Dead Point (23 page)

‘What was it?’

‘Porridge, scrambled eggs and a piece of steak. Sausage or two. Three, actually. Bit of bacon.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Mouldy muesli with curdling milk.’

‘Yes, I am in love,’ I said. ‘I feel you understand me.’

She gave me several bits of bacon and half a grilled Roma tomato. We were on the coffee when she said, ‘Jamie Toxteth. You were asking about him.’

It took a moment to summon up Jamie Toxteth. ‘The polo player.’

The unknown woman in the surveillance clip waiting for Robbie/Marco was in a car owned by a Jamie Toxteth company.

‘I was talking to someone in Sydney and I remembered your question.’ She drank coffee. ‘She said Susan Ayliss worked for Jamie and this Blackiston person before she became a media talent.’

Susan Ayliss had for a time been television’s favourite economics commentator, a Canberra academic who made Treasury notes sound like love letters. She had long blonde hair and a slightly pointy nose, and when she looked over her rimless glasses you wanted to be in her tutorial and you wanted to be the one who said something intelligent.

‘What became of the perfect creature?’

‘She’s an eco-consultant, she reinvented herself, did another degree. Became the squeakiest and cleanest consultant in the known universe, the flying darling of eco-consultancy. Whatever the fuck that is.’

‘Flying?’

‘She flies her own plane. Like Amelia Earwig. Sees the world from a great height. And won’t be interviewed because it could compromise her. The woman is beyond publicity. Beyond fucking belief, in fact.’

‘I forget why we’re talking about her.’

‘Before her career change, she had an affair with Jamie. More than an affair. She got divorced. Jamie left his wife, some even richer snorting-nostrilled horse-mounter no doubt. They lived together but in the end Jamie would not actually cut the painter.’

She’d lost me. I didn’t care much about the affairs of Sydney people. ‘Not since Van Gogh has a painter been properly cut,’ I said. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

Linda ignored the question, put marmalade on her last quarter of toast. ‘Apparently a poisonous breakup. Susan had become a partner in the firm, she was the one bringing in all the business, and she had to be bought out. My friend says Susie’s lawyer nailed Jamie.’

‘That’s interesting. I’m glad I know that. I’ve always felt there was something missing in my global picture.’

She smiled at me. ‘Including a new car every three years for a good while.’

She bit off a piece of toast. I watched her chewing. I’d always admired her eating. She was a very neat eater, no teeth showed, no crumb stuck or fell.

‘Susan Ayliss’s got long hair,’ I said.

‘So?’

‘The woman driving the car’s got short hair.’

‘When last did you see Ms Ayliss?’

‘Few years ago. Well, five or six, could be more. Ten.’

Linda put her head on one side and looked at me.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘It’s early.’

‘She was on the Cannon Ridge tender panel,’ said Linda. ‘I can’t remember why you were interested in the car?’

‘It appears in a video. Probably by accident. Why was she on the panel?’

‘I’m told the last Premier got prickly feelings around her.’

‘If that was the only qualification, panel meetings would have been at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.’

‘She’s also Ms Integrity.’

‘Integrity plus the pricklies, now that’s an unbeatable combo. I’ve got to go. I work in the hours of daylight.’

She leaned forward. ‘I sense,’ she said, ‘that you’re withholding. You’ll tell me if you chance upon anything of broadcast quality?’

‘With what inducement?’

Under the tablecloth, a hand was on my thigh. ‘I have inducements to offer.’

‘I’m not sure I fully grasp what you mean,’ I said.

Her hand moved upwards. The long fingers came into play. I could feel my blood rushing downhill, upper body going pale.

‘Grasp?’ she said. ‘I could fully grasp you right here.’

I looked at her. Her face was impassive, head cocked as if listening to distant sounds. She wasn’t wearing lipstick.

‘This hasn’t happened to me in public for, ah, fifteen years,’ I said.

‘Is it like Kennedy’s death?’ she said. ‘A whole generation of people know exactly where they were when they heard about it?’ She was scratching me, an unbearably erotic feeling.

‘It was in a train just outside Birmingham in England. Snow on the ground. Getting dark. I was eating a British Rail sausage roll.’

‘Who was the grasper?’

‘Let’s see now. I think it was someone I knew…’

She removed her hand. ‘That’s probably the way I’ll survive in memory. Just another hand. Oh well, off you go.’

Deep in thought, I drove to Fitzroy.

Finding a phone number for Susan Ayliss wasn’t easy. I rang Simone Bendsten. She was back in five minutes.

‘Her company’s called Ecomenical. She gave a paper at a conference in Canberra last year. Here’s the number.’

I rang it. The brisk and pleasant reception person wanted my name and my company and the nature of my business. ‘Tell Dr Ayliss my business is Robbie,’ I said. ‘I’ll spell that for you. R-O-B-B-I-E.’

I was early and had no trouble finding parking near the Albert Park Yachting & Angling Club. A cold day, the palms shaking in the wind.

She was early too. A new VW Passat, a trim and potent-looking machine in a Wehrmacht shade of grey, nosed into a space. A woman got out, dark glasses, headscarf. I watched her walk towards the pier, hands in the high pockets of her trench coat.

I sat for a while. Two hardy skateboarders came by, followed by a group of four fit-looking runners, women. I got out and went for a short walk along the esplanade, came back and went out on the pier.

She was looking my way, kept her eyes on me as I approached.

‘Mr Irish?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I’d like to ask you about Robbie.’

She made an impatient head movement, the kind of dismissive oh-fuck-off-you-idiot gesture that features in Learn Body Language For Success videos.

‘Spit it out,’ she said. ‘It’s cold here.’

‘Your choice of venue.’

‘I say again, Mr Irish, what do you want?’

‘You knew Robbie Colburne?’

‘What do you want?’

‘You know he’s dead?’

‘What do you want?’

‘You picked him up in your car one evening.’

An exasperated expulsion of air. ‘What is this? Can I ask again, for the last time, what do you want?’

‘Nothing. Robbie stole something from someone. The owner’s disappointed, saddened.’

She fiddled with the scarf, some loss of composure evident.

‘What makes you think I picked him up?’

Spots of rain on the pier, felt on my face.

‘Someone saw you. That’s not important.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m a lawyer acting for the victim.’

She sighed. ‘I feel like an absolute prick,’ she said. ‘No, let me rephrase that before the actress and the bishop are invoked.’

‘I could say that never occurred to me.’

She smiled and looked around, took off the dark glasses and the scarf. Her eyes were grey. Susan Ayliss, once the thinking person’s academic pin-up, now wore her hair short at the sides and longer on top and she had lines around her mouth and eyes but she could have stepped straight back into that role.

‘Christ, I hate scarves,’ she said. ‘I was once taken at gunpoint to a polo match, and there were all these ghastly nasal women wearing headscarves, like some cult.’

‘I blame the Queen,’ I said.

‘Damn right,’ said Susan Ayliss. ‘Well, what do you want to know?’

I couldn’t read anything in her eyes. She was here because I’d said Robbie’s name. Dead Robbie who was Marco, who was not an easy person to understand.

‘I hoped you could tell me something about Robbie.’

She turned, put her hands on the railing, no rings, clasped them. ‘I know almost nothing about him.’

I leaned on the railing, looked at the view: dishwater sea, seething. In the distance, specks of gulls floated around the Tasmania ferry at Station Pier. ‘Robbie Colburne isn’t his real name. You know that, of course.’

‘No.’ Quick.

I kept my eyes away, looked at the ribbed beach.

Two people had appeared on it, a short and a tall, walking close together, heads down like beachcombers. Not quite Gauguin country, Kerferd Road, unless you treasured used Chinese condoms and spent syringes.

‘There’s only one Robert Colburne on record, but it isn’t the dead man.’

‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘The person in question lifted the identity of Robert Colburne.’

I looked at her. She had a wary expression, as if I had more surprises in store. ‘So, who is the person?’

‘Marco Lucia is his name.’

Silence, our eyes locked. She looked away. I kept looking.

‘Ms Ayliss,’ I said, ‘Robbie was a blackmailer or he worked for blackmailers. Did you know that?’

Horn player’s lines around her mouth, an intake of air. ‘Yes.’

‘You’re right, it is cold out here. My car or yours?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m happier here.’

‘Will you tell me how you know he’s a blackmailer?’

‘I had an affair with him,’ she said. ‘No, that’s nonsense. I had sex with him. On several occasions.’

‘And?’

She moved her mouth, another sigh, deeper. ‘There was a video.’

It was getting colder, the sky changing colour like a quick-developing bruise.

‘Made with your consent?’

‘Consent? Well, I didn’t object. Not strenuously anyway. Coming after some bottles of Dom.’ Pause. ‘Are you shocked?’

I looked at her. The wind and the cold had tightened her skin, put colour in her cheeks. She looked a good ten years younger.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Shock went by some time ago. Passed in the night. So you made a video.’

She didn’t answer quickly. ‘It seemed like harmless fun at the time. Do you know that I was on the Cannon Ridge tender panel?’

‘Yes. How did you meet Robbie?’

She raised her hands, long fingers, I hadn’t noticed. ‘Don’t laugh. At the supermarket. I go to the same one almost every night. I’m always late at the office, never anything in the fridge at home. He bumped into me one night. Then I saw him again a day or two later and we said hello and he said something funny. I saw him again another night, we had a few words and he invited me for a drink.’

‘It didn’t strike you as more than coincidence?’

‘No. You go to the same place, you see the same people. And Robbie’s got…Robbie had a casual way. Quick and funny, nothing threatening about him. He was also very good looking and he didn’t seem to be aware of it.’ She looked at me, looked away. ‘And I was lonely, Mr Irish. I work all day and then I go home to nothing.’

It hadn’t occurred to me that people like Susan Ayliss also knew about loneliness.

‘Did he tell you he worked part-time at The Green Hill?’

‘Yes. He said he was trying to write a novel, took any job going.’

Silence. I watched the pair inspecting the beach. From time to time, the smaller one would stoop to look at something. Look but not touch. Sensible.

Susan Ayliss put her hands to her ears, rubbed them gently. Her nose wasn’t quite as pointy as I remembered. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we ended up at my place and had sex. I hadn’t actually had sex like that before. The men of my acquaintance had not prepared me for the experience.’

My thoughts went to Milan Filipovic. I’d asked him what kind of work Marco did.

Marco’s all cock. Work it out
.

‘How was the video made?’

She looked at me, startled. ‘By Robbie. Christ, it wasn’t a film set.’

‘On the first night?’

‘Certainly not. I was sober. The third time. He had a tiny camera, a digital thing, you could watch it on a monitor. That’s about all there was in this huge apartment. That and the bed.’

In some circumstances, people tell you more than they need to.

‘You watched it on a monitor?’

‘Yes. Are you enjoying this?’

‘And this was where?’

‘At a friend’s place.’

‘Your friend’s apartment?’

‘No, a friend of his.’

I thought about the surveillance video, the shot of Robbie going into a building.

‘Cathexis,’ I said.

She was looking away and she jerked her head at me. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention at that stage.’

‘Who’s the friend?’

‘No idea.’

‘And the blackmail came when?’

Susan tilted her head, smiled a smile with no life in it. ‘A man came to my office. He said he had a business proposition. I knew what was coming and I told him to get out. He said wait and he dialled a number on his mobile, said someone wanted to talk to me. It was Robbie. He said he was watching the video.’ She was looking down at the rail, shaking her head. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Talking about it makes me feel sick.’

‘I can understand that. What else did Robbie say?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t give him a chance. I gave the man the phone back and I said they could give the film to every television station and newspaper in the country, I did not give a damn.’

‘That was brave.’

‘Brave?’

‘You were taking a big risk.’

She shrugged. ‘They just picked the wrong person. A film of Susan Ayliss having sex? I don’t have family to worry about. All I’ve got is my professional reputation. Show it. It might improve my social life.’

She was a brave person.

‘When the man talked about a business proposition,’ I said, ‘what did you assume?’

‘The Cannon Ridge tender. I wasn’t doing anything else worth blackmailing me for.’

‘Did the man say which side sent him?’

‘No.’

‘What did you think?’

‘WRG.’

‘Why?’

‘He asked me if I’d had an offer from Anaxan.’

‘Did you tell the panel?’

‘No. I’m only stupid once. I hadn’t been blackmailed, Cannon Ridge hadn’t actually been mentioned.’

‘Splitting hairs though.’

Susan Ayliss gave me a look that said something I didn’t quite understand. ‘Mr Irish, in my life, I’ve worked very hard for everything. I grew up in foster homes. Fought off men since I was ten, put myself through university cleaning toilets. I can’t be blackmailed. But I wasn’t going to cut my own throat.’