Bad Debts (21 page)

‘And nobody,’ I said, ‘would have done anything unless they knew that Hoagland was going to be closed down.’

‘And sold to Hexiod.’

‘But you’re just guessing,’ I said. ‘It’s possible that Pixley was the one who tipped off the first buyers and that Charis is just the innocent last link in the chain.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘But nothing you know says that the whole thing was more than a little scam involving some small-time friends of Kevin Pixley’s.’

‘I don’t know what you’d call a big scam,’ said Linda.

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‘Leaving Hoagland aside,’ I said, ‘there’s still no real evidence that Anne Jeppeson was murdered. Or that Danny was framed. In fact, I now think it’s extremely unlikely that Danny was framed.’

She hugged herself. ‘Because Bruce says so? Five minutes with the Minister and you come out in reverse.’

‘What he says makes more sense of the evidence than my conclusions. And no-one’s going to prove any different. Even if Pitman was somehow involved, you won’t nail him.

You’d have to demonstrate a connection between him and one of the other parties. A tangible link. A beneficial link.’

Linda took my right hand and put it inside her pyjama top, under her right breast. ‘I love it when you sound lawyerly,’ she said. ‘Cup that. And demonstrate a connection.’

I wanted to cup it. And its twin. And to show a tangible link. But I felt a dread stealing over me and I took my hand away. ‘Linda,’ I said, ‘I think we’ve got to close the book on this thing. I’ve given my word to Bruce.’

She leaned back. ‘Your word? Your word what?’

I found it hard to say it. ‘I’ve told him that neither of us will take this any further. That includes the Hoagland sale.’

Linda stood up. ‘I don’t understand. Why? Why would you do that?’

How do you tell people about your fear that you might lose one of the few things that has given your life any meaning? ‘Bruce offered me a trade,’ I said.

‘A trade?’

‘Back off or be charged with a whole raft of offences over my Daylesford excursion.’

Linda shook her head in disbelief. ‘Bruce didn’t offer me a trade. You can’t speak for me. This whole thing doesn’t belong to you. You can’t suddenly take your ball and go home. This is a huge story. It could bring down a Cabinet Minister. Maybe the whole government. You can’t just switch it off because you’ve got cosy with the Police Minister.’

‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘I’m not cosy with him. I’m scared. I’m under the gun. They’ll charge me. I’ll get convicted. Even if I don’t go to jail, I’ll get struck off the roll. I’ll never be able to practise again.’

She looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. Then she turned and went into the bedroom. I waited, stomach tense, not knowing what to do, knowing I was losing 136

her. When she came out, she was dressed. She went over to where her jacket was hanging over a chair.

I said, ‘Can we calm this down? I’m—’

She cut me off, voice even. ‘Jack, as far as I can see four people have died over Hoagland. It’s likely that there’s been a spectacular piece of corruption. I was under the impression you cared about that. Now you’re telling me that the nice Police Minister has explained the whole thing to your satisfaction. And to help convince you, he’s threatened you with legal action. So to hell with justice, you’ve agreed to shut up. And you’ve agreed to shut me up. Well, I’m not yours to shut up. I don’t know what made you think I might be.’

I tried to get angry. ‘Hold on. A minute ago you were talking about a huge story. Now you’re campaigning for justice. Which one do you want to sacrifice me for? Justice or the huge story?’

There was something approaching contempt in her eyes. I knew about contempt in people’s eyes. In my life even outback barmen had looked at me with contempt in their eyes.

Linda took her jacket and walked to the door. When she got there, she turned and said,

‘If your new chum the Minister drops you in it because you can’t control me, my view is you should’ve asked me first. That’s about my pride. About your pride, I’d have thought you wouldn’t have given a fuck about getting struck off the roll if you could find out the truth about what happened to Danny McKillop. And if you think the Minister’s going to supply you with the truth, you have been living on some other planet for the last forty years. Goodbye.’

24

I rang twice before I gave up. She had the answering machine on. Halfway through my second message I felt pathetic and broke off. What was there to say anyhow? I lay down on the sofa and tried to sort out my thoughts.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Linda wouldn’t go along with what I’d done. I’d kept nagging at the thing because I felt I’d let Danny McKillop down. Twice. I didn’t think that anymore. I believed Bruce: Danny had probably intended to confront me over my part in his jailing; he might well have intended to kill me. And if Danny wasn’t framed for killing Anne Jeppeson, then she wasn’t murdered. That left the matter of finding out the truth about Hoagland. But I wasn’t going to give up my attachment to the law in pursuit of the truth about Hoagland. There wasn’t going to be any truth about it. No-one was going to go on trial for what would probably be regarded as a smart piece of property dealing. So it wasn’t a choice between getting justice for Danny or facing 137

serious criminal charges. It was a choice between achieving nothing and getting struck off.

When I finally went to bed, I slept badly, the dream coming back for the first time in years, and, after it woke me, the unbidden and random memories of childhood. The dreams began when I was about nine, when we went to live in the grand house in Toorak with my grandfather, my mother’s father, after my father’s death. My screams would wake my mother in her huge room miles down the corridor. I could never explain the dream or why it was so frightening. It is about surfaces and textures: smooth, cold surfaces like great sheets of iced marble that suddenly become hot and buckle and twist; steel bars that become dense forests of hot, slippery entrails; pale surfaces that feel solid before they turn to blood-red ooze, sucking you down like quicksand. The dream comes with no warning, as if a trapdoor opens and I fall from the safe and known world into a world that is nothing but terrifying sensation in which I am utterly alone.

The childhood memories started after Isabel’s death. They rise up in the margin between wakefulness and sleep and they lie on the mind like prints floating in fixer. All of them seem to date from the years before my father’s death. In one, I see the back of the house of my childhood friend Chris Freeborn. Chris’s little sister is outside the back door, stirring something in a zinc tub. Through the open back door I can see down a passage all the way to the street. There are people on the pavement outside, moving in and out of the frame of the front door. From inside the house, I can hear someone sobbing and saying something I cannot catch over and over again. In another, my mother is standing behind a high fence, her hands above shoulder-height, fingers hooked in the diamond mesh. She is wearing a dress with large spots on it and her hair is pulled back. The expression on her face is one of anxiety: her chin is lifted, her mouth is open slightly as if she is breathing shallowly through it. There are other women on either side of her, but she is not with them. I am looking at her from the other side of the fence and as I get closer I see that her left eye is full of blood.

These two memories and at least a dozen others fill me with unease, but they have no meaning. I have no other memories of Chris Freeborn’s house. Indeed, I cannot bring to mind Chris Freeborn’s face. Nor do I know anything about the fence behind which my mother stands. Or, in another memory, who the men are in the car full of cigarette smoke. Or, in another, why my mother and I are shivering in a doorway in the dark, hiding from the headlights of cars. There is no-one I can ask about them. My mother is dead, my sister was born after my father’s death, the Freeborn family is scattered to the winds.

At 5.40 a.m., exhausted, I declared the night at an end, got up and made a pot of tea.

While it was drawing, I found a novel called Over Ice I had been meaning to finish. I read until 8 a.m., when I wrenched myself away from the excitement of a pension in postwar Vienna to clean the flat. Some of the flat. One room. Partly. At 8.30, I drove 138

down Brunswick Street to Meaker’s. The street was almost empty, just me and a few party animals in leather and dark glasses moving towards the caffeine with the care of blind people in a strange place.

I almost missed the item on page five of the Age. ‘Former Minister found dead,’ the headline said. The story said Kevin Pixley had been found dead in the bathroom of his Brighton home. A heart attack was suspected. Mrs Pixley was in London.

What appetite I’d mustered was gone. In the night, I’d turned over the idea of going back to Pixley and putting Bruce’s accusations to him. In the end, I’d concluded that it would be pointless. Kevin Pixley wasn’t going to fall in a heap and confess anything to me.

And what did it matter? Guilt over Danny had started me off. Now I had little doubt that Danny had driven the car that killed Anne Jeppeson. I had nothing to feel guilty about.

I drank a short black and went around to Taub’s. The wood and oil smell of the workshop had the power to cheer me at even the lowest times. Down at my end of the workshop, Charlie had laid out on trestles the wood for my boardroom tabletop: three perfect walnut boards, fifteen feet long, eighteen inches wide and one-and-a-half inches thick. They came from what Charlie called The Bank, the timber stacked in the rafters. The first time Charlie had given me a job using timber from The Bank, I’d asked: ‘What’s this?’

‘Piece wood,’ Charlie said. ‘Swietenia mahagoni. Cuban mahogany. One hundred years old.’

‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for this,’ I said.

Charlie had taken the cheroot out of his mouth and given my statement some thought.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘till you make something nice out of it, it’s just a piece wood.’

I studied the rough walnut boards with reverence. This was one of the classic furniture timbers. Very few makers ever had the chance to work with wood of this quality and size. I turned one of the boards over. Chalked on the other side was the date Charlie had laid the resawn boards down: 10/3/46. This wood’s moisture content was so low that not even the ducted central heating in some Collins Street tower was going to cause it to move. Did an emerging mining company deserve a table made from unobtainable timber air-dried for at least fifty years? Wouldn’t some lesser, wetter timber do? The miners wouldn’t notice. I’d once asked Charlie the same question about a bureau he was making for a hotel owner with drug connections. ‘This arschloch I’m not making it for,’ he said. ‘He’s just the first owner. I’m making it for all the owners.’

I set aside my feeling of awe, put on my overalls and went to work. I gave the boards a preliminary pass over the pride of Charlie’s life, a near-new high-speed 24-inch surface 139

planer bought from a bankrupt furniture factory. I took off a tissue-paper-thin layer, exposing the figure in the wood. I went outside and stood in the drizzle for a few moments so that I could come back in and smell the fragrance of the walnut filling the workshop. After that, I gave the edges two passes each over the long-bed jointer to prepare them for edge-jointing. Then I set the planer and put the boards through again. They came out almost polished. I dipped a finger in a pot of Charlie’s own oil, cold-pressed linseed oil prepared on the workshop stove without chemicals. It was like putting a finger in honey. I drew a squiggle on one of the boards and rubbed the oil in.

The wood came to life: smooth, fine-textured, glowing.

I had the three boards on the trestles, admiring the fit of my edge joints, when Drew said from the door, ‘I never saw you look at a client that way.’

I looked at my watch. Three hours had slipped by. ‘I never had a client wanted to be planed, jointed and oiled,’ I said.

We picked up Norm O’Neill and Eric Tanner at the Prince. Wilbur Ong was going to the game with his grandson, Derek Ong, society dentist.

‘They can’t give this bunch a sheilas a beltin, might as well merge with Brighton Bowls Club,’ Norm O’Neill said.

‘I heard Vanotti’s got a groin problem,’ said Eric Tanner. ‘There’s a number of the fellas got things missing in their groins,’ Norm said gloomily.

Things were more cheerful on the way back from the Western Oval. Things were riotous on the way back from the Western Oval. We’d beaten St Kilda 84–79. St Kilda was one of the league’s most improved sides and we’d come from behind to win. It was coming from four goals down—that was what mattered. That was the sweetness.

Fitzroy had played its usual game: players dropping chest-marks and handballing at each other’s knees. But then, in the final quarter, Ansell and McCracken kicked two each. Then Grimmer kicked one. We were in front. And we stayed there, fighting off the Saints for ten agonising minutes. At the final siren, in the rain, we embraced one another and drank toasts from Drew’s little silver flask of malt whisky. Around us the Fitzroy supporters croaked out the club song with the joy that comes only to those who have kept the faith through the darkest nights.

At the Prince, the atmosphere was like VE Day. Even Stan was smiling. Even Stan’s wife cracked a joke. We had a few toasts, a few songs, relived a few great games. Then Drew and I took his car home and got a taxi to Vlado’s in Richmond. The warm room was full of Japanese tourists exclaiming at their handbag-sized steaks. We had almost finished ours and a bottle of ’88 Bailey’s shiraz when Drew said, ‘Hear anything more from that bloke who tried to heavy you?’

I told him about finding the two bodies.

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He looked at the roof, looked at me. ‘Fucking oath, Jack. Have you gone completely out of your brain?’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘there’s more.’ I told him about Linda’s digging into Hoagland and my discussion with the Minister.

When I’d finished, he cut the last of his rump in two. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘you won’t mind my saying you’re a stupid prick, will you?’