‘Mrs Bishop, do you know any reason why anyone would want to harm Ronnie?’
She looked out of the window again. ‘No.’
‘And you don’t know who the person was he came to see?’
‘No, I don’t. Ronnie never talked about himself, Mr Irish. Doug always said Ronnie would make a good spy.’
‘Did he take anything with him that day?’
‘No. Nothing. Everything he brought is here. I even found a CD he’d brought for me. Didn’t say a word, just slipped it into my rack. Just like him. He gave me a kiss and said he was going out for a while and he didn’t come back. I wanted to put a bandaid on the scratch on his cheek but he didn’t want me to.’
‘He had a scratch on his cheek?’
She nodded. ‘He said he scratched it on a hedge on his way to the corner shop to buy cigarettes.’ She looked at me as if something had just occurred to her. ‘You’re not a policeman yourself are you, Mr Irish? Two policemen came and had a really good look around. I’m not sure what they were looking for.’
‘No, Mrs Bishop. I’m a lawyer. I was involved in a trial years ago where Ronnie was a witness. There’s been some new developments lately and I thought Ronnie might be able to help with some information.’
‘I’m sure he’d be delighted to help,’ she said. ‘Did you know he was a social worker once? Helping the poor homeless children on the streets. Of course, what he really wanted to do was make films. Ronnie loved films. He saved up to buy a movie camera. He was always filming things.’
‘Was he a trained social worker, Mrs Bishop?’
‘Well, not really. He was a clever boy and he started at Melbourne University but he didn’t really settle down. Doug and I were living in Queensland then, for Doug’s health. Not that it improved. He missed the football so much, you know, I think it lowered his resistance.’
‘So Ronnie was a paid social worker, was he?’
‘Oh yes. He worked for the Safe Hands Foundation. They help the homeless.’
I’d never heard of the foundation but that didn’t mean anything. ‘Why did Ronnie move to Perth, Mrs Bishop?’
She pondered this for a moment. ‘I don’t know, really. Just wanted to go somewhere else, I suppose. Young people are like that, today, aren’t they?’
Ronnie was always going to be a young person to his mum. ‘He bought a new car before he left. That must have been expensive.’
She smiled. ‘He won some money on the Lotto. He took me to Georges to buy a winter coat. I’ve still got it. Beautiful. He’s such a generous boy.’
It was time to go. Mrs Bishop came to the front gate with me. In front of the house next door, a man in a dark double-breasted suit was leaning against a BMW, talking into a mobile phone. He gave Mrs Bishop a wave: five stiff fingers moved from side to side. He’d be making her an offer for the house any day now. I said I was sure Ronnie would be in touch soon, gave her my card, shook her small hand, and left.
12
I went back to my office and brooded for a while. Ronnie Bishop came to Melbourne a worried man. Perhaps his friend Charles Lee, the man who’d answered his telephone, could tell me why. He certainly wasn’t going to tell me on the phone. That meant going to Perth. I didn’t want to go to Perth. Did I owe it to Danny? What did I owe Danny, anyway? Bloody something. I phoned Veneto Travel.
‘Perth?’ said Shane DiSanto. He had recently inherited the business from his uncle Carlo. It was a big change from panel beating.
‘Put Denise on, Shane,’ I said.
‘Jack, Jack, Jack, I’m the boss here now. You’re talking to the owner. I can handle this. What you want to go to Perth for? You don’t go to Perth in winter. I can do you Hamilton Island. You can’t live at home and eat McDonald’s for what I can do it. Dirt, Jack, dirt. Are you listening?’
Shane eventually agreed to let me go to Perth and made the booking. I rang Linda Hillier and left a message on her machine. Then I considered ringing Charles Lee and decided against it.
When I went to pick up the ticket at the airport, they’d never heard of me. I rang Veneto and got Denise.
‘You’re lucky it’s only Perth,’ she said. ‘He made all the bookings for Frank La Bianca’s daughter’s honeymoon. High season in Florence. Lucky couple had to have sanctified root numero uno in the back seat of the Hertz car.’
I hired a Corolla in midair from a steward called David. He thought a person like me would be happier with a BMW. So did I.
It takes hours to get to Perth, flying over the huge shark-infested dent in the continent called the Great Australian Bight. And when you get there, you’re two hours in the past. I didn’t know Perth; it was just an airport on the way to Europe. They tell me the locals have secessionist tendencies. I can understand that. Judging by the accents, they’ll probably have a fight over whether to rename the State Manchester or Birmingham.
It was a sunny day in Perth, insignificant wisps of cloud decorating a sky the colour of old blue jeans. I studied the map book for about ten minutes and set off for Fremantle. On paper, getting there was a matter of keeping to the highroads. On land, however, the Corolla had a tendency to wander off the beaten track. On my second sighting of the same pub I stopped for lunch and directions. I sat out in the beer garden with a bottle of Swan Lager and a big piece of charred West Australian steer. Around me the locals, mostly Britons with flaking skins wearing towelling hats, were being enthusiastic about the chances of the West Coast Eagles against Carlton. I thought it would be nice if they both lost but this wasn’t the place to say it.
After lunch, I took some counsel from one of the Poms and went off driving again. By the time I found Fremantle I had a fair idea of Perth. It was a huge suburb built on sand dunes around a shallow estuary. The upmarket bits had more dark-green vegetation and more trees. I went through the city centre with its standard collection of glass towers and roughly followed the course of the Swan River to its mouth, which is the port of Fremantle.
Fremantle looked like an English Channel port transported to the Mediterranean; handsome Victorian stone buildings looking slightly uneasy in the hard light. There were plenty of signs of the tourist trappings that had made the place so dangerous during the America’s Cup challenge, but it also felt like a working harbour.
I had a good cup of coffee in a place full of voluble Italians and people with time to read a book in the middle of the day, walked around the fishing harbour, visited the maritime museum, browsed in a bookshop, had another cup of coffee.
Ronnie Bishop’s house was two or three blocks back from the waterfront, a sandstone dwelling in a street of smart revamped houses. It had two young palms in front, high walls blocking off the neighbours and a severe wrought-iron fence with spear tops. Morton Street, Clifton Hill, this was not.
The front door was a nice piece of woodwork, a rich, dark jarrah frame with panels of pine oiled to a dark honey colour. I pressed a brass button in a brass plate and heard the chime. No-one came. I took a walk up the street. The house next door bore a brass plate saying Souter & Whale, Architects. I was back in the car reading a novel I’d bought called The Means of Grace when a white Honda Civic drew up outside Ronnie’s address and a man in jeans and white golf shirt got out. He checked Ronnie’s mailbox, unlocked the front door and went inside, leaving it open. He was out again in minutes and set about watering the garden.
I got out of the Corolla and went over to the fence. He caught sight of me approaching.
‘You must be Charles,’ I said.
He was a tall man, early forties, light tan, thin and fit-looking. What remained of his hair was close-cropped. He looked like the mature outdoor male in an advertisement.