Peter Temple - Shooting Star

It opened.

A kitchen, huge, smelling of bacon, the scent of bacon fat, the smell of morning.

A man was sitting, leaning a little to the left, at a long table, a wooden farmhouse table, a shearers’ table, built to seat twenty people. He was in his fifties, strands of grey hair combed back over a freckled scalp, a nice face. The plate in front of him held scrambled eggs, bright yellow. Free-range eggs.

Eric, the man Lennox Guinane adopted. Eric, who could fix anything.

The hole was in his temple, just in from the ear, a small hole, not even a hole, just a dark dent.

We didn’t pause, went through a door into the wide passage, me first. The electronic humming of computers, otherwise silence.

Victor Guinane lay over his keyboard, shot from behind, upwards from the base of the skull, his brains on the wall above the monitor, still moist.

Keith Guinane was in the shrine to Cassie.

He had been on his knees in front of the table, the table that held the candle, when he pressed the muzzle of the pistol into the soft skin under his chin.

The flame in the candlestick on the lace-covered table was flickering in the last of the wax, guttering. It would die soon, no one left in this house to replace it, to keep the flame of remembrance alive.

TWO-AND-A-HALF hours’ drive from Brisbane, we parked the hire car on a green hill beyond Maleny, got out and stood in the sunlight looking over the landscape. Below us, in a paddock bordered by hoop pines, grazed a herd of Jersey cattle, stomachs full as blown-out cheeks.

‘Pretty country,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I could live out here, grow avocados.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘You’re an urban creature, an expert on coffee. Besides, they don’t need legal drug distributors around here. They grow their own. Time to go.’

The farmhouse was at the head of the valley, a handsome white timber building on stilts, verandahs on three sides, an elaborate portico. Behind it were outbuildings, all painted white, a water tank tower, not high, and a stand of trees.

We drove over a juddering cattlegrid and triggered some kind of alarm because I could see the white front door of the farmhouse go dark. Someone had opened it and was watching us come. Then the door closed, the space went white again.

The long driveway led past a pond, a big pond with an island and rushy banks and a jetty where a rowboat was tied up. Four horses, one a yearling, watched us from their post-and-rail paddock beyond the water.

As we neared the house, I could see into an outbuilding with horse tack on a rail, saddles, bridles, see a fowl run beyond that, washing on a line, a garage with three vehicles, a Mercedes, a four-wheel-drive, and a ute with a flat tray, two bales of hay on it.

‘Park at the front door,’ I said. ‘There’s someone waiting.’

We drew up on the gravel, got out.

The front door opened again and a man came out onto the verandah, a tall man in his sixties, country clothes, close-cut grey hair and a handsome face, a handsome sardonic face.

‘Frank,’ he said.

‘Nice place this,’ I said. ‘Nice country.’

A woman came through the door, also handsome, late thirties, a few strands of grey in her dark hair, dressed for riding, checked shirt, khaki breeches. She went to stand next to the man, put an arm through his, looked at us, not smiling.

No one said anything. I heard footsteps on gravel and a girl, a young woman, came around the corner of the house carrying a saddle. She was lovely, very like her mother standing on the verandah above us, but with a trace of her father in the mouth.

‘Hello,’ she said, friendly, a country person. She hadn’t noticed her parents on the verandah, saw them out of the corner of her eye, looked up in alarm.

‘What’s wrong? Dad?’

‘Nothing, Mel,’ said Tom Carson. ‘Just surprised to see our guests. Frank Calder, Michael Orlovsky, this is my daughter Melissa.

Come up, gentlemen, come inside, time for a drink.’

For a moment, I didn’t move, stood there looking at Melissa’s mother, holding Cassie Guinane’s eyes, hearing Christine Carson’s voice:

Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?

Then I said, ‘Just a quick one, we’re just passing through, a plane to catch.’

Vella rubbed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his long nose.

‘You could’ve saved me a lot of pain,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of pain.’

‘I didn’t know anything. Just a collection of feelings, bad feelings. It’s easy to get bad feelings when you hang around the Carsons.’

‘Oh, you knew plenty,’ he said. ‘All you had to do was mention the fucking Guinanes, point to them, and we could’ve gone around there, just a social call, kicked the shit out of them.’

‘Is that how it’s done? On the basis of exactly nothing, get a warrant to go around and kick the shit out of people who might be totally innocent?’

‘All we needed was a warrant to look inside the computers. For a Carson abduction-murder, any fucking magistrate will give you a warrant to look inside a computer. Anybody’s computer. We’d have found the photographs.’

We were in a smart pub in South Yarra, looking out over the Botanical Gardens, watching rain falling on runners, drinking Heineken. Vella finished his, motioned for two more.

‘And that brings me to the point again,’ he said. ‘Why? Why did the mad fuckers do it?’

‘I don’t know. We didn’t get to them because of motive. We got to them because of their voice-changing machine.’

Lying, lying to a friend, a man who trusted me, put himself at risk for me.

The beers came. Vella waited, then he said, ‘These pricks in forensic are slow but they get there eventually.’

‘Get where?’

‘There’s skin under Keith Guinane’s nails, some other signs. He put up a bit of a fight till they had him in position.’

I thought about sitting in the comforting study with old Pat Carson, the drop of whisky glowing gold on his chin, the pleasure in his voice as he said:

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. No respect. He had no respect.

Who had organised that? Tom and Noyce?

It would be dark soon, the park was full of shadows, the day was sliding out of reach. I thought about the guttering flame on the table in the shrine to Cassie. It would be long dead now, in a silent house.

‘Without shedding of blood is no remission,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Just something my mother used to say.’