glaze was settling over Red’s eyes. I droned on, my tone deliberately monotonous. Halfway through the parable of the walnut and the watermelon, bye-byes arrived and slipped Red silently across the border into the Land of Nod. As I laid the book down and tiptoed out of the room, he stirred a little, scratched his head and began quietly to snore.
The deluge outside had dropped to a steady patter. I climbed the ladder and checked the roof. So far so good. My impromptu engineering was holding up remarkably well. The plug of rolled-up overalls was a sodden mass, but it had swelled to a tight fit and very little water was leaking through. Just to be on the safe side, I sat a bucket underneath, balanced on a plank running across two of the rafters.
Then I screwed the top off the Jamesons and sat down with the Pacific Pastoral file. I looked at the photos first, spilling them across the kitchen table. The corpse had a face only a mother could love, a sentimental Hittite mother with cataracts. Apart from that, all you could tell was that he could have done with a course at Weight Watchers and that he was dead. I turned to the papers.
No wonder Charlene had made a point of telling Agnelli to get them back on her desk pronto. Many strings had been jerked and much red tape scissored to get this little collection of paper together. Preliminary reports of the Department of Labour Accident Investigations Division, photocopies of internal police incident sheets, and draft summaries from the coroner’s office did not spontaneously aggregate in the privacy of some filing cabinet and decide to throw themselves across the desk of the first available minister. The regrettable demise of Ekrem Bayraktar three days before had set the hidden hand of some dedicated paper chaser into motion.
But as far as I could tell, it had hardly been worth the bother. This was about as prosaic a stack of forms as death ever filled out. If there had ever been any drama here, it had quickly been reduced to a homogeneous grey soup of bureaucratese, lacking even the frisson of an interdepartmental difference of opinion. The medicos, the police, the coronial and departmental investigators were all in furious agreement.
The bare facts outlined were these. Bayraktar was Turkish. That much I had been right about. He had been in Australia three years, status permanent resident. His address was in Blyth Street, Brunswick, a flat I assumed. No next of kin was listed. He had been with Pacific Pastoral for a little over two years and as a leading-hand storeman had regular access to the plant’s storage freezers. Some time during Friday afternoon he had let himself into Number 3 chiller. He did this on his own initiative, without informing anyone and for reasons not apparent. Everyone was very clear on that point.
Some time later a refrigeration mechanic by the name of Herbert Gardiner entered the freezer to check the thermostat and found Bayraktar’s body. Herbert Gardiner? Where had I heard that name before? I shuffled the papers until I found the sheet of Upper House notepaper I had used to take down the name of Bernice’s shop steward. Yep, that was him.
Oh Herb, I mused out loud, whatever were your parents thinking when they planted that botanical name on you? Basil and Rosemary Gardiner and their little boy Herb. Hardly a sage choice. I shook my head in wonder and turned back to the subject at hand.
The cause of death was a heart attack, the exact time of which was subject to some speculation on account of the low temperature. Precision in this matter did not appear to be an issue, nor was any negligence or malfeasance on the company’s part suggested. All in all it was pretty much an open and shut case. Bayraktar was just another of the three-hundred-odd Victorians who died in industrial incidents every year. The only unanswered question was what the deceased had been doing wandering about in a giant deep freeze full of boxes of boned beef.
No bureaucrat in
The deluge outside had dropped to a steady patter. I climbed the ladder and checked the roof. So far so good. My impromptu engineering was holding up remarkably well. The plug of rolled-up overalls was a sodden mass, but it had swelled to a tight fit and very little water was leaking through. Just to be on the safe side, I sat a bucket underneath, balanced on a plank running across two of the rafters.
Then I screwed the top off the Jamesons and sat down with the Pacific Pastoral file. I looked at the photos first, spilling them across the kitchen table. The corpse had a face only a mother could love, a sentimental Hittite mother with cataracts. Apart from that, all you could tell was that he could have done with a course at Weight Watchers and that he was dead. I turned to the papers.
No wonder Charlene had made a point of telling Agnelli to get them back on her desk pronto. Many strings had been jerked and much red tape scissored to get this little collection of paper together. Preliminary reports of the Department of Labour Accident Investigations Division, photocopies of internal police incident sheets, and draft summaries from the coroner’s office did not spontaneously aggregate in the privacy of some filing cabinet and decide to throw themselves across the desk of the first available minister. The regrettable demise of Ekrem Bayraktar three days before had set the hidden hand of some dedicated paper chaser into motion.
But as far as I could tell, it had hardly been worth the bother. This was about as prosaic a stack of forms as death ever filled out. If there had ever been any drama here, it had quickly been reduced to a homogeneous grey soup of bureaucratese, lacking even the frisson of an interdepartmental difference of opinion. The medicos, the police, the coronial and departmental investigators were all in furious agreement.
The bare facts outlined were these. Bayraktar was Turkish. That much I had been right about. He had been in Australia three years, status permanent resident. His address was in Blyth Street, Brunswick, a flat I assumed. No next of kin was listed. He had been with Pacific Pastoral for a little over two years and as a leading-hand storeman had regular access to the plant’s storage freezers. Some time during Friday afternoon he had let himself into Number 3 chiller. He did this on his own initiative, without informing anyone and for reasons not apparent. Everyone was very clear on that point.
Some time later a refrigeration mechanic by the name of Herbert Gardiner entered the freezer to check the thermostat and found Bayraktar’s body. Herbert Gardiner? Where had I heard that name before? I shuffled the papers until I found the sheet of Upper House notepaper I had used to take down the name of Bernice’s shop steward. Yep, that was him.
Oh Herb, I mused out loud, whatever were your parents thinking when they planted that botanical name on you? Basil and Rosemary Gardiner and their little boy Herb. Hardly a sage choice. I shook my head in wonder and turned back to the subject at hand.
The cause of death was a heart attack, the exact time of which was subject to some speculation on account of the low temperature. Precision in this matter did not appear to be an issue, nor was any negligence or malfeasance on the company’s part suggested. All in all it was pretty much an open and shut case. Bayraktar was just another of the three-hundred-odd Victorians who died in industrial incidents every year. The only unanswered question was what the deceased had been doing wandering about in a giant deep freeze full of boxes of boned beef.
No bureaucrat in
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