I located my Smith amp; Wesson in a kitchen drawer and collected up the few things Warwick Baudin had in the house. When we left, James and Selby were sitting at the table with fresh cans of beer open. They were both snappy-dressers and somehow snappy dressers look all the worse when they’re knocked about. These two were — they were bloodied and bowed. They were looking at each other and not liking what they saw. Verna Reid was staring out the window like someone with a lot to think over. I tossed the two sets of car keys onto the table and left them to it.
We bundled Baudin into the Honda and took the dusty trail away from Wisemans Ferry. I locked the back doors but Baudin didn’t seem to have any fight in him which was just as well — he was a big lad. He fell asleep when we reached the highway and snored all the way back to Sydney.
Bettina didn’t say much. At my prompting she blocked in an odd fact or two about Selby. I got a picture of a man who thought big but didn’t have the ability to carry out his plans. At first she said she’d take him for every penny but she softened almost straightaway.
‘Hell, I haven’t been much fun to live with,’ she said. ‘I might go easy on him, there’s the girls to consider.’ She looked at her watch as she drove. ‘Tell you one thing, I haven’t been this sober this late in the day for a long time. Do you think that’s a good sign?’
‘Could be,’ I said. I felt she was warming up towards something more intimate and I didn’t feel up to handling it just then. I had too much on my hands with the drug-soaked man in the back seat and the nagging worry that I’d let Kay Fletcher down. Bettina saw I was preoccupied and left me alone. We reached her place late in the afternoon. She kissed me briefly and helped me shift Baudin over to my car. He was like a child just learning to walk. I wondered how he’d got up to Wisemans Ferry and what the hell he’d taken when he got there. We rolled him into the Falcon.
‘When do you plan to present him?’ Bettina said.
‘About a month from now.’
‘I’ll be in touch, it should be interesting.’ She peered in through the dirty window at the wreck of her thirty- one-year-old son. She shook her head, gave me a wave and set off towards her nasty house, her plain children and her problems.
I took him home to Glebe and put him in my spare bed, then I called my friend Ian Sangster who has a couple of medical degrees and an adventurous spirit. When Sangster arrived I gave him an outline of the problems — Baudin’s history, the drugs, the manipulation, and turned him loose. Then I made a drink and rolled some cigarettes and picked up the telephone. There was no answer at Kay’s flat. I called a journalist I knew in Canberra and he asked around and found that Kay had gone to Indonesia on assignment for the paper. She hadn’t left any message for me. I was thinking about that and smoking one of the cigarettes when I got a call from Lady Catherine’s residence. The caller was a Mrs McMahon who said she’d been hired for three days as a replacement for Verna Reid. Lady Catherine was ready to retire for the night and had instructed Mrs Mac to ring me for a progress report. It looked as if Verna had been giving herself a little elbow room. I told the woman that I’d report in half an hour and got the name of the hiring agency she worked for. Her assignment was going to run for a little more than three days.
I went through to the back of the house where Sangster was sitting in the kitchen with his long, mournful face drooping into a big glass of my scotch.
‘That’s a gunshot wound, Cliff,’ he said. ‘Should be reported.’
‘Hunting accident.’ I got some scotch for myself. ‘The rabbits were jumping over a barbed wire fence and he tried to do the same. Happens all the time.’
He shook his head and drank. Sangster has a drinking problem but no money problem, so maybe it’s not a problem.
‘Your friend’s in a bad way.’ He pulled out a little notebook and began checking items. ‘High blood pressure, furred tongue, dull reflexes, sugar in urine, obese, erratic pulse. He’s really been hitting it.’
‘Or being hit,’ I said. ‘I think he’s been pilled up and down and round about by other people for the last year or so. I doubt he’s made an independent move in that time.’
He grunted. ‘So what do you want to know? You want information from him, is that right?’ Sangster disapproves of my business which he calls a trade. I call his a racket.
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘First, is he going to be all right in the short term? I mean what’s he been on?’
‘Heavy amphetamine-alcohol mixture. He’s disoriented, dependant, pretty paranoic too, I’d say. But yes, he’s not going to die. If he went on the way he’s been going I’d give him two years at the most.’
‘He’s stopping,’ I said. ‘He’s going off everything and turning himself into a model citizen. He’s going to wear a suit and read the Financial Review.’
He held out his empty glass. ‘You’re going to work this miracle, are you Cliff?’
‘That’s right.’ I got two more drinks. Mine would put me well down the track but it was a drinking sort of night. ‘What are the problems, would you say?’
‘First, an incentive to be rehabilitated. It’s a boring process I’m told. What’s in it for him?’
‘Money,’ I said.
He drank reflectively. ‘That should help. He’s been going this way for a year you say?’
I nodded.
‘Well, you’ll have to watch him night and day. You might get him to try, he might really want to kick it, but he’ll get pulled back and if he slips too far too often you’re gone. A twenty-four hour vigil, seven days a week. How long have you got?’
‘I need results in a month.’
He shook his head. ‘You’ll have to get him really keen. What did he do before he started blowing his mind?’
‘Not much.’
‘Be uphill work then. Tell you another thing, you might have to subdue him, he’s a big bastard. Reckon you can handle him?’
‘I don’t know, we’ll see. Will I need anything — drugs, medicine?’
He drained his glass and got up. He stands six four and looking up at him made me look at the ceiling which was festooned with cobwebs. The house had a rundown, seedy feel and there hadn’t been a good solid laugh or a relaxed moment in it for a long time. Now it was to be a drying-out clinic and a jail and there’d be more ghosts and shadows and pain.
‘You don’t need drugs,’ Sangster, ‘just luck. You look pretty beat, Cliff. You should get some sleep. I gave him a shot and he’s out for twelve hours. After that you’ll have to be on your toes.’
I thanked him and let him out. Upstairs my meal-ticket and my bonus was sleeping. I felt drained, let-down, as is usual when a case has been resolved, but the feeling was exacerbated by the uncertainty about Kay. Women. That set me to thinking about how to play it with the old woman, how to stop her coming over in her wheelchair until the parcel was ready for delivery. A version of the truth seemed like the best ploy as it so often is.
I rang the ranch and gave Mrs McMahon a little low-key Hardy charm. It turned out she hadn’t liked Miss Reid very much on their one meeting and had found signs of neglect in the treatment of Lady C. She was against neglect. She seemed pleased at my suggestion that she might be needed for some time and more pleased at the advice to pack Verna Reid’s things and install them somewhere near the front. She passed me on to the widow.
‘Mr Hardy?’ That autocratic voice came on the line with a questioning note in it that was not really questioning. She knew the answers, or all the answers that mattered, except one.
‘Have you found him Mr Hardy?’
‘Yes.’
The silence was more expressive than words — dreams were fulfilled, hopes were given reality, life was full of promise as it should be.
‘Are you certain?’ No fakes tolerated.
‘Yes, I think you’ll be satisfied on that score. I can document it pretty well, also the physical resemblance is strong — or will be.’
‘Will be, will be?’ she shrilled. ‘What on earth does that mean?’
‘He’s had a pretty bad time. He’s going to need a month’s rest and some treatment. He’s ill.’
‘Nonsense. I must see him. Now!’
