Drawing The Line

1

The two people I had to thank for getting me off Samuelsons payroll and out on my own as a private investigator were Stuart Shrill, a solicitor, and Sugden Pascoe, a thug.

I was on my way to see Shrill and I knew he wasn't going to like what I had for him. You had to draw the line somewhere between an honest day's work and your own sense of what's right or wrong and I had drawn it across Stuart Shrill. I wasn't above bending the truth to suit my purposes, but I had decided I'd rather do it on my own time.

2

The Alfa howled as I went through orange lights on Countess and sliced neatly across four lanes of traffic get to the other side of Upper Roma Street. Horn blasts wailed behind me.

There was a free parking place outside Shrill's office. It was like palm tree across the desert up this end of town. My tyres yelped against kerbing as I pulled in.

The midday sun was blasting the street, melting tar, bouncing off dirty glass and metal. I half shut my eyes against the glare and climbed the stairs, picking at my shirt to keep it from sticking.

Walking into Shrill's waiting room was like walking out of a sauna into a meat locker. As soon as I shut the heavy glass door behind me, the sweat froze on my back.

To the left just beyond the door, an ice blue reception desk was completely bare except for a buzzer the size of half a grapefruit. I leant on the buzzer with the heel of my hand. A deadened nasal sound echoed somewhere behind.

Almost immediately, Schrill's secretary emerged. She was dressed for the airconditioning, in the sort of pastel shades you see in paintings on the walls of expensive tropical resorts. Her thick white stockings looked like icefloes.

She looked at the lozenge-shaped bracelet watch on her wrist. It was eight minutes past twelve.

"Mr Schrill is with someone," she said thinly. "He asked if you'd mind waiting."

The question was rhetorical. I smiled non-committally, moved sideways to the vinyl lounge chair and sat down. She looked at me for a moment, then went back through the doorway into the hall behind.

3

I leaned back, put the folders I had brought with me on my lap, and began cracking my knuckles and looking at the walls. Above the reception desk was a large version of Schrill's company logo, cut from red vinyl. The image was an "S", formed from the ribbon barristers used to tie up their torts. Like all lawyers, Schrill was a legend in his own mind.

The folders sitting on my lap were surveillance files on a woman named Sue Smith. Schrill, one of our regular clients, had instructed Samuelsons to gather any material which proved she was a woman of loose morals. This would form the basis of his defence for one of his business clients – a property developer named Albert Grundig, from Logan City – against Sue Smith's charge of sexual assault.

Most of Schrill's clients now came from Logan – it was a business frontier of unparalleled opportunity. Like most of the really successful business people there, Al Grundig was on the local council. It came in handy when reviewing his own zoning applications to build urban deathtraps on tea-tree swamp.

As a councillor Grundig had come into contact with Sue Smith, a single mother who worked part-time in the council library. Occasionally she worked late. One evening, after a council meeting, Grundig had seen the lights on in the library and had gone in to investigate.

Later that night the women at a Brisbane rape crisis centre persuaded Sue Smith to make a complaint. Police doctors examined her, an investigation was carried out, an eventually, Grundig was charged.