by Peter Corris
It didn’t touch her, she was a fanatic. She blew more smoke.
“Since this is all so civilised among you nice white people,” she said evenly, “could I have that drink now?”
Tickener picked up the glass and poured a generous dose, at a gesture from me he passed the bottle over and we had a little more all round. The girl tossed the whisky off and held out her glass for more, Tickener poured and she sipped a toothful. She looked at me and her mouth split open in a wide, bitter grin.
“If it does your ego any good Hardy, you’re pretty right in what you’ve said. Australian capital is screwing New Caledonia and those bitches you’re protecting are up to their twats in it.” She let the grin down into the glass for a second and when she looked up her face was a mask, vaguely triumphant and hard as flint. “Australia doesn’t care about the nuclear tests as long as the shit comes down on our dirty black hides and not yours.”
“Spare us the rave. You’re a killer, you can’t criticise anyone.”
It was a pathetic response, she knew it and I knew it.
“But you’ll let me go Hardy,” she said softly. “You’re a liberal, soft as butter, you haven’t got the guts to do anything else. You probably half agree with me.”
“You might be right,” I said wearily. “Anyway you’re not important. It suits me to have you on a plane to New Caledonia tomorrow and that suits you too. You’re on your way.”
“Jesus, Hardy!” Tickener was up out of his chair spilling his drink down his shirt. “You can’t just turn her loose. She killed a man tonight. I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going on. Look at her, I’m not sure she should be allowed out on her own, she looks like she’d cut off your feet and eat them.”
I laughed. “She’ll go like a lamb Harry.” I picked the bottle up and poured him another drink. “You’ve got all you need, you can break the Brave story once and for all, final chapter, in about two hours. I’ll phone the cops and your story only needs a few touches to it.”
“Yeah, like who killed Brave?”
“That’s easy, we don’t know. I’ll phone in that he’s dead, I won’t identify myself, the cops will think it’s a spin-off from the Costello thing. That’s easily fixed. You get an anonymous tip. It’s simple.”
Tickener scratched his chin. “That puts you and me in very deep. Three people know what really happened. You’re clean, why not let it all come out the way it really was?”
“I’m protecting my client,” I said. “This way no one gets hurt, no injustice is perpetrated. Do you really think most situations like this get properly aired and resolved down to the last detail? Come on, Harry.”
“I guess not. OK, have it your way. What about them?” He pointed to Haines and the girl.
“She’s leaving the country tomorrow.”
All eyes swung to Haines. He was finishing his drink, his face was white and his big body looked light and fragile. I was reminded of Cavendish’s description of him as passive, given to violent outbursts. There didn’t seem to be an outburst left in him.
“What about him?” said Tickener.
I looked at Haines again and something clicked in my mind and I felt sorrier for him than I’ve ever felt for anyone in my life, except myself.
“No worries there,” I said softly, “I’ve just worked the last little piece into place. He’ll do whatever I say because I can tell him what he’s needed to know all his life.”
Haines looked up at me with complete understanding. He’d lived for twenty-odd years for just the moment that was coming and nothing was ever going to be the same for him after it had passed. It was going to be a kind of death.
CHAPTER 29
I washed up the glasses and put the liquor away, then I went around retrieving things like used tissues and cigarette ends. I got Haines to drive the VW around the track a few times and had Tickener bring up my car, his, and the hire car Brave had arrived in. We drove them round and by the time we’d finished the track was criss-crossed with tyre marks and skids that no one could make any sense of. I wiped the hire car, a Valiant, clean and left it parked halfway up the track from the road. Pali and Haines did most of the watching, Tickener and I did most of the work. When we’d finished we all congregated, by chance, around the body of Dr Ian Brave. He lay on his back, fully stretched out, with broken bamboo stems jutting up all around him and pushing through his clothes. He was inelegant and lumpy in death, he looked like an old, collapsed scarecrow. One eye looked sightlessly up to the clouds, the other was a dark horror; one half of his face was a smooth, chalky white, the other was crumpled and stained dark—it was a map of heaven and hell. Pali looked down at him and I thought I saw a nerve jump in her ebony mask.
“How did you fall in with him?” I asked gently. She responded to the tone of the question by making a keening movement of her head. She ran her right palm down the inside of her left forearm.
“Drugs,” she said.
I nodded and turned away. I didn’t touch Brave and cautioned the others to keep well clear. I left the gun where it was. A few footprints wouldn’t matter. The cops would figure it the easiest way for them, but there was no point in leaving clues about which might set them doubting. Haines was off in some private world of his own. He sat on the edge of the deck picking at his fingers and only came to life when Tickener suggested firing the shack.
“Why would you want to do that?” he asked nervously.
“To confuse things, cover the tracks a bit more,” Tickener said.
“You’re ruthless,” Haines said shaking his head, “ruthless.”
I laughed. “Don’t listen to him, Ross,” I said, “he’d just like to have a fire to spice up his story a bit.”
Tickener grinned and lit a cigarette. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said. “And speaking of stories, how do I write it just from an anonymous tip-off? Where’s the journalistic thoroughness of investigation, not to mention integrity?”
“Where it usually is,” I said. “Listen Harry, you’re learning fast but you’ve got a long way to go. You listen to the police radio, they’ll send a car, the car will call for an ambulance, you’ll get some details that way, not many. Your story is that this confirmed the tip-off, you took the plunge—journalistic flair and derring-do.”
“It sounds shaky,” he said doubtfully.
“It’ll do,” I said, “happens all the time. By the way, how’s Joe Barrett these days?”
“Not so good,” he said happily.
I went back into the shack for a last look around. I collected the guns and took a minute to examine Haines’ little .32.
“Have you got a licence for this?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“How come?”
“Company executives who sometimes carry large sums of money can get pistol licences.”
I tossed it to him and he caught it. “You shouldn’t have it up here though,” I said, “better shift it. It might get some cop’s mind working, miracles do happen.”
He put the gun in the pocket of his windcheater, he was as docile as an old, pampered dog.
“OK Ross,” I said, “you’ve been a good boy so far, let’s see if you can keep it up. Where are the files?”
He hesitated for just a second, he looked at Tickener who had on his bloodhound face and Pali who was immobile, uninterested. He raised his eyes to mine and if I looked as old and empty and comfortless as I felt it must have been like the last gaze into the mirror before you cut your throat.
“I’ll show you.” His voice was a hoarse, thin whisper. He went across to the food storing and cooking end of the room and knelt down. He peeled up the sea-grass and prised up three lengths of floorboard with his fingernails. It was a hiding place that an experienced man would have located within five minutes, but Ross was one of life’s amateurs and nothing I�
�d seen of him so far suggested that he’d ever become a pro. He reached into the gap and pulled out a medium sized executive briefcase. It was black with lots of shiny metal trim.
“Let’s have it,” I said. “And put the boards and mat back.”
I snapped open the lid, it wasn’t even locked, and took a quick look at the contents. The case was full of letters, bank statements and sheets of paper with what looked like bank note serial numbers written on them. Some of the material was in original, some in photostat. There were half a dozen cassette tapes and an envelope full of photographs. I rifled through the stuff. It was a complete blackmailer’s kit with applications for development permits neatly stapled to notes about sums of money and times and places of delivery. There were different versions of subdivision plans with names of surveyors and others entered on the back along with information about money paid. There were several newspaper extracts from court proceedings with the names of police witnesses underlined and code numbers entered in the margins; typed lists of the names of municipal councillors had similar entries alongside as many names as not. The numbers bore some relation to digits written on the faces of the cassettes. Handled right it was a meal ticket for life and the only thing that surprised me was the relatively small bulk of it. Mark Gutteridge had been in business a long time and if this was his game he should have collected more dope than was here.
“Is this all?” I asked Haines.
“Yes, I gave the people I contacted the material that affected them. There must originally have been about this much again.”
“How much money did you raise?”
“About twenty-five thousand dollars.”
I groaned and sat down on the bed. “You must have driven them crazy,” I said, “you said you marked some of the cops?”
“Yes, three, the really bad ones, they . . .”
“Spare me. You hit them for a thousand or so?”
“That’s right, roughly.”
“A fortnight’s takings, a month when things are slack. No wonder there was flurry from on high, they wouldn’t understand it. You were dead safe in a way. No copies?”
“No.”
“Of course not, wouldn’t be fair would it?”
“No.”
“You’re an idiot.” I snapped the case shut and got to my feet.
“Hey can I have a look?” said Tickener.
I fended him off. “Harry this is too hot to handle, I can’t let you have it.”
“What are you going to do with it?” There was pain in his voice and I remembered that he’d saved my life.
“Tell you what I’ll do mate, I’ll look through it, get out a crumb that won’t be traceable necessarily to this little box of goodies and give it to you. You can use it one quiet Wednesday when nothing’s happening.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“Burn it and let the bastards sweat.”
We went out to the cars. I got in the Falcon and motioned for Pali to sit alongside me. She did it, like a sleepwalker. Haines drove the VW. I locked the briefcase into a compartment under the driver’s seat. Tickener followed us along the track in his ancient Holden and we bumped down the road back to the highway. We drove to Katoomba like beads on a string with a set gap between us. I signalled a stop and went into a telephone booth for four minutes. It wasn’t a NIDA performance but it was good enough to set the wheels in motion. I walked back to Tickener’s car to check a few details of the story with him. We shook hands and agreed to meet soon for a drink. He pulled the Holden out and set off for his typewriter and coffee. It was midnight. We drove back to Sydney; Haines and the girl changed places at Central Railway and she drove off without a word.
I drove to Glebe, took Haines into the house and made some coffee. We talked around it a bit and confusion was the keystone of his attitude. He was a bit in love with Ailsa but too screwed up to know it. Any mention of his mother was like drawing a toenail. He was like a man with every layer of skin off except the last, tender to the touch at a hundred points, bleeding here and there where his obsession obtruded and teetering on a terrible abyss of pain. What I had to tell him pushed him over the edge and he fell, screaming silently inside his lonely, alien shell.
After that we sat quietly for a while drinking the last of the coffee. I called a taxi and he went back to what he had to call home.
CHAPTER 30
I crawled out of bed around 10 am. It was one of those bright, cool summer mornings that Sydney specialises in. I made coffee, got the paper in and read it out in the courtyard. Tickener had made the front page again with his account of the discovery of Brave’s body. There were no pictures. Haines was mentioned as the owner of the property and I spared him a thought for the yarn he’d have to spin to the police, but we’d worked out an alibi—a phone conversation with his employer which I’d have to confirm with Ailsa today—in case he needed one. My guess was that he wouldn’t. The cops had no reason to disbelieve that Haines’ place had been picked at random for the revenge killing of Brave and no reason to connect Brave to Haines beyond the Gutteridge connection. I didn’t think they’d be very interested in probing that.
I went inside and phoned Ailsa. She sounded well and I told her I’d be in that afternoon.
“Is it over Cliff?” she said.
“It’s over.”
“Is it all right?”
“It’s all right for you.”
“And Susan?”
“It’ll never be all right for her. I’ll tell you all about it this afternoon love, be patient.”
“Not my strong suit as they say in the books.”
I asked her if the police had approached her and she said they hadn’t. I asked her to confirm Haines’ alibi and she said she would, but she never had to. I rang off and went back to the paper and another cup of coffee.
Tickener shared the front page with the latest cricket win. That seemed to call for a modest salutation. I hauled the wine and soda and ice out of the fridge, made a bacon sandwich and set myself up out in the yard. The biscuit factory was just tingeing the air with butterscotch.
I got the briefcase out of the car. I scrabbled about for some kindling and paper and stuffed it into the barbecue I’d built out of bricks pinched from here and there at dead of night. I poured a glass of wine and opened the case. After thumbing through the papers for a while I selected and set aside a newspaper clipping, a typed sheet and a photostat of a land title deed. The remainder of the papers I fed into the fire. I put the cassettes across the top of the grill and watched them melt like chocolate. The smell in the air was of plastic, laminated paper and corruption. I drank some wine, ate the sandwich and watched the thin, dark smoke from the fire threaten the unsullied purity of Soames’ whitewashed wall. The Gutteridge files were a heap of fine ashes interspersed with blobs of molten plastic when the fire died down. I pushed them about to make sure of the completeness of the destruction and slung the briefcase back into the car.
After a shave and a shower I went out and drew another hundred dollars with the credit card. I drove over to Paddington and rambled through the shops, eventually coming out with a djellaba in blue and white vertical stripes with a hood and drawstrings at the cuffs. I had lunch in a pub and drove over to the hospital.
Ailsa was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She was wearing a long, off-white calico nightgown cut square around the neck. I went up and kissed her on the mouth and then in each of the hollows of her shoulder bones. She smelled of roses.
“You look good, you smell good, you feel good.”
She put her arms up around my neck.
“More,” she said.
“You’re the queen of the world.”
I gave her the parcel, she unwrapped it and smoothed the robe out on the bed. She immediately began fiddling with the drawstrings.
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sp; She looked up at me. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Now tell me about it.”
I gave her all the details, it took a long time and she listened quietly, tracing patterns in the raised nap of the robe on the bed.
“What was the black girl’s motive?” she asked when I finished.
“Partly political. She’s some kind of nationalist, anti-British, anti-French, anti-Australian. Anti just about every bloody thing. You have interests in Noumea?”
She nodded.
“So has Susan I suspect. Your people must be stepping on toes over there, maybe it’s a genuine grievance, I don’t know. Anyway, she was here for a little private terrorism. But Brave got hold of her, something to do with drugs. Brave was an addict. Did you know that?”
“No. I’ll have to look into that.”
“The Noumea operation?”
“Yes.” She drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Well, Mark started it all I suppose by keeping the files. There are a lot of casualties. What about the survivors? What did you mean about Susan never being right again?”
“That connects back to Ross,” I said.
“Obviously, what about him?”
I got up off the bed and moved around the room. I picked up one of her books and smiled at the dog ears at fifty page intervals.
“Don’t start pacing again Cliff or I’ll bloody kill you. No, I just won’t pay you. Just tell me about it.”
I sat down again. “I was on the wrong track about him for a long time. I thought he was obsessed by his mother, he wasn’t. I was misled by the photographs he had. He was hung up about his father. Natural I suppose.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “well, do you know who his father is?”
“Was. Yes, I worked it out eventually.”
“How? Who?”
“How first. It was the only thing that fitted. Mark Gutteridge sent Susan away to Adelaide to have her child. OK, he wanted to spare her and everyone else the teenage pregnancy trauma. Fair enough. But a tremendous change in the nervous pattern of the Gutteridges dates from then. It manifests itself in different ways and they never get over it. That’s the first point. Secondly, Mark Gutteridge wasn’t a conventional man. He shouldn’t have been horrified when his illegitimate grandson turned up with proof of his identity. He’d be more likely to be intrigued, inclined to do something for the boy, like a Renaissance prince, right?”