Bad Debts Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then I looked up McKillop in the phonebook. There was a D. P.
    McKillop in Windermere Street, Northcote. I put my hand out to dial several times and withdrew it. Danny McKillop comes out of a black hole in my past, looks for me 19

    everywhere, and a few days later is dead. I opened the file I’d brought from Drew’s.
    Danny would have been in his late thirties. Died of what?
    When I finally dialled the number, a child answered, a girl, four or five perhaps.
    ‘This is Kirsty McKillop speaking,’ she said in precise tones. ‘Mum’s hanging up the washing.’
    ‘Could I speak to her please, Kirsty,’ I said.
    ‘Hold on. I’ll call her.’
    I heard her shouting, ‘Mum, a man’s on the phone, a man’s on the phone…’
    When she came on, the woman was out of breath. ‘Hello, Sue McKillop.’
    I said, ‘Mrs McKillop, sorry to bother you. Is that the home of Daniel Patrick McKillop?’
    I could hear her breathing. ‘Danny died, was killed on Friday night.’ Her voice was flat, slightly hoarse.
    ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘My name’s Jack Irish. I was his lawyer once. He was trying to get hold of me last week, but I was away…’
    ‘Yes, well, thank you for ringing, Mr Irish.’
    ‘Forgive me asking, but how…’
    She didn’t let me finish. ‘A policeman shot him. Murdered him.’ She was making a statement of fact.
    ‘Where did it happen?’ I asked the question without thinking, and as I did a chill came over me.
    ‘In a pub carpark. In Brunswick.’
    ‘What pub was—’
    ‘The Hero of Trafalgar.’
    5
    I never blamed myself for my wife’s death. Not then or now. A client of mine, Wayne Waylon Milovich, shot and killed Isabel in a parking garage in La Trobe Street. When he’d done that, he taped a letter addressed to me to her forehead and went back to his 20

    car, a 1974 Ford Falcon with one hundred and thirteen unpaid parking tickets against its number. He then detonated two or three sticks of gelignite on his lap. The letter went: ‘Mr Judas Lawyer Did You Now My Wife Run Away And Took My Kids While I Rotted In Jail Were You Sent Me Because You Wood Not Listen To What I Was Telling You As Your Clynt You Bastard.’
    Deranged clients. It’s a risk you run. Isabel knew that. She practised family law, where practically all the clients are deranged to some degree. I didn’t blame myself. I just raged against fate. I couldn’t get that through to people. They kept telling me to stop torturing myself. They wanted me to blame myself. I wasn’t walking around drunk, crying in pubs, getting into fights with strangers because I was blaming myself. I was in a state of incoherent rage. I had lost someone who had cast a glow into every corner of my life. I was entitled to my feelings. Loss. Hate. Hopelessness. Worthlessness. Only the return of Isabel would have been enough.
    Isabel and I were very different. Her childhood was the opposite of mine: she grew up in a fierce tribe of children, all lovingly neglected by their parents, a musician and a painter. She had emerged from the chaos clever, funny, diligent, dreamy, sensuous, and with an affection and concern for other people that descended indiscriminately like warm summer rain. She came into my habitual gloom and dispelled it, dissolved it, with one endless, helpless laugh.
    After her death, I lost control for months. I would have put Wayne together again fragment by fragment just to tear him apart with my hands and teeth. I could not be still. I could hardly bear to sit down. I could not listen to music, read, exchange more than a few words with anyone. I slept only when hopelessly drunk; I woke within minutes, slick with cold sweat. All food tasted like dry oats and I did not eat for days on end. After I walked out on Andrew Greer, I drifted for months, driving without aim, drinking all day in sour little country pubs, lapsing into unconsciousness in the car or in some paper-walled motel room. I got arrested eventually in a sodden town