Black Tide

by Peter Temple

  ‘You wouldn’t have an address for Mr Jellicoe, would you?’

  Doubtful look. ‘Not supposed to give you that. Shouldn’t give out customers’ addresses.’

  ‘It’s just to ask about Gary,’ I said. ‘We’re very worried about him. His father would appreciate your help. No mention of how we got the address, of course. Absolutely confidential.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t mention us. He’s on the mailing list, gets the newsletter.’

  He went over to the computer, tapped a few keys, gave me an address in East St Kilda.

  Mr Jellicoe lived in a narrow single-storey house, fifties infill, behind a high pale-yellow wall. I pressed the buzzer. No answer.

  A newish Saab did a smart reverse park outside the house next door and a thin middle-aged woman in denim overalls got out, pulled a briefcase after her.

  I buzzed again, longer. Waited, tried the solid wooden gate. Locked. No luck here.

  ‘No-one living there,’ the Saab woman said sternly. She was standing at the next-door gate, key in hand.

  I smiled at her. No response. Inner-city suspicion.

  ‘I’m looking for a Mr Jellicoe,’ I said. ‘He lived here until recently.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Someone bashed and strangled him. Police say he must have surprised a burglar.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Dead for a VCR. When?’

  She softened a little, pulled a face. ‘Early April. Third or the fourth,’ she said. ‘We’ve been done over twice in a year. I came in and found the one. Pathetic creature, really. Hanging out for a hit. It’s totally out of hand.’

  ‘Makes you want to move to the country,’ I said. ‘Country of Lapland. I don’t even know what Mr Jellicoe did for a living.’

  ‘Something to do with travel,’ she said. ‘In the city.’

  I drove back to Fitzroy. All the way, at the lights, men in cars and utes and panel vans picked their noses, admired the findings. The greasy-grey day, in its terminal stage, had a ruddy tinge, whole western sky the colour of a feverish child’s cheek.

  Sitting in the clotted traffic provided lots of time to think about Gary. Gary and his sophisticated switched-off security system, Gary being followed by a man, Gary vanishing, the man Gary regularly met at his liquor store being murdered.

  Stuck at a light, I rang Wootton. ‘That earlier inquiry,’ I said, ‘I need more.’

  ‘On a fee-for-service basis, I presume.’

  ‘At the discount rate extended to people who have performed services far, far beyond the call of duty. Yes.’

  Wootton sniffed. ‘What exactly do you need?’

  ‘The party’s source of income.’

  Wootton laughed, a flat, false laugh. ‘That’s quite impossible, I’m afraid. Not a service on offer.’

  ‘Just a thought,’ I said. ‘Having a drink after?’

  ‘Very likely.’

  I parked at the stable and took a tram into the city, only half a dozen people on board. Going the other way, the trams were crammed with the tired and oppressed on their way home.

  I got off at the first stop in Collins Street and walked back up the slope to Spring Street. The street had its winter evening feel: light the colour of a ripe peach falling across the pavement from the windows of expensive shops, falling on hurrying people, people in dark clothes, overcoats, scarves, a dark red the colour of drying blood the colour for women’s lips this year, background noise of hooting, of clanking trams, and, in the air, the pungent, urgent smell of exhaust fumes. Near the corner, a tall woman, dark-haired, long and intelligent face, severe grey suit, bumped into me, just a touch, a meeting of bodies. But she was wearing Linda’s perfume. It overwhelmed me, caught in my nose, my throat, my heart.

  Around the corner, in Spring Street, people were disappearing from sight into the underground as if being sucked into quicksand. I looked across at the State Parliament. On the steps, a television crew with lights was filming a fair-haired woman interviewing a man in a dark suit.

  Wootton was on his window seat in the Windsor Hotel’s street bar, whisky glass on counter, newspaper in hand. At the long bar, the youngish, smartish patrons, not a pierced protuberance or a shaven head to be seen, were braying and whinnying at one another.

  I bought a beer and joined him. ‘Cheers,’ I said.

  Wootton looked up from the newspaper, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, folded them, put them behind the triangle of red handkerchief in the top pocket of his dark-grey pinstriped suit.

  ‘In the courts this afternoon,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry to hear that. Bail obviously wasn’t a problem.’

  He ignored my flippancy.

  ‘The Crown dropped all charges against Brendan. Free man. As we speak, a free man motoring to his place in the country near Maryborough. There is a just God.’

  ‘A just God,’ I said, ‘would ensure that as we speak Brendan O’Grady was being crushed by a fully loaded car transporter. As for his country place, it used to belong to a bloke called Cicchini. Bren had him knocked so that he could harvest about four tonnes of weed the guy had ready for market. Plus he wanted to comfort the wife. And the daughter. Possibly the dog.’

  I drank some beer.

  Wootton coughed. ‘Sends you his best regards,’ he said. ‘Moving on. You’re in luck. Tax Office audited that fellow of yours last year.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Travel claims, most likely. Probably just picked him up in a computer sweep. Big claims. World traveller.’

  ‘On business?’

  Wootton nodded. ‘Allowed them, too. Makes a fair living, I can tell you.’

  ‘Source?’

  ‘Variety of sources. Printout’s in the bag.’ He pointed down at his brown buckle-up suburban bank manager’s leather briefcase.

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘Security consultant. A line of work I often wish I’d pursued. Studying the security needs of large corporations, designing security strategies, advising on equipment…’

  ‘Selling information to the opposition, taking kickbacks. You’d be a natural.’

  Wootton sighed, drank. ‘Dear me, your discount on this information just shrank to nothing. And the surcharge for gratuitous offensiveness has just cut in. Are you buying the chips? Salt and vinegar, please.’

  I bought the chips, then transferred the printout in Wootton’s briefcase to a white plastic shopping bag supplied by his formidable woman friend behind the bar. We had another drink and parted. Wootton strolled off to his parking garage. I rattled home on a tram-me, a blind man with a guide dog, four tired-looking Vietnamese women travelling together, and a large, florid drunk who talked and sang to his reflection in the window.

  Plastic bag in hand, I hiked along the narrow streets to my stable.

  No Linda on the answering machine. Only Andrew Greer, Brendan O’Grady’s new lawyer. He didn’t identify himself:

  Nice little hand of statements there. Pair is good but threes? Other side folded, gave up the game. Bren wants to have your babies. I’m out getting drunk with whores tonight but give me a call tomorrow.

  I put on water to boil for pasta, stuck frozen sauce in the microwave to defrost, lit a fire on the ashes of at least ten old fires.

  The chairs in my parlour seem empty and bare.

  That was a compelling message to leave. Guaranteed to strike a chord in Linda. E. A. Presley’s silliest number. Never heard together.

  I ate my meal without relish and settled down with the history of duelling. In the course of learning about how painful the consequences of giving offence once could be, I fell asleep, missing the appearance of the thirty-something spunk and the man who kissed her ear. Waking to a dry mouth and audible eyeballs, I made tea and watched an ABC documentary on Ulster. There was clearly something rubefacient in the water or the air of Ireland. More evidence for this came in the person of the presenter of the current affairs program that followed, a man of Irish descent possessing a distinctly russet hue. I went outside to fe
tch another log and when I got back the host was jousting with a bald man displaying the sad and silken demeanour of an undertaker.

  I didn’t care about current affairs. I switched off. I wanted to ring Linda, hear her laugh, hear her suggest that loving me and missing me were not out of the question. I wanted to go to sleep in the sound knowledge that impressions to the contrary were paranoid. But the sensible part of my intellect, now only marginally more than vestigial, said No.

  I went to bed to confront The Mountain from Afar: Men and their fathers. Before I could approach the mountain, however, I had to make the bed, turn down, tuck and tauten the twisted sheets.

  It seemed so pointless.

  It was so pointless.

  11

  I was in Meaker’s eating a sandwich of grilled ham with lettuce, tomato and gherkins and reading the Sportsman when the floor moved and I lost a lot of my light.

  Kelvin McCoy, reformed smack freak, unreformed drunk, gifted poseur in the plastic arts, former client, lowered his bulk into the chair across the table. McCoy had taken over the lease on the sweatshop across the road from my office and was using it as a studio/residence. If people didn’t believe he had any talent as an artist, they generally kept it to themselves: McCoy was built like a street-cleaning machine. He had a shaven head, stoved-in nose, small eyes the colour of candlewax, and he kept himself formidably dirty. About fifteen huge canvases a year came out of his studio under such titles as Patriarchy’s Dialectic and Rituals of Hegemony. A man who taught something called cultural studies at Melbourne University provided the names. Inexplicably, rich people rushed to buy McCoy’s dark and sinister messes of paint and hair and toenail clippings and unidentifiable but worrying substances. His gallery shark allowed him a small portion of the proceeds, which he made speed to redistribute.

  ‘Good day,’ I said. ‘You’ll find something to read in the basket next to the door. In your case, look at.’

  ‘I see your customer’s here,’ McCoy said, putting a hand into his armpit to scratch. I’d as soon put my hand into a used-syringe bin.

  ‘What?’ I kept my eyes on the paper. You didn’t want to encourage McCoy at this time of day. At most times of the day.

  ‘Miss Clean Living over there.’ He flicked his eyes. ‘Looking for you. Knocking on your door. Invited her over to look at my work but she wasn’t keen.’

  ‘That’s showing aesthetic judgment,’ I said. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Jesus, Irish, take a guess.’

  I looked around. McCoy appeared to be suggesting that it would be unusual to call anyone in full bike leathers with three-tone hair and noserings Miss Clean Living. That left the woman in the left-hand corner reading the Age. She was in her thirties, dark hair pulled back to show her ears, lightly tanned, tweed sportscoat with a soft leather collar.

  ‘That is probably a serious person in need of the services of a professional,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t know much about that, McCoy.’

  McCoy smiled. It involved his lips moving sideways and three deep creases appearing in his cheek. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I remember being in need of the services of a professional. And all I got was the service.’

  I took a sip of my coffee. ‘That’s wounding, Kelvin. You do know that whenever two or three lawyers get together, they still talk about the defence I mounted for you.’

  ‘That so?’ he said. ‘When your old clients get together, in the exercise yard, they still talk about how they got mounted.’

  I looked at the huge charlatan with respect. Nicotine, dope, hash, barbiturates, speed, acid, smack, Colombian marching powder, ecstasy, alcohol in every form, all had entered the massive frame by some route and in quantities guaranteed to lay waste to the collected brains of three Melbourne universities or eight in Queensland. In theory, a scan of this man’s skull should reveal a place as grey and still as Kerguelen Island in winter. Yet from time to time there were clear signs of electrical activity.

  ‘Client loyalty,’ I said thoughtfully, studying a hand- written advertisement on the wall for a play called The Penis Knife. ‘What do you have to do to earn it? Offer to fellate magistrates?’

  ‘Fell eight, fell nine,’ McCoy said. ‘Whatever it bloody takes. Now here’s something more my speed.’

  He left me for the company of the large manager of the tapas bar up the street on her coffee break.

  The woman in the corner had to pass my table to get to the cash register. ‘Simone Bendsten?’ I said.

  She nodded, wary, bringing a square brown leather briefcase around to protect her pelvis.

  ‘I’m Jack Irish. I gather I missed you at the office. Didn’t realise you’d be this quick. I’ll be back there in five minutes.’

  I’d been in Meaker’s earlier, in the cold, dark early day, black rain bouncing off the tarmac outside, sitting in the window reading the Tax Office’s report on Gary Connors’ income. Stale cornflakes at home and black coffee in the cafe, the place empty except for two young men, not together, both badly on the nod, scratching and snuffling.

  In my office, I’d remembered the letter and business card, found them in the righthand drawer: Bendsten Research. At 8.30 a.m., I rang. A woman answered, a person with the calm and rested voice of someone who’d had extensive experience of good, demonless sleep. I told her what I wanted.

  ‘Public companies obviously aren’t a problem,’ she said. ‘Private ones can be difficult. How much detail do you want?’ She had a faint accent, hard to place.

  ‘What, where, owners if it’s private, that sort of thing.’

  ‘The report will be delivered,’ she had said in a formal way.

  We left Meaker’s together.

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ she said.

  I watched her go. She had long legs for someone so small.

  At the office, I’d just sat down when she knocked. There isn’t a receptionist, a reception area. You open the door, look left and there I am, behind the table on which the tailor who had worked here for fifty years sat crosslegged to sew his seams.

  She sat in the client’s chair, briefcase on her lap.

  ‘Any luck?’ I said.

  She shrugged, opened her briefcase, took out an A4 envelope and put it on the table. ‘With two exceptions, as far as I can tell, these are all shells. Three of them share the same address in the Caymans. Following them up gets you nowhere. They’re owned by companies who are owned by other companies, and so it goes on. Like Russian dolls, one fits inside the other.’

  ‘The exceptions?’

  ‘One’s called Klostermann Gardier. A private bank in Luxembourg. The other’s a company called Aviation SF registered in Dublin. I ran all the names through the local databases and only Aviation SF came up. Last year, an Australian company called Fincham Air won a coastal surveillance tender. It listed among its assets 80 per cent of Aviation SF. Fincham itself is partly owned by a company called CrossTrice Holdings. And one of CrossTrice’s directors is a man called Lionel Carson.’

  Reading my face, she paused. ‘Know the name?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Carson used to be a director of Consolidated Freight Holdings. TransQuik Australia is their biggest company. He’s not active in CFH anymore but CrossTrice owns about 25 per cent of it.’

  TransQuik. Gary Connors’ employer after his departure from the force. And, at a considerable remove, still one of his employers.

  Simone looked around the bare office. ‘That’s it. It’s all in the report. You could have done this yourself, you know. The information’s all available.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t. What do I owe you?’

  ‘The invoice is with the report. An hour’s work. Seventy dollars.’ Her eyes flicked around the place again. ‘Well, say fifty-five.’

  ‘Seventy’s fine. Been doing this long?’

  ‘Second month.’

  ‘How’s business?’

  She looked at the ceiling, at me, quirky smile, shrug of the thin shoulders. ‘They’re not de
livering the money in dump trucks.’

  ‘Yet. Word will spread. Your accent…’

  ‘We came out from Denmark when I was thirteen. Complicated by doing my postgraduate work in Boston.’

  ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘Thank you. Well, if you need anything else…’

  ‘I have no doubt that I will.’

  I saw her to the door and admired her all the way to the corner. Then I got out the telephone book and found TransQuik’s head office.

  12

  The pilot of the six-seater Cessna looked to be about sixteen. He was wearing lean purple dark glasses, a huge multicoloured jumper of the kind teenagers once used to lose within a week of receiving from their grandmothers, and a peaked cap with Crapdusters Australia on the front. Facing backwards. In themselves, these things would have occasioned no more than deep unease. What induced the panic was that, waiting for take-off clearance, he appeared to be singing along to rap music in his headphones.

  Harry was next to the pilot, looking at him with calm and scholarly interest. Cam and I were seated behind them. Behind us was a long-nosed, melancholy track rider from Caulfield called Mickey Moon. He’d been the leading apprentice in his last two years but he had fat genes.

  Cam had his laptop open, studying bar graphs of horses’ times. Today, for going to the country, he was dressed like a corporate lawyer: navy suit, white cotton shirt with spread collar, blue and white checkerboard silk tie. In the city, he seemed to favour tight washed-out moleskins, boots and fine-check shirts.

  ‘Cam, shouldn’t this, ah, pilot be listening to the control tower?’ I said.

  Cam looked at me, looked at the pilot’s back, went back to the screen. ‘Like jockeys,’ he said. ‘Out of the mountin yard, got your money on em, just pray they know what they’re doin.’

  Immensely reassured, I closed my eyes and fell to doing breathing exercises recommended to me by a priest I’d defended on pornography charges.