back to it. Miss Reid watched me. I found it among the last few sheets. ‘CALLAGHAN, GERTRUDE’ was printed in neat capitals and a date, ‘8/5/33.’ This was when she’d come to work for the Chattertons as Bettina’s nurse, nanny or whatever. Two hand-written references were pinned to the sheet. One was from the matron of a country hospital testifying to Callaghan’s qualifications and competence; the other was from a doctor and expressed unqualified praise for her trustworthiness and abilities with children. Dr Alexander Osborn had a practice in Blackman’s Bay. I made notes from these testimonials and from the woman’s letter of application. Gertrude Callaghan was a spinster, born in Liverpool, England, in 1905. She left the Chattertons in June 1946 — her forwarding address was 11 Yancey Street, Blackman’s Bay.
I straightened up. Miss Reid was still sitting on the desk. She was looking tired but content.
‘Finished?’ she said. She let go a small, polite, well-covered yawn.
‘Nearly. I need the library.’
The old aggression flooded out. ‘You can’t go there. Lady Catherine is working on the memoirs in there, nothing must be disturbed.’
‘I won’t disturb anything. I have to look at a medical register. The Judge must have had it. I have it myself at home but I can’t go there.’
‘Why not?’
She came off the desk and moved towards the door; I herded her on and she opened it.
‘It’ll sound melodramatic, Miss Reid,’ I whispered, ‘but if I go home the police might be there and if they are they’ll arrest me.’
She was moving, keeping me at a distance. ‘What for?’
‘Murder. One I didn’t do.’
‘Who did?’ she gasped. ‘I didn’t… don’t believe you.’
I didn’t reply, just kept moving her along and we ended up at the library as I’d hoped. Miss Reid pushed open one of the high, heavily carved doors and fumbled for the light. When it came on it showed a big room with a high ceiling; two large windows were covered by heavy curtains. There was a long desk with papers laid out in neat bundles and some freshly sharpened pencils lined up.
Books dominated the room; there were thousands of them in cedar cases from floor to roof and there were two ladders on wheels ready to go. I thought of Henry Brain and his books in piles on the floor.
‘Is this catalogued?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She pointed to a wooden cabinet in one corner. I went over and thumbed through the cards. The medical directory was listed and numbered. I read the numbers on the shelves and climbed the ladder. The Judge had six copies going back as far as 1930, the most recent was 1975.
Dr Alexander Osborn was listed: born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1899, educated in the same city; medical training interrupted by two years in the army; served in France and Africa, rank of Captain. Osborn was a P amp; O ships’ doctor in the twenties and settled in Australia in 1929. Since 1939 he had had a practice in Blackman’s Bay. If he was still there what he wouldn’t know about the place wouldn’t be knowable. I noted the address and put the directories back.
‘All ship-shape,’ I said to Miss Reid.
‘You looked pleased with yourself.’
I was surprised and not pleased. ‘Do I? I shouldn’t be, this is just the start. But I’ve started to earn your boss’s money.’
‘I suppose that means something,’ she said acidly. ‘I wonder if I could go to bed now?’
I could have said something smart but didn’t. I don’t always. I wasn’t sure how to handle her. She probably didn’t know what I’d been hired to do, but there was her park assignation to consider and the half-lie I’d caught her in that night.
It seemed like the right time to do some work on her. She moved to open the door but I took hold of her arm.
‘Don’t touch me,’ she snapped.
‘I’d like to know what you plan to do about Rusty.’
‘Oh.’ There was relief in the sound. ‘I’ll call him.’
‘Is that what you do when your boyfriend visits? I mean the big guy in the blue car, the one Lady Catherine forbids you to see.’
‘I see who I like. Get out!’ She was a sabre fighter not a fencer; it was all beat-down-the-guard and thump for her. I decided to play the same way.
‘What’s his game, Miss Reid? Is he a chauffeur, a footman, what?’
The slur got straight to her. ‘He’s a property developer,’ she spat. ‘He makes more in a day than you’d scratch in…’
She knew it was a mistake and she hated herself, the hand that came up to her mouth almost delivered a slap. I let go her arm and opened the door.
‘Thank you Miss Reid,’ I said. ‘Be sure to call the dog.’
I heard her do some heavy breathing that seemed to characterise her anger; she didn’t call the dog and my flesh crept until I had my bum safely on the seat of the car.
I wanted a drink, a shower and a sleep. I had the drink, of Jameson’s Irish whisky. I still wanted the shower and sleep. Instead I drove south and stopped at the first open coffee bar. I drank two cups of black coffee and looked at the posters of Greece on the walls. Greece, that’d be nice. I like ouzo and I could run off the fatty food along the beach. I could lie in the sun, find a girl and learn Greek in bed. I pulled myself back to the here and now. For a trail thirty years old and not fresh lately it wasn’t so bad. But whoever had taken the photograph from Brain would be on the trail of the Callaghan woman too. If she was still alive. It was time for some night driving.
I paid for the coffee and thought again about a Greek island. Maybe I’d get a bonus if I found young Chatterton. I put my notebook and. 38 in the glovebox of the car and locked it. My jacket went on the seat along with three rolled cigarettes and the half-empty bottle. I got petrol and oil and water for the Falcon and told it we were going south and that it’d have a few hills to climb.
9
Blackman’s Bay is on the coast, about a hundred and fifty miles south of Sydney. It’s at the mouth of a river and was once a whaling port. After that it kept on with deep sea fishing for export, local fishing and tourism. I’d been through the place a few times and liked the look of it. I remembered it as a good-looking little town with a long timber and iron bridge over the river. At a pub a mile or so upstream I’d eaten some memorable oysters. Not a Greek island, but then I wasn’t on holiday.
I drove down the Princes Highway and took the freeway that skirts Wollongong and Port Kembla. The steelworks were a glowing, flame-spurting delirium too close for comfort. I hadn’t been out of the city in a long time, and south of the smoke and steel I began to feel some benefit from the drive and the sense of space around me. The Falcon coughed and protested on the hills. It was adapted to the harsh, stop and start grind of city driving. I nursed it. The air tasted cleaner by the mile and drunks on the road thinned out the further south I went. I’d smoked the cigarettes and now I took a careful pull on the bottle. The clean air blew into my face sharp and fresh and I felt good.
It was a clear night; the road slid down to the coast and the stars went on forever out to sea. I hit the Blackman’s Bay bridge sometime around 3.00 a.m. The planks rattled as I passed over them and I thought I could feel a slight swinging motion in the bridge. The main street was quiet; there were no all-night joints and most of the shops still used ordinary electric light which was switched off. A few neon tubes glowed prophetically in signs and windows. There was an extra service station and a shop or two, otherwise the town didn’t seem to have changed much. I drove down to the park near the beach where there was a town map on a board the way there always is in these places.
I located Yancey Street and went back to the car. Call it intuition, call it experience, but I was confident that she still lived there. There was no reason she should but I had a feeling I was dealing with something frozen in time and space. The nurse would still be there and so would the doctor. I realised I’d forgotten to check the doctor’s
