grinder in both hands, held it up like a howling icon, killed it.
Silence.
I stepped around the car skeleton and the person saw me. The yellow helmet visor reflected the glare from a light on a tripod.
‘I’m looking for Sarah Longmore,’ I said.
The person stood up, pushed up the visor, pulled off a glove by its fingertips. Then she combed her hair with her fingers.
‘Jack Irish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thanks for coming.’
Sarah Longmore wore no make-up, her short hair stuck up in several directions, her face was dirty, smeared, her eyebrows furry. She didn’t look like the dark-suited woman in court. I thought she looked better this way.
‘I told Andrew I’d come to see you,’ she said, ‘but he said that wasn’t the way it was done.’
Her accent was hard to place: not Australian, not quite upper-class English.
‘Drew’s good on the way things are done,’ I said. ‘This is also more interesting than my place.’
‘What time is it? I lose track.’
She pulled at the zip that ran diagonally across her chest, exposed a black T-shirt.
‘Just after four,’ I said.
‘Beer time. There’s tea, coffee, water.’
I could stomach a beer. On many days, I felt that a beer would go well with the muesli, then it would be nice to have another one to get the day moving, get things stabilised.
‘Beer, thanks,’ I said.
‘It’s in the shed.’
I followed her, walked around the prone cruciform figure to a lean-to in the back corner of the building, a building inside a building, a rough fibro structure with a window and a flue coming out of the roof. The foreman’s hut, presumably. Inside, there was a drum wood-burning heater, a formica-topped kitchen table with an electric frying pan and a toaster on it, two kitchen chairs, two 1950s Swedish-style easychairs. A small fridge, new, stood in the corner.
‘It’s not cold,’ she said. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Fine.’
‘I lived in Berlin,’ she said. She took two brown bottles off a shelf, put them on the table, uncapped them with a Swiss army knife lying ready. ‘The people I was with drank beer all the time. Morning, noon and night. You get a taste for it. Warm German beer.’
She handed me a bottle. Dresdner Pils. I took a swig. A brown-tasting beer, medicinal.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Sit.’
We sat in the chairs, bottoms too far down, knees too high, held our bottles on the wooden arms.
‘Andrew says you’re a lawyer who does other things,’ she said. ‘Finds people, witnesses, things like that. That’s odd for a lawyer, isn’t it?’
Sarah Longmore looked at you with the eyes of a child. I felt that she might say anything: My dad says you’re a stupid prick. Mum says you always hold on to her a bit too long.
‘A long story,’ I said. ‘Are you happy about being questioned?’
‘Well, I’ll say when I’m not.’
‘The plea, that’s final?’
She had the beer bottle to her lips, indenting the skin. She lowered it.
‘Mr Irish,’ she said, ‘I’ve had all the shit I can take in a week. You can go now.’
I nodded. ‘The innocent should always plead not guilty. The murder weapon.’
She closed her eyes for a long time, shook her head, opened her eyes. ‘Mickey gave it to me. I had a break-in, other strange stuff. He got worried. I didn’t want the fucking thing.’
‘May I ask what kind of relationship you had with Mickey?’
‘Sexual,’ she said. ‘Are there other kinds?’
‘Apparently. Do you know much about his affairs?’
Sarah raised her eyebrows.
‘His business affairs.’
She shook her head. ‘Not a lot, no.’
You could get to like the taste of Dresdner. Did Bomber Harris’s teenage aircrews hit the brewery, send the fluid flowing through the burning streets, turning to steam?
Now she drank, a decent swig, almost a third of the bottle. ‘That’s good,’ she said. She got up and went to a black leather jacket hanging over a chair, groped it, found a packet. Camel. ‘Started again,’ she said, stripping the cellophane. ‘No non-smokers in ghastly fucking remand, I can tell you. Clean for three years. Do you?’
I shook my head. I had no desire to smoke a cigarette, the hit was so small, you needed another one straight away. But it always saddened me, self-denial, it spoke of times gone.
There was a plastic lighter on the table. She lit, sucked. Her cheeks hollowed, she blew smoke.
‘The relationship with Mickey, did that end over your sister?’
She put her head back, wry smile. ‘No. I got tired of it. He wasn’t fun to be with anymore. Bad moods, always half-pissed.’ She tapped ash onto the floor. ‘And you’ll want to know that the sex had gone to hell too.’
‘Seemingly trivial details like that can help,’ I said. ‘They’ll say there was an overlap.’
‘Overlap?’
‘Mickey was seeing both of you at one point.’
‘Screwing you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘News to me but it’s no surprise.’
I looked away and after a while she sat down and said, ‘You radiate disbelief. If I’d found out at the time, it wouldn’t have surprised me. Sophie wants everything I’ve got and Mickey wanted everything, full stop. Until he had it. Then it had no value.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘At an exhibition about eighteen months ago. He rang me the next day.’
‘How long did it last?’
‘I packed it in three months ago.’
‘Did he ever say anything about being in danger?’
‘No. I can’t imagine Mickey saying anything like that.’
‘Get any feeling that he might be?’
She looked at her short nails. ‘No. Well, his driver always sat at the next table. That’s all.’
‘Did he eat?’
‘The driver?’
‘Yes.’
‘Vegetables. He only ate vegetables.’ She smiled.
It was cold in the room. The foreman would have had the drum heater going, the place snug, the dirty window bleeding condensation.
‘Do you sell your work?’ I said.
Sarah tilted her head, her mouth turned down, a mock-severe look. ‘Offer them for sale? No. They’re usually commissioned. Do they challenge you?’
I had some beer. ‘I find them full of challenge,’ I said.
She held up her cigarette, looked at it. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then all the fucking cutting and the welding and the grinding haven’t been entirely wasted.’
I thought about Charlie Taub. He would think that the cutting and welding and grinding were a complete waste of human effort.
‘Andrew will have to cast serious doubt on the prosecution case,’ I said. ‘If possible, he’ll want to offer an alternative explanation for Mickey’s murder. That’s the difficult part.’
She nodded. ‘If I could help, I’d help, Jesus, believe me I’d help.’
