She clasped her hands. ‘Mr Faraday, I’m happy to answer your questions but I’m not sure what this is about.’
I wasn’t sure either but I said, ‘I had the vague thought that Ned’s death might be connected with something that happened here in 1985.’
She was looking at me in a way that said she had grave doubts about my grip on reality. ‘I’ll find out,’ she said. ‘It’ll take a few minutes. Can I offer you coffee? Tea?’
I declined and she left me. I walked around the room looking at the pictures. The paintings were all oils, small, signed by the same hand-B.I. or B.L. From a distance they looked like bush campfire scenes. Close up, they had the power to disturb. Something unpleasant seemed to be happening in them, primitive sacrifice or torture, people in poses of prayer and supplication and indistinct flesh-toned objects in the flames. There were six of them, not markedly different, not hung in any order I could detect.
Marcia Carrier was in most of the photographs, family scenes with another dark-haired girl and a couple who might have been their grandparents. The man was stern-looking, handsome, hair intact, cleft chin. The woman was overweight, dowdy. I went back to looking at the paintings.
‘Painted by my father,’ Marcia Carrier said. ‘Just a weekend painter.’
‘Very dramatic weekend painter,’ I said.
She laughed again. ‘I must say I don’t quite understand them. Now. There was no-one absent without permission from here in late 1985. In fact, no-one strayed in 1985. Two girls took unofficial leave in 1986, both returned to us within a fortnight. Is that helpful?’
I said, ‘Thanks. I won’t waste any more of your time.’ ‘Coffee’s on its way,’ she said. ‘I insist.’
I sat down. The secretary came in with a tray holding a silver coffee jug, big French coffee cups, warm milk, shortbread. Marcia Carrier poured.
‘What sort of work do you do, Mr Faraday?’
‘I’m a blacksmith, metalworker.’
‘Really? I’ve never met a blacksmith. How do you become one?’
‘Years of training under a master craftsman. Intensive study of the properties of metals. Also, you have to be able to hit hot things with a really heavy hammer. How do you get to run a place like this?’
Her serious look did not leave her. ‘Well, you have to be a public-spirited person, utterly selfless, with an abiding faith in the essential goodness of human beings. You also need a deep understanding of psychology. Then you have to be a superb administrator who thinks nothing of working long and unpredictable hours.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘basically anyone can apply.’
She had an engaging laugh. ‘Your inmates…’ I said.
‘Clients.’
‘Clients. How do they get here?’
She was serious now. ‘The courts send us all sorts of girls-rich kids, poor kids, kids you can help, kids you can’t. They’ve all got one thing in common. No-one wants them except for the worst reasons. They’ve usually landed up on the street and someone, sometimes a number of people, is pushing them towards drugs and prostitution. If no-one intervenes, most of them won’t see twenty. If the department can convince a court that a girl’s in significant danger, she might get sent here.’
‘Then what happens?’
‘We try our best to help them. You have to understand, some of these girls have had no childhood. Shunted around, never felt wanted, sex at an early age, often raped. They’re fifteen going on forty. Our aim is to convince them that their lives have worth and that they can live worthwhile lives.’
I had the feeling she’d said all this before. Many times. ‘Doesn’t sound easy,’ I said.
‘No.’ She looked out of the window. ‘Mostly we’re too late. And for some girls I sometimes think it’s always too late.’
I didn’t say anything.
She turned her eyes on me. ‘Do you believe in evil, Mr Faraday?’
I thought about this for a while. It wasn’t the kind of question people often asked me. Finally I said, ‘I don’t doubt that some people are evil. I’m not sure there’s an evil that’s independent of evil people.’
Marcia Carrier nodded. ‘Have you noticed,’ she said, ‘that evil people have a kind of force about them? A kind of independence? It’s a very powerful thing to have. It’s a stillness, an absence of doubt, an indifference to the world. It draws people to them. The moral vacuum sucks people in. The weak go to the strong. We see girls like that here. Some of them come on like victims, like wounded creatures. But sooner or later the other side shows through. The side that’s the predator, the side that inflicts wounds. The evil side.’
She shook her head, quick self-chastising movement. ‘But that’s all too serious,’ she said. ‘We do what we can for the girls. They can study if they want to. Some do. For others, it’s too late. For now anyway. For them, we have a range of programs. Self-esteem. Life skills. Job skills. That sort of thing.’
That was the end of talking about Kinross Hall. She moved the conversation over to the possibility of spring ever coming. We talked about coffee-making, her ignorance of football, the effects of sun deprivation. It was an easy exchange. When I got up to go, she said, ‘This is going to nag at me. I’ll have another look at the records, see if there’s anything I didn’t spot that might have worried Mr Lowey. What’s your phone number?’
At the door, we shook hands. She had a nice, dry grip and she held it for a second.
‘I’m pleased to have met a blacksmith, Mr Faraday,’ she said.
‘Mac.’
‘Marcia.’
The security man had the gate open when I rounded the corner. He gave me a little wave.
I went home, lit the Ned Kelly in the forge and got back to work on the knives. I had made my first knife for George Tan, a chef friend of Vinnie the publican. He’d lost the index finger on his chopping hand to a boat winch. When he got back to work after two months off, he found his knives unbalanced in his hand. George showed me the problem in the pub one Monday night, and I drew a knife shape that might compensate for the missing finger. It took four or five versions to get the distribution of weight right. George was ecstatic. He rang me to say he wanted a full set. Another chef in his kitchen, a ten-fingered one, tried the knives and ordered three. He showed them to a chef in Sydney, who ordered a full set. I now had orders for about thirty knives.
Filing and fitting, stove gradually warming the room, I thought about my visit to Kinross Hall.
I couldn’t believe Ned had gone to see Marcia Carrier about work. Ned never asked anyone for work. And leaving aside Ned’s nature, he had no need to drum up work. His diary showed an almost full workload of bookings for two or three months.
Marcia Carrier had not told me the real reason for Ned’s visit to Kinross Hall the day before he died. Why? I kept turning my meeting with her over in my mind. Then I went to the office and rang Detective Sergeant Michael Shea. He was out. They would pass on a message. I left my number. I was sorting out Allie’s appointments when the phone rang.
‘Shea.’
I said, ‘There’s something. Ned Lowey complained to the cops about Kinross Hall in late 1985. November. Can you check that?’
Silence. He cleared his throat. ‘November ’85? Why the fuck would I want to check that?’
‘You might find out something.’
There was a long silence. I could hear traffic noises. Then he said, ‘I’m the policeman.’
‘Trying to help,’ I said. ‘Don’t want that, fine.’
Silence again. Someone said something in the background. Probably skinhead Cotter. ‘Get back to you,’ Shea said.
In the half-awake dawn, rain hissing in the downpipes, I lay on my back and, for the first time in years, thought about the old life. When I’d come to my father’s house and the smithy to stay, I had schooled myself to shy away from thinking about my recent past until the people in it seemed unreal and unimportant, as if I’d created them or seen them in a film. In my mind, I called that the old life. I wanted a new life, a life among ordinary people, people like Ned and Stan Harrop and Flannery. Now Ned’s death had shaken everything loose and I didn’t try to fight the thoughts.
The old life. It had been my life for thirteen years. The old life. The Job. The endless, seamless job that had no clear beginning and was never finished. ‘Your job!’ Susan had screamed one night. ‘Don’t call it your fucking job! It’s not a job. It’s your fucking life! It’s your fucking personality! It’s you. It’s what you are. You don’t exist without it. There isn’t anything fucking else in your world, don’t you understand that?’
I did understand that. And then again I didn’t. Not that it made any difference. She left me anyway. I came home one day and she was on the pavement putting suitcases into her car. It was a sunny day in early spring and, from a full block away, I saw the gold of her hair catch the light. A flash, like sun on a helmet.