Dead Man Switch

by Tara Moss

  ‘Hang on, Sam,’ Billie said, a thrill in her veins. The traffic further down the mountain had started to flow again, she could see, but automobiles on the nearest side of the road had not yet shifted, their outraged drivers too busy rubber-necking at the errant vehicle. Without hesitation, she took advantage of the brief opportunity to dart though the narrow path in the Oldsmobile’s wake, setting off another round of shouting she could barely hear above the roadster’s engine and the honking of horns. She made it through the gap expertly, not even scratching a corner of her beautiful motor car, and soon the low divider went under them like a rock, and the black roadster was narrowly missed by speeding cars coming up the other side. Billie turned sharply with a deft spin of the wheel and joined the flow of traffic going up the mountain. She felt the stares – including Sam’s – but did not acknowledge them. She had other things to focus on. Billie shifted gears, put the pedal down, and set to catching up with the men who had made the grave mistake of first ripping her stocking in a crude alley brawl and now attempting to hurt – no, kill – her client’s injured son while he lay helpless in a hospital bed. For these men, evidently no bar was set too low, and this was an error of judgement they would keenly regret if Billie had anything to do with it.

  Sam, evidently not as thrown by events as she had thought, had the presence of mind to reach into the glove box and pull out Billie’s leather driving gloves for her, which she managed to wriggle her hands into one at a time, not once taking her eyes off their target. Yes, she would need them.

  ‘Good thinking, Sam,’ she said, and used both hands again to weave around a bus full of school children, the leather providing an excellent grip on the wheel.

  The drivers on the Great Western Highway were by now well aware of the sudden and alarming presence of the tan and brown Oldsmobile, which moved erratically as the driver and his passenger turned around repeatedly to mark the progress of Billie’s roadster. Her car was a faster one, lighter and with a larger engine, and Billie knew it to be in far superior condition, despite its age. Both vehicles wove around the traffic, speeding up from thirty-five miles per hour to forty. By the time they approached Medlow Bath they were doing near to fifty, dodging around cars using the shoulder as the road narrowed. The Hydro Majestic hotel, where they’d triumphantly spent much of their afternoon, flew past. If the thugs wanted a chase, they had it.

  ‘The roads are becoming less familiar. They’ll try to lose us along here,’ Billie predicted. ‘We can’t let that happen.’

  One of the two small sloping rear windshields of the Oldsmobile shattered with a bang as they sped through the intersection at Blackheath and passed Gardner’s Inn, scattering glass over the road outside the pub, where three men were perched on wooden benches, enjoying an afternoon beverage. Two of them stood with a start, shouting and waving their arms, and in a flash were far behind them. They certainly had the attention of the locals. Now the armed passenger in the motor car ahead sat low, wind whipping his hair, the muzzle of his weapon falling temporarily from view.

  ‘Keep the gun down when we go through the villages . . . if you can,’ Billie shouted. ‘The cops are bound to catch up,’ though she wondered if that were true, considering the speeds they were hitting. This was not Sydney, where the police might meet them from any direction. ‘They shot out that window so they can hit us next,’ she warned, watching one of the men crawling towards the back. ‘We have to stop them, fast.’ They came around a bend, buildings falling away and the bush taking over. ‘Try the tyres now!’ Billie shouted above the roar of the wind and the engine. If Sam could get one wheel they would end up on the side of the road and this reckless chase would be over. As they passed between a railway line and an old cemetery, Sam shot once, twice, the Oldsmobile swerving in front of them. No hits.

  ‘I’m out!’ he shouted with frustration. His Smith & Wesson revolver was a five-shooter, and there wasn’t time to reload now, even if he had the bullets. He held up his gun helplessly next to her.

  ‘Take mine,’ Billie said and pushed her left thigh towards him, flipping back her hem with one hand. ‘It’s in my garter.’

  Sam hesitated. Her gun garter was a few inches wide and she had fashioned it to sit over the top of her stocking, and the effect, with the strip of lace and the delicate ribbon ties like the back of a corset, was pleasing as well as practical, she thought. But the sight of it strapped to her thigh evidently gave her assistant some pause, which was, at this moment, quite inconvenient.

  ‘Sam, take it now,’ Billie urged. The wind rushing through the car pushed up the hem of her dress yet further and the little mother-of-pearl grip of the gun flashed.

  Sam extracted the Colt.

  By now the traffic had thinned considerably; for the moment it was just them and the Oldsmobile, which frustratingly had not slowed. They’d passed the intersection at Mount Victoria with the old hotel and the railway, the last spot Billie knew, and were heading west into unfamiliar territory. Now dense bush and loosely tended agricultural land hugged the road, the odd weatherboard house sagging into its foundations the only signs of human habitation. The barrel of a gun revealed itself, gleaming and deadly, from the back window of the motor car ahead. ‘Look out!’ she called and a shot was fired, missing them narrowly. Billie steered in deliberate arcs along the road, making them a tougher target, her dark roadster holding the road expertly. And then the road opened up dramatically to reveal a precipitous descent into a valley awash with afternoon sunlight. The road turned left, winding downwards in wide curves through a cutting, a convict-built rock wall on one side, the valley beyond. Having seen the descent, Billie braked gently, feeling the roadster pull forward to the right. In seconds it came back under her control. The pair ahead had stopped shooting, and now that Sam had Billie’s gun, he seemed ready to use it. But not here. Not now. It was too steep. Too much curve.

  The Oldsmobile wobbled and veered left, a rear tyre moving unsteadily, and the old motor car swung dangerously, inexorably, past the edge of the lane, then onwards, bursting through the timber guard rails.

  In a plume of dust and shattered timber, the thugs were careering over the cliff, plummeting some three hundred feet to the valley below.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Tell me again what happened,’ the fresh-faced officer said, watching Billie carefully and with a somewhat puzzled expression, brows knitted together and head cocked. ‘You were driving the automobile, you say?’

  Billie and Sam sat in Katoomba Police Station, a combination sandstone lock-up, police station and sergeant’s residence at the rear of the Katoomba courthouse. Her black roadster, now a dusty grey from the chase, was parked outside the back entrance. The sun had set on both the day and Billie’s patience. The adrenaline of the pursuit had subsided, leaving little energy for strained diplomacy.

  ‘Yes, I was driving my motor car,’ she answered with emphasis. Having endured a far too tedious interrogation already, her professional smile – usually so handy – did not quite work, and settled into a scowl. She pushed back a wavy lock of dark hair that insisted on falling into her eyes, tried to tuck it under her hair wrap, but not finding a hair pin where she thought she might, let the curl fall again, all the better to obscure her interrogator. She crossed her arms. ‘I went to the hospital to see my clients—’ she began again but was interrupted.

  ‘Your clients?’ the officer echoed, as if she hadn’t painstakingly explained the situation already.

  Billie watched the uniformed constable from beneath her uncooperative locks. Sandy-haired and fit, he had the glowing but prematurely weathered skin and bright eyes of an outdoorsman. She imagined him scaling the local cliffs in his time off. He might have seen many things in his work with the Katoomba police, but it seemed that gun fights and women PIs driving fast automobiles did not fit into his framework of understanding about the world.

  ‘Yes, my clients,’ Billie enunciated clearly, with deliberate slowness. ‘I am a private inquiry agent, as I
mentioned, and this gentleman is my assistant.’ She gestured towards Sam as a school teacher might indicate a blackboard with a simple maths equation written on it, then cleared her throat and paused, trying to maintain whatever scant composure she still possessed. ‘My clients had almost arrived at the hospital when two men attacked their son in his hospital bed, then fled on being interrupted. It was at that time we made chase, as I mentioned,’ she said, stretching out her thinning patience as one would stretch a stick of chewing gum to the moon.

  There was a knock on the door and another officer entered, not quite as young, but with the same weathered, glowing skin as his colleague. ‘Mate, the crocodile . . .’ He paused. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, looking at the elegantly windswept woman and her partner who looked somewhat like Alan Ladd, clearly believing the pair had already departed. ‘Um, Constable, there’s been another spotting of the crocodile.’

  Billie’s eyebrows shot up. ‘A crocodile? Out here?’

  ‘Escaped from the travelling circus, it did. Been eluding us for weeks,’ the second officer said. He removed himself from the room, and Billie sincerely hoped that the sighting of the crocodile would precipitate the end of the interrogation.

  ‘And the shooting?’ the constable continued, evidently not finished yet, despite the bizarre news of a crocodile stalking the streets of his jurisdiction. ‘Why did you chase these armed men?’ he asked, for what might have been the fourth time. ‘That was dangerous, wasn’t it?’

  Billie willed herself to stay calm. Because they were armed men, shooting at people, she wanted to say, but refrained. ‘We felt it was our civic duty to alert the police, protect the vulnerable citizens at the hospital and hold the men until you arrived. Sadly, we could not reach them in time and they drove off the pass.’

  ‘Right,’ the constable said. ‘I’ll get my superior.’

  Billie felt like slapping him.

  It was dark before Sam and Billie were released and found themselves back at Katoomba’s ANZAC Memorial Hospital, finally alone with Nettie and Mikhall Brown, and provided with tea and Anzac biscuits. It was a blessing, to Billie’s mind, that the Browns had missed the struggle and the shooting, and had not seen their son pinned to the ground with a pillow forced over his face.

  ‘Do you recognise this photograph?’ Billie asked, putting down her tea and extending the small portrait first to Nettie Brown, then to Mikhall.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Nettie responded, surprised. ‘That is my aunt, Margarethe, and her family. Where did you find this?’

  Adin’s great-aunt. The one who stayed in Berlin. It was as Billie had suspected.

  ‘This was tucked away in Adin’s clothing. Do you think it could be the photograph taken from the frame in your office?’

  Husband and wife looked at each other. There was nodding. ‘Yes, I think so,’ Nettie said.

  ‘I must ask you again, does anything about this advertisement look familiar or ring a bell of any kind?’ Billie smoothed out the folded clipping on the table top, between the plate of biscuits and the pot of tea.

  ‘Well . . .’ Nettie blinked and bent closer. ‘My goodness. That looks like the same necklace, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it does appear to be the same necklace,’ Billie agreed, and watched her. The Kleemann design was quite distinctive. Those bat-wing shapes. Surely there couldn’t be too many like it?

  ‘I . . . I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. What would he have to do with an auction?’ Nettie asked, shaking her head. Billie recalled her frustration when she’d first been presented with the clipping, her inability to accept a connection. ‘But it is impossible. This was made by Georg Kleemann in Pforzheim, far from here. It was a prized possession of Margarethe’s. How could it be the same one?’

  Billie thought she knew how. And she thought Adin knew, too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Billie was stationed at the small corner balcony of her sixth-floor office, leaning against one of the Roman-style pillars, smoking a Lucky Strike and sipping Sam’s perfect tea as if it held the key to her restoration – and perhaps it did – when she heard the telephone ring. Today was a smoking day, she’d decided. She kept her eyes on Sydney city, at the miniaturised people coming and going on the streets below, at the morning sunlight falling on the tall buildings, as her assistant answered the call. After a moment Sam filled the doorway with a look of concern in his baby blues.

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you, Billie,’ he said. ‘It’s the police.’

  Billie strolled back inside, cigarette dangling from her Fighting Red. They’d spent a few too many hours with the police in Katoomba, but it wasn’t over yet, she felt sure. Between their overjoyed client, the less than overjoyed police and the shocked hospital staff, it had been quite the evening. She put her empty tea cup on the edge of her desk, then sat in her chair and picked up the receiver. ‘Billie Walker speaking. How may I help you?’ She leaned back, put her oxford-clad feet up and cast her eyes over the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald again, with its dramatic artist’s impression of the Oldsmobile flying off Victoria Pass.

  ‘This is Detective Inspector Cooper,’ said a deep voice down the line. ‘Our colleagues in Katoomba informed me about yesterday’s events.’

  And the papers, too, Billie thought. He couldn’t have missed the part where it said: ‘Lady Inquiry Agent Billie Walker, daughter of the late former detective Barry Walker, was reportedly involved in what witnesses described as a “shoot out” and “dramatic car chase” that led to the double fatality.’ It featured a clear photograph of her in a nipped-skirt suit and tilt hat, leaving Central Court on a divorce matter she had assisted with earlier in the year. They’d only just fallen short of giving out her number and office hours.

  ‘I’d like you to come down to the station today, if possible,’ the inspector said.

  Billie cocked her head and adjusted a stocking seam. This was no real surprise, though the deaths of those two men did seem to be somewhat outside what she imagined the detective inspector’s usual jurisdiction would be. ‘Of course, Inspector. I can be there soon, if that suits,’ she replied. She took another drag of her smouldering cigarette, felt the smoke fill her lungs, felt her shoulders drop. If she was in any real trouble they would be at her door, taking her to the station. The inspector’s approach implied that this would not be an interrogation with both barrels, as it were.

  ‘Yes. I’m at Central Police Station. I’ll wait,’ the inspector said and hung up.

  Billie placed the telephone receiver back in its cradle. She took another puff of her cigarette, a rare second one, then held it between her fingers, thinking. The gesture reminded her of her father, she realised. She was becoming more like him each day. She smiled her very best serene smile. ‘Sam, I need to head to the police station. Will you hold the fort?’

  Her assistant nodded. ‘Absolutely. I hope everything will be—’

  ‘It will be fine,’ she assured him. He was worried about having brandished a gun in front of witnesses, but he needn’t have been. The mountain cops seemed more suspicious of her driving than of this returned soldier’s attempts to bring down a couple of criminals with his long-barrelled farm gun. Men shot guns. That was easy enough to fathom. But women like Billie driving cars and whatnot? She turned and checked her hat in the oval mirror near her desk and, satisfied, slipped on her smoked glasses, cigarette dangling from her lips again. She took it out to touch up her Fighting Red, then replaced it. Blast. It was almost down to a stub. She placed it embers down in Sam’s ashtray. He pulled one from his pack, silently offered it and she nodded.

  Yes, today is a smoking day.

  ‘I should be back in an hour or so, otherwise I will telephone,’ Billie said, grabbing her handbag. ‘Oh, and if a flood of clients pours in waving ten-pound notes around, get them all some very good tea and don’t let them leave,’ she said dryly. ‘Our rate is now twelve pounds per day.’

  Billie knew Central Police Station well. Her father
had worked there in his days as a detective before she was born, and his work had brought him back there plenty of times in her youth. The Walkers and this place went way back. The three-storey police station building was a short walk up George Street from her office, and Billie chose to take the stroll rather than waste the precious petrol coupons she so enjoyed using on drives in the country – recent notorious events notwithstanding.

  The station got its name from both its location and purpose. The inner-city sandstone building had long acted as central police headquarters. The station housed the criminal investigation offices and other special branches, and backed onto the Central Police Court in Liverpool Street. Below ground the buildings were connected, allowing prisoners to be taken to court and back through a maze of dark corridors and holding cells filled with stinking, dangerous men – and the occasional deadly woman. At least that was how Billie remembered it from her father’s vivid stories when she was younger. But while the courthouse on Liverpool Street had the impressive frontage one expected of a civic building, the public entrance to Central Police Station, with its grand masonry arch, was incongruously on narrow Central Street, in reality more lane than street, as if the city had collectively decided not to look at the police station or think about Sydney’s underbelly of drunks, brawlers, thieves, rapists, petty criminals and crime bosses. It was the architectural equivalent of being swept under the carpet.