The Undertow

by Peter Corris

  The man who answered was elderly, white-haired but bearing up well. He stood confidently behind his screen door, holding the heavy door like a man not expecting trouble but prepared to cope with it by slamming the solid wood.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

  I held up my licence and the card on which Mrs Heysen had written in a copperplate hand: ‘Mr Lowenstein, my deepest thanks for your brave intervention. I would be most grateful if you would talk to Mr Hardy who is working for me. Sincerest thanks.’ Her signature, Catherine Heysen, was fluent and legible.

  ‘I saw Mrs Heysen in the hospital yesterday,’ I said. ‘She assured me she hadn’t given your name to anyone but the police and me, and won’t in the future. She respects your wish to remain anonymous. I’m trying to find out why she was shot at and—’

  Lowenstein waved his hand to silence me. He’d lifted the spectacles suspended around his neck up to operational to study the documents. Apparently satisfied, he nodded, dropped the glasses back to their original position, and unlatched the screen door. ‘Papers and notes can be forged,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen you arrive at Mrs Heysen’s house before, so I’m inclined to trust you. Please come in. How is the poor woman?’

  I went into a dim hallway with a carpet runner. The walls were lined with paintings or framed photographs, I couldn’t tell which. Lowenstein carefully relatched the screen door and let the other door swing closed. He moved well, considering his age, which I’d have put at closer to eighty than seventy. He glided past me, heading for some light at the end of the passage.

  ‘She’s recovering,’ I said. ‘Very grateful to you.’

  ‘It was nothing, but I certainly don’t want those television reporters who can’t pronounce words correctly or speak a grammatical sentence swarming around.’

  I’d recently heard an ABC newsreader pronounce the French name Georges as ‘Jorgez’, so I knew what he meant.

  ‘That won’t happen,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’

  He opened a door leading to a kitchen stocked with scrubbed pine furniture and fittings and with light flooding in through large windows.

  ‘I was having coffee. Would you like some? I must say you look a bit the worse for wear. Interesting how we seem unable to talk without drinking something. Have you noticed that?’

  ‘I have. Yes, thank you.’

  He poured the coffee and we sat at the table with the milk and sugar within reach. I took both; my system would be jumping with this much caffeine in me and I needed to dilute it and give the metabolism something to work on.

  ‘Now, what do you want to ask?’

  ‘I know the police will have put this to you already, but did you get a good look at the man who shot Mrs Heysen?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you get an impression of size?’

  ‘Good question. Put that way, yes. It was a biggish car and I could see head and shoulders well up, so I’d say—a big person, larger than average.’

  ‘What kind of car was it?’

  He smiled. ‘There you have me. I can’t identify cars at all, apart from Volvos and VW Beetles. Sorry. This was a large red sedan.’

  ‘That helps,’ I said. ‘Would you mind telling me how long you’ve lived here, Mr Lowenstein?’

  ‘Let me see. I bought it when I got my chair. That must be nearly forty years ago. I’ve been retired for fifteen years.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I should be calling you Professor. What was your field?’

  ‘Psychology. I had a chair at Sydney University.’

  ‘So you knew Dr Heysen and everything that happened back then?’

  ‘Yes and no. Are you having difficulty drinking with that damaged lip?’

  ‘A little, but I’ll manage. It’s good coffee. What d’you mean by yes and no?’

  ‘I took a sabbatical just before the matter broke, and then I took leave and worked in America for three years. I heard about it when I came back, but it had all more or less blown over by then. The Heysen house was rented. Mrs Heysen didn’t return for some years after that.’

  ‘What were your impressions of Heysen?’

  ‘A detestable man—arrogant, conceited and an anti-Semite.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘One can tell, Mr Hardy. One can tell.’

  ‘So you can tell that I’m not?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. What about the boy, William?’

  ‘I’m tempted to trot out the clinical cliches—only child, precocious, a mother’s boy without a valid male role model. All true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. He was nothing like his father in manner, nothing at all. He’d sky a ball over the fence now and then and come and ask for it. Very polite.’

  ‘You aren’t next door and they’re wide blocks.’

  ‘He told me he had his mother throw tennis balls to him in their yard for him to practise his defensive strokes. It’s hard to imagine such an elegant creature doing that, but I suppose she did. Sometimes he caught one on the rise in the meat of the bat. I played grade cricket myself when I was young. I knew what he meant.’

  I remembered playing backyard cricket in Maroubra with my mates. Over the fence was out for six. I don’t think any of us ever put it over more than one fence, let alone two. But then, we were more interested in surfing.

  ‘A big hit,’ I said.

  ‘He was an athletic young man. Mother-fixated, I should say, with all that that implies.’

  ‘You mean that he loved and hated her at the same time?’

  ‘Exactly. My wife thought very highly of him. She was Italian and she said he spoke the language fluently and well. The only child we had died as an infant and she liked to take young people under her wing. She thought William had an exceptional linguistic gift.’

  It was one of those moments when you respect a person’s emotional space and I was glad I had the coffee cup to fiddle with. The pause was brief.

  ‘She’s been dead for ten years,’ he said. ‘I should sell this place. I’ve had offers enough, God knows, but I can’t seem to get around to it. Something about the sums they mention and the way they talk puts me off. And I must confess I take an interest in the rehabilitation of the river, slow as it is. It’s never been clean in my time, but I believe it once was, with sandy banks. People swam and fished in it, I’m told.’

  ‘Hard to believe,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Would you mind telling me what you’re actually doing for Mrs Heysen?’

  ‘Several things.’

  ‘Now you’re being secretive. I thought frankness was your style.’

  ‘You’re right, Professor. As I said, I’m concerned about the attempt on Mrs Heysen’s life and I don’t know its source.’ I touched my scabby lip. ‘The shooting was a professional job gone wrong, and I’ve had a narrow miss as well. Apart from that, I’m trying to locate William Heysen. His mother hasn’t had any contact with him for some months and there’s a strong possibility he’s in serious trouble.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Are you saying he’s . . . missing?’

  ‘Effectively, yes. I’ve contacted people he lived with and worked with and none of them have—’ ‘Seen him, you’re about to say. But I have. He was here, at the house. Just a few days ago.’

  17

  I almost dropped the coffee cup. ‘You saw him? When was this?’

  Professor of Psychology or not, he looked as pleased by my reaction to his statement as anyone would have been.

  ‘Happily, I’m not afflicted by short-term memory loss like so many people my age. This was three days ago.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was sitting on the front verandah, reading. It catches the afternoon sun. I saw a car pull up outside the Heysen house. Cars, again. All I can say is that it wasn’t the car William used to drive when he lived here. This was a big car, a four-wheel drive model—’ he waved his hands to illustrate the style—‘and black. As I say, not his old car, but definitely him.’


  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No, no. I’m sure he didn’t even see me. I suppose I assumed he’d been to see his mother and was fetching something from the house for her. I didn’t know anything about him being missing. He went in.’

  ‘How long did he stay?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know. I went inside to make some notes on what I’d been reading. I still do some research and writing, you see. I didn’t go to the front again at all that day.

  The car had gone by the next day but he could have been there five minutes or five hours.’

  ‘How did he look? Confident? Furtive?’

  ‘Really, Mr Hardy, you ask the most extraordinary questions. I only glimpsed the boy for a few seconds.’

  ‘Your impression?’

  He thought. I suppose psychologists think a lot and don’t need any props to do it. His cup stayed on the table and he didn’t scratch himself or tent his fingers. He just sat.

  ‘Preoccupied,’ he said at last. ‘As you’d expect.’

  I nodded. Preoccupied perhaps, but not about his mother, who he hadn’t contacted. It was unlikely that he hadn’t heard about the shooting. I thanked him for giving me his time.

  He smiled. ‘The odd thing about my situation is that in one way I have all the time in the world and in another, who knows? Maybe not much.’

  ‘I think you’re good for a few years yet.’

  We moved back into the passage. ‘I hope so. I still enjoy life. I’m glad to have met you, Mr Hardy. I haven’t encountered many—what should I say, men of action?—in my life.

  You’d make an interesting case study.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You’re drawn to intrigue and violence like a moth to a flame.’

  I drove to the office mulling over what Professor Lowenstein had said, both about my character and his sighting of William Heysen. Intrigue went with the territory, but was it true that I welcomed violence? Cyn had always said so and she, like the professor, was very smart. I didn’t think of myself that way, but I knew I’d been involved in violence for the greater part of my life—from boxing as an adolescent in the police boys’ club, through military service and on into my career as a PEA. I decided that it was only partly true. I’d done the things I’d done not primarily because I sought the violence involved, but because I rejected the alternatives—the passive life, the routines. That satisfied me on that score.

  I parked, climbed the stairs and went into the office. The building is old and in poor repair. After my little nook had been closed up for a few days the general decay of the place seemed to creep in as a smell. But it’s probably just the cockroaches and mice—some dead, some alive—in the wall cavities. I sometimes wondered what the space I rented had been used for in the past. I once found a threepenny bit in the skirting board and a stiff, brittle condom caught in the slats of the venetian blind. Doesn’t tell you a lot but gives you ideas.

  The sighting of young Heysen, apparently prosperous, had to be a positive. Up to that point, given Rex Wain’s ‘whisper’, there had been a chance he wasn’t in the country. But why does a mother-fixated son not visit that mother in hospital? Because he can’t? Lowenstein could have mistaken preoccupation for worry. Whatever the reason, it hadn’t brought me any closer to finding him.

  I made some notes on the conversation with the Prof and couldn’t help underlining a phrase—He was nothing like his father . . . The conversation had left me with questions to add to the list I already had: why had William Heysen gone to the house? What, if anything, had he taken, or left? Would Catherine Heysen allow me to search the house? Where was William living? How many black 4WDs are there in Sydney? Not all of the questions I jot down at these moments are sensible.

  The coffee and paracetamol buzz was fading and my abused back was aching. A big man in a red Commodore. I was looking for bright and dull coloured cars in a city full of cars. Needles in a very big haystack. As I looked at my notes and doodles, I came close to being sure of one thing, more a matter of intuition than logic: the attacks on Catherine Heysen and me had to do with the old Heysen–Bellamy matter, not Billy boy.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Hardy.’

  ‘This is William Heysen.’

  I was surprised, but not as surprised as I would have been a few hours earlier.

  ‘Oh, yeah? The William Heysen who drives a black 4WD and doesn’t visit his mother in hospital when she’s been shot?’

  ‘Do you want to talk, or just make smartarse remarks?’

  ‘You talk, I’ll listen.’

  ‘I understand you’ve been looking for me.’

  ‘Right, on behalf of your mother.’

  ‘Yes, but before she was shot.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a long story. It goes back to Dr Gregory Heysen.’

  ‘My father, the murder conspirator.’

  ‘I have to tell you there’s some doubt about that.’

  ‘What? That he wasn’t guilty?’

  ‘Possibly. I think we should meet. There are . . . things to discuss.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I had to think about that. The whole matter of his paternity was hanging fire and could go either way. But I had him on the hook and didn’t want to lose him. I couldn’t think of a better bait.

  ‘The identity of your father.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We need to talk. Where are you, William?’

  ‘Patronise me, and you’ll never hear from me again.’

  Nasty. Maybe he was the doctor’s son.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is your enquiry in any way to do with the police?’

  That was a curly one if only he knew it. But I played a straight bat. ‘No.’

  ‘All right. We’ll talk.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  A few seconds elapsed and then the door swung in and a tallish young man stood there, lowering a mobile phone from his ear. ‘Right here.’

  I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Who’s the smartarse now?’ I said.

  ‘Melodramatic, I’ll agree.’

  He came in and dropped down into the client chair. He was very much as his mother had described him—not quite as tall, slim, dark-haired with an olive tint to his skin, handsome and aware of it. Too aware. He was clean-shaven; his hair was long but neat. He wore loose pants, a T-shirt and a denim jacket, all pricey, all clean. If he was on drugs they hadn’t taken any toll on him yet. He sat straight in the chair and looked at me with a confident manner, bordering on cockiness.

  ‘What’s this about my paternity?’

  ‘Let’s back up a bit,’ I said. ‘How did you find out about me?’

  He didn’t want to concede anything but apparently decided to yield a fraction. ‘I found your card in the house. I also heard an answering machine message from you that dated back a bit. Plus, a person I know told me you’d contacted her asking questions. Satisfied?’

  ‘That fits. Why haven’t you visited your mother? Why drop out of sight?’

  He shook his head. ‘That’s all I’m saying until I hear more from you.’

  I wasn’t used to fencing with someone so much younger, but there was something steely about him that made it necessary. ‘I should really get your mother’s permission to tell you this, but when you went off the rails after you found out about your father, she—’ His poise slipped for the first time. ‘What? She said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The composure returned almost immediately, shades of his mother. ‘Incredible. Go on.’

  This was getting tricky. I didn’t want to tell him about Frank and the paternity test and all the rest of it. Not yet, anyway. I swivelled around creakily in my chair that needed oiling and probably more than that. I stared out the window for a moment in the hope of unsettling him. It worked.

  ‘Well?’ He was a bit off balance now.

  ‘Look, William, you’re th
e one sneaking around, hiding, making furtive visits, worried about whether I’m tied in with the police. You’re obviously in some kind of trouble. I suggest you change your attitude.’

  He didn’t like it, but he didn’t get up and leave. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ he said quietly. ‘That woman’s a monster. She’s so manipulative she doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time. I didn’t go off the rails, as you put it, because I discovered my father was a criminal. I simply experimented with a different lifestyle for a while. I’d played the role of the achieving son for so long I was sick and tired of it. I knew she was living through me, having somehow stalled in her own life. Then I saw a . . . an opportunity and pursued it.’

  ‘Which has put you in danger.’

  ‘Maybe, but I believe I can handle it. There, I’ve put some cards on the table. Your turn. I’m interested in this paternity business, but it’s almost certainly one of her fantasies. If that’s the basis of your investigation, you’re on a hiding to nothing.’

  ‘It’s a bit more than that. There’s a strong possibility Dr Heysen was framed and that the person who did it wants no enquiry. I think that’s why your mother was shot and why I was attacked.’

  ‘The mouth,’ he said. ‘And the stiff neck.’

  He was smart and observant. ‘Exactly. I’m sure you’re relieved to learn that your mother being shot wasn’t to do with you and your activities.’

  ‘You’re on the wrong tack there, Mr Hardy. I never for a minute thought that was a possibility. You’ve met her. How many enemies do you think she’s been capable of making?’

  ‘Whether that’s true or not, she’s your mother and you don’t seem very concerned about her.’

  ‘Oh, I know she’s all right.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I went in there, into the hospital. I’d changed my appearance somewhat. I got close enough to see that she’s not in danger and is getting the best of care.’

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  ‘She doesn’t need help from me. She’s never needed help from anyone. Either that, or she needs so much help she’s beyond helping.’