Bad Debts Part 17

We were sitting in front of a fire in the house Anne Jeppeson grew up in, drinking tea out of bone china cups with little roses on them. The room was comfortable: good furniture scuffed by life. Outside, it was raining on the big garden, the usual thin Melbourne drizzle that dampened the heart more than anything else.

'I'm sorry to ask you to talk about something so painful,' I said. I meant it. There's a special kind of dread you don't know about until you have children.

Mrs Jeppeson shook her head. 'Nothing can make it any worse than it is,' she said. She was in her sixties, a thin and pretty woman with short hair and a faraway look. She was dressed for outdoor work: trousers, s.h.i.+rt, sleeveless jacket and short boots. 'Sometimes I'm glad to talk to someone about it. My husband can't bring himself to. But Anne's death lies there all the time.'

'Did you see much of her?'

'Not as much as we wanted to. She was always busy and she had her own friends. But she came for most Sunday lunches, well, perhaps every second Sunday here and at the sea. We have a place at Portsea. She was there with us for a few days that summer. Our son and his family were here too. They were living in Hong Kong then. He's in banking, like his father.'

She looked out of the window. Some bedraggled sparrows were pecking the terrace. 'Do you find the winters depressing?'

'Yes. Except for the football.'

'Anne liked football. Richmond. The Tigers. No-one else in the family has any interest in it. My husband pretends to be interested when we're with people who are. I don't know why. It's a male thing, I suppose. I spend as much time outside as possible in winter. I try to ignore the weather.'

'Does that help?'

'I'm not sure. I'd have to stop to find out. Why is Anne's death of interest now?'

'There's a possibility that the person convicted of knocking her down didn't do it.'

She didn't react. 'More tea? I think I'll have some.'

'Thank you. It's very good.'

She poured. 'Have another biscuit. They're homemade. Not by me. I bought them at the church fete. I can't bring myself to go to church any more so I go to all the fundraising efforts and buy things that never get eaten.'

I took another biscuit. 'Perhaps you can tell me something about the days before...'

'Her death. We hadn't seen her for a fortnight. She phoned on the Sunday to say she couldn't come to lunch. That Housing Commission business was on the go, so we saw her on television all the time. My husband was secretly quite proud of her, I think. Although you'd never have known it from the fights they had over those squats in people's houses she used to organise.'

'So you never had the chance to talk about the Hoagland protests?'

'Just a few words on the phone. Well, more than a few words, I suppose. It was very difficult to limit Anne to a few words. She was always so pa.s.sionate about everything, even when she was little. When she was thirteen or fourteen she knew everything about every oppressed group in the world. It drove her father up the wall. He even complained to the school about one of the teachers putting ideas into the girls' heads. They couldn't agree on anything political. If she wasn't arguing with her father, she was fighting with her brother. She enjoyed baiting him. He's very like his father. Conservative, I suppose. He used to call her Annie the Anarchist. It's funny how different children grow up to be, isn't it? Do you have children, Mr Irish?'

'Just the one.'

'I wish we'd had ten, s.p.a.ced over twenty years. A stupid idea, isn't it?'

'No.'

She smiled. 'Of course it is. You're very diplomatic.'

The time had come. I said, 'Do you know of any reason why someone would want to murder Anne?'

She put her cup and saucer down and looked at me steadily. She had the inner stillness of someone who has found meaninglessness in everything. 'Are you saying that Anne's death might have been murder?'

'There's a possibility she was murdered.'

She looked away. 'I don't know what to think about that. Who would do something like that? No-one ever suggested...'

'It's just a possibility,' I said. 'Both the man who went to jail and the witness have been shot dead in the last ten days.'

'Are the police investigating?'

'Not Anne's death, no.'

'So it's your idea that Anne might have been murdered?'

'My first concern was my ex-client's death but other things have turned up. Anne's death may be the key to what's happened since.'

She gave me a doubtful look. 'I don't know what I can do to help you, Mr Irish. Don't you think it's a police matter?'

'Not just yet. Is there anyone Anne might have confided in? I mean, if she had any fears for her safety, been threatened, anything like that?'

'I suppose the people in that group of hers. Right to a Roof? We never knew any of them.' She thought for a while. 'About her safety, I can remember her saying, it must have been at our wedding anniversary party, I can remember her saying she could go anywhere in safety because the Special Branch were always lurking somewhere.'

'At the squats she organised?'

'I think she meant generally. She was on about mining companies cheating Aboriginals, but I'm afraid I wasn't paying much attention. She usually had something she felt strongly about. Her father used to say she was only scored for percussion.'

There didn't seem to be anything left to ask. I thanked her for seeing me. The pa.s.sage leading to the front door was wide enough for us to walk side by side. One side was hung with Australian paintings from the thirties and forties: outdoor scenes, sunlit interiors. I recognised a Gruner and a Tidmarsh. The other wall was covered with framed family photographs.

At the front door, I looked to my right and saw a photograph of four solemn-faced girls in school uniform, two blonde, two dark-haired. They looked about sixteen. Under the picture, it said, 'Coniston Ladies' College Debating Team, 1976'.

I looked at the names. Anne Jeppeson was on the top right, blonde, with a snub nose and rebelliously tousled hair. The girl next to her was one of the brunettes.

Her name was Sarah Pixley.

'She loved debating at school,' said Mrs Jeppeson. 'My husband never went to hear her.'

I pointed at Sarah Pixley. 'Was she friendly with Anne Jeppeson?'

Mrs Jeppeson touched the photograph. 'Sarah Pixley. They were great friends at school. Two of a kind in many ways. Her father's the politician. Sarah hated him. She took her mother's name when she left school. Life can be cruel to parents, can't it?'

'It can, Mrs Jeppeson,' I said. 'It can.'

I drove away down streets where the naked branches of elms and oaks were woven overhead like basketwork and you could glimpse the pert backsides of BMWs and Saabs in brick-paved driveways. It took a while before I found a place that looked as if it might make a hamburger. I was starving.

The hamburger was of the old school: pressed flat as a powder compact, burnt mince topped with burnt onion and cold-storage tomato. It was made by a new-school Aussie, a Vietnamese with rings in one earlobe and a beanie in the Richmond colours. It wasn't a bad hamburger. A slice of sun came out and fell on my lap as I sat in the car, eating and watching a deal taking place across the street in a small park. Two boys in Melbourne Grammar blazers were scoring something off a tall youth with a ponytail wearing an oversized leather jacket. Answers to that day's maths homework, probably.

When I'd finished, I had a sudden urge to see what was happening to the Hoagland estate. I set off down Malvern Road in the direction of St Kilda Road. At Albert Park, I got on to Kings Way and went up King Street through the drab end of the business district. As I waited to turn into Dudley Street at the Flagstaff Gardens lights, a dero in a mauve polyester suit with a filthy Fitzroy FC scarf wound around his neck knocked on the pa.s.senger window. I leaned across and wound it down.

'Help a bloke can't get a job?' he asked. He had a long, narrow face, with deepset eyes and a big nose. He looked like a country boy lost in the city for forty years.

I found a five-dollar note and gave it to him. 'Go the Roys.'

'You're a prince among men,' the man said. 'Go Roys, make a noise.'

The future Yarra Cove was much larger than it had appeared on Gerry Schuster's computer screen. I parked near a wooden observation platform next to one of the three site gates. A burly man in a dark-blue uniform with a red shoulder patch that said AdvanceGuard was talking to the driver of a ute in the gateway.

There must have been twenty earthmoving vehicles, giant yellow insects, attacking the glum expanse of grey mud. At least as many trucks moved around the area on temporary roads, stretches of coa.r.s.e aggregate sinking into the clay.

Not a trace remained of anything that had been there before. I stood at the rail, ten metres up, and after a while the ripping and pus.h.i.+ng of the machines began to make some sense. They were gouging ma.s.sive trenches, the width of streets, running from the waterfront. All of them led to an oval-shaped area, bigger than a football field, marked out with yellow nylon cord threaded through the eyes of metre-high steel needles stuck in the ground. The site huts, a small village of them, were in the middle of the oval. Eventually, the oval would be a yacht basin, with the trenches becoming ca.n.a.ls leading from the riverfront. The Hoagland flats must have stood where a small digger was unearthing pipes in one ploughed-up patch.

For a while, caught up in the sheer scale of the operation, I watched the machines roaring and grinding, scooping and reversing, dumping, wheeling, their grey breaths pumping out and being s.n.a.t.c.hed by the sharp-toothed little wind off the river. The whole scene was one of power: man and machine changing a landscape by sheer force.

This was what it was all about.

Sheer force.

Anne Jeppeson thought she was taking on the power of Heartless Bureaucracy. What hit her was the sheer force of Money.

She died so that someone could make a fortune out of rich people's desire to park their boats outside their front doors.

It came to me with absolute certainty that my little inquiry into the lives and deaths of Danny McKillop and Anne Jeppeson was of no consequence whatsoever. Nothing would change what had happened, no-one would be called to account for it. Anne, Danny, Ronnie Bishop, the doctor, me-we were all just minor nuisances.

I felt like shouting f.u.c.k into the wind but there was someone else on the platform, a thin man with a week's grey stubble and wispy hair sticking out from under a beanie. He was drinking a can of Vic Bitter. Looking at me, he drained the can and threw it over his shoulder. 'Used to live here,' he shouted over the noise. 'f.u.c.king s.h.i.+thole. Should've flattened it years ago.' He took another can out of his anorak and popped it.

The daylight was almost gone when I parked outside my office. I had the key in the lock when I sensed someone behind me.

'Mr Irish.' It was a friendly voice. I turned. Two men, solid-looking, in dark suits. The one who had spoken held up an open badge wallet. 'Detective-Sergeant James,' he said. 'The Commissioner of Police would like a word, if it's convenient.'

'It's not,' I said. 'Tell him to make an appointment.'

'If it's not convenient, I have instructions to arrest you,' he said, voice still friendly.

'On what charge?'

'Several charges. One is conspiring to pervert the course of justice.'

'In what matter?'

'Murders. Two of them.'

A gap appeared in my social calendar. I rode in the back of their grey Ford. No-one said anything. When it was clear that we weren't going to police headquarters, I asked where we were going.

'Collins Street,' said the spokesman.

At the Hyatt on Collins, the driver showed the attendant a card and we drove into the underground carpark. We parked in a reserved bay next to the lift.

'Let's go,' said the spokesman.

The three of us went up to the twelfth floor. When the lift door opened, Detective-Sergeant James's partner went out first.

'After you,' said James. 'Number seven.'

I followed his partner down the hushed pink and grey corridor. As he pa.s.sed a door, he indicated it with his thumb and kept walking. I knocked at number seven. The partner had turned around about ten metres down the corridor and was looking at me. James, near the lifts, was studying a print on the wall.

The door was opened by a man in s.h.i.+rtsleeves and red braces. His tie was loose and he had a drink in his hand. 'Come in, Mr Irish,' he said.

It was the Minister for Police, Garth Bruce.

The suite was pale grey and pink like the corridor. We went through a small hallway into a large sitting room furnished with French period reproductions. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label, an ice bucket, a water carafe and cut-gla.s.s whisky gla.s.ses stood on a table against the wall. A briefcase was open on a small writing desk between opulently curtained windows.

'Thanks for coming,' Bruce said. 'Sorry about the escort. Let me give you a drink. Whisky, anything.'

I said no thanks, curtly.

He was at the side table with his gla.s.s. He put it down and turned, a big man, bigger in life than on television. He'd boxed. There was scar tissue around his eyes. It hadn't shown up on television. That would take skilful make-up. 'Jack,' he said, 'this is friendly. Let's have a quiet drink together. It's very much in your interests. Okay? What'll you have?'

I asked for whisky and water. He made two drinks and brought mine over. We sat down a metre apart. He took a big drink.

'That's better,' he said, sighing. 'Jesus, what a day. Politics. Win one, lose ten.' He took a cigarette out of a packet and offered the packet to me. I shook my head.

Bruce lit up with a lighter, blew out a long, thin stream of smoke and tapped the cigarette in the direction of an ashtray. Ash drifted to the carpet. He sat back, shoulders loose, and said, 'Jack, I'm told you've been asking around about a lot of old business, things that happened nine, ten years ago. That right?'

'Who tells you?'

He had another big drink. His eyes never left me. There was an appealing sadness about them. 'Let me tell you a story,' he said. 'I haven't got a lot of time. I don't want to dance around with you. When I got this job, I appointed a new Commissioner and a new deputy. The first thing I said to them, I said: "The f.u.c.king joke's over."'

He leaned forward. 'I was a cop for nearly twenty years, Jack. I know the system, I know what goes on. Everything. These new blokes knew that I knew what I was talking about. Cops've been bulls.h.i.+tting politicians for years. They can't do that to me. I'm not going to sit in a high chair and be fed s.h.i.+t with a spoon. That's why the Premier wanted me in this job.'

He drew on his cigarette and studied me. The silence and the open gaze were disconcerting. He hadn't been a cop for twenty years for nothing.

'Anyway,' he said, 'the point is, when this Danny McKillop got knocked behind the Trafalgar, I called in the file. I've had it with all this Dirty Harry s.h.i.+t. They see it on television. Twenty years, I fired three shots, all in response to c.u.n.ts firing at me.'

He sat back, stubbed out his cigarette, put his hands in his pockets. 'I read the wife's statement, reckoned there were some questions about what made McKillop so scared. Told the Commissioner that. He came back with all the background, the Jeppeson trial stuff, and the missing person's report on this Bishop.'

Bruce got up, took out another cigarette, flamed it with the lighter, went to the windows. 'Can't sit for long,' he said. 'Back's b.u.g.g.e.red. Anyway, Jack, what the Commissioner tells me is that the blokes he's had going over this business find your tracks all over the place. You're giving Vin McKillop money, you're in Perth, you're everywhere.'

He turned his head towards me. 'What's really worrying, Jack,' he said quietly, 'is that you were out there in the bush at Daylesford and it looks liked you wiped clean a whole lot of places. Places that could have had the prints of whoever topped Bishop and the druggie quack.'

He looked out into the night again. 'Now that is very, very serious,' he said. 'You know how serious, Jack.'

I had seen this coming but I still didn't know how to handle it. Bruce turned. There was a sheen on his face and on his scalp showing through the short, thinning hair.

'I never found the doctor's place,' I said. 'Got lost.'

He gave me a slow cop smile. 'That's a porky, Jack. If you were going to tell porkies, you should've changed the tyres on that motor Col Boon loaned you. Your tracks are all over the place.'

He came back to his chair and sat down carefully. 'That was a really stupid thing to do. The Commissioner wants to charge you. But he came to me first. That's why you're sitting here, not in metropolitan remand.'

We sat in silence for a while. The little carriage clock on the mantelpiece chimed the half hour, a silver splinter of sound.

Bruce picked up his gla.s.s, looked at it, rolled it like a thimble between his big, hairy hands. 'I knew that p.r.i.c.k killed your wife,' he said, not looking at me. 'Wayne Milovich. Knew him for years. He was always a dangerous animal. Only had to look at his eyes.'