himself. ‘One hundred per cent. Professional job.’
‘How’s that?’
The fireman took off his hard hat and mopped his face. ‘No-one hurt. People had time to get clear. Looks like there was a sort of preliminary bang and then a couple of blasts. That’s how the pros do it.’
‘Any chance of anything intact in there?’ I pointed to the ground floor flat.
‘No way.’
I became aware of the people in the courtyard. Singly and in pairs they stood around, some fully dressed and some in nightwear. They watched the fire with fascination. There was a light breeze and the noxious smoke was lifted up between the buildings and blown away. The plane tree neare. st the Greenwich Apartments was scorched; its leaves were brown and curling. A line ash started to fall on the bricks.
‘Mr Hardy!’
Ellen Barton came towards me; she was wearing a red silk dressing gown and enormous white slippers. Her purple hair was in disarray and I could see pink skull in patches where it was thin.
‘Hello, Ellen,’ I said.
‘Whatever happened to your eye?’
‘A long story. Did you see what happened here?’
Her head swivelled and her eyes opened. She sized Mercer and Drew up, probably guessed their ranks and years of service. ‘I was asleep. That lovely building. What a shame. What’ll happen to it now?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. Then I saw Leo Wise coming along the lane. He was walking slowly and had a hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off out of respect for something or someone.
‘Excuse me.’ I nodded to Ellen Barton and went to meet Wise. Drew and Mercer watched me as I guided him to one of the benches in the courtyard. We sat and he looked at the smouldering building.
‘This is to do with Carmel, of course,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I ran through it as quickly as I could. Mercer and Drew moved around restlessly. When I’d finished Wise looked away from the fire and stared at me.
‘You’re sure he was the one? This Kelly?’
‘He virtually said so, but de Vries was the only witness.’
‘It’s good enough for me. Thanks, Hardy.’
‘The building’s a mess.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s insured. I can probably even claim on the the kid’s videos.’
He wept then. I suspected that he hadn’t cried much before but he let it all go now in great gulping sobs. I patted his shoulder; Mercer and Drew watched for a while, then they drifted off down the lane.
We sat there a long time. The sky lightened. The people went back into their flats when the firemen gave them the word. Water hissed on the fire and the smoke welled up again and again. A smell of wet ash wafted through the courtyard and hung in the air. Eventually Wise lifted his head and wiped his eyes.
‘Christ,’ he said, ‘what a crazy thing for her to do. Will we ever know which one of the bastards was behind it?’
I shook my head. ‘Probably not.’
‘Crazy,’ he said. ‘Kids, they break your heart.’
‘Yeah.’ I put my hand up to my eye and eased the pressure of the pad. ‘That’s what my mother used to say.’
23
The deaths of Jan de Vries and Kevin Kelly and the fire-bombing of the Greenwich Apartments got a pretty big coverage in the papers. They made the tie-in with ‘the Video Girl’ too-there was no way to stop that. But the pornographic angle didn’t get a run.
The day following these events, Marjorie Legge and Monty Porter went on a world tour to study new markets for Australian products. When she was asked at the airport what products were involved Ms Legge turned to her husband and said, ‘Monty?’ Monty Porter punched the journalist on the nose.
About the same time. Carlo Gabriani left the country to investigate the distribution of Australian relief money to the victims of recent natural disasters in Italy. It was rumoured that he had some government backing for the trip, but that was only a rumour. I phoned Drew to ask him if he’d seen these interesting items in the press.
‘Rich people fly around the world all the time,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I might. Don’t you find the timing interesting?’
‘Not really. It’s coming on to winter here. Be lovely in the south of France about now. Probably be okay in Italy too. By the way, how’s the eye?’
‘I’m shocked, Drew. You’ve asked after my well-being. ‘
‘Not really. I’m wondering how you’ll look on the stand identifying people and all, when they point out you’d had an eye operation a couple of days before.’
‘I saw well enough to hit Kelly.’
‘Close range and you got him one out of four. It won’t look good, Hardy.’
In fact the eye was fine. I went to see Stivens at the appointed time and he was impressed by my progress. I was impressed by his Macquarie Street rooms and the size of the bill.
‘Two anesthetists?’ I said.
‘Back up. In case one passes out.’
‘You made a joke.’
‘It’s an old joke. I learned it from someone who explained it to me.’
You couldn’t catch Mr Stivens out, no matter how hard you tried. He told me to keep using the drops and to discard the pad when I wasn’t troubled by glare.
I charged Wise for one of the anesthetists and for 50 per cent of the costs that weren’t covered by Medicare. He paid promptly, which is an unusual thing for a rich man to do. I discarded the pad. I spent a lot of time in shaded bedrooms with Helen, doing it gently, and glare didn’t bother me a bit.
Richard Riddell engaged the services of a barrister with no known connections to any of the people Carmel Wise had investigated, to represent Derek William Allen, who was charged as an accessory to the murder of de Vries. Allen died, apparently of a heroin overdose, while on bail and before the case came to trial.
The block of flats at Tamarama didn’t have concrete cancer. Helen paid a deposit, the tenants moved out and she was in as a tenant herself, awaiting settlement, in a matter of weeks. I helped her to buy furniture and move her meagre belongings from my house to the flat. The first night we spent there the place was bare and we ate and sat and slept like Spartans. But gradually, the place took shape. I found I liked travelling over there by train and foot, or driving late at night. Some nights Helen stayed at my place.
We swam at Bondi often, although temperatures were dropping and it was more a matter of getting wet briefly and getting warm quickly than of frolicking in the surf. We walked along the headlands, rambled in the cemetery, drank coffee in Bondi and wine in the pub at Coogee. It was a happy time without friction. Our six months were slipping by very fast.
I’d returned the cassette of Bermagui to Judy Syme with some regret, but a few weeks later the film was shown on television accompanied by the inevitable ‘Video Girl’ nonsense. Helen and I watched it in her flat. Carmel Wise had created a place where people collided, where some things were resolved and others were not and where the final story was never really told. Sometimes her camera panned out over the sea and up into the clouds as if the real solutions might be there which meant that they were nowhere at all. I stared at the dark water and the starry sky and thought that the partial understanding we’d got of why she’d died-and no answer at all to the question of who had ordered her death-was what she would have expected.
