Peter Temple: Dead Point

Ignite the fire, watch that Avoca kindling go up like a cypress hedge. Now, to the kitchen. What follows Bollinger and oysters in champagne batter? Perhaps a slice of sirloin, a thick slice, moist and ruddy in the centre, served with a cream, mustard and finely chopped caper sauce, some small vegetables on the side. Yes, but the kitchen wasn’t going to run to that. Next. Open the fridge. There was a piece of corned beef. A corned-beef, cheddar and pickle sandwich and a glass, glasses, of Heathcote shiraz, that was what it was going to run to.

How old can corned beef get before it kills you? I sniffed and pondered, studied the iridescent surface of the chunk of meat and, sadly, decided that risk outweighed reward. Now it was cheddar and pickle, mature cheddar, not mature when bought but now most certainly. And then it flashed through my mind that it was bread that made the Earl of Sandwich’s innovation possible, you needed bread. Next.

I thought briefly about getting out the Studebaker Lark, agonised, then rang Lester at the Vietnamese takeaway in St Georges Road. Lester answered, a non-committal sound with which I was familiar. He was a client. I’d sorted out a small matter that troubled him. For an immoderate fee, in cash, a woman lawyer in Richmond had done the paperwork needed to bring his aged mother into the country. Then a man came around and told Lester that it would cost $150 a week, also in cash, to keep his mother from being sent back. The money would be passed on to a corrupt official in Canberra.

Lester had been paying for three years when he consulted me, referred by someone he wouldn’t name. I made some inquiries, then spoke to the Richmond solicitor on the telephone. She had no idea what I was talking about, she said, highly offended and haughty. I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said I’d appreciate a bank cheque for $23,400 payable to Lester, delivered to me by hand inside the hour.

She laughed, a series of starter-motor sounds. ‘Or what?’ she said.

‘Or you can practise law in Sierra Leone,’ I said. ‘How’s that for an or?’

A silence. ‘Your name again?’

‘Irish, Jack Irish.’

Another silence. ‘Are you the one who killed that ex-cop and the other guy?’

My turn to be silent, then I said, ‘I wasn’t charged with anything.’

The cheque arrived inside an hour. I took it around to the takeaway and gave it to Lester’s wife.

A few days later, Lester knocked on my office door. He was carrying a sports bag and he didn’t appear overjoyed. ‘How much?’ he said. ‘You?’

I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.

Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.

I was the law.

Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.

‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’

Now I said, ‘Lester, it’s Jack. Any chance of Bruce dropping off some food?’

‘How many?’

‘One.’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Jack, you want prawns?’

‘Lester, I need prawns.’

A glass later, the buzzer sounded and I went downstairs and opened the door to bright-eyed Bruce, the elder of Lester’s two teenage sons. He’d come on his bike, cardboard box on the carrier. I tried to give him some gold coins but he was under instructions. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘My dad says no-one’s allowed to take money from you.’

Virtue may be its own reward, but there are other possible spin-offs.

I said, ‘I wish that were a universal principle, Bruce.’

He smiled, he got it. No shonky lawyer was ever going to get fat on this new Australian.

Upstairs, the phone rang. I made haste up the old, squeaking stairs, both hands on the food box. Lyall had been known to ring on a Wednesday night, Thursday night, any night, from any time zone, usually from some troubled place, satellite phone borrowed from the CNN person or a UN person or, once, from the head of the Chechen mafia.

‘Irish,’ I said, winded. It was a handy name, you could say it as a sigh, one syllable, a longer surname would have had to become double-barrelled.

‘Jack, Jack,’ said Cyril Wootton, his resigned voice. ‘Whatever became of obligation, of sense of duty?’

My breath came back in a reasonable time. Recently I’d been running around Edinburgh Gardens in the early morning, going up Falconer Street and down Delbridge to Queen’s Parade, running and walking, limping really, streets empty, sometimes a dero lying on the pavement, clenched like a fist against the cold, the occasional pale young man with dark eye sockets and a stiff-legged walk, and always the three women at the tram stop, head-scarves, smoking and talking quietly, perhaps the last sweatshop workers to live in the gentrified suburb.

‘Got no idea, Cyril,’ I said. ‘I don’t follow the greyhounds. Never bet on anything that’s trying to catch something else, that’s the principle. Good names, though.’

In the moment before he spoke again, I heard the sounds of his midweek haunt, a pub in Kew he stopped off at to slake the thirst he developed after leaving the Windsor in Spring Street.

It was a raffish spot for Kew: two financial advisers had once fought to tears in the toilet, and the legend was that three pairs of women’s underpants were found in the beer garden after a local real-estate agency’s Christmas party in 1986.

Wootton expelled breath. ‘There is considerable anxiety,’ he said. ‘I am under pressure to produce results. And you cannot be contacted.’

I felt some contrition. I hadn’t done any serious looking for Robbie Colburne, occasional barman.

‘Feelers are out, Cyril,’ I said.

‘What feelers?’

‘He’s not using his vehicle, that narrows things.’

‘Narrows?’ There was no belief in Cyril’s voice. ‘Are you saying he hasn’t gone anywhere?’

‘Within limits.’

The trawl through the airlines hadn’t produced the name but that meant nothing. You could give any name if you paid cash to fly or you could travel by bus or taxi or a friend could give you a lift or you could ride your bicycle out of town, rollerblade, run, walk, limp.

‘Quite,’ he said in his assumed Coldstream Guards officer’s voice. ‘Is he spending?’

‘He’s a part-time barman. What would he have to spend?’

‘So you’ve got nothing to show for three days?’

‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘I’m probably being over sensitive, but, at this moment, my inclination is to say bugger off, get someone else. Silly, but that’s my state of mind.’

While Wootton weighed up his options, I listened to a surf of witty real-estate and financial-advice banter, the women shrieking, the men baying like hounds, randy hounds.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘it’s serious.’

Even against that background of happy parasites at play, I recognised a Wootton plea.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘My total attention to this matter.’

He caught my tone, knew that I was in earnest. ‘Yes. Give me a ring, old chap.’ I’d be giving him more than a ring. I’d be paying him a visit, and the thought gave me no pleasure.

By ten, I was in bed, betwixt fresh linen sheets, steaming Milo on the bedside table, classical FM on the radio. In my hands, I held a novel about young Americans undergoing rites of passage in Venezuela.