Quota (3 page)

She pressed her lips white against each other as the tears welled in her eyes. ‘I'll talk to the jewellers about the ring.' She gave him a thin smile. ‘I don't know if there's a cooling-off period.'

The tears broke free and ran down her cheeks.

BY THE TIME Barry Egan reached the commercial wharf, a small crowd had gathered. The sou'west change thrashed at everything, lifting a low moan from the pine trees. The crowd stood in beanies and heavy jackets as the rain soaked their shoulders. Most of them had come from the pub, muttering and pointing.
The Lanegans' boat's on fire and one of them Lanegan kids's been burnt to death.

The onlookers had nosed their vehicles into the carpark, forming haphazard angles in their rush to get to the scene. Some had even left their drivers door open. Headlights shone through the rain onto the crowd.

Barry ambled among them, nodding and grunting, hands buried in his pockets. Deep puddles had formed on the concrete wharf. At the lip of the concrete, a young police constable rested his foot on a bollard with a rope looped over it. At the other end was the Lanegans' shark boat, the
Caravel.
The cop was on the phone, ignoring the push of the crowd. He didn't share their interest in how an experienced fisherman could have burnt himself to death within sight of the harbour, or why he would be out there without a decky. It wasn't a bad night, thought Barry. Just not a night to go off fishing by yourself. He breathed deeply through his nose, pulling his chest up and his shoulders back. The smell of pine trees in the rain had something acrid in it. Burnt plastic, wood, something else.

The
Caravel
knocked gently at her moorings as men clambered over the decks. Its timbers were burnt black, segmented into little blocks of charcoal. Planks ended jaggedly, some burnt all the way through. It seemed odd to Barry that the charring started at the gunwale, well away from anything mechanical.

From there it had eaten into the foot of the cabin, up the side to the roofing, across the deck and over the equipment, bubbling the plastic covers into crazed stalactites. There were open holes in the hull like a cutaway diagram. Near the centre of the blackening, the timbers were still smoking faintly.

Between two of the men on board lay the rigid form of a dead man. He wore ordinary jeans, but they were burnt up to the hip on one side and to the mid-thigh on the other. His legs were blackened, the socks melted at his ankles and burnt away over the feet to reveal the snapped-off remnants of toes. The top half of the body was largely unmarked, and Barry could see enough of the face to recognise young Mags, the rough-cut eldest orphan of Dennis and Trish Lanegan.
There you go
, he thought. He'd always assumed it'd be the younger brother, the hair-triggered Patrick, who would come to a gruesome end in the rain.

A thick puddle of shiny black blood had congealed under the Lanegan boy's right ear, stretching itself into a bloody string as the men on the deck lifted the body towards a blue tarpaulin. The sight raised a low murmur from the crowd. Above the puttering of the rain, the voices rose as the body disappeared inside the tarp. It was clear to all present that this was not an accident at sea.

More men were recruited from among the crowd to assist with the lift over the edge of the vessel and up onto the wharf. A small man in a heavy woollen jumper tried to press the arm down. Recoiled in fright when it resisted him. Barry looked over the crowd. Laurie from the sports store and his wife Sue, partial to a quick drink before dinner some nights, but never among the revellers later on; four or five of the drunks from the Normans Woe, who always were; a couple of holidayers in loud Gore-Tex, one of whom pointed a phone camera at the tarp until the man in the jumper barked at him; two kids on BMXs. And Mick McVean.
Bastard
, thought Barry. No friends, no manners and aside from that, no interests. He was a loner who said little and appeared both unoccupied and constantly agitated. His only regular work was running errands for the Murchisons; at nights he'd fill a stool at the Normans Woe and stare at the women, working slowly through pots of light beer. He was tall and thick, as though he had settled into the shape that would take him to sixty: rounded shoulders and heavy jowls. Hair thinning in a deep vee over each temple, leaving a clump marooned above his forehead; belly slung low over the belt of his jeans.

As Barry watched him, McVean took a last look at the tarp and wandered off, fiddling with his phone. His eyes did not meet anyone's as he shouldered through the gathering on the wharf, heading further out on the planked decking rather than back towards the vehicles. Meanwhile the body was being lowered into the rear of the divvy van. Tight funding dictated that ambulances in these parts were reserved for the living, divvy vans for the drunk and the dead. The doors were slammed shut. A few on-lookers remained to peer at the boat, as the van rolled carefully through the crowd, its blue and red lights fracturing prettily in the raindrops.

Barry sat on a pile of craypots and studied McVean, who had walked directly to the Murchisons' boat, the
Open Quest
. Barry loved to know people's business and, as far as he could see, McVean had none out there at this time of night. The big man had stepped from the wharf onto the deck of the
Open Quest
, a higher and much bigger area than the
Caravel
's. The vessel rocked slightly under him. One of its mooring lines slapped the surface. McVean was looking for something. Lifting hatches, feeling through bunches of netting. Stopping to check tubs of equipment, dislodging lids with bearish sweeps of his broad hands.

Heaving himself up the ladder to the roof of the wheelhouse, he squatted over a black plastic spotlight on a mounting bracket. He produced a shifter and started to wrench away at it. When it came free, he stumped forwards to the wheelhouse, his heavy footfalls ringing on the narrow gangway. He stopped at a blue plastic barrel clamped to the wheelhouse wall, put the spotlight down and unscrewed the lid of the barrel. He peered inside. Barry's fascination had momentarily stopped his breath.

Then McVean replaced the lid and moved to an area on the wall next to the barrel where an empty steel clamp hung open. He held the clamp in his hand for a moment as if deep in thought. Then without warning, he lashed out with considerable violence and sank a boot into the cabin's steel wall. His hands flew up reflexively to restore his balance, and then rested on his hips. He swung a second kick at the spotlight, and sent it clattering across the deck. Then he looked back towards the carpark, and his eyes met Barry's.

‘What are you lookin at, cunt?' he spoke across the thirty metres that separated them, his voice carried by the wind.

Barry rose from his perch on the craypots and started towards the carpark without a word. With his back to the wharf, he waited anxiously for the sound of McVean's booted feet.

Again on the wind, without any rising of effort. ‘That's right, Egan, keep fucken walkin.' McVean was moving towards him, striding over the wharf timbers and onto the concrete apron, coming straight for the ute.

Barry swung onto the torn vinyl of the drivers seat, slammed the door and turned the key as he jabbed the accelerator. Nothing. Transmission in park? Yes. He looked up again. McVean was picking up the pace, mouth slightly agape, breathing harder. Barry's hands darted over the dashboard. What?
What?

The bloody interlock.

He grabbed the handset and heaved a panicky breath into it. Why wasn't anybody else looking at McVean?
Fuck fuck fuck
. After a long and cruel silence, the display on the interlock lit up and the ignition fired. McVean had reached him. He lifted one paw into the air and slammed it down on the bonnet with a loud
whoomp
, staring at Barry through the grubby windscreen. Barry listened gratefully as the little ute revved into life, jolted into reverse and drew away.

CHARLIE JARDIM WALKED the streets of Melbourne, lugging his heavy leather bag inches above the puddles. The late February heat had been swept away by a cold front, bringing squalls and flushing the grease and dust of the city's summer down the soupy gutters. He stopped to pick up a coffee, looking down Lonsdale Street at the long queue of meat wagons in the clearway. Remand prisoners, due in court for the morning's hearings.

As the lift rumbled to the eighth floor, still full of cold morning air, he was deep in thought. He didn't glance at the noticeboard at the back of the lift. Had he done so, he would have seen fresh obituaries for two of his colleagues. Men with grey hair and long familiarity with the cycle of victory and defeat. Whose heart and liver (respectively) had quit in disgust.

Charlie had spent two weeks on the brink of professional ruin. The two nights in the police cells were no great problem—in fact the cops passing through had been variously supportive and highly amused. His Cadaverous Honour Maurice Lefcovics fined him, but with little enthusiasm. Standing before him, Charlie suspected Lefcovics actually pitied him, chastened as he must be by the exercise of raw magisterial power. He walked out $2500 poorer.

It was after the hearing that the walls started to close in. A notice from the regulators: he'd been cited for misconduct. A letter from the OPP: he was stood down from prosecution work until further notice. A request from his indemnity insurers for a written statement on the incident with Lefcovics.

Charlie was tired, in a way that gave him a dangerous edge of indifference about the whole thing. Part of him wanted to make a fight of it, but there was a growing apathy too. Maybe it was just that he'd been found out at last: a harbourer of petty rages, unable to contain the personal within the professional. The grief, the hypocrisy seemed unending and Charlie was increasingly sure he wouldn't survive as an advocate. He couldn't hide his visceral reactions. Jesus, he had to clench his teeth to avoid crying some days.

And then there was Anna.

Just another pop-out commercial law drone, he'd assumed. Until she surprised him, kept surprising him, with her wit and gentle irony. Anna, who'd come in a great wave of love and acceptance, evading every self-destructive attempt to push her away. Who'd listened and responded to his tantrums and his fears.

She was too good to be true, of course. If nothing else there was her patient dedication to her own career. She didn't struggle against the lower-court grind like he did. Broadmeadows, Heidelberg, Melbourne Magistrates; weekends on a cycle of coffee up and booze down, reading the papers, then Monday's brief. She didn't slump into a Sunday-afternoon funk knowing she had to get on a tram next morning to do it all again. She would take months, years, the larger part of her life, and draw herself towards whatever it was that constituted fulfilment.

He didn't have that. Did he envy it? Was that why the mockery was always there, brewing and occasionally erupting? He'd made last night's conversation difficult; but how do you make a thing like that easy? He should call. Yes, and say what? Was that why people used text messages for these things?

The lift slowed. His mind lurched to business, the call last night after Anna left: an incoming brief, something significant. His clerk, working late when the courier delivered it, had thought of Charlie's situation and got straight on the phone. He wondered now if this would be the brief that would change everything. Make the lift and the coffee and the dry retching and the trams and whole shitty game fall away from the foreground like cardboard theatre sets, revealing something that would expunge the futile ritual of his weeks.

He assumed initially it was a defence job: it seemed unlikely the prosecutors would send him anything of consequence so soon after letting him know in writing that he was not wanted. He wasn't part of the defence community with their ritualised talk, their double standards on drug use. No one he knew would sling him a murder defence.

So all right, maybe it
was
a prosecution job. A Crown brief for murder could mean months of steady work, relief from the one-day Magistrates' Court brawls. Government money, straight up, and no catfights over fees.

And such a brief, in the cold summer of his exile, could only come from Harlan. If it was Harlan's name on the backsheet, Charlie knew what to expect. He'd wind up covering the miles for the crazy old bastard, leaving Harlan responsible for the genius and the big moments. Fair exchange, he thought.

The lift ejected him and his gust of street air on the eighth floor. He strode through the foyer to the door that bore his name. Throwing his overcoat at one chair and his bag at another, Charlie studied the trolley in the far corner of the room. Every other object in his office—Anna couldn't stand him calling the room ‘chambers'—answered an unconscious call for him: the filing cabinet, the back of the hard drive, the law reports, the row of framed certificates.

But the trolley stood there with its load of folders like a defiant stranger. He didn't know a thing about the world inside those folders, beyond the two printed names he could see: Murchison. McVean.
The Queen vs Murchison and McVean—Murder.

The ring binders were wrapped in white prosecutors' ribbon, the first one marked with Harlan's name as lead counsel. So he'd swung it somehow. The index volume bore the six-pointed star of the Victoria Police. The witness list: a dozen unfamiliar names, followed by some he knew—investigators, scientists, the photographer.

Charlie ran a thumb down the edge of the photo booklet, bound in the royal blue of the forensic science lab. Establishing shots, the back of a fibro house, a boat. Another boat, this one burnt. Plastic tubs, sitting on thick green grass, unlike the stuff of Melbourne, but more like, what? Ireland. Something slimy-looking—shellfish meat?—lined up in orderly rows on a white plastic sheet. A disposal skip. A shot of the inside of the skip, some sort of electronic instrument with a blank dead screen, above which was embossed the word
Navmaster
. A manhole in someone's ceiling, then insulation batts, a black object lying partially concealed under them. Charlie turned the booklet slightly, trying to identify it. Stuff in bins, so often the forensic treasure. Weir had once said to him that the criminal law is obsessed with discarded objects. A pair of upturned hands, the palms deeply fissured and callused.