He swore and hobbled. I held him up, still pushing; he couldn’t get any leverage and had to go with the pressure. At the right moment, I shoved again. He lurched forward and had to grab at the car for support. I opened the door and pushed him in. He lifted his foot out of the way quickly as I slammed the door. I moved around and got into the driver’s seat, ready for him to try something nasty at close quarters. He didn’t. He was curious. He took out a packet of Camels and a lighter. He lit up and I wound down the window.
‘So?’ he said.
I told him who I was and the nature of my business. He smoked in short, jerky puffs. He nodded and grinned when I said the name Andrew McPherson. When I finished talking he took a last, deep drag and flicked the cigarette past me and out the window.
‘That Logan better crawl under a rock,’ he said.
‘Kill him, would you?’
He laughed. ‘I never killed anyone in my fuckin’ life. Never would. Mug’s game.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. So, it’s just a scam, is it?’
‘Yeah. Right. Look, Hardy, I don’t want you on my fuckin’ back, so I’ll tell you about it. I take ten per cent up front and I don’t do anything. What’s going to happen? Do you think Mrs Fucknuckle’s going to go running to the cops and say “This guy didn’t kill my shitface husband the way he promised”? Like hell she is.’
‘Wasn’t this a bit different? The hit actually hiring you himself?’
He waved one of his big hands dismissively. ‘Bullshit. All bullshit. Tell him from me he’s as safe as… what the fuck is safe these days? How about my lift?’
I leaned across him and opened the door. He laughed, eased himself out and hobbled off back towards the pub.
I phoned Gabrielle Walker and gave her a suitably edited version of what had happened. ‘I don’t think you have to worry,’ I said. ‘How’s Mr McPherson?’
‘Cheerful. But he still thinks he’s doing something clever and solved his problem. It’s terrible for me. I don’t know what to do. But thank you for what you’ve done, Mr Hardy.’
‘Is he getting any help at the moment? Psychiatric help?’
‘No. Nothing like that.’
‘Maybe in time you’ll be able to talk about this. Tell him that he’s not going to be killed. It’s out of my line, but I’d talk to him if you think it would do any good.’
‘Perhaps. Not now. But thank you again, Mr Hardy.’
So, I left it there. What else was there to do? It was hard on the woman, but if McPherson had bought himself some kind of weird comfort for five hundred bucks, that was his business.
Two weeks later she phoned me at home, at five o’clock in the morning. ‘You bastard,’ she sobbed. ‘You bastard. You told me it was all right. You told me…’
It took me a few seconds to place the voice, distorted by grief and anger. ‘Ms Walker. What happened?’
‘He’s dead! Andrew’s dead. He killed him. God damn you, you bastard!’
She hung up. I gripped the receiver and tried to take in what she’d said. I was still half-asleep. Impossible. I started phoning and eventually got onto a Detective Sergeant Belfanti who was handling the investigation of the deaths of Andrew McPherson and Reginald Clark Cook.
‘Cook a big guy with a cleft chin?’ I asked.
Belfanti was terse. He told me to get down to the Edgecliff police station immediately. I was there in twenty-five minutes and shown into the detectives’ room. Belfanti was a young, well-groomed smoothie, learning to be tough.
‘Sit down, Hardy. How did you get onto this? It only happened a few hours ago.’
‘McPherson’s girlfriend.’
‘Tell me.’
He switched on a tape recorder and I told him. He listened impassively, scribbling notes with a gold pen. When I finished he looked up.
‘Really fucked up, didn’t you?’
I didn’t reply.
‘You’ve got contacts in the force. You didn’t think it’d be a good idea to talk to someone about this prick? This Cook?’
‘I thought I’d handled it.’
‘You handled it all right. Miss Walker and McPherson had a blue. She told him how you’d handled Cook’
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Simple enough. McPherson went after Cook with a gun-. 22 rifle, if you want to know. The witness says McPherson got Cook out of bed and started blasting. Cook took seven bullets, but he got McPherson.’
‘Who was the witness?’
‘Some whore Cook had with him. McPherson winged her too. Pity you weren’t around, Hardy. He could’ve taken a shot at you.’
‹‹Contents››
Lost and Found
‘It’s Colin, Mr Hardy. I know it is!’
She’d shown me a photograph and told me it was of her husband. A wife generally knows what her husband looks like, but I was sceptical. The photo was clipped from a local newspaper — the Eastern Suburbs Courier — one of those free rags full of civic news and real estate ads, not renowned for the quality of anything — photographs, paper, accuracy. The picture was of the Petersham Lawn Tennis Club Men’s A Grade team which had beaten the Coogee team in a semifinal of the club competition.
I put my finger on the rather blurred head of a man turned slightly away from the camera. ‘Him?’
Mrs Andrea Cook nodded. She was an attractive, somewhat care-worn, woman in her mid-thirties. She looked as though a few hours more sleep per night and a few hundred extra bucks per week would’ve transformed her into someone much more vibrant. She had told me that her husband had disappeared while swimming at Apollo Bay in Victoria four years ago. She and Colin Cook had been married for four years. They had a child and Colin had conducted a successful, small-scale building and consultancy business.
‘How small?’
‘Col built mudbrick houses, yurts, wattle and daub, that sort of thing. You know?’
I said I didn’t know and she filled me in quickly on the details of alternative house-building in Victoria in the mid-’80s. Apparently, special government-backed loans and even grants were available for people prepared to build their own houses out of local, environmentally-friendly materials. But the builders needed plans, advice, land-use approvals, and modifications to their solar, naturally-insulated, low-maintenance fantasies. That was where Colin came in. He built a mean mudbrick open-planner and he also had the technical and economic know-how and the political skills to steer projects through the grant application minefield into council-approved heaven.
‘Sounds like he was on a winner,’ I said.
‘For a while,’ Andrea Cook said. ‘But bad times began in Victoria earlier than most people think. The grants and loans started to dry up. The councils started to get scared of the greenies, especially in the country. They began to worry about how real environmentalists would feel about the rivers and creeks being toxic sewers for half the year.’
There was a passionate, iconoclastic note in her voice and, just for an instant, I could see this mild- mannered, suit-wearing middle-class woman as a denim-clad, headbanded greenie, chained to a fence or lying in the mud in front of a low-loader.
‘So what happened?’ I said.
‘The business got into trouble. Colin owed money to people who wouldn’t wait and the people who owed him money couldn’t pay. He was tense, withdrawn. We fought. He drank. We borrowed a house from some friends at Apollo Bay. Col went swimming one morning and didn’t come back. The water was rough that day. I still loved him.
