Free Black Tide by Peter Temple Page B

answer.
    A newish Saab did a smart reverse park outside the house next door and a thin middle-aged woman in denim overalls got out, pulled a briefcase after her.
    I buzzed again, longer. Waited, tried the solid wooden gate. Locked. No luck here.
    ‘No-one living there,’ the Saab woman said sternly. She was standing at the next-door gate, key in hand.
    I smiled at her. No response. Inner-city suspicion.
    ‘I’m looking for a Mr Jellicoe,’ I said. ‘He lived here until recently.’
    ‘He’s dead,’ she said. ‘Someone bashed and strangled him. Police say he must have surprised a burglar.’
    ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Dead for a VCR. When?’
    She softened a little, pulled a face. ‘Early April. Third or the fourth,’ she said. ‘We’ve been done over twice in a year. I came in and found the one. Pathetic creature, really. Hanging out for a hit. It’s totally out of hand.’
    ‘Makes you want to move to the country,’ I said. ‘Country of Lapland. I don’t even know what Mr Jellicoe did for a living.’
    ‘Something to do with travel,’ she said. ‘In the city.’
    I drove back to Fitzroy. All the way, at the lights, men in cars and utes and panel vans picked their noses, admired the findings. The greasy-grey day, in its terminal stage, had a ruddy tinge, whole western sky the colour of a feverish child’s cheek.
    Sitting in the clotted traffic provided lots of time to think about Gary. Gary and his sophisticated switched-off security system, Gary being followed by a man, Gary vanishing, the man Gary regularly met at his liquor store being murdered.
    Stuck at a light, I rang Wootton. ‘That earlier inquiry,’ I said, ‘I need more.’
    ‘On a fee-for-service basis, I presume.’
    ‘At the discount rate extended to people who have performed services far, far beyond the call of duty. Yes.’
    Wootton sniffed. ‘What exactly do you need?’
    ‘The party’s source of income.’
    Wootton laughed, a flat, false laugh. ‘That’s quite impossible, I’m afraid. Not a service on offer.’
    ‘Just a thought,’ I said. ‘Having a drink after?’
    ‘Very likely.’
    I parked at the stable and took a tram into the city, only half a dozen people on board. Going the other way, the trams were crammed with the tired and oppressed on their way home.
    I got off at the first stop in Collins Street and walked back up the slope to Spring Street. The street had its winter evening feel: light the colour of a ripe peach falling across the pavement from the windows of expensive shops, falling on hurrying people, people in dark clothes, overcoats, scarves, a dark red the colour of drying blood the colour for women’s lips this year, background noise of hooting, of clanking trams, and, in the air, the pungent, urgent smell of exhaust fumes. Near the corner, a tall woman, dark-haired, long and intelligent face, severe grey suit, bumped into me, just a touch, a meeting of bodies. But she was wearing Linda’s perfume. It overwhelmed me, caught in my nose, my throat, my heart.
    Around the corner, in Spring Street, people were disappearing from sight into the underground as if being sucked into quicksand. I looked across at the State Parliament. On the steps, a television crew with lights was filming a fair-haired woman interviewing a man in a dark suit.
    Wootton was on his window seat in the Windsor Hotel’s street bar, whisky glass on counter, newspaper in hand. At the long bar, the youngish, smartish patrons, not a pierced protuberance or a shaven head to be seen, were braying and whinnying at one another.
    I bought a beer and joined him. ‘Cheers,’ I said.
    Wootton looked up from the newspaper, took off his horn-rimmed glasses, folded them, put them behind the triangle of red handkerchief in the top pocket of his dark-grey pinstriped suit.
    ‘In the courts this afternoon,’ he said.
    ‘Sorry to hear that. Bail obviously wasn’t a problem.’
    He ignored my flippancy.
    ‘The Crown dropped all charges against