Shane Maloney - The Brush-Off

My presence within the stand of lilies, I was suddenly aware, had not passed unnoticed. An amorous couple reclining on the lawn nearby were beginning to cast hostile glances towards where my head extended above the leaf line. I turned my back to them, lest they get the wrong idea.

Was it really possible that Lambert could have got away with her CUSS fraud if not for the accidental depredations of a pair of skylarking ten-year-olds? Would Taylor’s forgeries have remained undetected in the face of public scrutiny? And why had Taylor been colluding with Lambert? According to Giles Aubrey, he hated her guts. Had the whole Szabo-Taylor story been a product of Aubrey’s notorious tendency to misrepresentation? Or had Marcus Taylor eventually become reconciled to his father’s ambitious young bit of cheesecake? Or had his broker, Salina Fleet, handled customer relations? Was it possible that he had no idea that Lambert was the buyer of his ‘appropriations’?

Did canna lilies, I wondered, benefit from the occasional dose of concentrated uric acid? This slash was taking on the proportions of an Olympic event. Marcus Taylor. Perhaps he, too, tried to piss in somebody’s garden. Maybe he thought he’d found the perfect way to avenge himself on Fiona Lambert. Maybe she had unwittingly given him the opportunity to engineer her downfall. Maybe he had wanted his forgeries to be discovered, as evidenced by the stamp on the back of Dry Gully. But not for the reasons Claire had postulated-not out of a forger’s vanity-but to discredit and destroy Fiona Lambert.

For months he had toiled in obscurity, producing an entire collection of fake art works in his ratty studio at the old YMCA. For months he had bided his time, waiting for just the right moment. For the moment when he could reveal that his perfectly innocent post-modern tributes had knowingly been passed off as the real thing by Fiona Lambert.

But something even better had come along. The CMA’s acquisition of Our Home. An irresistible opportunity-not just to avenge himself on Lambert-but to strike a blow against his dead father as well. Frustrated by his inability to obtain anything but the most meagre recognition of his own achievements as an artist-a paltry grant can be even more insulting than none at all-Taylor had manufactured a carbon-copy of Our Home with the object of compromising the integrity of Victor Szabo’s entire artistic output. Oedipus meets Hamlet on the banks of the Yarra.

At long last, the call of nature rang less stridently in my ears. Drained, I parted the broad green leaves of the cannae, stepped back out onto the lawn and gave the scandalised lovers a cheerful wave. Through the trees, I could see the white facade of the Centre for Modern Art. A scenario, part memory, part speculation, began to take shape.

Poor little Marcus Taylor. He really was a fuck-up. He painted his duplicate Our Home, but then got pissed and cocky and tipped his hand at the CMA opening. That little performance of his must really have set the cat among the pigeons. No wonder Salina Fleet had looked so nervous when he got up on that table and started waving his arms about. She knew what he was going to say. He’d given her a sneak preview of the notes to his speech a few moments before, out in the back garden.

Fiona Lambert was a cool customer, though. She didn’t betray herself, even though she was the one with most at stake. Later that night, while supposedly home in bed, she caught up with Taylor and sunk him and his troublesome plans in the National Gallery moat.

The sky was blue. Birds were singing. The grass was green and cool underfoot. I walked back towards Hope Street, where the Charade was parked, through a beautiful summer afternoon. I wondered how she had done it. How she’d managed to get Marcus Taylor’s unconscious body up over the parapet and roll it into the water. Knocking him out would have been the easy part. He was practically legless the last time I’d seen him, staggering down the Domain Road footpath.

His big moment had come to nothing. But he still hadn’t played his trump card. Our Home Mark 2 was still on its easel back at the YMCA. His day would come. Just you wait, he said. Just you wait.

Through an intermittent stream of traffic, I could see the very spot where I’d heard him mumble those words. Pausing beside an enormous Moreton Bay fig, I leaned against the trunk and recalled the scene.

Taylor coming one way. Me going the other. Up ahead of me, the Botanical Hotel. Ahead of Taylor, Lambert’s flat and, a fifteen-minute walk away, his own room in the YMCA. The disappearing tail-lights of Lloyd Eastlake’s Mercedes.

Rewind further. Up in the flat. Fiona on the phone. Out the window, standing less than fifty metres from where I was currently standing, also on the phone, Spider Webb.

The Missing Link. I’d been battling to put Spider into the picture. He and Fiona Lambert were, after all, far from a natural pair. But now that I began to put the pieces together, an alliance between the two of them made a certain sort of sense. Each was working Eastlake from a different direction- Spider looking for the main chance, Fiona needing help to work her gold mine.

Spider. Warning me off. Tidying up the loose ends. Loose ends like the fact that Taylor had gone to the bottom of the moat with his keys in his pocket. So somebody had to go back the next morning and retrieve the duplicate Szabo and dispose of the evidence of the Austral forgery factory. Loose ends like the fact that I’d got there first and had to be locked in the basement with Willy the Whale. Loose ends like Salina Fleet.

I thought again of Salina’s reaction at the moat. Those frozen expressions on her face, caught by the flashing ambulance light. Shock, panic, fear. Did she guess what had happened? Was her insistence that Taylor had killed himself a hastily improvised way of protecting herself, of demonstrating that she could be trusted to keep silent? And her appearance at the YMCA? Was she acting on her own initiative, hastening to clear out all evidence of Taylor’s work? Or was everyone just after Taylor’s version of Our Home?

Then I had come along, sticking my bib in. Not content to remain locked in the basement of the YMCA, I’d kicked up a racket. When Salina inadvertently released me, I put her on the spot. She was a fast thinker, but not entirely convincing in the clinches. And, by then, I’d seen the picture on the easel in Taylor’s studio. By then, I was starting to make a real nuisance of myself. I sought out Giles Aubrey, a man who could be relied on to grab the first opportunity that came his way to stir the pot, and gone running to Eastlake with what he told me. But Eastlake, in turn, told Lambert. So Aubrey had ended up at the bottom of the nearest riverbank with a compound fracture of the corpus delicti. At least Sal had the sense to make herself scarce.

As I stood there, concealed by the grey folds of Moreton Bay fig, contemplating my responsibility for Giles Aubrey’s death, Fiona Lambert came out of the block of flats. Hands empty, teeth shining, looking exceptionally pleased with herself, she crossed Domain Road and walked towards the Centre for Modern Art.

It was, I decided, time to blow the whistle on Ms Lambert. Get the cops on the case while she still had the hundred grand stashed in her flat. Detective Senior Constable Chris Micaelis would be hearing from me, I resolved, very soon. Just as soon as I’d made a couple of phone calls.

Once Fiona Lambert disappeared into the CMA, I hurried to the Charade and headed back towards the office. It was getting on for 4.30 and the ebb tide of early rush-hour traffic had begun to flow out of the city. Anybody with half a brain had already clocked-off and was headed for the beach.

Something I’d overheard in Fiona Lambert’s flat was exercising my mind. The world of high finance was terra incognita. It was time I got hold of a tourist guide. Even as I turned into St Kilda Road, I was pulling up in front of the Travelodge and fishing in my pockets for coins.