‘Jack, listen, this McKillop business. Can I give you a word of advice?’

‘Everyone else does.’

He took a deep draw, puckered his lips and blew a thin jet of smoke up past his nose. ‘I’d give it a miss if I were you.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t think it’s something you want to get mixed up in now. Sensitive business these days, cops shooting people. Wait for the inquest.’

‘That doesn’t answer the question,’ I said.

‘Trust me, mate. I’ve got your interests at heart.’

‘I’ll think about it. Did you get hold of Scullin?’

Barry nodded. ‘Not easy. He’s a busy man.’

‘I thought you said he’d gone fishing.’

‘Just a manner of speaking. He’s a smart fella. Runs some kind of security business now. Makes big bucks.’

‘What did he say about McKillop?’

‘He says he never talks about police business.’ Barry wound down his window and flicked the cigarette stub out. It landed on the bonnet of a car on the other side of the street.

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

‘You drove around here to tell me that?’

‘No. I wanted to tell you something else.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me any more questions about McKillop. Okay?’

Ronnie Bishop’s mother lived deep in working-class Brunswick. But even here the first seeker after capital gains had appeared. Right next door. The humble weatherboard dwelling had been given a picket fence, brick paving, two silver birches, a paint job and a brass ship’s bell. Mrs Bishop’s cottage appeared to be trying to lean on the newly straightened frame of its facelifted neighbour.

Mrs Bishop looked at me long and hard from behind a security gate after I introduced myself. Behind her the house was dark. She was probably in her seventies, small, sharp-featured, well-preserved and dressed like someone going out.

‘I rang about Ronnie,’ I said.

She held up a hand. ‘Sorry to stare. You look like my sister’s late boyfriend. Now there was a devil. Come in.’

We went down a dark passage, two doors on each side. She opened a door at the end and light flooded in. Beyond was a large new section, the width of the house, with full-length windows looking on to a paved terrace crammed with greenery.

‘This is nice,’ I said, looking at the glossy sealed floorboards, the newish upholstered chairs and sofa. Next door wasn’t the only place on the street that had been smartened up.

‘Ronnie paid for it,’ she said. ‘Sent me to Noosa for two weeks, rained all the time, never mind that. Came back, I nearly fell over, I can tell you. Opened the door and there it was, new furniture, everything. Like a dream, really. Sit down. I’ve just made some tea.’

There were biscuits too, bought biscuits but nice, on an EPNS server in the shape of a giant leaf.

‘Nice and warm, isn’t it,’ Mrs Bishop said. We were both sitting on the sofa. ‘Ronnie put in the central heating. Before that I used to sit on a hot water bottle with my feet on another one some days. Cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss, my late husband used to say.’

‘You said on the phone that Ronnie was depressed…’

Mrs Bishop looked away and when she answered all the cheerfulness had gone out of her voice. ‘Ronnie has AIDS, Mr Irish.’ Tears began to run down her powdery cheek, turning pink in the clear light from outside. I felt deeply helpless. I cleared my throat.

‘Do you think that had something to do with his disappearance?’

She turned back to me, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know. When I went to the police, they didn’t seem interested after I told them Ronnie was…was sick.’

‘How long was he going to stay in Melbourne, Mrs Bishop?’

‘Only a few days. Then he said he had to see someone and he’d be back soon. And he didn’t come back. And I’ve heard nothing. He wouldn’t do that.’

‘Why did he come to Melbourne?’

‘To see someone. And to see his mum, of course. He’s a lovely boy, Mr Irish. There’s no harm in him.’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Did he see the person?’

Mrs Bishop tidied her hair. ‘I don’t know, Mr Irish. But he said something to me a few days before he disappeared.’

I nodded helpfully.

‘He said, “Mum, if anything happens to me I’m insured for two hundred thousand dollars and most of it goes to you.” And then he said something else.’

She put both hands on my sleeve. ‘He said, my blood went cold, Mr Irish, he said, “Mum, if I turn up dead somewhere don’t ever believe it was my own fault.” That’s what he said. He was standing over there by the window. He’d been walking around the house for hours. Just smoking cigarettes and walking around.’

‘You told the police this?’

‘Of course. I told the lady policeman, Miss Ryan. She wrote it all down.’

‘Mrs Bishop, do you know any reason why anyone would want to harm Ronnie?’

She looked out of the window again. ‘No.’

‘And you don’t know who the person was he came to see?’

‘No, I don’t. Ronnie never talked about himself, Mr Irish. Doug always said Ronnie would make a good spy.’

‘Did he take anything with him that day?’

‘No. Nothing. Everything he brought is here. I even found a CD he’d brought for me. Didn’t say a word, just slipped it into my rack. Just like him. He gave me a kiss and said he was going out for a while and he didn’t come back. I wanted to put a bandaid on the scratch on his cheek but he didn’t want me to.’

‘He had a scratch on his cheek?’

She nodded. ‘He said he scratched it on a hedge on his way to the corner shop to buy cigarettes.’ She looked at me as if something had just occurred to her. ‘You’re not a policeman yourself are you, Mr Irish? Two policemen came and had a really good look around. I’m not sure what they were looking for.’

‘No, Mrs Bishop. I’m a lawyer. I was involved in a trial years ago where Ronnie was a witness. There’s been some new developments lately and I thought Ronnie might be able to help with some information.’

‘I’m sure he’d be delighted to help,’ she said. ‘Did you know he was a social worker once? Helping the poor homeless children on the streets. Of course, what he really wanted to do was make films. Ronnie loved films. He saved up to buy a movie camera. He was always filming things.’

‘Was he a trained social worker, Mrs Bishop?’

‘Well, not really. He was a clever boy and he started at Melbourne University but he didn’t really settle down. Doug and I were living in Queensland then, for Doug’s health. Not that it improved. He missed the football so much, you know, I think it lowered his resistance.’

‘So Ronnie was a paid social worker, was he?’

‘Oh yes. He worked for the Safe Hands Foundation. They help the homeless.’

I’d never heard of the foundation but that didn’t mean anything. ‘Why did Ronnie move to Perth, Mrs Bishop?’

She pondered this for a moment. ‘I don’t know, really. Just wanted to go somewhere else, I suppose. Young people are like that, today, aren’t they?’

Ronnie was always going to be a young person to his mum. ‘He bought a new car before he left. That must have been expensive.’

She smiled. ‘He won some money on the Lotto. He took me to Georges to buy a winter coat. I’ve still got it. Beautiful. He’s such a generous boy.’

It was time to go. Mrs Bishop came to the front gate with me. In front of the house next door, a man in a dark double-breasted suit was leaning against a BMW, talking into a mobile phone. He gave Mrs Bishop a wave: five stiff fingers moved from side to side. He’d be making her an offer for the house any day now. I said I was sure Ronnie would be in touch soon, gave her my card, shook her small hand, and left.

12

I went back to my office and brooded for a while. Ronnie Bishop came to Melbourne a worried man. Perhaps his friend Charles Lee, the man who’d answered his telephone, could tell me why. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me on the phone. That meant going to Perth. I didn’t want to go to Perth. Did I owe it to Danny? What did I owe Danny, anyway? Bloody something. I phoned Veneto Travel.

‘Perth?’ said Shane DiSanto. He had recently inherited the business from his uncle Carlo. It was a big change from panel beating.

‘Put Denise on, Shane,’ I said.

‘Jack, Jack, Jack, I’m the boss here now. You’re talking to the owner. I can handle this. What you want to go to Perth for? You don’t go to Perth in winter. I can do you Hamilton Island. You can’t live at home and eat McDonald’s for what I can do it. Dirt, Jack, dirt. Are you listening?’

Shane eventually agreed to let me go to Perth and made the booking. I rang Linda Hillier and left a message on her machine. Then I considered ringing Charles Lee and decided against it.

When I went to pick up the ticket at the airport, they’d never heard of me. I rang Veneto and got Denise.

‘You’re lucky it’s only Perth,’ she said. ‘He made all the bookings for Frank La Bianca’s daughter’s honeymoon. High season in Florence. Lucky couple had to have sanctified root numero uno in the back seat of the Hertz car.’

I hired a Corolla in midair from a steward called David. He thought a person like me would be happier with a BMW. So did I.

It takes hours to get to Perth, flying over the huge shark-infested dent in the continent called the Great Australian Bight. And when you get there, you’re two hours in the past. I didn’t know Perth; it was just an airport on the way to Europe. They tell me the locals have secessionist tendencies. I can understand that. Judging by the accents, they’ll probably have a fight over whether to rename the State Manchester or Birmingham.

It was a sunny day in Perth, insignificant wisps of cloud decorating a sky the colour of old blue jeans. I studied the map book for about ten minutes and set off for Fremantle. On paper, getting there was a matter of keeping to the highroads. On land, however, the Corolla had a tendency to wander off the beaten track. On my second sighting of the same pub I stopped for lunch and directions. I sat out in the beer garden with a bottle of Swan Lager and a big piece of charred West Australian steer. Around me the locals, mostly Britons with flaking skins wearing towelling hats, were being enthusiastic about the chances of the West Coast Eagles against Carlton. I thought it would be nice if they both lost but this wasn’t the place to say it.

After lunch, I took some counsel from one of the Poms and went off driving again. By the time I found Fremantle I had a fair idea of Perth. It was a huge suburb built on sand dunes around a shallow estuary. The upmarket bits had more dark-green vegetation and more trees. I went through the city centre with its standard collection of glass towers and roughly followed the course of the Swan River to its mouth, which is the port of Fremantle.

Fremantle looked like an English Channel port transported to the Mediterranean; handsome Victorian stone buildings looking slightly uneasy in the hard light. There were plenty of signs of the tourist trappings that had made the place so dangerous during the America’s Cup challenge, but it also felt like a working harbour.

I had a good cup of coffee in a place full of voluble Italians and people with time to read a book in the middle of the day, walked around the fishing harbour, visited the maritime museum, browsed in a bookshop, had another cup of coffee.

Ronnie Bishop’s house was two or three blocks back from the waterfront, a sandstone dwelling in a street of smart revamped houses. It had two young palms in front, high walls blocking off the neighbours and a severe wrought-iron fence with spear tops. Morton Street, Clifton Hill, this was not.

The front door was a nice piece of woodwork, a rich, dark jarrah frame with panels of pine oiled to a dark honey colour. I pressed a brass button in a brass plate and heard the chime. No-one came. I took a walk up the street. The house next door bore a brass plate saying Souter & Whale, Architects. I was back in the car reading a novel I’d bought called The Means of Grace when a white Honda Civic drew up outside Ronnie’s address and a man in jeans and white golf shirt got out. He checked Ronnie’s mailbox, unlocked the front door and went inside, leaving it open. He was out again in minutes and set about watering the garden.

I got out of the Corolla and went over to the fence. He caught sight of me approaching.

‘You must be Charles,’ I said.

He was a tall man, early forties, light tan, thin and fit-looking. What remained of his hair was close-cropped. He looked like the mature outdoor male in an advertisement.

‘Yes,’ he said, warily. He held the hose as if ready to water me.

‘I’m Jack Irish, the lawyer from Melbourne. I rang you about Ronnie.’

His face relaxed.

‘You’ve come a long way,’ he said. ‘Let’s go inside.’

I followed him though a small hallway with a highly polished floor into a sitting room furnished in a dark masculine style. He opened the curtains and we sat down in Morris chairs.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m very worried. I didn’t know anything until I rang his mum about the break-in.’

‘The break-in?’

‘Last Wednesday. We’ve cleaned up, but my God, the mess.’

‘What did they get?’

‘My dear, they walked off with the weirdest stuff. And they took housekeeping money as far as I can tell. Ronnie told me he’d left it in the usual place, which is under the breakfast cereals. Not a lot. I think it’s a hundred dollars. Mrs G says it’s not there.’

‘They gave the place a going over, did they?’

‘Certainly did, my God! The study you would not believe. A shambles. All Ronnie’s business papers on the floor, all the books off the shelves, all the drawers out of the desk.’

I said, ‘Charles, why would Ronnie disappear?’

He shook his head. ‘Jack—may I call you Jack?—I can’t think of any reason why. He’s been very, very depressed, of course, but…’ He looked away into the middle distance.

‘Why was that?’

‘Well, business has been terrible, for one thing.’

‘What business is that?’

‘Ronnie’s in video. It’s suffered with the rest of the economy. And he put a lot of capital into some compact disc venture. CD-ROM. Very high tech. A mystery to me.’ He put his right hand to his mouth. ‘I haven’t even offered you a drinky. I generally have a G and T around this time.’

I accepted a gin and tonic. It came large, with a smudge of bitters. Charles folded a leg under him as he sat down.

‘Ronnie’s mother says he has AIDS, Charles.’

He sighed. ‘The dear old girl. That’s simply not true. Ronnie is HIV-positive. There’s a big difference, you know. He’ll probably outlive us all.’

‘Did he think that way?’

He eyed me like a dog show judge. After a while, he said, ‘I’m not sure that I understand what’s going on.’

‘Going on?’

‘Going on. Something’s going on and I’m the poor bunny in the middle of it.’

‘Well, as I said on the phone, I’m interested in talking to Ronnie about evidence he gave in a trial in Melbourne years ago.’

‘You must be very interested to come to Perth to ask me questions.’

I shrugged. ‘I’m feeling a bit driven. And Ronnie’s the only person who can help me. If I knew a bit more about him, I might be able to find him.’

Charles looked at his nails. Clean, pink, blunt nails. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘ask away.’

‘Why did he go to Melbourne?’

‘He said he had to see someone.’

‘Do you know what about?’

‘I’d only be guessing.’

‘Even a guess might help.’

‘There were phone calls from Melbourne.’

I waited. Charles sipped his drink. There was a beautiful sunset going on outside. I could see a coral glow on the wall of the neighbour’s house. You don’t see sunsets in Melbourne in winter. It isn’t even clear to me that the sun rises in Melbourne in winter.

‘A man rang twice.’

‘Was that unusual?’

‘Yes. To ring here, that was unusual. I stop in on my way from work every day and give the garden a sprinkle, that sort of thing. It’d die if it was left to Ronnie. He doesn’t come home until all hours, so I listen to the answering machine and I ring him at the shop if it’s anything he needs to know about. The only person who calls from Melbourne is his mum and she generally rings on Sunday mornings.’

‘What did the man say?’

‘He said he needed to speak to Ronnie urgently. I rang Ronnie and gave him the message. Twice.’

‘Did he say anything?’

Charles was silent again for a while. He was still at war with himself about answering my questions.

‘The first time he said something like, “Oh, Christ, no”. Something like that.’

‘The man gave a name and a number to ring?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you remember the name?’

‘I’m afraid not. I’m hopeless about names. It’d be on the tape.’

I felt a small flush of excitement. ‘You’ve got the answering machine tape?’

‘No. The burglars took all the tapes. They took all the CDs too, but you can understand that. Ronnie didn’t wipe any answering machine tapes. He just put in a new tape. Some of them have got messages that go on for half an hour or more, my dear. He’s got these weird girlfriends. They don’t seem to want to talk to him. They just pour out all this drivel about men and shopping and films to the machine.’

‘But all the tapes were here?’

‘Yes. They were all in the phone table drawer. The burglars dumped the drawer on the floor, my dear. Gave it a kick too, by the look of things. Pens and stuff everywhere. They took the tape out of the machine, too.’

I tried the name Danny McKillop on him.

‘I can’t say yes and I can’t say no,’ he said. ‘I think it was an Irish sort of name. But I can’t be sure.’

‘Did Ronnie ever talk about his past?’

‘Never. The man was like the Sphinx. Could’ve been born yesterday.’

What had Ronnie’s mother said? Doug always said he would make a good spy.

‘He never mentioned any names?’

Charles picked up his glass and stuck the tip of his tongue into the liquid. He looked at me over the rim. ‘Not ever. I’ve been over all this before. I told the detectives that. They asked these questions. I told them the same thing. Ronnie simply did not talk about himself except in the vaguest way.’

‘These were the detectives about the break-in?’

‘Oh, absolutely not. That was PC Plod from the local station. These were men in plain clothes. Rather grubby plain clothes in the case of one of them.’ He laughed, a light laugh, verging on the nervous.

‘And they identified themselves as policemen?’

He didn’t answer for a few seconds, turning a gold band with a single red stone in it on the little finger of his right hand. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t. They came to the door at home. It’s just around the corner. My unit. About nine at night. Smelling, reeking of drink, if you don’t mind. One expects more.’

‘You assumed they were detectives?’

‘Yes. I did. They were, I think. They had that manner. The smaller one took out some sort of notebook. He wasn’t small, mind you. The opposite. Just smaller. He said something like: “It’s in connection with the disappearance of someone you know. Ronald Bishop. We’d like to ask you some questions.”’

I savoured the last of my drink. ‘Can I get the timing sorted out?’ I said. ‘This visit was after the break-in?’

‘Two days after. Mrs G and I had spent hours cleaning up and then I came home, utterly drained I can tell you, and I’d had a shower and slipped into a gown and there they were pounding on the door.’

‘What did they want to know?’

‘Refill time,’ Charles said. His drink was hardly touched but he took both glasses away. I took out my notebook, full of horse observations, and made a few entries. When he came back, Charles sat on the edge of his chair, glass held in both hands.

‘All they were interested in, Jack, was what Ronnie had told me about going to Melbourne,’ he said. ‘Names. They wanted to know any names he’d mentioned. And they wanted to know what he’d told me about his life in Melbourne before he came to Perth.’ He leaned towards me. ‘They were very crude, Jack. It upset me. I’m not used to that sort of thing. Not at all. I’d have complained if I’d thought it would do any good.’

‘Crude in what way?’

Charles made sure we had strong eye contact. ‘The smaller one said: “You poofs tell each other everything, don’t you? What did your boyfriend tell you about Melbourne?” Those were his words, Jack. Chock full of hatred, I can tell you. Almost spitting. And that is not the nature of our relationship at all. It is not physical.’

I nodded. ‘How did you respond?’

He shrugged. ‘I said Ronnie was a good friend and that he told me nothing about his early life and never mentioned names. And I said I’d like to have my lawyer present.’

‘And then?’

‘He became quite chummy in a nauseating sort of way and said they didn’t have any more questions. Then he asked if Ronnie had given me anything to look after for him. I said I didn’t want to answer any more questions and he said: “Answer me, cockbreath.” Those were his words. I felt scared. I said no he had not and would they please leave. And they did. Just walked out without another word.’

‘They never said anything about a court case long ago, in Melbourne?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’

‘Did Ronnie ever speak of giving evidence against someone?’

Charles was looking into his drink. ‘No. You don’t think they were policemen, do you, Jack?’

‘It’s hard to tell, Charles. If they come around again, don’t let them in. Say you have to get dressed, something’s on the stove, anything, and phone the police emergency number and say you’re being attacked. Then phone your lawyer.’

‘I don’t really have a lawyer,’ he said.

‘Get one.’

I finished my drink, gave him my telephone numbers, and he gave me his.

At the front gate, I asked, ‘Charles, would you call Ronnie a trustworthy person?’

He clicked the gate closed behind me. Another sigh, this one much deeper. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the gatepost.

‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘He didn’t tell you much, but what he did was almost all lies. Even when it didn’t matter a fig. Variety. That’s all he wanted. New bodies, new sensations. Boys. Girls. Didn’t matter to him. He got beaten up quite often. Once in this house by some little thug he was tying up. Face swollen like a pumpkin. Kicked in the head, all the money in the house taken, VCR, CDs. I had to take him to casualty. I thought that was what had happened when his mum rang me. That he was probably lying in some public toilet.’

‘Did he need money?’

‘I think so. He’d borrowed nearly five thousand dollars from me. They refused his American Express card at Latino’s the day before he went. I paid for the meal with my card. And there’s trouble about this house. It’s going to be sold by the bank.’

‘How did he get that way?’

Charles shook his head. He looked much older now, less firm of face. ‘I honestly don’t know, Jack,’ he said. ‘He didn’t tell me and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking.’

We shook hands. I liked him. He clearly deserved better than Ronnie Bishop. Burdett-Bishop.

‘Why did he stick the Burdett on his name?’ I asked.

Charles sighed and looked heavenwards. ‘He was thinking of going into real estate and he thought it sounded impressive.’

I went in search of lodgings, thankful that I’d bought a book.

13

A weak sun was shining on Melbourne, but to compensate a marrow-chilling wind was blowing. I rang the security parking garage and they sent their little bus to collect me.

‘Jetsetting again,’ the driver said. ‘You joined that Mile High Club yet?’

He was an ex-cop called Col Boon, pensioned off the force for extreme hypertension after shooting another cop during a raid on an indoor dope plantation in Coburg. A tragic mistake, the coroner said. I suppose in some ways it’s always a tragic mistake to shoot the man who’s rooting your wife every time you’re on nightshift and he’s not.

‘The club reckons I couldn’t stand the excitement of high-altitude copulation,’ I said.

Col made an animal noise. ‘Tell ’em you’ll do it sitting down. You growing a beard?’

I felt my two-day growth. ‘Stewies like a bit of hair,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Bit? Seen less hair on pussies.’ He took a corner with a squeal of balding tyres. ‘Talking pussies, you want to pick your stewie. Mate of mine put his hand in the golden triangle, found a big cock. Qantas I think it was.’

I pondered the significance of this story. My maternal grandmother apparently addressed stewardesses as ‘waitress’. She would not have taken well to the idea that some of them were, in fact, waiters.

At the parking garage, Col said, ‘There’s a hit of a problem with your car. That grease monkey rang. Says he took your motor to pieces and he can’t put it together again till he can find parts. Two weeks, minimum.’

I groaned. This was what happened when you left your ancient Lark for a service with a backyard mechanic who was a Studebaker fanatic.

‘Now you tell me. What am I supposed to do?’ I said. ‘Walk?’

‘He says he’s got an old Chevy you can use.’

‘I hate old Chevies.’

‘Well,’ Col said, ‘we’ve got a special on unclaimed vehicles this week. Nice Celica. Say two weeks, hundred and fifty.’

‘You work this out together?’

He looked hurt.

I said, ‘Throw in a full tank.’

‘Give us a break. There’s a good bit in it.’ He gave me an appraising look. ‘Had a call if your car was here.’

I waited.

‘Your office. A girl.’

I shook my head.

‘No. Well, this isn’t the lost and found either. Told her you hadn’t parked here for a while.’

‘You give a complete service here, Col,’ I said.

He handed me the keys. ‘I’d say look after it like your own,’ he said, ‘but that’s the last thing we want.’

I thought about Ronnie all the way to Fitzroy. I’d got the addresses from Charles and visited Ronnie’s two video rental shops in the Perth suburbs. One was closed. The other was in a small shopping mall and it didn’t look healthy. From behind a partition of grey tin shelves came the sobbing breaths, grunts, yells and urgings of a pornographic video and the jeers and cheers of a teenage audience. After a while, a sallow youth with a pigtail emerged and said, ‘Yep?’ It turned out he didn’t know Ronnie but was standing in for his friend’s friend, who sometimes worked in the shop.

At the workshop, Charlie was finishing up for the day, pottering around endlessly as usual—a dab of oil here, a wipe of a surface there, here a gentle opening and closing of a cabinet door, there a pull–push of a drawer. I gradually worked him through the front doors like a sheepdog with a particularly difficult sheep. We drove around to the Prince of Prussia. Usually we walked, but Charlie’s hip was hurting. I parked the Celica around the corner in a loading zone.

‘No respect for the law,’ Charlie said. ‘That’s where it all begins. Und du bist rechtsgelehrt.’

‘Have a heart,’ I said. ‘It’s only a little municipal regulation, shouldn’t apply after 5 p.m.’ When we were alone, Charlie often expressed his doubts and disappointments about me in German, language of my great-grandfather.

Wilbur Ong and Norm O’Neill were in position, beers, pies, Herald Sun form guides on the counter. They gave us the briefest acknowledgment.

‘My feelin is we’re lookin at a rerun of Kyneton twenty months ago,’ said Norm. The peak of his flat cap rested on his spectacles, which rested on a nose of heroic size.

‘Well, I’ve always loved yer feeling, darlin,’ said Wilbur, ‘but there’s a lotta wishful here. He’s bin five, seven, five first-up since then.’

‘’Course he has,’ said Norm. ‘That’s why we’re lookin at bloody forties here. Know it in my bones.’

‘Relied on your bones,’ Wilbur said, ‘we’d be round the Salvos eatin rabbit stew.’

‘Given these pies, that’s not a frightenin thought,’ said Norm. He turned to me. ‘Jack, prepared to divulge yer thoughts on the gallops at Geelong?’

‘People in the know treat my tips as scratchings,’ I said. ‘However, since it’s you lot.’

Charlie Taub gave a snort and went off to talk football to a retired tram driver called Wally Pollard. Wally’s only son, Bantam Pollard, ruined a promising career with Collingwood through bad timing. On a Friday night in 1975, the club president took six guests into the committee box to show them the ground’s new floodlights. They came on, casting a cold white light on the playing field and on Bantam Pollard’s spotty bottom. It was dead centre of the field, bracketed by the fleshy thighs of the president’s sixteen-year-old daughter.

We were on race four when a man came in the street door. He was about fifty, bald, of below medium height, with a heavy body. RayBans sat on a darkly tanned bull-terrier face. He’d spent about three grand on his gear, most of it on gold chains and a golden brown leather jacket that fitted him like a condom. The style said Sydney or the Gold Coast; the walk, as if he were rolling a tennis ball between his upper thighs, said cop, probably vice squad.

Stan the barman was at the far end of the counter. He exchanged a few words with Mr Gold Coast and then came down to our end of the bar.

‘Bloke’s asking for Jack,’ he said, looking at Wilbur. ‘What’ll I tell him?’

‘Tell him I’ll be along in a minute,’ I said. I lingered for a minute or two and then walked down the bar.

Stan had served Mr Gold Coast something with tonic. At my approach, he smiled at me, a lip lift to show lavatory-white capped teeth. It conveyed no more sentiment than a facial tic. He put out a hand.

‘Jack. Tony Baker.’ The hand exerted no pressure; a hand that felt to be made of one-inch brass plumbing fittings didn’t need to do anything other than Be.

‘What can I do for you?’ I said.

‘Have a drink with me.’

‘I’ve got one waiting.’

‘You do work among the elderly. That’s nice.’ He swallowed the contents of his glass and rapped it on the counter several times. Stan responded to the summons by leaving the room.

Tony Baker edged closer to me. The top of his head came up to my chin. This gave me all the physical confidence the giraffe feels when it meets the rhino. He showed me his teeth again.

‘Clubby here, am I right? No risk of anyone wanting to join though, mate. Well, this isn’t a social occasion. I’m here to straighten a coupla things out.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as your getting in the way of an official investigation.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of a number of matters, one of which touches Mr Ronald Bishop.’

‘What do you mean, touches?’

Tony Baker put his hand to his muscular sausage of a neck and turned his head a few centimetres to each side. ‘Jack,’ he said, speaking softly, ‘you don’t want to know, right? If you get in the way of this investigation you’ll get squashed so fucken flat they’ll post you.’

‘Who’ll squash me?’ I asked.

His eyes went hard. I noticed a small gold fleck in the right iris. ‘You’re not listening, Jack. I’m telling you to back off, drop it. This matter is at a very high level, a national level. I’ve said too much now.’

‘Have you got some identification?’ I realised I should have asked earlier.

Tony Baker closed his eyes and sighed. ‘Can I get this across to you without a map? You don’t want to know anything about me. Take it as gospel: you are obstructing an official operation. Pull your head in, forget about Mr Bishop, or you’ll wish it was you that cunt blew up in the carpark. Just fucken butt out.’

He left. I went back to the form but couldn’t concentrate. At six-thirty, Charlie’s granddaughter, the lovely Augustine, hooted outside. I went out with him. It was intensely cold after the warmth of the pub and the air had the burnt petrol smell of winter cities everywhere.

Charlie got into the car and wound down the window. ‘Eat some proper food,’ he said. ‘You need someone to look after you.’

I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Maybe you can talk your driver here into marrying me. It’s all indoor work.’

‘Let’s talk pay and conditions,’ Gus said. She was a trade union official.

Charlie snorted. ‘Go,’ he said to Gus. ‘Some men you don’t want in your family.’

I stood in the street and considered whether to go back into the pub and settle down or to go home. I decided to go home. I’ve learned to take the hard decisions.

The apartment was cold, the bulb in the bathroom had fused and the fridge smelled of five-day-old fish. Cam, Wootton and my daughter were on the answering machine. Claire said: Listen, Jack, I’m just ringing to say I miss you and I’ll be down for a visit soon. I might bring Eric to set your mind at rest. Your letter sounds glum. Don’t be. Love you. Bye.

I made a stiff Jamieson’s and soda and rang Linda Hillier. She wasn’t in the office.

14

Hardhills was a shop, a garage and a weatherboard pub at a churned-up crossroads. The nearest town of any size was thirty kilometres away. In between, it was all low sky, wet sheep and ponds in every hollow.

There were three utes outside the pub. Harry Strang eased the BMW to a stop beside the shop and switched off. He looked at his watch.

We sat in silence for five minutes. I was thinking about Ronnie Bishop. Cam was reading the Sporting Globe. Harry had his eyes closed, head back on the rest. Then he said, ‘Now this fella Rex Tie, supposed to meet us out here twelve sharp, he’s sittin in the pub over there with this other fella we’ve come to see. Talkin horses. Couple of the yokels no doubt waterin the tonsils. Publican’s hangin about. Rex’s takin the view that we’ll come in, have a few gargles first.’

‘Sounds reasonable,’ I said.

‘Not in this line of work,’ Harry said. ‘Thought I’d schooled Rex the last time. Easier to train a horse.’

At 12.15, two men came out of the pub. One of them, a gangling figure in a battered half-length Drizabone, came over to the car. At his approach, Harry pressed the button and his window slid down. The man bent down to look in. He had a long, sad, middle-aged face, much of it nose.

‘Sorry, Harry,’ he said. ‘Thought you might come in for a quick one.’

Harry looked at him. ‘Rex, you’ve forgotten.’

Rex straightened up and then he came down again. ‘Jeez, Harry, have a heart. This is bloody Hardhills. There’s only about four people.’

‘That’s four too many, Rex. Drive. We’ll follow.’

Rex and the other man got into their utes and drove off, the other man in front. We followed at a distance.

‘Harry, why do you need a lawyer for driving around the Western District?’ I asked. The question had been on my mind for some time.

He gave me a quick look. ‘The yokels’ve got a lot of respect for lawyers, Jack. Doesn’t hurt to show them one. That bloke up front, he’s got a horse called Dakota Dreaming, five years old, hasn’t run for two years. Not that it ran much before that either. What’s the ’rithmetic, Cam?’

‘Seven, one, one,’ said Cam. He was studying the landscape out of the side window.

‘Five-year-old. Seven races. Now that’s what I call lightly raced,’ Harry said. ‘And the reason is, Jack, the animal’s got a horrible record, truly horrible. Lucky he’s not in the pet’s mince or got a big copper’s bum on him. The fella up there, he’s owner number four, and number three made him a gift of the horse. Gratis and for nothing. He’s put two years into patchin up the beast and he reckons it’s got one or two big runs in it. Tell Jack the history, Cam.’

Cam looked around. ‘He’s bred for staying. Third highest price for a yearling in New Zealand in his year. Won his first race by seven lengths. Then Edgar Charlton bought him for a fair bit for a dentists’ syndicate. First time out he ran seventh against a good field, pulled up lame. Out for seventeen weeks. Came back at Sandown in December, second in a bunch of spring leftovers. Tendon trouble, twenty weeks off. March at Caulfield. Ninth out of thirteen. Ballarat three weeks later. Stone last. Bleeding. Took the compulsory count. The dentists spit the dummy, sold him. Turned out twice for the third owner for one sixth and one last.’

‘Fella trains over near Colac,’ Harry said. ‘John Nisbet. Gave our friend up ahead the horse with a bowed tendon on his near side and bone chips in both front legs. A dead loss.’

‘With respect, this outing doesn’t look like an investment to me,’ I said.

‘Shake,’ said Cam.

‘Won’t hurt to have a look,’ Harry said. ‘Old Rex’s no Rhodes Scholar but he’s not Curly Joe.’

The front vehicle turned right. A rutted track ran around the gentle eastern slope of a round-topped hill. At the foot of the northern slope were a farmhouse, stables, assorted sheds, a round yard. Horses in rugs were standing around looking bored in half a dozen paddocks. About a hundred metres from the buildings, the front driver pulled half off the track, got out and opened a gate. He waved us through.

Rex parked next to a shed and Harry pulled up beside him. We all got out and put on our coats. The north wind had ice in it.

‘Christ, Harry,’ said Cam, ‘can’t we do this in the summer? Bloody nun’s nipple.’

The lead driver parked next to the farmhouse. All the buildings except the stables were old but the place was kept up; fresh paint, taut wire, raked gravel. As we got out of the ute, a boy of about fourteen appeared at the front door of the house.

Harry introduced us to Rex and when the other man came over, Rex said, ‘Tony Ericson, this is Harry Strang, Cam Delray, and Harry’s lawyer, Jack Irish.’

We shook hands. Tony was jockey size but too heavy, lined face, thick dark hair cut short, big ears.

‘Never thought I’d meet you,’ he said to Harry. ‘Me dad used to say, “Think you’re Harry Strang?” when we tried some flash riding.’

‘How’s your dad?’ asked Harry.

Tony Ericson cocked his head. ‘You remember me dad? He always said he knew you.’

‘Ray Ericson,’ Harry said. ‘Still goin?’

Tony Ericson shook his head.

Harry patted his arm briskly. ‘Sorry to hear it. Ray could get a camel to jump. Now what’s the story?’

Tony Ericson looked at Rex Tie. ‘You want to, Rex…’

‘You go,’ Rex Tie said.

‘Let’s get down the stables,’ Tony said. ‘I brung the horse in. Lives outside normal. Bugger’s had enough soft in his life.’

We went down a gravel path, through a gate and round the corner of a long cinderblock stable building. There were eight stalls but only one horse. It was waiting for us, brown head turned our way, nostrils steaming.

Tony said, ‘Rex tell you his name’s Dakota Dreamin? We call him Slim.’

The horse snickered as we approached. Tony stroked his nose and fed him something.

‘They say he was a deadset mongrel, kickin, bitin, but we never seen it. Like a lamb. Me girl looks after him, ten-year-old.’ He looked behind us and said, ‘Tom, shake hands with the gentlemen. This is me boy Tom, waggin school. He’ll give the horse a little hit out.’

The boy from the front door came up and shook hands awkwardly. Someone other than a barber had given him a recent haircut. He was going to be too big for a jockey.

We walked down a road between paddocks and over a small rise. Below us, invisible from the stables, was a training track. You could smell the watermelon scent of new-mown grass before you saw it.

‘Two thousand four hundred metres,’ said Tony Ericson. ‘Got a twelve hundred metre chute over there.’ He pointed to the left. ‘Starting gate. Same grass as Flemington. Bloke done it in the sixties. Went bang here. Used to have rails and all. Had sheep on it for twenty years but we mowed it and rolled it and it come up good.’

I looked at Harry. He had his hands in the jacket pockets of his leather-trimmed loden jacket and a faraway expression on his face.

He took a hand out and rubbed his chin. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘Pride of the district, I imagine.’

‘Don’t follow,’ said Tony.

‘Other people use this?’

Tony shook his head. ‘No trainers around here. We only cleaned it up bout a year ago. Whole thing, that is.’

We all turned at the sound of hoofs. The boy, Tom, walked Dakota Dreaming up to us. The horse shone like glass, groomed to a standard only achievable by ten-year-old girls. It had pristine bandages on all legs. I knew enough about condition to know this creature was well advanced in his preparation to race.

Tony held the horse’s head. ‘Remember what I said. Take him out to the seven furlong. I’ll give you a bang. Don’t push him. If he’s feelin strong at the three hundred, let him go.’

The boy nodded and took the horse off. On the track, they went into an easy canter.

We walked along to where a big tin lollipop painted red marked the finish. Cam lit a cigarette, held it in the corner of his mouth while he fiddled with his stopwatch. Harry took out a small pair of binoculars and hung them around his neck. Tony Ericson put a blank into a starting pistol.

‘Don’t he mind the gun?’ asked Rex Tie.

‘Can’t hardly hear it over there,’ said Tony. ‘He’s ready. Light’s flashin.’ He raised the pistol above his head, waved it. The boy’s right arm went up and down. Tony fired, a flat smack.

Tom set a nice pace, about what you’d expect for a frontrunner over 1400 or 1600 metres on a country track. The straight was about 350 metres. When they came around the turn, you could see that the going was soft and that the horse was not entirely happy.

But the going wasn’t going to stop Slim putting on a show. At the 300-metre mark, you could see Tom urge the horse with hands and heels. It didn’t require much. With every appearance of enjoyment, the horse opened its stride, lowered its head and accelerated home. They went past the post flat out.

We stood in silence watching the boy, standing upright in the stirrups, slow the horse down.

Harry took off his hat and scratched his head. Cam was looking for a cigarette. Their eyes locked for a good three seconds.

‘What’s it say?’ asked Harry.

Cam found a cigarette and lit it with his Zippo.

‘For a stayer,’ he said, ‘smokin.’

15

Drew poured some red wine into our glasses, leant back and put his stockinged feet on the coffee table. ‘You want my advice?’

Harry and Cam had dropped me off at home but I didn’t go in. I’d been brooding all the way back from Hardhills and I felt the urge to talk to Drew. Once upon a time we’d talked to each other about all our problems.

I found him eating takeaway pizza over a pile of files in front of the fire in his house in Kew. The children were nowhere to be seen.

I said, ‘Well. Yes.’

‘Drop it. Forget Danny ever left the message. Take the gorilla’s advice about this Bishop too. You’ve touched a nerve somewhere.’

‘If I hadn’t been three-quarters pissed years ago I’d have tried to find out more about Danny’s movements the night of the hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘I might have kept him out of jail.’

Drew chewed for a while, studying the flames. Finally he said, ‘Bullshit, mate. Even if you’d been stone-cold sober and at the top of your form, it would never have occurred to you. You’d have pleaded him. You had to plead him. Since when do lawyers go looking for other explanations when the Crown’s got a case like that? Don’t kid yourself. There was no negligence there. There’s nothing owing on your part.’

We sat in silence for a while, looking at the flames. A wind had come up and every now and again it made a hollow sound in the chimney.

‘Remember that week fishing on the Delatite?’ Drew asked. ‘I reckon that was the best holiday of my adult life.’

‘You’ve never said that before,’ I said. ‘We caught about three fish.’

‘Didn’t matter a bugger. It was great. It’s all the kids seem to remember of their entire childhoods. Apart from the times I’m supposed to have been awful.’

I never thought about that trip. I’d curtained it off. It was the last holiday with Isabel.

‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Like being a kid again.’

‘Can’t get enough of that.’ Drew shifted in his chair. ‘Listen, Jack, Danny was probably knocked for some drug scam. This other bloke, from what you say, was a candidate for doing something unpleasant. If there are feral cops involved, the next thing is that you have an accident.’

I nodded. I knew he was right. It was too late to do the right thing by Danny McKillop. The guilt that had taken me to Perth was pointless. With a sense of relief, I held out my wine glass.

‘We’ll just finish this drop in here,’ said Drew, ‘and then I want to show you a little 1978 shiraz off vines that were ninety years old then. Client gave me a case.’

I ended up sleeping in the spare room.

I put in the next day at Taub’s, cutting a taper on and hand-morticing the legs of the boardroom table. It was soothing work for someone not feeling all that flash. Charlie didn’t make tables any more unless he had to. Having me around meant he didn’t have to. ‘A table is pretty much a table,’ he said. ‘When you can’t make a complete ruin.’

My cabinetmaking began as a kind of therapy on my way back from self-destruction. I can see that now. At the time it just seemed to happen. I noticed Charlie’s workshop while looking at the old tailor’s shop that is now my office. I went in on impulse. Sunlight was slanting in through the high windows, the air smelled of wood shavings and linseed oil and Charlie was at his workbench whistling while carving the back of a reproduction George III mahogany chair he was making to fill a gap in what the antique trade calls a long set. In that moment I fell in love with the idea of being a cabinetmaker. No such thought had ever entered my mind before. I knew absolutely nothing about woodwork. I went up to Charlie and said, ‘I’ll pay you to teach me something about making furniture.’

Charlie had given me his interested look and said, ‘Three things let me tell you. Number one, see a doctor. Number two, I’m too old to have an apprentice. Number three, you haven’t got enough money.’

After I moved into my office, I began to hang around Taub’s, making myself useful where I could. Charlie seemed to like the company. And he couldn’t stop himself showing me how to do things.

Just before 4 p.m., the phone rang. It was switched through from my office. It was Mrs Bishop, Ronnie’s mother.

‘Mr Irish,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you but I’m so dreadfully worried about Ronnie. I’ve been going over everything in my mind and I remembered him making a phone call. Well, I went to the phone, it’s in the passage, and looked at the little pad I keep there and there’s two numbers written down. By Ronnie.’

I said, ‘Good work, Mrs Bishop. Numbers mean anything to you?’

‘No. I don’t know them. I was going to ring them, but then I thought I’d ask you first. Should I tell the police? Would they be interested?’

‘Let me ring them first,’ I said. ‘The police often take some time to get around to things.’

I took down the numbers and went around to my office. I had a feeling about the first number. My scratchpad was beside the phone and on it a number was circled.

The first number was Danny McKillop’s.

I sat down and dialled the second number. The phone rang two or three times and then a voice said, ‘Father Gorman’s residence.’

It was another sour day, full of wind and rain. It took a long time to get across the city to the address Father Rafael Gorman had given me. The urban planners wrecked the traffic flow when they turned Swanston Street, once Melbourne’s spine, into some kind of half-baked pedestrian mall. Urban planners are people who know best. They should make them all marry social workers.

I sat in the jams and listened to Claude Haynes, the afternoon man on the ABC, interview the Premier. Like most men on the ABC, Claude had started out to be a clergyman but tossed in the frock after going a couple of rounds with God in the seminary. I don’t know whether the experience of the religious life left these people sadder but it certainly left them believing they were wiser than anyone else.

‘Premier,’ Claude said, making it sound like an assumed name, ‘the Opposition leader says you and your Planning Minister, Mr Pitman, are turning the State into a paradise for carpetbaggers and quick-buck artists. How do you respond to that?’

‘With a smile,’ said Dr Marcia Saunders, no trace of amusement in her voice. ‘Mr Kerr has no commercial experience and no commercial sense. He wouldn’t know a carpetbagger from the chairman of the Reserve Bank.’

Claude said, ‘Mr Kerr gave AM a list of what he called “Projects for the Pals” this morning—Yarra Cove, the Footscray Sportsdome, the new privately run remand centre and several others. He says they are all being developed by government pals. Are the developers your pals?’

‘Mr Kerr should know about pals,’ Dr Saunders replied. ‘He’s got where he is because of pals. If he’d had to rely on brains or ability, he’d still be teaching geography in primary school.’

With the delighted air of someone who thinks he’s trapped Wittgenstein in a logical error, Claude said, ‘That doesn’t answer my question: Are these developers your pals?’

There was a long silence. Then Marcia said, voice laden with menace, ‘Mr Haynes, you shouldn’t act as a frontman for these has-beens. If Mr Kerr has any evidence of favouritism, he should produce it. Let me assure the people of this State that this government doesn’t do favours. It assesses projects and people purely on merit. It follows all processes and procedures to the letter. The developments you’ve named are both sound commercial propositions and job creators for this State. The people behind them are highly experienced and astute operators who can be relied upon to do a good job. Are you suggesting anything to the contrary?’

Claude cleared his throat. ‘But are some of the developers supporters of your party?’

You could hear Marcia’s sigh. It combined disbelief with contempt. ‘Are you and Mr Kerr proposing that supporters of a governing party should be excluded from commercial life?’ she said. Each word was coated with scorn.

Claude’s tone went sugary. ‘I think you’re shooting the messenger here, Dr Saunders,’ he said. ‘I’m merely—’

‘Don’t try to hide behind the messenger argument,’ snapped Marcia. ‘You media leftovers from the sixties are seldom merely doing anything. But you might try to make your agenda a little less obvious.’

It went on like this. Claude kept trying to wrap himself in the rags of his dignity and Marcia kept tearing them off. I enjoyed Claude’s discomfort but there was something chilling about Dr Marcia Saunders, PhD in physical education from the University of Kansas and former stockbroker. She wasn’t the same person who’d smiled down from the election billboards.

After half an hour of traffic snarl, I’d had enough. I did a savage left turn in the face of traffic into a one-way street. One crime led to another, I had a few altercations and near-misses but I got to Father Gorman’s address near Albert Park Lake with all the paint on.

I parked in a no-parking zone. Col Boon could knock a fellow cop and get the pension, he could beat parking tickets on this Celica.

Father Gorman’s address was an oddly tapering new building. The tenants weren’t short of space: there were eight floors and only six brass plates on the plinth outside. The one for the sixth floor said: Safe Hands Foundation.

The name meant something to me. I remembered as I reached the glass doors: Ronnie Bishop had once worked for the Safe Hands Foundation. Helping homeless children, his mother had said. Trying to root them had been the view of his former neighbour in Morton Street.

Thc tenants were fussy about who came to visit them. A security man with a snub nose, pale eyes and skin the colour of dirty underclothing kept me captive between two sets of glass doors while he wrote down my particulars on a clipboard. A tattoo peeped out from under his wristwatch. He wasn’t too flash at writing.

Then he wanted my driver’s licence.

‘I’m not trying to cash a cheque here, sonny,’ I said. ‘Just phone the man.’

Tight little smile. ‘The body corporate lays down the security procedures.’ Flat Queensland voice. Pause. ‘Sir.’

‘This isn’t Pentridge,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they retrain you for this job? Just phone.’

He held my gaze briefly, but I’d got him in one. ‘I’ll check,’ he said.

He made his call, came back, let me in, escorted me to the lift, up to the sixth floor, rang the bell on one of the two doors in the foyer, waited until a handsome dark youth opened the door. Through all this, he said nothing and exuded hatred.

‘Come this way,’ the youth said. His hair was drawn back tightly in a ponytail and he had the superior and slightly miffed manner of the waiters in most Melbourne restaurants.

I followed him through a large, elegant room and down a passage lined with framed architectural drawings to a teak six-panel door. The youth pushed open the door.

The voice from within was rich, warm and full of authority. ‘Thank you, Francis. Do remember to knock next time. Mr Irish, come in. Oh, Francis, bring us a pot of coffee, there’s a good boy.’

Father Gorman was coming round from behind a rosewood table with a column and platform base. On it were three or four files, a desk blotter and a fountain pen. He was a large man, probably in his sixties, big shoulders, crisp grey hair with just a hint of a wave brushed back, even features tanned the colour of milk fudge. He was wearing a navy-blue, double-breasted suit over a brilliantly white shirt. His tie had what looked like tiny camels on it.

He held out a hand. It was a surprisingly hard hand for a man of the cloth.

‘Pleasure to meet you, Jack,’ he said. ‘Let’s sit down.’

He led the way down the long panelled room to a setting of club armchairs and two sofas around a low military chest. A butler’s table with bottles and decanters stood against the inside wall, which was covered with paintings, mostly landscapes. French doors in one exterior wall gave on to a terrace. Deep windows in the other provided a view to the Westgate Bridge and beyond. The beyond was dark with rain.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said, gesturing with both hands at the room, the view. ‘I thank the Lord for it every day. And I thank Joseph Kwitny, the foundation’s benefactor whose generosity allows an instrument of the Lord’s will to live and work in such splendour.’

I got the feeling he had said this piece before but he said it very well. I sat down first and he took a chair beside me, close enough to lean out and touch.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘and what part of Ireland do the Irish come from?’

‘Not a well-known part,’ I said. ‘The Jewish quarter of Hamburg. My great-grandfather’s name was Isadore Reich. He ran away to sea and jumped ship in Melbourne. When he wrote his name down as I. Reich for his first employer, the man pronounced it as I. Rish. That’s what he became. Irish. I’m thinking of changing it back.’

Father Gorman laughed, a sound of deep enjoyment that washed over you, made you want to laugh with him, made you happy that you’d amused him. And while he was laughing, crinkles of pleasure around his eyes, he leaned over and touched my arm.

‘Don’t you ever do that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t be able to tell that wonderful story any more. And you’d be hurting the whole line of dear departed Irishes.’ He leaned back and put his hands in his pockets. ‘Well now, Jack Irish, what can I tell you about Ronnie Bishop?’

I had told him on the phone that Ronnie was missing. ‘Why did he ring you?’ I asked.

‘Why, he wanted to come around and see me. I hadn’t seen him for years. I’ve known the lad a long time, you know.’

‘I gather he once worked for the foundation.’

‘Briefly. He wasn’t really suited to the work. Not that I say that in any detrimental sense, mind. It’s special work, dealing with the young in distress. Not everyone has the gifts needed.’

‘And did he come around to see you?’

‘Of course. We talked for an hour and then I had to go to a meeting. That was…’ He raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘That was last Friday.’

‘How was he?’

‘Well, Jack, what do you know of the man’s situation?’ He fixed me with a look of inquiry that said ‘Let’s trust each other.’

‘I gather he’s HIV-positive.’

Father Gorman took his hands out of his pockets, sat forward, put his fingertips together. The nails were manicured. He had a slim gold watch on his wrist. Dark hairs fought to get out from under it. He looked out at the view. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He told me that and I felt his pain and anger. And his fear.’

He turned his head to look at me, a clear, steady gaze.

‘I’m interested in why he came to Melbourne. Did he say anything about that to you?’ I asked.

‘I assumed he had come to see his family. He said he was staying with his mother.’

There was a sound at the doorway and the youth came in carrying a tray with a tall silver coffee pot. The small cups chattered as he dropped the tray on the table from a height of at least two inches.

‘Ah, Francis,’ said Father Gorman. ‘We may have to send you to waiter school. Perhaps in your home country.’ He was smiling broadly, but there was an edge to his tone, a hint of autumn on a warm wind.

The youth gave him a glance of pure malice, tossed his ponytail and left. Father Gorman’s eyes followed him. ‘Rescued from a life of abuse and poverty,’ he said. ‘But still uncertain of what the Lord wants for him.’

I thought the Lord probably wanted a good swift kick up the arse for him, but I held my tongue. Father Gorman poured coffee. We both had ours black and sugarless. It was very bad coffee. I went back to Ronnie. ‘He was working for the foundation when he testified against a hit-and-run driver,’ I said.

Father Gorman took a sip of coffee. ‘I recall that well, yes. A tragedy. Lovely young woman.’

‘Did Ronnie ever say anything about his testimony?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Did Ronnie ever talk about what happened that night?’

Father Gorman put his cup down and inspected me. ‘I suppose we talked about it at the time. It would have been odd not to. Is there some reason why I should recall such a conversation?’

‘Not if you don’t. Did Ronnie mention when you saw him that the hit-and-run driver was out of jail and had been in touch with him?’

Father Gorman shot his left cuff to look at his watch. ‘Jack, my heavens,’ he said. ‘I’ve a speech to deliver. I’m going to have to be dreadfully rude and cut short our talk. No, I can’t say that he did mention anything like that. Would the man want to harm him?’

‘I don’t think so. I think he wanted something else.’

He frowned. ‘And what could that be?’

‘It’s not clear. Have you any idea who Ronnie might turn to if he wanted to hide, Father?’

Father Gorman was already on his feet. ‘Hide? That’s a strange thing to suggest, isn’t it? Why would he want to hide?’

I got up. ‘It seems Ronnie was worried about his safety before he disappeared.’

He furrowed his brow, a look of deep concern. ‘His safety? I thought you said the man posed no threat to him? My impression was that he was deeply troubled about his health, Jack. He certainly didn’t suggest that he wanted to hide. Are you sure about this?’

He was walking me along, holding my arm. I felt like a parishioner in need of comfort. ‘Let me see you out. Don’t hesitate to give me a call if there’s anything else I can do for you. I’m sorry our talk was so short. My work’s an endless round of functions and speeches. I try to find an individual message for each group, but it’s a battle. You’d know that. Lawyers understand. Every client’s a new client, isn’t that so? I toyed with the idea of the law, you know, but someone else had other ideas.’

At the front door, something made me ask a final question. ‘When did you last speak to Ronnie, Father? I mean, before he rang you about coming to see you?’

Father Gorman stroked his chin. It was shaven to perfection. ‘It would have been as much as seven or eight years ago, Jack. I got quite a surprise when I heard his voice, but I placed it straight away. I don’t forget voices for some reason. The Lord’s compensation for forgetting everything else, I suppose.’

He saw me to the lift. In the lobby downstairs, the ex-screw made a big show of logging me out.

16

‘Well, old sausage,’ said Wootton. ‘It’d be another matter if this was an inquiry you were pursuing on my behalf.’

I’d tracked Wootton to the street bar of the Windsor Hotel, a Victorian pile near Parliament, after ringing his office on the way back from Father Gorman’s. He stopped off there every day on his way home. It was Wootton’s sort of place: wood panelling, photographs of cricket teams.

We were sitting at a window looking out on Spring Street. It was just after 5.30 p.m. and the place was filling up with pudgy young men in expensive suits and club ties. Wootton was wearing a dark pinstripe suit with waistcoat, shirt with narrow stripes and a tie with little crests on it. His thinning hair was brushed back on his perfectly round skull and his moustache, dyed jet black, was bristly but trim. He looked like an old-style Collins Street banker and that was the way he wanted to look.

I’d known Wootton in Vietnam. He’d been a sergeant in stores, thankless work in the service of country. In lieu of thanks, he’d taken money from about twenty bars and brothels for supplying them with everything from Fosters beer to Vegemite. Wootton would have gone home very rich if two military policemen hadn’t seized his stash of US dollars two days before he was due to fly out. He never faced trial. The MPs thought the loss would be enough of a lesson to him. He never said another word about his money. And nor did they.

‘Cyril, I think I’ve got more than enough credit in my account to cover this little favour. But if it’s too much trouble—’

‘Steady on, Jack,’ said Wootton. ‘No need to get shirty.’ He took a sip of his whisky and water and rolled it around in his mouth, lips pursed. When he’d swallowed, he sighed and said, ‘I’ll have to go and do this from a bloody public phone, you know. Give me the number and the dates.’

I sipped my beer and read the Herald Sun Wootton had left behind while I waited. The lead story was another police shooting. A policewoman had shot dead a man who came at her with a knife when she attended a domestic dispute in Reservoir. The new Police Minister, Garth Bruce, was quoted as saying: ‘As a former policeman, I know the demands and dangers of the job. I am not, of course, passing any opinion on what took place in this incident. The coroner will decide that. But I’m determined that the police force will move away from the culture of the gun that’s become entrenched over the last ten years or so.’ There was a photograph of the Minister: a big serious man with short hair and rimless glasses.

Wootton was away about fifteen minutes. He came in brushing rain off his suit. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said. ‘Supposed to be a bloody five-star hotel. Had to go outside in the rain to find a phone that worked.’

A black Mercedes pulled up outside and two Japanese men in soaked golf outfits got out of the back. They stood close together in the drizzle, cap peaks almost touching, watching the driver unload two massive golf bags and wheelchair-size chrome golf buggies from the boot.

‘Sons of Nippon,’ said Wootton, flicking moisture off his moustache. ‘Don’t know if I’d go swanning around Tokyo if I’d worked thousands of Japs to death in World War II.’

‘Those two look a bit young to have worked anyone to death in World War II,’ I said.

‘Don’t be facetious. I need something to eat.’ He went over to the counter. A barmaid served him immediately. They knew the man here. He came back opening a bag of salt and vinegar chips. ‘Want some?’

I shook my head. He crammed a handful in under the moustache. Pieces stuck to it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’ll take about ten minutes for the reverse directory.’

Until Wootton went back to his phone, we continued our argument about how much I’d added to my fee for getting a gun pointed at me by Eddie Dollery.

When he came back, Wootton took an old envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. On the back were about a dozen telephone numbers, all the calls to different numbers made on Mrs Bishop’s telephone in the three days Ronnie was there. Against each one, in Wootton’s neat hand, was a name and address.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope I’ve contributed to you finding your catamite.’

‘Sodomite,’ I said. ‘He presumably had catamites. I only asked you to do it for me because I’m sworn to uphold the law.’

Wootton stuffed some more chips in his mouth. Through them, he said, ‘Hah bloody hah. Joined the Boy Scouts, have we? Dib, Dib, Dib. Dob, Dob, Dob.’

‘That’s the Cubs, Cyril,’ I said. ‘But how would you know?’

I went home and tried Linda Hillier at Pacific Rim News. She was in Sydney, a man said. Back tomorrow. I poured a glass of white wine from an opened bottle in the fridge and studied the phone calls from Mrs Bishop’s number. The calls to Danny McKillop and Father Gorman jumped out at me. That left nine calls. I rang Mrs Bishop. We went through the other calls from the beginning of the list. She had made all the calls except the last one. It was to a P. Gilbert, Long Gully Road, Daylesford. Made at 4.07 p.m. on the day Ronnie vanished.

‘That must be Paul Gilbert,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t thought of him in years. Dr Paul Gilbert, he was. He went to school with Ronnie. Lovely boy, very clever. He had a surgery in St Georges Road.’

‘The address is in Daylesford,’ I said.

‘Well, he’s not a doctor anymore,’ Mrs Bishop said. ‘There was some trouble over drugs. It was in the papers. He started uni at the same time as Ronnie. I used to see Paul’s mum sometimes. She was so proud of her boy before it happened.’

I rang the number twice before I went to bed. No answer. I fell asleep thinking about Linda Hillier. She probably had a good laugh at being come on to by the likes of me. Why had Gavin Legge called her a starfucker and a groupie? What star? What group? I hoped she wasn’t avoiding me.

17

The bare limbs of Wombat Hill’s English trees still smoked mist as I drove into Daylesford just after 9 a.m. The commuters were all gone and the small town’s locals were easing themselves into the day. I parked in the main street and asked at the butcher’s for directions to Long Gully Road. Butchers are the most friendly shopkeepers. It must have something to do with working with dead animals.