by Peter Temple
I tried to imitate Cam’s calm. ‘Put your shoes on. Get the disks. Quickly. We’ve got to get out of here. Come to the studio.’
The ladder was aluminium, lightweight. I had it up against the wall beneath the hatch in the roof when Linda came in, wide-eyed, carrying a laptop and her bag.
‘I’ll go first,’ I said. ‘Get the hatch open.’
It was at least six metres to the roof. The ladder flexed alarmingly, not made for my weight.
I was halfway up when the banging started at the front door.
‘Jack Irish,’ a voice shouted. ‘Police. We know you’re home, Jack. Open the door. No-one gets hurt.’
I put one hand up and found a handle on the hatch cover. I tugged it. It didn’t move. The hatch cover wouldn’t open.
Something hard hit the front door. They were trying to break in.
The ladder was flexing alarmingly. I braced myself and got both hands to the handle.
I tugged. It wouldn’t budge.
There was a louder impact from the front door.
I tried again. I moved the handle from side to side, desperately. It shifted.
I tried again. Backwards, forwards. It moved. I’d been forcing it in the wrong direction. I pushed the handle away from me and the hatch slid open. I grabbed the edge of the hole and pulled myself up the last steps and out on to the roof.
By the time I’d turned back to the hole, Linda was half-way up the ladder. When she was near enough, I leant down and took her bag and the laptop. Then I pulled her up.
The ladder came up easily. We stood panting on the concrete roof in the dark, cold night air.
‘Close it,’ Linda said, pointing at the hatch. As I bent down to slide the door over, there were four sharp sounds from below. Gunshots. They were trying to shoot open the lock on the front door.
I slid the hatch closed and stood up.
What was I supposed to do now?
The roof door to the internal stairs.
I looked around. About ten metres away I could make out a large, square structure. The lift housing.
‘Wait here,’ I said and ran. The roof was slippery, some kind of moss growing on the concrete. At the corner of the housing, I fell, sliding across the rough surface. I got up, sharp pain in the left knee. The door was a few metres away, open. I got to it, closed it and felt for the bolt.
There wasn’t a bolt. The door couldn’t be locked.
I opened it slowly, stuck my head in and listened.
Silence. The men weren’t at the front door any more. They were in the flat. There was nowhere to hide there. They would very quickly know we had got out.
I closed the door again and looked at it, felt it. Nothing on the surface of the door.
My fingers touched something on the door frame to my left. I felt to the right of the door. The same. Steel brackets.
The door was meant to be barred, not bolted.
Where was the bar? I felt around frantically, seeing better now, eyes getting used to the dark. No bar.
I looked around the roof. Away to my left, there was something moving.
I squinted, trying to see better.
Washing. Someone had hung a line of washing on the roof. Hung the line between what? I limped over. Two lengths of one-inch pipe with welded crossbars held up the washing line.
I went over to one, put both hands around it and pulled with all my force. It came out so easily that I fell over backwards, pipe clutched to my chest. Scrambling to my feet, I wrenched off the washing line and ran for the door, pipe at the port arms.
I was a few metres from the door when someone in the stairwell shouted something. I could only catch the word ‘stairs’.
I got to the door. I could hear footsteps thudding metres away.
The door wouldn’t close fully.
I stood back and kicked the door so hard I felt the impact in my wrists and at the top of my skull.
The door closed.
I stepped back, winded.
Something hit the door like a sledgehammer. It swung open and a man—short, bald—came through, left shoulder first, right arm coming around with a long-barrelled revolver held shoulder-high.
He was so close I could smell his breath: alcohol and garlic.
I brought the steel pipe I was holding around with all the force I had. It only had to travel about half a metre before it made contact with the side of the man’s head.
He went over sideways, hitting the doorframe with his right shoulder and falling back into the stairwell.
I dropped the pipe, slammed the door shut again and rammed the pipe though the brackets.
When I turned, Linda was behind me.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she said. ‘Come on. Cam’s on the roof next door.’
For a moment, I was too winded to move. Then I staggered after her. When we got to the parapet wall to the left of the roof hatch, I saw Cam.
He was on the roof of the building across the lane, sitting on the parapet wall, smoking a cigarette. Next to him on the wall were Linda’s laptop and bag. She must have thrown them to him.
‘G’day,’ he said. ‘Shove that ladder over.’
I looked over the edge of our wall. Six floors below, light was reflected off wet cobblestones. I looked over at Cam. His building was about four or five metres higher than ours. The gap between us was about the same.
I went over and got the ladder. It seemed terribly flimsy. I got it upright and leaned it over until Cam could catch the top rung. He pulled it up until he could hold the sides standing up.
‘Ladies first,’ he said.
I looked at Linda. She smiled, a tight little smile. ‘We used to do this at Girl Guides,’ she said. ‘Piece of cake.’
She scrambled across in seconds.
My turn. My knee was aching. I’d grazed my hip. I was having trouble breathing. I felt a hundred years old.
‘I was happier doing conveyancing,’ I said to no-one in particular.
Then I went across that inadequate bridge like a big monkey.
33
Cam had a ute this time, a battered Ford with a lashed-down tarpaulin over the tray. It was parked in a narrow blind lane off Little Bourke Street.
‘What’s the next stop?’ he asked.
We were all leaning on parts of the ute, trying to control our breathing.
‘Shoreham,’ said Linda and caught her breath. ‘On the Mornington Peninsula. I know a place there. It’ll be empty.’
Cam straightened up. ‘Country air,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’ He started loosening the tray cover. When he had the back open, he looked at me and said, ‘They’re looking for two blokes, mate. Hop in.’
‘In the back?’
‘There’s a mattress. And pillows. Lots of air gets in. You can have a kip.’
I climbed in and lay down. Cam lashed the cover down. It was pitch-black under the cover, dark and claustrophobic and smelling of engine oil. I had to fight the urge to try and break out.
We were reversing over cobblestones. The springs transmitted every bump. I found a pillow, dragged it under my head, closed my eyes and tried to think about sharpening the blade of a number 7 plane. I was trying to learn how to grind a hollow angle and then hone the blade on that angle with a circular motion the way the Japanese did. I was thinking about how to improve my honing action when I fell asleep.
I woke with a start, no idea where I was, tried to sit up, bounced off the taut nylon tray cover, fell back in fright.
Cam’s voice said, ‘Nice place. They’d have something to drink here, would they?’
I knew where I was. How had I managed to fall asleep? I lay still and listened to my heartbeat while Cam loosened the cover.
‘Breathing?’ he said. ‘Relaxed?’
Inside ten minutes we were drinking whisky in front of a fire in the stone hearth of what seemed to be an enormous mudbrick and timber house. I went outside and stood on the terrace. There was a vineyard running away from the house.
I w
ent back inside. Cam was on his haunches, fiddling with the fire.
‘Were they cops?’ I asked. I felt wide-awake. I’d slept for more than two hours.
‘Moved like cops,’ said Cam. ‘Very efficient. I gather you decked one.’
‘Tony Baker he calls himself,’ I said. ‘Came to the pub to scare me off. Made out he was a fed of some kind.’
‘If he’s a dead fed,’ Cam said, ‘we have other problems.’ He stood up and yawned. ‘That’s enough Monday now. I’ll find a bed.’
I looked at Linda. She was asleep, head fallen onto the arm of the sofa, hair fallen over her face. In the end, perfect exhaustion drives out fear.
‘I’ll just sit here,’ I said. ‘Reflect on how I got everybody into this shit.’
‘That’s the past,’ Cam said. ‘Think about the future. How to get everybody out of this shit.’
After a while, I got up and found a blanket to put over Linda. She didn’t wake up when I swung her legs onto the sofa and arranged a pillow under her head.
I kissed her on the cheek, got some whisky, put some more wood on the fire. The future. But we weren’t finished with the past yet. What had Paul Vane seen on the night Anne Jeppeson died? What was the evidence he knew about? And what was the evidence Father Gorman had told Ronnie to bring to Melbourne and where was it?
Time passed. I fed the fire, listened to the night sounds. It was after three before I felt tired enough to find a bed. Sleep eventually came.
Sunlight on my face woke me. It was after 9 a.m. My knee was stiff and sore and the skin around my hip was tender. I felt dirty. Looking for a shower, I went into the kitchen. Cam was sitting at the table, eating toast and jam, clean, hair slicked back.
He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. I went that way. Linda was sitting at a big desk, looking at her laptop screen. She looked clean too.
‘Does that thing work anywhere?’ I said.
She looked up and smiled. ‘I’ve written the whole fucking thing. All of it. The whole Yarrabank saga. And I’m plugged in to the world again. Through my trusty modem.’
I said, ‘Modem’s not a word you can love.’
She tapped the computer screen. ‘There’s a P. K.Vane in Breamlea,’ she said. ‘Must have moved from Beaumaris. We can take the car ferry.’
There wasn’t a single thing to lose.
‘I’ll have a shower,’ I said. ‘See if you can find the departure times.’
The woman was tall and thin and her labrador was old and fat. She was wearing a big yellow sou’wester that ended at her knees. Her legs were bare and she was barefoot.
There was no-one else on the beach. Just Linda and I and the woman and the dog and the gulls. We saw her a long way off, walking on the hard wet sand, hands in pockets, head down, getting her feet wet when the tiny waves ran in. The dog walked up on the dry sand, stiff-legged, stopping every few yards for a hopeful inspection of something delivered by the tide.
When she was about a hundred metres away, I got up and went towards her. The labrador came out to meet me, friendly but watchful. I stopped and offered him my hand. He came over, nosed it, allowed me to rub his head.
When she was close enough to hear me, I said, ‘Mrs Vane?’
She nodded. She had strong bones in her face, big streaks of grey in her hair, skin seen too much sun.
‘Are you the widow of Paul Karl Vane of the Victoria Police?’
She nodded again, still walking.
‘Mrs Vane, I’d like to talk to you about your husband and the deaths of Anne Jeppeson and Danny McKillop.’
She kept looking at me and didn’t say anything until she was close, three or four metres away. The dog went to her.
She leant down and rubbed its head, eyes still on me. Her eyes were startlingly blue.
‘I was hoping someone would come,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ve had one happy day since they killed that girl.’
She put out a hand and I took it. We walked up the beach.
34
The shack was up in the hills behind Apollo Bay. We got lost once, retraced our route, found where we’d gone wrong. Cam was driving, the three of us crammed onto the bench seat, Linda in the middle.
On the way from Breamlea, keeping to the back roads, Cam said, ‘How come she doesn’t know what it is?’
‘Paul Vane never told her,’ I said. ‘He woke her up on the night Anne was killed and told her he’d seen it happen. He was electric, sat drinking all night. The next day, when the television had the news of Danny’s arrest, he told her Danny hadn’t done it, that it was murder, that he knew who’d done it but couldn’t tell anyone.’
‘So she kept quiet too,’ said Cam.
I moved my cramped arm from behind Linda’s head. ‘She says it haunted her. When she read about Danny’s sentence, she was sick. Paul became morose, drank more, used to say he’d done the wrong thing but it was too late. Eventually he took early retirement. Then he got sick, bowel cancer. He kept telling her he was going to give her the evidence, that he was going to get a lot of money to provide for her after he was gone, that she should tell Danny that he was innocent and give him the evidence.’
‘Money?’ asked Cam. ‘Did he get it?’
I shook my head. ‘No. She thinks he tried to blackmail someone over Danny’s death and that’s why he was murdered. He told her where the evidence was the morning of the day he was shot.’
‘And then she rang Danny?’
‘Later. After Paul’s murder, the house was broken into and searched from top to bottom. Then Paul’s boat caught fire at its moorings at Sandringham and blew up. She says she was too scared to fetch the evidence. And then she was watching television and saw the news that Danny’d been shot. After that, there didn’t seem to be any point.’
‘That must be it up ahead,’ Linda said. She’d fallen asleep a few times on the trip, head lolling on to my shoulder.
The shack was old, just a big room and a lean-to, probably a timber-getter’s humble home. It was made of timber slabs, weathered to a light grey, but still solid. The whole place was leaning slightly, held up by a huge brick chimney.
We got out, stretching stiff limbs. The air was cold and moist. Far away, we could hear a vehicle changing gear on a hill, then silence. The birds were quiet at this time of day.
The front door was padlocked, no more than a gesture considering the condition of the door and its frame. I opened the lock with the key Judith Vane had given me.
Inside it was dark, almost no light coming through the dirty panes of the two small windows. To my right was the fireplace, a huge red brick structure, the front blackened almost to the roof by thousands of fires.
You couldn’t light a fire in it now. The opening, about the size of two fridges side by side, had been closed in with fibreboard. Some kind of wooden frame had been built in the opening and the fibreboard nailed to it. This work was recent compared to the age of the shack.
‘It’s in there,’ I said, pointing at the chimney.
‘There’s a crowbar in the ute,’ Cam said. He went out to fetch it.
Linda and I looked at each other.
‘So, Jack Irish,’ she said. ‘This is it.’
I nodded.
Cam was in the doorway, a weary little smile on his face. He didn’t have the crowbar.
‘No crowbar?’ I said.
He took a step into the room.
There was a man behind him holding a pump-action shotgun. It was Tony Baker, with a big plaster on the side of his face where I’d hit him with the steel pipe.
‘Move along, coon,’ he said.
Cam came into the room. Baker came in too, a safe distance behind Cam. He’d done this kind of thing before.
Another man, in an expensive camelhair overcoat, came into the doorway. He was tall, somewhere beyond fifty, that was the only safe guess: full head of close-cropped silver hair, narrow tanned face with a strong jaw and deep lines down from a nose that had seen contact. He had a young man�
��s full, slightly contemptuous mouth. In one hand, he held a short-barrelled .38. In the other, he had the crowbar.
‘Jack Irish,’ he said. ‘I’m Martin Scullin. You’re a fucking pain in the arse.’ His voice was as flat and his diction as slow as Barry Tregear’s. Country boys both, grown old in the city. Or maybe it was the standard issue voice in the old Consorting Squad.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ I said. To my surprise, my voice sounded normal.
‘Where’s the stuff?’ Scullin said. He didn’t sound particularly interested.
‘I don’t know. We’re just looking.’
Scullin looked at Tony Baker, no expression on his face.
Baker clubbed Cam across the jaw with the shotgun barrel. Cam went down like a suit slipping off a clothes hanger. He fell to his knees, tried to stand up.
Baker stepped over and hit him in the face with the barrel again. Twice.
Blood spurted out of Cam’s nose, turning his shirt black.
Baker turned his bull-terrier head and looked at me. Even in that light, I could see the gold fleck in his eye.
‘I’m going to kill this coon,’ he said. ‘Then I’m going to kill that bitch.’
He kicked Cam in the ribs, a short, stabbing movement, full of power. Cam shook his head like a swimmer trying to clear water from his ears.
Baker kicked him again, harder. Cam put his hands on the floor, got into a sitting position, looked up, eyes closed. His mouth was wide open, a cave streaming blood.
Baker hit him under the jaw with an upward movement of the shotgun butt. Cam fell over sideways.
Baker stepped back, readying himself to kick.
‘Leave him,’ I said. ‘It’s in the chimney.’
Baker looked at Scullin.
Scullin said to me, ‘Get it.’
Baker pointed the shotgun at me. Scullin passed me the crowbar.
I looked at Linda. She was kneeling next to Cam, holding his head, blood all over her arms.
The fireplace cover came off easily, nails squeaking. In the fireplace was an old stove, a Dover, filthy with soot, stovepipe rusted.
‘Get up there,’ Scullin said.
There wasn’t room for me and the stovepipe. I took it in both hands and worked it loose. It came off and fell behind the stove with a crash. I got on the stove awkwardly, kneeling, bent over, and looked up the chimney. Soot fell on my face. Dark. I couldn’t see anything.