And I’d seen the man in the flesh. I’d met his eyes, looked up, across a long divide, seen a pink hole of hate open in his beard. The city was full of tall men with beards. I looked out of the window, looked across the street expecting to see one. And I did, froze. Then I recognised him, he was a journalist, a football writer, he found poetry and pathos and lessons for living and dying in young men chasing a ball. At the end of his right arm was a child, fighting like a fish, padded and capped and ecstatic at being with him in the street.
Where was he yesterday, in the afternoon? Parking a people-mover in a parking bay for the disabled near Museum Station?
I didn’t read the newspapers’ text. What could they tell me that I didn’t know or didn’t want to know? The last segment of toast and poached egg, I left it on the plate, ordered coffee, went outside and rang Detective Senior Sergeant Vella. He answered with a sound made in his throat, the sound an animal might make, rolling over in a narrow and dark cave heated by its own blood, a sleeping animal disturbed by something.
‘I didn’t think about Noyce’s mobile,’ I said. ‘Nor did anyone else. How’s that for being sharp?’
‘What?’
‘They rang last night, said, “Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.”’
A silence.
‘Say it again.’ The animal was fully awake.
I said it again.
‘Eye for an eye?’
‘Eye for an eye.’
Silence. ‘Means what? In your judgment?’
‘I presume that they blame the Carsons for a death. You’d want to be checking all deaths in the empire since at least 1990. Can’t be that many.’
He coughed. ‘Four at one go on the Coniston House site. Crane fell over. That’d be ’91, ’92, around then. Where are you?’
‘Borscht in Acland Street. Something else. There’s a woman, a nurse, Anthea Wyllie, disappeared in Altona in 1988. Last seen talking to Mark Carson. I’d look at the family, friends. Hard.’
‘Wyllie? Spell that.’
I did so.
‘Don’t go away. Someone will come for the mobile. The beard.
False, you reckon?’
‘The bathroom fittings bloke in Revesdale Road says the driver who pissed him off had a beard. The young offsider says the man next to the Tarago in the lane had a big moustache.’
‘Bloke who sold the Tarago says a beard. So it would have to be full beard, moustache only, back to full beard. If it’s the same bloke, that says you saw a false beard.’
‘It’s possible. Like some bad cop movie.’
‘My life’s a bad cop movie. Not improved by people like you.’
I went inside and drank lukewarm coffee and waited. Not long.
A green Falcon double-parked outside and the passenger came in, a woman in black who looked like a tired netball player. She walked straight to my table, knew me. I gave her Noyce’s vibrating phone.
‘It needs a charge,’ I said.
‘Don’t we all.’ She took it and left.
My phone rang. I went outside. Running my life from a place that served breakfast.
‘Frank?’
Corin.
How can you identify someone from one word they say?
Probably by intonation, a Tone and Break problem.
‘I’ve been meaning to ring,’ I said.
‘That wasn’t you on television last night, was it? At Museum Station?’
Her tone was tentative. She wanted me to say: No, that wasn’t me. Wasn’t it awful?
‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘That job’s over.’
As I said it, I thought, the matter-of-fact, just-another-day-atthe-office attitude, that’s a bad mistake.
She didn’t say anything. I could hear her breathing and I knew what she was thinking: How do I extricate myself from this? I don’t want to offend this person, he might…
‘I’m going to the country this afternoon,’ she said. ‘My brother’s got a few acres, he’s planted vines. Somehow, I’m in charge of them, I’m the de facto viticulturist, he’s too busy, too tired, too hungover.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That sounds nice. Enjoy yourself. I’ll give you a ring some time. Or you could give me a ring.’
‘Can you come?’
A man popping up like a cork, breaking the surface, tanks shrugged off, weightbelt jettisoned, taking air into empty lungs, ‘Today? Let me think, yes, I think I can fit that in.’
‘It’s staying over,’ she said. ‘Tonight. Pretty primitive.’
‘Primitive? No spa bath?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I don’t know. That sort of back-to-nature stuff has its appeal for me. What time? My vehicle or yours?’
‘Around four-thirty. It’s the bulk-manure mover, I’m afraid. I’ve got to take bags of things. What’s your address?’
For a second, the sky lightened, it seemed as if the sun was coming out. In the midst of death, we are in life. Not a sentiment my mother would have approved of.
37
The land was on a hillside, reached by a lane where half-a-dozen old elms had gone feral, produced hundreds of suckers that formed an undisciplined hedgerow.
I got out in the near-dark to open the gate, a vicious thing of twisted pipes and rusted wire that resented being unlatched and fought back as I dragged it through long grass.
Corin drove through and parked inside an open hayshed, a roof held up by massive eucalypt trunks. Beyond that was an old stone and brick barn, a long building with a loft door at one end. I closed the gate and walked down the track to join her, breathing out little ghosts of steam.
‘Welcome to Nightmarch Hill,’ said Corin, opening the vehicle’s back door. She was in her work clothes. ‘Named for Phar Lap’s brother.’
‘He’d be as well known as Elvis’s brother,’ I said.
‘Elvis had a brother?’
‘No.’
‘Well, Phar Lap did.’ She handed me a plastic crate of food. ‘Nightmarch. A man called Crossley bought the whole hill after he won twenty thousand pounds on him in the Epsom Handicap in 1929. It’s all broken up now but this bit kept the name. Don’t know why. The house is on the property next door. Dump the stuff at the door. I’ll get the generator going.’
She went around the side of the barn. I had everything at the side door of the barn when a diesel engine began to thump. Corin came back and opened the door, went in and switched on lights.
It was one large space with a brick-paved floor, a makeshift kitchen at one end, a collection of old chairs around a drum stove, a Ned Kelly, at the other, and a long table with benches on either side in the middle. Next to the table, a wide, sturdy ladder went up to a hole in the wooden ceiling. Three new French windows and a door had been knocked into the north wall.
‘The bathroom’s through the kitchen,’ said Corin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know there is one, complete with Scandinavian composting toilet.’
She’d been strained on the trip, arriving three-quarters of an hour late to pick me up, taking four long calls and making two in the ninety-minute drive. At one point, she said to a caller in a calm voice, ‘David, I understand your concerns but I assure you that I’ll meet the deadline.’ Pause. ‘Yes, the start has been slow.’ Pause. ‘No, I cannot bring them in over the weekend.’ Pause. ‘I’m sorry your client won’t be impressed.’ Pause. ‘No, I did not give any commitments on progress. My commitment is to a finishing date, that’s not going to be broken.’ Long pause. ‘David, for fuck’s sake, the job’ll be done on time if I have to build the fucking walls myself and lay the turf by fucking moonlight.’
‘Sorry about that,’ she’d said to me. ‘Losing control. Two big jobs and three smaller ones on the go. Been flat out for weeks, six days a week. I promised myself this afternoon off, got on the road at seven this morning to do it.’
Now she said, ‘The bedrooms are upstairs. Well, put it this way, upstairs is where you sleep.’