Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

‘Surprised at you, Mac. Everybody knows zugzwang.’

‘Withdrawing, Lewis? Last chance.’ I put my hand on the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

‘ Open it,’ he said. ‘At “z”.’

I did. ‘Zugbloodyzwang,’ I said. ‘You little…’

There was no recovering from zugzwang. We were packing up, when I said, ‘Think about what I said about school?’

He didn’t look at me. ‘Thinkin about it,’ he said. ‘Thinkin about it a lot.’

When Lew went off to bed, I put another log on the fire, fetched a glass of the red, got out a book Stan had lent me called The Plant Hunter: A Life of Colonel A. E. Hillary. I was on page four when Lew came in wearing pyjamas.

‘Forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘I was lookin in Ned’s Kingswood for my stopwatch. He used to take me out on the road and drop me for my run and I left the watch in the car one day.’ He held out a piece of paper. ‘This was on the floor.’

I took it. It was a ticket from a parking machine, a Footscray Council parking machine in the Footscray Library parking area. It was valid until 3.30 pm on 11 July. That was two days before Ned’s death.

‘Make sense to you?’ I said.

Lew shook his head. ‘Ned had to go to Melbourne, he started complainin a month before.’

‘Must be some explanation,’ I said. ‘Sleep well.’

When he’d gone, I got out the Melways street directory and found the Footscray Library parking lot. Then I got the Melbourne White Pages and looked up Dr Ian Barbie.

I put the Melways and the phone book away, refilled my glass in the kitchen, slumped in the armchair staring at the fire.

Ned had parked within two hundred metres of Dr Barbie’s consulting rooms. Two days later, Ned was dead. Hanged. Two days after that, Dr Barbie was dead. Hanged.

The wind was coming up, moaning in the chimney, sound like a faraway wolf. The dog and I went out to the office in search of a telephone number I hadn’t used in years.

I saw Brendan Burrows from a long way away. He had a distinctive walk, his left shoulder dropping as his left heel hit the ground. Even from fifty metres, I could tell that he’d aged about twenty years since I’d last seen him. You could count the straw hairs he had left, deep lines ran down from the thin, sharp nose. It’s hard to be a policeman and an informer on your colleagues. The days are cold, the nights are worse.

‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting down next to me. ‘Used to be able to do this stuff on the phone. How ya goin? Fair while.’ We shook hands. The country train platform at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne held us and a fat woman, exhausted, and two small children bouncing off each other like atoms in some elemental physical process that produced tears.

He put his hand into his leather jacket and took out a sheet torn from a notebook. ‘Ian Ralph Barbie, forty-six, medical practitioner, 18 Ralston Street, Flemington, hanging by the neck in disused premises at 28 Varley Street, Footscray. Your man?’

I nodded.

‘Got this on the phone in a hurry. Body found approx eleven am, 16 July. Estimated time of death between nine pm and midnight, 15 July. Cause of death, a lot of technical shit, but it’s strangulation by hanging. Significant quantity of pethidine. Lots of tracks. No injuries. Last meal approx eight hours before death.’

‘On him?’

‘Wallet. Cards. No cash. Car clean like a rental. Jumped off the top. Drove inside the building, got on the roof, chucked the rope over a beam.’

‘Don’t you need some special knot for a noose?’

‘Something that’ll slip. Must’ve looked it up. There’s nothing isn’t in books.’

‘Note?’

‘No.’

‘Any interest?’

Brendan’s head turned slightly. A shaven-headed man in an anorak carrying a bulging sports bag was coming down the platform. His eyes flicked at us as he passed. You could hear Brendan’s jaws unlock.

‘They look at you,’ he said, ‘they’re not on.’ But he watched the man go down the concrete peninsula. ‘Need a break. You get para. You bastards owe me. No, no interest. Another medico on the peth, can’t take the lows anymore, goes out on a high. Happens with the quacks a lot. Guilt. Feel a lot of guilt. Pillars of fucking society sticking stuff up the arm. Don’t call peth the doctor’s drug for nothing. Still, dangling’s a worry. Unusual. Needle, that’s the way they go. You got it, you use it.’

‘That’s it, then?’

‘Well, watch’s gone, clear mark of watch on left wrist. Probably nicked by the deros.’

‘Deros?’

‘They found him.’

‘Right. Brendan, listen. Scully-what’s happened to him?’

‘Been livin in Queensland? Outer space? Good things only for the man. Next deputy commissioner. To be anointed soon.’

‘I’ve been away. How’d he do that?’

‘Plugged a bloke into Springvale, suburb of smack. Smackvale. Three years in the making. Had to import this cop from Vietnam. Any day now they’ll announce he’s delivered half the Vietcong and a fucking mountain of smack. Scully’s going to be the hero of the day. Course, most of the stuff’ll be back on the street by dark. Catch the upward move in price.’

‘He’s a lucky man.’

‘Blessed.’ Brendan looked around, scratched his scalp. ‘You heard the shit’s flying sideways about surveillance records? About ten years’ worth gone missing in Ridley Street.’

‘They’re on disk, right?’

He made a snorting sound, like a horse. ‘They scanned everything onto a hard drive, three sets of backup floppies. But the bloke taking the floppies over to Curzon Street for safekeeping, he got hit from behind by a truck. And while they’re sorting it out, his briefcase gets nicked. Can you believe that? Oh well, there’s always the paper. But no, all the paper has vanished. Fucking truckload. Well, this is bad, but thank Christ there’s the hard disk.’

Brendan paused, looking as happy as I’d seen him.

‘Guess,’ he said.

I’d guessed. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Hard drive’s like the Pope’s conscience. Not a fucking thing on it. Hacked into, they reckon. Supposed to be impossible.’

‘So?’

‘Lots of people happy.’

‘You reckon what?’

‘Dunno. People don’t get together to make something like that happen. More like one very big person got together with some friends. Couldn’t just take out the bit the person wanted, they took the lot.’

I said, ‘And you take the view one friend could be Scully. How come the Commissioner doesn’t think that too?’

Brendan gave me a long, unblinking stare. ‘Yeah, well, the view’s different from the thirtieth fucking floor. Ground level’s where you smell the garbage. They’re all overdue, that mob.’ ‘I hear Bianchi drowned.’

‘A fucking tragedy. Cop resigns, buys waterside mansion in Noosa with modest pension and savings. Found floating in river. New wife says he went out for a look at the new boat, she falls asleep. Exhausted from a marathon dicking probably. Next morning the neighbour sees poor Darren bobbing around like a turd.’

‘What about Hill?’

‘Bobby’s making lots of money in the baboon hire business. Calls himself a security consultant. Need muscle for your rock concert, nightclub, anything, Hill Associates got baboons on tap, any number. Also provides special security services for rich people. Drives this grey Merc.’

‘I knew the boy would amount to something.’ We shook hands. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’

‘I only do it because you can get me killed,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘You go first. I’ll just have a smoke, watch the trains a bit.’

I was a few paces away when he said, ‘Mac.’

I turned.