‘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.