Black Tide (17 page)

‘I’m a bit short on theory. Practice isn’t that long either. Did Stuart work from here?’

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‘Had the room next to his bedroom as an office.’ She drank some beer. ‘Had? He still has. We never touched anything. Anyway, he’s not officially dead. Kate won’t apply to have him declared dead. She’s absolutely convinced that he’s walking around somewhere, that he’s lost his memory and will get it back.’

‘What do you think?’

Shrug. ‘If he’s alive, he’s not in New Zealand. His picture’s been on television, in all the papers, Kate spent a fortune getting posters put up everywhere. Someone would have seen him. The cities are like big country towns and the towns are like Hamilton in the 1950s.’

I said, ‘I know this is a big ask, but could I have a look at his office?’

Lyall gave me a long look. ‘Sure. I was going to suggest it. Help de-spookify it for me.

Come.’

She went up the stairs first. It was no hardship walking behind her.

‘It was okay while Bradley was here,’ she said, ‘but now every time I come home, I listen for sounds upstairs, listen for his music. He used to play this Afro–Caribbean stuff.

I tried keeping his doors open, but one day I came back from Hong Kong and they were closed. I went absolutely rigid, didn’t know what to do.’

Upstairs, there was a broad landing with three doors on either side.

‘The cleaning lady had closed them,’ Lyall said. ‘I left them closed after that, told her never to leave them open. Now every time I come back I expect to see them open.’

Stuart Wardle’s office didn’t look like the dabbling room of a dilettante journalist. Two walls had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A work table under the window held a computer monitor, keyboard and tower, a fax, telephone, answering machine. Stuart’s chair was an expensive executive model, flanked by large wire wastepaper baskets. Twin two-drawer filing cabinets stood against the fourth wall, one bearing a compact copier, the other a compact stereo.

I opened the bottom drawer of the left-hand filing cabinet. Empty. Top. Empty. Next cabinet. Same.

‘This phone used to be the line into the house,’ Lyall said from the doorway. ‘The one downstairs was an extension. Caused all kinds of shit when he left the answering machine on. You’d be downstairs, the phone would ring, stop before you got there, race upstairs, get in here, hear the last word of a message. That’s one change we made.’

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‘Messages on this machine when you got back?’

‘Lots. Always lots.’

‘For Stuart?’

‘Some. A friend from the States. She stayed here once. And the Economist. He’d done work for them. It’s an English magazine.’

‘I know.’

Pause, eyes locked.

A swig from the bottle, head tilted back. Long neck. The exposed neck is a sweet and vulnerable thing.

Lowered the bottle. ‘More than your average suburban solicitor knows,’ she said, ‘Mr Irish.’

‘Depends. Some are exceedingly well read, the others go into politics or crime.’

I found her smile attractive. And heartening.

‘His sister had rung a few times,’ she said. ‘And there were three or four calls for Bradley. I wrote all the messages in the logbook.’

I looked around some more. ‘The room was like this when you first came into it after your trip?’

‘Yes. Nothing’s been touched. It’s been dusted, that’s all.’

‘Nothing on the desk? Wastepaper baskets empty? Filing cabinets empty?’

‘Yes. He’d done a big clean-up. I don’t know about the filing cabinets, never saw them open.’

‘The clean-up, was that unusual?’

‘I’ll say. Two in two months was outstandingly unusual. Two a year was more like it. He used to buy those huge orange garden rubbish bags.’

‘So he’d had a clean-up two months earlier?’

Lyall nodded. ‘I helped him put the bags in his car. Five of them. Took them to be shredded somewhere. Paranoid about his waste paper.’

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‘Where would he keep his papers? Bank statements, credit-card statements, bills, receipts, that sort of thing? The tax stuff?’

‘There were some in the filing cabinets. The missing persons guy took them.’

‘Never gave them back?’

‘Probably gave them to Kate. I don’t know.’

‘Can I see his bedroom?’

It was purely functional: double bed, one bedside table with lamp, chest of drawers. A built-in cupboard covered one wall.

‘We tidied up in here,’ Lyall said. ‘Did his washing.’

‘Any signs of packing? Clothes missing? Luggage?’

‘Are you sure you’re a solicitor?’ she said. ‘My feeling is you’ve done this kind of thing before.’

‘Instinct,’ I said. ‘I rely on instinct.’

She smiled, finished the beer. ‘Hard to tell about clothes. Stuart wore jeans and T-shirts most of the time and he had plenty of both. His little aluminium suitcase isn’t here. He only ever took that.’

On the way downstairs, I said, ‘His car’s here, you said.’

‘It’s still in the garage. There’s nothing in it.’

‘Check the boot?’

Pause. ‘I don’t know. Bradley might’ve. He had it put on these jack things, sort of mothballed.’

The garage was reached through a door in the courtyard wall. A newish Honda was parked behind an old BMW coupe on jacks. Five wheels were leaning against the back wall.

‘You might like to wait outside,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’

Lyall took her lower lip between her teeth. A full lower lip, square white teeth. She handed over the keys, didn’t move.

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The ignition key unlocked the boot. The lid didn’t come up automatically.

I got fingertips under the numberplate and lifted. It resisted. Came up suddenly. Empty.

A strong smell of brake fluid leaked from a plastic container.

I looked around. Lyall had the fingers of her right hand to her mouth. But not alarmed.

People who went into other countries illegally to take snaps would presumably not alarm easily.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

The glove compartment held a Melway map book for greater Melbourne and a VicRoads map book for country Victoria. Half-under the front seat was a crushed McDonald’s packet.

I looked at the instruments. Only 56,657 km on the clock. Reconditioned engine, perhaps, clock turned back. Was that legal? The trip meter read 667 km.

Nothing here.

Back in the kitchen, I said, ‘A final request.’

Lyall was getting another Miller’s out of the fridge. ‘I find it hard to refuse you,’ she said. ‘An uncomfortable feeling.’

We exchanged looks again. Plain. A very strange perception. ‘Would you mind if someone gave Stuart’s computer a lookover?’

She tilted her head. ‘Is that all?’

‘It’s all I can think of at the moment.’

‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘Something will come to you.’

21

It began to rain on the way back to the office, nondescript Melbourne rain that didn’t even seem to fall. It seeped. The Stud’s erratic wipers, hard-contact, soft-contact, no-contact, always added another pleasurable dimension to winter. Coming down the straight towards the Swanston Street roundabout, straining to see through the smear, my mind was on Lyall Cronin.

At the front door, a little tipsy, she’d said, ‘My regards to Mrs Irish and all the little Irishes. Or should that be little Irish?’

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I looked at her. She pushed her hair back with her left hand. She wasn’t asking a question about the plural form and I did not have to answer the question she was asking. ‘No Mrs Irish,’ I said. ‘One little Irish, living with a fishing boat skipper called Eric. Somewhere out there beyond Brisbane. I try not to think about it.’

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘my regards to the current stand-in for the previous Mrs Irish.’

That was the moment. The moment to say nothing, smile, offer a handshake, say thank you. The moment to be non-committal. To be non-committal and professional.

Bugger that. Linda was being kissed on the ear in public. ‘Things are quiet on the stand-in front. I don’t think I’ve given you my card.’

Many arrogant men in expensive leased cars are encountered at the Swanston Street roundabout. At any time of the day. I think they live in North Carlton. One of them hooted at me. I hit the brake, he came close to climbing the kerb. Nice moment.

Immature, yes. There is a certain immaturity in taking pleasure at seeing terror in the eyes of a Mercedes driver. But parts of us are forever immature. I can name my bits.

No messages at the office but, better than messages, a cheque from Belvedere Investments, aka Cyril Wootton enterprises. I took my seat behind the tailor’s table.

Assumed the position. Tried to think. Stuart Wardle was possibly not a line of inquiry worth pursuing. So what if he knew something about Klostermann Gardier and Klostermann paid Gary large sums. That didn’t link them in any useful way.

Stuart Wardle was probably a dead-end.

Still. The neatness of his office. Clean-ups.

I’ll say. Two in two months was outstandingly unusual.

An untidy man who cleaned up before he disappeared. Suicides sometimes did that.

Nothing in the wastepaper baskets.

Nothing in the filing cabinets. No personal papers.

No papers in Gary Connors’ apartment. No papers in Jellicoe’s house. Cleaned by professionals? Like the two men who called themselves Detectives Carmody and Mildren of the Australian Federal Police and spent forty-five minutes in Gary’s apartment on April 5.

Gary. Gary was the point. On the last day that I knew anything about his movements, he was being watched by a man called Canetti, an ex-Fed with an ACT driver’s licence.

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This whole business was beginning to look complicated. Complicated and hazardous.

Rinaldi thought Gary’s link with Klostermann Gardier was a good enough reason to back off. Barry Tregear thought Gary’s TransQuik connection was unhealthy for me.

Don’t ask. Leave it. They want snow in Darwin, these boys, it falls.

I could tell Des that I’d made no progress, couldn’t really do any more. It was the sensible thing to do. Rinaldi would approve, Barry would approve, Drew would approve.

Des’s trim weatherboard, in a street full of helpful and strong young women, was going to be shot out from under him. An elderly man, no house, no capital, on the pension, where did that leave him? In some narrow partitioned-off space in a squalid firetrap of an accommodation house, possessions in a suitcase, lying on a stained mattress on a sagging bed, coughing phlegm, staring at the spotted ceiling, smelling the reek from the lavatory down the passage, hearing the body noises of the hopeless people on either side.

I took out the photograph. I’d looked at it every day since Des gave it to me. The three men in singlets on the scaffolding on the fateful day. A man turned away, unidentifiable. In the middle, a man laughing. The tendons in this man’s neck stand out like balsawood struts under damp tissue paper. He has muscular stonemason’s arms and a head too narrow for his short, slicked-down hairstyle. It is Des.

And next to him in the tiny picture is my father. He is big, big shoulders, arms, a full head taller than Des, dark hair combed back, wry mouth, amused, head turned to Des.

It was possible to see, in this small photograph, that my father is looking at Des with affection, enjoying his laughter. Des was a friend. That was the reason for finding Gary, for getting Des’s money back. My father would have wanted me to help him.

My father would want me to help him.

The thought came to me unbidden and with it the cover of Linda’s left-behind book, The Mountain from Afar.

Oh God, men and their fathers.

Music. Like the mountain, from afar.

I got up and went to the window. In the closing day, the street gleamed wetly, its heavily cambered surface like the black cracked back of some ancient serpent rising between the buildings. The music was coming from Kelvin McCoy’s atelier. Classical music, Debussy, at a guess. The thought of McCoy finding inspiration for his greasetrap paintings in Debussy stopped me dead in my tracks.

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I went across the street, stood at the door and listened, unashamed.

A woman’s voice over the music. Then McCoy’s ruined tones, saying loudly, ‘Relax, darling. It’s nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. I’m an artist, I work with naked women every day.’

Work? With naked women?

Indeed.

I stopped off at Taub’s to collect Charlie, got him out the door in twenty minutes. At the Prince, Norm O’Neill was reading the Herald Sun sports section.

‘Jack, Charlie,’ he said, waving the tabloid, ‘where’d ya reckon they get these footy writers? From the kinder? Bloody born yesterday. This clown here, knows nothin about the Sainters. All this dickhead knows, club coulda come down from Mars just last year.’

And to make an end is to make a beginning. Was that what T. S. Eliot said?

This thought in mind, I requested a round from the publican. Stan was looking a model of geniality, your plump old-fashioned landlord, dispenser of wisdom and good cheer.

What drug could work the miracle of complete personality reversal?

‘Doubled the offer,’ he said, putting down my beer, leaning across the bar, not so much whispering as sniggering. ‘They want the old photos pretty bad.’

And then he winked, leered, took on a turbo-charged plump model of geniality look. AMr-Pickwick-on-human-growth-hormones look.

I put my face close to his. ‘Stanley, you’re not listening. The photographs aren’t just old photos. You’re trying to sell sacred objects. They’re worth more than your life. Much more. The people who’ll kill you don’t give a shit about life sentences. They could depart any second. You with me?’

Stan pulled back, still beaming like Mr Pickwick, Mr Pickwick turned compassionate outreach worker. ‘Jack,’ he said. The one word had an understanding and non-judgmental tone. ‘Jack, excuse me, you’re a nice bloke but you don’t understand the dynamics of change. Don’t mean to offend, you’re gettin a bit like the old farts. Livin in the past.’

He examined me benignly. ‘Not just the photos, Jack. The party don’t just want the photos. Thought you’d grasped that.’