“Sally Fitch would be your best bet. Get at it from the rape angle. What she doesn’t know about criminal fucking isn’t worth knowing. I’ll take you along.”
We left the room and he moved along the corridor in that light, fast way that some big men can. He must have weighed sixteen stone and no-one got in his way. He nodded to people and I kept an eye out for the crew-cut redhead but she didn’t show. Green poked his head through a door then went in and I followed. It was another thirty-desk room with a good deal of noise and screwed up paper. Green ushered me across to a corner where a pot plant, a hat stand and a filing cabinet sheltered one desk a bit from the hurly-burly. He introduced me to the woman behind the desk; they ribbed each other about their drinking, smoking and other vices. Green shook my hand again and went away.
Sally Fitch was a lean blonde in her thirties. Her hair was rather faded and she showed signs of wear and tear; there was a scar running down the left side of her face that she covered with make-up. She was a good-looking woman, nonetheless. She lit a cigarette and looked me over with steady green eyes that wouldn’t be surprised at anything, not even if I leaped up that minute and threw myself out the window.
“What can I tell you that Garth can’t, Mr Hardy?” she asked. “Like those virtuous private eyes I can say I don’t do divorce work.”
I laughed. “I do when I can get it. It’s getting rarer.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Divorce is?”
“No, the dirty work those virtuous private eyes say ‘I don’t do’ to.”
She tapped ash off her cigarette and pushed it about in the glass ashtray. “Good thing too. Mine was as dirty as you’d hope to see. Well then, what?”
“I want to know all you can tell me about a rape case in Newcastle around 1966 or ‘67 – all the names, all the details. I don’t have time to look up the papers and my guess is it wouldn’t have made the papers anyway.”
“Why?”
“If I’m on the right track, the girl involved would have been a juvenile, very much so.”
She drew on her cigarette and let the smoke trickle out through her nostrils, an unusual thing for a woman to do. On her it looked amusing and I grinned. She didn’t notice. She scribbled “1967” and “Newcastle” on a blotter in front of her and drew lines around it. She embellished the lines, producing an ornate, curly doodle, then she got up and pulled a drawer out of her filing cabinet. Two drawers and some vivid swearing later she lifted out a thin manilla folder. A glossy photograph slipped out and I bent to pick it up.
“Hold on!” She came around the desk and retrieved the picture. “I don’t just hand this stuff out willy-nilly.” She smiled and softened her voice. “Anyway, don’t steal my thunder.”
I nodded and waited while she looked through the papers. There wasn’t much to it and it didn’t take her long. She closed the file and looked up.
“I think this is the one you want. The girl was fifteen, Newcastle, May 1967. It was a bit out of the ordinary; the girl knew the man who raped her. She knew the woman he lived with better. And the girl reported the rape to the police herself. There was a short piece, no details, in the Newcastle paper. No reporting on the trial, that’s the law.”
“Yes. You’ve got the names though?”
“Uh-huh. The girl was Naomi Rouble, the man was Joseph Berrigan. The woman he lived with was Patricia Baker.”
I nodded. “That’s it. It makes sense in a crazy way. What about the photo?”
“The girl. It was taken when she came out of the police station – suppressed of course.” She slid it across the desk. The hair was wild and dishevelled, the eyes were puffy from crying and it was eleven long years ago, but the face was unmistakably that of Noni Tarelton.
13
By the time I’d thanked Sally Fitch, looked in on Tickener and cleared the building (no sight of the redhead), it was midday. The streets were crowded with people doing their lunchtime shopping and gawking. George Street was a solid wall of bodies coming the other way and I gave up the battle and ducked into a pub to drink my lunch and do some thinking. I had a steak with the wine and turned the case over in my mind. A constant stream of smooth-voiced chatter from the businessmen pushing out their waistcoats with expense account lunches didn’t help, but then there wasn’t much to think about. Noni Rouble-Tarelton was on the run with a man who’d raped her eleven years before. He’d killed one person since getting out of jail and savagely beaten two more, both women. Now it looked like he was a blackmailer. There were still questions on all this but a few answers were coming in; the bank robbery and fifty thousand dollars was part of it. On the ethical side was the question of when to let the police in. That troubled me. It always does.
I walked up George Street through the thinning ranks as the slaves went back to work. The rain had cleared away and a pale sunlight was dappling the footpaths and glinting on the oil slicks on the road. I hailed a cruising cab and said I wanted to go to La Perouse. The cabbie was a chunky, greying veteran who looked as if he’d been born behind a steering wheel. He was reluctant about the trip.
“It’ll cost you.”
“La Perouse,” I repeated. “You could get lucky.”
He grunted and dropped the flag. He was sour at the possibility of having to drive back to town without a fare, but every profession has its perils. I settled back and endured his company. The traffic was light and we made good time. Long Bay didn’t look too bad in the sunlight, especially with the new outside walls. Inside them it was a different matter. I directed the driver through La Perouse’s neglected streets and we found the pub where I’d drunk with Jimmy Sunday. I tipped the driver and he forced out some thanks before slamming the door harder than he needed to.
A dark woman was behind the bar. She was sitting on a stool smoking and reading a magazine. Apart from her the bar was empty. I went up and laid a five dollar note on the counter and ordered a middy. She pulled it.
“Jimmy Sunday around?” I asked before she could get her hand on the money. She drew on her cigarette and expelled smoke over my head.
“Might be.”
“Will you have one yourself?”
“Tah.” She flicked out a glass and slid it under the gin bottle in a smooth, practised movement. I waited while she splashed tonic into the glass, dropped in some ice and made change from the five. She took a sip of the drink and sighed appreciatively.
“You know Jimmy?” she said.
“A bit. I was drinking with him here the night before last. Thought I’d run into him again.”
“What’s your name?”
I told her. She drank some gin and pulled on the cigarette, it burned down to the filter and she dropped it at her feet. She was a big woman wearing a blouse and jeans. A packet of cigarettes was in the top pocket of the blouse resting on the shelf of her big, stiffly brassiered bosom. She pulled out the cigarettes and got another one going.
“Jimmy’s around. Could give ‘im a ring if you like.”
“Thanks.” I drank some beer while she went off to the telephone at the far end of the bar. I wandered over to the wall and looked at the sporting photographs that are a part of the decor of all genuine Australian pubs, symbolising some mystic connection between athleticism and alcohol. The pictures were mostly of racehorses, stretched out near the winning post and standing in the victory ring with flowers around their necks. One of the winning jockeys was an Aborigine but none of the proud owners was anything but true-blue Caucasian. There was a collection of boxing pictures and a cartoonist’s attempt at capturing the mystique of the Sands brothers: Dave, Alfie, Clem, George and Russell stood in a ring with their gloved hands clasped above their heads in the fighter’s victory salute. There was a close-up of dark little Elley Bennett landing one of his famous knockout punches on “Mustard” Coleman and another of Bobby Sinn, face wrinkled with concentration, picking off a bewildered Jimmy Carruthers with a classic straight left.