‘Hoagland was her chance for real fame.’
I said, ‘My memory’s pretty vague about that period. I read the clippings today. It’s not clear how she got into the limelight.’
‘She was a natural for the part from the moment it leaked out that the government was going to knock down the Hoagland Housing Commission flats. Do you know Yarrabank?’
‘Vaguely. I had a client from there once. Stabbed someone in a park. His best friend, I think it was.’
‘That’s what Yarrabank friends are for,’ said Linda. ‘It’s shitsville. Maybe it’s going to be Venice when the Premier’s mates are finished with it, but it was darkest shitsville then.’
I suddenly connected. Yarra Cove—the new development I’d seen the sly-faced Planning Minister, Lance Pitman, and the spotty ABC reporter going on about on TV—was on the site of the old Hoagland housing estate. There was a freeway on one side and once there’d been collapsing warehouses on the riverbank, filthy docks all around. There was a munitions factory there in the forties, a battery factory burnt down there in the early sixties. Christ knows what the soil pollution level was.
‘How did a Housing Commission block ever get there?’ I asked.
‘One of the great mysteries of our time. They’ve shredded the files and composted the bits. People say the land was bought from a mate of the then Housing Minister for about ten times its value and the buildings were put up by another mate for about five times the going rate. The story goes the three of them bought half of Merimbula with the proceeds.’
‘How did they get anybody to live there?’
‘No choice for some people,’ she said. ‘That or under a bridge. And the Commission shunted in their problem cases from all over. Move to Hoagland and we’ll forget about the three years’ rent owing and the fire and the explosion and the missing hot water system. That sort of thing. It was a hellhole. The cops called it the Leper Colony, LC for short.’
‘Small, though?’
‘Couple of hundred inmates. Small by Housing Commission standards, fifty flats, three three-storey walk-ups. When it leaked out that the government planned to close it, the Ministry said the place was so wrecked it was cheaper to build new flats than to fix it. But Yarrabank was not the place to build them. The place to build them was on land the Commission had bought on the outskirts of Sunshine.’
‘Not from the same mate?’ I said.
‘One day we’ll know.’
‘What did the residents think?’
‘Well, you’d have thought that even Sunshine would look like Surfers Paradise from Hoagland. But we don’t actually know what the residents thought because Anne Jeppeson came on the scene like Batwoman and after that all we knew was what the Fight for Hoagland action committee thought. Well, what Anne Jeppeson said the committee thought. All the media attention was on her. It was the Anne Jeppeson Show.’
‘What was her background?’
‘Strictly middle class. Deep suburbia. Volvo in every drive. Private school. Did politics at Monash. Worked for the Footscray Legal Service for a while. Tried to organise pieceworkers in the rag trade, then she got together a bunch of leftier-than-thou people and founded Right to a Roof. She organised a lot of squats in empty mansions in Toorak, that sort of thing. Great TV pictures.’
Linda finished her drink. I poured some more. ‘Anyway, when Hoagland turned up, she stitched together a big coalition of left groups. Christ knows how. They were people who hated one another. She got about five thousand people out for a demonstration, got the Building Workers’ Alliance to black-ban the Sunshine site, talked the public service unions into running stop-works. She was all over the papers, TV. The camera liked her. Joan of Arc come back in tight jeans and boots.’
‘And then she got killed.’
Linda nodded. ‘Without her, the whole Hoagland protest fell apart. Fight for Hoagland didn’t actually exist without her. No-one really gave a shit about Hoagland, least of all the tenants. They came out and said: “Please God, can we move somewhere else?” Suddenly the Housing Commission discovered it had empty flats all over the place. Hoagland got flattened inside a month.’
I said, ‘So it wouldn’t be likely that she was killed to stop her obstructing Hoagland’s closure?’
Her eyes flicked around the room and came back to me. A little smile. ‘Bit of an extreme step for the Housing Com-mission to take, don’t you think?’
I told her how the witness against Danny had abandoned his old Renault and taken off in a sports car for a new life in Perth after the trial.
She listened with her chin on her hand. ‘What does that suggest to you?’
‘I don’t know. I’m told Danny was unconscious near a pub miles from his car about half an hour before the car hit Anne Jeppeson. I’m groping around.’
‘Why would anyone pay Ronnie Bishop to tell the lies that sent McKillop to jail?’
‘Well, maybe it was the only way they could get the verdict,’ I said.
‘Are we talking about the cops?’
I poured some more wine. You don’t get much waiter-pouring at Donelli’s. ‘It’s possible. A drug squad cop called Scullin knew both Danny McKillop and Ronnie Bishop.’
Linda said, ‘Let me get this straight. Someone wants a conviction for Anne Jeppeson’s death. They use Bishop to frame McKillop. Is that right?’
‘That’s my extremely vague line of thought.’
‘Let’s move over to the “How”. As I recall, Ronnie gave the cops the car rego that night and they ran the number and went to McKillop’s place and found him asleep in the car. Blood all over the front.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And then Ronnie identified McKillop in a line-up.’
‘Yes.’
‘So if McKillop is innocent, someone else drove the car? And planted him in it later?’
Our first course arrived: honey-cured salmon with a mild peppercorn sauce. This was very fast for the establishment. People had eaten their shoe-leather while waiting for their first courses at Donelli’s. Donelly was obviously feeling some remorse about his outstanding debt and had given our order priority.
We talked about other things as we ate. Television, newspapers, the law. Linda had a sharp eye for a target and a spare, funny delivery, but she didn’t give away much about herself.
There was no pause between dishes. Donelly himself, head like a sculpture in Virginia ham draped with seaweed, white jacket tight as a bandage on his fat torso, came out of the kitchen with the main course.
‘If I may say so, Irish, it’s impeccable taste you’re showing dining with this lady, and she with you,’ he said, eyes never leaving Linda. ‘Not to mention your choice of establishment.’
‘It chooses itself, Patrick,’ I said. ‘For many reasons.’
‘All of them sound,’ he replied. ‘And you’ll do me the honour of accepting a little libation I’ll be sending over with the young fella.’
It was an old-fashioned Italian dish, chicken and veal risotto, the kind of thing you might cook yourself on a Sunday if you had someone to eat it with. Donelly’s libation arrived, a bottle of Barolo by Giuseppe Contratio, ten years old.
Linda tasted it. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘They know you here.’
‘Carnal knowledge,’ I said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
We got back to Ronnie Bishop over coffee. Linda came back from the women’s room, slid into her seat and said, ‘Listen, Jack, let’s say that the driver, let’s say that McKillop was the target. Someone wanted him in jail and they framed him. So Anne was just unlucky.’
‘Chosen at random, you mean?’ I said.
‘Yes. They had to knock someone down at a certain time of night, in a certain area. And she was there. Could’ve been anybody.’
‘It’s hard to see why anyone would go to that trouble to put Danny inside. Easier to knock him off.’
She nodded. Tips of hair slipped around and touched the corner of her mouth. She was faintly flushed from the wine. I found her very attractive and she knew it. ‘Maybe the Hoagland tenants saw their chances of escaping from the ghastly place slipping away and put out a contract on Anne Jeppeson,’ she said. ‘And whoever did the job
