“How is Ailsa?” he said suddenly. He’d dropped the hurt look and the probing look, now he was mild and charming. He was a chameleon.
“She’s OK,” I said gruffly. It seemed inadequate.
“Bloody awful business,” he said, “I got the gist of it from Sir John Guilford, and I read about Bryn. Dreadful. A chapter of accidents.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t want to sit here exchanging chummy gossip with you, Haines. I don’t like you, you don’t like me. But since we’re at it, did you hear about Susan Gutteridge? She’s in hospital too.”
He looked and sounded surprised. We were talking about his mother although he didn’t know that I knew it. Nothing like filial concern showed in his face but there was no way it would — his feelings about his own flesh and blood were unique to him.
“God, no. What’s the matter with her?”
“Hit and run.”
“How bad?”
“Broken legs, she’ll live.”
He shook his head. It was a bad moment for me because, despite myself, I believed what I saw — a man who apparently didn’t know a thing about events he was supposed to have engineered. It was time to get on with it before I found myself giving away too much for this stage of the game. I got off the desk and made impatient movements with my feet. He looked at me curiously for a second and then flicked the intercom button. He told the secretary he’d be with Mr Kent for a few minutes and we went out of the office.
Mr Kent looked like just the sort of man for tax dodges, he faded into the background without a trace. He had wispy hair, a grey suit and a general air of not being there at all. Like everyone in the place he was smart and efficient. He read Ailsa’s note, reached into his desk for a manila folder and wrote my name on the top of it. He went to pin the note inside the folder but I stopped him and told him I wanted to keep it. He smiled knowingly. “Very wise,” he said. He pressed a button and a girl appeared in the open doorway about two seconds later. “Photocopy please,” Kent said extending the note to her, “and arrange credit cards for Mr Hardy. The usual things.” The secretary nodded a sleekly groomed head and whispered away. Kent busied himself with a ruled form on which he wrote my name and made some entries in a tight, cribbed hand. There was no love lost between him and Haines who straightened his cuffs and looked more or less in my direction.
“Satisfied Hardy?” he said.
“Very. Thank you Mr Haines. Don’t fall in any swimming pools.”
Kent looked up bemused but Haines’ face was a bored, non-reacting mask. He inclined his head to Kent and went out, leaving the door open. Kent got up and shut it. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him and he seemed to feel the same way about me. We lingered in silence until the girl came back with the papers. She handed them to Kent who dismissed her with the economical nod that seemed to be his speciality before slipping the photostat into the file. He handed the original back to me.
“A credit card valid for the standard airlines for six months will be ready for you at the desk, Mr Hardy,” he said. “And now, a Cashcard?”
“What’s that?”
He unleashed what appeared to be the whole of his personality in the form of a tight, self-satisfied smile. “It’s at the desk, you can use it to draw a hundred dollars a day for the next calendar month.”
“Wonderful,” I said, “what about taxis, call girls and squaring cops?”
“Your problem, Mr Hardy. To me you are a miscellaneous expense.”
He scribbled the day’s date on the outside of the folder and pulled a bulging, loose leaf file towards him like a long lost lover. I was dismissed, I know a perfectionist when I see one.
The girl at the front desk was having a bad day. She held out two cards, one of them similar to a bankcard, the other plainer with a gold edge.
“Please sign these, Mr Hardy.”
I signed them. She slipped them into plastic holders and handed them to me.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “capitalism is doomed.”
She gave me a brilliant smile. She’d solved it, I was a madman.
I went home, packed a few things into an overnight bag and phone booked an afternoon flight to Adelaide. The credit card worked like a charm at the first bank I came to. I caught a taxi out to the airport and called the hospital half an hour before my plane was due for boarding. I left messages for Ailsa and Susan telling them not to see anyone except their doctors. After buying the Sydney afternoon and the Adelaide morning papers I went through the ticket collection and seat allocation routines and got on the plane. It was half empty which felt strange until I remembered that it was nearly always that way in first class, I just hadn’t had much experience of it.
The plane boomed along for two hours damaging the ozone. I had a couple of gins and tonic because I like the miniature bottles.
Adelaide doesn’t rate too highly with me. It’s flat and there’s no water to speak of. The celebrated hills are too close to the city. It feels as if you could kick a football from the city stadium up into the hills without really trying. When I go there it’s always raining and I’m never dressed for it. The plane slewed about a bit on the wet runway and we all scampered for cover in our lightweight ensembles. The rain was more a spit than a shower, but the only happy-looking people at the terminal were those who were flying the hell out of the place.
I went to the Avis desk and hired a Ford Escort for two days after proving beyond all doubt that I was Clifford Hardy, licensed to drive, and handing over enough money to make it not worth my while to steal it. My luggage came down the chute, I slung it into the back of the car and drove in to what they call the city. I tried to cheer myself with the thought that the Athens of the South is a great place for the cheap food and drink, but I only half- succeeded.
The buildings were dribbling water down their grey faces and those damn hills were still much too close. I checked in at the Colonial Hotel across the road from the University and ordered a bottle of Scotch with ice and a soda syphon. I settled down with a tall glass, a map and the telephone directory. The orphanage was listed and I called it. I might as well have saved my breath and money. The woman I spoke to wouldn’t confirm that Haines had been an inmate, wouldn’t give out information about past directors of the place and wouldn’t arrange an interview for me with the present boss. She wasn’t interested in sarcasm either, she hung up as I was thanking her. But that was all right. The first dead end in an investigation is a challenge to me, it’s only after one or two more that I feel hurt and start sulking.
They couldn’t conceal the address of the place from me. I located it on the map, poured out and drank a quick neat one, and tucked the ice and soda away in the miniature fridge. I got the car out of the hotel parking lot and drove off towards the hills. The rain had stopped.
It took me nearly an hour to reach the orphanage which put the time at close to five o’clock. The photographs I’d seen of the place hadn’t done it justice. It was straight out of Dickens or maybe even Mervyn Peake; every angle and corner suggested order and discipline. It had no charm; I like old buildings, but I wouldn’t have minded if they pulled this one down. It looked in pretty good shape however, and the grounds were well cared for which suggested a groundsman. Groundsmen and caretakers tend to be long-term employees and I was counting on that now. I parked back up the road from the main gates and set off on a circumnavigation of the grounds which covered about ten acres. The main building stood on a rise more or less in the middle of the land which was enclosed by a high fence of cast iron spears. A paved drive ran from the main gates up to the front of the building and down to a smaller set of gates on the other side. There was a football oval and a fair bit of lawn and garden but too much asphalt and government issue cream paint.
I scouted around the fence until I found what I was looking for — a small cottage in the northeast corner of the grounds. It would have been a city trendy’s dream, sandstock bricks, double fronted and without obvious signs of later improvements. A man was standing in front of the cottage doing nothing in particular. At that distance he looked old, bent over a bit, and there was a pipe smoking gently in his face. He had his hands and a good part of his arms deep in the pockets of a pair of old khaki overalls. I stuck my head up over the spears.
“Gidday,” I shouted.
He stood like stone. I shouted again with the same result. He might have been deep in reverie, but it seemed more likely that he was hard of hearing. I looked around for something to throw and found a piece of rotten branch. I heaved it over the fence and it landed a bit off to one side of him. He took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at it. Then he put the pipe back and looked at it again. I reached down for another piece of wood to throw when he
