Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

It was dark before the circus was over. We stood in the sitting room. ‘Helluva way to spend an afternoon,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s over. Time to get moving.’

‘A drink,’ she said. ‘Have a drink.’ The high colour brought on by the television appearances was fading. She tried out the name. ‘John.’

‘I’ve got a long way to go.’

‘Just a drink. One drink. What d’ya drink? Beer? I’ve got beer. Wine? Lots of wine. Bobo didn’t drink anything except wine. All kinds of wine. There’s a cellar y’know. Proper cellar. Bobo had to have a cellar.’

‘Beer would be good.’

‘Beer. I’ll have a beer too. Don’t often drink beer. Fattening. What the fuck.’

At six thirty, we watched the news on television. Melanie’s house from the air, the voice-over. ‘A thirty-two-year-old Shepparton woman and her de facto husband were found dead of gunshot wounds in their house outside the town today.’ We saw a lot of police coming and going and a young male reporter with receding hair identified the dead man as Barry James Field, twenty-seven, an unemployed building worker. Lee-Anne came on and said her dignified piece. The camera liked her.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Just right.’

‘Police are treating the deaths as a murder-suicide,’ the reporter said.

At eight o’clock, I rang Lew. ‘I’m held up here,’ I said. ‘Back tomorrow.’

Lee-Anne came into the kitchen with a bottle of champagne. The heating was on high, she’d taken off the fluffy top to reveal a Club Med T-shirt strained to its limits, her colour was back. ‘Perrier Something,’ she said. ‘Fucking case of it down there. All right, y’reckon?’

‘I reckon.’

I opened it gently. I’d have to get a cab to a motel.

‘Bobo had the cleaning contract at my work,’ Lee-Anne said. ‘Clean, clean, clean, it was like a religion. First place we lived in, rental, you won’t believe this, he used to get in the roof with this industrial vacuum. Huge fucking thing, noise like a Boeing, suck a rat out of a drain.’

I poured. Lee-Anne drank half a glass.

‘Dust in the ceiling. Couldn’t bear the idea. Can you credit that? I mean, who cares you don’t even know it’s there? Mind you, look at this place now. Bobo’ll be spinning.’

‘Looks fine,’ I said. Somehow I’d forgotten that we were twenty metres from a house where we’d found two people dead.

‘Light’s too bright.’ She went to the door and turned a knob. ‘Better. Dimmers in every room. Toilet, even. I thought dimmers were about bloody romance. Shouldn’t talk like this about Bobo. Drove the ute under a semi outside Wang. Horror crash, the paper said. Could’ve posted it. What I want to know is what the fuck he’s doing outside Wang when he tells me he’s in Bendigo overnight, big cleaning contract coming up?’

Lee-Anne came back to her seat opposite me. She put her elbows on the counter, held out her glass and looked into my eyes. She was looking startlingly attractive. ‘Bobo was number two. First was Steve. Don’t even think about him. Photographer. Just a kid when I met him. Coburg girl. Very strict family. My God, strict. You don’t know strict. You have to be Coburg Lebanese to know strict.’

I filled her glass, added Perrier Jouet to mine. Very good drop. Howard James Lefroy liked Perrier Jouet. Not the drink you’d expect to be having outside Shepparton on a freezing night in June, wind coming up outside, silver foil insulation on the unfinished wall vibrating like a drum skin, blood still on the tiles in the shaky weatherboard next door.

‘Not that it kept you fucking pure,’ said Lee-Anne. She put her hands on the counter. They were good hands, long fingers, nails not painted. ‘Not when you met a photographer. Called himself a photographer. Not what a lot of people called him.’

Lee-Anne put an arm up her T-shirt to adjust her bra. I was hypnotised.

‘Wedding pictures. Half the time they didn’t come out. Whole fuckin weddings, excuse me. Vanished like they never happened. Steve was always on the run from fathers, brothers, uncles. I donta wanta my money back, I wanta my daughter’s pictures, watta fuck you do with them? Not a street he could walk in safety, Steve, that many people lookin for him.’

We opened another bottle of the French. It seemed to last five minutes.

‘Listen, Lee-Anne,’ I said. ‘Reckon we can get a taxi out here? Take me to a motel?’

She put her glass down, got up, took off her T-shirt, threw it over her shoulder, put her hand behind her back, unclipped her virgin-white bra, tossed it away. It landed in the sink.

‘I don’t suppose you’d have a spare bed,’ I said, mouth dry.

‘It’s been four years,’ she said, coming around the counter. ‘I’ve still got Bobo’s condoms.’

In the night, she woke me and asked, ‘You seen dead people before?’

What do you say?

I left before dawn, kissed her on the mouth.

The title of Melanie Pavitt’s handwritten autobiography promised more than it delivered. It didn’t go beyond the age of thirteen. She stopped in the middle of a page with the words: I did not see Mum again. I herd she went to Perth with a man but I dont no if its true. She never loved me so it dosent matter.

All the letters except one were from a man called Kevin, written from Darwin and Kalgoorlie, never more than a page: weather, job, miss you, love. The most recent one was five years old.

The other letter was brief, too, in a sloping female hand, signed by someone called Gaby, dated 12 July 1995. No address. It read:

Mel!!! You rememberd my Mums adress!!! She sent the letter to me here in Cairns. Im living here with a man called Otto, hes a German mechanic and very nice and kind altho a bit old. Still you cant have everything can you. I was really shocked to see the things you wrote. The barstards shoud be locked up!!! You are pretty lucky to be alive I reckon, its like those backpackers mudered near Sydney, Otto new one of them, a girl. Id never have said that Ken woud do something like that, they are people you are suposed to be abel to trust!!!I suppose they think there money makes it alrite. Now you now where I am come and stay, theres lots of room. Otto wont mind. Its hot all year here. To warm a lot. Write soon.

Love Gaby.

I read the letter twice.

Ken?

That was the name Dot Walsh said the naked girl in Colson’s Road had said over and over.

… saying the name Ken over and over again.

I read Gaby’s letter a third time. I was in the kitchen, sitting near the fired-up stove, but I felt a chill, as if a window had been opened, letting in a gust of freezing air.

I opened the stove’s firebox and fed in the letters from Kevin. If he was Melanie’s killer, he was probably going to go unpunished, courtesy of me. Then I went out and got the Kinross Hall records. They listed a girl called Gabriele Elaine Makin, age sixteen, at Kinross Hall at the same time as Melanie Pavitt in 1985.

I found the staff list and went through it. No Ken.

At least two people knew who Ken was and what happened on the night Sim Walsh, World War II fighter pilot and drunk, found Melanie Pavitt naked in Colson’s Road.

One of them was dead, one bullet through the left eye from a.38 Ruger from at least two metres away. If my judgment was worth anything, Melanie Pavitt had not been shot by her boyfriend, Barry James Field, unemployed building worker. Lee-Anne described Barry as a calm, sensible person who was the best thing that had ever happened to Melanie. He also seemed an unlikely owner of a weapon the cops had in ten minutes identified as stolen from a Sydney gun shop in 1994.

The other person who knew what happened to Melanie in 1985 was Gaby Makin.