Peter Temple - Bad Debts

I took a step inside the room.

A man was in a sitting position on the floor in the corner to my right. He was wearing a loose pink garment. His left arm was at his side. His right was on his lap with a revolver in his hand. Something long-barrelled.

At first I thought he was wearing something on his head, a kind of big mask. Then I realised his head was twice its normal size, a bloated, suppurating mess.

I felt vomit rise in my throat, but I took another step into the room.

There was something in the spa bath. I couldn’t see what. Steam was rising from the surface. The water was much hotter than any bath should be.

I wiped my eyes. Something insubstantial was bobbing gently on the hot bubbles. It was clothing, I thought.

I took another step. And as I did, trapped bubbles turned the clothing around and I saw the skull of a body cooked down to its bones.

The whole spa bath was stock made from a human being. I was going to be sick. I held off until I got outside and then the cold air took the smell out of my nostrils and the urge went away. I stood out in the weak sunlight for a while, thinking. Finally, I took a deep breath and went looking for something to wipe off fingerprints.

You should report crimes to the police. I didn’t want to be the one to report this crime. Instead, I drove back to the man putting in the pole. He was tamping with a big metal post. This time I didn’t get out of the car. I wound down the window. He looked up.

‘You said turn right at the T-junction, didn’t you?’

He looked at me with contempt. ‘Left,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Well, fuck that for a joke, I’ve wasted enough time on this bloody call. I’ve got better things to do than fuck around in this wilderness.’

I took off with the wheels spinning. About two kilometres down the road, I found a signpost to Daylesford. This time Les was in the front of the butcher’s shop. Going into a place filled with meat now was an act of sheer will.

‘Thanks for the map,’ I said, ‘but I got lost and I had a flat.’

Les looked mortified. ‘Map was okay,’ he said.

‘Not your fault. I reckon I missed the second turning and took the third.’

Les thought about this, eyes roofward. Then he nodded. ‘That’d be right. Then you’d turn into Kittelty’s Lane and then you’d be stuffed.’

‘Stuffed,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, I don’t think I want to sell a copier to anyone lives out there. I’d rather do service calls to King Island.’

I bought some bullboar sausages and set off for the city. In Bacchus Marsh, I went to the post office and found the number for the Daylesford RSPCA. A woman came on. There were some animals in shocking condition at the health place in Long Gully Road, I told her. ‘You’d better send someone today or they’ll be dead.’

‘Long Gully Road,’ she repeated. ‘What’s the health place?’

‘You’ll see the sign,’ I said. ‘Look in the cinderblock building.’

I was reasonably sure they didn’t record calls to the RSPCA. Almost everywhere else seemed to.

On the way back, I thought about Vietnam. In my time there I’d seen a fair number of dead and dying people. It puts another layer of skin on you. I should have been in shock at finding the bodies. Instead, I was feeling mildly elated. My instinct to pursue the trail of Ronnie had been right. Unless this matter was even more complicated than it appeared, one of the bodies was almost certainly his. The other man could be his old pal ex-doctor Paul Gilbert. I thought about the revolver in the man’s hand. Had he shot himself? Had he shot the person in the spa first? I tried to remember the colour of the water in the spa. I hadn’t registered it as any particular colour. Would it have been dark if the person had been shot in the bath? But the person might have been shot dead earlier and put in the bath.

But even if I had found Ronnie, that didn’t advance things much. All I knew now was that the man accused of running down Anne Jeppeson ten years before had died violently, followed shortly by his accuser. I knew that Danny had believed he was innocent of the crime and that his wife said he had been told this by a woman conveying a message from her dying husband. I also knew that Danny McKillop had left messages for Ronnie Bishop. Then Ronnie had come to Melbourne and telephoned Danny.

The only obvious thing about all this was that it went back to Anne Jeppeson’s death. That was what linked the dead men. Another obvious thing was that this was a good time to take a holiday in Queensland. I could simply run away from all this. I had run away from the private school my grandfather sent me to. I had run away from my mother’s expectations and joined the army. I had run away from my wife’s death and from my partner and from my duty to a client. Why not run away? Why change a lifetime’s response now?

It’s never too late to change. When I got to my office, I rang a man called Mike Drake in the Attorney-General’s department. I’d been at law school with him and he had almost gone into partnership with Drew and me.

He sounded tired. ‘You want me to ask the NCA if they know someone called Tony Baker? Are you aware that you don’t ask the NCA questions? They ask you questions.’

He rang back inside fifteen minutes. The National Crimes Authority denied all knowledge of Tony Baker. ‘That might be true,’ he said. ‘Or it might not.’

‘Covers the possibilities,’ I said. ‘Thanks, mate.’ It struck me that a description of Tony Baker might have helped the NCA identify him: five foot six, two hundred pounds, appearance of a.45 slug wearing a leather jacket.

I rang Linda Hillier.

‘I’ve been ringing you,’ she said. ‘What happened to the answering machine?’

‘Forgot to put it on.’

‘Listen, that stuff we were talking about. I’ve been scratching round a bit. Can you meet me in Smith Street?’

Gerry Schuster was fat, and that’s putting it politely. She was on a backless ergonomic kneeling contraption in an alcove created out of two computer workstations. I assumed that was what she was on. No part of what supported her was visible beneath a garishly coloured tent big enough to house four small Bedouin.

Linda said, ‘Gerry, this is Jack Irish. He’s got an interest in this stuff too.’

From beneath a greasy fringe that touched her eyebrows, Gerry gave me the look chefs reserve for three-day-old fish. ‘Meechou,’ she said. You couldn’t have posted a five cent coin through her lips when she spoke.

We were in a large room on the third floor of an old building off Smith Street, Collingwood, not too far from Taub’s Cabinetmaking. On the door, a plastic sign said: UrbanData. The room was divided into three by low hessian-covered partitions. Gerry had the biggest one. Gerry had the biggest everything, as far as I could see. There were five women working at computers. In a corner, a bearded man of indeterminate age, about two weight divisions below Gerry, was staring at a monitor showing a bar graph in at least ten colours.

‘UrbanData collect and sell data on anything to do with the city,’ Linda had said on the way. ‘Cat deaths, bicycle accidents, condom sales, anything. They can make the data talk, too.’

Gerry Schuster shifted, wobbled and said, ‘I’ve got inner-city Melbourne property transfers 1976 to 1980 loaded. What you want to know?’

Her fingers lay on the keyboard like tired sausages, each one wearing a ring.

‘Transfers in Yarrabank,’ said Linda.

Gerry tapped a few keys. An outline map of greater Melbourne appeared, overlaid by a numbered grid. ‘Zone 14,’ she said and tapped in the number.

The outline disappeared, replaced by a map of an area of the city, also overlaid by a numbered grid.