address and I went back to the board. A big wave lifted up and crashed on the beach and I could hear the bridge creaking in the light wind. I took a few steps onto the sand and looked out to sea. I could make out a few lights moving slowly a long way out. Off to the left a cliff dropped sharply down to the water. For no reason I thought of it as a jumping-off place for suicides. Suddenly I didn’t want to disturb the old ghosts, didn’t want to check on whether people still lived where they had once lived and knew about things that happened thirty years ago. I wanted a future, I didn’t want to rake over a painful past. I wished I was on the ship and at sea. I shook the thought off and went back to the car.
The roads threaded up behind the town into the hills. I bore left at a crossroad; Yancey Street was an unpaved track with no town lighting. I crept down it trying to pick up its features in the headlights. There were only a few houses as far as I could tell from gateposts and signboards and they were located well back from the track. Number eleven was identifiable by a sign painted on a handsome gum near a bend in the road. There were no houses opposite and it seemed to be flanked by vacant lots. There was a lot of pampas grass along the front boundary and no welcoming lights winking beyond it. If I’d been an old lady I wouldn’t have felt secure there; I was a middle-aged man with a middle-sized gun and I still didn’t feel secure.
I got the gun from the glove box and a torch and locked up the note book and the spare ammunition. The trunk of the gum tree was broad and pale and reassuring in the beam of the torch. I put the car keys on top of the offside front wheel and moved towards Nurse Callaghan’s abode. It was no time to go calling on an old lady, but I could poke around, get the feel of the place. And some old ladies get up very early in the morning, especially in the country.
The light danced over the springy grass and picked up a straggling track where vehicles had brushed Nature aside. I started up the incline, flicking the light to each side and bringing it back to the rough drive. Away down the hill the sea moved convulsively. Up here the only thing moving was me. Everything thickened in front of me suddenly and I realised that the track had taken a turn. I rounded the bend and was pulled up by a shape looming in front of me. I swung the torch, got an impression of shape, a car, and colour, blue, and then the starry heavens fell in on me. Pain sketched a searing yellow and red diagram in front of my eyes, all zigzags and angles, and then it blacked out and so did I.
When I came out of it a salty seaside dew had settled on me. My clothes and hair were moist and my skin was tacky and cold. It was still dark but the sky was lightening over what had to be the east. It all swam around when I lifted my head and I crunched dirt between aching teeth. Everything ached. I stretched out my hand and felt about in a wide arc. The torch was still there and still working. The car was gone. It had passed over me or around me — I was still in one piece. I pulled myself up and stood swaying, getting my bearings. I began to walk up towards the house which someone hadn’t wanted me to visit — not before they’d left, anyhow. It couldn’t be good. Daylight was seeping in, a couple of birds started up singing and I swore at them. My head hurt.
The house was a modest fibro-cement job that had been reasonably well looked after. A garden bed running across the front of it had had loving care. It was a showpiece of pruned rose bushes and other flowers that didn’t get that way on their own.
The house was on three-foot brick pillars and I looked under at intervals as I skirted round. Nothing moved under the house and I couldn’t hear anything moving inside. I went to the front door, knocked quietly and waited. Nothing. The door was locked. I went round to the back; a flywire screen had a tear in it near the door handle. I reached through and turned. I went into a small enclosed porch cluttered with gardening tools and fishing tackle. I went through a kitchen which was tidy and neat into a short passageway with two doors off it. The door on the left let into a sitting room; in the dawn light I could make out a fireplace, some easy chairs, a television set. There was a low table with a pile of plastic-jacketed library books on it.
The other door opened onto a bedroom. An old woman was lying on her back on the big bed, her hands were stretched out on the cover with the palms up. I cleared my throat and knocked on the door jamb. She didn’t move. I went closer. The gardening and the fishing and the TV and the reading were all over for her. She was dead.
There was no sign of violence on her face or in the room; the only unnatural thing was the position of her hands. I looked closely at her face but her eyes seemed to have closed naturally and the light beside the bed was soft enough to have been a night light. The bed cover was smooth but not too smooth. I went back to the kitchen and looked at the pile of bills on the spike — they covered the usual things and were made out to Gertrude Callaghan. I looked at the tear in the screen door but if there’s a way to tell whether fine plastic-mesh has been cut recently I don’t know it.
Back in the bedroom I stood at the end of the bed and wondered if she’d died naturally or not. It seemed unlikely that she had and I felt guilty as if I’d brought this on her. It wasn’t true of course; totally innocent victims are few, but that’s how I felt. She was an impressive-looking old person with snow-white hair and a strong, intelligent face. The signs were around of an active and meaningful old age that should have ended better. I read somewhere about some people — Indians I think — who used to put their problems to the newly dead. I think they arranged the corpse in such a way that its head or arm could move involuntarily and a man with special powers would interpret the movements. I looked down at the old nurse.
‘Did Bettina Chatterton have a son?’ I asked quietly.
Not a hair stirred.
‘Is he still alive?’
Nothing. I’d have to do it the hard way. I searched the place thoroughly — drawers, cupboards, books, floor coverings — for evidence of a connection between the nurse and the Chattertons after 1946. There was nothing. I found the Judge’s reference which gave Gertrude a good character and the documentation of her employment, all on the coast, over the following twenty years. There were photographs showing how the Liverpool girl had turned into the nurse and the old gardener and fisherwoman but nothing pointing to a grandson for the late Sir Clive. There were two things of interest: a flock of intimate notes, spanning three decades, from Dr Osborn to Nurse Callaghan and signs that someone had gone through the place before me.
It was almost daylight when I left the house but the sky was overcast and a thin fog was hanging around the tops of the trees. I went down the track and poked around in the grass until I found my gun. Nothing was stirring in Yancey Street except the birds. My head still hurt. I touched the spot and felt dried, caked blood. I was getting less presentable by the hour but there was no one around to notice. Everything was quiet and serene like Nurse Callaghan sleeping the last sleep.
10
When I’d cleared Yancey Street and made a few turns I stopped to take stock of things. The notebook was still in the glove box and the lock was intact. It was more than I could say for myself. My head needed a dressing and I needed a shave. That was what showed; my teeth were scummy from a day’s drinking and my body was stiff and sore from lack of sleep — lying like a log for a couple of hours in wet grass doesn’t count. My head ached fiercely. I looked at the whisky and shuddered. Then I salvaged a couple of aspirin out of the rubbish on the back seat and swilled them down with the whisky. I almost gagged but I grabbed the steering wheel and hung on to everything. After a minute or two I didn’t feel any worse, maybe even better. Time to tackle Dr Osborn.
He was in front of his house, bending to pick up a newspaper. He wore a checked dressing gown and the white trousers of striped cotton pyjamas flopped around his ankles. He bent like an old man, stiffly and slowly, but he bent. I walked over and called out something polite. He looked in my direction but I had the feeling that he couldn’t see me. I reached the gate and called out again.
‘Dr Osborn.’
‘Yes, wait a minute.’ There was still a faint Scots tang in the words despite fifty years of exposure to Australian speech. He moved slowly down the path towards me holding the rolled-up newspaper in his hand. I waited by the gate and watched his face. A certain blankness was in it until he was about ten feet away, then interest came into his eyes. He fished out a pair of spectacles from the dressing gown pocket and hooked them on.
‘Yes young man?’
‘I have to talk to you doctor, about Gertrude Callaghan.’
