The boy folded, and moved to the phone. ‘Moorabool Police Station, Constable Petrovic speaking. Uh huh…Uh huh. Just a minute madam, I’ll see if he’s in yet.’
He covered the mouthpiece, looked at Bradley. ‘It’s Mrs… Councillor Curio. Tell her you’re—?’
Bradley snatched the phone, pasted a smile on.
‘Hello, Dianne. How are you this gorgeous Monday morning?’ Simpering like a ladies-wear assistant. ‘And how’s his lordship? You’re not…? Oh…hmm.’ Bradley started tapping the desk with his pen, and nodding gravely. ‘Hm-hmm? Look, we’re flat to the boards this morning, but I’ll be over in due course.’
A squawk of protest. He winced.
‘Right, twenty minutes then.’
Hanging up, he looked at Bligh and Petrovic, both consumed by more pressing activities. Bradley was about to reach for his hat, when he decided to turn the unanswerable question onto his probationary constable.
‘How would you like a little job, Michael?’
7
Moorabool Regional Council was a kidney-coloured brick eyesore with an impractically flat roof that had been thrown up ten years ago by somebody’s—Councillor Curio’s?—brother-in-law, a stone’s throw from the Curios’ Prime Foods warehouse. Convenient. For Councillor Dianne Curio and her husband, at any rate. Also convenient was the parking spot by the door, with her name on it, where a bright red Jaguar sat shimmering in the glare. The councillor’s office lay at the end of a corridor off the foyer, onto which a row of mission-brown doors opened.
Mick was ushered into the last of these by the receptionist, a thirtyish brunette whose attractive figure couldn’t quite be hidden by her orange shift. She sized him up at the door, and he handed her his card. She glanced at it quizzically.
‘That’s Good-no.’ He gave her his wry smile. ‘As in No-Good, backwards.’
‘Right. You can go in now.’ She returned a mysterious, slightly anxious look. Interesting shade of violet, her eyes. Reminded him of some movie actress or other.
Councillor Curio looked up from a grand desk that overlooked, through venetian blinds, the block behind Main Street. The receptionist announced him in a melodic voice. ‘Constable Good-Enough. Sorry, Good-no.’
‘Thanks Eileen. Well,’ the councillor said as Eileen slipped away. ‘You took your time getting here, constable. Sit, sit. I’ll be with you in two seconds.’
While she ran her pen over whatever file it was that couldn’t wait, Mick peered around her domain. The burnt orange carpet, plain curtains, chipboard furnishings, all spoke of the councillor’s modesty. The oak desk, however, would have been at home in an admiral’s stateroom. His eyes fell on a filing cabinet in the corner, with two of its drawers lying open at odd angles, slid right to the end of their rails. He studied the window. The torn flyscreen. Bent lock. Signs of break and enter. But the window exposed to the car park and the treeless street suggested a burglar would be highly visible. Perhaps not in the middle of the night.
He was running his eye over the lock of the door beside him when, a good bit longer than two seconds later, the lady dropped her file and swanned around the desk towards him.
‘Right then. Councillor Curio—all my friends call me Dianne.’ She extended her large fleshy hand and applied a politician’s power grip to Mick’s.
‘Constable Goodenough, and my friends call me Mick. Both of them.’ He smiled.
She didn’t and pulled her hand away. ‘I thought Sergeant Bradley was coming over?’
‘Sergeant Bradley’s busy on another matter, so I’m afraid I’ll have to do for now.’ He nodded at the window. ‘You’ve had a break-in, Dianne?’
‘Pffft.’ She huffed as if shooing away flies and nodded at the filing cabinet. ‘I came in this morning to find the window wide open, the lock broken, as you see. The filing cabinet like this, files all over the shop.’ She waved at a pile of manila folders in a neat stack on the floor. ‘Very distressing.’
‘Is anything important missing?’
‘Of course. Three or four very sensitive files.’
‘Three? Or four?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Might do,’ he shrugged. ‘The filing cabinet was locked?’
‘It’s been broken. As I said.’
‘No, councillor, you said the window lock had been broken.’ Goodenough smiled tightly. ‘But I see the filing cabinet was too.’
‘Pffft.’ That huffing noise again. ‘D’you want to look at it or not?’
‘I do.’ Goodenough moved to the filing cabinet. ‘First tell me about these missing files, Dianne.’
‘Nothing to tell.’ He held her look until she shrugged. ‘Let’s just say…they were of a sensitive nature.’
‘Sensitive, how?’ Mick was starting to enjoy this exchange.
‘Just, not, um, something we’d want bandied about to the public at large.’
‘Why not?’
‘Is this relevant?’
‘As I said, Councillor Curio, it might be.’
Sweeping a hand through her dyed black fringe, she heaved a weary sigh. ‘This is why I told Jeff if you can’t come yourself, send over someone who understands these matters. Ross Bligh, for instance.’
Goodenough raised an eyebrow. ‘Constable Bligh works for the council too, does he?’
‘What? God no! Ross isn’t a stranger, that’s all.’ Mrs Curio looked up at the wall as if counting fly specks. ‘He knows how we work. Now look, Constable…Goodwit—’
‘Good-no,’ he said, slowly.
She gritted her teeth. Intimidation of the new boy perhaps not the right tactic. She forced a tolerant smile. ‘If you must know, Constable Goodenough, those files concern a memorandum of agreement for the transfer of some properties of interest to the council. Nothing more sinister than that.’
Mick nodded. She nodded. Consensus at last. Then he said, ‘What sort of properties?’
‘I just knew you were going to ask me that,’ she sighed. ‘And the short answer is—I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘OK. Does anyone have copies of these files?’
‘Of course they don’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you, would I?’
Mick did what the police chaplain had advised him to do in trying circumstances: he took a deep breath and silently counted to eight as he moved past her to the window.
‘Let’s have a look at this, shall we?’
He raised the venetians, didn’t have to look twice at the lock to see it had been forced open with a narrow, flat-edged tool. From the inside, funnily enough.
‘Excuse me again,’ he breezed past her tightly folded arms to the filing cabinet, where he saw scratches around the lock and another narrow groove gouged in the metal, same size as the gouges around the window lock.
‘Do you have keys for this?’
‘Yes.’ She opened the top desk drawer, reached in for two small keys on a wire ring and slapped them down on her desk.
‘Will you try them in the lock for me, please?’
She did. The lock had been bent, but the key still turned it.