The search took nearly two hours: house, smithy, all the outbuildings. When they’d finished, the five of them had a conference outside. Shea came into the office and said, no expression, ‘Firearm on the premises.’
I nodded.
‘.38 Colt Python.’
I nodded again.
‘Licence?’
‘No.’
‘Unlicensed firearm?’
I savoured the moment. ‘Special permit.’
‘Special permit. That’s for what reason?’
I said, ‘See if they’ll tell you, Detective Sergeant.’
He didn’t like this. ‘I will. I will.’
When they’d bagged the gun we set off for town, Shea and Cotter in front with Lewis, then me in the Land Rover, then the other car. It began to rain as we crested the last hump of the Great Dividing Range, all sixty metres of it.
I parked behind Shea and Cotter in front of the police station, an old two-storey redbrick building with an ugly new annexe. The other cops drove through an entrance marked of f icial par king onl y.
As I got out, the door of a BMW on the other side of the narrow street opened and a tall woman with dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail got out. She took a leather briefcase out of the back seat and came over.
‘Mr Faraday?’ she said. ‘Laura Randall.’ Her breath was steam in the cold afternoon. She was in her thirties, thin, plain, pale skin, faintly amused twist to her mouth. The clothes were expensive: brown leather bomber jacket, dark tartan trousers over gleaming boots.
We shook hands. Shea, Cotter and Lew were out of the car, standing on the pavement. Cotter had his hands in his pockets and a cigarette in his mouth. He looked like a bouncer on his break.
I moved around so that I had my back to them. ‘That’s your client,’ I said. ‘The young fella. He told them the story this morning. He doesn’t know anything. The fat one over there, Shea, he’s hinting he thinks the kid and I might be in it, killed Ned for the inheritance. Maybe more than just friends, too.’
She looked me hard in the eyes. ‘Sexually involved?’ she said. ‘Are you?’
‘Only with the opposite sex,’ I said. ‘And that infrequently.’ She didn’t smile.
I said, ‘There’s nothing like that. Lew’s a good kid, been messed around by his mother. His grandfather was my father’s best friend.’ I paused. ‘He was my best friend too.’
Laura Randall said, ‘You need to understand, if he makes an admission in this interview, they’ll call me as a witness. I won’t be able to represent him.’
I shook my head. ‘Can’t happen. Nothing to admit. I just want someone with him, make him feel he’s not alone with these blokes.’
‘You’ll need someone with you too,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not with this lot. I’ve been on fishing trips with pros.’
She gave me an interested look. ‘Talk to you later,’ she said. ‘Mr Faraday.’
‘Ms Randall.’ To the dog, I said, ‘Stay.’
It was dark before we got home and we were both staring-eyed with fatigue. After I switched off the engine, we sat in silence for a while. Finally, I shook myself into action. ‘Okay. Lew, that’s over. There’s two big pies in the top rack of the freezer. Bang them in the microwave, twenty minutes on defrost. I’ll get the fire going.’
We ate lamb pies, made for me by the lady down the road, in front of the fire, watching football in Perth on television. Lew drank half a glass of beer. I drank half a bottle of red. He had barely stopped chewing when his head fell onto his shoulder. I made the bed in the spare room, put a pair of pyjamas on the pillow, woke him and pushed him off to bed. Then I started work on the second half of the bottle.
In the night, far from dawn, I sat up, fully awake, swept the blankets from my legs. Deep in sleep, some noise had alarmed me. Not the wind nagging at the guttering and the loose tiles, shaking the windows, making the trees groan like old men being massaged. Not the occasional slash of rain hitting the panes like pebbles. Not the house timbers creaking and ticking and uttering tiny screeches, not the plumbing gargling and knocking, not the creatures moving in the roof.
Something else.
When I’d first come from Melbourne, to my father’s house at the crossroads, the old life’s burden of fear and vigilance heavy on my back, I’d sat in the dark in every room in turn, eyes closed, listening, pigeonholing sounds. And I had slept fitfully for weeks until I knew every night noise of the place. Only then was I sure that I would hear the sounds that I was always listening for: a vehicle stopping on the road or in the lane, a squeak of the new gravel I’d put around the house, the thin complaint of a window being forced.
Now I heard the sound again: the flat, hard smack of a door slamming.
It was the smithy door. Once or twice a year I’d forget to slide the bolt. The wind would gradually prise the door open, then slam it triumphantly and start prising again.
I got up and went into the black, wet night. The dog came from nowhere to join me, silently.
Francis Keany was waiting for us in front of the dilapidated mansion called Harkness Park, sitting in his warm Discovery, smoking a panatella and listening to La Traviata on eight speakers. When the window slid down, the warmth and the aromatic Cuban smoke and the music floated out to us where we stood in the cold and the rain and the mud.
‘Boys,’ he said. ‘You know I don’t like to wait around when you’re on my time.’
Stan Harrop cleared his nose and spat, a sound like a blow dart being fired. The missile hit the right front hubcap. ‘We’re not on your fucking time, Frankie,’ he said. ‘We’re here to look at a job. Don’t like it, off we fuck.’
Francis’s eyes narrowed. Then self-interest clicked in and he cocked his head and smiled, the smile that had won many a society matron’s heart. And the rest, so the word went. ‘You’re absolutely right, Stan,’ he said. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me show you the magnitude of the task.’
He got out of the vehicle, put a Barbour hat on his sleek head to complete his Barbour outfit, and led us down the driveway and into the wilderness. We couldn’t get far: this was a garden gone feral. Francis started down what was once a path and was now a dripping tunnel that narrowed rapidly. He wrestled with branches for a few metres, gradually losing confidence. Finally, faced with an impassable thicket, he gave up. We reversed out, Lew in front, then me, then Flannery, then Stan, then Francis.
Francis pushed his way past us and tried another matted and sodden avenue. A few metres in, he missed an overgrown step, fell forward and disappeared into a dank mass of vegetation. His shriek hung in the cold air, wild enough to send hundreds of birds thrumming skywards.
We all stopped. Stan began to roll a cigarette one-handed as we waited for Francis to emerge. ‘Hurt yourself?’ he said, no trace of sympathy in his voice, as the wet figure struggled upright, cursing.
‘Course I fucking hurt myself,’ Francis said, each word a small, distinct explosion. ‘Look at this shit on my trousers.’
‘On?’ Stan said. ‘We know there’s a shit in your trousers. What are we looking for here, Frankie? Don’t have to hack my way with a bloody machete to see it’s a jungle.’
Francis was examining the slime on his palms, mouth pursed in disgust. ‘My clients want it restored,’ he said. ‘I was trying to show you the enormity of the task.’
‘Enormity? That’s not the word you want, Frankie,’ Stan said. He was a pedant about language. ‘Try enormousness. And if they want it bloody restored, what do they want it bloody restored to?’
‘I don’t know,’ Francis snarled. ‘Don’t fucking care. Its former fucking glory. That’s your department.’
‘Francis Keany doesn’t know and doesn’t fucking care. You should put that on your business cards.’
Stan took pleasure in giving Francis this kind of needle. The only reason Francis tolerated it was because without Stan he wouldn’t be able to take on jobs like this. Francis had started out as a florist and conned his way into the garden design trade. He apparently wasn’t too bad at doing little squares of box with lollipops in the middle and iceberg roses lashed to dark-green trellis. But then one of his satisfied society matrons commissioned him to do a four-acre garden from scratch near Mount Macedon. Francis panicked: you couldn’t fill four acres with little squares of Buxus sempervirens. You couldn’t copy another big garden. People would notice. And then, somehow, he heard about Stan Harrop.
Stan had started work at twelve as a garden boy at Sefton Hall in the south of England. Four years later, he lied about his age and went off to war. When he came back, five years on, he was all of twenty-one, sergeant’s stripes on his arm, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest, and a long bayonet scar on his right forearm. It was twenty years before he left Sefton Hall again, this time to catch the P amp;O liner to Sydney to be head gardener on an estate outside Mittagong. Over the next twenty years, he ran four other big gardens. Then he bought fifty acres with a round hill on it down the road from Ned Lowey and started a nursery. That was where Francis Keany found him. It was the luckiest day of Francis’s life. And for Ned and Flannery, and later for me, it meant fairly regular work at a decent rate of pay.