Free Sucked In by Shane Maloney Page B

boy,’ he’d chorus.
    Low-grade monstering, it might have got a rise out of a first-year apprentice. But it was like water off Merv’s Brylcreemed comb-over to me. I wasn’t there to bat the breeze. I was there to get the national secretary’s sign-off so I could send the union newsletter to press.
    Merv would put on his thick, big-framed reading glasses and carefully study the layout boards, all the while eyeballing me as if I was trying to pull a swiftie on him. Once he’d confirmed that his photograph did indeed appear on every second page, he’d grunt grudgingly and reach for his signing pen.
    The pen was part of a brass desk-set fashioned from an expended shell casing. Merv’s desk was a repository of such items. An ashtray on bullet legs. A cartridge cigarette lighter. A letter-opener with an anti-tank round for a handle.
    At first I’d assumed Merv’s cherished collection of museumquality trenchware was a souvenir of his war service, a reminder of his front-line participation in the global conflict against fascism. But not according to Col Bishop.
    â€˜Merv never heard a shot fired in anger,’ Col once told me. ‘He was in the sanitation corps. The Royal Australian Shitshovellers. Got clapped up in Cairo then invalided home after the provos beat him to a pulp in a street brawl. But that’s not something Merv cares to advertise. He just happens to like that sort of crap. And if people want to jump to the wrong conclusion, that’s hardly Merv’s fault, is it?’
    Nor, contrary to the suggestion in his obituary, was Cutlett much of a family man. The wife might have survived him, but she was long gone. Gave him the flick some time back in the fifties, according to office rumour. The daughter—her name escaped me, perhaps I’d never known it—was sighted in his office occasionally, a listless lump of ageless frump whose resigned demeanour reinforced the assumption that old Merv was not worth breeding off.
    He was definitely a dinosaur in his general attitude to women, for all his leftist posturing. The office ‘girls’, Margot and Prue, clearly did not relish their frequent trips to the Trades Hall to fetch or deliver documents. It was not for nothing, apparently, that they called him Merv the Perv.
    I had no idea how his daughter felt about his disappearance, let alone the prospect that his remains had been resurrected from the mud at the bottom of Lake Nillahcootie. If identification of the remains involved DNA tests, she’d probably already had a visit from the police.
    I pocketed the clippings and downed the dregs of my tea. Like I’d told Inky, Merv Cutlett’s disappearance was a non-story. Even the most imaginative journalist would be hard put to suggest otherwise. If and when the ownership of the remains was confirmed, the whole business wouldn’t be worth more than a couple of paragraphs, a historical postscript.
    Vic Valentine, crime beat specialist, was probably just giving the trees a passing shake, see if anything interesting fell out. I’d be telling him not to waste his time.
    As I was standing at the register, paying for lunch, my mobile rang. It was Inky.
    â€˜Re that drink with Valentine,’ he rasped. ‘He suggested somewhere in Fitzroy, a place called the Toilers Retreat. You know it?’
    Valentine obviously had a sense of humour. The Toilers Retreat was a watering hole in Brunswick Street, a former milk bar that had been refurbished in the faux proletarian style. The name was part of the design. At least it wasn’t the Hammer and Tongs or the Rack and Pinion.
    â€˜I used to live around the corner,’ I said. ‘What time?’
    â€˜Six-thirty,’ he said. ‘If your car’s at the House, I’ll cadge a lift with you. See you at six in Strangers Corridor, okay? Oh, and by the way, the odds have shortened on the deceased being Merv. Nothing official yet but