by Peter Temple
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Did Ronnie ever talk about what happened that night?’
Father Gorman put his cup down and inspected me. ‘I suppose we talked about it at the time. It would have been odd not to. Is there some reason why I should recall such a conversation?’
‘Not if you don’t. Did Ronnie mention when you saw him that the hit-and-run driver was out of jail and had been in touch with him?’
Father Gorman shot his left cuff to look at his watch. ‘Jack, my heavens,’ he said. ‘I’ve a speech to deliver. I’m going to have to be dreadfully rude and cut short our talk. No, I can’t say that he did mention anything like that. Would the man want to harm him?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he wanted something else.’
He frowned. ‘And what could that be?’
‘It’s not clear. Have you any idea who Ronnie might turn to if he wanted to hide, Father?’
Father Gorman was already on his feet. ‘Hide? That’s a strange thing to suggest, isn’t it? Why would he want to hide?’
I got up. ‘It seems Ronnie was worried about his safety before he disappeared.’
He furrowed his brow, a look of deep concern. ‘His safety? I thought you said the man posed no threat to him? My impression was that he was deeply troubled about his health, Jack. He certainly didn’t suggest that he wanted to hide. Are you sure about this?’
He was walking me along, holding my arm. I felt like a parishioner in need of comfort. ‘Let me see you out. Don’t hesitate to give me a call if there’s anything else I can do for you. I’m sorry our talk was so short. My work’s an endless round of functions and speeches. I try to find an individual message for each group, but it’s a battle. You’d know that. Lawyers understand. Every client’s a new client, isn’t that so? I toyed with the idea of the law, you know, but someone else had other ideas.’
At the front door, something made me ask a final question. ‘When did you last speak to Ronnie, Father? I mean, before he rang you about coming to see you?’
Father Gorman stroked his chin. It was shaven to perfection. ‘It would have been as much as seven or eight years ago, Jack. I got quite a surprise when I heard his voice, but I placed it straight away. I don’t forget voices for some reason. The Lord’s compensation for forgetting everything else, I suppose.’
He saw me to the lift. In the lobby downstairs, the ex-screw made a big show of logging me out.
16
‘Well, old sausage,’ said Wootton. ‘It’d be another matter if this was an inquiry you were pursuing on my behalf.’
I’d tracked Wootton to the street bar of the Windsor Hotel, a Victorian pile near Parliament, after ringing his office on the way back from Father Gorman’s. He stopped off there every day on his way home. It was Wootton’s sort of place: wood panelling, photographs of cricket teams.
We were sitting at a window looking out on Spring Street. It was just after 5.30 p.m. and the place was filling up with pudgy young men in expensive suits and club ties. Wootton was wearing a dark pinstripe suit with waistcoat, shirt with narrow stripes and a tie with little crests on it. His thinning hair was brushed back on his perfectly round skull and his moustache, dyed jet black, was bristly but trim. He looked like an old-style Collins Street banker and that was the way he wanted to look.
I’d known Wootton in Vietnam. He’d been a sergeant in stores, thankless work in the service of country. In lieu of thanks, he’d taken money from about twenty bars and brothels for supplying them with everything from Fosters beer to Vegemite. Wootton would have gone home very rich if two military policemen hadn’t seized his stash of US dollars two days before he was due to fly out. He never faced trial. The MPs thought the loss would be enough of a lesson to him. He never said another word about his money. And nor did they.
‘Cyril, I think I’ve got more than enough credit in my account to cover this little favour. But if it’s too much trouble—’
‘Steady on, Jack,’ said Wootton. ‘No need to get shirty.’ He took a sip of his whisky and water and rolled it around in his mouth, lips pursed. When he’d swallowed, he sighed and said, ‘I’ll have to go and do this from a bloody public phone, you know. Give me the number and the dates.’
I sipped my beer and read the Herald Sun Wootton had left behind while I waited. The lead story was another police shooting. A policewoman had shot dead a man who came at her with a knife when she attended a domestic dispute in Reservoir. The new Police Minister, Garth Bruce, was quoted as saying: ‘As a former policeman, I know the demands and dangers of the job. I am not, of course, passing any opinion on what took place in this incident. The coroner will decide that. But I’m determined that the police force will move away from the culture of the gun that’s become entrenched over the last ten years or so.’ There was a photograph of the Minister: a big serious man with short hair and rimless glasses.
Wootton was away about fifteen minutes. He came in brushing rain off his suit. ‘Can you believe it?’ he said. ‘Supposed to be a bloody five-star hotel. Had to go outside in the rain to find a phone that worked.’
A black Mercedes pulled up outside and two Japanese men in soaked golf outfits got out of the back. They stood close together in the drizzle, cap peaks almost touching, watching the driver unload two massive golf bags and wheelchair-size chrome golf buggies from the boot.
‘Sons of Nippon,’ said Wootton, flicking moisture off his moustache. ‘Don’t know if I’d go swanning around Tokyo if I’d worked thousands of Japs to death in World War II.’
‘Those two look a bit young to have worked anyone to death in World War II,’ I said.
‘Don’t be facetious. I need something to eat.’ He went over to the counter. A barmaid served him immediately. They knew the man here. He came back opening a bag of salt and vinegar chips. ‘Want some?’
I shook my head. He crammed a handful in under the moustache. Pieces stuck to it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’ll take about ten minutes for the reverse directory.’
Until Wootton went back to his phone, we continued our argument about how much I’d added to my fee for getting a gun pointed at me by Eddie Dollery.
When he came back, Wootton took an old envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it over. On the back were about a dozen telephone numbers, all the calls to different numbers made on Mrs Bishop’s telephone in the three days Ronnie was there. Against each one, in Wootton’s neat hand, was a name and address.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope I’ve contributed to you finding your catamite.’
‘Sodomite,’ I said. ‘He presumably had catamites. I only asked you to do it for me because I’m sworn to uphold the law.’
Wootton stuffed some more chips in his mouth. Through them, he said, ‘Hah bloody hah. Joined the Boy Scouts, have we? Dib, Dib, Dib. Dob, Dob, Dob.’
‘That’s the Cubs, Cyril,’ I said. ‘But how would you know?’
I went home and tried Linda Hillier at Pacific Rim News. She was in Sydney, a man said. Back tomorrow. I poured a glass of white wine from an opened bottle in the fridge and studied the phone calls from Mrs Bishop’s number. The calls to Danny McKillop and Father Gorman jumped out at me. That left nine calls. I rang Mrs Bishop. We went through the other calls from the beginning of the list. She had made all the calls except the last one. It was to a P. Gilbert, Long Gully Road, Daylesford. Made at 4.07 p.m. on the day Ronnie vanished.
‘That must be Paul Gilbert,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t thought of him in years. Dr Paul Gilbert, he was. He went to school with Ronnie. Lovely boy, very clever. He had a surgery in St Georges Road.’
‘The address is in Daylesford,’ I said.
‘Well, he’s not a doctor anymore,’ Mrs Bishop said. ‘There was some trouble over drugs. It was in the papers. He started uni at the same time as Ronnie. I used to see Paul’s mum sometimes. She was so proud of her boy before it happened.’
I rang the number twice before I went to bed. No answer. I fel
l asleep thinking about Linda Hillier. She probably had a good laugh at being come on to by the likes of me. Why had Gavin Legge called her a starfucker and a groupie? What star? What group? I hoped she wasn’t avoiding me.
17
The bare limbs of Wombat Hill’s English trees still smoked mist as I drove into Daylesford just after 9 a.m. The commuters were all gone and the small town’s locals were easing themselves into the day. I parked in the main street and asked at the butcher’s for directions to Long Gully Road. Butchers are the most friendly shopkeepers. It must have something to do with working with dead animals.
‘Jeez,’ said the butcher, ‘Long Gully Road. Be out there in the forest, I reckon.’ He shouted, ‘Les! Where’s Long Gully Road?’
A tall youth with red hair came in wiping his hands on butcher’s paper. ‘G’day,’ he said. ‘Where’s a pen? Have to draw youse a map. It’s out to buggery in the badlands.’
I’d tried P. Gilbert’s number twice more that morning. No answer. I was eating my microwaved porridge when I decided to take a drive out to Daylesford. I didn’t give much thought then to the pointlessness of driving for an hour to a house where no-one was answering the telephone. On the way I did, and almost turned back.
Twenty minutes after leaving the butcher’s I was lost. The bush around Daylesford was veined with twisting, rutted roads going nowhere. Les’s map wasn’t much use after the first wrong turn. I was about to do a U-turn and try to retrace my route when I saw a man in overalls putting in a fence strainer post. Back in the trees a timber shack leant against a woodpile. He must have heard my approach but he didn’t look up until I was out of the Celica.
‘G’day,’ I said. ‘Looking for Long Gully Road.’
He looked at me for a while, big beard, eyes slit, jaws chewing cud. ‘Back to the T-junction. Left. Third road on the left.’
I found the turnoff. The sign said NO THROUGH ROAD. Just off the ground, a square wooden board with an arrow had Koolanja Healing Centre, Spa, Massage in peeling white paint on a green background. There were old bullet holes in it. I drove about a kilometre through the scrubby regrowth forest before a duplicate of the first sign pointed down a narrow track.
The buildings were behind a fence in a big clearing at the end of the road: a long, low weatherboard with a verandah along the front, a square cinderblock building with narrow windows and, behind them and to the left, a steel-frame shed without walls. The gate was closed and on it a sign saying CLOSED hung at an angle.
A car was parked in front of the cinderblock building: a BMW, not new. I suddenly realised that I’d never asked what sort of car Ronnie was driving. In the shed, I could see two other vehicles, a four-wheel-drive and an old Holden.
I parked outside the gate and let myself in. No dogs. Dogs appear quickly or not at all. Ahead of me a driveway ran for about thirty metres, ending in a gravelled area in front of the buildings. On either side of the drive, a formal garden had been attempted and long ago given up on. Only the winter rain was keeping the surviving plants going.
I walked down the drive. It had been planted with poplars but they’d never got beyond infancy. Near the house, I could hear the sound of piano music, something classical. The front door was open. The music was coming from inside. I knocked loudly and said, ‘Anybody home?’ Nothing happened. I tried again. Only the music. Then it stopped and a voice said, ‘One of Chopin’s loveliest. And now for a complete contrast in composing style…’
The front door led into a long sitting room, furnished with stripped pine country-look pieces. The room was cold and unkempt, as if people had been dossing in it. In a stone fireplace, ashes were a foot deep. There were newspapers everywhere and all the surfaces held empty beer and soft drink cans and dirty plates.
I said my ‘Anybody home?’ again and went through into a big kitchen. The radio was on a shelf above the workbench, which was covered with the remains of meals long past.
I didn’t look at the rest of the house. I went out the way I had come and walked over to the cinderblock building. Nothing happened when I knocked and called out.
I opened the door. A wave of warmth hit me. The air was moist and smelled of chlorine. Chlorine and something else. It was dark inside, the venetian blinds at the slit windows closed. I found a light switch. Two fluorescent tubes flickered, then lit up a sort of reception area, with canvas director’s chairs and a glass coffee table holding stacked magazines.
I called out again. Nothing. I crossed the room to a half-open door. Beyond was darkness. I groped around and found another light switch just inside the door. I was looking down a corridor with two doors on either side and one at the end, all closed. The smell was stronger here. The air was also steamier.
My shoes made no sound on the grey felt-like carpet as I walked down the passage. I opened the first door on my left.
It was empty except for a pine upright chair and a large, deep coffin-like object against the end wall. There were pegs on the wall to hold clothes. The smell in here was salty. I guessed the giant coffin was a flotation tank, a bath filled with salt water for experiencing weightlessness.
The hatch on top was closed. Without thinking, I walked across and slid it back. It was empty. I felt foolish.
The room on the right held another tank. I didn’t look inside. The next door down on the right opened to reveal a room set up for massage: table, shelves with small bottles. There were posters of Nordic scenes on the walls. Pine forests, snow, frozen lakes.
I didn’t enter the room. As I turned to the door across the way, my eye caught a ghost of steam coming out from under the door at the end of the passage.
I went down the passage and put my hand on the door handle. Then something made me knock. No reply. I waited, knocked again.
Then I turned the handle and pushed the door open.
The smell came out on a great cloud of steam, the smell of stock made with chlorinated water, a pungent, medicinal smell that filled my sinuses and made my eyes water.
I retreated down the passage to the entrance and watched the steam billow out of the room. Just turn around and go home, my inner voice said. Just walk out of this building, down the drive and find your way back to the man putting in the pole. Stop and tell him thanks for giving you shitty directions, you couldn’t find Long Gully Road, so bugger it you were giving up. Go back to Daylesford and buy some bullboar sausages from the butcher. Tell Les you couldn’t follow his map and it wasn’t important. Drive home and have a shower. Forget about Danny and Ronnie and anybody else whose name ended in a diminutive.
But I didn’t listen to my inner voice. When the steam thinned, I went back down the corridor.
I’d left the door only half-open.
I pushed it fully open.
The room was still dense with steam but I could see that it was like a large bathroom, tiled floor to ceiling. In the corner to my right, I could dimly make out a large spa bath, above the ground.
I took a step inside the room.
A man was in a sitting position on the floor in the corner to my right. He was wearing a loose pink garment. His left arm was at his side. His right was on his lap with a revolver in his hand. Something long-barrelled.
At first I thought he was wearing something on his head, a kind of big mask. Then I realised his head was twice its normal size, a bloated, suppurating mess.
I felt vomit rise in my throat, but I took another step into the room.
There was something in the spa bath. I couldn’t see what. Steam was rising from the surface. The water was much hotter than any bath should be.
I wiped my eyes. Something insubstantial was bobbing gently on the hot bubbles. It was clothing, I thought.
I took another step. And as I did, trapped bubbles turned the clothing around and I saw the skull of a body cooked down to its bones.
The whole spa bath was stock made from a human being. I was going to be sick. I held off until I got outside and then the cold air took the smell out of my nostrils and
the urge went away. I stood out in the weak sunlight for a while, thinking. Finally, I took a deep breath and went looking for something to wipe off fingerprints.
You should report crimes to the police. I didn’t want to be the one to report this crime. Instead, I drove back to the man putting in the pole. He was tamping with a big metal post. This time I didn’t get out of the car. I wound down the window. He looked up.
‘You said turn right at the T-junction, didn’t you?’
He looked at me with contempt. ‘Left,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Well, fuck that for a joke, I’ve wasted enough time on this bloody call. I’ve got better things to do than fuck around in this wilderness.’
I took off with the wheels spinning. About two kilometres down the road, I found a signpost to Daylesford. This time Les was in the front of the butcher’s shop. Going into a place filled with meat now was an act of sheer will.
‘Thanks for the map,’ I said, ‘but I got lost and I had a flat.’
Les looked mortified. ‘Map was okay,’ he said.
‘Not your fault. I reckon I missed the second turning and took the third.’
Les thought about this, eyes roofward. Then he nodded. ‘That’d be right. Then you’d turn into Kittelty’s Lane and then you’d be stuffed.’
‘Stuffed,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I want to sell a copier to anyone lives out there. I’d rather do service calls to King Island.’
I bought some bullboar sausages and set off for the city. In Bacchus Marsh, I went to the post office and found the number for the Daylesford RSPCA. A woman came on. There were some animals in shocking condition at the health place in Long Gully Road, I told her. ‘You’d better send someone today or they’ll be dead.’
‘Long Gully Road,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the health place?’
‘You’ll see the sign,’ I said. ‘Look in the cinderblock building.’
I was reasonably sure they didn’t record calls to the RSPCA. Almost everywhere else seemed to.
