White Dog Read Online Free PDF

calves, the ankles, the feet. They resembled humans on all fours, humans with long dog heads, engaged in some hungry act.
    Did people buy these creations? Where would you put one?
    The grinding noise was coming from a lit area behind a pile of metal scrap – two car bodies, a stack of car doors, a large disembowelled machine, possibly a litho printing press, offcuts of steel and aluminium sheeting, a pick-up-sticks pile of rusted steel rods.
    I came around the heap.
    In a clearing, in a pond of bright light, a person in filthy overalls was kneeling on someone much bigger, face down, arms outstretched, applying a metal grinder to the head.
    I took a step back and looked through the empty socket of a car door. There is a sinister, expectant pleasure in watching someone using a tool that spits on protective gear, makes from a small clumsiness a whine of ground bone and sends a lovely arc of warm blood into the air.
    There was no clumsiness. Sparks streamed from the felled knight’s metal shell until the worker raised the grinder in both hands, held it up like a howling icon, killed it.
    Silence.
    I stepped around the car skeleton and the person saw me. The yellow helmet visor reflected the glare from a light on a tripod.
    ‘I’m looking for Sarah Longmore,’ I said.
    The person stood up, pushed up the visor, pulled off a glove by its fingertips. Then she combed her hair with her fingers.
    ‘Jack Irish?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Thanks for coming.’
    Sarah Longmore wore no make-up, her short hair stuck up in several directions, her face was dirty, smeared, her eyebrows furry. She didn’t look like the dark-suited woman in court. I thought she looked better this way.
    ‘I told Andrew I’d come to see you,’ she said, ‘but he said that wasn’t the way it was done.’
    Her accent was hard to place: not Australian, not quite upper-class English.
    ‘Drew’s good on the way things are done,’ I said. ‘This is also more interesting than my place.’
    ‘What time is it? I lose track.’
    She pulled at the zip that ran diagonally across her chest, exposed a black T-shirt.
    ‘Just after four,’ I said.
    ‘Beer time. There’s tea, coffee, water.’
    I could stomach a beer. On many days, I felt that a beer would go well with the muesli, then it would be nice to have another one to get the day moving, get things stabilised.
    ‘Beer, thanks,’ I said.
    ‘It’s in the shed.’
    I followed her, walked around the prone cruciform figure to a lean-to in the back corner of the building, a building inside a building, a rough fibro structure with a window and a flue coming out of the roof. The foreman’s hut, presumably. Inside, there was a drum wood-burning heater, a formica-topped kitchen table with an electric frying pan and a toaster on it, two kitchen chairs, two 1950s Swedish-style easychairs. A small fridge, new, stood in the corner.
    ‘It’s not cold,’ she said. ‘Is that okay?’
    ‘Fine.’
    ‘I lived in Berlin,’ she said. She took two brown bottles off a shelf, put them on the table, uncapped them with a Swiss army knife lying ready. ‘The people I was with drank beer all the time. Morning, noon and night. You get a taste for it. Warm German beer.’
    She handed me a bottle. Dresdner Pils. I took a swig. A brown-tasting beer, medicinal.
    ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Sit.’
    We sat in the chairs, bottoms too far down, knees too high, held our bottles on the wooden arms.
    ‘Andrew says you’re a lawyer who does other things,’ she said. ‘Finds people, witnesses, things like that. That’s odd for a lawyer, isn’t it?’
    Sarah Longmore looked at you with the eyes of a child. I felt that she might say anything: My dad says you’re a stupid prick. Mum says you always hold on to her a bit too long.
    ‘A long story,’ I said. ‘Are you happy about being questioned?’
    ‘Well, I’ll say when I’m not.’
    ‘The plea, that’s final?’
    She had the beer bottle to her lips, indenting the skin. She lowered