Bad Debts (29 page)

I clambered across from my branch, got my head and shoulders and one arm in and pulled myself across.

The floor of the hideaway was below the level of the doorway. I lowered myself tentatively into the gloom. About a metre down, my feet touched the floor. For a while I couldn’t see anything, then gradually I made out the corners of the room. Light came from the door, now a window, from gaps between the bargeboards and the roof. It was a little box, perhaps three metres square, with a pitched ceiling, boarded off from the rest of the ceiling of the house. The floor was covered with flower-patterned linoleum.

It was empty.

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Not even cobwebs.

Nowhere to hide anything.

There was no sign that anyone had ever used the room, had ever had a secret life up here.

I groaned again. Going down would be even harder than coming up.

I squeezed my upper body through the entrance, reached out and got a grip on a branch above my head. I pulled myself up to it, getting a knee on the sill, then standing up. As I did so, the jagged end of a short dead branch almost took out my left eye.

I pulled my head back.

The tip of the branch was just inches away. It was bone white, except for odd grey marks, almost like fingerprints, on the underside.

I wanted to put a bandaid on the scratch on his cheek but he didn’t want me to.

That’s what Mrs Bishop had said when we first talked about Ronnie’s disappearance.

Ronnie had been here.

Standing just where I was standing. A scratch on his cheek bleeding.

Ronnie had scratched his cheek on the branch. He had put his left hand to his cheek and it had come away with blood on it. In anger, he had grabbed the branch and tried to break it.

But it wouldn’t break. And he left his blood on it, dark marks now weathered to grey.

‘Are you all right, Mr Irish?’

Mrs Bishop was looking up at me, eyes wide.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

I scrambled back through the small door.

Somewhere in here. Somewhere in this empty room was Ronnie’s evidence.

I went around the walls carefully, feeling for a loose board, a door to a hiding place. It took about five minutes.

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Nothing.

The floor. Perhaps there was a gap between the floor and the ceiling below. I knelt down and tried to lift the nearest corner of the linoleum.

It wouldn’t come up. It was held down by tacks, one every few centimetres.

I went all round the lino edge under the doorway, trying to lift it with my nails. It was tacked down tight. Along the right-hand wall, it was the same.

In the right-hand corner, a small piece came up.

I tugged at it.

It was just one broken tack. The rest held.

Along the back wall, all hope gone, feeling the regular line of tackheads.

The tacks stopped.

I ran my fingertips into the corner, perhaps thirty centimetres away.

No tacks.

I ran them down the left-hand wall.

No tacks for the first thirty centimetres.

I felt in the dark corner. The lino curled back slightly. I pulled at it. A triangular piece peeled back stiffly. I felt beneath it with my right hand.

There was a small trapdoor, perhaps twenty centimetres by fifteen.

I pulled it up with my nails. It came away easily.

I put my hand into the cavity.

There was a box, a long narrow box, shallow, lidded.

I got my hand under it and took it out of the cavity. It was a nice box, pearwood perhaps, the kind that used to hold the accessories for sewing machines.

I got up and went to the entrance, to the light.

The lid had a small catch.

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I opened it.

Cam’s girlfriend’s flat was the way we’d left it, apart from the battered front door. My malt whisky was still standing next to the telephone in the kitchen.

Cam was in the Barcelona chair, holding himself upright, drinking Cascade out of the bottle again. I was on the sofa, drinking nothing, nervous. Linda was at Channel 7.

‘They’ll run it you reckon?’ asked Cam.

‘Depends what’s on Vane’s film.’

We sat in silence in the gloom. After a while, I got up and drank some water. Cam finished his beer, got up painfully to get another one out of the fridge. When he came back, he said, ‘That shooting today. Made me think of my German.’

‘Your German?’

‘Last bloke who shot at me. Before…when was it? Yesterday.’ He lit a Gitane. ‘Gary Hoffmeister. We were shooting roos out to buggery, out there in the Grey Range. I only met him the day before we went. Off his head. Had a whole trunk of guns. Rifles, handguns, shotguns. Never stopped shooting, shoot anything, trees, stones, anything.

He was full of Nazi shit, too. Kept asking me about my name, how come I was this colour. I just said, I’m a tanned Australian, mate. I thought, you’ll keep. Wait till we’re out of here.’

Cam drank some beer.

‘Last night out,’ he said, ‘Gary was off his face, talking about Anglo-Saxon purity, Hitler was right, the coming Indonesian invasion. I went to take a piss round the back of the cooltruck. Came round the corner, .38 slug hits the truck next to my head. Into reverse, got to the cab to get my rifle, he fires about five shots, trying to hit me right through the driver’s door.’

He appeared to lose interest in the story.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘Got the iron, off into the scrub. Took about half an hour to get a clear shot at the bastard. He was trying to stalk me like Rambo. I put him in with the roos, took him to the cops in Charleville. He was nice and cold. They knew fucking Gary there, handshakes all round, good bloody riddance.’

‘They charge you?’

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‘Had to. Court found I acted in self-defence. Had to come back from WA. Took a little trip back to the scene while I was there. Near there, anyway.’

‘What for?’

Cam smiled his rare smile. ‘Dig up the ten grand Gary had in his gun crate. And that Ruger. No point in giving that kind of stuff to the cops. Spoils ’em.’

The phone rang. It was 6.25 p.m.

I went into the kitchen and picked it up.

‘Put on the TV,’ Linda said. ‘Seven at six-thirty.’

I went back to the sitting room and switched on the set.

‘Something’s on,’ I said. ‘Six-thirty.’

The ads went on forever. We sat in silence.

The current affairs show began with its montage of news footage: bombs, riots, politicians talking.

Then the serious young woman came on, dark top, little scarf, air of barely controlled excitement.

‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘this program deals with allegations about the involvement of a Cabinet Minister, public servants, a clergyman, trade union leaders and others in an under-age sex ring. It also alleges police involvement in the death in 1984 of a social justice activist, and massive corruption surrounding Charis Corporation’s six hundred million dollar Yarra Cove development.’

She paused.

‘These are serious and dramatic allegations. And we believe they are fully substantiated.’

Another pause.

‘First,’ she said, ‘we show you, exclusively, shocking photographs taken by a Special Branch detective on the night in 1984 when social justice activist Anne Jeppeson met her death.’

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First, we saw some old footage of Anne Jeppeson leading a Save Hoagland march and answering questions at a news conference. A male voice-over gave a quick history of the Hoagland closure.

Then the woman said, ‘On the night of 18 June 1984, Anne Jeppeson was leaving her terrace house in Ardenne Street, Richmond, at 11.40 p.m. Unbeknown to her a Special Branch officer, Paul Karl Vane, was watching her house from a vehicle parked across the street. He had a camera and began taking pictures as she left the house.’

I held my breath.

The first photograph came on, startlingly clear. It showed Anne Jeppeson, in a leather jacket and jeans, coming out of the front door of a terrace house. Her head was turned back, as if she was speaking to someone. It must have been Manuel Carvalho.

The next picture showed Anne stepping off the kerb. She was looking to her right, not alarmed.

The next one showed her almost in the middle of the road, still looking right. Now her mouth was open, her right hand was coming up, the whites of her eyes showing.

Then the camera turned its attention to where she was looking. The picture showed a car, a Kingswood, two figures in the front seat, faces just white blurs.

There was another shot, the car closer, the faces clearer.

In the next picture, Anne Jeppeson was lifted off the ground, top half of her body on the bonnet of the Kingswood, the lower half in the air.

Now you could see the faces of the driver and the passenger clearly.

The driver was Garth Bruce, Minister for Police. Younger but unmistakably Garth Bruce.

The passenger was Martin Scullin, now lying dead on the floor in the shack in the Otways.

‘We have every reason to believe,’ the presenter said, ‘that the driver of the vehicle seen colliding with Anne Jeppeson is Garth Bruce, now Minister for Police, and that the passenger is Martin Scullin, then a Drug Squad detective and now owner of a security company, AdvanceGuard Security, the company started by Garth Bruce after leaving the Victoria police.’

Cam made a sound of triumph that could have been heard by low-flying aircraft.

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Then they got on to Ronnie Bishop’s videos, the ones I had found in the nice sewing machine box under the floor of the roof cubbyhouse. They did their fuzzy pixels to prevent us seeing exactly what was happening but it very clearly involved sexual acts with young people of both sexes who couldn’t be said to be willing partners.

They did show us the faces of the adults.

Lance Pitman, Minister for Planning, was there.

Father Rafael Gorman was there.

So was a man the presenter identified as the late Malcolm Bleek, once the highest ranking public servant in the Planning Department.

Then there were two leaders of the trade union movement, a prominent financial entrepreneur now living abroad, and other men the presenter didn’t identify. Someone would recognise them. Wives. Children. Colleagues.

There were a lot of close-ups. Ronnie had made sure everyone was identifiable.

‘These shocking films,’ the presenter said, ‘are believed to have been taken by Ronald Bishop, an employee of the Safe Hands Foundation, an organisation founded by Father Rafael Gorman to help homeless young people. It is likely that the films were used to blackmail Mr Lance Pitman and others seen in them. It appears likely that Bishop kept a copy of the films, perhaps as some form of insurance.’

Then Linda came on, poised and professional, and told the full story of Yarrabank and Hoagland. Names, dates, everything. How Anne Jeppeson came close to torpedoing the whole thing and was murdered for it. How Detective-Sergeant Scullin probably provided the helpless Danny McKillop to take the rap and how Father Gorman probably provided Ronnie Bishop to seal Danny’s fate.

The whole thing took half an hour. Much of the detail was conjecture, but it made a powerful case. When it was over, Cam got up, flexed his shoulders gingerly, and said,

‘Shocking. Could undermine faith in grown-up people. There’s some Krug around here.

What about you?’

I looked at him and said, ‘Give me a beer mug full to start.’

36

There is ice in the wind at Caulfield on a Saturday in late autumn. Long-legged Cynthia the head Commissioner and Cyril Wootton were both dressed for it: tweedy, scarves.

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At 2.50 p.m., I was looking at Nancy Farmer, Tony Ericson, and Dakota Dreaming, aka Slim, in the mounting yard. Nancy was fidgety, patting the horse, tugging at her silks, pushing strands of hair into her cap. Tony was worse. He had the air of a man waiting for the jury to come back. But the horse was calm enough for the three of them. He looked at the ground mostly, like someone who knows about waiting.

Tony’s children were at the rail, popeyed with excitement. The girl had been neglecting her grooming. Dakota didn’t look as lustrous as when I’d last seen him. It was worth trying, but it wasn’t going to fool anyone. The horse was right: rippling, tight behind the saddle, poverty lines on the rump.

The man next to me was looking at Dakota too.

‘Nothin wrong with that bugger you can see,’ he said, pointing at the horse with his rolled up copy of the Herald Sun. ‘Shockin history though.’

‘Shocking,’ I said. Ron Pevsner in the Age thought so too. He assessed Dakota’s price at 50-1. That was about tops for Ron. His colleague Bart Grantley rated the horse at two out of ten. No-one knew what a horse had to do to get a rating of one. Die in its previous race, perhaps. The form comment was: ‘Comeback race. Lightly raced but injury prone and seems fully tested. Hard to have.’ All the other form guides said much the same. The Wizard assessed his odds at 100-1 and said: ‘Must improve.’ It would be hard to argue with this daring judgment.

I’d driven Harry to the track. Cam was in Sydney, handling the plunge on the interstate ring at Randwick.

Harry was in a philosophical mood. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘pullin off a coup’s a bit of a miracle, y’know. I’ve had a coup horse run last. Stone motherless last. Goodbye seventy grand.’

He smiled. ‘There’s a number of worries. The horse, the weight, the jockey, the barrier draw, the track. Any one can sink you. And then there’s another tiny matter. Today, thirteen other bloody cattle. Some of ’em even trying to win.’

Before we parted, he said, ‘Lunch money in your pocket?’

I nodded.

He said, ‘Jack, somethin extra I want you to do. Occurred to me.’

At 2.45 p.m., I went over to where Wootton was reading his race book. He looked every inch the bank manager at his leisure.

‘Well, Cyril,’ I said, ‘I’ve been thinking about another one of your commissioners. Eddie Dollery. I hope your Cynthia doesn’t have a taste for rooting men wearing uniforms and crotchless underwear.’

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I gave him the small white card. He took it with the lack of enthusiasm of a man being offered a business card by an encyclopedia salesman.