Haines looked up at me with complete understanding. He’d lived for twenty-odd years for just the moment that was coming and nothing was ever going to be the same for him after it had passed. It was going to be a kind of death.
29
I washed up the glasses and put the liquor away, then I went around retrieving things like used tissues and cigarette ends. I got Haines to drive the VW around the track a few times and had Tickener bring up my car, his, and the hire car Brave had arrived in. We drove them round and by the time we’d finished the track was criss- crossed with tyre marks and skids that no one could make any sense of. I wiped the hire car, a Valiant, clean and left it parked half-way up the track from the road. Pali and Haines did most of the watching, Tickener and I did most of the work. When we’d finished we all congregated, by chance, around the body of Dr Ian Brave. He lay on his back, fully stretched out, with broken bamboo stems jutting up all around him and pushing through his clothes. He was inelegant and lumpy in death, he looked like an old, collapsed scarecrow. One eye looked sightlessly up to the clouds, the other was a dark horror; one half of his face was a smooth, chalky white, the other was crumpled and stained dark — it was a map of heaven and hell. Pali looked down at him and I thought I saw a nerve jump in her ebony mask.
“How did you fall in with him?” I asked gently. She responded to the tone of the question by making a keening movement of her head. She ran her right palm down the inside of her left forearm.
“Drugs,” she said.
I nodded and turned away. I didn’t touch Brave and cautioned the others to keep well clear. I left the gun where it was. A few footprints wouldn’t matter. The cops would figure it the easiest way for them, but there was no point in leaving clues about which might set them doubting. Haines was off in some private world of his own. He sat on the edge of the deck picking at his fingers and only came to life when Tickener suggested firing the shack.
“Why would you want to do that?” he asked nervously.
“To confuse things, cover the tracks a bit more,” Tickener said.
“You’re ruthless,” Haines said shaking his head, “ruthless.”
I laughed. “Don’t listen to him, Ross,” I said, “he’d just like to have a fire to spice up his story a bit.”
Tickener grinned and lit a cigarette. “It’s not a bad idea,” he said. “And speaking of stories, how do I write it just from an anonymous tip-off? Where’s the journalistic thoroughness of investigation, not to mention integrity?”
“Where it usually is,” I said. “Listen Harry, you’re learning fast but you’ve got a long way to go. You listen to the police radio, they’ll send a car, the car will call for an ambulance, you’ll get some details that way, not many. Your story is that this confirmed the tip-off, you took the plunge — journalistic flair and derring-do.”
“It sounds shaky,” he said doubtfully.
“It’ll do,” I said, “happens all the time. By the way, how’s Joe Barrett these days?”
“Not so good,” he said happily.
I went back into the shack for a last look around. I collected the guns and took a minute to examine Haines little. 32.
“Have you got a licence for this?” I asked him.
“Yes.”
“How come?”
“Company executives who sometimes carry large sums of money can get pistol licenses.”
I tossed it to him and he caught it. “You shouldn’t have it up here though,” I said, “better shift it. It might get some cop’s mind working, miracles do happen.”
He put the gun in the pocket of his windcheater, he was as docile as an old, pampered dog.
“OK Ross,” I said, “you’ve been a good boy so far, let’s see if you can keep it up. Where are the files?”
He hesitated for just a second, he looked at Tickener who had on his bloodhound face and Pali who was immobile, uninterested. He raised his eyes to mine and if I looked as old and empty and comfortless as I felt it must have been like the last gaze into the mirror before you cut your throat.
“I’ll show you.” His voice was a hoarse, thin whisper. He went across to the food storing and cooking end of the room and knelt down. He peeled up the sea-grass and prised up three lengths of floorboard with his fingernails. It was a hiding place that an experienced man would have located within five minutes, but Ross was one of life’s amateurs and nothing I’d seen of him so far suggested that he’d ever become a pro. He reached into the gap and pulled out a medium sized executive brief case. It was black with lots of shiny metal trim.
“Let’s have it,” I said. “And put the boards and mat back.”
I snapped open the lid, it wasn’t even locked, and took a quick look at the contents. The case was full of letters, bank statements and sheets of paper with what looked like bank note serial numbers written on them. Some of the material was in original, some in photostat. There were half a dozen cassette tapes and an envelope full of photographs. I rifled through the stuff. It was a complete blackmailer’s kit with applications for development permits neatly stapled to notes about sums of money and times and places of delivery. There were different versions of subdivision plans with names of surveyors and others entered on the back along with information about money paid. There were several newspaper extracts from court proceedings with the names of police witnesses underlined and code numbers entered in the margins; typed lists of the names of municipal councillors had similar entries alongside as many names as not. The numbers bore some relation to digits written on the faces of the cassettes. Handled right it was a meal ticket for life and the only thing that surprised me was the relatively small bulk of it. Mark Gutteridge had been in business a long time and if this was his game he should have collected more dope than was here.
“Is this all?” I asked Haines.
“Yes, I gave the people I contacted the material that affected them. There must originally have been about this much again.”
“How much money did you raise?”
“About twenty-five thousand dollars.”
I groaned and sat down on the bed. “You must have driven them crazy,” I said, “you said you marked some of the cops?”
“Yes, three, the really bad ones, they…”
“Spare me. You hit them for a thousand or so?”
“That’s right, roughly.”
“A fortnight’s takings, a month when things are slack. No wonder there was flurry from on high, they wouldn’t understand it. You were dead safe in a way. No copies?”
“No.”
“Of course not, wouldn’t be fair would it?”
“No.”
“You’re an idiot.” I snapped the case shut and got to my feet.
“Hey can I have a look?” said Tickener.
I fended him off. “Harry this is too hot to handle, I can’t let you have it.”
“What are you going to do with it?” There was pain in his voice and I remembered that he’d saved my life.
“Tell you what I’ll do mate, I’ll look through it, get out a crumb that won’t be traceable necessarily to this little box of goodies and give it to you. You can use it one quiet Wednesday when nothing’s happening.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“Burn it and let the bastards sweat.”
We went out to the cars. I got in the Falcon and motioned for Pali to sit alongside me. She did it, like a sleepwalker. Haines drove the VW. I locked the briefcase into a compartment under the driver’s seat. Tickener followed us along the track in his ancient Holden and we bumped down the road back to the highway. We drove to Katoomba like beads on a string with a set gap between us. I signalled a stop and went into a telephone booth for four minutes. It wasn’t a NIDA performance but it was good enough to set the wheels in motion. I walked back to
