I was looking for a watcher and I’d found one, mad or not. I admitted that I wasn’t serving warrants and showed her my credentials.
‘Let’s talk,’ she said.
Two minutes later I was inside her house and the jug was on for tea. There are certain very rare circumstances when I’ll drink tea and this was one of them. Miss Cartwright’s house was an old weatherboard, something like a Queenslander, except much narrower and with a high loft room in the front. She took me up the steep staircase and showed me how the window of the loft afforded a view between the trees into the Macleod compound. I hadn’t doubted her but she seemed to want to establish her bona fides.
Her house was well-kept but not fussy. Surfaces were clean rather than polished, and in the kitchen where we were going to drink the tea, gardening gloves, books and a pair of Wellington boots lay around where they could be got at rather than where they could’ve been more tidily placed. She took off her glasses and put them on a table. ‘I don’t need them inside and I’ve got other ones for reading.’
I nodded. I didn’t need any more convincing that her vision was okay. A grey tabby wandered through and went on its way without comment from its owner. At least Miss Cartwright wasn’t a dotty or obsessive cat fancier. So far, so good.
Mirabelle Cartwright told me that she and her sister, Beatrix, had lived all their lives in this house which had belonged to their parents. Neither had married and both had retired from jobs in the public service on small but adequate pensions. Beatrix had gone to Macleod for treatment for her arthritis and had, according to her sister, ‘fallen under his evil spell’.
‘That man seduced her. I don’t mean in the nasty sense. I mean that he took her over, body and soul. She altered her will without my knowledge and left her half of the house to him and not to me, breaking our agreement of thirty years’ standing.
‘He prescribed steam baths and ice baths and I don’t know what else for the poor soul. She was dead within a year of first seeing him. At first I thought it was just, you know, fate. Beatrix had never been as healthy as me. I would’ve expected her to live well beyond seventy-three all the same. Our parents both lived into their nineties and our brothers…’ She broke off.
I sipped my tea and didn’t say anything.
‘They were fine young men, athletes. They could swim like fish and run like the wind. They were both killed in the war. Both.’
I was becoming more sceptical by the minute. The Cartwrights seemed to have run into more than their share of bad luck. Australian casualties in World War II weren’t that high. For two brothers to be killed must have been a rarity, whereas in the Great War it was commonplace. And doctors have a peculiar appeal for some single women. The scepticism must have shown on my face because she put down her cup sharply so that it rattled in the saucer. ‘You don’t believe me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think that because I live here under that man’s sufferance… Oh, yes he could compel me to sell up at any time… my mind is poisoned against him.’
She was a very acute person, something like that was exactly what I’d been thinking.
‘Well, you’re wrong, Mr Hardy. I’m not the only one, you see. I asked around down at the elderly citizens’ club and much the same thing had happened to several other people. They’d lost people after that man had started treating them and for some of them it was worse.’
She really had me now. ‘In what way, Miss Cartwright?’
She leaned forward and hissed the words. ‘They disappeared.’
I was doubtful again. I needed something stronger than tea to cope with all this. I sat back in my chair and gave her a hard look. You notified the police of course.’
She shook her neat head. Her still thick, silvery hair fell forward and she brushed it back impatiently. It occurred to me that she would have been attractive when young and she still had vitality. I wondered what had caused her life to run on the track it had. In a very short space of time I’d heard about long-living parents, athletic brothers and a sick sister. Who was it said that a dysfunctional family is any with more than one member?
‘No, I didn’t go to the police about Beatrix,’ she said. ‘What could I prove? I thought about going when those people told me about the disappearances but I thought too long. Two were quite old and they died not that long after I spoke with them. That left only Mrs Barnes and I have to admit that she’s not quite all there any more.’
‘I see.’
She looked at her wristwatch. ‘I generally have a whisky about now. Would you care for one, Mr Hardy?’
Recipe for a long life, I thought, and said that I’d like a whisky. She had a decanter on a tray on a drinks trolley along with some glasses. She went to the kitchen and came back with a soda siphon and a bowl of ice. Working on the top of the trolley, she dropped one cube into a glass, poured a single finger and filled the glass with soda. She pushed the makings towards me. ‘Make yourself a decent one,’ she said. ‘My father used to say that drowning good whisky was a crime. Mind you, he was talking about Scotch and this is Irish whisky. I haven’t been able to abide Scots things since…’
I made a solid drink and took a good slug of it. I rolled the liquor around in my mouth and let it slide down. Whatever the top of the line Irish whisky might be, this was it. In the old days I would’ve rolled a cigarette, had another drink and hoped for the chemical stimulus to produce an insight. Now, the alcohol had to do it alone. Sometimes it felt like flying with one wing.
‘Miss Cartwright,’ I said. ‘I’m still not sure why you’ve told me all this.’
She pecked at her drink like a hummingbird. ‘But you’re interested?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought you would be. When I saw a resourceful-looking person go in and come out so quickly I guessed that you and that man hadn’t seen eye to eye. And when I saw what happened between you and the thug I felt convinced of it.’
‘I think he has some involvement with the man I’m looking for. But it’s just a suspicion. You have to be very careful with doctors, they…’
‘I’m sure he has a lot of things to hide. Who is this person?’
‘Do you watch the news on television or listen to the radio news?’
‘Sometimes, not lately.’
I told her about the death of the guard at Tadpole Creek and my interest in the matter without mentioning any names. I mentioned Talbot’s van again.
‘I’ve certainly seen that van over there. It goes in through that back entrance.’
‘How often have you seen it?’
She tapped her fingers on the table. ‘Oh, my memory for something like that is so bad. More than once or twice is all I could be sure of.’
I thought back quickly. There’d been two vehicles in the carport. Neither was a van. ‘Have you seen it recently?’
She sipped her pale drink. ‘I really couldn’t say. Of course I don’t keep a watch on the place all the time. I’ve got a garden to attend to and shopping to do and so on.’
I finished the drink and stood up. ‘This has all been very interesting, Miss Cartwright and I think you’ve been of some help. If Macleod’s involved in the matter I’m looking into I’ll try to see that he gets into serious trouble. You can get me on these numbers pretty well any time. Let me know if you see the van or the young man who drives it. The one with the limp.’
She took the card that I held out. ‘And the young woman I’ve seen. Who is she exactly?’
‘I wish I knew.’
She shook her head. ‘I think you do know.’
‘She may be my daughter.’
Her nod was wise, compassionate, concerned – all that.
17
