Bad Debts ji-1

by Peter Temple

  I went with him to the front door. He was outside when he said, ‘That little case of mine, that’s in the kitchen now. Under the sink. I wouldn’t open this door to anyone if I were you.’

  I detoured to the bathroom on my way back, looking for aspirin. Pumping adrenalin leaves you feeling dull and headachey. I was studying the contents of the medicine cabinet when it came to me out of nowhere.

  I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.

  Anne Jeppeson’s mother. That was what she had said.

  30

  The Law Department at Melbourne University looks the way universities should. It has courtyards and cloisters and ivy.

  I loitered downstairs, near where a girl had set fire to herself during the Vietnam War. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole campus was full of people in ex-army overcoats wearing beanies. I was just older than most of them. By about thirty years.

  My man came out ahead of his students, striding briskly, looking the way lecturers usually look after a lecture: happy and smug. His name was Barry Chilvers and he taught constitutional law. He was also a civil liberties activist and knew more about the Special Branch than most people.

  ‘Barry,’ I said when he was level with me.

  He jerked his head up at me, eyes startled behind the big glasses.

  I took the beanie off.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jack,’ he said, exasperated, ‘where’d you get that coat? And the beanie, for Christ sakes. It’s a Collingwood beanie. How can you wear a Collingwood beanie?’

  ‘Ensures that I’m not recognised,’ I said. ‘Got a moment?’

  We went upstairs to his office. It was the same mess I remembered: books, papers, journals, student essays, styrofoam cups, newspapers, bits of clothing everywhere. Two computers had been added to the chaos.

  I cleared away a briefcase and a pile of files from a chair and sat down. ‘You were looking very pleased with yourself,’ I said.

  He scratched his woolly grey head. ‘One of the better days at the pearl–swine interface,’ he said. ‘Some days I come back and headbutt the door. To what do I owe this visit?’

  ‘Do you remember Anne Jeppeson?’

  ‘Sure. Got run down. She was a spunk. Politically loony but a spunk.’

  ‘Would the Special Branch have watched her?’

  He put a thumb behind his top teeth, took it out. ‘It’s hard to say. Who says so?’

  ‘She said something to her mother.’

  ‘There was a lot of paranoia about the Branch. If you believed all the people who said the Branch was watching them, it wouldn’t have been a branch, it would have been the whole bloody tree.’

  ‘But it’s possible?’

  He shrugged. ‘More than most, I suppose. She was into a whole lot of stuff the Branch would have had an interest in—Roxby Downs, Aboriginal rights in Tasmania, East Timor. You name it.’

  ‘East Timor? The Special Branch? I thought it was only interested in local stuff?’

  Barry shrugged again. ‘The Branch, ASIO, ASIS, you can’t separate them. They scratched each other’s backs. So it’s possible, yes.’

  I told him what else I needed to know.

  He groaned. ‘Where some Branch goon was at a certain time in 1984? Jesus H. Christ, Jack, you don’t have modest requests, do you? When in ’84?’

  I told him.

  ‘Not long before Harker got the boot and the new government closed the Branch down.’

  ‘That’s right. There’d be records somewhere, wouldn’t there?’

  Barry shook his head. ‘Shredded. On orders from the highest authority. All records to be destroyed.’

  ‘So there’s no record of what they were up to?’

  He clapped his hands. ‘Shredded,’ he said. ‘But not before being copied.’

  ‘Shredded? And copied?’

  ‘What do you expect?’ said Barry. ‘I think it was something the cops and the new Opposition found themselves in agreement on. Think about it. The files represent about five billion hours of coppers standing around in the rain dying to have a piss. You shred them and a couple of years later another government gets elected and wants you to start all over again, spying on the same bunch of harmless sods. They say they went through three copiers. Twenty-four hours a day for days.’

  ‘Who’s got the copy?’

  ‘What copy? No-one’s ever admitted the files were copied.’

  I said, ‘Barry, I’m talking life and death.’

  He did another big head scratch, rolled his chair back till it hit a pile of books. The pile toppled, slithered to become a ziggurat.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise you anything, though. I’ll ask a man who might be able to ask another man, who might know someone.’

  I stood up. ‘I need to know today. It’s that bad.’

  Barry stood up. His eyes were level with my middle greatcoat button. He looked up at me. ‘You serious?’

  I nodded.

  He nodded back, sadly. ‘I’ll go after my tutorial. You can’t phone him, this bloke. Paranoid. Give me the date and the name, anything that’ll help.’

  ‘God loves you, Barry,’ I said.

  ‘There is no God and you know it. Ring me at home after five. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t know if they copied this kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘I’m only doing this because of your old man’s record for Fitzroy, you know. I wouldn’t do it for you.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’

  31

  I found Linda at a laptop computer in a long, narrow room off the kitchen. A bench down one wall held three computers, one with a huge monitor, and two printers. The other wall was covered in corkboard, with dozens of computer-generated colour images stuck up. They seemed to be tryouts of the landscape paintings.

  ‘Cam’s woman’s a computer freak,’ Linda said. She was scrolling text on her screen. ‘She’s got enough power here to run the tax system.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Tell you when I’ve done it.’ She was tapping keys.

  I went into the vast sitting room. It was 4.30 p.m. Both the fire in the fireplace and the day outside were dying. I brought in a log from the woodpile in the entrance hall, put it on the steel dogs and scraped all the embers together under it. Then I did an inspection of the premises. Apart from the sitting room, computer room and kitchen, there were two huge bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a studio the size of a pool hall. Next to the steel front door, another steel door opened on to the building’s internal staircase.

  When I’d done the tour, I sat down in front of the fire, put my hands in my pockets, stared into the flames and tried to work out how we could come out of hiding safely. All I could think of was to have Drew negotiate with the police. Negotiate over what, was the question. The bombing of my flat was certainly proof that I needed protection. Or was it? People had been known to boobytrap their own houses. After all, it wasn’t me who was blown up. Maybe I’d set a trap for someone else.

  What about the men with the sub-machine gun on the motorcycle? We hadn’t reported it. We’d had the car spirited away. By now, the body was probably crushed to the size of a tea chest. Cam’s friend who took it away wasn’t going to jump up and testify for me.

  As for Linda, what exactly was she in hiding from, they would ask? No-one had tried to kill her. She’d been burgled, that’s all. Everyday occurrence.

  And the Minister? The Minister wouldn’t recognise my name.

  It was 5.30 p.m. before Linda emerged, carrying a printout.

  ‘Hey, let’s get some light here,’ she said. ‘It’s like a set for Macbeth.’

  I realised with a start that the room was in deep gloom, the firelight playing on the unfinished landscapes around the walls.

  Linda found a panel of switches next to the kitchen doorway. ‘Fuck. Like a Boeing.’ She hit several switches. Concealed lighting came on all over the room.r />
  ‘That’s more like it,’ she said. ‘Save the firelight for later. I’ve got something. Remember all the companies in the Yarrabank buy-up turned out to be owned by other off-shore companies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been searching all the finance databases for anything on the offshore companies and one database turned up three of the companies at once. The Jersey companies. They were suspected in 1982 by the Securities Commission in Britain of warehousing shares for an Irish company that was trying to take over a British construction group.’

  ‘I’m lost already,’ I said.

  ‘Wait. It becomes clearer. The three companies were all run from Jersey by an accountant. The securities people forced him to disclose where the money had come from to buy the shares in the construction group. It didn’t come from the Irish company. It came from the company that owned the Jersey companies. This one was registered in the Cayman Islands. It’s called Pericoe Holdings. That’s where the story stops. The Securities Commission lost interest in the inquiry.’

  She paused.

  ‘But you didn’t?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I was searching a new South Pacific database at the university in Suva. Just to see what it held. And I turned up a little item from 1981 in a defunct publication called Pacific Focus. Just been scanned into the system. They reported that a Cayman-registered company had a shareholding in a company that wanted to set up a bank in the New Groningen Islands. And what was the Cayman company’s name?’

  ‘This is a test, isn’t it? My answer is: I don’t know.’

  ‘Pericoe Holdings.’

  ‘This is it?’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘Pericoe was obliged under local law to disclose its shareholders.’ She read from the printout. ‘“Shareholders: J. Massey of Carnegie Road, Toorak, Melbourne, Australia; M. Jillings of Miller Street, Kew, Melbourne, Australia; and H. McGinty of Carnham Close, Brighton, Melbourne, Australia.”’

  ‘Do we know these people?’

  Linda came over and stood in front of me. ‘J. Massey is Jocelyn Massey, ex-wife of Dix Massey, Charis Corp’s fixer-in-chief. M. Jillings is Maxine Jillings, wife of Keith Jillings, a major shareholder in Charis Corp. H. McGinty is Hayden McGinty, who sucks to get on the social pages and is the wife of Martin McGinty, chief executive of Marbild, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Charis Corporation.’

  She flicked the printout in the direction of the coffee table and put her hands on her hips. ‘This is the jackpot,’ she said. ‘This is it. This is the connection between Charis and the buying up of Yarrabank. It’s going to take an awful lot of explaining away. And it sure as fuck ain’t gonna work to say these Charis Corp girls put their spare housekeeping money into real estate.’

  ‘You’re pretty smart for a good-looking person,’ I said. ‘Do people tell you that?’

  ‘Only when they want to fuck me. What about the Special Branch man?’

  ‘I’ve got to phone Barry Chilvers.’

  A child answered at Barry’s number. A girl. Barry had obviously started on a second round of procreation, probably with a graduate student. That was the price of academic life. Inexplicably, first wives stopped being turned on by your mind.

  When he came on, he said, ‘Chilvers.’

  I said, ‘It’s the man in the Collingwood beanie.’

  ‘That’s got to be cryptic enough. Hello, phone-tappers. Mate, your conjecture turns out to be correct. The female person was an object of attention.’

  ‘And the male person?’

  ‘Not attending on her, I’m afraid. He was keeping an eye on an East Timor activist in town for a rally. Does that make life easier?’

  ‘Barry,’ I said, ‘it may make it possible. What does his log record?’

  ‘Nothing. Uneventful. He said the man spent the evening with known friends in Scott Street, Fitzroy, then went back to his hotel. That’s it.’

  ‘The man in the Collingwood beanie thanks you very much.’

  Barry said, ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’

  I went back into the sitting room. Linda was at the bank of windows. She turned.

  I said, ‘I want you to think very carefully. On the night Anne was killed, P. K. Vane of the Special Branch was keeping track of an East Timor activist visiting Melbourne.’

  Linda nodded. ‘That’d be Manuel Carvalho,’ she said. ‘He was here often. I remember now, there was talk of Anne having an affair with him at some stage.’

  ‘Can you remember where Anne was earlier that evening?’ I asked.

  ‘With friends. In Fitzroy.’

  ‘Sure it was Fitzroy?’

  ‘Absolutely. Scott Street. I knew the people vaguely.’ She lifted her head. I saw the shine in her eyes. ‘Wait. You’re going to tell me Carvalho was in Scott Street that night, aren’t you?’

  I gave her a double thumbs-up. I felt like someone who’d tipped a 500-1 shot for the Melbourne Cup. ‘That’s exactly what I’m going to tell you. I’m betting that Manuel Carvalho went back to Richmond with Anne. And that P. K. Vane, doing his duty, followed them there. And then P. K. saw something. And for some reason he kept quiet about it. He’s our man. He’s the one. His wife rang Danny. He’s the one with the evidence.’

  Linda put her head back, closed her eyes, smiled and ran her fingers through her hair.

  I slumped on to the sofa, legs outstretched, flooded with elation and relief. There was hope.

  Linda walked across the room. When she was standing between my legs, she reached down with both hands and began to pull up her tight black skirt, working it up slowly over her thighs. When her stocking tops and suspenders came into sight, I said, trying to speak normally, ‘Since when do you wear a suspender belt?’

  She wriggled her skirt up higher. She wasn’t wearing panties. My eyes were level with her dense pubic bush. She put her hands on her hips and pushed her pelvis at me

  ‘I always wear a suspender belt,’ she said, ‘when I want someone to fuck me senseless on the floor in front of a fire.’

  She started unbuttoning her blouse. I reached out and put my hands around her waist. She stopped unbuttoning and pulled her skirt up over her hips.

  ‘Now you’ve seen mine, Irish,’ she said. ‘Take off your pants and show me yours.’

  32

  How can you make love when people are trying to kill you? You can. Does perfect love drive out fear? For a while. I reflected on these matters afterwards as I lay naked, sweat beginning to chill, in front of the fire.

  Linda came in wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt. ‘This girl’s got everything,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should start painting.’

  I got up. I have always felt silly naked the minute the other person puts something on. I kissed her and went off to shower.

  I was under the spray in the room-sized shower when Linda said from the door, ‘Get a move on. I’ve found the champagne.’

  The ex-lover’s clothes did fit me. I borrowed a corduroy shirt. I was passing through the kitchen when Linda said from the computer room, ‘Your glass’s on the fireplace. I’m just trying the name P. K. Vane on the Age news database.’

  It was Krug, vintage, utterly delicious, the tiniest prickles on the tongue. I felt my whole body relax.

  We were going to get out of this. For the first time, I felt that.

  Linda came out of the kitchen.

  ‘There is a God,’ I said. ‘Where’s your glass?’

  She said, ‘Paul Karl Vane didn’t die of natural causes. He was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Beaumaris. Shot six times, four shots from close range, three of them in the head.’

  Linda went to bed at 10 p.m., subdued. Finding out about Paul Vane had taken the gloss off linking Charis Corp to the Yarrabank buy-up. I sat in front of the fire, drinking a small amount of malt whisky. My bombing was the second item on the 10.30 Channel 9 news. The helicopter looked right down into my sitting room through the hole in the roof. I looked away.

  The newsreader, a woman with the tee
th of a much larger person, said, ‘Police are tonight looking for the owner of the flat, Jack Irish, a Fitzroy lawyer. He is described as in his forties, tall, heavily built, with dark hair. He may be with another man, Cameron Delray, of no fixed address. Delray is in his thirties, tall, slim, dark hair and sallow skin. The men may be accompanied by a dark-haired woman, also tall, wearing a dark outfit. Police say the men were involved in a shooting incident earlier today and are believed to be armed. They should not be approached. Please ring the number that follows if you think you have seen these people.’

  Jesus.

  I felt the panic rising again. I got up and added some whisky to my glass. Now I had to get hold of Drew or we were going to meet the fate of Danny McKillop in the Trafalgar carpark.

  First, my sister. She picked it up instantly. ‘My God, Jack,’ she said, ‘what on—’

  I spoke quickly. ‘Rosa, listen. I’m okay. I want you to ring Claire and tell her I spoke to you and I’m fine. It’s all a misunderstanding. Don’t worry about the television. I’ve got to keep down for a bit but it’s going to he okay. I’ll ring you.’

  ‘Does that mean our lunch is off?’

  ‘Not necessarily. I’ll be in touch. Love.’

  I put the phone down. Lunch. I shook my head in wonder. Drew. I was putting out my hand to dial when the phone rang.

  I picked it up. ‘Yes,’ I said, tentatively.

  ‘Jack.’ It was Cam. ‘Listen, mate,’ he said conversationally, ‘time to go. There’s blokes coming up for you. With guns. Go into the studio. There’s a ladder in there, extension ladder, against the left-hand wall. You’ll see a square hole in the roof in the left-hand corner, like an inspection hatch. You with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. The phone was trembling in my hand.

  ‘Get up there. You can slide the cover open, get on the roof. Pull the ladder up. First thing, go round that lift housing building up there and bolt the steel door to the stairs. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘There’s no other way up there. It’ll give you a bit of time. Get moving now. They’re on their way up.’

  The line went dead.

  ‘What is it?’ Linda was in the doorway, pillow marks on one side of her face. She’d fallen asleep fully dressed.