Carmel brought the potent eggcup of coffee and a yellow A4 envelope. ‘Enzio says this came yesterday.’ She touched the tip of her tongue to her upper lip, a kissable upper lip. ‘He’s whistling,’ she said. ‘Is there a secret?’
‘Make them come to you,’ I said. ‘Never use force.’
She nodded, no expression. ‘Thank you. I believe some call you the cookmaster.’
‘The knowing do,’ I said.
Carmel was clearing the table next to the door as I left.
‘Your work here will never be done,’ she said.
The office was cold and I noticed dust. How could anyone trust a solicitor whose office was dusty? I put on the blow heater and the smell of hot dust filled the room. How had this dust problem crept up on me?
Cyril Wootton on the answering machine, twice, a Wootton urgent but not irascible, which was unusual. My sister, Rosa, mildly exasperated, which was not. Drew Greer, saying unkind, mocking things about St Kilda’s performance against West Coast. Sad but to be expected from someone rendered agnostic by the death of Fitzroy. And Mrs Purbrick.
Jack, darling, such short notice but you must come for drinks tomorrow, six-ish, no excuses accepted.
It’s business, I thought. And my chance to meet the Cundalls. Everyone else had.
I rang Cyril.
‘As always, Mr Wootton will be delighted to have made contact with you,’ said Mrs Davenport. Every day, she sounded more like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
‘But do we ever really make contact, Mrs Davenport? We talk, we may even touch, but do we make contact? I mean, in the sense of…’
‘Putting you through,’ she said.
‘Jesus, Jack,’ said Wootton, ‘mobile that’s not switched on, what the fuck is the purpose…’
‘Silence is the purpose, Cyril. The silence in which to do one’s work.’
He gave me a silence. Then he made a noise, not so much animal as vegetable, the noise a sad carrot or potato might make, the noise of something deeply, hopelessly embedded in mud.
‘The client would like a progress report,’ he said.
Spoilt rotten, judges. Associates and clerks and tipstaffs and witnesses and defendants and jurors and learned counsel in silly wigs, all hanging on their every word, many of them hanging and fawning.
‘Tell the client I’ll report when there’s something worth reporting.’
Wootton whistled, put the phone down. He’d be one of the fawners. I’d have to ask Cyril how it was that Mr Justice Colin Loder brought the problem of Robbie Colburne to him.
I sat down and thought about my progress. Nil, really. Robbie left the country and didn’t appear to have come back. That was about it. It was strange but there were possible explanations.
Time to go home. Dawn in cold Lithgow seemed days away.
Halfway to my car, I heard a car slowing behind me, looked around, flight-or-fight coming into play: a red Alfa, new, two men in it. At an unthreatening crawl, it drew level, and the passenger window slid down.
‘Jack Irish?’
The man was young, sleek dark hair, a mole beside his mouth. He was wearing a grey polo-neck and a soft-looking black leather jacket without a collar.
I nodded, kept walking.
‘For you,’ he said, holding out a brown paper bag. ‘From a friend.’
Without thinking, I took it. The car pulled away, braked before it took the sharp corner, a double pulse of red light in the gloomy day.
The bag held a video cassette, new, unlabelled. Courtesy, presumably, of Detective Sergeant Warren Bowman.
16
At home, I half-filled the bath, drowsed in it for a long time with a glass of single malt, the end of a bottle given to me by Lyall, bought duty-free in some airport servicing a trouble spot. Or Santa bloody Barbara. It was peaceful in the big room, a bedroom when I bought the building. Once upon a time, a fire had sometimes been lit in the brick hearth on a cold Sunday afternoon, one person had read in the bath, the other had sat in the armchair.
I thought more about Robert Colburne. The judge was paying to find out what had really happened to him if he hadn’t accidentally overdosed. He said he was acting on behalf of someone who knew Robbie, lost touch with him for a long time, then made contact again in Melbourne.
I didn’t like the feel of that story, the distance it placed between Mr Justice Loder and Robbie.
Musing in the claw-footed bath, a bath big enough for two, if they arranged themselves.
I dismissed that memory, rose and donned un-ironed but clean garments and began the preparation of a modest meal.
I drank some red wine, moved roughly chopped onion around for a while, kept away from the hot spot that the famous and expensive French frying pan wasn’t supposed to have. The French are the finest conpeople in the world. I added garlic and mushrooms, a tin of tomatoes.
The video. Delivered by hand by men in an expensive car. Undercover cops? I switched off the gas, took my glass to the sitting room and plugged in the cassette, went to the couch and used the remote. The video flickered briefly, began.
A young man got out of a cab. This would be Robbie Colburne. He was tall and slim and, from on high and zooming in and out on him, the camera caught a certain athletic insouciance: chin up, arms moving freely, first two fingers extended pistol-like. It was night but made day by spotlights recessed into the building on his left. Light gleamed on his cheekbones, on his straight black hair combed back. He was handsome, all in black, a jacket worn over a tee-shirt.
The camera followed him to where he disappeared beneath a cantilevered porch bearing the name of the building, incised in polished concrete: CATHEXIS.
Daylight this time, someone sitting at a table on the pavement from across a busy street, traffic blocking vision for seconds at a time. Then a new camera angle, nothing obscuring the man now but the camera unsteady. He had a small glass on a saucer, the shortest of short blacks, drank a teaspoonful, looked around, newspaper in his hand, a half-amused look. He was dark, balding, a fleshy intimidating face.
Early evening, the young man again, Robbie, seen in profile, side-on, waiting to cross a busy street, finding a break in the traffic, walking diagonally, the confident walk.
Night again. A long shot in bad conditions, rain, a car window coming down, the camera zooming in, the young man behind the wheel, in a dinner suit now, white shirt, black bow tie, saying a few words to someone outside the vehicle.
End of moving pictures.
I’d asked Warren Bowman for a photograph of Robbie.
I’d expected a still, a mortuary picture. Instead, he sent me a collection of surveillance video clips showing Robbie under expensive observation, moving, in the street. Good of him but why? I could ask Detective Sergeant Bowman. But he would probably say that he was just being helpful.
And why did a casual barman like Robbie deserve this kind of photographic attention? Was it because he wasn’t just a barman, as my anonymous caller had suggested?
Warren Bowman said senior drug squad officers were on the scene quickly after the uniformed cops reported finding Robbie’s body.
Expensive surveillance, two cameras on one occasion. That only happened to persons of great interest. Unless Robbie was an accidental, someone filmed in the surveillance of someone else. But, in that case, he would be someone close to the target; there was no other way he would be caught on camera so many times.
Robbie caught up in the surveillance of someone else. Was that it? The fleshy man?
Back to cooking. Time to add the tuna, get the rice going.
I was eating in front of the television when the phone rang. Cam.
‘Little trip in the morning,’ he said. ‘Won’t take long.’
Peter Temple
Dead Point (Jack Irish Thriller 3)
‘I got talkin to the bloke at the hotel next door,’ Cam said. He wound down his window, flicked his cigarette end out, raised the window. We were in the V-8, passing the Fawkner Crematorium on the Hume, a sunny morning, petrol tanker ahead, Kenworth behind, stream of heavy metal coming the other way.