The Undertow

'I'm going to have to ask you about him. Will that upset you?'

She let loose a throaty laugh. 'Not in the least. I don't want you to think I'm a dried-up, frustrated old woman, Mr Hardy.'

Her eyes were bright and her smile had turned mocking-at me.

'I don't,' I said.

'You might. You couldn't be blamed.' She consulted a gold watch on her wrist. 'Yes. This's a good time. Let me show you something.'

She wheeled around and moved towards a door standing ajar. Her bedroom. The room had a big window with a view across the street to a block of flats of similar size and vintage.

'Sit on the bed,' she said. 'A great big fellow like you would be too obvious.'

Directly opposite and not more than fifty metres away was another large window. I had a clear view into the room and saw a tall, blonde woman taking off her dress and unhooking her bra to reveal impressive breasts. A man standing near her was watching with his hands busy on himself.

'Not a good one,' Roma Brown said. 'A disappointment. Probably just a self-abuser. It's better when they do something standing up or they have oral sex. That's very enjoyable. Are you shocked?'

If I was, I wasn't going to show it. 'I'm surprised she doesn't know about you.'

The wheelchair spun around again and she laughed as she left the room. 'Oh, she knows. We're quite good friends. She doesn't mind in the least. In fact she says it gives her pleasure. As you can imagine, not every engagement is enjoyable. It's what I meant by my little hobby.'

We went back to the sitting room. 'I just wanted you to know that although Karl broke my heart and a motor car broke my body, I haven't resigned from the human race. A very nice man visits me regularly and we enjoy ourselves- well, I certainly do.'

'I'm glad to hear it. Tell me about Dr Lubeck-Karl. German, I suppose.'

'Originally, I'm sure. But he had no accent. He was as Australian as you and I with our standard names. I must admit I knew very little about him. The affair only lasted a few weeks.'

'You don't have a photograph?'

'I did, but I tore it up in pique. I'm sorry. He was tall, like you, and dark like you. But more heavily built and with much less hair. Very little, in fact. I've never found baldness unattractive, which men don't understand.'

'They say bald men have more testosterone.'

She smiled. 'Well, he certainly had his share. What else? I got the impression he was a contemporary of Dr Heysen and Dr Bellamy and had qualified at Sydney University. I mean contemporary as a graduate-Karl was a few years older.'

'Family?'

'Never mentioned. D'you mean did he have a wife? After what happened, I wouldn't be surprised. Shouldn't you be making notes?'

'Later. Habits? Sports? Interests?'

'Mr Hardy, I was head over heels in blind love. I'd be inventing if I said that from my point of view the answer to your questions was anything but sex, sex, sex.'

8

I went to the outdoor coffee area where Burton Street hits Crown, ordered a flat white and sat down with my notebook to make my usual squiggles, arrows and dotted lines. They're supposed to help me make connections and to inspire questions and speculations. Sometimes they do, and once or twice the process has led me definitively through a maze in the right direction. Mostly, they just help to make the maze clearer.

Roma Brown was a fresh source, virtually untapped by the police. If Wain or one of the other PEAs had talked to her she certainly would have mentioned it. A fresh source when investigating an old matter on which the dust has settled is pure gold. She'd given me things to think about. If she was right about Heysen doing makeovers of some sort for shady customers, it could explain why he had the substantial equity Simmonds had mentioned. Equally, it could have put him in danger if one of his clients was either dissatisfied or took it into his head to take the doctor out of circulation. The possibilities were many.

A complication to this line of thinking was the evidence that Heysen was strapped for cash at the time of Bellamy's death. Had the makeover business dried up? And if so, why? Was he being blackmailed? And if so, by whom?

All that was assuming that someone had framed Heysen for Bellamy's murder. But what if Bellamy had found out about his partner's illicit activities and had hired Padrone to silence him and been outbid by Heysen? Guilty as charged, but a tangled and very speculative web. If Cassidy and Wain had known about Heysen's sideline and hushed it up, what might've followed from that? Getting to be too much to hold in my head. I drank the coffee and sketched out the various scenarios as a series of questions. One course of action was clear-find Karl Lubeck, the medical Lothario.

The coffee tables and umbrellas were located in a space dropped down below the level of Crown Street that's reached by a set of sandstone steps. A bit of old Sydney town preserved-something I always like to see. A much-touted vegetarian restaurant is opposite, along with boutiques and minute art galleries. There are plenty of sex shops around selling what they sell, and I suppose people seeing Roma Brown in her wheelchair would think they were irrelevant to her. They'd be dead wrong, I thought, and good on her.

Back in the Mitchell Library, and I set about the task of tracking Dr Karl methodically, consulting first the telephone directories in all the capital cities, knowing the reluctance of doctors to go bush. No result. Then the medical directory which covers the whole country and is never completely up to date but catches most of the long-termers. Ditto.

I stood on the steps outside the library as the rain fell, and rang my doctor, Ian Sangster, who sits on various medical boards and tribunals and has extensive contacts in the profession.

'This was when?' Ian asked.

'Twenty-three years ago.'

'Could be dead, it's a high stress profession.'

'He'd only be sixty or so.'

'What was his lifestyle?'

'All I know is that he liked sex and I'm told he was good at it.'

'That's a life-preserving recipe. Sorry, Cliff, never heard of him, but I'll ask around. D'you know anything more about him? Any chance he was deregistered somewhere along the line?'

'Possible, but that's all I've got at present.'

'I can check that. I'll let you know if he turns up.'

Not much more to be done there for the moment. There was no mention of a Dr Lubeck in Frank's notes or at the trial. Either the police didn't find out about him or Cassidy and Wain knew of him but suppressed the information. Why? Maybe because they were concealing everything to do with Heysen's sideline. Again, why? Good question. Possible answers were a pay-off or fear. On the basis of Wain's reaction, I'd have to go along with fear. But of whom or what?

Another name I had a question mark beside was Pixie Padrone. I was still curious about what had happened to the alleged fee for the hit. I added a question mark beside the twenty grand. Wain had said that Pixie was on the street, meaning that she was in the lower echelon of sex workers-the least paid, the most exploited, the most vulnerable. In that shadowy world people disappear, change their names, change their sex and are hard to track.

I had a source of information though-Ruby Gentle is the proprietor of the House of Ruby, a massage parlour and relaxation centre in Kings Cross. I'd located her lost daughter some years back, got a protection racketeer off her back, and we've remained on friendly terms. I hadn't seen her since I'd left Darlinghurst for Newtown, but this was definitely the time to renew the acquaintance.

The House of Ruby is open twenty-four hours a day and Ruby herself is in attendance until the early hours in a supervisory and occasionally participatory capacity. It was mid-afternoon on a Friday and I knew she'd be there.