Peter Temple - Bad Debts

Topaz-ring sausage touched the screen. ‘This is the sub-zone here,’ she said. ‘Twelve.’

She tapped in 12.

Up came a gridded map showing Yarrabank, the river and part of the area on the opposite bank.

‘It’s this area here,’ Linda said, pointing at the screen.

‘Twelve stroke six,’ Gerry said. She hit 12/6.

Now there was a detailed map of part of Yarrabank. At its centre was the Hoagland estate.

‘Let’s look at the picture.’ Gerry pulled down a menu from the top of the screen. On it she blipped a command called Aerial. We waited for a second and then the map turned into an aerial photograph of the part of Yarrabank we’d been looking at.

‘This is smart,’ I said.

Gerry gave me a look of contempt. The sausages flashed through another set of keystrokes and the aerial photograph changed into a jigsaw puzzle of different-coloured pieces.

‘Property boundaries in 14/12/6,’ she said. ‘Each piece is a separate title.’

She pulled down a menu and blipped a command called Breakdown. A box appeared with about ten options. She chose Number. The figure 27 appeared.

‘Number of titles in the sub-sub-zone,’ said Gerry.

‘Let’s say I want to find the owner of that bit,’ Linda said. She pointed to a small triangular piece on the bank of the river.

Gerry put the pointer on it and double-clicked it. From a menu called Data, she clicked the Titleholders command. The screen went blank and then a list of names, addresses, dates and numbers appeared.

The most recent was Tilsit Holdings. The date of transfer was 14 February 1984.

‘If you’ve got a name, you can do a search,’ Gerry said, looking at Linda.

She pulled down a menu called Search, clicked Name and a box appeared.

She typed in Tilsit Holdings. A list of about eight properties appeared. She typed a command, went back to the jigsaw map and blipped a command called Site. Eight pieces of the mosaic went red. They were dotted along the river frontage in front of the Hoagland estate.

‘All owned by Tilsit,’ said Gerry.

Linda took a notebook out of her bag, flipped it open and ran a finger down the page. ‘Can you try Muscanda Developments?’ she said and spelt it.

I looked at her.

‘Later,’ she said.

The sausages were a blur. About half a dozen pieces of the puzzle in front of and beside Hoagland turned red. Some were tiny, two were quite large.

‘Bingo,’ Linda said.

I looked at her. Her eyes were shining.

‘I’ve got more names,’ she said. ‘Can we get the maps and the data printed out?’

‘What do you think?’ Gerry said. ‘This is a business.’

The rest of it took about fifteen minutes. Then we took the folder of printouts around to Meaker’s and ordered long blacks. We sat opposite each other, my back against the wall. Linda was wearing a white turtleneck and a leather bomber jacket. Very fetching.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

She drank some coffee. ‘Well, I was thinking about Anne Jeppeson after our dinner and I mentioned it the next day to a guy at work who was a State political reporter on the Herald in those days. Before the drink got to him. He said he remembered there was a huge fight in Cabinet about selling the Hoagland site. The Planning Minister was Kevin Pixley. Remember him?’

I nodded.

‘Lance Pitman was the Housing Minister who closed Hoagland. He wanted to sell the site without calling for tenders. Pixley wouldn’t have a bar of it and he had a lot of support in Cabinet. Then Harker, the Premier, reshuffled the Cabinet and suddenly Pixley was Transport Minister and Lance Pitman was Planning. And then Pitman approved the sale of the site.’

‘Who would have wanted to buy it ten years ago?’

‘That’s what I asked myself. And why didn’t Pitman want to go to tender? The site was bought by a company called Hexiod Holdings, a shelf company with an accountant called Norman Jovanovich and two other people as directors. Hexiod held on to the property until three months ago, when it was sold to Charis Corporation, the Yarra Cove developers. It was sold the day after Pitman and company got back into government.’

‘What about the waterfront land, the properties we’ve been looking at?’

She put out her slim hand and touched my arm. ‘Jack, there’s something like seventy properties involved. If I read this UrbanData stuff right, at least seven companies started buying or taking options on the riverbank sites about eighteen months before the government announced it was closing Hoagland. At some point, I don’t know when yet, another outfit, called Niemen PL, emerged as owner of all the properties. Six years ago, Niemen consolidated all the waterfront properties into one and applied for rezoning of the area as residential.’

Linda paused while what appeared to be members of a female bike gang came in, talking at the top of their voices. Across the street, a white Holden with tinted windows was parked outside a furniture shop. A tall, balding man in a grey windcheater came walking along from the city side and got in the passenger door.

‘Anyway,’ said Linda, ‘the government knocked them back. They went to the Planning Appeals Board and won. Then the Planning Minister overruled the board.’

‘Why was that?’

The driver of the white Holden was getting out of the car. He crossed the road to our side and disappeared from view.

‘Said rezoning wasn’t in keeping with the government’s long-term plans for the area.’

I saw a match flare behind the Holden’s tinted driver’s side window. The man who had got in the passenger side was now in the driver’s seat. He opened the window a couple of inches to flick out his match.

Linda looked at her watch and drained her coffee. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘The last act in this saga is that six weeks ago Niemen sold the consolidated waterfront land to Charis.’

‘So Charis now owns the whole site?’

‘That’s right. There’s a road between the waterfront properties and the Hoagland land. The government sold the road to Charis a few days after the waterfront deal. And soon after that Charis announced the Yarra Cove development.’

‘Tell us thinkers slowed by age and drink what all this means,’ I said.

Linda gave me her slow smile. ‘I think it means that closing Hoagland was part of a plan to put together a thirty-acre waterfront site. That’s a developer’s wet dream. The only reason Yarra Cove didn’t get started a long time ago is that the Harker government got thrown out at the ’84 election. That meant a ten-year wait till Pitman and company got back in.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘And if Hoagland hadn’t been closed in ’84?’

She leaned across the table. ‘Then someone was stuck with a whole lot of falling-down old warehouses and polluted factory sites backed by the toughest Housing Commission flats in the city.’

The driver of the Holden was lighting up again. I said, ‘Are we both concluding that Anne Jeppeson’s death suited some people?’

‘I’ve got to find out more about the companies involved. But the answer is Yes. I think we should talk to Kevin Pixley.’

‘What became of him?’

‘Retired. Lives in Brighton. The bloke at work is an old drinking mate of his. I’ll see if he can get Pixley to talk to us.’

I said, ‘Can we have dinner? I’ve got to tell you something about Ronnie.’

She gave me an interested look. ‘Ring me before eight-thirty. I’m working till then.’

I took my time finishing the coffee. Then I took a stroll down Brunswick Street, marvelling at the dress sense of the young, crossed over to the other side at Johnson Street, walked back to my car.

The white Holden was gone.