‘Just a few words on the phone. Well, more than a few words, I suppose. It was very difficult to limit Anne to a few words. She was always so passionate about everything, even when she was little. When she was thirteen or fourteen she knew everything about every oppressed group in the world. It drove her father up the wall. He even complained to the school about one of the teachers putting ideas into the girls’ heads. They couldn’t agree on anything political. If she wasn’t arguing with her father, she was fighting with her brother. She enjoyed baiting him. He’s very like his father. Conservative, I suppose. He used to call her Annie the Anarchist. It’s funny how different children grow up to be, isn’t it? Do you have children, Mr Irish?’
‘Just the one.’
‘I wish we’d had ten, spaced over twenty years. A stupid idea, isn’t it?’
‘No.’
She smiled. ‘Of course it is. You’re very diplomatic.’
The time had come. I said, ‘Do you know of any reason why someone would want to murder Anne?’
She put her cup and saucer down and looked at me steadily. She had the inner stillness of someone who has found meaninglessness in everything. ‘Are you saying that Anne’s death might have been murder?’
‘There’s a possibility she was murdered.’
She looked away. ‘I don’t know what to think about that. Who would do something like that? No-one ever suggested…’
‘It’s just a possibility,’ I said. ‘Both the man who went to jail and the witness have been shot dead in the last ten days.’
‘Are the police investigating?’
‘Not Anne’s death, no.’
‘So it’s your idea that Anne might have been murdered?’
‘My first concern was my ex-client’s death but other things have turned up. Anne’s death may be the key to what’s happened since.’
She gave me a doubtful look. ‘I don’t know what I can do to help you, Mr Irish. Don’t you think it’s a police matter?’
‘Not just yet. Is there anyone Anne might have confided in? I mean, if she had any fears for her safety, been threatened, anything like that?’
‘I suppose the people in that group of hers. Right to a Roof? We never knew any of them.’ She thought for a while. ‘About her safety, I can remember her saying, it must have been at our wedding anniversary party, I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.’
‘At the squats she organised?’
‘I think she meant generally. She was on about mining companies cheating Aboriginals, but I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention. She usually had something she felt strongly about. Her father used to say she was only scored for percussion.’
There didn’t seem to be anything left to ask. I thanked her for seeing me. The passage leading to the front door was wide enough for us to walk side by side. One side was hung with Australian paintings from the thirties and forties: outdoor scenes, sunlit interiors. I recognised a Gruner and a Tidmarsh. The other wall was covered with framed family photographs.
At the front door, I looked to my right and saw a photograph of four solemn-faced girls in school uniform, two blonde, two dark-haired. They looked about sixteen. Under the picture, it said, ‘Coniston Ladies’ College Debating Team, 1976’.
I looked at the names. Anne Jeppeson was on the top right, blonde, with a snub nose and rebelliously tousled hair. The girl next to her was one of the brunettes.
Her name was Sarah Pixley.
‘She loved debating at school,’ said Mrs Jeppeson. ‘My husband never went to hear her.’
I pointed at Sarah Pixley. ‘Was she friendly with Anne Jeppeson?’
Mrs Jeppeson touched the photograph. ‘Sarah Pixley. They were great friends at school. Two of a kind in many ways. Her father’s the politician. Sarah hated him. She took her mother’s name when she left school. Life can be cruel to parents, can’t it?’
‘It can, Mrs Jeppeson,’ I said. ‘It can.’
I drove away down streets where the naked branches of elms and oaks were woven overhead like basketwork and you could glimpse the pert backsides of BMWs and Saabs in brick-paved driveways. It took a while before I found a place that looked as if it might make a hamburger. I was starving.
The hamburger was of the old school: pressed flat as a powder compact, burnt mince topped with burnt onion and cold-storage tomato. It was made by a new-school Aussie, a Vietnamese with rings in one earlobe and a beanie in the Richmond colours. It wasn’t a bad hamburger. A slice of sun came out and fell on my lap as I sat in the car, eating and watching a deal taking place across the street in a small park. Two boys in Melbourne Grammar blazers were scoring something off a tall youth with a ponytail wearing an oversized leather jacket. Answers to that day’s maths homework, probably.
When I’d finished, I had a sudden urge to see what was happening to the Hoagland estate. I set off down Malvern Road in the direction of St Kilda Road. At Albert Park, I got on to Kings Way and went up King Street through the drab end of the business district. As I waited to turn into Dudley Street at the Flagstaff Gardens lights, a dero in a mauve polyester suit with a filthy Fitzroy FC scarf wound around his neck knocked on the passenger window. I leaned across and wound it down.
‘Help a bloke can’t get a job?’ he asked. He had a long, narrow face, with deepset eyes and a big nose. He looked like a country boy lost in the city for forty years.
I found a five-dollar note and gave it to him. ‘Go the Roys.’
‘You’re a prince among men,’ the man said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’
The future Yarra Cove was much larger than it had appeared on Gerry Schuster’s computer screen. I parked near a wooden observation platform next to one of the three site gates. A burly man in a dark-blue uniform with a red shoulder patch that said AdvanceGuard was talking to the driver of a ute in the gateway.
There must have been twenty earthmoving vehicles, giant yellow insects, attacking the glum expanse of grey mud. At least as many trucks moved around the area on temporary roads, stretches of coarse aggregate sinking into the clay.
Not a trace remained of anything that had been there before. I stood at the rail, ten metres up, and after a while the ripping and pushing of the machines began to make some sense. They were gouging massive trenches, the width of streets, running from the waterfront. All of them led to an oval-shaped area, bigger than a football field, marked out with yellow nylon cord threaded through the eyes of metre-high steel needles stuck in the ground. The site huts, a small village of them, were in the middle of the oval. Eventually, the oval would be a yacht basin, with the trenches becoming canals leading from the riverfront. The Hoagland flats must have stood where a small digger was unearthing pipes in one ploughed-up patch.
For a while, caught up in the sheer scale of the operation, I watched the machines roaring and grinding, scooping and reversing, dumping, wheeling, their grey breaths pumping out and being snatched by the sharp- toothed little wind off the river. The whole scene was one of power: man and machine changing a landscape by sheer force.
This was what it was all about.
Sheer force.
Anne Jeppeson thought she was taking on the power of Heartless Bureaucracy. What hit her was the sheer force of Money.
She died so that someone could make a fortune out of rich people’s desire to park their boats outside their front doors.
It came to me with absolute certainty that my little inquiry into the lives and deaths of Danny McKillop and Anne Jeppeson was of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing would change what had happened, no-one would be called to account for it. Anne, Danny, Ronnie Bishop, the doctor, me—we were all just minor nuisances.
I felt like shouting Fuck into the wind but there was someone else on the platform, a thin man with a week’s grey stubble and wispy hair sticking out from under a beanie. He was drinking a can of Vic Bitter. Looking at me, he drained the can and threw it over his shoulder. ‘Used to live here,’ he shouted over the noise. ‘Fucking shithole.
