Pause. ‘That would be terrific, Denise. I’ll wait on.’
We sat in silence looking at each other. Linda reached down, took the hem of her skirt and began to work it up, slowly, one thigh at a time, flexing her thigh muscles and moving her bottom from side to side. I could see the dark at the fork of her legs when she said, ‘Still here. Right. No serving members so far this year. Good. What about non-serving?’
Pause. ‘Two in January. None in Feb. One in March. One in April. Okay. Now, Denise, I’ll need the names to check against our register.’
Pause. ‘H. J. Mullins. T. R. Conroy. M. E. F. Davis. P. K. Vane. That’s V-A-N-E, is it? Terrific. I see we’ve got them all except Vane. You wouldn’t have any biographical data there, would you, Denise?’
Pause. ‘Just service dates. Um. ’63 to ’88. Special Branch 1978 to ’84. Look, Denise, you’ve been a great help. Thanks very much. Much appreciated.’
Linda put the phone down and pulled her skirt back to respectability. ‘I can’t bear to see a man salivate,’ she said. ‘The only possibility is P. K. Vane. He was in the Special Branch when Anne was killed, though.’
‘I’d say that lets him out. They spent all their time hanging around anarchist meetings. Six people and a collie dog and two Special Branch. Our bloke would probably be in Drugs, one of Scullin’s mates.’
There was a sound in the hallway. I felt my shoulders tense. Cam came in.
‘All fixed up,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’m shooting through. You want me, press auto and 8 on the phone. It’ll page me.’ He opened his jacket and showed the pager on his belt.
‘I’m in your debt, mate,’ I said.
Cam said, ‘Saturday, that’s the day we pay off debts. There’s plenty of food here.’ He eyed Linda appraisingly. ‘Try the cupboards in the big bedroom for clothes. You’re not far apart in size. Jack, there’s men’s clothes in the other bedroom. One of her exes. Biggish fella, I gather. Nice line in shirts. Help yourself.’
I went with him to the front door. He was outside when he said, ‘That little case of mine, that’s in the kitchen now. Under the sink. I wouldn’t open this door to anyone if I were you.’
I detoured to the bathroom on my way back, looking for aspirin. Pumping adrenalin leaves you feeling dull and headachey. I was studying the contents of the medicine cabinet when it came to me out of nowhere.
I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.
Anne Jeppeson’s mother. That was what she had said.
30
The Law Department at Melbourne University looks the way universities should. It has courtyards and cloisters and ivy.
I loitered downstairs, near where a girl had set fire to herself during the Vietnam War. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole campus was full of people in ex-army overcoats wearing beanies. I was just older than most of them. By about thirty years.
My man came out ahead of his students, striding briskly, looking the way lecturers usually look after a lecture: happy and smug. His name was Barry Chilvers and he taught constitutional law. He was also a civil liberties activist and knew more about the Special Branch than most people.
‘Barry,’ I said when he was level with me.
He jerked his head up at me, eyes startled behind the big glasses.
I took the beanie off.
‘Jesus Christ, Jack,’ he said, exasperated, ‘where’d you get that coat? And the beanie, for Christ sakes. It’s a Collingwood beanie. How can you wear a Collingwood beanie?’
‘Ensures that I’m not recognised,’ I said. ‘Got a moment?’
We went upstairs to his office. It was the same mess I remembered: books, papers, journals, student essays, styrofoam cups, newspapers, bits of clothing everywhere. Two computers had been added to the chaos.
I cleared away a briefcase and a pile of files from a chair and sat down. ‘You were looking very pleased with yourself,’ I said.
He scratched his woolly grey head. ‘One of the better days at the pearl–swine interface,’ he said. ‘Some days I come back and headbutt the door. To what do I owe this visit?’
‘Do you remember Anne Jeppeson?’
‘Sure. Got run down. She was a spunk. Politically loony but a spunk.’
‘Would the Special Branch have watched her?’
He put a thumb behind his top teeth, took it out. ‘It’s hard to say. Who says so?’
‘She said something to her mother.’
‘There was a lot of paranoia about the Branch. If you believed all the people who said the Branch was watching them, it wouldn’t have been a branch, it would have been the whole bloody tree.’
‘But it’s possible?’
He shrugged. ‘More than most, I suppose. She was into a whole lot of stuff the Branch would have had an interest in—Roxby Downs, Aboriginal rights in Tasmania, East Timor. You name it.’
‘East Timor? The Special Branch? I thought it was only interested in local stuff?’
Barry shrugged again. ‘The Branch, ASIO, ASIS, you can’t separate them. They scratched each other’s backs. So it’s possible, yes.’
I told him what else I needed to know.
He groaned. ‘Where some Branch goon was at a certain time in 1984? Jesus H. Christ, Jack, you don’t have modest requests, do you? When in ’84?’
I told him.
‘Not long before Harker got the boot and the new government closed the Branch down.’
‘That’s right. There’d be records somewhere, wouldn’t there?’
Barry shook his head. ‘Shredded. On orders from the highest authority. All records to be destroyed.’
‘So there’s no record of what they were up to?’
He clapped his hands. ‘Shredded,’ he said. ‘But not before being copied.’
‘Shredded? And copied?’
‘What do you expect?’ said Barry. ‘I think it was something the cops and the new Opposition found themselves in agreement on. Think about it. The files represent about five billion hours of coppers standing around in the rain dying to have a piss. You shred them and a couple of years later another government gets elected and wants you to start all over again, spying on the same bunch of harmless sods. They say they went through three copiers. Twenty-four hours a day for days.’
‘Who’s got the copy?’
‘What copy? No-one’s ever admitted the files were copied.’
I said, ‘Barry, I’m talking life and death.’
He did another big head scratch, rolled his chair back till it hit a pile of books. The pile toppled, slithered to become a ziggurat.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise you anything, though. I’ll ask a man who might be able to ask another man, who might know someone.’
I stood up. ‘I need to know today. It’s that bad.’
Barry stood up. His eyes were level with my middle greatcoat button. He looked up at me. ‘You serious?’
I nodded.
He nodded back, sadly. ‘I’ll go after my tutorial. You can’t phone him, this bloke. Paranoid. Give me the date and the name, anything that’ll help.’
‘God loves you, Barry,’ I said.
‘There is no God and you know it. Ring me at home after five. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t know if they copied this kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘I’m only doing this because of your old man’s record for Fitzroy, you know. I wouldn’t do it for you.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’
31
I found Linda at a laptop computer in a long, narrow room off the kitchen. A bench down one wall held three computers, one with a huge monitor, and two printers. The other wall was covered in corkboard, with dozens of computer-generated colour images stuck up. They seemed to be tryouts of the landscape paintings.