For breakfast, I had muesli. Ancient muesli. Recovered muesli. It tasted as I imagined food found beside a mummy in a pyramid would. Then I drove out to Des Connors’ house in Northcote. Not much traffic, rain weeping out of a sky the colour of the best man’s tie.
Des was up, saw me arrive and opened the front door before I got there. He was wearing a blue suit with wide lapels, a white shirt and a tie with red spots.
‘Come in, Jack,’ he said.
‘Not this time. Lightning visit. You’re looking pretty spruce.’
‘Havin lunch with the girls down the street. They don’t work Mondays. Vegetables only, she said. Dunno about that.’
‘Very healthy,’ I said. ‘I’ll be ringing the cops in about twenty minutes. When they come around, tell them you came to see me and we went around to Gary’s place, had a look to see if he might be away on a trip. That way they won’t get too excited if they decide to look for fingerprints and find ours.’
Des nodded. ‘Just tell em what we did.’
‘That’s right. Those keys of Gary’s. I might take them, have another look.’
He was back with them in thirty seconds.
We went out to the gate. ‘Should be a grievin parent,’ he said. ‘Can’t find it in me, Jack. All I can think is I done me dough. Goodbye house.’
I leaned over the gate, grasped his left arm. ‘Even if the dough’s done, Des, you’re staying in this house. Out feet first. In about fifty years.’
He blinked a few times. ‘Sure, now?’
‘Give you my word, good enough?’
He looked at me, some moisture in the eyes. ‘Reckon,’ he said. ‘Bill Irish’s boy.’
The things we bring upon ourselves.
I spent the day on the Purbrick library, cutting mortices. No hollow-chisel morticer in this workshop. A drill press, yes. Charlie wasn’t averse to amateurs like me getting rid of most of the waste with the drill press but he could do the whole job much faster with a chisel, a piece of steel honed to the point where it could take shavings off a fingernail.
Early on, Charlie had shown me how to use the drill press to make it easier to get rid of waste in a mortice. But you sense things. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me to use the drill press. It was just that he didn’t show any enthusiasm for it. Some machines he loved. He loved the tablesaws, loved the big industrial planer, gave it a pat like a man patting a bottom, an incorrect man patting a female rump, a lingering feel in the pat.
The message unspoken was that a person who took the occupation seriously would use a chisel to create a mortice. And when you’d felt dry, fine-grained timber succumb to the knife-edge, you agreed.
We had lunch in front of the stove. My soggy salad sandwich was from down the road. Charlie had corned beef, mustard, homemade sauerkraut, bread baked by the husband of one of his granddaughters, a stockbroker called Martin something who specialised in mining stocks. Charlie brought in half a loaf for me from time to time. It was sourdough rye, dense, intense, exactly what a rich Harvard MBA would produce in his kitchen for relaxation. On Sunday, get in touch with the earth. Monday, get back to screwing the planet.
‘Six syringes outside today,’ Charlie said. ‘Coming to what, the world? Children. Shouldn’t be smoking, they stick needles in their arms. Who’s to blame? I ask you that.’
‘The blame question,’ I said. ‘They ask that a lot on the radio. And in the papers. Very good question. It can also be a very stupid question.’
Charlie pondered this, staring at the last bite of sandwich in his huge hand. ‘Men make their own history,’ he said, ‘but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Karl Marx.’
‘Yes?’
‘So some you can blame on the past, on other people, some you can’t.’
‘I like the sound of that,’ I said, feeding my sandwich wrap to the fire. ‘How do you work out which bit you can blame on which?’
‘Think,’ Charlie said. ‘You think a lot.’
He stood up, rehearsed sending down a bowl, and went off, mind now turned to the prospect of inflicting further humiliation on the teen set at the bowls club.
It was darkening outside before I’d cut all the tenons, trial-fitted the pieces and was ready for the glue-up. Although Charlie had at least ten good reasons for not gluing-up near the end of the day, I loved to come into the workshop in the morning and take the clamps off a piece of furniture.
Glue-up tomorrow? No.
Cold hide glue for this job. You needed the slower drying time in case anything went wrong. I laid out the pieces on the low assembly table, used three brushes to apply the glue, worked at a steady pace. Then I fitted everything together, slid home the joints, applied the clamps, fifteen short and six long sash clamps, no metal touching wood. Next came fiddling with the clamp pressures, checking all corners with a square, measuring the diagonals with Charlie’s measuring stick invention to ensure squareness.
Finally, I stood back and marvelled at my confidence, my cleanliness, at the fact that complicated glue-ups that had once terrified me more than my early court appearances ever did were now everyday matters.
Weary, fingers second-skinned with glue, pleased with myself, I went home. It was raining steadily, but the discovery of Gary’s car had brightened my world. A dead Gary you didn’t have to look for. If I could find some way of securing Des in his house, the whole matter was closed. Everything. Whatever business Dean Canetti had with Gary, it was over. And whatever Black Tide was, it wasn’t any of my business.
In my domain, cleansed, restless, I toyed with the idea of ringing Lyall Cronin, handsome and world-weary photographer, suggesting a drink, perhaps a meal. Had she been mildly suggestive at the end of our encounter?
She’d been mildly pissed.
My confidence failed me. Not for the first time.
I was thinking about what to eat when the street gate buzzer sounded.
Simone Bendsten, fetching in short red weatherproof jacket, rain beaded on her hair. Behind her, a dark Honda was double-parked, engine running.
She held out an envelope. ‘This was in my letterbox, addressed to you. Mysterious. Got to run.’
I shouted my thanks after her. Outside the front door, I looked at the envelope. My name and address, care of Bendsten Research. Under that, in capitals: PLEASE DELIVER BEFORE 8 PM TODAY. PLEASE DO NOT MAKE TELEPHONE CONTACT WITH MR IRISH.
Inside, one sheet of A4 bearing a short message.