She laughed, the first free and easy sound I’d heard from her.
I introduced her to Hilde and stayed long enough for Sarah to settle in. Everyone gets along with Hilde; she has a quality that immediately puts people at their ease and impels them to like her. Hilde made coffee and we had it out in the back courtyard, which was biggish for Paddington. Sarah dug out her cigarettes and asked Hilde if she minded.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I did it at your age, so did Frank, and I bet Cliff did, right?’
‘Rollies,’ I said.
‘You’ll quit if you’re smart,’ Hilde said. ‘You’re a very pretty girl and it stains your teeth and isn’t good for your skin, but right now isn’t the time.’ She slipped into a serviceable American accent. ‘Bad week to give up sniffing glue.’
Sarah giggled. ‘Flying High. I love that movie,’ but she lit the cigarette.
Hilde said her twelve-year-old son would soon be home and hitting the fridge. ‘He’s a hot pool player.’
Sarah smiled. ‘We’ll see how hot.’
The conference was held at the Surry Hills police centre under tight security. Present were Frank Parker; Ian Watson; his superior, Chief Superintendent Maurice Lomax; Inspector Gail Henderson the head of the police media liaison unit; Kate Cafarella and me. Watson had cooled off about the way I’d handled things at Church Point and seen the necessity of having Cafarella there for the discussion and planning. I gathered there’d been some dispute about my participation but sanity had prevailed.
They’d played the tape through once already but ran it again when I arrived.
‘Any comment, Cliff?’ Frank asked.
I shrugged. ‘It says what it says. Wayne has to be a person of interest.’
‘He’s a minister of the crown,’ Lomax snapped. ‘A bit of respect.’
‘I’ll consider respecting him when I hear he has a watertight alibi for the time Angela Pettigrew was killed.’
Gail Henderson looked up from a note she was writing. ‘This has to be handled very carefully. If the press gets a whiff of an interest in Mr Ireland,’ she nodded at Lomax, ‘the knives will be out. Dodgy MPs sell papers.’
‘Do you mind me asking what you’re writing there, Gail?’ Frank asked.
She held up the notebook. ‘Just the names of everyone here. Am I right in thinking no one else shares this information?’
‘Except Sarah and Ronny and his dad,’ I said.
Watson said, ‘Ronald Charles O’Connor and Michael O’Connor are both under surveillance pending the outcome of this meeting.’
Then there was a lot of procedural stuff about MPs’ diaries and their drivers’ log books and telephone and tax records and background checks. Angela Pettigrew had been a partner in a small firm importing ceramic ornaments from Italy. A blow from one of these-a vase I certainly hadn’t noticed on my visit to the house-had killed her. The books would be looked at and a search warrant secured for the house.
‘To look for the frilly stuff,’ Cafarella said. ‘My job, I suppose.’
‘Give you a hand if you like,’ I said.
The look she shot me would have made lava freeze.
Watson asked the question I’d been waiting for. ‘Hardy, was there anything else she said that you didn’t get on tape? I mean before or after you started recording?’
‘Yes.’
Lomax, Watson and Cafarella leaned forward; Gail Henderson had her pen poised. Cafarella twigged that I was playing games and shook her head, leaned back. Watson didn’t catch on. ‘What?’ he said.
‘She said it was neat that Deputy Commissioner Parker’s house has a pool table.’
Frank smiled. Gail Henderson smiled. The detectives didn’t. What I’d said was almost true: I didn’t think there was any need to tell them that Justin had also seen the psychiatrist Sarah had described as dopey. That had more to do with my case than theirs.
I phoned Hampshire and arranged a meeting. He wanted me to go to Crows Nest and I said I was tired of the Harbour Bridge and how about Glebe. He hesitated and I knew why. Sydney’s criminal world was divided into sectors, like Berlin, and you didn’t want to be in your enemy’s sector. Wilson Stafford was inner west.
We agreed on Hyde Park. I walked there from where I’d left the car in Darlinghurst. I had no reason to think that Wilson Stafford had anyone watching me, but with cops and crooks always talking to each other you never know, so I took the. 38 and paid very careful attention to my rear and sides on my way.
I took a seat fifty metres on from the fountain and watched the passers-by and the pigeons and the windblown leaves. Therapeutic. Hampshire came from the direction of St James train station. He looked very different from the jaunty figure who’d come to my office. He was tieless, wore a grey suit that didn’t match his brown shoes very well. He was smoking and he stumbled over a small step in the paving. He got to my bench and sat without saying anything, breathing hard. He took a long drag on his cigarette before dropping it and stamping it out.
‘Last one,’ he said. ‘Ever.’
‘Good luck. I met up with Wilson Stafford the other day and he-’
‘Jesus Christ!’ He half rose and looked around as if he expected Sharkey Finn to pop out from behind a tree.
‘Easy,’ I said. ‘You didn’t tell me you had such interesting acquaintances, Paul.’
14
I told him what I’d learned from Barry Templeton about his activities before he went to America. Hampshire nodded his agreement.
‘That’s about right. What you don’t know is that when I was flush in America I made restitution to some of those people.’
‘Not to Wilson Stafford.’
‘No, that was beyond me and the money I made ran out pretty quick.’
‘Money made how?’
He sighed. ‘The usual way. Americans can be very gullible. But it all went pear-shaped after a while.’
‘That’s why you came back? Because there were Wilson Stafford types in America?’
‘Worse. They contract out their grievances to ruthless individuals who… but that’s not the whole of it. The woman I took up with turned out to be a gold-digger who got very nasty when the gold ran out.’
‘Which expression do you prefer-between the devil and the deep blue sea or between a rock and a hard place?’
‘You’re taking the piss. I suppose I deserve it. You won’t believe me, but I genuinely wanted to try to get things in order-make my peace with Angela, try to find Justin. But now, with everything that’s happened, I don’t know.’
‘You did the identification?’
‘I did. The injuries were horrible. It must have been a terrible sight for Sarah.’
‘Let’s talk about Sarah. You implied she wasn’t your child.’
‘That’s right. Angela wasn’t faithful to me, any more than I was to her. When she fell pregnant with Sarah it was just barely possible I was the father. Unlikely though.’
‘Any idea who the father might have been?’
‘No. I was away a lot, in the Pacific, in the States. I had the impression there was one person in particular but I didn’t know who. I didn’t want to know, and I wasn’t in a position to throw stones. Why are you asking?’
I expanded a bit on what I’d told him on the phone when I was getting his permission to look after Sarah. Then I’d simply said that Sarah was distressed and there were concerns for her safety. Now I said that an important person was under suspicion for Angela’s death-someone capable of exerting pressure on the police.
‘Who, for God’s sake?’
