I nodded. I could imagine an upset Wesley being very frightening. ‘A girl’
‘Yeah, well, Clinton seemed dead keen on her, then she was out of the picture. I’ve known him for a couple of years and he’s had more girls than I’ve had hot dinners. I thought he’d get over it but he didn’t seem to. He got moody and that. He stopped going to football and basketball training, or turned up late. He got sloppy around the house and hard to get on with. He was like a different person.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Come on, he must’ve called her something. What about when they talked on the phone?’
He rubbed at the stubble. ‘I suppose so, but I can’t remember. It didn’t go on for that long, only a couple of weeks, and I never met her. He never brought her here the way he did the others. All I know is she was at the uni and she played basketball. That’s how he met her. I suppose I should have been more sympathetic when he told me, but I’ve got my own worries, what with the essays and trying to work and get enough fucking sleep to be able to think straight…’
‘When he told you what?’
‘That she was dead.’
3
Noel Kidman was studying computer science and had a job lined up with a company setting up web sites for businesses. It was a big opportunity in a competitive field and he needed his degree to clinch it. The need dominated his thinking and blunted his human responses. We talked some more over the coffee and he admitted as much and felt guilty about it. He was bright but under a lot of pressure and Clinton’s defection threatened to be a last straw. With absolutely no authority to do so, I told him to continue to use the car and that I’d get Clinton’s father to pay the back rent and pay for at least the next month.
‘D’you mean that?’ He looked as if a sack of cement had just been lifted off his shoulders.
‘Sure. And you phone me if you remember anything that might be helpful’
He fingered my card. ‘I will. Shit, d’you really think… I mean, foul play?’
‘I always think foul play in my game,’ I said. ‘That way I get a pleasant surprise every once in a while.’
‘That sounds depressing.’
‘It has its moments. What’s the phone number here?’
‘It’s disconnected. I mean, it stopped working and I can’t afford to pay for it anyway.’
‘Since when?’
He thought about it. ‘Since just after Clint’s Dad rang.’
All that gave me something to chew on but it didn’t taste good. On the drive to Campbelltown where the main campus of the university was located, I tried to remember what Clinton had been like. Not much stuck in my mind apart from his athleticism and patience with someone in an early stage of decay. Wesley had said the boy had never given him much trouble and certainly hadn’t hinted at mental instability. There was nothing in his background or lifestyle to suggest that. Still, there was the business of his multiple girlfriends, then a serious if somewhat mysterious relationship ending on the woman’s death. Worrying.
I forced myself to stop thinking about the matter while I negotiated the unfamiliar roads in the rain being driven by a gusty wind. One minute the wipers were working overtime, the next it was only a drizzle, then it became fierce again. Difficult conditions and all the other drivers were taking it slow. It was going to be late on a bad afternoon when I arrived-not the best time to be asking questions about a young woman who’d recently died. But there’s no good time for something like that.
I’m not often in Campbelltown, which tends to be serviced for my line of work from Parramatta, and I’d never been to the Southwestern University. The campus was a kilometre from the centre of the town, a collection of low- rise, cement block buildings scattered over what had probably once been orchards or market gardens. I found the campus map, located the sports centre and parked in the visitors’ area. In a small set-up like this, it wasn’t so far from the sports centre. In the bigger universities it either doesn’t exist or is a bus ride from the action. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. I exchanged the jacket for a hooded parka and ran through the rain to where the lights had been turned on against the late afternoon gloom.
The building was warm and bright, very welcome after the nastiness outside. An impossibly healthy-looking woman wearing a tracksuit with the name Kathy printed on the top was dealing with business at the reception desk. I shook water from my parka, taking care that it fell outside the door, made sure my shirt was tucked in and approached the desk. I could hear squash being played somewhere, an aerobics instructor screaming her directions and the unmistakable sound of basketball players pounding the boards. The average age of everyone in the place was probably twenty-one, but hell, I was bench-pressing quite a few kilos myself these days.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ Kathy said.
‘Hello. Do you know a young man named Clinton Scott?’
‘Clint, yes. He plays basketball for… ‘
I held up my PEA licence. ‘He’s missing. Has been for some time. I’ve been hired by his father to find him.’
‘Missing. Gee, I don’t know. Yes, I guess I haven’t seen him here for a while but I thought he might be injured or something. That happens all the time and they go off for physio and rehab and that. Missing, what…?’
‘There could be explanations, all sorts of explanations. But I’ve been told that he had a girlfriend who also played basketball and that she died. Do you know anything about that?’
She shook her head. ‘No. I haven’t heard anything like that. Who was she?’
‘I don’t know the name.’ The thought struck me then that Clinton might not have been telling the truth to Noel and that this might be a dead end.
‘I play soccer,’ Kathy said. ‘I don’t know much about the basketballers, the women that is. You should talk to Tanya. She’s the basketball coach. She’d know.’
‘Tanya?’
‘Tanya Martyn. With a “y”. She coaches basketball, hockey, and track and field. I think she’s here tonight.’ She consulted a chart on the wall. Her own name was slotted into a board showing who was on duty at the desk- Katharine Simpson.
‘Yeah, she should be finishing up with the hockey people in twenty minutes. I can send her a message that you want to see her if you like.’
‘Please.’ I handed her a card and she tapped away on a keyboard. She made to return the card but I told her to keep it and to mention my enquiry to anyone she thought might be able to help. My guess was that this was the listening post for the sporting fraternity of the campus, and that there would be no better broadcaster than Kathy Simpson.
‘Mr Hardy is it?’
I’d wandered off to watch a squash game from above the court. I’ve never enjoyed squash but I admire the stamina of the players. I spun around to see a tall, dark woman in a blue tracksuit examining me. She had a clipboard in her hand and gave the impression that she was going to give me marks for cleanliness and posture.
‘Ms Martyn. Yes, I’m Hardy. I wonder if I can have a few words with you. Has Kathy told you about my enquiry?’
She drew nearer and dropped the clipboard onto a chair. She had short hair, fine features and a light film of sweat on her face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you’ve got things screwed up.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I’m sitting down. I’m beat.’
We sat in the chairs with our backs to where the pair below where beating hell out of the little black ball.
