Quota (12 page)

‘I've said what I've said. The rest is your problem, mate.'

‘Well yes, it is for the time being. But the thing is, the defendants' lawyers are going to see through it just as easily as I have and they'll be coming from a different angle. They'll be saying
you
did it.' He drained the coffee. ‘Then it's
your
problem.'

Patrick put the robot down and swiped it with his finger so that it spun on its back. ‘I'll just have to take my chances on that front. Are you done?'

‘I'm done,' said Charlie, with an air of surrender. He scooped his mug and placed it on the sink. ‘Thanks for the coffee.'

As Charlie headed for the front door, down that dark hallway that filled him with unaccountable sadness, he sensed Patrick was close behind him, shepherding him in his haste to get him out of the place. As if he was an ill omen or a harbinger of misfortune. Patrick closed the front door firmly before Charlie was over the doormat.

He was reaching for the car door when a voice from the side of the house stopped him. The girl, Milly. She was breathless as she approached, nervous. Charlie felt justified in letting her squirm.

‘What?'

‘I just wanted to say sorry.'

‘For what?'

‘For last night. Like, I didn't know he was gonna do it. I thought he just wanted to warn you off, y'know. I mean I thought he'd—I didn't think he'd hit ya like that.'

‘Yeah? Well, tell him from me he's a fucking savage. And seeing as you got me out there so he could do it, all I can think is you're a dirty little mole and you don't know any better.'

He expected she'd fire up, which, he figured, is why anyone calls a mole a mole. But her reaction surprised him: her face crumpled and she began to cry.

‘We're just—trying—to—look after him,' she sobbed. She was leaning on the back of the Saab now, clenching her jaw in an effort to stop the sobbing. ‘He's good, Paddy.
Good
. You don't understand what he's dealing with—it's you, it's the welfare, the bloody Murchisons, it's where the money comes from, it's who looks after the little ones. He's not coping. He's gonna be the next one to go at this rate. It'll do him in, I swear. This fucking family'—she heaved a great ragged sob from somewhere in her throat—‘it's a mess. Been a shitstorm for years. Why do you have to pile up even more crap on us? Why can't you all just fuck off and leave us alone?' She was beseeching him. Charlie had no idea where to look. He certainly couldn't look back at her.

‘Arch was a fucking idiot to give you a belting like that. I don't expect you to believe me, but he thought he was helping us. I'm, I'm sorry,' she sniffed.

‘Yeah. Right.'

‘He's me boyfriend,' she said softly. ‘Sort of. Has been for two weeks anyway. I arksed him to come along when I went to your place because I was too scared to go on me own. I didn't know he was gonna do that. I never would've been a part a that. The fucken idiot was tryin to impress me.'

Suddenly she stuck her hand out, offering it to Charlie. He must have stared at it for an uncomfortably long time. Where he came from, girls in motocross T-shirts didn't shake hands, didn't lift their reddened eyes to a stranger they'd ambushed and expect compromise. He was, yet again, a fumbler in a foreign land. He took the hand and shook it. It was warm and strong, and the first comforting thing he could remember in a long time.

THE BAND WERE doing a sound check in the public bar. The chrome rims of the drum kit caught the lights as a skinny guitarist plugged a lead into his amp, the pop and hum causing nearby drinkers to clutch at their ears.

Charlie's phone had gone dead, as it frequently did when he needed it. He leaned against the heavy stone pillar behind the bar and dialled Weir's home number on the pub's phone, another small courtesy extended to him by Les. The big man's generosity had him baffled. As the guitarist ran the edge of his pick down a guitar string with a metallic
thrring
, the line clicked through, and he was surprised by Weir's voice, raised to a holler and echoing.

‘Yairse.'

‘Harlan, Charlie.'

‘Hello lad. How are we faring?'

‘Sorry, I'm just having a little trouble with the line here. Are you hands-free?'

‘Better than that. I got a bloke in and he's wired the phone through the stereo. I can just walk around the house talking, see, and your voice is coming to me in surround sound. I change rooms, I've still got you. Infra red, I think. Bluetooth or something. I'm in the living room now.'

‘Call me a Luddite Harlan, but why the hell would you want to do that?'

‘The pursuit of applied thought.' There was a hint of mock pomposity; he knew how he sounded
.
‘You filter out the distractions and you're thinking without impediment. I did a plea deal the other day with the Bearded Basque, never left my kitchen bench. This is that thing in Pascoe Vale—you know it?—I was chopping coriander. Anyway, his bloke'll nod to reckless endangerment and we'll drop the culpable, and I had a whole laksa slapped together by the time I got rid of him. I don't know what the Basque was doing at the time, probably guzzling scotch in chambers under that bloody great portrait of Ignatius Loyola. So me, I've got my hands free, but the sound quality's beautiful, that's the thing, and you don't have to have one of those idiotic real estate spruiker things attached to your ear. You can gesticulate, pace up and down. Hey? And I've got a better sense of your inflection and so forth. Booming out of the ceiling. But I'm sure that's not why you rang, is it?'

Charlie imagined him in the living room he'd only ever seen once. Neat, orderly and functional, a repudiation of his seniority. Fishing photos. A big Rank Arena telly from the eighties. Couches in a floral pattern the dear departed Pamela had picked out. Lampstands, art that was tasteful, even progressive, and evaded any suggestion of Weir's role. A detailed litho of a wattle bird in a thin gilt frame. Seascapes done in thick, gloopy oils that made no sense at five paces, but resolved into photorealistic clarity from across the room. Framed portraits of his daughters, and Pamela, standing conversationally together in a recess on the bookshelf. A room that spoke of man without a need for fearsome projection, a man who at home became a hermit with a TV guide and socks.

‘Wasn't the laksa a distraction?'

‘Goodness me, no. There's no better stimulus to clear thought than semi-sedentary activity. Something your body can do without cerebral oversight. Walking, for instance. Now tell me'—Charlie had the feeling he'd stopped pacing and was standing under one of his ceiling speakers, in effect peering at him—‘what's happening down there?'

‘It's not looking good, boss. I've been to see our witness and he's damaged goods. He's seen me coming a mile off, and he doesn't want to co-operate. Half the town knows what I'm up to and you've got a few who support the Murchisons and reckon Lanegan got what was coming to him. There's others who reckon Patrick's mad and there's a few who support him and think I should fuck off.' Charlie picked at the stonework absently. ‘I'm not sure how we're going to go, to be honest.'

There was a long silence at the other end.

‘How are you coming across to them?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I mean…don't take this the wrong way, hmm? But it's going to take some, er,
humility
to break through.'

The picking finger stopped in its tracks and Charlie felt a hot pang of shock.

‘I…um. Harlan, are you suggesting I'm up myself?'

Weir's tone immediately softened. ‘Not for a second. But you're trying very hard and that means you come over in a particular way. These people are not like you: you understand that don't you?'

‘Tonight's my third night drinking at this bar. Believe me, the differences are stark.'

‘There you go again—that's where you're going to have trouble. You're an outsider and there's going to be some suspicion that goes with that but you might not be meeting them halfway. Those people
have
to deal with outsiders to some degree, like tourists and bureaucrats and retirees, but it doesn't come easy to them. In the Pitcairn Islands, you're either a local or you're from
away
. How about that for an idea…You either grow up on a speck of rock in the middle of the ocean, or you're an alien. To some lesser degree, lad, you're encountering the same dichotomy. Go easy on them.'

‘Harlan, I'll be honest with you. This isn't what I do. I stand up in court and argue, just like you do: all right, obviously not as well as you do it. I don't come from the country, and I'm not going incognito. Fuck, I wear slacks, okay? You sent me down here to talk to a witness to see if the bloke's going to give evidence—
truthful
evidence…' Charlie found himself jabbing his forefinger in the air for emphasis. Heads in the bar had noticed, and he pocketed the offending hand.

‘Now there's a fair bit a resistance around the place and I can reliably report that he's not coming through with the goods. I've spoken to him and I don't think he's well. Psychiatrically, I mean. So there's your answer. My car's smashed up, I've been in a fight, I'm talking to myself quite a bit and I've got a few domestic spot fires of my own back home. How about we call it a day on this one, eh?'

Silence filled the line, and somehow Charlie again knew how Weir was standing: hands on hips, staring at his feet with his brows pushed over his eyes. It was a pose he'd adopted on the few occasions Charlie had seen him deeply troubled.

‘You need to keep going.'

‘Why?'

Charlie felt the idiocy of the whole venture crowding in on him. ‘If you tell me to try harder and I start really pressuring this bloke, he's just as likely to blurt it in cross-examination and you and I are going to be flushed out in court as having influenced him. Is that what you want?'

His hands were again making agitated thrusts. A hairy forearm curled around the pillar, placed a beer on the woodwork, then disappeared.

‘Let's go back to the plan, eh?' Harlan offered gently. ‘You know and I know that the boy knows more than he's said, hmm?'

Charlie could hear his footfalls on the faraway carpet.

‘So I can have him brought to court under subpoena, and what will he do? He'll resent us for starters and he'll be out of his element. So he'll revert to type and stand there like a drongo. We can drop him altogether, but the defence are going to smell a rodent and demand that we call him for cross-examination. Besides, we can't just work around him—what sort of jury is going to give us the thumbs up on a circumstantial case with a plainly absent eyewitness?'

‘Maybe if he's not going to do it then that's the end, Harlan. Maybe you've just got to accept that it's not going to work. What you've got me doing here is not only fucking annoying, it's also not my line of work and it's potentially impro—'

‘Oh get your hand off it, Charlie.'

‘Pardon me?'

‘You're being paid a daily rate and I got Accounts to cover all your travel expenses, including whatever you rack up in that…hotel of yours. There's a man called Lewis in Dauphin who does smash repairs. I want you to find him and get your car fixed. I've made arrangements to cover it. You've got a little window out of your life over there, lad. No pressure. Isn't that what you've been after?'

Charlie leaned back against the pillar and studied the grotty ceiling tiles. A glass broke somewhere in the public bar. He sighed deeply, the expelled air fanning down from his nose and making a noise in the receiver.

‘How much longer?'

‘However long you need. If it gets past May, I'll start cooking up adjournments.'

‘Mm.'

‘Charlie, when this works, and it
will
work, you will have made it happen. One day this kid's going to thank you for getting him into the starting gate. He just doesn't know it yet.'

Charlie took a deep gulp at the beer. It was cold and it felt disturbingly like an old friend. There was no sound from Harlan as he swallowed, exhaled, and leaned heavily on the stonework once again.

‘You know, I've got no idea what I'm doing here…'

‘None of us know what we're doing. And I mean that in the big sense. Let's just stumble on in this direction for a little while, shall we?'

Seized by the impulse to retain a shard of defiance, Charlie clicked the phone gently back onto its hook without a further word and immediately felt mean. He picked up the beer and wandered back towards the bar as a sour-looking woman read meal numbers into the bistro microphone.

THE GIRLS HAD said it would be the last place on the left as you walked towards the TV antenna. They'd been eyeing him as they danced in front of the guitarist, flirting and throwing their hair. He sat through the ritual, unmoved. Their cheap clothes, the lithe bodies, that hair; all of it was new enough to flaunt in the full confidence of youth. For now.

‘Where ya from?'

Charlie smiled weakly as the taller of the two leaned down into his face, enveloping him in a cloud of perfume. She had freckles, and a silver sleeper through her eyebrow. ‘My mate wants to know where you're from,' she grinned, as the other girl swung a kick at her backside and shrieked, ‘Argh! Bitch!'

The tall girl hooted with delight and extended a hand. ‘Dance!' she yelled, just as the band rang off the end of a song.

Heads turned and Charlie panicked. ‘I'm right thanks.'

She stuck out her lower lip and feigned disappointment, then just as quickly brightened again and told him about the party, only just down the road, and all the booze was laid on because the pub guys would take care of it and the host—Corey? Cody?—was
sooo
hilarious. The band started up again and the room resumed its rhythm.