An Iron Rose (9 page)

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Fucking phone book of stuff. Boy downloaded all the ’85 material in the file.’

I took the packet. ‘How’d he get in?’

Alex smiled his foxish smile. ‘They’ve got a link with Social Security. He reckons their data protection’s good as a knitted condom.’

‘What’s the bill?’

‘I’ll put it in the bank,’ Alex said. ‘Day will come.’

We shook hands. He looked at me for a while, deciding something. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. He walked off, hand in pockets, chin up, at ease with himself.

It was just before dark as I entered the home straight, the long avenue of bare poplars, the light turning steely blue-grey, the wet road shining like a blade. I was thinking about the girl in the mine shaft. Could she have been brought from far away? Whoever pushed her into the hole in the ground had to know that it was there: you wouldn’t travel a long distance with a dead body unless you had some burial spot in mind. Perhaps a local person, someone who knew the area, had murdered the girl in Melbourne. Had the police eliminated all the girls missing in Melbourne around that time? Surely not.

But why would Ned be interested in the finding of her body? Why did he go to Kinross Hall?

Allie was still working in the smithy. Face shining, she was making curtain poles, bending and twisting the red-hot iron into shepherd’s crook shapes with smooth, economic movements. I stood in the doorway watching her. She reminded me of my father at work. I was never going to be that good.

‘Looking smart,’ she said, putting the last pole in the rack. ‘Debonair, even. That’s the first time I’ve seen you wearing a tie.’

‘You only had to ask,’ I said, taking it off and putting it in a jacket pocket. Everything all right here?’

‘Booming,’ she said. ‘Woman over at Kyneton wants two sets of gates. She saw the ones you made for Alan Frith.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Frith doesn’t pay for his inside a week, I’ll take them round to her.’

‘And a man called Flannery was here. He put a case of beer in the office.’

‘That’s nice too,’ I said. ‘How many did he drink?’

‘Just one.’

‘Must be Lent,’ I said. ‘You in a hurry?’

She looked at me speculatively. ‘No.’

‘Mind helping me read something?’ I told her about Ned working at Kinross Hall in 1985, Mick Doolan’s story about the complaint to the police, Ned’s visit four days before his death, and my meeting with Marcia Carrier.

‘Pretty weird,’ she said. ‘What’s the reading matter?’

‘Kinross Hall records.’

‘How’d you get them?’

‘Some bloke gave them to me. I forget who.’

She scratched her short hair, face impassive. ‘Maybe it was the same bloke who told you about Alan Snelling and you’ve developed a block about remembering him.’

I tore the continuous print-out Alex had given me into pages while Allie showered. She came back in jeans, a grey polo-necked sweater and her half-length Drizabone, and we walked down the road. Her skew nose and wet and shiny crew cut gave her the look of a boxer. A rather sexy female boxer. She caught me looking at her.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’

The pub was empty except for Vinnie and George Beale playing draughts and a farmer reading the
Weekly Times
at the bar. We got two beers and went into the small lounge where a fire was dying in the grate. I fed it some kindling and a log from the bin.

‘I’m hoping there’s something that’ll jump out at you,’ I said, giving her half of the print-out pages.

‘Like what?’

‘Christ knows. Something happening to a girl. Trouble of some kind. Anything out of the ordinary.’

We settled down in the sagging armchairs and started reading. I’d taken the first half of 1985 and it quickly became clear that the department liked paperwork. Kinross Hall filed monthly accounts, fortnightly pay sheets, weekly lists of admissions and discharges, and reports by Dr Ian Barbie on medical visits. Every three months, it produced a budget operating statement and a report card on each inmate. The department filed full personal dossiers on all new admissions. Once a month, Kinross Hall was visited by two senior department staff and they filed a report.

It took us more than an hour to skim through the printouts. Midway, I fetched more beer. Finally, Allie said, ‘Well, nothing sticks out to me. I mean, here’s a major event. The inspectors had four written complaints about the food in October. Dr Carrier says the reason was the cook was off sick and the second in charge was having domestic troubles and basically couldn’t give a bugger about the food.’

‘No-one jump the wire in November?’ I said.

‘No. There were five admissions and three discharges in November. The three had all turned seventeen. They don’t seem to be able to hold them after that.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘The hot water system broke down.’

‘You hungry?’

‘Why?’

‘I’ve got a farm chook, raised on insects and berries in the wild.’

‘Now you tell me. I’m going out.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘hot date with Alan Snelling could be better than a hot chook.’

‘It’s not Alan Snelling. You took the shine off Alan Snelling. A vet.’

‘Pure animal, some vets,’ I said.

She smiled at me. ‘This one comes on like he’s got a Rottweiler stuffed down the front of his jeans.’

‘Probably a Jack Russell thinks it’s a Rottweiler.’

‘It’s not the size of the bite that counts.’

‘What counts?’

‘How long they gnaw at you.’

At home, Mick Doolan and Lew were watching a golf video. As I came in the door, Mick was saying, ‘It’s all that wantin to hit the ball to kingdom come, lad. Bin the ruination of many a great talent. What I’m tryin to do is to get you to play the game backwards.’

‘But drivin’s where the game starts,’ Lew said.

‘And ends fer a lotta the fellas. We’ll get to the drivin. We’ve got the puttin down flat. Now we’ve got to get the approach right. Not twice outta ten, not three times. Ten outta ten. Lookit this fella on the screen here. Ya can’t putt like that. See. Bloody country mile.’

‘Can’t you watch porn videos like everyone else?’ I said.

Mick looked around. ‘When I’m done coachin this lad,’ he said, ‘they’ll be askin us to
star
in the porno videos.’

‘Golf porn,’ I said. ‘There could be a market for that.’

I went to work on the chicken. My father’s recipe, made a hundred times: rub the skin with butter, stuff with a mixture of breadcrumbs, finely chopped onion, Worcester sauce, grated lemon rind, chopped raisins, half a cup of brandy. Stick in oven until brown.

I opened a bottle of the Maglieri. Mick came in to say goodnight and had a glass. He studied the label. ‘Lay this drop on,’ he said, ‘they’d be fightin to get in for communion.’ 74

After supper, Lew and I played Scrabble. He was good with small words, quick to see possibilities.

‘ “Zugzwang”?’ I said. ‘Two zs. What kind of a word is “zugzwang”?’

‘You challengin it?’

‘Zugzwang? I am most certainly challenging zugzwang.’

‘We playin double score penalty for failed challenges?’

‘We are. And we are playing minus-score penalty to a player who doesn’t take the opportunity to withdraw when challenged. Are you withdrawing zugzwang?’

‘Surprised at you, Mac. Everybody knows zugzwang.’

‘Withdrawing, Lewis? Last chance.’ I put my hand on the
Concise Oxford Dictionary.

‘
Open it,’ he said. ‘At “z”.’

I did. ‘Zugbloodyzwang,’ I said. ‘You little…’

There was no recovering from zugzwang. We were packing up, when I said, ‘Think about what I said about school?’

He didn’t look at me. ‘Thinkin about it,’ he said. ‘Thinkin about it a lot.’

When Lew went off to bed, I put another log on the fire, fetched a glass of the red, got out a book Stan had lent me called
The Plant Hunter: A Life of Colonel A. E. Hillary.
I was on page four when Lew came in wearing pyjamas.

‘Forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘I was lookin in Ned’s Kingswood for my stopwatch. He used to take me out on the road and drop me for my run and I left the watch in the car one day.’ He held out a piece of paper. ‘This was on the floor.’

I took it. It was a ticket from a parking machine, a Footscray Council parking machine in the Footscray Library parking area. It was valid until 3.30 pm on 11 July. That was two days before Ned’s death.

‘Make sense to you?’ I said.

Lew shook his head. ‘Ned had to go to Melbourne, he started complainin a month before.’

‘Must be some explanation,’ I said. ‘Sleep well.’

When he’d gone, I got out the Melways street directory and found the Footscray Library parking lot. Then I got the Melbourne White Pages and looked up Dr Ian Barbie.

I put the Melways and the phone book away, refilled my glass in the kitchen, slumped in the armchair staring at the fire.

Ned had parked within two hundred metres of Dr Barbie’s consulting rooms. Two days later, Ned was dead. Hanged. Two days after that, Dr Barbie was dead. Hanged.

The wind was coming up, moaning in the chimney, sound like a faraway wolf. The dog and I went out to the office in search of a telephone number I hadn’t used in years.

I saw Brendan Burrows from a long way away. He had a distinctive walk, his left shoulder dropping as his left heel hit the ground. Even from fifty metres, I could tell that he’d aged about twenty years since I’d last seen him. You could count the straw hairs he had left, deep lines ran down from the thin, sharp nose. It’s hard to be a policeman and an informer on your colleagues. The days are cold, the nights are worse.

‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting down next to me. ‘Used to be able to do this stuff on the phone. How ya goin? Fair while.’ We shook hands. The country train platform at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne held us and a fat woman, exhausted, and two small children bouncing off each other like atoms in some elemental physical process that produced tears.

He put his hand into his leather jacket and took out a sheet torn from a notebook. ‘Ian Ralph Barbie, forty-six, medical practitioner, 18 Ralston Street, Flemington, hanging by the neck in disused premises at 28 Varley Street, Footscray. Your man?’

I nodded.

‘Got this on the phone in a hurry. Body found approx eleven am, 16 July. Estimated time of death between nine pm and midnight, 15 July. Cause of death, a lot of technical shit, but it’s strangulation by hanging. Significant quantity of pethidine. Lots of tracks. No injuries. Last meal approx eight hours before death.’

‘On him?’

‘Wallet. Cards. No cash. Car clean like a rental. Jumped off the top. Drove inside the building, got on the roof, chucked the rope over a beam.’

‘Don’t you need some special knot for a noose?’

‘Something that’ll slip. Must’ve looked it up. There’s nothing isn’t in books.’

‘Note?’

‘No.’

‘Any interest?’

Brendan’s head turned slightly. A shaven-headed man in an anorak carrying a bulging sports bag was coming down the platform. His eyes flicked at us as he passed. You could hear Brendan’s jaws unlock.

‘They look at you,’ he said, ‘they’re not on.’ But he watched the man go down the concrete peninsula. ‘Need a break. You get para. You bastards owe me. No, no interest. Another medico on the peth, can’t take the lows anymore, goes out on a high. Happens with the quacks a lot. Guilt. Feel a lot of guilt. Pillars of fucking society sticking stuff up the arm. Don’t call peth the doctor’s drug for nothing. Still, dangling’s a worry. Unusual. Needle, that’s the way they go. You got it, you use it.’

‘That’s it, then?’

‘Well, watch’s gone, clear mark of watch on left wrist. Probably nicked by the deros.’

‘Deros?’

‘They found him.’

‘Right. Brendan, listen. Scully—what’s happened to him?’

‘Been livin in Queensland? Outer space? Good things only for the man. Next deputy commissioner. To be anointed soon.’

‘I’ve been away. How’d he do that?’

‘Plugged a bloke into Springvale, suburb of smack. Smackvale. Three years in the making. Had to import this cop from Vietnam. Any day now they’ll announce he’s delivered half the Vietcong and a fucking mountain of smack. Scully’s going to be the hero of the day. Course, most of the stuff’ll be back on the street by dark. Catch the upward move in price.’

‘He’s a lucky man.’

‘Blessed.’ Brendan looked around, scratched his scalp. ‘You heard the shit’s flying sideways about surveillance records? About ten years’ worth gone missing in Ridley Street.’

‘They’re on disk, right?’

He made a snorting sound, like a horse. ‘They scanned everything onto a hard drive, three sets of backup floppies. But the bloke taking the floppies over to Curzon Street for safekeeping, he got hit from behind by a truck. And while they’re sorting it out, his briefcase gets nicked. Can you believe that? Oh well, there’s always the paper. But no, all the paper has vanished. Fucking truckload. Well, this is bad, but thank Christ there’s the hard disk.’