by Jean Bedford
“But why did they suspect you in the first place?” I asked. It was really hard not to direct all the questions to the old woman — he referred them to her, anyway.
“I…” he looked at his mother. She nodded impatiently. “I knew those girls,” he said, in a slow voice. “They liked my kites.”
“Kites?” Graham prompted, and got a pleased nod in answer.
The old woman leaned forward. “He has fine collection,” she said, like the mother of a small boy, pride mixed with exasperation in her voice. “Many kites. Big ones…” Her gnarled hands made a large shape in the air. “He fly them in the park, down there.” She gestured through the lace curtains towards the football ground and the tangled bush near the creek. “Every weekend. Only now, not so much. People stare at him after Kylie disappear… sometimes they say things, upset him.” She looked away from us, into her own unhappiness. “He go sometimes to different park now. Far… farther away.”
Joe took his moods from his mother, too, and now his pleased smile faded.
“I didn’t hurt them,” he said, suddenly. “I just let them hold the strings sometimes. They were nice little girls. My friends.”
There wasn’t much more to be got. Joe must have looked like an obvious suspect to the neighbourhood — a rather odd bachelor with a foreign mother — and to the police, too. It would have been an easy solution. I thought of the Christie case and shivered. That supposed murderer had actually been executed, for no real reason other than his peculiarity, and Christie’s confession had come too late.
As we were getting up to go, with polite thanks for the coffee, I thought of something.
“Mrs Kominsky, the newspapers referred to you as friends of the Johnson family at the time…?”
She shrugged. “I know the mother, Carol. Just a bit. She work in the supermarket. Nice lady. We talk sometimes. Her mother Polish, like me. She talk Polish to me.” She hesitated at the door, then decided to tell us the rest. “Joe do… did… her garden. Sometimes. Cart rubbish away. He work there the day Kylie disappear. But he do nothing, Miss Anna. He’s good man.”
I think it was the ‘Miss Anna’ that did it, from this fabulous old biddy. I left Graham at the car and marched next door. When I came back I felt better.
“I told her that on second look it wasn’t prickly pear at all,” I said and started the car. We were both silent on the drive back. I really didn’t want it to be Joe, but I had to admit it was possible, and Graham obviously felt the same way. I dropped him at his place in Leichardt and went home.
*
I spent a miserable night alone with Toby, feeling restless and uneasy. I didn’t like the side of detecting I’d seen that afternoon, and I knew the memory of Mrs Kominsky would nag at me for a while. At 2 a.m., finally admitting insomnia, I got up and made myself a glass of hot milk. I took it back to bed with my notepad and pen, and tried to work out what we should do next.
Rex Channing, I thought. How did he make his money? I made a note — we should check out his business interests. Perhaps he had enemies who wouldn’t stop at kidnapping his daughter. I wondered vaguely how you did check out such things, and realised I was very sleepy. Lorna would know. I had another important thought as I drifted into unconsciousness, but I didn’t have the willpower to write it down, and by the time I woke up I’d forgotten it.
I was grumpy and slightly manic in the morning. When Graham arrived I was rearranging pot-plants and fussing over the placement of furniture. He took one look at me and quietly edged towards the coffee-maker. With a strong long black in my hands I calmed down a bit. It was one of those times I would have killed for a cigarette, but Graham had never been a smoker — no budging there — and I knew if I went out and bought a packet I’d fall right off the wagon in my present mood and be chain-smoking again in no time.
“Well, boss?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking hard. “I wish we could talk to Leonie.”
“Well — can’t we try? She can only refuse.”
I stared at him. Thoughts of Paul Whitehouse’s reaction if he heard about it made me anxious. I wondered why it mattered to me what he thought.
“You do it,” I said. “And make up a good cover story. I don’t want it getting back to Paul.”
“Okay, leave it to me,” and he picked up his jacket and went out, whistling. I watched him with awe, thinking this was a new and determined Graham. Then I shrugged and looked at last night’s notes. Rex’s business dealings. I should ring Lorna. I was reaching for the phone when it rang under my hand. I hesitated, wondering if it was going to be another threatening call, then picked it up. I didn’t get a chance to go into my receptionist’s act before Trent’s most exaggerated queen’s voice overrode me.
“Anna, pet! I looked under the loose brick and then I banged and banged on the door, but no one came. Not even me, and I love a good bang…”
“Oh shit,” I said. “I forgot to get the new key made. What time was it?”
“I don’t know — yesterday afternoon some time. Want me to come over now?” His voice had reverted to its normal pleasant baritone.
“Yes, please.” I thought of the messy kitchen upstairs. Trent was a law unto himself, and could be a complete nightmare if he was having any sort of emotional upheaval, which was often, but he did clean a good house. He was also always losing the key to my place. I sometimes thought I should just make a weekly ritual of getting a new one cut, except that I got the shudders when I thought of how many were already lying around Sydney’s main beats. And probably some outside Sydney… I worried about his habits — particularly his penchant for rough trade. I expected him to get beaten to death one night, or, if not that, then it would be the ghastly vigil in the AIDS ward. I really wished he’d meet a nice bloke and settle down.
“Okay, I’ll be right over.” He sounded cheerful, anyway, I thought. I put the phone down and looked up the Rag’s number again. It was so like my old one at Glebe that I kept forgetting it. Again the phone rang before I could dial, startling me. This time it was Rita — I’d forgotten all about our tennis date. I hadn’t done very well with Monday’s list — my clothes were still waiting to go to the dry-cleaner’s, too. I listened to her rattle on for a while, apologised for keeping her waiting at the courts and laughed at her enthusiastic description of the man who’d finally offered her a game of singles, ended up driving her home, asking her to dinner and sending her flowers. It was the sort of thing that was always happening to Rita, a fluffy blonde who looked as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. In fact she worked as a counsellor for transsexuals in the Cross. I arranged to call her when I was less busy, and, finally, dialled the number of the paper.
Lorna’s cool, cigarette-husked voice came on, “Yeah?”
“Lorna, it’s Anna. Can you tell me about Rex Channing’s business interests?”
“Sure can.” Lorna had developed her laconic style early. At school she was always being berated for her ‘yes/no’ answers, particularly in essays. It was one of the many things that had infuriated the nuns — they knew she was having them on, and she did brilliantly in all the important exams.
“What d’you want to know?”
“Oh, who he owes, who might bear him a grudge, that sort of thing. A general run-down.” I hoped she knew what I meant — I didn’t have a clue.
“Okay.”
“Lorna.” I was wary. “Was he… were he and Clyde very closely connected?”
“Who knows? They knew each other, that’s for sure. Get back to you. Okay?”
I sat back, smiling, then I got up and made a fresh cup of coffee.
*
An hour later, with Trent upstairs bustling the vacuum cleaner around, I sat doodling on my notepad, yet another coffee beside me and the cryptic all done except for a chemical formula meaning the silicate of something I’d never heard of, somehow combined with an African monkey, and wondered how to fill in the rest of the day. Then the fleeting, half-grasped thought of
the night before came back and hit me — Glenn Sheedy! He’d been in charge of the investigation into Clyde’s death until suddenly called off and we’d become sort of friends in that time. He knew Lorna quite well — he was one of her ‘good’ cops. I could see he’d known there was something shady going on, and that he wanted to find out what it was. He was really pissed off at being taken off the case — we’d had a bad argument when he accused me of pulling strings. By then I had my little briefcase full of names and dates, and I was sorely tempted to pass it over to Glenn. But I hadn’t. What good could it do? Clyde was dead.
Since then Glenn and I had had a few lunches and he’d given me advice about setting up the agency — mostly along the lines of ‘Don’t do it’. I liked him a lot, and he seemed to like me, too, in a heavily avuncular way.
Glenn wasn’t in, but I left a message. I needed to know exactly what the police claimed Leonie Channing had said, and I also wanted to trace the Johnsons and learn a little more about Kylie’s disappearance. Meanwhile, I thought, heaving myself into action, I could at least go to the library and look up the other newspaper archives. I got as far as the garage and then thought of the ferry. It was a beautiful day, and why live in Balmain if you never take the ferry? I felt better at the thought of the strong salt wind that always seems to cut across the harbour. Blow away the cobwebs, I thought.
Chapter 4
The next few days are such a blur that it’s hard to put them in order. From the moment I felt the push in the back as I moved towards the ferry ramp, to the moment I woke up in Balmain Hospital with concussion, multiple abrasions and a few broken ribs, is a complete blank. Twenty-four hours of my life gone. I should have been thankful — remembering being crunched between the ferry and the wharf and nearly drowning probably wouldn’t be all that great. I had a peculiar sort of partial amnesia at first. I could remember my unmarried name, but not my address or phone number. I knew I had a white cat called Toby, which wasn’t much help.
But the sight of Graham’s familiar face helped a lot. He’d rung nearly every hospital in Sydney until, on the second try, Balmain had admitted having someone of my general description.
“You look terrible,” he said, over a huge fragrant bunch of Tasmanian hybrid freesias. I usually don’t like the hybrids, but these were lovely.
“Graham! Graham… Connelly,” I said triumphantly. Then, “Graham, what’s my name? They can’t find any Anna Neville in the phone book.”
Looking at his shocked, sympathetic face, other things came flooding back.
“Leonie Channing,” I said. “Did you talk to her?”
“Yes,” he sat down on the vinyl chair near the bed, “but I’m not going to talk about any of this until you’re a bit better. What happened, Anna? They said an accident on the ferry…”
“Oh,” I said. I remembered the wharf, the queue to the ramp. There had been a large group of school children coming off. I couldn’t really remember much about the others waiting to get on with me — I’d been reading my Dorothy Sayers. A young woman with small kids, I thought; a couple of men; an elderly woman with a shopping trolley. But the school party had been swarming everywhere, and we’d had to shuffle over near the stanchions to give them room. I remembered the push and then the utterly helpless feeling of falling.
“Graham — I was pushed! Didn’t anyone notice?”
He didn’t want to believe me. “No,” he said slowly. “Some bloke saw you trip and said he’d put out a hand to catch you, but you were already over the edge. The ferry captain called the ambulance and gave you mouth-to-mouth. That’s all I found out here. I haven’t spoken to the ambulance driver…”
“I wonder if he gave his name?” The picture of a dark-haired man in jeans and a thick jumper was gradually forming in my mind. I wondered if I’d remember his face if I saw him again.
“Graham, we have to get the accident report,” I said urgently. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”
A nurse came in and told Graham he would have to go. She seemed pleased that I’d remembered who I was and told me I was being moved to a ward now that I was recovering. I looked around the little bare room and I was relieved. Any would-be murderer would find it a lot harder with other patients around.
Graham gave me a kiss and said he’d probably come in again that night.
“The accident report,” I said as he went out the door. “Don’t forget.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, and bowed.
*
I slept for most of the afternoon, except for the uncomfortable routines of having my temperature taken every hour and the dextrose drip replaced periodically. Then I lay in a drowse, trying to put it all together. If the threatening phone call and the ferry incident were related, which it seemed they must be, then whatever it was about must pre-date our involvement in the Channing case. I was aware of vague anxiety stirring underneath the sedatives. What was it I was meant to keep out of? Could it be something to do with Clyde?
Graham’s visit later, after a half-hearted hospital meal of soup and custard, which was all I could force past my damaged ribs, didn’t do much to cheer me up. He’d managed to get the gist of the accident report from the ambulance driver, but it was unhelpful. One of the ferry workers had actually dived in after me. He’d checked him out, and the names of the other witnesses, and they all tallied except one — the man who’d said he’d tried to stop me falling.
“The phone number he gave was one of those ‘dial your own horoscope’ things,” he said. “And the address was a school in Marrickville. They’d never heard of a Jack Robinson, funnily enough.” We made a face at each other.
He’d obviously been busy, and I squeezed his hand gratefully.
“Someone who lives in the inner west and has a penchant for astrology,” I said, trying to be funny. “He shouldn’t be hard to find.”
He also had little to report about Leonie Channing. He’d pretended to be a social worker from a new ‘prisoners outside bars’ self-help organisation. I had an immediate picture of a chain-gang sinking schooners outside some pub like the Riverview, and laughed. It hurt, and Graham looked offended.
“No,” I said, “it was a brilliant idea. So what was she like?”
“I didn’t take to her,” he said. “She’s a dour piece — hard face, black hair, lots of makeup. And she wouldn’t say a word. I said if the police had lied about her admissions we could do something, and she just laughed. Then I asked her if she felt she was being treated properly, if she had any complaints, and she said she didn’t care. She had no complaints about anything. It was a dead loss.” He shook his head. “Awful house, too, full of things. Ornaments and photographs. Here,” he remembered something. “I nicked this when she wasn’t looking. Is that Rex?”
“Graham!” but I took the photo eagerly. It showed Leonie Channing with a grim smile in the background and Rex grinning at the rather sulky-looking little girl on his lap. I was surprised at the love in his face. It made him look like a different person.
“It was on the back of the shelf near where I’d put my briefcase,” he said. “It was the only one with a man in it. She must have forgotten it was there.”
“Well, that’s Rex. Rex the family man. But it doesn’t help much, does it?”
“Oh, by the way, Glenn Sheedy rang,” he said. “Said he was returning your call.” he looked at me suspiciously.
“Good.” I told Graham what I wanted Glenn to find out for us and he promised to get on to him in the morning. I also asked him to send a case of good beer to the ferry workers. The same nurse came in to shoo him out — she must have worked a twelve-hour shift — and I was so tired I was glad to be alone.
I was taken off the drip and allowed biscuits with my supper-time tea. It still hurt to swallow. The others in the four-bed ward seemed to be permanently asleep, except for a pretty Aboriginal woman in the next bed to me, who had a constant stream of visitors and kept escaping outside with them for a cigarette. She smiled and gave me the thumb
s-up signal as I settled down to sleep.
“Domestic?” she asked knowledgeably.
I shook my head. “Accident,” I said. “I fell off a ferry.”
She was impressed, but I was too tired to talk, and switched off the light. I closed my eyes against the image of her sitting bolt upright in her bed, edgy and bored and energetic. I wondered, in a vague way, what was wrong with her.
*
Two days later I was allowed home, after a battery of tests had tentatively established there were no clots or fragments of bone in the brain. I was sore all over but my head had more or less stopped aching, and the bruises round my eyes were barely noticeable under liquid makeup. I said goodbye to Francie in the next bed — she was being moved, too, over to the cancer ward at RPA. She’d come into Casualty with severe back pain; now it was diagnosed. It had knocked off some of her bounce, but she was still slipping out for a smoke whenever she could. Her husband, a stocky little lair, had gone grey in the face overnight. On the way out I ordered flowers to be waiting for her when she got to her new bed. Graham helped me to his old Holden, which he’d finally got out of the garage after six months of what he called minor cosmetic work.
“I’ve arranged for a security guard,” he said, wincing at the clanking sound that started up under the bonnet as soon as we drove off. “He’ll just keep watch outside the house — he won’t follow you about.”
I was touched. Even more so when I met him — a wiry Welshman called Evan Kingdom, with a black belt in karate, he told us. He was sitting on the front step with Toby on his lap when we pulled up and I took an instant liking to him.
Graham drove off again after he’d introduced me to Evan, saying mysteriously that he ‘had a lead to follow up’. I promised I’d take things easy and be careful, but as soon as I’d changed my clothes I headed for the office. I felt jumpy after my enforced rest. On my desk was a summary of what Graham had got from Glenn Sheedy on Kylie Johnson’s disappearance. I made coffee and settled down to read it.