by Peter Corris
I walked back the way I came and found Cyn waiting for me outside the newsagency.
‘You ran off. You saw her, didn’t you?’ she said.
‘I saw someone.’
‘Oh, God.’
She swayed and I had to grab her to stop her falling. I was shocked at how thin her arms were and she weighed next to nothing. She was a fully grown woman but she felt like a child as I helped her walk slowly back to my car. She said nothing until we reached her building, then she turned to me. Her blue German eyes were a washed out pale grey and there were two hectic spots in her cheeks.
‘You lost her, didn’t you?’
‘Not exactly. She got into a van and I got its number.’ I showed her the writing on my hand; it had run a bit from perspiration. ‘I can trace it. Maybe.’
‘What d’you mean, maybe?’
‘Cyn, she wasn’t driving. I can trace the owner, but who’s to say the owner was even driving. Young people borrow and lend cars all the time.’
‘It’s something though. I know you’ll be able to find her. Thanks, Cliff.’
‘Don’t thank me yet. Wait a bit.’
‘She was looking at me, wasn’t she?’
‘Right.’ I wondered whether to tell her in detail what had happened. How would she take it? I decided that she wanted everything she could get, needed it. ‘She saw you buy the ticket and scratch it. I have to tell you she wasn’t impressed.’
‘Wasn’t she? Well, that’s too bad. You know I had a feeling that she was close. More than a feeling—I knew she was there, and I wanted to stand still and do something to give you a chance to look around properly. I guess it worked.’
‘I guess it did. How much did you win?’
‘Oh, a hundred dollars. I’ll give it to Geoffrey. You saw him the other day.’
‘Yes. Seemed like a good kid.’
‘He is. Cliff—you saw her. You must have been fairly close at one point …’
‘She had her back to me most of the time.’
‘Cliff.’
I gave in. ‘Okay—you’re right. She bears a remarkable resemblance to Eve. Moved like her as well.’
‘Moved?’
‘Eve was a champion schoolgirl sprinter. She could lick me over a hundred yards. She had this long stride. Quite different from the way they run now. This girl moved the same way.’
‘Thank you. You’ll follow this up and keep me informed?’
‘Of course. Can you manage? D’you want me to call someone? Your son?’
‘No, I’ll be all right after a rest.’
‘I’ll see you up there.’
‘No. I couldn’t bear you to see how I live. The place is awash with pills and things to throw up into. If you want to help me, just find her. Please.’
‘How will your kids cope with this, if it turns out to be true?’
‘How will you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well I don’t know about them either. It’s not the sort of situation you can cite precedents for. We’ll all in the shit together, as you might say.’
I wondered whether I should tell her about the freak wagon—it had sported a Nimbin Mardi Grass sticker and an old one with Porky Pig in a police uniform—and what that might imply about the sort of company the woman was keeping. I decided against. Cyn eased herself out of the car and managed to give the door a healthy slam. She crossed the road with her backbone ramrod straight and I watched her use her security card on the gate and disappear into her own world—what was left of it.
4
I used the mobile to call my contact in the Roads and Traffic Authority and negotiate a fee—all done in a long-established encrypted fashion. Corruption has its place in the scheme of things. She said she’d get on it immediately. I gave her my mobile number and the numbers at home and the office.
‘Important, huh? Xerox.’ This was a signal that she knew the call wasn’t being monitored. How they can be sure I don’t know, but they do.
‘Very.’
‘I should’ve gone higher.’
‘Remember ICAC.’
‘Fuck ICAC. Be back to you soon.’
I drove home thinking that of all the strayed, absent, missing, absconding person quests I’d ever been on, this was the strangest. The day turned foul. The rain bucketed down and the traffic became sluggish apart from the odd cowboy confident of his vision and his radials. I drifted back into Glebe and had lunch at the cafe at the corner of Glebe Point Road and Broadway where a string quartet plays on Friday and Saturday nights. Glebe has changed since Cyn lived here.
I drove home and picked up the slightly damp mail from the slightly leaky letterbox. Although I hadn’t seen it for so long I recognised Cyn’s handwriting on one of the letters. There was no mistaking that precise backhand. I ripped it open and swore when I saw that as well as a note it contained a cheque for $3000. The cheque fell to the floor as I read the note:
Dear Cliff
Don’t be offended. I know this business won’t be easy for you, but I want you to treat it as a job as much as you can. I know you’re good at your job and that you love it. I hated it as you know, but that’s ancient history.
Please do your very best. You never know, we might have done something right after all.
My first impulse was to tear up the cheque but I resisted it. A private enquiry agent needs a client to validate his activities and there’s no better validation than money. The rules state that there should be a signed contract as well, but who ever heard of a game where everyone played by the rules? I put the cheque away in my wallet. When I got to the office I’d open a file labelled ‘Samuels’ and put the cheque and the note and a copy of the photograph of Eve in it.
Waiting for the call from the RTA, I made coffee and sat looking out at the rain and trying to find other explanations for the woman who was watching Cyn, or other identities for her. Both my parents were only children so there were no first cousins resembling Eve or myself to consider. I was as sure as any man who’d led a reasonably active sex life can be that I’d fathered no children. The question was—had Eve ever had an illegitimate child? I thought it highly unlikely. As a teenager Eve entered a god-bothering phase that lasted until she went to university at the age of twenty-two. She was evangelical and puritanical until she plunged into left-wing politics in her first year. She married Luke, a fellow radical, in her second year and they had the first of their two sons within a year of that. I’d found Eve the Christian pretty hard to take, but I’d kept in touch with her. I saw more of her after she swapped the Bible for Gramsci. I didn’t take Gramsci on board any more than I had the Bible, but it made her easier to make fun of. I couldn’t see where Eve could’ve squeezed in a kid.
A doppelgänger? Sure, they exist, but why would my sister’s doppelgänger be watching my ex-wife? The world is crazy, but not that crazy.
The call came through as I was contemplating making a second pot of coffee as a way of heading off the impulse to have a drink. Like many people in this suspicious age, I tend to use the answering machine to screen calls, but this time I picked up.
‘Xerox and bingo, Cliff.’
This meant that the call was unmonitored and that the vehicle wasn’t registered to some subsidiary of some other string of companies that would make the enquiry amount to a paper chase.
‘Tell me.’
‘Damien Talbot, unit 3, number 12, George Avenue, Homebush. Age twenty-six. The vehicle was purchased a year ago for two thousand five hundred dollars from a dealer in Homebush. Must be a bomb.’
I grunted. ‘Anything else?’
‘Your meter’s ticking.’
‘Remember ICAC.’
‘Fuck ICAC. Yep, our Damien has a shitload of unpaid parking tickets out on him, plus an unroadworthy citation. As we speak, being followed up by the boys and girls in blue.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Up yours. Good punting.’
This was a reference to the method of payment—a
deposit in her TAB account. I hung up and studied my notes. I doubted that Cyn would like what I’d turned up so far, particularly the location. Cyn used to regard Leichhardt as the western suburbs and so beneath contempt.
Homebush was much further west.
I’d never spent much time in Homebush, had hardly ever been out there. Despite the attractive name, as far as I knew—and a quick check of an old Gregory’s confirmed it—the place was a bit of a wasteland. Homebush Bay was muddy and mangrove-ringed; there was a brickworks, an abattoir and a huge rubbish dump in the middle of some secondary-growth bushland. The Flemington saleyards were nearby and it was said that escaped pigs from the saleyards had gone feral on the dump and in the bush and were a risk to life and limb. For many years the pub on Parramatta Road, adjacent to the saleyards, was known as the Sheep Shit Inn.
George Avenue was a short street running uphill. From the top there would once have been a view across the bush towards the dam and what lay beyond, now the view was of hundreds of hectares of development for the Olympic Games. Brand new roads with pristine kerb and guttering gleaming in the rain; towering steel and cement structures resembling, at distance, the Pompidou Centre; massive earthmoving equipment reshaping the terrain; kilometres of orange tape and temporary barriers; vast tracts of bare earth and not a blade of grass in sight. Here and there the past had been preserved. The dam still existed and what looked like the brickworks. Some trees remained, but there was nowhere for a feral pig to hide. Despite the heavy rain the work was still going on. Bulldozers and backhoes were moving and cranes were swinging their loads.
I turned my attention to the undistinguished block of cream-brick flats at number 12. A three-storey 1950s job and showing its age, with rust stains around the drainpipes and moss in the mortar. These days we forget that most people didn’t have cars in the ’50s and blocks of flats like these made little provision for them. It looked as if there was space for three or four cars at most, the rest would have to park in the street. I wasn’t surprised that the psychedelic van wasn’t in evidence—enquiries are rarely that easy. There were twelve letter boxes and the junk mail sticking out of number 3 wasn’t a promising sign.
Security was non-existent—the ’50s again—and I walked in the front door, located unit 3 at the back and knocked loudly. Nothing. I pressed my ear to the door but got none of the noises of occupation—voices, radio, TV, vacuum cleaner—just the silence that means empty. The lock was pickable but it was a bit early in the proceedings for that. I knocked at number 4 opposite. No response. Likewise at number 2, but the door of number 1 swung open so quickly that I guessed the occupant had been waiting for me. A looker-outer of windows, an ear to the ground type. That could be good.
She was somewhere between middle-aged and older and trying hard to stay on the right side of the divide. She was medium tall, heavily built but holding it well, with considerable undergarment help, in a short, tight skirt and snug-fitting, ribbed, rollneck sweater. She was expertly made up, her hair was attractively arranged and the way she leaned against the door jamb suggested that standing in doorways wasn’t new to her.
‘I thought you might be here for me,’ she said. ‘But even the shy ones don’t knock on all the other doors first.’
Her broad smile invited me to smile in turn. ‘Not today, I’m afraid. I’d like to talk to you, though.’
‘Cop?’
I shook my head and showed her my licence.
‘Cop,’ she said. She glanced at her watch. ‘Well, I guess my 3.30’s not coming. I can spare you some time. We can see how we go. Come in, Clifford.’
I winced at the name, but it was encouraging that she was a quick study. Stepping into her flat from the shabby passage was like moving from economy up to business class. The room was tastefully and unfussily furnished with just enough touches—velvet cushions, Balinese-looking wall hangings, a waft of incense—to suggest that things could get interesting further inside.
She pointed to a chair but I shook my head and stood just inside the room. She chuckled and dropped smoothly onto the couch, drawing her legs together, knees up high. She had good legs in sheer black stockings. Medium heels. ‘I’m Annette, Clifford,’ she said. ‘From the look of you I’d say you’ve been around, so I’m not going to pretend I’m a chiropodist.’
‘More into counselling?’
She smiled. ‘I’m on the older woman game. If I’d known how profitable and easy it was I’d have taken it up long ago.’
‘Good for you, Annette. Less of the Clifford, if you don’t mind. Cliff'll do. I’m interested in the tenant of number 3, Damien Talbot.’
‘Mmm. Young. Tall. Good-looking. Long hair. Limps a bit. That him?’
‘Sounds right. He drives a Kombi van painted the colours of the rainbow.’
She snapped her fingers. Her nails were long, red. ‘That’s him. Good. You look like trouble. If I can give him some, I will.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Little shit booked an appointment with me and then couldn’t get it up. I gave him the name of one of those male clinics. He went nuts and tried to stand over me. I won’t take that. My bloke broke one of his thumbs. By accident. That discouraged him.’
This was worse than I’d expected and I sat down to absorb it.
‘Not what you wanted to hear, eh?’
‘No. When was this?’
‘Let’s think. Haven’t seen them for a couple of weeks. Say, three weeks ago.’
I took the photo of Eve from my wallet and showed it to her. ‘When you say them, d’you mean this woman?’
She scarcely glanced at it. ‘Yep, that’s her. Poor kid. She looks like she deserves better than him, but you never can tell.’
‘Do you know her name?’
‘No. I never had much to do with them apart from that one time and that was enough for me. Come to think of it I did hear a name. From him, that is. Melly? Molly? Something like that.
‘Well, I can see why you’re worried. About her being with him I mean. Bloody good-looking and charming with it, but a real nasty streak. He speaks well. You know, good grammar and all. But it’s an act.’
‘An act?’
‘Yeah. Like he’s acting and the real him is something else. Look, I love a chat but I’m running a business here. I can’t see how I can help you. They did a flit, the agent tells me, so you won’t get a forwarding address.’
‘Just anything you know could be a help.’
She looked at her watch again. ‘Like what?’
‘Their movements. Did they go to work?’
She laughed. ‘Not likely. Dole bludgers for sure. I mean him. I saw her reading at the bus stop a couple of times. Could be a student.’
‘So, what did they do with themselves? Did they have any friends in the flats here? Is there someone else who might know something?’
She shook her head. ‘Scarcely ever here. Oh, there is one thing. That’s if I’ve still got it. Hang on.’
She went out to the kitchen and came back with a leaflet. ‘She put these in the letterboxes. I stuck it up on the fridge. I hate all that Olympics carry on, but I suppose it’ll be good for business. Take a look.’
The leaflet was cheaply produced, with a grainy photograph showing a narrow tree-fringed waterway. It was headed SAVE TADPOLE CREEK and went on to solicit support for the Friends of the Creek’s on-site picket preventing the diversion and piping of the stream.
‘I haven’t heard anything about this, have you?’
She shrugged. ‘They’ve probably hushed it up. I’ve got a client who works on one of the projects over there. He says you wouldn’t believe the rackets going on. And nobody wants to stir the possum. Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to chat about politics and such. Now, if you’d like to make a booking I’ll give you my number.’
I stood and tapped the paper. ‘Can I keep this?’
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll write the number on the back.’
She gave it to me
and I thanked her.
‘No trouble. I hope you call.’
‘One thing, Annette, if you don’t mind my asking.’ I gestured at the room in general. ‘You’ve got this looking very nice, but why here?’
She steered me towards the door. ‘A lot you know. The richer they are the more down-market they like the neighbourhood to be. And somewhere wifey-poo would never ever go.’
5
I sat in the car and thought over what I’d learned and how Cyn would react to it. ‘Molly’s’ environmentalism would no doubt please her, but she wouldn’t be too happy about the information so far on Damien Talbot. Neither was I. It was disconcerting to find myself thinking along in sync with a person I’d once been close to but had had no contact with for over two decades. It made me feel as if all the intervening years had been somehow wiped out, or at least reduced in significance. I didn’t like the feeling.
Sitting there in the car, wet from the dash through the rain, and cold, I concocted two alternative hypotheses to Cyn’s. One, ‘Molly’ had something going with Cyn’s son, Geoffrey, and was checking out the mother. Two, Cyn had designed a building that had caused grief for someone connected with ‘Molly’ and she was following up on it. The resemblance to Eve was an irrelevance. I wasn’t convinced by either theory. The first one implied that someone other than Talbot was driving the van and the second was drawing a very long bow, but they gave me a focus. Find ‘Molly’ and sort it out.
Tadpole Creek wasn’t marked on my directory but I figured I could find it by driving around the development sites. I was wrong. Beautifully made roads led nowhere and high cyclone fences appeared without warning. I saw the completed Showgrounds, the completed State Sports Centre, the almost completed Aquatic Centre and the barely begun futuristic-looking Olympic Stadium. Car parks everywhere, vast tarmacked surfaces and five-storey cement boxes. The new railway station still managed to look like a railway station while the skeleton of a huge hotel-to-be could turn into almost anything. The Olympic Village was on a hillside overlooking the Stadium. I knew that the one they’d built for the Melbourne Olympics had turned into a low-rent public housing precinct; this one looked more likely to become a townhouse complex with its own private police force.