Bad Debts

‘Jeez,’ said the butcher, ‘Long Gully Road. Be out there in the forest, I reckon.’ He shouted, ‘Les! Where’s Long Gully Road?’

A tall youth with red hair came in wiping his hands on butcher’s paper. ‘G’day,’ he said. ‘Where’s a pen? Have to draw youse a map. It’s out to buggery in the badlands.’

I’d tried P. Gilbert’s number twice more that morning. No answer. I was eating my microwaved porridge when I decided to take a drive out to Daylesford. I didn’t give much thought then to the pointlessness of driving for an hour to a house where no-one was answering the telephone. On the way I did, and almost turned back.

Twenty minutes after leaving the butcher’s I was lost. The bush around Daylesford was veined with twisting, rutted roads going nowhere. Les’s map wasn’t much use after the first wrong turn. I was about to do a U-turn and try to retrace my route when I saw a man in overalls putting in a fence strainer post. Back in the trees a timber shack leant against a woodpile. He must have heard my approach but he didn’t look up until I was out of the Celica.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘Looking for Long Gully Road.’

He looked at me for a while, big beard, eyes slit, jaws chewing cud. ‘Back to the T-junction. Left. Third road on the left.’

I found the turnoff. The sign said NO THROUGH ROAD. Just off the ground, a square wooden board with an arrow had Koolanja Healing Centre, Spa, Massage in peeling white paint on a green background. There were old bullet holes in it. I drove about a kilometre through the scrubby regrowth forest before a duplicate of the first sign pointed down a narrow track.

The buildings were behind a fence in a big clearing at the end of the road: a long, low weatherboard with a verandah along the front, a square cinderblock building with narrow windows and, behind them and to the left, a steel-frame shed without walls. The gate was closed and on it a sign saying CLOSED hung at an angle.

A car was parked in front of the cinderblock building: a BMW, not new. I suddenly realised that I’d never asked what sort of car Ronnie was driving. In the shed, I could see two other vehicles, a four-wheel-drive and an old Holden.

I parked outside the gate and let myself in. No dogs. Dogs appear quickly or not at all. Ahead of me a driveway ran for about thirty metres, ending in a gravelled area in front of the buildings. On either side of the drive, a formal garden had been attempted and long ago given up on. Only the winter rain was keeping the surviving plants going.

I walked down the drive. It had been planted with poplars but they’d never got beyond infancy. Near the house, I could hear the sound of piano music, something classical. The front door was open. The music was coming from inside. I knocked loudly and said, ‘Anybody home?’ Nothing happened. I tried again. Only the music. Then it stopped and a voice said, ‘One of Chopin’s loveliest. And now for a complete contrast in composing style…’

The front door led into a long sitting room, furnished with stripped pine country-look pieces. The room was cold and unkempt, as if people had been dossing in it. In a stone fireplace, ashes were a foot deep. There were newspapers everywhere and all the surfaces held empty beer and soft drink cans and dirty plates.

I said my ‘Anybody home?’ again and went through into a big kitchen. The radio was on a shelf above the workbench, which was covered with the remains of meals long past.

I didn’t look at the rest of the house. I went out the way I had come and walked over to the cinderblock building. Nothing happened when I knocked and called out.

I opened the door. A wave of warmth hit me. The air was moist and smelled of chlorine. Chlorine and something else. It was dark inside, the venetian blinds at the slit windows closed. I found a light switch. Two fluorescent tubes flickered, then lit up a sort of reception area, with canvas director’s chairs and a glass coffee table holding stacked magazines.

I called out again. Nothing. I crossed the room to a half-open door. Beyond was darkness. I groped around and found another light switch just inside the door. I was looking down a corridor with two doors on either side and one at the end, all closed. The smell was stronger here. The air was also steamier.

My shoes made no sound on the grey felt-like carpet as I walked down the passage. I opened the first door on my left.

It was empty except for a pine upright chair and a large, deep coffin-like object against the end wall. There were pegs on the wall to hold clothes. The smell in here was salty. I guessed the giant coffin was a flotation tank, a bath filled with salt water for experiencing weightlessness.

The hatch on top was closed. Without thinking, I walked across and slid it back. It was empty. I felt foolish.

The room on the right held another tank. I didn’t look inside. The next door down on the right opened to reveal a room set up for massage: table, shelves with small bottles. There were posters of Nordic scenes on the walls. Pine forests, snow, frozen lakes.

I didn’t enter the room. As I turned to the door across the way, my eye caught a ghost of steam coming out from under the door at the end of the passage.

I went down the passage and put my hand on the door handle. Then something made me knock. No reply. I waited, knocked again.

Then I turned the handle and pushed the door open.

The smell came out on a great cloud of steam, the smell of stock made with chlorinated water, a pungent, medicinal smell that filled my sinuses and made my eyes water.

I retreated down the passage to the entrance and watched the steam billow out of the room. Just turn around and go home, my inner voice said. Just walk out of this building, down the drive and find your way back to the man putting in the pole. Stop and tell him thanks for giving you shitty directions, you couldn’t find Long Gully Road, so bugger it you were giving up. Go back to Daylesford and buy some bullboar sausages from the butcher. Tell Les you couldn’t follow his map and it wasn’t important. Drive home and have a shower. Forget about Danny and Ronnie and anybody else whose name ended in a diminutive.

But I didn’t listen to my inner voice. When the steam thinned, I went back down the corridor.

I’d left the door only half-open.

I pushed it fully open.

The room was still dense with steam but I could see that it was like a large bathroom, tiled floor to ceiling. In the corner to my right, I could dimly make out a large spa bath, above the ground.

I took a step inside the room.

A man was in a sitting position on the floor in the corner to my right. He was wearing a loose pink garment. His left arm was at his side. His right was on his lap with a revolver in his hand. Something long-barrelled.

At first I thought he was wearing something on his head, a kind of big mask. Then I realised his head was twice its normal size, a bloated, suppurating mess.

I felt vomit rise in my throat, but I took another step into the room.

There was something in the spa bath. I couldn’t see what. Steam was rising from the surface. The water was much hotter than any bath should be.

I wiped my eyes. Something insubstantial was bobbing gently on the hot bubbles. It was clothing, I thought.

I took another step. And as I did, trapped bubbles turned the clothing around and I saw the skull of a body cooked down to its bones.

The whole spa bath was stock made from a human being. I was going to be sick. I held off until I got outside and then the cold air took the smell out of my nostrils and the urge went away. I stood out in the weak sunlight for a while, thinking. Finally, I took a deep breath and went looking for something to wipe off fingerprints.

You should report crimes to the police. I didn’t want to be the one to report this crime. Instead, I drove back to the man putting in the pole. He was tamping with a big metal post. This time I didn’t get out of the car. I wound down the window. He looked up.

‘You said turn right at the T-junction, didn’t you?’

He looked at me with contempt. ‘Left,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Well, fuck that for a joke, I’ve wasted enough time on this bloody call. I’ve got better things to do than fuck around in this wilderness.’

I took off with the wheels spinning. About two kilometres down the road, I found a signpost to Daylesford. This time Les was in the front of the butcher’s shop. Going into a place filled with meat now was an act of sheer will.

‘Thanks for the map,’ I said, ‘but I got lost and I had a flat.’

Les looked mortified. ‘Map was okay,’ he said.

‘Not your fault. I reckon I missed the second turning and took the third.’

Les thought about this, eyes roofward. Then he nodded. ‘That’d be right. Then you’d turn into Kittelty’s Lane and then you’d be stuffed.’

‘Stuffed,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I want to sell a copier to anyone lives out there. I’d rather do service calls to King Island.’

I bought some bullboar sausages and set off for the city. In Bacchus Marsh, I went to the post office and found the number for the Daylesford RSPCA. A woman came on. There were some animals in shocking condition at the health place in Long Gully Road, I told her. ‘You’d better send someone today or they’ll be dead.’

‘Long Gully Road,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the health place?’

‘You’ll see the sign,’ I said. ‘Look in the cinderblock building.’

I was reasonably sure they didn’t record calls to the RSPCA. Almost everywhere else seemed to.

On the way back, I thought about Vietnam. In my time there I’d seen a fair number of dead and dying people. It puts another layer of skin on you. I should have been in shock at finding the bodies. Instead, I was feeling mildly elated. My instinct to pursue the trail of Ronnie had been right. Unless this matter was even more complicated than it appeared, one of the bodies was almost certainly his. The other man could be his old pal ex-doctor Paul Gilbert. I thought about the revolver in the man’s hand. Had he shot himself? Had he shot the person in the spa first? I tried to remember the colour of the water in the spa. I hadn’t registered it as any particular colour. Would it have been dark if the person had been shot in the bath? But the person might have been shot dead earlier and put in the bath.

But even if I had found Ronnie, that didn’t advance things much. All I knew now was that the man accused of running down Anne Jeppeson ten years before had died violently, followed shortly by his accuser. I knew that Danny had believed he was innocent of the crime and that his wife said he had been told this by a woman conveying a message from her dying husband. I also knew that Danny McKillop had left messages for Ronnie Bishop. Then Ronnie had come to Melbourne and telephoned Danny.

The only obvious thing about all this was that it went back to Anne Jeppeson’s death. That was what linked the dead men. Another obvious thing was that this was a good time to take a holiday in Queensland. I could simply run away from all this. I had run away from the private school my grandfather sent me to. I had run away from my mother’s expectations and joined the army. I had run away from my wife’s death and from my partner and from my duty to a client. Why not run away? Why change a lifetime’s response now?

It’s never too late to change. When I got to my office, I rang a man called Mike Drake in the Attorney-General’s department. I’d been at law school with him and he had almost gone into partnership with Drew and me.

He sounded tired. ‘You want me to ask the NCA if they know someone called Tony Baker? Are you aware that you don’t ask the NCA questions? They ask you questions.’

He rang back inside fifteen minutes. The National Crimes Authority denied all knowledge of Tony Baker. ‘That might be true,’ he said. ‘Or it might not.’

‘Covers the possibilities,’ I said. ‘Thanks, mate.’ It struck me that a description of Tony Baker might have helped the NCA identify him: five foot six, two hundred pounds, appearance of a .45 slug wearing a leather jacket.

I rang Linda Hillier.

‘I’ve been ringing you,’ she said. ‘What happened to the answering machine?’

‘Forgot to put it on.’

‘Listen, that stuff we were talking about. I’ve been scratching round a bit. Can you meet me in Smith Street?’

18

Gerry Schuster was fat, and that’s putting it politely. She was on a backless ergonomic kneeling contraption in an alcove created out of two computer workstations. I assumed that was what she was on. No part of what supported her was visible beneath a garishly coloured tent big enough to house four small Bedouin.

Linda said, ‘Gerry, this is Jack Irish. He’s got an interest in this stuff too.’

From beneath a greasy fringe that touched her eyebrows, Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish. ‘Meechou,’ she said. You couldn’t have posted a five cent coin through her lips when she spoke.

We were in a large room on the third floor of an old building off Smith Street, Collingwood, not too far from Taub’s Cabinetmaking. On the door, a plastic sign said: UrbanData. The room was divided into three by low hessian-covered partitions. Gerry had the biggest one. Gerry had the biggest everything, as far as I could see. There were five women working at computers. In a corner, a bearded man of indeterminate age, about two weight divisions below Gerry, was staring at a monitor showing a bar graph in at least ten colours.

‘UrbanData collect and sell data on anything to do with the city,’ Linda had said on the way. ‘Cat deaths, bicycle accidents, condom sales, anything. They can make the data talk, too.’

Gerry Schuster shifted, wobbled and said, ‘I’ve got inner-city Melbourne property transfers 1976 to 1980 loaded. What you want to know?’

Her fingers lay on the keyboard like tired sausages, each one wearing a ring.

‘Transfers in Yarrabank,’ said Linda.

Gerry tapped a few keys. An outline map of greater Melbourne appeared, overlaid by a numbered grid. ‘Zone 14,’ she said and tapped in the number.

The outline disappeared, replaced by a map of an area of the city, also overlaid by a numbered grid.

Topaz-ring sausage touched the screen. ‘This is the sub-zone here,’ she said. ‘Twelve.’

She tapped in 12.

Up came a gridded map showing Yarrabank, the river and part of the area on the opposite bank.

‘It’s this area here,’ Linda said, pointing at the screen.

‘Twelve stroke six,’ Gerry said. She hit 12/6.

Now there was a detailed map of part of Yarrabank. At its centre was the Hoagland estate.

‘Let’s look at the picture.’ Gerry pulled down a menu from the top of the screen. On it she blipped a command called Aerial. We waited for a second and then the map turned into an aerial photograph of the part of Yarrabank we’d been looking at.

‘This is smart,’ I said.

Gerry gave me a look of contempt. The sausages flashed through another set of keystrokes and the aerial photograph changed into a jigsaw puzzle of different-coloured pieces.

‘Property boundaries in 14/12/6,’ she said. ‘Each piece is a separate title.’

She pulled down a menu and blipped a command called Breakdown. A box appeared with about ten options. She chose Number. The figure 27 appeared.

‘Number of titles in the sub-sub-zone,’ said Gerry.

‘Let’s say I want to find the owner of that bit,’ Linda said. She pointed to a small triangular piece on the bank of the river.

Gerry put the pointer on it and double-clicked it. From a menu called Data, she clicked the Titleholders command. The screen went blank and then a list of names, addresses, dates and numbers appeared.

The most recent was Tilsit Holdings. The date of transfer was 14 February 1984.

‘If you’ve got a name, you can do a search,’ Gerry said, looking at Linda.

She pulled down a menu called Search, clicked Name and a box appeared.

She typed in Tilsit Holdings. A list of about eight properties appeared. She typed a command, went back to the jigsaw map and blipped a command called Site. Eight pieces of the mosaic went red. They were dotted along the river frontage in front of the Hoagland estate.

‘All owned by Tilsit,’ said Gerry.

Linda took a notebook out of her bag, flipped it open and ran a finger down the page. ‘Can you try Muscanda Developments?’ she said and spelt it.

I looked at her.

‘Later,’ she said.

The sausages were a blur. About half a dozen pieces of the puzzle in front of and beside Hoagland turned red. Some were tiny, two were quite large.

‘Bingo,’ Linda said.

I looked at her. Her eyes were shining.

‘I’ve got more names,’ she said. ‘Can we get the maps and the data printed out?’

‘What do you think?’ Gerry said. ‘This is a business.’

The rest of it took about fifteen minutes. Then we took the folder of printouts around to Meaker’s and ordered long blacks. We sat opposite each other, my back against the wall. Linda was wearing a white turtleneck and a leather bomber jacket. Very fetching.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

She drank some coffee. ‘Well, I was thinking about Anne Jeppeson after our dinner and I mentioned it the next day to a guy at work who was a State political reporter on the Herald in those days. Before the drink got to him. He said he remembered there was a huge fight in Cabinet about selling the Hoagland site. The Planning Minister was Kevin Pixley. Remember him?’

I nodded.

‘Lance Pitman was the Housing Minister who closed Hoagland. He wanted to sell the site without calling for tenders. Pixley wouldn’t have a bar of it and he had a lot of support in Cabinet. Then Harker, the Premier, reshuffled the Cabinet and suddenly Pixley was Transport Minister and Lance Pitman was Planning. And then Pitman approved the sale of the site.’

‘Who would have wanted to buy it ten years ago?’

‘That’s what I asked myself. And why didn’t Pitman want to go to tender? The site was bought by a company called Hexiod Holdings, a shelf company with an accountant called Norman Jovanovich and two other people as directors. Hexiod held on to the property until three months ago, when it was sold to Charis Corporation, the Yarra Cove developers. It was sold the day after Pitman and company got back into government.’

‘What about the waterfront land, the properties we’ve been looking at?’

She put out her slim hand and touched my arm. ‘Jack, there’s something like seventy properties involved. If I read this UrbanData stuff right, at least seven companies started buying or taking options on the riverbank sites about eighteen months before the government announced it was closing Hoagland. At some point, I don’t know when yet, another outfit, called Niemen PL, emerged as owner of all the properties. Six years ago, Niemen consolidated all the waterfront properties into one and applied for rezoning of the area as residential.’

Linda paused while what appeared to be members of a female bike gang came in, talking at the top of their voices. Across the street, a white Holden with tinted windows was parked outside a furniture shop. A tall, balding man in a grey windcheater came walking along from the city side and got in the passenger door.

‘Anyway,’ said Linda, ‘the government knocked them back. They went to the Planning Appeals Board and won. Then the Planning Minister overruled the board.’

‘Why was that?’

The driver of the white Holden was getting out of the car. He crossed the road to our side and disappeared from view.

‘Said rezoning wasn’t in keeping with the government’s long-term plans for the area.’

I saw a match flare behind the Holden’s tinted driver’s side window. The man who had got in the passenger side was now in the driver’s seat. He opened the window a couple of inches to flick out his match.

Linda looked at her watch and drained her coffee. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘The last act in this saga is that six weeks ago Niemen sold the consolidated waterfront land to Charis.’

‘So Charis now owns the whole site?’

‘That’s right. There’s a road between the waterfront properties and the Hoagland land. The government sold the road to Charis a few days after the waterfront deal. And soon after that Charis announced the Yarra Cove development.’

‘Tell us thinkers slowed by age and drink what all this means,’ I said.

Linda gave me her slow smile. ‘I think it means that closing Hoagland was part of a plan to put together a thirty-acre waterfront site. That’s a developer’s wet dream. The only reason Yarra Cove didn’t get started a long time ago is that the Harker government got thrown out at the ’84 election. That meant a ten-year wait till Pitman and company got back in.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘And if Hoagland hadn’t been closed in ’84?’

She leaned across the table. ‘Then someone was stuck with a whole lot of falling-down old warehouses and polluted factory sites backed by the toughest Housing Commission flats in the city.’

The driver of the Holden was lighting up again. I said, ‘Are we both concluding that Anne Jeppeson’s death suited some people?’

‘I’ve got to find out more about the companies involved. But the answer is Yes. I think we should talk to Kevin Pixley.’

‘What became of him?’

‘Retired. Lives in Brighton. The bloke at work is an old drinking mate of his. I’ll see if he can get Pixley to talk to us.’

I said, ‘Can we have dinner? I’ve got to tell you something about Ronnie.’

She gave me an interested look. ‘Ring me before eight-thirty. I’m working till then.’

I took my time finishing the coffee. Then I took a stroll down Brunswick Street, marvelling at the dress sense of the young, crossed over to the other side at Johnson Street, walked back to my car.

The white Holden was gone.

19

I went back to my office and rang the last number Cam had left. He didn’t seem to leave the same number twice running. A woman with a French accent invited me to leave a message. My eye fell on the mobile phone in its little plastic case next to the Mac. I’d bought it in a fit of technological anxiety and used it about four times. I left the number with the French lady and walked over to Charlie’s.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Had the breakfast. Ready for the day’s work.’ He was preparing a length of wood for steam-bending, using a block plane to chamfer the edges that would be in tension. This was to stop the wood fibres breaking loose. In the corner, the low potbelly stove was fired up, and Charlie’s ancient steam kettle was starting to vibrate.

‘I’ve been out since dawn,’ I said. ‘Looking for people.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘A man with a profession. What does he do? He goes to the races and he looks for people who should stay missing.’

The mobile phone went off in my pocket, a nasty, insistent electronic noise. It was Cam. ‘The big man wants to have breakfast tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You on?’

I said yes.

‘Pick you up quarter to eight.’

I felt Charlie’s eyes on me as I closed the flap and put the phone in my pocket.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr Big Business Man. Mr Executive. So busy he can’t go to the telephone anymore, has to take it with him. Next it’s no time even to go for a shit. Take a little shithouse around with you, do it in the motor car.’

‘You need to keep up with things in my line of work,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, disbelief in his tone. ‘When you going to finish that table, Mr Walking Telephone?’

‘Friday. Well, Sunday.’

‘Got a big job yesterday,’ he said. ‘Man wants me to make him a library in Toorak. Panelled. Carved. Don’t know if I’m up to it anymore.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not up to it. Play bowls instead. Give the work to somebody who can do it.’

‘I just might,’ Charlie said. ‘Or maybe I’ll get an apprentice, hey? Smart girl. Strong. Not afraid of work. Reliable even.’

‘Good idea,’ I said, heading for my bits of table. ‘Anyone would want to spend five years making mortice and tenon joints and finding out about the finer points of lawn bowls.’

Charlie finished his planing and took the boards over to the steam box. It was a length of glazed sewerage pipe, eight feet long, sixteen inches in diameter, plugged at both ends. The steam went in at one end and escaped through a hole at the other. He gave it an appreciative smack with a huge hand. ‘You want to know something?’ he said. ‘You can give a schmuck a walking telephone. But what you got then is a schmuck with a walking telephone.’

‘Gee, you can learn a lot around here,’ I said, ‘just by listening.’

The workshop was warm from the steam box and the rest of the afternoon slipped by. At quarter to six, we called it a day and went around to the Prince. What Charlie called the Fitzroy Youth Club was in position at the bar.

‘Jack, my boy,’ said Wilbur Ong. ‘Did I tell you I tipped eight out of eight three weeks in a row now? In me granddaughter’s tipping pool, round this place she works. Hundreds in it. I give her me tips Thursday nights when she comes for tea. Me daughter’s girl.’

Norm O’Neill’s huge nose came around slowly, like the forward cannon on the USS Missouri swivelling to speak to Vietnam. ‘You can only get eight out of eight, Wilbur,’ he said slowly and with menace, ‘if you tip against the Lions.’

Wilbur gave him a pitying look. ‘Norm,’ he said, ‘if you was forty years younger I’d take you outside for jumpin to that conclusion. ’Course I don’t tip against the Lions. It’s the girl. She takes all me other tips and changes that one. She reckons tippin against the Lions is the only sure thing left in the footie.’

‘I don’t think you brought your daughter up right,’ Eric Tanner said.

Stan came out from behind the bar and switched on the television set on the wall in the corner. It was news time. When the set was first put in, Stan tried to keep it on all the time but the Youth Club kept switching it off. Now it went on for the news and football.

The news opened with a helicopter view of Dr Paul Gilbert’s health centre with at least ten vehicles parked outside the front gate.

‘Two men have been found shot dead at an isolated property bordering on the Wombat State Forest outside Daylesford,’ the woman newsreader said. ‘One of the bodies was in a hot spa bath. Police said the men might have been dead for as long as a week.’

The helicopter went in for a closer look. I could see two men in plain clothes standing outside the house. They looked up at the helicopter and the one on the left’s lips said, ‘Fuck off.’

‘Police said the bodies had been identified. Their names are expected to be released later this evening. The property is owned by Dr Paul Gilbert, a Melbourne general practitioner who was permanently barred from practice in 1987 after being found guilty of a variety of drug offences. He served two and a half years of a six-year sentence. Dr Gilbert lived on the property. He has not been seen in Daylesford for more than a week.’

The news went on to other things. I finished my beer and drove home. The streets seemed to be full of white Holdens. Had a white Holden followed me to Daylesford? My neck hair prickled.

20

When I got home, I rang Linda Hillier. She wasn’t at her desk, said a man. He took a message. I was looking sadly into the near-empty fridge when the phone rang.

‘We need to talk,’ Linda Hillier said.

‘Endlessly,’ I answered. Then I went for it. ‘Can you come around here? No. Will you come around here?’

‘What’s the address?’

I walked around the corner to Papa’s Original Greek Taverna and bought some bread, olives, dolmades and an unidentified fish stuffed with thyme and basil from Mrs Papa. Menu price less fifteen per cent, that was our deal.

I was just out of the shower when the bell rang. I pulled on underpants, denims and a shirt.

‘Well, hello,’ she said. There was rain on her hair.

‘You’re wet,’ I said.

‘So are you. At least I’ve got shoes on.’

She had changed since this morning. She was wearing a trenchcoat over grey flannels, a cream shirt and a tweed jacket. I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.

‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.

We stood awkwardly for a moment, something trembling in the air between us. I looked around at the books in piles on every surface, the CDs and tapes everywhere, the unhung pictures, seeing the place for the first time in years.

‘It’s sort of gentlemen’s club mates with undergraduate student digs,’ she said.

I cleared my throat. ‘Come into the kitchen and I’ll give you a drink. What would you like?’ The kitchen was respectable. I’d cleaned it recently.

‘Whisky and water if you’ve got it.’

She had a good inspection of the contents of the open shelves while I got the drinks, watching her out of the corner of my eye and telling her about my visit to Father Gorman. I poured myself a glass of Coldstream Hills pinot noir from a bottle I’d started on the day before.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

‘Cheers. I’ve met Gorman a couple of times. He’s a walker for high-society hags. Something slimy about him.’

‘A walker?’

‘Takes them to the theatre, to parties. When their husbands are too busy fucking the secretary.’

‘You’re very knowledgeable,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a fish. If you’re hungry.’

‘A fish,’ she said thoughtfully. Our eyes were locked. I couldn’t look away. I didn’t want to look away.

‘It doesn’t have to be fish.’

She bit her lower lip. ‘What else have you got?’

I wanted very much to bite her lower lip. ‘There’s some steak,’ I said. ‘Sirloin. Frozen.’

We had somehow got closer. I couldn’t remember moving. She put out her left hand and touched the hollow in my throat with one finger.

‘Sirloin,’ she said. She put her glass down on the counter and slowly folded her arms under her breasts. It was somehow a hugely erotic gesture. ‘Anything else?’

‘Dolmades?’

We looked at each other in silence. I wanted to move my erection to a more comfortable position but I was paralysed. She looked down at it.

‘Have you got a condom?’ she said.

I swallowed some wine with difficulty. ‘I suppose you’ll think I’m predatory if I say yes?’

She nodded. ‘Possibly.’

I put my glass on the counter. She put a fingertip against my lips. I kissed it. As her mouth came nearer I could smell the malt whisky. I put my hands on her buttocks and pulled her close. I could feel the elastic of her panties under my thumbs.

Our lips came together. Her right hand moved between us and cupped me. I thought I’d swoon.

‘I’m going to swoon.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘you should lie down.’

I took her hand and led her into the bedroom. We undressed with the urgency of people shedding burning clothes.

‘Bugger buttons,’ she said thickly, pulling her shirt over her head. She shrugged out of her bra and, for a moment, stood there naked to the waist, big breasts over prominent ribs. Then she stripped off her grey flannels, pantyhose and white bikini pants. She was built for movement: long bones and long muscles that showed under the skin.

The sheets were like ice. But only for seconds.

Around midnight, we ate sirloin steak sandwiches and drank the rest of the Coldstream Hills. It was too late for fish.

‘Did you live here with your wife?’ Linda said in a neutral tone.

‘Yes. But we didn’t sleep in that bedroom. That was the spare room. I couldn’t bear to go into the bedroom for a long time.’

She said, ‘You knew what I was thinking. Do all the girls ask that?’

‘One hundred per cent of them.’

She looked at the ceiling, nodding.

‘One girl, one question. That’s a hundred per cent, isn’t it?’

She smiled. ‘I knew this would happen,’ she said. ‘When I saw you coming down the newsroom with that twerp Legge.’

We were on the sofa, backs against the arms, legs entwined, chewing. Linda was wearing a sort of kimono thing my daughter had left behind. She was about a foot taller than Claire, all of it leg. I was in my old towelling dressing gown.

‘I know what went through your mind,’ I said. ‘Here comes six foot two of solid erotic pleasure.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I thought, here comes exactly the kind of rumpled, predatory, middle-aged sleazebag I always end up fucking.’

‘I thought you said you wouldn’t think I was predatory.’

‘I said I possibly would. Anyway, that was tonight,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to be predatory tonight. All you had to do was lie back.’

‘I liked the lying back bit,’ I said. ‘You’re born to the saddle.’

‘All it takes is a good pommel,’ she said and rubbed her instep down my right calf. ‘What’s that funny shaped scar on your stomach?’

‘I was hoping you’d ask. A man shot me.’

‘Why?’

‘Trespass,’ I said.

‘Trespass where?’

‘In Vietnam. How come you’ve got such strong legs?’

She put her head back and looked down her nose at me, eyes narrowed. ‘Is that a flattering question? Don’t answer. Think. Think about the proximity of my heel to your groin.’

I said, ‘Higher. A little higher. Gently.’

She moved her foot up my leg. ‘I was an athlete,’ she said. ‘From about ten to eighteen. Then I went to uni. One joint, one paper cup of cheap wine, one night in the sack. Ex-athlete.’

‘Ex-track athlete,’ I said. ‘There are other places to display athleticism.’

Linda put her plate on the floor and slid down the sofa. The kimono rode up above her pubic hair. She lifted one long, strong leg and rested it on my shoulder. ‘That is so,’ she said. ‘What do you know about the leather sofa half mile?’

‘It’ll leave a wet spot,’ I said.

‘Wet spot? It’ll float the sofa into the fucking kitchen.’

Later I told her about my trip to Paul Gilbert’s health spa.

‘Jesus Christ, Jack,’ she said. ‘How the fuck can you be so calm? You should have gone to the cops.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Too messy.’ But I was starting to have doubts about my decision.

Harry met Cam and me at the front door. He was wearing a hacking jacket in soft grey checks, grey flannels, a pale yellow brushed-cotton shirt, and a silk tie in shades of grey and lavender. We went through into the breakfast room. Rain misted the french doors on to the terrace but concealed lighting made the square room’s lemon walls glow and the whole house was warm enough for shirtsleeves.

We helped ourselves to muesli or porridge from the buffet. Harry and I had oatmeal porridge soaked with raisins overnight. Cam had a teaspoon of muesli. Then Mrs Aldridge brought in poached eggs, grilled ham, pencil-thin beef sausages, and grilled tomatoes. Harry once told us she had cooked for an English trainer. He said the man didn’t give him a ride for two years after he stole Mrs Aldridge by offering her five pounds a week more than she was getting. ‘Ate like a prince after that,’ he said. ‘Didn’t eat often but when I did, by Jesus.’

In the study after the first sip of Mrs Aldridge’s coffee, dark and viscous as mapping ink, Harry said, ‘Jack, this Dakota Dreamin. We’re thinkin of goin for a ride.’

‘From what we saw?’ I said.

Harry scratched inside an ear. ‘Tony Ericson won’t run the bugger in a proper trial. Don’t blame him. Too risky, history like that.’ He sniffed his cup. ‘He’s happy to see him take it easy on his first outin, though. But we know, there’s only a couple of nags runnin around in the mud now could show him a bum.’

I said, ‘If form’s a guide, this thing may never run like that again, never mind improve.’

‘Chance of that.’ Harry sipped his coffee. ‘Still, Ericson reckons he’ll take a race or two. Cam here likes him.’

I looked at Cam. He’d gone off with the boy, Tom, and the horse after the gallop.

‘The boy reckons he’s taken the horse around that 2400 in just on two-thirty,’ said Cam. ‘Didn’t tell his dad. Tony would have paddled his arse.’

I’d come to realise that Cam’s judgment was vital to Harry’s operations. Harry watched jockeys. Cam looked at horses. ‘Fella’s got the Eye,’ Harry said to me after my second photography mission. ‘Not one in a thousand around horses got it. Can’t learn it. Mystery.’

Harry held up the silver coffee pot inquiringly. ‘Two-thirty on that sheep paddock is hot stuff. Add a few seconds, it’s still smokin.’ He poured for Cam. ‘Still. Spring would’ve been best. But we can’t hold this thing together that long.’

‘Who’s inside so far?’ Cam said.

‘Ericson says it’s just Rex Tie,’ Harry said. ‘Might well be true. Told Rex, he says one word, in his sleep even, he’ll train polar bears in Siberia for a livin.’ He swivelled his chair, looked out into the dripping garden for a few seconds, completed the circuit. ‘I reckon we’ve got a better than usual chance to keep this thing tight. Not your whole stable and the connections in the know here. Just a few yokels.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Fair few things to think about concernin this horse, though. Number one is: do we want to go first up?’

We sat in silence for a while. I wasn’t sure that I had a sensible opinion about when to mount a betting coup.

‘First,’ Cam said. He stretched his legs. You could see he was thinking about a cigarette.

‘What’s the reasonin?’ Harry said.

Cam smiled his thin smile. ‘There’s two points,’ he said. ‘One, like Jack says, there might not be a second up. Two, the first time this horse turned out twice in a reasonable time, he bled. The second time he came off lame. I say put on the money and pray.’

Harry was doodling with his Mont Blanc on the blotter. ‘What do you reckon, Jack?’ he asked without looking up.

‘How much is involved here?’ For once I wanted to know.

Harry shook his head. ‘Not yet. Money clouds the judgment. We want the horse to win for us. Question is, do we want to try for first up?’

I said, ‘If we don’t, the whole world gets a look at him. If he finishes in one piece and he backs up again inside a reasonable time, someone’s going to be looking for the party. We’d be, wouldn’t we?’

Harry pushed his coffee cup and saucer away, opened the brassbound cedar cigar box on the desk and took out the first of his three Havanas of the day.

Cam was out of the gate as Harry’s fingers touched the porcelain cup. He was blowing Gitane smoke out of his nose before Harry had the cigar band off.

‘Not an easy one,’ Harry said. Eyeing the cigar suspiciously, he rolled it between the thumb and fingers of his left hand. Then he picked up a silver spike and violated the rounded end. After several exploratory sucks, he lit the cigar with a kitchen match, leaned back and waved the small baton at me. ‘Sure you won’t, Jack? Makes it all worthwhile.’

I shook my head sadly. You can get over love affairs but you never get over Havanas.

‘Horse’s goin racin with us or without us,’ Harry said. ‘Thing is, if it’s not with us, Ericson and Rex Tie’ll go looking for the stake money. They might as well go on the wireless with the news.’

We sat in silence again. The smoke from Harry’s Havana drifted up towards the lofty ceiling, meeting and mingling with that from Cam’s Gitane. Outside, a gust of wind plucked at the last few leaves on the elm.

Harry made a clicking noise. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘First up it is.’ He opened a drawer and took out a yellow legal pad. ‘This is a big one, Jack. We have to spread the risk around, that’s the way we do it. Done a few quick sums here. I’m assumin we’ll start in the fifties, see the price shrink like a prick in a cold shower when we get movin. If you’re in, it’s twenty-five grand apiece from you fellas.’

He looked at Cam, at me. ‘What’s your thinkin?’

Cam blew a perfect smoke ring. ‘I’m in,’ he said.

‘Jack?’

Twenty-five thousand dollars. I was broke as usual. Most of the Ballarat payout had been distributed among my creditors. What would Charlie Taub say? I knew what he’d say. He’d say: Horse business. Never met a man it didn’t ruin. In any event, the creature would probably break down soon after leaving the barrier and be shot behind a screen.

‘How long have I got to raise it?’ I asked.

Harry took a draw, studied the cigar, reluctantly tipped off an inch of ash. ‘Your credit’s good. Day before’ll do.’ He looked at me. ‘I’d offer you a loan, Jack,’ he said, little smile. ‘Only my late dad always said never lend a gambler money. You’re sidin with the devil if you do.’

‘A wise father,’ I said, ‘is worth more than a clever child.’ We went into the cinema and watched films of all Dakota Dreaming’s races. Only the first one gave me any hope.

21

Kevin Pixley, former MP for Peterslee and Minister for Urban Development, lived in one of a row of mansions with the bay at the end of their gardens. Peterslee this wasn’t. Peterslee was little brick veneers with concrete yards cringing in the flightpath from Tullamarine.

Linda had set up the appointment with Pixley. Then she’d been summoned to see the boss at the headquarters in Sydney. ‘It’s just bullshit,’ she said. ‘Randy little Pom with a wife in Singapore. The creep’s been trying to get into my pants since he arrived.’

I said, ‘Inexplicable. Why would he want to do that?’

‘I’ll deal with you when I get back tonight. I told Pixley you’re helping with legal aspects of a story I’m doing on city planning. Try to keep it as general as you can to start with, okay? No cross-examination. Ask him what he thinks of the Planning Appeals Board, how attractive is Melbourne to developers, that sort of thing. Work him around to 1984. See if the bile surfaces.’

‘Can I wear a hat with a little Press card in the band?’

‘Only if that’s all you wear. They say his second wife liked a bit of rough trade. New one’s probably the same.’

I had to announce myself into a microphone behind a grille next to a door set in a two-metre wall. The door clicked open immediately. Beyond was a short brick path flanked by cumquat trees clipped into perfect balls. It led to a two-storey mock-Georgian structure painted to look like a down-at-heel Roman palazzo.

The front door opened when I was a couple of metres away. It was a woman in her late thirties, dark, pretty in a nervous way. She was dressed for dry sailing: boat shoes, white duck trousers, striped top, little kerchief at the throat.

‘Good morning,’ she said. She had a professional smile, like an air hostess or a car hire receptionist. ‘I’m Jackie Pixley. Come in. Kevin’s just having a drink before lunch. He’s not supposed to. He’s had a bypass, you know.’

It was 11.30 a.m.

We went through a hallway into a huge sitting room with french doors leading out to a paved terrace. An immaculate formal garden led the eye to the view of the bay. It was its usual grey, sullen winter self.

There were two sets of leather chairs grouped around massive polished granite pedestals with glass tops. We went around the setting on the left and though a door into another large room. This one was panelled floor to ceiling in dark wood. A snooker table with legs like tree trunks dominated the room. Against the far wall was a bar that could seat about twenty. Behind it, mirrored shelves held at least a hundred bottles and dozens of gleaming glasses. The top shelf appeared to have every malt whisky made.

Seated behind the bar was Kevin Pixley. I remembered his press photographs of a decade before: built like an old-time stevedore, strong square face, dark hair brushed straight back, oddly delicate nose and mouth. The man behind the bar was a shrunken and blurred version of the one in those pictures. He was tanned like his wife but the colouring looked unhealthy on him. In spite of the warmth of the room, he was wearing a bulky cream sweater. He leant over the counter and put out a hand.

‘Jack Irish,’ he said. ‘Spit of your old man. He was one of the hardest bastards ever to pull on a Fitzroy guernsey.’

We shook hands. I used to get a lot of this kind of thing when I was younger. It always embarrassed me.

‘Sit,’ he said. ‘What’ll it be?’ There was a tic at the corner of his left eye.

I said beer and he slid along to a proper pub beer tap. His stool was on wheels. I caught sight of the back of a wheelchair sticking out from the corner of the bar.

‘Something for you, madam?’ Pixley asked. I realised his wife was still standing in the doorway.

‘Not just yet, thanks,’ she said. ‘We’ll be lunching at twelve-thirty, Kevin. I’m going shopping. Goodbye, Mr Irish.’

‘Pretty economically done, eh,’ said Pixley, putting down a beer with a head like spun candy. ‘I’ve got my instructions, you’ve got your marching orders.’ He took a swallow of the colourless liquid in his own glass. There was just a hint of a tremble in his hand as he raised it. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘why are you snooping around for Ms Linda Hillier? Didn’t I used to see your name in the papers defending criminal slime?’

‘This is just a little job Linda thinks a lawyer might be useful for. I’m not quite sure why. Did she tell you what it’s about?’

‘Something about planning. Sounded like a cock and bull story to me.’

He finished his drink and turned to the serving counter.

He took down a bottle of Gilbey’s gin and poured half a glass. Then he added a dash of tonic and stirred the mixture with a big finger.

‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘I’m not supposed to drink. Fuck ’em. What else is there?’ He took a sip and licked his lips. ‘She thought a lawyer might be useful, hey? Be the first time. Cabinet was full of bloody suburban lawyers. Think they’re the bloody chosen race.’

‘We’re looking at decisions like the one to close the Hoagland estate,’ I said. ‘It leaked out in May 1984. We’re interested in what happened in Cabinet.’

Pixley put his glass on the bar, put his elbows on the counter and looked me in the eyes.

‘This is about Yarrabank, right? What’s the shithole going to be called now?’

‘Yarra Cove,’ I said.

‘Yarra fucking Cove. That what it’s about?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you lot trying to do?’

‘It’s just a general piece of planning.’

He gave me a smile of pure disbelief. ‘Planning shit, Jack,’ he said. ‘I’ve been dealing with the fucking media for forty years. Ms Hillier thought she’d have a better chance of getting me to tip a bucket if she sent you.’ He leant forward until his face was a handspan from mine. ‘I’ve got it, haven’t I?’

I sat back on my stool. There wasn’t going to be a general discussion about planning. ‘Well, I suppose there’s a public service element in shafting the shaftworthy.’

Pixley laughed, a throat-clearing sound. ‘I can think of a couple of dozen shaftworthies,’ he said. ‘So ask me a question.’

I took out my notebook. ‘Who made the decision to close Hoagland?’

He shook his head in mock admiration. ‘You’ve got good timing, Jack. I was looking at ’84 in my diaries the day before yesterday. The answer is Lance Pitman. He convinced the Premier that shutting the hellhole was a good idea. Stop all the publicity about rapes and fires and general mayhem in the place. Thought he had it all stitched up, usual breezy fait a-fucking-ccompli style. Then he got to Cabinet and some people weren’t happy.’

‘But the Premier overruled them?’

‘No. Harker didn’t try too hard to get his way. There wasn’t a decision taken then. Pitman looked like he’d been bitten in a blow job. He couldn’t believe Harker wouldn’t push it through.’

Pixley paused to drink. ‘Stage two. After the meeting, someone leaked it that Cabinet had approved closing the place. Next afternoon, we had the usual rent-a-lefty crowd outside Parliament screaming “Save Hoagland”. Bloody unions making threats. And some cop jockey rides his horse over a twat in a wheelchair.’

‘So at that point the Premier could simply have said it wasn’t going to happen? Hadn’t been approved by Cabinet.’

‘And that’s what he was going to say, mate. That’s what I advised him to do. I heard him tell Pitman that was what he was going to do. He was nervous as hell about the protests. Never expected a reaction like that. Walking up and down in his office saying, “That fucking little bitch”. We had an election coming up, all the bleeding hearts in the party on the phone to him saying we had to soften our image after the way we chainsawed the bloody power workers. Last thing anyone wanted was all the clergy and the social welfare industry getting on heat. Next thing you find bloody independents coming up in the marginals like pricks at a pyjama party. What Harker was scared of was that the party would lose the election and blame it on him closing bloody Hoagland. He wasn’t going to close it in a fit.’

‘But he did?’

‘Well, everything changed in a flash when the Jeppeson woman got hit by that prick.’

‘What happened in Cabinet?’

‘The woman was running the whole protest single-handed. We didn’t know that. Once she was gone, it just fizzled out. Meantime, Pitman’s people are putting it around that the Premier’s authority is on the line, battle for control of Cabinet, leadership challenge brewing, all that sort of shit.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Harker jumped on all the people who’d opposed closing Hoagland. We had a Cabinet meeting and now everybody’s crapping on about we can’t have mob rule, need a show of support for the Premier, in the public interest to close the dungheap anyway, that sort of shit.’

‘So Lance Pitman won.’

‘That’s right. Touch and go for the bastard, though. That Jeppeson woman came within a rat’s foreskin of getting the closure stopped.’ Pixley started coughing and only stopped when he took a mouthful of gin and tonic. ‘Jesus, if it’s not one thing it’s another,’ he said weakly. ‘Can’t even take a piss any more without splashing my boots.’

‘And when the estate was sold, there was a bit of a barney over that, wasn’t there?’

Pixley studied me for a while. ‘You could say that. In spades.’

I said, ‘Pitman wanted to sell it without calling for tenders.’

‘That’s right. Stank like last week’s roadkill.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, people who knew Pitman didn’t swallow all the bullshit about we’ll never get an offer this high again if we put it out to tender until doomsday.’

‘What did they know about Pitman?’

He studied me some more, the tic going in his eye. Then he knocked back his drink and busied himself fixing another one. He poured me a beer in a clean glass without asking.

When he handed it to me, he said, ‘Let me tell you something about my life, Jack. I joined the party with my dad when he came back from the war. I was seventeen. I just missed the war. I wanted to go, lie about my age, be a hero, fight the bloody Japs. Mum wouldn’t hear of it. And I couldn’t bring myself to go without her blessing.’

He took a sip and studied his glass. ‘Four blokes in my class went. Just the one came back. You couldn’t recognise him. Just bones. A skeleton. Bobby Morrisey was his name, little fellow. Never well again in his life. Fucking Japs. There were lots of blokes like that around where we lived. Think the local MP would do anything for them? Not on your bloody life. Too busy fighting factional wars to give a bugger about the voters. Well, I ended up taking that seat from the bastard. No-one thought it was possible. There wasn’t even a branch of the party there when I joined. When I got into Parliament I did what I could for Bobby Morrisey and the others. Felt I owed it to them. Something personal, like they’d gone instead of me. Nonsense that, but there you are.’

I nodded. I didn’t see where this was going and time was running out before Mrs Pixley closed the proceedings.

Pixley did some more coughing. ‘What I need is a fucking smoke,’ he said. ‘Don’t have one on you? No. Bloody woman searches the house like the Gestapo. Bugger that. Thing is, Jack, I found it wasn’t an unusual thing to do, look after people. Sure, there were a lot of toffee-nosed dickheads on our side. But they weren’t in there to feather their own bloody nests, not in those years. That’s why I couldn’t understand people like Lance Pitman when they came in, when I realised what the cunts wanted out of politics.’

He looked away for a while, down the bar. Then he jerked his head around and said, ‘Nice house this, eh Jack? Cost a bit more than my super, you’ll say to yourself. That bastard Pitman put it around that it came out of graft. He’s still putting it around, every chance he gets. Well, I’ll tell you where it came out of. It came out of me mum’s will, that’s where. And she got it from Uncle Les when he died in Queensland. I’m not saying the old bastard was straight. I’m not saying he got it by the sweat of his brow. There’s a lot of stories about him. But it came to me out of the cleanest hands on earth.’

Pixley lapsed back into coughing. His eyes were streaming. The big bar clock said 12.15. I’d have to come back. I gestured and made to stand up. He waved me down.

‘Sit. I’m not done. Pitman. I’m talking about Pitman. You want to know about him? That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘This is all off the record, right? That bloody newspaper even suggests I’m a source, you’ll find out I’ve still got friends, understand me?’

I nodded again.

‘Yes, well, Lance Pitman. Mr Lucky, we used to call him. No bigger disgrace to the party ever walked. It means nothing to him, dogshit. He was a fucking little real estate agent out there in Allenby when he saw the whole place was changing. All the basketweavers and potmakers and bloody unemployed architects making houses out of mudcakes were moving back to Carlton and the place was filling up with young people with kids, big mortgages. Next thing he’s joined the party, he’s branch secretary, he’s signed on hundreds of these beancounters and computer salesmen. Before you look the cunt’s in Parliament. He’d have joined the Nazi Party if he thought it would carry Lance Pitman to glory.’

Behind me, Jackie Pixley said, ‘Lunch is served, Kevin. You’ll have to excuse us, Mr Irish.’ Her voice was as cold as the wind on Station Pier.

Pixley’s eyes narrowed. ‘Leave us alone, woman,’ he said. ‘It’ll be closing time for me soon e-bloody-nough. And get me my diary for 1980.’

I heard her turn on her heel on the polished boards. It made a squeak. We sat in silence. Inside a minute she was back, slamming a leatherbound book down on the bar and leaving. Squeak.

‘Nice girl,’ Pixley said. ‘Met her on the plane to Europe after Ellen shot through. My second wife, that was. She couldn’t stand being alone. Took to fucking plumbers, electricians, any bloke in overalls with a tool. Now Jackie can’t bear that I can’t go out much. And the bloody people around here don’t want to know us. Christ knows what that’ll lead to.’

‘I can come back,’ I said.

‘Bugger that. I’m warmed up. How’s your drink? I’ll give you another one.’

When he’d poured the drinks, he said, ‘Anyway, the bastard went around brown-nosing every living thing in the caucus. We get into office in ’76 and Pitman’s in Cabinet. Minister for Police. That’s a laugh. He should’ve been the first one arrested. But they liked him there, the cops. He made a lot of cop friends. They know a shonk when they see one. He howled like a dingo when Harker moved him to Housing.’

I didn’t have time for a complete history of the Harker government. ‘About Yarrabank,’ I said.

He ignored the hint. ‘What the bastard really wanted was Planning,’ he said. ‘He’d have put on lipstick and a party frock and sucked off the whole caucus for Planning. But not even Harker was stupid enough to give it to him. Not then, anyway. Later on, they were like bumboys.’

I said, ‘Why did he want it so badly?’

Pixley looked at me sadly. ‘Come on, Jack. Where’ve you been? Cause that’s where the big graft is. That’s where the big boys play.’

‘And that was your portfolio.’

‘From ’80 till ’84. Then Harker dumped me for Lucky Lance over the Hoagland sale. Just before the voters dumped the bloody lot of us. I never took a quid, not a bottle of Scotch, in the job. And it was lying around. Made some fucking horrible decisions, mind you. Some places in the city I can’t hardly bear to go. Still. Bloody honest cockups. Pure ignorance and led by the nose by certain people in the department. Some of them pals of Lance Pitman. The bastard came to see me in ’80. I’ll find it here.’

He picked up the diary with 1980 in gold on its cover and riffled through the gilt-edged pages. ‘Got it. Listen:

‘“Pitman came to see me this morning. Slimy as ever. Said he understands that I’m much more suited to the job than he could ever be. Knows all about Ellen. Said it’s a tragedy the way women don’t understand the demands of high office, etc etc. Beat around the bush till I asked him what he wanted. Nothing, he says. Just wanted to say he’s there if I need anything. Then he asked would I like some company. He’s got a young woman friend, lost her husband, understands grief and so on. Told him no thanks. He hung around a bit more, then asked me how I was going on the Baygate project. I said it was going through due process. He said he thought it would be bad for the party’s image with business if it got knocked back. Also, the developers were likely to be generous donors at election time. I didn’t show any interest. Then he asked me if I’d heard there was a chance ColdRoads could put their new packing plant in my electorate. I said I thought it was going to Orbison. That wasn’t settled yet, he said. Raelene came in and said my appointment had arrived. At the door, Pitman turned around and said, as if he’d just remembered it, that, by the way, did I know that the major shareholders in Baygate were also on the board of ColdRoads. I don’t have any doubt about his meaning, but I don’t want to go to Harker with something the bastard will say was just an innocent remark.”’

He looked up at me. ‘You know what happened?’

I shook my head.

‘Baygate got built. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out just because Pitman wanted it built. I should have. That was a good enough reason. But I wanted it to be a fair planning decision. And the department was divided about it. So I ended up going along with the senior man, a bloke called Malcolm Bleek, who reckoned it was a good thing. And come the election, some of the directors of the company, in their individual capacities mark you, came over with big contributions to the party.’

‘Could be just sound business practice,’ I said.

‘Bullshit. But listen to this. Peterslee was always a marginal seat. Held it because people trusted me, bugger my party. But it only took about three hundred pricks to cross over and I’m gone. And in this business you don’t come back. Ten days before the election, ColdRoads Australia announces it’s putting its new plant in my electorate. Jobs in construction, a whole lot of new permanent jobs. Like a marginal MP’s wet dream, eh?’

I said, ‘You’re saying Pitman believed you’d delivered the goods.’

‘I don’t think he was sure. But he came in to see me again after the election. Before he could open his mouth, I said to him, “You slimy little shit, if you ever mention the name of a project to me again, that project is dead in the water. I don’t care what it is, can be the landing strip for the second coming, it is fucking stone dead.” He never said a word, just turned and walked.’

Pixley stared into his glass. ‘Like I said, Jack, your timing’s good. Three months ago, I’d have told you to fuck off. I took the view that I couldn’t get Pitman without hurting the party. And I couldn’t do that. Party’s been my whole life. Been everything to me. Cost me two marriages, kids who don’t want to know me, but that was my choice.’

He finished his drink. ‘One for the road,’ he said and set to work again.

I drained my beer and waited for him in silence. When he’d put the glass in front of me, he said, ‘Mortality, that’s what changed my mind. I was lying in the Epworth waiting for the knife and I thought about dying and fucking Lance Pitman coming to my funeral. I thought, fuck me, if I come out of this and a chance comes up, I’ll shaft the fucker. It’ll hurt the party, but in the long run not shafting him will hurt it more.’

‘Is there likely to be any kind of evidence against him?’

‘You and Ms Hillier are going to have to find that out. Let me tell you the rest of the story.’

Pixley seemed to have gone down a gear. His eyelids were drooping. He shook himself alert. ‘About a year after Baygate, the same senior man in my department talked me into chucking out a planning decision against a company called Hexiod Holdings. Big shopping mall in Apsley. Millions involved. I also had the local MP camping in my office and a man called Massey, Dix Massey. Know of him?’

‘Owns racehorses.’

‘And other things. He’s Charis Corp’s chief cocksucker and standover man. Well, a couple of months later the same man in my department, Bleek, comes to see me. He’s sweating blood. He says there are things he wants to tell me but he wants indemnity first.’

Pixley drank deeply. ‘I said, “Tell me what it’s about, I’ll think about the indemnity.” He won’t. The bastard wants forgiveness before confession. We went on like this for a while, I told him to go away and think about it, come back tomorrow. He comes back the next day, says he had a brainstorm, he was talking rubbish on medication. Stress. Overwork. He’s taking sick leave. Please forget about the matter. Never came back. Early retirement. Never set foot in the building again. He’s dead now. Killed himself about six months later.’

‘You’re saying this was connected with Pitman?’

Pixley shrugged. ‘You can make your own connections. You know the name of the company that had the foresight to buy Hoagland?’

‘Yes. Hexiod Holdings.’

He nodded. ‘That’s the company. Sold it to Charis Corporation the other day, I see.’

‘Can I get this straight?’ I asked. ‘You’re saying that Pitman closed down Hoagland so that Hexiod could buy the site and turn it over to Charis?’

‘Draw your own fucking conclusions.’ He leaned forward. ‘What do you reckon’s the company that ended up building Baygate?’

‘Charis?’

‘Fast learner. That’s right. Came from nothing to be one of the biggest developers in the state in about ten years. Bloody miraculous. And now Pitman’s in the Planning chair again, old Joe Kwitny’s two boys can get seriously rich. Charles and bloody Andrew really can’t miss now. Next thing the Kwitnys are going to want their pederast pal Father fucking Gorman in Parliament.’

Father Gorman’s fulsome tribute to Joseph Kwitny came back to me. ‘Close to the Father, are they?’ I asked.

‘Old Joe’s the biggest donor to that shonky foundation of his. And I think Dix Massey’s one of the directors or whatever they call them.’

Pixley had another coughing fit. When it stopped, he pushed his glass away. He looked utterly worn out. ‘I’ve said enough, Jack. Time for some lettuce and my nap.’

I stood up. ‘Just one last thing,’ I said. ‘The death of Anne Jeppeson.’

‘Spot of luck for Mr Lucky Pitman, eh? Or do people make their own luck? See yourself out, Jack. Come again.’

I said thanks again. On the way out, I saw Jackie Pixley looking out at the bay. I said goodbye and she said something without turning.

22

We were sitting in front of a fire in the house Anne Jeppeson grew up in, drinking tea out of bone china cups with little roses on them. The room was comfortable: good furniture scuffed by life. Outside, it was raining on the big garden, the usual thin Melbourne drizzle that dampened the heart more than anything else.

‘I’m sorry to ask you to talk about something so painful,’ I said. I meant it. There’s a special kind of dread you don’t know about until you have children.

Mrs Jeppeson shook her head. ‘Nothing can make it any worse than it is,’ she said. She was in her sixties, a thin and pretty woman with short hair and a faraway look. She was dressed for outdoor work: trousers, shirt, sleeveless jacket and short boots. ‘Sometimes I’m glad to talk to someone about it. My husband can’t bring himself to. But Anne’s death lies there all the time.’

‘Did you see much of her?’

‘Not as much as we wanted to. She was always busy and she had her own friends. But she came for most Sunday lunches, well, perhaps every second Sunday here and at the sea. We have a place at Portsea. She was there with us for a few days that summer. Our son and his family were here too. They were living in Hong Kong then. He’s in banking, like his father.’

She looked out of the window. Some bedraggled sparrows were pecking the terrace. ‘Do you find the winters depressing?’

‘Yes. Except for the football.’

‘Anne liked football. Richmond. The Tigers. No-one else in the family has any interest in it. My husband pretends to be interested when we’re with people who are. I don’t know why. It’s a male thing, I suppose. I spend as much time outside as possible in winter. I try to ignore the weather.’

‘Does that help?’

‘I’m not sure. I’d have to stop to find out. Why is Anne’s death of interest now?’

‘There’s a possibility that the person convicted of knocking her down didn’t do it.’

She didn’t react. ‘More tea? I think I’ll have some.’

‘Thank you. It’s very good.’

She poured. ‘Have another biscuit. They’re homemade. Not by me. I bought them at the church fete. I can’t bring myself to go to church any more so I go to all the fundraising efforts and buy things that never get eaten.’

I took another biscuit. ‘Perhaps you can tell me something about the days before…’

‘Her death. We hadn’t seen her for a fortnight. She phoned on the Sunday to say she couldn’t come to lunch. That Housing Commission business was on the go, so we saw her on television all the time. My husband was secretly quite proud of her, I think. Although you’d never have known it from the fights they had over those squats in people’s houses she used to organise.’

‘So you never had the chance to talk about the Hoagland protests?’

‘Just a few words on the phone. Well, more than a few words, I suppose. It was very difficult to limit Anne to a few words. She was always so passionate about everything, even when she was little. When she was thirteen or fourteen she knew everything about every oppressed group in the world. It drove her father up the wall. He even complained to the school about one of the teachers putting ideas into the girls’ heads. They couldn’t agree on anything political. If she wasn’t arguing with her father, she was fighting with her brother. She enjoyed baiting him. He’s very like his father. Conservative, I suppose. He used to call her Annie the Anarchist. It’s funny how different children grow up to be, isn’t it? Do you have children, Mr Irish?’

‘Just the one.’

‘I wish we’d had ten, spaced over twenty years. A stupid idea, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

She smiled. ‘Of course it is. You’re very diplomatic.’

The time had come. I said, ‘Do you know of any reason why someone would want to murder Anne?’

She put her cup and saucer down and looked at me steadily. She had the inner stillness of someone who has found meaninglessness in everything. ‘Are you saying that Anne’s death might have been murder?’

‘There’s a possibility she was murdered.’

She looked away. ‘I don’t know what to think about that. Who would do something like that? No-one ever suggested…’

‘It’s just a possibility,’ I said. ‘Both the man who went to jail and the witness have been shot dead in the last ten days.’

‘Are the police investigating?’

‘Not Anne’s death, no.’

‘So it’s your idea that Anne might have been murdered?’

‘My first concern was my ex-client’s death but other things have turned up. Anne’s death may be the key to what’s happened since.’

She gave me a doubtful look. ‘I don’t know what I can do to help you, Mr Irish. Don’t you think it’s a police matter?’

‘Not just yet. Is there anyone Anne might have confided in? I mean, if she had any fears for her safety, been threatened, anything like that?’

‘I suppose the people in that group of hers. Right to a Roof? We never knew any of them.’ She thought for a while. ‘About her safety, I can remember her saying, it must have been at our wedding anniversary party, I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.’

‘At the squats she organised?’

‘I think she meant generally. She was on about mining companies cheating Aboriginals, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention. She usually had something she felt strongly about. Her father used to say she was only scored for percussion.’

There didn’t seem to be anything left to ask. I thanked her for seeing me. The passage leading to the front door was wide enough for us to walk side by side. One side was hung with Australian paintings from the thirties and forties: outdoor scenes, sunlit interiors. I recognised a Gruner and a Tidmarsh. The other wall was covered with framed family photographs.

At the front door, I looked to my right and saw a photograph of four solemn-faced girls in school uniform, two blonde, two dark-haired. They looked about sixteen. Under the picture, it said, ‘Coniston Ladies’ College Debating Team, 1976’.

I looked at the names. Anne Jeppeson was on the top right, blonde, with a snub nose and rebelliously tousled hair. The girl next to her was one of the brunettes.

Her name was Sarah Pixley.

‘She loved debating at school,’ said Mrs Jeppeson. ‘My husband never went to hear her.’

I pointed at Sarah Pixley. ‘Was she friendly with Anne Jeppeson?’

Mrs Jeppeson touched the photograph. ‘Sarah Pixley. They were great friends at school. Two of a kind in many ways. Her father’s the politician. Sarah hated him. She took her mother’s name when she left school. Life can be cruel to parents, can’t it?’

‘It can, Mrs Jeppeson,’ I said. ‘It can.’

I drove away down streets where the naked branches of elms and oaks were woven overhead like basketwork and you could glimpse the pert backsides of BMWs and Saabs in brick-paved driveways. It took a while before I found a place that looked as if it might make a hamburger. I was starving.

The hamburger was of the old school: pressed flat as a powder compact, burnt mince topped with burnt onion and cold-storage tomato. It was made by a new-school Aussie, a Vietnamese with rings in one earlobe and a beanie in the Richmond colours. It wasn’t a bad hamburger. A slice of sun came out and fell on my lap as I sat in the car, eating and watching a deal taking place across the street in a small park. Two boys in Melbourne Grammar blazers were scoring something off a tall youth with a ponytail wearing an oversized leather jacket. Answers to that day’s maths homework, probably.

When I’d finished, I had a sudden urge to see what was happening to the Hoagland estate. I set off down Malvern Road in the direction of St Kilda Road. At Albert Park, I got on to Kings Way and went up King Street through the drab end of the business district. As I waited to turn into Dudley Street at the Flagstaff Gardens lights, a dero in a mauve polyester suit with a filthy Fitzroy FC scarf wound around his neck knocked on the passenger window. I leaned across and wound it down.

‘Help a bloke can’t get a job?’ he asked. He had a long, narrow face, with deepset eyes and a big nose. He looked like a country boy lost in the city for forty years.

I found a five-dollar note and gave it to him. ‘Go the Roys.’

‘You’re a prince among men,’ the man said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’

The future Yarra Cove was much larger than it had appeared on Gerry Schuster’s computer screen. I parked near a wooden observation platform next to one of the three site gates. A burly man in a dark-blue uniform with a red shoulder patch that said AdvanceGuard was talking to the driver of a ute in the gateway.

There must have been twenty earthmoving vehicles, giant yellow insects, attacking the glum expanse of grey mud. At least as many trucks moved around the area on temporary roads, stretches of coarse aggregate sinking into the clay.

Not a trace remained of anything that had been there before. I stood at the rail, ten metres up, and after a while the ripping and pushing of the machines began to make some sense. They were gouging massive trenches, the width of streets, running from the waterfront. All of them led to an oval-shaped area, bigger than a football field, marked out with yellow nylon cord threaded through the eyes of metre-high steel needles stuck in the ground. The site huts, a small village of them, were in the middle of the oval. Eventually, the oval would be a yacht basin, with the trenches becoming canals leading from the riverfront. The Hoagland flats must have stood where a small digger was unearthing pipes in one ploughed-up patch.

For a while, caught up in the sheer scale of the operation, I watched the machines roaring and grinding, scooping and reversing, dumping, wheeling, their grey breaths pumping out and being snatched by the sharp-toothed little wind off the river. The whole scene was one of power: man and machine changing a landscape by sheer force.

This was what it was all about.

Sheer force.

Anne Jeppeson thought she was taking on the power of Heartless Bureaucracy. What hit her was the sheer force of Money.

She died so that someone could make a fortune out of rich people’s desire to park their boats outside their front doors.

It came to me with absolute certainty that my little inquiry into the lives and deaths of Danny McKillop and Anne Jeppeson was of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing would change what had happened, no-one would be called to account for it. Anne, Danny, Ronnie Bishop, the doctor, me—we were all just minor nuisances.

I felt like shouting Fuck into the wind but there was someone else on the platform, a thin man with a week’s grey stubble and wispy hair sticking out from under a beanie. He was drinking a can of Vic Bitter. Looking at me, he drained the can and threw it over his shoulder. ‘Used to live here,’ he shouted over the noise. ‘Fucking shithole. Should’ve flattened it years ago.’ He took another can out of his anorak and popped it.

The daylight was almost gone when I parked outside my office. I had the key in the lock when I sensed someone behind me.

‘Mr Irish.’ It was a friendly voice. I turned. Two men, solid-looking, in dark suits. The one who had spoken held up an open badge wallet. ‘Detective-Sergeant James,’ he said. ‘The Commissioner of Police would like a word, if it’s convenient.’

‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘Tell him to make an appointment.’

‘If it’s not convenient, I have instructions to arrest you,’ he said, voice still friendly.

‘On what charge?’

‘Several charges. One is conspiring to pervert the course of justice.’

‘In what matter?’

‘Murders. Two of them.’

A gap appeared in my social calendar. I rode in the back of their grey Ford. No-one said anything. When it was clear that we weren’t going to police headquarters, I asked where we were going.

‘Collins Street,’ said the spokesman.

At the Hyatt on Collins, the driver showed the attendant a card and we drove into the underground carpark. We parked in a reserved bay next to the lift.

‘Let’s go,’ said the spokesman.

The three of us went up to the twelfth floor. When the lift door opened, Detective-Sergeant James’s partner went out first.

‘After you,’ said James. ‘Number seven.’

I followed his partner down the hushed pink and grey corridor. As he passed a door, he indicated it with his thumb and kept walking. I knocked at number seven. The partner had turned around about ten metres down the corridor and was looking at me. James, near the lifts, was studying a print on the wall.

The door was opened by a man in shirtsleeves and red braces. His tie was loose and he had a drink in his hand. ‘Come in, Mr Irish,’ he said.

It was the Minister for Police, Garth Bruce.

The suite was pale grey and pink like the corridor. We went through a small hallway into a large sitting room furnished with French period reproductions. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, an ice bucket, a water carafe and cut-glass whisky glasses stood on a table against the wall. A briefcase was open on a small writing desk between opulently curtained windows.

‘Thanks for coming,’ Bruce said. ‘Sorry about the escort. Let me give you a drink. Whisky, anything.’

I said no thanks, curtly.

He was at the side table with his glass. He put it down and turned, a big man, bigger in life than on television. He’d boxed. There was scar tissue around his eyes. It hadn’t shown up on television. That would take skilful make-up. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘this is friendly. Let’s have a quiet drink together. It’s very much in your interests. Okay? What’ll you have?’

I asked for whisky and water. He made two drinks and brought mine over. We sat down a metre apart. He took a big drink.

‘That’s better,’ he said, sighing. ‘Jesus, what a day. Politics. Win one, lose ten.’ He took a cigarette out of a packet and offered the packet to me. I shook my head.

Bruce lit up with a lighter, blew out a long, thin stream of smoke and tapped the cigarette in the direction of an ashtray. Ash drifted to the carpet. He sat back, shoulders loose, and said, ‘Jack, I’m told you’ve been asking around about a lot of old business, things that happened nine, ten years ago. That right?’

‘Who tells you?’

He had another big drink. His eyes never left me. There was an appealing sadness about them. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got a lot of time. I don’t want to dance around with you. When I got this job, I appointed a new Commissioner and a new deputy. The first thing I said to them, I said: “The fucking joke’s over.”’

He leaned forward. ‘I was a cop for nearly twenty years, Jack. I know the system, I know what goes on. Everything. These new blokes knew that I knew what I was talking about. Cops’ve been bullshitting politicians for years. They can’t do that to me. I’m not going to sit in a high chair and be fed shit with a spoon. That’s why the Premier wanted me in this job.’

He drew on his cigarette and studied me. The silence and the open gaze were disconcerting. He hadn’t been a cop for twenty years for nothing.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the point is, when this Danny McKillop got knocked behind the Trafalgar, I called in the file. I’ve had it with all this Dirty Harry shit. They see it on television. Twenty years, I fired three shots, all in response to cunts firing at me.’

He sat back, stubbed out his cigarette, put his hands in his pockets. ‘I read the wife’s statement, reckoned there were some questions about what made McKillop so scared. Told the Commissioner that. He came back with all the background, the Jeppeson trial stuff, and the missing person’s report on this Bishop.’

Bruce got up, took out another cigarette, flamed it with the lighter, went to the windows. ‘Can’t sit for long,’ he said. ‘Back’s buggered. Anyway, Jack, what the Commissioner tells me is that the blokes he’s had going over this business find your tracks all over the place. You’re giving Vin McKillop money, you’re in Perth, you’re everywhere.’

He turned his head towards me. ‘What’s really worrying, Jack,’ he said quietly, ‘is that you were out there in the bush at Daylesford and it looks liked you wiped clean a whole lot of places. Places that could have had the prints of whoever topped Bishop and the druggie quack.’

He looked out into the night again. ‘Now that is very, very serious,’ he said. ‘You know how serious, Jack.’

I had seen this coming but I still didn’t know how to handle it. Bruce turned. There was a sheen on his face and on his scalp showing through the short, thinning hair.

‘I never found the doctor’s place,’ I said. ‘Got lost.’

He gave me a slow cop smile. ‘That’s a porky, Jack. If you were going to tell porkies, you should’ve changed the tyres on that motor Col Boon loaned you. Your tracks are all over the place.’

He came back to his chair and sat down carefully. ‘That was a really stupid thing to do. The Commissioner wants to charge you. But he came to me first. That’s why you’re sitting here, not in metropolitan remand.’

We sat in silence for a while. The little carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour, a silver splinter of sound.

Bruce picked up his glass, looked at it, rolled it like a thimble between his big, hairy hands. ‘I knew that prick killed your wife,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘Wayne Milovich. Knew him for years. He was always a dangerous animal. Only had to look at his eyes.’

I didn’t know what to say. There was silence again. Bruce rolled his glass.

‘Crim tried to shoot my daughter,’ he said. ‘She was in the kitchen, looking in the fridge. Went through her hair, through the cupboard, through the wall. Couldn’t pin it on him. Bloke called Freely. We knew it was him. His whole fucking family, about fifty of them, said he was watching TV at the time. Couldn’t shake them. And by Jesus we shook some of them.’

‘I never heard about that,’ I said.

‘No. We kept it quiet. You don’t want to give the other animals ideas.’

He got up, collected my glass and made the drinks. While his back was turned, he said, voice just a little rough, ‘She was sixteen, lovely girl. Not the same again. Ever. Lost to me. To all of us. In and out of the funny farms. Cut her wrists, swallowed anything she could find. They found her on the beach just before Christmas. Her birthday was Boxing Day. Twenty-first that year. My fault, I suppose. My wife thought so, anyway. Never forgave me.’

I looked at the big back, the way he was holding himself. ‘You can’t take the blame for what mad people do,’ I said. ‘You couldn’t know.’ My voice seemed too loud.

‘You could say I did know,’ Bruce said flatly. ‘He told me he was going to do it. Outside court. He said, “Watch your family, Bruce, something could happen to them.” I told him, “You wouldn’t have the guts, you chickenshit little bastard.” I laughed at him. He was a runt, five foot fuckall. You’d never credit that he would do it.’

He brought my drink over. I got up to take it. We stood together awkwardly, not knowing where to look, some kind of bond of loss between us. I knew now why I wasn’t in metropolitan remand.

‘Cheers,’ Bruce said.

‘Cheers.’

We drank.

‘Never said anything to you? Milovich.’

‘Just the normal abuse. I wouldn’t have paid any attention if he had. I wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘Would you have told your wife?’

I shook my head.

Bruce nodded. He drank again, wiped his mouth and said, ‘You see Danny McKillop after he got out?’

‘No.’

‘So what, you heard about the shooting, started poking around?’

‘No. I was away for a couple of days. When I came back there were messages on my answering machine from him. I didn’t even remember who he was. He was waiting for me at the Trafalgar that night. Only I didn’t play the tape till the next day.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Said he was in trouble. He was scared.’

‘You talk to the wife?’

‘Yes.’

‘She tell you about the phone call, about Danny getting the idea he didn’t kill the Jeppeson woman?’

I nodded.

‘You reckoned there might be something in it, did you?’

I nodded again.

Bruce shook his head. ‘And Vin McKillop? He help you along with the theory?’

I shrugged.

Bruce gave me the look. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘don’t come the lawyer with me. If I don’t help you, you’re going to have to practise in Somalia, somewhere like that.’

I didn’t ponder the matter. ‘Vin says someone saw Danny miles away from his car and dead drunk about twenty minutes before Anne Jeppeson was killed. And there was a cop with Danny earlier. Someone called Scullin. Vin says Danny was Scullin’s dog.’

Bruce sighed and shook his head. He went over to his briefcase and took out a manila folder. He waved it at me. ‘I can’t show you this,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you what it says. Sit down.’

I sat down.

‘Danny wasn’t a dog. Vin was a dog. Vin was Scullin’s dog in those parts. And Vin thought that being an informer gave him some kind of immunity. The next thing Scullin hears is Vin is dealing speed on a fair scale and he’s claiming he’s got police protection. Scullin didn’t like that. He put him away. Four years. Vin’s been trying to get even ever since. He’s obsessed with Scullin.’

I said, ‘So?’

Bruce tapped the folder. ‘It’s Vin fed Danny all that stuff about being innocent, about Scullin being around that night. It’s all bullshit. There’s no question that Danny was the driver. Vin’s idea was that Danny might go nuts and nail Scullin for him.’

I thought about this for a while. Bruce sat down again, gingerly, and lit a cigarette.

‘There’s something else,’ he said.

I waited.

‘The gun Danny had on him at the Trafalgar.’

‘The gun the cop says he had on him. Yes.’

‘It’s the gun that knocked Ronnie Bishop and his druggie doctor mate out at Daylesford.’

This took a bit of absorbing too.

‘You know what that means, Jack?’ Bruce was holding the folder against his chin.

I had an idea. ‘Tell me.’

‘Danny was going to kill you that night. You and Scullin and Ronnie Bishop were the trifecta. Good thing you didn’t listen to your messages. Danny wanted to knock you, mate. He reckoned you helped fit him up.’

My mouth was dry. I finished my drink, got up and opened a bottle of soda. The realisation that you’ve been a blind prick is not an easy one to come to terms with.

‘What about the doctor?’ I asked. ‘Where’s he come into this?’

‘Wrong place, wrong time. That’s what it looks like. You can tell me something else. This Hillier woman. She’s scratching around the Yarra Cove history. What’s that all about?’

I said, ‘There’s not a lot you don’t know, is there?’

‘I’ll be open with you. The Yarra Cove history is a sensitive subject for the Premier. For the whole fucking party. What’s Hillier looking for?’

‘I don’t think I can tell you that.’

Bruce got up, big hands holding his back, and walked over to the desk. He began to pack up his briefcase. ‘You can go,’ he said. ‘Those blokes brought you will take you up the road and charge you. Good luck.’

I didn’t feel like going anywhere. I didn’t want to be charged. I didn’t want to tell my pathetically naive story in court. I didn’t want never to be able to call myself a lawyer again.

‘She thinks closing the Hoagland estate was part of a plan to put together the Yarra Cove site. It looks like Lance Pitman closed down Hoagland so that some mates could buy it. They’d started stitching up the properties around it long before.’

Bruce stood his briefcase upright. ‘She work this out all by herself?’

I said, ‘I talked to Kevin Pixley. He as good as shafts Pitman.’

Bruce took his hands off the briefcase and looked at them. ‘Jack,’ he said quietly, ‘do you know who the biggest crook ever to hold ministerial office in this State is?’

‘Be an open field, wouldn’t it?’

‘No. There’s a clear winner. Kevin fucking Pixley. You are sitting here and telling me that you and this journo woman are taking the word of a man who was in the pocket of every shonky developer in the State. Did you go to his big house? Did he tell you about the place at Portsea? Tell you about that little six-bathroom shack in Port Douglas? Didn’t happen to mention his old uncle who left him the money, did he? Or his brother, good old Wal Pixley, the one who always seemed to know where to buy property? The one with the instinct for buying cheap just before the rezoning sent prices through the roof?’

I drank some more soda water.

‘Let me tell you about Hoagland,’ Bruce said. ‘I know all about bloody Hoagland. Closing it was decided on about eighteen months before it came to Cabinet. Only three people knew. The Premier, Pitman and Pixley. Putting together a big waterfront site was Pixley’s idea. He told his mates, small fry, little property crooks he’d helped out, and they started to buy up the land around the site. But things went sour. They say he wanted a huge payoff for his tip. One last payday before the South of France. His mates didn’t want to come over with a massive sum of money before they could sell the properties. So Pixley turned nasty. Said, I’ll fucking show you. And when it came to Cabinet, all of a sudden Pixley doesn’t want a bar of closing Hoagland. He organises a little Cabinet revolt. They say he got his daughter to tip off the Jeppeson woman. And he leaked it that Cabinet had approved the bloody thing.’

I said, ‘All or nothing? That doesn’t sound smart.’

‘It was smart,’ Bruce said. ‘The story is his mates said okay, okay, we’ll come over with the money. Just stop opposing it. Unorganise your little Cabinet revolt. And he did. End of opposition in Cabinet. Then of all the fucking luck, Danny McKillop gets off his face and decides to go for a drive. End of opposition outside Cabinet.’

‘What about when it came to selling the site? Pixley opposed that too. How does that fit?’

‘Well, there’s two schools of thought. One says it was just a replay of the first scam. The bastard wanted another bite at the cherry. More money from his mates. Blackmail. The other school says it was just a big sham. He knew he was going to be rolled out of Planning. He’d corrupted the whole bloody department. Him and his offsider Bleek, the department head. The Premier’d had enough, thank God. So Pixley thought, here’s a way to go out with dignity. Rolled on a matter of principle.’

There was a knock at the door. Bruce went out and closed the door behind him. I drank more soda water and thought about Pixley.

Bruce came back in, leaving the door open. He said, ‘I’m pressed, Jack, I’ve got to be somewhere. If your friend Ms Hillier goes on with her inquiries, she’s going to find out what a crook Pixley was and how a couple of his mates, small-timers, made a few quid out of Yarrabank. None of it’s got anything to do with the Yarra Cove developers. Charis is clean. The site was offered to them and they bought it. But the Pixley part’s not a bad story, the fucking Age will love it, the ABC’s little turds will come in their pants. Their panties.’

He looked at me for a while.

‘Jack, I want a favour from you,’ he said. ‘You’ve made a cunt of yourself over Danny McKillop, right?’

He waited.

I nodded.

Bruce looked away. ‘I think you’ve had enough pain with this Milovich. I’m going to lean on the Commissioner. I’m going to get them to wipe you out of this like you wiped your Daylesford prints. I’ll get the files cleaned up. No charges. No trace of you.’

I felt a surge of gratitude, a great sense of relief.

‘What I want from you is that you get Ms Hillier to back off the Yarrabank story. If it was up to me, I’d give her a hand with it. Pixley deserves his name written in shit on every building in town. But the Premier takes the view that it will sink the government. Taint everything we’ve ever done, everything we do in future. We’ll just limp through our term. And then the voters will dump us. All because of Kevin Pixley.’

Bruce came over and stood in front of me. ‘What do you say, Jack? It’s not a big ask.’

I stood up. ‘I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘And thanks.’ I put out my right hand. He took it in both of his.

‘I’ll give you a number for me,’ he said. ‘Got a pen?’

I got out my notebook and wrote down the number.

‘If anything comes up,’ he said, ‘ring it and say…what shall we say? Say John English wants to talk to the Minister.’

At the door, we shook hands again. ‘You’re doing the right thing, Jack,’ he said. ‘This is the only way to do it.’

The two men drove me back to my office, silence all the way.

23

We were eating ravioli and drinking red wine in front of the fire when I asked, ‘What did Legge mean about the return of the starfucker?’

Linda looked at me thoughtfully while chewing. A large piece of glossy hair had fallen over one eye. She was wearing an old pair of my pyjamas. It came back to me that there is a brief stage in relationships when women like to wear your clothes.

‘In what context was this remark made?’ she said.

‘The day I met you. Talking about you coming back to Melbourne. Later on, he called you an ex-groupie and you said something nice about his wife.’

‘You give good ravioli,’ she said. ‘The Age is full of people like Legge. Done all their growing up there, can’t work anywhere else. What do you do around here, generally speaking, after ravioli?’

‘Oh, around here we just horse around, generally speaking.’

‘Horse around? Can you show me how that’s done? I’m a city girl.’ She slid off her chair into a sitting position on the carpet. The pyjama pants tucked up into her groin. ‘Is there any special equipment needed?’

‘Generally speaking, we make do with the bare minimum. Improvise.’

‘Is that so?’ she said, unbuttoning her top button with her left hand.

Later on, I fetched another log from the pile under the fire escape. The lights were off and the firelight made the room look both mysterious and comforting. We sat side by side on the couch, silent for a while, companionable.

‘Starfucking,’ I reminded her.

Linda said, ‘I went off with a singer in a rock band. I walked out on my husband of three years and my job. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

‘Good band?’

‘Not bad. Power and Imagination, it was called. They looked like artists and poets are supposed to, sort of pale and dreamy and wasted. They got that way on a strict diet of smack, speed and Bushmills.’

She swung her legs over mine and leaned back. ‘Eric was just chipping in the beginning. “Everything’s under control” was his favourite expression. We had a great time. Played all over Europe, did a tour with Fruit Palace, went to a party with Mick Jagger, met Andy Warhol. What a prick.’

‘Were you in love?’ I said.

‘Madly. I was just a kid. Only I didn’t know it. I was twenty-three, never really been out of Melbourne, married to a doctor I met at uni. Then one day this utterly strange and exciting creature came into my life. He had a kind of erotic presence, it was overpowering. And he lived in a world that had nothing to do with shopping and dishes and catching trams and alarm clocks and meals at certain times and lunch with your husband’s parents every Sunday. He put his hand on me and I was gone.’

I found the red wine and poured some into our glasses.

‘So that’s starfucking,’ Linda said. ‘And it all ends in tears, believe me.’

‘Everything’s got a price.’

She leaned over and kissed me half on the mouth. ‘Mine’s cheap. Plate of ravioli is the going rate. You’ve got a bit of an erotic presence yourself, if I may say so. Of the wounded rogue bull-elephant variety.’

‘Many a cow has told me that,’ I said. ‘I want to tell you something.’ I’d been putting this off all night.

‘So soon? There’s another woman already?’

‘I got escorted to see the Police Minister this evening. The cops know I was at the doctor’s place. They know I wiped my prints.’

Her eyes were wide. ‘How did they find out?’

‘Somebody must have remembered the Celica’s rego. Bloke I asked for directions, I suppose. They seem to have traced it to the guy who lent it to me. And matched its tyre prints with some I left at the scene. He says they matched them, anyway.’

‘What now?’ There was concern in her voice.

‘There’s more.’ I told her everything Bruce had told me.

‘That’s quite a session you had,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘You believe him?’

‘Mainly. It makes more sense than the version I half convinced myself was true.’

‘So Danny McKillop ends up getting lumbered with everything. Revenge killer. How come he didn’t start with this Scullin?’

I shrugged. ‘Could be any number of reasons. No-one will ever know.’

Linda lay back and looked at the ceiling. ‘What did Pixley tell you?’

‘Lots. He hates Pitman. He says Pitman tried to get him to do things for big donors to the party and shut down Hoagland so that he could sell the site to mates. He says Cabinet didn’t approve the sale the first time Pitman raised it. But someone leaked that it had been approved.’

Linda pushed back her hair. ‘Pixley says this outright?’

‘More or less.’

‘Paydirt,’ she said. She had the shine in her eyes I’d seen when the fat woman played the computer at UrbanData.

‘Not quite. He won’t go on the record. I also talked to Anne Jeppeson’s mother. Pixley’s daughter, Sarah, was in Anne’s class at school. They were close friends.’

‘Jesus. That’s stretching coincidence a bit. Wait a minute. The Cabinet leak about Hoagland…’

‘Bruce says Pixley told his daughter, who told Anne. Pixley also suggested that Bleek, the senior officer in the Planning department, was got to by Pitman. He’s dead too. Bruce says Bleek was corrupted by Pixley.’

‘Did Pixley mention companies?’

‘Hexiod and Charis. He says they’re the same thing.’

‘This is heavy stuff,’ Linda said. ‘Pass the wine.’

I poured some more of the red. ‘You won’t be able to drive after this,’ I said hopefully.

Linda looked at the fire through her glass. ‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘I’ll just have to stay over and fuck your face off. Listen, I think Bruce is trying to bullshit you. I’ve searched all the Yarrabank titles. What it looks like is that about eighteen months before Pitman decided to shut Hoagland eight companies began buying up the area.’

‘Eight companies?’

‘That’s right. Eight companies with names like Edelweiss Nominees Number 12 and Collarstud Holdings and Rabbitrun. And they in turn are owned by companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands and Vanuatu and Jersey.’

‘Dummies.’

‘Your normal shelf numbers. I’ve talked to five of the sellers. At least three real estate firms were involved. The owners were made reasonable offers. There was no hurry for possession, the agents said. They could stay on, no rent, if they wanted to. They would get sixty days’ notice to move. And there was a secrecy bonus if the buyer was satisfied that no word of the deal had leaked out for thirty days after the sale.’

‘Was it paid?’

‘Yes. More than a year before Pitman went to Cabinet with his proposal the whole area around Hoagland was stitched up by the eight companies. Well, all except one bit, a sheetmetal works. That changed hands about six months after the others. The land anyway. The factory burnt down.’

‘Someone who wouldn’t sell?’

‘Could be. I’d have to talk to the owner.’

‘What’s all this add up to?’

‘I’d say somebody had the idea for Yarra Cove and quietly bought up the properties through the nominee companies. The companies warehoused them, waiting for Hoagland to be closed and sold to Hexiod Holdings. But before anything could happen, the government lost the election. The nominee companies then one by one sold their waterfront properties to a company called Niemen PL and Niemen consolidated them into one property, a semicircle around Hoagland. Niemen applied for a rezoning for the consolidated property as residential. But the new government blocked them. So nothing happened for nine years. Then Pitman’s mob came back into power and the next day Hexiod sold the Hoagland site to Charis Corporation. Soon after that, Niemen sold the waterfront strip to Charis. Hey presto, the jigsaw’s complete. All is in readiness for a six hundred million dollar development.’

I felt tiredness creeping over me. ‘So Charis might only have come into the picture at the end?’

Linda put her glass on the floor. ‘I’d guess that all parties were in on the deal from the beginning. Hexiod wouldn’t have bought Hoagland if it wasn’t sure it could buy the rest of the land. The people behind the nominee companies wouldn’t have bought up the whole area unless they were part of a deal with Hexiod and Charis.’

‘And nobody,’ I said, ‘would have done anything unless they knew that Hoagland was going to be closed down.’

‘And sold to Hexiod.’

‘But you’re just guessing,’ I said. ‘It’s possible that Pixley was the one who tipped off the first buyers and that Charis is just the innocent last link in the chain.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘But nothing you know says that the whole thing was more than a little scam involving some small-time friends of Kevin Pixley’s.’

‘I don’t know what you’d call a big scam,’ said Linda.

‘Leaving Hoagland aside,’ I said, ‘there’s still no real evidence that Anne Jeppeson was murdered. Or that Danny was framed. In fact, I now think it’s extremely unlikely that Danny was framed.’

She hugged herself. ‘Because Bruce says so? Five minutes with the Minister and you come out in reverse.’

‘What he says makes more sense of the evidence than my conclusions. And no-one’s going to prove any different. Even if Pitman was somehow involved, you won’t nail him. You’d have to demonstrate a connection between him and one of the other parties. A tangible link. A beneficial link.’

Linda took my right hand and put it inside her pyjama top, under her right breast. ‘I love it when you sound lawyerly,’ she said. ‘Cup that. And demonstrate a connection.’

I wanted to cup it. And its twin. And to show a tangible link. But I felt a dread stealing over me and I took my hand away. ‘Linda,’ I said, ‘I think we’ve got to close the book on this thing. I’ve given my word to Bruce.’

She leaned back. ‘Your word? Your word what?’

I found it hard to say it. ‘I’ve told him that neither of us will take this any further. That includes the Hoagland sale.’

Linda stood up. ‘I don’t understand. Why? Why would you do that?’

How do you tell people about your fear that you might lose one of the few things that has given your life any meaning? ‘Bruce offered me a trade,’ I said.

‘A trade?’

‘Back off or be charged with a whole raft of offences over my Daylesford excursion.’

Linda shook her head in disbelief. ‘Bruce didn’t offer me a trade. You can’t speak for me. This whole thing doesn’t belong to you. You can’t suddenly take your ball and go home. This is a huge story. It could bring down a Cabinet Minister. Maybe the whole government. You can’t just switch it off because you’ve got cosy with the Police Minister.’

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’m not cosy with him. I’m scared. I’m under the gun. They’ll charge me. I’ll get convicted. Even if I don’t go to jail, I’ll get struck off the roll. I’ll never be able to practise again.’

She looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. Then she turned and went into the bedroom. I waited, stomach tense, not knowing what to do, knowing I was losing her. When she came out, she was dressed. She went over to where her jacket was hanging over a chair.

I said, ‘Can we calm this down? I’m—’

She cut me off, voice even. ‘Jack, as far as I can see four people have died over Hoagland. It’s likely that there’s been a spectacular piece of corruption. I was under the impression you cared about that. Now you’re telling me that the nice Police Minister has explained the whole thing to your satisfaction. And to help convince you, he’s threatened you with legal action. So to hell with justice, you’ve agreed to shut up. And you’ve agreed to shut me up. Well, I’m not yours to shut up. I don’t know what made you think I might be.’

I tried to get angry. ‘Hold on. A minute ago you were talking about a huge story. Now you’re campaigning for justice. Which one do you want to sacrifice me for? Justice or the huge story?’

There was something approaching contempt in her eyes. I knew about contempt in people’s eyes. In my life even outback barmen had looked at me with contempt in their eyes.

Linda took her jacket and walked to the door. When she got there, she turned and said, ‘If your new chum the Minister drops you in it because you can’t control me, my view is you should’ve asked me first. That’s about my pride. About your pride, I’d have thought you wouldn’t have given a fuck about getting struck off the roll if you could find out the truth about what happened to Danny McKillop. And if you think the Minister’s going to supply you with the truth, you have been living on some other planet for the last forty years. Goodbye.’

24

I rang twice before I gave up. She had the answering machine on. Halfway through my second message I felt pathetic and broke off. What was there to say anyhow? I lay down on the sofa and tried to sort out my thoughts.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Linda wouldn’t go along with what I’d done. I’d kept nagging at the thing because I felt I’d let Danny McKillop down. Twice. I didn’t think that anymore. I believed Bruce: Danny had probably intended to confront me over my part in his jailing; he might well have intended to kill me. And if Danny wasn’t framed for killing Anne Jeppeson, then she wasn’t murdered. That left the matter of finding out the truth about Hoagland. But I wasn’t going to give up my attachment to the law in pursuit of the truth about Hoagland. There wasn’t going to be any truth about it. No-one was going to go on trial for what would probably be regarded as a smart piece of property dealing. So it wasn’t a choice between getting justice for Danny or facing serious criminal charges. It was a choice between achieving nothing and getting struck off.

When I finally went to bed, I slept badly, the dream coming back for the first time in years, and, after it woke me, the unbidden and random memories of childhood. The dreams began when I was about nine, when we went to live in the grand house in Toorak with my grandfather, my mother’s father, after my father’s death. My screams would wake my mother in her huge room miles down the corridor. I could never explain the dream or why it was so frightening. It is about surfaces and textures: smooth, cold surfaces like great sheets of iced marble that suddenly become hot and buckle and twist; steel bars that become dense forests of hot, slippery entrails; pale surfaces that feel solid before they turn to blood-red ooze, sucking you down like quicksand. The dream comes with no warning, as if a trapdoor opens and I fall from the safe and known world into a world that is nothing but terrifying sensation in which I am utterly alone.

The childhood memories started after Isabel’s death. They rise up in the margin between wakefulness and sleep and they lie on the mind like prints floating in fixer. All of them seem to date from the years before my father’s death. In one, I see the back of the house of my childhood friend Chris Freeborn. Chris’s little sister is outside the back door, stirring something in a zinc tub. Through the open back door I can see down a passage all the way to the street. There are people on the pavement outside, moving in and out of the frame of the front door. From inside the house, I can hear someone sobbing and saying something I cannot catch over and over again. In another, my mother is standing behind a high fence, her hands above shoulder-height, fingers hooked in the diamond mesh. She is wearing a dress with large spots on it and her hair is pulled back. The expression on her face is one of anxiety: her chin is lifted, her mouth is open slightly as if she is breathing shallowly through it. There are other women on either side of her, but she is not with them. I am looking at her from the other side of the fence and as I get closer I see that her left eye is full of blood.

These two memories and at least a dozen others fill me with unease, but they have no meaning. I have no other memories of Chris Freeborn’s house. Indeed, I cannot bring to mind Chris Freeborn’s face. Nor do I know anything about the fence behind which my mother stands. Or, in another memory, who the men are in the car full of cigarette smoke. Or, in another, why my mother and I are shivering in a doorway in the dark, hiding from the headlights of cars. There is no-one I can ask about them. My mother is dead, my sister was born after my father’s death, the Freeborn family is scattered to the winds.

At 5.40 a.m., exhausted, I declared the night at an end, got up and made a pot of tea. While it was drawing, I found a novel called Over Ice I had been meaning to finish. I read until 8 a.m., when I wrenched myself away from the excitement of a pension in postwar Vienna to clean the flat. Some of the flat. One room. Partly. At 8.30, I drove down Brunswick Street to Meaker’s. The street was almost empty, just me and a few party animals in leather and dark glasses moving towards the caffeine with the care of blind people in a strange place.

I almost missed the item on page five of the Age. ‘Former Minister found dead,’ the headline said. The story said Kevin Pixley had been found dead in the bathroom of his Brighton home. A heart attack was suspected. Mrs Pixley was in London.

What appetite I’d mustered was gone. In the night, I’d turned over the idea of going back to Pixley and putting Bruce’s accusations to him. In the end, I’d concluded that it would be pointless. Kevin Pixley wasn’t going to fall in a heap and confess anything to me.

And what did it matter? Guilt over Danny had started me off. Now I had little doubt that Danny had driven the car that killed Anne Jeppeson. I had nothing to feel guilty about.

I drank a short black and went around to Taub’s. The wood and oil smell of the workshop had the power to cheer me at even the lowest times. Down at my end of the workshop, Charlie had laid out on trestles the wood for my boardroom tabletop: three perfect walnut boards, fifteen feet long, eighteen inches wide and one-and-a-half inches thick. They came from what Charlie called The Bank, the timber stacked in the rafters. The first time Charlie had given me a job using timber from The Bank, I’d asked: ‘What’s this?’

‘Piece wood,’ Charlie said. ‘Swietenia mahagoni. Cuban mahogany. One hundred years old.’

‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for this,’ I said.

Charlie had taken the cheroot out of his mouth and given my statement some thought. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘till you make something nice out of it, it’s just a piece wood.’

I studied the rough walnut boards with reverence. This was one of the classic furniture timbers. Very few makers ever had the chance to work with wood of this quality and size. I turned one of the boards over. Chalked on the other side was the date Charlie had laid the resawn boards down: 10/3/46. This wood’s moisture content was so low that not even the ducted central heating in some Collins Street tower was going to cause it to move. Did an emerging mining company deserve a table made from unobtainable timber air-dried for at least fifty years? Wouldn’t some lesser, wetter timber do? The miners wouldn’t notice. I’d once asked Charlie the same question about a bureau he was making for a hotel owner with drug connections. ‘This arschloch I’m not making it for,’ he said. ‘He’s just the first owner. I’m making it for all the owners.’

I set aside my feeling of awe, put on my overalls and went to work. I gave the boards a preliminary pass over the pride of Charlie’s life, a near-new high-speed 24-inch surface planer bought from a bankrupt furniture factory. I took off a tissue-paper-thin layer, exposing the figure in the wood. I went outside and stood in the drizzle for a few moments so that I could come back in and smell the fragrance of the walnut filling the workshop. After that, I gave the edges two passes each over the long-bed jointer to prepare them for edge-jointing. Then I set the planer and put the boards through again. They came out almost polished. I dipped a finger in a pot of Charlie’s own oil, cold-pressed linseed oil prepared on the workshop stove without chemicals. It was like putting a finger in honey. I drew a squiggle on one of the boards and rubbed the oil in. The wood came to life: smooth, fine-textured, glowing.

I had the three boards on the trestles, admiring the fit of my edge joints, when Drew said from the door, ‘I never saw you look at a client that way.’

I looked at my watch. Three hours had slipped by. ‘I never had a client wanted to be planed, jointed and oiled,’ I said.

We picked up Norm O’Neill and Eric Tanner at the Prince. Wilbur Ong was going to the game with his grandson, Derek Ong, society dentist.

‘They can’t give this bunch a sheilas a beltin, might as well merge with Brighton Bowls Club,’ Norm O’Neill said.

‘I heard Vanotti’s got a groin problem,’ said Eric Tanner. ‘There’s a number of the fellas got things missing in their groins,’ Norm said gloomily.

Things were more cheerful on the way back from the Western Oval. Things were riotous on the way back from the Western Oval. We’d beaten St Kilda 84–79. St Kilda was one of the league’s most improved sides and we’d come from behind to win. It was coming from four goals down—that was what mattered. That was the sweetness. Fitzroy had played its usual game: players dropping chest-marks and handballing at each other’s knees. But then, in the final quarter, Ansell and McCracken kicked two each. Then Grimmer kicked one. We were in front. And we stayed there, fighting off the Saints for ten agonising minutes. At the final siren, in the rain, we embraced one another and drank toasts from Drew’s little silver flask of malt whisky. Around us the Fitzroy supporters croaked out the club song with the joy that comes only to those who have kept the faith through the darkest nights.

At the Prince, the atmosphere was like VE Day. Even Stan was smiling. Even Stan’s wife cracked a joke. We had a few toasts, a few songs, relived a few great games. Then Drew and I took his car home and got a taxi to Vlado’s in Richmond. The warm room was full of Japanese tourists exclaiming at their handbag-sized steaks. We had almost finished ours and a bottle of ’88 Bailey’s shiraz when Drew said, ‘Hear anything more from that bloke who tried to heavy you?’

I told him about finding the two bodies.

He looked at the roof, looked at me. ‘Fucking oath, Jack. Have you gone completely out of your brain?’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘there’s more.’ I told him about Linda’s digging into Hoagland and my discussion with the Minister.

When I’d finished, he cut the last of his rump in two. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘you won’t mind my saying you’re a stupid prick, will you?’

‘Not really.’

He put a piece of steak in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, looking around the room. ‘Mate, you don’t seem to have got a grip on something,’ he said.

‘What particular thing is that?’ I asked.

‘You’ve gatecrashed a party at the big end of town. With McKillop, I thought you were getting mixed up with some drug business and someone was giving you a chance to pull your head in. Now you tell me you’ve been trying to tie up the Jeppeson death and McKillop’s conviction and death and Bishop’s and the doctor’s, the whole bloody mess, with Yarra Cove.’

He looked around again. ‘This is dangerous stuff. We shouldn’t even talk about it in public places.’

‘Come on, Drew,’ I said. ‘This is Melbourne.’

Drew drank some wine. He leaned forward. ‘Jack, I think you’re out of touch. You’re still stuck in the days when the Melbourne Club ran this town. All those pompous arseholes who owned factories and insurance companies and played the market. All went to Melbourne Grammar or similar and basically silly buggers who didn’t like Jews or Ities or other kinds of wogs. Otherwise reasonably harmless twerps. Their day’s gone, Jack. They woke up one day and found the real money was in property development. Residential subdivisions. Hotels. Shopping centres. Office blocks. And most of the people making the money didn’t give a shit about joining the club.’

He dropped his voice. ‘I’m talking about people like Joe Kwitny, mate. Came out here with two pounds and holes in his socks. Got a job as a brickie, didn’t know a brick from a banjo. Some old bloke in Preston gave him a crash course for ten bob. Next thing Joe’s the gun brickie, the union’s telling him to slow down or a wall’s going to fall on him. So bugger the union, Joe borrows a few quid, goes off concreting over backyards, putting up brick-veneer houses. That was the beginning. The next thing people like Joe were employing hundreds, doing million-dollar deals, putting up buildings overnight, building whole fucking suburbs out there on the fringes. And on the way they found out how to make sure government gave them the decisions they wanted, how to get the unions on side.’

Drew paused and looked at me for a while, the way teachers look at less-than-quick pupils. ‘These people don’t think bribery is a crime, Jack,’ he said. ‘It’s just an alternative way to get things done. Blackmail? Well, some people won’t co-operate. Rough stuff, murder maybe? Well, accidents happen. Some of the smarter ones even take the long view. They’ve gone into politics, stacking party branches, getting the right people into Parliament.’

Drew paused, spoke slowly. ‘I’m talking about Joe Kwitny, Jack. Charis fucking Corporation.’

He sat back. I didn’t know quite what to say. Drew didn’t normally deliver lectures. We ate in silence for a while. Then he said, ‘Well, that’s the lecture. That’s the way the world is now, and mate, you have been wandering around in it like some yokel from Terang in town for the day. You think you’re doing something good, not so? You see it in terms of right and wrong, justice, that kind of thing. Well, pardon me, you know and I know that the system is not about fairness. It’s not about good and bad. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s about power, Jack. I know that. You should know that.’

‘At least I knew when to back off.’

Drew shook his head. ‘I don’t know if you’ve backed off in time. One thing’s for sure. Bruce is no white knight. He’s going to rebury this smelly stuff you’ve been digging up. You just have to make sure he doesn’t put you in the hole too.’

‘I could get myself some insurance.’

He cocked his head. ‘Don’t follow you?’

‘Say it gets into the papers.’

Drew didn’t reply until he had aligned his cutlery, wiped his mouth with his napkin, folded it, put it under his side plate, signalled the waiter and ordered two brandies.

‘Mate,’ he said, ‘don’t let the thought cross your mind. If they can hang this stuff on anybody, it’ll be on small fry and people already dead. And you’ll keep. These people have got long memories. They’ll come back for you.’

At home, I could smell Linda’s perfume on the pillows. For a moment, I lay there, drowning in a sense of loss. Then I got up and changed the sheets and pillowcases. I slept better. The first night is always the worst.

Phillip Epstein, art dealer, didn’t ask to see the provenance, although I had it.

‘You’d expect, what?’ he said.

‘I need twenty-five thousand as soon as possible,’ I said. ‘They should cover that.’

He patted my arm. ‘Sisley,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a reasonable expectation. Where on earth did you get them?’

‘From my wife. Her grandfather once owned the whole notebook.’

He frowned. ‘You’ve got more?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘They’re the only material thing I’ve got left that’s worth anything.’

‘I’ll be happy to advance the twenty-five thousand. We’d want to take our time selling.’

‘It would help,’ I said, ‘if it was in cash.’

He smiled. ‘Let’s go in the back and have a drink. We’re not talking used notes in small denominations, are we?’

‘Large denominations would be better.’

25

Hardhills was as we’d left it: cold, damp, three utes and a dog outside the pub. On the way, Harry said, ‘Fill you in, Jack, next Saturday’s the day. Caulfield, race four. Two thousand four hundred. Bit short for the bloke’s breeding but it’ll do. Next point. We’re puttin a girl on him.’

‘I thought it was going to be Mick Sayre,’ I said.

Harry popped a Smartie. ‘Turns out Mickey’s a bit of a worry,’ he said. ‘Cam here was talkin to a clocker, fella who knows a few things. Says Mickey put a whole Greek syndicate on a plunge up in Sydney. On the day the stable got such a fright when they saw the odds go to buggery, they told Mick, bugger this, we’re not goin on at four to one, we’ll do it another day. Trouble was, Mickey’s more frightened of the Greeks than the stable. Wins three lengths clear. Next start, two to one favourite. Greeks love Mick but he doesn’t ride for that stable any more.’

‘Who’s the girl?’

Harry turned and gave me a wink. ‘You might’ve seen her. Nicest little bum on the turf.’

‘That’s her qualification?’

Harry smiled. ‘Nancy Farmer. Rides for her dad. Harold. Two city wins. Mostly she rides the cattle out in the bush. Cam’s happy. Wanted a girl from the start.’

‘Why’s that?’

Cam was driving the big BMW. He took it around a speeding semi with a smooth change-down and a burst of power before he gave me a glance. ‘There’s two reasons,’ he said. ‘One, women can keep their mouths shut. They don’t get on the phone, go down the pub, do all their mates a favour. Reason two, a little girl’s been looking after this bloke fulltime for a year. They’re in love. Her and her brother’s all that’s ridden him. You don’t want to put some cocky bastard on him, hard hands, knows it all, thinks he can thrash him home.’

‘I’m convinced,’ I said. ‘What about her bum?’

‘Bum?’ Cam said. ‘Since when do jockeys have bums?’

We parked in the same place as before. Cam got out to have a smoke. Harry put his seat back.

‘She’ll be along in a minute,’ he said.

‘The jockey?’

‘Staying at Ericson’s till the race. I want her to get to know this Dakota Dreamin.’

An old Land Rover pulled up next to us. A woman in her early twenties got out, moleskins, checked shirt, short hair, windburnt face: lean as string. Cam went over. They shook hands, said a few words.

Cam came back and got in, drove off. She followed us around and over the low hills and parked next to us at Ericson’s. She was out quickly, waiting, hands in flap pockets.

It was just as cold as the time before. Cam said, ‘This is Mr Strang and Mr Irish, Mr Strang’s lawyer.’ We shook hands. She was good-looking, big mouth, no make-up, a hint of wariness in the eyes.

‘You’re on time. That’s good,’ said Harry.

Tony Ericson came up the gravel path from the stables. More handshakes.

‘Use your kitchen table, Tony?’ Harry said. ‘Bit of talkin to do.’

Ericson led us inside the house and down a passage to a big, warm kitchen with an old Aga stove. We sat down at the table. Harry was at the top. Nancy Farmer was opposite me. She put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers. She had big wrists and strong hands like Harry’s.

‘Nancy,’ said Harry. ‘Mr Delray told you he wanted you to ride a bit of track on this Dakota Dreamin before Saturday.’

She said, ‘That’s right.’

Harry said, ‘This horse is goin to win.’

She kept looking at him, no expression.

‘It’s goin to win,’ Harry said, ‘because it’s the best horse in the race. There’s nothin else happenin.’

Nancy nodded. A little tension went out of her shoulders. ‘Why me?’ she asked.

‘Like your style, good hands, got a bit extra out of that Home Boy in the spring.’

‘Didn’t get me any more races in town,’ she said.

Harry smiled. ‘This’ll be the makin of you. Tony, tell Nancy about this bloke.’

Tony Ericson didn’t do much public speaking but he got through it. At the end, he said, ‘He goes down the beach every day. Me girl rides him in the water, on the sand. Four days he does a bit of track, not too much. Not the way the others do it, but he’s rock-hard now. Just right.’

Nancy said, ‘You trialled him at the distance?’

Tony shook his head. ‘No. He’s bred for the two miles but he’ll run a strong race at anything over two thou.’

She looked around the table. ‘I’ll do my best.’

Harry said, ‘You’ll understand if I say you can’t make any phone calls without Mr Ericson’s with you? You got a mobile with you?’

She shook her head. ‘Is this big?’ she asked.

Harry nodded. ‘Big enough.’

The tip of her tongue came out and moistened her lower lip. ‘I don’t have any calls to make,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said Harry. ‘There’s a thousand for the week’s work here. You want to talk about the race fee?’

Nancy looked at him, unsmiling. ‘It’s laid down.’ She paused. ‘Excuse me, are you the Harry Strang…?’

‘Things go right,’ Harry said slowly, ‘Mr Ericson here is a generous owner.’ He patted the table with both hands. ‘Well, business over. Let’s have a look at the bloke.’

At Dakota’s stable, a small girl in overalls was waiting, stroking the horse’s nose. She had short red hair and freckles.

‘This is me girl Denny,’ Ericson said. ‘Slim’s sort of her horse.’

Nancy shook hands with Denny. ‘Pleased to meet you, boss,’ she said. ‘Now that’s what I call grooming. You want to bring him out?’

The girl blushed with pleasure.

Dakota came out calmly, gleaming like a horse in a painting. Denny handled him as if he were a big labrador. He was saddled and bridled inside a minute. We walked behind Nancy, Denny and the horse to the track. Dakota had his head down, his neck extended. He looked as if he were deep in thought, a horse at peace with himself and his surroundings.

‘Walks like a stayer,’ Harry said. ‘You can always tell.’

At the track, Nancy adjusted the stirrups, swung up effortlessly.

‘Have a little muck about, get the feel of him,’ said Tony Ericson.

We watched for fifteen minutes while she took him up and down the track, trot, canter, short gallop, bit of walking around. When she came back to us, she said, ‘Nice horse, likes to run,’ rubbing his jaw. She got off and gave the reins to Denny.

‘Walk with me,’ Harry said. They hung back. When I looked around, they had their heads together, Harry talking with his hands. At the top of the gravel path, they caught up.

‘Friday, I’ll be back, talk some tactics, look at some movies,’ Harry said.

On the way home, Harry said to Cam, ‘Girl can ride. Strong, too. You got a feelin?’

Cam flicked a glance at him. ‘You know what Oscar Wilde said? Only one thing makes more of a fool of a man than a woman. And that’s a horse.’

Harry said, reflectively, ‘That so? Didn’t know old Oscar rode horses. Knew he rode everythin else.’

The sun came out as we drove over the Westgate Bridge. Off to the left, far off in the distance, I could see the observation platform at Yarra Cove. They had put three flags on it now. Big flags.

26

I got in another two hours’ work at Taub’s. The three tabletop boards had to be joined with hide glue. Charlie wouldn’t use anything else for this kind of work. Some cabinetmakers use epoxy resin glues. The joints were claimed to be stronger than the woods they joined. When I mentioned this to Charlie, he said, with feigned incomprehension, ‘Stronger than the wood? You want joints stronger than wood, welding is the trade.’

I measured out a quantity of hide glue, golden granules, dissolved them in water, added some more granules and heated up the liquid in the glue pot. While it was warming, I put the boards on the gluing stand and dry-clamped them. The fit was good. I unclamped them and, when the glue was hot, I carefully painted it on two interior edges with a hogbristle brush. Then I put hardwood strips down the outside to protect the outer edges and one-inch dowels outside them to spread the clamp pressure. I tightened the eight bar clamps, the outside pair first, then alternately on each side. At each end and at three intervals along the surface, I used three-by-three hardwood cauls and C-clamps to make sure that the pressure of the bar clamps wasn’t distorting the assembly.

It had to be absolutely flat. There were no second chances.

Then I tinkered with the clamps for a good fifteen minutes, trying to ensure that I had enough pressure but didn’t force out glue and starve the joints. ‘Trust your hands,’ Charlie used to say in the early days. ‘If you’re straining, it’s too tight.’ I didn’t quite understand this: Charlie could tighten the nuts on the Sydney Harbour Bridge with his bare hands without taking any strain.

When I’d cleaned up, I went home. Reluctantly.

Sunday night. I cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, fed the dishwasher, tried to read the Sunday Age, opened a bottle of wine, drank half a glass, stared at the contents of the fridge. Made a cheese and gherkin sandwich. Women come into your life and all the hard-earned self-sufficiency deserts you. Suddenly you’re half a person again.

The phone rang. Long-distance beeps.

‘Jack Irish?’ Ronnie Bishop’s friend Charles Lee in Perth.

I said I was sorry about Ronnie’s death. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I wasn’t interested in Ronnie anymore.

‘Jack,’ he said. ‘I should tell the police this now that Ronnie’s dead. Remember I told you about the answering machine tape? How it was missing?’

‘I remember.’

‘Well, I found it. About half an hour ago. Under the drinks cupboard next to the phone. It must have slid under there when the burglar tipped out the phone table drawer. It’s got the messages from Melbourne for Ronnie.’

‘Have you listened to them again?’

‘Yes. They’re from different people. The first one left a name and phone number. Danny McKillop. Do you want the number?’

I said, ‘No. I’ve got that number. What about the other one?’

‘There’s just a message. No name. It’s a man.’

‘What’s the message.’

‘I’ve written it down. He said, “Ronald, listen to me carefully. It’s absolutely vital that you bring the evidence. You were stupid to take it and now you’ve been doubly stupid. I’ll have to extricate you.” Then he says something that sounds like “sculling’s the one in trouble”. And then he says, “Ring me when you get here.”’

‘Can you play that to me over the phone?’ I said.

Charles hesitated. ‘I can try. I’ll put it on the stereo tape deck and hold the phone near the speakers. Hang on.’

I could hear him moving about the room. There were a few false tape starts, then he came back on and said, ‘Here goes.’

There was an electronic whine, a pause, a throat-clearing. Then the rich voice of Father Rafael Gorman said, ‘Ronald, listen to…’

When the message finished, Charles said, ‘Did you get that?’

I said, ‘Loud and clear.’

‘Do you know who it is?’

‘I think so. Well done, Charles.’

‘I should tell the police, shouldn’t I, Jack? It could be very important.’

I made a decision without a second’s conscious thought. ‘Charles,’ I said, ‘this is important but I want you to wait until I call you before you tell the police. It won’t be more than forty-eight hours, I promise. Will you do that?’

He didn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. Yes, I will. Jack, there’s something else.’

‘Yes?’

I waited.

‘This is probably quite meaningless.’

I waited.

‘I certainly wasn’t going to tell those men, but there was something the day Ronnie left for Melbourne.’

‘What was that?’ I said encouragingly.

‘Well, I drove him into the city that morning. I had the day off. He said he had to get something out of his safe deposit box at the bank. I dropped him outside and waited, double parked. He was only about five minutes. Then we drove back to his place. His suitcase was already packed and he opened the zip compartment and he took something out of his jacket pocket and put it in.’

‘Any idea what?’

‘No. Something flat, that’s all.’

‘And you think that’s what he’d got out of his safe deposit?’

‘Yes. Well, I can’t be sure. I felt bad about not telling you before.’

‘I’m glad you have now. It could be useful. Keep it to yourself. Thanks, Charles. Ring me if you think of anything else. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Maybe you can help with something else. Someone I don’t know knows I was in Perth asking about Ronnie. Have you told anyone about me?’

Again, he didn’t hesitate. ‘No. It’ll be that architect bitch next door. When you were in your car I looked around and I could see her shape against the venetian blind upstairs. She thinks you can’t see her, but there’s light behind her. I’ve seen her there before. Once when my friend from work came to keep me company while I was tidying up Ronnie’s garden she had a good look. And then she came out and took the dog up the street and back. It was because she couldn’t see his licence plate from the window, I’m sure.’

‘Who would she tell?’

‘Those men, I suppose. The ones I told you about.’

I said, ‘Thanks again, Charles. I’ll be in touch.’

In the kitchen, I poured a glass of wine. There was a little tingle in my body. I found a piece of paper for doodling and sat at the kitchen table.

Father Gorman had said, Scullin’s the one in trouble. Trouble over what? Danny McKillop’s attempt to get his case reopened? Not if Bruce was to be believed. Why then had Ronnie come to Melbourne if not in response to Danny’s phone call? How would Scullin be involved? What was the evidence his old employer wanted him to bring? Evidence of what? Had Gorman steered Ronnie out to the doctor’s establishment in the bush so that he could be murdered? Did this have any connection with Danny?

The phone rang again. Blinking, I looked at my watch: 11.15. It was Linda. Just when I’d stopped missing her for three minutes at a time.

‘You alone?’ she said.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I had three girls home delivered from Dial-a-Doll.’

‘I’ve been burgled. The place is a shambles.’

I sat upright. ‘What’s gone?’

‘My laptop. All my disks. Whole filing cabinet emptied. Not the television or the VCR or the stereo.’ There was a pause. ‘It’s a bit scary.’

‘Don’t touch anything. Grab some clothes and come over here. We’ll get the cops in tomorrow.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m okay. I’ve already rung the cops. If I don’t stay here tonight I’ll never come back.’

‘I’ll come over.’

‘No. It’s fine. I just wanted to tell you. Hear your voice, really. There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘Everything I’ve put into the computer system at work is gone. Wiped.’

‘Accident?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Don’t you have some kind of security?’

‘Yes. There’s more.’

I waited.

‘That creep in Sydney I told you about? The regional director?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s told my boss here that I’m to drop any story about Yarra Cove or anything to do with Charis Corporation.’

Suddenly the room felt cold. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’d think about it.’

‘Sure you don’t want to come over here?’

‘Yes. I’ll call you in the morning.’

‘Call me any time. How did they get in?’

‘Don’t know. The front door was still locked.’

‘Have you got a chain?’

‘Yes. And two bolts.’

‘Lock up tight after the cops leave. And don’t let the cops in without showing you their ID. Get them to push it under the door or through the letterbox. Okay?’

‘Right, O Masterful One.’

‘I think you’re back to normal.’

‘Getting there. Talk to you tomorrow.’

‘Early. Before you go to work. Goodnight.’

There was a moment’s silence. Neither of us wanted to be the first to hang up.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Missed you.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Life’s been lacking something.’

I put the bars on the front and back doors and looked down the lane for a while before I went to bed. I tried to sleep but I kept thinking about Drew’s description of the rise of the Kwitny empire. He was right. I had been a bit like a yokel from Terang. For a whole decade, I hadn’t paid any attention to anything except cabinetmaking and plodding around looking for people who didn’t want to be found.

27

Linda rang at 7.30 a.m. I was up, just out of the shower.

‘Let’s have breakfast,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got much time.’

We met at Meaker’s at eight and ordered orange juice and muesli.

‘I’m not sure what to do,’ she said. She looked thinner somehow. ‘I’m not as brave as I thought I was.’

‘It comes to us all.’

‘It’s not just the burglary,’ she said. ‘I was being followed yesterday. I tracked down the man whose sheetmetal works across the road from Hoagland burnt down. He didn’t want to know me. Then he rang yesterday and said he’d thought about it and he’d talk to me. I went out to his house, out in Swanreach. Lives all alone in this brick-veneer palace. He says he didn’t want to sell at first because it suited him to be in Yarrabank. Then he sniffed that the whole place was being bought up, so he held out, thought he’d get twice what they were offering.’

She was silent while our breakfast was served. We both drank some juice.

‘He says two men came to see him at home. Just arrived at the front door. They offered him ten per cent more than the agent’s offer. When he said no, one man said there wouldn’t be any more offers. No threats. After that, a whole series of weird things began to happen. The two family dogs died, poisoned. About ten kilos of broken glass was put in the swimming pool. Undertakers got calls to go to the house. One night, five different pizza deliveries were made. Then his wife’s car went in for a service and when she drove it again the brakes failed. She broke her arm and some ribs.’

‘Did he go to the cops?’

‘Early on. They said there was nothing they could do. Hire a security firm.’

‘Did he tell them about the pressure to sell his factory?’

‘He says yes. He went to his local MP, too.’

I said, ‘Swanreach? Don’t tell me.’

She nodded. ‘His MP’s Lance Pitman.’

‘Eat your muesli,’ I said, not feeling like mine. We sat there, eating and looking at each other.

‘And then?’ I asked when we’d almost finished.

‘He says business began to fall off even before the men came to see him. He depended on five or six major customers. Two went, and then after the visit his biggest customer, more than half his business, went elsewhere.’

‘Reasons?’

‘They gave him a story he didn’t believe. He says they couldn’t look him in the eye.’ She paused and ate a spoonful. ‘And then one Friday night the place burnt down. Blew up, actually. Full of gas cylinders.’

‘Cause?’

‘Made to look like negligence, he says. Insurance wouldn’t pay. He thinks one of his workers set it up.’

‘So he sold?’

‘Yes. He was ruined. He says he could have sold the business for half a million before it all started. After the fire, it was worth nothing. No customers. No premises. The agents came around and offered half of the original offer and he took it.’

‘Why did he change his mind about talking to you?’ I asked.

Linda was studying the street. ‘He says it’s been boiling inside him all these years. He’s convinced the whole business killed his wife. And his divorced daughter, who lived with him with her kids, she said he’d gone neurotic and went to live somewhere else.’

‘Tell me about being followed.’

She smiled, a thin smile. ‘Talking about neurotic,’ she said. ‘All day Saturday I had this feeling someone was watching me. Then yesterday, after I left Swanreach, I stopped for gas and a car, ordinary cream Holden or something with two men in it, pulled up at the air hose. I realised I’d seen it parked way down the road from the house I’d been at.’

She took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, I went in to pay and I buggered about, bought a drink, looked at the magazines, studied the engine additives, fanbelts, whatever. The guy at the air hose pumped three tyres and then he stuck on the fourth one, at the back. His head kept bobbing up. Finally, he hung up the hose and they drove off. I went outside quickly and they were pulling up by the side of the road about a hundred metres down. In front of a parked car. I went by them—I didn’t have any choice—and they zipped out, forced their way into the traffic and sat about five cars behind me. I pulled in at a liquor place in Alphington and when I came out, they were at the kerb about two hundred metres back. So I changed direction, went back past them.’

‘You realised that would tell them for sure they’d been spotted?’

Linda shrugged. ‘I hate to say it, but I was completely spooked. I was hoping I was wrong. I hoped they’d go away.’

‘But they didn’t?’

‘They did a U-turn right in the face of traffic. I drove on for a bit, did an illegal U-turn at some lights, saw them on my right, and then I didn’t see them again.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Home first. Put the interview notes on the laptop. Then to work. That’s when I got the message from this arsehole in Sydney. Via this spineless arsehole in Melbourne. And discovered my computer wipeout.’ She smiled another wan smile. ‘First I’m followed, then at work I get two quick kidney punches. Go home for the knockout blow. Every square inch of the place searched. I kid you not. My old photo albums, Christ. They took the top off the lavatory cistern. Left it in the bath.’

I thought about Eddie Dollery and the money in the dishwasher. Was that only two weeks ago? Our coffees came. I was trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t reveal the jellyback in me when Linda said, voice low, ‘Oh, and about your friend Ronnie Bishop.’

‘What?’

‘I talked to someone I know from when I was on the compassion beat at the Age. She’s a welfarey, a youth worker, knew Ronnie Bishop from way back. She says she wanted to give a party when she heard he was found dead.’

I waited.

‘She says she thinks he got a whole lot of street kids into porn movies. She says she’s heard that Father Gorman runs the Safe Hands Foundation as a kind of brothel for sleaze-bags looking for under-age sex. Ronnie was a recruiting agent on the street.’

I remembered something Mrs Bishop had said: Ronnie loved films. He saved up to buy a movie camera. He was always filming things.

Linda lowered her voice even further. ‘Here’s the really interesting bit. My contact says that around the time of the Hoagland business, she was working in a youth refuge, lots of street kids with drug habits. One of them, a girl about fourteen, saw a man on TV one night and said, “That’s the bloke who fucked me and my friend.”’

‘Ronnie?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Lance Pitman MP, then Housing Minister.’

I closed my eyes and said, ‘Jesus. Did they go to the cops?’

‘No. No point. The girl wouldn’t talk to the cops. But she fingered Ronnie Bishop as the one who set it up.’

I looked out the window. Ronnie and Father Gorman and Lance Pitman and Scullin the cop. Under-age sex and porn movies. And the Kwitny family, patrons of the Safe Hands Foundation and owners of Charis Corporation. ‘What did they do about it?’ I asked.

‘This woman and another youth worker went to see Father Gorman. He gave them a lot of charm, said he’d look into it. They didn’t hear anything more. Ronnie wasn’t seen on the streets again.’

‘And they left it at that?’

‘They’re both good Catholics. He’s a priest.’

I said, ‘What are you going to do now?’

She gave me her unblinking look. ‘What the burglars didn’t know is that I’d backed up everything at work and on the laptop on disk. And the disk is in my bag. I’m going to try to link Charis Corporation to the companies that bought up Yarrabank. That’s the link I need. But if I can’t tie them together, I’ll write the story of the buy-up and see if the Age will run it.’ She blinked. ‘I’m sorry, Jack, I have to.’

I sighed and put my hand on hers. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said. ‘Let me tell you about my phone call from Perth.’

There was a piece of cardboard torn off a beer carton slipped under my office door. On it was written: I rembered somthing else about what you was asking about. See me at my house. It was signed: B. Curran, 15 Morton Street, Clifton Hill.

It didn’t mean anything for a moment, and then I remembered I’d left my card with the man who’d lived next door to Ronnie Bishop in Clifton Hill.

A car hooted outside. It was Cam. We had a meeting organised with Cyril Wootton and his chief commissioner at the pub in Taylor’s Lakes. Cam favoured places in the suburban wastelands for meetings like this.

It started to sprinkle with rain as we hit the freeway in Kensington.

We were in the fast lane, doing ten over the limit. On the right-hand bend coming up to the Coburg exit, Cam shifted into the middle lane, giving a furniture truck no more than a second’s warning.

Five hundred metres further, he went back into the fast, no warning. A hooter blared at us.

‘Having fun?’ I asked.

‘Two pricks on a bike been with us since Carlton,’ Cam said, voice normal. ‘Just wanted to see what they’d do.’

‘What’d they do?’

‘Dropped way back. Put your hand under the seat, will you, mate. There’s a little case.’

I found what looked like a small aluminium briefcase under the seat. It was heavy.

‘It’s loaded. Keep it out of sight,’ Cam said.

I unsnapped the lid of the case. Inside, nestled in hard foam, were a long-barrelled revolver, cleaning equipment and about thirty rounds of ammunition.

‘Ruger Redhawk,’ Cam said.

‘That’s nice. What the fuck’s going on?’

Cam had his eyes on the rear-view mirror. ‘Dunno. Could be just two pricks out for a ride. Could be someone thinks we’ve got the cash for the Commissioner on board.’

‘Who knows we’re meeting him?’

‘It’s a her. Just Wootton.’

The Essendon exit was coming up. Cam waited until it was almost too late and then swung off sharply on to it without signalling. ‘I’m going first left, round the sports fields,’ Cam said. ‘Hold your tummy.’

I looked back. Three hundred metres behind us, four cars in between, a motorcycle with two figures in black wearing fullface helmets on it was coming off the freeway.

‘Bloke on the back’s got a little bag,’ I said.

‘His playlunch maybe,’ Cam said. ‘When last you shoot anything?’

I felt fear for the first time. It had seemed a bit of a joke up to then. ‘In the Mallee about ten years ago,’ I said. ‘Shot a few rabbits.’

‘Take that thing out of the box.’

I took the Ruger out and looked back again. The motorcycle was accelerating past the cars, closing the gap between us quickly.

The engine screamed and the tyres squealed as Cam changed down and took the left, but the car held its line. ‘Nice bus this,’ Cam said. ‘But it hasn’t got the legs for this kind of thing.’

The bike leant over at forty-five degrees as it came around the corner behind us, perhaps two hundred metres away.

We were on a street with houses on our right and sports fields behind a high wire fence on the left. We had to turn right at the corner coming up or go into a parking lot for the sports complex.

‘I think we’ve got to show these boys the iron,’ Cam said. ‘Can’t outrun them. I’m going to broadside in this parking lot. Get out quick, I’m coming out the same door.’

My eyes flicked to the speedo. We were doing a hundred when we went into the parking area. There were three cars in it, all near the gate at the left.

I looked back again. The bikers were close now, perhaps a hundred metres. The sun had come out and their leathers gleamed like otter skins.

Cam swung left towards the cars, slowed, then swung right. As the car came around, he hit the brake.

We went into a broadside skid across the tarmac, the right-hand wheels lifting. We came to a stop side on to a fence a few metres away.

‘Out we go,’ said Cam calmly.

I opened my door and half fell out. Cam was right behind me in a crawl.

‘Keep down,’ he said. ‘Give me the gun.’

We crouched behind the front of the car. I could feel the heat from the engine on my face. Cam pulled back the Ruger’s hammer.

The bike came into the parking lot almost without slowing and went right. As it turned half side-on to us, I got a view of the passenger.

His bag was slung around his neck by the strap now and he was holding something black and blunt.

‘Fucking Christ,’ said Cam.

It was a sub-machine gun.

The rider slowed and swung left. He was going to make a run parallel to us.

We both ducked. They must have been about twenty metres from us when the passenger opened up, flat, coughing sounds, not loud. Most of the first burst was high, over the top of the car. But the last rounds hit the front windscreen with sharp tapping noises. A large, jagged hole appeared on the passenger side and the rest turned to mosaic.

A second later, the next burst of hard coughing. They went low. Some hit the car, some hit the tarmac underneath, ricocheted and pinged off the chassis.

The bike was past, accelerating into a turn for another run.

‘Fuck this for a joke,’ Cam said. He straightened up, Ruger in both hands, and leant his long forearms on the bonnet.

I put my head up. The bikers were side-on, just starting the turn towards us. The passenger saw Cam and raised the fat barrel of his weapon.

Cam fired.

He missed.

He fired again.

The bullet hit the back of the gunman’s helmet. His left arm went up as the impact lifted him off the bike and spun him on to the tarmac.

The rider, unbalanced, veered sharply towards us, gained control and swung savagely away.

‘One down,’ Cam said softly, steadying himself for a shot at the rider.

The passenger got to his knees, left hand to his helmet, sub-machine gun still in the other. He was small, no bigger than a fourteen-year-old. He shook his head like a dog, then turned to look at us.

Cam was aiming at the rider.

The small man brought the sub-machine gun up.

‘Down!’ I shouted, grabbing Cam’s coat and pulling him onto me.

The weapon coughed again, bullets whining just over the bonnet where Cam had been.

‘Little fucker,’ Cam said.

The bike’s engine roared.

Cam put his head up. ‘Party’s over,’ he said.

I stood up. They were going out of the parking area exit, sun glinting on their helmets, engine screaming in second gear.

We listened to the sound of the bike going up the road, turning left, getting fainter. Then it was still, just the hum from the freeway and the jungle sounds of small children playing far away. It had taken no more than forty seconds from the time the bikers came into the parking area. Now only the smell of cordite hanging in the cold air spoke of violence and near-death.

I looked around, expecting to see people everywhere. There was no-one. The silenced sub-machine gun had probably gone unheard, Cam’s shots taken for a car backfiring.

Cam finished putting his Ruger back into its case and took a packet of Gitanes out of his top pocket. ‘You smoking?’

‘Just this once,’ I said. I cupped my hands around the lighter flame. They weren’t shaking. Not yet. The first draw almost made me sit down.

‘Well, you can rule out money,’ said Cam. ‘That ain’t the way they go about taking it off people.’

Something was gradually dawning on my adrenalin-soaked brain. ‘Where did you say you first saw them?’

‘Top of Elgin Street. They couldn’t have been behind me long. I’d have seen them on the freeway.’

I took another draw. Another reel. ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘I don’t think this is connected with the horses. Something else. Little job I’ve been doing.’

Cam blew smoke out of his nose, looked around. ‘Don’t take any big jobs,’ he said. ‘You want to get the cops over here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to take care of it myself.’

I didn’t need to think about it. There wasn’t anything the cops could do for you if people wanted to kill you. Not unless there was something you could do for the cops, and then you ended up living in a caravan park in Deniliquin on the witness protection program.

We inspected the car. Apart from the windscreen, there were about half a dozen bullet holes.

Cam took out his mobile. ‘It’ll probably go,’ he said, ‘but I don’t want to explain these holes to the jacks. I’ll get a mate to bring some wheels around, take this away. Wonder where that prick got an Ingram?’

I said, ‘Is that what it was?’

‘Not your normal scumbag piece of iron.’

Cam got through to someone. ‘Henry,’ he said. ‘I want you to think about how much you owe me…’

Fifteen minutes later, a Ford Granada came into the parking lot, followed by a tow truck. The tow truck driver, a huge man with a beard, stuck masking tape over all the bullet holes. He’d done this sort of thing before. We were on the freeway in the Ford in five minutes.

After a while, Cam gave me a quick look. He was steering with his fingertips, cigarette drooping from his mouth. ‘Knew their business,’ he said, ‘we’d both be looking at the lid.’

‘I’m glad they don’t know their business,’ I said. I put my hands out and looked at them. I was shaking. ‘I’m just starting to react.’

Cam said, ‘Want somewhere else to stay?’

I was thinking about phone calls. Calls from Charles and Linda last night. All my calls in the past weeks. I really was a yokel.

‘I’ll need room for two,’ I said.

‘Two, twenty,’ Cam said. ‘You can use my current’s place. She’s gone to Italy.’

‘I wish I was in Italy,’ I said. ‘Italy, Bosnia, anywhere.’

Cam opened the window and flicked his cigarette out. ‘Things go right Saturday,’ he said, ‘we can all go to Italy. First class.’

28

Wootton was waiting in the parking lot of the pub, a hideous pre-cast concrete affair with flagpoles all over the front. He was in his XK Jaguar, reading a magazine. He put it away when he saw us coming. I went around to his side. The window was down.

‘Can you get someone to debug my place?’ I said.

He frowned. ‘Really, Jack, are you sure you’re important enough for people to want…’ My expression stopped him. ‘When do you want it done?’

‘Now,’ I said.

‘Now?’

‘Now. The person can pick up a key from the ground-floor flat. Number one. Say Jack sends his fondest regards and the bloke will hand over the key.’

Wootton took out his mobile phone and got out of the car. ‘What’s the address?’ he asked. He punched in a number and spoke to someone in cryptic terms, giving the address and the introduction. ‘It’s urgent,’ he said.

The commissioner was waiting for us in the lounge, a pinkish chamber, full of angular chrome and plastic furniture. I didn’t know there were people who’d place your bets for a commission who didn’t look like Eddie Dollery or like market gardeners in town for the day.

Wootton did the introductions. He introduced me as Ray and Cam as Barry. The Commissioner was called Cynthia. She was in her late thirties or early forties, grey suit, tall and slim, an intelligent face of sharp planes relieved by a lower lip as plump as an oyster. Her shoulder-length dark hair slipped silkily around her head.

She was business-like. Harry would approve.

‘How big?’ she said.

‘As possible,’ Cam replied.

‘They’re gun-shy these days,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to spread it around.’

Cam nodded. ‘This is the drill,’ he said. ‘You wait for the second call. We expect the price to drift. Then we want as many fair-sized hits as we can get without collapsing the price. Then send in the troops, like they’ve heard the late mail. Take it all the way to the floor.’

She smiled a cautious smile, cocked her head. ‘Some organising here. Small army. There’s not that many reliables around.’

I thought I caught a hint of working-class Tasmania in her voice, perhaps one of those bone-hard timber towns, full of red-faced men with pale eyes and bad breath, the girls with one pretty summer before the babies and the cigs and the mid-morning start on the wine cask. Cynthia would have got out early, escaped to the mainland.

‘We’re told you can do it. But if you can’t…’ said Cam.

She crossed her legs. In my trained observer way, I registered that they were exceptionally long legs. Part of me couldn’t believe that I was sitting in this garish place looking at legs and listening to talk about backing horses when people had recently been trying to kill me.

‘I can do it,’ she said. ‘What happens interstate?’

‘You get first go,’ Cam said. ‘We’ll take what we can get elsewhere.’

‘The TAB?’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said.

‘When do I know?’

Cam lit a Gitane and blew smoke out sideways. ‘Cyril will tell you where to be,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to be ready to push the button, go straight off.’

‘Not even the race number?’

Cam shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Makes it hard if it’s going to be the eighth.’

‘Life’s hard,’ Cam said. ‘Cyril says we don’t have to worry about collecting. Is that right? We hate worrying.’

Cynthia gestured with her hands, palms upward. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ve got three teenagers to look after.’

‘I know that,’ said Cam. ‘Think about them. We’ll need a full accounting. Every bit of paper. Anything else I can tell you?’

She shook her head and stood up. ‘Nice to do business with you,’ she said.

‘We hope so,’ Cam said. ‘We hope so.’

We were waiting at the St George’s Road lights when the ambulance came through and did a screeching right turn.

‘Just live for speed,’ said Cam.

I saw the smoke before we turned into my street, a dark plume against the cigarette-smoke sky. When we turned, we saw the street was blocked by three police cars. People were everywhere. Further down, a fire engine was paralleled to the pavement. Its ladders were up and firemen on them were spraying water into a huge hole in the building’s roof.

It was my building.

The huge hole was in my roof.

My home was burning.

Cam pulled up and looked at me. ‘Your place, right?’ he said.

I could only nod.

‘Better wait,’ he said, opening his door.

I slumped against the door pillar. I could recognise at least a dozen people standing around. Neighbours. The man from the corner shop.

Can was back inside five minutes. He didn’t say anything, did a slow U-turn. We were heading down Brunswick Street when he spoke.

‘Cop reckons the bloke turned the key and the whole place went up. He might live. Door could have saved him.’

‘It was supposed to be me,’ I said. Cam didn’t need telling. I needed to say it. I wasn’t feeling scared. All I could think about was the flat. It contained everything I valued. My books. My music. The paintings and prints Isabel had bought, always as presents for me. The leather sofa and armchairs we’d bought together at the Old Colonists’ Club auction. It was my home, the only place that had ever meant anything to me since leaving my first home at the age of ten. It was my history, my link with Isabel. If Cam could have taken me directly to the person responsible for destroying it, I would have committed murder.

After a while, Cam said, ‘Where to?’

My first thought was my office. Then it sunk in. I couldn’t go near my office or Taub’s. People were trying to kill me. They’d been prepared to kill Cam this morning. They would kill Charlie if he got in their way. They probably intended to kill Linda.

Now I felt fear, a knot in my stomach.

‘I’ve got to make a call,’ I said. ‘Talk to someone.’

Cam turned into Gertrude Street and parked next to the Housing Commission flats. Three men in overcoats, all bearded, were sitting on a scuffed knoll, passing around the silver bladder of a wine cask.

I took the mobile and got out. In my wallet, I found the number Garth Bruce had given me. I’d transferred it to the back of a business card. About to press the first button, I hesitated. How could I trust Bruce? Linda didn’t. Drew didn’t. Then I remembered the awkward way we’d stood together, two men struggling to come to terms with their grief, and his words: I think you’ve had enough pain with this Milovich.

I punched the number. It was answered on the second ring. A woman. I said John English wanted to speak to the Minister.

‘Please hold on,’ she said.

I leaned against the car. The sun had come out, making the day seem colder. One of the bearded men on the knoll was trying to strangle the last drop of wine out of the bladder.

‘Yes.’ It was Bruce.

‘Someone’s trying to kill me,’ I said. ‘Twice today.’

He said nothing for a moment. I could hear him breathing.

‘God,’ he said. ‘You all right?’

I said yes.

Another pause. ‘Where are you?’

‘In the street.’

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘this is getting out of hand.’ His speech was measured. ‘I think I’ve underestimated Pixley’s old mates. We’ll have to put you somewhere safe till we can shake some sense into them. The Hillier woman too. Can you get in touch with her?’

‘Yes. She’s being followed.’

‘That so? Be the same people. Okay, listen, we’ve got to do this carefully. Yarra Bend. There’s a park up there, near the golf course. Know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get hold of Hillier and get up there, park as far away from those public toilets as possible. What are you driving? What’s the rego?’

I walked around the back of the car and read out the number. ‘Ford Granada,’ I said. ‘Blue.’

‘Right. Let’s make it in an hour’s time. The two blokes from last time will pick you up, get you somewhere safe.’ He paused. ‘Now this is important. Don’t talk to anyone except Hillier. And don’t say a word about this arrangement to her on the phone. She’s probably tapped.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘An hour from now.’ The lead ball of fear in my stomach was dissolving.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’ll be fine. Just take it easy. We can fix this up in a day or so. I’ll see you tonight.’

I rang Linda’s number. She answered straight away.

‘I want you to make sure you’re alone and get a cab to the place where we ate. The first time, remember?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Something very serious. I’ll tell you when I see you. Get the cab to park as close to the place as possible. Wait in the cab until you see me.’

‘Jack, what’s going on?’ she said.

‘Half an hour from now. Okay?’

‘Yes. Okay.’

‘See you then. Love.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Love.’

29

I got back into the Granada. Cam was reading the paper, smoking a Gitane.

‘I’ll get off your back in an hour’s time,’ I said. ‘I won’t take up that offer of yours. Need to disappear for a day or so.

Cam gave me a long look. ‘I’ll miss the excitement,’ he said.

I was looking in my wallet to see how much money I had. There was a piece of cardboard in the note section. I took it out: I rembered somthing else about what you was asking about. See me at my house. B. Curran, 15 Morton Street, Clifton Hill.

Clifton Hill was as safe a place as any to pass the half-hour until it was time to pick up Linda.

‘Can we take a little drive around to Clifton Hill?’ I said.

The man was wearing the same outfit as before: dirty blue nylon anorak, black tracksuit pants. There was every chance that it hadn’t come off since our previous meeting.

‘Wondered when you’d come,’ he said.

‘You remembered something else about Ronnie Bishop,’ I said.

He looked at me, said nothing.

I took out my wallet and offered him a twenty.

He took it. ‘Had to walk round to your place,’ he said. ‘Bloody long way. Had to take a cab back. Me legs is bad.’

I found a ten and gave it to him.

‘Wait,’ he said. He shuffled down the dark passage and came back a minute later, folded newspaper in his hand. ‘’Member I said cops come around next door couple times?’

I nodded.

He coughed and spat past my right shoulder. ‘One’s a cunt called Scullin.’

‘You told me that.’

He sniffed. ‘Didn’t know who the other was. Do now.’

‘Yes? Who?’

He unfolded the paper. It was the Herald Sun. He looked at the front page. ‘This bastard,’ he said.

He turned the newspaper to face me. There was a large colour photograph of a man sitting in front of microphones. He was flanked by two high-ranking policemen in uniform.

‘Which cop?’ I said, studying the policemen.

‘Not the cops. The cunt in the middle. The fucking Minister. That’s him.’

I was about to put the phone down when the woman answered.

‘I need to get in touch with Vin McKillop,’ I said.

She started coughing, a loose, emphysemic sound. I waited. When she stopped, I said again, ‘Vin McKillop, I need—’

‘Vin’s dead,’ she said. ‘Overdose.’

I didn’t ask her any questions.

I went into the sitting room. Linda was standing in front of the huge fireplace in the centre of Cam’s absent girlfriend’s place off Crombie Lane in the heart of the city. Her apartment occupied the top floor of an old six-storey warehouse. She was an artist. Paintings were everywhere, mostly landscapes at different stages of completion.

‘Vin McKillop’s dead,’ I said. ‘Pixley’s dead, Vin’s dead. It’s like a battlefield.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Linda said. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

‘Garth Bruce visited Ronnie Bishop with Scullin more than once around the time of Anne Jeppeson’s death,’ I said. ‘If Scullin fixed up Danny for killing her, Garth Bruce must be part of the whole thing. He was setting us up.’

Cam was lying on a sofa, long legs over the arm, head propped up by cushions, drinking Cascade out of the bottle.

‘So Bruce’s got the motor’s number,’ he said. He’d had no trouble grasping my explanation of what was going on. It didn’t seem to surprise him either.

‘I suppose that was dumb,’ I said, ‘but you don’t expect the Minister for Police to try to kill you.

‘It’s just possible he’s not involved,’ Linda said. She was dressed for business in a suit, cream silk blouse, black stockings and high heels. Overexcited though I was, the sight aroused a frisson of lust.

‘I don’t think we should operate on that assumption, I said. ‘What can we do about the car?’ It was now in the girlfriend’s garage on the ground floor.

Cam swung his legs to the floor. ‘It can stay where it is. I’ll get my mate to report it stolen, give me another one.’ He stood up and walked off down the long room in the direction of the kitchen.

Linda’s eyes followed him. ‘What does he do for a living?’

‘He’s a gambler,’ I said. ‘He shot a midget firing a sub-machine gun off a motorbike this morning. That’s how I’m here.’

She nodded. ‘I can believe that,’ she said. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Think. Think about evidence. Evidence is the only thing that can help us now.’

‘Did you tell me once,’ Linda said, chin on her palms. ‘Did you tell me that Danny’s wife said there was evidence he didn’t do it?’

I thought back to the night, in the family room Danny built. Yes. She said a woman phoned Danny. The woman said her husband had died.’

But she didn’t give Danny the evidence?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t suppose it follows that if it’s evidence that proves Danny didn’t do it, it’s evidence of who did’, Linda said.

‘It might be.’ I was thinking. ‘What kind of person would have the evidence? It would have to be a cop, wouldn’t it?’

‘Could be someone connected with Charis Corp.’

I sighed. ‘That’s right. This is a dead-end.’

Linda got up and crossed to a huge steel-framed window. Her high heels went tock on the polished concrete floor. She had to stand on tiptoe to look out. Her calf muscles tensed deliciously. At any other time I would have been seized with an impulse to rush her from the rear.

‘Let’s say it’s a cop. Was a cop,’ she said. ‘What then?’

‘Died some time before Danny was shot. At least a month.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I’m assuming the woman got in touch with Danny soon after her husband’s death. That’s when she rang. About a month before Danny was killed.’

Linda turned around. ‘What date was that?’

I told her.

‘Where’s the phone?’ she said.

‘Coming up.’ Cam was coming back, carrying a cordless phone. ‘I’m taking a stroll to pick up some other wheels. I’ll come back, see if you need anything.’

Linda took the phone from him. ‘Phone book?’

‘In the kitchen. On the fridge.’ He gave me a wave.

When she came back, Linda took a notebook out of her bag, sat down and punched a number.

‘Hello, Police Association? Can I speak to the secretary? Right. Who could I speak to about membership records? Oh, you’ve got a membership secretary. Denise Walters. I’d like to, yes.’

Linda waited, looking at me. ‘Denise, hi,’ she said. ‘My name’s Colleen Farrell. Dr Colleen Farrell. From Monash University Medical School. Denise, I wonder if you can help me. We’re doing a study on police mortality in Australia. Do you know about that? No? It’s at the early stages, but we think it’ll help the police case for a stress loading on salaries.’

Pause. ‘Yes. Abnormally high levels, we think, Denise. We’ve run into a little problem you might be able to help us with. We don’t have any data for Victoria for the last two months.’

Pause. ‘Yes, that’s right. We got the other data directly from the Commissioner’s office but the person there has gone on leave and I’d like to get up to date before I go on leave.’

Pause. ‘That would be terrific, Denise. I’ll wait on.’

We sat in silence looking at each other. Linda reached down, took the hem of her skirt and began to work it up, slowly, one thigh at a time, flexing her thigh muscles and moving her bottom from side to side. I could see the dark at the fork of her legs when she said, ‘Still here. Right. No serving members so far this year. Good. What about non-serving?’

Pause. ‘Two in January. None in Feb. One in March. One in April. Okay. Now, Denise, I’ll need the names to check against our register.’

Pause. ‘H. J. Mullins. T. R. Conroy. M. E. F. Davis. P. K. Vane. That’s V-A-N-E, is it? Terrific. I see we’ve got them all except Vane. You wouldn’t have any biographical data there, would you, Denise?’

Pause. ‘Just service dates. Um. ’63 to ’88. Special Branch 1978 to ’84. Look, Denise, you’ve been a great help. Thanks very much. Much appreciated.’

Linda put the phone down and pulled her skirt back to respectability. ‘I can’t bear to see a man salivate,’ she said. ‘The only possibility is P. K. Vane. He was in the Special Branch when Anne was killed, though.’

‘I’d say that lets him out. They spent all their time hanging around anarchist meetings. Six people and a collie dog and two Special Branch. Our bloke would probably be in Drugs, one of Scullin’s mates.’

There was a sound in the hallway. I felt my shoulders tense. Cam came in.

‘All fixed up,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m shooting through. You want me, press auto and 8 on the phone. It’ll page me.’ He opened his jacket and showed the pager on his belt.

‘I’m in your debt, mate,’ I said.

Cam said, ‘Saturday, that’s the day we pay off debts. There’s plenty of food here.’ He eyed Linda appraisingly. ‘Try the cupboards in the big bedroom for clothes. You’re not far apart in size. Jack, there’s men’s clothes in the other bedroom. One of her exes. Biggish fella, I gather. Nice line in shirts. Help yourself.’

I went with him to the front door. He was outside when he said, ‘That little case of mine, that’s in the kitchen now. Under the sink. I wouldn’t open this door to anyone if I were you.’

I detoured to the bathroom on my way back, looking for aspirin. Pumping adrenalin leaves you feeling dull and headachey. I was studying the contents of the medicine cabinet when it came to me out of nowhere.

I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.

Anne Jeppeson’s mother. That was what she had said.

30

The Law Department at Melbourne University looks the way universities should. It has courtyards and cloisters and ivy.

I loitered downstairs, near where a girl had set fire to herself during the Vietnam War. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole campus was full of people in ex-army overcoats wearing beanies. I was just older than most of them. By about thirty years.

My man came out ahead of his students, striding briskly, looking the way lecturers usually look after a lecture: happy and smug. His name was Barry Chilvers and he taught constitutional law. He was also a civil liberties activist and knew more about the Special Branch than most people.

‘Barry,’ I said when he was level with me.

He jerked his head up at me, eyes startled behind the big glasses.

I took the beanie off.

‘Jesus Christ, Jack,’ he said, exasperated, ‘where’d you get that coat? And the beanie, for Christ sakes. It’s a Collingwood beanie. How can you wear a Collingwood beanie?’

‘Ensures that I’m not recognised,’ I said. ‘Got a moment?’

We went upstairs to his office. It was the same mess I remembered: books, papers, journals, student essays, styrofoam cups, newspapers, bits of clothing everywhere. Two computers had been added to the chaos.

I cleared away a briefcase and a pile of files from a chair and sat down. ‘You were looking very pleased with yourself,’ I said.

He scratched his woolly grey head. ‘One of the better days at the pearl–swine interface,’ he said. ‘Some days I come back and headbutt the door. To what do I owe this visit?’

‘Do you remember Anne Jeppeson?’

‘Sure. Got run down. She was a spunk. Politically loony but a spunk.’

‘Would the Special Branch have watched her?’

He put a thumb behind his top teeth, took it out. ‘It’s hard to say. Who says so?’

‘She said something to her mother.’

‘There was a lot of paranoia about the Branch. If you believed all the people who said the Branch was watching them, it wouldn’t have been a branch, it would have been the whole bloody tree.’

‘But it’s possible?’

He shrugged. ‘More than most, I suppose. She was into a whole lot of stuff the Branch would have had an interest in—Roxby Downs, Aboriginal rights in Tasmania, East Timor. You name it.’

‘East Timor? The Special Branch? I thought it was only interested in local stuff?’

Barry shrugged again. ‘The Branch, ASIO, ASIS, you can’t separate them. They scratched each other’s backs. So it’s possible, yes.’

I told him what else I needed to know.

He groaned. ‘Where some Branch goon was at a certain time in 1984? Jesus H. Christ, Jack, you don’t have modest requests, do you? When in ’84?’

I told him.

‘Not long before Harker got the boot and the new government closed the Branch down.’

‘That’s right. There’d be records somewhere, wouldn’t there?’

Barry shook his head. ‘Shredded. On orders from the highest authority. All records to be destroyed.’

‘So there’s no record of what they were up to?’

He clapped his hands. ‘Shredded,’ he said. ‘But not before being copied.’

‘Shredded? And copied?’

‘What do you expect?’ said Barry. ‘I think it was something the cops and the new Opposition found themselves in agreement on. Think about it. The files represent about five billion hours of coppers standing around in the rain dying to have a piss. You shred them and a couple of years later another government gets elected and wants you to start all over again, spying on the same bunch of harmless sods. They say they went through three copiers. Twenty-four hours a day for days.’

‘Who’s got the copy?’

‘What copy? No-one’s ever admitted the files were copied.’

I said, ‘Barry, I’m talking life and death.’

He did another big head scratch, rolled his chair back till it hit a pile of books. The pile toppled, slithered to become a ziggurat.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise you anything, though. I’ll ask a man who might be able to ask another man, who might know someone.’

I stood up. ‘I need to know today. It’s that bad.’

Barry stood up. His eyes were level with my middle greatcoat button. He looked up at me. ‘You serious?’

I nodded.

He nodded back, sadly. ‘I’ll go after my tutorial. You can’t phone him, this bloke. Paranoid. Give me the date and the name, anything that’ll help.’

‘God loves you, Barry,’ I said.

‘There is no God and you know it. Ring me at home after five. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t know if they copied this kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘I’m only doing this because of your old man’s record for Fitzroy, you know. I wouldn’t do it for you.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’

31

I found Linda at a laptop computer in a long, narrow room off the kitchen. A bench down one wall held three computers, one with a huge monitor, and two printers. The other wall was covered in corkboard, with dozens of computer-generated colour images stuck up. They seemed to be tryouts of the landscape paintings.

‘Cam’s woman’s a computer freak,’ Linda said. She was scrolling text on her screen. ‘She’s got enough power here to run the tax system.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Tell you when I’ve done it.’ She was tapping keys.

I went into the vast sitting room. It was 4.30 p.m. Both the fire in the fireplace and the day outside were dying. I brought in a log from the woodpile in the entrance hall, put it on the steel dogs and scraped all the embers together under it. Then I did an inspection of the premises. Apart from the sitting room, computer room and kitchen, there were two huge bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a studio the size of a pool hall. Next to the steel front door, another steel door opened on to the building’s internal staircase.

When I’d done the tour, I sat down in front of the fire, put my hands in my pockets, stared into the flames and tried to work out how we could come out of hiding safely. All I could think of was to have Drew negotiate with the police. Negotiate over what, was the question. The bombing of my flat was certainly proof that I needed protection. Or was it? People had been known to boobytrap their own houses. After all, it wasn’t me who was blown up. Maybe I’d set a trap for someone else.

What about the men with the sub-machine gun on the motorcycle? We hadn’t reported it. We’d had the car spirited away. By now, the body was probably crushed to the size of a tea chest. Cam’s friend who took it away wasn’t going to jump up and testify for me.

As for Linda, what exactly was she in hiding from, they would ask? No-one had tried to kill her. She’d been burgled, that’s all. Everyday occurrence.

And the Minister? The Minister wouldn’t recognise my name.

It was 5.30 p.m. before Linda emerged, carrying a printout.

‘Hey, let’s get some light here,’ she said. ‘It’s like a set for Macbeth.’

I realised with a start that the room was in deep gloom, the firelight playing on the unfinished landscapes around the walls.

Linda found a panel of switches next to the kitchen doorway. ‘Fuck. Like a Boeing.’ She hit several switches. Concealed lighting came on all over the room.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘Save the firelight for later. I’ve got something. Remember all the companies in the Yarrabank buy-up turned out to be owned by other off-shore companies?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’ve been searching all the finance databases for anything on the offshore companies and one database turned up three of the companies at once. The Jersey companies. They were suspected in 1982 by the Securities Commission in Britain of warehousing shares for an Irish company that was trying to take over a British construction group.’

‘I’m lost already,’ I said.

‘Wait. It becomes clearer. The three companies were all run from Jersey by an accountant. The securities people forced him to disclose where the money had come from to buy the shares in the construction group. It didn’t come from the Irish company. It came from the company that owned the Jersey companies. This one was registered in the Cayman Islands. It’s called Pericoe Holdings. That’s where the story stops. The Securities Commission lost interest in the inquiry.’

She paused.

‘But you didn’t?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I was searching a new South Pacific database at the university in Suva. Just to see what it held. And I turned up a little item from 1981 in a defunct publication called Pacific Focus. Just been scanned into the system. They reported that a Cayman-registered company had a shareholding in a company that wanted to set up a bank in the New Groningen Islands. And what was the Cayman company’s name?’

‘This is a test, isn’t it? My answer is: I don’t know.’

‘Pericoe Holdings.’

‘This is it?’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Pericoe was obliged under local law to disclose its shareholders.’ She read from the printout. ‘“Shareholders: J. Massey of Carnegie Road, Toorak, Melbourne, Australia; M. Jillings of Miller Street, Kew, Melbourne, Australia; and H. McGinty of Carnham Close, Brighton, Melbourne, Australia.”’

‘Do we know these people?’

Linda came over and stood in front of me. ‘J. Massey is Jocelyn Massey, ex-wife of Dix Massey, Charis Corp’s fixer-in-chief. M. Jillings is Maxine Jillings, wife of Keith Jillings, a major shareholder in Charis Corp. H. McGinty is Hayden McGinty, who sucks to get on the social pages and is the wife of Martin McGinty, chief executive of Marbild, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Charis Corporation.’

She flicked the printout in the direction of the coffee table and put her hands on her hips. ‘This is the jackpot,’ she said. ‘This is it. This is the connection between Charis and the buying up of Yarrabank. It’s going to take an awful lot of explaining away. And it sure as fuck ain’t gonna work to say these Charis Corp girls put their spare housekeeping money into real estate.’

‘You’re pretty smart for a good-looking person,’ I said. ‘Do people tell you that?’

‘Only when they want to fuck me. What about the Special Branch man?’

‘I’ve got to phone Barry Chilvers.’

A child answered at Barry’s number. A girl. Barry had obviously started on a second round of procreation, probably with a graduate student. That was the price of academic life. Inexplicably, first wives stopped being turned on by your mind.

When he came on, he said, ‘Chilvers.’

I said, ‘It’s the man in the Collingwood beanie.’

‘That’s got to be cryptic enough. Hello, phone-tappers. Mate, your conjecture turns out to be correct. The female person was an object of attention.’

‘And the male person?’

‘Not attending on her, I’m afraid. He was keeping an eye on an East Timor activist in town for a rally. Does that make life easier?’

‘Barry,’ I said, ‘it may make it possible. What does his log record?’

‘Nothing. Uneventful. He said the man spent the evening with known friends in Scott Street, Fitzroy, then went back to his hotel. That’s it.’

‘The man in the Collingwood beanie thanks you very much.’

Barry said, ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’

I went back into the sitting room. Linda was at the bank of windows. She turned.

I said, ‘I want you to think very carefully. On the night Anne was killed, P. K. Vane of the Special Branch was keeping track of an East Timor activist visiting Melbourne.’

Linda nodded. ‘That’d be Manuel Carvalho,’ she said. ‘He was here often. I remember now, there was talk of Anne having an affair with him at some stage.’

‘Can you remember where Anne was earlier that evening?’ I asked.

‘With friends. In Fitzroy.’

‘Sure it was Fitzroy?’

‘Absolutely. Scott Street. I knew the people vaguely.’ She lifted her head. I saw the shine in her eyes. ‘Wait. You’re going to tell me Carvalho was in Scott Street that night, aren’t you?’

I gave her a double thumbs-up. I felt like someone who’d tipped a 500-1 shot for the Melbourne Cup. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to tell you. I’m betting that Manuel Carvalho went back to Richmond with Anne. And that P. K. Vane, doing his duty, followed them there. And then P. K. saw something. And for some reason he kept quiet about it. He’s our man. He’s the one. His wife rang Danny. He’s the one with the evidence.’

Linda put her head back, closed her eyes, smiled and ran her fingers through her hair.

I slumped on to the sofa, legs outstretched, flooded with elation and relief. There was hope.

Linda walked across the room. When she was standing between my legs, she reached down with both hands and began to pull up her tight black skirt, working it up slowly over her thighs. When her stocking tops and suspenders came into sight, I said, trying to speak normally, ‘Since when do you wear a suspender belt?’