Quota (17 page)

The beer arrived and he ordered chilli beef. An old couple entered and seated themselves at one of the tables. The proprietor seemed to know them, and didn't bother to stand as they came in. Charlie returned to his thoughts while the goldfish circled. A bell rang in the servery as the Brothers Gibb faded through the closing bars of ‘More than a Woman'. The man returned with his meal and Charlie ordered a bottle of red. He could always ask for the cork.

The door opened again as he was pouring himself a glass, and a couple entered: a middle-aged man and a woman who was older, sixty-five maybe. He had a guiding hand behind the small of her back, not touching, and they stood close. Charlie couldn't tell whether they were mother and son or friends of some kind, but something about the tilt of the man's head indicated reluctance.

They scanned the room for a moment and saw him. It seemed they'd expected to find him, because they came straight over to the booth. The woman's face was lined and her smile was full of affection. She wore neat frameless glasses and had her greying hair dyed to a reddish brown and clumped up into a warm-looking tuft. Her appearance suggested she had worked hard for many years, but not without reward: rings glittered on both hands and she'd pinned her shawl with a studded silver brooch.

‘Hello young man,' she smiled, as though she'd just run into a favourite nephew. ‘Do you mind if we join you?'

The man's face had not moved: he stood behind the woman and slightly to one side, watching Charlie. Short hair; strongly built. He held himself very upright, with the beginnings of a gut pushing the front of his shirt. His gaze left Charlie just long enough to check the door and the other tables. He's not in a relationship with this woman, thought Charlie. He's a cop.

Charlie stood and offered his hand to the woman. ‘Charlie Jardim.'

‘Lovely to meet you,' said the woman, and stepped past him to sit herself down. Charlie's momentary confusion must have registered on his face, because the man stuck his hand out.

‘This is Delvene Murchison, Charlie,' he said. ‘And I'm Neil Robertson.'

Charlie took a moment to piece it together.

‘Detective Sergeant?'

‘Yep.'

Delvene Murchison was looking for the proprietor. Robertson pulled a chair from a nearby table and positioned it at the open end of the booth, tipping one shoulder sideways as the proprietor approached.

‘Ken dear, how are you,' she beamed at him.

‘Mrs Delvene.' His ballpoint was poised over the pad. ‘You are so lovely tonight. You having some entree? Main meal?'

‘Ken, I'll have some of that—what is that?—that young Mr Jarman is having, and will you get some lemon chicken please for Neil?' She swept up the menus and pushed the condiments out to the far end of the booth to make room for her elbows.

‘Now, it's Charlie isn't it. How's it all going Charlie?'

‘What do you mean?

‘Well, how are you enjoying the town?'

‘It seems fine. Quiet I guess.'

‘It is, isn't it.' She scrunched her nose a little in sympathy. ‘But there's so much
life
just under the surface. I mean, I know it can seem a bit closed to someone like you, but that's just country people. Very
conservative
you know.'

Robertson hadn't moved. Charlie tried to smile politely at Delvene Murchison, but was finding it very hard to figure her out.

‘I'd never seen the place until I married Alan,' she went on. ‘I came from inland, off a farm, and I just thought we'd never fit in. Lovely people once you get to know them, though. Some of them are come down the line from Bass Strait sealers, you know. But you have to have a bit of renewal around the place, or we'd all be inbred! Ha!' She clapped her hands together. ‘The ones that come into the town, they bring things in and that. You know, skills, money. Me and Alan worked so hard in the early days. Him fishing and me raising the kids and working in the pub. And we bought the furniture shop and then, well! We bought that pub for cash you know.'

She looked at him over her glasses.

‘Put the whole lot down without a loan. No one had seen anything like it. Place was going to the dogs up till then, but we got in there and we worked and we worked. My!' She stopped, momentarily stunned by the memory of her own effort.

‘There was one year, might've been 1980 I think, I kept on cleaning the rooms and pouring beer until I was nine months pregnant, about to pop. It was hot that year too. But the more we put in, the luckier we got. The boat was a success. The fishing here used to be very easy you know. We could hire two or three of the local kids to work the boat…our kids too, obviously, but I reckon just about every kid in the town's either had a go on the boat or behind the bar. Some of them have made something out of that, got themselves an ab licence or a cray licence or something. Few went off to university. Some of em wouldn't work if their life depended on it. Can't help em. You get to a point, you just tell em not to come back. They drift on. The ones that don't make it, they generally don't hang around—they go to the big towns, or off to Melbourne. Couple do stay—they just hit the other side of the bar.

‘But you look at that Les. I mean, now there's a diamond. Never had a bad day's work out of Les. He's trustworthy, he's got a memory like an elephant. In fact, he's got an arse like an elephant, doesn't he Robbo!'

She slapped Robertson's thigh surprisingly hard, and he jumped a little.

‘We love Les. Everyone loves Les. Have you had a chat to him?'

‘I have.'

‘There. See? Isn't he gold?'

‘He seems a good guy. So where's Mr Murchison?'

‘Alan? God,' she shot a look at Robertson, ‘have you ever heard anyone call him
mister
? He's got the gastro.' She giggled. ‘Didn't get it here, mind you. Or at the pub.' She waggled a finger at Charlie in case he'd leapt intemperately to that conclusion.

A silence fell over them. It felt awkward to Charlie, but he suspected Delvene was untroubled by it. The food arrived and she attacked it with a fork, leaving the chopsticks in their paper wrapping. The lemon chicken was placed in front of Robertson but he made no attempt to touch it. He was still staring at a point somewhere in front of Charlie, somewhere in the air between them.

‘Is there some reason you want to talk to me?' Charlie asked.

Delvene looked surprised.

‘No, not at all,' she said, as the fork hovered in front of her. ‘Just thought, you know, we needed to catch up, touch base, all that. We—you're here by yourself and us Murchisons, we specialise in hospitality of course.' The cheesy smile had returned. ‘And we've got something in common, haven't we.'

‘What's that?'

‘Well we've both got an interest in young Skip.' She returned to pushing her meal around the plate, building a forkful slowly and deliberately.

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I mean, I'm his mother. I know him and I'm worried about him. And you,' she pointed the fork at him for emphasis. ‘You need to do a job on him.'

‘I'm not sure I want to discuss him at all, Mrs Murchison.'

‘Please. Delvene. Even in this little place'—she looked around the restaurant—‘there's more to people than meets the eye. Take Ken there.' She pointed the fork again, this time at the restaurant proprietor, engrossed in his book. ‘You look at Ken and you see some Chinese guy. Ken is from Zuhai City, on the coast near Hong Kong. Fishing town, like this one. Fair bit bigger I imagine. But before he came here, he had a fishing business. Things went bad, government gave him a hard time. You see, he's a Daoist, a Shenyi Daoist. You familiar with the Daoists, Charlie?'

Charlie confessed that he wasn't. His meal had gone cold.

‘They believe, among other things, in a sea goddess. Interesting. Poor Ken got here as a reffo, got his visa and all that, but he's still waiting for family reunion. He's got a wife and a child back there. The loneliness must be unbearable. So you know, you just see a Chinese bloke who runs a restaurant, but there's a whole world behind him, whole world inside him. And in the same way, people in this town, they look at you and they just see some cunt from Melbourne'—her face did not change as she said this—‘but I'm sure there's a story to you too Mr Jarman.'

‘J– Jardim.'

‘Sorry.' Her smile was like ice. She spoke more slowly now, considering her words carefully. ‘You've probably got your reasons for being here, love. I'm sure you believe in those reasons. But Alan and me, we can't sit by while our son rots away on remand because of this…business. I want—'

‘I said I won't discuss it.'

She raised the cautionary finger again. Robertson still had not moved.

‘You don't have to say anything. You just have to listen. Skip has nothing to do with Matt Lanegan's death. Nothing. It's all a nasty little internal thing among the Lanegans and the rough crowd they mix with. Poachers, drug dealers. Unsavoury types who have a way of winding up in car boots and ditches and God knows what. My boy might be many things, young man. I know he's undisciplined and he's cost Alan and me plenty of money over the years with his idiotic schemes. But he is no killer. Frankly I don't think he has the ticker for it.'

‘It wasn't me that charged him, Mrs Murchison—'

‘
Delvene
,' she corrected him again, more forcefully.

‘My job is to prosecute the charges that were laid by police. If you've got some issue with the decision to charge your son, perhaps you should be speaking with Detective Robertson here.'

Charlie pushed his chopsticks together and scrunched the paper packaging into a hard little ball. It rolled away from his fingertips across the tablecloth. He wanted to make the detective involve himself, to break free of this woman's ruthless hold on the conversation.

‘Robbo and me have discussed it many times, believe me,' continued Delvene Murchison. ‘If it'd been left to him, I'm sure the situation would be different. But of course, it's a homicide and so the Melbourne squads have to get involved. It was all taken off him without any regard for his understanding of—' she hesitated, eyes shifting. ‘Local things. You're not the first outsider to come in here and tell us what's going on in our town.'

Charlie sighed. He hoped it sounded like weariness, but in reality he was slightly unnerved. ‘I'm sure you want something from me. I don't expect
he'
s going to ask for it. So do you want to tell me what the pitch is?'

‘Well, that's a bit abrupt. I don't know how to take that. Let's see, you're in our town, drinking at our hotel, talking to our employees and taking up their time. You're waltzing around the place like it's fine with us, and it's
not
fine with us, you understand?'

She was still smiling that smile, leaning forward now and peering over the top of the glasses, straight into his eyes. ‘I know you've spoken to that Lanegan boy, and I can't for the life of me work out why you would try to change his evidence.'

‘I'm not.'

‘Don't interrupt me.' She pointed a finger directly between his eyes, and he found himself transfixed by her fleshy pink knuckles, the gold of her rings. ‘He's given his statement, he's said what he's said, and that's the end of the matter. My boy is in enough bother without you trying to get people to say things.'

‘What I'm doing here and who I speak to is none of your business, Delvene.'

‘Well you're wrong about that, young man. It's very much my business.' She tidied the fork, the unopened chopsticks, on her plate and picked up the straps of her handbag.

‘Things are going to get quite a bit uglier for Patrick Lanegan if I see any more of this going on.'

Charlie couldn't believe what he was hearing.

‘Are you threatening me?'

‘No, I'm threatening him.'

Again, she stared back at Charlie without blinking.

‘You appear to be threatening me in front of a police officer.' Charlie gestured at Robertson, who did not react in any way. Delvene Murchison looked at the detective as though she hadn't previously noticed him.

‘He knows his place, young man. So should you. Finish up your bits and pieces and head off back to Melbourne, hm?'

Without another word, she swept up the handbag and walked off, Detective Robertson trailing in her wake.

Charlie watched them pass through the door, Robertson obsequiously holding it open as Delvene Murchison strode into the night. He called the proprietor over.

‘Ken, can I have the bill please?'

He smiled happily.

‘Oh no sir. Mrs Delvene, she fix.'

THE TRACTOR TYRES picked up the powdery white sand and spilled it as they turned. Patrick sat high on the machine, twisted around and reversing carefully towards the water. A heavy steel boat—Charlie would've called it a tinny—was hitched to the tractor.

Patrick revved the tractor and the boat slipped free in the cool shallows. A gout of black diesel smoke belched from the tractor's stack. Charlie had the bowline in his hand and it pulled taut, tugging him a couple of steps into the water before he arrested the boat's momentum. He listened to the chucking sound of the bow as it nodded up and down. Patrick drove the tractor back over the beach and up to its gravel perch under the scrub. Things were protected and delicate down here in the lee of the cliffs; the plants were finer and taller, and the undergrowth grew lush.

Tiny fish darted around Charlie's shins as Patrick sauntered back across the beach.

‘Jump in,' he said, and began pulling the stern of the boat around so the nose pointed out to sea.

Charlie hauled himself up over the edge, trailing water off his jeans as he went. He landed awkwardly on a steel seat and extracted his left foot gingerly from a tray of fishing tackle, none of which managed to hook him. Patrick waded the shallows, gave the boat a shove and climbed in. The motor started without protest, and he gently throttled it forwards. The sun was still behind the cliffs, and the water was in shadow. Looking down into it, Charlie could make out the sandy bottom, tinted emerald green. Clumps of broken-off kelp shot past on the surface as they went.