something or other and employed in New Guinea. Their real father, who knew too many things, had been killed in what had been called an accident in the industrial section of Long Bay prison.
“Done any scuba diving, Ray?”
“Plenty. Love it.”
“What’s the depth of the water under the harbour bridge?”
Ray fiddled with his empty can, crushing its sides. Unlike his brother, he was a practical man who liked to have something to see and handle in front of him. Theoretical questions, or those requiring information to be transferred from one track to another, made him uncomfortable. “I’ve got a Maritime Services Board chart on the boat that’d tell me,” he said. “At a guess, twenty metres. Certainly not more. That’s average-high and low tide.”
“Is that a deep dive?”
“Are you kidding? Piece of piss. ‘Course, it’d be murky down there. Lot of crap in the harbour.”
“What about at night?”
He leaned forward in his chair. “ Very murky. But you can take down a light that makes it OK.”
“What about a camera?”
“Christ, Cliff.” He leaned back and crushed the can vertically. When he’d reduced it to the size of a doughnut he looked at me and grinned. “Why not?”
“This isn’t Mission Impossible, Ray. If it’s too bloody hard to handle, I’ll come at it another way.”
“I can dive around the bridge at night and take photos,” Ray said. “When d’you want it done?”
“Tonight,” I said.
That’s when Paul Guthrie called us in to dinner.
Fish, naturally, in that company. All I know about fish is that when it’s fresh and well cooked I like it, and when it’s not I don’t. This was great. The Guthries treated each other as a group of special friends might-quick to understand and sympathise, happy to chide and be chided. But I didn’t feel excluded. I enjoyed the talk and the meal and the dry white. Ray, I noticed, drank mineral water and talked less than the rest of us. Ate less, too.
Almost as soon as he decently could, he wiped his mouth on the paper towel provided, collected his couple of plates and stood. “Excuse me. Great dinner…”
“You hardly touched it,” Pat Guthrie said. “Are you sure you’re not sick too?”
“I’m fine. I just have to make a few phone calls.” His nod was more for me than his parents as he left the room.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’ve asked Ray for some help. He seems to have taken it very seriously.”
“It’s all right, Cliff,” Paul said. “Ray’s like that. He takes things seriously. I remember once when he…”
“Don’t start, Paul,” his wife said. “And don’t keep things from me. What are you asking Ray to do, Cliff?”
I told her as we cleared up the dishes and took them to the kitchen, where she stacked them in the washer. “Aren’t there regulations about that?” she said. “I mean, can anyone just go diving around the bridge? I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“Ray’ll know,” Paul Guthrie said from the doorway. “Or he’d know someone who will know. Don’t worry.”
Pat turned on the machine. “It sounds dangerous. At night. No preparation. Why does it have to be like that?”
Paul Guthrie was spooning coffee into a glass beaker. He poured in the boiling water and set the plunger in place. “ Is it dangerous, Cliff?”
“Ray doesn’t seem to think so. But I’ll call it off if it gets tricky. Don’t worry, I’m too old for cowboy stuff.”
“So we’ve noticed,” Paul said. He touched his own forehead, which wasn’t scratched and scraped like mine.
I grinned. “I was assisting the police. Pat, it has to be at night to avoid publicity. The woman I’m working for has a right to that. Anything to do with mysterious deaths brings headlines. Team that up with the bridge and you’ve got a tabloid reporter’s dream.”
Guthrie pressed the plunger down. He set the pot, cups, sugar and milk on a tray. “Let’s go through to the sitting room. I saw them building the bridge, you know. Went to the opening ceremony and every-thing.”
We got settled with the coffee. Paul took some artificial sweeteners from a shelf and dropped in two tablets. “I’m seventy this year,” he said. “Milk, Cliff?”
Pat laughed as she took a half spoon of sugar. “He’ll take it black, Paul. He’s a tough guy.” For a moment I thought that Pat Guthrie might be turning against me, protecting her young from the sort of disruption I represented. But she included me in the amusement. “And don’t you come the smart-arse old-timer. Tell us about the bridge.”
“They say a million people went across it on the first day,” I said. “I never really believed that.”
“I do,” Paul said. “I can’t tell you much about the ceremony. I was there, but way back in the crowd. I know I’ve never seen so many people in one place before. I didn’t see de Groot. There was just a series of yells and shouts and screams. I think I fell asleep that afternoon, some-where along the line.”
“I’m more interested in the industrial aspects”, I said.
Guthrie’s thumb and third finger probed the grooves in his cheeks. “My father was captain of one of the tugboats that helped to build the bridge.”
“What did the tugboats do?” Pat asked.
“A lot of the superstructure was built on shore and taken out to where it was needed on barges. Then it was hoisted up into place. The tugs pulled the barges.”
“I’ve seen some photographs of that operation,” I said. “Must’ve been pretty tricky in bad weather.”
Guthrie nodded. “It was. The whole bloody thing was tricky. It’s a wonder more people weren’t killed.”
Pat was about to sip her coffee but she stopped the movement. “I didn’t know people were killed.”
“Quite a few,” Guthrie said. “In the quarry at Moruya, in the workshop, on the bridge. I saw all of it. I was only a nipper but my Dad was interested and he took me around. He could go anywhere he liked, of course.”
Paul had forgotten his half-drunk coffee. He was settled back in his chair with his memories. Knowing the sharpness of his mind and the clarity of his perceptions, it was reasonable to hope that the memories would be distinct. “What were the working conditions like?” I said.
“By today’s standards, terrible, and pretty bad even by the standards of the 1920s and 1930s. You have to remember that it was bloody hard to get work then. Men’d do amazing things for a couple of quid a week when they had mouths to feed.”
“I’ve never thought about it,” Pat said. “The bridge has always been sort of… there.”
“Well, it wasn’t. It was the most amazing thing to see those two bloody great arches grow out on either side and finally join up. It seemed, I don’t know, like something almost impossible for men to achieve. It made a very deep impression on me, even though I was so young. My Dad was a bit of a Bolshie, and he used to talk about the cost of the thing in human terms.”
“Deaths and injuries,” I said.
“Yes. There was nothing in the papers about the injuries, except the occasional bit of bullshit from the managers.”
“Like what?” I asked.
Guthrie made a derisive, snorting sound. “Oh, about how the workers were like soldiers going into battle, and casualties were inevitable. That sort of thing. My dad used to read stuff like that out from the papers. It made him angry. I saw things that make me angry to think about them, even now.”
“What, Paul?” Pat had put her cup down and was staring at her husband.
Guthrie rubbed his hand across his face. He looked around his comfortable, well-appointed sitting room as if he could hardly believe in the reality of his surroundings. “One thing in particular. I can see it now, and I still don’t like to think about it. Dad had taken me to the fabrication workshop. It was where Luna Park is now. They built big sections and took them out on the barges. They used a hot-rivet method.”
Pat shook her head. “You’ve lost me.”
Guthrie’s eyes seemed to retreat into his skull. “They heated the rivets up, almost to liquid point then they spooned them across to the rivetter who had heavy gloves and tongs. He lifted the bit of red-hot metal out and
