As I finished giving the emergency operator the details, I became aware of a noise. A repetitive thunking. A low-pitched pulse, barely audible over the drum beat of the rain on the roof. Hanging up, I cocked my ears and tracked the sound. It was coming from the stereo, one of those Bang amp; Olufsen jobs like an anodised aluminium tea-tray. Aubrey must have had a thousand records, the edges of their covers squared off in perfect order in a set of custom-built timber shelves. I lifted the stylus arm onto its cradle and picked the record up by its edges. Faure’s Requiem, von Somevun conducting. A little light listening for a sticky Sunday arvo. I slipped the record into its sleeve.
In Aubrey’s wardrobe, I found a gaberdine overcoat. By the time I’d scrambled down the bank, it seemed like a pointless gesture. His clothes and hair were drenched and little rivulets of rainwater were forking and branching around his twisted limbs. The correct procedure, probably, was to leave him where he lay. Let him lie there, open-mouthed amid the puddles until appropriately qualified people arrived and did what appropriately qualified people do.
But I’d taken tea with this man, eaten one of his ginger-nut snaps. Not to have picked him up out of the dirt would have felt like a calculated act of disrespect. Of myself as much as of him. Besides which, the river was beginning to rise. Rain-pitted water was inching towards the body. The cause of his death was patently obvious, written in the clearly visible trajectory of his fall down the riverbank. I stood for a moment looking down at the second wet body I had seen in as many days. Then I draped the coat over Aubrey and carried him up to the house. I think the coat weighed more.
‘What you told me yesterday,’ I asked, as we trudged together through the smell of wet earth and the drumming of rain on leaves. ‘What was true and what was lies? And what did you talk about with Phillip Veale?’ But Giles Aubrey made no answer.
If moving the body was a problem, nobody told me. Nobody told me much at all, really. I’d only just finished laying Aubrey out on his bed when the ambulance arrived. The two-man crew ignored the rain which had eased to a steaming drizzle. I didn’t really know the man, I explained. My son had found the body.
‘These old people,’ said the driver, not unsympathetically. ‘They do insist on living alone.’
The label on a bottle of pills on the bedside table bore the name of a local doctor known to the paramedics. She was phoned and agreed to come immediately. She would, I was told, sign as to cause of death. A nearby undertaker was also called. Procedures were in motion. Red and I were superfluous. We’d walked halfway back to the Charade before I realised that they hadn’t even asked my name.
Our drive back into town was subdued. My attention was focused on Sunday drivers, poor visibility and slippery roads. ‘You handled that well,’ I told Red. ‘Not many kids your age have seen a dead body. How do you feel?’
He fiddled with the radio, unfussed, immortal. ‘Life’s a bitch,’ he said. ‘Then you die.’ The catchphrase in my mind remained unspoken. ‘Did he jump? Or was he pushed?’
We made it to the movies, after all. Not Die Hard but Moonwalker. First we ate cheap Chinese, then we sat side by side in the dark and watched Michael Jackson scratch his crotch for ninety minutes. My mind floated free, searching for a thread to cling to in the maze of possibilities, to bind the fragments of fact and conjecture together.
Marcus Taylor makes a minor scene at the Centre for Modern Art. What were his words? ‘This edifice is built on a lie.’ Six hours later, he’s dead. A note found in his pocket raves about corrupt hands on the levers of power. ‘You do not know what you are buying.’ A picture vanishes from his studio.
Salina Fleet, my lucky break turned sour. She claims to be Taylor’s lover and blames herself for his suicide. Then she plays down the relationship and accepts without surprise the proposition that his death was accidental. Volunteering the information that she was selling his ‘appropriations’ and demanding protection, she realises she’s said more than she should and clams up. Then she flees in fear. Not from me. Her bag was half-packed before I arrived. From Spider Webb.
Spider, me old mate. The hot-shot bodyguard warning me off. Off what? The sixty thousand dollar question. Or the six hundred thousand dollar question? The common link between Salina and Spider-Taylor’s vanished painting, Our Home Mark 2. And Lloyd Eastlake? Where did he come in to the picture? Or didn’t he? And Giles Aubrey, with his incredible tale of undetected fakery. Was he, literally, the fall guy?
By the time Michael Jackson transmogrified into a flying saucer and went into orbit, I knew one thing for sure. It was something I’d known before we came into the theatre. As long as Red was in town, as long as there was the slightest chance that Spider Webb’s implicit threat was real, the only business I’d be minding was my own.
Back outside on the street, the drizzle had stopped and the cloud ceiling had lifted. ‘Look,’ said Red, pointing upwards. ‘Michael Jackson.’
I looked where he was pointing, to where the moon glowed like a candle behind a paper screen. It hung low in the sky, immediately above the towering steel skeleton of the Karlcraft Centre. ‘This edifice is built on a lie,’ I heard Marcus Taylor saying.
‘Tricked ya,’ crowed Red. As we crossed the street to the car, I reached out and took his hand. He wasn’t such a big boy that he wouldn’t let me hold it.
My new desk was real wood. My new chair had adjustable lumbar support. The new morning was washed clean from the night’s rain. The outlook for Monday was a mild, blue-skyed twenty-eight degrees. My shoes were shined and just enough phone-message slips had accumulated to confirm that I was a man worth knowing.
But turning up at 8.45 a.m. on my first official day at my new job with a pair of ten-year-olds in tow was hardly the ideal way to strike fear into the hearts of the Arts Ministry pen-pushers.
Red was with me because his flight back to Sydney didn’t leave until 9.20 that evening and, for a few hours at least, our quality time had to take a back seat to my day job. Tarquin Curnow came along because of a deal I’d cut with Faye and Leo the night before.
The predicament we faced that morning was a common one for the time of year. All over town, parental noses were due back at the grindstone. But the school term had not yet resumed. For another week, mothers and fathers would be forced to improvise child-care arrangements. Fortunately, Leo was employed at the university, a place where the concept of work is still pending definition. We agreed that if he could slip away at lunchtime and mind the boys for the afternoon, I would keep them occupied for the morning. Exactly how, I wasn’t sure.
‘You two can play computer games on my Macintosh,’ said Trish, who’d already set up Checkpoint Charlie at Agnelli’s door. ‘Just keep the noise down and don’t get in my way.’ Trish was still adopting a wait-and-see attitude towards me, but she’d had a soft spot for Red ever since he was a baby.
The cool change had made it possible to sleep comfortably for the first time in a week. And I hadn’t wasted the opportunity by dreaming of Spider Webb. One of the first lessons you learn in a political party is patience, to defer to force majeure, keep your powder dry and bide your time. I’d decided to bide mine until precisely 9.30 that evening, the moment at which Red’s plane would be airborne and cruising north at an altitude of 10,000 metres and a speed of 500 knots. As of then, and not before, Spider Webb and the mystery of the missing painting would be at the top of my agenda.
In the meantime, while the boys sat in a corner of the ministerial reception area defending the galaxy from space invaders, I had a different fish to fry.
But first I had to catch it. Since my original idea of putting Angelo Agnelli and Max Karlin together and monitoring developments had proved abortive, the time had come to start asking direct questions about my boss’s move into the world of campaign finance. I went to my new desk, picked up my new telephone and rang Duncan Keogh at party headquarters. ‘Murray Whelan here, Duncan,’ I said. ‘Calling from Angelo Agnelli’s office.’