‘Moneyholism,’ Jik said, like a lecturer to a dimmish class, ‘is a widespread disease easily understood by everyone who has ever felt a twinge of greed, which is everyone.’
‘Go on about Hudson,’ Sarah said.
‘Hudson had the organising ability... I didn’t know when I came that the organisation was so huge, but I did know it was organised, if you see what I mean. It was an overseas operation. It took some doing. Knowhow.’
Jik tugged the ring off a can of beer and passed it to me, wincing as he stretched.
‘But he convinced me I was wrong about him,’ I said, drinking through the triangular hole. ‘Because he was so careful. He pretended he had to look up the name of the gallery where Donald bought his picture. He didn’t think of me as a threat, of course, but just as Donald’s cousin. Not until he talked to Wexford down on the lawn.’
‘I remember,’ Sarah said. ‘When you said it had ripped the whole works apart.’
‘Mm... I thought it was only that he had told Wexford I was Donald’s cousin, but of course Wexford also told him that I’d met Greene in Maisie’s ruins in Sussex and then turned up in the gallery looking at the original of Maisie’s burnt painting.’
‘Jesus Almighty,’ Jik said. ‘No wonder we beat it to Alice Springs.’
‘Yes, but by then I didn’t think it could be Hudson I was looking for. I was looking for someone brutal, who passed on his violence through his employees. Hudson didn’t look or act brutal.’ I paused. ‘The only slightest crack was when his gamble went down the drain at the races. He gripped his binoculars so hard that his knuckles showed white. But you can’t think a man is a big-time thug just because he gets upset over losing a bet.’
Jik grinned. ‘I’d qualify.’
‘In spades, redoubled,’ Sarah said.
‘I was thinking about it in the Alice Springs hospital... There hadn’t been time for the musclemen to get to Alice from Melbourne between us buying Renbo’s picture and me diving off the balcony, but there had been time for them to come from Adelaide, and Hudson’s base was at Adelaide... but it was much too flimsy.’
‘They might have been in Alice to start with,’ Jik said reasonably.
‘They might, but what for?’ I yawned. ‘Then on the night of the Cup you said Hudson had made a point of asking you about me... and I wondered how he knew you.’
‘Do you know,’ Sarah said, ‘I did wonder too at the time, but it didn’t seem important. I mean, we’d seen him from the top of the stands, so it didn’t seem impossible that somewhere he’d seen you with us.’
‘The boy knew you,’ I said. ‘And he was at the races, because he followed you, with Greene, to the Hilton. The boy must have pointed you out to Greene.’
‘And Greene to Wexford, and Wexford to Hudson?’ Jik asked.
‘Quite likely.’
‘And by then,’ he said, ‘They all knew they wanted to silence you pretty badly, and they’d had a chance and muffed it... I’d love to have heard what happened when they found we’d robbed the gallery.’ He chuckled, tipping up his beer can to catch the last few drops.
‘On the morning after,’ I said, ‘a letter from Hudson was delivered by hand to the Hilton. How did he know we were there?’
They stared. ‘Greene must have told him,’ Jik said. ‘We certainly didn’t. We didn’t tell anybody. We were careful about it.’
‘So was I,’ I said. ‘That letter offered to show me round a vineyard. Well... if I hadn’t been so doubtful of him, I might have gone. He was a friend of Donald’s... and a vineyard would be interesting. From his point of view, anyway, it was worth a try.’
‘Jesus!’
‘On the night of the Cup, when we were in that motel near Box Hill, I telephoned the police in England and spoke to the man in charge of Donald’s case, Inspector Frost. I asked him to ask Donald some questions... and this morning outside Wellington I got the answers.’
‘This morning seems several light years away,’ Sarah said.
‘Mm...’
‘What questions and what answers?’ Jik said.
‘The questions were, did Donald tell Hudson all about the wine in his cellar, and did Donald tell Wexford about the wine in the cellar, and was it Hudson who had suggested to Donald that he and Regina should go and look at the Munnings in the Arts Centre. And the answers were “Yes, of course”, and “No, whyever should I?”, and “Yes”.’
They thought about it in silence. Jik fiddled with the dispenser in the room’s in-built refrigerator and liberated another can of Fosters.
‘So what then?’ Sarah said.
‘So the Melbourne police said it was too insubstantial, but if they could tie Hudson in definitely with the gallery they might believe it. So they dangled in front of Hudson the pictures and stuff we stole from the gallery, and along he came to collect them.’
‘How? How did they dangle them?’
‘They let Wexford accidentally overhear snippets from a fake report from several hotels about odd deposits in their baggage rooms, including the paintings at the Hilton. Then after we got here they gave him an opportunity to use the telephone when he thought no one was listening, and he rang Hudson at the house he’s been staying in here for the races, and told him. So Hudson wrote himself a letter to the Hilton from me, and zoomed along to remove the incriminating evidence.’
‘He must have been crazy.’
‘Stupid. But he thought I was dead... and he’d no idea anyone suspected him. He should have had the sense to know that Wexford’s call to him would be bugged by the police... but Frost told me that Wexford would think he was using a public ‘phone booth.’
‘Sneaky,’ Sarah said.
I yawned. ‘It takes a sneak to catch a sneak.’
‘You’d never have thought Hudson would blaze up like that,’ she said. ‘He looked so... so dangerous.’ She shivered. ‘You wouldn’t think people could hide such really frightening violence under a friendly public face.’
‘The nice Irish bloke next door,’ Jik said, standing up, ‘can leave a bomb to blow the legs off children.’
He pulled Sarah to her feet. ‘What do you think I paint?’ he said. ‘Vases of flowers?’ He looked down at me. ‘Horses?’
We parted the next morning at Melbourne airport, where we seemed to have spent a good deal of our lives.
‘It seems strange, saying goodbye,’ Sarah said.
‘I’ll be coming back,’ I said.
They nodded.
‘Well...’ We looked at watches.
It was like all partings. There wasn’t much to say. I saw in their eyes, as they must have seen in mine, that the past ten days would quickly become a nostalgic memory. Something we did in our crazy youth. Distant.
‘Would you do it all again?’ Jik said.
I thought inconsequentially of surviving wartime pilots looking back from forty years on. Had their achievements been worth the blood and sweat and risk of death: did they regret?.
I smiled. Forty years on didn’t matter. What the future made of the past was its own tragedy. What we ourselves did on the day was all that counted.
‘I guess I would.’
I leaned forward and kissed Sarah, my oldest friend’s wife.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Find one of your own.’
17
Maisie saw me before I saw her, and came sweeping down like a great scarlet bird, wings outstretched.
Monday lunchtime at Wolverhampton races, misty and cold.
‘Hello, dear, I’m so glad you’ve come. Did you have a good trip back, because of course it’s such a long way, isn’t it, with all that wretched jet lag?’ She patted my arm and peered acutely at my face. ‘You don’t really look awfully well, dear, if you don’t mind me saying so, and you don’t seem to have collected any sun-tan, though I suppose as you haven’t been away two weeks it isn’t surprising, but those are nasty gashes on your hand, dear, aren’t they, and you were walking very carefully just now.’