‘She’s taken the day off. Not for the first time. She says she’ll talk to you but only in person. Really, I don’t know. Is it so important?’
‘It could be.’
‘Where are you now?’
I told her and she said I should come back to the house. That didn’t sound like the best of ideas and I said so. She had the answer.
‘The dragon mother will absent herself. She’ll be in the garden. It needs work.’
A lot of things around that place needed work but the arrangement sounded okay. I stopped at a liquor store and bought a can of draft Guinness. A chop in every glass. A kilometre short of the house I opened the can, carefully let it foam into a paper cup and drank it down. Ah, the gift of we Irish to the human race.
5
The rain had gone and the steps up to the house had dried out, but the water had caused crumbling in some places and a few of the bricks looked ready to head south. Angela was facing some serious maintenance problems. She opened the door to me, ushered me in without speaking, knocked on Sarah’s door as we went past and continued through to the sunroom. She was wearing jeans, rubber boots and a faded denim shirt. She picked up a straw hat and a can of insect repellent from a table near the door to the wooden steps leading down to the garden.
‘She smokes. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘A lot do. The smart ones stop.’
‘We live in hope.’ A quick smile and she was off.
Sarah came into the sunroom wearing white jeans and a black T-shirt with the face of Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes printed on it. She was barefoot but stood several centimetres taller than her mother. The makeup had gone and her long, fair hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was a good-looking young woman with a generous mouth and big eyes that did not bulge in the slightest.
I met her in the centre of the room and we shook hands. ‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘I’m sorry about what I said to you the other day. Ronny called and said you’d given him a lift. That was nice of you.’
‘It was raining pretty hard and he was sloshing along, but I admit I wanted information from him. That’s what I do. Let’s sit down, Sarah.’
She sat across the low coffee table from me and looked like the private schoolgirl she was-straight back, knees together. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Angela told me you’re trying to find Just.’
‘That’s right, working for your father.’
Her ‘Mmm,’ was sceptical.
‘I’ve seen a record of the interview you had with the police back then. You didn’t have much to say.’
‘I was a kid, and I didn’t know anything.’
‘Well, you might have known more than you thought. Justin said something to you about being a soldier of fortune. Ronny told me that.’
‘Jesus, that’s right. But I didn’t remember when I was talking to the policewoman. She wasn’t very smart. I don’t think she knew what she was doing, really.’
‘So what can you tell me about that?’
‘Hang on.’ She got up, hurried out and came back with a packet of Stuyvesant and a lighter. She offered them, I shook my head and she lit up. It was a bit studied but she was getting the hang of it. She moved the squeaky clean ashtray on the table closer and tapped off the minimal amount of ash produced by one draw, the way they do.
‘Just was always on about the army and how the Hampshires had fought in every bloody war under the sun. I used to tease him about it and say how America got beaten in Vietnam and how they burnt villages and raped women and that. It made him angry and that’s what I wanted to do. I loved him, but…’ She smoked, tapped ash. ‘You know, brothers and sisters, especially after Dad left and Angela went round the bend. It all got a bit, you know, tense. Anyway, this time I said something like that and he just nodded. Then he swore and reckoned he wanted to do it properly, like a soldier of fortune’
‘Did you know what he meant?’
‘Not really. I had some rough idea, from a movie or something. I said what about the army, and he said fuck the army.’
‘That’s all? He didn’t mention a country or a place?’
‘No, that was it. I thought it was just him sounding off. I didn’t even remember it when that dumb policewoman came along. Did I screw things up?’
‘No, I don’t think so. There’s another thing. At Justin’s school I was told that he was friendly with someone named Pierre Fontaine. D’you know anything about him?’
Her eyes opened wide and she dropped the cigarette on the glass-topped table. ‘Shit!’ She picked it up quickly and stubbed it out half smoked in the ashtray.
‘Who told you that?’
‘I won’t say, just as I won’t tell anybody else what you’re telling me. Them’s the rules.’
‘You must tell the person who’s paying you.’ She wasn’t dumb.
‘Well, there I use my discretion.’
‘Did Ronny say anything about Pierre?’
‘I hadn’t even heard the name until this morning at the school. Should I talk to Ronny about him?’
She shook her head and the ponytail swung. ‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Who is he? Why were you so surprised to hear the name?’
‘I was surprised that anyone would say that Just knew him. That guy, Pierre, was done for drugs. He’s the one that supplied Ronny with some hash that got him kicked out of Bryce. Justin hated drugs, he was a real pain in the arse about it.’ She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and held it up. ‘He hated smoking and he didn’t drink, ever. I can’t believe he had anything to do with Pierre.’
‘Did you have anything to do with him, Sarah?’
She stood up and went to the louvre windows to check on her mother. ‘Sure, I scored some grass off him a couple of times.’
‘I have to talk to him to find out what went on between him and Justin. It might help me to trace your brother, although it’s worrying. D’you know where I can find him?’
She sat down. ‘Of course I do. He got caught supplying heroin to some kids. He’s in gaol.’
I sat back and let that sink in while Sarah smoked and looked less cooperative.
‘I can understand why Pierre Fontaine’s name didn’t come up when you and Justin’s friends talked to the police,’ I said.
She brushed that off with a wave of the cigarette hand. ‘Look, Just didn’t really have any friends. And I told you, the cops asked dumb questions. They didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.’
‘How long after Justin went missing did Fontaine get caught?’
Sarah finished her cigarette and gave some thought to her answer. ‘If you go to see Pierre you won’t tell him I talked about him, will you? I mean, he won’t be in gaol forever and he’s a bad dude.’
‘Did I tell you who told me about Fontaine? No. The same goes for you. Like I won’t tell your mother you smoke grass.’
She laughed. ‘She knows, she just doesn’t want to know she knows. All right, let me think. The police got him about a year ago, so it was about a year after Just…’
‘Went missing.’
She nodded.
I stood. ‘Thanks, Sarah. You’ve been a big help.’
She stood as well and looked surprised to find herself on her feet, being polite. ‘Have I? I haven’t heard that said before by anyone around here.’
‘Give your mother a break. She’s holding in a lot of grief and anger. People like her, conventional people, find all this sort of stuff very confusing.’
‘You’re not conventional, are you, Mr Hardy?’
‘I can’t afford to be.’
Peter Corris
CH33 – Open File
‘And I don’t want to be.’
‘One more thing-Justin went on a school excursion to Bangara near the end of the year and something there seemed to affect him. Does Bangara mean anything to you?’
‘Bangara? Yeah, that’s where some fucking Hampshire hero came from. Great-grandfather or something. He got killed in the First World War.’
I thanked her again and asked her to thank her mother. She said she would and I believed her. She didn’t exactly escort me out, but she made more or less polite gestures along those lines. I gave her a goodbye nod in the passage and she smiled and raised a hand almost shyly, like a schoolgirl.