the licence number. There were no keys in the ignition. That could mean one of two things — the car was stolen or the crying had been an act put on after she’d had the presence of mind to take the keys out of the lock. I pulled the bonnet release, yanked back the cardboard housing and looked in at the panel — nothing across the ignition terminals. Fooled again, Hardy.
It was after six and a warm drizzle had settled in when I got back into my car and started the motor. The Falcon protested the change in the weather by coughing and it flooded before I got it running reasonably. I swung her around, pulled out of the parking lot and took the road back to town. I stopped at a hamburger place and picked up one with all the trimmings. I got a six-pack of beer from a pub full of used car salesmen working on late afternoon marks and tired-looking men putting off going home to their wives.
8
I ate the hamburger and swigged the beer as I drove. The traffic was light and I made good time to Longueville. Lights were on in the front rooms and the colour TV sets were semaphoring comforting messages to each other across the deep gardens and quiet, damp streets. I parked about a hundred yards from the entrance to the clinic on the opposite side of the road, and focused my night glasses on the relevant point. I could see cars approaching and turning into the reception booth from the other direction and I had a good view of the ones that passed me to get there. I figured I had about an hour at most before someone inside might tally up comments about the tone of the street and come out to investigate.
So I gave myself an hour with the thought that I might sneak an extra fifteen minutes if nothing happened. I was pretty sure something would happen — enough shit had been hitting the fan over the last twenty-four hours or so to produce some reaction in this area. I risked a cigarette or two, drank the beer, now heating up a bit but not too bad, and waited. The first car came about ten minutes after I arrived. It was a Rover, nice car.
The street light caught its number plate nicely as it made a purring turn to the reception booth. I had the glasses on it and wrote the number down. I was too far away to be sure, but I thought there was a driver in front and one passenger behind. Fifteen minutes later a car came up from behind, moving fast. I hunched down in the seat but it roared past. I sat up and then went down again as another car came from the same direction. A light coloured Fairlane swished past me and took the turn, too fast and not quite steady, into the clinic. The light didn’t hit this one as well as before, but he had to back out and take another run at the drive so I got the number with no trouble.
Ten minutes went by to the whisper of the falling rain. The Rover slid out onto the road and went back to where it came from. I checked my reading of the number plate and found I had it right. The second car left and the third arrived almost simultaneously. The Fairlane lurched out onto the road, collected the kerb and almost collided with an Italianate sports model which was gliding up towards the clinic and me. The driver flicked out of the path of the Ford and neatly whipped around to stop perfectly aligned with the gates. The number plate was a blur through all this. I swore and settled down to wait for the car’s reappearance. I felt edgy and exposed, I was pushing my luck.
After eight minutes lights went on in the compound and I heard a dog bark. Warning bells rang in my head and the name of every prison I’d ever heard of flashed through my mind. I didn’t have all the information I wanted but I had enough.
The Falcon threatened to flood but relented. I revved it firmly, did a tight U turn and got the hell out of Longueville.
Mosman seemed a hundred miles away and all of it uphill. I washed down a few caffeine tablets with a swill of beer and concentrated on navigating the greasy roads. I was tired or I would have noticed it at least ten minutes sooner — an unchanging pair of headlights centred in my rear vision mirror like bright, sparkling diamonds. The driver knew nothing about tailing, which was comforting, but I felt I’d had enough of that scene for one day. He would have followed me down a sewer and it was child’s play to fake a right turn and then run him into the kerb. When he stopped his left front wheel was up on the concrete and the genteel, muted neon lights of the Waterson amp; Sons funeral parlour were flashing in his eyes.
I got out cautiously and kept the gun down in my jacket pocket. The car was an old FB Holden and the driver was not all that much older than it was. He had damp blond hair, pretty long, but there wasn’t enough of it to be worth spending much time on. There wasn’t much of him all round — he looked almost childlike sitting in the car with his sports jacket collar turned up. I could see a tight grin on his face and he was fumbling inside his breast pocket as I approached the car — he was so amateurish it was almost funny.
I leaned on the car and rapped on the driver’s window. A wallet and some papers spilled out on his lap as he pulled his hand out to wind down the window. He leaned forward to recover the papers presenting me with a thin, clean neck that I could have broken between my thumb and forefinger.
“I have identification.” His voice squeaked a bit and was young and educated.
“Let’s not worry about who you are first off,” I said. “Everybody has identification, everyone is someone if you get what I mean. Why were you following me?”
“That’s connected with who I am.”
He seemed determined to tell me and I thought I’d better sit down to receive the impact. I walked round the back of the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side at the front.
“Right. This is cosy. Now, who are you and why were you following me?”
He pushed the wallet over. Tucked in one of its compartments was a press identification card with photograph. The name on the card was Harry Tickener and it was him all right on the photograph; he had to be the only one of his kind in captivity.
“OK, you’re an artist. Let’s have the answers.”
“I work on The News. I just got up to the political reporting team last week, from sports, you might have seen the byline?”
“I don’t follow the volleyball all that closely. Come on, get to the point.”
“I haven’t done much yet in the political line. I’ve mostly run errands for Joe Barrett.”
Now that was a name with clout. Barrett was by way of being a crime-busting political reporter and he’d made some fat faces very red in his time. The News occasionally gave him his head on a story and he was very good for circulation when they did. He went a bit wild sometimes so they used him sparingly. Tickener pulled out some thick plain American cigarettes and got one lit after a struggle. He puffed, didn’t draw back and the Holden turned into a fair imitation of a second class smoking compartment on the New South Wales railways. I reached across, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it out the window.
“If you want me to say ‘Quit stalling’ I will. I’ll pull a rod and do a Cagney impression if you insist, but how about just telling me in plain and simple English what you’re up to.”
He nodded and the words tumbled fast. “I took a call for Joe. She must have thought she had got on to him direct, anyway I didn’t get time to say who I was. She said she had a tip on a big story and if I
… if Joe wanted to get in on it he should start taking an interest in Dr Ian Brave. She said she’d call again if she saw any signs of interest at our end.”
“So you took the job on?”
“Yes, there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Joe’s in Canberra for a few days. I thought I could do the initial poking around and let Joe take it from there. Or maybe he’d let me follow it through, I don’t know. Anyway, it sounded interesting so I went out tonight to have a look at Brave’s place. I saw you parked and watching the clinic, so when you left I followed you. I thought you might lead me to someone, maybe the woman who rang.”
“Where were you?”
“My car was two blocks away. I watched you from the garden of the house on the corner of the street you were in.”
He looked wet enough for it to be true and the story sounded straight.
“Tell me about the woman’s voice.”
“It was nice, educated, with an accent.”
“What sort of accent?”
“European, not Italian, maybe French.”
