An Iron Rose (10 page)

Brendan paused, looking as happy as I’d seen him.

‘Guess,’ he said.

I’d guessed. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Hard drive’s like the Pope’s conscience. Not a fucking thing on it. Hacked into, they reckon. Supposed to be impossible.’

‘So?’

‘Lots of people happy.’

‘You reckon what?’

‘Dunno. People don’t get together to make something like that happen. More like one very big person got together with some friends. Couldn’t just take out the bit the person wanted, they took the lot.’

I said, ‘And you take the view one friend could be Scully. How come the Commissioner doesn’t think that too?’

Brendan gave me a long, unblinking stare. ‘Yeah, well, the view’s different from the thirtieth fucking floor. Ground level’s where you smell the garbage. They’re all overdue, that mob.’ ‘I hear Bianchi drowned.’

‘A fucking tragedy. Cop resigns, buys waterside mansion in Noosa with modest pension and savings. Found floating in river. New wife says he went out for a look at the new boat, she falls asleep. Exhausted from a marathon dicking probably. Next morning the neighbour sees poor Darren bobbing around like a turd.’

‘What about Hill?’

‘Bobby’s making lots of money in the baboon hire business. Calls himself a security consultant. Need muscle for your rock concert, nightclub, anything, Hill Associates got baboons on tap, any number. Also provides special security services for rich people. Drives this grey Merc.’

‘I knew the boy would amount to something.’ We shook hands. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’

‘I only do it because you can get me killed,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘You go first. I’ll just have a smoke, watch the trains a bit.’

I was a few paces away when he said, ‘Mac.’

I turned.

‘The Lefroy thing,’ he said. ‘I heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then.’

‘Yes?’

‘Mance was there too. That’s all I heard.’ He looked away.

‘Much maligned creatures, chooks,’ said Dot Walsh, frisbeeing out another precise arc of grain to the variegated flock of fowls. ‘Quite intelligent, some of them. Unlike sheep, which are uniformly stupid.’

She pointed to a large black-and-white bird. ‘That’s Helen, my favourite. After Helen of Troy.’

By her voice, Mrs Walsh was English, in her seventies, deeply lined but unbowed and undimmed, with hair cut short and sharp. I’d told her my business at the front door. She’d shown no interest in why I wanted to know more about the story her husband had told Frank Cullen.

‘I’m surprised Frank remembers it,’ she’d said. ‘I used to make a special trip to the tip with bottles after one of their sessions. Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters now that Simon’s gone. Come through. It’s chook feeding time.’

When she’d exhausted the grain, we went on a tour of the garden. Even in the bleak heart of winter, it was beautiful: huge bare oaks and elms, black against the asbestos sky, views of farmland at the end of long hedged paths, a pond with ducks, a rose walk that narrowed to a slim gate just wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

‘How big?’ I said.

‘Two acres,’ she said. ‘All that’s left of nearly a thousand. From a thousand acres to two in a generation. That was my Simon’s accomplishment. Simon and Johnny Walker Black Label. The old firm, he used to say. Still, he was a lovely man, lovely. Just unfirm of purpose.’

She moved her head like her hens as she talked, quick sideways jerks, little tilts, chin up, chin down, eyes darting.

I got on to the subject. ‘You never saw the girl that night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was in Queensland with Fiona, our daughter. She was having domestic trouble. Temperament like Simon, I’m afraid. Forty-six and still thinks that responsibility is something for grown-ups.’

‘Could you put a date on that trip?’

‘Oh yes. October 1985. My granddaughter had her tenth birthday while I was there.’

‘May I ask you what your husband told you happened?’

‘Simon ran out of cigarettes at about ten o’clock. It often happened. It was a Thursday night I think, my first night away. He drove down to the Milstead pub. He used to take the back roads. He was coming back down Colson’s Road, do you know it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, he came around a bend and there was this girl by the side of the road. Not a stitch on. Naked. She’d been beaten. He got her into the car and brought her back here.’

‘He didn’t think of going to the police?’

‘The police? No. He thought she needed medical attention.’

‘She was badly hurt?’

‘He thought so at first. Lots of blood. But most of it had come from her nose. That was swollen. Simon thought it might be broken. There were red puffy welts all over her body as if she had been whipped, he said. And she had scratches everywhere and dust and what looked like cement stuck to her. But he didn’t think she was seriously hurt.’

‘Why didn’t he take her to casualty?’

She gave me her sharp little look. ‘Simon was a drunk, Mr Faraday,’ she said, no irritation in her voice, ‘but he wasn’t a fool. It was half past ten at night. He would have had at least half a bottle of whisky under his belt by then. He’d already had his licence suspended once. The safest thing for both of them was to bring her here and get someone else to take her to hospital.’

‘Did he find out how she got her injuries?’

She didn’t answer for a while. We were walking between low walls of volcanic stone towards the back of the old redbrick farmhouse. The sky had cleared in the west and the last of the sun was warming an aged golden Labrador where it sat watching us, fat bottom flat on the verandah boards.

‘In the beginning, in the car, Simon said she was crying and babbling and saying the name “Ken” over and over again. He couldn’t get any sense out of her. He thought she was on drugs. When they got here, he gave her a gown to put on and he went to the telephone to ring Brian. That’s his nephew, he farms about ten minutes from here. He wanted Brian to take her to casualty. That’s when the girl attacked him.’

‘Attacked him?’

‘Tried to get the phone away from him and punched him.’

‘He’d told her what he was doing? Phoning someone to take her to hospital?’

‘I suppose so. He said she shouted, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll say you raped me”. Her nose was bleeding again and her blood got all over him. I saw his jumper when I got back.’

‘So he didn’t phone?’

‘No. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to, Mr Faraday. Went into shock, I imagine.’

We’d reached the verandah. The dog came upright by sliding its forelegs forward until they went over the edge and dropped to the first step.

‘This bloke’s in worse shape than I am,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘Needs two new hips. Can I offer you a beer? I have a Cooper’s Sparkling this time every day.’

We sat on the side verandah in the weak sun and drank beer. I had a pewter mug with a glass bottom and an inscription. I held the mug away from me to read it:
To Sim, a mad Australian, from his comrades, 610 Squadron, Biggin Hill, 1944.

‘
He was in the RAF,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘He was in England doing an agriculture course when the war broke out, so he joined up. He was billeted with my aunt for a while. That’s where I met him.’

I said, ‘Biggin Hill was a fighter station, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at the sky as if expecting to see a Spitfire come out of the sun. ‘He never got over the war. None of them did, really. All that expecting to die. Every day. For so long. And they were so young.’

A silence fell between us, not uneasy, until she said, ‘The girl calmed down after that, said she was sorry. Simon found some of Fiona’s pyjamas and a pair of her riding jeans and an old shirt. She showered and went to bed in the spare room. The bed’s always made. Simon said he brought her a mug of Milo but she was asleep. The next day, she asked if he could take her to a station and lend her the fare to Melbourne. Simon said she looked terrible, swollen nose, black eyes. He took her to Ballan, bought her ticket and gave her fifty dollars. And that was that.’

‘Did he find out her name?’

‘No.’

‘And he never reported it to anyone?’

‘No. He should have. It was too late by the time I got back.’

‘Did he think she was from Kinross Hall?’

‘Well, she wasn’t a local. You get to know the locals.’

‘But there wasn’t any other reason to think that?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever think about how she might have found herself in Colson’s Road?’

She shrugged, took a sip of beer. ‘Simon thought she might have been pushed out of a car.’

I finished my beer, got up, said my thanks. At the front gate, Mrs Walsh said, ‘Things left undone. Sins of omission. Most of us err more on that side, don’t you think, Mr Faraday?’

Howard Lefroy’s apartment, the blood up the tiled walls, came into my mind.

‘Amen,’ I said.

A naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. A naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in October 1985.

Ned worked at Kinross Hall in November 1985.

And never set foot there again. Until a few days before his murder.

I took the long way home, down Colson’s Road to Milstead in the closing day. There was a pine forest on the one side, scrubby salt-affected wetlands on the other. Dead redgums marked the line of a creek running northwest. The last of the light went no more than four or five metres into the pines. Beyond that, it was already cold, dark, sterile night. Nothing cheered the heart on this stretch of Colson’s Road.

Neither did anything in the bar at the Milstead pub. An L-shaped room with a lounge area to the right, it had fallen in the formica wars of the seventies. The barman was a thin, sallow man with greased-back curly hair and a big nose broken at least twice. A small letter J was crudely tattooed in the hollow of his throat. As an educated guess, I would have said four or five priors, at least one involving serious assault, and a degree or two from the stone college. He hadn’t studied beer pulling either.

‘Helpin out,’ he said, putting down the dripping glass. ‘Owner’s on the beach in fucking Bali, regular bloke got done this arvo, wouldn’t take the breathie, the bastards lock him up.’

‘Thought you had some rights,’ I said. ‘You local?’

He gave me a long look and made a judgment. ‘Wife,’ he said. ‘Well, ex, pretty much. Bitch. Fuckin family swarm around here. Get the motor goin, I’m off to WA. Bin there? Fuckin paradise.’

He took my five-dollar note and short-changed me without going near the till.

‘Who owns the pine forest down the road here?’ I said.

He was pouring himself a vodka. Three vodkas, in fact. ‘Wooden have a fuckin clue, mate.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ya breathin there, Denise? Who owns the pine forest?’

‘Silvateq Corporation,’ a husky voice said from around the corner. ‘S-i-l-v-a-t-e-q.’

I took my glass and made the trip. A woman somewhere out beyond seventy, face a carefully applied pink mask matching her tracksuit, was sitting at a round table playing patience. She was drinking a dark liquid out of a shot glass.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘John Faraday. What’s Silvateq Corporation?’

She looked me over and went back to the cards. ‘A company,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Is it local?’

‘Collins Street,’ she said. ‘They sent me a letter tellin me not to use their road.
Their
road. It’s bin a public track since God was in nappies. Wrote back, told ’em to bugger off. Not another word.’

‘They backed off?’

‘No. Put a bloody great barbed-wire fence across the road and dug a trench behind it. Looks like the bloody Somme.’

She took a sip of the black liquid and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Course the shire’s bought off. Only takes about ten quid.’

‘This was when?’

She flipped a card. ‘More than ten years. When did that Hawke get in?’

‘In ’82.’

‘Round about then. Bought it from old Veene. He planted the trees along the road. Twenty rows, I remember. This other bunch planted the rest. Know what they call bloody pine plantations? Green graveyard. Nothin lives in ’em.’

Green graveyard. I thought about that on the trip home. The mine shaft the girl was thrown down was in a pine forest near Rippon. How far was that from Colson’s Road?

On the way home, gloomy, I stopped at Flannery’s place, a small village of dangerously old sheds surrounding a weatherboard house. He lived with a cheerful nurse called Amy who wouldn’t marry him. ‘Marry a flogged-out backyard mechanic whose first wife walked off with a water diviner?’ she once said. ‘I’d need time to think about that. A lifetime.’

‘Just as easy been the fence bloke,’ Flannery had said, ‘but then I’da had a new fence. This bugger’s got a bit of wire, coathanger wire, picks three spots, bloody wire’s vibrating like a pit bull’s chain. Down we go, drillin halfway to the hot place, fifty bucks a metre. Two holes bone dry, third one a little piddle comes out, takes half an hour to fill the dog bowl. Still cry when I think about it.’