shrubs. I saw every kind of flower I can identify, which is four, and dozens of others. The lawn was meticulously cut. Someone spent many hours per week in that garden and knew what he was doing.
I took a run past the house, turned at the top of the quiet street and came back down on the other side. I stopped a few doors further on. There was no activity in the street. There wouldn’t be — this was a both-people- working and children-at-creche-or-school zone. I got out of my car after finding a clipboard and some paper amid the rubbish on the back seat. I riffled through the blank sheets of paper, adjusted the clip, tucked the board under my arm and marched up to the gate. I walked briskly to the front door and rang the bell. Behind all that shrubbery I was scarcely visible from the street or the flanking houses. If my entry hadn’t attracted any adverse attention I was set. If someone had seen me go in and knew the house was empty I could be in trouble, but I probably had some time to work in before they’d get up the spirit to ring the cops. I gave it a minute. The air was warm and still and full of insect noises. I slipped a skeleton key into the old Yale lock and turned. The door came open as if I was the master returning from a hard day’s work.
The door gave onto a hallway with wallpaper that reminded me of my aunt Joan’s — men on horseback in pink coats, and dogs and foxes chasing each other from floor to ceiling. To the left were double glass doors which opened onto a large living room with a big handsome fireplace. On the other side of the house there were two large bedrooms and a bathroom and toilet. Behind this the kitchen ran the width of the house and behind that was a glassed-in sun porch with full length sliding doors. A very nice drinking area. The back garden was as well kept and well stocked flora-wise as the front. I went through the porch, down a cement path to the garage. All the usual carpenter’s tools hung up above a bench against their silhouettes carefully painted in black on the fibro cement wall. A wide selection of gardening tools stood against the wall lined up like soldiers at attention. There were some oil stains on the concrete floor but no one’s perfect.
Back in the house I began a systematic search of drawers and cupboards to see if I could turn up anything which might suggest involvement in Gutteridge affairs beyond what was normal for a loyal employee. Contrary to their image, accountants have a very high rate of criminality — their training and professional habits make them formidable schemers and planners. Chalmers, however, seemed as honest as Baden Powell. His kitchen drawers showed him to be a model of efficiency and tidiness. The household accounts were spiked and filed down to the last detail in the second bedroom which he used as a guest room and study. My keys got me into every drawer and cabinet and revealed a man pretty much as dull as Ailsa had portrayed him. He had plenty of money, from his salary and stock market investments which seemed to be cautious and consistently profitable. His income tax submissions were a joy to see. He practically deducted his shoe leather and they bought it every time.
The main bedroom presented a contrast to the rest of the house where the fittings were austere, almost plain. This room had a softer, sensuous feel. The double bed was low slung and springy, the sheets and pillow cases were black satin under a knotty Peruvian woollen cover. There was a large cedar wardrobe with two full length mirrors and a chest of the same wood which stood five feet high — both thousand dollar antiques. The right hand door on the wardrobe offered the first resistance I’d met with in the house. It had a double lock with the second mechanism low down and concealed by a movable panel. I had to work on it with two keys and a piece of stiff plastic to get it open. The hanging space inside was crammed with full length and street length dresses and nightgowns, they ranged from frilly, frothy affairs to sleek streamlined jobs. A set of shelves in the cupboard was occupied by layers of silk and satin underwear — panties, bras, petticoats, stockings and suspenders. A box on the bottom shelf was full of make-up — lipsticks, false eyelashes, brushes and pencils, eye shadow and other pots and tubes beyond my experience.
The bottom drawer of the set between the two full length doors also put up a struggle. I jiggled it open with a long key and a lot of quiet swearing. Ross Haines couldn’t have been more wrong about Chalmers; he was a homosexual alright, but about as repressed as Nero. The drawer was full of photographs, loose and glued into several albums. Many of the pictures were heavy stuff even in these permissive times. They showed a man whom I took to be Chalmers, in woman’s clothing, making love, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes and fours. Several of the pictures had been taken in the room I was in, some were outdoor shots, others were taken in what looked like motel rooms. One album contained photos of Chalmers taken over about twenty years. He was a medium sized man with a thin face and hair that time was harvesting. One picture was arresting: Chalmers stood, dressed in a suit cut in the style of twenty years before, alongside a woman with a fresh pretty face and a neat figure. From their accessories and the background it was clearly a wedding picture — Chalmers’ smile was a death mask grimace. There were a few blank leaves in the album following this picture and signs that others had been torn out. Later leaves held snapshots of men, sitting around tables, standing in streets or sprawling on grass or sand. Chalmers wore white, open-necked shirts in most of the pictures and he looked like the photographs you see of Kim Philby in Russia — not quite relaxed in front of the camera, but obviously having a good time.
I muttered “Good luck to you” under my breath and returned the photographs to their original places as carefully as I could. I looked around to make sure I hadn’t disturbed the room and left the house by the front door. Clipboard under my arm I walked to the car. I rolled a cigarette and smoked it down while staring through the windscreen. Walter Chalmers had his own deep secrets and I judged that this made him unlikely to trade in those of other people.
21
I was back in the hospital by five o’clock. The same crowd of visitors milled about in the lobby waiting to catch lifts up to the wards. There was a different receptionist at the desk but the same smell in the corridors. Ailsa was sitting up in her bed. She was wearing a little make-up and a different nightgown. This one had a loose tie around the neck, a sort of drawstring, and she was fiddling with the strings when I walked into the room. She looked outwardly better but inwardly worse. The hands she held out tentatively to me were trembling and cold. I held her hands for a minute and broke the silence clumsily.
“What’s wrong love, cigarette withdrawal or morphine addiction?”
“Don’t joke, Cliff,” she said, “just look at that.” She nodded down at the newspaper which was lying folded up on the bed. I picked it up and read the lead story. It said that Dr Ian Brave, who had been held in custody in connection with the sheltering of Rory Costello, had escaped from the hospital wing of the Long Bay Jail. Tickener had the byline and he’d made the most of the meagre facts he’d had to work with. Brave had been taken ill with severe vomiting and internal pain and had been escorted to the hospital. He’d been sedated and an armed guard had been set up outside his room. The room was inspected hourly and Brave had vanished between eleven o’clock and noon. The guard denied leaving his post and said he’d heard nothing suspicious from inside the room. Tickener described Brave as a “consulting psychologist” and mentioned obliquely that he had an intimate knowledge of drugs and had used hypnotism in the treatment of his patients.
Ailsa was gnawing at her nails as I read and she dug a jagged one into my arm as I put the paper down.
“I heard about Bryn on the news this morning and now this. What’s happening, Cliff? I’m scared, I don’t understand it. I don’t feel safe even in here with Brave out there somewhere.”
I poured her some water and tried to calm her down, but she was close to hysteria. She brushed the glass aside.
“I don’t want water. How could he escape from prison? How could he?”
“Easy love, you’re safe here. It could have been fixed for him. He’s had one cop in his pocket, why not more? The story doesn’t say whether it was a police guard or a prison guard. I don’t really think he could have used hypnotism on the guard, but it’s possible. It gives the guard an out anyway.”
“Jesus, it scares me,” she said.
“Me too,” I said, then mostly to myself, “I suppose he could have fixed it while he was inside.”
She jumped at it. “Fixed what?”
She was so edgy that it seemed better to give her something real to bite on rather than let her fantasise herself into nervous collapse. I told her about the attempt to kill Susan Gutteridge and worked back from that through her abduction and my part in Bryn’s death. I didn’t tell her that Susan wanted to hire me. She listened attentively and reached up to touch my face when I was finished. She seemed calmer. We went into one of our silent communings, looking at each other with foolish smiles on our faces.
