by Peter Corris
‘Saw you going into those other houses,’ she said. ‘Knew you’d be coming here.’
I showed her the licence. She drew on the cigarette and puffed smoke over my shoulder. She was tall and lean, wearing a singlet top and shorts. Bare feet.
‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about what happened when the church was damaged,’ I said. ‘That is, if you were here.’
She moved her thin body aside to let me pass by her into the house, although I could have made it easily. She stayed propped up against the door and I had the feeling that she’d touch the wall all the way down the passage. Either that or grab me for support. She was a good-looking, thirty-five-ish woman with short dark hair and glazed blue eyes. She was very drunk. ‘Insurance,’ she said.
‘No. I’m a private detective. I’m making enquiries about the death …
She took a risk, moved away from the door-jamb and grabbed my arm. The cigarette threatened to burn a hole in my shirt sleeve. ‘Come in,’ she slurred, ‘it’s about time someone looked into this.’
5
She walked with unnatural steadiness down the dark passageway towards the light. She grabbed at the door that led through to the kitchen and I’d have bet there was a mark on the wood at just that spot from all the other times before. The kitchen was modern and dirty. The polished floorboards were sticky and there were glasses and mugs all over the sink and a few more of each on the table. There was no sign of solid food ever being consumed. She made straight for the bench where a four-litre cask of white wine was sitting precariously near the edge. On the floor beneath it was a thick puddle that had attracted flies and dust.
She dropped her still-burning cigarette into the sink and, without consulting me, took a glass from beside the sink. She ran water into it, swilled it out, and filled it to the brim from the cask. Then she filled her own. ‘Have a drink.’
I took the glass, feeling the slippery, greasy surface and wondering how long since it had seen hot water.
‘Let’s go outside.’
The french windows were open. She made it through them with inches to spare on one side and flopped down on a banana lounge, the metal legs of which moved and scratched the patio’s tiles, not for the first time. I sat opposite her in a canvas deckchair. She lifted her glass carefully to her mouth; her breasts rose under her singlet and the thin roll of fat around her waist tensed. She drank and the flesh subsided. ‘I didn’t get your name?’
‘Cliff Hardy. From Sydney.’ I don’t know why I said that, possibly because I thought she might talk more freely to someone who wasn’t going to be around to talk about her.
She grinned sloppily and sang, in a passable imitation of the voice that used to close down one of the Sydney TV stations each night, back when the stations closed: ‘My city of Syd-ney, I’ve never been a-way. Great town, better than this hole.’
I got out my notebook, allowing me to put the dirty glass of warm wine down on the tiles. ‘Mrs …?’
‘Atkinson, Rhonda Atkinson, formerly of Sydney, now of Shitville.’
‘You said there was reason to enquire about the damage to the church.’
‘That’s right. Finally getting the message, are they?’ She drank half of her glass in two gulps and waved her hand at the kitchen. ‘Would you get my smokes? They’re in there somewhere.’
I went into the kitchen and looked around among the debris. A packet of Sterling ultra-milds and a disposable lighter lay on a shelf above the sink along with an array of about twenty bottles with labels detailing the prescribed doses. ‘The capsules, for depression’; ‘the tablets, for sleeplessnness’, ‘the tonic …’ They were all prescribed for Mrs R. Atkinson and they did not make me feel hopeful. None of the labels recommended that they be taken with liberal quantities of cheap wine.
I took the cigarettes out to Mrs Atkinson. She flipped the box open and pulled one free with a practised pout of her full lips. I lit it for her.
‘Want one?’
I shook my head and went back to the chair.
‘Wowser, are you? Don’t drink neither?’
I couldn’t have that. I grabbed the glass and took a decent swig. I’d drunk it warmer and worse in my time, much worse. ‘Tell me about the church, Mrs Atkinson.’
She finished off her drink and rested the empty glass on her slight stomach roll. She blew smoke in the direction of Holy Cross. ‘My husband’s under there,’ she said, ‘only they won’t bloody-well admit it.’
Rhonda Atkinson was convinced, or pretended to be convinced, that her husband was beneath the collapsed foundations of the church across the road. To the suggestion that the wreckage had been cleared and only one body discovered she said, ‘Huh, with bloody great scoops and shovels as big as a room. They must’ve missed him. Dumped him in a truck like garbage.’ She knew nothing about Oscar Bach and cared less. She had not been at home when the earthquake struck. It took half an hour and lot of phony note scribbling and head nodding and the finishing off of the glass of warm white to get away from her.
I drove slowly around Hamilton thinking that the earthquake had claimed more victims than people realised. Mrs Atkinson was another one. Her kind is always produced by natural or man-made disasters. Ask around after any revolution and you’ll find wives whose husbands have seized the chance to slip away. The town was battered all right, almost every big building showed signs of damage. There must have been a lot of closing down sales and dust-damaged goods going cheap. Big, solid trees grew along the roads and in the parks; I thought of their roots going down and wrapping around house-sized boulders under the ground, gripping the bedrock. It made the 180-year-old city seem very impermanent.
Long and painful experience has me that the first thing to do when arriving in a town and preparing to annoy the citizens is to check in first with the cops. Newcastle is a nicely laid out place, a sort of ribbon running along a narrow spit of land with water—the Pacific Ocean and the Hunter River—on both sides. The Police Headquarters was on the corner of Church and Watt Streets, and my Gregory’s showed me how handy everything was for the authorities—the court house, a hospital and the morgue were all nearby. I parked legally, beginning as I meant to go on, and walked a couple of blocks to the police station. Nice wide streets, solid buildings; it must have filled the convicts with pride to have hacked all this out of the swamp and scrub.
No one at Police HQ was overly impressed by my credentials, but they didn’t kick me down the steps. After some sitting, thumb twiddling and yawning in a waiting room that was about one step above a lockup for comfort, I was shown into the presence of Detective Inspector Edward Withers. That’s what it said on the nameplate on his desk. He didn’t look up from his paperwork, just pointed to a chair and said, ‘Ticket’.
I put the licence on the desk just out of his reach and sat down. He continued to flick through papers and make notes. I sat. To look at the licence he’d have to stop paper shuffling. Balding head hunched over, wide shoulders, shirt sleeves, loosened tie, wedding ring glinting as he methodically shifted a stack of papers and files from his left to his right. To talk to him would be like talking to a hay bailer. War of nerves.
Eventually he had transferred every sheet and folder from one side to the other. Had to do something with those big, meaty hands. He reached for the licence, glanced at it and dropped it as if it was something that needed wiping.
‘What’re you doing here, Hardy?’
The voice, coming out of a face that looked as if it had been kicked more often than kissed, was what you’d expect, a deep, don’t-bullshit-me rumble. I considered lying, running some line about insurance or worker’s compensation, but something about his manner deterred me. He was a cop of the old school—thirty years on the force, no more corrupt than anyone else and less than some, good at scaring the shit out of ninety per cent of the crims he dealt with and probably a good family man. Tell the truth and he might cooperate, lie and be caught out and you’d lose some teeth. ‘I’m working for Horrie Jacob
s, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Know him?’
He nodded.
‘He thinks a mate of his wasn’t killed in the earthquake the way everyone else thinks.’
He picked up a pen and pulled a notepad closer. ‘Who would that be?’
‘A man named Oscar Bach.’
He dropped the pen, but I couldn’t tell whether he was surprised or just uninterested. ‘Inquest. Bit of a bloody church came down on him.’
‘That’s not what Mr Jacobs thinks.’
Withers sighed. He was bored already and I could imagine him lifting the phone and calling for another batch of papers. ‘D’you know how many problems we’ve had to deal with this year? Dodgy insurance claims, damaged vehicles, looters, squatters …’
‘Missing husbands,’ I said.
He raised his thin, fair eyebrows. His beaten-up, ugly face didn’t get any prettier but a bit more intelligence showed.
‘I met a woman in Hamilton who’s got a bee in her bonnet.’
‘Rhonda Atkinson,’ he said. ‘Have you been bothering people already? Before checking in with us?’
First slip, Cliff, I thought. Watch it. ‘No. We just had a chat. She did most of the talking.’
‘That’d be right. Well, what does Mr Jacobs want you to do for him?’
I gave him the gist of Horrie’s case, keeping it spare. I also said I’d talked to Ralph Jacobs. The name registered with him. I played it as crooked as I thought I could get away with, suggesting that I was sceptical about Horrie’s story and doing the family a favour if I found nothing to support it. He listened and even made a few notes. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Who can I ring in Sydney to get a reference on you? I’d prefer someone who’s not in the Bay.’
Cop humour, better than no humour at all. I smiled politely. I gave him Frank Parker’s name and number and stared out the window while he made the call. We were on the north side of the building and I could see out across commercial rooftops to the railway station and the harbour. It looked as if a lot of work had been done on the waterfront—I could see fresh paint and gleaming metal. The water was a deep blue and, in contrast to similar views in Sydney, the ships were cargo vessels, not a yacht in sight.
Withers put the phone down and looked at me as if I might just possibly be house-trained. ‘Parker gives you a good name. He tells me you sometimes need a word, to stop you from getting yourself into trouble.’
‘That’s fair enough,’ I said.
‘We don’t like extra trouble around here. We’ve got all we need.’
I was still gazing at the fine view. ‘Looks pretty quiet to me, but you never know what you’re going to find when you turn over a rock, or a brick.’
‘Parker also said you liked to come the needle. I don’t care for that too much.’
I looked away from the window towards the man at the desk. It was like turning off Jana Wendt and looking at the wall. ‘Look, Inspector, I don’t want trouble. If you can help me to get a look at the autopsy report on Bach, talk to the paramedics, tell me what the word on him was, fine. If not, I’ll just quietly go through channels and knock on doors.’
He looked at my licence again, jotted a few things on his notepad and pushed the vinyl folder across the desk towards me. ‘Far as I know, there was nothing about Bach to interest us. I’d be surprised if there was any sort of file on him. Migrant, I seem to remember. Ran a little business. Cleanskin. Autopsy? I dunno Did he have any family?’
‘Not that I’ve heard of.’
‘Sad, that. Family life’s the only thing worth having. You got a family, Hardy?’
‘No. Frank Parker’s boy, Clifford, is my godson. That’s as close as I get.’
He frowned. ‘I see. Well, the autopsy must’ve been done somewhere. It was all pretty chaotic there at the time. I’m sure you can track it down. I can help with one thing though. I can put you in touch with the police officer who found Bach. How’d that be?’
‘That’d be a big help. Who’s that?’
Withers smiled, showing big, uneven, yellow teeth. ‘Senior Sergeant Glenys Withers. My daughter.’
6
I suppose I’d been expecting a broad-beamed stalwart, all epaulettes and nightstick with a high-riding hip pistol. Glenys Withers was a slender woman with short brown hair and a lean, sensitive face. She was sitting behind a desk where her father said she’d be—in the personnel section, but she wasn’t nearly as interested in paper shuffling as he was. She looked up as soon as I was within speaking distance. A sure sign that the person behind the desk welcomes distraction.
‘Yes?’ Nice voice, quiet, good-humoured, not much good for crowd-control, but it’s amazing what a bullhorn can do. I was too old a hand to judge a cop by its cover.
I put my licence folder down in front of her. ‘I’ve just been talking to Inspector Withers, upstairs, Senior,’ I said. ‘He recommended that I see you next.’
She examined the photo and the printed details as if she’d never seen a PEA licence before. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she interviewed people for jobs like hers. If so, what had she been doing in Hamilton on the 28th? She closed the folder and handed it back. ‘Sit down, Mr Hardy.’
She studied me with a pair of very blue eyes with a few fine lines around them that said she was thirty, not twenty. The rest of her, the hair, the nicely shaped shoulders and chest inside the crisp white shirt and the wide mouth, didn’t look any particular age. Just good. I gave her a short version of the story, taking care not to sound as if the police force or anyone else had been remiss. No Royal Commission required. I tried to communicate my own interest in some of the questions that Horrie Jacobs’ allegation threw up. Particularly ones he wasn’t aware of, such as the notion that a rich old man was a target of some kind.
‘I remember when he won all that money. Generally speaking, people said it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke. Unusual reaction. Usually, there’s jealousy.’
‘He’s that sort of a man,’ I said.
‘I don’t see how I can help you, though,’ she said. ‘You had to be here to appreciate what things were like that day.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It was dreadful. We were all called out to do one thing or another. I’ve been on the force for ten years and I’ve seen a few things. But nothing like that. The distress and fear in the streets. I hope I never see it again.’
‘You saw Oscar Bach’s body?’
She nodded. The clean, shiny brown hair bounced. She wore two small earrings in the lobe of one ear—a silver and a gold, interlocked. Somehow it made her seem less like a police person. ‘I worked in Beaumont Street, up where the awnings had come down, for a few hours. Then a woman said there was a body under the church. She was hysterical. A lot of people were. I wanted to go on helping where I was but the Sergeant told me to go and take a look.’
‘Do you know who the woman was?’
‘Yes. A Mrs Atkinson. She’s got a drinking problem. Her husband was always leaving her and always coming back when she threatened to kill herself, you know?’
I nodded. I knew. Who doesn’t?
‘She came along with me, down the street. Weeping and carrying on. The church was a mess. The whole of the side section had collapsed. Mr Bach was half-covered by bricks.’
‘Which half?’
She looked at me with dislike and snapped, ‘The top. His feet, too. Are you enjoying this? I had a hysterical woman tearing my arm out of the socket, blood and dust and crap all over me and a man lying there with his head turned to pulp. I didn’t enjoy it, I can tell you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was in a war once. I know what you’re talking about.’
‘Vietnam?’
‘Similar. Bit before. Malaya. It’s just that I have to be sure Oscar Bach was killed by falling bricks, not by anything else.’
‘Like what?’
I mimed the action of clutching a brick and using it as a bludgeon. She looked at me as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether I was a
n animal or an insect. Then she frowned. Two grooves appeared between her dark eyebrows and I had an impulse to reach across the desk and put my thumb on them, to smooth them away. ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘How could you tell?’
‘Were there any photographs taken?’
‘I don’t think so. As I said, everything was chaotic. Just up the street …’
‘Some people were killed by things falling on them. So it was assumed the same thing had happened at the church. What did Mrs Atkinson do?’
‘I’m getting a bit tired of this. You’re questioning my competence.’
‘I have to,’ I said. ‘People pay me to do that. It doesn’t make me popular and often I’m wrong anyway. Try to see it from my point of view.’
I liked her face, her voice and the calm steadiness of her. She was angry but not letting it block out everything else. I wondered why she was letting me take up so much of her time. I didn’t kid myself it was my rugged good looks. Dad, most likely. She took a packet of cigarettes from her skirt pocket and offered them to me. I shook my head and she lit up. She drew on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. ‘Mrs Atkinson waited until the paramedics came and they uncovered the body. When she saw the boots and the overall she knew it wasn’t her husband and she went right off the edge. I had to take her home. They removed the body. I put in a report. That’s all, Mr …’ she butted out the cigarette.
‘Hardy,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Do you know where the post-mortem was conducted?’
She reached for the phone on her desk. ‘No, but I could find out.’ She lifted the phone and dropped it. ‘What the hell am I doing?’
I grinned. ‘Assisting me in my enquiries. Inspector Withers cleared me with Sydney.’
‘That goes without saying. He wouldn’t talk to a private detective otherwise. Look, I’ve got work to do here and …’
I wiped the grin and tried to look professional. ‘I get the impression that you don’t like people barging into town and bothering the citizens with a lot of questions. Fair enough. I wouldn’t like it either if I was in your shoes. How about this? You find a few minutes in your busy day to help me—get the autopsy report, anything your people might have had on Mr Bach, a few odds and ends. You let me see them and I get out of your hair so much the quicker.’