the Commodore’s stop lights though; they flashed at me bright and early enough to allow me to drop back and pull in to the kerb well before Winslow parked.
Ignoring the rain, I wound down the window to get a clearer view as Winslow flicked the car door closed and scooted through a gate to a deep verandah running the width of a well-kept, double-fronted terrace house. Winslow shook water from his light rain coat by flapping it and jerking his shoulders. He looked nervous as he knocked. A light came on over his head and a woman appeared in the doorway. Winslow grabbed her as if his life depended on trapping her where she stood. Her slender bare arms wrapped around him and I could see her face before she buried it in his shoulder: black hair gleamed under the porch light; teeth and eyes shone against a skin the colour of a ripe plum.
The light went out and with it a sour breath from me. Peeper Hardy strikes again. I waited long enough to be sure he wasn’t just there to hand out a How to Vote card and then I drove home. The water was over the hubcaps in several places between Woollahra and Glebe, and the rain fell hard all night. I drank wine and watched Gene Hackman and went to bed with Helen and didn’t hear the rain. Somehow I thought Ian Winslow wouldn’t be hearing it either.
‘Poor woman,’ Helen said as she buttered the toast. The rain had stopped but big, black clouds hung over the city. We had the lights on at nine o’clock in the morning.
‘Which one?’ I said.
‘The wife.’ She passed me the toast and I poured coffee for us both.
‘What about the other one?’
‘Hmm. He’s the Minister for Ethnic Affairs, isn’t he? God, it’s like that Shirley Maclaine joke about Peacock. He was the Minister for Foreign Affairs so I gave him one to remember.’ She bit into her toast, dropped crumbs on her silk dressing gown and brushed them on to the floor. ‘I don’t find Shirley Maclaine all that funny, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t find Peacock all that funny either.’
‘He’s funny compared with Fraser.’
‘It’s raining again,’ I said.
‘What’re you going to do?’
‘Take another look at the place.’
‘What good will that do?’ Helen pushed her chair back and reached for her packet of Gitanes. She smoked one a day, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes last thing at night. You could never tell which it would be. She didn’t know herself.
‘Hardy’s law,’ I said. ‘Put off doing an unpleasant thing if you can. Something worse might happen and then the first thing won’t look so bad.’
Helen smiled and lit her cigarette.
I’d wasted most of the morning waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t, so now it was early in the afternoon and I’d been watching the house in Woollahra for an hour. In that time I’d seen four women. One was the person who’d greeted Ian Winslow so enthusiastically the night before. She looked even more exotic in the daytime. She’d run down to the corner shop when the rain stopped briefly. She moved like a dancer, long legs, lithe body in tights and a loose sweater. Her hair was piled up on her head like a high, black turban revealing a long, slender neck circled by a white ribbon. Another of the women, who also ran a short errand, was almost as dark but had a different cast to her features, less African, more Indian. The other two were Asian or Eurasian, possibly Filipino. Dressed for the wet weather, they left in taxis.
On a dry day I’d have felt conspicuous. The other cars in the street were younger and better bred than mine; the houses all had that heavily mortgaged but well cared-for look, and there was no soggy rubbish in the gutters like in Glebe. It wasn’t a place for loitering in. I had my hand on the ignition key when the door of the house flew open and a woman ran out on to the street. She threw her head back and screamed up at the leaking sky as she ran. A man charged out of the house but was checked by a passing car. The woman ran down the footpath towards me, still screaming, bare feet flying and one arm flopping oddly as she moved. I got out of the car and she almost fell into my arms. The blood on her rubbed off on me. The man came on; he was dark and big but flabby. There was blood on his white shirt. He stopped and the three of us stood there in the rain.
‘Come,’ the man said. He beckoned with an impatient flick of his fingers.
The woman shivered and shrank closer to me.
‘She doesn’t want to come,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go?’
‘Wife,’ he said.
‘No! No!’ She gripped my arm. Blood dripped on to the wet footpath. He reached for her and I stepped forward and chopped at the muscle of his extended arm. He yelped and swung at me but he had to move his feet to do it. One foot came down on some Moreton Bay mush and he started to slip; I helped him with a shove to the shoulder. He slithered and crashed into the side of a car. His leg twisted under him as he went down hard.
The woman was small and light; I half-carried her to my car, pushed her across to the passenger side and got behind the wheel. As we turned the corner out of the street I looked in the rear vision mirror-the dark man was lurching across the road towards the house and the African Queen was rushing out into the rain to meet him.
‘You need a doctor.’ Blood was welling up from a slash across her right forearm; her left arm was giving her pain. She winced as she tried to straighten it.
‘Yes.’ Her voice was just above a whisper, hard to hear with the noise of my old engine, old wipers and the hiss of traffic on a wet road. She was young and pretty with delicate features and a pale amber skin. Her black hair had been held up by combs one of which had fallen out so that she had a half disordered look that would have been very attractive if it weren’t for the blood and the trembling spasms that shook her. Her thin dress was soaked.
A kilometre from the Woollahra house, I pulled up outside one of the twenty-four-hour clinics that have sprung up around the city in recent times. She glanced out the window and shrieked. Her hands clutched for a hold on the dashboard.
‘No, no, not here! No!’
Jesus, what is this? I thought, but I got moving again.
‘Okay, okay, I’ll get you to my doctor. All right?’
She nodded and slumped down in the seat. When I could spare attention from the treacherous roads I glanced across at her. She wasn’t dead and she wasn’t asleep-half-alive would about describe it.
Ian Sangster stitched the cut in the right arm and eased the dislocated shoulder back. He put the left arm in a sling. The woman took it all without a murmur.
‘Bad cut, Cliff,’ Ian said.
‘Dangerous place, the kitchen; almost as bad as the bedroom.’
Ian sniffed. ‘She’s got some nasty bruises too. There was a big, strong man involved.’
‘He’s limping now,’ I said. ‘Tell me, Ian, what d’you think of these clinics-the joints with the leather lounges and cocktail cabinets?’
‘A few of them’re all right, some’ll be video shops in six months.’ He snorted. ‘Come to think of it, that’s about what they are now, some of ‘em. Why?’
‘No reason.’
‘If you’re sick, come to me.’
‘I haven’t been sick since I stopped smoking.’
‘Wise, very wise.’ Ian smoked fifty a day.
She gave me a name on the drive home, Lela Somosi, and told me she was a Filipino. That’s all; she was almost unconscious. Shock and exhaustion, Ian had said. I squelched up the path to the front of my house half- carrying her as before-great stuff for the neighbours. Helen let me in and didn’t ask any questions. She put Lela Somosi in a warm bath, gave her a dressing gown and made her some tea. The woman clutched the mug and took a sip. She smiled at Helen.
‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll show you where you can sleep in a minute,’ I said. ‘But will you tell me about that house first?’
She nodded. ‘Women come there from overseas. We are not here legally. We work as prostitutes. For
