I kept quiet about it. Evans prepared a statement for the press and went into a huddle with Tickener and Jones about their respective rights to the glamour and gore of the evening. They sorted it out and the pressmen, looking pretty pleased with themselves, came over to shake my hand before leaving.
“Lucky I followed you, Hardy,” said Tickener. “Instinct, eh?”
We shook. “I guess so,” I said. He hadn’t handled himself too badly and he’d be well clear of the sports page and Joe Barrett’s errands now. Also, he now owed me something and it’s handy in my game to have a pressman in your debt. Colin Jones looked like he needed some sleep, but if he was going to get his pictures into the morning editions he probably wouldn’t get it. He let go my hand and slapped one of his cameras.
“Miles to go before I sleep,” he said.
“You’re the only educated cameraman in the west, Colin.”
“Yeah, it gets in the way. Thanks for letting me in, Cliff, it made a change.” They wandered off to put the final touches on the thrills in store for their readers over the yoghurt and crispies.
I’d exhausted my packet of Drum and drunk all the autovend coffee I could stand. It was 2 a.m. and I felt like I needed a new skin, a new throat and quite a few other accessories. I had an Irish thirst and the image of the wine in my refrigerator beckoned me like the damasked arm of the lady in the lake. Evans started slipping papers into folders and his telephone had finally stopped ringing hot. I was sitting across from his self-satisfied look. He reached into a drawer of the scarred and battered pine desk and fished out two cigars in cellophane wrappers. He offered me one.
“Keeping ‘em since Jenny was born. Thought it might be a son. This is the next best thing, have one?”
I shook my head. “Wouldn’t have a cold beer would you?”
He smiled, lit his cigar and leaned back blowing a thin stream of the rich, creamy smoke at the ceiling. “Piss artist,” he said indulgently. “Case closed, Cliff?”
“Yours or mine?”
“Mine is like a fish’s arsehole. I mean yours.”
“I don’t know yet.” I was lying, I suspected it was just beginning and that there were many little corners of it still unexplored and a great highway of truth still to put through the lives of the people concerned.
“Well, anything I can do, just let me know.” He looked at his watch and I took the point. We shook hands and I trudged down the corridor and took yet another chance on the lift. We made a nice couple as we wheezed down to ground level and I closed its wire grille gently; with care and kind treatment we might both just last out the decade.
I picked up my car which was looking sheepish and barely roadworthy among the powder blues in the police parking lot, and drove home through the back streets and quietest roads. I tried to think of Ailsa battling with her pain in hospital, and Susan Gutteridge coming out of a long slide, and Bryn cruising and cruel like a harbour shark, but all the pictures blurred and the people receded far off into the distance. A truck backfired when I was within fifty yards of home, and as I sidled the Falcon into the yard my ears were ringing with the noise and I could smell the smoke and feel the shotgun heavy and deadly in my hands. I went into the house, drank a long glass of wine and made coffee, but I went to sleep in a chair while waiting for the cup I’d poured to cool. I swilled it down cold and went to bed.
Tickener made a good job of it. His headline was lurid but his story was sharp and clear. Evans got a splash verbally and photographically and there were lots of adjectives scattered through the writing like “fearless” and “masterly”. I got a few mentions and anyone reading between the lines would come away with the knowledge that I had killed Costello, but who reads between the lines any more? The name Gutteridge didn’t figure in the story and it seemed that a combination of brilliant investigatory journalism and enterprising police work had delivered the goods. That suited me. The last thing I wanted was pictures of myself in the papers and my name a household word — it might feel good, but it would play hell with business if kids came up to ask you for your autograph while you were staking out a love nest.
I read most of this sitting on the lavatory while a warm, soft Sydney rain darkened the courtyard bricks. Back in the kitchen I made coffee and welsh rarebit. Ordinarily, I’d have been at least semi-relaxed. I was on a case, on expenses and earning them and hadn’t had any bones broken in the past twenty-four hours. But this one was different, my client was special and she was in hospital and I was partly to blame. The villain was in custody as they say, but villains were coming out of the woodwork and the past was sending out tentacles which were winding around the necks of people living and dying in the present. It’s a dying trade I’m in.
I called the hospital and was told that I could visit Miss Sleeman at 10 a.m., seeing that I was the one who’d admitted her. I took a long, hot then cold shower, which made me feel virtuous. I capitalised on this by taking the flagon and a glass out onto the bricks along with my electric razor and my razor sharp mind. I sipped the wine and ran the tiny, whirring blades over my face. The sun climbed up over the top of the biscuit factory and beamed heat down into the courtyard. The bricks started to steam and sweat began to roll off my chest down into the thin layers of fat around my waist. I resolved again to walk more and to cut out beer and that was as far as my thinking took me. I towelled off the sweat, dressed in cotton slacks, shirt and sandals and played inch by inch with the Falcon out onto the street. There was a sweet, malty biscuit smell in the air as I drove past the front of my house. Soames had just put on his first record of the day. Pretty soon he’d take a peek over the fence, shake his head at the empty flagon and roll his apres-muesli joint.
I don’t like hospitals. My mother and father and Uncle Ted died in them. They all smell and look the same, all polished glass and lino and reek of disinfectant. Ailsa was on the fourth floor in a ward past the maternity unit. It was crammed full of rosy cheeked mothers smothering babies, black, white and brindle, against their chests. It made me feel my childlessness like a burden and I wondered if Ailsa felt the same way. Perhaps she didn’t need to. She hadn’t mentioned any children, but then I had only got a pretty episodic biography of her, perhaps she had twins being finished in Switzerland. Dangerous thoughts for someone for whom marriage was a busted flush and kids were something not to shoot when out on business. I had wanted kids but Cyn hadn’t unless I was going to be home at six o’clock every night and I couldn’t give her that guarantee. I was in an intensely self-critical mood when I arrived at Ailsa’s ward. A roly-poly matron who hadn’t heard how dragon-like she should be showed me to the door and told me I could have an hour. I went in.
Ailsa was sitting up in bed wearing a white cheesecloth nightgown. She had no make-up on and had lost a lot of colour in her face, her eyes were shadowed and huge so that she looked pale and fragile like a French mime. The bronze hair was newly washed and a bit curly and she had a scrubbed clean look as if she was about to be delivered somewhere. Her face and lips were still puffy and bruised, but when she looked up from her book she managed to work her features into a smile.
“Hardy,” she said, “the great protector.”
I moved up, took the book away and grabbed her hands. She winced with pain and I swore and let her go. She reached out slowly and stiffly and put her hand on my forearm, it rested there light and feathery like a silk stocking across a chair.
“You’re hopeless,” she said, “no fruit, no magazines. How’ll we fill in the time?”
I gave her a leer and she smiled before shaking her head. “Not for weeks,” she said. “But when I can you’ll be the first man I call.”
I was relieved. We’d seemed to be plunging into something very heavy and I wasn’t sure I could handle it yet, or ever. Her version of the way we stood, even though it was determined by her injuries, accorded with my feelings and relaxed me. I patted her hand and we sat there quietly for a minute or two feeling something like trust and understanding flow between us. I eased back the loose sleeves of her nightdress and saw that her forearms were bandaged. I told her again that I was sorry I hadn’t been there.
“Don’t be silly, Cliff,” she said, “how could you have known what was going to happen. The whole thing has got out of control. I don’t understand it properly, do you?”
“No, I can’t make the connections. It’s all hooked up. Brave, Bryn, the files and the threats, but I don’t know how they’re linked exactly. That makes it hard to take the next step with any confidence.”
“What are you going to do then?”
I looked at her and ran my finger lightly across her high, sharp cheekbone. The skin was stretched thin and tight across it like a rubber membrane over a specimen bottle. “I haven’t finished checking all the possibilities I was working on yesterday. Brave is out of circulation of course.” I nodded at the newspapers lying on a bedside chair.
“Yes,” she said, “thank God for that.” She was looking tired already and spoke slowly. “But I want it seen
