other countries illegally to take snaps would presumably not alarm easily.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
The glove compartment held a Melway map book for greater Melbourne and a VicRoads map book for country Victoria. Half-under the front seat was a crushed McDonald’s packet.
I looked at the instruments. Only 56,657 km on the clock. Reconditioned engine, perhaps, clock turned back. Was that legal? The trip meter read 667 km.
Nothing here.
Back in the kitchen, I said, ‘A final request.’
Lyall was getting another Miller’s out of the fridge. ‘I find it hard to refuse you,’ she said. ‘An uncomfortable feeling.’
We exchanged looks again. Plain. A very strange perception. ‘Would you mind if someone gave Stuart’s computer a lookover?’
She tilted her head. ‘Is that all?’
‘It’s all I can think of at the moment.’
‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘Something will come to you.’
21
It began to rain on the way back to the office, nondescript Melbourne rain that didn’t even seem to fall. It seeped. The Stud’s erratic wipers, hard-contact, soft-contact, no-contact, always added another pleasurable dimension to winter. Coming down the straight towards the Swanston Street roundabout, straining to see through the smear, my mind was on Lyall Cronin.
At the front door, a little tipsy, she’d said, ‘My regards to Mrs Irish and all the little Irishes. Or should that be little Irish?’
I looked at her. She pushed her hair back with her left hand. She wasn’t asking a question about the plural form and I did not have to answer the question she was asking. ‘No Mrs Irish,’ I said. ‘One little Irish, living with a fishing boat skipper called Eric. Somewhere out there beyond Brisbane. I try not to think about it.’
‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘my regards to the current stand-in for the previous Mrs Irish.’
That was the moment. The moment to say nothing, smile, offer a handshake, say thank you. The moment to be non-committal. To be non-committal and professional.
Bugger that. Linda was being kissed on the ear in public. ‘Things are quiet on the stand-in front. I don’t think I’ve given you my card.’
Many arrogant men in expensive leased cars are encountered at the Swanston Street roundabout. At any time of the day. I think they live in North Carlton. One of them hooted at me. I hit the brake, he came close to climbing the kerb. Nice moment. Immature, yes. There is a certain immaturity in taking pleasure at seeing terror in the eyes of a Mercedes driver. But parts of us are forever immature. I can name my bits.
No messages at the office but, better than messages, a cheque from Belvedere Investments, aka Cyril Wootton enterprises. I took my seat behind the tailor’s table. Assumed the position. Tried to think. Stuart Wardle was possibly not a line of inquiry worth pursuing. So what if he knew something about Klostermann Gardier and Klostermann paid Gary large sums. That didn’t link them in any useful way.
Stuart Wardle was probably a dead-end.
Still. The neatness of his office. Clean-ups.
I’ll say. Two in two months was outstandingly unusual.
An untidy man who cleaned up before he disappeared. Suicides sometimes did that. Nothing in the wastepaper baskets.
Nothing in the filing cabinets. No personal papers.
No papers in Gary Connors’ apartment. No papers in Jellicoe’s house. Cleaned by professionals? Like the two men who called themselves Detectives Carmody and Mildren of the Australian Federal Police and spent forty-five minutes in Gary’s apartment on April 5.
Gary. Gary was the point. On the last day that I knew anything about his movements, he was being watched by a man called Canetti, an ex-Fed with an ACT driver’s licence.
This whole business was beginning to look complicated. Complicated and hazardous. Rinaldi thought Gary’s link with Klostermann Gardier was a good enough reason to back off. Barry Tregear thought Gary’s TransQuik connection was unhealthy for me.
Don’t ask. Leave it. They want snow in Darwin, these boys, it falls.
I could tell Des that I’d made no progress, couldn’t really do any more. It was the sensible thing to do. Rinaldi would approve, Barry would approve, Drew would approve.
Des’s trim weatherboard, in a street full of helpful and strong young women, was going to be shot out from under him. An elderly man, no house, no capital, on the pension, where did that leave him? In some narrow partitioned-off space in a squalid firetrap of an accommodation house, possessions in a suitcase, lying on a stained mattress on a sagging bed, coughing phlegm, staring at the spotted ceiling, smelling the reek from the lavatory down the passage, hearing the body noises of the hopeless people on either side.
I took out the photograph. I’d looked at it every day since Des gave it to me. The three men in singlets on the scaffolding on the fateful day. A man turned away, unidentifiable. In the middle, a man laughing. The tendons in this man’s neck stand out like balsawood struts under damp tissue paper. He has muscular stonemason’s arms and a head too narrow for his short, slicked-down hairstyle. It is Des.
And next to him in the tiny picture is my father. He is big, big shoulders, arms, a full head taller than Des, dark hair combed back, wry mouth, amused, head turned to Des.
It was possible to see, in this small photograph, that my father is looking at Des with affection, enjoying his laughter. Des was a friend. That was the reason for finding Gary, for getting Des’s money back. My father would have wanted me to help him.
My father would want me to help him.
The thought came to me unbidden and with it the cover of Linda’s left-behind book, The Mountain from Afar.
Oh God, men and their fathers.
Music. Like the mountain, from afar.
I got up and went to the window. In the closing day, the street gleamed wetly, its heavily cambered surface like the black cracked back of some ancient serpent rising between the buildings. The music was coming from Kelvin McCoy’s atelier. Classical music, Debussy, at a guess. The thought of McCoy finding inspiration for his greasetrap paintings in Debussy stopped me dead in my tracks.
I went across the street, stood at the door and listened, unashamed.
A woman’s voice over the music. Then McCoy’s ruined tones, saying loudly, ‘Relax, darling. It’s nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. I’m an artist, I work with naked women every day.’
Work? With naked women?
Indeed.
I stopped off at Taub’s to collect Charlie, got him out the door in twenty minutes. At the Prince, Norm O’Neill was reading the Herald Sun sports section.
‘Jack, Charlie,’ he said, waving the tabloid, ‘where’d ya reckon they get these footy writers? From the kinder? Bloody born yesterday. This clown here, knows nothin about the Sainters. All this dickhead knows, club coulda come down from Mars just last year.’
And to make an end is to make a beginning. Was that what T. S. Eliot said?
This thought in mind, I requested a round from the publican. Stan was looking a model of geniality, your plump old-fashioned landlord, dispenser of wisdom and good cheer. What drug could work the miracle of complete personality reversal?
‘Doubled the offer,’ he said, putting down my beer, leaning across the bar, not so much whispering as sniggering. ‘They want the old photos pretty bad.’
And then he winked, leered, took on a turbo-charged plump model of geniality look. A-Mr-Pickwick-on-human-
