Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

Marcia unclasped her hands, pushed back her hair, started to speak, hesitated. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this, Mac,’ she said, ‘but that’s not the whole story.’

I shook my head in disbelief. I didn’t want to hear any more. I wanted to hold on to the Ned I loved.

‘The girls said Dr Barbie was at Ned’s house and had sex with them. Violent sex.’

Ned going to see Ian Barbie in Footscray.

Ned and Ian Barbie, both dead, hanged.

The girl’s skeleton in the mine shaft. The newspapers Ned kept.

Melanie Pavitt, naked and bleeding in Colson’s Road. About four kilometres from Ned’s house.

‘What are you going to do?’ I said.

Marcia got up, tugged at her sweater. ‘Nothing. I’m not going to do anything. They’re dead. Both men. What’s the point of doing anything now? The families have had enough pain.’

She came over, put her hand on my arm. I could smell her hair, a rose garden far away.

‘Mac, I’ve destroyed Daryl’s report,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I think you and I are the only people who know about this. The two of us and the girls. They probably don’t even remember it. I’m protecting myself, I can’t deny that. I was in charge, I’m responsible for the girls’ welfare. But I’m a victim here too. I knew nothing about what happened. Daryl left this thing behind like a time bomb.’

I didn’t say anything.

Marcia squeezed my arm gently. ‘Mac, I think I’m doing the right thing for everyone. Is it the right thing? If you think it isn’t, I’ll go public, take the consequences. If you think it is, we never speak of the matter again. To anyone.’

What else was there to say? ‘Yes.’ I said. ‘It’s the right thing.’

At her car, engine running, window down, she said, not looking at me, ‘God, I’m glad that’s over. Would you like to have a drink some time, dinner? Anything?’

I pulled myself together. ‘Drink, dinner, followed by anything. And everything.’

‘I’ll call you,’ she said, hint of a smile.

I watched the car go down the lane, turn, heard a little growl of acceleration. I didn’t want to go inside, didn’t know what to do with myself, got into the Land Rover and drove.

Stan Harrop and his son, David, were in the northwest corner of the field nursery on Stan’s property, talking to the driver of a tip truck carrying a load of stones. I parked at the gate and made my way along the paths between raised north-south beds. David gave me a salute. He was about twenty-five, thin and sandy, with Stan’s big hands. Stan had waited until he was nearly fifty to take his shot at immortality with David’s mother.

‘A wall, Mac,’ Stan said. ‘A drystone wall. Twenty metres of wall. Know anything about drystone walls?’

‘Been a while,’ I said. When I was sixteen my father and I built two hundred metres of drystone wall on a property called Arcadia near Wagga. In my mind I saw a man and a boy and a pile of stones in the burning day, and heard my father say: Stone you need’s at the bottom of the bloody pile. That’s the way nature works. In bloody opposition to man.

‘ So where d’ya want ’em?’ the driver said. He was a fat, sad-looking man in overalls and a baseball cap with ‘Toyota’ across the front.

Stan scratched his head. ‘Well, I suppose they can go just here.’

‘Want my advice?’ I said.

‘Quick,’ Stan said.

‘What’s the line of the wall?’

‘North-south,’ David said. He pointed. ‘In line with that post.’

‘Take it slow and tip ’em out down the line,’ I said to the driver. ‘You don’t want any piles. Do that?’

‘At the limit of the technology,’ the man said. We got out of the way and he went into action.

‘The right stone,’ I said. ‘Finding it’s the problem. Much easier if they’re spread out.’

‘What about the footing?’ said Stan.

‘How high’s the wall supposed to be?’

‘Not high,’ said David. ‘Metre and half.’

‘High enough,’ I said. ‘Needs a trench about half a metre deep, metre and a quarter wide. Then you taper the wall to about fifty centimetres at the top. Put a bit of cement in the bottom layers. Purists don’t like that.’

‘Purists be buggered,’ Stan said. ‘Get the machinery, lad.’

I got gloves out of the Land Rover, put on boots. David ripped the footing in half an hour. We shovelled out the earth, hard work, and then we got the strings up. I showed Stan how to arrange the bottom rocks, then David and I carried and Stan laid. It was punishing work, moving heavy objects not created with human hands in mind.

‘Wanted to give the women a surprise,’ Stan said. ‘Gone to Melbourne. To shop. What kind of bloody activity is that?’

‘I could learn to shop,’ I said. ‘Can’t be that hard.’

I was glad to be there, glad that there was somewhere I could be, glad to be doing something that prevented me from thinking about Ned. I desperately didn’t want to think about Ned.

We stopped when the light was almost gone, cold biting the face.

‘I think I see a drink in your future,’ Stan said, patting my shoulder. ‘Thought metal was the area of expertise. Now you turn out to know a bit about stone.’

We sat in Stan’s office next to the low whitewashed brick house he had built in the lee of the hill. A fire was burning in a Ned Kelly drum stove. David drank his beer and went off to feed the chooks. Stan took two more bottles of Boag out of the small fridge in the corner and opened them.

‘Something on your mind,’ he said.

I drank some beer out of the glass mug and looked at a botanical print on the wall. ‘Heard a story about Ned today,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He was lighting his pipe with a big kitchen match.

I told him what Marcia had said.

Stan blew out smoke, drank beer, put the mug and pipe down. He didn’t show any sign of shock.

‘Ned. Drugs. Sex with teenage girls.’ He looked at me over the big hairy knuckles of his clasped hands. ‘Go to my grave not believing it.’

‘Who’d invent something like that?’ I said.

‘You believe it?’

‘Rather not think about it. Wouldn’t have had to think about if I hadn’t gone poking about.’

‘What poking about?’

I told him about Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall, how my questioning of Marcia Carrier had led to her finding of Daryl Hopman’s report.

‘Just her word for it, then,’ Stan said. ‘Could be trying to shift the blame from the doctor to Ned.’

‘Then why mention the doctor at all?’

We sat in silence, Stan generating smoke. For a moment I had been going to tell him about the other things that haunted me: the skeleton in the mine shaft, Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road, Ned’s visit to Ian Barbie in Footscray. But Daryl Hopman’s report offered an explanation for all of them that was too chilling to speak about.

‘Better get moving,’ I said, getting up. ‘Boy’s at home without food.’

‘Boys find food,’ Stan said. He walked to the vehicle with me. When I’d started it, he said: ‘Learned a lot about men in the war. Scoundrels and saints, met ’em both. Don’t believe this about Ned, so it’s not going to change anything.’

We looked at each other, united in our desire to hold on to the Ned we knew.

‘Another thing, Mac,’ said Stan.

I could barely see his face.

‘Ned was like a brother to your father. Something like this, he would have known. See you tomorrow.’

As I drove away, I thought perhaps my father did know. Perhaps that was what he wanted to tell me on the night he shot himself.

We’d put in five hours in the grounds of Harkness Park- me, Stan Harrop, Lew and Flannery-before Francis Keany’s Discovery murmured down the driveway. What we were trying to do was uncover paths, using a large-scale plan Stan and I had drawn from exploration and aerial photographs and the old photographs I’d found.