by Peter Temple
I didn’t hear her over the crackling in the stove. She came on bare feet, down the ladder and across the space behind me, walked around in front of me, a tall woman in a white shift, pulled it over her head, warm light on her breasts, on her belly. She knelt astride me, took my head in both hands, kissed me, drew my head to her chest, buried my face in her warmth, in her skin, in the smell of her, took my hand and pressed it on her.
Later, lying in Corin’s bed, up in the old hayloft, still the lingering scent of dry hay, my head on her breasts, I said, ‘This is a bit of an adventure for me. Just being alone with an attractive woman. Well, any woman really.’
‘I feel betrayed. I was told that mediators took vows of abstinence. That’s why I felt so safe inviting you for the weekend.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Those are gladiators. It’s to save their strength for the combat.’
‘Oh shit,’ she said.
‘It’s all right. Mediators only proceed by consensus. They’re bound by the oath of consensus.’
‘That sounds like something from school history. In 1202, Magnus IV broke the Oath of Consensus and invaded Sangria.’
I kissed the soft skin under her chin. ‘Mountain stronghold of the Vodka Martini people. You’re right.’
The next day, we awoke in the same state of mind we’d gone to bed in, then we washed and ate. She taught me how to prune, and we pruned savagely. Light rain fell on us, stained our clothing. For lunch, we grilled venison sausages, dark tubes she’d brought, ate them with mustard on rolls. Back to work. I caught her eye from time to time, she looked at me, I couldn’t read her look. Could be interest, lust, regret, could be, Oh shit, what have I got myself into? Sex conquers nothing, explains nothing. She waited for me to finish my row.
‘So,’ she said. ‘See you next year.’
We showered, drank and ate, made love in her bed, went downstairs and ate some more, made love in front of the Ned Kelly, went up the ladder. I kissed her and held her and slept as if cleansed of everything that stained me.
In the city, outside my apartment block, a dirty rain falling, leaning in at her window, I said, ‘So, another toyboy dabbled with. Now it’s back to changing the face of the earth.’
She put her hand under my chin, kissed me on the mouth, a kiss to remember. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘In one weekend, I’ve had the army and the police force. Know anyone who’s been in the air force and the navy?’
‘I’ll ask around,’ I said, ‘and call you.’
I watched her go, waved, felt a stabbbing sense of loss.
38
Orlovsky said, ‘I’ve gone back to that subscribers’ file, the one, you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Saw you on TV about fifty times and it made me think.’
‘What?’
‘The first time, I only pulled the current list, the paid-up people.’
‘So?’
‘I went back, found all the subscribers they’ve ever had. I’ve got other names now, subscribers who dropped off. There’s a definite civilian here, no public service, academic connection I can find.’
‘In Melbourne?’
‘Eltham, yeah.’
‘You at home?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘There’s something else. I’m coming over.’
Orlovsky lived in Elwood, in half of a house on a respectable middle-class street. Amid the Volvos, his vehicle stood out like a garbage scow in a pleasure-boat marina. As I walked up the path to the porch, he opened the front door. We went down the passage into a big north-facing room furnished with a trestle table holding an array of computing equipment, a desk chair, an old armchair covered with a sheet and a television set on a coffee table against the wall. Like the rest of the house, the room had an air of monastic tidiness.
‘This gets more professional-looking every time I come here,’ I said.
‘Strictly a recreational user.’ Orlovsky walked over to the table and pointed at a monitor. ‘This’s the baby,’ he said.
A name and address were highlighted on the screen:
Keith Guinane
7 Scobie’s Lane
ELTHAM 3095
VICTORIA
AUSTRALIA.
There was also an Internet address and what was probably a subscriber code number.
‘Subscriber in ’97, ’98,’ Orlovsky said. ‘No one’s heard of him.
I rang around.’
I sat down in the armchair. ‘This is going to be tricky,’ I said. ‘But first, we’ve got SeineNet sitting in a Carson computer. The bloke who gave it to me’s very nervous. Can you get rid of it without going back there?’
Orlovsky nodded, sat down at the keyboard and went to work. I went into the kitchen and tapped some water from the earthenware filter barrel, had a sip. It tasted worse than water from the tap.
‘Ready to destroy here,’ Orlovsky shouted from the back room. ‘No last requests? Never have the grunt to run this thing again.’
Glass at my lips. Keith Guinane of Eltham.
‘Try the name,’ I shouted back. ‘Try the subscriber’s name.’
I was in the computer room doorway, when Orlovsky said, ‘Jesus Christ, come here.’
On the screen was the heading GUINANE, CASSANDRA (CASSIE) and the date 12 May 1986. Under it were menu boxes, dozens of them.
‘Who’s Cassie Guinane?’
Orlovsky clicked on a box. A colour photograph of a young woman appeared, dark shoulder-length hair, a strong face, good looking. She was sitting at a table, wearing a low-cut dress showing a deep cleavage. A dinner party, a celebration of some kind, perhaps a wedding reception or a twenty-first birthday. The people on either side of her had been cropped out but you could see a man’s shoulder and a bare arm.
The text beside the picture said:
Cassandra (Cassie) Natalie Guinane, born 17 October 1962, Eltham, Melbourne
Occupation: Postgraduate student
Last seen: Swanston Street, outside Newman College, University of Melbourne, apparently waiting
Time: 7.20 p.m.
Date: 12 May 1986
Dress: Long dark coat over jeans and polo-neck sweater
‘Any Keith Guinane?’
Orlovsky went back to the menu, clicked Family under Interviews.
Three names came up:
Guinane, Keith Allan, brother
Guinane, Lennox Pearse, father
Guinane, Victor Martin, brother
‘Is this stretching coincidence or what?’ said Orlovsky.
‘Bring it up.’
It took almost three-quarters of an hour to skim the Guinane material in SeineNet, me sitting on a kitchen chair next to Orlovsky. When we’d finished, he made espresso coffee and we sat outside the kitchen door in the late morning sun.
‘Buggered if I can see how this can tie in with the Carsons,’ said Orlovsky.
‘Not exactly your innocent, Cassie,’ I said.
Orlovsky sniffed his coffee. ‘Costa Rican blend. Produced by slave labour, no doubt. She was twenty-four. They found four blokes she’d possibly screwed. That’s not setting any records. For a male, they’d probably have turned up six times that many.’
‘And that would be for an underachieving wimp like you. It’s not the number. Only one of them was under thirty-five. And that was when she was twenty and he was thirty-four. The lecturer was twice her age.’
For a moment, my mind went to a lecturer, a landscape design lecturer. I shook the thought away.
‘Women find maturity appealing,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Real maturity, that is. Men grown out of childish pursuits like playing with guns, playing cops-and-robbers, that sort of thing.’
‘I find that hard to understand,’ I said. ‘Anyway, she liked older men. Which may be hugely significant or mean absolutely piss-all and I’m sorry I raised it.’
‘Hitting on the name when you’re interested in voice systems, finding it in SeineNet, it’s one of those coincidences,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Weird but ther
e’s weirder, much weirder.’
‘Don’t tell me about them. How’s your neighbour?’
I’d briefly met the woman who lived in the other half of Orlovsky’s house. He seemed to be on more than neighbourly terms with her.
‘Gone white-water rafting in New Zealand.’ A pensive note in his voice. ‘With her upper-level management colleagues. Bonding, they want them to bond. Costs the company four grand a head.’
‘Should make them all join the Army Reserve,’ I said. ‘It’s free and I gather they bond like two-pack adhesive. Can’t separate them. After dark, they become inseparable.’
He laughed but it was a duty laugh. ‘I think she may be entering a bondish phase,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘I can’t quite work out what to do. Don’t know where to go from here. If I want to go anywhere.’
This wasn’t standard Orlovsky talk. There was vulnerability in his voice, the way he moved his shoulders, his head.
‘Things can dry up in you,’ I said. ‘That’s the worst of the life. You don’t learn to live with women. You learn to shut them out. It’s not a good way to be.’
We sat in the weak sunlight, a still winter’s day, smog haze building up over the city, drinking Costa Rican coffee. Dun-coloured sparrows who would inherit the earth in partnership with the cockroaches walked right up to our feet. Orlovsky lit a cigarette, exhaled. The smoke hung in the air, didn’t want to fade away.
‘Well, you’d know,’ he said. Barrier up, the standard Mick back in action. ‘Twice married. Unsuccessfully.’
‘You can’t be married twice successfully unless they leave you for health reasons. The first one was just practice. It doesn’t count, shouldn’t be recorded as a conviction. Listen, Mark Carson. He’d be in SeineNet. The missing woman in Altona. Last person to see her.’
We went inside. Orlovsky called up a Find box, typed in Carson, Mark and clicked. The program replied with a list of references found: one in the Alice Carson investigation under Family, and references in the Anthea Wyllie investigation under the interviews with Mark, Stephanie Carson, Jeremy Fisher and Moira Rickard and in the investigating officer’s summary.
‘Let’s see Jeremy Fisher,’ I said.
We read the transcript of the interview. Jeremy said that he’d heard Mark leaving shortly after the last client left the Altona Community Legal Centre. A matter of minutes afterwards, he thought.
Under the transcript, the interviewer noted that Jeremy had rung him two hours later to say that he’d remembered that after hearing the client leave, he’d gone to the filing room to look for something. It was after he was back in his office that he heard Mark leave. As he’d been away for at least fifteen minutes, Mark must have been in the building for about twenty minutes after his client left.
We went to the investigating officer’s summary. He concluded that Anthea had been abducted while walking from the legal centre to the hospital, a distance she could have covered in less than fifteen minutes. He noted Jeremy Fisher’s change of story but said there was no reason to doubt him. Fisher and Carson denied any discussion of their statements. Carson’s sister, Stephanie Carson, said in a statement that she rang her brother at home that night around 9.30 p.m. and spoke to him. He said he had just come in the door. The timing matched Jeremy Fisher’s revised estimate that Mark left around 9 p.m.
Two days after Anthea Wyllie disappeared, the investigating officer concluded:
Anthea was probably abducted within ten minutes of leaving the legal centre while walking to the hospital. She would not have got into a vehicle driven by anyone she did not know and trust. We have conducted fifty-eight extensive interviews and done 171 alibi cross-checks and have not produced a suspect.It is likely that she was abducted by force by a stranger/s and the investigation will have to be broadened to take in that category of known offender.
There were several more investigation summaries. The most recent review said:
There are no grounds for optimism concerning this investigation. It may be that in time some evidence will come forward to assist.
‘Touched by tragedy, Keith Guinane, Mark Carson,’ said Orlovsky.
‘Fuck tragedy. Get them up again, the Guinanes. And for Christ’s sake don’t destroy this thing.’
‘Sir.’
The father of Cassie and Keith and Victor Guinane was Lennox Pearse Guinane, an architect of a practice called Sitesong. There was an address in Heidelberg, a phone number. A file note recorded that Lennox Guinane committed suicide in 1988, two years after his daughter’s disappearance.
‘Get Lennox,’ I said.
The database recorded that Lennox Guinane had a conviction for driving under the influence and convictions for assault and illegal possession of firearms.
‘An armed and violent architect,’ said Orlovsky. ‘You’d have had a lot in common.’
39
‘I couldn’t change the name from Sitesong,’ said David Klinger. ‘Appalling name but it was there before I was. I’ve lived with it all these years. Used to be very trendy.’ He sniffed. ‘Trendy. Not a word you hear today either. We were a bit trendy, a bit fashionable then.’
He drank half a glass of white wine, glass the size of a cricket ball. ‘Len was a guru, one of the mudbrick gurus.’ There was no admiration in his voice.
David Klinger, all that remained of the architectural practice of Sitesong, was a man having a go at defying age. He was well into his sixties, shaven head, rimless glasses, thin body in a black teeshirt and black jeans. We were sitting at a table in his studio upstairs in a square tower attached to a house. Half a cheese and lettuce sandwich lay on a large white plate, next to it, two open bottles of white wine, one half-empty. A drawing board with a plan on it looked over a golf course.
‘Very much gurus,’ I said. ‘Both of you. That’s why I was keen to do something on your practice when this assignment came up. I was thinking along the lines of short biographies with details of major works.’
‘Len’s been done,’ said Klinger, filling his glass. ‘A student at Melbourne Uni did a Master’s thesis on the mudbrick pioneers. What’s her name now? Kilpatrick, Fitzpatrick, something like that. They’ll all be in there, Knox, Len, the others. Visionaries, all of them.’ Much less than admiration in his tone. ‘Mind you, I’ve never seen it. She promised to give me a copy, spent bloody days here, let her see all the sketches, plans, everything. Never heard from her again. That’s bloody gratitude for you.’
He studied me, narrowed eyes. ‘You’re from where?’
‘Burnley, part-time.’
‘Teach architecture there now?’
‘It’s a landscape design project,’ I said. ‘We’re encouraged to see the buildings as part of the landscape.’
Klinger nodded. ‘Enlightened of them. I did a bit of teaching at Melbourne, place was full of career-change hopefuls. Didn’t have a clue what they were getting into, most of them, not a clue. This practice’s been going since 1956 and on average I doubt whether we’ve made more than the basic wage. People don’t understand that. Bloody brickie makes more, much more. Go and be a brickie, that’s what I used to tell them. They didn’t like that.’
‘I’m holding on to my day job,’ I said.
He was studying the view without seeing it, glass in one hand, tapping the bony knuckles of the other on the table. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Melbourne Uni will let you see the thesis on the gurus, get what you need out of that.’
‘I’ve seen the thesis,’ I said. ‘But what I wanted to do was talk about your partnership. I wanted to talk to you about how you worked together, how you influenced each other.’
Klinger laughed, it turned into a cough. He stilled it with wine, a little warmth came into his gaze. ‘Won’t have a drop? The Queen Adelaide, all I can afford these days. Price of wine’s bloody outrageous. Influenced each other? I don’t know about influencing Len. I’d studied in Europe, of course. Len never left Australia, very narrow was the guru.’
‘So you brought a wider
vision to the practice.’
He drank wine, turned his lips down. ‘I was younger,’ he said. He burped. ‘Excuse me.’
‘That would’ve made a difference.’
‘Nothing made a difference to Len. He was a bulldozer. Get in his way, he’d go right over you, didn’t give a damn. Got into these fearful rages.’
Klinger finished his glass, filled it, most of the bottle gone. ‘Didn’t drink before sundown in the old days,’ he said. ‘Can’t stay awake long after sundown now.’
‘Lennox had a bad temper?’
‘Tantrums. Like a child. Ellen told me, that was his wife, died in an accident. Tragedy. I loved that woman.’ He fell silent, stared at his glass. Then he looked up. ‘What was I saying?’
‘Ellen told you…’
‘Yes, the tantrums. Len’s father was the same. Ellen’s father-in-law. He was a doctor, used to rage at his patients, felt they were letting him down. Ellen said he went to see a patient in hospital one day and shouted at the poor fellow so violently the man had a heart attack on the spot.’
‘That kind of thing can run in a family,’ I said. ‘Did he pass it on to the children?’
Klinger sighed, sipped. ‘Sure you won’t?’
‘Perhaps half a glass. That would be nice.’
‘Excellent.’ He was pleased to have drinking company. ‘I’ll just get a glass. Frank, it’s Frank, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘David. Call me David. No one’s ever called me Dave. I wouldn’t have minded that. Dave.’
He went to a cupboard in the corner and came back with another goldfish-bowl glass, splashed it three-quarters full.
‘What were you saying?’
‘His temper. Passed on to the children?’
‘Ah, the children.’ Klinger’s good mood dimmed a little. ‘The twins, well, they were a worry from early on in the piece. There’s something about twins, something mysterious, I don’t know. They were both late developers, didn’t start talking properly until they were, oh, five, thereabouts. But they had this private language, they made these sounds, not quite words. Word-like sounds. Only to each other, didn’t respond to their parents or to Cassie for ages, more or less ignored them.’
