Truth

by Peter Temple

  ‘It’s a woman found dead,’ said Ulyatt. ‘It’s not clear to me that she was murdered. And I can’t see why you would go on television until you’ve examined the information you want. Which we will provide as speedily as we can, I can assure you.’

  ‘I don’t need to be told how to conduct an investigation,’ said Villani. ‘And I don’t want to be told.’

  ‘I’m trying to help. I can go further up the food chain,’ said Ulyatt.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talk to people in government.’

  Awake at 4.30am, Villani was feeling the length of the day now, his best behind him. ‘You’ll talk to people in government,’ he said.

  Ulyatt’s lips drew back. ‘As a last resort, of course.’

  ‘So resort to it, mate,’ said Villani, pilot flame of resentment igniting the burner. ‘You’re dealing with the bottom feeders, there’s nowhere to go but up.’

  ‘I certainly will be putting our view,’ said Ulyatt, a long sour look, he rose, the woman rose too. He turned on his black shoes, the woman turned, they both wore thin black shoes, they both had slack arses, one fat, one thin, the surgery hadn’t extended to lifting her arse. They left, Ulyatt taking out his mobile.

  ‘No garbage to leave the premises, Mr Manton,’ said Villani. ‘I’ve always wanted to give someone that instruction.’

  ‘It’s gone,’ said Manton. ‘It goes before 7am, every day except Sunday.’

  ‘Right. So. How do you get up there?’

  ‘Private lifts,’ said Manton. ‘From the basements and the ground floor. Card-activated, access only to your floor.’

  ‘And who’s got cards?’

  Manton turned to Condy. ‘David?’

  ‘I’d have to check,’ said Condy.

  Villani said, ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘There’s a procedure for issuing cards. I’ll check.’

  Villani moved his shoulders. ‘Getting into the apartment?’ he said. ‘How’s that work?’

  ‘Same card, plus a PIN and optional fingerprint and iris scanning,’ said Condy. ‘The print and iris are in temporary abeyance.’

  ‘Temporary what?’

  ‘Ah, being finetuned.’

  ‘Not working?’

  ‘For the moment, no.’

  ‘So it’s just the card?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Same card you don’t know how many people have.’

  Villani turned to Dove.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get the fullest co-operation here, I’ll be on television saying that this building is a management disaster and a dangerous place to live and residents should be alarmed.’

  ‘Inspector, we’re trying to be…’

  ‘Just do it, please,’ said Villani, rising.

  In the ground-floor foyer, he said to Dove and Weber, ‘One, get Tracy onto the company that owns the apartment. Two, ID’s the priority here. Run her prints. See what vision they’ve got, get someone to take down every rego in the parking garage. And get that casino guest list.’

  Dove nodded.

  Weber said, scratching his scalp, ‘Fancy set-up, this. Like a palace.’

  ‘So what?’ said Villani.

  Weber shrugged, awkward.

  ‘Just another dead person,’ said Villani. ‘Flat in a Housing Commission, this palace, all the same. Just procedure. Bomb it to Snake.’

  ‘Excuse, boss?’

  ‘Know the term, Mr Dove? Honours degree of any use here?’

  ‘I’d say it’s a technical Homicide term,’ said Dove. He was cleaning his rimless glasses, brown face vulnerable.

  Villani looked at him for a while. ‘Follow the drill. The procedure. Do what you’ve been taught. Tick stuff off. That way you don’t have to ask for help.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for help,’ said Dove. ‘I asked Inspector Kiely a few questions.’

  ‘Not the way he saw it,’ said Villani. His phone tapped his chest.

  ‘Please hold for Mr Colby,’ said Angela Lowell, the secretary.

  The assistant commissioner said, ‘Steve, this Prosilio woman, I’ve had Mr Barry on the line. Broken neck, right?’

  ‘They say that.’

  ‘So he understands it could be an accident. A fall.’

  ‘Bullshit, boss,’ said Villani.

  ‘Yeah, well, he wants nothing said about murder.’

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Mr Barry’s request to you. I’m the fucking conduit. With me, inspector?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Talk later, okay?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  Ulyatt hadn’t been bluffing. He’d gone close to the top of the food chain. Perhaps he’d gone to the top, to Chief Commissioner Gillam, perhaps he could go to the premier.

  Dove and Weber were looking at him.

  ‘Media out there?’ said Villani.

  ‘No,’ said Dove.

  ‘No? What happened to media leaks? Anyway, if they show up, say a woman found dead, cause not established, can’t rule out anything. Don’t say murder, don’t say suspicious, don’t say anything about where in the building. Just a dead woman and we are waiting for forensic.’

  Dove blinked, made tiny head movements, Villani saw his anxiety. His impulse was to make him suffer but judgment overrode it.

  ‘On second thoughts, you do it, Web,’ he said. ‘See how you go in the big smoke.’

  Wide eyes, Weber said, ‘Sure, boss, sure. Done a bit of media.’

  Villani passed through the sliding doors, the hot late afternoon seized his breath, his passage was brief, no media, down the stairs, across the forecourt, a cool car waiting.

  On the radio, Alan Machin, 3AR’s drive man, said:

  …35-plus tomorrow, two more days and we break the record. Why did I say that? People talk as if we want to break records like this. Lowest rainfall for a century. Hottest day. Can we stop talking about records? Gerry from Greenvale’s on the line, what’s on your mind, Gerry?

  ‘Radio okay, boss?’

  ‘Fine.’

  …years ago, you ring the cops, the ambos, they come. Five minutes. Saturday there’s shit across the road here, I ring the cops, twenty minutes, I ring again, it’s a bloody riot out there, mate, girls screamin, animals trashin cars, they throw a letterbox through my front window, there’s more arrivin all the time, no cops. I ring again, then there’s two kids stabbed, another one’s head’s smashed in, somebody calls the medics.

  So how far’s the nearest police station, Gerry?

  Craigieburn Road, isn’t it? Too far’s all I can say. Twenty-five minutes for the ambos to get here, they say the one kid’s dead already. And the ambos load them up and they’re gone before the bloody cops get here.

  So it’s what, more than an hour all-up before the police respond, is that…

  Definitely. You notice they find hundreds when some dork gets lost bloody bushwalkin? That sorta thing?

  Thanks for that, Gerry. Alice’s been waiting, go ahead, Alice.

  It’s Alysha, actually, with a y. I wanted to talk about the trains but your caller’s bloody spot on. We get riots around here, I’m not joking, riot’s the only…

  Where’s that, Alisha, where’s around…

  Braybrook. Yeah. Police don’t give a stuff, let them kill each other, gangs, it’s like you don’t see an Aussie face, all foreigners, blacks, Asians. Yeah…

  ‘They don’t like cops much, do they, boss?’ said the driver.

  ‘They can’t like cops,’ said Villani. ‘Cops are their better side.’

  IN HIS office, Gavan Kiely gone to Auckland, Villani switched on the big monitor, muted, waited for the 6.30pm news, unmuted.

  A burning world—scarlet hills, grey-white funeral plumes, trees exploding, blackened vehicle carapaces, paddocks of charcoal, flames sluicing down a gentle slope of brown grass, the helicopters’ water trunks hanging in the air.

  …weary firefighters are bracing themselves for a last-ditch stand against a racing fire
front that threatens the high country village of Morpeth, where most residents have chosen to stay and defend their homes despite warnings to heed the terrible lessons of 2009…

  When it was full dark, his father and Gordie would see the ochre glow in the sky, Morpeth was thirty kilometres by road from Selborne but only four valleys away.

  A plane crash in Indonesia, a factory explosion in Geelong, a six-car freeway pile-up, the shut-down of an electronics company.

  The wide-eyed newsreader said:

  …four hundred A-listers, many of them high-rolling gamblers from Asia, the United States and Europe, last night had a preview of the Orion, Australia’s newest casino and its most exclusive…

  Men in evening dress, women in little black dresses getting out of cars, walking up a red carpet. Villani recognised a millionaire property developer, an actor whose career was dead, a famous footballer you could rent by the hour, two cocaine-addicted television personalities, a sallow man who owned racehorses and many jockeys.

  A helicopter shot of the Prosilio building, then a spiky-haired young man on the forecourt said:

  The boutique gambling venue is housed in this building, the newly commissioned Prosilio Tower, one of Australia’s most expensive residential addresses. It’s a world of total luxury for the millionaire residents, who live high above the city behind layers of the most advanced electronic and other security…

  His phone.

  ‘Pope Barry is pleased,’ said Colby.

  Villani said, ‘About what?’

  ‘Prosilio. The girl.’

  ‘Nothing to do with me. The absent media, who arranged that?’

  ‘I’d only be guessing.’

  ‘Yeah, right. This Prosilio prick, Elliot, Ulyatt, his company owns the building. Came on like we’re from the council about overhanging branches.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘Well I said fuck off.’

  ‘Well I can say he went somewhere. I can say that.’

  ‘I don’t like this stuff, boss.’

  ‘They don’t want bad news.’

  ‘The casino?’ said Villani.

  ‘The casino’s not it, son,’ said Colby. ‘Up there in the air there’s like a whole suburb of unsold million-buck apartments. All spruiked to be as safe as living next door to the Benalla copshop in 1952. You make all this money and you can buy anything and then some deranged psycho shithead invades your space and kills you. Fucks you and tortures you and kills you.’

  ‘I see the unappealing part of that.’

  ‘So you’ll also try to grasp the charm of a murder in the building.’

  Anna Markham on the screen, cold, pinstriped jacket. He had looked at the dimple in her chin from close range, thought about inserting his tongue into the tiny cleft.

  ‘I’ll work on that, boss,’ he said.

  ‘Front and fucking centre. In the big game now. Not in Armed Robbery anymore. Not you, not me.’

  …today’s poll shock, the threat of a nurses’ strike, the questions over the Calder Village project and next week’s demonstrations in the Goulburn Valley. With the election weeks away, Premier Yeats has a few things to be worried about…

  She had the private-school voice, the expensive tones.

  The anchorman said:

  …political editor Anna Markham. Now to finance news. In a surprise development in the media world today, a new…

  The phone. Mute.

  ‘Media on the line, boss. Mr Searle.’

  ‘Stevo, how you going?’ Hoarse cigarette voice.

  ‘Good. What?’

  ‘To business. Like that in a man. Listen, this Prosilio woman, got anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, so we keep it off the agenda till you have, no point in…’

  ‘If we don’t ID her before,’ said Villani, ‘I want her on all news tomorrow.’

  ‘My word,’ said Searle. ‘And obviously it’s not stressing the Prosilio angle, it’s a woman we want identified, that’s basically…’

  ‘Talk tomorrow,’ said Villani. ‘Calls waiting.’

  ‘Inspector.’

  Villani sat for a long time, head back, eyes closed, thinking about the girl-woman who looked like Lizzie lying in a glass bath in a glass room high above the stained world.

  Three levels of security, panic buttons, so many barriers, so insulated. And still the fear. He saw the girl’s skin, grey of the earliest dawn, he saw the shallow bowl between her hipbones and her pubic hair holding droplets like a desert plant.

  The water would have been bobbed, flecked and scummed with substances released by her body. He was glad he hadn’t seen that.

  Time to go, put an end to the day.

  No one to have a drink with. He could not do that anymore, he was the boss.

  Go home. No one there.

  He rang Bob Villani’s number, saw the passage in his father’s house, the phone on the rickety table, heard the telephone’s urgent sound, saw the dog listening, head on one side. He did not wait for it to ring out.

  Inspector. Head of Homicide.

  He knew he was going to do it but he waited, drew it out, went to the cupboard and found the card in her spiky hand. He sat, pressed the numbers, a mobile.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Stephen Villani. If I’ve got the right number, I’m exploring the possibility of seeing someone again.’

  ‘Right number, explorer. When did you have in mind?’

  ‘Well, whenever.’

  ‘Like tonight?’

  He could not believe his luck. ‘Like tonight, I would have that in mind, yes.’

  ‘I can change my plans,’ she said, the arrogant voice. ‘I can be where I live in…oh, about an hour.’

  ‘You want to change your plans?’

  ‘Let me think. Yes, I want to change my plans.’

  ‘Well, I can be there.’

  ‘Don’t eat. Be hungry.’

  ‘So that’s how hunger works,’ said Villani. ‘Give me the address.’

  ‘South Melbourne. Eighteen Minter Street. Exeter Place. Apartment twelve.’

  He felt the blood in his veins, the little tightness in his chest, the way he felt in the ring before the bell, before the fight began.

  ‘SATISFACTORY,’ said Anna Markham.

  ‘Can I get a more precise mark?’ said Villani.

  He was on his side, he kissed her cheekbone. Anna turned her head, found his mouth. It was a good kiss.

  ‘It’s binary at this stage,’ she said. ‘Satisfactory, unsatisfactory.’

  ‘Before I rang,’ he said. ‘Where were you going?’

  ‘To see a play.’

  ‘With?

  ‘A friend.’ ‘Male friend?’ ‘Possibly.’

  ‘There are ways to tell.’

  ‘I like uncertainty,’ Anna said. ‘Don’t you want to know what play?’

  A test. Villani felt the great space between them. She had been to university, the apartment was full of books, paintings, classical music CDs fanned on a sideboard. He had no learning beyond school, he learned little there that he could remember, in high school he had been in a play, shotgunned by a spunky teacher, he saw her face. Ms Davis, she insisted on the Ms. All he knew about art and music came from Laurie dragging him out until she grew weary of it. He read the newspapers, Bob had instilled the habit in him, he watched movies late at night when he couldn’t sleep.

  And trees, he knew a fair bit about trees. For a start, he knew the botanical names of about fifty oaks.

  ‘What play?’ he said.

  ‘The Tempest. Shakespeare.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  He put his head back and after a while he said, ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve…’

  Fingertips dug into his upper arm.

  ‘And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind,’ Villani said.

  ‘Who are you?’


  ‘It’s the new force,’ he said. ‘We find Shakespeare relevant. Plus inspirational.’

  She moved onto him, silk, her hair fell on him. ‘I had a feeling you might be the thinking woman’s investigator. Great screw too. If a little hasty.’

  ‘I’ll give you hasty.’

  She was thin but muscled, she pretended to surrender, then she resisted him, he tried to pin her down, aroused.

  He saw the girl in the back seat of the car, blurred lipstick. Fear flooded him.

  ‘What?’ she said, ‘what?’

  ‘I thought you were…fighting me.’

  ‘I like fighting you. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Turned you off?’

  He rolled over, saw the matted hair on his belly, there was flab.

  ‘Just tired,’ he said. ‘Up early.’

  She said nothing for a while, reached for her gown, rose like a mantis, no effort. ‘Take a shower, we’ll eat.’

  Villani was towelling his hair when his phone rang.

  ‘Dad.’

  Corin.

  ‘Yes, love. What?’

  ‘I’m a bit spooked. There’s a car hanging around.’

  The fear. In his stomach, in his throat, instant bile in his mouth. ‘Hanging around how?’ he said, casual.

  ‘Drove past as I got home, two guys. Then I took the bin out and it’s parked down the street. I went out just now and it was gone and then they came around the block and parked further up.’

  ‘What kind of car?’

  ‘They all look alike. New. Light colour.’

  ‘Won’t be anything, but lock up, be on the safe side. I’ll get someone to come around, I’m on my way. Twenty minutes max. Ring me if anything happens. That clear?’

  ‘Sir. Right, yeah. Thanks, Dad.’

  His precious girl. Thanking him as if he were doing her a favour. He speed-dialled, spoke to the duty person, waited, heard the talk on the radio.

  ‘Car four minutes away, boss,’ said the woman.

  ‘Tell them I’ll be there in twenty, hang on for me.’

  Anna was at the kitchen end of the big room, hair up, barefoot, thin gown. She turned her head.

  Villani walked across the space, stood behind her.

  ‘Prime rump strips,’ Anna said. ‘To build strength.’

  There was an awkwardness. Villani wanted to pull her against him. ‘Prime rump’s cost me my strength,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go. Urgent stuff.’