Shooting Star (29 page)

Alice, talking to me. How long ago that seemed.

WE FOUND a place in Eltham to have coffee, waited for it in silence at a table on the pavement, Orlovsky smoking.

‘The voices,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Remember what Alice said about the voices?’

‘I remember.’ I got out my mobile and rang inquiries, got a number.

And she still went to school every day, driven by Eric, got good marks.

‘Yes,’ said a woman in the school records office after I’d lied to her, ‘Cassandra Guinane was a pupil here. She finished in 1979.’

‘Stephanie Carson?’

Pause. ‘Carson. Yes, finished in the same year.’

‘Was that a large class?’

‘No, about twenty.’

I said thank you. The coffee arrived. Orlovsky took a sip, looked disapproving.

‘Tastes like something made from a parasitic plant that attaches itself to mangrove roots,’ he said.

I was thinking: This is the moment to ring Vella, meet him, lay it all out. The moment to stand clear, leave it alone. My watch is over.

I hadn’t killed Anne Carson. There was never a moment when I could have saved her, never a moment when anyone could have saved her. She was doomed the instant the Guinanes decided on her, decided that she would be the next sacrifice to the memory of Cassie.

But why the Carsons? Was it possible they thought Mark took Cassie from them? Mark was probably an abductor and a murderer, had probably killed Anthea Wyllie, got his sister and Jeremy Fisher to lie for him, give him an alibi. Jeremy Fisher’s career had gone like a rocket after he lied for Mark. Tom Carson had moved all the CarsonCorp business to Jeremy’s firm, Jeremy was in charge of the Carson stock exchange float, a man grown rich on the Carsons.

Did Graham Noyce know about Mark? Who knew what Noyce knew? He fixed things for the Carsons. He didn’t want me near Mark. Because of the float, he said, didn’t want any bad press about a Carson, any Carson.

And Barry Carson? Barry didn’t mind me having a look at Mark, encouraged me. Barry hated Mark, wouldn’t be in the same room with him. Perhaps Barry was less worried about a Mark Carson scandal because he didn’t mind the float prospects being hurt. Was he the person cultivating the idea that Tom was too old to lead the company into its new public incarnation? Tom thought so.

But none of that mattered. The Guinanes had killed a girl. Done things to a terrified girl and then electrocuted her, executed her.

Had they done it in the shrine to Cassie?

Why was it a Carson girl?

It didn’t matter. Time to go. Back to Afghanistan.

You planning on going back there? Have another crack at them? Bring the boys back to life?

‘I’m going back,’ I said.

Orlovsky was looking into his coffee cup. ‘I don’t feel inclined to pay for stuff like this,’ he said. ‘What?’

‘I’m going back.’

He fixed dark eyes on me, ran fingertips over his lips. ‘To what end?’

I didn’t want to answer the question. It wasn’t reasonable to want that man in the camouflage pants, those men in camouflage pants, weak chins, mocking eyes, to want those men to tell me what they’d done, to show me where they’d kept the girls, to show me where Anne’s hair got wet before they took her picture, where they’d combed it, to show me the bath they electrocuted her in, to show me where they kept her body, kept it cold.

But I wanted them to do that, the Guinanes.

I’d put my hand out to her, touched her lovely face, felt the cold.

What had David Klinger said?

…even bloody cold storage, some silent fridge thing he devised.

Orlovsky said again, ‘To what end?’

There was no reason in it. I had no explanation to offer.

Orlovsky saw that. I saw it in his eyes.

‘Take a cab home,’ I said. ‘It’s on the house.’

We sat there looking at each other.

‘Just don’t fucking smoke,’ he said. ‘No fucking smoking.’

WE DIDN’T go to the impressive front doors this time. We went around the house, going fast on the dirt, making a noise, took a hard right at the back of the sprawling building, another mudbrick building to the left, braked to a stop, came out of the car at a fairly efficient speed, not in condition for this kind of thing, crossed the space, ran over the terrace towards the back door.

Not an old door this time, an ordinary door, four panels, also saved, scrounged from some other life, tried the doorknob.

It opened.

A kitchen, huge, smelling of bacon, the scent of bacon fat, the smell of morning.

A man was sitting, leaning a little to the left, at a long table, a wooden farmhouse table, a shearers’ table, built to seat twenty people. He was in his fifties, strands of grey hair combed back over a freckled scalp, a nice face. The plate in front of him held scrambled eggs, bright yellow. Free-range eggs.

Eric, the man Lennox Guinane adopted. Eric, who could fix anything.

The hole was in his temple, just in from the ear, a small hole, not even a hole, just a dark dent.

We didn’t pause, went through a door into the wide passage, me first. The electronic humming of computers, otherwise silence.

Victor Guinane lay over his keyboard, shot from behind, upwards from the base of the skull, his brains on the wall above the monitor, still moist.

Keith Guinane was in the shrine to Cassie.

He had been on his knees in front of the table, the table that held the candle, when he pressed the muzzle of the pistol into the soft skin under his chin.

The flame in the candlestick on the lace-covered table was flickering in the last of the wax, guttering. It would die soon, no one left in this house to replace it, to keep the flame of remembrance alive.

TWO-AND-A-HALF hours’ drive from Brisbane, we parked the hire car on a green hill beyond Maleny, got out and stood in the sunlight looking over the landscape. Below us, in a paddock bordered by hoop pines, grazed a herd of Jersey cattle, stomachs full as blown-out cheeks.

‘Pretty country,’ said Orlovsky. ‘I could live out here, grow avocados.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘You’re an urban creature, an expert on coffee. Besides, they don’t need legal drug distributors around here. They grow their own. Time to go.’

The farmhouse was at the head of the valley, a handsome white timber building on stilts, verandahs on three sides, an elaborate portico. Behind it were outbuildings, all painted white, a water tank tower, not high, and a stand of trees.

We drove over a juddering cattlegrid and triggered some kind of alarm because I could see the white front door of the farmhouse go dark. Someone had opened it and was watching us come. Then the door closed, the space went white again.

The long driveway led past a pond, a big pond with an island and rushy banks and a jetty where a rowboat was tied up. Four horses, one a yearling, watched us from their post-and-rail paddock beyond the water.

As we neared the house, I could see into an outbuilding with horse tack on a rail, saddles, bridles, see a fowl run beyond that, washing on a line, a garage with three vehicles, a Mercedes, a four-wheel-drive, and a ute with a flat tray, two bales of hay on it.

‘Park at the front door,’ I said. ‘There’s someone waiting.’

We drew up on the gravel, got out.

The front door opened again and a man came out onto the verandah, a tall man in his sixties, country clothes, close-cut grey hair and a handsome face, a handsome sardonic face.

‘Frank,’ he said.

‘Nice place this,’ I said. ‘Nice country.’

A woman came through the door, also handsome, late thirties, a few strands of grey in her dark hair, dressed for riding, checked shirt, khaki breeches. She went to stand next to the man, put an arm through his, looked at us, not smiling.

No one said anything. I heard footsteps on gravel and a girl, a young woman, came around the corner of the house carrying a saddle. She was lovely, very like her mother standing on the verandah above us, but with a trace of her father in the mouth.

‘Hello,’ she said, friendly, a country person. She hadn’t noticed her parents on the verandah, saw them out of the corner of her eye, looked up in alarm.

‘What’s wrong? Dad?’

‘Nothing, Mel,’ said Tom Carson. ‘Just surprised to see our guests. Frank Calder, Michael Orlovsky, this is my daughter Melissa.

Come up, gentlemen, come inside, time for a drink.’

For a moment, I didn’t move, stood there looking at Melissa’s mother, holding Cassie Guinane’s eyes, hearing Christine Carson’s voice:

Stephanie found her father screwing her school friend in the tennis pavilion at Portsea, did you know that?

Then I said, ‘Just a quick one, we’re just passing through, a plane to catch.’

VELLA RUBBED his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his long nose.

‘You could’ve saved me a lot of pain,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of pain.’

‘I didn’t know anything. Just a collection of feelings, bad feelings. It’s easy to get bad feelings when you hang around the Carsons.’

‘Oh, you knew plenty,’ he said. ‘All you had to do was mention the fucking Guinanes, point to them, and we could’ve gone around there, just a social call, kicked the shit out of them.’

‘Is that how it’s done? On the basis of exactly nothing, get a warrant to go around and kick the shit out of people who might be totally innocent?’

‘All we needed was a warrant to look inside the computers. For a Carson abduction-murder, any fucking magistrate will give you a warrant to look inside a computer. Anybody’s computer. We’d have found the photographs.’

We were in a smart pub in South Yarra, looking out over the Botanical Gardens, watching rain falling on runners, drinking Heineken. Vella finished his, motioned for two more.

‘And that brings me to the point again,’ he said. ‘Why? Why did the mad fuckers do it?’

‘I don’t know. We didn’t get to them because of motive. We got to them because of their voice-changing machine.’

Lying, lying to a friend, a man who trusted me, put himself at risk for me.

The beers came. Vella waited, then he said, ‘These pricks in forensic are slow but they get there eventually.’

‘Get where?’

‘There’s skin under Keith Guinane’s nails, some other signs. He put up a bit of a fight till they had him in position.’

I thought about sitting in the comforting study with old Pat Carson, the drop of whisky glowing gold on his chin, the pleasure in his voice as he said:

Had a bad accident later, Mr Ashley Tolliver, Q fuckin C, two years later, a good time later. Just lost control of the car. Mercedes, mark you. Into the sea.
Down there other side of Lorne, the cliff ’s steep, go off the edge…Never walked again, they say. No respect. He had no respect.

Who had organised that? Tom and Noyce?

It would be dark soon, the park was full of shadows, the day was sliding out of reach. I thought about the guttering flame on the table in the shrine to Cassie. It would be long dead now, in a silent house.

‘Without shedding of blood is no remission,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Just something my mother used to say.’