Something Fishy Read Online Free

motors were beginning to whoosh down the hill from the thicketed heights of Toorak. When Red’s eight slid under the Swan Street bridge, I got back into my Magna Executive and joined the flow.
    By six-thirty, I was pacing the treadmill in the gym at the City Baths, a towel around my neck, a newspaper draped across the console. I did my usual ten kilometres, going nowhere, reading as I went. The Age , the Australian , the Herald Sun , a summary of pending amendments to the Gaming and Betting Act, agenda papers for the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. Anything to keep from thinking.
    Lyndal had weaned me off cigarettes and making the effort to stay healthy had become a way of honouring her memory. But trudging along a rubber belt was never more than a chore and I still kept a packet of smokes in the glove-box of the car for moments of maximum stress. I finished my session with a couple of laps of the pool and a bowl of fibre in the chlorine-scented snack-bar, then crawled through the swell of rush-hour to Parliament House.
    For all its neo-classical splendour, its colonnaded portico and gilded chambers, the House was feeling its age. A haughty Victorian dowager, it was inadequate to the demands of the late twentieth century. Behind the brass and marble, beyond the pedimented portals and wood-panelled halls, it was a rabbit warren of file-filled crannies and windowless cubicles. Only the biggest of the big chiefs warranted a private office and for opposition backbenchers like me, the lowest of the low, it offered a desk in a shared office in a permanently temporary outbuilding abutting the carpark.
    The Henhouse, we called it. But despite its clapboard construction and nylon carpet, it met its obligations to protocol. The name-plate beside the plywood door listed me as ‘The Honourable M. E. Whelan’.
    The first to arrive, I turned on the lights as I walked along the corridor to my office. Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift. I transferred the contents of my briefcase to the desk and hung up my overcoat. Aquascutum, a fortieth birthday present to myself, a bit the worse for wear. Like its owner.
    Get a grip, I warned myself. Today would be hard, but there had been harder days. Much harder. Keep it in perspective, don’t let them get to you. Lyndal’s death was part of a big news story, a major episode in an unfinished saga. And with the cops keen to generate optimum coverage, it was inevitable the media would come after me when the report became public.
    And what would I say? That I felt some sort of closure?
    Pig’s arse I did.
    Problem was, I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. It wasn’t just that it was impossible to express my feelings about Lyndal’s death in a neat, five-second sound bite. If that was all they wanted, the platitudes could be found. I was a politician, after all. But what if I was quizzed about the subsequent events? If that happened, and if I didn’t keep a tight rein on myself, the shit would really start to fly.
    I sat down at my standard-issue, formica-veneer desk. Keep it moving, that was my watchword. Head down, tail up. In-tray to out-tray. The first item was a reminder letter from the state secretariat regarding the deadline for submissions to the party reorganisation review process. I stared down at it and yawned. The phone rang.
    â€˜Saw the light,’ said a woman’s voice. ‘Thought it was you. Wondering how you’re set today. Any chance of a favour?’
    It was Della McLeish, administrative assistant to Jim Constantinides, leader of the opposition in the upper house, calling from Jim’s office in the main building. Jim was the closest thing I had to a boss, so a request from Della carried a certain amount of weight. ‘It’s a last-minute stand-in job,’ she explained. ‘Out-of-town sitting of the Coastal Management Advisory Panel. Comes under Natural Resources, Moira Henley’s