He saw me to the lift. In the lobby downstairs, the ex-screw made a big show of logging me out.
16
‘Well, old sausage,’ said Wootton. ‘It’d be another matter if this was an inquiry you were pursuing on my behalf.’
I’d tracked Wootton to the street bar of the Windsor Hotel, a Victorian pile near Parliament, after ringing his office on the way back from Father Gorman’s. He stopped off there every day on his way home. It was Wootton’s sort of place: wood panelling, photographs of cricket teams.
We were sitting at a window looking out on Spring Street. It was just after 5.30 p.m. and the place was filling up with pudgy young men in expensive suits and club ties. Wootton was wearing a dark pinstripe suit with waistcoat, shirt with narrow stripes and a tie with little crests on it. His thinning hair was brushed back on his perfectly round skull and his moustache, dyed jet black, was bristly but trim. He looked like an old-style Collins Street banker and that was the way he wanted to look.
I’d known Wootton in Vietnam. He’d been a sergeant in stores, thankless work in the service of country. In lieu of thanks, he’d taken money from about twenty bars and brothels for supplying them with everything from Fosters beer to Vegemite. Wootton would have gone home very rich if two military policemen hadn’t seized his stash of US dollars two days before he was due to fly out. He never faced trial. The MPs thought the loss would be enough of a lesson to him. He never said another word about his money. And nor did they.
‘Cyril, I think I’ve got more than enough credit in my account to cover this little favour. But if it’s too much trouble—’
‘Steady on, Jack,’ said Wootton. ‘No need to get shirty.’ He took a sip of his whisky and water and rolled it around in his mouth, lips pursed. When he’d swallowed, he sighed and said, ‘I’ll have to go and do this from a bloody public phone, you know. Give me the number and the dates.’
I sipped my beer and read the Herald Sun Wootton had left behind while I waited. The lead story was another police shooting. A policewoman had shot dead a man who came at her with a knife when she attended a domestic dispute in Reservoir. The new Police Minister, Garth Bruce, was quoted as saying: ‘As a former policeman, I know the demands and dangers of the job. I am not, of course, passing any opinion on what took place in this incident. The coroner will decide that. But I’m determined that the police force will move away from the culture of the gun that’s become entrenched over the last ten years or so.’ There was a photograph of the Minister: a big serious man with short hair and rimless glasses.
Wootton was away about fifteen minutes. He came in brushing rain off his suit. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said. ‘Supposed to be a bloody five-star hotel. Had to go outside in the rain to find a phone that worked.’
A black Mercedes pulled up outside and two Japanese men in soaked golf outfits got out of the back. They stood close together in the drizzle, cap peaks almost touching, watching the driver unload two massive golf bags and wheelchair-size chrome golf buggies from the boot.
‘Sons of Nippon,’ said Wootton, flicking moisture off his moustache. ‘Don’t know if I’d go swanning around Tokyo if I’d worked thousands of Japs to death in World War II.’
‘Those two look a bit young to have worked anyone to death in World War II,’ I said.
‘Don’t be facetious. I need something to eat.’ He went over to the counter. A barmaid served him immediately. They knew the man here. He came back opening a bag of salt and vinegar chips. ‘Want some?’
I shook my head. He crammed a handful in under the moustache. Pieces stuck to it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’ll take about ten minutes for the reverse directory.’
Until Wootton went back to his phone, we continued our argument about how much I’d added to my fee for getting a gun pointed at me by Eddie Dollery.
When he came back, Wootton took an old envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. On the back were about a dozen telephone numbers, all the calls to different numbers made on Mrs Bishop’s telephone in the three days Ronnie was there. Against each one, in Wootton’s neat hand, was a name and address.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope I’ve contributed to you finding your catamite.’
‘Sodomite,’ I said. ‘He presumably had catamites. I only asked you to do it for me because I’m sworn to uphold the law.’
Wootton stuffed some more chips in his mouth. Through them, he said, ‘Hah bloody hah. Joined the Boy Scouts, have we? Dib, Dib, Dib. Dob, Dob, Dob.’
‘That’s the Cubs, Cyril,’ I said. ‘But how would you know?’
I went home and tried Linda Hillier at Pacific Rim News. She was in Sydney, a man said. Back tomorrow. I poured a glass of white wine from an opened bottle in the fridge and studied the phone calls from Mrs Bishop’s number. The calls to Danny McKillop and Father Gorman jumped out at me. That left nine calls. I rang Mrs Bishop. We went through the other calls from the beginning of the list. She had made all the calls except the last one. It was to a P. Gilbert, Long Gully Road, Daylesford. Made at 4.07 p.m. on the day Ronnie vanished.
‘That must be Paul Gilbert,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t thought of him in years. Dr Paul Gilbert, he was. He went to school with Ronnie. Lovely boy, very clever. He had a surgery in St Georges Road.’
‘The address is in Daylesford,’ I said.
‘Well, he’s not a doctor anymore,’ Mrs Bishop said. ‘There was some trouble over drugs. It was in the papers. He started uni at the same time as Ronnie. I used to see Paul’s mum sometimes. She was so proud of her boy before it happened.’
I rang the number twice before I went to bed. No answer. I fell asleep thinking about Linda Hillier. She probably had a good laugh at being come on to by the likes of me. Why had Gavin Legge called her a starfucker and a groupie? What star? What group? I hoped she wasn’t avoiding me.
17
The bare limbs of Wombat Hill’s English trees still smoked mist as I drove into Daylesford just after 9 a.m. The commuters were all gone and the small town’s locals were easing themselves into the day. I parked in the main street and asked at the butcher’s for directions to Long Gully Road. Butchers are the most friendly shopkeepers. It must have something to do with working with dead animals.
‘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
