Peter Temple - Black Tide

‘So he’d had a clean-up two months earlier?’

Lyall nodded. ‘I helped him put the bags in his car. Five of them. Took them to be shredded somewhere. Paranoid about his waste paper.’

‘Where would he keep his papers? Bank statements, credit-card statements, bills, receipts, that sort of thing? The tax stuff?’

‘There were some in the filing cabinets. The missing persons guy took them.’

‘Never gave them back?’

‘Probably gave them to Kate. I don’t know.’

‘Can I see his bedroom?’

It was purely functional: double bed, one bedside table with lamp, chest of drawers. A built-in cupboard covered one wall.

‘We tidied up in here,’ Lyall said. ‘Did his washing.’

‘Any signs of packing? Clothes missing? Luggage?’

‘Are you sure you’re a solicitor?’ she said. ‘My feeling is you’ve done this kind of thing before.’

‘Instinct,’ I said. ‘I rely on instinct.’

She smiled, finished the beer. ‘Hard to tell about clothes. Stuart wore jeans and T-shirts most of the time and he had plenty of both. His little aluminium suitcase isn’t here. He only ever took that.’

On the way downstairs, I said, ‘His car’s here, you said.’

‘It’s still in the garage. There’s nothing in it.’

‘Check the boot?’

Pause. ‘I don’t know. Bradley might’ve. He had it put on these jack things, sort of mothballed.’

The garage was reached through a door in the courtyard wall. A newish Honda was parked behind an old BMW coupe on jacks. Five wheels were leaning against the back wall.

‘You might like to wait outside,’ I said. ‘Just in case.’

Lyall took her lower lip between her teeth. A full lower lip, square white teeth. She handed over the keys, didn’t move.

The ignition key unlocked the boot. The lid didn’t come up automatically.

I got fingertips under the numberplate and lifted. It resisted. Came up suddenly. Empty. A strong smell of brake fluid leaked from a plastic container.

I looked around. Lyall had the fingers of her right hand to her mouth. But not alarmed. People who went into other countries illegally to take snaps would presumably not alarm easily.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

The glove compartment held a Melway map book for greater Melbourne and a VicRoads map book for country Victoria. Half-under the front seat was a crushed McDonald’s packet.

I looked at the instruments. Only 56,657 km on the clock. Reconditioned engine, perhaps, clock turned back. Was that legal? The trip meter read 667 km.

Nothing here.

Back in the kitchen, I said, ‘A final request.’

Lyall was getting another Miller’s out of the fridge. ‘I find it hard to refuse you,’ she said. ‘An uncomfortable feeling.’

We exchanged looks again. Plain. A very strange perception. ‘Would you mind if someone gave Stuart’s computer a lookover?’

She tilted her head. ‘Is that all?’

‘It’s all I can think of at the moment.’

‘Keep thinking,’ she said. ‘Something will come to you.’

It began to rain on the way back to the office, nondescript Melbourne rain that didn’t even seem to fall. It seeped. The Stud’s erratic wipers, hard-contact, soft-contact, no-contact, always added another pleasurable dimension to winter. Coming down the straight towards the Swanston Street roundabout, straining to see through the smear, my mind was on Lyall Cronin.

At the front door, a little tipsy, she’d said, ‘My regards to Mrs Irish and all the little Irishes. Or should that be little Irish?’

I looked at her. She pushed her hair back with her left hand. She wasn’t asking a question about the plural form and I did not have to answer the question she was asking. ‘No Mrs Irish,’ I said. ‘One little Irish, living with a fishing boat skipper called Eric. Somewhere out there beyond Brisbane. I try not to think about it.’

‘Well, then,’ she said, ‘my regards to the current stand-in for the previous Mrs Irish.’

That was the moment. The moment to say nothing, smile, offer a handshake, say thank you. The moment to be non-committal. To be non-committal and professional.

Bugger that. Linda was being kissed on the ear in public. ‘Things are quiet on the stand-in front. I don’t think I’ve given you my card.’

Many arrogant men in expensive leased cars are encountered at the Swanston Street roundabout. At any time of the day. I think they live in North Carlton. One of them hooted at me. I hit the brake, he came close to climbing the kerb. Nice moment. Immature, yes. There is a certain immaturity in taking pleasure at seeing terror in the eyes of a Mercedes driver. But parts of us are forever immature. I can name my bits.

No messages at the office but, better than messages, a cheque from Belvedere Investments, aka Cyril Wootton enterprises. I took my seat behind the tailor’s table. Assumed the position. Tried to think. Stuart Wardle was possibly not a line of inquiry worth pursuing. So what if he knew something about Klostermann Gardier and Klostermann paid Gary large sums. That didn’t link them in any useful way.

Stuart Wardle was probably a dead-end.

Still. The neatness of his office. Clean-ups.

I’ll say. Two in two months was outstandingly unusual.

An untidy man who cleaned up before he disappeared. Suicides sometimes did that. Nothing in the wastepaper baskets.

Nothing in the filing cabinets. No personal papers.

No papers in Gary Connors’ apartment. No papers in Jellicoe’s house. Cleaned by professionals? Like the two men who called themselves Detectives Carmody and Mildren of the Australian Federal Police and spent forty-five minutes in Gary’s apartment on April 5.

Gary. Gary was the point. On the last day that I knew anything about his movements, he was being watched by a man called Canetti, an ex-Fed with an ACT driver’s licence.

This whole business was beginning to look complicated. Complicated and hazardous. Rinaldi thought Gary’s link with Klostermann Gardier was a good enough reason to back off. Barry Tregear thought Gary’s TransQuik connection was unhealthy for me.

Don’t ask. Leave it. They want snow in Darwin, these boys, it falls.

I could tell Des that I’d made no progress, couldn’t really do any more. It was the sensible thing to do. Rinaldi would approve, Barry would approve, Drew would approve.

Des’s trim weatherboard, in a street full of helpful and strong young women, was going to be shot out from under him. An elderly man, no house, no capital, on the pension, where did that leave him? In some narrow partitioned-off space in a squalid firetrap of an accommodation house, possessions in a suitcase, lying on a stained mattress on a sagging bed, coughing phlegm, staring at the spotted ceiling, smelling the reek from the lavatory down the passage, hearing the body noises of the hopeless people on either side.

I took out the photograph. I’d looked at it every day since Des gave it to me. The three men in singlets on the scaffolding on the fateful day. A man turned away, unidentifiable. In the middle, a man laughing. The tendons in this man’s neck stand out like balsawood struts under damp tissue paper. He has muscular stonemason’s arms and a head too narrow for his short, slicked-down hairstyle. It is Des.

And next to him in the tiny picture is my father. He is big, big shoulders, arms, a full head taller than Des, dark hair combed back, wry mouth, amused, head turned to Des.

It was possible to see, in this small photograph, that my father is looking at Des with affection, enjoying his laughter. Des was a friend. That was the reason for finding Gary, for getting Des’s money back. My father would have wanted me to help him.