…and Stephanie and her fuckin husband, don’t like to say the bastard’s name, Jonathan fuckin Chadwick.
‘How did they destroy Jonty?’
Christine sighed, scratched her scalp, put her hands into her sleeves, scratched, took them out. ‘Isn’t it time?’ she said to Jude, standing behind me. ‘Jude, isn’t it time? Darling?’
‘In a while,’ said Jude, power in her voice. ‘When your visitor is finished.’
I repeated the question.
Christine got up, began to walk back and forth in front of me. ‘Jonty? Oh, they have their ways. They got his licence taken away. Tom and Barry. They’ve got the power. Just pick up the phone.’
‘What licence was that?’
‘Licence to be a doctor, I don’t know what they call it.’
‘On what grounds was his licence to practise suspended?’
‘They’re so fucking self-righteous. Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?’ Her shoulder twitched, moved again.
‘Tell me about Jonty.’
‘Jude, it must be time, why can’t I have a fucking watch, what fucking harm can that possibly do? How do I fucking kill myself with a watch? Please, Jude…’
‘Your visitor’s not finished,’ said Jude curtly. ‘Pay attention.’
Christine looked at me, jerked her head from side to side. ‘Jesus. What?’
‘Tell me about Jonty.’
‘Shit, he’s no saint. The guy was dealing in his office, right, he was shooting up junkies in his office. The far gones. Including me. He used to shoot me up, shoot up too, then I’d leave and he’d go back to seeing patients. Old ladies.’
‘And after he was suspended?’
‘Kicked him out. Expelled him from the family. Like me. Started dealing in clubs, in the street. He owed huge fucking sums to the suppliers, they were going to kill him…Can you go now, please, please.’
‘Just one last thing. How did they destroy Mark?’
‘Wouldn’t have him in the business. Barry wouldn’t have him. Barry hates him. I don’t know why. Won’t be in a room with him. He got Mark’s law firm to fire him. Then his own father wouldn’t give him a cent.’
She was rubbing her hands together, scratched her face. ‘Can you go now. Please?’
I stood up. ‘Thank you, Mrs Carson,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your talking to me.’
‘Yes. Goodbye.’ She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at Jude. ‘Jude, darling, he’s going…’
The man was waiting for me in the anteroom, presumably had watched us on the monitor.
‘As you’ve seen,’ he said as we walked down the corridor, ‘Mrs Carson is not the easiest of patients.’
‘She’s not a patient,’ I said, ‘she’s an inmate.’
We flew home over the lush hills, beneath us the fields, the settlements, the roads, the cars, they looked like the perfect countrysides model railway enthusiasts build: one of each thing and everything in its place. I thought that there had probably been a time when the Carsons imagined they had built a perfect landscape, shaped the world with their money. Then strangers came and took Alice away from them and suddenly their money was as shells and flints and sharks’ teeth and Reichsmarks, a basketful would not preserve a hair on the girl’s head.
The pilot was looking at me. ‘Ex-military?’ he said. In his dark glasses I could see my reflection, bulbous.
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Something. I had ten years.’
‘Ex all kinds of things,’ I said. ‘Ex-everything, basically.’
He looked away, flash of glasses.
We were over the Dandenongs and ahead, choking on its own foul breath, lay the imperfect city. Many of each thing and nothing in its place.
16
From Orlovsky’s car, coming in on the hideous tollway, I rang a cop called Vince Hartnett in Drugs and didn’t say my name.
‘Give me a number, call you in a minute.’
He’d be going outside to talk on a stolen mobile newly liberated from a dealer.
‘Got two private sales of Taragos to check,’ said Orlovsky. ‘And that’s it. The market in old Taragos is sluggish.’
‘The auctions,’ I said. ‘Could’ve been bought at auction.’
‘Could’ve been bought in 1988.’
I nodded, thinking about Dr Jonty Chadwick shooting up Christine in his consulting room, shooting up himself. Putting the blood pressure cuff on shaking junkies, pumping it up tight and giving them the needle. Not an old-fashioned family doctor but a doctor for the new family, the family of addicts. Still, even junkie doctors would have much experience of performing small procedures: extracting splinters, lancing boils, carving out plantar warts.
Cutting off two joints of a little finger. His niece’s little finger.
That would be a minor procedure. Hygienically done.
Was that likely? The son-in-law kicked out, expelled from the Carson family, struck off the medical roll. It was possible.
My phone rang. Vince Hartnett.
‘A doctor called Jonathan Chadwick. Mean anything?’
‘Jonty baby. Dr Happy. Added a new depth to general practice.
Yes, I know Jonty.’ He had a quick, streetwise way of talking.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Inside. Got five years in, let me see, ’96, ’97. Trying for the big time. Hopeless case. Sadly missed by the street life.’
I thanked Vince, went back to thinking about the Carsons. I knew something about one of them: Pat Carson junior, Alice’s brother. A few weeks after I’d ended the little hostage drama in the underwear store, Graham Noyce invited me for a drink at a small and horrendously smart hotel called The Hotel Off Collins. The Carson family owned it, he told me. They wanted to show their gratitude for the handling of the lingerie incident. He put an envelope on the table. I said thanks but life had taught me that whatever joy the contents of envelopes brought, accepting them was a step on the way to sadness.
He didn’t press it, put the envelope away, gave me his card. Then, when I was out of the force and desperate, I sent him my card. This claimed that I was a Mediator and Negotiator. About a month later, he gave me a job to do for Barry Carson. Barry’s nineteen-year-old boy, Pat Junior, was getting some life experience from a thirty-four-year-old table dancer called Sam Stark, formerly Janelle Hopper. Sam was professing undying love for the young Carson, and he was lavishing gifts on her and talking about marriage when he turned twenty-one and got his trust money from his maternal grandfather. I had a word with Sam and found her to be sincere in her love for Pat. At least until we got to fifty thousand dollars and a one-way ticket to Brisbane, business class.
At that point, before my eyes, her love for the youth withered. Noyce rang the next day to say thanks, Sam Stark had broken off with Pat Junior, booked a flight to Brisbane.
Had Sam told Pat that she’d been bought off? How would he take that? He was a wild young man by Noyce’s account. Dropped out of university. In with bad company. Casino lizards, Noyce said. Pat had already sold the car his mother gave him when he left school to pay off gambling debts. Would he be part of the kidnapping of his cousin’s child? Angry, in debt, in the company of fast people. Someone might have suggested it, made a joke of it.
I rang Graham Noyce’s mobile. ‘It’s Frank,’ I said. ‘Anything happening?’
‘Nothing. How’d you go with Christine?’
‘An unwell person.’
‘Yes, a variety of problems, including, would you believe it, narcissism.’
‘Anything with a narc in it I’d believe.’
‘So not a useful trip?’
‘No. What’s Pat Junior doing these days?’
There was a short silence. I could see his worried face, more hairs jumping scalp. ‘That’s not a, a casual question, is it?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘He’s a worry for Barry. And for Katherine. They got his grandmother, she’s in her eighties, to change the terms of the trust. I told you about the trust, did I?’
‘You did.’
‘Pat won’t be getting his three-quarter million till he turns thirty now. His mother told him on the phone from England. I understand he went berserk, grabbed some antique glass thing, smashed a mirror dating from Napoleon’s day. Security had to be called in.’