6

I PARKED the Mazda next to a four-cab monster in the nearly full car park of the Coach and Horses Hotel and locked the door.

Construction workers and tradies had been marinating in the front bar since downing tools around mid-afternoon. They’d been joined by white-collar drones at five; add in sundry semi-permanent residents, and the pub was almost at capacity. My anxiety levels were already high, and with this rowdy crowd, I had the added difficulty of picking out a man I knew only by his threatening tone of voice.

I looked out for men on their own. A chap at the quiet-ish end of the bar had a glass to his lips, but his pale eyes darted around the room. Our eyes locked, and I freaked: Brash. He had a gut that enjoyed two family-sized pizzas before dinner. Despite his bulk, he leaned back, straining the bar stool, and drained the glass. Head the colour of a scalded crustacean. White hair, a chunky gold chain at the neck, an alarming dint in his forehead, and a piece of ear missing. His neutral mannerisms gave no hint of intent. He might fillet you or help you carry the shopping. He nodded to the stool beside him.

I walked over and offered a hand, a work habit, automatic civility to commence proceedings. This amused him, as though I’d tried to shake hands with a scorpion. He raised two fat fingers, and a woman behind the bar immediately tilted a clean glass under the tap.

‘You don’t seem the type,’ he said, without looking at me.

I swallowed, trying to draw moisture into my mouth. ‘What type?’

‘“What type,” she says.’ He shook his head. ‘That act might work with your average ignoramus, but not me. I know what you are.’

I almost laughed. I wished I knew what I was. ‘How can you possibly know —’

‘We’ve got mutual friends.’

‘I doubt it.’

His face stretched into a smirk. ‘Clacker ring a bell?’

‘No. No bells.’

He showed his bottom teeth, and his growing irritation. ‘Clacker AKA Darren. Think carefully before you answer.’

My stupid brain couldn’t cope with the stress. Neurones misfired, thoughts bounced about ineffectually like a game of pong. For the life of me, I could not dredge up a ‘Clacker’. My glance shifted to the door.

‘Focus, Stella. Remember: I know where you live, where you work. I know your car.’

‘But I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, horrified at how scared I sounded.

Two beers arrived on the bar. Percy passed one to me. I picked it up and drank some froth. He took a seasoned drinker’s guzzle of his. When he set it down, I detected a hint of impatience. ‘Darren Clyde Pickering. Died in a suspicious house fire while on bail.’

‘Oh, that Clacker.’ A lowlife murderer I’d known. He’d killed a teenager on the orders of Gaetano Cesarelli to cover his other crimes: kidnapping, torture, murder, conspiracy. ‘We weren’t friends. I hated Clacker.’

A grin. ‘Good girl.’ He scratched the spikes of white stubble on his chin. ‘That’s where the Venn circles overlap.’

Venn? Was he a gangster, too? Wait a fucking minute. ‘You worked for Cesarelli?’

He closed his eyes. ‘Good times, I must say. Still, does no good to dwell on the past. Joe and me were the last ones standing. And now it’s just me.’ He sniffed.

‘My condolences about Joe,’ I said, and I meant it. Losing a friend hurts like hell.

‘Thank you.’ He seemed genuinely touched.

I drank some beer, relishing the bitterness.

He sat more upright, a back-to-business signal. ‘Mrs Phelan needs your help.’

‘I know. And I said I’d help her.’

‘We need to know exactly what happened.’

‘You’re not listening. I said I’d help, and I will. I’ve already made some enquiries.’ A pathetic, but necessary lie. ‘I don’t see why you need to —’

‘No, you’re not listening.’

I looked down the bar. The staff were pulling beers, tapping credit cards, mixing cocktails. ‘I need the bathroom.’ I rose.

‘Sit down.’

‘You can’t order me around,’ I said, sitting.

He leaned towards me. ‘I know. About. The money.’

I gulped in vain like a landed guppy. Air, where did all the fucking air go?

‘What money?’ I wheezed. I wasn’t being disingenuous. Though perhaps a better question was ‘Which money?’ It was fair to say the financial side of my life was complicated.

‘Ten years ago now. A couple of dealers OD’d in their commission flat before handing over the earnings. Cesarelli assumed the cops pocketed it. But I went down there and had a sniff around. My contact said you were seen entering their flat before the cops arrived.’

Brash let that sink in.

So, I’d finally been sprung. I drank some beer, remembering how I’d lived in fear and guilt, worrying I’d been seen, that one day someone would accuse me. But time passed, and nothing had happened. Then Cesarelli was murdered, and, like a fool, I’d begun to relax.

He finished his beer and tapped a coin on the bar. The woman came over. ‘Perce?’

‘Another. And one for me slow mate here.’ He slapped my back. ‘Drink up, Stella.’

The woman left.

‘Either you’re extremely stupid or you’ve got more balls than most cunts,’ he said.

Extremely stupid was the correct answer, but I couldn’t speak.

‘Relax, will you? I never told Cesarelli, and he’s long past caring.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘To be honest, I didn’t believe it. A social worker wouldn’t do something so fucking reckless. But the truth is, that little stash was nothing. I mean, sure, gangsters don’t like getting ripped off, and Cesarelli seethed for a while. But the ice market was crazy. Very fucking busy. Fucking shit-ton of money coming in. So I filed it,’ he pointed to his bulbous beetroot head, ‘here.’

I nodded. This was easily the creepiest conversation I’d ever had. One of them. Top ten.

‘Then Joe gets popped in jail. I bring Mrs Phelan flowers. She goes, there’s a Stella Hardy I need you to talk to. Her brother was in the Arsehole Bogwater with Joe. She’s got access and she’s got form. An A-grade sticky beak she is, gets to the bottom of things. I go, rightio, I can persuade. Then it hit me. Stella-fucking-Hardy. The light-fingered do-gooder.’

Lucky for me, the fund was sitting in a storage unit, cash at the ready for just these sorts of emergencies. ‘When do you want the money?’

‘Wrong. I’m not interested in that pissing little pile.’ He announced this with a sly, knowing smile, and then sipped his beer. ‘Some things are worth more than money, Hardy.’

‘Such as?’

He raised his eyebrows, as though I’d amazed him. ‘Your life, dummy.’

I released an involuntary high-pitched titter. Why did I always laugh when I was frightened?

‘You think that’s funny?’

‘Oh God, no. It’s just. I don’t know … the banality of it. A gangland hit.’

Brash shook his head. ‘Nah. Too clichéd. I’ve been reading about the Mexican cartels. Now those blokes know how to get rid of someone. I’m thinking lye, I’m thinking caustic solutions, I’m thinking you reduced to mush and bone fragments.’

‘Okay. No need to get crazy. You want me to look into the prison thing? Ask around? I can do that.’

‘No. I want the name of Joe’s murderer.’ He lowered his voice. ‘So I know who to kill.’

That celebratory dancing going on inside me was my survival instinct. How easy is that? Give him a name and you get to keep living. I found myself nodding.

‘Whom to kill,’ I said, grinning.

His head cracked in half, and he roared like a machine gun. ‘We have ourselves a deal.’ His over-sized paw came at me, palm at a harmless angle.

I grabbed a part of it and moved it up and down. ‘Yes, we do.’

‘Give us your number.’

I wrote it down.

‘Should take you …’ he thought for a moment. ‘I reckon a week. Two at the most.’

‘What? Are you kidding? I need more time than that.’

‘Saturday week, Hardy,’ he said. He cracked a horrible grin. ‘Tick. Tock. Tick-tock.’ He patted me on the head in time with the words. I was mortified. ‘Whom,’ he said, and started laughing again. Then he sauntered out of the pub, still roaring with laughter.

I have no memory of leaving the Coach and Horses, or how I drove back to Ascot Vale. In a daze, I entered my local bottle shop. The shopkeeper was happy to see me.

‘Mate, how’s things?’

Beery gas escaped me. ‘Nothing, I mean, who? Certainly, um, good.’

‘Got a great special on wine casks this week.’

‘You know me too well.’

He laughed.

‘I mean it. You are way too familiar with my habits.’

He laughed all the more, but I was serious. I’d have to start buying my wine casks elsewhere. Sure, I was capable of blowing fifty bucks on a fancy French champagne for dinner with Brophy, but my standard partiality was a bag of plonk in a handy cardboard box. And now this busybody was judging me. Rankled, I made a show of pretending to know the finer points of viticulture. ‘I’m looking for a varietal of the California region. Have any?’

He laughed again. ‘Try that aisle, the reds.’

I caught his eye-roll as I turned away. The bottles seemed to be arranged without any thought as to their type, quality, or value for money. I crouched to study the label on a dusty bottle on the bottom shelf. Who was I kidding?

I dumped my usual cask on the counter. He was serving another customer, who was something of an oddity in this urban setting — a farmer gone to seed. Late sixties, poor attempt at a shave, dusty jeans, flannelette shirt. A circle in his thinning hair where the hat always sat. A knobbly hand took the change, and he limped out of the shop.

‘Salt of the earth,’ the bottle-shop man said, with an admiring nod at the door.

‘Anachronism,’ I countered.

‘Real Australia,’ he retorted.

‘Dinosaur redneck.’

‘Tough, hard-working, primary producer.’

‘Socially regressive, subsidised, National Party voter.’

‘Enjoy your cask.’

‘Thank you, I will.’

That went well. Now for the supermarket.

The doors parted with a whisper, and I wrestled a trolley away from its pack. Shielded from my fellow citizens by a dark cloud of fuck-off vapour, I ploughed the aisles, pulling random items down — no thought, no plan. Fabric softener. Oh boy, was I ever in trouble. Jar of pickles. Nah, just give Percy Brash a name. Dental floss. Any name, like, some enemy of mine. Dozen eggs. No, bad Stella. Frozen cheesecake. My epitaph, my memoir: Made a mess of things, lol soz. One hundred Earl Grey tea bags. Come on, concentrate, what did I actually need? A proper dog lead and a frozen pizza. I eschewed the available self-serve check-out and waited for an age in line for a live human to scan and bag the stuff and rote-wish me a nice day.

It was a clear evening when I drove up Roxburgh Street, one of those bottlers, straight out of a postcard. If you want a postcard from Ascot Vale. And who wouldn’t? Home to million-dollar semi-detached dwellings, with the occasional gangland hit in broad daylight on the main drag, just to get the blood moving. The orange sky turned to pink before my eyes. Cask, pizza, heavenly sunset — everything was going to be okay.

I thought of the imminent baby. A blend of Ben and Loretta, poor thing. I wondered what kind of child Brophy and I might produce. A sensitive artist, like her father? Or a crook with a chip on her shoulder, like me?

On the street, Nigel was pulling Loretta along by her scarf. I wound the window down as far as it would go and yelled through the crack. ‘I’ve got dinner and some food for Nigel.’

‘Great. See you later.’

Later? What was she doing? I drove into the garage and glanced back. She’d crossed the street and was talking to someone … It was the hayseed from the bottle shop. The man held up a hand, and the dog immediately plonked his arse down. I watched in increasing amazement as they stood back in the shadows and began passing a whiskey bottle back and forth, deep in furtive discussion.

I ran up to my flat, two steps at a time, whacked on the oven, and ripped the plastic from a pizza. Dinner sorted, I ran into my bedroom for a quick rummage through Loretta’s stuff before she returned. I found my clothes strewn all over the floor, drawers open, and items spilling out over the sides and across the bed like a scene from The Exorcist. So, it all looked pretty normal.

Except … wait, did I leave Kylie’s legal papers on the floor in my room? I tried to remember. Why would I? I had no interest in it. But I was sure I’d left them in a stack on the kitchen table. And now the stack had moved to the floor of my bedroom, in a disorderly jumble. I gathered them up, knocked them into order, and put the stack in a folder in the kitchen.

Boy, did Loretta have a lot of questions to answer. And since she still had not returned, I took the opportunity to return to my original plan of rifling through her belongings.

The first suitcase held a few of those loose-knit jumpers, a pair of jeans, socks and a pair of worn-down runners. The other case contained some t-shirts, a battered book on pregnancy, and a plastic A4 document case with ‘EBV — Angus in the Wimmera’ written on a stick-on label on the front.

In farmer lingo, ‘EBV’ stood for ‘Estimated Breeding Value’, a method of calculating possible cattle-breeding outcomes. I opened the case and sifted through the papers. Documents about production traits in language I had not heard since childhood. There was stuff about fertility, calving ease, milking ability. Other documents were on selection decisions for better performance. I closed the clips and put the case back. The shopping bags held toiletries and a wallet with a driver’s licence. Her name really was Loretta. Knock me down with a brick. Loretta Swindon was twenty. Ben was mid-forties. A man who had been in and out of prison most of his adult life. Some of Loretta’s life choices were terrible.

Mine, on the other hand, were top-shelf. Notwithstanding the thieving and the gangsters and the deal to find the identity of a prisoner’s killer.

The strong urge to flee flared in me again. How much would I get for my flat?, I wondered. And what might that buy me in, say, Wellington. Or Tierra del Fuego. Or Nairobi. I was shaken from my reverie at eight, when Brophy hit my buzzer.

I held the door open. ‘Jesus, look at you. Skin and bone. Given up eating for Lent?’

‘Still fighting off the virus.’ He wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘Can’t shake it.’

Time stopped for a lingering smooch, no stupid virus would keep us apart. The smell of burning pizza, however, did.

It was black on the edges, but still edible. Loretta hadn’t come back with Nigel. We ate half the pizza and put some aside for her. I rang the number, and it went straight to voicemail.

‘She’s on the phone. She must be alright.’

Brophy ran a hand under my t-shirt.

Later, I fired up my laptop, and we settled in on the sofa for a binge of Midnight Sun, a cop show set in northern Sweden.

‘Midsomer with snow,’ Brophy pronounced two episodes in. ‘Half the town will die before they solve this one.’

Every time the streaming faltered, I topped up our glasses. After three episodes, and many glasses of wine, Loretta still had not returned. When some poor Swede got fed to a pack of wolves, I started to worry about her.

It was nearly midnight, and Brophy had to leave for work. He’d started a new job at the fruit and vegetable wholesale market. The crazy hours suited his lifestyle. At five in the morning, he’d go home and paint for hours. He picked up his keys, and, at last, the door unlocked. Nigel came bounding in, followed by Loretta. She seemed wired, and her beady eyes sized up Brophy suspiciously.

‘Brophy, this is Loretta, and Nigel the wolfhound.’

‘Alaskan Malamute,’ she said and went into my bedroom and shut the door.

Brophy gave me a sympathetic look and left for the market.

I went into my room and flicked the light. ‘Listen. I don’t know what your game is —’

She was spread out on the bed, weeping like a child.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Just hormones,’ she said, sobbing. ‘Don’t worry.’

I paused, weighing up whether or not to sit down and hold her hand. My feelings towards that unhappy creature were as mixed as a good martini. She was clearly dodgy, but then, so was I. She was tough and clever and independent. Ben was unworthy of her.

I turned off the light and shut the door. Nigel stood in the middle of the lounge room, hesitant, waiting for instructions. When I slumped onto the couch he wagged his tail uncertainly, panting, watching me. I got up, found a blanket and made a bed for him in the corner of the sitting room. The dog circled the bed a few times and flopped down exhausted.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

He closed his eyes.