I went back and took the card.
“What old chap?”
“Old Abo. Down here… let’s see… yesterday. Had a police pass. Relative of some kind. He just took one quick look and left. They’re superstitious about the dead aren’t they?”
“Yeah. So am I. About this man.” I described Rupert Sharkey to the attendant but he shook his head.
“No, nothing like that. This man was short and stocky… an’ older than what you’re saying.”
“What was the name on the card?”
“I don’t remember. He’ll have it up at the desk.”
I thanked him again and went up. Hatchet-face looked displeased to see me but showed off his efficiency by producing the black man’s police pass within seconds. It carried the name Percy White and an address in Redfern. I handed my card in and left the place puzzled, unenlightened – but alive.
I celebrated my condition with a beer in the Forest Lodge hotel up the street from the house of the dead. I bought tobacco and smoked a few cigarettes and let the fumes of liquor and weed take away the stink of death.
Half-way through the second beer I called Sharkeys’ number in La Perouse. Sunday was there and I filled him in with what I had on Moody’s contract with Trueman. He said Williams had seen Moody and warned him not to sign anything further and the fighter had agreed. Nothing more had been heard from Penny. I asked Sunday about Percy White but he’d never heard of him. As far as he knew, and that was pretty far, Simmonds had no such relative. The description I had could fit a hundred men in La Perouse alone. I asked him if Ricky Simmonds had a scar on his left leg. He laughed.
“I never knew an Aborigine who didn’t – falls, burns, sores, insect bites, you should see me.”
I grunted something and rang off. I finished the beer, left the pub and walked across to the university library. A quick check of an old city directory told me that the address “Percy White” had given in Redfern didn’t exist.
This heavy detecting took me until midday. I bought some Vogel bread sandwiches outside the library and stretched out on the lawn that overlooks Victoria park. The buildings around the quadrangle loomed up behind me, solid and gothic and echoing to the footsteps of the learned. The neophytes gathered on the lawn giving me, an outsider, a wide berth. Almost to a man and a woman they wore jeans, forbidden dress at university back in the days when I’d played briefly at the experience. Otherwise nothing much had changed; the sexes basically grouped apart with only a few of the stars from each side coming into collision. But the lawn lunch-eaters weren’t representative. Behind closed pub doors and in smoky studies the drinkers and hairy politicians gathered to plot the overthrow of society within the next semester. The deadly swots were still in the library and the smooth-talking professionals who would control this place and most others like it in a few years, were debating, or running the tennis club or sipping sherry somewhere with their masters. I ate the sandwiches and watched a pair of tight-jeaned women parade slowly across my field of vision. Their breasts jogged gently under linen shirts, their bottoms rode high and tight and their legs seemed to go on forever. I sighed, got up and brushed grass off my clothes. I was sweating. It was a fine day. Maybe I was too warmly dressed.
17
I caught a taxi to Paddington and was met at the door by a flushed and anxious-looking Madeline. She had a couple of dresses over her arm and there were shoes on the floor in the passage behind her.
“Leaving?” I asked.
She bit her lip. The white chunky teeth went into the moist purple lip and sent a sexual shiver through me. She saw my reaction and it didn’t throw her one degree off course.
“I am if you must know. Ted’s impossible. All that money for that worthless slut… the police…”
“She’s his daughter.”
“Maybe – if her mother was anything like her who could say?”
It was nothing to me except that men being left by their wives are apt to act irrationally and Ted couldn’t afford to. I said so and she spun away and started to gather up shoes. I came a couple of steps into the passage and tried to keep my mind off the yard of deadly stocking she was showing under a white crepe dress. She saw me looking, straightened up and smoothed the dress down. My mouth went dry.
“You haven’t the time,” she said softly. “Ted got a call half an hour ago. He was to wait for another call at his office. He’s there now with the money – off you run, Mr Hardy.”
“Where’s the office?” I croaked. She walked off down the hall; she’d spent hours on the walk and it was worth every minute. She came back with a card and I took it.
“Don’t leave,” I said. “See it through. You’re being childish. See how it looks after we get the girl back.”
She threw the dresses down and burst into tears. She dumped the shoes and ran off down the hall.
Well done Hardy. Terrific work. So subtle. I closed the door quietly and backed out to the gate. A white Celica was parked outside the house with some clothes on the back seat. The key was in the ignition and Madeline’s perfume was in the air. I slid in behind the wheel, started the car and drove off towards the city. I didn’t like the new twist. It had an amateur feel. It’s easier to watch a house than a city building, easier to spot reinforcements. Then I swore at myself for not scouting Armstrong Street. If there had been a look-out he’d have got the message loud and clear. Maybe it wasn’t an amateur play after all.
Ted’s office was in a tower block across from Hyde Park. The Celica had a sticker on it that let me drive into the car park under the tower and almost got a salute from the attendant. Ted’s suite of offices had a lot of shag pile carpet, stained wood and tinted glass. Here he was Tarelton Enterprises and looking like he could spare a hundred grand, but you can never tell.
An ash blonde stopped pecking at her typewriter and showed me into Ted’s lair. The carpet was deeper and the wood more highly polished than outside; there was an interesting-looking bar at the end of the room and that’s where Ted was standing. He greeted me and dropped ice into a second glass and built two Scotches. He walked back to his quarter-acre desk and set the glasses down carefully; it wasn’t his first drink and it wasn’t his second. He waved me to a chair; I picked up the Scotch and sat down – it was a drink to sit down with.
“Got the money?” I asked.
“Sure.” He reached down, missed his aim and had to steady himself on the desk. He pulled up a black, metal-bound attache case. “Wanna see it?” He was aping confidence and assurance but it was a bad act.
I nodded. He sprung the locks and pushed the case across the desk. The money lay in neat rows held by the case’s straps. It looked what it was – a hell of a lot of cash.
Ted said the call was due at four o’clock and we were twenty minutes short of that. I drank and looked at my employer. He seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes; the expensive tailoring hung on him indifferently and his patterned, Establishment tie was askew. Normally Ted had a high colour – the product of good health, good times and good brandy. Today he was pale with a couple of vivid spots. Bristles that had survived a shaky shave outcropped on the pale skin. His hand shook as he scrabbled a cigar out of a box on the desk. I rolled and lit a cigarette. We drank and my nerves started to twang in the silence.
“I pinched your wife’s car,” I said. “I think she was planning on leaving. Why don’t you ring her?”
“You a bloody marriage counsellor now?”
“Just an idea. You’re going to need help through this.”
Panic leaped through the liquor and into his eyes. “Why? You don’t think they’ll… they won’t kill her?” He looked at the money.
“You can’t tell. I don’t think so, but it might not be easy getting her back.”
“You’re saying she’s in with them? I told you that’s crap. I don’t want to hear any more of that.”
“Mr Tarelton,” I said wearily, “this is nice Scotch but this isn’t a nice job. You don’t know your daughter, you don’t know the first thing about her. I’ve found out things about her that’d make your hair curl. That’s my job. I rake muck and mostly I keep it to myself when I can. Sometimes I can’t and this looks like one of those times. Please don’t tell me what you don’t want to hear. It doesn’t help.” I’d started to raise my voice. Now I dropped it back to as comfortable a tone as I could manage. “I think it would be a good idea if you called your wife.”