Tickener’s car to check a few details of the story with him. We shook hands and agreed to meet soon for a drink. He pulled the Holden out and set off for his typewriter and coffee. It was midnight. We drove back to Sydney; Haines and the girl changed places at Central Railway and she drove off without a word.
I drove to Glebe, took Haines into the house and made some coffee. We talked around it a bit and confusion was the keystone of his attitude. He was a bit in love with Ailsa but too screwed up to know it. Any mention of his mother was like drawing a toenail. He was like a man with every layer of skin off except the last, tender to the touch at a hundred points, bleeding here and there where his obsession obtruded and teetering on a terrible abyss of pain. What I had to tell him pushed him over the edge and he fell, screaming silently inside his lonely, alien shell.
After that we sat quietly for a while drinking the last of the coffee. I called a taxi and he went back to what he had to call home.
30
I crawled out of bed around 10 am. It was one of those bright, cool summer mornings that Sydney specialises in. I made coffee, got the paper in and read it out in the courtyard. Tickener had made the front page again with his account of the discovery of Brave’s body. There were no pictures. Haines was mentioned as the owner of the property and I spared him a thought for the yarn he’d have to spin to the police, but we’d worked out an alibi — a phone conversation with his employer which I’d have to confirm with Ailsa today — in case he needed one. My guess was that he wouldn’t. The cops had no reason to disbelieve that Haines’ place had been picked at random for the revenge killing of Brave and no reason to connect Brave to Haines beyond the Gutteridge connection. I didn’t think they’d be very interested in probing that.
I went inside and phoned Ailsa. She sounded well and I told her I’d be in that afternoon.
“Is it over Cliff?” she said.
“It’s over.”
“Is it all right?”
“It’s all right for you.”
“And Susan?”
“It’ll never be all right for her. I’ll tell you all about it this afternoon love, be patient.”
“Not my strong suit as they say in the books.”
I asked her if the police had approached her and she said they hadn’t. I asked her to confirm Haines’ alibi and she said she would, but she never had to. I rang off and went back to the paper and another cup of coffee.
Tickener shared the front page with the latest cricket win. That seemed to call for a modest salutation. I hauled the wine and soda and ice out of the fridge, made a bacon sandwich and set myself up out in the yard. The biscuit factory was just tingeing the air with butterscotch.
I got the briefcase out of the car. I scrabbled about for some kindling and paper and stuffed it into the barbecue I’d built out of bricks pinched from here and there at dead of night. I poured a glass of wine and opened the case. After thumbing through the papers for a while I selected and set aside a newspaper clipping, a typed sheet and a photostat of a land title deed. The remainder of the papers I fed into the fire. I put the cassettes across the top of the grill and watched them melt like chocolate. The smell in the air was of plastic, laminated paper and corruption. I drank some wine, ate the sandwich and watched the thin, dark smoke from the fire threaten the unsullied purity of Soames’ whitewashed wall. The Gutteridge files were a heap of fine ashes interspersed with blobs of molten plastic when the fire died down. I pushed them about to make sure of the completeness of the destruction and slung the briefcase back into the car.
After a shave and a shower I went out and drew another hundred dollars with the credit card. I drove over to Paddington and rambled through the shops, eventually coming out with a djellaba in blue and white vertical stripes with a hood and drawstrings at the cuffs. I had lunch in a pub and drove over to the hospital.
Ailsa was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She was wearing a long, off-white calico nightgown cut square around the neck. I went up and kissed her on the mouth and then in each of the hollows of her shoulder bones. She smelted of roses.
“You look good, you smell good, you feel good.”
She put her arms up around my neck.
“More,” she said.
“You’re the queen of the world.”
I gave her the parcel, she unwrapped it and smoothed the robe out on the bed. She immediately began fiddling with the drawstrings.
She looked up at me. “It’s lovely,” she said. “Now tell me about it.”
I gave her all the details, it took a long time and she listened quietly, tracing patterns in the raised nap of the robe on the bed.
“What was the black girl’s motive?” she asked when I finished.
“Partly political. She’s some kind of nationalist, anti-British, anti-French, anti-Australian. And just about every bloody thing. You have interests in Noumea?”
She nodded.
“So has Susan I suspect. Your people must be stepping on toes over there, maybe it’s a genuine grievance, I don’t know. Anyway, she was here for a little private terrorism. But Brave got hold of her, something to do with drugs. Brave was an addict. Did you know that?”
“No. I’ll have to look into that.”
“The Noumea operation?”
“Yes.” She drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “Well, Mark started it all I suppose by keeping the files. There are a lot of casualties. What about the survivors? What did you mean about Susan never being right again?”
“That connects back to Ross,” I said.
“Obviously, what about him?”
I got up off the bed and moved around the room. I picked up one of her books and smiled at the dog ears at fifty page intervals.
“Don’t start pacing again Cliff or I’ll bloody kill you. No, I just won’t pay you. Just tell me about it.”
I sat down again. “I was on the wrong track about him for a long time. I thought he was obsessed by his mother, he wasn’t. I was misled by the photographs he had. He was hung up about his father. Natural I suppose.”
“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, “well, do you know who his father is?”
“Was. Yes, I worked it out eventually.”
“How? Who?”
“How first. It was the only thing that fitted. Mark Gutteridge sent Susan away to Adelaide to have her child. OK, he wanted to spare her and everyone else the teenage pregnancy trauma. Fair enough. But a tremendous change in the nervous pattern of the Gutteridges dates from then. It manifests itself in different ways and they never get over it. That’s the first point. Secondly, Mark Gutteridge wasn’t a conventional man. He shouldn’t have been horrified when his illegitimate grandson turned up with proof of his identity. He’d be more likely to be intrigued, inclined to do something for the boy, like a Renaissance prince, right?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“But he doesn’t. He flips. He can’t handle it and that sets Ross off.”
“All right, that’s a lot of how. Now, who was Ross’ father?”
“Bryn,” I said.
I sat on the bed and Ailsa rested her head against my thigh and we watched the day dying slowly outside the open window. An ascending jet littered the sky with dirty brown smoke, its boom drowned out something Ailsa murmured and I stroked her hair in reply. Maybe she was thinking about Mark Gutteridge, maybe about the children she’d never have. I was thinking about raw, haunted people who twanged the nerves of everyone they touched — like Bryn, like Haines, like Cyn. They couldn’t sloop along in the shallows where the water was warm and the breeze
