Free Bad Debts by Peter Temple Page B

fix something.’
    It was raining outside. I didn’t mind much.

10
    Linda Hillier said she’d be finished by eight. We agreed to meet at Donelli’s in Smith Street, Collingwood. It was owned by Patrick Donelly, an Irishman who wanted to be an Italian and who owed me money.
    Linda was wearing a tailored navy jacket. I watched her hanging up her raincoat. She was taller than I remembered. Then I remembered I’d never seen her standing up. She felt my eyes on her and turned her head to look straight at me across the crowded room. For some reason, I felt embarrassed, as if I’d been caught looking down her dress. She came across and I stood up and pulled out a chair.
    ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘This is a nice way to end a real pain of a day.’
    I poured her some of the house white, the menus came and we inspected them for a while. When we’d ordered the same things, she said, ‘Gavin Legge rang up and told me about your wife. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    ‘Well,’ she said, ‘what else can I tell you about Anne Jeppeson? I’ve been thinking about her since you left. I talked to her the morning before she was killed. She was like a happy attack dog. “I’m going to get the bastards,” she kept saying.’
    ‘You weren’t one of her admirers?’
    She thought for a moment. ‘There were things about her I admired. But, no, I wasn’t one of her admirers. She had this deep contempt for the media and this equally deep need to be the subject of its attention.’
    ‘You had dealings with her before the Hoagland business?’
    ‘Long before. She cultivated me when she was trying to market herself as a barefoot paralegal in Footscray. It wasn’t enough for justice to be done. Anne Jeppeson had to be seen to be doing it.’ Linda drank half her glass. ‘Hoagland was her chance for real fame.’
    I said, ‘My memory’s pretty vague about that period. I read the clippings today. It’s not clear how she got into the limelight.’
    ‘She was a natural for the part from the moment it leaked out that the government was going to knock down the Hoagland Housing Commission flats. Do you know Yarrabank?’
    ‘Vaguely. I had a client from there once. Stabbed someone in a park. His best friend, I think it was.’
    ‘That’s what Yarrabank friends are for,’ said Linda. ‘It’s shitsville. Maybe it’s going to be Venice when the Premier’s mates are finished with it, but it was darkest shitsville then.’
    I suddenly connected. Yarra Cove—the new development I’d seen the sly-faced Planning Minister, Lance Pitman, and the spotty ABC reporter going on about on TV—was on the site of the old Hoagland housing estate. There was a freeway on one side and once there’d been collapsing warehouses on the riverbank, filthy docks all around. There was a munitions factory there in the forties, a battery factory burnt down there in the early sixties. Christ knows what the soil pollution level was.
    ‘How did a Housing Commission block ever get there?’ I asked.
    ‘One of the great mysteries of our time. They’ve shredded the files and composted the bits. People say the land was bought from a mate of the then Housing Minister for about ten times its value and the buildings were put up by another mate for about five times the going rate. The story goes the three of them bought half of Merimbula with the proceeds.’
    ‘How did they get anybody to live there?’
    ‘No choice for some people,’ she said. ‘That or under a bridge. And the Commission shunted in their problem cases from all over. Move to Hoagland and we’ll forget about the three years’ rent owing and the fire and the explosion and the missing hot water system. That sort of thing. It was a hellhole. The cops called it the Leper Colony, LC for short.’
    ‘Small, though?’
    ‘Couple of hundred inmates. Small by Housing Commission standards, fifty flats, three three-storey walk-ups. When it leaked out that the government planned to close it,