Quota (11 page)

He wanders out with the rain speckling the shoulders of his coat, then working its way under his collar. Makes his way to Russell Street, looping through video arcades, an alien in a suit. No one looks at him. None wears any sign of having passed her a foil and taken her cash. She's gone, swallowed whole by the city.

He circles back towards the court, and as he reaches the stairs he can see her sitting there. The damn bag she hauls everywhere, piled by her side. In it, the photo she presses on those who challenge her. He's seen it many times: her in the full blush of health, heavier, smiling and bathed in sun, a baby clutched to her shoulder and a stumping toddler in the foreground, reaching towards the camera. The optimism caught in that instant is unbearable: the impossibility of a child and her children.

He rushes up the first few steps and hauls her to her feet. ‘Where did you go? We were getting somewhere…' But her head is limp and heavy. The fury wells up in him and he grips her chin, yanks her face up. There are tears gathered in her eyelashes, pooled and not falling, and the eyes are not hers anymore. A sucking, choking horror consumes him and he looks down at the arm he's taken, at the crook of her elbow, where a bright spot of blood sits in the smooth white curve of her skin.

On the nights when the dream doesn't come back to him so strongly it is the only transmission he receives: just that arm, that skin, that tiny prick of blood.

The banging came distantly through his sleep. He felt it had been going on for a long time before he'd heard it. He opened one eye and looked at the clock on the bedside table. In bloody red numerals it said 3:24.

The banging was harder than polite but not quite smashing. Groups of three, evenly spaced.

‘What?' he called. The knocking stopped then resumed, this time on the glass.

It was still windy outside, and he could hear the roof creaking as gusts caught the eaves. He sighed, reached the kitchen and turned on the outside light. Next to the laundry sink he paused for a moment.

‘Who is it?'

The knocking stopped.

‘Can you just open the door?' came a female voice.

Charlie waited again, head down and listening, as the light fed back into the room through the gaps in the curtains.

He opened the door sharply and startled a girl, who was midway through the motion of hitting it again. A pretty girl, badly dyed blonde hair pulled back, her body indistinct in a heavy jumper and scarf. Teenager. She watched him for some time before she spoke.

‘You the prosecutor from Melbourne?'

Charlie rubbed his eyes wearily. He'd collapsed after half a dozen more beers, staggered back to the house in the early evening and finished up snoring in front of infomercials in the banged-up armchair. Only the incessant clattering of the wind outside had roused him enough to reach the bed.

‘Uh huh.' There was nothing but ocean and wind out there. Where had this girl come from?

‘I think I can help you with…what you're doing.'

‘What's that mean?' He stood aside in the doorway. ‘Do you want to come in?'

‘Nah. But I, um, I want to talk. To you.' She motioned slightly with a tilt of her head, and Charlie stepped onto the doormat.

‘About what?' he began. There was a sound to his right and he looked that way just long enough to see a figure running from behind the hot water tank, straight at him and the girl. He couldn't register why someone would be doing that, where this person had come from, whether it was him or the girl who was in danger. But he knew it was danger of some kind.

He was able to form that thought plainly in the instant before there was a massive bolt of pain from his ear, and he fell. He felt weight on his ribs and looked up to see a male face under a baseball cap. Young, maybe a little older than the girl, and twisted with fury. His shirt was loose and it flapped wildly as he raised a fist and punched him in the eye.

‘Fucker,' he spat, and slapped Charlie across the face. ‘You like that, arsehole?'

‘Get
off
me,' Charlie blurted. ‘What do you want?'

There was no answer, but his assailant got up and grabbed him by the front of the T-shirt, punching down hard onto an area between Charlie's cheek and his nose. As the stinging and the tears cleared, Charlie could feel blood starting to run warm down the side of his face and into his ear. He felt a kick in his ribs, then another and another.

‘Leave him,' came the girl's raised voice. Charlie could hear panic in her tone. She seemed to be hitting the person who was hitting him, because his body rocked towards Charlie's a couple of times. The male face appeared close to his, and for the first time he took a long look at it—a thin nose, high cheeks and pale eyes. He had a light, wispy stubble and a cold sore in the corner of his mouth. The mouth was open and moving but he needed time to follow the words.

‘Stay the
fuck
away from Paddy Lanegan. You listening? Leave him fucken alone.' He pointed straight between Charlie's eyes. ‘Fucken idiot.'

The man jabbed a short punch into the fibro wall behind Charlie's head, breaking through the surface with a loud clatter. Charlie could hear his light footfalls as he skipped off the timber decking and was gone, the girl with him. He lay on the doormat and coughed painfully.

So Patrick Lanegan had an ally after all. He felt a need to lie where he was, pinned under the deafening chorus of pain, his eyes turned up towards the eaves. Bugs had gathered around the globe above him, swirling round and round in endless, pointless circles.

FROM THE ROAD, the property looked like a picture of rural tranquility. Small and functional, with hedges of dark cypress on the windward side. A lush bed of green pasture fenced with barbed wire and redgum squatted directly in front of the house. Three listless-looking calves regarded Charlie's approach. The driveway was marked by a cut-open white plastic tub that served as a mailbox. A childish hand had written ‘4231' on it in thick black texta. Charlie picked his way over a cattle grid at the gate and walked towards the house.

As he got closer to the house, the disarray revealed itself. A child's bicycle lay in long grass where the gravel met the overgrowth. Sheets of corrugated green plastic had been used as shades around the front door of the house, casting a sickly green glow on the cement sheeting exterior. A rusty dark green Camira wagon was parked on the drive, the same one he'd seen parked at the footy the previous day.

Seeing no buzzer on the front door he rapped loudly on the metalwork of the flywire. He could hear children inside the house. There was a thump and the deeper growl of an adult voice, followed by the sound of nearing footsteps. The door swung open to reveal the thin features of Patrick Hughes Lanegan.

‘Jesus,' he blurted. Charlie had forgotten about his face. A boy of primary school age peered out from around Lanegan's hip. ‘What happened to his face Paddy?' he asked, staring.

‘Shut up Benny,' came the curt reply. Lanegan swung the door open and stopped it against its springs with his booted foot. He raised his chin.

‘Yeah?'

Charlie knew there was no easy way to start this conversation. ‘I'm Charlie Jardim,' he began. ‘I'm—'

‘From the footy. You think I'm stupid? You're a prosecutor.' The whole of Patrick Lanegan's lanky frame prickled with hostility.

‘What do you want?'

‘I'd like to talk to you about your brother's death.'

The boy grunted something at him as he said these words and kicked his small foot at the screen door. Lanegan aimed a backhand swipe at the side of his head. ‘Fuck off Benny. Go an find the others.' The kid aimed one last vicious look at Charlie and disappeared into the gloom.

‘I've already told the local coppers what happened. Go ask them for a copy, okay?'

‘I just need to go through it again quickly, if you don't mind,' said Charlie. He was about to lose this bloke, but his face hurt and he wasn't going to give him the pleasure of begging for an audience.

‘Then go get a copy and go through it. I'm done with the coppers. I'd prefer it if you got off my fucking property. Please.'

‘Well,' sighed Charlie. ‘I will, but I tell you what. I've driven a fucking long way to get here and smashed up my car on the way. I've tried to be polite but I've had nothing but bloody suspicion and rudeness everywhere I've gone. Leaving aside Les at the pub, this has got to be the meanest, most paranoid little shithole I've ever been sent to…'

Lanegan didn't respond, so he went on.

‘What is it with you people? It's like you're under siege for christ's sake. Some dickhead turns up on my doorstep last night and punches me in the head, apparently because I'm here to talk to you, and it's not even like I'm gonna pull you in for something—I'm here to help you out for fuck's sake. Jesus.'

He guessed from the silence inside the house that the kids in there were eavesdropping. ‘So okay, I'll leave. I'll turn around and go home, and I won't give this joint another thought. But I reckon you should do me the courtesy of at least listening to me.'

‘Yeah, yeah.'

Lanegan regarded him in an exasperated way for a long time.

‘Who gave you the floggin?' he said eventually. He rested his chin on the sleeve of the arm holding the door.

‘I don't know. Young bloke, had a girl with him.' Charlie's hand went up unconsciously to the lazy bulge of swelling over his left eye.

‘That's odd,' said Lanegan flatly. ‘Come in.'

The kitchen was crowded with food in various stages of its life: groceries not yet unpacked from plastic bags, bitten sandwiches on the benches, fruit in a bowl and strewn across a tabletop. Smeared dishes were left where they'd been attacked. The smell of old meals in the room was distantly comforting.

Charlie took a seat at a table surfaced in linoleum and edged with rusty chrome. Lanegan had put a kettle on the stove and was looking for mugs. Two boys now stood in the doorway, their curiosity beating out their shyness. They were more or less identical, even dressed the same, their straight, reddish brown hair bowl-cut over a spray of freckles. One of them held a figurine at Charlie's eye level. ‘It's a Transformer,' he said gravely. ‘It's mine.'

Patrick brought him the coffee he hadn't asked for and the boys scattered again in response to some unseen cue. Instant, pale with milk and made in a heavy, chipped mug. Charlie accepted it gratefully, though he'd intuited enough to the ways of this town to know that being given coffee was no sign of warmth. It was the proper observance of ritual and nothing more. The silence mounted.

‘So, the twins are eight, hey?'

‘Yep.'

‘And you're, what, twenty-three? That's a fair spread.'

‘Mm.' Patrick was fiddling with a plastic robot at the other end of the table, prising at a battery cover with a small screwdriver.

‘Folks must've started early, hey?' Charlie cursed himself inwardly.

Patrick's brows lowered in irritation. ‘No, not really.'

The silence descended again, broken eventually by Patrick.

‘So what's up?'

‘Well you seem to know who I am,' began Charlie. ‘I work with the Office of Public Prosecutions. I'm a barrister, a freelance lawyer if you like, but I'm doing a job with the OPP at the moment. That job is the murder trial of the two men who killed your brother.'

Patrick redoubled his focus on the robot. ‘Aha.'

‘I'm working with a senior crown prosecutor on this matter. We divide up the various things that need to be done and—as you can imagine, there's a fair bit of work to do, especially when you've got two defendants, two sets of lawyers and so on…'

‘Mm. Must be full on.' Patrick had got the screwdriver into the innards of the robot, which now cleaved open with a loud plastic
snap
.

‘We've got a lot of evidence to get through, Patrick. There's all the police work, the telephone intercepts, the searches of cars and houses, the pathology on your brother's…on your brother. There's the other forensics, like the weapon.'

‘Yep.'

‘And there's your evidence.'

Charlie's words were drowned by a loud clatter as the boy from the doorway reappeared, running through the kitchen chased by someone larger. Charlie's gaze shot from the boy to his pursuer as she came through the doorway.

Blonde hair, roughly dyed. Big, dark eyes. Prettier than he remembered, and younger; maybe fifteen. Definitely her.

She stopped abruptly in the doorway and stared at him. He could feel her gaze wandering over his face, the comically bulging eye, the graze under his chin. Then she was gone, leaving the kid to scuttle after her somewhere in the gloom at the front of the house. Charlie looked back at Patrick, immediately filled with suspicion. He was still probing at the robot.

He looked up, fixing Charlie with a very direct gaze. ‘What happened to your face anyway?'

‘I told you. Someone came over last night and gave me a flogging.' He stared back until Patrick returned his attention to the toy. Charlie could detect no sign that he had any idea of what had just happened.

‘Who was that in the doorway?'

‘That's my sister, Milly. Say hello, Milly,' he called over Charlie's shoulder towards the door. The response came from somewhere in the front half of the house. Nonchalant.

‘So,' resumed Charlie. ‘Your evidence. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but both the senior prosecutor and I, we read your statement and we think it isn't right. That is, we don't think you've told the truth.' He watched Patrick carefully as he said this.

Patrick's face didn't change. ‘What makes you think that?' he asked.

‘Look, it's not a criticism of you, okay. We see this sort of thing a fair bit. Sometimes people are protecting someone else, sometimes they're under pressure from somebody, sometimes they're trying to do what they think is right. But usually the logic in the statement just isn't there, and that's, that's what we thought when we read yours. I don't believe you would've sent your brother off into danger that night without supporting him. I don't think Murchison and McVean would've taken off in a hurry as they did, leaving the
Caravel
burning, unless they had a more pressing concern, and I think that concern was that you had got away. That's a pretty reasonable assumption isn't it?'