If it goes wrong, it’ll somehow be my fault. And I’ll blame myself too. For not having the brains to walk out now.
That was all I had to blame myself for: not walking out when I should have. What would they have done? Hired someone else? Brought in their international security consultants?
All I had to blame myself for? All? Vella was right: my duty had been to leave the Carson house that night and tell the police that a girl had been kidnapped. The trail was fresh. An hour would have produced addresses for every Tarago ever registered in Victoria and, in a few hours more, the field narrowed to perhaps twenty per cent of them.
In the cold and sordid apartment, too cold to take off my jacket, I lay on the sofa and ate old salt and vinegar chips, chips so old they could have been made from papyrus, drank wine left open in the fridge for I didn’t know how long. Too long, much too long.
When the wine was gone, I thought about going out for more, hunted without optimism in the kitchen cupboards, experienced a miracle, found a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label in a box, gift-wrapped in striped paper, tied with a green ribbon. Little Morris had given it to me, the day I went to hand in my resignation, to short-circuit the procedure that began with my hands around Hepburn’s throat. ‘Everyone put in,’ he said. ‘They asked me to say, why is it you can never do a job properly?’
I had come home and stuck the package somewhere, anywhere, out of sight, didn’t want to know about it, about no longer being a part of something bigger than myself.
Anne. Dead how long? She had been cold, icy.
Not a night to think about that. A suitable night to drink this expensive whisky and think about other things. Try not to think about anything would be better.
The room began to warm, my aches diminished and I felt a numbness stealing over me, half-drunken numbness. I kicked off my shoes, put my glass on the floor, folded my arms, closed my eyes, could have gone to sleep, was going to sleep.
Vibration in my chest. Insistent.
I sat upright, clutched myself.
Noyce’s tiny weightless mobile, not given back, not left behind in the Garden House, throbbing in my inside pocket.
I got it out, with difficulty, squinted at the buttons, pressed the phone symbol.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The voice. Croaky John Wayne and awkward Jimmy Stewart and shy Alan Ladd and dry Randolph Scott, all in it.
‘Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.’
I should have rung Vella. I didn’t, put the lights out, lay in the dark and sipped whisky till sleep threw itself over me like a blanket.
IN THE NIGHT, the dream of Afghanistan, one of the dreams, the one in which I am trying to get to Cowper, liquid-eyed Cowper, who is screaming, the scream of a child, calling for me. His captain. If I can get to him, I can save him. There is no logic in this, it is a dream. I am crawling towards him, gunfire, pieces of the helicopter burning around me. I am burdened by a weight, it holds me back, I move with agonising slowness. Then I realise what the weight is: my legs are missing, a large part of my legs, well above the knees. I am having to haul my body without help from my legs. And at the moment of this realisation, pain floods through me and I know that I cannot save Cowper because I am dying very quickly.
I woke up, still there, still legless and bleeding to death on that dark Afghan plain, sat up, pushed away the blanket, felt for my knees, found them and lay back, exhausted, as wet as if I had been swimming. Eventually, I fell asleep again, but a fitful, fearful sleep this time, broken by the slam of a car door, a snarling cat skirmish, an alarm trilling far away. When I could see the dark behind the blind fading to grey, I got up, put on a tracksuit and runners and went out into the cold, near-empty world. It had been weeks and all the bits of my body that needed regular moving had stiffened up. For a while, everything hurt, my back, ankles, knees, but by the time I reached the Esplanade, I had found my stride, the pains were down to tolerable levels. And, gradually, the chemical balance in my bloodstream seemed to return to normal, my skin stopped feeling stretched like kite paper, my jaw stopped clicking.
Running, early misty rain on my face, thinking, unable to stop thinking.
Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.
A grievance against the Carsons. Hatred, enough to kill an innocent girl for. Madness. Hatred turned to madness. What were the Carsons being blamed for? An eye for an eye. For a death? The death of someone in a part of the Carson empire, the diversified Carson empire, now not just a construction company but the owner of shopping centres and retail chains and big pieces of other companies? Industrial accidents? A death on a building site? Presumably there’d been many people killed over the years. Deaths for which the Carsons could be held directly responsible.
Anthea Wyllie. The Altona nurse who vanished after seeing Mark Carson. Jeremy Fisher gave Mark an alibi. Was there a family who didn’t accept that, who thought Mark was responsible? What was it that made a rich city lawyer give his services to the needy in a distant suburb? Was he in search of prey?
Did this mean Anne had been chosen simply because she was an available Carson, female Carson, because the kidnappers watched the school and followed Whitton’s car? Cars—he used three Carson cars. Chosen because she was the easiest Carson child to get to. Anne Carson was a soft target, walking down Revesdale Road alone, flushed from whatever took place in Craig’s yellow van, going into an alley. The other children were too young or too old, were elsewhere, far away. Anne’s younger sister, Vicky, went to an exclusive primary school, a walled school, driven in a minibus with five other rich children. The driver and guard came from a security firm.
That would be a hard target.
I ran out of legs on the home stretch, had to push myself, to ignore the body’s protests, to strive to hold the pace and not to weaken. Once I’d found satisfaction in that, asked it of others, demanded it of others. Not anymore. Proving yourself to yourself, to others above you and below you, that came to an end in fire and blood and broken bodies.
At the apartment, I showered and shaved, put on a shirt laundered by the Carson housekeeping staff, grey flannels cleaned and pressed. Then I drove to Acland Street, bought the papers and had breakfast, no relish in the eating of it after I saw the front-page headlines, the grainy photographs lifted from Museum Station’s security cameras. Both papers carried sequences of pictures of the wheelchair on the escalator and blurred enlargements and a police artist’s sketches of the man’s bearded face, full on and in profile.
This wasn’t going to do Detective Senior Sergeant John Ricardo Vella and the combined crews of the homicide squad any good. Fourteen, he said. They could activate all fifty-six members and it wouldn’t do any good. Take away the beard and you had nothing. I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup and nor would anyone else. Not sensibly.
And I’d seen the man in the flesh. I’d met his eyes, looked up, across a long divide, seen a pink hole of hate open in his beard. The city was full of tall men with beards. I looked out of the window, looked across the street expecting to see one. And I did, froze. Then I recognised him, he was a journalist, a football writer, he found poetry and pathos and lessons for living and dying in young men chasing a ball. At the end of his right arm was a child, fighting like a fish, padded and capped and ecstatic at being with him in the street.
Where was he yesterday, in the afternoon? Parking a people-mover in a parking bay for the disabled near Museum Station?
I didn’t read the newspapers’ text. What could they tell me that I didn’t know or didn’t want to know? The last segment of toast and poached egg, I left it on the plate, ordered coffee, went outside and rang Detective Senior Sergeant Vella. He answered with a sound made in his throat, the sound an animal might make, rolling over in a narrow and dark cave
heated by its own blood, a sleeping animal disturbed by something.
‘I didn’t think about Noyce’s mobile,’ I said. ‘Nor did anyone else. How’s that for being sharp?’
‘What?’
‘They rang last night, said, “Tell the Carsons it’s not an eye for an eye. We want more than an eye for an eye. Worth much more than one Carson slut. Tell all the Carson sluts that.”’
A silence.
‘Say it again.’ The animal was fully awake.
I said it again.
‘Eye for an eye?’
‘Eye for an eye.’
Silence. ‘Means what? In your judgment?’
‘I presume that they blame the Carsons for a death. You’d want to be checking all deaths in the empire since at least 1990. Can’t be that many.’
He coughed. ‘Four at one go on the Coniston House site. Crane fell over. That’d be ’91, ’92, around then. Where are you?’
‘Borscht in Acland Street. Something else. There’s a woman, a nurse, Anthea Wyllie, disappeared in Altona in 1988. Last seen talking to Mark Carson. I’d look at the family, friends. Hard.’
‘Wyllie? Spell that.’
I did so.
‘Don’t go away. Someone will come for the mobile. The beard.
False, you reckon?’
‘The bathroom fittings bloke in Revesdale Road says the driver who pissed him off had a beard. The young offsider says the man next to the Tarago in the lane had a big moustache.’
‘Bloke who sold the Tarago says a beard. So it would have to be full beard, moustache only, back to full beard. If it’s the same bloke, that says you saw a false beard.’
‘It’s possible. Like some bad cop movie.’
‘My life’s a bad cop movie. Not improved by people like you.’
I went inside and drank lukewarm coffee and waited. Not long.
A green Falcon double-parked outside and the passenger came in, a woman in black who looked like a tired netball player. She walked straight to my table, knew me. I gave her Noyce’s vibrating phone.
‘It needs a charge,’ I said.
‘Don’t we all.’ She took it and left.
My phone rang. I went outside. Running my life from a place that served breakfast.
‘Frank?’
Corin.
How can you identify someone from one word they say?
Probably by intonation, a Tone and Break problem.
‘I’ve been meaning to ring,’ I said.
‘That wasn’t you on television last night, was it? At Museum Station?’
Her tone was tentative. She wanted me to say: No, that wasn’t me. Wasn’t it awful?
‘I’m afraid so,’ I said. ‘That job’s over.’
As I said it, I thought, the matter-of-fact, just-another-day-atthe-office attitude, that’s a bad mistake.
She didn’t say anything. I could hear her breathing and I knew what she was thinking: How do I extricate myself from this? I don’t want to offend this person, he might…
‘I’m going to the country this afternoon,’ she said. ‘My brother’s got a few acres, he’s planted vines. Somehow, I’m in charge of them, I’m the de facto viticulturist, he’s too busy, too tired, too hungover.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘That sounds nice. Enjoy yourself. I’ll give you a ring some time. Or you could give me a ring.’
‘Can you come?’
A man popping up like a cork, breaking the surface, tanks shrugged off, weightbelt jettisoned, taking air into empty lungs, ‘Today? Let me think, yes, I think I can fit that in.’
‘It’s staying over,’ she said. ‘Tonight. Pretty primitive.’
‘Primitive? No spa bath?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I don’t know. That sort of back-to-nature stuff has its appeal for me. What time? My vehicle or yours?’
‘Around four-thirty. It’s the bulk-manure mover, I’m afraid. I’ve got to take bags of things. What’s your address?’
For a second, the sky lightened, it seemed as if the sun was coming out. In the midst of death, we are in life. Not a sentiment my mother would have approved of.
THE LAND was on a hillside, reached by a lane where half-a-dozen old elms had gone feral, produced hundreds of suckers that formed an undisciplined hedgerow.
I got out in the near-dark to open the gate, a vicious thing of twisted pipes and rusted wire that resented being unlatched and fought back as I dragged it through long grass.
Corin drove through and parked inside an open hayshed, a roof held up by massive eucalypt trunks. Beyond that was an old stone and brick barn, a long building with a loft door at one end. I closed the gate and walked down the track to join her, breathing out little ghosts of steam.
‘Welcome to Nightmarch Hill,’ said Corin, opening the vehicle’s back door. She was in her work clothes. ‘Named for Phar Lap’s brother.’
‘He’d be as well known as Elvis’s brother,’ I said.
‘Elvis had a brother?’
‘No.’
‘Well, Phar Lap did.’ She handed me a plastic crate of food. ‘Nightmarch. A man called Crossley bought the whole hill after he won twenty thousand pounds on him in the Epsom Handicap in 1929. It’s all broken up now but this bit kept the name. Don’t know why. The house is on the property next door. Dump the stuff at the door. I’ll get the generator going.’
She went around the side of the barn. I had everything at the side door of the barn when a diesel engine began to thump. Corin came back and opened the door, went in and switched on lights.
It was one large space with a brick-paved floor, a makeshift kitchen at one end, a collection of old chairs around a drum stove, a Ned Kelly, at the other, and a long table with benches on either side in the middle. Next to the table, a wide, sturdy ladder went up to a hole in the wooden ceiling. Three new French windows and a door had been knocked into the north wall.
‘The bathroom’s through the kitchen,’ said Corin. ‘You’ll be pleased to know there is one, complete with Scandinavian composting toilet.’
She’d been strained on the trip, arriving three-quarters of an hour late to pick me up, taking four long calls and making two in the ninety-minute drive. At one point, she said to a caller in a calm voice, ‘David, I understand your concerns but I assure you that I’ll meet the deadline.’ Pause. ‘Yes, the start has been slow.’ Pause. ‘No, I cannot bring them in over the weekend.’ Pause. ‘I’m sorry your client won’t be impressed.’ Pause. ‘No, I did not give any commitments on progress. My commitment is to a finishing date, that’s not going to be broken.’ Long pause. ‘David, for fuck’s sake, the job’ll be done on time if I have to build the fucking walls myself and lay the turf by fucking moonlight.’
‘Sorry about that,’ she’d said to me. ‘Losing control. Two big jobs and three smaller ones on the go. Been flat out for weeks, six days a week. I promised myself this afternoon off, got on the road at seven this morning to do it.’
Now she said, ‘The bedrooms are upstairs. Well, put it this way, upstairs is where you sleep.’
I carried my bottles of wine and the food crate down the room and put it on the kitchen counter.
‘There’s a bit of light left,’ she said. ‘Come and look at the vineyard.’
We went out of the north wall door onto a terrace. The day had been clear and to our left there was still a glow in the sky, like a fire burning on a long front, far away. Close-planted rows of small leafless vines began a few metres from the barn, ran down the slope away from us towards a dense line of bare trees. The sound of water moving came up the hill.
‘There’s a winter creek down there,’ said Corin. ‘Some years it runs well into summer. You can swim in the pools.’
I hadn’t stood next to her before. She was tall, straight-backed and I could see her profile against the light. She looked at me, I looked away, caught.
‘I picked grapes when I was a kid,’ I said. ‘The rows were further apart. And the vines.’
‘You’re an observant student,’ she said. ‘What my brother is attempting to do here has nothing to do with conventional viticultural practice. It has to do with viticultural stupidity. He found shiraz vines with the smallest fruit in the world and planted them close together. The idea is to put them under stress. Benign stress, they call it. Then you only allow the vines to produce small amounts of fruit. And, by hand, you pluck off half the leaves. With me to this point?’
‘No. Then what happens?’
‘If the theory’s correct and your site aspect’s perfect and the soils are right and the temperatures are optimal and the rainfall is what you need, and the birds haven’t eaten all your mini-berries, then you get small amounts of highly-concentrated fruit. You crush it and let it ferment with the wild yeasts. That’s like sending your precious children out to play with wild dogs.’
‘I’m beginning to see the charm of this,’ I said.
She looked at me and smiled, nodded.
We stood in silence, looking out on a world leaving our sight, just touching, feeling through the fabrics that enclosed us that we were touching.
Suddenly, it was dark, black, the far line of fire gone, extinguished, the world constricted, stopping where the tongues of light from the windows ended. No sound but the generator’s pulse and the moving water, winter water, urgent, going somewhere, irritated by banks and rocks and roots and trailing branches.
‘A fire and a drink,’ Corin said, all the tightness gone from her voice. ‘A cross-trained person like you could light the fire. It’s stacked, I do it before I leave. Obsessive-compulsive.’
We went inside. I knelt, scratched a kitchen match, put it to the Ned Kelly. It sniffed at the flame, drew breath, exploded, sucked oxygen out of the room.
‘First fire, then drink, then art,’ she said. ‘That’s evolution. In shorthand. I’ve brought this frozen stew thing. Make no claims for it, emergency rations, meat and veg. I cook a huge amount of it so that I can forget about cooking. Come home and be a vegetable.’
She fetched a red cast-iron pot, put it on the Kelly. I opened a bottle of white and we sat in the old armchairs, deep in the sag, generator thumping softly, fire making throaty noises, both comforting sounds.
Shooting Star Page 17