I shook my head.
‘No. Me neither. They say it can help with the fear. I deeply fucking doubt that. Well, we’ve got to talk some details. Got a little room here I sometimes use.’
Later, before he sent me off, Berglin said, ‘How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life. The work, the job, it’s on the side of the fourteen-year-olds. Get a few free tastes-two years later, they’re in the cold filing cabinet, tracks all over ’em like a rash. This scum, they are way over on the other side. Across the dark river. Keep it in mind, Mac. Won’t, of course. Wouldn’t be any fucking use if you did.’
He was absolutely right. I never gave it a thought over the next few years, living under the gun, sweating on the moment of discovery. But I often thought about that meeting with Berglin later. And I thought about it again, driving home from talking to Dr Crewe.
I parked outside the smithy and went to have a piss in the bathroom alongside the office. Still thinking about Berglin, I was in the room before I heard the shower.
Allie was in the big open shower stall facing me. She had her head back under the spray, arms raised to shampoo her hair. Before I backed out, I registered sleek pubic hair, flattened breasts with prominent nipples, defined ribcage, long muscular thighs.
I was in the smithy, shaken, lustful, looking at a sketch of gateposts a hobby farmer outside Wallace wanted when Allie came in, shiny clean, spiky, no make-up.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘No truck. Didn’t occur to me you’d be showering.’
‘That’s okay,’ she said without a trace of embarrassment. ‘They told us at school to lock the cubicle. I was feeling filthy. Alarm didn’t go off this morning, twenty minutes to get to the job.’
‘Where’s the truck?’
‘Lent it to Mick. Met him in the pub at lunchtime. He’s broken down other side Newstead.’
‘Overloaded with furniture ripped off the rural poor,’ I said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen you naked.’
She smiled. ‘You only had to ask.’
We looked at each other for a moment, a trace of awkwardness.
‘You working?’ she said.
‘Gateposts for a bloke at Wallace.’ I handed her the sketch the man had given me.
She whistled. ‘Gateposts? These are gateposts? What is the place? Some kind of agribrothel?’
‘Hardiplank house on two acres. He says his wife saw gateposts like this in America. Went to Disneyland with her first husband.’
Allie scratched her head. ‘Disneyland and Cape Kennedy, Cape Canaveral, whatever it’s called. Does he see that they look like two giant wangers?’
‘Wanger? That’s the current term is it?’
She nodded. ‘This week’s term. Wanger.’
‘He’s under no illusions,’ I said. ‘I suggested to him that they looked like a pair of pricks and he said, there’s been two of us. When my wife marries again, she can come around and get you to make a third prick.’
‘No illusions,’ Allie said.
‘Any idea how you’d make something like this?’
She shrugged. ‘You work behind closed doors. Then you transport them at night, under a tarp. And you don’t have anything to do with their, ah, erection.’
When we stopped laughing, we went over to the office and worked out how to make the posts and what to charge.
‘Add twenty percent to cover embarrassment and possible prosecution,’ Allie said.
‘We may have priced ourselves out of the market here,’ I said.
‘For this kind of work,’ Allie said, ‘we are the market.’
I rang the man and gave him the quote. When I put the phone down, I said, ‘Didn’t blink. Wife wants them up in time for the Grand Final. They have a big gathering every year.’
Allie frowned.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop now.’
We went out into the rapidly chilling day to inspect the steel store.
‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ Berglin said. ‘Nothing for four years, then twice inside a month.’
I could picture the long, sardonic face, the narrow black shoes on the desk, the cigarette dangling from the jaundiced fingers.
‘Twice?’
‘Had your local jacks on the line about that special permit. Been firing the cowboy gun at the neighbours?’
‘What’d you tell them?’
‘Piss off. How’ve you been?’
‘Fair. You?’
‘So-so. Creeping age. What’s on your mind?’
‘Two things. One’s a favour.’
‘ “And every favour has its price/paid not in coin/but in flesh/slice by slice.” Know that poem?’
‘Engraved on the mind,’ I said. ‘After two hundred hearings. I need to find someone.’
‘We all do. It’s the human condition.’
‘Melanie Loreen Pavitt.’ I spelled the surname. ‘Born November 1966. Discharged from Kinross Hall November 1983. No known family. No fixed address after 1979.’
I’d gone back to the Kinross Hall print-out after talking to Dr Crewe. It said that in October 1983, in the week that Simon Walsh found the naked girl on Colson’s Road, a girl called Melanie Pavitt turned seventeen and reached the end of her two-year stay at Kinross Hall. It was a straw.
‘Thirty-two now,’ Berglin said. ‘What’s Kinross Hall?’
‘Place of safety, girls’ juvenile detention centre, whatever they call them now.’