I could shrug it off. I’d had worse disappointments and fifteen-year-old Kristina had shown every sign of being able to handle herself in the dodgy world she was in, apparently by choice. I decided to turn my attention to the Farmer matter. That was where the money was, and the questions to be answered, and there was no emotional involvement to muddy the waters.
I got the
‘Not much detail on how and where, let alone why,’ I said.
‘Shotgun up close. What you might call emphatic.’
‘Also noisy.’
‘Well, up-market townhouse, double glazed, and you know how it is-you hear shots at night, it’s probably Bruce or Clint.’
‘What about why?’
‘We should meet.’
‘I’m coming down today. You say where and when.’
‘Any preferences?’
‘I’d rather not be too close to any police precincts.’
He laughed. He said he was writing a story on the problem with the coast road and would be in the Coalcliff area. We agreed to meet in the Clifton pub at 1 pm, giving me time to pack a few more things than I’d taken the first time and to fit in a quick gym workout. Before I left I rang Marisha’s number again with the same result. I had a fleeting, unsettling thought: what if the pair of them were in some kind of danger from Parnevik or someone else? I dismissed it, but it was enough to take the edge off my pleasure at getting out of Sydney.
The Clifton pub sits high above a rocky shore. The coastline is fragile and photographs inside the hotel show that it has changed a lot over the years. The mine that burrowed into the escarpment is now just a coking operation, and the jetty where the coal was loaded was swept away years ago. Most of the houses that once perched on top of the cliff are long gone and the instability problem with the road indicates that changes are still going on. There was a concrete barrier and a boom gate across the road and a high chain link fence with barbed wire further on. With the coast road closed for the couple of kilometres between Clifton and Coalcliff, the locals have to go a long way around to north or south to get to where they used to go directly. The closure had made the Sydney papers and there was a suggestion that house prices in the area could drop as a result. Nobody’d be happy about it.
The weather had taken a turn for the worse and I was wearing jeans, my flannie and a leather jacket and needing every layer. I was early and business wasn’t brisk. I studied the photographs of the shoreline and then a set featuring boxers who were from the area or had fought locally in the golden era of Australian boxing-Spargo, Delaney, Patrick and others.
I was nursing a beer on the big back deck that looked straight east to New Zealand when a tall man walked out and ran his eye over the three or four of us rugged outside drinkers. He held a copy of the
He stuck out his hand. ‘De Witt.’
‘Cliff Hardy.’ We shook.
‘Thing you should know,’ he said. ‘I’m a recovering alcoholic. This is soda and bitters. I can handle staying here about as long as it’ll take you to finish that beer.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You test yourself, right?’
He nodded. ‘You’ve been there?’
An image of Glen Withers, tight as a drum with the effort of not drinking in a drinking environment, came to my mind. ‘Friend,’ I said.
I proposed that we meet at the Farmer property in Wombarra. It seemed like a good setting for us to exchange information. The way it can in the Illawarra, the weather changed in a few minutes. The sun was shining and the wind had dropped when I reached the gate leading to the Farmer acres. Off with the jacket. De Witt parked his Volvo station wagon carefully by the side of the road but stepped out into thick grass and a soft spot. He was wearing a baggy linen suit over a black poloneck skivvy. Shiny black slip-ons, now rather muddy. He picked his way carefully towards me over the sloppy ground.
‘Bit of rain here lately,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘All we need. A bit more at the right time in the right place and that coast road’s history. There’s a metre wide crack running for fifty metres on the sea side of the road. Deep, too.’
‘Aren’t they working on it?’
‘Thinking about it.’ He cleared his throat, pulled out his cigarettes and lit up. ‘But we’re not here to talk about the weather or roads, are we?’
‘No.’
‘Why are we here?’
Insisting it was off the record for now, I elaborated on the little I’d said on the phone, telling him about the Farmer case and how it had led me to MacPherson.
‘Or not quite to him,’ I said. ‘The cops found my card on him and knew I wanted to talk to him.’
‘Interesting. Why me?’
‘I checked on a few of your stories. Seems to me you’ve got a pretty good idea of what goes on around here. And reading between the lines in your piece on MacPherson, I reckon you can say a bit more about him than that he was a thirty-three-year-old insurance salesman.’
‘You’re right there. Now just suppose there’s something in all this…’
‘You’ve got the inside track.’
‘Fair enough.’
We were both leaning on the gate enjoying the pale sunshine. I guessed that De Witt, although his face was lined and grooved, was only in his mid-thirties. But from the tension in his long body and the way he was smoking, he looked likely to die sober in his forties. He gazed out over Elizabeth Farmer’s inheritance and shook his head. ‘I can’t see a development behind it. Your client’ll have to get all sorts of permits even to rebuild here.’
‘That’s what she says, but like I told you, she’s had a generous offer from her dad’s ex. I thought you might be able to look into whether Matilda Sharpe-Tarleton Farmer has any dodgy connections down here.’
‘Speculative investigation?’
‘Yeah, like the Watergate burglary.’
He grinned, blew a cloud of smoke and was gripped by a spasm of coughing. I slapped his bony back and when he’d recovered he looked at me with watery eyes. ‘I know, I know. And while I do that, what will you be doing?’
‘What was MacPherson into-drugs, vice, politics?’
‘All of the above.’
‘With a few signposts from you, that’s where I’ll be looking.’
13
De Witt told me that MacPherson was a veteran of the 1991Gulf War and had been a member of an outlaw bikie gang for a few years after that. Then he’d done a business degree at Wollongong University and had a few jobs in the insurance business before his last position with Illawarra Mutual.
‘That job was most likely a cover. MacPherson was almost certainly still involved in drugs. Had too much money for it to be otherwise.’
‘You mentioned vice and corruption.’
‘No, you did. But they all go together. The pros down here are almost all addicts. So are some of the
