Stiff by Shane Maloney Page A

nous in the financial planning department. That wouldn’t be hard. Whelan senior had been through six pubs in twenty years, each smaller than the one before it.
    I was thinking about making a break for it when a little tan Toyota Corolla scooted into the driveway and disappeared down the side. The dog yapped a bit, then the front door opened. For a man in his sixties, Herb Gardiner was very well preserved, a bit of a gent in a Fletcher Jones tweed jacket, corduroy trousers and a rollneck navy-blue jumper. He had the nuggetty face of an ex-pug and the lightness on his feet of a man who’d just taken out the box trifecta at Eagle Farm. He wore the crooked grin of a short man on good terms with the whole world. If he was suffering from post-fatality trauma, he was bearing up well.
    ‘And who are you, then?’ he demanded with exactly the inflection you’d use yourself if you walked into your lounge room and found a total stranger with a scabby face dawdling on the divan.
    As I stood up to tell him, the widow came out of the kitchen. ‘He’s come about the house,’ she said. The apron had disappeared and she’d plumped up her hair. Gardiner shrugged off his tweed jacket, brushed the raindrops away with the meticulousness of a bloke who took good care of his tools, and draped it over the back of one of the pink armchairs.
    ‘Actually,’ I said guiltily, ‘the union suggested I get in touch.’
    ‘Did they just?’
    Fair enough. This one called for a very straight bat. ‘It’s a courtesy call really, Mr Gardiner. My name is Murray Whelan. It’s about the, uh, incident last week at work.’
    Gardiner gave me the stop sign. ‘Those scones of yours smell scrumptious.’ He sprayed charm all over the widow, splashing some on me in the process. He scooped the brochures up off the coffee table and slotted them into a gap in the blondwood shelf of white-bound encyclopedias. ‘I’ll make a bit of space. Sit down, Mr Whelan.’
    ‘Murray, please.’
    The scones appeared before my bum had even hit the cushion, straight out of the oven. A good three inches tall, they were, on a tray with jam and whipped cream and little linen serviettes. As Mrs Nextdoor bent to lower the tray, Gardiner, master again in his own house, patted her rump. She all but purred. He looked at me across her backside and winked. Here was a man who had it made, and didn’t he know it. For the first time all day, I was beginning to enjoy myself.
    ‘Leave you boys to it, will I then?’ she said.
    ‘Rightio, pet. Thanks a lot.’ Gardiner pulled up his sleeves daintily and reached for the teapot. Under the grizzled hair of his forearm was an ancient tattoo—a faded, languorous mermaid. ‘I’ll be mother,’ he said.
    Entertaining Herb’s uninvited callers was clearly not what the good widow had in mind when she’d come round to play house, but she copped it sweet. Gardiner would be around for a little while yet. She went out through the kitchen and I heard the back door close.
    ‘So, what’s this all about, son?’ Gardiner said amiably.
    It was long past the point where there was any mileage in playing funny buggers. I put my cards on the table, face up between the apricot conserve and turf tips. ‘I work for Charlene Wills,’ I said. Gardiner accepted my credentials with a nod. The local member was well known.
    ‘Dunno if you saw it,’ I went on, ‘but there was bit of speculation in the Sun yesterday to the effect that this business out at Pacific Pastoral on Friday might lead to some kind of industrial problems. The government would prefer that didn’t happen. A committee in the Industry Department has called for a report. Since I work in this area they decided I was just the bunny to write it for them. And because you’re the union rep and also happened to be on the spot when the body turned up, I thought I’d come straight to the horse’s mouth.’
    Gardiner took all this in, nodded again and broke open a scone. ‘I went through