Free Cooking the Books by Kerry Greenwood Page A

drunks’ camp down by the river is known by at least three names, some of them quite unprintable, and tracking them down is going to be difficult. Because even if they do know a Spazzo, it might not be the Spazzo I am seeking.’
    ‘And they may not want to tell you where he is, assuming they know, and assuming he hasn’t moved on.’
    ‘That too,’ he agreed gloomily. These nights among the lost, stolen and strayed were beginning to get Daniel down. There’s only so much squalor that one man can handle. Horatio sat down for a really thorough wash and I watched him.
    ‘What say I come with you?’ I asked.
    ‘You’re working, so you need your sleep,’ he replied.
    ‘Not tomorrow. Tomorrow the whole lunch is being catered by a rather famous Thai restaurant. And how that touchy collection of diners are going to cope with the chilli in Thai food is not my problem.’
    ‘I would really like some company,’ he admitted.
    ‘Good. Then let’s have a lazy afternoon. Egg and bacon pie for dinner—I made us one while I was constructing the others. Then we can go forth and find out what we can . . . er . . . find out.’
    ‘Nice,’ said Daniel, and kissed me, which is ample reward for a space of time mixing with the dispossessed. I picked at the olives in the salade Niçoise and stopped asking questions and the afternoon passed very pleasantly with me doing my own accounts and Daniel watching Babylon 5 .
    I love doing my accounts. It’s probably a character flaw.
    That fiendish north wind was still blowing when we set out, on foot, towards the river. I was sweating by the time we crossed the bridge and began to descend through the park into the underworld. The stone steps were designed for ladies in crinolines, so they are very broad and shallow (falling over in a crinoline was a deeply embarrassing experience, as I had found once during a school play). Leaves were being torn from the English trees and flung past us like dirty confetti. Even the Australian trees were bowing before the gale. Apart from anything else, it was very noisy. It was like trying to converse while a train is pulling into the station. There are many things I loathe about Melbourne, and one of them is this habit of the hot wind to just manifest itself like the Demon King in a pantomime and desiccate and destroy everything it touches. Kepler, Jon’s lover, who is Chinese, calls it ‘Dragon’s Breath’ and that is a good name. We don’t have a name for it, just ‘that bloody north wind’. Cops say that after it has been blowing for a while, tempers are frayed, nerves scraped raw, and homicides happen. It is at the height of a north wind episode that people decide that they really cannot stand their neighbour/spouse/children/drinking buddy/man who just looked at them funny and try to obliterate him/her/them with a handy axe. I can understand that. Other places call it Mistral or Khamsin. It’s unbearable, whatever you call it.
    But down under the trees the fury of the gale was foiled by the foliage and the solidity of the Victorian garden design. The old builders didn’t take any lip from Nature. If she talked back, they felled her. They built walls to conduct the respectable feet of the gentry to points of botanical interest and they labelled every tree. It must have been nice to be that sure about everything. I’m not that sure about anything.
    But under the canopy the natives were restless. We heard voices, now that it was quiet enough to hear anything. There was a party going on under the trees on the edge of the river, where the locked boathouse loomed and its security system provided light. There was a fire—even on such a night as this!—and men sat around it, toasting sausages on sticks, leaning back on stacks of boxed wine.
    ‘Someone’s come into money,’ said Daniel.
    They were ragged and pitiful, the rejects. Clothes which might originally have been good—I saw at least one handmade suit, fraying, the stitching