Bad Debts Part 27

Cam straightened up. 'Country air,' he said. 'Let's go.' He started loosening the tray cover. When he had the back open, he looked at me and said, 'They're looking for two blokes, mate. Hop in.'

'In the back?'

'There's a mattress. And pillows. Lots of air gets in. You can have a kip.'

I climbed in and lay down. Cam lashed the cover down. It was pitch-black under the cover, dark and claustrophobic and smelling of engine oil. I had to fight the urge to try and break out.

We were reversing over cobblestones. The springs transmitted every b.u.mp. I found a pillow, dragged it under my head, closed my eyes and tried to think about sharpening the blade of a number 7 plane. I was trying to learn how to grind a hollow angle and then hone the blade on that angle with a circular motion the way the j.a.panese did. I was thinking about how to improve my honing action when I fell asleep.

I woke with a start, no idea where I was, tried to sit up, bounced off the taut nylon tray cover, fell back in fright.

Cam's voice said, 'Nice place. They'd have something to drink here, would they?'

I knew where I was. How had I managed to fall asleep? I lay still and listened to my heartbeat while Cam loosened the cover.

'Breathing?' he said. 'Relaxed?'

Inside ten minutes we were drinking whisky in front of a fire in the stone hearth of what seemed to be an enormous mudbrick and timber house. I went outside and stood on the terrace. There was a vineyard running away from the house.

I went back inside. Cam was on his haunches, fiddling with the fire.

'Were they cops?' I asked. I felt wide-awake. I'd slept for more than two hours.

'Moved like cops,' said Cam. 'Very efficient. I gather you decked one.'

'Tony Baker he calls himself,' I said. 'Came to the pub to scare me off. Made out he was a fed of some kind.'

'If he's a dead fed,' Cam said, 'we have other problems.' He stood up and yawned. 'That's enough Monday now. I'll find a bed.'

I looked at Linda. She was asleep, head fallen onto the arm of the sofa, hair fallen over her face. In the end, perfect exhaustion drives out fear.

'I'll just sit here,' I said. 'Reflect on how I got everybody into this s.h.i.t.'

'That's the past,' Cam said. 'Think about the future. How to get everybody out of this s.h.i.t.'

After a while, I got up and found a blanket to put over Linda. She didn't wake up when I swung her legs onto the sofa and arranged a pillow under her head.

I kissed her on the cheek, got some whisky, put some more wood on the fire. The future. But we weren't finished with the past yet. What had Paul Vane seen on the night Anne Jeppeson died? What was the evidence he knew about? And what was the evidence Father Gorman had told Ronnie to bring to Melbourne and where was it?

Time pa.s.sed. I fed the fire, listened to the night sounds. It was after three before I felt tired enough to find a bed. Sleep eventually came.

Sunlight on my face woke me. It was after 9 a.m. My knee was stiff and sore and the skin around my hip was tender. I felt dirty. Looking for a shower, I went into the kitchen. Cam was sitting at the table, eating toast and jam, clean, hair slicked back.

He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder. I went that way. Linda was sitting at a big desk, looking at her laptop screen. She looked clean too.

'Does that thing work anywhere?' I said.

She looked up and smiled. 'I've written the whole f.u.c.king thing. All of it. The whole Yarrabank saga. And I'm plugged in to the world again. Through my trusty modem.'

I said, 'Modem's not a word you can love.'

She tapped the computer screen. 'There's a P. K.Vane in Breamlea,' she said. 'Must have moved from Beaumaris. We can take the car ferry.'

There wasn't a single thing to lose.

'I'll have a shower,' I said. 'See if you can find the departure times.'

The woman was tall and thin and her labrador was old and fat. She was wearing a big yellow sou'wester that ended at her knees. Her legs were bare and she was barefoot.

There was no-one else on the beach. Just Linda and I and the woman and the dog and the gulls. We saw her a long way off, walking on the hard wet sand, hands in pockets, head down, getting her feet wet when the tiny waves ran in. The dog walked up on the dry sand, stiff-legged, stopping every few yards for a hopeful inspection of something delivered by the tide.

When she was about a hundred metres away, I got up and went towards her. The labrador came out to meet me, friendly but watchful. I stopped and offered him my hand. He came over, nosed it, allowed me to rub his head.

When she was close enough to hear me, I said, 'Mrs Vane?'

She nodded. She had strong bones in her face, big streaks of grey in her hair, skin seen too much sun.

'Are you the widow of Paul Karl Vane of the Victoria Police?'

She nodded again, still walking.

'Mrs Vane, I'd like to talk to you about your husband and the deaths of Anne Jeppeson and Danny McKillop.'

She kept looking at me and didn't say anything until she was close, three or four metres away. The dog went to her.

She leant down and rubbed its head, eyes still on me. Her eyes were startlingly blue.

'I was hoping someone would come,' she said. 'I don't think I've had one happy day since they killed that girl.'

She put out a hand and I took it. We walked up the beach.

34

The shack was up in the hills behind Apollo Bay. We got lost once, retraced our route, found where we'd gone wrong. Cam was driving, the three of us crammed onto the bench seat, Linda in the middle.

On the way from Breamlea, keeping to the back roads, Cam said, 'How come she doesn't know what it is?'

'Paul Vane never told her,' I said. 'He woke her up on the night Anne was killed and told her he'd seen it happen. He was electric, sat drinking all night. The next day, when the television had the news of Danny's arrest, he told her Danny hadn't done it, that it was murder, that he knew who'd done it but couldn't tell anyone.'

'So she kept quiet too,' said Cam.

I moved my cramped arm from behind Linda's head. 'She says it haunted her. When she read about Danny's sentence, she was sick. Paul became morose, drank more, used to say he'd done the wrong thing but it was too late. Eventually he took early retirement. Then he got sick, bowel cancer. He kept telling her he was going to give her the evidence, that he was going to get a lot of money to provide for her after he was gone, that she should tell Danny that he was innocent and give him the evidence.'

'Money?' asked Cam. 'Did he get it?'

I shook my head. 'No. She thinks he tried to blackmail someone over Danny's death and that's why he was murdered. He told her where the evidence was the morning of the day he was shot.'

'And then she rang Danny?'

'Later. After Paul's murder, the house was broken into and searched from top to bottom. Then Paul's boat caught fire at its moorings at Sandringham and blew up. She says she was too scared to fetch the evidence. And then she was watching television and saw the news that Danny'd been shot. After that, there didn't seem to be any point.'

'That must be it up ahead,' Linda said. She'd fallen asleep a few times on the trip, head lolling on to my shoulder.

The shack was old, just a big room and a lean-to, probably a timber-getter's humble home. It was made of timber slabs, weathered to a light grey, but still solid. The whole place was leaning slightly, held up by a huge brick chimney.

We got out, stretching stiff limbs. The air was cold and moist. Far away, we could hear a vehicle changing gear on a hill, then silence. The birds were quiet at this time of day.

The front door was padlocked, no more than a gesture considering the condition of the door and its frame. I opened the lock with the key Judith Vane had given me.

Inside it was dark, almost no light coming through the dirty panes of the two small windows. To my right was the fireplace, a huge red brick structure, the front blackened almost to the roof by thousands of fires.

You couldn't light a fire in it now. The opening, about the size of two fridges side by side, had been closed in with fibreboard. Some kind of wooden frame had been built in the opening and the fibreboard nailed to it. This work was recent compared to the age of the shack.

'It's in there,' I said, pointing at the chimney.

'There's a crowbar in the ute,' Cam said. He went out to fetch it.

Linda and I looked at each other.

'So, Jack Irish,' she said. 'This is it.'

I nodded.

Cam was in the doorway, a weary little smile on his face. He didn't have the crowbar.

'No crowbar?' I said.

He took a step into the room.

There was a man behind him holding a pump-action shotgun. It was Tony Baker, with a big plaster on the side of his face where I'd hit him with the steel pipe.

'Move along, c.o.o.n,' he said.

Cam came into the room. Baker came in too, a safe distance behind Cam. He'd done this kind of thing before.

Another man, in an expensive camelhair overcoat, came into the doorway. He was tall, somewhere beyond fifty, that was the only safe guess: full head of close-cropped silver hair, narrow tanned face with a strong jaw and deep lines down from a nose that had seen contact. He had a young man's full, slightly contemptuous mouth. In one hand, he held a short-barrelled .38. In the other, he had the crowbar.

'Jack Irish,' he said. 'I'm Martin Scullin. You're a f.u.c.king pain in the a.r.s.e.' His voice was as flat and his diction as slow as Barry Tregear's. Country boys both, grown old in the city. Or maybe it was the standard issue voice in the old Consorting Squad.

'I've heard a lot about you,' I said. To my surprise, my voice sounded normal.

'Where's the stuff?' Scullin said. He didn't sound particularly interested.

'I don't know. We're just looking.'

Scullin looked at Tony Baker, no expression on his face.

Baker clubbed Cam across the jaw with the shotgun barrel. Cam went down like a suit slipping off a clothes hanger. He fell to his knees, tried to stand up.

Baker stepped over and hit him in the face with the barrel again. Twice.

Blood spurted out of Cam's nose, turning his shirt black.

Baker turned his bull-terrier head and looked at me. Even in that light, I could see the gold fleck in his eye.

'I'm going to kill this c.o.o.n,' he said. 'Then I'm going to kill that b.i.t.c.h.'

He kicked Cam in the ribs, a short, stabbing movement, full of power. Cam shook his head like a swimmer trying to clear water from his ears.

Baker kicked him again, harder. Cam put his hands on the floor, got into a sitting position, looked up, eyes closed. His mouth was wide open, a cave streaming blood.

Baker hit him under the jaw with an upward movement of the shotgun b.u.t.t. Cam fell over sideways.

Baker stepped back, readying himself to kick.

'Leave him,' I said. 'It's in the chimney.'

Baker looked at Scullin.

Scullin said to me, 'Get it.'

Baker pointed the shotgun at me. Scullin pa.s.sed me the crowbar.

I looked at Linda. She was kneeling next to Cam, holding his head, blood all over her arms.

The fireplace cover came off easily, nails squeaking. In the fireplace was an old stove, a Dover, filthy with soot, stovepipe rusted.

'Get up there,' Scullin said.

There wasn't room for me and the stovepipe. I took it in both hands and worked it loose. It came off and fell behind the stove with a crash. I got on the stove awkwardly, kneeling, bent over, and looked up the chimney. Soot fell on my face. Dark. I couldn't see anything.

'Get up there,' Scullin said again.

I pressed my hands against the chimney sides, got on one leg, then the other. I was in the chimney from below my waist up.

I put my hands up and began to feel around.

Nothing. Just flaking soot. I reached higher. A ledge. The chimney had a jink.

My fingertips touched something. Smooth. Cold. I felt sideways, found an edge.