The Law Department at Melbourne University looks the way universities should. It has courtyards and cloisters and ivy.
I loitered downstairs, near where a girl had set fire to herself during the Vietnam War. Nobody paid any attention to me. The whole campus was full of people in ex-army overcoats wearing beanies. I was just older than most of them. By about thirty years.
My man came out ahead of his students, striding briskly, looking the way lecturers usually look after a lecture: happy and smug. His name was Barry Chilvers and he taught constitutional law. He was also a civil liberties activist and knew more about the Special Branch than most people.
‘Barry,’ I said when he was level with me.
He jerked his head up at me, eyes startled behind the big glasses.
I took the beanie off.
‘Jesus Christ, Jack,’ he said, exasperated, ‘where’d you get that coat? And the beanie, for Christ sakes. It’s a Collingwood beanie. How can you wear a Collingwood beanie?’
‘Ensures that I’m not recognised,’ I said. ‘Got a moment?’
We went upstairs to his office. It was the same mess I remembered: books, papers, journals, student essays, styrofoam cups, newspapers, bits of clothing everywhere. Two computers had been added to the chaos.
I cleared away a briefcase and a pile of files from a chair and sat down. ‘You were looking very pleased with yourself,’ I said.
He scratched his woolly grey head. ‘One of the better days at the pearl-swine interface,’ he said. ‘Some days I come back and headbutt the door. To what do I owe this visit?’
‘Do you remember Anne Jeppeson?’
‘Sure. Got run down. She was a spunk. Politically loony but a spunk.’
‘Would the Special Branch have watched her?’
He put a thumb behind his top teeth, took it out. ‘It’s hard to say. Who says so?’
‘She said something to her mother.’
‘There was a lot of paranoia about the Branch. If you believed all the people who said the Branch was watching them, it wouldn’t have been a branch, it would have been the whole bloody tree.’
‘But it’s possible?’
He shrugged. ‘More than most, I suppose. She was into a whole lot of stuff the Branch would have had an interest in-Roxby Downs, Aboriginal rights in Tasmania, East Timor. You name it.’
‘East Timor? The Special Branch? I thought it was only interested in local stuff?’
Barry shrugged again. ‘The Branch, ASIO, ASIS, you can’t separate them. They scratched each other’s backs. So it’s possible, yes.’
I told him what else I needed to know.
He groaned. ‘Where some Branch goon was at a certain time in 1984? Jesus H. Christ, Jack, you don’t have modest requests, do you? When in ’84?’
I told him.
‘Not long before Harker got the boot and the new government closed the Branch down.’
‘That’s right. There’d be records somewhere, wouldn’t there?’
Barry shook his head. ‘Shredded. On orders from the highest authority. All records to be destroyed.’
‘So there’s no record of what they were up to?’
He clapped his hands. ‘Shredded,’ he said. ‘But not before being copied.’
‘Shredded? And copied?’
‘What do you expect?’ said Barry. ‘I think it was something the cops and the new Opposition found themselves in agreement on. Think about it. The files represent about five billion hours of coppers standing around in the rain dying to have a piss. You shred them and a couple of years later another government gets elected and wants you to start all over again, spying on the same bunch of harmless sods. They say they went through three copiers. Twenty-four hours a day for days.’
‘Who’s got the copy?’
‘What copy? No-one’s ever admitted the files were copied.’
I said, ‘Barry, I’m talking life and death.’
He did another big head scratch, rolled his chair back till it hit a pile of books. The pile toppled, slithered to become a ziggurat.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise you anything, though. I’ll ask a man who might be able to ask another man, who might know someone.’
I stood up. ‘I need to know today. It’s that bad.’
Barry stood up. His eyes were level with my middle greatcoat button. He looked up at me. ‘You serious?’
I nodded.
He nodded back, sadly. ‘I’ll go after my tutorial. You can’t phone him, this bloke. Paranoid. Give me the date and the name, anything that’ll help.’
‘God loves you, Barry,’ I said.
‘There is no God and you know it. Ring me at home after five. But I can’t promise anything. I don’t know if they copied this kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘I’m only doing this because of your old man’s record for Fitzroy, you know. I wouldn’t do it for you.’
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Go Roys, make a noise.’