“You weren’t in Sydney when this thing came up?”
“No, I was on a country job, Broken Hill and Melbourne after that. I had a holiday in Fiji on the proceeds, I must have missed it all.”
Grant looked sour, I shouldn’t have mentioned the holiday, but he went on: “OK, well it made a fair splash in the papers. The open safe was hinted at in one of the papers, but that was as far as it went.”
“Who called you?”
“Servant, an old one, she’d been with the Gutteridge guy for years, nothing there. Nothing much for her in the will.”
“Who else was around?”
“The lot, from memory, a driver, two gardeners as well as the old housekeeper — that’s the underlings. Then there was the wife and a son and daughter. Probably ran out of places to spend their money in and had to stay home.”
“Now Grant, don’t be bitter. They have their troubles just like you and I. The fix came in, did it?”
“Yeah, the photographer arrived fast and fired off a few but the support squad had some heavies in it and they took over — OK Cliff, you’ve got the inside dope. Make me feel good about it within twenty-four hours,” he said, “or I’ll call it all square, all round.”
The pressure of his job was getting to him, or maybe it was some other trouble. Whatever the case, now wasn’t the time to sketch out my suspicions. Just now he’d rather fight than think.
“I think I can promise you that,” I said.
“Lovely,” he gave me a tired smile. “Now, I got something off my chest and I’ve got your promise, my day is made. Shoot through Cliff. I’ll be expecting to hear from you.” I got up and patted him on the shoulder. He faked a collapse into his chair and picked up the top file in his IN tray.
I walked down the corridor and took the lift again. From the noise it made I might just have caught it on its last journey. The desk sergeant called me over and handed me the phone. It was Grant.
“I forgot to tell you to take care of yourself,” he said.
“Why do you say it now?”
“I keep up with what’s going on. Bryn Gutteridge’s chum was shot once, close in but very neat. Whoever did it had done it before.”
“I’ll sniff every hand I shake and watch for bulges under jackets.”
“If you meet him you probably won’t have time for one wisecrack.” The phone went dead. I hung on to it for a second listening to nothing.
7
I realised how beat up I looked when I hit the street and how ill-equipped I was for the weather. The storm that had been brewing broke when I was in the police building. Rain sheeted down bringing clouds of steam up from the pavements. The water soaked into my torn pants and dirty shirt which was pinkish from diluted blood. I had a change of clothes back in my office and I decided to complete the picture of ruin by taking the short walk there despite the rain.
I started out and caught sight in an oddly angled shop window of a red Volkswagen. It was well back and crawling along in the thick traffic. I took a turn and walked slowly down the street. A look in a parked car’s side mirror showed that the VW had stopped at the top of the street after making the turn. I still couldn’t get a glimpse of the driver.
I walked back to St Peters Street the most direct way, cleaned up, changed my clothes and came down after checking that there hadn’t been any calls. The rain had stopped, the air was moist and clean-tasting and all the city’s photochemical sludge was running down the gutters to the sea. I got the Falcon out of the tatooist’s backyard and took off going south-east. The VW picked me up and stayed with me through Taylor Square, Moore Park and Kensington. He was doing it quite nicely, like a pacer, one out and one back, and then letting me get away a little. I cruised past the University and took the turn to Maroubra.
The used car yards cuddled up against each other on both sides of the road over a short stretch of ugly Australia. I made a late turn left, a quick one right and pulled up under a heavily over-growing row of plane trees the council pruners must have missed. I pulled the Smith amp; Wesson out of its clip under the dashboard and jumped out of the car onto the road. The Volkswagen came round the corner and I faced it fifty yards ahead with the gun up. I counted on the element of surprise to bring the car to a stop but I was wrong. The driver slowed a fraction, then accelerated and came straight on like the Light Brigade. I swore, jumped aside, hit the Falcon hip and thigh and dropped the gun. The little red car roared to the end of the street, brakes screaming, then it slewed around in a full turn taking some of the sidewalk to do it, and came belting back towards me. Dead end street. That gave me a chance to reverse the roles. I picked up the gun as the VW passed me and had my car turning before its tail whipped around out of what had been a quiet little street twenty seconds ago.
The Volkswagen was new and the Falcon was old, but the horsepower was all on my side. I had the car in sight as it turned onto the highway and kept with it through thick and thin. The traffic thinned as we got into Maroubra and I moved up closer. The driver appeared to be small with frizzy dark hair and I saw the flash of light on wrap-around sunglasses on one of the turns. From his driving I assumed that he was worried, it was jerky and he wasn’t timing things well.
We moved on down towards the beach and then turned right up a steep hill flanked by tall apartment blocks with names like “Nevada” and “San Bernadino”.
I crowded the VW near the crown of the hill opposite “Reno”, but the driver found a little more speed and went into a cheeky slalom down the other side. I took evasive action, conscious of my lack of insurance, but I was hard on its twin exhausts when we turned into a long, flat run parallel to the beach. A mistake, I’d surfed along this beach for ten years and knew its geography like the back of my hand. It was deserted now, dark clouds were boiling up out over the sea and the road was slick with oily rainbow patches showing between the puddles.
I closed up behind the VW, timed the move and brought my black paintwork up alongside the red. I pulled my door handle down and held the door ajar. I blared my horn and gave the little car a quick flick with the door. It slewed away and shot through the only gap available — into a fenced parking lot which reached down to a toilet block and changing sheds on the beachfront. The VW driver struggled for control and then had to pull up within twenty yards. He made it, just. I ran in after it and brought the Falcon skidding in on an angle that closed off all exits.
I killed the engine, grabbed the. 38 and moved around my car. The other driver was sitting quietly, hands on the wheel, crying softly and shaking. The frizzy hair was short and black as pitch, the thin shoulders in the dark T- shirt were heaving and her face when she turned it up to me was dark as chocolate and beautiful as a rose. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. The flesh under my hand was soft and the bone felt like a fine steel rod.
“Take it easy,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you. Calm down and tell me why you were following me.”
She kept on shaking and sobbing and she dropped her head, the crisp hair curled on the nape of her neck like black metal filings. I wanted to touch them and moved my hand up.
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” Her voice was lilting with an accent, not American. I stepped back and rubbed my tired face with the hand holding the gun. She jack-knifed from the car and sprinted for the beach bent low and balanced, legs pumping. I yelled and brought the gun up but she was too fast. She rounded the changing shed and was into the scrub before I’d taken a step. I lumbered after her but the day had taken its toll; there was no one in sight on the sodden beach and the flickers in the scrub a hundred yards away could easily have been branches in the wind.
I gave the car a quick once-over. It was a recent model which had been well kept. The clean vinyl and interior paintwork probably carried hundreds of fingerprints but I couldn’t see any point in collecting them. There was a service book in the glove box and a street directory in the driver’s side pocket. A folded copy of The News lay on the back seat open at the international news page. There was a pair of pliers and a roll of insulating tape in the passenger side door pocket; no cigarette butts, no night club matches, no soil obviously from the lower eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. For no special reason I wiped off places I’d touched in the car and wrote down
