Griffo drank and fought in every pub in The Rocks this is incontestable. Seekers after authenticity are starting to discover the pub and pose a threat to its integrity, but for the moment it’s holding its own against the pressure to become another unisex, unidrink playground. The counter tea, served early, was steak, salad and chips and I ordered it along with a litre carafe of the house plonk. This made me an eccentric in the saloon bar where workers in singlets were putting down beer with their food and a scattering of executives and trendies were drinking wine from bottles with theirs. They gave me a beer glass with the carafe which suited me fine.
The paper was full of the usual drivel — the Pope pronouncing on sex and politicians claiming to speak for the common man. The lead story was about Rory Costello — standover man and armed robbery expert, who’d been sentenced to twenty years in Long Bay. He’d escaped ten days ago and had been sighted simultaneously in Perth and Cairns. The steak was good and the wine fair. I ate and drank slowly and tried to make some sense of the information I had on the Gutteridge case so far.
I hadn’t established any clear connection between the threats to Susan Gutteridge and the suicide of her father, if it was suicide. Bryn Gutteridge hadn’t provided any connections out of his picture of his father — an honest, if forceful, businessman. Gutteridge’s ex-wife had a different picture of him — unscrupulous and dishonest, with a thousand enemies, any one of whom could be taking it out on the daughter. This view of the late Gutteridge appealed to me most, but that could have been my bank balance and prejudices speaking. Against Bryn’s story in general was that he had lied about his attitude to Dr Brave, or a lie was implied in what he’d told me. That is, if Ailsa Sleeman was telling the truth. She was a complex woman who’d seen two tycoon husbands off, but she had no obvious reason to lie on this point. It was easily checked, but that went for Bryn’s story too. He seemed to be in dubious control of his cool. Maybe he lied about everything. Maybe he was an eccentric millionaire who liked to send private detectives on wild goose chases. Suddenly, that seemed like a clean, uncomplicated thing to do — to chase wild geese in northern Canada. I ate, drank, smoked and thought until it was time to go and meet the stricken sister.
Leafy Longueville features trees and water glimpses. There’s some big money and a lot of middle-sized money around; the middling people are working to keep up with the big people who are looking across the Lane Cove river towards Hunters Hill, where everybody has big money, and wondering if they can afford the move. The people work outside the area, send their kids out of it to school and don’t talk to each other. They spend their time cultivating high, privacy-making hedges and looking the other way.
At 7.15 Longueville is quiet. Hoses sprinkle on lawns and the big cars are all sitting in their garages. Nobody and nothing moves in the front grounds of the houses. The terraces and swimming pools out back could be awash with gin and naked women, but you’d never know from the street. The clinic was a block from the suburb’s main road. That put it close to the river, and into the heart of the Hunters Hill envy zone. I didn’t lock the Falcon because there are no car thieves in Longueville and I didn’t take my gun because there are no muggings either. Longuevillians do their thieving in the city five days a week, nine to five, and they get away from it all at home. The Brave clinic was an assemblage of white brick buildings with tinted glass standing in an acre or two of lawn and trees. There were no fountains or benches of the kind that are supposed to soothe troubled minds. Rather the air was of tight security. There was a high cyclone fence with concrete-embedded posts and a glassed-in reception booth which looked a bit too well equipped electrically for the sort of place the clinic was supposed to be. Since my commando days I’ve always been tempted by cyclone fences — the sadistic instructors must have sent us over hundreds of the bastards at terrific risks to our virility — but not this one. It was wired up to blazes and looked as if sirens would wail if you touched it, while relaying TV pictures of your blackheads to the main block.
I walked up to the booth. Some distance from it a metallic voice bounced off my chest.
“Please state your business.”
The guy in the booth leaned forward to look at me through the glass. He wore a white shirt, grey jacket and black tie. Through the thick glass his face was a pale, distorted blob. No microphones were visible. He just spoke in my general direction and I heard him loud and clear. I had to assume he could hear me.
“I have an appointment to see one of Dr Brave’s patients at 7.30. My name is Hardy.”
He pressed a button, a pane of glass slid back. He put his right hand through and snapped fingers tightly gloved in black leather.
“Identification please.”
I fished in my pocket and pulled out the licence card. It looks like a student ID card and would get me into Robert Redford movies half-price if I looked twenty years younger and could stand Robert Redford. I handed the card over. More glass slid back and the guard looked me over critically like a Russian customs officer who can be satisfied as to your identification but is pretty unhappy that you exist at all. He nodded, handed back the card and pressed a button; a gate beside the booth swung open.
“Please walk up to the largest building ahead of you, Mr Hardy. Stay on the path all the way please.”
I went through. There were a few lights up on poles and some in hatches at ground level. They focused on the wide, intricately laid brick path. There was no excuse for slipping off it onto the velvet grass but I dawdled off to the left and took a couple of steps on the sward just for the hell of it. Closed circuit security TV is even more boring than the public kind, and I might just have made someone’s day.
Close up all the buildings had a severe practical look. The main block had heavyweight glass and timber doors at the top of a dozen steps. I went up, pushed them open with a featherlight touch and went into a cool, navy- carpeted lobby with a reception desk set at an artful angle. No blondes A tall burly guy who looked like an Italian eased himself off the desk and stepped towards me. He was wearing a denim suit with knife edge creases and white shoes. His white silk shirt was open far enough to show a gold medallion nestling in a thatch of thick, black hair. His waist was slim, there was no fat on him and only a slight thickening of his features betrayed how many fights he’d been in. He looked as if he’d won most of them.
“Please come with me, Mr Hardy. Dr Brave is waiting for you.”
He inclined his black pompadour towards a teak door at the end of the room. He’d said it before, more or less, but he was still having trouble wrapping his western suburbs Italian accent around the polite words He was built for action and it was a pity to make him talk. He ushered me through the door and down a long corridor done up in the same style as the lobby. Glass-panelled doors opened off it at frequent intervals and the Italian plucked at my sleeve when I slowed down to take a look through one. The place was getting to me — it looked like a jail for people who were very rich and very sorry for what they’d done. I passed him on the left and pulled open the next door on that side.
“Interesting place this,” I said, sticking my head into the room. Empty, sterile; with bars on the windows. A hand fell down on my shoulder and the fingers closed vice-like around the bone. He pulled mc back as easy as a kid pulling on a wad of gum.
“Don’t do that again, Mr Hardy.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just curious.” I had a feeling that he was trying to hurry me through this part of the building. I wondered why.
“Don’t be.”
We were side by side when we reached die next door on the right. I hunched myself and cannoned into him blasting him against the wall. I opened the door and stepped in. He recovered fast and moved towards me. When he was half-way through the opening, I swung the door back full into him. He took some of it in the face, some at the knee and the handle in the solar plexus. He collapsed like a skyscraper in an earthquake. I turned around to look at the room. I caught a glimpse of a man with a bandaged face sitting on a bed before I felt like I’d been dumped by a gigantic wave: a ton of metal tried to tear my head from my shoulders and sandbags crashed into my belly and knees. I went down into deep, dark water watching a pin-point of light which dimmed, dimmed and died.
Everything hurt when I swam up out of the dark. I tried to slide down into it again but I was slapped hard across the face and pulled up into a sitting position on a short, hard couch. I turned my head painfully and saw the Italian dusting off his hands. He looked bad — one side of his face was a purple smear and he stood awkwardly, favouring one leg. But he was on his feet and in better shape therefore than me. Sitting behind a table in the middle of the room was the man I’d seen pulling into Gutteridge’s driveway in the Bentley. His face had the colour and texture of chalk. His hair was jet black and there was black hair on the backs of his hands. His eyebrows were thick, black bars that met in the middle; he looked like a chessboard come to life. His voice was soft with a burr that could have been Scots but might have been the echoes and rings inside my head.
“You have been very foolish, Mr Hardy. You were asked to observe certain civilities. May I ask why you did not?”
