them sitting on a bench in the park, starting with the sports section.
SAINTS OVERPOWER CARLTON. That made me feel better. It was a beginning, a clean start to the season.
At home, a message from my sister on the machine. I rang.
‘Jesus,’ said Rosa. ‘What’s happening? Is this a time warp? The response time just shortened by twelve days.’
‘We are constantly tuning our operating procedures,’ I said.
I crossed the Yarra in Linda’s Alfa and we ate in a place that was uncertain whether it wanted to be a restaurant or a house party that charged. Then we toured the art galleries of South Yarra, the soft-shirted owners treating Rosa the way casinos treat highrollers. In the last one, I left her talking to the smooth young art pimp and wandered around. The smallest chamber was given over to four large canvases dotted with crude animals and symbols that appeared to be lifted directly from the art of the Nupe in northern Nigeria.
Rosa and the gallerista came up behind me.
‘Excellent investments,’ said the man. ‘I’m afraid Gary’s got a terminal smack habit. This’s the work of two years. Could be the last.’
I looked at a signature. Gary Webber. I thought of the walk at Macedon. Sir Colin had spat the name. People the Long-mores touched didn’t seem to lead lucky lives.
Peter Temple
White Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4)
‘Well,’ said Cyril Wootton, ‘that’s not very good, is it? Have to do better than that, won’t you? Clients on premium rates expect premium results, don’t they?’
Replete after the long-awaited breakfast of soft-poached eggs with the lot at Enzio’s, I was sitting in a client’s chair in Wootton’s office, a chamber appointed like the Writing Room on the first-class deck of a P amp; O liner. Cyril was behind his large desk, small, plump hands folded on the leather inlay, his head cocked, very much the bank manager with a defaulting borrower, say, a farmer whose livestock, crops and homestead had been destroyed by a freak hailstorm.
‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘I suggest you go easy on the terminal interrogative phrases.’
‘What?’ he said, coming upright in his chair, alarm in his eyes, eyebrows risen. ‘What’s that mean?’
‘Interrogatives again,’ I said. ‘To business. The person’s phone calls for a month or so.’
Wootton sat back, adjusted his tie, smoothed his oiled hair, sniffed. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I think you forget who is employer and whom is employed.’
‘Always uppermost in my mind, Cyril,’ I said. ‘That and grammar.’
‘It’ll take a day or two,’ he said. ‘It’s become more difficult. Apparently every Tom, Dick and Harry wants this sensitive information now.’
‘It is annoying when the agencies of law enforcement jump the queue,’ I said. ‘Speaking of which, is that records clerk dog of yours still in place?’
Wootton had suborned a civilian in the police force, a grudge-bearer of some kind, the public service was full of them — evolutionary losers in the Darwinian in-fights, political suck-ups beached a mile inland by the tsunamis of change in government, ordinary incompetents embittered by being ignored for promotion. These people needed little encouragement to defame their superiors. A few long lunches, a day at the races, dinner with a prepaid harlot or two, and they were groomed and ready for service.
‘I assume so,’ said Wootton.
I reached across for one of his pads and wrote the name Janene Ballich.
Cyril put on his new glasses, round and gold-rimmed. ‘What’s this?’ he said.
‘Some connection with the deceased. She may be in the jacks’ database.’
Cyril gave me his banker’s look again. ‘One conserves one’s resources for the truly important,’ he said. ‘One begins with the newspaper files.’
I’d had enough prudent bank manager. ‘Really? One could also easily find oneself bereft of one’s only employee remotely capable of dealing with one’s titled clientele. With me, sunshine?’
‘I’ll make the request,’ he said, not happy.
‘An answer today would be nice.’
‘That is not within my control.’
‘Pull on the chokechain,’ I said. ‘What’s the point of having dogs if you can’t command them?’
A knock on the door.
‘Enter,’ said Cyril.
I turned. It was Mrs Davenport, Wootton’s receptionist. In the innocent pre-AIDS days, she had been the front-of-house person for a specialist in social complaints who ministered to the big end of town. It was perfect training for her job with Cyril. Through his parlour too passed people burdened with painful and embarrassing afflictions which they did not wish to become common knowledge. Mrs Davenport treated these clients as she had her earlier ones — with an air of frigid disdain.
‘Your next appointee will be here in fifteen minutes, Mr Wootton,’ she said. ‘As you know, the person does not wish to be kept waiting.’
‘Thank you,’ said Wootton.
She withdrew.
‘If I get anything, I’ll send it around,’ said Wootton. ‘To which of the places you flit among?’
‘Between, Cyril. I flit between. It’s thieves I’m among.’
His eyebrows rose again.
‘Charlie’s,’ I said. ‘Put it in the box at Charlie’s.’
In the reception room, I said goodbye to Mrs Davenport. ‘I can’t promise when I’ll be back,’ I said. ‘Can you endure that uncertainty?’
She gazed at me, unblinking, no emotion disturbing her white marble countenance. I longed to reach out and touch her hair, disturb its frozen waves like an icebreaker piercing the Arctic sea.
‘In future, please ring before seeking to see Mr Wootton,’ she said.
‘But it’s really you, you, you I want to see.’
‘Good-day, Mr Irish.’
At the door, I turned and said, ‘Mrs Davenport, have you any idea of the effect your icy demeanour has on men?’
She didn’t look at me. ‘I understand there are telephone counselling services for those unable to seek professional help in the normal way,’ she said. ‘Good-day again.’
‘God,’ I said, ‘you just keep tightening the screw, don’t you?’
I went down to the street with birdsong in my heart.
Peter Temple
White Dog (Jack Irish Thriller 4)
‘In your hands, Mr Irish,’ he said, a plump face under slick hair, a brisk voice. I knew him, he’d delivered before.
I said thank you. There was no signing for envelopes from D. J. Olivier. I went back to my table and opened this one with a sharpened bicycle spoke I’d found in the alley and sterilised. A wad of A4 sheets of paper, some photographs, laser-printed. A sticky yellow square was attached to the first page. One handwritten sentence: ‘Care might be in order.’
A stranger to care, I returned to my chair behind the tailor’s table. I read:
MICHAEL RAIMOND FRANKLIN
Born 1962, Brisbane. Father Gianfranco Francesca, labourer, mother Alessandra Francesca, nee Cometti, household duties. Only child. St Patrick’s College, graduated 1979. Engineering University of Queensland 1980-81. First-class honours, passes all subjects.
Passport information: First use, 1982. Stamps, in sequence, for United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Australia, September 1986.
Registered as employee of Casterton Construction, Brisbane [see below for Casterton] in December 1986. Position: supervisor.
