Peter Temple - White Dog

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

A single light coming down the street where the vehicle was parked. It stopped. Near the car?

‘There’s a motorbike,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Tell me what happens.’

Headlights came on, the bike was moving, the grey four-wheel-drive came out from the kerb behind it, followed it to the corner, the bike turned left, the vehicle followed.

‘They’re there,’ I said.

The bike went beyond the boot factory. The big, shiny vehicle stopped in front of it, on the wrong side of the road, on the park side. The driver opened the door, got out, in dark clothing, leaned back inside, doing something.

I heard Cam say, speaking to someone else on another phone, ‘Mate, I’m from the council. You’re parked in a residents’ zone, so we want to ask you politely not to do it again. But there’s a small penalty this time. Look out the window.’

Across the park, the man had left the driver’s door of the four-wheel-drive open, he was walking to the motorbike, not hurrying. He got there, got onto the pillion.

A yellow light inside the four-wheel-drive, a puff of yellow. It turned orange, then red.

The motorbike jumped away, turned right, mounted the kerb, violated a public park, travelled across country.

‘Any action there?’ said Cam.

‘The Toyota thing is burning,’ I said. ‘Outside my house.’ My front door opened, a man came out, stood, his hands raised in horror.

‘Good,’ said Cam. ‘Well, you might piss off now before the crowds arrive.’

The four-wheel-drive was burning inside, sucking in air through the open driver’s door. There was a small explosion in the vehicle, a thump.

‘Sure you don’t need a bed?’ said Cam.

‘Sure,’ I said.

The Stud started without demur and we left, my heartrate up but I was feeling better about the world. There is nothing like an act of meaningful violence to restore one’s belief in the possibility of some control over life.

I went to the office. It seemed undisturbed, the Mickey Franklin document box was in the new hidey hole under the fridge. Outside, in the wet, I paused to listen to the music from McCoy’s atelier-seductorium. Vivaldi. In a perfect world, these hackneyed sounds would justify a Special Operations Group raid on the premises to save some barely nubile art student from the advances of the priapic carpet-clad poseur.

To South Melbourne, to Vizionbanc, keeping an eye on the cars behind me. I gave the woman the file of photographs and Teresa Dilthey Milder’s e-mail address. She gave the pictures back to me in five minutes. Finally, to Carlton, to Linda’s apartment, a tired man, a man without a home.

Linda’s apartment was a nice substitute for a home. It had no food but it had sofas and a flat-screen television and a turbo-charged heating system. And it had drink. I took a bottle of Carlsberg from the pantry shelf and half lay on the sofa in the sitting room, feeling the room warming, my blood movement slowing.

What was the man waiting for me going to do when I walked in the door?

Next time I’ll bring someone round, and, when I’m finished, he’ll fuck you, okay?

I didn’t want to think about that. I was now in serious trouble. I had probably been in serious trouble for a while. Anyway, there wasn’t any going back. The problem was how to go forward.

The man who parked next to me under the bare oaks and gave me Janene Ballich’s name, that person knew about the night at the River Plaza, knew that at some point Mickey was there.

Was he saying that Mickey’s death was related to him being there?

Who could know these things and want to tell me?

Someone unhappy about Mickey’s death. Someone close to Mickey. Someone wanting the truth to come out but afraid to talk to the police. How could this person know about Janene Ballich? Told by Mickey? Why?

I didn’t know anything. I didn’t even know how to back off now that I’d shown signs of fight by having the Toyota torched.

I was too tired to go out in search of food, had a look around the kitchen, opened the fridge. Empty. Oh Lord, at the airport Linda had asked me to switch off the fridge and freezer. Just another thing left undone. I looked for the freezer. Where was it? Cleverly concealed in a cupboard.

Paydirt. Thank God I hadn’t switched it off. It held a loaf of bread and a round tin-foil container labelled chicken and mushroom pie. So what if the pie’s use-by date was long passed? Frozen was frozen, frozen was like death, there was no use-by in frozen. We could eat woolly mammoths found in glaciers if we chose to. I took the pie to the stainless steel oven.

Smeg is not a good name for a cooking appliance. The resonances of the word Smeg are not good. I opened a bottle of Spanish red, Marques de Murrieta, 1994. Linda had never got over Spain, she’d been there with her rock star. People should get over Spain, move on.

I took my glass back to the couch, got the television’s remote control to work. Nightcall with Barry Daly, an earnest-looking ABC man, strange hair, eyebrows in a chevron, his whole being oppressed by the news of the day. Barras Holdings. The name kept coming back. The hirers of the penthouse suite, what kind of company was that? I didn’t have to look up Simone Bendsten’s number, my index finger danced over the buttons.

‘We are indeed still active,’ said Simone. ‘A rush job for counsel assisting the building royal commission.’

‘When it comes to totting up the bill,’ I said, ‘do unto counsel what counsel will be doing to the taxpayer. Can you squeeze in a tiny inquiry?’

‘When did I say no to you, Jack?’

‘I cannot tell you how singular you are in that respect,’ I said. ‘Something called Barras Holdings.’

A second or two of hearing distant voices, bantering, and music, a laugh, the sounds of a good place to work.

‘That’s B-A-R-R-A-S, is it?’ said Simone, something more in her voice than an inquiry about spelling.

‘Yes.’

‘Not doing any work for the commission, are you?’

‘No.’

She coughed, small Melbourne winter coughs, brought on by cold and damp and melancholy.

‘Jack,’ she said, ‘I shouldn’t say this and it’s obviously pure coincidence but the commission is interested in Barras Holdings. It’s an investment company. On the public record, just in the last three years we can find nearly two hundred properties Barras bought, either off the plan or on completion. Apartments, houses, commercial properties. Barras usually sells them within months. For rather modest gains, as far as we can see.’

‘So counsel thinks Barras is dodgy?’

‘Our job here is research, if you take my meaning.’

‘I do. And who owns the company?’

‘Sole director is K. M. Etzdorf of an address in Monaco. He signs all company documents. The registered address is Marti Partners, Brisbane.’

Monaco, home of Charles Robert Hartfield, late of Melbourne, and Tony Haig’s boating companion. Alexander Marti Partners, accountants to both Mickey Franklin and Haig.

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘Does Barras deal with MassiBild and a company called Saint Charles?’

I could hear Simone breathe out. ‘Very much so. Directly with Saint Charles. And with companies associated with MassiBild. It’s complicated, to put it mildly.’

‘Far too complicated for me,’ I said. ‘I hope my next call is of a social nature.’

‘Calls of any nature welcome,’ she said.

I said goodbye and checked on the pie, poured some more of the Marques, an exceptional drop. When I came back, Barry Daly, sad as ever, was speaking against a scene of men in suits entering a building: ‘… sitting in Melbourne today heard an allegation that former federal cabinet minister Michael Londregan used his influence to get planning approval for three sixteen-storey towers to be built in a twelve-storey zone in Melbourne’s CBD. The proposal had been rejected four times by various authorities.’