And you could see the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.
You could see the rings on his fingers, big rings on big fingers.
I touched my face.
I knew the rings. I felt a joy.
31
Eric the Cybergoth rang back when I was halfway through the second bottle of beer. He coughed for a while, the man who put the hack into hacker.
‘Redmile Solutions, four vehicles, want them?’ he said, nasal and throaty and apparently speaking from beneath an eider-down.
‘Might as well.’ I wrote down details of four vehicles, the address in Abbotsford. It was just off Johnston Street, in the dip, not a great distance from where I sat. I said goodbye, reached for my book, found a number.
‘No, we never sleep,’ said Simone Bendsten. ‘We can’t afford to now that we are in fact we and not lonesome me calling myself we like Queen Victoria.’
I went to the kitchen and rinsed an arbitrary quantity of rice, put it in the rice pot, covered it with a certain amount of water, threw in two cubes of frozen chicken stock, put the container into the microwave and punched in an arbitrary cooking time.
It would turn out soggy, it would turn out as a hard rice cake. Or each grain would be perfect, moist, independent of its neighbours. There was no knowing.
And I didn’t care. I opened a can of tuna and went to the cupboard for the plum sauce from the Adelaide Hills. There could not possibly be enough tuna swimming around Thailand to supply every supermarket in the world with as much tuna as they needed. What was this stuff? Patagonian toothfish?
Capers, gherkins, where? The phone.
‘Jack,’ she said, ‘The Age carried a report on 12 June 1995 of two men accused of assaulting a building contractor called Darren Kluske in a parking lot in Melton. Kluske said he was working on a MassiBild site at the time and he’d seen the men on building sites before. He believed they worked for a company called Redmile that, quote, does Massi’s dirty work, unquote.’
‘Names?’
‘Brian Robert Grayling and Reece Stedman. Twenty-two June, charges withdrawn. A prosecution witness declined to testify. The name also shows up in the building industry royal commission a week ago.’
‘Yes?’
‘In Perth, a witness told the commission his job in 1998 was to distribute cash payments to workers on five sites. The money was given to him in plastic bags by, quote, different blokes from Redmile, unquote. He was asked about Redmile but he said all he knew was the name and that they were, quote, heavies, dangerous people, unquote.’
‘Can you run the two men?’
‘We’re ahead of you, Jack. Grayling’s dead, there’s a death notice in 1998. Stedman was a detective sergeant in the Victoria Police. On 17 May 1993, he was named in an internal affairs report on the drug squad leaked to the Herald Sun. He is known to, quote, associate with drug dealers, pimps and prostitutes, unquote. Two days later, 20 May, the paper carried a story saying the three drug-squad members named in the document had resigned from the force.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘You are as a dutiful child to a blind man.’
‘If I don’t get some exercise soon,’ she said, ‘only the less sighted will go out with me.’
‘My sight is reasonable and I will always go out with you.’
‘Starting when?’
‘Well, how does damn soon sound?’
‘Sounds fine, if vague. But you have my number.’
I ate my simple meal watching television and reading a two-day-old newspaper. In a report on the royal commission, a MassiBild employee denied any knowledge of the practice of contractors supplying subcontractors with cash to pay workers.
All too complicated. Too many names, brain of dough. The bones of my face ached, my chest and stomach hurt where I’d been punched. I was also badly hung over.
I switched on the answering machine, turned the volume to nothing, kicked the wedges under the doors, went to bed. While I was trying to keep from thinking, sleep claimed me like quicksand.
32
I woke late, it was after nine, eastern sunlight on the curtains. In the bathroom, I looked. The swelling had almost gone from my cheeks, welts less livid, a few thin scabs formed.
Under the falling water, I thought about near-death experiences, people trying to kill me, beating me up, threatening me. Not what I’d had in mind when I took the decision to give up practising criminal law.
Dressing, I thought that, when this was over, I would tell Wootton I didn’t want any more jobs. Between leases and contracts and a bit of luck with the horses, I could get by. Selling the Stud would help. It was like owning a yacht, the cost per hour of use was shocking.
When this was over. When would that be? When I found out what had happened to Janene and Katelyn, the missing women? Dead women? My thoughts kept coming back to them. This matter began to take on its strange shape the night the car pulled up next to me outside the boot factory.
Mickey Franklin.
Yes?
I’ll give you a name.
A name?
Janene Ballich.
How do you spell that?
B-A-L–L-I–C-H.
Names are useful. Come in and see my collected phone books.
Jack, this is serious shit, mate. Goodnight.
Serious, indeed. Janene and Wayne. Dead Wayne, entrepreneur of the senses, one-stop Wayne. I put bread in the toaster, old but good bread in an old toaster with sides that opened, sat at the kitchen table in the sunlight, and remembered Popeye Costello’s words.
Girls, boys, micks, dicks, cock-frocks, fladgers, bondies, whatever. Customer-driven, that’s the ticket.
And Janene? On the menu?
I suppose.
Tea. I emptied the kettle, refilled, put a teabag into the teapot, empty and clean. When did I do that? Thinking about Wayne Dilthey, cocky Wayne standing between Janene and Katelyn in the photograph. That would have been close to the highwater mark, lovely young spunks on either side, his bottom touching the Porsche.
Wayne Dilthey. Like a sex-and-drugs supermarket that did home deliveries. Was that how it worked? Where was Wayne going when fate caught up with him in Kaniva? Mileages to buggery in South Australia written on his road map, said Barry Tregear.
The toast was smouldering. I turned it over. At the time, you often failed to understand the significance of what people were telling you. Your mind was usually ahead, thinking of the next question. What set great cross- examiners apart was that they listened to witnesses’ answers, never got ahead of themselves, stayed with a topic until it was flat as a bunny ironed by several roadtrains. That was the way you nudged the witness beyond the rehearsed answers, edged them into the ad-lib zone, Drew’s term.
Wayne was on the run, clearly. Something happened and he ran. Did something happen to Wayne and Janene
