Quota (28 page)

‘Of course.'

Taia stood again and came around the desk to Barry, throwing an arm over his shoulders. Barry could remember once shooting a deer with his form three science teacher in the Grampians, and then having to carry the thing downhill to camp over his shoulders. He was reasonably sure the deer had been lighter than the arm he was now supporting.

At the door of the office, Taia clapped his shoulder lightly once. ‘When you get to the bottom of the stairs, they'll show you out to your ute. Don't stop on the way home, will you.'

Barry stepped onto the first tread of the stairs and looked back to respond, but Taia had already shut the door behind him. Once they'd led him out of the factory and shot the bolts in the carpark door, Barry threw the bag on the passenger seat and reversed out so fast he nearly slammed into one of the pillars supporting the first floor. As he shifted into drive he punched the locks on both doors.

Only when he'd reached the left turn to head south and begin the long journey home did he feel safe enough to unzip the bag and look inside. Taia had his ninety kilos of hash, and that might genuinely have been a career best for him. But this was most definitely more money than Barry had ever seen in one place.

BY ELEVEN O'CLOCK on the Friday night, Charlie was reclined on the couch with the TV on mute, watching footballers swarm over the livid green carpet of the MCG. His socked feet loomed giant and fluffy in the foreground as he chewed idly on the end of a pen. A handwritten draft of the Crown's legal submissions lay on his lap. By Monday afternoon, they needed to be in the judge's hands, in perfect shape.

Weir had finished the prosecution's closing address that afternoon, the fifteenth day of the trial. Throughout the long speech, he'd retained his sunny demeanour, his theatrical flourishes. Yet, as Charlie knew from their private conversations, he accepted that it was all over—the jury would never see past the Basque's evisceration of Patrick.

They agreed that there were more outcomes in prospect here than the guilty and not guilty available to the jury. That binary choice seemed a gross oversimplification of the ways this could play out. There was, it seemed certain, an unseen third way. Whatever it was, the bad guys knew it, Paddy knew it—even a couple of the witnesses seemed to be tuned in to a different frequency. For Charlie, if all of that bloody effort had been directed at getting to truth, getting down to the meaning of what happened, he was fairly sure they hadn't even come close.

For Weir, none of this apparently mattered. It was evidence of his perfect suitability for his role that he could fight so hard, work so methodically towards a result, and then accept it, good or bad, with serene indifference. He was exactly like this when the verdict went his way, too. Only through fanatical belief in the system could you devote such care to the construction of an argument but never fall for the hubris of believing it.

They'd parted ways at the lifts in the prosecutors' office. Weir was going twitching on the weekend, having recently equipped himself with a brand new copy of Simpson and Day, and a pair of Bushnell 8 x 42 waterproof binoculars. Charlie hadn't managed to show any interest. He was tired and had, for the moment, no appetite for Weir's eccentricities.

The mobile rang and he ignored it, listening for the chime of the voicemail. It never came—the phone stopped, then rang again. Annie? She hadn't rung in months. She was normally very careful about ringing people too late at night anyway. He picked up the phone and heard an unfamiliar male voice.

‘Charlie Jardim?'

‘Yes.'

‘Charlie, my name's Phil Weir. We haven't met. I…'

‘Ah, yes, Phil, Harlan's spoken about you. How's it going?'

There was a long silence on the other end of the line, faint music in the background. A long expiration of air.

‘Charlie, Dad had an, had an aneurism. At his place. He's—'

‘Oh shit. Where is he now?'

‘He passed away, Charlie. He's gone.' His voice wobbled and broke. ‘There was nothing anyone could do.'

‘What?' Charlie's mind raced. The shock had robbed him of anything sensible to say. ‘Who found him?'

‘Some, some mate of his. He had a friend coming over to take him birdwatching. I've got his card here. Alan someone. Found him in the kitchen. Called an ambulance. I didn't know who, I thought…I knew you two were close. I thought you'd need to know. With the trial and all that.'

‘Thanks, thanks,' said Charlie quietly.

The line went dead, and Charlie could see Weir's head, his wandering silver tufts of hair, the jowls that formed around his smile. The brows, so often arched in amusement, the bags under his eyes that spoke of comfort but never fatigue. That rumpled sack of a suit he wore. The tatty old robes he was always tugging at.
He couldn't be gone he couldn't be gone.

A pillar in his life had just crumbled, and he suddenly felt older.
This can't be right
, he heard himself say.
We're in the middle of a trial
. There was of course no reason why Weir's passing should fit with anyone's timetable. It was just a hole that had opened up, dark and inexplicable, threatening to swallow him.

Justice Fabian Williams allowed the defence to make their closing addresses, with Charlie seated alone at the jury's end of the bar table, and then he adjourned the court for the funeral. Nothing was said to the jury: no human event, not even death itself, could be allowed to weigh upon the objectivity of their decision-making. They were simply told they would have a day off. They had been working hard, said the judge, and they were about to enter the most important phase of their task. A day's rest would do them good. In their undisguised excitement at this news, none of them gave a thought to the empty chair.

The next morning Charlie came into chambers early, having accepted a lift to the church from an old common lawyer who'd known Weir since uni days. On his desk, he found a cardboard box with a note in an envelope taped to the top. It was from Weir's secretary. She'd been cleaning out his chambers, she wrote, and had selected a few things she thought Weir would want him to have. He lifted them out one by one; carefully wrapped in tissue, three of his glass paperweights featuring tiny, detailed birds. His notebook from the trial, filled with his long, open cursive. On the inside cover, Charlie discovered, Weir had stuck every yellow post-it note they'd exchanged in the last three weeks: messages ranging from the practical (
inadmissible hearsay—object!
) to the snide (
Ocas is moulting—check the hair on his folder
). As he always did during trials, Weir had filled the book with doodles—animals, buildings, elaborately decorated capital letters, abstract patterns. There was a crumpled head that bore a reasonable likeness to the judge; one or two others that Charlie recognised as the faces of the jurors.

Further down in the box he found the five heavy volumes of
Words and Phrases Judicially Defined,
bound in leather and embossed in gold. He'd once made the mistake of pointing out to Weir that all the information in those books wouldn't fill half a CD. He had felt like a lout the moment it was out of his mouth. Now, with the books in his hands, the comment seemed immeasurably stupid. He piled the volumes neatly on his desk.

Last of all, he lifted Weir's wig tin from the box. It would already have been ancient when Weir got it. Thirty years on, the enamelling was chipping away and rust had started to discolour the seams of the tin. Inside was his wig, shaggy bloody smelly thing. It seemed part of him, so often had Charlie been in his company in court. He ran his hand briefly around its frayed edges and replaced it gently, pressing the lid of the tin into place. The car would be waiting downstairs on the street. He locked the door and headed for the lift.

In the car, Weir's old mate had talked steadily, a look of sorrow on his face, an air of resignation that suggested more of his contemporaries were leaving him year after year. ‘I know about you,' he said. ‘Harlan worried incessantly about you.'

The church was way up Sydney Road in Coburg, a place Charlie wouldn't have gone by choice. It soared into the late winter sky, dark and intimidating. Inside, an organ droned and the air was cut with heavy incense. Weir had once called himself a deracinated papist: this was a surprising choice of venue.

He stepped into a pew, nodding at familiar faces: other prosecutors, Ocas and the judge, who'd placed themselves several rows apart to maintain a proper separation. Four rows from him, the unmistakable profile of Les Reynolds, head down and looking like a stranger in a suit.

Charlie peered between the shoulders of the congregation and saw the casket, the gleaming handles, the flowers on its lid. He felt a regret he couldn't identify.
Is all grief ultimately selfish?
He recognised these feelings from the years after Harry, not so much mourning his beloved brother as wanting something back, for himself. And now it was his friend, his confessor, his only professional ally. The man who'd pour two scotches, push one towards Charlie and take his own, gently questioning him, revealing truths by patient deconstruction. That knack of his, of clearing away the fog, getting to the answer. And now he was gone, the loss of those discussions panicked him more than the prospect of completing the trial alone.

He opened the order of service and looked at the simple black and white photo the family had selected: Weir in his fishing gear, propped up at a table in a garden somewhere, a wine bottle in front of him and a laddish grin on his face. Below the picture they'd included the Byron he was so fond of reciting, lines from
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:
I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

The people to his left leaned back to allow room for a latecomer, and Charlie looked up to see Anna, dressed for the office, radiant. Eyes followed her as she took her place beside him, giving him the tiniest smile under the sweep of her hair. Suddenly the incense was gone and she smelled the way he remembered. She slid her arm through his and found his hand, squeezing it quickly. Her jacketed sleeve pressed lightly against his arm. Then she looked straight ahead and he was left in wonderment at the randomness of such moments. His friend in the casket, and her beside him as though nothing had changed, as though they'd always be this way.

The wake was held at Weir's club, a place he had himself derided as a ridiculous late-nineteenth-century hangout for toffs and monarchists. They'd lunched there once or twice, Charlie mocking the chesterfields with their stained antimacassars, the brass buffet trolleys and portraits of syphilitic dukes. Weir had taken it all with good grace: had in fact taunted Charlie by quoting loudly from
Quadrant
over soup.

The crowd picked at chicken sandwiches, dropping fragments of shredded lettuce on the rugs as they exchanged their war stories. Charlie and Anna stood in the centre of the room, talking quietly under the ambient noise. She said she'd missed him. He told her he'd paid off the lounge suite with the first round of trial preparation fees. She'd been offered partnership at the beginning of the financial year and turned it down. She couldn't explain why. He'd memorised the scientific names for crayfish, abalone and flathead. He wasn't sure why either. He wanted her to know about the things in the cardboard box, Weir's things. She thought one of the paperweights ought to stay in his chambers, one on his bookshelf at home. She wanted one to go to her office so she could think about them both. He swiped a bottle of sparkling from a French-polished side table and poured them both a glass. She wanted to know whether there'd been a fight over the admissibility of Patrick's first statement. He explained how it had to go into evidence as a prior inconsistent statement. She said criminal lawyers were crude. He asked about the earrings she was wearing that he'd never seen before, a dart of cold fear behind the question. She told him she'd bought them for herself as a breaking-up present, out of their joint account. She punched him in the arm when he confessed he hadn't noticed the account balance had taken a hit. She admitted she'd cried when she tried them on.

MICHAEL JOHN MCVEAN watched the jurors filing back into the seats they'd left three and a half days ago. Never in the entire course of the trial had they arranged themselves in the same way twice: sometimes the suburban mother would head for the far end, sometimes the middle-aged slob with his Holden racing shirts would come in last and occupy the top left corner. But never would all twelve of them repeat their seating pattern. He took this as a sign that they hadn't formed any allegiances among themselves; that they remained twelve little islands. But he didn't know how to read that. It could've meant that each of them independently considered him as guilty as hell, and didn't need to form a knitting circle to confirm their view. It could've meant they were hopelessly divided and would never reach a verdict, guilty or not. It could've meant anything and nothing. Maybe it was just how people are.

Each juror picked their way across the vacant seats towards the last empty one, where they sat themselves down. It reminded McVean of watching people file into a cinema, careful not to bark their shins or trip over their feet as they turned their hips to accommodate the narrow gap between the rows. Only two of them looked towards the dock as they walked in: the fat bald guy with the glasses—hard to say where the hell he was looking at the best of times—and the young girl, receptionist, something like that, who paused for just a moment and fired a look of withering hatred towards him and Murchison. Although he couldn't tell if it was directed at him personally, or at Murchison or at both of them, it unsettled McVean, particularly when he realised, after she'd taken her seat, that she'd been crying.