Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

Neither did anything in the bar at the Milstead pub. An L-shaped room with a lounge area to the right, it had fallen in the formica wars of the seventies. The barman was a thin, sallow man with greased-back curly hair and a big nose broken at least twice. A small letter J was crudely tattooed in the hollow of his throat. As an educated guess, I would have said four or five priors, at least one involving serious assault, and a degree or two from the stone college. He hadn’t studied beer pulling either.

‘Helpin out,’ he said, putting down the dripping glass. ‘Owner’s on the beach in fucking Bali, regular bloke got done this arvo, wouldn’t take the breathie, the bastards lock him up.’

‘Thought you had some rights,’ I said. ‘You local?’

He gave me a long look and made a judgment. ‘Wife,’ he said. ‘Well, ex, pretty much. Bitch. Fuckin family swarm around here. Get the motor goin, I’m off to WA. Bin there? Fuckin paradise.’

He took my five-dollar note and short-changed me without going near the till.

‘Who owns the pine forest down the road here?’ I said.

He was pouring himself a vodka. Three vodkas, in fact. ‘Wooden have a fuckin clue, mate.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ya breathin there, Denise? Who owns the pine forest?’

‘Silvateq Corporation,’ a husky voice said from around the corner. ‘S-i-l-v-a-t-e-q.’

I took my glass and made the trip. A woman somewhere out beyond seventy, face a carefully applied pink mask matching her tracksuit, was sitting at a round table playing patience. She was drinking a dark liquid out of a shot glass.

‘G’day,’ I said. ‘John Faraday. What’s Silvateq Corporation?’

She looked me over and went back to the cards. ‘A company,’ she said.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Is it local?’

‘Collins Street,’ she said. ‘They sent me a letter tellin me not to use their road. Their road. It’s bin a public track since God was in nappies. Wrote back, told ’em to bugger off. Not another word.’

‘They backed off?’

‘No. Put a bloody great barbed-wire fence across the road and dug a trench behind it. Looks like the bloody Somme.’

She took a sip of the black liquid and ran her tongue over her teeth. ‘Course the shire’s bought off. Only takes about ten quid.’

‘This was when?’

She flipped a card. ‘More than ten years. When did that Hawke get in?’

‘In ’82.’

‘Round about then. Bought it from old Veene. He planted the trees along the road. Twenty rows, I remember. This other bunch planted the rest. Know what they call bloody pine plantations? Green graveyard. Nothin lives in ’em.’

Green graveyard. I thought about that on the trip home. The mine shaft the girl was thrown down was in a pine forest near Rippon. How far was that from Colson’s Road?

On the way home, gloomy, I stopped at Flannery’s place, a small village of dangerously old sheds surrounding a weatherboard house. He lived with a cheerful nurse called Amy who wouldn’t marry him. ‘Marry a flogged-out backyard mechanic whose first wife walked off with a water diviner?’ she once said. ‘I’d need time to think about that. A lifetime.’

‘Just as easy been the fence bloke,’ Flannery had said, ‘but then I’da had a new fence. This bugger’s got a bit of wire, coathanger wire, picks three spots, bloody wire’s vibrating like a pit bull’s chain. Down we go, drillin halfway to the hot place, fifty bucks a metre. Two holes bone dry, third one a little piddle comes out, takes half an hour to fill the dog bowl. Still cry when I think about it.’

Flannery was in one of the sheds working under the hood of a Holden ute by the light of a portable hand lamp. The vehicle was covered in stickers saying things like Toot to Root and Emergency Sex Vehicle and Bulk Sperm Carrier.

‘ My cousin’s boy’s,’ he said. ‘Virgin vehicle. Never had a girl in it.’

‘I can see he’s waiting for someone special,’ I said. ‘Listen, you know of Ned ever going around asking for jobs?’

Flannery was wiping his large hands on his jumper, a garment that qualified as a natural oil resource. ‘Ned? Ask for a job? You smokin something?’

‘Second question. He ever talk about a doctor called Ian Barbie?’

‘What’s this? Doctor? Ned wouldn’t know a doctor from a brown dog.’

I looked into the engine. ‘Dirty.’

‘Clean inside that matters,’ Flannery said. ‘Let’s go a beer. Got some in this little fridge over here, bought it off Mick.’

‘I can see the dent.’

‘What dent?’

‘Dent it got falling off the truck.’

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Making knives would be easy if all you wanted was a good knife. But you don’t. You want a perfect knife. And so, in the endless grinding and filing and fitting and buffing, the mind has plenty of time to dwell. Today, moist Irish day, sky the colour of sugar in suspension, I dwelt on Brendan Burrow’s parting words. All I wanted from Brendan were the details of Ian Barbie’s suicide. And then he said: The Lefroy thing. Heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then. And I said: Yes? And he said: Mance was there too.

Mance was there too.

The feeling of missing a step, of walking into a glass door, of being shaken from deep sleep. With Bianchi? At the same time as Bianchi? I knew the answer. Just before noon, I finished polishing a small paring knife and the dog and I went over to the office.

The file was at the back of the cabinet, not looked at for years. I sat down at the table and took out the record of interview. I didn’t want to read it again. I read it.

RECORD OF INTERVIEW

DATE: 5 June 1994.

TIME COMMENCED: 3.10 pm.

TIME TERMINATED: 3.25 pm.

NAME: MacArthur John Faraday, Detective Senior Sergeant, Australian Federal Police.

OFFICERS PRESENT: Colin Arthur Payne, Inspector, Australian Federal Police. Wayne Ronald Rapsey, Detective Inspector, Internal Affairs Division, Australian Federal Police. Joseph Musca, Detective Inspector, Victoria Police.

SUBJECT: Matters relating to the surveillance of Howard James Lefroy.

D-I RAPSEY: For the record, this is a resumption of the interview with Detective Faraday terminated at five forty-five pm yesterday. Detective, do you have anything to add to your statements yesterday?

DSS FARADAY: No. Sir.

D-I RAPSEY: I want to go over a few things. The decision to wait for Howard Lefroy to dispose of the heroin. You made it.

DSS FARADAY: Yes.

D-I RAPSEY: Did you inform your superiors that Lefroy was in possession of the heroin?

DSS FARADAY: No.

D-I RAPSEY: Why was that?

DSS FARADAY: I was afraid it would jeopardise the operation.

D-I RAPSEY: Reporting something to your superior officer would jeopardise an operation. Serious statement, detective.

DSS FARADAY: Yes, sir. As I said last time and the time before, it was not my superior officer I was worried about but other officers.

D-I RAPSEY: Equally serious. What was your reason for waiting?

DSS FARADAY: I believed Lefroy was dealing with a top-level distributor. We had no idea who. Just take Lefroy out, some other importer takes his place. Nail everyone at the pick-up, we at least have a chance of finding out who’s buying. Small chance, but a chance.

D-I RAPSEY: You say you discussed this with Inspector Scully.

DSS FARADAY: I told him. Correct.

D-I RAPSEY: What was his view?

DSS FARADAY: I don’t recall him offering a view.

D-I RAPSEY: Did he disagree?

DSS FARADAY: I don’t recall that he offered an opinion.

D-I RAPSEY: What if Inspector Scully says that he made it clear to you that he strongly opposed waiting for Lefroy to dispose of the heroin and wanted to…?