by Peter Temple
‘That was a matter of someone else getting hurt. A fellow officer.’
‘You were blamed?’
‘Not unreasonably. I was trying to strangle him.’
We sat in silence for a while. I knew I should not have said that.
She had turned away from me slightly; she would have formed the view that I was a psycho.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you showed a certain indifference to his personal safety?’
‘Total indifference. And no, I’m not a psycho. Do it again tomorrow, though.’
Corin shook her head. ‘The accused shows no remorse,’ she said.
‘Well, you know enough about me now to stop taking my calls,’ I said. ‘How’d you get into landscape design?’
She turned her upper body towards me. She wasn’t rejecting me.
‘Total indifference to personal solvency,’ she said. ‘I was an architect and all I did was work on tower blocks and shopping malls and ablution blocks. No one ever asked me to join their smart little practices, do restaurants and things. So I said, I don’t think I have what it takes to be an architect, to hell with this, and I went back to uni and starved while I did landscape design.’
‘And became an ornament to the profession,’ I said. ‘To the landscape, for that matter.’
Our eyes met. Grey with light flecks, hers. I looked away first, swallowed, balled up my bagel wrapping. ‘Trying to flirt with the teacher,’ I said. ‘That’s probably not done.’
‘It’s flirting with students that’s frowned on,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to be careful. While we’re asking questions, what’s a person of your, um, varied background doing at horticultural college?’
‘I like gardens,’ I said. ‘I had a garden when I was a kid, a vegie and flower garden. The lady next door marked off this plot for me in her back yard, gave me the seeds, showed me how to plant them.
I used to go there every day with my little watering can, water the ground. Sit there and watch. I didn’t want to miss the moment…’ I tailed off. It wasn’t a story I wanted to tell. I’d already said things I didn’t want to out of some need to explain myself to this woman, have her like me.
‘When they came up.’ She finished the sentence for me. ‘I know. You only have to look away and up the bastards come.’
We were smiling at each other when one of my phones, Noyce’s vibrating phone, fluttered against my ribs.
‘Phone,’ I said, taking it out. ‘I’ll just get out. Coffee’s getting cold.’
I got out, closed the door, stood in the cold wind, felt it on my scalp, felt the fear in me, and pressed the button.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Who’s that?’
The voice.
‘Frank Calder. I work for the Carson family. Who’s that?’
Silence.
‘Put Tom Carson on.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘from now on you talk to me. And don’t start shouting, I don’t give a shit about shouting, I don’t give a shit about the Carson family either, I’m just someone paid to do this and shouting is a waste of time. You talk to me or you don’t talk.’
Silence.
The voice.
‘Okay, listen, this is what you do…’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t do anything until we know the girl is alive. Don’t like that, fuck off.’
Silence. I waited, then I said, ‘Send us a photograph, Express Post, same as your last letter. A Polaroid, any picture. We want to see the girl, see her properly. She’s got to be holding today’s newspaper, any paper, the front page. Today’s paper. Close up. And we want to see her pinkie, the little finger, see that it’s properly bandaged. You with me?’
Silence.
‘Then you ring at 11.30 a.m. tomorrow. We’re convinced she’s okay, you can tell me what to do and we’ll do it. No argument. To the letter. Failing that, fuck you and we’ll find you if it takes fifty years.’
Silence.
A click.
Dear God, what had I done? Condemned the girl to death?
Not if she was already dead.
Corin was looking at me from inside the vehicle, styrofoam cup under her lips, a faintly quizzical look. She had nice eyebrows, I registered for the first time.
I opened the door and got back in, felt the body warmth.
‘A client,’ I said. ‘How’s the coffee?’
I took the cap off mine, had a sip, a thrumming in my body, in my chest. A new feeling. A sign of weakness, thrumming.
‘Good coffee. You’ve got the kind of client I’d like.’
She’d watched me speaking.
‘What kind of client is that?’
‘Someone you can give orders to. Instead of the reverse.’
‘You lipread?’
‘I wish. You were doing all the talking.’
I drank more coffee, half the lukewarm cup. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, hesitated. ‘I’m hopeless at this kind of thing. Can I see you again? Is that possible?’
Corin had some coffee, touched her short hair.
‘That’s possible,’ she said. ‘That should be probable. From my point of view.’
‘I’ll call you tonight,’ I said. ‘Is calling you always okay?’
She gave me her slow smile, put a hand out and touched my sleeve, plucked something off it. ‘A leaf. You won’t get anyone else, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ I said.
‘What about you? Are you safe to call?’
I got out a card with the mobile number. ‘I don’t know whether it’s safe to call me,’ I said. ‘But I’m on my own, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ she said.
29
I rang Graham Noyce and told him about the call.
‘What if they don’t come through?’ he said.
‘Call the cops. It’s over then.’
‘I’ll tell the Carsons.’
Aware of the pointlessness of what I was doing, I drove to Altona, over the Westgate Bridge and along the freeway to Millers Road, down towards the bay past the carbon black factory and the refinery with its chimneys that flamed day and night.
The Altona Community Legal Centre didn’t spend any money on front. It was housed in an ugly yellow-brick building that still carried faint fancy signwriting saying it had once been the premises of the Modern Bakery.
A young woman with two children was sitting in the reception room, the children fighting for her attention like small but vicious animals attacking a much larger and wounded creature. Behind a counter bearing neat stacks of pamphlets on subjects such as rape counselling, domestic violence and the legal rights of teenagers, a woman in middle age, good-humoured face, was on the phone. She eyed me warily, ended her conversation.
‘Yes?’ she said.
I introduced myself, said I’d spoken to Sue Torvalds, the solicitor, earlier in the day about someone who had been a volunteer solicitor in the late 1980s.
She smiled. ‘Yes, Sue told me. I’m Ellen Khoury, I’m the only worker who was here then.’
‘Can you spare a few minutes?’
‘Sue’s not here. I can’t leave the phone really. We can talk here if you like.’
‘You had a volunteer solicitor around that time. Mark Carson.
I represent his family. They’re a bit worried about him and I’m trying to get some idea of the kind of person he is, the people he knew then, just scratching around really.’
She bit her lower lip. ‘You’re some kind of investigator?’
‘No. It’s a favour really. To the family.’
Ellen wasn’t happy about something. ‘That’s a long time ago,’ she said. ‘You should talk to Jeremy Fisher, he was…’ ‘I know. I’d like to talk to him but he’s a big-shot lawyer now.
You have to make an appointment three months ahead to see him.
Did you know Mark then?’
She nodded, didn’t want to look me in the eye. ‘Yes, there were only a few solicitors came in then.
And now.’
‘I suppose it would have been unusual for someone from a big city firm to find the time to come out here at night.’
One of the predator children let out a piercing scream. I turned in time to see it strike its fellow-predator a full blow in the face, instant retaliation for some wrong. The victim stumbled, fell over backwards and hit its head on the brown nylon carpet, screamed too.
Without venom or force, the mother backhanded the striker, leaned forward and pulled the victim upright by the bib of his tiny overalls, dragged him into the moulded plastic chair next to her.
‘Don’t bloody go near each other,’ she said. She looked at us. ‘Kids, Christ, I’m up to here.’
I turned back to Ellen Khoury. ‘Mark would have been an unusual volunteer, would he?’
‘I suppose so. Most of those we get work for the labour firms or small firms around here.’
‘And he did a good job?’
‘Well, I was just the front-office worker, you’d have to ask Jeremy Fisher.’ She was drumming the fingers of her right hand on the desk, fast.
This looked like having even less point than I’d expected. With nothing to lose, I said, ‘And after the incident, he didn’t come anymore?’
Ellen stopped drumming, scratched her head at the hairline. She looked relieved. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, he could have. Jeremy told the police Mark was here until after she would have been picked up or whatever. So he was in the clear.’
‘Yes. In the clear. The police came here when…’
‘The next day. They didn’t know she’d been here until they talked to a friend of hers early in the morning.’ She was talking easily now. ‘I was here and they came in and gave me the name and I couldn’t find the book. Never found the book, it vanished. So we couldn’t help them. Anyway, they showed her picture to Moira Rickard, she was the vol on the desk that night, and she remembered her, remembered she’d seen Mark. Last client of the night. She was still with him when Moira went home. We never did that again, go before the last client’s gone.’
I nodded. ‘And Jeremy was here?’
‘Yes.’ Ellen’s face was expressionless. ‘He resigned a few months later, went to some big firm.’
‘I can’t remember the woman’s name,’ I said. ‘I’ve gone blank.’
‘Anthea Wyllie. She was a nurse at the hospital. You still hear people around here talking about it. They say her parents blame us. That’s a bit rough.’
‘Certainly is,’ I said. ‘Well, thanks for talking to me, Ellen. I’ll have to make an appointment to see Jeremy.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Jeremy’s the one to talk to.’
Back over the bridge, sun behind me like a poisonous fireball heading for earth, to the left Docklands, ahead the shining towers of the city.
Anthea Wyllie. A missing woman, a woman missing after seeing Mark Carson, never seen again. What sort of curse lay on this family, rich beyond greed, cradled in luxury, that their children were stolen from them, that those they touched they marked with crosses of ash?
30
Mr Pat Carson would like to see me if it was convenient, said the security man in the underground carpark, taking the Audi keys from my hand.
It was convenient.
‘Frank, get a drink,’ Pat said, a glass on the desk at his right hand, his knuckles touching it.
I poured a finger of the peaty liquid, dusted it with water, sat down opposite the old man. There was something about the room, the panelling, the armchairs, the soft lights. At the end of a long and fruitless day, my lunch engagement excepted, it brought a little peace to the soul.
I had a sip. Pat had a sip.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What’d a man do without a drop of the nerve tonic?’
I nodded. He’d had a good few drops. My gaze fell for the first time on a photograph on the wall behind Pat, a photograph lit by a brass picture lamp, of a big gathering, outdoors, everyone standing: Pat and a woman, dark eyes, grey hair pulled back, severe-looking; Tom and Barry with their wives; a woman about Barry’s age, probably their sister, Louise, smiling at a tall man who had his arms around three girls, one a teenager. Next to him was Christine, carrying a baby, that would be Anne. In front was a small boy, tennis racket in hand: Pat Junior. The dark-haired child with the serious face next to him was Alice, her ordeal still to come. On the left of the crowd, I identified Stephanie, long and lithe in a bikini, her hand on the shoulder of a handsome blond man, probably Dr Jonty. She wasn’t looking at the camera, she was looking at someone in bathers on the opposite fringe, someone who looked as if he had arrived late, got out of the pool just in time for the photograph. It was a young man who looked like Tom Carson with thirty years removed, softly muscular, with thick wet hair fallen across his forehead like a spray, dark and handsome and with a sardonic look. Mark Carson, I had no doubt.
‘Graham says you told the bastard to give us proof Anne’s alive,’ said Pat.
‘Yes.’
‘No risk there? Not normal people these. Could do anythin.’ His voice was hesitant, he had a look in his eyes that said: tell me good news. Not the Pat Carson of a few days before, but that Pat Carson had been sober.
‘Mr Carson,’ I said, ‘I think Anne’s dead.’
He looked into my eyes, sniffed twice, had a sip of whisky, didn’t put the glass down, touched it to his lips again, moistened them with whisky.
‘I thought, the finger,’ he said, ‘I thought that meant she was alive.’
‘It’s a feeling,’ I said. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time with people who want to hurt other people, to punish them.’
‘Punish? Who? Mark?’
‘Perhaps the family or Tom, perhaps Mark.’
Pat shook his head. ‘Don’t understand. Punish? For what?’
I said nothing, looked away, looked at the photograph behind him. This was what a dynasty looked like. The builders’ labourer who ended up owning the building. All the buildings. The boys, who transcended their unschooled father’s violent past, his lack of education, who went to private schools and ended up with handicaps of six or eight at Royal Melbourne, were members of a city club that would never have admitted their father, a club whose older members, close to death now, in the home straight, still muttered ‘bog Irish’ and sprayed spittle at the mention of names like Carson. The boys, who married the daughters of stockbrokers and minor English aristocracy. And the girl, who married into a family of Western District graziers, polo players with city homes in Toorak.
In the crowded photograph, people close together, the eye went first to Pat because he had space around him. His nearest and dearest did not press upon him. He remained at a small distance, his chin up, a rich and powerful self-made man surrounded by his handsome family, a man who had undoubtedly bought and paid for many members of clubs that would not admit him.
‘I don’t know for what,’ I said. ‘I just hope I’m wrong. But there wasn’t any other way. We have to have proof that Anne’s alive.’
‘You know what you’re doin,’ he said, resigned but not convinced. ‘What’s the proof?’
‘Photograph of Anne holding today’s newspaper.’
Pat nodded. ‘That’ll do.’
‘Stone, Boyle, Carides, do they do much of the company’s legal work?’
He coughed, coughed again, seemed to have trouble coping with the change of topic. ‘All of it far’s I know. Watterson’s used to be our lawyers. Got rich on us. Mark’s firm got a fair bit while he was there. Then Tom shifted all the business over to Stone’s. Big fight with Barry about that. Lawyers used to be Barry’s business, I left it to him, didn’t want anythin to do with em. Put your dog in a hole with the other fella’s dog, you don’t expect em both to come out in better shape than they went in. That’s lawyers.’
‘Why did Tom change firms?’
‘Dunno. I stayed out of it. Gettin too old to worry about stuff like that.’ He made a throwing-away gesture. ‘Pour me a bit there.’
I go
t up and poured, put the glass in his hand.
‘After Alice,’ I said, ‘the police put together a list of people who might have had a grudge against the family, the company.’
He nodded again, smiled, pushed his head forward. He was ancient and ageless and reptilian when he did that. ‘Like a phone book. Bloody hundreds of names. Still, that’s business, that’s life.’
‘People hating you enough to want to harm your children?’
The smile went away and he had a careful look at me, a long and judgmental look from under eyelids without lashes.
‘You sound like that Royal Commission lawyer, Frank,’ he said.
‘Know about that? The commission?’
‘Yes.’
‘He asked questions like that. Bit of a question, bit of a comment. He was a smartarse. Mr Ashley Tolliver, Queen’s fuckin Counsel. You answer the question, mainly pretty bloody stupid question, then the bastard asks it again, only he’s addin somethin from your answer, makes it all sound different.’
I felt his tone of voice on my face, like a coldroom door opening, old, dead, chilled air coming out, and I said, ‘I wasn’t making any comment. It was just a question.’
Pat Carson shook his head, nodded, shook his head. ‘Mr Ashley Tolliver, counsel of the fuckin Queen. Her fuckin Majesty. Two days of the sneerin bastard, never done a day’s work, talked like he knew the buildin business, wouldn’t know a concrete pour from a fuckin wet dream. Talked to me like I was some piece of shit, no respect, bit of dogshit on his shoe.’
He drank some whisky. A drop rolled down his chin, caught the light and glowed like a tear of gold. ‘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.’ He looked at me. ‘No respect. He had no respect.’
I finished my drink. ‘I’ll come over in the morning. Wait for the post.’
As I neared the library door, I heard Tom saying loudly, ‘…sources close to the company, that means a source inside the fucking company, now who the fuck could that be, I ask you?’
