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‘Is there anything I can do for you, Maria?’

‘Yes,’ she sobbed. ‘You can piss off.’

Families are hell. Who said that? I drove back to Glebe, feeling none of the satisfaction that usually comes with having got the answers to the questions. I opened a can of beer and sat down to consider my next move. There was no proof of either discovery-that Eric Trumble had fathered Lee North and that Lee North had fathered David Trumble-but I had no doubt that both things were true. But could I communicate that certainty to my client? And should I? I’m no social worker, but you’d have to have the sensitivity of a sewer pipe not to be concerned about how the revelation could affect the prospects of young David,

One can became two and I switched to cask white without getting any inspiration. I fed myself and the cat out of cans and settled down to scribble some notes on the meeting with Maria North-Barr. Of the three people I’d met so far in the case, only Rose North had any serenity and it was partly due to senile dementia. An unhappy business. I flicked on the television and turned it off almost straight away. I picked up Theroux’s Happy Isles of Oceania but put it down after a few pages. I had all the spleen and depression I needed.

The sound of the doorbell was welcome. I took another swig of wine and wandered down the passage to open the door. Sean Trumble stood there, pale and tense, his hands thrust in the deep pockets of an anorak. The night had become cold without me noticing.

‘Well, what’ve you found out?’

I told the first lie to come into my head. ‘I haven’t started on it yet.’

His right hand came out, holding a heavy pistol. ‘I know you’re lying, Hardy. Get back in there and keep your hands in sight or I’ll put a bullet in you.’

You don’t argue with a Vietnam veteran and an ex-mercenary. I backed down the corridor towards the stairs. He stepped inside and flicked the door closed with his foot.

‘Anyone else here?’

‘Yeah. Three cops. We’re playing a little poker.’

‘I’m not in the mood for jokes. Turn around and keep moving.’

‘I prefer to keep an eye on you and I’m telling you I haven’t…’

He raised the pistol an inch. His hand was steady.

‘You’re lucky I don’t make you fucking crawl. You saw Rose North and Maria today. Had a good long talk with the both of them.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘Think I’m stupid? Think I’d trust someone in your stinking business?’

‘You didn’t follow me. I’d have spotted you.’

‘ I didn’t, but the other guy I hired did. I guess he knows the tricks of the trade as well as you, maybe better.’

It wasn’t as much of a blow to my pride as if Trumble himself had tailed me, but it was bad enough. I turned around and went back to the living room and my glass of wine. Trumble watched me but there was indecision written all over him. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house and if he shot me he might not learn what he was burning to know. I emptied my glass.

‘Want a drink, Sean?’

‘Fuck you, I… ‘

I tossed the glass from one hand to the other. An old trick but he was so agitated he fell for it. His eyes followed the glass for an instant, long enough for me to take a long step and chop down on his forearm with a clenched fist. If you hit the right spot in the right way, the nerves jump and the hand opens. He dropped the pistol and I shirt-fronted him, throwing him back against the stairwell. He hit awkwardly and the breath whooshed out of him. I picked up the pistol and ejected the magazine before tossing it to him. He tried for it, but he dropped the catch.

‘I’ll get you a drink anyway. You’re going to need it.’

I put three fingers of Scotch on top of a couple of ice cubes and drew off another glass of wine for myself. When I got back he was slumped in a chair, rubbing his forearm. He accepted the glass and took a gulp.

‘There was no need for that. I wouldn’t have shot you.’

‘Matter of professional pride.’

He’d closed off my options, so I told him what the two women had told me-straight, word for word as close as I could remember it, no punches pulled, no embellishments. He sipped his whisky as he listened. I finished about the same time he emptied the glass. He swilled the ice cubes, clockwise, then anti-clockwise. My nerves were screaming but he seemed to relax.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it,’ I said.

He stared at the floor and appeared to go into a kind of trance. When he spoke his voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘So David’s not my son. He’s my father’s grandson. And he’s my… nephew.’

I nodded.

He smiled, put the glass down on the floor, stood and held out his hand. ‘That’s close enough. Thanks, Hardy.’

‹‹Contents››

Archie’s Last Case

Archie Merrett lived in a Glebe flat a few streets away from my place. I used to see him pretty often in the pub. We’d have a drink or two, pass the time. Archie had plenty of time to pass and he appeared to have lots of money to spend as he was doing it. He was about sixty-five when I first met him ten years ago; he had no hobbies apart from the horses and drinking, and he said he’d come back to Sydney after retiring and living on the Gold Coast for a time.

‘It was all different in my day, boyo,’ he told me almost every time we talked. ‘We earned our dough.’

I’d nod and drink some beer and try to catch what he was saying above the noise of the television. He was usually saying the same thing.

‘What’ve you done today, Cliff?’

‘Served a summons or two, collected a debt, held a guy’s hand while he had a meeting with some people he’d never met before.’

Archie’s old eyes, peeping out between puckered wrinkles, would light up. ‘Any trouble?’

‘No.’

‘Different in my day.’

‘When you were all boyos.’

‘You can laugh, but it used to be a tough racket.’

He was referring to the private enquiry agent business which he’d been in from the time he got back from New Guinea in ‘46 until his retirement about twenty years later. In those days, according to Arch, most of the work was in divorce-although Arch preferred to call it ‘matrimonial’.

‘It scarred a man, Cliff, all that climbing in and out of windows, taking photos, going to court and hearing the terrible things men and women said and did to each other. It put me off marriage, I can tell you.’

I liked to hear his stories about the Fifties when I’d been body-surfing, boxing and thinking about girls and adventures in foreign parts, so I’d often egg him on with a remark like, ‘Ruined a few suits too, eh, Arch?’

A throaty, fifty-a-day chuckle. ‘You bet. Did I ever tell you about the time I was under a bedroom, down with the cat shit and spiders, with a stopwatch in my hand.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well I was. I’d got a bit of stick from a judge about being vague in my evidence and I’d decided to go scientific. I was going to time those bloody bed squeaks-so many to the minute.’

“What happened?’

‘Bloke must’ve weighed twenty stone, wharfie he was, and this little slip of a woman. Don’t know how she survived it. Anyway, I’ve got the stopwatch out and the torch on and I’m counting the squeaks and suddenly the whole bloody lot’s coming down on top of me. Bloody borer in the bearers.’

Arch’s wheezes and gasps would overwhelm him for a few minutes until he caught enough breath to light another cigarette. Then he’d tell me about the time he was out on a window ledge and felt a sneeze coming on, or when the grandmother kidnapped her baby grandson from her Protestant daughter-in-law so she could have him baptised as a Catholic. I liked Arch and his stories. The emphysema and circulation problems got him in the end, of course. I visited him in hospital a few times. They put a hole in his neck and took off one of his legs. Then he died and I missed him.