An Iron Rose

by Peter Temple

  I opened a bottle of the Maglieri. Mick came in to say goodnight and had a glass. He studied the label. ‘Lay this drop on,’ he said, ‘they’d be fightin to get in for communion.’ 74

  After supper, Lew and I played Scrabble. He was good with small words, quick to see possibilities.

  ‘ “Zugzwang”?’ I said. ‘Two zs. What kind of a word is “zugzwang”?’

  ‘You challengin it?’

  ‘Zugzwang? I am most certainly challenging zugzwang.’

  ‘We playin double score penalty for failed challenges?’

  ‘We are. And we are playing minus-score penalty to a player who doesn’t take the opportunity to withdraw when challenged. Are you withdrawing zugzwang?’

  ‘Surprised at you, Mac. Everybody knows zugzwang.’

  ‘Withdrawing, Lewis? Last chance.’ I put my hand on the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

  ‘Open it,’ he said. ‘At “z”.’

  I did. ‘Zugbloodyzwang,’ I said. ‘You little…’

  There was no recovering from zugzwang. We were packing up, when I said, ‘Think about what I said about school?’

  He didn’t look at me. ‘Thinkin about it,’ he said. ‘Thinkin about it a lot.’

  When Lew went off to bed, I put another log on the fire, fetched a glass of the red, got out a book Stan had lent me called The Plant Hunter: A Life of Colonel A. E. Hillary. I was on page four when Lew came in wearing pyjamas.

  ‘Forgot to tell you,’ he said. ‘I was lookin in Ned’s Kingswood for my stopwatch. He used to take me out on the road and drop me for my run and I left the watch in the car one day.’ He held out a piece of paper. ‘This was on the floor.’

  I took it. It was a ticket from a parking machine, a Footscray Council parking machine in the Footscray Library parking area. It was valid until 3.30 pm on 11 July. That was two days before Ned’s death.

  ‘Make sense to you?’ I said.

  Lew shook his head. ‘Ned had to go to Melbourne, he started complainin a month before.’

  ‘Must be some explanation,’ I said. ‘Sleep well.’

  When he’d gone, I got out the Melways street directory and found the Footscray Library parking lot. Then I got the Melbourne White Pages and looked up Dr Ian Barbie.

  I put the Melways and the phone book away, refilled my glass in the kitchen, slumped in the armchair staring at the fire.

  Ned had parked within two hundred metres of Dr Barbie’s consulting rooms. Two days later, Ned was dead. Hanged. Two days after that, Dr Barbie was dead. Hanged.

  The wind was coming up, moaning in the chimney, sound like a faraway wolf. The dog and I went out to the office in search of a telephone number I hadn’t used in years.

  I saw Brendan Burrows from a long way away. He had a distinctive walk, his left shoulder dropping as his left heel hit the ground. Even from fifty metres, I could tell that he’d aged about twenty years since I’d last seen him. You could count the straw hairs he had left, deep lines ran down from the thin, sharp nose. It’s hard to be a policeman and an informer on your colleagues. The days are cold, the nights are worse.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting down next to me. ‘Used to be able to do this stuff on the phone. How ya goin? Fair while.’ We shook hands. The country train platform at Spencer Street Station in Melbourne held us and a fat woman, exhausted, and two small children bouncing off each other like atoms in some elemental physical process that produced tears.

  He put his hand into his leather jacket and took out a sheet torn from a notebook. ‘Ian Ralph Barbie, forty-six, medical practitioner, 18 Ralston Street, Flemington, hanging by the neck in disused premises at 28 Varley Street, Footscray. Your man?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Got this on the phone in a hurry. Body found approx eleven am, 16 July. Estimated time of death between nine pm and midnight, 15 July. Cause of death, a lot of technical shit, but it’s strangulation by hanging. Significant quantity of pethidine. Lots of tracks. No injuries. Last meal approx eight hours before death.’

  ‘On him?’

  ‘Wallet. Cards. No cash. Car clean like a rental. Jumped off the top. Drove inside the building, got on the roof, chucked the rope over a beam.’

  ‘Don’t you need some special knot for a noose?’

  ‘Something that’ll slip. Must’ve looked it up. There’s nothing isn’t in books.’

  ‘Note?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any interest?’

  Brendan’s head turned slightly. A shaven-headed man in an anorak carrying a bulging sports bag was coming down the platform. His eyes flicked at us as he passed. You could hear Brendan’s jaws unlock.

  ‘They look at you,’ he said, ‘they’re not on.’ But he watched the man go down the concrete peninsula. ‘Need a break. You get para. You bastards owe me. No, no interest. Another medico on the peth, can’t take the lows anymore, goes out on a high. Happens with the quacks a lot. Guilt. Feel a lot of guilt. Pillars of fucking society sticking stuff up the arm. Don’t call peth the doctor’s drug for nothing. Still, dangling’s a worry. Unusual. Needle, that’s the way they go. You got it, you use it.’

  ‘That’s it, then?’

  ‘Well, watch’s gone, clear mark of watch on left wrist. Probably nicked by the deros.’

  ‘Deros?’

  ‘They found him.’

  ‘Right. Brendan, listen. Scully-what’s happened to him?’

  ‘Been livin in Queensland? Outer space? Good things only for the man. Next deputy commissioner. To be anointed soon.’

  ‘I’ve been away. How’d he do that?’

  ‘Plugged a bloke into Springvale, suburb of smack. Smackvale. Three years in the making. Had to import this cop from Vietnam. Any day now they’ll announce he’s delivered half the Vietcong and a fucking mountain of smack. Scully’s going to be the hero of the day. Course, most of the stuff’ll be back on the street by dark. Catch the upward move in price.’

  ‘He’s a lucky man.’

  ‘Blessed.’ Brendan looked around, scratched his scalp. ‘You heard the shit’s flying sideways about surveillance records? About ten years’ worth gone missing in Ridley Street.’

  ‘They’re on disk, right?’

  He made a snorting sound, like a horse. ‘They scanned everything onto a hard drive, three sets of backup floppies. But the bloke taking the floppies over to Curzon Street for safekeeping, he got hit from behind by a truck. And while they’re sorting it out, his briefcase gets nicked. Can you believe that? Oh well, there’s always the paper. But no, all the paper has vanished. Fucking truckload. Well, this is bad, but thank Christ there’s the hard disk.’

  Brendan paused, looking as happy as I’d seen him.

  ‘Guess,’ he said.

  I’d guessed. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Hard drive’s like the Pope’s conscience. Not a fucking thing on it. Hacked into, they reckon. Supposed to be impossible.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Lots of people happy.’

  ‘You reckon what?’

  ‘Dunno. People don’t get together to make something like that happen. More like one very big person got together with some friends. Couldn’t just take out the bit the person wanted, they took the lot.’

  I said, ‘And you take the view one friend could be Scully. How come the Commissioner doesn’t think that too?’

  Brendan gave me a long, unblinking stare. ‘Yeah, well, the view’s different from the thirtieth fucking floor. Ground level’s where you smell the garbage. They’re all overdue, that mob.’ ‘I hear Bianchi drowned.’

  ‘A fucking tragedy. Cop resigns, buys waterside mansion in Noosa with modest pension and savings. Found floating in river. New wife says he went out for a look at the new boat, she falls asleep. Exhausted from a marathon dicking probably. Next morning the neighbour sees poor Darren bobbing around like a turd.’

  ‘What about Hill?’

  ‘Bobby’s making lots of money in the baboon hire business. Calls himself a security consultant. Need
muscle for your rock concert, nightclub, anything, Hill Associates got baboons on tap, any number. Also provides special security services for rich people. Drives this grey Merc.’

  ‘I knew the boy would amount to something.’ We shook hands. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’

  ‘I only do it because you can get me killed,’ he said, unsmiling. ‘You go first. I’ll just have a smoke, watch the trains a bit.’

  I was a few paces away when he said, ‘Mac.’

  I turned.

  ‘The Lefroy thing,’ he said. ‘I heard Bianchi was in that pub in Deer Park one day around then.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mance was there too. That’s all I heard.’ He looked away.

  ‘Much maligned creatures, chooks,’ said Dot Walsh, frisbeeing out another precise arc of grain to the variegated flock of fowls. ‘Quite intelligent, some of them. Unlike sheep, which are uniformly stupid.’

  She pointed to a large black-and-white bird. ‘That’s Helen, my favourite. After Helen of Troy.’

  By her voice, Mrs Walsh was English, in her seventies, deeply lined but unbowed and undimmed, with hair cut short and sharp. I’d told her my business at the front door. She’d shown no interest in why I wanted to know more about the story her husband had told Frank Cullen.

  ‘I’m surprised Frank remembers it,’ she’d said. ‘I used to make a special trip to the tip with bottles after one of their sessions. Anyway, I don’t suppose it matters now that Simon’s gone. Come through. It’s chook feeding time.’

  When she’d exhausted the grain, we went on a tour of the garden. Even in the bleak heart of winter, it was beautiful: huge bare oaks and elms, black against the asbestos sky, views of farmland at the end of long hedged paths, a pond with ducks, a rose walk that narrowed to a slim gate just wide enough for a wheelbarrow.

  ‘How big?’ I said.

  ‘Two acres,’ she said. ‘All that’s left of nearly a thousand. From a thousand acres to two in a generation. That was my Simon’s accomplishment. Simon and Johnny Walker Black Label. The old firm, he used to say. Still, he was a lovely man, lovely. Just unfirm of purpose.’

  She moved her head like her hens as she talked, quick sideways jerks, little tilts, chin up, chin down, eyes darting.

  I got on to the subject. ‘You never saw the girl that night?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I was in Queensland with Fiona, our daughter. She was having domestic trouble. Temperament like Simon, I’m afraid. Forty-six and still thinks that responsibility is something for grown-ups.’

  ‘Could you put a date on that trip?’

  ‘Oh yes. October 1985. My granddaughter had her tenth birthday while I was there.’

  ‘May I ask you what your husband told you happened?’

  ‘Simon ran out of cigarettes at about ten o’clock. It often happened. It was a Thursday night I think, my first night away. He drove down to the Milstead pub. He used to take the back roads. He was coming back down Colson’s Road, do you know it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, he came around a bend and there was this girl by the side of the road. Not a stitch on. Naked. She’d been beaten. He got her into the car and brought her back here.’

  ‘He didn’t think of going to the police?’

  ‘The police? No. He thought she needed medical attention.’

  ‘She was badly hurt?’

  ‘He thought so at first. Lots of blood. But most of it had come from her nose. That was swollen. Simon thought it might be broken. There were red puffy welts all over her body as if she had been whipped, he said. And she had scratches everywhere and dust and what looked like cement stuck to her. But he didn’t think she was seriously hurt.’

  ‘Why didn’t he take her to casualty?’

  She gave me her sharp little look. ‘Simon was a drunk, Mr Faraday,’ she said, no irritation in her voice, ‘but he wasn’t a fool. It was half past ten at night. He would have had at least half a bottle of whisky under his belt by then. He’d already had his licence suspended once. The safest thing for both of them was to bring her here and get someone else to take her to hospital.’

  ‘Did he find out how she got her injuries?’

  She didn’t answer for a while. We were walking between low walls of volcanic stone towards the back of the old redbrick farmhouse. The sky had cleared in the west and the last of the sun was warming an aged golden Labrador where it sat watching us, fat bottom flat on the verandah boards.

  ‘In the beginning, in the car, Simon said she was crying and babbling and saying the name “Ken” over and over again. He couldn’t get any sense out of her. He thought she was on drugs. When they got here, he gave her a gown to put on and he went to the telephone to ring Brian. That’s his nephew, he farms about ten minutes from here. He wanted Brian to take her to casualty. That’s when the girl attacked him.’

  ‘Attacked him?’

  ‘Tried to get the phone away from him and punched him.’

  ‘He’d told her what he was doing? Phoning someone to take her to hospital?’

  ‘I suppose so. He said she shouted, “Don’t tell anyone. I’ll say you raped me”. Her nose was bleeding again and her blood got all over him. I saw his jumper when I got back.’

  ‘So he didn’t phone?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t the sort of thing he was used to, Mr Faraday. Went into shock, I imagine.’

  We’d reached the verandah. The dog came upright by sliding its forelegs forward until they went over the edge and dropped to the first step.

  ‘This bloke’s in worse shape than I am,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘Needs two new hips. Can I offer you a beer? I have a Cooper’s Sparkling this time every day.’

  We sat on the side verandah in the weak sun and drank beer. I had a pewter mug with a glass bottom and an inscription. I held the mug away from me to read it: To Sim, a mad Australian, from his comrades, 610 Squadron, Biggin Hill, 1944.

  ‘He was in the RAF,’ Mrs Walsh said. ‘He was in England doing an agriculture course when the war broke out, so he joined up. He was billeted with my aunt for a while. That’s where I met him.’

  I said, ‘Biggin Hill was a fighter station, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking up at the sky as if expecting to see a Spitfire come out of the sun. ‘He never got over the war. None of them did, really. All that expecting to die. Every day. For so long. And they were so young.’

  A silence fell between us, not uneasy, until she said, ‘The girl calmed down after that, said she was sorry. Simon found some of Fiona’s pyjamas and a pair of her riding jeans and an old shirt. She showered and went to bed in the spare room. The bed’s always made. Simon said he brought her a mug of Milo but she was asleep. The next day, she asked if he could take her to a station and lend her the fare to Melbourne. Simon said she looked terrible, swollen nose, black eyes. He took her to Ballan, bought her ticket and gave her fifty dollars. And that was that.’

  ‘Did he find out her name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And he never reported it to anyone?’

  ‘No. He should have. It was too late by the time I got back.’

  ‘Did he think she was from Kinross Hall?’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t a local. You get to know the locals.’

  ‘But there wasn’t any other reason to think that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you ever think about how she might have found herself in Colson’s Road?’

  She shrugged, took a sip of beer. ‘Simon thought she might have been pushed out of a car.’

  I finished my beer, got up, said my thanks. At the front gate, Mrs Walsh said, ‘Things left undone. Sins of omission. Most of us err more on that side, don’t you think, Mr Faraday?’

  Howard Lefroy’s apartment, the blood up the tiled walls, came into my mind.

  ‘Amen,’ I said.

  A naked girl, neck broken, thrown down a mine shaft, some time after 1984. A naked girl, beaten, by a lonely roadside in October 1985.
/>   Ned worked at Kinross Hall in November 1985.

  And never set foot there again. Until a few days before his murder.

  I took the long way home, down Colson’s Road to Milstead in the closing day. There was a pine forest on the one side, scrubby salt-affected wetlands on the other. Dead redgums marked the line of a creek running northwest. The last of the light went no more than four or five metres into the pines. Beyond that, it was already cold, dark, sterile night. Nothing cheered the heart on this stretch of Colson’s Road.

  Neither did anything in the bar at the Milstead pub. An L-shaped room with a lounge area to the right, it had fallen in the formica wars of the seventies. The barman was a thin, sallow man with greased-back curly hair and a big nose broken at least twice. A small letter J was crudely tattooed in the hollow of his throat. As an educated guess, I would have said four or five priors, at least one involving serious assault, and a degree or two from the stone college. He hadn’t studied beer pulling either.

  ‘Helpin out,’ he said, putting down the dripping glass. ‘Owner’s on the beach in fucking Bali, regular bloke got done this arvo, wouldn’t take the breathie, the bastards lock him up.’

  ‘Thought you had some rights,’ I said. ‘You local?’

  He gave me a long look and made a judgment. ‘Wife,’ he said. ‘Well, ex, pretty much. Bitch. Fuckin family swarm around here. Get the motor goin, I’m off to WA. Bin there? Fuckin paradise.’

  He took my five-dollar note and short-changed me without going near the till.

  ‘Who owns the pine forest down the road here?’ I said.

  He was pouring himself a vodka. Three vodkas, in fact. ‘Wooden have a fuckin clue, mate.’ He raised his voice. ‘Ya breathin there, Denise? Who owns the pine forest?’

  ‘Silvateq Corporation,’ a husky voice said from around the corner. ‘S-i-l-v-a-t-e-q.’

  I took my glass and made the trip. A woman somewhere out beyond seventy, face a carefully applied pink mask matching her tracksuit, was sitting at a round table playing patience. She was drinking a dark liquid out of a shot glass.

  ‘G’day,’ I said. ‘John Faraday. What’s Silvateq Corporation?’