Quota (20 page)

Les was thinking, still spinning the wheel of the bike.

‘And if it's deliberately lit, and if it's obvious, who's in the shit then, Charlie? Who's ol' Robbo gonna drag in for an interview? Won't be the Murchisons. It's gonna be the bloke that's got a bone to pick with them lot. Same bloke you've got giving evidence.'

‘You can't be serious.'

‘Well, you tell me. Everything was going along swimmingly. Young Skip's on trial for the murder but Patrick's not gonna talk. So the Murchisons mightn't like it much, but if they just wait it all out, things'll be fine. Then you come to town and the kid changes his mind, decides he'll explain what happened on the night, eh?'

He looked questioningly at Charlie, who was feeling a growing knot of nausea in his stomach.

‘You know I can't tell you where all that's up to, Les.'

‘Well that's as good as confirming it. So the Murchisons need to smear his name, make sure he's a useless witness.
Discredit
him, that's the word, isn't it?'

Charlie didn't respond.

‘The allegation doesn't have to stick. I mean, they won't want it to backfire on
them
, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't stick on Patrick. They just need it to raise enough of a stink that he's useless in the court case. And they pick up nine hundred grand along the way, offload a shitty old business that only made 'em two bob a week. And they get their boy off the hook.'

He bounced the wheel a couple of times on the ground.

‘Fuck me…pretty bloody easy isn't it?'

Charlie watched the front wall beginning to buckle. Great blocks of cut stone, laid by long-forgotten hands, began tumbling into the street, first in ones and twos, and then whole sections of wall staggering and falling. Clouds of dust and smoke billowed into the headlights of the circling vehicles. Charlie felt a terrible sense of waste. The deliberate destruction of this thing that careful generations had assembled and tended, trashed for reasons that related only to a handful of angry people. Storms and floods and depressions, as much as fights and parties and street parades…the stonework had stood there; had framed them in common memory. It filled him with disgust to think that by morning it would be wet ash and rubble, pools of dirty water.

The two of them sat in silence, watching the firemen working at the building. There was no urgency in the effort now. There was no contest to be had with the flames.

Unnoticed by anyone else, Patrick's Camira rolled to a stop behind the fire trucks, and Charlie could see him dimly behind the windscreen, in the same ripped flannie he wore everywhere. When the car came to rest he made no move to get out. He was talking to someone in the passenger seat. Charlie felt sure this wasn't Patrick's work. Nothing about him suggested he'd do such a thing. The only thing Charlie had definitely worked out about Patrick Lanegan was that he lacked the ability to influence the happenings around him. He wasn't about to impose himself on the order of events, the poor bastard.

The flames were dying. Either the water had started to take effect, or there was simply nothing left to feed them. One of the crews had finished hosing the wreckage and started packing equipment into the truck. Les was talking to a fireman who'd wandered over. Both of them had their arms folded, and stood shoulder to shoulder, talking with their heads down. The fireman was tapping the side of his boot on the bluestone kerb.

Les ambled back to Charlie, climbed back onto the bike and sighed deeply. ‘You were right. They didn't have much trouble figuring it out. Back door of the kitchen was jemmied open and the gas jets were on flat out.'

The radiant warmth from the fire was beginning to subside. The flames still reflected on the side of the car but they had lost their intensity. A startled dog had been pacing through the crowd, darting from group to group in search of a comforting hand; now it ambled off into the night.

Charlie knew he was far too close to this business. There was a crucial line between observing events and influencing their very occurrence. He could not show Patrick any further sympathy, could not even satisfy himself that the fire had nothing to do with him. He had to turn his back on it all before the trial itself fell victim to the junior prosecutor's meddling. As he watched the dark outline of Patrick's car, a figure emerged from the passenger door and started walking around the back of the crowd, behind the parked fire trucks, towards him. It was the girl from the ambush, the sister from Patrick's house. The name escaped him for a moment.

Milly.

She was wearing a white frock and wobbling slightly on a pair of heels.

‘You're dressed up,' he said.

‘Last rehearsal for the deb ball,' she replied, brushing her hands self-consciously over her hips. ‘Paddy asked me to tell you something.'

Even as she said it, the words had a familiar ring and Charlie found himself looking for a sprinting thug from stage left.

‘He said he won't give you a statement.'

Charlie nodded wearily.

‘He said the Murchisons done this.' She nodded towards the fire. ‘And he said he's gonna tell the truth. In court.'

Charlie took this in for a moment.

‘Tell him the car's fixed,' he said. ‘I'm leaving in the morning.'

He looked back at the fire. Delvene Murchison was still wrapped around the man Charlie assumed to be her husband. Her show of emotion was nearly as mesmerising as the fire itself: the operatic grief, the flailing arms and sobs.

Yet even as he watched her, a strange thing happened. From her position against the man's chest, she looked up, looked across the intersection and found Charlie. Her eyes locked directly onto his, and for a split second her expression revealed something to him, something tiny and secretive; not quite a smile. The look would replay itself in his mind all the way back to Melbourne. An admission of everything, and a guarantee that nothing would be conceded.

THE TRIAL

JURY SELECTED IN ABALONE MURDER TRIAL
Emma Killian, Court Reporter

Jury selection was completed today in the trial of two men accused of the murder of a commercial fisherman at Dauphin, in the state's west.

Toby James Murchison and Michael John McVean, both 25, of Dauphin, Victoria are accused of the shooting death of Matthew Lanegan, 24, in August last year.

Prosecutor Harlan Weir SC opened the Crown's case to the jury, describing the shooting as having been motivated by ‘appalling greed and cowardice'. The two men are alleged to have been trading over-quota abalone through the black market, employing the victim and his younger brother as couriers. In what appears to be a dispute over payment of commission to the brothers for their role, Mr Weir said the victim was lured to a night-time meeting on board the accuseds' commercial fishing vessel, offshore from the small town. When he boarded the vessel, he was shot and his body was then dumped back on his own boat, which was subsequently set on fire. The pair were arrested two days later, after mobile phone records and security logging at the town's wharf indicated their presence at the rendezvous. A rifle, alleged to be the murder weapon, was found dumped at sea near the point at which the two boats are said to have met on the night.

Murchison, whose father owns the town's only hotel, as well as a lucrative abalone licence and a tourism business, is represented by renowned defence advocate Jose Ocas QC. Mr Ocas today described the Crown case against his client as ‘a clumsily woven patchwork of circumstantial evidence, rumour and flat-out guesswork'.

Mr McVean, meanwhile, has been allocated an advocate from the public defender's office, believed at this stage to be Franz Rhodes. The trial, before Justice Fabian Williams, is expected to last two weeks.

The small town of Dauphin has attracted unwanted publicity in recent years, having been the subject of Fisheries Department operations that have uncovered evidence of large-scale poaching of abalone by groups already involved in drug trafficking. Despite this, it remains the highest-earning rural shire in the state, principally because it is home to several abalone licence holders. The licences are currently worth between 2 and 3 million dollars and can return huge profits to the licensee. A shire official, speaking this week on condition of anonymity, said the town ‘can't afford to have this thing stick…people here rely heavily on the Murchison interests for their ongoing employment'.

In an interesting footnote to the trial's commencement today, the prosecution's junior counsel is Charlie Jardim, the young barrister who came to dubious prominence in February after being remanded in custody for contempt of court. In a fiery confrontation with Magistrate Maurice Lefcovics, Mr Jardim had told the veteran magistrate that he was ‘known throughout the state as a heartless old prick and a drunk and seeing I've gone this far, your daughter in law's appointment to the court is widely viewed as a grubby political payoff.' Court transcript of the incident was widely circulated among lawyers by email in the ensuing weeks.

Asked today for comment regarding the appointment of Mr Jardim to the murder trial, the Director of Public Prosecutions would say only that ‘It has always been the case that our senior prosecutors have autonomy over their choice of junior counsel. Mr Jardim is still on the Roll of Counsel and is not currently subject to any sanction which would prevent him from appearing.' Privately, the Director is said to be fuming at the appointment and has called for vetting of all junior counsel appointments to major trials within his office.

The trial will resume tomorrow, with the victim's brother Patrick Lanegan scheduled to give evidence early next week.

CHARLIE TOOK A bundle of the previous day's transcript and headed for the library. He'd never been able to eat during a trial. It wasn't that the stress got to him; he just ran without refuelling, could think and talk for hours on end until he collapsed in the evening. It was, he reflected, one of the many things that made him poor company: a man who spent all his energy and intellect on a room full of hostile strangers and had nothing left afterwards for friends at night.

He loved the massive flagstones of the Supreme Court, their sense of a brutal Victorian past. Where the corridors came to a corner, the stones were worn into a shallow scoop, countless feet scouring the basalt into a fine dust, down through a century and more. It all spoke of a cult of death, even now when the last witnesses to the days of capital punishment were nearing retirement. The Basque had alluded to it in casual conversation one morning as they waited for the associate to unlock the courtroom.

‘Feeling a bit of strain over all this?' he'd asked.

‘No,' Charlie had smiled back, simply because he wouldn't give him anything.

‘Yes you are,' replied the Basque. ‘There's nothing more serious than what we're doing. I can still remember the days when there was a noose at the end of a trial like this, you know.'

‘If I was prosecuting it,' Charlie had countered, ‘why would that be my worry? Wouldn't that be eating away at the defence counsel?'

In front of them there was a loud bang as the antique locks of the courtroom door tumbled open.

‘Sure,' Ocas had said. ‘You never wanted to send your client away to their death. But the prosecutor used to feel it too, sometimes more so. At least the defence counsel had the consolation that they were trying to
save
the poor bastard. Your lot were actively trying to kill him.'

Such encounters with the Basque were all part of the theatre, the countless little ways he found of getting under an opponent's skin. He had an uncanny feel for it.

Charlie wandered past the portraits of dead judges, the brass plates marking courtrooms and offices, the accumulated stains of passing hands that had brushed the sandstone walls. It was impossible to feel any sense of a higher justice in such a corridor. It was only a passage through time towards more of the same: violence and perfidy and their consequences. These stones fed on human lives.

He was thinking about Patrick's evidence in chief that morning. Allowing for the fact that witness examination had a way of stripping all the life out of a story, Patrick had managed to relate the whole thing in much the same way he'd told it to Charlie in the boat all those weeks ago. He'd been reliable on all the major points of the story, picking up the hints in Charlie's open-ended questions and betraying just enough grief to lend credibility to the tale. The judge had stepped in here and there, pecking at hearsay slips and venturing some faint scepticism on occasions. But largely he'd stayed out of it, listening and watching in grave silence. Weir sat in attentive repose, making occasional notes in a ring binder that would form the basis for his closing address. Even the Basque had restrained himself, though it alarmed Charlie to see that he was smiling broadly almost all the way through. This was just as likely to be for the jury's benefit, but it filled Charlie with dread to think that after lunch, he was going to have to turn this unsteady witness over to cross-examination.

Charlie continued walking towards the weak reflection of sunlight that indicated an exit. Through more doorways and out under a portico into the building's hexagonal inner courtyard with the corresponding six-sided bulk of the old library in the centre. He stopped in a warm, bright patch of sun and felt the glow of it soaking through his robes and his suit, finding his body beneath. A lone plane tree showed vivid specks of green where the spring growth would burst forth in the weeks after this miserable business was done. And, he assured himself, by the time the leaves had reached their full size, dappling the hot summer sun and lifting in the northerly, he'd be gone.

A voice called his name quietly from the shade. It was Patrick, leaning against a verandah post, halfway through a cigarette. His bony wrists sprouted from the cuffs of the borrowed suit as he smoked. Charlie looked both ways quickly, conscious of the awkwardness of being caught talking to the witness.