Читать книгу Flush - Jane Clifton - Страница 11

`Oh shit, yeah, I remember. He was the sort of guy you hoped that, for her sake, she stayed missing.'

PC Metcalf threw back his head and laughed then, realising his gaffe, quickly tried to make up ground.

Archie's impulse to drop in at Prahran CIB had hit the jackpot. The two constables present on January 28, when Kransky filed his Missing Person Report, were on duty.

`Stressed, he was,' Metcalf said. `Very stressed. Bloody hot night wasn't it, Ed?'

PC Ed Conrad, who could have passed as his twin brother, nodded. `Bloody hot.'

`This place was busier than a TAB on Cup Day,' Metcalf continued. `About eleven when he rocked up, wasn't it Ed?'

`Yep.'

`We were both busting for a beer.' Metcalf pointed at himself and Conrad. `We'd had a bloody gutful. Australia Day weekend coming up, give me strength! And this was only Friday night. Darren couldn't type up the paperwork fast enough.'

`You say he seemed stressed?' Archie asked.

`Angry too,' Ed said quietly.

`My word he was angry,' Metcalf concurred. He slapped the counter with the flat of his hand, for emphasis. `Mightily pissed off. Couldn't understand why we didn't just hop in our cars and go looking for the missus right that minute.'

`You made that crack about the full moon, remember?' Ed said, smiling.

Metcalf was momentarily confused. He folded his arms across his chest and cocked his head to one side.

`Oh shit, yeah,' he said slowly with fake chagrin, burying his head in his hands. `I remember. You tell `em Ed.'

`Bob here suggested that it might be something to do with the moon,' Ed said, looking at them with a daffy smile. When no response was forthcoming from either Archie or Davey he continued in a less whimsical manner. `He suggested that women did all kinds of strange things at full moon. I mean, we notice it here all the time, don't we?'

He looked at Metcalf who let him dangle.

`A lot more activity on full moons. We make a note of it on the calendar.'

There was a long silence before Archie spoke.

`So, Mr Kransky came to the station on the night of Friday, January 28 at about eleven p.m.' He was making a point of enunciating each word clearly, Davey noted. `He came to register his wife as a missing person and to seek police assistance in locating her?'

`Yes,' the two men said in unison.

`He seemed agitated to begin with, then annoyed at what he perceived to be a lack of interest.' Archie looked pointedly at Constable Metcalf who was waxing paler by the minute.

Davey, who had been taking notes, weighed in. `Did Mr Kransky mention when he had last seen his wife?'

`It's in the report.' Ed became defensive. `Saturday, January 22. When she left for work.'

The ghost of a snigger played about Metcalf's lips and they shot each other a furtive glance.

Archie raised an eyebrow. `Conrad?'

`I mean, you had to feel sorry for the bastard, I suppose,' Ed blustered.

`Who? Kransky?' said Davey. `Why?'

Metcalf took up the story.

`Ed here asks Kransky where his wife works, didn't you Ed?'

Conrad nodded.

`And?' Archie was losing his patience. Davey was waiting for the gasket to blow. These guys were skating on extremely thin ice and the hot weather wasn't helping.

`And Kransky says,' Metcalf took a breath and launched into a very bad impression of a European accent, `"She is menn-ager at Ritz Hotel in Vint-zorr".'

The two men laughed while Archie and Davey stared at them, waiting. When both men had finally regained their composure, Archie spoke. So quietly even Davey was scared.

`Was it your belief that Mr Kransky was unaware of the nature of the business conducted at the Ritz Hotel in Windsor?'

`I'd reckon,' Metcalf said with a snort. `Though it's hard to imagine anyone being that dumb.'

`And did you make it your business to enlighten Mr Kransky as to the nature of the business conducted at the Ritz Hotel?'

`No way,' Conrad said with an emphatic shake of his head. `No point in inflaming a potentially volatile domestic situation.'

`Yeah,' his partner concurred, visibly relieved by Conrad's use of correct terminology.

Archie wasn't buying it.

`Would it be fair to say that you may have, inadvertently perhaps, given Mr Kransky the impression that his notion of his wife's employment was a crock of shit?' Archie asked.

Another silence.

`It's possible,' Conrad said, looking sideways at his partner. Metcalf had obviously decided, wisely, to let his partner do all the talking. `I mean, we did laugh when he said that, didn't we Bob? And he didn't like that. He started banging the desk and yelling, you know, things like "Why you are laughing?" and "Is good job! My wife she is very good vorr-ker!" Anyway, we told him to lower his voice unless he fancied a night in the lock-up.'

`Trying to calm him down, you know?' Metcalf said.

`He was cranky,'Conrad said.

In spite of himself, Metcalf let out a loud guffaw, and slapped his thighs.

`No, mate, Kransky! His name was Kransky, not cranky.'

`He was angry,' Conrad said.

As they walked back to the car, Archie let forth a stream of expletives in which the words `clown', `comedian' and other words beginning with the same letter featured heavily.

`Let's eat,' Davey suggested when the door slammed on his partner's side of the car.

`Fancy a countery?'Archie asked.

`Not fussed,' Davey said. `Where?'

`The Ritz.'

`City swelters in summer scorcher!' Col scoffed. He turned the page of the newspaper.

This city wouldn't know its hot from its hot cross buns, he said to himself. A couple of Februarys in Kalgoorlie would teach Victorians a thing or two about `sweltering'. You didn't hear West Australians whinging about heatwaves until the mercury got above forty for at least five days in a row. Melbourne was cool by comparison. In more ways than one.

He poured another coffee from the stainless steel cafetière.

Col Jones was dog-tired and antsy. The strain of the past week was making its presence felt in every sinew of his hulking frame.

The view from his apartment on the seventeenth floor was dominated by the kindergarten colours and jungle-gym architecture of Docklands Stadium, against a mutating backdrop of the Western face of the old city. He longed to kick off his shoes and stretch out on the king-size bed, but Col was expecting an important call.

Yeah, Melbourne was cool, he repeated to himself. Cold, more like it. A city with tickets on itself. An attitude dating back to settlement and a squattocracy they had the nerve to boast about. Not in the circles Col moved in, of course, where money was the only cachet. Those other wankers could be as elitist and up themselves as they liked, with their opera and their ballet and their dreary old buildings. In Col's book, power and the buck got off at the same tram stop.

Despite all of that, though, he enjoyed his visits east. Even this one had started out well. Until the shit had hit the fan.

Every time the driver dropped him off at Waterfront City, Col congratulated himself on his happy knack of being able to see into the real estate future with a gimlet eye. His strike rate was awesome, even if he did say so himself.

Twenty-five years ago, when East Perth was still a slum, who was it that had the nous to tilt up snazzy-looking apartment blocks in streets infamous hitherto only for their vast array of knocking shops?

`No-one will want to live there!' his wife, June, had lisped in protest. `You're not squandering Daddy's money on such a silly idea!'

He could talk her round in those days. She'd do anything for a soft word and a sweet caress, and Col knew it. He only had to tell her how beautiful she was, when it was as plain as the hooked nose on her pock-marked face that, to the world at large, she was the lantern-jawed, buck-toothed opposite.

Young Colin Jones was a charmer back then, lean and mean, with a twinkle in his blue eyes that could charm the knickers off a nun. Fresh out of tech, with his engineering degree tucked under one muscly arm, Col had been an instant hit with `Daddy' from the moment he showed up at Klondike Constructions Pty Ltd. Within five short years he'd blitzed his way up the ladder to senior management. Within six, the lad from Kellerberrin was already on speaking terms with his future wife's nipples. The first to show any interest in anything below her eyebrows, Col wasted no time staking a legal claim. It was the first and only time he sensed that her old man had caught a vague whiff of rodent.

Newlywed Col was managing director when, unseasonably early, the old man kicked the bucket and June inherited the pile. Within a year, and with more cajoling than even he imagined himself capable of, his adoring wife relinquished complete control of the purse strings and left him free, at last, to dispense with lip service to the old man and activate his self-serving, rapacious, architectural vision for the city of Perth without a backward glance towards heritage or taste. He never let her down, he told himself, and he never ripped her off. On the contrary. With an almost unseemly haste he fathered four children so exquisite he sometimes wondered if they had been swapped at the hospital. And if the nappy bucket wasn't enough to keep her busy, Mr and Mrs Jones were patrons of the arts, community leaders, host and hostess of myriad, sparkling, charity causes.

By the late eighties Col Jones had pumped Klondike up to a point where its sale price was worth letting go. He moved on to bigger projects: supermarkets, shopping centres, sporting arenas — both nationally and internationally.

He was, in every sense of the word, a magnate. And a chick-magnet, to boot.

And didn't they flock and flutter? Pretty young things on the make flapped their gauzy wings against his ruddy cheeks, and still he kept up his end of the marital bargain.

He and June hadn't had sex since the America's Cup gentrified Fremantle, and hadn't shared a bedroom since Keating bounced Hawke. Later, when all the kids had grown up and flown the coop, his wife might turn around and ask "What happened? Where'd everybody go?" But not now. Not when it mattered. Not when Col had found Inga.

Inga the adorable, Inga the delicious, Inga the woman of his wildest dreams who did things for and to him he'd never even had the imagination to fantasize about. Inga's long, long legs and flawless skin. Inga's enormous, cushiony breasts. Her arse? He could write a book about the curve, the declivity between the cheeks. He pictured it arching towards him, begging for possession. Where was she now, his Inga, at nine thirty on a Saturday night? They usually dined at eight.

A billboard proclaiming `This Is The Show' had stood proudly over the doorway of the original Ritz Hotel in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda, during the sixties and seventies. The gaudy, hot-pink acronym T-I-T-S rhymed with the hotel's name and distinguished the venue from any of its distant haughty relations in London or New York.

There was no billboard above the door to the Ritz Hotel in Windsor. The old strip joint in St Kilda was as classy as the original Windsor Castle compared to this joint, thought Davey, as they parked outside the dimly lit corner pub.

Two massive Islanders bursting out of single-breasted suits, hands folded over their dicks or fiddling with their ear piece wires, studiously looked the other way when he and Archie approached. They could scent pig a mile off.

A Lynx and Air-O-Zone charged atmosphere enveloped the two policemen as they entered and squelched their way across the sticky carpet to the bar. Davey was so hungry he could have eaten the crutch out of a low-flying duck. There were bowls of complimentary beer nuts on offer, but he knew better than to touch them without the reassurance of a recent tetanus shot. They ordered two Parma and Pot specials then parked themselves in a booth at the back of the room, in order to clock the trade.

Saturday night. Rush hour. Punters came and went. Some hung around the bar, getting off on the vibe or ogling the merchandise. Others made the deal and walked out with the goods.

Warm welcomes turned to frost when Davey, on Archie's insistence, approached the bar and started flashing Inga's photo around. Like so many clams at a clambake the women wouldn't even articulate the words `nup' or `dunno'. It was as if he had just announced he had bird flu as, one by one, they recoiled from his presence.

All except one.

She looked about eighteen, Davey thought, and in need of a good meal. Her thick white hair was short and spiky with a long fringe. Heavy black eye make up, cerise lips and a tongue stud. Her black fingernails were square-cut and featured tiny white skulls. Davey noticed these last details because her hands were shaking as they held Inga's photograph.

`Her—' she began, but she was cut off by the arrival of another woman who pushed between them.

`Ga-ree!' she yelled at the barman. `Voddie!'

The woman looked down at the photo and up at Davey and asked, `You after a redhead, love? Is Pixie in tonight Ree?'

The skinny blonde dropped the photo back on the bar.

`Haven't seen her,' she said.

`The woman in the photo?' Davey asked.

`No, lover, she means Pixie,' rasped the new arrival, speaking slowly as if to a child.

`You ever seen this woman before?' Davey asked her, proffering the photo.

`Ohhh,' she replied wearily, batting heavy lashes at him, not looking at the photo. `It's like that, is it?'

She shook her head and reached for the vodka.

`What about you?' Davey slid the picture over to Gary.

The barman glanced at the photo but didn't pick it up.

`Mate, we get so many girls in here. They come and go, know what I mean? Can't remember 'em all.'

`And definitely not this one?' Davey persisted.

`Not as many redheads, I gotta admit,' he mused.

`What about this man?' Davey asked, pulling out the photo of Kransky.

The barman made a noise of protest and spread his palms in front of him.

`Mate, asking me to remember the girls' faces is hard enough, don't even start me with the blokes! Although,' a sneer spread across his lips as he indicated the photo, `we do try to keep the ugly ones out.'

He laughed and moved off to serve customers and Davey turned away.

`If Pixie shows up I'll tell her to look out for you,' drawled the dark haired woman. She muttered something under her breath and the blonde giggled.

Archie was polishing off a second pot when Davey returned to the booth.

`Any joy?'

Davey shrugged and took a swig of flat beer. `Might come back later and give the blonde another nudge.'

Archie burped loudly and clasped his left side. `Don't waste your time, son.'