Shooting Star

29

I rang Graham Noyce and told him about the call.

‘What if they don’t come through?’ he said.

‘Call the cops. It’s over then.’

‘I’ll tell the Carsons.’

Aware of the pointlessness of what I was doing, I drove to Altona, over the Westgate Bridge and along the freeway to Millers Road, down towards the bay past the carbon black factory and the refinery with its chimneys that flamed day and night.

The Altona Community Legal Centre didn’t spend any money on front. It was housed in an ugly yellow-brick building that still carried faint fancy signwriting saying it had once been the premises of the Modern Bakery.

A young woman with two children was sitting in the reception room, the children fighting for her attention like small but vicious animals attacking a much larger and wounded creature. Behind a counter bearing neat stacks of pamphlets on subjects such as rape counselling, domestic violence and the legal rights of teenagers, a woman in middle age, good-humoured face, was on the phone. She eyed me warily, ended her conversation.

‘Yes?’ she said.

I introduced myself, said I’d spoken to Sue Torvalds, the solicitor, earlier in the day about someone who had been a volunteer solicitor in the late 1980s.

She smiled. ‘Yes, Sue told me. I’m Ellen Khoury, I’m the only worker who was here then.’

‘Can you spare a few minutes?’

‘Sue’s not here. I can’t leave the phone really. We can talk here if you like.’

‘You had a volunteer solicitor around that time. Mark Carson.

I represent his family. They’re a bit worried about him and I’m trying to get some idea of the kind of person he is, the people he knew then, just scratching around really.’

She bit her lower lip. ‘You’re some kind of investigator?’

‘No. It’s a favour really. To the family.’

Ellen wasn’t happy about something. ‘That’s a long time ago,’ she said. ‘You should talk to Jeremy Fisher, he was…’ ‘I know. I’d like to talk to him but he’s a big-shot lawyer now.

You have to make an appointment three months ahead to see him.

Did you know Mark then?’

She nodded, didn’t want to look me in the eye. ‘Yes, there were only a few solicitors came in then. And now.’

‘I suppose it would have been unusual for someone from a big city firm to find the time to come out here at night.’

One of the predator children let out a piercing scream. I turned in time to see it strike its fellow-predator a full blow in the face, instant retaliation for some wrong. The victim stumbled, fell over backwards and hit its head on the brown nylon carpet, screamed too.

Without venom or force, the mother backhanded the striker, leaned forward and pulled the victim upright by the bib of his tiny overalls, dragged him into the moulded plastic chair next to her.

‘Don’t bloody go near each other,’ she said. She looked at us. ‘Kids, Christ, I’m up to here.’

I turned back to Ellen Khoury. ‘Mark would have been an unusual volunteer, would he?’

‘I suppose so. Most of those we get work for the labour firms or small firms around here.’

‘And he did a good job?’

‘Well, I was just the front-office worker, you’d have to ask Jeremy Fisher.’ She was drumming the fingers of her right hand on the desk, fast.

This looked like having even less point than I’d expected. With nothing to lose, I said, ‘And after the incident, he didn’t come anymore?’

Ellen stopped drumming, scratched her head at the hairline. She looked relieved. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, he could have. Jeremy told the police Mark was here until after she would have been picked up or whatever. So he was in the clear.’

‘Yes. In the clear. The police came here when…’

‘The next day. They didn’t know she’d been here until they talked to a friend of hers early in the morning.’ She was talking easily now. ‘I was here and they came in and gave me the name and I couldn’t find the book. Never found the book, it vanished. So we couldn’t help them. Anyway, they showed her picture to Moira Rickard, she was the vol on the desk that night, and she remembered her, remembered she’d seen Mark. Last client of the night. She was still with him when Moira went home. We never did that again, go before the last client’s gone.’

I nodded. ‘And Jeremy was here?’

‘Yes.’ Ellen’s face was expressionless. ‘He resigned a few months later, went to some big firm.’

‘I can’t remember the woman’s name,’ I said. ‘I’ve gone blank.’

‘Anthea Wyllie. She was a nurse at the hospital. You still hear people around here talking about it. They say her parents blame us. That’s a bit rough.’

‘Certainly is,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks for talking to me, Ellen. I’ll have to make an appointment to see Jeremy.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Jeremy’s the one to talk to.’

Back over the bridge, sun behind me like a poisonous fireball heading for earth, to the left Docklands, ahead the shining towers of the city.

Anthea Wyllie. A missing woman, a woman missing after seeing Mark Carson, never seen again. What sort of curse lay on this family, rich beyond greed, cradled in luxury, that their children were stolen from them, that those they touched they marked with crosses of ash?