Free Bad Debts by Peter Temple

It’s called librarianship.
    The thin man with the silly little cornsilk moustache gave me a smile of pure dislike and went away. I was sitting at a table in the Age library on the fourth floor of the paper’s 48

    hideous building on Spencer Street. A message from Steve Phillips, the assistant editor, had preceded me but that had only made me more unwelcome. I went back some distance with Phillips. In the early ’80s I’d got his teenage son off a drugs charge. I’d been recommended by a reporter called Gavin Legge for whom I’d obtained extremely lucky verdicts on a bunch of charges arising from his birthday party at a fashionable restaurant called Melitta’s.
    Mr Silly Moustache took all of ten minutes to produce the file. I slid the fiche onto the platen, switched on and, as always, found that it was upside down. When I’d corrected this, I zoomed across to the end and worked backwards.
    The last clipping was a short item from 1986 about the setting up by her parents of the Anne Jeppeson Memorial Scholarship at Monash University. It was to go to a student studying politics. Before that came the court reports I’d already seen in my file on Danny, then the report on Anne’s death. It was a page three story, with a picture of the scene and an inset photograph of her. She had short hair and a snub nose and she looked smart and formidable. A quick look at the headlines on the rest of the clippings suggested that this was the case. I wrote down the bylines on those stories that had them.
    Anne Jeppeson had been a campaigner for public housing and public housing tenants.
    At the time she was killed she was involved in trying to prevent the closing down of a public housing estate called Hoagland in Yarrabank.
    I leaned back in the upright chair and closed my eyes. Ronnie Bishop had helped send to jail the man accused of killing a woman campaigning against the closing of a public housing estate. Why would he lie to do that? Public-spiritedness? It didn’t sound like Ronnie Bishop.
    I asked SM whether I could get the Jeppeson file photocopied. He looked at me as if I’d asked for a colonic irrigation.
    ‘Would it help if I went through Steve Phillips?’ I said sweetly.
    ‘It’ll take half an hour,’ he said. ‘There isn’t anyone to do it now.’
    I said I’d come back and went looking for a caffeine jolt.
    I came upon the drinks machine without warning, which made it impossible to avoid my former client Gavin Legge. He looked up from stirring his styrofoam cup. The smile of a professional greeter appeared on his face.
    ‘Jack Irish,’ he said. He put down the cup and stuck out a small hand. ‘Great to see you.
    Who’s in the shit this time?’
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    Legge was in his early forties, with greying curly hair and small features being overwhelmed by pudge. Behind thick-lensed designer glasses his eyes were slitty. All his stories in the paper seemed to involve free travel and free eating and drinking. He also dropped a lot of names. At the time I was defending him, one of his mercifully unneeded character witnesses said of him, ‘For a free sausage roll and a couple of glasses of plonk, Gavin Legge will get six mentions of anything you’re selling into the paper.’
    ‘Using the library,’ I said. ‘Maybe you can help.’
    ‘My pleasure.’ He was eager to please. As well he might be, given that it had taken me a year to get any money out of him.
    I put the coins in the machine and pressed for white coffee. I got out my notebook and found the three bylines on the Jeppeson stories. ‘These people still around? Sally Chan?
    Matthew Lunt?’
    ‘Jeez, you’re going back a bit. Chan went to Sydney about ten years ago and Lunt’s dead.’
    ‘Linda Hillier?’
    ‘Return of the starfucker. Came back to Melbourne a few months ago. She works for PRN, Pacific Rim News, it’s a financial news outfit. Just around the corner. Want to meet her?’
    ‘Wouldn’t mind. I saw your byline on a story about Yarra