Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

‘The Lefroy thing,’ he said. ‘I heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then.’

‘Yes?’

‘Mance was there too. That’s all I heard.’ He looked away.

‘Much maligned creatures, chooks,’ said Dot Walsh, frisbeeing out another precise arc of grain to the variegated flock of fowls. ‘Quite intelligent, some of them. Unlike sheep, which are uniformly stupid.’

She pointed to a large black-and-white bird. ‘That’s Helen, my favourite. After Helen of Troy.’

By her voice, Mrs Walsh was English, in her seventies, deeply lined but unbowed and undimmed, with hair cut short and sharp. I’d told her my business at the front door. She’d shown no interest in why I wanted to know more about the story her husband had told Frank Cullen.

‘I’m surprised Frank remembers it,’ she’d said. ‘I used to make a special trip to the tip with bottles after one of their sessions. Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters now that Simon’s gone. Come through. It’s chook feeding time.’

When she’d exhausted the grain, we went on a tour of the garden. Even in the bleak heart of winter, it was beautiful: huge bare oaks and elms, black against the asbestos sky, views of farmland at the end of long hedged paths, a pond with ducks, a rose walk that narrowed to a slim gate just wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

‘How big?’ I said.

‘Two acres,’ she said. ‘All that’s left of nearly a thousand. From a thousand acres to two in a generation. That was my Simon’s accomplishment. Simon and Johnny Walker Black Label. The old firm, he used to say. Still, he was a lovely man, lovely. Just unfirm of purpose.’

She moved her head like her hens as she talked, quick sideways jerks, little tilts, chin up, chin down, eyes darting.

I got on to the subject. ‘You never saw the girl that night?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I was in Queensland with Fiona, our daughter. She was having domestic trouble. Temperament like Simon, I’m afraid. Forty-six and still thinks that responsibility is something for grown-ups.’

‘Could you put a date on that trip?’

‘Oh yes. October 1985. My granddaughter had her tenth birthday while I was there.’

‘May I ask you what your husband told you happened?’

‘Simon ran out of cigarettes at about ten o’clock. It often happened. It was a Thursday night I think, my first night away. He drove down to the Milstead pub. He used to take the back roads. He was coming back down Colson’s Road, do you know it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, he came around a bend and there was this girl by the side of the road. Not a stitch on. Naked. She’d been beaten. He got her into the car and brought her back here.’

‘He didn’t think of going to the police?’

‘The police? No. He thought she needed medical attention.’

‘She was badly hurt?’

‘He thought so at first. Lots of blood. But most of it had come from her nose. That was swollen. Simon thought it might be broken. There were red puffy welts all over her body as if she had been whipped, he said. And she had scratches everywhere and dust and what looked like cement stuck to her. But he didn’t think she was seriously hurt.’

‘Why didn’t he take her to casualty?’

She gave me her sharp little look. ‘Simon was a drunk, Mr Faraday,’ she said, no irritation in her voice, ‘but he wasn’t a fool. It was half past ten at night. He would have had at least half a bottle of whisky under his belt by then. He’d already had his licence suspended once. The safest thing for both of them was to bring her here and get someone else to take her to hospital.’

‘Did he find out how she got her injuries?’

She didn’t answer for a while. We were walking between low walls of volcanic stone towards the back of the old redbrick farmhouse. The sky had cleared in the west and the last of the sun was warming an aged golden Labrador where it sat watching us, fat bottom flat on the verandah boards.

‘In the beginning, in the car, Simon said she was crying and babbling and saying the name “Ken” over and over again. He couldn’t get any sense out of her. He thought she was on drugs. When they got here, he gave her a gown to put on and he went to the telephone to ring Brian. That’s his nephew, he farms about ten minutes from here. He wanted Brian to take her to casualty. That’s when the girl attacked him.’

‘Attacked him?’

‘Tried to get the phone away from him and punched him.’

‘He’d told her what he was doing? Phoning someone to take her to hospital?’

‘I suppose so. He said she shouted, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll say you raped me”. Her nose was bleeding again and her blood got all over him. I saw his jumper when I got back.’

‘So he didn’t phone?’

‘No. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to, Mr Faraday. Went into shock, I imagine.’

We’d reached the verandah. The dog came upright by sliding its forelegs forward until they went over the edge and dropped to the first step.

‘This bloke’s in worse shape than I am,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘Needs two new hips. Can I offer you a beer? I have a Cooper’s Sparkling this time every day.’

We sat on the side verandah in the weak sun and drank beer. I had a pewter mug with a glass bottom and an inscription. I held the mug away from me to read it: To Sim, a mad Australian, from his comrades, 610 Squadron, Biggin Hill, 1944.

‘ He was in the RAF,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘He was in England doing an agriculture course when the war broke out, so he joined up. He was billeted with my aunt for a while. That’s where I met him.’

I said, ‘Biggin Hill was a fighter station, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at the sky as if expecting to see a Spitfire come out of the sun. ‘He never got over the war. None of them did, really. All that expecting to die. Every day. For so long. And they were so young.’

A silence fell between us, not uneasy, until she said, ‘The girl calmed down after that, said she was sorry. Simon found some of Fiona’s pyjamas and a pair of her riding jeans and an old shirt. She showered and went to bed in the spare room. The bed’s always made. Simon said he brought her a mug of Milo but she was asleep. The next day, she asked if he could take her to a station and lend her the fare to Melbourne. Simon said she looked terrible, swollen nose, black eyes. He took her to Ballan, bought her ticket and gave her fifty dollars. And that was that.’

‘Did he find out her name?’

‘No.’

‘And he never reported it to anyone?’

‘No. He should have. It was too late by the time I got back.’

‘Did he think she was from Kinross Hall?’

‘Well, she wasn’t a local. You get to know the locals.’

‘But there wasn’t any other reason to think that?’

‘No.’

‘Do you ever think about how she might have found herself in Colson’s Road?’

She shrugged, took a sip of beer. ‘Simon thought she might have been pushed out of a car.’

I finished my beer, got up, said my thanks. At the front gate, Mrs Walsh said, ‘Things left undone. Sins of omission. Most of us err more on that side, don’t you think, Mr Faraday?’

Howard Lefroy’s apartment, the blood up the tiled walls, came into my mind.

‘Amen,’ I said.

A naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. A naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in October 1985.

Ned worked at Kinross Hall in November 1985.

And never set foot there again. Until a few days before his murder.

I took the long way home, down Colson’s Road to Milstead in the closing day. There was a pine forest on the one side, scrubby salt-affected wetlands on the other. Dead redgums marked the line of a creek running northwest. The last of the light went no more than four or five metres into the pines. Beyond that, it was already cold, dark, sterile night. Nothing cheered the heart on this stretch of Colson’s Road.