Comeback

Tricky territory for her. There were, at a guess, four or five bedrooms in the house. She could be raking it in. She nodded.

‘Why did you think she might be dead?’

She began to twist one of the rings on her finger. The sort of fidgeting that usually precedes a lie. My guess was that she’d poked into Mary Oberon’s belongings or overheard something and didn’t want to admit it. She looked around the room and didn’t speak.

I shrugged. ‘Okay, well I’ll have to take it further, Mrs. .?’

‘She was terrified.’

‘Of what?’

‘A man.’

I sat on the arm of one of the chairs. That perched me well above her in a dominant position. No great achievement; she was a guilty, frightened woman and I wasn’t proud of pressuring her.

‘Tell me,’ I said.

She said Mary Oberon had paid a month’s rent in advance. I’d have been willing to bet she’d extracted an extra month as a bond of sorts but I didn’t interrupt her. She’d left before the month was up taking everything with her, which wasn’t much to start with-clothes, toiletries, a computer, a mobile phone, an mp3 player which the woman called an earplug thing. I asked how she knew the music was terrible if Mary Oberon had listened through earplugs. She said she heard it sometimes when Mary played it without the earplugs just to annoy her. She left after being threatened by the only visitor she ever had-a bearded man driving a white car.

‘Threatened how?’ I said.

‘They had arguments the couple of times he called. He woke her up in the morning and I could hear their voices raised.’

I bet you could hear them , I thought. Raised or not .

‘Then one afternoon he came and they went outside. It looked as though he was trying to make her get into his car. I was watching from the side window. She wouldn’t go. He got into the car and he tried to run her over. He drove the car over the gutter and up onto the nature strip and she had to jump out of the way. She fell over and he drove off. You can still see the marks the car wheels made on the grass.’

‘Did you go out to her?’

‘No, I was too frightened. I thought he might come back.’

And you didn’t want to get involved . ‘What happened then?’

‘She came in and I heard her crying in her room for a while. I went shopping and when I came back she was gone. No note. She took the key to the house and her room. I had to change the lock on the front door and get. . two more keys cut.’

And then some , I thought. I felt sure she knew more than she was telling me but had no idea how to tease it out other than by being direct. I stood and then sat down abruptly. She almost yelped in alarm.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it? Quickly.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Will you leave if I do?’

‘Probably.’

‘Wait here.’

I didn’t. I followed her out of the room and down the passage to the kitchen. Her purse was sitting on a bench. She opened it, took out a banknote and handed it to me. It was a Fijian fifty-dollar note.

‘I found it down behind the bureau in her room. Please take it and go.’

I put the note in my pocket and moved away. ‘Why did you try to keep this from me? Don’t tell me you thought she might come back for it.’

‘Because I don’t like you.’

‘It’s mutual.’

I left the house and went around the corner. There were two deep gouges in the grass on the nature strip about a metre in from the kerb. Impossible to tell whether it had been a serious attempt to run the woman down, but it was certainly enough to give anyone a hell of a fright. I looked up and saw the woman watching me from the house. The curtain twitched back closed when she saw me looking. I wondered if she’d reconsider her next tax return. Probably not, that kind of greed is ingrained.

Back in the car I looked again at the photo of Mary Oberon. Her skin appeared to be dark but not very dark, her eyes slanted slightly and she had a fine blade of a nose. A strong suggestion of Indian ancestry I hadn’t noticed before. I started the engine and at that moment what had swum at the edge of my consciousness about the driver of the Commodore came into clear focus. The man had a jutting chin and a beard.

On the drive back to the city I considered the information I’d picked up. An Indian prostitute being threatened by a man who looked likely to be the one who’d killed Bobby Forrest. Hard to make sense of, but it suggested a course of action if I was inclined to take it. Should I? I knew I wasn’t directly responsible for Bobby’s death. He wouldn’t have wanted me to bodyguard him. I anticipated that he might be under surveillance and had warned him, but I hadn’t thought he was in mortal danger. But that raised another concern. Had he put himself in that danger by hiring me? That possibility nagged at me all the way back to Pyrmont.

My mobile had been buzzing and chirping practically all day. I sat in my office, scrolled through and thought about deleting all the unfamiliar numbers and names. Most of them were bound to be media people, calling and texting, looking for dirt on Bobby Forrest, but you never can tell. I worked through them, deleting the media stuff, which left me with calls from Frank Parker and Megan and a text with the source blocked that read: leave it alone. he had it coming.

5

I rang Frank and assured him that I was okay and probably not facing any serious problems with the police. He offered to help in any way he could and I told him I’d keep that in mind.

‘You’re not going to follow this up, are you?’

‘Only if it follows me.’

‘Jesus, Cliff. Let it go.’

‘Probably will.’

It was a constant theme with my friends-advising me to stick to the nuts and bolts of my business and not go involving myself in the labyrinth of people’s problems. My ex-wife Cyn had said it was a psychological quirk that I should try to do something about.

‘How?’ I’d asked.

‘See a psychiatrist.’

‘I’ve seen too many Woody Allen movies to take them seriously.’

That started a fight, one of many. Cyn didn’t find Woody funny.

Megan didn’t join the ‘leave it be’ chorus, not explicitly, but she did want to know whether I’d need the couch again and I told her I wouldn’t. Part of me wanted to let it go and just maybe I would have if it hadn’t been for the text message. That made it personal and Bobby had paid for at least a few days’ more work. I scribbled down the text message and looked at it. ‘Had it coming’ suggested something in the past rather than the trouble Bobby had brought to me, but I had no handle on that. Sophie Marjoram hadn’t helped.

I left the office still undecided about what to do. I drove to Glebe and took a careful look along the street before pulling up at my house. Still no sign of the media pack. I got out of the car and was about to lock it with the remote control when I became aware of someone bearing down on me from across the road. He was big and moving fast.