“How’s Lloyd Meredith?”
“Mending. We would have got Ballantine ourselves, Hardy. You realise that.”
“Sure,” I said. “While on the subject of getting people, what about Tobin?”
“Conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, he’s going inside for a long, long time.”
“Good,” I said. “Moody?”
“Resigned. Pissed off about something or other. It’s not a perfect world, Hardy.”
Louise Madden buried her father in the cemetery at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, I drove up there for the occasion. It was a fine, cold day in the mountains and there were a lot of people present-Brian Madden’s former colleagues, some of his ex-students, a number of Louise’s friends, people from the golf club. I looked around for Dell Burton, the other woman who grieved for Madden, but she wasn’t there. We all stood in the small space available between other graves and watched the quiet, dignified ceremony. Louise held the handful of earth a long time before dropping it in on the box.
Later, back at her rambling weather-board house in Leura, she thanked me for giving her the chance to say goodbye to her father properly.
I sipped my drink and didn’t say anything.
She was almost smiling. “Cheer up, it means a lot to me, all this. Having people around. Do any of your cases have a really happy ending, Cliff?”
“Not lately,” I said. “But I keep hoping.”