‘And how long was he here?’
‘Would’ve been about a year. Been a bloody lot shorter if I hadn’t been…’ He scratched his neck. ‘I only come back a coupla weeks before he pissed off. Bloody Moira put up with him, Christ only knows women. Used to talk to the little cunt over the fence.’
‘He just left, did he?’
‘Showed up one day in a white Triumph sports. Y’know the kind? They don’t make ’em any more. TR something. Just packed his case, buggered off. Left the old Renault standin out there. Coupla them kids took off in it. Never come back, neither.’
‘He didn’t leave because of you?’
He shook his head. ‘I hadn’t got round to him yet. He just pissed off. Reckon the cops were on him.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Two come round there a couple times.’
‘What, uniform cops?’
‘No. Plain clothes.’
‘You sure?’
He had another suck on the can. ‘I know the one,’ he said.
‘You know his name?’ I had a big swig of my beer.
‘Scullin. His name’s Scullin. He grew up round Abbotsford.’
‘So the cops came around twice and then he left?’
He nodded. ‘More than twice. Coupla times. Told Moira before he pissed off some bullshit about he’d won some money, something like that. I reckon it was drugs.’
‘Anyone else around here know him?’
He thought about it, smoke seeping out of his nostrils. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Bloke on the other side’s dead.’
I drained the can. ‘This is helpful,’ I said, getting up. ‘Much obliged.’ I took out my wallet, found a twenty and offered it. He took it and put it under the catfood can.
At the front door, I said, ‘Well, thanks again.’ He gave me a little wave.
I was at the gate when he said, ‘I’m just thinkin. Remember the bloke on the other side, Greek he was, tellin me one day he read where Ronnie dobbed in some hit-and-run bloke.’
I paused. ‘When was that?’
He spat on to the path. ‘Dunno.’
‘Was it while he was living here?’
‘Must’ve been. Bloke said he remembered Ronnie gettin in a car all smartened up. Then he read where he dobbed this other fella. That’s what the Greek said. Don’t get time to read the paper myself.’
‘That’s useful,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
9
I went back to my office, made some black tea and sat in the client’s chair. Where was Ronnie Bishop now? Last seen tooling off in his Triumph, fresh from doing his civic duty in the matter of R. v. McKillop. And where was a policeman called Scullin, whose circle included the accused and the star witness?
Barry Tregear didn’t need to think about the name Scullin.
‘Martin Scullin. I know Scull,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘No problem. He might be able to help me with something.’
‘You still farting around with that McKillop business?’
‘On and off.’
‘You’ve missed Scull today. By about six years. He took the package. Gone fishing.’
‘What about a number or an address?’
‘Big ask. I’ll have to talk to the man. What do you want to see him about?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Tell him it’s about an old dog of his, Danny McKillop.’
‘Where’d you get that?’ Tregear asked.
‘Widely known at the time.’
‘I’ll get back to you. Where are you?’
I gave him the number.
I gave the R. Bishops in the phone book a quick run-through. There were only two Ronalds and neither of them had ever lived in Morton Street. I rang an estate agent called Millie Vincent I’d had dealings with and asked her to check the Landlords’ database for Ronald Bishop. She rang back in twenty minutes.
‘They’ll drum me out of the trade for doing this,’ she said. ‘A Ronald Arthur Bishop rented a house in Prahran in 1984–85. Then a Perth agent ran a check on him for a property in Fremantle in late ’85.’
She gave me the name of the agent.
I got through to a man called Michael Brooke. He got the impression I was a fellow real estate agent and told me a Ronald Bishop had been the tenant of a house in Walpole Street, Fremantle. ‘Then he bought it at auction in, oh, ’86 or ’87. Paid a bit over the odds then but it’s turned out to be a smart buy. By the way, he calls himself Ronnie Burdett-Bishop now. Moved upmarket.’
R. A. Burdett-Bishop was in the Perth phonebook.
No-one answered at the first two attempts. The phone rang for a long time before a low-voiced male answered on the third try.
‘Could I speak to Ronnie, please,’ I said.
‘Who is that?’
‘An old acquaintance suggested I call him.’
There was a pause. ‘Ronnie’s in Melbourne.’
‘That’s where I’m calling from. Is there some way I can get in touch with him here?’
There was another pause. ‘Who did you say you were?’
‘My name’s Jack Irish,’ I said. ‘I’m a lawyer. You’ll find me in the Melbourne phone book.’ For some reason, this statement sometimes had a reassuring effect on people.
‘Well, I’d like to help you,’ the man said. ‘My name’s Charles Lee. I’m a friend of Ronnie’s. I’m keeping an eye on his house. No-one seems to know where Ronnie is at the moment…’
‘You don’t have a Melbourne address for him?’
‘Um, you could try his mother. Would you like her number?’
I wrote it down, said thanks and goodbye, then dialled it. No-one at home.
It’s nice that there’s a special occupation for the anal retentive. It’s called librarianship. The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper’s hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the assistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early ’80s I’d got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I’d been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I’d obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta’s.
Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I’d corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.
The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I’d already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne’s death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.
Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants. At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.
I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn’t sound like Ronnie Bishop.
I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I’d asked for a colonic irrigation.
‘Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?’ I said sweetly.
‘It’ll take half an hour,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anyone to do it now.’