by Berry, Tony
‘Nothing,’ said Kevin. ‘What’s there to tell?’
Greg shrugged, huddled into his jacket, studying the ground, the toe of one work boot tracing patterns in the dirt.
‘Just wondered. You’re the one who found her. Thought the cops might have said something. You know, who she was, how she was killed, any clues, suspects, all that sort of stuff.’
The words tumbled out, the pitch of his voice rising, two tones down from hysteria. Kevin couldn’t understand. He’d never got used to Greg’s outbursts. The kid would plod through hours of work, saying next to nothing. Then he’d fire up, shooting off the words, getting all excited, even angry, usually about nothing at all. But this seemed different. Kevin rose suddenly to his feet, knocking over the camp stool in his haste. He’d had enough. He was irritated, unsettled. His day was out of whack, the placid routine riddled with stress. His mouth was a finger’s length off Greg’s ear.
‘What the fuck’s got into you?’ he hissed. ‘This isn’t some bloody American TV show where the cops go round revealing their clues and their suspects. It’s real life, mate. Some girl’s been murdered and they’re not about to shout their mouths off to you, me or anyone else. It’s just our bad luck the bastards decided to dump her here.’
Kevin took a step back. He had a fleeting sense of isolation; two people marooned amid the swirl of activity surrounding them. Temporarily dumped and ignored but likely to be swept back into the action at any moment. He studied Greg’s face, thin, stubbled with two days’ growth, and saw something more than anxiety.
‘You know something, don’t you?’
Greg drooped his head and shuffled uneasily, one foot still scuffing at the gravelled ground. He gave the slightest of nods.
‘Was that a yes?
‘Mmmm.’
Kevin scoped the crowd. It was growing by the minute. Television crews had arrived, setting up cameras, thrusting wandering mikes into the face of anyone prepared to speak, journalists with tape recorders, photographers, more police and the inevitable rent-a-crowd of passers-by and rubberneckers. Everyone’s focus seemed to be elsewhere.
‘What? What is it?’
Greg’s reply was muffled, mumbled.
‘I know her.’
‘Shit!’
Kevin heard a nervous snigger from the bowed head.
‘Yeah, right.
Kevin took another look around. The detectives were in a huddle, seemingly comparing notes. One turned his head and threw a quick glance in their direction. Kevin felt an immediate twinge of guilt.
‘Tell the cops.’
‘Can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just can’t.’
Kevin looked across at the detective huddle. The same one was looking at them again. The guilt pangs returned. He had to ask.
‘Did you do it?’
Greg’s arms shot up to his side, bent, fist clenched, like a boxer poised to strike. His head no longer drooped. A spume of spittle accompanied his words.
‘No, Kev, no. Not me. No, I couldn’t do it.’
‘So what couldn’t you do?’ asked the detective who had quietly appeared at Kevin’s shoulder. ‘Is there something we should know?’
Kevin tried masking his surprise, gathering his thoughts. A long, slow intake of breath helped and he ran his hand slowly back through his hair before turning as slowly as he could manage to face the detective.
‘I doubt it, sergeant. I think it’s what they call a matter of workplace relations.’
He mustered up what was intended to be a matey smile. He walked while he talked, hoping to slowly shepherd the detective back to his group.
‘You know how it is with these young fellows – pick and choose what they do; won’t take orders.’
Kevin flapped a hand behind his back, signalling Greg to move away. The detective gave him a quizzical look. Kevin kept weaving his story.
‘Lots of loose dogs here. We’ve got to keep ’em away while we re-turf. Told Greg it was his job but he reckons he can’t. Allergic or something, so he says.’
Kevin came to a halt. Not a bad yarn, he thought. As good as many of the furphies he’d heard around the bar back in the days when the Dover Hotel was a real pub and not a bloody yuppie restaurant. They’d stopped walking. There was a long silence. Kevin felt he was being judged. So many marks out of ten. The detective looked him up and down, his face expressionless, the eyes revealing nothing. Kevin knew he was expected to stand and wait. It seemed ages before the detective spoke.
‘Nice story, Mr Grundy. Let’s hope your mate’s allergy has nothing to do with little white dogs.’
EIGHT
THE Manchester Unity tower is one of Richmond’s most impressive buildings, although the mass of pedestrians scurrying down Swanston Street rarely cast an eye sideways or upwards to admire its soaring ornamental modern Gothic towers. Few appreciate it was once the city’s tallest building and the first in the state with escalators. It was also the proud owner of the country’s largest diesel generator, used to power its three high-speed lifts.
Bromo made a cautious approach. He mingled with a meandering stream of shoppers sampling the boutiques in the brighter half of Howey Place before making a sharp left turn into its gloomy other half – a dimly lit wide corridor lined by blacked-out windows and a train of dumpsters. He took a quick sideways glance at the darkened windows. He could detect no following reflections. At the corridor’s far end he zigzagged into the building’s narrow side entrance. It sloped up to the grand foyer past the smallest coffee shop he’d ever seen – two tiny tables and a banquette squeezed behind a glass wall, more a display window than a coffee lounge. Opposite was an equally minute servery – a hole in the wall where coffees were brewed and snacks miraculously created.
Bromo paused at an L-shaped stairwell with deep stone steps leading to the basement. He leaned over the balustrade and feigned a tourist-like interest in a gallery of monochrome pictures. They showed the city as it was when the building first opened, towering over all around it. The wall beneath the pictures was covered in antique brass letterboxes. Bromo studied the names of tenants. He noted a diadem’s worth of jewellers, diamond merchants and goldsmiths along with a sprinkling of dentists, masseurs, chiropractors, sundry other therapists and a few anonymous nominee companies. The name he sought was on the ninth floor.
Bromo hovered around the foyer for a few minutes, watching the people coming and going. He waited outside the triple lift doors, heavy with beaten copper embellishments and the symbol of the long-gone Manchester Unity company founded in 1840. Coats of arms set in the tiled floor and above the lift entrance proclaimed the organisation’s lofty aims: “Amicitia Amor et Veritas”. A sculptured frieze showed workers wielding picks and shovels and bending their backs in a way no modern tradesman would consider.
He noted a security camera pointing down at the lift doors. Set into an angle of the wall was a steel letterbox fed by a glass-encased chute once used to dispatch mail from the upper floors. He stepped into the lift, a moving cell with walls of marquetry panelling, a domed glass roof and a brass handrail along one side. The lift attendants were all that were missing. They had long been replaced by a melodious female voice which recited their arrival at each level.
He took the lift to the uppermost floor, one below the rooftop penthouse. There was no one else in the lift. He felt secure and rode it down again to the floor he wanted.
The door opened on to a corridor of doors, all bearing the name plates of diamond merchants or diamond cutters. The doors were covered in heavy metal grilles with keypads and notices proclaiming 24-hour surveillance.
Bromo found the name he was looking for and obeyed the instruction alongside a button fixed to the door. “Press”, it said. The voice that answered was female, deep and heavily accented.
‘Yes? You want?’
Bromo guessed middle-European. And elderly. He bent in towards the intercom welded to the grille.
‘I’ve come to
see Mr Jacowiscz.’
He hoped he’d got the pronunciation right. So many dialects and variations to juggle with in that complex part of the world.
‘You have appointment? Your name pliz.’
‘Perkins.’ He visualised her raising a thick eyebrow, suspicious. He decided to elaborate. ‘Bromo Perkins. I phoned earlier.’
‘You wait.’
It sounded like an order but he took it as a request. Either way, there was no alternative. The heavy door through which he’d come had shut quietly behind him, its locks sliding back into place with the faintest of clicks. The brass grille facing him was backed by a black sheet of glass – one-way viewing, he assumed. In its centre was a small speaker hole. He was in a minuscule cell with no option but to wait. There were no distractions, no year-old magazines, not even a clock to tick away the minutes. Eventually he heard a crackling sound as the speaker came to life. This time the voice was male, also old and foreign.
‘Who sent you?’
‘Liz. Liz Shapcott.’
Again Bromo felt he had to spell things out. There was a long moment of silence. Not even the sound of trams clunking along Swanston Street. Nothing penetrated this space. He felt trapped. This was not where he should be. One door behind, one in front, both securely latched. Liz had given him a bum steer. Then Bromo heard a slight click, followed by the aged male voice.
‘Come in.’
He pushed the door ahead of him. Gently at first, then harder. It was heavy, thick, metal-banded. He stepped into a small room, bare except for a two-seater lounge, its leather covering scratched and torn along the armrests. A holding cell. Another grille, filling the top half of a wooden door, confronted him. It shielded a man who peered at Bromo from behind thick bottle-glass spectacles. Bromo thought of a mad professor. The man’s hair was wild and thinning.
‘You’d better come in.’
The voice was soft and slurred by the same thick European accent as the woman’s – somewhere east of Vienna, Bromo reckoned. Probably from a country that no longer existed. The man was hunched into a dark green knitted cardigan . His mouth was twisted, oddly so, one side turned down, the other angled upwards. He waved Bromo forward, opening the door just wide enough for him to enter a square windowless room panelled in light timber. The man extended a hand.
‘I am Jacowiscz.’
Bromo nodded.
‘Perkins. As I said, a friend of Liz Shapcott.’ He felt he needed to reinforce his credentials.
They held hands briefly, a minor formality, nothing firm or meaningful. Jacowiscz sat at a revolving wooden office chair and indicated a modern plastic seat facing him across a desk. Bromo sat.
‘Do you have anything to show me?’
Bromo thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and shrugged his shoulders. He was unsure of his next move. This wasn’t quite what he had expected when he’d made his phone call. The woman at the other end of the line – secretary? assistant? a younger, much more anglicised family member? – had said Mr Jacowiscz would be pleased to see him. Yes, Ms Shapcott had vouched for him, given him a good reference. Mr Jacowiscz would make sure they were undisturbed.
Liz had given no indication of the suspicion Bromo felt he was now facing. Quite the opposite. She had been his first point of contact after deciding he’d get no answers from turning a diamond – or a piece of cut glass (he had no idea) – over and over in his hands. He had given her a call and wasted no time on the niceties.
*
‘Liz, what do you know about diamonds?’
‘They’re a girl’s best friend?’
She was asking, not telling. Her preference was for gemstones that she cut and polished herself, sometimes even chipping them out of the ground on fossicking expeditions. Her jewellery was all home-made, not high-priced retail baubles bought by men out to impress.
‘Yeah, and they’re forever, too,’ said Bromo. ‘Cut the clichés. This is serious.’
‘Oh, who are you wooing this time?’
‘You should know better than to ask that.’
An instant replay of Can’t Buy Me Love whirred in his head. He kept it on mute. Why brand himself as a Beatles’ boy when she had long ago tabbed him as a Mahler nut?
‘Anyway, it’s the other way round. Someone seems to be wooing me.’
‘Anyone I know? Surely not the lovely Delia. I wouldn’t have thought diamonds were her style.’
They were getting off the track. Using the wrong words. Crossed lines. He ran his hand through his hair, tangled and greasy, the result of a rushed shower with no time for shampoo and conditioner.
‘This isn’t about romance, Liz. Women don’t send men diamonds without a very good reason. And love – sex if you prefer it (and he still didn’t know if she did) – isn’t one of them.’
Bromo gave her a re-run of the past 24 hours, keeping it tight and restricting Sigiriya and Dayani Perera to only the briefest of mentions – a defence mechanism against the barbs Liz tended to fire whenever he mentioned other women. He ended his report with the opening of the package and finding the unexplained diamond (or was it merely glass?) that was now wrapped in tissue and clutched in his hand inside his trouser pocket.
For a while there had been silence. When she eventually spoke Bromo was relieved to hear her earlier flippancy replaced by a more serious note. Liz said she thought she could help; at least give him someone to talk to, make the introductions. She asked for 30 minutes to make a call, set things up. She was back on the line sooner than he expected, a surprising urgency in her voice. Mr Jacowiscz, apparently a nice old guy who was a wiz with diamonds and a member of her lapidary club, would see him. Liz gave Bromo the details, then hesitated.
‘Be careful, Bromo.’
He heard a tremor in her voice.
‘Mention of Sigiriya sent Mr Jacowiscz right off. He seemed to make a connection but wouldn’t explain. But let’s say I think you’re getting into dangerous territory.’
Bromo rubbed at his ear lobe. Why was he not surprised? He tried a chuckle that convinced not even himself.
‘Try taking the tablets, Liz. They’ll fix the paranoia.’
‘It’s no joke, Bromo. Take care.’
Her tone of concern was worrying, but he said nothing. Pretend it wasn’t happening and it might go away. Or was it one of those things everyone seemed to be harking on about these days – the elephant in the room? The fucking great obstacle you just couldn’t ignore. Hell, it was just a bloody diamond for chrissakes. Probably fake, cut glass. He let her have her say. She was subdued, twitchy.
‘I wish I could come with you but I’ve got a funeral to attend.’
Bromo strived for a sympathetic voice. As far as he was concerned a funeral was a contrived religious excess, an over-produced theatrical event designed to wring every drop of emotion from people already grieving to the full. Better to take the money wasted on church, priests and gaudy coffins and slap it on the bar where the true mourners could gather and remember. Goodbye world, have a drink on me.
‘Sorry to hear it. Anyone close?’
‘Not really. Our paths crossed. A young Malaysian girl, Tamsyn Chong.’
Her voice was breaking up. Bromo heard the emotion.
‘A very nasty death. We’ll talk about it some other time. Gotta go.’
She cut the call abruptly. Crossed paths indeed, thought Bromo. There was more to it than that.
*
Bromo replayed the last few exchanges of their phone call in his head as he waited and fidgeted. Across the desk, Jacowiscz continued his appraisal, grey rheumy eyes boring deep into him, making judgments on heaven knows what.
‘Have you got it with you?’
Jacowiscz reached out a hand, palm up, long bony fingers slightly curled, the middle one missing above the knuckle. Bromo was briefly distracted by a fleeting thought of Shylock. He hesitated before drawing the ball of tissue from his pocket, feeling its firm centre to ensure the stone was still there. He placed it in the jewel
ler’s upturned palm.
‘Tell me what you think. Is it the real deal?’
Jacowiscz unfolded the tissue slowly, his movements emphasising Bromo’s impatience. He inserted a loupe – the diamond dealer’s glass – in his right eye, bent a lamp low over the desk and studied the gem, if that’s what it was. Bromo leaned forward, seeing only a piece of glitter, sparkling under the bright light but knowing nothing of its worth.
He watched Jacowiscz take his time, peering deep into the stone (or was it cut glass?) – turning it round, then over, reading its secrets, looking for blemishes no layman would detect, assessing its proportions, checking for imperfections, seeking more information than Bromo felt he needed to know.
The atmosphere was oppressive; no sound, no movement, almost a vacuum apart from the hum of an air-conditioner high on the wall. Bromo ran the fingers of one hand around the neckline of his shirt, massaged his throat, rubbed one eye, anything to feel something was happening, that he was not stuck in some inescapable void. He fingered the old wound on his earlobe, his personal stress alarm. Bloody thing was playing up again. Three deep breaths were needed. He took them, long and slow, and felt better. Good enough to hurry things along.
‘Any thoughts?’
Jacowiscz unbent and slowly pushed the lamp away, a man not to be hurried. The jeweller drew breath, a low rasping in his throat.
‘It’s a diamond,’ he said.
Yeah, thought Bromo, no real surprises there. Was that it? Somehow he was expecting more.
‘How good?’
Jacowiscz shrugged. He wasn’t going to be rushed. His was a cautious cat-and-mouse world of bid and counter-bid.
‘Maybe a few thousand.’
‘Dollars?’
‘Of course.’
Bromo accepted the mild reprimand. His impatience was getting the better of him. Jacowiscz let him down gently.
‘The way we price a diamond is based on very precise evaluations and a complex set of tables. Something we call the four Cs – clarity, colour, cut and carat. I can measure all these and give you an exact figure, Mr Perkins. But I don’t think that will be necessary.’