Peter Temple - White Dog

Subject’s connections make action difficult. He is a donor to both parties through Saint Charles. Large circle of associates includes former federal cabinet minister Michael Londregan, now in business as investment advisor in Sydney.

Two investigations discontinued under pressure. February 1995, death of employee James Gavin Medlicott, 36, found to be suicide. Medlicott twice arrested for sex offences, charges dropped. Present offsider Bernard Karl Paech, 44, accountant, worked for Massiani family company MassiBild 1991-97. [For Paech, see AI/857/86/89/94-98 continuing. For Massianis see AI/992/83-4/92-6 continuing.]

MassiBild and associated companies involved in many deals with Saint Charles. Paech operates from office in Little Collins Street, Melbourne. Michael Raimond Franklin, mentioned earlier, worked for Casterton Construction of Brisbane (a company with links to Haig and Paech) from 1986 before moving to MassiBild in Melbourne in 1989. Informant W3 identifies Franklin as key player until he left Massiani in 1995 to start property development firm Joinville Development. Paech was for a time co-director of the parent company, Yardlive. [See Attachment 3A.]

That was the end of the fragment. The report said more would follow. I looked at the photographs. Two men on a city street, the blurred foreground suggesting that the photographer was across the road. 3A was written in a corner. The taller man was Mickey Franklin looking sideways at his companion, questioning, two fingers holding his dark glasses up on his forehead.

The other man was broad, pudgy, balding, round glasses, scratching his head. Was this Bernie Paech?

The second photograph, labelled 3B, showed the deck of what was probably a big motor yacht seen through a thicket of masts and rigging. A man in a T-shirt was talking to a young woman in a bikini, a girl with short wet-looking blonde hair. Anthony Haig?

Seeks company of much younger women.

When did he start doing that? How old did you have to be to be accused of this offence?

Another woman had her naked back to the camera. To her right, a fat man with a shaven head, dark glasses, was looking into the camera, pointing. He had a cigarette in his mouth.

This would then be Charles Hartfield, solicitor, once of Melbourne, now of Monaco. He didn’t look too happy at the instant of being snapped but he would probably look content on other occasions. But perhaps not. Pinching $30 million, dumping the wife and kids, becoming a Pole, that could carry a price. In the long run, it might have been easier to do honest work in William Street, drive home to Kew or Glen Iris in the BMW, go to the place at the beach in the Merc wagon on weekends.

I looked at the first photograph again, Mickey Franklin and Bernie Paech in the street. Now I saw that Bernie wasn’t scratching his head, he was on the phone. Mickey was wearing a well-cut piece of cloth — it lay on him like oil on a dead penguin.

Too late to ease my way out of this? It was a job for a team and a team might not get anywhere either. Mickey had no doubt done naughty things, that was the norm in his line of work. But you didn’t get knocked for it. Apart from which, he’d been on his own for years, a corner-shop operator, no threat to the Massianis or any other giant. Sarah Longmore might or might not have killed Mickey but I was highly unlikely to find any other firm suspects.

An involuntary groan, a sound born of impotence and anxiety. It was followed by thoughts of coffee. I set out for Brunswick Street. The street was abuzz, teeming with people talking on their mobiles about their fantastic new jobs/projects/relationships. Until recently, I would have had a quick browse in the bookshop where the gun shop used to be, but it too was gone. A business called Twicks in its place, and, in due course, Twicks, a purveyor of tastefully arranged homewares made by slave labour somewhere, would be another stratum in the ghostly midden of departed businesses.

Enzio’s was having a successful opening day. It too was trilling with mobiles and alive with the sound of happy banter. I found a seat against the wall for the second time that day and spotted a few Meaker’s regulars who’d transferred: the pharmacist who’d quit pill-dispensing to write terrible plays; the publisher with the drinking problem who’d once stuck her tongue into the tight cleavage of a cabinet minister’s wife at a book launch; the haggard maker of documentary films known to have tried to fake his own kidnapping to extort money from his rich father.

I thought about Mickey Franklin. He was starting to look like someone with a fair bit of unexposed form. A key player, said the document leaked from somewhere, no doubt a government agency. Player in what?

Olivier’s fragment didn’t have the sound of yet another investigation into rigged tenders, union pay-offs, cash and kind bribes, safety trade-offs, sweeteners for inspectors, over-invoicing, under-invoicing, insurance rip-offs, off-site beatings, severe discomfort caused by poisoned fast food, tragic accidents in freeway traffic put down to the inexplicable failure of vital bits of brakes and steerings. It had the ring of crime intelligence-gathering, the sort of stuff passed around meetings in Canberra.

This stuff wasn’t going to help me. I had a name, that was the way to go. My coffee arrived. The taste of it improved my mood greatly.

After lunch, I went around to Charlie’s and spent the afternoon assembling drawers, each one subjected to rigorous quality inspection.

‘I can do this, you know,’ I said after a while. ‘It doesn’t require a twelve-year apprenticeship under a sadistic Tischlermeister.’

‘Just looking,’ said Charlie.

Wootton rang while we were cleaning up. ‘That name,’ he said. ‘I’ve tracked down the mother.’

Into Tingaboora under steady rain, just before 11 am, passing rotting wooden houses, listing hay shelters, paddocks growing crops of old car bodies and their innards — seats, engine blocks, gearboxes, radiators, drive shafts, axles. Erosion rivulets ran down the slopes, fence pickets hung in space over gullies, and, on the flatter bits of ground, a few sheep stood, sad prisoners in their massive growths of dirty wool.

There were four streets in the town, two running parallel each way, a noughts and crosses grid. I drove up and down them, all gravel except for the main one, looking for the name and number. The two running east-west turned to mud beyond the last unstable broken-guttered weatherboard houses. A hundred metres away, across a bumpy moss-green floodplain strewn with rubbish and engraved with the deep doughnuts made by drunken hoons, a line of willows marked a creek. Two cows were tethered at the end of one street, heads together. They looked at me, gentle eyes, creatures spared the pain of wanting something else. At the end of the other street, a goat was chewing a beer carton, absorbed in the task.

No street names, no numbers I could see. I gave up and parked the Stud in the main street, a few doors down from the pub, the Balmoral, beyond the hairdressing salon and the milkbar.

I sat, tired, the back, in the neck, not keen to do anything, easy to rest my head against the door jamb, have a little sleep. A car, a swish. Minutes passed. I sat up, wiped the windscreen. A man wearing a Collingwood beanie on top of a pulled-down balaclava was approaching. Sinister, helmeted, an impoverished knight reduced to pushing a bicycle with a flat back tyre. The eyes in their apertures looked at me, the man veered from his path to get a closer look. Our eyes met. He looked away, looked again, moved along, looked back, stopped. I thought he was going to come back, knock on the window, ask me a question. He wouldn’t want anything, people didn’t beg in these towns. But he didn’t. He made a head and shoulder movement suggesting some inner shiver. Then two women came out of the pub, perhaps mother and daughter, both grown up too quickly, both in lurid pink tracksuits. The younger one was carrying a child on her hip, her arm hooked around its midriff. It screamed, drummed heels. She stuck her cigarette in her mouth, smacked the child’s face with a fluid forehand, said something to her companion, a slew of words.