‘Had to be one.’ There was a slight panting in his voice but that was all the effect the bit of action had on him. ‘Means he’s here’, he said.
The hair was still sticking up on the back of my neck, but Hayes had moved on to the next step. He examined the back door which was sturdy, set close in its frame and flush with the wall. It had a newish Chubb Guardian lock.
‘Alarm?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘No point. Don’t like this, though. Side.’
We stepped over the body of the dog and went along the slab to the side of the house. The concrete gave way to wood-a narrow, slatted-verandah, with the slats running at right-angles to the house. Halfway along, a French window was being softly stroked by a tree branch. A dog’s bowl and an old blanket lay on the slats in front of the window.
Hayes bent and slipped off his city shoes; he looked at my feet and nodded. We passed the heavily curtained section of the window, and Hayes picked up the bowl and laid it carefully down on top of the blanket. The menace and purpose of him had me almost mesmerised now. I forgot who he was and what he was doing-his meticulous, precise movements seemed to have a validity of their own that had nothing to do with law and justice. I felt as if I was watching a riveting film with a very good actor in the lead. I fought against the feeling, trying to define my own role. My battered ear was hurting as the cool air nipped at it, and I could feel the gun in my pocket.
Hayes tried the handle on the French window and it turned easily with a slight creak. He shook his head at the carelessness; but Fido was supposed to take care of this entrance, and he’d been taken care of. He opened the glass-paned door and looked in. I was close behind him, but my feeling was that he knew just where I was and what my hands were doing. There was light only at the back of the house; the room we faced was dark and still. Hayes eased the door open until it was at its full swing. He pinned it there with his stockinged foot and motioned me to go in. I looked at him: his face was set, but not tense. I couldn’t see any sweat beads at the ex-hairline. His gun moved impatiently and I stepped into Peter Collinson’s hideaway.
19
The room we were in seemed to take up about a third of the floor plan of the house. There was a deep carpet on the floor, and the walls were wood-panelled. A big fireplace divided the wall opposite the French windows, and there were heavy drapes drawn over floor-to-ceiling windows in the wall which formed the front of the house. The glass-paned front door was uncovered.
Hayes and I stood by the open window, breathing softly and adapting to the darkness. The moon moved into the clear and beams of light came through the glass-enough to show the outlines of the furniture, which consisted of a low table in front of the fireplace, an easy chair to the side of it and a hi-fi, radio and TV unit. A set of low shelves held records and cassettes, and there was a large bookcase, well stocked.
Hayes pointed and we moved across the carpet towards the back. The house had a simple lay-out; a galley-style kitchen ran along the whole length of the back section, and we didn’t bother to go down the three steps to look in. The single bedroom was off the large front room to the left. The door stood half-open and there was a soft light inside. Hayes moved the slide on the. 45 back, cocking it. The mechanism was oiled and smooth and the click was barely audible although I was only a few centimetres away from it.
‘Go into the bedroom’, he whispered, ‘and stand in the nearest corner with your face to the wall.’
My heart was crashing in my chest and I could feel the blood beating in my temples. The floor felt red hot. I could smell Hayes an arm’s length behind me. I went across and sidled through the door, knocking my elbow as I went. Hayes’ breath was sibilant by my shoulder. I moved towards the corner as instructed, but it wasn’t necessary to go all the way. The night-light was turned very low, barely lifting the gloom, but I could see that there was no one in the bed. I stopped at the foot of the double bed; Hayes stopped, too. The bed was rumpled and a pair of track suit-style pyjamas lay across the single pillow.
‘He’s not here’, I said, stupidly.
‘He was.’
My legs felt shaky, and I sat down on the end of the bed. Hayes moved forward, picked up an ashtray from the bedside table and looked at the half-dozen butts.
‘He was here tonight.’ He looked at the butts again and at the bed. ‘Alone.’
We prowled through the house and Hayes used the torch, still carefully, to find out what he wanted to know. In the kitchen there was evidence of an evening meal and some after dinner drinking. Collinson had a supply of everything, and all of the best quality. The refrigerator was full of food and drink- meat, cheeses, white wine, beer. The cupboards were stacked with packet and tinned food and everything necessary for successful cooking. There were several dozen bottles of red wine in a rack and a few more cases of the stuff along with spirits and mixers. I felt myself relaxing a little.
‘Crime pays’, I said. Hayes didn’t laugh.
‘Where the fuck is he?’
Under the house, reached from a set of steps in the kitchen, was the garage, storeroom, workshop and boat shed. The food supply was siege-worthy, as Phillips had said. There were two cars in residence-a Mercedes and a battered Holden panel van. Two wide benches held vices, clamps and the equipment for servicing cars and boats. We looked around, both trying to do the same thing-use the information this setup gave us to judge where he might be. My recent minor boat experience gave me the answer.
‘Here’s the boat stuff, I said. ‘Where’s the boat-speedboat, dinghy, whatever? There’s marks here’. I squatted on the cement floor, ‘that shows where he towed a boat up. Probably with the panel van. No boat now.’
He nodded. We went back into the house, through it, and out the front door. The water was still at low tide and the mud, or something under it, was making the sucking noise I had heard from the back of the house. There was a small patch of grass in front of the house with some beach scrub fringing it. A jetty, about twenty metres long joined the grassy bank, ran over a short belt of sand and stretched its length out over the moving mud.
Hayes never let his guard down; he dropped behind me and let me lead the way down the jetty. It ended in a wide-planked staging with a hand rail, and steps which would have reached the water at high tide. Now, they finished a metre or so above the heaving, dark mud. There was an almost-empty can of diesel fuel on the top step, and an oily rag hanging over the rail. Hayes, who was wearing his shoes again but had taken off his jacket, bent to examine these items after waving me to a safe distance. The moon was high now in a clear sky and visibility was good. I saw dark, moist circles spreading under Hayes’ armpits-his only indisposition; my shirt was a damp rag. He straightened up with clicking bones.
‘If he’s fishing, Christ knows when he’ll be back.’
I thought about the house and the garage, checking the items mentally.
‘No fishing gear anywhere’, I said. ‘No fish in the freezer. He’s not a fisherman. He’ll be back for breakfast. He likes to eat. Probably feeds the birds, too.’
Hayes turned to look back at the house. It was shadowed by the trees growing close to it and the foliage spread out unbroken to either side. There were houses further up the hill, but none so close to the water.
The shoreline was rocky for most of the cove and there were no other houses with such direct access to the water until further around the points off to the east and west. When Collinson came back he’d be pulling up to a private jetty in a semi-private setting. His tying-up point would be well below the main section of the jetty, virtually invisible to all except someone who cared to station himself in the scrub to the right. Such a person would be twenty metres from the boat landing, in concealment and unobstructed. If it happened like that, Collinson was a dead man. I took all this in quickly and Hayes obviously did the same. His usually grim expression-something like a cross between a headmaster’s and a bookie’s-relaxed a fraction. You couldn’t call it a smile.