Peter Temple: White Dog

‘It’s not cold,’ she said. ‘Is that okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘I lived in Berlin,’ she said. She took two brown bottles off a shelf, put them on the table, uncapped them with a Swiss army knife lying ready. ‘The people I was with drank beer all the time. Morning, noon and night. You get a taste for it. Warm German beer.’

She handed me a bottle. Dresdner Pils. I took a swig. A brown-tasting beer, medicinal.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Sit.’

We sat in the chairs, bottoms too far down, knees too high, held our bottles on the wooden arms.

‘Andrew says you’re a lawyer who does other things,’ she said. ‘Finds people, witnesses, things like that. That’s odd for a lawyer, isn’t it?’

Sarah Longmore looked at you with the eyes of a child. I felt that she might say anything: My dad says you’re a stupid prick. Mum says you always hold on to her a bit too long.

‘A long story,’ I said. ‘Are you happy about being questioned?’

‘Well, I’ll say when I’m not.’

‘The plea, that’s final?’

She had the beer bottle to her lips, indenting the skin. She lowered it.

‘Mr Irish,’ she said, ‘I’ve had all the shit I can take in a week. You can go now.’

I nodded. ‘The innocent should always plead not guilty. The murder weapon.’

She closed her eyes for a long time, shook her head, opened her eyes. ‘Mickey gave it to me. I had a break-in, other strange stuff. He got worried. I didn’t want the fucking thing.’

‘May I ask what kind of relationship you had with Mickey?’

‘Sexual,’ she said. ‘Are there other kinds?’

‘Apparently. Do you know much about his affairs?’

Sarah raised her eyebrows.

‘His business affairs.’

She shook her head. ‘Not a lot, no.’

You could get to like the taste of Dresdner. Did Bomber Harris’s teenage aircrews hit the brewery, send the fluid flowing through the burning streets, turning to steam?

Now she drank, a decent swig, almost a third of the bottle. ‘That’s good,’ she said. She got up and went to a black leather jacket hanging over a chair, groped it, found a packet. Camel. ‘Started again,’ she said, stripping the cellophane. ‘No non-smokers in ghastly fucking remand, I can tell you. Clean for three years. Do you?’

I shook my head. I had no desire to smoke a cigarette, the hit was so small, you needed another one straight away. But it always saddened me, self-denial, it spoke of times gone.

There was a plastic lighter on the table. She lit, sucked. Her cheeks hollowed, she blew smoke.

‘The relationship with Mickey, did that end over your sister?’

She put her head back, wry smile. ‘No. I got tired of it. He wasn’t fun to be with anymore. Bad moods, always half-pissed.’ She tapped ash onto the floor. ‘And you’ll want to know that the sex had gone to hell too.’

‘Seemingly trivial details like that can help,’ I said. ‘They’ll say there was an overlap.’

‘Overlap?’

‘Mickey was seeing both of you at one point.’

‘Screwing you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘News to me but it’s no surprise.’

I looked away and after a while she sat down and said, ‘You radiate disbelief. If I’d found out at the time, it wouldn’t have surprised me. Sophie wants everything I’ve got and Mickey wanted everything, full stop. Until he had it. Then it had no value.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘At an exhibition about eighteen months ago. He rang me the next day.’

‘How long did it last?’

‘I packed it in three months ago.’

‘Did he ever say anything about being in danger?’

‘No. I can’t imagine Mickey saying anything like that.’

‘Get any feeling that he might be?’

She looked at her short nails. ‘No. Well, his driver always sat at the next table. That’s all.’

‘Did he eat?’

‘The driver?’

‘Yes.’

‘Vegetables. He only ate vegetables.’ She smiled.

It was cold in the room. The foreman would have had the drum heater going, the place snug, the dirty window bleeding condensation.

‘Do you sell your work?’ I said.

Sarah tilted her head, her mouth turned down, a mock-severe look. ‘Offer them for sale? No. They’re usually commissioned. Do they challenge you?’

I had some beer. ‘I find them full of challenge,’ I said.

She held up her cigarette, looked at it. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Then all the fucking cutting and the welding and the grinding haven’t been entirely wasted.’

I thought about Charlie Taub. He would think that the cutting and welding and grinding were a complete waste of human effort.

‘Andrew will have to cast serious doubt on the prosecution case,’ I said. ‘If possible, he’ll want to offer an alternative explanation for Mickey’s murder. That’s the difficult part.’

She nodded. ‘If I could help, I’d help, Jesus, believe me I’d help.’

‘They’ve got a witness, says she saw you near Mickey’s on the night.’

‘That’s impossible. Perhaps she saw someone she thought was me.’

‘She’ll say she saw you on another occasion having an argument with a man about a parking spot.’

Sarah frowned, touched her mouth.

‘Did something like that happen?’

‘Yes. Months ago. This bastard nipped in behind me and took my park. I was reversing. I was enraged, I got out and he told me to piss off. I wouldn’t let him get out of his car. Finally, he got scared and reversed.’

‘We’ll have to get back to this, it’s not good,’ I said. ‘Tell me about the bruise.’

‘What?’

Sarah lifted her chin, took a drag, her eyes were on the ceiling, showing her neck, a long column and pale, tendons showing, a shadow visible on the right side.

‘They’ll say you got the mark from Mickey.’

We sat in the sagging Swedish Modern chairs, looking at each other, hearing the sounds from the world outside, muted by distance and obstruction but still hard and clanging.

The cigarette was over. She got up, went to the stove, opened the door and tossed the butt in.

‘I’ve often had bruises,’ she said.

I waited, drank some more beer. There was a new noise now, a siren, intermittent, a lonely sound. Sarah turned.

‘I was unloading some stuff from a truck last Wednesday. A bit slipped, caught me in the throat.’

She unzipped her right sleeve, showed me her forearm. On the intimate inner-arm skin below the elbow was a lavender blotch. ‘I bruise easily. Banged this against a piece of scrap yesterday. Hardly felt it.’

The siren had stopped. The other noises had gone too, as if its mournful wail had been a signal to desist.

‘You came here after court?’ I said.

‘I’m not letting this fucking unbelievably awful bullshit take over my life. If I don’t carry on as normal I’ll lose my mind.’

‘Andrew will want you to testify,’ I said. ‘It would be best if he knew about anything that might be damaging.’

Sarah sat down, sank into the chair, legs apart, held the bottle of Dresdner Pils in both hands. I saw the tiny pinch of flesh between her eyes.

‘It’s not a pure and holy life,’ she said. ‘I got a conviction for possession. Just dope. Andrew appeared for me. I don’t think he remembers.’

‘No surprises, that’s what makes a defence lawyer happy,’ I said. ‘Drew wouldn’t want you remembering anything under cross-examination.’

‘Such as?’

‘An extreme example would be a similar death of someone else close to you.’

Sarah closed her eyes and shook her head, slowly, as if in pain. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’

‘You said you had a break-in. Where was that?’

She opened her eyes. Hazel would be the colour. ‘Where I live. At my father’s townhouse in St Kilda. I suppose break-in isn’t the word. There wasn’t any breaking.’