by Garry Disher
Lydia checked the garden shed and the garage: same story.
Maybe the police had already found Furneaux’s escape stash. Lydia believed there had to be one: money, and passports, credit cards and drivers’ licences in false names. She returned to the house and searched every room, drawn to the kinds of small, overlooked spaces found in any domestic setting.
All she found was dust and air.
There was something about the bathroom though. She tapped the tiles around the bath. Hollow. Everything inside her lifted in hope. She smashed her way in—more dust and air—and stood glumly. A moment later it occurred to her that Furneaux had fitted the room with a cluster of heat-demist lights above the mirror and heating rails for the fat towels. So why was there also a panel radiator bolted to the wall?
She returned to the garage and came back with a toolbox. The radiator lid was removable. Beneath it was a small hollow and $2500 in a rubber band, together with a credit card in the name of Leslie Shirlow.
Someone rapped on the front door.
Lydia ducked into Furneaux’s bedroom. The wardrobe was crammed with suits. She adjusted the scarf around her head, then draped the darkest suit over her arm, together with a white shirt and a sombre tie, and made for the front of the house, working an expression of sadness onto her face.
‘Yes?’ she said to the elderly man on Furneaux’s front step. He was bisected by the crime-scene tape.
He peered at her in the poor light. ‘I live across the road. I saw lights on and thought I’d better check.’
Good thing he didn’t call the cops, Lydia thought. Her voice loaded with grief, she said, ‘Henri is—was—my brother-in-law. I just called in to collect a suit for his ... you know ... his coffin.’
The man was appalled to think that he’d been insensitive. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, backing away, almost scuttling.
‘Thanks for your concern,’ Lydia said.
Sooner or later he’d think again about what he’d seen. Lydia ducked back inside, found a handful of shirts, T-shirts, pullovers, shorts and even jeans that might fit her, crammed them into a small pull-along suitcase, and left the house.
* * * *
As she rode the last bus of the evening out into the Yarra Valley, Lydia thought about the name on the credit card: ‘Leslie Shirlow’. Leslie was a name used by men and women. She practised writing the signature on a scrap of paper and began to think her way into the skin of Leslie Shirlow.
Ten at night and Yarra Junction was dead. Lydia walked into a motel and said, ‘My car died.’
‘You poor thing,’ the woman on reception said, handing her a room key.
In the morning she set about finding Eddie Oberin’s aunt’s cottage. She’d been there only once, early in her marriage, about fifteen years ago, and the area had altered a lot. She didn’t want to set tongues wagging or be bounced from pillar to post, her face registering with the town’s busybodies, so she went straight to the priest. A strict Catholic, his aunt, Eddie had said.
The priest was old, frail, but remembered Eddie’s aunt well. ‘Dear old soul,’ he said, drawing a spidery map for Lydia.
She shoved $50 into the poor box and returned to the highway, where she used some more of Henri Furneaux’s $2500. Years since she’d ridden a bicycle, and the road beyond the town was winding and steep, petering out to a strip of degraded dirt and gravel. But at the end of it she spotted the cottage and dismounted. Tucking the bike behind bracken, she darted from tree to tree until she had good sightlines to the only doors, one at the rear, and a side door to the kitchen. She watched for an hour. She tossed pebbles onto the roof and against a window. No reaction.
Lydia went in. Eddie and his woman had marked the place: sex and other odours, empty bottles, food scraps, the stubs of a few joints. But it would do for a couple of days. She cleaned away the crap, swept, dusted, scrubbed. Then, knowing the temperature would plummet by evening, she set a fire. And found $120,000 stowed in a backpack under a pile of kindling, bark, twigs and pinecones. As though someone expected to come back for it pretty soon.
Clearly not Eddie, but a mad woman with a gun. Lydia shrugged the pack onto her back and returned to the bike. Fatigue ran deeply in her now, but she was alert for cars as she rode down into the valley again. Here a taxi took her to another town and a choice of three used-car yards. Wyatt was in her thoughts the whole way. She looked for a set of wheels that wouldn’t attract attention, knowing that’s what he’d do. Nothing fast, fussy or old. She almost selected a silver Corolla, until she realised the white Holden ute gave her a dimension far removed from getaway driver, robber or fugitive. Farmer’s wife, perhaps. Gardener. Someone into horses. Curiously, she began to feel a kind of release from Wyatt, knowing she was able to operate as he did. Their paths would cross again, or they wouldn’t. He’d track her down, or he wouldn’t. She didn’t hope for it, wouldn’t seek it, but wouldn’t knock it, either. In the meantime, she’d be fine on her own. She’d been doing that for a long time.
She headed north in the ute, picturing Wyatt’s thin, watchful face, and gave a crooked grin as she saw him acknowledge, in some distant time and place, why she’d had to spend $9995 of their hundred and twenty grand.
* * * *
47
Still the Westlake Towers slumbered. Wyatt crossed the road and went in, all of his senses tuned. Nothing tugged at him. He climbed to the eighth floor. Still nothing. A matter of time, he thought. The torched Holden would be traced back to his building, Rigby was ambitious, and other players might have talked.
He wiped down the apartment and made a final run-through of his possessions. A corner of him hoped to find Lydia Stark, hiding where Khandi and Lowe had failed to spot her, but she was gone.
And so was the ladder from the broom cupboard. He knew at once how she’d used it, and found the proof on his balcony, fresh scratch marks on the railing and the gentle exhalations of a curtain on an adjacent balcony. Wyatt kept tabs on everyone in the building. His neighbour was a student from Hong Kong and unlikely to have gone out leaving her balcony open.
So why hadn’t she reported an intruder? Had Lydia hurt her? Lydia was like him in unwitting ways, and she’d have recognised two options: remain next door, hoping Khandi would think she was in the wind, or break cover, knowing there might be other shooters on the street.
Wyatt left his apartment for the last time and knocked on the neighbour’s door.
He knocked again.
The security chain rattled into place on the other side, the door cracked open, and he was examined by a nervy eye and a wing of dark hair. ‘My electricity’s off,’ Wyatt said. ‘Is yours?’
The girl’s head jerked back. He heard a light switch, and then she was opening the door, smiling shyly and demonstrating that she had power to her hallway light. She’d been asleep, her T-shirt rucked, her cheeks pillow-creased. ‘Thank you,’ Wyatt said, projecting his voice into her apartment. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’
She smiled again, and began to close her door. Lydia didn’t come rushing out.
Then Wyatt realised that Lydia had a third option: his first-floor apartment. If she reasoned that Eddie’s sweetheart had already searched it, she might go there. She might reason that he would, too.
He walked down the stairs, entered the corridor, and stopped. The gunshot odour was acrid and recent.
He crept to the blue door and saw the hole, the wood splintered, stippled with gunshot residue, and believed then that Lydia was dead. He didn’t allow himself to feel anything but keyed the lock and pushed on the door, meeting the resistance of her body. He pushed harder, slipped through the gap, and stood for a moment, taking in the slumped body and pooling blood.
He’d been clenching himself. Relief flooded in. ‘Tyler,’ he said. ‘You dumb shit.’
Lydia had got out, Wyatt knew that now. He swept through the apartment to make sure, and returned to the body. ‘Dumb shit,’ he said again, looking down on the sulky mouth of Ma Gadd’s nephew.
* * * *
Even dead, the guy was a problem. Late that evening Wyatt drove to a costly corner of Brighton, a quiet, leafy street by the water. He guessed Ma Gadd was an embarrassment to her neighbours with her pudding shape, worn-out slippers on swollen feet, whiskery moles, permanent cigarette haze and working-class voice. They’d hate her for lowering the tone, for being richer and cannier than they were. They couldn’t even accuse her of nouveau vulgarity because that described them, behind their personal trainers, grammar-school children and BMWs.
It was almost midnight when he knocked on her door. He wasn’t surprised when his answer was a gun barrel grinding at the base of his spine.
‘Hello, Ma.’
‘You’re losing your touch, son.’
‘I knew you were behind me, Ma.’
‘Sure you did,’ Ma said, letting her gun arm drop.
Wyatt turned to face her. ‘You’ve got a leaf in your hair.’
‘Shut up. I’m assuming this isn’t good news?’
‘Correct.’
Ma sighed. ‘Let’s go inside.’
No one could see them on the shadowy front step, for Brighton was a forest of dense hedges, but voices carry at night. ‘Around the back,’ Ma said.
Wyatt followed her to a deep, broad yard landscaped with roses: roses on trellises, in clumps or meandering along white pebble paths around goldfish ponds and beds of herbs and English flowers. The air was fecund, not unpleasant, and Wyatt breathed it in as Ma opened a glass door in a glass wall and ushered him to a honey-coloured cane chair beside a glass-and-cane table.
‘Drink?’
‘No.’’
‘I think I’m going to need one,’ Ma Gadd said, leaving the sunroom.
Wyatt tensed a little, but when she came back she was alone and carrying a glass and a bottle of Glenfiddich. She poured, drained the glass, poured again.
‘Where is he?’
‘Lying inside my front door.’
‘You put him there?’
‘He put himself there, Ma.’
‘You put him on the floor, I mean.’
Wyatt shook his head. ‘He was waiting to kill me. Someone knocked on the door. When he put his eye to the peephole, that someone shot him.’
Ma gave a bleak smile and drank again. ‘Hadn’t the sense he was born with.’
Wyatt said nothing.
‘He must have followed you home sometime,’ said Ma, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
‘That must be it,’ said Wyatt.
They were silent, Ma apparently looking back down the years. She said, ‘You pissed some people off and my nephew suffered for it.’
Wyatt didn’t want her to read it like that. That’s why he was here. He told her what had happened.
‘You fixed this shooter?’
‘Yes.’
Ma smiled without much warmth, accepting that Wyatt hadn’t done it to please her. ‘I hear there’s a Frenchman.’
Wyatt stared at her. Ma had another hit of scotch and apparently slumbered for a while. Without opening her eyes she said, ‘You don’t want me for an enemy. That’s why you came here tonight.’
‘You’ve got a long reach and a longer memory,’ Wyatt agreed. ‘You know a lot of people. A lot of favours are owed to you.’
‘Better believe it,’ Ma said.
They were silent again.
‘I suppose you could have dumped him at sea,’ Ma said.
‘If I had been the one who’d killed him, then yes.’
‘Even so, you could have hidden him where he’d never be found.’
‘If I did that,’ Wyatt said, ‘if he disappeared without explanation, you’d eventually come after me.’
Ma nodded. ‘He was obsessed with you. He knew you had a job in the pipeline.’
‘I’d never have cut him in,’ Wyatt said. ‘Not in a million years.’
There was a flash of something like anger in Ma, but then she sighed. ‘True.’
‘You have the resources to collect his body and give him a proper burial, no questions asked,’ Wyatt said. He fished in his pockets, Ma watching like a hawk, and located the apartment key. He placed it on the glass top.
Ma nodded her thanks. At the same time, she was a businesswoman; making money was as important as familial rights and responsibilities. ‘You get your apartment cleaned up. What do I get?’
‘Apart from being reunited with your nephew?’ Wyatt said, raising an eyebrow.
This counted as humour in Wyatt. Ma scowled and it was like a storm cloud gathering. ‘You think that’s enough? Tyler was a loser. His mother—my sister—was a loser. I’m owed something for the years of strife and for cleaning up your mess.’
Wyatt gave her his cold smile to show that he’d only been needling her. ‘I’m selling the apartment. I’ve wiped it down and removed all of the paperwork. The furnishings are yours.’
‘Terrific. A couple of Ikea chairs and a microwave.’
‘Paintings,’ Wyatt said, ‘worth a quarter of a million dollars.’
‘Paintings?’
Wyatt looked around at the open door to the main part of the house, the bare walls of the hallway beyond. ‘Look good in there, Ma.’
He could tell she was intrigued. Her idea of decorating a house was to hang the wails with Collingwood Football Club posters and pennants. He wrote her out a receipt and handed over the provenance papers. ‘They’re now officially yours. They’re clean, I bought them legally.’
‘Warner?’ said Ma, screwing her eyes up, the papers a centimetre from her fleshy nose.
‘It’s a name I can’t use any more.’
‘So where’ll you go now?’
‘Where the money is,’ Wyatt said.
* * * *
48
Le Page’s corner of the world was at its best in autumn. Many people preferred spring, but spring was too rampant for Le Page’s tastes, the blackberry bushes reaching out their ensnaring canes, the trees overloaded with immature leaves, the bracken too glossy, the rivers and hillside streams flowing unchecked with the snowmelt, the roads, hiking tracks and villages already choked with tourists. Le Page had never met a tourist who was not vulgar and over-equipped. There was a factory, somewhere, churning out tourist clones.
Give him autumn.
He liked to walk in the afternoons, and most days he took a set route. His dirt-and-gravel access track wound for a kilometre through a beech forest, under a small-leaf canopy so dense that light and sound were diminished and his footsteps were almost silent on the leaves that freckled the moist ground. At a couple of places he was obliged to watch his feet over washaways and patches of black mud where ever-running streams cut across the road. In fact, the sound of water flowing over mossy stones and down the grooved runnels of the mountainsides was constant.
In recent days, Le Page had been listening for the sounds that didn’t belong. He did it again today, but heard only the water, then the buzz and snap of insects and blowsy blowflies, and the distant tock and tinkle that marked the motions of the sheep in the meadows above, below and across from his mountain slope. The old ways still persisted here. The Toulouse bourgeoisie converted the old fieldstone barns and farmhouses into weekenders, homes away from home, and found themselves alongside shepherds who had never married, never left the mountain valleys but tended their little flocks, ruled by the seasons and the ways of their forefathers.
Le Page waved away a butterfly and stepped over a couple of jet-black slugs. He’d reached the head of his access track. To the right a dirt road wound upwards to a couple of summit farms and the steeper slopes above the snowline. He was rarely inclined to go that way, for it took him away from civilisation. He had little regard for civilisation, but it did exercise his mind and senses, and so he took the left fork, which wound down to one of the narrow sealed roads that stitched together the farms and villages. The trees cleared to sparser clumps of ash and silver birch, while the road itself was lined on either side by grass, n
ettles and blackberry bushes. Late berries hung from the snarling canes and he stopped for a while to pick and eat them. No one came for these berries; the locals and the tourists came for those on the walking track beyond the crossroad ahead of him. The track drew a winding inscription across the glossy green meadowland above the valley villages and farming compounds. Here you’d meet jolly, striding hikers, old men out walking and middle-aged couples picking berries, their little Renaults and Citroens parked below somewhere. You might meet sheep, too, and silent old shepherds. Once upon a time you’d have met smugglers passing to and from Spain, and during World War II you’d have encountered members of the Resistance guiding downed Allied pilots over the Pyrenees.