by Peter Temple
The smile went, her eyes widened, she held out a hand for her dress, pulled it on as efficiently as she’d taken it off. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Please God, no.’
‘Let’s sit down,’ I said.
We sat down. She was shaking her head, looking down, breathing quickly and shallowly. ‘Poor baby,’ she said. ‘Poor, poor baby.’ Then she looked up slowly, eyes narrowed, smiled. ‘Just a trick, isn’t it? They sent you to play this trick on me. They want me to go completely out of my mind.’
‘Who would want that?’
‘Tom and Barry. Who fucking else? They used to put a tape recorder next to my bed when I was asleep. Telling me what a bad mother I was, telling me I should kill myself, how that was what was best for the children. Of course, Carol was behind it all. She hated me from the start. Detested me. She told Mark I’d trapped him, that I should’ve been on the Pill.’
She was moving her head from side to side now, her right hand at her throat inside the shift collar, feeling the scar tissue.
‘They sent you, didn’t they? Didn’t they?’
I took a chance. ‘Pat sent me,’ I said. ‘He sends you his love.’
She was startled. Her head stopped moving. ‘Pat? Did he? Why doesn’t he come and see me?’ Her voice had taken on a sad, whining tone. ‘I love Pat. Like a father. Pat doesn’t know what the others are doing. He’d never let them do anything to me…’
‘Anne hasn’t been kidnapped,’ I said, tasting the lie on my tongue. ‘I’m the new person in charge of the children’s safety. I’m trying to identify any possible threats to them. So that we can act in advance, keep them safe.’
She nodded, thoughts now somewhere else. ‘My father doesn’t want anything to do with me,’ she said. ‘He married his secretary six months after Mum’s death. They killed her. Murdered her.’
This was not the person to be asking questions about possible kidnappers of her daughter. I should have accepted the briefing, accepted it and flown back to town afterwards. I could have had the briefing on the telephone, never flown here at all.
‘They destroyed Jonty too, you know. And Mark, their own flesh and blood,’ Christine said. ‘Although he’s the sick one, he’s the one who’s sick.’
‘Jonty. Who’s Jonty?’
‘Stephanie’s husband.’
I remembered Pat’s words on the first night, in his study sipping malt whisky:
…and Stephanie and her fuckin husband, don’t like to say the bastard’s name, Jonathan fuckin Chadwick.
‘How did they destroy Jonty?’
Christine sighed, scratched her scalp, put her hands into her sleeves, scratched, took them out. ‘Isn’t it time?’ she said to Jude, standing behind me. ‘Jude, isn’t it time? Darling?’
‘In a while,’ said Jude, power in her voice. ‘When your visitor is finished.’
I repeated the question.
Christine got up, began to walk back and forth in front of me. ‘Jonty? Oh, they have their ways. They got his licence taken away. Tom and Barry. They’ve got the power. Just pick up the phone.’
‘What licence was that?’
‘Licence to be a doctor, I don’t know what they call it.’
‘On what grounds was his licence to practise suspended?’
‘They’re so fucking self-righteous. Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?’ Her shoulder twitched, moved again.
‘Tell me about Jonty.’
‘Jude, it must be time, why can’t I have a fucking watch, what fucking harm can that possibly do? How do I fucking kill myself with a watch? Please, Jude…’
‘Your visitor’s not finished,’ said Jude curtly. ‘Pay attention.’
Christine looked at me, jerked her head from side to side. ‘Jesus. What?’
‘Tell me about Jonty.’
‘Shit, he’s no saint. The guy was dealing in his office, right, he was shooting up junkies in his office. The far gones. Including me. He used to shoot me up, shoot up too, then I’d leave and he’d go back to seeing patients. Old ladies.’
‘And after he was suspended?’
‘Kicked him out. Expelled him from the family. Like me. Started dealing in clubs, in the street. He owed huge fucking sums to the suppliers, they were going to kill him…Can you go now, please, please.’
‘Just one last thing. How did they destroy Mark?’
‘Wouldn’t have him in the business. Barry wouldn’t have him. Barry hates him. I don’t know why. Won’t be in a room with him. He got Mark’s law firm to fire him. Then his own father wouldn’t give him a cent.’
She was rubbing her hands together, scratched her face. ‘Can you go now. Please?’
I stood up. ‘Thank you, Mrs Carson,’ I said. ‘I appreciate your talking to me.’
‘Yes. Goodbye.’ She wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at Jude. ‘Jude, darling, he’s going…’
The man was waiting for me in the anteroom, presumably had watched us on the monitor.
‘As you’ve seen,’ he said as we walked down the corridor, ‘Mrs Carson is not the easiest of patients.’
‘She’s not a patient,’ I said, ‘she’s an inmate.’
We flew home over the lush hills, beneath us the fields, the settlements, the roads, the cars, they looked like the perfect countrysides model railway enthusiasts build: one of each thing and everything in its place. I thought that there had probably been a time when the Carsons imagined they had built a perfect landscape, shaped the world with their money. Then strangers came and took Alice away from them and suddenly their money was as shells and flints and sharks’ teeth and Reichsmarks, a basketful would not preserve a hair on the girl’s head.
The pilot was looking at me. ‘Ex-military?’ he said. In his dark glasses I could see my reflection, bulbous.
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Something. I had ten years.’
‘Ex all kinds of things,’ I said. ‘Ex-everything, basically.’
He looked away, flash of glasses.
We were over the Dandenongs and ahead, choking on its own foul breath, lay the imperfect city. Many of each thing and nothing in its place.
16
From Orlovsky’s car, coming in on the hideous tollway, I rang a cop called Vince Hartnett in Drugs and didn’t say my name.
‘Give me a number, call you in a minute.’
He’d be going outside to talk on a stolen mobile newly liberated from a dealer.
‘Got two private sales of Taragos to check,’ said Orlovsky. ‘And that’s it. The market in old Taragos is sluggish.’
‘The auctions,’ I said. ‘Could’ve been bought at auction.’
‘Could’ve been bought in 1988.’
I nodded, thinking about Dr Jonty Chadwick shooting up Christine in his consulting room, shooting up himself. Putting the blood pressure cuff on shaking junkies, pumping it up tight and giving them the needle. Not an old-fashioned family doctor but a doctor for the new family, the family of addicts. Still, even junkie doctors would have much experience of performing small procedures: extracting splinters, lancing boils, carving out plantar warts.
Cutting off two joints of a little finger. His niece’s little finger.
That would be a minor procedure. Hygienically done.
Was that likely? The son-in-law kicked out, expelled from the Carson family, struck off the medical roll. It was possible.
My phone rang. Vince Hartnett.
‘A doctor called Jonathan Chadwick. Mean anything?’
‘Jonty baby. Dr Happy. Added a new depth to general practice.
Yes, I know Jonty.’ He had a quick, streetwise way of talking.
‘What happened to him?’
‘Inside. Got five years in, let me see, ’96, ’97. Trying for the big time. Hopeless case. Sadly missed by the street life.’
I thanked Vince, went back to thinking about the Carsons. I knew something about one of them: Pat Carson junior, Alice’s brot
her. A few weeks after I’d ended the little hostage drama in the underwear store, Graham Noyce invited me for a drink at a small and horrendously smart hotel called The Hotel Off Collins. The Carson family owned it, he told me. They wanted to show their gratitude for the handling of the lingerie incident. He put an envelope on the table. I said thanks but life had taught me that whatever joy the contents of envelopes brought, accepting them was a step on the way to sadness.
He didn’t press it, put the envelope away, gave me his card. Then, when I was out of the force and desperate, I sent him my card. This claimed that I was a Mediator and Negotiator. About a month later, he gave me a job to do for Barry Carson. Barry’s nineteen-year-old boy, Pat Junior, was getting some life experience from a thirty-four-year-old table dancer called Sam Stark, formerly Janelle Hopper. Sam was professing undying love for the young Carson, and he was lavishing gifts on her and talking about marriage when he turned twenty-one and got his trust money from his maternal grandfather. I had a word with Sam and found her to be sincere in her love for Pat. At least until we got to fifty thousand dollars and a one-way ticket to Brisbane, business class.
At that point, before my eyes, her love for the youth withered. Noyce rang the next day to say thanks, Sam Stark had broken off with Pat Junior, booked a flight to Brisbane.
Had Sam told Pat that she’d been bought off? How would he take that? He was a wild young man by Noyce’s account. Dropped out of university. In with bad company. Casino lizards, Noyce said. Pat had already sold the car his mother gave him when he left school to pay off gambling debts. Would he be part of the kidnapping of his cousin’s child? Angry, in debt, in the company of fast people. Someone might have suggested it, made a joke of it.
I rang Graham Noyce’s mobile. ‘It’s Frank,’ I said. ‘Anything happening?’
‘Nothing. How’d you go with Christine?’
‘An unwell person.’
‘Yes, a variety of problems, including, would you believe it, narcissism.’
‘Anything with a narc in it I’d believe.’
‘So not a useful trip?’
‘No. What’s Pat Junior doing these days?’
There was a short silence. I could see his worried face, more hairs jumping scalp. ‘That’s not a, a casual question, is it?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘He’s a worry for Barry. And for Katherine. They got his grandmother, she’s in her eighties, to change the terms of the trust. I told you about the trust, did I?’
‘You did.’
‘Pat won’t be getting his three-quarter million till he turns thirty now. His mother told him on the phone from England. I understand he went berserk, grabbed some antique glass thing, smashed a mirror dating from Napoleon’s day. Security had to be called in.’
‘Who says money can’t buy happiness?’ I said. ‘Like the Kennedys.’
‘I won’t say I haven’t dreamt of a man in a window with a rifle.’ A pause. ‘Pat…you don’t think…’
‘What do you know about Pat’s reaction to Alice’s kidnapping? And his mother taking her to England?’
In my mind, I could see the shrug. ‘Only what Barry’s said. He thinks Pat’s got some kind of emotion-deficit disorder. Doesn’t seem to have any attachment to Barry or Katherine or Alice. Anyone, for that matter. Well, perhaps that whore you bought off. He took that badly.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘Wouldn’t have to be Einstein. Eternal love one minute, the next she’s gone. Plus…’ ‘Plus?’
‘He knows what the family money can do. We had to solve a pregnancy matter when he was sixteen. Quite expensive, it turned out to be. The girl’s father saw an opportunity to get a unit in Byron Bay.’
‘Pat’s been told about Anne?’
‘No.’
‘Where would he be at this time of day?’
‘Wherever he is, he’ll be asleep, building up his reserves for another assault on the casino. He’s got an apartment in South Melbourne, behind the Malthouse. Courtesy of Grandma. The block’s called, odd name, hold on a sec, it’s called…Anvil Square. In Anvil Square East, I think it is.’
Noyce paused. ‘He’s a weird kid, Frank, cold as stone, bit out of control, bit of a smartarse, too much stuff up the nose, but…’
‘But is probably right,’ I said. ‘Talk to you later.’
They rip his girlfriend off him, they keep his money from him. Dangerous people squeezing him to pay his debts. Coke habit. He could get others to help him, to make the kidnap seem to be about something other than money.
Orlovsky was looking at me, an inquiry in his left eyebrow. ‘Pat Junior?’
‘Barry’s boy. Twenty-one this year.’
‘Ah. Generation X. Wants to finance an Internet startup, perhaps? He’s looking for venture capital. Kidnap a relative. Cut off a big bit of finger, that’ll show them we’re totally full-on.’ He sniffed. ‘Feeling in full control of whatever it is we’re doing, Frank? Pardon, you’re doing. I’m just driving the car and kicking fellow human beings on demand.’
I sighed. ‘Rich kids have done worse things. Like killing their parents to speed up the inheritance. Go to the orphans’ picnic. Kidnapping a cousin is nothing. We need a bit of surveillance.’
‘We need something. I’m on the road on Thursday, bear that in mind.’
I rang Vella. ‘I liked that Mongolian octopus. You Vellas, you’re across so many cultures.’
‘We come across easy. Marco’s bookkeeper’s looking for you. Some rent matter.’
‘Trivial. Give him my love. Listen, let’s say you want your girlfriend watched, you’re insane with jealousy, you have to know. But if she spots the prick, she phones your wife to complain. Who’s your man?’
‘Woman, my woman. You sleep through the gender-sensitivity workshop?’
‘I was sick that day. My mother wrote a note. Name and number?’
17
Angela Cairncross was an in-between person: between clothing styles, between ages, possibly even between genders. She pushed over a set of photographs. ‘That’s me,’ she said.
I looked through them. She was good. A bag lady on a bench, a plump man walking two small dogs, a tired-looking nurse going home, a man in overalls next to vans with Telstra and Optus written on the sides.
‘Don’t get a chance to go out anymore, the business’s got so big,’ said Angela. ‘Once it was just Bert, my late husband, and Harry Chalmers and me. Now it’s ten full-timers, thirty temps on call, part-timers, they do a shift. Works well, you never see the same person, same vehicle, twice. Variety, that’s the key. Variety. The police have trouble getting that part right.’
I didn’t demur. The jacks didn’t get lots of things right. I’d tried very hard to point some of them out. In a manner that was held to be extreme. Murderous in fact.
‘Yes,’ said Angela. ‘You can’t run a business like this on trade union lines. Flexibility, that’s what you need.’
We were in the cheerful offices of Cairncross amp; Associates above a printery off York Street in South Melbourne. There were prints and posters on the yellow walls, flowers on the desks. Down below, the presses were running: you could feel the vibrations in the soles of your feet, coming up your chair legs.
‘Pat’s a rich kid, may be out of his depth,’ I said. ‘Bad company, gambling, that kind of thing. We’re worried he might be doing something stupid.’
Angela scratched an eyebrow, just a pale line, with a middle finger. ‘Stupid? Illegal?’
‘Might be involved in a kidnapping.’
She turned down her lips and nodded. ‘That is stupid. Reported, is it?’
‘No. Not yet. We need twenty-four hours on him, more if anything shows. You’ll understand, there’s a fear the victim will be in danger if they get even a wrong feeling.’
‘It’s more than him?’
‘There would have to be. A courier’s on the way with a photograph of Pat and a rego number but that’s it.’
‘Anv
il Square. I know it.’ Angela looked at the ceiling. ‘All new buildings that area, apartments. It’ll be hard. There’s no street life. Got a budget in mind?’
‘If you need an airship, hire one.’
‘So that will be stills and video.’ She wrote on the form, looked up.
‘We don’t do interceptions, bugs, without a warrant, you know that? We can get some sound. Outside, public places. Not guaranteed, of course.’
‘It has to start soonest.’
‘Starts as soon as the picture gets here. I’ve got two people free, can bring in others. Is Pat one of those Carsons?’
There wasn’t any point in telling lies. Her business was lies. ‘Yes. They’re not keen on publicity.’
‘Won’t get any out of this office. We’ve done all kinds of people, I can tell you. And that’s all I’ll tell you. Bert used to say we live or die by confidentiality. Any sensitivity about where the bill goes?’
‘No.’ I gave her Graham Noyce’s address and my mobile number. ‘How do you report?’
‘Office is staffed twenty-four hours. In a case like this, operatives call in every hour or whenever something happens.’ She wrote a number on a card and handed it over. ‘I’ve written the case number there. You can ring this office at any time for an update. Just give the case number. It’s like your PIN. Any important development, we’ll be in touch with you immediately.’
I got up. ‘This sounds businesslike, Angela.’
She smiled, pleased. ‘We’re in the business of service, Mr Calder. That’s what Bert used to say. The McDonald’s of the industry, I like to think. Many of our competitors are more like fish and chip shops.’
Orlovsky was leaning on the car, talking on the mobile. He finished as I approached, eyed me, half-smiling.
‘Could have the vehicle. A youngish bloke and an older one, driving an old stationwagon. Paid cash. Sounds like the two in Revesdale Street, beard on the younger one.’
‘Jesus. Show ID?’
‘No. The seller didn’t ask.’
I closed my eyes, sagged. ‘Station wagon rego?’