‘E-cup. At least it’s in the family,’ Vella said. ‘Don’t tell my sister.’
I got in, tried to start the car. Angry whine. It wouldn’t start.
‘Man and machine,’ said Vella. ‘In perfect harmony.’ He drained his can, dropkicked it towards the street. It bounced on a parked car.
‘Do that in your street?’ I said. ‘Kick beer cans onto cars? I’m coming around to piss in your neighbour’s letterbox.’
‘Feel free,’ said Vella. ‘A bouncer. Well, ex-bouncer. Presently awaiting trial for throwing a bloke across King Street. Landed on a parking meter.’
‘The one on the other side,’ I said. ‘The tiny Quaker.’
I tried the starter again. It whined and nothing happened. I waited, tried again. Reluctantly, the engine came to life.
‘Saturday?’ Vella said. ‘Come and eat. With a knife and fork. Remember?’ He mimed eating with a knife and fork. ‘That’s provided we don’t have some pressing murder in Wangaratta or fucking Moe.’
I mimed gnawing on a bone. ‘Real men eat with their hands,’ I said. ‘Kill it and eat it.’
Vella shook his head. ‘Kill a home-delivery pizza,’ he said. ‘Stalk a pizza and take it out with your bare hands. Eight, around then.’
I gave him the thumbs up and took off. Slowly. Five minutes from the college, at an intersection, ahead of me a class and then a date with the teacher, the mobile made its mad-bird noise, changed my plans, changed many things.
2
The security system guarding the home of Pat Carson, patriarch of the Carson dynasty, began with a three-metre-high boundary wall. Then you drove into a gatehouse in the wall and a door closed behind you and ahead another door shot up from the ground and you were going nowhere, not until someone somewhere had looked at your picture from at least four angles and pressed a button. Once out of jail, concealed spotlights revealed that the boundary wall wasn’t the only obstacle intruders faced. Four metres or so inside it was an elegant stake-pointed steel fence several metres high. It was entirely possible that the grassed area in between was patrolled by Dobermans and their handlers.
Three Mercedes, one small and two big, were parked in front of the landing-strip terrace that preceded the huge neo-Georgian structure. I parked the shabbier but sexier member of the Axis Powers in front of them.
A man called Graham Noyce was waiting for me. He was in his early forties, short and pudgy, snub nose, fair hair giving out in front. Once a lawyer and an adviser to politicians, he now worked for the Carson family as some kind of fixer. I’d first met him after an affair in a distant reach of the Carson empire, a shopping-mall branch of a women’s underwear chain called Cusp. The unhinged husband of an ex-employee took three staff and four customers, all women, hostage. In the beginning, the man, a plumber called Tony, wanted his wife and the manager, who was on leave, brought to him. The idea was that he would get them to confess to having a lesbian affair. I got him to let me sit in the front part of the shop on a white plastic chair, and I managed to talk him out of the confession-extracting scheme.
Okay, he said, a million dollars, cash money, delivered by a Carson, no one else would do, plus a helicopter and pilot on the shopping centre roof. That or he’d kill the women one at a time, starting with the fat one who reminded him of his sister, the fucking bitch. Sounds reasonable, I’d said, let’s talk details. In the midst of a discussion ranging over many topics, including religion, trust and the ability of lingerie to inflame and deprave, I broke off to get two cans from the machine across the way, outside the jeans shop. Just me in the shopping mall, air-conditioning humming as it pushed the dead air around, all the shops evacuated, the workers and the gawkers and Hepburn and his killers down at the police line. I went back into the lingerie shop, popped my can of Sprite, got reasonably close, tossed Tony his Diet Coke, underhand.
Tony relaxed, took his trigger hand off the shotgun to catch it, and that was the end of the matter.
Five hours after it began. Your face and your shoulders ache dully for days, tension clotted in the muscles.
Noyce put out a hand. Firm but not too firm.
‘Frank. Thanks for coming at short notice. Pat appreciates it.’
We went through the front door. I touched its surface, at least twenty coats of black paint, each one almost rubbed away by hand before the next was applied. Inside, the amount of space was alarming: a sparsely furnished hall the size of an art gallery, then a softly lit passage two hospital trolleys could pass in. At its end, a full twenty metres away, a rosewood staircase rose in a gentle curve.
Pat Carson’s study was halfway down the passage. Noyce took me in without knocking. It wasn’t a bookish room but a clubby room, a big panelled room, six or seven armchairs, small tables, family photographs and portraits on the walls. Behind a desk the size of a billiard table, closed wooden internal shutters behind him, sat a man, old, had to be in his eighties, square face, deeply lined, full head of charged white hair brushed back.
‘Mr Carson,’ said Noyce, ‘this is Frank Calder. Frank, Mr Pat Carson.’
I knew quite a lot about Pat Carson, a man who went from penniless immigrant builders’ labourer to millionaire property developer before he was forty. In his time, he had been accused of beating, bribing or threatening everyone in the building unions, top to bottom, of being the most ruthless figure in the industry, the worst person an honest union man or a subcontractor could ever meet, the most sinister person in construction. But a Royal Commission in the seventies couldn’t prove that, couldn’t find a single witness to testify to acts more reprehensible than bullying and intimidation and vague mentions of future favours.
Pat Carson waved a big parcel of bones at me, a hand that had known work. As he raised his head to inspect me, his neck skin tautened and, for an instant, he could have been the older brother of the man standing at the fireplace.
‘A soldier once, they tell me,’ he said. ‘And a policeman.’
I nodded.
‘Don’t know whether that’s a good combination for a man. Havin either of them jobs, for that matter. You know my sons? Tom.’
Standing in front of the fireplace, dark-suited right arm draped along the mantel. Tom Carson moved fingers at me. He was in his sixties, tall, with close-cut grey hair, curved nose presiding over a severe face.
Tom was the visible Carson, the elder son, the public face of the country’s richest private company, a man who dined with prime ministers and premiers. Lately, his picture had been in all the newspapers because he was taking Carson Corporation public, ending fifty years of utterly private ownership. He reminded me of someone I’d served under, a man who liked to witness pain. Not inflict, just watch.
Another man, younger, mid-fifties, sat forward in a buttoned leather armchair, extended a hand. ‘Barry Carson, Frank,’ he said, a genial voice, a light, boyish voice, a voice to put you at your ease. We shook hands. ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. He had no grey in his fair hair, dyed probably. There was a hint of the voluptuary in his face, the fleshiness, the hooded eyes behind round fine-framed glasses.
Barry pointed to the chair next to him. ‘Sit here, Frank.’
I sat down. Noyce took a seat beside the desk.
‘Tell him, Graham,’ said Pat Carson.
‘We’ve had a kidnapping,’ Noyce said. ‘Today. Tom’s granddaughter. Anne. She’s fifteen.’
‘That’s police business,’ I said.
‘No.’ Pat shook his head. ‘No.’
‘I can’t help you,’ I said. ‘These are life and death things.’
‘My daughter, Alice, was kidnapped in 1990,’ Barry said. He wasn’t looking at me, eyes on something behind his father. ‘She was eleven. Getting out of the car in the garage of our house in Power Avenue. Two men. They left a note saying no police or your daughter dies. Wait for ransom instructions. But we did call in the police. How can you not call the police? That’s how stupid we were. So we had all kinds of police arrive, state, federal, name it. They said they wouldn’t interfere with the handing over of the ransom, wouldn’t do anything until we had Alice back.’