Terry and I went to a pub down near the wharf in Balmain. You can eat outside there, and hear yourself talk above the acoustic bush band. They have a couple of very heavy people to deal with the drunks and the food is good. Terry seems to eat mainly lettuce, and drink hardly at all; I was manfully doing my share of both when she told me that two of Pat’s owners had pulled their dogs out.
‘Hear about the doping did they?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought that was a close-kept secret.’
‘So did I, so did Dad. What does it mean d’you think?’
I ate and drank and thought for a while. ‘Sounds as if the doper spread the word.’
‘That wouldn’t make sense.’ She took a tiny sip of wine, as if even half a glass would ruin her backhand.
‘It might, if the idea is just to put Pat out of business, not to actually fix races. Does that open up a line of thought?’
‘No.’
‘Well, try this; it could be revenge.’
She almost choked. ‘On Dad? Come on.’ Then she saw that I was serious. ‘Revenge’, she said slowly. ‘We go in a bit for that on the circuit, but it’s not common in real life, is it?’
That’s another thing I like about Terry, although she’s serious about her tennis she doesn’t think it’s ‘real life’; she won’t go on the gin when it’s over. ‘No, it’s not common’, I said. ‘In fact it’s rare. “Maintain your rage” and all that, people can’t do it mostly. But it does happen; we’d better ask Pat about his enemies.’
‘I’m sure he hasn’t any.’
‘Everyone has.’ She didn’t like that too much; she doesn’t like my suspicious nature or the work I do, really. It’s a problem, and we spent the rest of the dinner talking about other things and getting over the bad spot.
Back in Rozelle Pat was still up, working on his books. We went through the tea and coffee ritual again and I asked Pat if he’d made any enemies in the game.
‘Few’, he said. I glanced up at Terry.
‘Any that’d want to put you out of business?’
He blew smoke and deliberated. ‘Only one I reckon. Bloke was a vet and I gave evidence against him for doping. He didn’t like it, and said he’d get me.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about him?’
‘Couldn’t be him, mate. He’s in gaol; he went to Queensland, got mixed up in something, and I heard he got ten years.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, four, five years ago.’
‘He could be out, Pat’, I said.
Terry and I went back to her flat at Rushcutters Bay, near the White City courts, and she acknowledged that I could be on to something. We left it there and went to bed; it hurt a bit, what with the bruises and all, but it didn’t hurt enough to stop us. The ex-vet’s name was Leslie Victor Mahony, and it took me two phone calls and half an hour to find out that he’d been released from gaol in Brisbane three months back having served four and a half years of a ten year sentence for embezzlement and fraud. I spent the next two days confirming that Mahony had come to Sydney and failing to locate him. There was a definite feeling that Doc Mahony was in town, but no-one knew where, or they weren’t saying.
At the end of the second day I was dispirited. Terry was playing an exhibition match but I didn’t feel like going, and I didn’t feel like reporting my lack of progress to her afterwards. The case was turning into a fair bitch and, weakling that I am, I got drunk. I started on beer when I got home, went on to wine with my meal and on to whisky after that. I woke up with a mouth like a kangaroo pouch. I stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, telling myself how not smoking reduced hangovers. All that did was make me wish I had a cigarette.
I was drinking coffee, and thinking speculatively about eggs when the phone rang.
The voice said: ‘I hear you’re looking for Doc Mahony.’
I said: That’s right, who’s this?’
The voice said: ‘Nobody. How well do you know Heathcote?’
‘I know it.’
‘You get there, and pick up a road that runs along the railway, going south. Where the bitumen stops you go right on an unmade road for two miles. You take a left fork, go down a dip and there’s a shack on your right. Mahoney’s there.’
‘You a friend of his?’
‘I wouldn’t piss on him. If you want him, he’s there.’
He hung up and I tried to remember whether I’d heard the voice before, I thought I had but I’ve heard a hell of a lot of voices. I didn’t like it at all; it looked to me as if a. 22 had been used on the Frenchman’s windows and a. 22 bullet can kill you. An anonymous phone call, a shack in the bush-it sounded like a trap. It sounds crazy and probably had something to do with the brain cells I’d burnt out the night before, but I just couldn’t get too frightened about a vet. I checked over the. 38 carefully, took some extra ammunition and went to Heathcote.
I’ve heard people talk fondly about Heathcote as an unspoiled place of their childhood; it’s hard to imagine it like that now. The sprawl on the western side of the highway is the standard, sterile, red brick horrorland where the garage dominates the outside of the house and the TV set the inside. Over the highway and the railway line though, the area has retained some dusty charm; if you like faded weatherboard houses with old wooden fences and roofs rusting quietly away. Up to a point I followed the directions I’d been given, but I’m not that green; I had a map of the tracks leading into the National Park behind and beyond and I marked where the shack would be and circled up around behind it. I stopped at a point which I calculated would be about half a mile from the shack; it was a still, quiet day with the birds subdued in the sun. I closed the car door softly and started down the rough track towards a patch of forest behind the track. Things jumped and wriggled in the grass beside the track and I resolved to be very, very careful so that they wouldn’t be jumping and wriggling over me.
The shack, as I looked at it through the trees, was exactly that-an ancient, weatherboard affair that had lost its pretensions to paint long ago. Grass grew in the guttering and sprouted out through the lower boards. I squatted behind a tree for ten minutes soaking up the atmosphere-no sign of a car, no wisps of smoke in the air, no coughing. I did a complete circle of the place at about seventy-five yards distance, the way they’d taught me in Malaya. Still nothing. There are two theories on approaching a possibly defended place like this: one says you should keep circling and come in closer each time; the other has it that this causes too much movement and you should come in straight. The first way was out because there was a clear patch about fifty yards deep in front of the shack and I’m a straight line man myself, anyway.
I made it down to the back door without any trouble. The building was a tiny one-pitch, three rooms at most. The noise I could hear inside was snoring. I gave it a few minutes, but it was real snoring, complete with irregular rhythm and grunts. I eased the door open and went in; floorboards creaked and the door grated, but Doc Mahony wasn’t worried-he was lying on a bed in his underwear with a big, dreamy smile on his face-maybe he was dreaming of when he was young and slim and sober, which he wasn’t anymore. There was an empty bottle of Bundaberg rum on the floor and one half full on a chair beside the bed.
It was a dump comparable to the Frenchman’s and the rural setting didn’t help it any; you could hardly see through the dusty windows and the kikuyu poked up through the floor. I couldn’t find the. 22, which worried me, and I was also worried by the empty tins and the food and water bowls in the back room-I hadn’t seen any sign of a dog. I filled the empty rum bottle with water and went back to the bed chamber. The Doc tried to ignore the first few drops but then I got some good ones down his nose and into his mouth and he spluttered and coughed and woke up.
His face was pale, grimy with dirt and whiskers, and lumpy like his body. He had a few thin strands of hair plastered to his head with sweat, and a few teeth, but much of the beauty of the human face and form was lacking. He opened his eyes and his voice was surprisingly pleasant-sounding.