Quota (4 page)

Sometimes, in their effort to capture a particular evidentiary feature—a tiny graze, a crease in the skin, the smashed panel work of a car—the forensic photographers would accidentally strike compositional gold. The upturned palms seemed to be pleading. Without an accompanying face, without context, the hands asked for something on behalf of the unnamed and the overlooked.

Next, a police photo of a male face, sleepy, rough and creased. A sullen mouth, stubble darker in the valleys of the jowls. A wide nose separating dark, heavy eyes. Shaggy brown eyebrows and receding hair. Charlie checked the index: this was accused number one, Michael John McVean. He looked as mean as hell.

The face of the other accused, Toby James Murchison, had the childish look of military photographs from old wars. A full mouth, a ruddy blush on the cheeks like a public schoolboy hauled off to fight, still perplexed by his change in fortune.

Next, a family's photograph of their lost son.

It was strange, Charlie thought, how people who'd died immediately looked different in the photographs taken while they were living. Lost. He wondered if anyone had ever done a study, taken a hundred mixed photos and asked people to nominate the living and the dead.

He flipped photos and tapped the end of a pencil on the top of the desk clock. It was Anna's gift to him, the clock, when he got his first prosecution gig. The bright optimism of the brass dial spoke of stoic cheer, nobility, something—but it reminded him daily that by tiny ticking increments, he was becoming an old man. More than any other object in the room, it was a reminder to him that he was badly out of touch with the way others, Anna in particular, saw him.

He watched the clock take three minutes of his life. Dropped his gaze back to the photo book.

The sheen of a mortuary table. A dead guy with burnt legs, naked and washed, mottled with livor. Close-ups, like an uncomfortable introduction. Slack face; pale lips, a week's stubble and the eyes of shopwindowfish. Young, grotty-looking. The police would've picked this one for a
scrote,
but having just seen him dressed, a little younger, Charlie felt a wash of sadness.

A round puncture wound over the right temple. No doubt there would be a pathologist's report among the ring binders that would refer to ‘a circular defect in the right temporal region': the language of objective examination. Someone had plugged the boy. He leafed onwards. More images of the body on the bench, the right forearm slightly aloft in half-hearted protest.

Charlie snapped the book shut and slotted it back into the top shelf of the trolley. He took out the first of the fifteen numbered volumes, carried it to the desk and flipped it open. Well, sorry men, he said to himself: let's have the story.

STATEMENT OF PATRICK HUGHES LANEGAN, 4231 SOUTH COAST HIGHWAY, DAUPHIN VICTORIA.

I was born on 23 January, 1991 and I am a commercial fisherman. I am the brother of Matthew LANEGAN (DOB 11/6/89) who was also known to me as Matt and Mags, and I have a sister and twin brothers. Their names are Milly (15), Ben and Jack (both 8). My parents are both deceased.

I know a man named Toby MURCHISON, although he is known to me as Skip. Everyone just calls him that. Toby and I went through high school in the same year, and his family run the Normans Woe. They also have an abalone licence, meaning they are able to take 2.3 tonnes of abalone from Victorian waters each year. This is called their quota, and they have to sell it through the co-op and record all the amounts. The Murchisons boat is called the Open Quest.

My brother and I have a shark boat in Dauphin, the Caravel. It is a steel hull, about 8 metres. We have run it as a squid boat a few times in recent years because the shark numbers have been down.

On approximately three or four occasions in the past I have bought one pound blocks of dope off Skip and resold it. Other times I have taken dope to Melbourne for Skip and received payment from him for doing the trip. By dope I mean cannabis. I think the cannabis was hydroponic, although I don't know where it was grown. The times when I have resold the dope, I would break it down to a couple of ounce lots and some one gram deals to sell. I would keep about an eighth of the block to smoke by myself.

In about June last year I had a chat with Skip which I think was in the bottleshop at the Normans Woe. I was walking through to get beers, and Skip was working out there. He does this sometimes at night since his eco-tourism business shut down. We just talked about general stuff, fishing and that. Then he mentioned that they were going way over quota and they could use a hand getting rid of some extra abs. I sort of laughed it off at the time, but I mentioned it too Matt when I got home.

Matt brought it up a few times after that and he was really keen to do it. I think it was matt that went back to Skip and said yes. It definately wasn't me.

Nothing much happened about it for a few weeks after that, and then there was a stretch of good fishing weather and everyone was out. This was approximately the first week of June. Matt got a call on his mobile, I think it was Skip or his mate Mick McVEAN, saying to meet up at a point which they gave him off the GPS. This was roughly three nautical miles south of Boulder Point.

We went there and met up with the Open Quest. It was just Mick and Skip on board. They gave us three plastic tubs of shucked abalone, that means the shell and gut were taken off. I would say this was about 450 abs. They told us to deliver them to an address in Melbourne which I do not wish to provide. The agreed price was $2000 and I think Matt had sorted this out already, but I don't know if it was during the phone call.

This job worked out without any problems and we got paid in cash a few days later by Mick in the front bar of the Normans Woe. After that, we did about four or five more jobs like the first one, always at the end of a stretch of good diving weather. We sometimes had fish we didn't want to sell through the co-op, so this was no problem. We would take up a few tubs for Skip in with the shark fillets or whatever else in the refrigerated van.

We did a job for Skip Murchison yesterday. It was me and Matt and Mick in Matt's van. Skip wanted Mick to go with us because he said he was worried about whether we were skimming some of the abs and selling them off somewhere else. This was not true, and I know Skip and Matt had had an argument about it because Matt was dirty about the whole thing for a few days before we did yesterday's run. He also had the shits because Skip and Mick were getting behind with there payments. He said at one stage that he was going to stop doing runs for Skip, but he changed his mind because we needed the money.

We took the abalone to the Melbourne address as usual. I know Matt was expecting Mick to pay us on the spot, once the delivery was done. He figured if Mick was with us, then he should have the money. Mick didn't have it and the two of them were bluing about it all the way back. At one stage, at a servo on the Geelong Freeway, they nearly had a punchup and I had to get between them.

By the time we got back to town it was getting dark. We left Mick at the wharf at about six o'clock and went home. Matt was getting more and more angry about the money and in the end he rang Skip and it turned out he was heading out around then to go fishing anyway. He said to come out and meet him at the same spot as usual. He said he was going to fish that night and if Matt was so keen for the money that he couldn't wait till morning, he was welcome to come out and Skip would fix him up.

I dropped Matt at the wharf about eight pm and he said he would go out to get the money from Skip and then see me at home. I sat at home and watched a DVD by myself. Because it was a Saturday night, MIlly was out doing stuff and the twins were asleep. By about eleven I started wondering if he'd come back in and gone straight to the Normans Woe, so I went down there looking for him. His phone was going to voicemail. I come home from there, and I was just turning off the car in our driveway when Robbo turned up in the divvy van and told me Matt had been shot and the Caravel was on fire. I was asked to come down to the lockup and identify Matt's body.

I do not know who shot matt. I was at home all through that evening, except for about ten minutes when I went to the Normans Woe looking for Matt.

Patrick James LANEGAN

Statement taken and signature witnessed by me
At 1:06am on 11 August 20--
at Dauphin in the State of Victoria

Neil Robertson
Detective Sergeant 258447

CHARLIE WRESTLED THE overcoat on as he slammed the door of his room. The family lawyer next door was deep in negotiation mode, feet on his desk, loud, breezy and profane; as comfortable selling real estate as children. Charlie passed the stale flowers at the empty reception desk—a constant sore point for the one commercial lawyer on the floor who doggedly arranged
Harper's Bazaar
and
Vogue
on the waiting room coffee table only to watch them gather coffee rings.

Across the street at the prosecutors' chambers, Charlie found that the card he'd been issued was no longer recognised by the scanner on the door. He waited until a woman in earphones swiped in, and darted through the doors behind her.

Harlan Weir SC was perched regally behind a big plain desk in his fourth-floor office. Among the neat piles of paper, each crowned by a glass paperweight, Harlan cut a large, shambolic figure, not quite aligned in his chair, silver hair swept over a wide forehead, suit jacket crumpled. He was polishing his glasses vigorously with the end of his tie.

‘How come I got this brief?' asked Charlie, before he'd even sat down.

Weir ignored the question. ‘What'd you think?'

‘It's interesting. Sad bunch of people. You been there?'

‘Nope. Looks vulgar to me…kelp and lighthouses. Fish.'

His lips momentarily caught on his teeth, in a comical death's head grin. ‘I think I'm an inlander.'

Weir held the glasses up to the light to inspect his work.

‘Have you ever studied the Beaufort Scale, Charlie? Beautiful piece of writing. It's a technical document, of course, but from a time when you could write technical stuff with your heart, when it wasn't so bloody soporific. Beaufort was a Pom, and he wanted to—' Weir squinted as he replaced the glasses on his nose. ‘He wanted a way to relate wind strengths to the appearance of the sea. Subjective exercise really. “Crests of glassy appearance” and so forth.' He studied his thumbnails momentarily. ‘“Rolling is heavy.” Dear me. Isn't that beautiful?
Rolling is heavy
…You can't describe anything scientific in those terms anymore. No verbs at all now, let alone at the front end like that. Or if they do have verbs they're the ones they develop in a test tube by reconfiguring noun DNA. Do you know I heard a man say “baselining” the other day?'

‘In court?'

‘No, on the television.' Harlan rolled one of the paperweights in his left palm. ‘Talking about football of course. And while I'm on that, tell me this—why are they so obsessed with accountability on the field, which to my mind is such an obscurity that none of them actually knows what it is—and yet they appear to be accountable to no one at all when they go out at night? You employ it as a sports cliché and it's apparently more important than life itself. And yet, used the way the Queen intended—that is, as a moral standard—it baffles them to the extent that they see no problem with urinating on a police car.'

‘Which queen?'

‘What?'

‘Which queen intended it to be used that way?' Charlie had become adept at pulling the handbrake on these tirades.

Weir sighed. ‘You've read this, this Murchison brief?'

‘Enough of it.' He tried again. ‘How come I got the gig?'

‘Why on earth wouldn't you?' Weir had leaned forward very slightly, and he studied Charlie with gentle regard. A phone rang distantly outside the room. Charlie found himself looking at the spines of the books behind the desk.

Weir was still watching him. ‘Now tell me how we're going to run it.'

‘Okay. You've got these two families, the Lanegans and the Murchisons. The second accused, McVean, he's just hired muscle. Lanegans have got a tribe of kids and both parents are dead. They're in the fishing game but a bit on the periphery, well-known troublemakers in the town. They get an approach from the Murchisons, who own just about everything in the main street. They're also into fishing and they've got an abalone licence. The Murchisons say, we're getting more abalone than we can legally sell through the co-op or whatever, so if you take these extra abalone to Melbourne so we can move them through the black market, we'll give you a commission.'

‘Why don't they take their own abalone to Melbourne?'

‘Licence is worth a couple of million dollars and they're not going to risk it. Fisheries do roadblocks, all sorts of stuff to catch these people. So they're better off putting a couple of expendables on the road and just denying everything if they get caught.'

‘What, with shellfish? It's not exactly Burmese heroin.'

‘It's very expensive stuff. There's only a dozen or so of these licences west of the cape, and there's an insatiable export market. I rang their fishermen's board after I'd finished reading the brief, and I got talking to this guy. He described it as swimming along scooping up hundred-dollar bills. Anyway, those boats are only sharing about twenty-five tonnes of product for the year, so the quota quickly cuts 'em off. And the co-op, the central clearing house for the abalone, it issues a docket which has to stay with that consignment of shellfish pretty much all the way to the table. Makes it very hard to fool the system once the abalone catch has been declared.'

‘So you don't declare it in the first place.' Weir nodded. ‘What about the murder charge?'

‘I think at a gut level a jury would buy it. There's clear physical evidence of deliberate homicide, the way the wound looks. There's motive: the Murchisons were behind in their payments and the victim was getting lippy about it. He'd complained to people at the pub, he'd made scenes at various times in front of others. It's a small town and people have a mind for other people's business. If the town witnesses stand up, then none of that's going to be too difficult. There's opportunity—the accused have got access to a boat. The phone records show some contact during the day between accused and victim, and then again about an hour before the fire's first spotted from shore, so that all ties in. Neither of the accused has got much of an alibi, and one of them, I think McVean, can be placed at the wharf; he accessed the security panel at exactly the right time. Murchison is by all accounts slightly smarter than McVean, but he was silly enough to answer a few questions in his police interview—made a bit of a mess of it. McVean's dumb, but different kind of dumb. Knows enough to give a no-comment. Anyway, the police version is very plausible: they arranged to meet at sea, either for the accused to provide more product to the victim, or so they could set up an ambush. There's a disagreement out there, or the whole thing was prearranged. They shoot him then and there on board the Murchisons' boat, throw him over into his own boat and set fire to it in the hope it'll burn to the waterline and—'