by Peter Temple
I pushed on. ‘Her mother, then.’
Tom wasn’t going to be pushed. He drew on the panatella, exhaled in a resigned way, said in a level tone, not unpleasant, ‘Frank, we’re not paying you for that kind of advice. We don’t need that kind of advice.’
Tightness in my face, around the eyes, the mouth. I paid attention to the feeling. When you know that the rational part of your brain is no longer in full control, you can do something about that. Or not.
I looked at the carpet, at nothing, took my time, looked up, at Tom, he didn’t blink, a hard buyer in a buyer’s market, at Barry, who met my gaze, flicked his eyes downwards, away, and at Stephanie, whose expression carried a hint of apology for her father.
‘Okay,’ I said, steady now. ‘It’s not clear to me what you’re paying me for. But, since you are paying, let me say that we may be in for a long wait. And sooner or later, you will call in the police. If they release Anne, if they don’t, at some point you have to call the cops. So, things we can do now will save hours, days maybe, when that happens.’
‘Such as?’
‘Ask the basic questions. Try to get some feeling for who these people might be. I don’t think we risk spooking them. Fifty cops around the record store, yes. Two blokes looking around, no. And get Jahn, Cullinan to draw up a list of ex-employees who might have a grudge. Going back five years. That’ll save lots of time when the crunch comes.’
There was a moment when Tom was poised to say no. I could see it in his eyes, in the way he moved his head.
Stephanie had an unlit cigarette in her mouth, tilted her head back to look up at her father. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I agree with Frank. We can’t just sit here hoping it’ll turn out well if we throw bags of money at them. And that voice, my God, that’s not someone you can buy off. That’s someone…I don’t know. Hates.’
Tom looked down at her.
‘Frank’s right, Dad,’ she said.
He sighed, put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’ll talk to the old man.’
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘If anyone has even the vaguest suspicion about who these people might be, some personal grudge perhaps, this is the time to tell me.’
Silence. Tom shrugged. Barry shrugged. Stephanie and Noyce shook their heads.
‘What about Mark?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘Mark’s been a fool in business but he doesn’t have enemies like that.’
9
Carmen Geary didn’t seem to be in shock over the disappearance of her friend. She looked me over as if I were applying for a position for which looks were important. Her own looks put her closer to twenty than any fifteen-year-old should be, a long-legged girl-woman with gleaming dark hair that had continually to be pushed away, theatrically, from her face.
‘The man,’ I said. ‘Can you describe him?’
She blinked her lashes at me. ‘Sure. Old. Sort of dirty looking, glasses with thick lenses…’ ‘Dirty. What, like unshaven?’
‘No. Not unshaven, just sort of dirty, y’know.’
‘The glasses. Shape?’
‘Big old-fashioned ones, squarish, with thick black frames.’
‘Thick lenses?’
‘No, don’t think so.’
‘How far away?’
‘Close. Over there, sort of.’ She pointed at the window wall.
‘Anything else about him?’
‘The cap. A red cap.’
‘A baseball cap?’
She nodded. ‘Makita logo on it.’
We were upstairs in Pat Carson’s mansion, in a comfortably furnished sitting room with French doors to a balcony. Carmen’s mother, Lauren, was next door, in an office with filing cabinets and a computer on a neat desk. ‘It’s like running a medium-size hotel,’ she’d said on the way upstairs. ‘I was housekeeper at three Hiltons. This is much the same.’
‘Although in hotels even the most troublesome guests eventually leave,’ I said.
She laughed. It was a deep, good-natured laugh. ‘There is that to look forward to in hotels,’ she said.
I asked the question on my mind. ‘Does the remuneration here include school fees?’
Lauren laughed again. ‘That was Mr Pat Carson’s idea. He said, “When you live with the family and look after the family, you’re part of the family. And so your child goes to school where the Carsons go.”’
Now I said to Carmen, ‘You saw him three times and he was there when you went into the store and still there when you came out.’
Hair brushed away, fingers flicking outwards. ‘No. He was still there the first two times. The third time he wasn’t. Frank. Trams come all the time, so he wasn’t waiting for a tram.’
‘When was the last time you saw him?’
‘On Thursday.’
‘What time was that?’
Carmen shifted in her chair, recrossed her legs in her short skirt.
‘Twenty past four, around then.’
‘That wouldn’t give you much time in the store.’
‘No. We’re only there twenty-five minutes, something like that.’
Hand flicking hair. ‘How old are you, Frank?’
I ignored the question. ‘What sport do you play at school, Carmen?’
‘Sport? Oh, tennis.’ She was scratching her head. ‘And swimming. We swim. What do you play? Do you work out?’
‘Does Anne have anyone special she talks to at the record shop?’
‘Special?’ She smiled, head on one side, lips well apart showing perfect teeth, a cover-girl smile, asked the mock-naive question.
‘You mean, like a boy?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Not really. Well, boys are always coming on to you. I bet girls come on to you. Do they?’
‘Not since I stopped washing ten years ago,’ I said, unsmiling. ‘So there’s no boyfriend?’
She had her right hand at her face. ‘Boyfriend? No. No boyfriend.’
‘And you’d know, wouldn’t you?’
She spoke from behind her fingers, the other hand running up and down her left thigh. ‘Wouldn’t everyone? This place’s a jail. Everyone’s paranoid.’
‘On Thursday, you came out about 4.50 when you couldn’t find Anne.’
‘Yes.’
‘Crowded, the store?’
‘Yes. Lots of kids.’ Carmen was moistening her upper lip with a tongue tip, a perfectly pink arrowhead.
‘Often get separated when you’re in the store?’
‘Well, if you’re talking to someone else, you don’t notice what the person you’re with’s doing. But quarter to five’s when Dennis picks us up, so I looked around, couldn’t see her, went all over the place.’ She looked down. ‘I got a bit scared.’
‘That’s being paranoid, is it?’
Carmen sniffed. ‘Bit, I suppose.’
‘Happened before? Couldn’t find Anne?’
Wide eyes on me. ‘No.’
‘What did Dennis do when you went to the car and told him?’
‘Double-parked. We went back in and looked again. Then Dennis got the call on his mobile.’
‘The call?’
‘From Graham. About the kidnap call to Anne’s grandpa.’
I sat back, elbows on the chair arms, fingers interlocked, and looked into her eyes.
‘That’s the chaplain’s look,’ said Carmen. ‘He does that, he’s a spunk, a girl in another class saw him in St Kilda at one in the morning with this like real tart…’
‘On a mission of mercy, no doubt,’ I said, standing, feeling the pain in my leg. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Carmen. Think about Thursday, anything could be important.’
‘You’re a Capricorn, aren’t you?’ she said, head on one side again, all front teeth on show. ‘Can’t be faithful.’
‘Can’t even be hopeful,’ I said. ‘There’s one other thing I just remembered. The school says neither of you has played any sport this term. On Tuesdays or Thursdays. So you’d have to be doing something else on Tuesdays a
nd Thursdays, wouldn’t you.’
I gave her a while to answer, held her eyes, not smiling. Then I said, ‘It’s what you don’t tell me you’ll be sorry about.’
Her pink tongue came out again and licked a lower lip as red and full as a late-season plum.
‘His name’s Craig,’ she said. ‘That’s all I know, I swear.’
10
The drivers’ quarters were in an overgrown brick cottage ten metres from the stairs leading to the Carsons’ basement carpark. There was always a driver on call, night and day, said Noyce.
Whitton came to the door with his jacket on, ready for work.
‘A few more words,’ I said.
‘Sure, right, come in.’
We went in. ‘This is Michael Orlovsky. He works with me.’
Whitton put out his right hand. Orlovsky kept his hands in his pockets, nodded.
The staff did well in the Carson compound. Whitton’s room looked as if it had been done by a decorator, tweeds and checks and a group of architectural prints on a wall.
‘Sit down,’ I said and I went over to look at the prints, precise drawings of small and elegant buildings, some with domes and pillars and steps, one a tapering tower with a curiously fluted roof. For a time in my early adolescence, I’d had dreams about being an architect, taken books out of the library, tried to copy the illustrations I liked. ‘Don’t be so pathetic, Frank,’ my mother said one day. ‘Only babies copy things.’ I didn’t do any more copying, tore up my drawings, didn’t take out any more books on buildings.
Whitton sat on the edge of a sofa, pale eyes uneasy, blinking rapidly. ‘So what can I…’
‘What can you?’ I said. ‘What can you?’ I moved to look at the view from the window. A small vegetable garden, then a wall. There were brick paths between the dormant beds, dark soil mounded like plump graves and, against the wall, a low lean-to glasshouse.
‘What I told you on Thursday,’ Whitton said, ‘that’s pretty much it.’
I didn’t look at him. Who had lived in this cottage, worked in the kitchen garden? The Carsons had bought up the whole block, all their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours, consolidated the properties, taken down the fences, encircled the whole with a barrier, only two entries, gates and cameras. That the Carson family might live here free from fear, immune to the envy and resentment of those beyond the walls. But only here. They still had to leave the sanctuary, go into the world, onto the streets, into the city, see the passing world through windows, pale teenagers with chemical eyes, poor people clutching plastic bags holding a gas-ripened tomato and two hundred grams of fatty mince, sad men with mortuary stubble eking out their days. Even sitting in the Merc at the lights, cool in summer, just right in winter, the Carsons had no choice but to hear the crude and throaty menace of bored-out Holdens beside them, feel the redline bass from eight speakers penetrating their German monocoque, vibrating it, violating it.
‘Pretty much it,’ he said again, voice tight.
I turned and looked at him. His face was tight too, pale, colour gone from the flesh, dying fish colour, blood gone elsewhere, to where it was most needed.
‘Fucked her,’ I said. ‘Fifteen.’
His head was pointed left, he shook it a few times, changed his mind, made a rocking movement with his body, still didn’t look at me.
‘Fucked her,’ I said.
Whitton closed his eyes. He looked much younger that way, spiky eyelashes, spears, a fence of eyelashes. Moisture appeared, a rim of liquid, tears, trembling, a sigh could break the surface tension.
He sniffed, shook his head, the heart’s pure waters broke, rolled down his face, met his lips.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Just once, just once.’
I sat down in a comfortable armchair opposite Whitton, leaned back, stared at him, waited for him.
He kept his gaze down, wiped his cheeks with the back of his right hand. ‘Carmen tell you?’
‘What kind of jobs you going for after this?’ I said.
He put his big hands between his knees, squeezed them with his thighs. ‘You don’t know her,’ he said. ‘It’s not like she’s a little girl. Had two blokes rootin her in her room at Portsea in January, the one’s about thirty, maybe more, rubbish she picked up on the beach, they ring her on her mobile, she let em in the gate at two in the morning.’
‘I don’t want to know her,’ I said. ‘I want to find her. So let’s move on from this What-I-told-you-on-Thursday-that’s-pretty-much-it shit.’
I took the tiny tape recorder out of my inside jacket pocket and put it on the coffee table.
‘Everything,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave out a fucking thing.’
When he’d finished, I said, ‘Draw me a map. Show me exactly where you dropped Anne.’
Whitton was in the kitchen looking for paper when my mobile rang.
‘I’m home, got the slippers on, sitting here with a beer, in about twenty minutes we’re eating octopus. Caught today by my cousin. And where the fuck are you?’
Detective Senior Sergeant Vella. It was Saturday.
‘Is that octopus Italian style?’
‘No. This is octopus cooked in the Mongolian style. You sew it up in a goat’s bladder, full, and…’
‘Say no more. Twenty minutes, I’m there.’
Whitton came out and showed me a piece of paper, neatly drawn map. ‘Here’s the school,’ he said.
I looked, folded the paper, put it in my shirt pocket.
He took a pace backwards, exercised his thick neck. ‘Me and Anne,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘You got to understand, she’s the one…’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t have to understand. I don’t care. I’m not telling anyone. Yet. I might not, depends. Just stay close. I don’t want to have to look for you.’
Orlovsky and I walked back to our quarters in the Garden House, through what resembled a small park, gusty night, oak trees shaking, shedding leaves like big flakes of dandruff. Orlovsky said, deeply scornful, ‘You like this kind of stuff, don’t you? Army, cops, you’re cross-trained in arsehole skills.’
I breathed deeply, no smell of pollution here, only wet greenery: the rich have power over the wind. ‘Listen, wimp,’ I said, ‘your kind are the first ones to ring for a cross-trained arsehole when they hear a noise in the night.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but does he come?’
11
Sunday morning at 9 a.m. with a hangover is a good time to knock on people’s doors and ask them questions without having any identification. But Orlovsky, coming from the other end of the genteel Brighton block, hit the paydirt quickly. He fetched me.
‘Mrs Neill, this is my associate, Frank Calder,’ said Orlovsky,
smiling at me.
I shook her hand. She was in her seventies, at least, straight back, hair whipped into stiff peaks like egg white, two-piece tweed suit suitable for church. Anglican, probably.
‘I endured it for two weeks,’ she said. ‘Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then I adopted my late husband’s attitude. Thus far and no farther. He also believed in confronting your fears and mocking them. To the very end, I may say.’
‘What did you do?’ I said.
‘I simply marched out there and knocked on the window. His head was leaning against it. Gave him no end of a fright. The Lord knows how they can be in a confined space with noise like that. I swear the whole vehicle was moving.’
‘And?’
‘Well, he wound down the window, my dear, and the noise was even worse and I said, I shouted, this is a residential street and you are making enough noise to wake the dead. So he switched off the record player, whatever those things are, and he turned out to be a rather nice young man, rings in his ears but rather nice. Very apologetic. Took me aback. I was ready for a fight.’
I took out the photograph of Anne. ‘The girl who got into the vehicle, is this her?’
It was a recent photograph, taken by Carmen in January at the Carson house at Portsea. Anne was sit
ting on a low white wall, laughing, a big piece of dirty-blonde hair falling forward. I could see Whitton’s point. In a black one-piece bathing suit cut high in the legs and low in front, there was nothing of the gawky adolescent about her. No barman would have asked her for ID.
Without hesitation. ‘Yes. Pretty girl in a raincoat. A yellow raincoat, one of those plastic ones.’
A raincoat to cover her school uniform.
‘What did he look like, apart from the rings in his ear?’ I said.
‘Ears. Both of them, three or four little rings. Well, he was darkish. Mediterranean, I would say. If one’s allowed to these days.
Hair combed back.’
‘About what age, would you say?’
‘Oh, I’m hopeless at ages. They all look so young. Twenty-five perhaps.’
‘Long hair?’
She thought. ‘No, not long, not short, tidy hair, little sideburns.’
‘Moustache, beard?’
‘No. Has he done something?’
‘It’s possible.’
‘Well, he was a tradesman, I’m sure of that.’
‘What makes you sure?’
‘Overalls. He was wearing those overalls they wear a tee-shirt under. Winter and summer. Don’t seem to feel the cold, tradesmen, have you noticed that?’
‘It’s their training,’ said Orlovsky.
‘Also, I could see tools and things in the back.’
‘Tools?’ I said.
‘A sort of saw thing, a power thing. And a cabinet with drawers, a metal cabinet. Against the side.’
‘Anything else?’
She paused, moved her head in a birdlike way. ‘He must like boxing.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He had two boxing gloves tattooed on his arm, high up, just peeking out of his sleeve. With a little key under them. And two tiny boxing gloves hanging from the mirror, you know the way some people hang things in their cars? Quite dangerous, I think. Distracting.’
I asked more questions but the well was dry. We said our thanks.
In his car, Orlovsky said, ‘Anne the poor little rich girl and Craig the crafty tradesman. Probably rooting while the brother or the cousin makes the phone calls.’