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?’
