'Good. What about the boy, William?'
'I'm tempted to trot out the clinical cliches-only child, precocious, a mother's boy without a valid male role model. All true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. He was nothing like his father in manner, nothing at all. He'd sky a ball over the fence now and then and come and ask for it. Very polite.'
'You aren't next door and they're wide blocks.'
'He told me he had his mother throw tennis balls to him in their yard for him to practise his defensive strokes. It's hard to imagine such an elegant creature doing that, but I suppose she did. Sometimes he caught one on the rise in the meat of the bat. I played grade cricket myself when I was young. I knew what he meant.'
I remembered playing backyard cricket in Maroubra with my mates. Over the fence was out for six. I don't think any of us ever put it over more than one fence, let alone two. But then, we were more interested in surfing.
'A big hit,' I said.
'He was an athletic young man. Mother-fixated, I should say, with all that that implies.'
'You mean that he loved and hated her at the same time?'
'Exactly. My wife thought very highly of him. She was Italian and she said he spoke the language fluently and well. The only child we had died as an infant and she liked to take young people under her wing. She thought William had an exceptional linguistic gift.'
It was one of those moments when you respect a person's emotional space and I was glad I had the coffee cup to fiddle with. The pause was brief.
'She's been dead for ten years,' he said. 'I should sell this place. I've had offers enough, God knows, but I can't seem to get around to it. Something about the sums they mention and the way they talk puts me off. And I must confess I take an interest in the rehabilitation of the river, slow as it is. It's never been clean in my time, but I believe it once was, with sandy banks. People swam and fished in it, I'm told.'
'Hard to believe,' I said.
'Yes. Would you mind telling me what you're actually doing for Mrs Heysen?'
'Several things.'
'Now you're being secretive. I thought frankness was your style.'
'You're right, Professor. As I said, I'm concerned about the attempt on Mrs Heysen's life and I don't know its source.' I touched my scabby lip. 'The shooting was a professional job gone wrong, and I've had a narrow miss as well. Apart from that, I'm trying to locate William Heysen. His mother hasn't had any contact with him for some months and there's a strong possibility he's in serious trouble.'
'I'm sorry to hear that. Are you saying he's… missing?'
'Effectively, yes. I've contacted people he lived with and worked with and none of them have-'
'Seen him, you're about to say. But I have. He was here, at the house. Just a few days ago.'
17
I almost dropped the coffee cup. 'You saw him? When was this?'
Professor of Psychology or not, he looked as pleased by my reaction to his statement as anyone would have been. 'Happily, I'm not afflicted by short-term memory loss like so many people my age. This was three days ago.'
'What happened?'
'I was sitting on the front verandah, reading. It catches the afternoon sun. I saw a car pull up outside the Heysen house. Cars, again. All I can say is that it wasn't the car William used to drive when he lived here. This was a big car, a four-wheel drive model-' he waved his hands to illustrate the style-'and black. As I say, not his old car, but definitely him.'
'Did you speak to him?'
'No, no. I'm sure he didn't even see me. I suppose I assumed he'd been to see his mother and was fetching something from the house for her. I didn't know anything about him being missing. He went in.'
'How long did he stay?'
'I'm afraid I don't know. I went inside to make some notes on what I'd been reading. I still do some research and writing, you see. I didn't go to the front again at all that day. The car had gone by the next day but he could have been there five minutes or five hours.'
'How did he look? Confident? Furtive?'
'Really, Mr Hardy, you ask the most extraordinary questions. I only glimpsed the boy for a few seconds.'
'Your impression?'
He thought. I suppose psychologists think a lot and don't need any props to do it. His cup stayed on the table and he didn't scratch himself or tent his fingers. He just sat. 'Preoccupied,' he said at last. 'As you'd expect.'
I nodded. Preoccupied perhaps, but not about his mother, who he hadn't contacted. It was unlikely that he hadn't heard about the shooting. I thanked him for giving me his time.
He smiled. 'The odd thing about my situation is that in one way I have all the time in the world and in another, who knows? Maybe not much.'
'I think you're good for a few years yet.'
We moved back into the passage. 'I hope so. I still enjoy life. I'm glad to have met you, Mr Hardy. I haven't encountered many-what should I say, men of action? — in my life. You'd make an interesting case study.'
'I don't think so.'
'Oh, yes. You're drawn to intrigue and violence like a moth to a flame.'
I drove to the office mulling over what Professor Lowen-stein had said, both about my character and his sighting of William Heysen. Intrigue went with the territory, but was it true that I welcomed violence? Cyn had always said so and she, like the professor, was very smart. I didn't think of myself that way, but I knew I'd been involved in violence for the greater part of my life-from boxing as an adolescent in the police boys' club, through military service and on into my career as a PEA. I decided that it was only partly true. I'd done the things I'd done not primarily because I sought the violence involved, but because I rejected the alternatives-the passive life, the routines. That satisfied me on that score.
I parked, climbed the stairs and went into the office. The building is old and in poor repair. After my little nook had been closed up for a few days the general decay of the place seemed to creep in as a smell. But it's probably just the cockroaches and mice-some dead, some alive-in the wall cavities. I sometimes wondered what the space I rented had been used for in the past. I once found a threepenny bit in the skirting board and a stiff, brittle condom caught in the slats of the venetian blind. Doesn't tell you a lot but gives you ideas.
The sighting of young Heysen, apparently prosperous, had to be a positive. Up to that point, given Rex Wain's 'whisper', there had been a chance he wasn't in the country. But why does a mother-fixated son not visit that mother in hospital? Because he can't? Lowenstein could have mistaken preoccupation for worry. Whatever the reason, it hadn't brought me any closer to finding him.
I made some notes on the conversation with the Prof and couldn't help underlining a phrase-He was nothing like his father… The conversation had left me with questions to add to the list I already had: why had William Heysen gone to the house? What, if anything, had he taken, or left? Would Catherine Heysen allow me to search the house? Where was William living? How many black 4WDs are there in Sydney? Not all of the questions I jot down at these moments are sensible.
The coffee and paracetamol buzz was fading and my abused back was aching. A big man in a red Commodore. I was looking for bright and dull coloured cars in a city full of cars. Needles in a very big haystack. As I looked at my notes and doodles, I came close to being sure of one thing, more a matter of intuition than logic: the attacks on Catherine Heysen and me had to do with the old Heysen-Bellamy matter, not Billy boy.
The phone rang.
'Hardy.'
'This is William Heysen.'
I was surprised, but not as surprised as I would have been a few hours earlier.
'Oh, yeah? The William Heysen who drives a black 4WD and doesn't visit his mother in hospital when she's
