Peter Temple - Black Tide

I was looking at the women in the chairs. The one nearest was leaning back, getting a hairwash and scalp massage. Her eyes were closed in what looked like sexual pleasure. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Her ex-father-in-law wants to get in touch.’

He gave me a look of total disbelief. ‘She married again,’ he said. ‘The dears never learn, do they? Why they can’t be happy just doing whatever it is they do with men, I’ll never know.’

‘Would you know her new name? If she took on a new name.’

‘Of course she took on a new name. What’s the point of taking on a new husband if you don’t take the name? Might as well be married to the old one.’

He cocked his head, put a fingertip to the middle of his mouth. ‘George might know. George knows everything. He actually listens to what people are saying. I gave that up years ago. No-one’s told me anything remotely interesting since I was doing a certain Royal’s hair in London. And that’s a while ago, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me, would you? Absolute bitch of course, but the gossip? She’d just given the man she married for his impressive equipment the heave-ho. Anyway, she couldn’t bear being vertical for more than short periods. No-one was safe. I can tell you, I’ve felt that jewelled claw on my thigh. Rippling thigh.’

‘George?’

He looked around and shouted, ‘Linda, darling, get George to come out here, will you?’ To me, he said, ‘The old thing’s in there fiddling the books.’

A man who could have been his slighter, shorter brother came out of a door at the back of the room. He was holding black-rimmed glasses at mouth level.

‘What?’ he said, not happy at being summoned.

‘Chrissy Donato. She married Gary Connors. That didn’t last. What then?’

‘Married a man called Sargent. He owns all those ghastly wedding reception places. They bought the Mendels’ mansion in Macedon.’

‘Thank you, George. You may return to your culinary accounting chore.’

‘Very fucking kind of you,’ said George, pivoting.

On the tram, I thought about Gary. He might have more than one residence. People earning $350,000 a year could afford holiday houses. Perhaps the case of beer and the six bottles of wine were for his holiday house. Not a long holiday. The Mornington Peninsula perhaps? Somewhere along the Great Ocean Road? It wasn’t a promising line of inquiry. Nothing about Gary said holiday house. And if he’d gone away for a holiday, he would be using his cards.

I rang Des from the office.

‘Des, should have asked you. Gary have a holiday place? Somewhere he might go that you know of?’

Des sucked his teeth. ‘Wouldn’t know, Jack. The second wife might know.’

Chrissy Donato-Connors-Sargent had travelled some distance from a Housing Commission house in Broadmeadows. She now lived on the slopes of Mount Macedon, down a country lane behind high stone walls. I switched off and listened. Birdsong, the faraway buzz of a ride-on mower, the whop of a tennis ball being hit hard.

Chrissy received me in a conservatory full of jungle plants looking out onto a broad brick-paved terrace, beyond which was a thirty-metre pool, azure in a moment of sunshine. The tennis sound was coming from behind a creeper-covered fence.

‘Mr Irish, Mrs Sargent,’ said the large brown man in a dark suit who’d allowed me in.

She was sitting upright in a white metal-framed chair. There were at least ten other chairs in groups around two glass-topped tables.

I shook a long-fingered hand. Somewhere in her forties, Chrissy was taut-skinned, with short, shiny brown hair, strong cheekbones, big pale eyes. She was wearing grey flannels with turn-ups, brown brogues and a man’s business shirt, striped.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Tea? Something else?’

I said neither, thank you.

The manservant nodded, departed.

‘So Gary’s missing,’ she said, turned her mouth down. ‘I can’t find it in my heart to regard that as bad news.’

‘That’s a widespread attitude. But his father would like him found.’

Chrissy had a steady gaze. ‘Even bastards have fathers, I suppose, but isn’t it a bit late for him to be interested in Gary?’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, they kicked him out when he was a little kid. Fostered him or something. He was sent to this chook farm in Tasmania. It was like a prison farm, he said. They took all the fosters they could get. He used to talk about how he had to get up in the dark, do four hours’ work before school, four hours afterwards. I thought the experience had helped make him the shit he is.’

Fostered? On a chook farm in Tasmania? That didn’t sound right to me. I’d have to ask Des about this. ‘His father’s major concern is the $60,000 he lent Gary.’

‘Ah,’ said Chrissy, ‘now you’re talking Gary.’

A gate beyond the pool opened and a man appeared, a tall man, no visible hair on his head, wearing only small, loose running shorts, white socks, tennis shoes. His thin, sinewy torso shone with sweat. He wasn’t so much tanned as burnt the colour of a goldfish.

‘Tennis machine’s chucked in the towel,’ Chrissy said.

The man walked to the pool’s edge, bent down, untied his shoelaces, pulled off his shoes, ripped off his socks. Then he turned to face us, looked up, gave a hip-high wave, took off his shorts and underpants, kicked them away. He stood looking in our direction for a few moments, turned, bent his knees, did a flat racing dive. Jet aircraft with its undercarriage down. His arms were moving before he hit the water and he settled into an effortless killer crawl punctuated by racing turns.

‘Be a bit cold in there, wouldn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Alan’s got a thing about fitness,’ said Chrissy, wry expression. ‘Helps him sleep. Asleep long before I get to bed.’

‘I’ve really only got one question, Mrs Sargent. Sounds silly. Where would Gary go if he was scared, desperate, thought someone was trying to kill him?’

Chrissy didn’t treat the question seriously. ‘Someone like me, you mean? Have you got any idea how many people would like to kill Gary? It’d be like the Myer sale after Christmas. Push doors down to kill Gary. People killed in the crush.’

‘No idea then?’

She watched Alan churning the water. ‘Men are mad,’ she said. ‘In love for about sixty seconds, it’s just the way you look, your tits. Can’t love you for anything else.’

Alan did another duck-dive turn, emerged, ferocious head. Lean arms cleaved the water.

‘Cept my dad,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t like that. Loved mum. She was fat. He used to touch her ear, give it a little pull, always remember that. Walk with me to school, holding my hand. Remember that. Died when he was forty-eight.’

We sat in the huge fenestrated space, the house expensive beyond dreams, servants waiting somewhere, a beautiful woman, dresser of hair, a hardness to her mouth, fibro house in Broadmeadows floating out there in her past, sweet, sad memories of a patch of dying lawn, a father and a mother and a little girl. Arms around each other.

Below us, a rich man, thin, all body fat dissolved, was pushing himself: against water, against age, against the inability to sleep unless exhausted.

I tried again. ‘Gary didn’t have a holiday place that you know of? Anything like that? Somewhere he might go?’

Chrissy laughed. ‘No. Not in my time. And not ever, I’d say. Gary wouldn’t know how to take a holiday. Not a normal holiday. Sex tour, gambling junket, yes, holiday no.’

‘There is one more thing. Personal thing.’

‘Ask,’ Chrissy said.

‘When you broke up with Gary, was that for any particular reason?’

‘Particular? Well…’ She looked at me and smiled her wry smile. ‘Gary couldn’t leave women alone. It’s a sort of insecurity thing. He couldn’t stand to think that someone didn’t care about him. He wanted women to fall in love with him. That was one problem. Then there was the violence. And the coke. He was just barely in control. The gambling, that was out of control. He was making big money at TransQuik in ’85, ’86, ’87, and there’d be Sundays when all we had was loose change. And I had the bruises.’