I ran home, showered, dressed, and, without calling, drove up to Macedon. When I’d parked outside the garages and got out, I stood on the raked gravel for a few moments. A day in its final quarter, winter stillness. Clean, cold air, the perfume of woodsmoke and leafmould and regret.
I was on the second terrace of the stone path when the front door opened, inhabitants warned by a sensor at the gates, no doubt. A woman in jeans and a poloneck sweater. She had blondish hair to just below her ears, parted at the left. I didn’t need to be told who she was. Sophie. I could see Sir Colin Longmore in her — the chin, the forehead. But she had Sarah’s build, tall and whip-thin, the long neck.
‘Jack,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
She pointed at the forecourt. ‘My father. You’ve been on the security camera.’
We shook hands.
‘Leaving messages on your machine doesn’t work,’ she said. A direct gaze, disconcerting, no automatic smile.
‘I’ve gone off answering machines for the moment,’ I said.
‘I can understand that,’ she said. ‘Come in.’
She led me down a long, broad, unadorned passage, through a room with no clear function, into a sitting room, not large, a sisal carpet, rugs on it. Sir Colin got up from a severe wooden chair. He was in an old grey jumper and corduroys, shoeless, long blue bootsocks pulled up over his trousers. It gave him a pixie-like look.
‘Jack,’ he said, his hand out. ‘Bit thin but you’re vertical, that’s the ticket.’
‘I wanted to ask about the paying of my hospital bill and a deposit in my bank account,’ I said.
Sir Colin looked at his daughter, a sliver of a look, looked back at me.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said, his eyebrows now not on the same plane, the left higher than the right. ‘Are you demanding money?’
I turned and left the grand house, found my own way out. No one came after me. The front door closed with the sound I remembered from the second-last door at Pentridge Prison, the Stone College, in the old days, when I had a respectable job, did what I could for people who generally found themselves where they were because life hadn’t opened up before them like a flower. Early on, it hit them in the face like a big fist.
I liked those people more, a lot more.
22
‘Funny business,’ said Harry Strang. ‘Travellin well, good Lord’s givin all the other bastards the rough end. Smack. Holy boot up ya own bum.’
Beyond Camperdown in the mist, three of us in the big BMW, Harry at the wheel. I was in the back, reading the Age. Cam was doing something on his laptop.
‘Ireland,’ said Harry. ‘Never should’ve bin there. Two meetins to go, championship in my pocket. Get a call from this trainer, done me a couple of good ones when I first come out. So I go up on the Wednesday, get on this nice little grey for him.’
He took a large hand off the wheel to reach for the winegum ashtray while overtaking a milk tanker. A truck was coming at us. Its airhorn brayed. I groaned with fear. Cam looked up, went back to his screen.
We escaped annihilation by a short half-boot.
‘Panicky, your average truckie,’ said Harry. ‘No bloody judgment. Where was I? Yes, the finger. There I am, a perfect sit, we’re goin to street the cattle. Come round the bend, straighten up, the pony in front throws a shoe, I never see it, hits my bloke between the eyes, I’m airborne, crossin the rail at altitude.’
Harry looked back at me, sharp brown eyes, a look longer than I liked. He snapped fingers. ‘Broken leg,’ he said. Another snap. ‘Bloody collarbone too.’
‘Unfortunate,’ I said.
‘The championship it cost me,’ he said. ‘Plus a swag of bickies, needless to say. Didn’t need the bickies that much, would’ve liked the championship, my word.’
‘And the moral of the story?’ I said, looking at the land, dark-green, waterlogged, like Ireland with added extinct volcanoes.
‘Avoid Ireland,’ said Cam. ‘And don’t return favours.’
Harry shook his head, pained. ‘Don’t ya listen?’ he said. ‘Life, I’m talkin about life.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Cam.
‘Any life in mind?’ I said. ‘Any particular wimpy, self-pitying existence in mind?’
Harry waved his left hand in dismissal. ‘Gettin up and goin,’ he said, ‘that’s the important thing. Not so, Cam?’
‘The goin part,’ said Cam, not looking up. ‘I’m the goin expert. Left with the best of them.’
Harry sighed, sought comfort in winegums. ‘Near here. Getting close, as I remember.’
‘Over the hill and about two ks,’ said Cam. ‘There’s a shed fallin down. Just after.’
Harry looked at his watch. ‘Give her a ring. Did it quicker last time as I recall,’ he said, putting his foot down.
I breathed again when we left the main road, turned inland. We travelled through a bumpy landscape, winter creeks running, sheep in clumps and strung up slopes like woolly beads. I got out for the gate at Middle Hill, Breeding and Training, W. amp; L. Halsey. It was a good gate, well hung, over a grid too, no easy escape from Middle Hill. The mist was gone now, sky full of fast-running cloud, blue holes coming and going.
‘You only bring me for the gates,’ I said when I was back in the warmth, rubbing my hands.
Black Angus cattle on both sides ignored us as we went up the gentle rise, over the crest.
‘Nice things, cattle,’ said Cam. ‘Shame to eat them.’
At the homestead, we parked on dry gravel in front of a big steel shed. The earth beneath us had been ripped and veined with drainage pipes, there was no other way to provide such a surface.
A door in a door opened and a woman stepped out. She was wearing what had been closest to hand in the icy dawn: a jumper at the point of fibre collapse, a short Drizabone, a tracksuit bottom possibly from the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, elastic-sided Blundstones. As she came, she had a hand on the knitted headgear, the beanie.
We got out. I thought it was the sight of Cam putting on his dark-grey Italian overcoat that decided her against the beanie. She ripped it off, stuffed it in a pocket, pulled up her saggy pants.
‘Mr Strang, Cam,’ she said. ‘Freeze your bum off today. Yesterday, like Bali.’
‘Bracin,’ said Harry. ‘Don’t think you’ve met Jack. Jack Irish, Lorna Halsey. Jack’s my legal fella.’
We shook hands.
‘How’s he doin?’ said Harry.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Like a dog with Chink, never seen a horse so rapt. Can’t believe he’s supposed to be a killer. My girl’s ridin him.’
‘Chink settle him?’ said Cam. He wasn’t looking at her, gazing around like an inspector. ‘Stay over?’
‘Three days,’ she said. ‘Slept in the barn, in his swag. Couldn’t get him no further than the kitchen. Not house-trained, he reckons.’
‘Tells the truth,’ said Cam.
Lorna was looking at Cam, a look you recognised after you were eighteen.
‘This way,’ she said.
We crossed the shed towards an open door, across the concrete floor of a tidy room for farm equipment, horse tack, feed, entered a big gravelled courtyard with horse boxes on each side. Two long heads stabled next to each other looked at us. The fourth side of the yard was an open-sided shed.
Crossing the yard, Lorna said, ‘Chink’s something, makes you feel like a beginner. Got a mongrel here, supposed to be broken, won’t let anyone on him. It took about fifteen minutes, Chink’s riding him like he’s the clerk of the course’s pony.’
‘Keepin this beast outside?’ said Harry.
‘Chink’s advice. In the near paddock.’
It was even colder on the other side of the buildings, the wind up the slope bringing tears. A teenage girl in rain-gear was riding a horse in a paddock with a good surface, not too wet. She saw us. Lorna made a signal, a circle with an index finger.
The rider took the horse around on an oval course, canter, brief gallop, canter, came to us, reined in near the gate and sat patting her mount.