by Peter Corris
I could almost hear Arch’s harsh, cracked voice gently mocking me. ‘You’re an investigator aren’t you, boyo? Investigate!’
‘Right, Arch,’ I said. I wrote down all the names and tried to assemble information about them. I knew that Sir Alexander Farfrae, the press baron, and Colin Redding, the politico, were both dead. The Who was Who told me that George Lucan-Paget was dead too. I’d never heard of the doctors, but neither was listed in the current register—presumably gone to join ordinary mortals. A couple of phone calls got me the unhelpful intelligence that Sir Arthur Bothwick, the judge, was alive, but in a nursing home suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.
The women were all said to have been younger, therefore probably still around, but a quick check on a couple of them showed several subsequent marriages and name changes. Too complicated, and it was unlikely that they would talk to me, anyway. That left the lawyer, Terry Farmer, and the private dicks. I rang Richard Adcock who runs a magazine called Seneca, which is dedicated to keeping law-makers and lawyers in line.
‘Hello, Cliff Hardy, private eye,’ Richard said. ‘About as popular as …’
‘Don’t, Richard. Please don’t. Terry Farmer. What d’you know?’
‘Interesting. What do you know?’
‘Nothing. I’m looking into something that happened a quarter of a century ago. So far, everyone’s dead.’
‘Send out for a ouija board, Cliff,’ Richard said. ‘Farmer’s dead, too. Of AIDS last year. One of the oldest victims.’
‘Shit. Alistair McLachlan?’
‘Barrister, solicitor or what?’
‘Solicitor.’
‘Hang on.’
I was at home, nursing the ankle. I judged I had time. I limped to the kitchen and tapped the cask of white. When I returned Richard was back on the line—waiting, very keen.
‘Cliff,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to go tit for tat on this.’
‘It’s ancient history,’ I said.
‘I like a good story.’
‘I’ll buy you lunch and tell you all, when I’ve got to the bottom of it.’
‘What if I want to print?’
I thought about it—about Arch and the big names involved. Some of that old power might still be lurking about and Arch had deemed me his ‘friend and confidant’. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I can’t promise.’
Richard sighed. He’s a great radio and TV performer and knows how to sigh, even into a telephone. ‘I’m too intrigued to hold back. I accept your risible terms. Alistair McLachlan had a very big eastern suburbs practice. He committed suicide the hard way twenty-four years ago. The cops said he must have nearly ruptured his soft palate with the gun muzzle. He left a lot of very unhappy people behind him. Cliff?’
‘I’ll call you,’ I said.
There were no current listings for Pike, Bourke or Martin as private enquiry agents. That didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t still active—working for big security firms or trading under names like Ace Detective Agency. But I had never heard of them and, from the sound of Arch’s notes, they were contemporaries of his—highly strung men with chequered pasts and some very bad habits. The odds against them still being around were long. But Dick Maxwell was still around and still working, after a fashion. What’s more, I knew where he was. The problem was whether to take him a packet of Earl Grey tea or a bottle of Beefeater gin.
I bought both and drove up to Springwood in the Blue Mountains, where Maxwell had got himself a job as ‘security manager’ of an estate owned by Peter Blain, a wealthy man who had made a lot of enemies. Blain was tough, but getting along in years. He was also a homosexual which was probably how Dick Maxwell got the job. When sober, Dick Maxwell could do a decent job, but he hadn’t been sober very much in the last ten years. One month you’d hear that he’d taken the cure, was going to AA and drinking nothing but tea with lemon; the next you’d see him in the Journalists’ Club, spinning yarns, lying his head off, totally pissed.
I drove past the Lindsay house, where the tourists’ cars were parked higgledy-piggledy all along the track, down deeper into the valley. The Blain estate was vast—a high drystone wall fronted the unmade road and the twenty or so hectares of cleared land were surrounded by dense bush. I pulled up outside the elaborate iron gates, a small one for people on foot and a big one for motor traffic, both set in a stone arch, remote-controlled and electrified to the hilt. Birds circled overhead, then settled back into the trees. Some of them whistled and called and were answered from deeper in the forest. I sucked in deep breaths of the cool, clean April air. Every time I go to the Blue Mountains I think the same thing: What the hell am I doing, living in that city shithole when this is all here and available? Then I go back to the shithole and it throws a lot of very confusing answers at me.
The booth behind the small gate was empty but there was a squawk box to talk into.
I pressed the button. ‘Cliff Hardy to see Mr Maxwell.’
Maxwell’s fruity tones came through: ‘Clifford. How nice. What would it be about, this unexpected call?’
‘Arch Merrett,’ I said.
The pause at the other end spoke volumes. ‘Ah, well, I don’t quite know …’
‘He’s dead, Dick. He left me some files and you know what an inquisitive type I am.’
‘Best to let old Archie rest in peace, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t. Let me in, Dick, or I’ll make a hell of a lot of trouble. I can see a greenhouse through the gate here. How about I put a few thirty-eight slugs into it for openers?’
‘You, ah … wouldn’t have a drink on you by any chance, would you?’
‘Beefeaters,’ I said. ‘Half bottle.’
The buzzer sounded and I pushed open the smaller of the two gates. I tramped up a gravel path that ran beside the bricked driveway. The house was a huge, rambling two-storey affair, all windows, stone and wood, half-covered in creeper. I was still a hundred metres from it when I saw Maxwell coming down the path. He was wearing country squire gear—tweed jacket, drill trousers, boots—and carrying a shotgun. I stopped and took out my pistol. Maxwell stopped, too. We were both out of effective range, but I fancied my chances better than his. As a target, he was approximately twice as wide. Maxwell stared at me for a few long seconds, then he broke open the gun and came forward with it hanging limply over his arm.
‘Cliff, old love! What a pleasure. How’d you like my country seat?’
‘Very nice, Dick,’ I said. ‘I like your attention to security, too.’
He jiggled the gun. ‘Force of habit. I’ve got nice little digs around the side here. Come along and we’ll have a natter.’
We followed the path past the greenhouse to a long walkway, bordered by flowers and topped by a pergola draped with vines and creepers. Maxwell had a small cottage set at a short distance from the house.
‘Servants’ quarters,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’
I went through into a neat living room, rather dark on account of the small windows which were half-obscured by creeper, but comfortably furnished. Maxwell took two shells from the gun, closed it up and rested it against the wall. He was looking at me closely and I produced the flat bottle from my pocket as I put my .38 away.
‘Splendid.’ He bustled away into the deeper gloom and returned with two old-fashioned crystal glasses. ‘Good gin likes its own company best.’
I put the bottle on the low table in the middle of the room and sat down. ‘Like you, Dick?’
He was already turning the cap. ‘Perforce, these days,’ he said.
‘I want to talk about the old days.’
‘Cheers.’ Maxwell drank a double slug straight off and poured again.
I took a sip. ‘Don’t get pissed on me, Dick. It won’t work.’
‘There’s not enough in this little bottle to get me pissed. And there’s nothing else on hand. I’ve been drying out.’
I didn’t say anything, didn’t feel any guilt. A d
runk finds reasons to drink, that’s the way it is. I got up and went through the cottage to the kitchen. The refrigerator held milk, yoghurt, low-fat cheese, fruit juice and diet soft drink. I found a plastic iceblock tray in the freezer, flexed it and filled a bowl with ice. On the way back to the sitting room I glanced into the bedroom—single bed, spartan fittings, not Dick Maxwell’s style at all. In the front room the level in the bottle was much lower and Dick was slipping the shells back into the shotgun. I came up quietly and put the muzzle of my .38 into his fleshy neck.
‘Don’t be silly, Dick.’
‘For me, not for you.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘They’ve sent you, haven’t they? They’ve kept their word after all this time.’
I put my pistol away and relieved him of the shotgun. I set the bowl of ice on the table and steered him back to his chair. ‘Dick,’ I said. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. As I told you, Arch Merrett left me his files. Your name came up in the last one. A divorce case. I know something about it but I want to know more. It’s idle curiosity, that’s all.’
Maxwell’s hand shook as he poured himself more gin. He added a couple of ice cubes and his tremor rattled them against the sides of the glass. ‘I wish I could believe you.’
‘You can. Tell me about you and Arch and Pike and the others.’
‘It all went wrong.’
That didn’t surprise me. There was something too flash about the scheme as outlined in Arch’s notes—too many people in the know, too many to square. ‘How?’
‘Every bloody way. From the word go. Pike was supposed to copy …’
‘The discretion statements, I know. Just tell it, Dick. If I get lost, I’ll ask you for directions.’
It took him a while and the rest of the gin, but I got the full story. Photocopy machines were slow affairs in those days, requiring careful handling. Pike’s broke down and he was late getting the documents back to the court. This put the clerk under some kind of pressure and he talked to someone who talked to someone else. When the time came for the boyos to put the screws on, they met with delays and confused arrangements that taxed their nerves and stretched the bonds of friendship.
‘They got onto us,’ Maxwell said. ‘I never found out how, exactly.’
He waited for me to speak and when I didn’t he went on, ‘Through the lawyers, possibly. It’s usually the lawyers. I got a visit from a very nasty type who did me a considerable hurt. The same happened to the others, I shouldn’t wonder. We all left Sydney for a time. That was part of the arrangement.’
‘Did you get the money?’
Maxwell sniffed. ‘Some of it was paid, I believe. I didn’t see any. We all lost our licences, of course. That was easy for them. And they all got their divorces. Shits.’
‘But you got your licence back.’
‘Ten years later, dear boy, and I had to do some very smelly things to get it.’
‘What about the others?’
Maxwell shrugged. ‘Pike went back into the racing industry in some capacity. God knows what. Probably doping horses. Ross Martin got fifteen years for importing smack. He died in prison. Bourke drowned up at Coolangatta. Fell out of boat when he was fishing. And now you tell me Arch Merrett’s dead. He was a dark horse.’
‘Meaning?’
The bottle was practically empty and Maxwell was looking edgy again. ‘Hardy, you haven’t been stringing me along, have you? I’ve lived with this for twenty-four years.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘The word was that our lives were forfeit. I was given to understand that I could be snuffed out at any time. It was a threat, of course, designed to keep one’s trap shut, and I complied, believe me. But I always thought that it might happen. That one of those bastards might decide that today was the day.’
‘They’re all dead, Dick. Except one who’s in a hospital and doesn’t remember his own name.’
‘Sons, daughters, associates …’
‘Come on. It’s water under the bridge. No one remembers. No one cares.’
He was still suspicious. ‘Except you.’
‘I’m the curious kind. I like to know the end of a story. Besides, I liked Arch.’
One of Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Did you? Well, yes, I suppose people did. He was a clever devil. Looked and sounded ordinary.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
Maxwell emptied the last few drops of gin into his glass. I still had half an inch in mine and he reached over and took it. ‘You’ve heard what happened to Pike, Bourke, Martin and me. Tell me, just to satisfy my curiosity, where did Merrett go when he left Sydney.’
‘The Gold Coast.’
‘Is that so? And when he died was he reduced to the status of a servant, like me, or was he in comfortable circumstances?’
‘He was well fixed.’
Maxwell drained the gin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions.’
I thought about it on the drive back to the city. All circumstantial, but it added up: Arch Merrett ratted on his fellow conspirators and got away with at least some of the money and his hide intact. Frankie Bourke went looking for him up north and didn’t come back. Arch had left me the files for my ‘education’, but I think the lesson he wanted to teach me was one I had learned a long time ago.
Gone Fishing
The ‘back beach’ on the east coast of Fraser Island is a wide strip of white sand that runs for 125 kilometres from Waddy Point in the north to Hook Point in the south. The best time to see it is after the tide has wiped out the thousands of 4WD tyre tracks that turn the beach into a kind of temporary two-lane highway. The worst time is in the middle of the day with the sun beating down and the Toyotas and Land Rovers roaring along, scaring the birds and leaving behind fumes and traces of oil and rubber.
I’d seen it at both times and at all times in between for the past four days. I’d put ‘fishing’ on the Application to Camp form I’d lodged with the Parks and Wildlife people in Hervey Bay. I had the permit and all the gear—rods and reels, lines, hooks, sinkers, knives, buckets, net in my Land Cruiser. I also had a portable generator that ran a fridge to make ice for the esky. The equipment had come with the vehicle and I hadn’t touched it, apart from the ice and the esky. My idea of catching fish is to go to Doyles and put a fork in a couple of grilled fillets. I was a fisher of men.
Simon Bucholtz and his brother Alex, nineteen and eighteen respectively, had disappeared in July. They’d gone backpacking to Queensland, taking a break from their university studies after the first semester. They’d called their father from Maryborough to say they were pushing on to Bundaberg, and hadn’t been seen or heard of in the ten weeks since. The police had done all the usual things, including giving up the search. The boys’ father, Horst Bucholtz, had come to me—on the recommendation of a satisfied client—with his slender thread of new evidence, his straw to cling to, his piece of floating wreckage.
‘My friend saw them, Mr Hardy. Eight weeks ago. He was getting a plane on the beach on Fraser Island and he saw the boys just as he got on board. He flew to Brisbane and then to the States. He did not know the boys were missing until he got back yesterday. Even then …’ Bucholtz was a big man, fifty plus and looking it around the eyes and in the way he carried himself. His wide shoulders had a defeated slump that looked unnatural with his trim physique and athletic grace. He sniffed, pulled the shoulders back and got himself under control. ‘Even then, he only mentioned seeing them as a casual afterthought. He was amazed at my reaction. He thought I had gone mad.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said. ‘He knew the boys well by sight?’
A sharp nod. ‘He knows them, yes.’
There’s not much you can do when a desperate parent gets into that positive mode, but you have to try. ‘Even so, eight weeks is a long time for them to be out of touch. I’m sorry, but you have to expect …’
He was all systems go
now, imperious. He stopped me with a raised clenched fist. ‘Foul play. No. When I told him what had happened, Claude immediately phoned someone he knows on the island. This man was present when Claude spotted the boys. He says he has seen them in different parts of the island.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Fishing, camping, walking.’
‘When did he see them last?’
The shoulders slid forward. ‘He thinks a month ago, maybe six weeks.’
‘You should go to the police, Mr Bucholtz. They …’
‘No! I can’t understand why they would stay there. They must be in some kind of trouble. The police could make it worse, whatever it is. I want you to find them. Please, find them and find out what’s going on. Then I’ll decide what to do.’
It sounded screwy but interesting. I was upfront with Bucholtz. I told him that before I’d take him on I’d run a check on him, talk with the police and his friend Claude and his contact on the island. He agreed.
I did all that and found nothing to deter me. Bucholtz was a builder and prosperous. His wife had died two years before. Nothing remarkable about the boys—Simon doing Arts at Sydney, Alex doing Environmental Studies at the University of Western Sydney. Missing Persons in Brisbane faxed me a selection of their file which told me nothing useful. Claude Tolbeck, motor mechanic and fisherman, confirmed Bucholtz’s account.
I mugged up a bit on the island during the flight to Brisbane. It was basically built of sand carried north from the rivers of New South Wales and deposited by peculiarities of the currents and waves over thousands of years. It had rainforest and lots of other vegetation, magnificent beaches, crystal-clear springs and was free of rats, mice and all feral animals except the dingo. Timber-getters and mineral sands miners backed by Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been happy to chop and mine it into a moonscape but conservationists, led by John Sinclair of the Fraser Island Defenders Organisation (FIDO), had stopped them. It was now a number one tourist destination.