Peter Temple: An Iron Rose

‘Making things on this when Queen Victoria was a baby,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it’s outlived its usefulness. Might as well hang on to your old underpants.’

I thought about this for a moment. ‘Wish someone else would hang on to my old underpants,’ I said. ‘While I’m wearing them.’

Allie was pushing coal towards the glowing coke. She looked up, bland. ‘Surprised to hear that position’s vacant,’ she said. ‘Give it a blast. We’ll be here all day.’

I gave the fire a blast. Allie Morris was a qualified farrier and blacksmith, trained in England. For a long time I’d been looking for someone to do the horse work and help in the smithy. Then I saw her advertisement in the Situations Wanted.

‘I’d be in that if the terms were right,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘But I’ve got to tell you, I’m not keen on the business side.’

‘You mean extracting the money?’

‘In particular.’

‘You want to come around on Sunday? Eight-thirty? Or any time. Give me a hand with something. We’ll talk about it.’

I’d explained what I wanted to do.

It took a good while to get the fire right: raking and wetting until we had a good mass of burning coke that could be compacted.

‘What I had in mind,’ I said, ‘you do the horse work, I take the bookings, keep up the stores, send out the bills, and get the buggers to pay.’

‘Last item there,’ said Allie. ‘That’s the important function. That’s where I fall down.’ She shook her head. ‘Horse people.’

‘Tight as Speedos,’ I said.

‘I had to tell this one bloke, I’m coming around with two big men and we’re going to fit him with racing shoes, run him over the jumps. And he still took another week to pay up.’

‘I’ll need your help with some general work too,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I can’t cope. And I’m not all that flash on the finer stuff.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Allie, banking coal around the coke. ‘Got to get even heat for a job like this. Get the heat to bounce off the coal, eat the oxygen. Reducing fire, know the term?’

‘Use it all the time,’ I said.

Lew and the dog came in to watch. The dog went straight to his spot on a pile of old potato sacks in a corner, well away from sparks and flying bits of clinker.

Finally, Allie said, ‘All right, let’s do it.’ She was flushed from the heat. It was an attractive sight.

I had a sliding block and tackle rigged from the steel beam in the roof and a chain around the battered anvil’s waist. Lew and I pulled it up, an unwieldy 285 pounds of metal. You could tell the weight from the numbers stamped on the waist: two-two-five, standing for two hundredweights, or 224 pounds; two quarters of a hundredweight, fifty-six pounds; and five pounds. To get it under the smoke hood and onto the coke bed, Allie slid it slowly down a sheet of steel plate.

When it was in place, I unshackled the chain.

‘Got any tea?’ Allie said. ‘This’ll take a while.’

‘I’ll make it,’ said Lew. He looked glad of something to do.

It took about an hour in the intense heat to get the face of the anvil to the right colour. We put on gloves and I got the chain around its waist, pulled it to the lip of the forge and Lew and Allie hoisted it. The day was dark outside and we had no lights on in the smithy. But when the anvil came out and hung in the air, turning gently, the room filled with its glowing orange light and we stood in awe for a moment, three priests with golden faces.

Carefully, we set the dangerous object down on the block of triple-reinforced concrete I used for big heavy jobs.

‘Well,’ said Allie, ‘the thing will probably break in half. Put your helmet on.’

I handed her a six-pound flatter and a two-pound hammer and we went to work, hammering, dressing the face and edges of the anvil, trying to get the working surface back to something like its original flatness.

‘Lew’s grandfather found this anvil,’ I said. ‘In the old stables at Kinross Hall. Bought it off them for twenty dollars. Gave it to my old man.’

Allie Morris had just left when they arrived, two men in plainclothes in a silver Holden. I heard the car outside and met them at the smithy door. The dog came out with me. His upper lip twitched.

‘Lie down,’ I said. He turned his head and looked at me, lay down. But his eyes were on the men.

‘MacArthur John Faraday?’ the cop in front said.

I nodded.

‘Police,’ he said. They both did a casual flash of ID.

I put out my hand. ‘Look at those.’

They glanced at each other, eyes talking, handed over the wallets. The man who’d spoken was Detective Sergeant Michael Bernard Shea. His offsider was Detective Constable Allan Vernon Cotter. Shea was in his forties, large and going to flab, ginger hair, faded freckles, big ears. He had the bleak look men get on assembly lines. Cotter was dark, under thirty, neck muscled like a bull terrier’s, eyes too close, hair cropped to a five-o’clock shadow. Chewing gum.

I gave them the wallets back.

‘Lewis Lowey here?’ Shea said.

‘Yes.’

‘Like a word with you first, then him. Somewhere we can sit down?’

‘What kind of word? We’ve given statements.’

Shea held up a big hand. ‘Informal. Get some background.’

I put my head back in the door. ‘Police,’ I said. ‘Don’t go anywhere, Lew.’

I took them over to the shed that served as the business’s office. It held a table, three kitchen chairs, and a filing cabinet bought at a clearing sale. I sat down behind the table. Cotter spun a chair around and sat down like a cowboy.

Shea perched on the filing cabinet behind Cotter. He looked around the room, distaste on his face, sniffing the musty air like someone who suspects a gas leak. ‘So you been here, what, five years?’ he said.

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘And you know this bloke?’

‘A long time.’

‘First on the scene.’

‘Second.’

‘You and the kid. First and second.’

I didn’t say anything. Silence for a while. Shea coughed, a dry little cough.

‘You, ah, friendly with the kid?’ This from the offsider, Cotter. He was staring at me, black eyes gleaming like sucked grapes. His ears were pierced, but he wasn’t wearing an earring. He smiled and winked.

I said to Shea, ‘Detective Constable Cotter just winked at me. What does that mean?’

‘I’ll do this, Detective Cotter,’ Shea said. ‘So Lewis rang you at…?’

‘Two forty-five. It’s in the statement.’

‘Yeah. He says you got there about two fifty-five. Looking at his watch all the time.’

‘About right.’

‘Clarify this for me,’ Shea said. ‘It’s twenty kilometres from here. You get dressed and drive it in ten minutes. Give or take a minute.’

‘It’s fifteen the short way,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get dressed. I was dressed. I fell asleep dressed. And I didn’t obey the speed limit.’

Shea rubbed the corner of his right eye with a finger like a hairy ginger banana. ‘Old bloke worth a bit?’

‘Look like it?’

‘Can’t tell sometimes. Keep it under the mattress. That his property?’

I nodded.

‘Who stands to benefit then?’

‘There’s just Lew, his grandson.’

‘Then there’s you.’

‘I’m not family.’

‘How come you inherit?’

I said, ‘I’m not with you.’

‘We found his will,’ Shea said. ‘You get a share.’

I shrugged. This was news to me. ‘I don’t know about that.’

Cotter said, ‘Got any gumboots?’ Pause. ‘Mr Faraday.’

I looked at him. ‘Dogs got bums? Try the back porch.’

Cotter got up and left.

‘We’ll have to take them away,’ Shea said.