An Iron Rose (16 page)

I sat down.

‘When you came to see me about Ned Lowey, I think I said it was going to nag at me.’ She was studying her left hand on the arm of the chair. It was older than her face.

‘I remember.’

A spray of rain, like gravel thrown, hit the window. She tensed. Our eyes met.

‘Well, it did. I went back to the files, looking for something that might have happened while Mr Lowey was working at Kinross. I found something. About an hour ago.’

‘Happened to a girl?’

She nodded. ‘Two girls.’

‘When you were in charge?’

‘I was new. Took over in 1983, into a nightmare. The place was run like a mini-kingdom, all these places were, minimal record-keeping, incompetent staff, all sorts of kickbacks with suppliers and contractors, ghosts on the payroll, you name it. My predecessor might have been a wonderful man but he was completely out of touch with what was going on around him. And to make things worse, Kinross wasn’t even getting the funding it was entitled to. So I cleaned up the obvious rorts and got a proper reporting system going. Then I left the day-to-day running to my deputy. He seemed to be an honest person. I devoted most of my time to working on the department and the minister to get Kinross’s funding up to speed.’

‘The girls,’ I said.

She clasped her hands, face unhappy. ‘Mac, I found a report in Daryl Hopman’s confidential file. He was my deputy. I’ve never seen the file before, didn’t know it existed. And I only found it by chance.’

‘What kind of report?’

‘It involves two girls. I should have been told about it and I wasn’t.’

She paused. I waited.

She sighed again. ‘It also involves Mr Lowey. I’m sorry to tell you that. I know how much he meant to you.’

‘Involves?’ I could feel the blood in my head.

Marcia put her hands through her hair. ‘I’ll just say it. The girls were caught coming back into the Kinross grounds shortly before four am one night in November 1985. They said they had been at Ned Lowey’s house and had been given drugs, amphetamines, speed, for sex.’

I stood up. ‘Not possible, a mistake. Not Ned. Absolutely not.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Marcia said. ‘I’m really sorry. I felt I had to tell you.’

I went to the window, looked out, saw nothing. ‘What was done?’

‘Nothing. It’s unbelievable. Nothing was done about a serious allegation of criminal conduct. Nothing. It says everything about the way Kinross was run in the old days. I shudder to think what else may have been ignored like this. In the maintenance supervisor’s file I found a note from Daryl saying that Ned was not to be employed again. I presume Daryl wrote the report as some kind of insurance if word leaked out.’

‘Insurance?’

‘He may have planned to say that he had made a report to me and that I was the one who failed to act.’

‘The girls said Ned gave them drugs?’ Ned having anything to do with any drug other than a stubbie of Vic Bitter was inconceivable. But my treacherous inner voice said:
What do you really know about Ned?

Marcia unclasped her hands, pushed back her hair, started to speak, hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Mac,’ she said, ‘but that’s not the whole story.’

I shook my head in disbelief. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to hold on to the Ned I loved.

‘The girls said Dr Barbie was at Ned’s house and had sex with them. Violent sex.’

Ned going to see Ian Barbie in Footscray.

Ned and Ian Barbie, both dead, hanged.

The girl’s skeleton in the mine shaft. The newspapers Ned kept.

Melanie Pavitt, naked and bleeding in Colson’s Road. About four kilometres from Ned’s house.

‘What are you going to do?’ I said.

Marcia got up, tugged at her sweater. ‘Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. They’re dead. Both men. What’s the point of doing anything now? The families have had enough pain.’

She came over, put her hand on my arm. I could smell her hair, a rose garden far away.

‘Mac, I’ve destroyed Daryl’s report,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I think you and I are the only people who know about this. The two of us and the girls. They probably don’t even remember it. I’m protecting myself, I can’t deny that. I was in charge, I’m responsible for the girls’ welfare. But I’m a victim here too. I knew nothing about what happened. Daryl left this thing behind like a time bomb.’

I didn’t say anything.

Marcia squeezed my arm gently. ‘Mac, I think I’m doing the right thing for everyone. Is it the right thing? If you think it isn’t, I’ll go public, take the consequences. If you think it is, we never speak of the matter again. To anyone.’

What else was there to say? ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘It’s the right thing.’

At her car, engine running, window down, she said, not looking at me, ‘God, I’m glad that’s over. Would you like to have a drink some time, dinner? Anything?’

I pulled myself together. ‘Drink, dinner, followed by anything. And everything.’

‘I’ll call you,’ she said, hint of a smile.

I watched the car go down the lane, turn, heard a little growl of acceleration. I didn’t want to go inside, didn’t know what to do with myself, got into the Land Rover and drove.

Stan Harrop and his son, David, were in the northwest corner of the field nursery on Stan’s property, talking to the driver of a tip truck carrying a load of stones. I parked at the gate and made my way along the paths between raised north–south beds. David gave me a salute. He was about twenty-five, thin and sandy, with Stan’s big hands. Stan had waited until he was nearly fifty to take his shot at immortality with David’s mother.

‘A wall, Mac,’ Stan said. ‘A drystone wall. Twenty metres of wall. Know anything about drystone walls?’

‘Been a while,’ I said. When I was sixteen my father and I built two hundred metres of drystone wall on a property called Arcadia near Wagga. In my mind I saw a man and a boy and a pile of stones in the burning day, and heard my father say:
Stone you need’s at the bottom of the bloody pile. That’s the way nature works. In bloody opposition to man.

‘
So where d’ya want ’em?’ the driver said. He was a fat, sad-looking man in overalls and a baseball cap with ‘Toyota’ across the front.

Stan scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose they can go just here.’

‘Want my advice?’ I said.

‘Quick,’ Stan said.

‘What’s the line of the wall?’

‘North–south,’ David said. He pointed. ‘In line with that post.’

‘Take it slow and tip ’em out down the line,’ I said to the driver. ‘You don’t want any piles. Do that?’

‘At the limit of the technology,’ the man said. We got out of the way and he went into action.

‘The right stone,’ I said. ‘Finding it’s the problem. Much easier if they’re spread out.’

‘What about the footing?’ said Stan.

‘How high’s the wall supposed to be?’

‘Not high,’ said David. ‘Metre and half.’

‘High enough,’ I said. ‘Needs a trench about half a metre deep, metre and a quarter wide. Then you taper the wall to about fifty centimetres at the top. Put a bit of cement in the bottom layers. Purists don’t like that.’

‘Purists be buggered,’ Stan said. ‘Get the machinery, lad.’

I got gloves out of the Land Rover, put on boots. David ripped the footing in half an hour. We shovelled out the earth, hard work, and then we got the strings up. I showed Stan how to arrange the bottom rocks, then David and I carried and Stan laid. It was punishing work, moving heavy objects not created with human hands in mind.

‘Wanted to give the women a surprise,’ Stan said. ‘Gone to Melbourne. To shop. What kind of bloody activity is that?’

‘I could learn to shop,’ I said. ‘Can’t be that hard.’

I was glad to be there, glad that there was somewhere I could be, glad to be doing something that prevented me from thinking about Ned. I desperately didn’t want to think about Ned.

We stopped when the light was almost gone, cold biting the face.

‘I think I see a drink in your future,’ Stan said, patting my shoulder. ‘Thought metal was the area of expertise. Now you turn out to know a bit about stone.’

We sat in Stan’s office next to the low whitewashed brick house he had built in the lee of the hill. A fire was burning in a Ned Kelly drum stove. David drank his beer and went off to feed the chooks. Stan took two more bottles of Boag out of the small fridge in the corner and opened them.

‘Something on your mind,’ he said.

I drank some beer out of the glass mug and looked at a botanical print on the wall. ‘Heard a story about Ned today,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He was lighting his pipe with a big kitchen match.

I told him what Marcia had said.

Stan blew out smoke, drank beer, put the mug and pipe down. He didn’t show any sign of shock.

‘Ned. Drugs. Sex with teenage girls.’ He looked at me over the big hairy knuckles of his clasped hands. ‘Go to my grave not believing it.’

‘Who’d invent something like that?’ I said.

‘You believe it?’

‘Rather not think about it. Wouldn’t have had to think about if I hadn’t gone poking about.’

‘What poking about?’

I told him about Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall, how my questioning of Marcia Carrier had led to her finding of Daryl Hopman’s report.

‘Just her word for it, then,’ Stan said. ‘Could be trying to shift the blame from the doctor to Ned.’

‘Then why mention the doctor at all?’

We sat in silence, Stan generating smoke. For a moment I had been going to tell him about the other things that haunted me: the skeleton in the mine shaft, Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road, Ned’s visit to Ian Barbie in Footscray. But Daryl Hopman’s report offered an explanation for all of them that was too chilling to speak about.

‘Better get moving,’ I said, getting up. ‘Boy’s at home without food.’

‘Boys find food,’ Stan said. He walked to the vehicle with me. When I’d started it, he said: ‘Learned a lot about men in the war. Scoundrels and saints, met ’em both. Don’t believe this about Ned, so it’s not going to change anything.’

We looked at each other, united in our desire to hold on to the Ned we knew.

‘Another thing, Mac,’ said Stan.

I could barely see his face.

‘Ned was like a brother to your father. Something like this, he would have known. See you tomorrow.’

As I drove away, I thought perhaps my father did know. Perhaps that was what he wanted to tell me on the night he shot himself.

We’d put in five hours in the grounds of Harkness Park— me, Stan Harrop, Lew and Flannery—before Francis Keany’s Discovery murmured down the driveway. What we were trying to do was uncover paths, using a large-scale plan Stan and I had drawn from exploration and aerial photographs and the old photographs I’d found.

‘They’re bloody there,’ Stan said. ‘Get the paths, we’ve got the garden.’

It was hard going: the place was one big muddy thicket. The elms in particular had embarked on world conquest, sending out armies of suckers, densely colonising large areas. Some of the suckers were mature trees, now spawning empires of their own.

‘Dutch elm disease might be the answer,’ Stan said. ‘Nature’s way of saying fuck off.’

Stan had assembled us at 8.30. We were armed with two chainsaws and a new thing, a brushcutter with a circular chainsaw blade. Flannery liked the idea very much.

‘Tremble, jungle,’ he said.

I said, ‘The point is, Flannery, we apply the technology with some purpose in mind. We don’t apply it simply because we like laying waste to large areas of nature and seeing big things fall over.’

‘Wimp,’ said Flannery.

Stan went for a long walk through the muddy paddocks around the house. We were on smoko, sitting on Flannery’s ute, when he came back. ‘Major thing,’ he said, hitching his buttocks onto the tray, ‘major thing is, gardens like this, they’re designed for vistas. Looking
from
the house and the garden, looking
at
the house and the garden. But if the bloody vista’s gone, all brick-veneer slums crowding it, you can’t see what the designer saw.’

‘So you got it worked out,’ Flannery said. He was eating a pie. A viscous fluid the colour of liquid fertiliser was leaking down his unshaven chin. This and the Geelong beanie pulled down to a centimetre above his eyebrows gave him a particularly fetching appearance.

‘More or less,’ Stan said. At that moment, Francis Keany’s vehicle came into view.

Francis got out, the picture of an English country gentleman. He nodded to the peasants and said to Stan: ‘Good morning, Stan. So what do we now know? Enough research to write an entry in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Paid by the hour. Photographs taken from a great height. At a cost of about five dollars a metre. Charged both going up and coming down, as far as I can tell. So what do we now know about this garden?’

Francis had clearly been working on his opening lines during the drive from Melbourne.