‘He doesn’t say.’
‘Police ever mention a note to you?’
‘No. Well, they asked me if I knew of any note Ian might have left. They didn’t know of one.’
Ian’s wristwatch. Brendan Burrows on the station platform.
Well, watch’s gone, clear mark of watch on left wrist. Probably nicked by the deros.
Could they have taken anything else?
‘It’ll probably turn up. Thanks for telling me, Irene.’
‘About Ian and pethidine…’
‘Yes.’
‘You were right. Andrew Stephens told me. I never knew. Must have been blind.’
‘Most of us are blind some of the time,’ I said. ‘Some of us most of the time. There wasn’t anything you could have done.’
‘No, well, I suppose not. Thanks, Mac.’
I went out to see Frank and Jim off. Frank said: ‘Gettin the winch tomorrow. Big bugger. More pull than a scoutmaster. I’ll come round, you can bolt it on for me, we’ll settle up.’
Frank and Jim had to wait at the entrance to the lane to let another vehicle in. A silver Holden. I stood where I was outside the smithy and Detective Sergeant Shea drove the car to within twenty-five centimetres of my kneecaps.
Detective Shea was alone, the lovable Cotter presumably engaged in bringing cheer elsewhere. He got out of the car, looked at me, looked around, not approving. ‘Bloody freezing as usual,’ he said.
‘I’m stuck here,’ I said. ‘You on the other hand are free to leave for warmer parts any time you like.’
‘Don’t take it personal,’ he said. ‘Talk inside?’
We went into the office. It wasn’t much warmer there. I sat behind the desk, Shea looked at the kitchen chair disdainfully and sat on the filing cabinet.
‘Suppose you thought we weren’t doin anything,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thought you weren’t achieving anything.’
He smiled his bleak smile. ‘Takes time,’ he said. ‘You’d know. That complaint you told me about. One Ned made. About Kinross Hall, 1985. I looked that up. Investigated and found to be without substance. No further action taken.’
‘What was the complaint?’
Shea looked awkward. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘y’know I’m not allowed to divulge this kind of stuff. Lots of complaints, they’ve got no basis in fact, cause innocent people harm if the word got around…’
‘Ned’s dead,’ I said. ‘And it’s a long time ago.’
He rubbed his jaw with a big red hand. ‘This’s off the record, I never told you this, flat denial from me.’
‘I never heard it from you.’
‘Ned said a girl at Kinross told him the director, her name’s Marcia something…’
‘Carrier.’ A sick feeling was coming over me.
‘That’s right. The girl said this Marcia got her alone and made sexual, y’know, advances to her. She didn’t want to and the woman slapped her up, blood nose, hit her on the body with somethin she said, stick, cane.’
I kept my voice neutral. ‘This was investigated?’
Shea nodded. ‘Oh yeah, two officers investigated. No substance. Girl said she’d made up the story to get some smokes from Ned. Marcia whatshername, she said the girl was always makin up stories, been to her with wild stories, fantasy artist, something like that.’
‘Fantasist.’
‘That. So end of story. Scully and the other officer said no grounds to do anythin.’
The light from the window seemed suddenly brighter. I had difficulty seeing Shea’s features. ‘Scully?’ I said.
‘Yeah. Big noise now. You’d know him. In drugs. They say he’s going to be deputy commissioner. Stationed here for three, four years in the eighties.’
‘I know him,’ I said. ‘Who’s the other officer?’
Shea got out his notebook, found the place. ‘Bloke called Hill,’ he said.
I nodded, got up. We went out into the rain. At the car, I put out my hand. We shook.
‘Not finished with Ned,’ he said. ‘There’s stuff I’m workin on. Be in touch.’
I went back to the office, sat down, stared at the desktop: Scully and Hill at Kinross Hall investigating Ned’s complaint about Marcia Carrier.
I thought about the paintings in Marcia’s office, small paintings of what looked like primitive sacrifice or torture.
The skeleton in the mine shaft. A girl. Around sixteen.
Ned’s work diary, that was where it all began. I got out the box holding everything from Ned’s desk: the newspapers, the marbles, the old wooden ruler from the grocer in Wagga, the big yellow envelope full of stuff.
I read the diary again. It was 1985 that had started me on Kinross Hall. As I went through it, I was thinking about Berglin. Berglin on making sense of scraps of information, on knowing people:
What you ask yourself is: what will this stuff I’m hearing about look like in hindsight? What kind of sense will it make then? You’ve got to think like an archaeologist, digs up this bit of something, fragment, could be bit of ancient pisspot, could be bit of the Holy Grail. The archaeologist’s got to see the whole pot in the fragment. It’s called using your imagination. They don’t pick you people for this kind of ability, so we’re working against type.
Same thing with targets. You think you know them. Seen the pictures, maybe watched them in the street, public places, read the file, know their histories. But you don’t know them until you can predict what they’ll do in given circumstances. Till then, they’re just cardboard people to you. That’s why you’ve got to listen to the tapes. Everything. Every boring word, never mind it’s about who’s picking up the kids from school or who did what at fucking golf. You don’t know a target until every grunt has meaning for you. And lots of it, it’s just grunts. People just grunt at each other. Grunts with meaning.
It came out of the page in Ned’s diary, lifted out at me, 1987: March 12. Veene house, Colson’s Road. Fix gutters, new downpipes. Six hours. $100.00. Materials $45.60. Found silver chain.
Under this entry, Ned had written: Forgot to put with invoice.
Silver chain. I remembered something about a silver chain. In the newspapers from Ned’s drawer. I got them out. Page three, a Thursday in June, a photograph of a chain with a small silver star and a broken catch. An ankle chain.