Jarman’s running a one-cop station in the Mallee. Day I got back to the Bar, Apsley Kerr Woodward offered me a brief worth maybe a hundred grand a year. What do you think I’m saying?’
‘I wish I could be sure. And this Wardle, the journalist, that was the only contact you had?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Thanks. Buy you a drink some time. Not mineral water.’
He nodded. ‘Pleasure. Got your number.’ I watched him go to the car, open a back door, put his bags on the seat. He looked back at me, said, ‘Jack, I’m not getting it over to you. There’s stuff I can’t talk about. Klostermann Gardier don’t give up. If your bloke’s mixed up with them, walk away. That’s the only reason I told you all this.’
I nodded. ‘I tend towards the obtuse. Sounds like good advice.’
At the driver’s door, he said, ‘It was for me and it is for you. These people can Mortein anything. You might buzz around for a while but eventually you’ll be dead. I’ll call you. Get together with Greer. Have a meal. Nights are long these days.’
They were indeed.
16
I went to the office and found Simone Bendsten’s card. The address was about six blocks away. I knew the place. It had been a tea-packing plant, red-brick building empty for years. Then part of it burnt down in the seventies, and it served as dero accommodation until two speculators bought the roofless shell in the early eighties. They turned it into four barnlike apartments with a shared courtyard in the middle. Probably the first lofts in Fitzroy, possibly even Melbourne. The building was a tombstone for a working-class suburb.
Entry was through the courtyard door, admission by buzzer. I stood in the damp and buzzed.
‘Bendsten Research,’ Simone said.
‘Jack Irish. Simone, I’ve got a few jobs.’
She unlocked the door from on high. The courtyard had a glass roof and was full of greenery in huge pots. Her apartment was up iron stairs to the right. She was waiting in the doorway.
‘Come in.’
She was in jeans and a big cotton shirt, socks, no shoes. Today, her dark hair was loose.
‘Not dressed for business today,’ she said.
Down a short passage into a room the size of two double garages, kitchen bench against the righthand wall, the rest of the space furnished for eating, lounging, working. In the middle, a fire burned low in an elegant black enamel woodheater. Simone’s work table held a formidable battery of electronic equipment. Two monitors glowed blue in the low light.
We sat in Morris chairs with leather cushions. I told her about looking for Gary. ‘I’m getting the feeling I should be careful on the phone. I’ve got some more names. People this time. One is Carlos Siebold. He’s a Paraguayan lawyer based in Hamburg who acts for Klostermann Gardier. You looked them up.’
I spelled Siebold. ‘Two others. Major-General Gordon Ibell. And Charles deFoster Winter.’
Simone said, ‘I’ll have to try a lot of databases, European, American. It’ll cost a bit.’
‘Stop when you get to three hundred bucks,’ I said.
‘Nothing like that. I’ll call you tomorrow. At home?’
‘Keep it cryptic. I’ll come around.’ I gave her the number.
I put in a few hours at Taub’s, building the framework for the first of six mahogany mantelpieces Charlie was making to go into a mansion at Mount Macedon being rebuilt after a fire. Then I went home for a shower and a change of clothes and caught a tram into the city.
Only one Pom was on the cutting floor of UpperCut, a tall, elegant man with thick grey hair running back from his brow in waves. He was all in black.
‘Chrissy, Chrissy Donato,’ the man said. ‘That’s an awfully long time ago. I was just a boy then. She married the scrumptious Gary and went off to live happily ever after. Which in this case was about two years, I think. She popped in every now and again. Not for years now, though. What’s she done?’
I was looking at the women in the chairs. The one nearest was leaning back, getting a hairwash and scalp massage. Her eyes were closed in what looked like sexual pleasure. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Her ex-father-in-law wants to get in touch.’
He gave me a look of total disbelief. ‘She married again,’ he said. ‘The dears never learn, do they? Why they can’t be happy just doing whatever it is they do with men, I’ll never know.’
‘Would you know her new name? If she took on a new name.’
‘Of course she took on a new name. What’s the point of taking on a new husband if you don’t take the name? Might as well be married to the old one.’
He cocked his head, put a fingertip to the middle of his mouth. ‘George might know. George knows everything. He actually listens to what people are saying. I gave that up years ago. No-one’s told me anything remotely interesting since I was doing a certain Royal’s hair in London. And that’s a while ago, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? Absolute bitch of course, but the gossip? She’d just given the man she married for his impressive equipment the heave-ho. Anyway, she couldn’t bear being vertical for more than short periods. No-one was safe. I can tell you, I’ve felt that jewelled claw on my thigh. Rippling thigh.’
‘George?’
He looked around and shouted, ‘Linda, darling, get George to come out here, will you?’ To me, he said, ‘The old thing’s in there fiddling the books.’
A man who could have been his slighter, shorter brother came out of a door at the back of the room. He was holding black-rimmed glasses at mouth level.
‘What?’ he said, not happy at being summoned.
‘Chrissy Donato. She married Gary Connors. That didn’t last. What then?’
‘Married a man called Sargent. He owns all those ghastly wedding reception places. They bought the Mendels’ mansion in Macedon.’
‘Thank you, George. You may return to your culinary accounting chore.’
‘Very fucking kind of you,’ said George, pivoting.
On the tram, I thought about Gary. He might have more than one residence. People earning $350,000 a year could afford holiday houses. Perhaps the case of beer and the six bottles of wine were for his holiday house. Not a long holiday. The Mornington Peninsula perhaps? Somewhere along the Great Ocean Road? It wasn’t a promising line of inquiry. Nothing about Gary said holiday house. And if he’d gone away for a holiday, he would be using his cards.
I rang Des from the office.
‘Des, should have asked you. Gary have a holiday place? Somewhere he might go that you know of?’
Des sucked his teeth. ‘Wouldn’t know, Jack. The second wife might know.’
17
Chrissy Donato-Connors-Sargent had travelled some distance from a Housing Commission house in Broadmeadows. She now lived on the slopes of Mount Macedon, down a country lane behind high stone walls. I switched off and listened. Birdsong, the faraway buzz of a ride-on mower, the whop of a tennis ball being hit hard.
Chrissy received me in a conservatory full of jungle plants looking out onto a broad brick-paved terrace, beyond which was a thirty-metre pool, azure in a moment of sunshine. The tennis sound was coming from behind a creeper-covered fence.
‘Mr Irish, Mrs Sargent,’ said the large brown man in a dark suit who’d allowed me in.
She was sitting upright in a white metal-framed chair. There were at least ten other chairs in groups around two glass-topped tables.
