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  PRAISE FOR SHANE MALONEY

  AND MURRAY WHELAN

  ‘Where has Murray Whelan been all my life?’

  West Australian

  ‘One of our best and most consistently original crime

  writers. Highly recommended.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Maloney’s ironically faceted style is elided, almost laconically; the extraneous is struck out, leaving cinematic vividness in his choice of the most significant detail, and a sense of motion and change. He also does the colloquial better than anyone in local crime fiction.’ Graeme Blundell, Weekend Australian

  ‘Maloney, the great exponent of the Australian crime genre, has done it again. The Big Ask is full of laugh-out-loud humour as well as jaw-dropping accuracy in describing Australian political life.’ marie claire

  ‘The great joy of Maloney is that he seems effortlessly to marry tightly constructed crime stories to great satirical vision…there’s no doubting the brilliance of the writing.’ Ian Rankin, Age

  ‘There is only one Australian crime writer on my list this year—Shane Maloney. His satires on Australian political life are always hilarious.’ Examiner

  ‘Maloney is top shelf.’ Australian

  ‘Whelan’s wry social commentaries, ironic observations and many failed attempts at getting the girl make him one of Australian crime fiction’s most attractive characters, and Maloney one of the genre’s most gifted writers.’ Who Weekly

  ‘I look forward to the next Murray Whelan book with the same anticipation of pleasure that I feel for the new Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Maloney is a literary writer who…takes characters that are stereotypes (the public servant, the minister, the arty type) and depicts them with subtlety and originality and compassionate humour. He also writes a ripping yarn.’

  Eureka Street

  ‘To the list that contains Charles Willeford’s Florida Keys, Jim Thompson’s West Texas, Pete Dexter’s Philadelphia, James Crumley’s Montana and Carl Hiaasen’s Miami, you can add Shane Maloney’s Melbourne. Maloney has created a fictional city that contains the best of the real and the not quite real.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Maloney is a born writer…For the first time, in the vicinity of Australian crime-writing, we hear the true national voice of comic futility, a literary voice which is rich, ridiculous and tawdry, which can set itself up with a soaring rhetoric and slide on the banana skin of its own piss-elegance… Maloney is terrific.’ Age

  ‘A writer who seems to have been sitting on a thousand observations now unleashed.’ Sunday Age

  ‘The pure pleasure of Maloney’s book lies in being plunged so thoroughly into the complicated byways of Australian politics…a fast-paced, fresh, unerringly funny book… Murray is a great creation, one that takes the wisecracking wise guy into a whole new realm.’ Houston Chronicle

  ‘Maloney has a quirky eye for descriptive details that lend frequent humor to a fascinating and adventurous plot. Highly recommended.’ Library Journal

  ‘A rollicking good read.’ Brisbane Sunday Mail

  SHANE MALONEY’S MURRAY WHELAN NOVELS

  Stiff

  The Brush-Off (winner of the Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel)

  Nice Try

  The Big Ask

  Something Fishy

  sucked in

  SHANE

  MALONEY

  TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William St

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Shane Maloney 2007

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part

  of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

  photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both

  the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company 2007

  Typeset in 12.5/16 Baskerville MT by J&M Typesetting

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Maloney, Shane.

  Sucked in.

  ISBN 978-1-921145-44-5 (pbk.).

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ghirardelli Foundation, the Cape Liptrap Lodge for Demented Writers, the Patramani family of Episkopi, Crete and Señora Luisa Guzman of Cochabamba, Bolivia.

  To my sister, who saved my life in Puno,

  and my wife, who helped.

  The author of this book, its setting and characters, are entirely fictitious. There is no such place as Melbourne.

  The Australian Labor Party exists only in the imagination of its members. The process by which it selects its candidates for public office is a source of ongoing bafflement.

  Prelude

  On a cool and overcast April afternoon, a retrenched Repco salesman from Benalla named Geoff Lyons and his fishing mate, Craig Kitson, drove the forty-three kilometres to Lake Nillahcootie in Geoff ’s Toyota 4 Runner. When they got to the boat ramp, they sat for a minute, staring out the windscreen.

  ‘Jeeze,’ said Craig. ‘That was quick.’

  Geoff said, ‘Told ya.’

  The lake, an eight by three kilometre reservoir on the Broken River where it flows out of the High Country, was almost completely empty.

  At the end of January, VicWater had commenced stabilisation work on the weir wall, a concrete dam constructed in the 1950s. They were sinking new reinforcement plugs, a project which involved opening the sluices and draining the lake. Since Craig and Geoff last saw it, the water level had dropped ninety percent. For the first time in forty years, the course of the original river bed was visible, its meandering progress marked by an intermittent line of truncated, long-dead trees.

  The two men walked out onto the lakebed, testing the surface. The gradient was slight and the hot summer and long dry autumn had dried the clay pan to a firm crust. Craig said, ‘Think it’ll take the Toyota?’

  ‘We get bogged,’ Geoff warned, ‘you’re the one walks to town.’

  Closer to the trees, the clay was covered with cracks like the stained fissures in an old teacup and the sharp edges of blackened stumps broke the surface of the ground. When the Toyota’s traction started to slip, they got out and walked the last hundred metres, carrying their waders. Craig took a plastic bucket, just in case they found anything worth keeping.

  They had fished Lake Nillahcootie many times over the years, although they preferred Eildon or, better still, Lake Mulwala. But Nillahcootie was handy, only half an hour out of town and too small to interest the watersport crowd. There was a camping ground near the weir and holiday houses scattered along the shoreline but some weekends they’d virtually have the place to themselves.

  Mostly it was redfin and brown trout on live bait from Geoff ’s tinnie, but they’d also taken some nice rainbows on spinners from the shore, particularly in the shaded shallows where the trees ran right down to the water. The Murray cod that preferred the deep holes of the old river bed had eluded them, however, and cost them some top-shelf trolling lures on hidden snags.

  So they’d come up with the idea of doing a bit of reconnaissance while the water level was down. A better idea of the lay of the lakebed might improve their chances when it was again hidden beneath opaque, red-brown water.

  The old riverbed was now a chain of shallow pools linked by a feeble trickle of muddy water, its surface swarming with midges
. All the useable timber had been cleared before the dam was flooded, leaving only dead or diseased trees. Their denuded trunks now jutted out of the sludge, bleached and sepulchral, surrounded by fallen, half-buried logs. The men followed the river’s meandering course upstream, checking their location against the undulating paddocks and clumps of trees that marked the shoreline.

  Oddments of litter were scattered across the lake floor, mainly old bottles and cans. They fossicked as they went and within half an hour they’d picked up some metal lures in pretty good nick, an assortment of wire traces and a slime covered Tarax lemonade bottle. By then, they’d given up the idea of discovering the hiding places of the fabled cod. No way were they going to start sloshing around in the murky black water that now filled the riverbed.

  ‘Careful.’ Geoff pointed to a sinuous grey shape draped over a fallen tree-trunk. ‘Snake.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t moving. Craig waded through the ankledeep water and took a closer look. ‘A deadly nylon python,’ he called. One end was buried in the mud, the other disappeared into dark water between two logs. ‘Could be an anchor rope.’

  He straddled the logs and hauled. The rope offered little resistance. It came up in a loose tangle, slimy and thick with a black mass of rotted vegetation. Trapped within its coils was a ball of fibrous mud, an oversized coconut.

  ‘Hey, check this out,’ he called back to Geoff.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Looks like a skull.’

  Geoff came closer, primed for one of Craig’s lame jokes.

  Craig reached down gingerly, hooked his fingers through the eye holes and held it aloft for Geoff to see. ‘Human, I reckon.’

  The bone was stained tan, the bottom jaw was missing and the nasal socket was eaten away at the edges, but the shape of the cranium was unmistakable.

  Geoff shaded his eyes with his hand and took a long hard look.

  ‘Well I’ll be fucked.’

  I stood at the edge of the grave and sprinkled a handful of soil onto the lid of the coffin, adding it to the mound of clay and carnations. It was a classy box, rosewood with silver handles, befitting its distinguished occupant.

  Charles Joseph Talbot, MHR. A cabinet minister in three successive Labor administrations, twice as Minister for Industrial Relations and, until the previous week, member for Coolaroo and manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia. A pillar of the community. An elder of the tribe.

  At sixty-four, Charlie Talbot was as dead as a man can get. It was hard to believe he was gone, even though it had happened right in front of me.

  ‘You’re in good hands, mate,’ I murmured. ‘The Lord’s a Labor man.’

  Charlie and the Lord went way back. Back to when he was a lay preacher, whatever that means, in the Methodist church. It was down that obscure tributary that Charlie had floated into the union movement, and thence into the Australian Labor Party. A world in which the Lord’s name is not often invoked, except in vain.

  I couldn’t say if Charlie’s faith survived the journey. It was not a subject we had ever discussed, although we’d talked of many things, often at great length, in the decades of our friendship. But whether he was now enrolled in the choir eternal or merely, as I suspected, compost, I knew I’d never forget him.

  Ceding my place to the next mourner in line, I wandered a little further into the cemetery. It was an autumn afternoon, late in the twentieth century, and there was still enough lustre in the stainless-steel sky to have me squinting against the glare. I pulled a pair of sunglasses from my breast pocket, lit a pensive cigarette and took in the scene.

  After the interminable eulogising of the funeral service, the graveside formalities had been brief. The crowd was drifting away, gravitating down the gravel pathway to the cars at the graveyard gate. The widow was escorted by the federal party leader, a stout man, if only in the physical sense. She was still a good looking woman, Margot, no diminution of assets there.

  Charlie’s three daughters kept their distance, husbands and children clustered around them as they accepted condolences. Although she’d been married to Charlie for almost ten years, Margot was still the Other Woman as far as his children were concerned. The Jezebel who’d snared their grieving father while the flowers were still fresh on their mother’s grave.

  She slept elsewhere, the sainted Shirley. She was taking her eternal rest beside her mother and father at Fawkner cemetery, fifteen minutes up the road.

  But even in death Charlie had civic obligations. And so it was here in Coburg cemetery, ceremonial burial site of the electorate he had represented for almost twenty years, that his mortal remains were interred. Here, cheek-by-jowl with the district’s other deceased dignitaries, a hundred and fifty years of extinct aldermen and mouldering worthies. I suspected Charlie would find them dull company. Not that he was any too lively himself anymore.

  Still, he had a pretty good view.

  Melbourne is a city of many inclinations but very few hills. Its northern suburbs are almost unremittingly flat but the cemetery occupied the slope of a low ridge, screened from six lanes of traffic by a row of feathery old cypresses, so even the slight rise of the bone yard offered a rare vantage point. To the west stood the grim shell of Pentridge prison, a crane jutting from its innards. The old bluestone college was currently being made over into luxury apartments and B Division, home of the hardened, would soon be equipped for designer living. A gated community of the newer kind, vendor finance available.

  The last two mourners were lingering at the graveside. Men of Charlie’s vintage, dark-suited, they were conducting a hushed but animated conversation across the pit. I contemplated the bleached inscriptions and grievous angels for as long as it took to finish my cigarette, then crushed the butt with the toe of my shoe. At the sound, the pair turned and looked my way.

  One of them cocked his head sideways, a summons. He was a compact, beetle-browed man with wavy black hair above an alert, self-assured face. His companion, a stoop-shouldered scarecrow of a man with thinning gingerygrey hair and a matching beard, opened his mouth as if to object, then closed it again. He pushed his thick-framed spectacles back up the bridge of his nose and watched me approach.

  ‘Senator,’ I said, dipping my head to the darker one.

  Senator Barry Quinlan. The grey eminence of the Left faction of the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party. Punter, bon vivant, all-round philanthropist and currently the Shadow Minister for Telecommunications.

  ‘Murray,’ he nodded back. ‘Sad occasion.’

  As befitted a champion of the underdog, Quinlan took great care with his appearance. His tailored three-button suit and immaculate white shirt were set off with a Windsor-knotted black tie and expensive cufflinks. The morose beanpole beside him, by contrast, was so nondescript that he might almost have been invisible. But that, I reflected, was Colin Bishop’s greatest talent.

  ‘G’day, Col,’ I said. ‘Or is it Professor Col these days?’

  When I’d last seen Colin Bishop, he was running the Trade Union Training Authority. Now he was Pro ViceChancellor of Maribyrnong University, a federally funded provider of post-secondary education in the fields of tourism, food technology and hospitality studies.

  ‘Show some decorum, you cheeky bugger,’ said Quinlan. ‘A bit of respect for your elders and betters.’

  Unholstering a silver hipflask, he toasted the coffin, took a shot and offered it around. I obliged, for form’s sake, and passed the flask to Bishop. Col hesitated, then took a long slug.

  ‘Lard-arse Charlie,’ he intoned, peering downwards. ‘Wonder how they got him in that box?’

  ‘Levered him in with fence pickets,’ Quinlan suggested.

  There was no malice in the banter. Life goes on. Big boys don’t get soppy. We were just four blokes, chewing the rag. Charlie was the quiet one in the rosewood overcoat.

  ‘And you were there when it happened?’ sa
id the senator, suddenly serious again.

  I nodded. ‘Sitting at the same table in the dining room of the Mildura Grand Hotel.’

  It was a story I was already sick of telling. But these two were entitled. They’d known Charlie even longer than I had.

  ‘We’d just finished our back-to-the-bush roadshow. Labor Listens.’

  Half a dozen of us trooping around the back-blocks in shiny new Akubras, listening to the yokels bitch about the axing of government services that everybody knew we had neither the present ability nor the future intention to restore. It had been a proper pain in the bum. A thousand kilometres in four days, preaching to the converted in community recreation facilities and civic halls.

  ‘Charlie was in Mildura for some regional and rural gabfest in his capacity as Shadow Minister for Infrastructure. We all ended up at Stefano’s for dinner.’

  ‘As you would,’ said Quinlan. Stefano’s was the town’s landmark eatery, five toques in the Age Good Food Guide. ‘Did you try the saltbush lamb?’

  Colin Bishop looked up from the coffin and sucked his cheeks impatiently.

  ‘Let’s just say we made a night of it,’ I said. ‘First thing next morning, the rest of the team took the early plane back to Melbourne. Charlie and I were booked on the noon flight, so we had time for a leisurely breakfast.’

  Poor Charlie, under doctor’s instructions to watch his weight, had settled for the fresh fruit compote. If only he’d known it was his last meal, he’d probably have ordered the lamb’s fry and bacon.

  ‘We were taking our time over coffee and newspapers when he started to make groaning noises. Not particularly loud so I didn’t pay much attention. Just assumed he was muttering to himself as he read. Then, suddenly, the paper cascaded to the floor and he was clawing at his collar. He’d gone all pale and clammy and his eyes were bulging out of his head. Heart attack. Cardiogenic shock.’