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stuff with your heart, when it wasn’t so bloody soporific. Beaufort was a Pom, and he wanted to—’ Weir squinted as he replaced the glasses on his nose. ‘He wanted a way to relate wind strengths to the appearance of the sea. Subjective exercise really. “Crests of glassy appearance” and so forth.’ He studied his thumbnails momentarily. ‘“Rolling is heavy.” Dear me. Isn’t that beautiful? Rolling is heavy …You can’t describe anything scientific in those terms anymore. No verbs at all now, let alone at the front end like that. Or if they do have verbs they’re the ones they develop in a test tube by reconfiguring noun DNA. Do you know I heard a man say “baselining” the other day?’
    â€˜In court?’
    â€˜No, on the television.’ Harlan rolled one of the paperweights in his left palm. ‘Talking about football of course. And while I’m on that, tell me this—why are they so obsessed with accountability on the field, which to my mind is such an obscurity that none of them actually knows what it is—and yet they appear to be accountable to no one at all when they go out at night? You employ it as a sports cliché and it’s apparently more important than life itself. And yet, used the way the Queen intended—that is, as a moral standard—it baffles them to the extent that they see no problem with urinating on a police car.’
    â€˜Which queen?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Which queen intended it to be used that way?’ Charlie had become adept at pulling the handbrake on these tirades.
    Weir sighed. ‘You’ve read this, this Murchison brief?’
    â€˜Enough of it.’ He tried again. ‘How come I got the gig?’
    â€˜Why on earth wouldn’t you?’ Weir had leaned forward very slightly, and he studied Charlie with gentle regard. A phone rang distantly outside the room. Charlie found himself looking at the spines of the books behind the desk.
    Weir was still watching him. ‘Now tell me how we’re going to run it.’
    â€˜Okay. You’ve got these two families, the Lanegans and the Murchisons. The second accused, McVean, he’s just hired muscle. Lanegans have got a tribe of kids and both parents are dead. They’re in the fishing game but a bit on the periphery, well-known troublemakers in the town. They get an approach from the Murchisons, who own just about everything in the main street. They’re also into fishing and they’ve got an abalone licence. The Murchisons say, we’re getting more abalone than we can legally sell through the co-op or whatever, so if you take these extra abalone to Melbourne so we can move them through the black market, we’ll give you a commission.’
    â€˜Why don’t they take their own abalone to Melbourne?’
    â€˜Licence is worth a couple of million dollars and they’re not going to risk it. Fisheries do roadblocks, all sorts of stuff to catch these people. So they’re better off putting a couple of expendables on the road and just denying everything if they get caught.’
    â€˜What, with shellfish? It’s not exactly Burmese heroin.’
    â€˜It’s very expensive stuff. There’s only a dozen or so of these licences west of the cape, and there’s an insatiable export market. I rang their fishermen’s board after I’d finished reading the brief, and I got talking to this guy. He described it as swimming along scooping up hundred-dollar bills. Anyway, those boats are only sharing about twenty-five tonnes of product for the year, so the quota quickly cuts ’em off. And the co-op, the central clearing house for the abalone, it issues a docket which has to stay with that consignment of shellfish pretty much all the way to the table. Makes it very hard to fool the system once the abalone catch has been declared.’
    â€˜So you don’t declare it in the