An Iron Rose

by Peter Temple

  ‘I know what happened from then,’ I said.

  I went over the story with her. There wasn’t any more to tell. Outside, cold a shock after the warm house, Gaby said, ‘I don’t want any trouble. Really. I’ve got a good bloke now and the baby.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You won’t hear anything about this again. But if you remember anything else, ring me.’

  I wrote my number on the back of an automatic teller machine receipt.

  In the rear-view mirror, I saw her watching me go, standing in the universal stance of mothers, baby on hip, pelvis tilted, knees slightly bent. I thought, what right have I to give her any assurances?

  The last person I had given assurances to was Carlie Mance.

  Driving back, my mind drifted over what I knew and what I didn’t know. The two men who assaulted Melanie could be the killers of the girl in the mine shaft. Who were they? Ian Barbie and someone else.

  Barbie the delivery man. Had he delivered other Kinross Hall girls? How could he do that without the girls being reported missing?

  And that raised the issue that I didn’t much want to think about. Had my inquiry about Melanie led to her death? How could that be? I ask Berglin to trace someone and then I find the person shot dead. Melanie Pavitt, not shot dead in the messy way of domestic killings everywhere. No. Shot dead with fussy precision. One shot in the eye. Was this the work of her gentle unemployed builders’ labourer? This I could not believe. Then Berglin lies to me about Gaby Makin. Why? What conceivable interest could Berglin have in my inquiries? He was a federal drug cop and drugs didn’t seem to enter this puzzle.

  Berglin lie to me? Of all the things he said to me over the years, when I thought of him, two sentences spoken in his hoarse voice at our first meeting always echoed in the mind: How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life.

  In the shitstorm after the Lefroy and Mance killings, when all fingers pointed at me, Berglin had been impassive. He never said the words I wanted him to say, never patted my arm, never invited me to confide in him. You could read nothing in his eyes. One morning, suspended from duty, wife gone, unshaven, hungover, I went to his office. He looked at me with interest while I shouted at him: abuse, recriminations, accusations of betrayal. When I ran out of things to say, Berglin said, no expression, ‘Mac, if I think you’ve moved across, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll come around and kill you. Enjoy the vacation. Now fuck off.’

  I left, feeling much better.

  Now I’d have to see him, confront him with the lie he’d told me. I hoped very much that he could explain it away, but I couldn’t see how.

  I was still brooding on this as I drove down the damp and overgrown driveway at Harkness Park. Stan had rung to say that Francis wanted him to put on extra hands, presumably so that he could send out his bills sooner. Stan was reluctant: he didn’t like big crews. I’d suggested that instead of bringing in more workers we draw up a work schedule that provided incentives for meeting targets early. Flannery and Lew liked the idea. They were to have spent the morning clearing the main path down the sightline. Stan had estimated hours for the job and I wanted to see how far they’d got.

  They’d done well, pushing at least thirty metres beyond Stan’s expectation, neat work, greenery piled ready for chipping. I was admiring the elaborate brick and cut stone path uncovered, thinking about where to establish the compost heaps, when I heard a vehicle in the driveway, just a hum. I didn’t think about it, backed into the dense overgrown box hedge beside the path, looked back towards the house. A month earlier, I wouldn’t have done this. Fear had come back into my life, uninvited.

  I waited.

  Anne Karsh, hair pulled back today, jeans, battered short Drizabone, looking around. I stepped out of hiding. We walked towards each other down the path, eyes meeting, looking away, coming back.

  ‘Checking on progress,’ I said when we were close enough.

  ‘You or me?’

  ‘Both?’

  ‘No, not me,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Just wanted to be here, really. In love with it. What were you doing in the hedge? If that’s a hedge.’

  ‘Hedge examination. How about this path?’

  ‘This is an unbelievable path. It’s so ornate.’

  I turned and we walked to the edge of the known garden. Beyond was wilderness. ‘It’s like archaeology,’ she said. ‘For the first time, I can understand the thrill.’

  ‘Thrill time next week,’ I said. ‘The pines come down. Then we see the steeple. See what the man wanted us to see.’

  ‘Who cuts them down?’ We were on our way back.

  ‘A professional. The biggest one’s nine metres around at the base. Death to amateurs. We could bring in a portable sawmill, turn them into planks. You could have something made out of them. Terrible waste otherwise. All those years of growing.’

  She looked at me. ‘Leon’ll like that. Could you do it?’

  ‘If you tell Francis that’s what you want.’

  She held out her right hand. We stopped. ‘I’ll tell him now.’ She took out a small leatherbound book, found a page, took a mobile telephone, minute, from another pocket, punched numbers. After a short wait, she said. ‘Francis, Anne Karsh…Well, thank you. Francis, the pines blocking the view to the church steeple are coming down next week. Can you arrange to have them turned into usable timber?…Leon will be thrilled. Stan will arrange it, I’m sure. Thank you, Francis…I look forward to that too. Bye.’

  We walked, explored the thicket around the site of the original house, forced our way through to the old orchard, desperate-looking fruit trees but the least overgrown place because of the deep mulch of fallen fruit.

  ‘You can prune these buggers back to life,’ I said. ‘If you want them.’

  ‘I want them,’ she said. ‘I want everything the way it was.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘I’ve got a flask of coffee,’ Anne said. A thorn had scratched her cheekbone, delicate serration, line of blood like the teeth of a tiny saw. ‘Drink coffee?’

  ‘Got enough?’

  ‘I’ve got enough.’

  The Mercedes boot held a wicker basket with a stainless-steel flask and stainless-steel cups. We sat side by side on the front steps of the house, huge, dangerously aged poised portico above us, drinking coffee, talking about the garden. She had an easy manner, sense of humour, no hint of rich lady about her. A weak sun emerged, touched her hair.

  ‘Nice,’ she said.

  ‘Good coffee.’

  ‘The day, the place, the moment.’

  ‘Those too.’

  We didn’t look at each other, something in the air. Then our eyes met for a moment.

  ‘Mr Karsh working today?’ I said, regretted the question.

  ‘No. He’s in Noosa for the weekend. His new girlfriend goes to Noosa for the winter.’

  I looked at her. ‘I understand it’s wall-to-wall girlfriends in Noosa.’

  She leaned sideways, studied me, smiled a wry smile. ‘I’ve been a girlfriend. There’s no moral high ground left for me.’

  ‘Not for any of us,’ I said.

  ‘Leon’s a charming person,’ she said. ‘His problem is chronic envy. Non-specific envy. His greatest fear is that he’s missing something, that there’s something he should be doing, that there’s something he doesn’t know about or hasn’t got that will make him happy and complete. If he saw a man leading a duck down the road on a piece of string and looking at peace, Leon would send someone out to buy a duck and give it a try for fifteen minutes. Then he’d say, fuck this duck, why’s that woman on the bicycle look so pleased?’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look so pleased?’

  ‘So,’ Anne said. ‘Blacksmiths are not without insight. I worked for a merchant bank that was hired by a company to fight off a takeover bid by one of Leon’s companies. Very messy business, went on for months, working seventeen, eighteen hours a day, seven days.
One Sunday I got home and my husband had gone off with my best friend. Anyway, we fought off Leon and we had a no-hard-feelings drink with the other side and Leon showed up. I think he then began to see me as a substitute for the company he couldn’t have. Anything Leon can’t have leaps in value in his eyes.’

  ‘So he took you over.’

  She smiled. ‘Well, as I said, he’s a charming person. He has the gift of charm. It was a totally uncontested takeover. But as I found out, for Leon, you conquer the peak, another peak beckons. More coffee?’

  ‘Just a drop.’

  ‘There’s plenty.’ She poured. ‘That’s me. And I’m not complaining. What about you?’

  ‘My wife didn’t like my hours either.’

  ‘Blacksmiths work long hours?’

  ‘Pre-blacksmith.’ I stood up. ‘Time to go. Thanks for the coffee.’

  She stood up too. Standing on the step above me put her eyes level with mine. We looked at each other. ‘Let me know when you’d like to see the mill,’ I said.

  Anne nodded. ‘Can you give me a number?’ She wrote it in her leather-bound book.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘See you soon then.’

  She put out a hand and straightened my shirt collar, pulled her hand back. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I thought she blushed a little.

  ‘Terrible urge to straighten pictures,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you. Next week.’

  I drove home in the waning day. Towering dark clouds on all horizons made it seem as if I were crossing a valley floor. It was dark by the time I stopped outside the Heart of Oak to see if Flannery was there. He wasn’t.

  ‘Car went in your drive just before dark,’ Vinnie said.

  I left the vehicle where it was, walked up the road, climbed the paddock gate in the far corner and crossed the sodden field so that I could come at the house from the back, from behind the smithy.

  The caller was still there: a car was parked in front of the office. I went across the gravel, slowly, my gravel, gravel put down so that I could hear it crunch. All senses on high-beam, I looked into the kitchen window.

  Something touched my leg. I froze.

  The dog, puzzled.

  Inside, Lew was feeding the stove. He turned and said something to someone out of my field of view. The person laughed.

  I let out my pent-up breath and opened the back door.

  Berglin was in my favourite chair, long shoes on the table, cigarette dangling from a hand.

  ‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ he said. ‘Home is the hunter.’

  There was no other way to do this. ‘Lew,’ I said, ‘I need to talk to this gentleman alone.’

  When he’d gone, I said, ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘Come again?’ Berglin’s eyebrows went up in the middle.

  ‘That trace. Gabriele Makin.’

  ‘Yeah. Dead.’

  ‘Not dead. Undead. Not a million fucking kilometres from here.’

  He blew smoke towards me, eyes narrowed. ‘You sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

  ‘How’d you find her?’

  ‘Phone book. What the fuck did you use?’

  ‘Contractor.’

  ‘Why?’

  He blew smoke. ‘Why? I’m going to put some personal request through the system? I’m going to do that? I put that Melanie Pavitt through the system, Canberra’d be asking me why I wanted to find a person turns up dead. Make sense to you? Fresh air’s slowing the brain out here.’

  ‘Who’s the contractor?’

  Berglin mashed his cigarette into the ashtray Lew had found for him. ‘It’s my worry. I’ll talk to him. Believe me, I’ll talk to him.’

  From nowhere the thought came to me. ‘Alex Rickard,’ I said. ‘You’re using Alex Rickard.’

  Berglin was lighting another cigarette, lighter poised. He lowered it. ‘I’ll stand on the cunt’s head,’ he said. ‘We’ll know why in quick time.’

  ‘What about a beer?’ I said, slack with relief. Not Berglin to blame but Alex Rickard.

  ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  I opened two Boags, found two glasses, sat down at the table.

  Berglin took a big draught from the bottle. ‘Listen,’ he said, two reasons I’m out here in the fucking tundra. One is, from your time on the Lefroy fuck-up, the name Algie mean anything?’

  ‘Algae? As in blue-green slime?’

  ‘Don’t know. Could be. Not likely. Could be A-L-G-I-E. Could be two parts: Al G, like a first name and a surname initial. Maybe Al Gee.’

  ‘No. Never heard it. It’s someone’s name?’

  ‘Calls himself that, yeah.’

  ‘How’s this come up?’

  ‘Run-through last night, Bulleen of all fucking places. Nothing’s sacred. Person we had an interest in last year. Local jacks turned over this low-level garbage in Footscray, he tells them this weed bloke’s grown overnight. Now he’s a smack supplier, found some fucking original channel-big, not your arse full of condoms at all. Scully’s cockbrains wire the place up like a recording studio, move in across the road. Nothing to report. So they say. Stereo-quality farting, got the man mango-kissing his sister-in-law, very vocal performance, that’s about it. Waste of public money.’

  He drank some more beer. ‘This is good,’ he said, looking at the bottle. ‘The pointyheads can make beer. Anyway, subject closed until last night. Then the serene Bulleen household is severely disrupted. Man alone at home, wife at the Chadstone shopping centre. He’s beaten, badly knocked about, teeth dislodged, flogged. Worse. Throat cut.’ He paused. ‘Don’t say anything, the thought occurs.’

  We sat in silence for a few seconds. Berglin drank most of his beer, wiped his thin lips. I got out two more.

  ‘Good dog,’ he said. ‘Now the reason for all this unpleasantness might have remained obscure, MacArthur. But for one thing. False wall in the back of the house, space about a metre between the kitchen and the laundry. Get into it through the ceiling. Up the ladder in the garage, through the inspection hole. Last night, half the fucking kitchen wall kicked in.’

  Berglin put out the cigarette, more gently this time, found another one, looked at it, put it down on the table. ‘Christ knows what these cunts went off with,’ he said, ‘but they left behind, down there in a corner, up against the plasterboard, a quarter kilo of outstanding, medal-winning-purity product. Melbourne Show quality.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Just bad light, they reckon. Pricks in a hurry, got plenty, never saw it.’

  ‘Algie,’ I said. ‘Where’s that come in?’

  ‘The wife says, she is a very scared person, that the deceased said to another man, person she doesn’t know, she was near them in a public place, he said, “Algie’s on, the lot”.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘She heard that. Algie.’

  ‘Four words. What public place? Street? Shopping centre? Lots of noise?’

  ‘Noisy, but Algie, yeah. She says, she said to him in the car, who’s Algie? He said, just a bloke I’m doing business with.’

  ‘Could have been clearing his throat. Said it fast? Algiesonthelot. Native English speakers these Bulleen people?’

  ‘Since your departure,’ said Berglin, ‘we find ourselves bereft of ideas. But we stumble on. He’s Turkish, old man’s a Turk. We’ve run Algie by umpteen Turks. More Turks than Gallipoli. Doesn’t make sense in Turkish.’

  ‘But it’s come up before.’

  ‘What?’ He was studying the beer bottle again.

  ‘Algie. Algie-the word in question.’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s been around.’

  ‘Around? Well, familiar word. Algie. Since when? Since before Lefroy?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m here. Asking you.’

  ‘So when’s it come up? How long after Lefroy?’

  ‘Not long. Soon. On some drug bug, these spiders are talking. Appears to be about Lefroy. The one says, heard it was Algie.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that,’ I said. �
��How come I don’t know that?’

  ‘Mac, no-one needs to know everything.’

  ‘What does that mean? Exactly?’ I said.

  ‘What it says.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘Soon after Lefroy I had a definite need to know about anything like that, Berg,’ I said. ‘But moving on, you’re here because you’re in some kind of shit, second Lefroy-style run-through, new boys in Canberra think it’s time you kicked on to that block at Batemans Bay. That it?’

  ‘Third,’ said Berglin.

  ‘Third?’

  ‘Third Lefroy-style run-through. There’s lots of them go on but not killing. Three years ago, we had two Chinese blokes, property investment advisors for Hong Kong syndicates, that’s the story. Rent a flat in St Kilda, ground floor, beachfront, big flat, four bedrooms, gold taps, that sort of thing. They come and go, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok, Hawaii, Sydney, Brisbane. Never stop for more than a few days, real estate people show them around buildings. Hong Kong clears them, Scully’s people give them a clean bill. Operation terminated. I had a bad feeling, but we couldn’t go on without the local jacks.’

  Berglin lit his cigarette. ‘About eighteen months ago, the lady lives upstairs looks down from her balcony, sees a pool of blood on the balcony below. From under the door. It’s all tiles, inside and out. Blood runs free. She calls jacks. Chinese bloke’s taped up, throat cut.’

  He looked at me in silence for a while.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Woman there too. A hooker. In the bathroom. Same treatment as the bloke. And worse. Much worse. We kept the details quiet.’

  I swallowed. ‘This means what?’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Stuff, money, probably money. Pick-up, pay off. Someone knew.’

  ‘Algie?’

  ‘Yesterday was a big day for shit floating up. There was another hooker these Chinese blokes liked. Hired by the day on other visits. Woman called Lurleen. We couldn’t ever find her. Yesterday she rings a number we gave this other hooker, her friend, back then. Lurleen’s back in town and she’s scared. I had a little walk and talk with her. Guess what?’