I was in the office, going through Allie’s work diary and writing up invoices, when I heard the car. Marcia Carrier was getting out of her BMW when I reached the door. She didn’t look like an Olympic dressage contestant today. Today she looked like an Olympic skier,
‘Mac,’ she said, ‘I rang the number you gave me, no reply. So I drove over on the off-chance.’
‘Nice to see you,’ I said.
‘Got a few minutes?’
‘Hours. Days. Kitchen’s the only warm room in the house.’
‘I was hoping for the forge.’
‘Forge’s having a rest today. Sunday is forge’s day of rest.’
The kitchen didn’t look too bad. Spartan but clean. I pulled another captain’s chair in front of the stove. Mick Doolan had sold me six for two hundred dollars: ‘To you, Moc, a gift. What I paid for them. Less. I think about it now, less. Much less.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ I said.
‘Mac, sit,’ she said, lacing her fingers. ‘I have to tell you something and I’m embarrassed about it…’
I sat down.
‘When you came to see me about Ned Lowey, I think I said it was going to nag at me.’ She was studying her left hand on the arm of the chair. It was older than her face.
‘I remember.’
A spray of rain, like gravel thrown, hit the window. She tensed. Our eyes met.
‘Well, it did. I went back to the files, looking for something that might have happened while Mr Lowey was working at Kinross. I found something. About an hour ago.’
‘Happened to a girl?’
She nodded. ‘Two girls.’
‘When you were in charge?’
‘I was new. Took over in 1983, into a nightmare. The place was run like a mini-kingdom, all these places were, minimal record-keeping, incompetent staff, all sorts of kickbacks with suppliers and contractors, ghosts on the payroll, you name it. My predecessor might have been a wonderful man but he was completely out of touch with what was going on around him. And to make things worse, Kinross wasn’t even getting the funding it was entitled to. So I cleaned up the obvious rorts and got a proper reporting system going. Then I left the day-to-day running to my deputy. He seemed to be an honest person. I devoted most of my time to working on the department and the minister to get Kinross’s funding up to speed.’
‘The girls,’ I said.
She clasped her hands, face unhappy. ‘Mac, I found a report in Daryl Hopman’s confidential file. He was my deputy. I’ve never seen the file before, didn’t know it existed. And I only found it by chance.’
‘What kind of report?’
‘It involves two girls. I should have been told about it and I wasn’t.’
She paused. I waited.
She sighed again. ‘It also involves Mr Lowey. I’m sorry to tell you that. I know how much he meant to you.’
‘Involves?’ I could feel the blood in my head.
Marcia put her hands through her hair. ‘I’ll just say it. The girls were caught coming back into the Kinross grounds shortly before four am one night in November 1985. They said they had been at Ned Lowey’s house and had been given drugs, amphetamines, speed, for sex.’
I stood up. ‘Not possible, a mistake. Not Ned. Absolutely not.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marcia said. ‘I’m really sorry. I felt I had to tell you.’
I went to the window, looked out, saw nothing. ‘What was done?’
‘Nothing. It’s unbelievable. Nothing was done about a serious allegation of criminal conduct. Nothing. It says everything about the way Kinross was run in the old days. I shudder to think what else may have been ignored like this. In the maintenance supervisor’s file I found a note from Daryl saying that Ned was not to be employed again. I presume Daryl wrote the report as some kind of insurance if word leaked out.’
‘Insurance?’
‘He may have planned to say that he had made a report to me and that I was the one who failed to act.’
‘The girls said Ned gave them drugs?’ Ned having anything to do with any drug other than a stubbie of Vic Bitter was inconceivable. But my treacherous inner voice said:
Marcia unclasped her hands, pushed back her hair, started to speak, hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Mac,’ she said, ‘but that’s not the whole story.’
I shook my head in disbelief. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to hold on to the Ned I loved.
‘The girls said Dr Barbie was at Ned’s house and had sex with them. Violent sex.’
Ned going to see Ian Barbie in Footscray.
Ned and Ian Barbie, both dead, hanged.
The girl’s skeleton in the mine shaft. The newspapers Ned kept.
Melanie Pavitt, naked and bleeding in Colson’s Road. About four kilometres from Ned’s house.
‘What are you going to do?’ I said.
Marcia got up, tugged at her sweater. ‘Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. They’re dead. Both men. What’s the point of doing anything now? The families have had enough pain.’
She came over, put her hand on my arm. I could smell her hair, a rose garden far away.
‘Mac, I’ve destroyed Daryl’s report,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I think you and I are the only people who know about this. The two of us and the girls. They probably don’t even remember it. I’m protecting myself, I can’t deny that. I was in charge, I’m responsible for the girls’ welfare. But I’m a victim here too. I knew nothing about what happened. Daryl left this thing behind like a time bomb.’
I didn’t say anything.
Marcia squeezed my arm gently. ‘Mac, I think I’m doing the right thing for everyone. Is it the right thing? If you think it isn’t, I’ll go public, take the consequences. If you think it is, we never speak of the matter again. To anyone.’
What else was there to say? ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘It’s the right thing.’
At her car, engine running, window down, she said, not looking at me, ‘God, I’m glad that’s over. Would you like to have a drink some time, dinner? Anything?’
I pulled myself together. ‘Drink, dinner, followed by anything. And everything.’
‘I’ll call you,’ she said, hint of a smile.
I watched the car go down the lane, turn, heard a little growl of acceleration. I didn’t want to go inside, didn’t know what to do with myself, got into the Land Rover and drove.
Stan Harrop and his son, David, were in the northwest corner of the field nursery on Stan’s property, talking to the driver of a tip truck carrying a load of stones. I parked at the gate and made my way along the paths between raised north-south beds. David gave me a salute. He was about twenty-five, thin and sandy, with Stan’s big hands. Stan had waited until he was nearly fifty to take his shot at immortality with David’s mother.
‘A wall, Mac,’ Stan said. ‘A drystone wall. Twenty metres of wall. Know anything about drystone walls?’
‘Been a while,’ I said. When I was sixteen my father and I built two hundred metres of drystone wall on a property called Arcadia near Wagga. In my mind I saw a man and a boy and a pile of stones in the burning day, and heard my father say:
Stan scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose they can go just here.’
‘Want my advice?’ I said.
