by Peter Corris
“I think I can promise you that,” I said.
“Lovely,” he gave me a tired smile. “Now, I got something off my chest and I’ve got your promise, my day is made. Shoot through Cliff. I’ll be expecting to hear from you.” I got up and patted him on the shoulder. He faked a collapse into his chair and picked up the top file in his IN tray.
I walked down the corridor and took the lift again. From the noise it made I might just have caught it on its last journey. The desk sergeant called me over and handed me the phone. It was Grant.
“I forgot to tell you to take care of yourself,” he said.
“Why do you say it now?”
“I keep up with what’s going on. Bryn Gutteridge’s chum was shot once, close in but very neat. Whoever did it had done it before.”
“I’ll sniff every hand I shake and watch for bulges under jackets.”
“If you meet him you probably won’t have time for one wisecrack.” The phone went dead. I hung on to it for a second listening to nothing.
7
I realised how beat up I looked when I hit the street and how ill-equipped I was for the weather. The storm that had been brewing broke when I was in the police building. Rain sheeted down bringing clouds of steam up from the pavements. The water soaked into my torn pants and dirty shirt which was pinkish from diluted blood. I had a change of clothes back in my office and I decided to complete the picture of ruin by taking the short walk there despite the rain.
I started out and caught sight in an oddly angled shop window of a red Volkswagen. It was well back and crawling along in the thick traffic. I took a turn and walked slowly down the street. A look in a parked car’s side mirror showed that the VW had stopped at the top of the street after making the turn. I still couldn’t get a glimpse of the driver.
I walked back to St Peters Street the most direct way, cleaned up, changed my clothes and came down after checking that there hadn’t been any calls. The rain had stopped, the air was moist and clean-tasting and all the city’s photochemical sludge was running down the gutters to the sea. I got the Falcon out of the tatooist’s backyard and took off going south-east. The VW picked me up and stayed with me through Taylor Square, Moore Park and Kensington. He was doing it quite nicely, like a pacer, one out and one back, and then letting me get away a little. I cruised past the University and took the turn to Maroubra.
The used car yards cuddled up against each other on both sides of the road over a short stretch of ugly Australia. I made a late turn left, a quick one right and pulled up under a heavily over-growing row of plane trees the council pruners must have missed. I pulled the Smith amp; Wesson out of its clip under the dashboard and jumped out of the car onto the road. The Volkswagen came round the corner and I faced it fifty yards ahead with the gun up. I counted on the element of surprise to bring the car to a stop but I was wrong. The driver slowed a fraction, then accelerated and came straight on like the Light Brigade. I swore, jumped aside, hit the Falcon hip and thigh and dropped the gun. The little red car roared to the end of the street, brakes screaming, then it slewed around in a full turn taking some of the sidewalk to do it, and came belting back towards me. Dead end street. That gave me a chance to reverse the roles. I picked up the gun as the VW passed me and had my car turning before its tail whipped around out of what had been a quiet little street twenty seconds ago.
The Volkswagen was new and the Falcon was old, but the horsepower was all on my side. I had the car in sight as it turned onto the highway and kept with it through thick and thin. The traffic thinned as we got into Maroubra and I moved up closer. The driver appeared to be small with frizzy dark hair and I saw the flash of light on wrap-around sunglasses on one of the turns. From his driving I assumed that he was worried, it was jerky and he wasn’t timing things well.
We moved on down towards the beach and then turned right up a steep hill flanked by tall apartment blocks with names like “Nevada” and “San Bernadino”.
I crowded the VW near the crown of the hill opposite “Reno”, but the driver found a little more speed and went into a cheeky slalom down the other side. I took evasive action, conscious of my lack of insurance, but I was hard on its twin exhausts when we turned into a long, flat run parallel to the beach. A mistake, I’d surfed along this beach for ten years and knew its geography like the back of my hand. It was deserted now, dark clouds were boiling up out over the sea and the road was slick with oily rainbow patches showing between the puddles.
I closed up behind the VW, timed the move and brought my black paintwork up alongside the red. I pulled my door handle down and held the door ajar. I blared my horn and gave the little car a quick flick with the door. It slewed away and shot through the only gap available — into a fenced parking lot which reached down to a toilet block and changing sheds on the beachfront. The VW driver struggled for control and then had to pull up within twenty yards. He made it, just. I ran in after it and brought the Falcon skidding in on an angle that closed off all exits.
I killed the engine, grabbed the. 38 and moved around my car. The other driver was sitting quietly, hands on the wheel, crying softly and shaking. The frizzy hair was short and black as pitch, the thin shoulders in the dark T-shirt were heaving and her face when she turned it up to me was dark as chocolate and beautiful as a rose. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. The flesh under my hand was soft and the bone felt like a fine steel rod.
“Take it easy,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Calm down and tell me why you were following me.”
She kept on shaking and sobbing and she dropped her head, the crisp hair curled on the nape of her neck like black metal filings. I wanted to touch them and moved my hand up.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” Her voice was lilting with an accent, not American. I stepped back and rubbed my tired face with the hand holding the gun. She jack-knifed from the car and sprinted for the beach bent low and balanced, legs pumping. I yelled and brought the gun up but she was too fast. She rounded the changing shed and was into the scrub before I’d taken a step. I lumbered after her but the day had taken its toll; there was no one in sight on the sodden beach and the flickers in the scrub a hundred yards away could easily have been branches in the wind.
I gave the car a quick once-over. It was a recent model which had been well kept. The clean vinyl and interior paintwork probably carried hundreds of fingerprints but I couldn’t see any point in collecting them. There was a service book in the glove box and a street directory in the driver’s side pocket. A folded copy of The News lay on the back seat open at the international news page. There was a pair of pliers and a roll of insulating tape in the passenger side door pocket; no cigarette butts, no night club matches, no soil obviously from the lower eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. For no special reason I wiped off places I’d touched in the car and wrote down the licence number. There were no keys in the ignition. That could mean one of two things — the car was stolen or the crying had been an act put on after she’d had the presence of mind to take the keys out of the lock. I pulled the bonnet release, yanked back the cardboard housing and looked in at the panel — nothing across the ignition terminals. Fooled again, Hardy.
It was after six and a warm drizzle had settled in when I got back into my car and started the motor. The Falcon protested the change in the weather by coughing and it flooded before I got it running reasonably. I swung her around, pulled out of the parking lot and took the road back to town. I stopped at a hamburger place and picked up one with all the trimmings. I got a six-pack of beer from a pub full of used car salesmen working on late afternoon marks and tired-looking men putting off going home to their wives.
8
I ate the hamburger and swigged the beer as I drove. The traffic was light and I made good time to Longueville. Lights were on in the front rooms and the colour TV sets were semaphoring comforting messages to each other across the deep gardens and quiet, damp streets. I parked about a hundred yards fro
m the entrance to the clinic on the opposite side of the road, and focused my night glasses on the relevant point. I could see cars approaching and turning into the reception booth from the other direction and I had a good view of the ones that passed me to get there. I figured I had about an hour at most before someone inside might tally up comments about the tone of the street and come out to investigate.
So I gave myself an hour with the thought that I might sneak an extra fifteen minutes if nothing happened. I was pretty sure something would happen — enough shit had been hitting the fan over the last twenty-four hours or so to produce some reaction in this area. I risked a cigarette or two, drank the beer, now heating up a bit but not too bad, and waited. The first car came about ten minutes after I arrived. It was a Rover, nice car.
The street light caught its number plate nicely as it made a purring turn to the reception booth. I had the glasses on it and wrote the number down. I was too far away to be sure, but I thought there was a driver in front and one passenger behind. Fifteen minutes later a car came up from behind, moving fast. I hunched down in the seat but it roared past. I sat up and then went down again as another car came from the same direction. A light coloured Fairlane swished past me and took the turn, too fast and not quite steady, into the clinic. The light didn’t hit this one as well as before, but he had to back out and take another run at the drive so I got the number with no trouble.
Ten minutes went by to the whisper of the falling rain. The Rover slid out onto the road and went back to where it came from. I checked my reading of the number plate and found I had it right. The second car left and the third arrived almost simultaneously. The Fairlane lurched out onto the road, collected the kerb and almost collided with an Italianate sports model which was gliding up towards the clinic and me. The driver flicked out of the path of the Ford and neatly whipped around to stop perfectly aligned with the gates. The number plate was a blur through all this. I swore and settled down to wait for the car’s reappearance. I felt edgy and exposed, I was pushing my luck.
After eight minutes lights went on in the compound and I heard a dog bark. Warning bells rang in my head and the name of every prison I’d ever heard of flashed through my mind. I didn’t have all the information I wanted but I had enough.
The Falcon threatened to flood but relented. I revved it firmly, did a tight U turn and got the hell out of Longueville.
Mosman seemed a hundred miles away and all of it uphill. I washed down a few caffeine tablets with a swill of beer and concentrated on navigating the greasy roads. I was tired or I would have noticed it at least ten minutes sooner — an unchanging pair of headlights centred in my rear vision mirror like bright, sparkling diamonds. The driver knew nothing about tailing, which was comforting, but I felt I’d had enough of that scene for one day. He would have followed me down a sewer and it was child’s play to fake a right turn and then run him into the kerb. When he stopped his left front wheel was up on the concrete and the genteel, muted neon lights of the Waterson amp; Sons funeral parlour were flashing in his eyes.
I got out cautiously and kept the gun down in my jacket pocket. The car was an old FB Holden and the driver was not all that much older than it was. He had damp blond hair, pretty long, but there wasn’t enough of it to be worth spending much time on. There wasn’t much of him all round — he looked almost childlike sitting in the car with his sports jacket collar turned up. I could see a tight grin on his face and he was fumbling inside his breast pocket as I approached the car — he was so amateurish it was almost funny.
I leaned on the car and rapped on the driver’s window. A wallet and some papers spilled out on his lap as he pulled his hand out to wind down the window. He leaned forward to recover the papers presenting me with a thin, clean neck that I could have broken between my thumb and forefinger.
“I have identification.” His voice squeaked a bit and was young and educated.
“Let’s not worry about who you are first off,” I said. “Everybody has identification, everyone is someone if you get what I mean. Why were you following me?”
“That’s connected with who I am.”
He seemed determined to tell me and I thought I’d better sit down to receive the impact. I walked round the back of the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side at the front.
“Right. This is cosy. Now, who are you and why were you following me?”
He pushed the wallet over. Tucked in one of its compartments was a press identification card with photograph. The name on the card was Harry Tickener and it was him all right on the photograph; he had to be the only one of his kind in captivity.
“OK, you’re an artist. Let’s have the answers.”
“I work on The News. I just got up to the political reporting team last week, from sports, you might have seen the byline?”
“I don’t follow the volleyball all that closely. Come on, get to the point.”
“I haven’t done much yet in the political line. I’ve mostly run errands for Joe Barrett.”
Now that was a name with clout. Barrett was by way of being a crime-busting political reporter and he’d made some fat faces very red in his time. The News occasionally gave him his head on a story and he was very good for circulation when they did. He went a bit wild sometimes so they used him sparingly. Tickener pulled out some thick plain American cigarettes and got one lit after a struggle. He puffed, didn’t draw back and the Holden turned into a fair imitation of a second class smoking compartment on the New South Wales railways. I reached across, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it out the window.
“If you want me to say ‘Quit stalling’ I will. I’ll pull a rod and do a Cagney impression if you insist, but how about just telling me in plain and simple English what you’re up to.”
He nodded and the words tumbled fast. “I took a call for Joe. She must have thought she had got on to him direct, anyway I didn’t get time to say who I was. She said she had a tip on a big story and if I
… if Joe wanted to get in on it he should start taking an interest in Dr Ian Brave. She said she’d call again if she saw any signs of interest at our end.”
“So you took the job on?”
“Yes, there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Joe’s in Canberra for a few days. I thought I could do the initial poking around and let Joe take it from there. Or maybe he’d let me follow it through, I don’t know. Anyway, it sounded interesting so I went out tonight to have a look at Brave’s place. I saw you parked and watching the clinic, so when you left I followed you. I thought you might lead me to someone, maybe the woman who rang.”
“Where were you?”
“My car was two blocks away. I watched you from the garden of the house on the corner of the street you were in.”
He looked wet enough for it to be true and the story sounded straight.
“Tell me about the woman’s voice.”
“It was nice, educated, with an accent.”
“What sort of accent?”
“European, not Italian, maybe French.”
It checked. The net was getting thrown wider all the time and it seemed like the moment to bring in some keen, unpaid help. I was thinking how to put it to him when I caught sight of my face in his rear vision mirror. It looked like it had been made out of a kerosene drum; my skin was pale and creased and my nose and jaw were sharp and cruel. I tried to produce a smile out of this unsuitable material and to get a half-way human tone into my voice.
“Look Tickener, we could get together on this. I think there is a story in it and you could have it. If I call you in it’s your story, not Barrett’s. That tip was incidental, get it?”
He nodded slowly. “It isn’t quite ethical, but…”
I broke in. “Ethical is what doesn’t keep you awake. It’s different from one person to another, that’s what’s interesting about it. Do you want to hear more?”
“Yes.”
I gave him some of the details, stressed the political impli
cations and the likelihood of high level police involvement, hence the need for security at the investigative end. He came in like a well hooked trout. He was eager to do anything, he’d go anywhere, meet me anytime. I almost regretted the impulse to use him, faithful dogs can get in the way, but I felt that events to come would justify co-opting him. I gave him the licence numbers — of the Volkswagen and the cars that had visited the clinic that night — and told him his first assignment was to get the names and addresses of the people to whom they were registered. He said he had a contact in the right place for this dating from the days when he used to follow football players to get a line on what clubs they might defect to. I felt better about him. We agreed to be at our respective phone numbers at a certain time the next day. We shook hands. I got out of the car and he drove off, probably with dreams of Watergate in his head. I eased myself back into the traffic and headed for Mosman where the drizzle would look romantic falling on the lapping waves and the mansions.
9
The Alfa was looking racey and the boat toey when I arrived at Ailsa’s place. I parked the Falcon next to the boat and took the steps two at a time to test my wind. It seemed to take ten minutes to reach the top and I wondered how Ailsa made out on fifty smokes a day. The door was made of Oregon pine with glass panels. The curtains inside drew across what looked like a hundred yards of glass on each side. I gave the handle an experimental turn. It was locked, as befitted the front door of a lady whose car has been booby trapped with gelignite. I pressed the bell and waited. Ailsa’s voice came from inside, back a bit and to one side. Good.
“Who is it?”
“Cliff Hardy.”
To judge from the sound she was drawing a bolt and undoing a chain. She said “Come in”, and I opened the door and pushed aside a section of the heavy curtains. Ailsa was standing well inside the room, with one hand up to the electric light switch and the other full of a big, black gun pointing at my navel. We looked at each other for a full quarter minute.