Death by the Book - Lenny Bartulin [57]
‘I didn’t tell them.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to find out who the fuck is trying to set me up.’
‘Don’t you think the cops would be better at that?’
Jack paused. ‘I’m seeing Annabelle Kasprowicz.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Calm down or you’ll drive us off the road.’ Jack wiped at his foggy window with a sleeve, the unlit cigarette in his fingertips. ‘I want to keep seeing her.’
‘Okay, no more,’ said MacAllister, shaking his head. ‘Don’t tell me any fucking more, I don’t want to know about it.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘Yep, that’s what I say. Enough.’ MacAllister straightened up behind the wheel. ‘Soon you’ll be having a fucking menage à trois with Durst. Or maybe you already are? A big, all-in fuck festival at the Kasprowicz house!’
‘Every Saturday night.’
‘Yep, every Saturday night. I should have guessed.’
MacAllister leaned into the windscreen. Jack sank into his seat. The windows began to fog with their brooding.
They stopped to piss at a roadside truck stop, holding their breath against the stench of the chemical toilets. They drove on. Here and there a smoky mist lay through clusters of trees and hovered over low corners of the paddocks around them. Even with the drenching, the land looked brown and useless.
Half an hour later they turned off the Hume and drove through the town of Mittagong. The sky was still bloated with clouds. The place was almost empty. Jack saw a skinny woman with stringy blonde hair, smoking a cigarette under the post-office awning and ignoring the toddler crying into her leg. She looked up as they drove past. Her face was too long for so early in the day.
‘How far to Clifford’s place?’ asked Jack. He wound the window down to let a little air in.
‘Not far.’
A few kilometres later, the town of Bowral. Half-a-dozen more and they turned left onto a narrow sealed road, edged with gravel and shallow muddy gutters. Then another forty minutes with not much to see but a lot of silent land getting wet.
Eventually they drove into a stand of eucalyptus trees and tall pines and what looked like cedar, black with rain. Waist-high bushes and ferns, swaying in the wind. The car rumbled over a small timber bridge with a creek rushing underneath. They passed a gatehouse and drove under a thin metal arch with creepers twisted around it. There were letters welded there, too. They spelled Kininmonth in long curly script. Jack looked at MacAllister.
‘It means rich bastard.’
They came into the open again and followed a curved carriage driveway up a gentle rise. Gravel crunched pleasantly as they came over the low hill. Kininmonth. After the Great Wall of China, it was probably the next thing you could see from the moon.
‘Jesus,’ said Jack. ‘Monarch of the fucking Glen.’
The driveway bisected perfect lawns, rows of white and yellow rose bushes, and thick green hedges at least ten feet high. The house was grey granite, streaked with rain. Gabled roofs, crow-stepped and castellated parapets, and six chimney stacks in case it got cold during a siege. Jack could only imagine how many rooms it had. There was probably a spare ballroom somewhere to keep the dustpan and broom in.
They got out of the car. MacAllister heaved a doorknocker the size of a church bell. They waited in the vaulted alcove, looking around. After a while, the front door opened.
MacAllister smiled broadly. ‘Morning, Mr Harris.’
Clifford Harris looked fifty, with longish straw-blonde hair and not-quite-ironed-out wrinkles around his eyes. He was tall and paunchy, no chin, small grey eyes and a buttery complexion. Whatever he had that might have appealed to women was mostly in his wallet. He was wearing jeans, polished black leather boots and a tight white shirt with military style lapels. There was a silver watch on his wrist that was probably no good for his posture. He seemed annoyed.
‘Brendan. I wasn’t expecting you until the afternoon.’
MacAllister gave him a perplexed look. ‘I thought you said any time was fine?’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Clifford Harris