Free An Iron Rose by Peter Temple Page B

bookshop when the phone rang. I went outside into Bourke Street. It was lunchtime, street full of smart people in black.
     
    ‘That thing we were talking about,’ Alex said.
     
    ‘Yes.’
     
    ‘Don’t have to go the next step. Where are you?’
     
    ‘Bourke Street. I’m parked in Hardware Lane.’
     
    ‘The one on the corner?’
     
    ‘Right.’
     
    ‘I’m closer than you are. See you outside the side door.’
     
    I spotted him from a long way away, across the lane, back to the car park, brown packet under his arm. When I got close enough, I saw him watching me in the shop window. I gave a spy-type wave, close to the hip. He turned and came over.
     
    ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Fucking phone book of stuff. Boy downloaded all the ’85 material in the file.’
     
    I took the packet. ‘How’d he get in?’
     
    Alex smiled his foxish smile. ‘They’ve got a link with Social Security. He reckons their data protection’s good as a knitted condom.’
     
    ‘What’s the bill?’
     
    ‘I’ll put it in the bank,’ Alex said. ‘Day will come.’
     
    We shook hands. He looked at me for a while, deciding something. ‘Look after yourself,’ he said. He walked off, hand in pockets, chin up, at ease with himself.
     

It was just before dark as I entered the home straight, the long avenue of bare poplars, the light turning steely blue-grey, the wet road shining like a blade. I was thinking about the girl in the mine shaft. Could she have been brought from far away? Whoever pushed her into the hole in the ground had to know that it was there: you wouldn’t travel a long distance with a dead body unless you had some burial spot in mind. Perhaps a local person, someone who knew the area, had murdered the girl in Melbourne. Had the police eliminated all the girls missing in Melbourne around that time? Surely not.
    But why would Ned be interested in the finding of her body? Why did he go to Kinross Hall?
     
    Allie was still working in the smithy. Face shining, she was making curtain poles, bending and twisting the red-hot iron into shepherd’s crook shapes with smooth, economic movements. I stood in the doorway watching her. She reminded me of my father at work. I was never going to be that good.
     
    ‘Looking smart,’ she said, putting the last pole in the rack. ‘Debonair, even. That’s the first time I’ve seen you wearing a tie.’
     
    ‘You only had to ask,’ I said, taking it off and putting it in a jacket pocket. Everything all right here?’
     
    ‘Booming,’ she said. ‘Woman over at Kyneton wants two sets of gates. She saw the ones you made for Alan Frith.’
     
    ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘Frith doesn’t pay for his inside a week, I’ll take them round to her.’
     
    ‘And a man called Flannery was here. He put a case of beer in the office.’
     
    ‘That’s nice too,’ I said. ‘How many did he drink?’
     
    ‘Just one.’
     
    ‘Must be Lent,’ I said. ‘You in a hurry?’
     
    She looked at me speculatively. ‘No.’
     
    ‘Mind helping me read something?’ I told her about Ned working at Kinross Hall in 1985, Mick Doolan’s story about the complaint to the police, Ned’s visit four days before his death, and my meeting with Marcia Carrier.
     
    ‘Pretty weird,’ she said. ‘What’s the reading matter?’
     
    ‘Kinross Hall records.’
     
    ‘How’d you get them?’
     
    ‘Some bloke gave them to me. I forget who.’
     
    She scratched her short hair, face impassive. ‘Maybe it was the same bloke who told you about Alan Snelling and you’ve developed a block about remembering him.’
     
    I tore the continuous print-out Alex had given me into pages while Allie showered. She came back in jeans, a grey polo-necked sweater and her half-length Drizabone, and we walked down the road. Her skew nose and wet and shiny crew cut gave her the look of a boxer. A rather sexy female boxer. She caught me looking at her.
     
    ‘What?’ she