‘Hello,’ she said, friendly, a country person. She hadn’t noticed her parents on the verandah, saw them out of the corner of her eye, looked up in alarm.
‘What’s wrong? Dad?’
‘Nothing, Mel,’ said Tom Carson. ‘Just surprised to see our guests. Frank Calder, Michael Orlovsky, this is my daughter Melissa.
Come up, gentlemen, come inside, time for a drink.’
For a moment, I didn’t move, stood there looking at Melissa’s mother, holding Cassie Guinane’s eyes, hearing Christine Carson’s voice:
Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?
Then I said, ‘Just a quick one, we’re just passing through, a plane to catch.’
46
Vella rubbed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his long nose.
‘You could’ve saved me a lot of pain,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of pain.’
‘I didn’t know anything. Just a collection of feelings, bad feelings. It’s easy to get bad feelings when you hang around the Carsons.’
‘Oh, you knew plenty,’ he said. ‘All you had to do was mention the fucking Guinanes, point to them, and we could’ve gone around there, just a social call, kicked the shit out of them.’
‘Is that how it’s done? On the basis of exactly nothing, get a warrant to go around and kick the shit out of people who might be totally innocent?’
‘All we needed was a warrant to look inside the computers. For a Carson abduction-murder, any fucking magistrate will give you a warrant to look inside a computer. Anybody’s computer. We’d have found the photographs.’
We were in a smart pub in South Yarra, looking out over the Botanical Gardens, watching rain falling on runners, drinking Heineken. Vella finished his, motioned for two more.
‘And that brings me to the point again,’ he said. ‘Why? Why did the mad fuckers do it?’
‘I don’t know. We didn’t get to them because of motive. We got to them because of their voice-changing machine.’
Lying, lying to a friend, a man who trusted me, put himself at risk for me.
The beers came. Vella waited, then he said, ‘These pricks in forensic are slow but they get there eventually.’
‘Get where?’
‘There’s skin under Keith Guinane’s nails, some other signs. He put up a bit of a fight till they had him in position.’
I thought about sitting in the comforting study with old Pat Carson, the drop of whisky glowing gold on his chin, the pleasure in his voice as he said:
Had a bad accident later, Mr Ashley Tolliver, Q fuckin C, two years later, a good time later. Just lost control of the car. Mercedes, mark you. Into the sea.Down there other side of Lorne, the cliff ’s steep, go off the edge…Never walked again, they say. No respect. He had no respect.
Who had organised that? Tom and Noyce?
It would be dark soon, the park was full of shadows, the day was sliding out of reach. I thought about the guttering flame on the table in the shrine to Cassie. It would be long dead now, in a silent house.
‘Without shedding of blood is no remission,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Just something my mother used to say.’