‘That looks like a Honda Accord to me. I’ll say goodbye now, Noel. But if a telephone rings down there in the next few minutes, my offer stands.’
15
Sneaking up on a place that’s got good security and is housing an armed and dangerous man isn’t a lot of fun. In the First World War they used to fill the troops up with rum before sending them over the top. The way I was feeling, that didn’t sound like a bad idea. I was out of practice at this sort of thing. My days of jungle fighting in Malaya were well behind me and, as I moved down towards the building, using trees and high grass for cover, I felt as if I was carrying a sign saying ‘Intruder Coming’. Every twig I put my foot on seemed to crack like a. 22 shot.
But I had the increasing darkness on my side and I made it to the rusted cyclone fence where Noel had said the sensors were planted. There was just enough light for me to confirm something of what he’d said. The wire was rusted in spots but it had been strongly patched by more wire painted brown to look rusted. The uprights were solidly anchored in concrete and, although there were rusty strands and mended ones, the barbed wire on top of the fence would do the job it was intended to do.
Haitch had driven through double gates and locked them behind him. I had to assume that the whole perimeter was protected by the sensors and that any disturbance of the fence would set off an alarm. Fair enough. In Malaya they taught us to turn the enemy’s strengths into weaknesses. Sometimes we managed to do it. There was a lot of rubbish lying around outside the fence and I located a three-metre length of rusted iron pipe as well as some dried-out cardboard boxes and a rotted mattress. I made a pile of strips torn from the boxes and stuffing from the mattress, along with leaves and sticks, and set fire to it. When the blaze was going strong I upended the pipe and let it crash down on the fence.
An alarm sounded inside the ramshackle building; light came on and Haitch Henderson stuck his nose out through the front door. He came a little further out, far enough for me to see that he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun. I saw his reaction as the fire spread, consuming grass near the fence and leaping up to lick at the dry grass caught in the wire. It must have looked pretty alarming from where he stood. He disappeared, the alarm stopped ringing, and I ran forward to take up a position near the gate, hunched down behind a straggling oleander bush. Haitch came out again with the shotgun in one hand and a fire-extinguisher in the other. He unlocked the gate, ran towards the fire and sprayed foam over it. I slipped through the gate and sprinted for the tacked-on front porch with its overhanging iron roof.
Haitch soon had the fire out. He stood and looked at the pipe, shook his head and came back through the gate. He locked it and tramped up the cracked concrete path. I had to make a judgment as to whether to take him inside the building or outside. Outside was dark but familiar after standing there for a few minutes; inside was an unknown quantity. When his foot hit the first step I thumbed the safety off, stepped out and let him see the Colt.
‘Put the shottie down, Haitch, and the extinguisher. You won’t need them.’
I could see his face in some light coming from the side of the building. He was fatter than I remembered, and the hair worn long over his missing ear was grey. He dropped the extinguisher.
‘Hardy, you cunt. What’re you doing here?’
‘Telling you to drop the shotgun.’
‘You haven’t got the guts to shoot me.’
It all happened very quickly. I heard what he said and for a split second I thought it might be true. I knew he had the guts to shoot me and when he swung the shotgun up that ended all thinking. I shot him twice in the chest. Impossible to miss at the range and I was braced for the kick of the pistol. The two shots sounded like one and anyway were drowned out by the shotgun blast. He’d squeezed one off with the last movement he’d ever make. The shotgun flew out of his hands and into the long grass. Haitch almost left the ground himself; the impact blew him back, flicked him around, and he melted down into the crumbling concrete path with his back towards me.
‘Jesus,’ I gasped, ‘why did you do that?’
I lowered the pistol, went forward and checked him the way I had Cy Sackville, with the same result. The two bullets had punched through him and his life was over. It wasn’t much of a life but I was sickened by taking it. I squatted down and felt the sweat that had broken out on me at some point cool and dry. I realised I was muttering to myself, though what I was saying made no sense. I sucked in deep breaths of the air that smelled of wood smoke and cordite and looked around me. That feeling of fine-tuned senses that had been with me throughout was still there. I felt I could hear every sound for miles around and somehow it registered that there were no sirens, there was no noise at all. The faint light glinted on the casings from my shots, lying on the concrete just below the steps. Crucial evidence, vital signs. I got to my feet, moved forward, bent, picked up the bits of metal and dropped them into my pocket.
I must have realised what I was going to do when I tampered with the evidence like that, but I wasn’t conscious of any thought-out procedure. It just seemed to flow naturally. I went into the building and saw what Noel had meant. The facade was exactly that. The inside had been lined, rewired, painted, redesigned. There was a large slab floored workshop where three motor bodies sat up on blocks. They were covered with tarpaulins but the shape was distinctive. Being careful not to touch anything, I moved past the cars and a big roller door to an area at the back of the place that had been wired and plumbed and fitted out as living quarters.
This was more Haitch Henderson’s style. There was a mid-size bed, an easy chair and TV with built-in VCR. No greasy gas ring for Haitch; the room had a microwave oven, bar fridge, pop-up toaster and electric snack-maker. There was Scotch, vodka and gin on a tray on top of the fridge. A man can only take so much. I tore a paper towel from the roll in a wall rack and used it to hold and open the bottle of Haig. I took one long swig and swallow and then a shorter one, tasting the liquor this time. I realised when I set the bottle down that I’d been shaking slightly the whole time. The whisky helped, but I resisted the temptation to have some more.
I started to investigate the place in earnest. In cupboards and the fridge Haitch had enough provisions for at least a week of comfortable living. In an annexe I found a washing machine and drier and a well-stocked freezer that added several weeks on. Henderson’s personal possessions were arranged neatly and systematically on a clothes rack beside the bed, in a suitcase and overnight bag under it and in a small chest of drawers. His wallet was on the bed. I used a blade on my Swiss army knife to lift and turn the various items. His whole life in its current phase was laid out for me to look at and it wouldn’t take very long. For a better person than Haitch, this would have seemed sad. The box of shotgun shells reminded me that it wasn’t sad at all.
From a few receipts and other papers I pieced together Henderson’s life over the past few months. He’d been living in Melbourne until very recently. As an old hand, he had no cheque-book stubs or bank passbooks, but I found an autobank slip he’d evidently neglected to destroy. Careless. A week back he’d withdrawn four hundred dollars from an account that had a balance of just over thirty thousand. Twelve hundred and twenty dollars were in his wallet along with a keycard in the name of A. J. Saunders. Haitch was in the chips and it could only be for services rendered. Services to whom was the question and I focused my search on answering that question. I pocketed the card. There was no little black book or microfilm hidden in the heel of any of his three pairs of shoes, but two things invited explanation-a key and a phonecard with a number written on it.
The keys to the Honda and to the building were on a ring beside the beer can that Henderson had been drinking from when I disturbed him. This single key was in a compartment of his wallet. The phonecard had the look of the autobank slip-something intended to be thrown away and overlooked. I sat on the bed (if the forensic people had a way to identify a bum print on a bed they were welcome to take me) and thought over my options. To go to the police would involve me in a complex and time-consuming process that might end with me spending time in gaol. I rejected that. It was a sure bet that Noel kept more than his spare Citroens here. There had to be drugs around the place somewhere and I considered searching for them, leaving a trace and arranging things to look as if Haitch had died defending his son’s stash. Cute, but I didn’t have the time for it.
I decided to leave things as they were. On a bench in the workshop I found a dismantled and possibly defective US-made blast grenade along with a magnetic clip, some wire and a couple of low-tension springs. I threw back the tarpaulins and searched the workshop and the cars thoroughly but there was no sign of the sort of weapon that had been used to kill Cy and, possibly, Julius Fleischman. Someone else involved or a hiding place? ’The
