Peter Temple - Dead Point

One day, I would phone in. One day when I had the words to speak to Linda.

At home. A fire. No, too much effort. I put on the heating, went to the kitchen, began the defrosting of Sunday’s stew and opened a bottle of the exemplary Mill Hill chardonnay. Then I slumped in the armchair, switched on the television for the news.

Innocents dying, the guilty walking free, nature mocking the frailty of human habitations, a hijacking, a royal birth, a supermodel on drug charges, a politician caught out in a lie, a cat’s incredible sewer journey, the death of a revered pornographer and the legal battle over his archive of people doing things. Sport. And weather, a map, a man who knew about weather: cold, rain, the possibility of periods without the latter.

Watching this necklace of images strung in some electronic bunker, a part of my mind that bicycled along dull streets and sat on benches overlooking nothing was thinking about Robbie Colburne.

What to make of Robbie? Gets into university. Drops out. Runs up debts. Departs for foreign shores in 1996. Not recorded as coming back. Four years later, back nevertheless, renews his driver’s licence and, notwithstanding his credit history, gets a credit card with a $10,000 limit. Appears in Melbourne with a small but expensive wardrobe, gets a casual job as a barman, dies of a drug overdose.

A short but puzzling life.

Someone had to know more about Robbie. Someone had to be able to put some coherence into this narrative. It was just a question of who. The woman who left the message on the answering machine knew something. But I didn’t know who she was.

I rang Cyril Wootton on his latest mobile number. The numbers changed all the time.

‘You wish to make contact with me?’ he said. ‘How unusual. That’s twice in a few days. The hole in the ozone layer, El Pino, to what do I owe this?’

‘Nino. El Nino. Pina Colada. Expensive, this thing.’

‘How much?’

‘Yes or no. I’m happier with no.’ I didn’t want to go travelling.

‘Yes, if properly accounted for.’

‘Was it not ever thus?’

‘Ever thus my arse,’ said Wootton.

‘Really, Cyril,’ I said, ‘at times your vocabulary is at odds with your appearance. Your carefully cultivated appearance.’

The town of Walkley was a long and narrow blanket thrown over the spine of a ridge running out the back of the Great Dividing Range. To get there, you drove out of Sydney and on through hard country, high, gaunt, dry. Everywhere black rock broke the thin skin of soil, erosion gullies furrowed the slopes. The light was white and offended my city eyes.

I drove around until I found the school, it wasn’t difficult, parked the hired Corolla outside the only brick building. The wind was a shock, buffeting, frozen hands pressing against my face.

A sign took me past murmuring classrooms to the principal’s office. In the anteroom, a stone-faced woman, big, sat on a stool behind a counter. She looked at me and asked, ‘You’re not Telstra, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Bastards. Kin I do for you?’

‘Carly?’

‘Yes.’

‘I spoke to you yesterday. Jack Irish. The lawyer from Melbourne.’

‘Oh.’ She looked less stony. ‘Well. Melbourne. My little sister lives in Doncaster.’

‘I’m told it’s a great place to live. Does she like it?’

Wince, shrug of big shoulders.

‘He’s a paramedic. She met him in Bali. This bloke with them, he was dancing, fell over. Heart. Young, too. Everyone panicked. Denzil just went over, pushed everyone away, sat on the bloke, got the ticker going.’

‘Saved his life.’

‘No. Well, for a bit. Anyway, Carol’s down there with him. In Doncaster. Supposed to get married but it’s bin six years.’

‘It’s a big step. Giving it a lot of thought.’

‘Yeah.’ She passed a hand over her right temple. ‘That or he’s got somethin else goin.’

Time to move on from Doncaster. ‘The principal’s in?’

Carly rose with difficulty and went to the door at the back of the room, knocked, waited, opened it and put her head in.

‘The man from Melbourne’s here,’ she said. ‘Mr Irish. He rang yesterday.’

She waved me in.

The principal was behind a bare desk in a big, light room with school photographs on one wall and a large whiteboard covered with diagrams and lists on another. He stood up and put out a hand.

‘David Pengelly.’

‘Jack Irish.’

We shook hands and sat down. He had wispy hair combed across his scalp and a thin, worried face, the face of a farmer forever anxious about weather and weeds and the bank.

‘Long way to come.’

‘Excuse for a drive. I had business in Sydney.’

‘Carly says you’re asking about a student.’

‘He would have finished about ten years ago. Robert Gregory Colburne.’

‘What’s it in connection with?’

‘He died suddenly. No-one knows anything about his family, next of kin. I was asked to look into it.’ All true.

Pengelly scratched his scalp with one finger, taking care not to disturb hair. ‘Ten years,’ he said. ‘That’s a problem.’

I waited.

‘The records used to be in a demountable out the back,’ he said, pointing. ‘Burnt down in ’94, my first year here. Couldn’t save anything. Kids. Year twelves, just after the exams.’

‘Anyone still on the staff from 1990?’

He pulled a face. ‘Ann Pescott. That’d be about it. Been packing it in, all the senior ones.’

‘Could I talk to her? It would only take a minute.’

Silence while he studied me. Then he got up and went to the door. ‘Carly, ask Ann Pescott to step in for a minute, will you?’

He came back. ‘Died suddenly?’

‘Drugs,’ I said. ‘Accidental.’

‘Not much accidental about drugs. I used to teach in Sydney, in the west. Kids shooting up in the toilet block. Got away first chance I could.’ He looked out of the window at a sad stand of eucalypts moving in the wind. ‘Can’t get away from it though. Can’t get away from anything, can you?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘No.’ He was studying me again. ‘I wanted to be a lawyer. Had the marks. My parents didn’t have the money.’

I didn’t have anything to say to that. There was a knock at the door and a woman in her forties came in, not confidently. I stood up.

‘Ann, this is Mr Irish, a lawyer,’ said Pengelly. ‘It’s about a kid from years ago. What was the name?’

I shook hands with Ann Pescott. She had an intelligent face, lines of disappointment, nervousness in her eyes: cared too much, waited too long.

‘Robert Gregory Colburne. He started at Sydney University in 1991, so 1990 would probably…’

Her face was blank. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Colburne, I don’t remember a Colburne. But I didn’t have the seniors then.’ Her eyes apologised for failing me. ‘Sorry.’

‘He’d have been a bright student.’

‘No. He didn’t come through me.’ She swallowed. ‘Must have arrived in eleven or twelve. There were a few new kids around from Forestry around then.’

‘Forestry?’

‘Conservation and Forestry, whatever it was called then, changes its name every year. They sent a whole lot of people up here from Sydney. Regionalisation I think it was called. Total disaster, city people, they all hated it and then the government changed and they all went back.’

‘So people around here would remember them?’

She shrugged. ‘Well, yes. Some. I suppose.’

‘Where should I start?’

A siren sounded, a harsh noise.

Ann Pescott’s eyes went to Mr Pengelly.

‘They’ll probably find their own way out,’ he said. ‘Animals generally do when the door’s open.’