An Iron Rose

by Peter Temple

  ‘I know,’ Jim said.

  ‘Chaplain in the Navy, bloody Australian Navy, two pisspots and a tin bath. Hearin the bunnyboys’ confessions.’ He put on a high voice. ‘ “Forgive me, father, I cracked a fat at Mass.” ’ Then a deep voice: ‘ “My son, the Lord forbids us to lust after petty officers’ bums. Say fifty Hail Marys and, report to my cabin after lights out.” ’

  ‘He’s all right,’ Jim said. ‘Hasn’t been much of a life for him.’

  ‘All right?’ said Frank. ‘All right? He’s far from bloody all right. If he was all right he’d never have landed up here so he wouldn’t have much of a life. He’d a been a bloody cardinal, wouldn’t he?’

  Frank took a small leather-bound flask out of his inside pocket. ‘Just thinkin about bloody Kellaway gives me a need for drink,’ he said. He took off the cap and had a good swig.

  Jim muttered something.

  ‘What’s that?’ Frank said, wiping his lips. ‘You say somethin?’

  ‘Nothin.’

  ‘Don’t bloody nothin me. Somethin to say, spit it out.’

  ‘Bit early for the piss, innit?’

  Frank nodded knowingly. ‘Sonny,’ he said, ‘don’t come the fuckin little prig with me. I’ve had disapproval from a whole family of disapproval experts. I feel like it, I’ll give myself a whisky enema for breakfast.’

  I was looking at the plan. ‘What’s this twisty thing you’ve drawn here, Frank?’

  He eased himself up and came over. ‘It’s a spring, Mac. A shock absorber.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘That horse mounter needed a shock absorber.’

  ‘I need a bloody shock absorber,’ Frank said. ‘Shares goin down like the Titanic and the bastards call an election. This country’s buggered, y’know that, Mac. Get butchered for bloody king and country twice, then it’s for the Yanks. Now everythin’s for sale. Power stations. Telephone. Bloody airports. Negative gear this bloody Parliament buildin chock-a-block with liars, thousands of bloody bent police thrown in. Buy the whole country.’

  ‘What about Crewe?’ I said. ‘Going to get back, is he?’ I went over to the cabinet to look for some suitable springs for the shock absorber.

  ‘Anthony Crewe,’ Frank said. ‘Lord only knows how they made that bastard attorney-general. Bloody miscarriage of justice if ever there was one. Done that shonky will for old Morrissey.’

  ‘That’s enough, Frank,’ Jim said.

  Frank turned his big head slowly. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What did you say?’

  Jim looked away. ‘You know what Mr Petty always said about repeatin gossip.’

  A look somewhere between pleasure and pain came over Frank’s face. ‘Little man,’ he said, ‘don’t quote The Great Squatter to me. I’ve told you that before. I had those sayins straight from the horse’s arse for thirty-five years. Now a miniature ghost of the old shit follows me around repeatin them. Is that what they mean by everlastin life? You’re dead but your miserable opinions linger on to haunt the livin?’

  He turned back to me. ‘Now, as I was sayin, the bastard Crewe shoulda been in jail over that will.’

  ‘What will?’ I was looking in the box for springs.

  ‘Will he produced after old Morrissey turned up his toes. Half the bloody estate to the physiothingamajig. Who happens to be Mr Shonky Crewe’s current rootee. Lorraine was her name, I recall. Latest in a long line. Once he got his cut, he was into that Kinross Hall warder. Dr Marcia somethin or other. All legs and hair.’

  I looked up. ‘Crewe had an affair with Marcia Carrier?’

  ‘That’s what they say,’ Frank said. ‘He’s the boss cockie out there, y’know. Chairman of the council, whatever. They should take a bloody good look at that place. God knows what goes on there. I see the quack switched off his lights the other day. Hanged himself down there in Footscray. Least he picked a place with a decent footy team.’

  ‘Frank,’ Jim said. He had a habit of sitting with his hands clamped between his knees, palms together.

  ‘Shut up,’ Frank said. ‘Dr Barbie. Good name, eh? I’d take the wife rowin, though. That Irene.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’ I said.

  Frank lit another cigarette. It started a coughing fit. When it ended, he wiped moist eyes and said, ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Dr Barbie. Where’s he fit in?’

  ‘Kinross quack. Inherited the job from old Crewe. Looks just like old Crewe, too. Now Dr Barbie’s mum, she was the receptionist for umpteen bloody years.’

  ‘You never bloody stop, do you?’ Jim said.

  ‘Take that girl Sim Walsh picked up,’ Frank said. ‘Now where did she come from? Naked as your Eve. On Colson’s Road. Out there in the middle of the night. Covered in blood. Been whipped like a horse.’

  ‘That’s serious,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody oath. Told me about it one night he’d pushed the boat out to bloody Tasmania.’

  ‘Drunk talk,’ said Jim. ‘Sim Walsh was drunk for forty years. Most likely made the whole thing up.’

  I said, ‘When was this?’

  ‘Good way back,’ Frank said. ‘Around ’82, could be ’83. Thereabouts.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothin. Said he took her home, cleaned her up. Girl wouldn’t go to hospital, wouldn’t go to the police. Scared out of her wits. Put her to bed. Next day, gone.’

  ‘She tell him what happened?’

  ‘No. Kept talkin about a bloke called Ken. You got springs, then?’

  ‘I want the right springs,’ I said. ‘Not any old springs. Who was the girl?’

  Frank stumped over to the door and flicked his cigarette end into the yard. ‘Juvenile harlot from Kinross Hall,’ he said.

  ‘She told him that?’

  Frank thought about this. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘near enough. Sim said she was ravin. Drugs, he reckoned. Mind you, he was ravin a bit himself that night.’

  ‘Never reported it?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Frank said. ‘Come round the next day, eyes narrer as bloody stamps side-on. Said, do me a favour, what I said about that girl, forget it. Load of rubbish I made up.’

  ‘And here you are doin it,’ said Jim. ‘He told you it was a load of rubbish. What more d’ya want?’

  ‘I want you to keep your mouth shut,’ Frank said. ‘Sim didn’t make it up. He could bloody bignote himself-me and Douglas Bader and Sailor Malan saved the world from the bloody Nazis-but he wouldn’t make anythin up. Not out of nothin. Not in his nature. Oh no, it happened. Believe you me. He never came near me after that. Saw me comin, he’d cross the street. Another bugger I wouldn’t go to his bloody funeral.’

  Alex Rickard was ten minutes late but that was a misdemeanour by his standards. ‘Mac, Mac,’ he said, sliding onto the plastic barstool seat. ‘Back from the fucking dead. Where you been, mate?’

  ‘Here and there,’ I said. ‘What is it with you and these grunge pits?’

  Alex looked around at the pub: yellow smoke-stained walls, plastic furniture, scratched and cigarette-burnt formica-topped bar, three customers who looked like stroke victims. It was on Sydney Road and John Laws was braying at full volume to overcome Melbourne’s worst traffic noise. The house smell was a mixture of burnt diesel, stale beer, and carbolic. ‘I dunno,’ he said, shrugging his boxer’s shoulders in the expensive sports coat. ‘It’s the kind of bloke I am. True to my roots.’

  ‘That’s the thing they all value most about you,’ I said.

  ‘You drinking?’ said the barman. He’d modelled his appearance on the barmen in early Clint Eastwood westerns.

  ‘Beer,’ said Alex. I ordered a gin and tonic. I wasn’t going to drink anything that came up from this pub’s cellar.

  ‘No tonic,’ said the barman. ‘No call for it.’

  ‘What do they drink gin with?’ I said.

  ‘Coke,’ said the barman. ‘You drink Coke with gin.’

  ‘Whisky and water,’ I said. ‘You got any call for water?’

 
He muttered something and left.

  Alex rubbed the tip of his long nose between finger and thumb. ‘Y’know a Painter and Docker got it right where you’re sitting?’ he said. ‘Bloke walked in the door, up behind him, took this big fucking.38 out the front of his anorak. Three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. Back of the head, two in the spine. Walks out the door. Gone.’

  ‘They get him?’ I said.

  ‘No witnesses,’ Alex said. ‘Sixteen people in the pub, no-one saw a fucking thing.’

  ‘Funny that,’ I said. ‘You get so wrapped up talking footy, they shoot someone next to you, covers you with blood, you don’t notice a thing.’

  The drinks arrived. Alex paid, keeping his wallet well below the counter. ‘So they say you looked the other way on Lefroy,’ he said, not looking at me.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘I done a few jobs for Scully.’

  ‘Scully tell you?’

  ‘Nah. The offsider.’

  ‘Hill? Bianchi?’

  ‘Hill. Bianchi’s dead. Went to Queensland and drowned.’

  ‘Wonderful news,’ I said. ‘Saves me killing him. Listen, your boy any good on the Human Services Department?’

  He flicked his eyes at me, away, back. ‘Human Services? What the fuck you want with Human Services? They dealing now?’

  ‘It’s a private thing. I need the records of a place called Kinross Hall for 1985. It’s a kind of girls’ home. Who went in, who came out. All that.’

  Alex drank some beer, took out a packet of Camel. ‘Smoke?’

  I shook my head.

  He lit up, blew plumes out of his nostrils. ‘Could be easy. Could be fucking hard. It’s in the database, my boy’s probably in there like a honeymoon prick. Not-well, there’s ways. But it’ll cost.’

  ‘How long to find out?’

  Alex took out a grubby little notebook and a pen. ‘How d’ya spell this place?’

  I told him.

  ‘Eighty-five. What’s the mobile?’

  I gave him my number.

  ‘He can probably get in and look at the database inside an hour. Not there, I’ll have to think. I’ve got this sheila in the archives, knockers absent but Jesus, the arse on her. She can get all kinds of stuff. Thinks it’s sexy. Like I’m a spy.’

  ‘In your special way, Alex,’ I said, ‘you are. Want to talk about money?’

  He gave me a long look, drawing on the cigarette. There was something of the fox about him. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Maybe if we have to go the next step.’

  I was looking at the military history shelf in Hill of Content bookshop when the phone rang. I went outside into Bourke Street. It was lunchtime, street full of smart people in black.

  ‘That thing we were talking about,’ Alex said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t have to go the next step. Where are you?’

  ‘Bourke Street. I’m parked in Hardware Lane.’

  ‘The one on the corner?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m closer than you are. See you outside the side door.’

  I spotted him from a long way away, across the lane, back to the car park, brown packet under his arm. When I got close enough, I saw him watching me in the shop window. I gave a spy-type wave, close to the hip. He turned and came over.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Fucking phone book of stuff. Boy downloaded all the ’85 material in the file.’

  I took the packet. ‘How’d he get in?’

  Alex smiled his foxish smile. ‘They’ve got a link with Social Security. He reckons their data protection’s good as a knitted condom.’

  ‘What’s the bill?’

  ‘I’ll put it in the bank,’ Alex said. ‘Day will come.’

  We shook hands. He looked at me for a while, deciding something. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. He walked off, hand in pockets, chin up, at ease with himself.

  It was just before dark as I entered the home straight, the long avenue of bare poplars, the light turning steely blue-grey, the wet road shining like a blade. I was thinking about the girl in the mine shaft. Could she have been brought from far away? Whoever pushed her into the hole in the ground had to know that it was there: you wouldn’t travel a long distance with a dead body unless you had some burial spot in mind. Perhaps a local person, someone who knew the area, had murdered the girl in Melbourne. Had the police eliminated all the girls missing in Melbourne around that time? Surely not.

  But why would Ned be interested in the finding of her body? Why did he go to Kinross Hall?

  Allie was still working in the smithy. Face shining, she was making curtain poles, bending and twisting the red-hot iron into shepherd’s crook shapes with smooth, economic movements. I stood in the doorway watching her. She reminded me of my father at work. I was never going to be that good.

  ‘Looking smart,’ she said, putting the last pole in the rack. ‘Debonair, even. That’s the first time I’ve seen you wearing a tie.’

  ‘You only had to ask,’ I said, taking it off and putting it in a jacket pocket. Everything all right here?’

  ‘Booming,’ she said. ‘Woman over at Kyneton wants two sets of gates. She saw the ones you made for Alan Frith.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Frith doesn’t pay for his inside a week, I’ll take them round to her.’

  ‘And a man called Flannery was here. He put a case of beer in the office.’

  ‘That’s nice too,’ I said. ‘How many did he drink?’

  ‘Just one.’

  ‘Must be Lent,’ I said. ‘You in a hurry?’

  She looked at me speculatively. ‘No.’

  ‘Mind helping me read something?’ I told her about Ned working at Kinross Hall in 1985, Mick Doolan’s story about the complaint to the police, Ned’s visit four days before his death, and my meeting with Marcia Carrier.

  ‘Pretty weird,’ she said. ‘What’s the reading matter?’

  ‘Kinross Hall records.’

  ‘How’d you get them?’

  ‘Some bloke gave them to me. I forget who.’

  She scratched her short hair, face impassive. ‘Maybe it was the same bloke who told you about Alan Snelling and you’ve developed a block about remembering him.’

  I tore the continuous print-out Alex had given me into pages while Allie showered. She came back in jeans, a grey polo-necked sweater and her half-length Drizabone, and we walked down the road. Her skew nose and wet and shiny crew cut gave her the look of a boxer. A rather sexy female boxer. She caught me looking at her.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  The pub was empty except for Vinnie and George Beale playing draughts and a farmer reading the Weekly Times at the bar. We got two beers and went into the small lounge where a fire was dying in the grate. I fed it some kindling and a log from the bin.

  ‘I’m hoping there’s something that’ll jump out at you,’ I said, giving her half of the print-out pages.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Christ knows. Something happening to a girl. Trouble of some kind. Anything out of the ordinary.’

  We settled down in the sagging armchairs and started reading. I’d taken the first half of 1985 and it quickly became clear that the department liked paperwork. Kinross Hall filed monthly accounts, fortnightly pay sheets, weekly lists of admissions and discharges, and reports by Dr Ian Barbie on medical visits. Every three months, it produced a budget operating statement and a report card on each inmate. The department filed full personal dossiers on all new admissions. Once a month, Kinross Hall was visited by two senior department staff and they filed a report.

  It took us more than an hour to skim through the printouts. Midway, I fetched more beer. Finally, Allie said, ‘Well, nothing sticks out to me. I mean, here’s a major event. The inspectors had four written complaints about the food in October. Dr Carrier says the reason was the cook was off sick and the second in charge was having domestic troubles and basically couldn’t give a bugger about the food.’
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br />   ‘No-one jump the wire in November?’ I said.

  ‘No. There were five admissions and three discharges in November. The three had all turned seventeen. They don’t seem to be able to hold them after that.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘The hot water system broke down.’

  ‘You hungry?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got a farm chook, raised on insects and berries in the wild.’

  ‘Now you tell me. I’m going out.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘hot date with Alan Snelling could be better than a hot chook.’

  ‘It’s not Alan Snelling. You took the shine off Alan Snelling. A vet.’

  ‘Pure animal, some vets,’ I said.

  She smiled at me. ‘This one comes on like he’s got a Rottweiler stuffed down the front of his jeans.’

  ‘Probably a Jack Russell thinks it’s a Rottweiler.’

  ‘It’s not the size of the bite that counts.’

  ‘What counts?’

  ‘How long they gnaw at you.’

  At home, Mick Doolan and Lew were watching a golf video. As I came in the door, Mick was saying, ‘It’s all that wantin to hit the ball to kingdom come, lad. Bin the ruination of many a great talent. What I’m tryin to do is to get you to play the game backwards.’

  ‘But drivin’s where the game starts,’ Lew said.

  ‘And ends fer a lotta the fellas. We’ll get to the drivin. We’ve got the puttin down flat. Now we’ve got to get the approach right. Not twice outta ten, not three times. Ten outta ten. Lookit this fella on the screen here. Ya can’t putt like that. See. Bloody country mile.’

  ‘Can’t you watch porn videos like everyone else?’ I said.

  Mick looked around. ‘When I’m done coachin this lad,’ he said, ‘they’ll be askin us to star in the porno videos.’

  ‘Golf porn,’ I said. ‘There could be a market for that.’

  I went to work on the chicken. My father’s recipe, made a hundred times: rub the skin with butter, stuff with a mixture of breadcrumbs, finely chopped onion, Worcester sauce, grated lemon rind, chopped raisins, half a cup of brandy. Stick in oven until brown.