I went back to my office, made some black tea and sat in the client’s chair. Where was Ronnie Bishop now? Last seen tooling off in his Triumph, fresh from doing his civic duty in the matter of R. v. McKillop. And where was a policeman called Scullin, whose circle included the accused and the star witness?
Barry Tregear didn’t need to think about the name Scullin.
‘Martin Scullin. I know Scull,’ he said. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘No problem. He might be able to help me with something.’
‘You still farting around with that McKillop business?’
‘On and off.’
‘You’ve missed Scull today. By about six years. He took the package. Gone fishing.’
‘What about a number or an address?’
‘Big ask. I’ll have to talk to the man. What do you want to see him about?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Tell him it’s about an old dog of his, Danny McKillop.’
‘Where’d you get that?’ Tregear asked.
‘Widely known at the time.’
‘I’ll get back to you. Where are you?’
I gave him the number.
I gave the R. Bishops in the phone book a quick run-through. There were only two Ronalds and neither of them had ever lived in Morton Street. I rang an estate agent called Millie Vincent I’d had dealings with and asked her to check the Landlords’ database for Ronald Bishop. She rang back in twenty minutes.
‘They’ll drum me out of the trade for doing this,’ she said. ‘A Ronald Arthur Bishop rented a house in Prahran in 1984-85. Then a Perth agent ran a check on him for a property in Fremantle in late ’85.’
She gave me the name of the agent.
I got through to a man called Michael Brooke. He got the impression I was a fellow real estate agent and told me a Ronald Bishop had been the tenant of a house in Walpole Street, Fremantle. ‘Then he bought it at auction in, oh, ’86 or ’87. Paid a bit over the odds then but it’s turned out to be a smart buy. By the way, he calls himself Ronnie Burdett-Bishop now. Moved upmarket.’
R. A. Burdett-Bishop was in the Perth phonebook.
No-one answered at the first two attempts. The phone rang for a long time before a low-voiced male answered on the third try.
‘Could I speak to Ronnie, please,’ I said.
‘Who is that?’
‘An old acquaintance suggested I call him.’
There was a pause. ‘Ronnie’s in Melbourne.’
‘That’s where I’m calling from. Is there some way I can get in touch with him here?’
There was another pause. ‘Who did you say you were?’
‘My name’s Jack Irish,’ I said. ‘I’m a lawyer. You’ll find me in the Melbourne phone book.’ For some reason, this statement sometimes had a reassuring effect on people.
‘Well, I’d like to help you,’ the man said. ‘My name’s Charles Lee. I’m a friend of Ronnie’s. I’m keeping an eye on his house. No-one seems to know where Ronnie is at the moment…’
‘You don’t have a Melbourne address for him?’
‘Um, you could try his mother. Would you like her number?’
I wrote it down, said thanks and goodbye, then dialled it. No-one at home.
It’s nice that there’s a special occupation for the anal retentive. It’s called librarianship. The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper’s hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the assistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early ’80s I’d got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I’d been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I’d obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta’s.
Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I’d corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.
The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I’d already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne’s death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.
Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants. At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.
I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn’t sound like Ronnie Bishop.
I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I’d asked for a colonic irrigation.
‘Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?’ I said sweetly.
‘It’ll take half an hour,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anyone to do it now.’
I said I’d come back and went looking for a caffeine jolt.
I came upon the drinks machine without warning, which made it impossible to avoid my former client Gavin Legge. He looked up from stirring his styrofoam cup. The smile of a professional greeter appeared on his face.
‘Jack Irish,’ he said. He put down the cup and stuck out a small hand. ‘Great to see you. Who’s in the shit this time?’
Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking. He also dropped a lot of names. At the time I was defending him, one of his mercifully unneeded character witnesses said of him, ‘For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you’re selling into the paper.’
‘Using the library,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can help.’
‘My pleasure.’ He was eager to please. As well he might be, given that it had taken me a year to get any money out of him.
I put the coins in the machine and pressed for white coffee. I got out my notebook and found the three bylines on the Jeppeson stories. ‘These people still around? Sally Chan? Matthew Lunt?’
‘Jeez, you’re going back a bit. Chan went to Sydney about ten years ago and Lunt’s dead.’
‘Linda Hillier?’
‘Return of the starfucker. Came back to Melbourne a few months ago. She works for PRN, Pacific Rim News, it’s a financial news outfit. Just around the corner. Want to meet her?’
‘Wouldn’t mind. I saw your byline on a story about Yarra Cove.’
Legge whistled. ‘Now those boys know how to treat the media,’ he said. ‘Nothing but the French at the launch. Non-vintage but the French. Like the good old days. It’s been local pissfizz at these things for years.’
‘Only the fittest have come through,’ I said. The machine started spitting out my drink.
Legge took a sip of his coffee and pulled a face. ‘This stuff tastes like piss too. Bloody machines. Christ knows why we put up with it. Fucking useless union. Follow me.’
We left the building and walked up two blocks towards the city centre. Pacific Rim News had the fourth floor of a small office block. A security man gave us labels and we went into a huge room full of formica desks and computer terminals.
Legge said, ‘I still owe you that lunch. What about tomorrow? It’s on the paper. I’m reviewing a new restaurant. They fall over themselves.’
‘Don’t you do these things incognito?’
‘Certainly do. But I gave them an anonymous tip-off.’ He laughed, an unpleasant gurgling sound.
‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but I’m out of town tomorrow. Some other time would be nice.’
Linda Hillier was in a corner of the room where several desks seemed to have formed a huddle. She had been alerted and watched us coming, a pencil crosswise in her mouth between toothpaste-commercial teeth. When we got to her, Legge said, ‘Linda Hillier, I want you to meet Jack Irish, the lawyer who kept me out of jail for punching that food bitch.’
Linda Hillier removed the pencil from her mouth. She was in her mid-thirties, shiny brown hair, a full mouth, dark eyes and a scattering of faded freckles. She wasn’t good-looking but she was handsome.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Next time tell us what you’ll take to throw the case.’
‘Jack’s interested in something you covered when you were a young groupie,’ Legge said.
‘That far back?’ Linda said. ‘When you were still married to that nice plump girl from Accounts? The one who was sweet enough to blow all the Age copyboys at the Christmas party?’
‘Touché,’ said Legge. ‘I can’t stand around all day talking about old times. Jack, I’ll ring you about lunch.’
We watched Legge walk off. I noticed that all the men in the room were frozen into poses suggesting deep concentration while all the women seemed to be typing. Could it be that the men were transmitting thoughts to the women, who were typing them up? I suggested this to Linda Hillier. She looked at me speculatively.
‘Thoughts?’ she said. ‘Most of these guys couldn’t transmit herpes. What’s your interest in history?’
‘I’m interested in the Anne Jeppeson hit-and-run,’ I said. ‘Remember her?’
She nodded.
‘I saw your byline on some stories in her file.’
She said, ‘Is this a legal matter?’
‘No. I don’t practise much anymore.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Live off my wits,’ I said. ‘Gamble. Drink.’
She smiled, an attractive downturning. ‘Then you’ll be keeping much the same company as before. Well, what can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson?’
‘Did it cross anyone’s mind at the time that she might have been deliberately run down?’
‘By that drunk? Was he capable of forming an intention?’
‘What I mean is, did anyone think he might have been used to kill Anne Jeppeson?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suggest that.’ She paused and looked at me intently. ‘Hang on a minute. It’s just come back to me. Didn’t you appear for the driver?’
I nodded. ‘Not with any distinction. He came out of jail a few years ago. New person, good job, wife and kid. Then a cop shot him dead in Brunswick last Friday.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I read that the bloke’d done time for hit-and-run. I didn’t make the connection.’
The phone on her desk rang. She talked to someone in monosyllables for a while, then put the phone down. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m under the gun here for a while. I’ve got to file a story for Hong Kong in about eight minutes.’
I took a chance. ‘Can we talk outside hours?’
She gave me a questioning look. ‘You mean tonight?’
I hadn’t had a date in two years. ‘If you’re free,’ I said.
There was a pause. We looked at each other in a new way.
She said, ‘Ring me here at seven. We can fix something.’
It was raining outside. I didn’t mind much.