by Peter Temple
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?’
18
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.
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 po
int, 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.
19
I went back to my office and rang the last number Cam had left. He didn’t seem to leave the same number twice running. A woman with a French accent invited me to leave a message. My eye fell on the mobile phone in its little plastic case next to the Mac. I’d bought it in a fit of technological anxiety and used it about four times. I left the number with the French lady and walked over to Charlie’s.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Had the breakfast. Ready for the day’s work.’ He was preparing a length of wood for steam-bending, using a block plane to chamfer the edges that would be in tension. This was to stop the wood fibres breaking loose. In the corner, the low potbelly stove was fired up, and Charlie’s ancient steam kettle was starting to vibrate.
‘I’ve been out since dawn,’ I said. ‘Looking for people.’
He shook his head sadly. ‘A man with a profession. What does he do? He goes to the races and he looks for people who should stay missing.’
The mobile phone went off in my pocket, a nasty, insistent electronic noise. It was Cam. ‘The big man wants to have breakfast tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You on?’
I said yes.
‘Pick you up quarter to eight.’
I felt Charlie’s eyes on me as I closed the flap and put the phone in my pocket.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Mr Big Business Man. Mr Executive. So busy he can’t go to the telephone anymore, has to take it with him. Next it’s no time even to go for a shit. Take a little shithouse around with you, do it in the motor car.’
‘You need to keep up with things in my line of work,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, disbelief in his tone. ‘When you going to finish that table, Mr Walking Telephone?’
‘Friday. Well, Sunday.’
‘Got a big job yesterday,’ he said. ‘Man wants me to make him a library in Toorak. Panelled. Carved. Don’t know if I’m up to it anymore.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you’re not up to it. Play bowls instead. Give the work to somebody who can do it.’
‘I just might,’ Charlie said. ‘Or maybe I’ll get an apprentice, hey? Smart girl. Strong. Not afraid of work. Reliable even.’
‘Good idea,’ I said, heading for my bits of table. ‘Anyone would want to spend five years making mortice and tenon joints and finding out about the finer points of lawn bowls.’
Charlie finished his planing and took the boards over to the steam box. It was a length of glazed sewerage pipe, eight feet long, sixteen inches in diameter, plugged at both ends. The steam went in at one end and escaped through a hole at the other. He gave it an appreciative smack with a huge hand. ‘You want to know something?’ he said. ‘You can give a schmuck a walking telephone. But what you got then is a schmuck with a walking telephone.’
‘Gee, you can learn a lot around here,’ I said, ‘just by listening.’
The workshop was warm from the steam box and the rest of the afternoon slipped by. At quarter to six, we called it a day and went around to the Prince. What Charlie called the Fitzroy Youth Club was in position at the bar.
‘Jack, my boy,’ said Wilbur Ong. ‘Did I tell you I tipped eight out of eight three weeks in a row now? In me granddaughter’s tipping pool, round this place she works. Hundreds in it. I give her me tips Thursday nights when she comes for tea. Me daughter’s girl.’
Norm O’Neill’s huge nose came around slowly, like the forward cannon on the USS Missouri swivelling to speak to Vietnam. ‘You can only get eight out of eight, Wilbur,’ he said slowly and with menace, ‘if you tip against the Lions.’
Wilbur gave him a pitying look. ‘Norm,’ he said, ‘if you was forty years younger I’d take you outside for jumpin to that conclusion. ’Course I don’t tip against the Lions. It’s the girl. She takes all me other tips and changes that one. She reckons tippin against the Lions is the only sure thing left in the footie.’
‘I don’t think you brought your daughter up right,’ Eric Tanner said.
Stan came out from behind the bar and switched on the television set on the wall in the corner. It was news time. When the set was first put in, Stan tried to keep it on all the time but the Youth Club kept switching it off. Now it went on for the news and football.
The news opened with a helicopter view of Dr Paul Gilbert’s health centre with at least ten vehicles parked outside the front gate.
‘Two men have been found shot dead at an isolated property bordering on the Wombat State Forest outside Daylesford,’ the woman newsreader said. ‘One of the bodies was in a hot spa bath. Police said the men might have been dead for as long as a week.’
The helicopter went in for a closer look. I could see two men in plain clothes standing outside the house. They looked up at the helicopter and the one on the left’s lips said, ‘Fuck off.’
‘Police said the bodies had been identifi
ed. Their names are expected to be released later this evening. The property is owned by Dr Paul Gilbert, a Melbourne general practitioner who was permanently barred from practice in 1987 after being found guilty of a variety of drug offences. He served two and a half years of a six-year sentence. Dr Gilbert lived on the property. He has not been seen in Daylesford for more than a week.’
The news went on to other things. I finished my beer and drove home. The streets seemed to be full of white Holdens. Had a white Holden followed me to Daylesford? My neck hair prickled.
20
When I got home, I rang Linda Hillier. She wasn’t at her desk, said a man. He took a message. I was looking sadly into the near-empty fridge when the phone rang.
‘We need to talk,’ Linda Hillier said.
‘Endlessly,’ I answered. Then I went for it. ‘Can you come around here? No. Will you come around here?’
‘What’s the address?’
I walked around the corner to Papa’s Original Greek Taverna and bought some bread, olives, dolmades and an unidentified fish stuffed with thyme and basil from Mrs Papa. Menu price less fifteen per cent, that was our deal.
I was just out of the shower when the bell rang. I pulled on underpants, denims and a shirt.
‘Well, hello,’ she said. There was rain on her hair.
‘You’re wet,’ I said.
‘So are you. At least I’ve got shoes on.’
She had changed since this morning. She was wearing a trenchcoat over grey flannels, a cream shirt and a tweed jacket. I caught her scent as I took the coat and jacket. It was, in a word, throaty.
‘This is nice,’ she said, looking around.
We stood awkwardly for a moment, something trembling in the air between us. I looked around at the books in piles on every surface, the CDs and tapes everywhere, the unhung pictures, seeing the place for the first time in years.