“Right. Ray was a big help there.”
“Looks like you should’ve taken him along with you.”
“Maybe. I hope he can help me some more.” I touched the scratches. “But no rough stuff involved.”
Guthrie nodded and waited. He was a discreet, experienced level-headed man, and there seemed no reason not to tell him about the Madden case. It sometimes helps to talk to an objective onlooker anyway. I gave it to him chapter and verse, and he listened in silence, sipping on his beer.
“Interesting,” he said when I’d finished. “And you want to go and have a look in the water under the bridge?”
“Not me. Someone who knows how to handle himself in that situation. I thought Ray might know someone, be able to help with a boat and so on.”
“He will. And he’ll do the dive himself. He’s an expert, and he’s always felt that he owes you a big favour.”
I waved that away, or tried to. “I don’t want him to feel like that. I just want to hire him to do a job. Perhaps you can help me to get it on that sort of footing, Paul?”
“I’ll try. When would you want to do this?”
“Tonight.”
He broke into harsh, deep-chested laughter. “Jesus, Hardy, you’re the limit. I should’ve known. Pat did. I said some-thing about having you stay over for a night and go out on the harbour and she said, ‘He’ll be off chasing someone’.”
I was saved from having to reply by the simultaneous arrival of Ray Guthrie and his mother. There was just enough light outside for me to see the little Honda and the Holden Jackaroo pulling up side by side in the driveway.
Pat Guthrie was a small, dark woman with a trim figure and a worried look which gave way very attractively to merriment. She came across the grass and into the den, kissed her husband and pointed a mock finger-pistol at me. “Hullo, Cliff. You haven’t changed much. A bit thinner, are you? Good to see you.”
“You too, Pat. You look well.”
She nodded in Guthrie’s direction. “We are. Has he shown you the snaps of the grandchildren yet?”
“Pat,” Guthrie protested, “I’m not that doting, am I?”
“Just doting enough. Want another beer? Dinner’ll be a while.”
Guthrie patted his taut waistline and refused. I accepted; Pat smiled and left, and it was Ray Guthrie who brought in the can. I hadn’t seen Ray since he and his girlfriend, Jess Polansky, had left Helen Broadway’s flat in Elizabeth Bay. This was after I’d helped to send Ray’s real father to gaol and shown him that his stepfather was the best friend he had in the world. Ray had broadened a bit, but the bulk looked to be due to hard work more than self-indulgence. He was weatherbeaten but not careworn. He looked happy. He shoved the beer at me, and we shook hands.
“How’s Jess?” I said.
“Just great. Sends her best. She coul0dn’t come, one of the kids is crook…”
“What?” Paul Guthrie almost jumped from his chair.
“Take it easy, Paul,” Ray said. “It’s nothing. She just needs her mum tonight.”
“All right, but keep an eye on her.”
Ray drank some beer and looked at his stepfather with affection. “You know, Cliff, he’d send to New York for the best fingernail man if one of them had some-thing wrong with a fingernail.”
Too much fond family feeling embarrasses me after a while. I hid the discomfort behind my can and an interest in the view from the window. The last of the daylight flickered out over the water The lights on the moored boats in Middle Harbour and the glow in the sky across the water above Seaforth began to provide the sort of nightscape that justifies the mortgages. Paul Guthrie and his stepson were on such good terms that their casual talk was easy to drop in and out of. Pat came in and sat with a dry sherry for a while, and then she and Paul went off to put the finishing touches on the dinner.
“So,” Ray said, “I told you how to get to the Pavarotti and you got bashed up?”
“Finished the job, though. It was useful information.” I looked at Ray’s solid, jeans-and-windbreaker-covered figure. “I could’ve used you along at a couple of points, I admit.”
“Try me now. What’re you after?”
“Did Paul give you a hint?”
Ray shook his head. “Mister Discretion, Paul. I’ve come to realise that a good stepfather is better than a real father in a way. He can move aside, let you grow up. Both Chris and me have benefited.”
I nodded. Chris was Ray’s brother, who’d also struck trouble a few years back. Now he was graduate in something or other and employed in New Guinea. Their real father, who knew too many things, had been killed in what had been called an accident in the industrial section of Long Bay prison.
“Done any scuba diving, Ray?”
“Plenty. Love it.”
“What’s the depth of the water under the harbour bridge?”
Ray fiddled with his empty can, crushing its sides. Unlike his brother, he was a practical man who liked to have something to see and handle in front of him. Theoretical questions, or those requiring information to be transferred from one track to another, made him uncomfortable. “I’ve got a Maritime Services Board chart on the boat that’d tell me,” he said. “At a guess, twenty metres. Certainly not more. That’s average-high and low tide.”
“Is that a deep dive?”
“Are you kidding? Piece of piss. ‘Course, it’d be murky down there. Lot of crap in the harbour.”
“What about at night?”
He leaned forward in his chair. “ Very murky. But you can take down a light that makes it OK.”
“What about a camera?”
“Christ, Cliff.” He leaned back and crushed the can vertically. When he’d reduced it to the size of a doughnut he looked at me and grinned. “Why not?”
“This isn’t Mission Impossible, Ray. If it’s too bloody hard to handle, I’ll come at it another way.”
“I can dive around the bridge at night and take photos,” Ray said. “When d’you want it done?”
“Tonight,” I said.
That’s when Paul Guthrie called us in to dinner.
Fish, naturally, in that company. All I know about fish is that when it’s fresh and well cooked I like it, and when it’s not I don’t. This was great. The Guthries treated each other as a group of special friends might-quick to understand and sympathise, happy to chide and be chided. But I didn’t feel excluded. I enjoyed the talk and the meal and the dry white. Ray, I noticed, drank mineral water and talked less than the rest of us. Ate less, too.
Almost as soon as he decently could, he wiped his mouth on the paper towel provided, collected his couple of plates and stood. “Excuse me. Great dinner…”
“You hardly touched it,” Pat Guthrie said. “Are you sure you’re not sick too?”
“I’m fine. I just have to make a few phone calls.” His nod was more for me than his parents as he left the room.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’ve asked Ray for some help. He seems to have taken it very seriously.”
“It’s all right, Cliff,” Paul said. “Ray’s like that. He takes things seriously. I remember once when he…”
“Don’t start, Paul,” his wife said. “And don’t keep things from me. What are you asking Ray to do, Cliff?”
I told her as we cleared up the dishes and took them to the kitchen, where she stacked them in the washer. “Aren’t there regulations about that?” she said. “I mean, can anyone just go diving around the bridge? I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Ray’ll know,” Paul Guthrie said from the doorway. “Or he’d know someone who will know. Don’t worry.”
Pat turned on the machine. “It sounds dangerous. At night. No preparation. Why does it have to be like that?”
Paul Guthrie was spooning coffee into a glass beaker. He poured in the boiling water and set the plunger in place. “ Is it dangerous, Cliff?”
“Ray doesn’t seem to think so. But I’ll call it off if it gets tricky. Don’t worry, I’m too old for cowboy stuff.”
“So we’ve noticed,” Paul said. He touched his own forehead, which wasn’t scratched and scraped like mine.
I grinned. “I was assisting the police. Pat, it has to be at night to avoid publicity. The woman I’m working for has a right to that. Anything to do with mysterious deaths brings headlines. Team that up with the bridge and you’ve got a tabloid reporter’s dream.”