She half-turned around and reached down for her coffee; it was about the first movement not connected with sex she’d made since my arrival at 2 a.m. She drank the coffee in a couple of gulps, the way I usually do myself. She ate a piece of toast. Then she put her face close to mine and looked at me as if she was counting the crow’s feet.
‘Something bad happened last night’, she said. ‘You fucked me to help you to forget about it.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Yes, you did. It was terrific; I’m not complaining.’ She held out her cup. ‘Now I want some more coffee and some toast and the oil, and I want to hear about it.’
Parker sounded grouchy on the phone, as if he and Hilde had struck their first reef. We agreed to meet later in the day to review procedure, but I had a feeling that the Hardy-Parker accord would prove uneasy.
Helen had a red Camira, one of the kind they drove from Sydney to Melbourne on less than a tank of petrol. The way she drove she’d be lucky to make it to Gundagai. She was a fast, aggressive driver with a good traffic sense, and a fine disregard for the workings of the machine.
Lady Bay is at the top of the peninsula, one bay on from Camp Cove. I thought I knew the way but I gave Helen a wrong direction and we ended up within the bounds of HMAS Watson. A land-locked sailor, with one of those shaves you can rub with a cigarette paper and not hear a sound and wearing starched, knee-length shorts, steered us right with a leer.
The deal is that you park at Camp Cove, which is a topless but not bottomless beach, and walk around the cliffs a kilometre or so to Lady Bay. Helen was wearing loose, light-blue trousers, a striped tee-shirt and sandals. She climbed the fences, jumped across gaps between the concrete slabs and negotiated the gun emplacements which were built to repel an invader that never came. Her dark-red, cropped hair shone like polished stone when the sun caught it, and she moved effortlessly, like an expert bushwalker.
I brought up the rear, carrying the bag and the towels and feeling the sweat running down under my shirt. It was hot with no wind; it was too early for the sea breeze, and the still, warm air gave the sea sounds a special clarity-the noise of the birds, the water against the cliffs and the scrape of Helen’s sandals on the rocks.
The nude bathing beach looks to have been designed by Nature for the purpose; you reach it by going backwards ten metres down a ladder attached to a sheer drop. The distance was about the same as Tiny Spotswood’s fall, but here you descended from grass to sand, by wood not metal, and in the full clean light of the sun. The top of the cliff is a flat sward and there, fully-clothed, with their legs dangling over the edge, sat three men with their eyes fixed on the people below. I went down the ladder after Helen and we stood on the sand and surveyed the sixty metre beach, flanked at both ends by rocks.
All the sun bathers were men; they were very tanned and most were muscular. They lay and sat, very still, and seemed to be thinking about stillness.
‘It’s a tableau vivant’, Helen whispered.
‘What’s that?’
‘Look it up.’
‘You’re the only broad on the beach.’
‘Somehow that seems more novel than taking the clothes off.’
We took the clothes off, just dropped them and the bag where we stood, and ran down to the water. It was cool, a bit cloudy and very deep within a few metres of the shore. Helen waded a few steps, dived and went underwater for about ten metres. She surfaced and swam seawards with long, easy strokes. I ploughed along after her with my Maroubra-basic stroke, and we swam well out to where the water was translucent and cold. We trod water and touched each other.
‘I was going to say how does a country girl like you get to swim like that, then I remembered that you’re not a country girl.’
‘Coogee.’ she said. ‘Remember the trams?’
We paddled around for a while, and then swam in. Stretched out on the sand, side by side, we joined the statuary. A quarter of an hour of that, and Helen started to giggle.
‘I can’t take this; it’s like being in Madame Tussaud’s.’
We were back at her place, drinking coffee, when I finally got around to telling her the shape and substance of the Guthrie case. ‘I’d already told her about Spotswood’s fall, this was the context. I sanitised it a bit. I told her about Parker.
‘He sounds ruthless.’
‘He’s not generally, or I used not to think so. This seems to have made him harder. People don’t realise what being a cop is like, especially a Homicide detective. It’s not all free beers and fucks. In a funny way, a cop is what he does. An honest, energetic cop like Parker is very honest; uncomfortably so, maybe.’
‘What about you? Do you become what you do?’
I smiled. ‘Not as much. That’s one of the reasons I’m not a cop. Tell me about Michael.’
‘Mike. No one calls him Michael.’
‘I felt Mike was a bit informal, under the circumstances.’
‘What are the circumstances, Cliff?’
‘God knows. How much of your first six months have you really got left?’
‘Hours.’
‘Let’s not waste ‘em.’
We went back to bed with enthusiasm and success. There was a good deal of tenderness too, for the first time. I learned a bit more about Mike; that he farmed everything from pigs to grapes; that he operated a small cannery; that he worked twenty hours a day.
‘He’s in love with the land’, she said.
‘Uh huh.’
‘He’s writing a book about it.’
‘When? In his sleep?’
I only got information about her by way of trade. She’d been a librarian in Sydney before meeting and marrying Michael Broadway, teacher turned gentleman farmer. She’d done a degree by correspondence, and got first class honours in English.
‘I’m depressed’, I said.
‘Why?’
‘I dropped out after one year of Law. I passed Constitutional History and Criminal Law-failed Contracts and Torts.’
‘What’re Torts?’
‘I forget.’
Helen’s advice on my professional problem was to get hold of Ray Guthrie, tell him everything I knew and detach him from the criminal element.
‘He might be part of the criminal element himself by now’, I said. ‘And there’s his attitude to his real father to consider. I just don’t know how powerful a feeling that is. You’re a parent, tell me about what children feel for their parents.’
‘Parents don’t know what they feel.’
‘There you are, then.’
‘It sounds as if it’ll all end in grief, she said. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s how it sounds to me.’
‘That’s why I have to stick with it and see it through in something like Parker’s terms. Not exactly his, but to some sort of resolution. If I’m on the spot, maybe I can cut down on the grief a bit.’
‘I hope so.’
My arrangement with Parker was to meet him back at my place at around seven. That gave me several hours for my long shot. Mahoney Place is a narrow, one-way street in Surry Hills which runs off South Dowling Street, opposite Moore Park. I left my car in a lane nearby and walked in the park for a while, watching some kids risking their lives at grass skiing. I was trying to change gear out of ‘tenderness’ and into ‘work’. Kids having a good time on the grass didn’t quite do it-maybe if one of them had broken his neck.
Right now, ‘work’ meant going to make enquiries about a private detective named Phillips; ‘loathsome’ in at
