Torn Apart

He was working on another mouthful and he held up a hand to signal a wait until he had chewed and swallowed.

'Why?' he said.

'I liked Pat and I don't like what happened to him. I want someone to pay.'

'Fair enough. I was a bit pissed and should've kept my trap shut, but what I was going to say was that sometimes-only sometimes, mind you-Pat arranged for some trouble to happen at a place we were doing the security for. Nothing too serious, but just so word got around that we were useful and up to the job. You understand?'

He sawed off another piece of steak, pressing down hard, and speared some chips. I'd given up on the tough meat and was investigating the rather limp salad. I'd told Frank Parker I thought Patrick might cut corners without knowing why I thought so, but here was confirmation.

'Interesting,' I said. 'How many people know about that?'

'Just a few.'

'And a hundred bucks lets you tell me?'

He was cleaning his plate, mopping up fat and tomato sauce with two slices of white bread. He finished and took a long pull on his schooner.

'Why the fuck not?' he said, swallowing. 'I'll get the flick for sure from the new mob and bugger-all severance pay as a casual.'

'Who are they?'

'Consolidated Securities. Yanks. All computers and bullshit. You've run well over your twenty minutes.'

'You're looking at another hundred. Can you think of anything, an incident, something going wrong with that scam, that would've made an enemy for Patrick, supposing it got known?'

He took a chip from my plate and ate it as he thought about an answer. He was like those people who can't think without smoking, except his prop was food.

'Three hundred,' he said.

I nodded.

He leaned closer. 'We were doing security for this pub in Hamilton. Music gig, country rock-James O'Day and the Currawongs. Well, Pat arranged for this fight to break out, nothing serious, and me and another bloke were supposed to move in and stop it. But a brazier got knocked over and a fire broke out and a good bit of the pub got burned down. Get me another drink, eh?'

I got the beer. He tapped his pocket for his cigarettes, remembered the new rules and swore.

'Go on,' I said.

'The wife of the guy who owned the pub was killed by the fire. Pat paid me a fair bit of money to keep quiet and I did, but the other bloke, the one who sort of provoked the fight, he disappeared. I heard a whisper that the pub owner killed him. Maybe Pat killed him or he just shot through. I dunno, but Pat was edgy for quite a while after.'

Pat, a killer? I wouldn't have thought so, but I was learning something new about him every day. 'This was when?'

'About two years ago.'

'The names of the other Pavee guy and the pub owner?'

He shook his head and held out his hand. 'No names.'

I gave him three hundreds but he didn't look happy. He drained his third schooner and left.

I only had to go a block to South Dowling Street and then cross to Moore Park and I fancied a contemplative walk, even though the day was cold and windy. On the paths the trees dripped on me from the morning rain and the fallen leaves were slushy underfoot. I think of myself as a summer rather than a winter person but for some reason the conditions suited my mood. I walked briskly and warmed up.

Barclay's information was interesting and would be easy enough to check, at least in its outline. I knew James O'Day, who'd fought as Jimmy O'Day, some years back. A good, careful fighter with a good, careful manager who'd picked his fights. Never won a serious title, but he'd made money and got out of the game before any damage was done and turned to his other talent-music. The Currawongs were a moderately successful band. I'd seen them live once in Bulli in the course of an investigation and talked to O'Day a few times. I owned a couple of their albums, one of them signed by James. I could ask him about the Hamilton gig and the fire and I could go there and ask questions. A man who lost a wife in a fire caused by someone playing a dodgy game might well want revenge. I felt enlivened as I went up the steep path towards the golf course. Bugger golf, I had work to do.

I phoned O'Day, spoke to one of his girlfriends, and arranged to meet him at his place in Newtown that evening. She said he was just back from a tour and was chilling. I spent part of the afternoon in the gym and the rest loading the photographs from my mobile onto the computer. I flicked through them, slotting the right paper into the printer, and printed out the shot of Patrick pretending to play his fiddle with an appropriate Dublin scene in the background-a pub. I wasn't really concentrating and was about to close down when something I'd seen in passing nagged at me.

I went through the shots more slowly until I came to the photos showing the tavern where the ceilidh had taken place. The light wasn't the best and the pictures were fuzzy. The one of Angela Warburton in profile didn't do her justice. I found the one that had almost captured my attention-a wide-angle shot that showed Patrick with a group in the middle of a wild leap with his eyes closed in joy, and in drink. A man sitting behind him was staring at Patrick with a look of sheer malevolence on his face. He was thin, dark, not young, and not obviously one of the Travellers. Although there were other people sitting near him he gave the impression of being on his own.

I blew the image up and studied it. The hostility was unmistakable, made more emphatic by the bony thinness of his face. He had a barely touched pint of beer in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, but he didn't look drunk or as if he was about to do anything. He just stared and hated.

The next photo in the sequence was only moments later and covered the same scene, but the man was gone and Patrick had taken a breather. I ran off a copy of the photo. In the old days I'd have opened a file and the photo would have gone into it. But that was then and this was now. I pinned the ceilidh photo and the one of Patrick with his fiddle to the corkboard in the kitchen where I could look at and think about them.

James O'Day and assorted members of the Currawongs, their road crew and girlfriends, occupied a big terrace house in Newtown close to Camperdown Park. I rolled up at about 7 pm with half a slab of beer-the acceptable calling card. A young woman let me in and took the beer. She wore modified goth gear-black clothes and shining metal-but didn't have the sullen, the-world-is-a-shitheap look. I actually got a smile.

'James is in the kitchen,' she said.

'Cooking?'

'I wish. We've got pizza coming. I thought you were it.'

'Sorry.'

She smiled again, her lip ring glinting in the light, and lifted the beer. 'You're welcome.'

I followed her down the passage past a couple of rooms, one with a whiff of marijuana leaking out. The kitchen was galley-style, made spacious by a wall being knocked out and an archway constructed. There was a big pine table in the centre and an even bigger antique oak butcher's bench along one wall. Speakers hung at various points around the room and most of the surfaces were covered with magazines, books, newspapers and CDs.

'Your visitor, James,' the woman said, 'bearing gifts.'

O'Day was in his early forties, middle-sized and lean. His Aboriginal ancestry was becoming more pronounced with the passing years. He seemed darker and heavier around the brows than when I'd last seen him. He wore a few marks of other men's fists on his face, but not many. He was sitting at the table tapping on the keyboard of a notebook computer.

'Cliff, good to see you, brother. Saw you at the Moody fight. Still interested in the sweet science, eh? This is Vicki.'

'Now and then, Jimmy. Hello, Vicki.'

She'd taken the tops off three of the stubbies in a matter of seconds. She handed me one. 'Hi, Cliff,' she said. 'Is this going to be, like, secret men's business?'

O'Day looked up from the screen, accepted the stubby and shook his head. 'Don't reckon. Hey, Cliff, what's a good rhyme for silver?'