She put out her slim hand and touched my arm. ‘Jack, there’s something like seventy properties involved. If I read this UrbanData stuff right, at least seven companies started buying or taking options on the riverbank sites about eighteen months before the government announced it was closing Hoagland. At some point, I don’t know when yet, another outfit, called Niemen PL, emerged as owner of all the properties. Six years ago, Niemen consolidated all the waterfront properties into one and applied for rezoning of the area as residential.’
Linda paused while what appeared to be members of a female bike gang came in, talking at the top of their voices. Across the street, a white Holden with tinted windows was parked outside a furniture shop. A tall, balding man in a grey windcheater came walking along from the city side and got in the passenger door.
‘Anyway,’ said Linda, ‘the government knocked them back. They went to the Planning Appeals Board and won. Then the Planning Minister overruled the board.’
‘Why was that?’
The driver of the white Holden was getting out of the car. He crossed the road to our side and disappeared from view.
‘Said rezoning wasn’t in keeping with the government’s long-term plans for the area.’
I saw a match flare behind the Holden’s tinted driver’s side window. The man who had got in the passenger side was now in the driver’s seat. He opened the window a couple of inches to flick out his match.
Linda looked at her watch and drained her coffee. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘The last act in this saga is that six weeks ago Niemen sold the consolidated waterfront land to Charis.’
‘So Charis now owns the whole site?’
‘That’s right. There’s a road between the waterfront properties and the Hoagland land. The government sold the road to Charis a few days after the waterfront deal. And soon after that Charis announced the Yarra Cove development.’
‘Tell us thinkers slowed by age and drink what all this means,’ I said.
Linda gave me her slow smile. ‘I think it means that closing Hoagland was part of a plan to put together a thirty-acre waterfront site. That’s a developer’s wet dream. The only reason Yarra Cove didn’t get started a long time ago is that the Harker government got thrown out at the ’84 election. That meant a ten-year wait till Pitman and company got back in.’
I thought about this for a while. ‘And if Hoagland hadn’t been closed in ’84?’
She leaned across the table. ‘Then someone was stuck with a whole lot of falling-down old warehouses and polluted factory sites backed by the toughest Housing Commission flats in the city.’
The driver of the Holden was lighting up again. I said, ‘Are we both concluding that Anne Jeppeson’s death suited some people?’
‘I’ve got to find out more about the companies involved. But the answer is Yes. I think we should talk to Kevin Pixley.’
‘What became of him?’
‘Retired. Lives in Brighton. The bloke at work is an old drinking mate of his. I’ll see if he can get Pixley to talk to us.’
I said, ‘Can we have dinner? I’ve got to tell you something about Ronnie.’
She gave me an interested look. ‘Ring me before eight-thirty. I’m working till then.’
I took my time finishing the coffee. Then I took a stroll down Brunswick Street, marvelling at the dress sense of the young, crossed over to the other side at Johnson Street, walked back to my car.
The white Holden was gone.
19
I went back to my office and rang the last number Cam had left. He didn’t seem to leave the same number twice running. A woman with a French accent invited me to leave a message. My eye fell on the mobile phone in its little plastic case next to the Mac. I’d bought it in a fit of technological anxiety and used it about four times. I left the number with the French lady and walked over to Charlie’s.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Had the breakfast. Ready for the day’s work.’ He was preparing a length of wood for steam- bending, using a block plane to chamfer the edges that would be in tension. This was to stop the wood fibres breaking loose. In the corner, the low potbelly stove was fired up, and Charlie’s ancient steam kettle was starting to vibrate.
‘I’ve been out since dawn,’ I said. ‘Looking for people.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘A man with a profession. What does he do? He goes to the races and he looks for people who should stay missing.’
The mobile phone went off in my pocket, a nasty, insistent electronic noise. It was Cam. ‘The big man wants to have breakfast tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You on?’
I said yes.
‘Pick you up quarter to eight.’
I felt Charlie’s eyes on me as I closed the flap and put the phone in my pocket.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr Big Business Man. Mr Executive. So busy he can’t go to the telephone anymore, has to take it with him. Next it’s no time even to go for a shit. Take a little shithouse around with you, do it in the motor car.’
‘You need to keep up with things in my line of work,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, disbelief in his tone. ‘When you going to finish that table, Mr Walking Telephone?’
‘Friday. Well, Sunday.’
‘Got a big job yesterday,’ he said. ‘Man wants me to make him a library in Toorak. Panelled. Carved. Don’t know if I’m up to it anymore.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not up to it. Play bowls instead. Give the work to somebody who can do it.’
‘I just might,’ Charlie said. ‘Or maybe I’ll get an apprentice, hey? Smart girl. Strong. Not afraid of work. Reliable even.’
‘Good idea,’ I said, heading for my bits of table. ‘Anyone would want to spend five years making mortice and tenon joints and finding out about the finer points of lawn bowls.’
Charlie finished his planing and took the boards over to the steam box. It was a length of glazed sewerage pipe, eight feet long, sixteen inches in diameter, plugged at both ends. The steam went in at one end and escaped through a hole at the other. He gave it an appreciative smack with a huge hand. ‘You want to know something?’ he said. ‘You can give a schmuck a walking telephone. But what you got then is a schmuck with a walking telephone.’
‘Gee, you can learn a lot around here,’ I said, ‘just by listening.’
The workshop was warm from the steam box and the rest of the afternoon slipped by. At quarter to six, we called it a day and went around to the Prince. What Charlie called the Fitzroy Youth Club was in position at the bar.
‘Jack, my boy,’ said Wilbur Ong. ‘Did I tell you I tipped eight out of eight three weeks in a row now? In me granddaughter’s tipping pool, round this place she works. Hundreds in it. I give her me tips Thursday nights when she comes for tea. Me daughter’s girl.’
Norm O’Neill’s huge nose came around slowly, like the forward cannon on the USS Missouri swivelling to speak to Vietnam. ‘You can only get eight out of eight, Wilbur,’ he said slowly and with menace, ‘if you tip against the Lions.’
Wilbur gave him a pitying look. ‘Norm,’ he said, ‘if you was forty years younger I’d take you outside for jumpin to that conclusion. ’Course I don’t tip against the Lions. It’s the girl. She takes all me other tips and changes that one. She reckons tippin against the Lions is the only sure thing left in the footie.’
‘I don’t think you brought your daughter up right,’ Eric Tanner said.
Stan came out from behind the bar and switched on the television set on the wall in the corner. It was news time. When the set was first put in, Stan tried to keep it on all the time but the Youth Club kept switching it off. Now it went on for the news and football.
The news opened with a helicopter view of Dr Paul Gilbert’s health centre with at least ten vehicles parked outside the front gate.
‘Two men have been found shot dead at an isolated property bordering on the Wombat State Forest outside Daylesford,’ the woman newsreader said. ‘One of the bodies was in a hot spa bath. Police said the men might have
