stroll away. It was a fair bet that the pair who lived in Gladesville arrived together; that made it likely that Dent, who lived close by, was the late one. That was consistent with human nature. The late one was the most likely to have heard me talking to Betty Tracey. I knew I was drawing a long bow. Maybe the man I’d seen enter a house ahead of me in Pump Street on my first visit hadn’t entered 43A; maybe he hadn’t noticed me at all. Maybe he wasn’t Merv Dent. Maybe Stan Livermore had simply fallen and hit his head. I took out my notes and checked through the list of names of men injured in the bridge construction. All three names Lithgow had given me appeared. I shoved the directory back in the glovebox, locked the car and headed for Windmill Lane.
At the top of Pump Street I got another angle on the bridge, different from the view from Lithgow’s window. Now it looked less impressive, as if it was too big for the job it was doing. The water it spanned didn’t seem to need such massive engineering to master it. Still, it was always going to be more interesting than the tunnel. I thought I could see a yellow stain in the water in the area where the tunnelling work was going on. But that might have been my anti-tunnel imagination at work. A few metres down the steep street, and the water and bridge disappeared.
Windmill Street had probably never looked so good before in its long history. The houses had been cleaned up and repainted in colonial colours; the new paving was in keeping with the buildings, and something green was growing in almost every place it was possible for something green to grow. The harmony was putting me in the wrong mood. I was possibly about to face a multiple killer; a man with an obsession that was stronger to him than the claims of human life. A twisted individual: we’re all twisted, but some twists are more dangerous than others… I was trying to build up some aggression. I should have had the taste of tobacco and beer in my mouth, not good dry sherry.
As I turned into Windmill Lane, I realised that my attitude was mainly one of curiosity rather than anger. I had questions rather than accusations. What forces could prompt a man to kill repeatedly? Why had he waited so long to begin killing, or had he waited? The cases of death and disappearance I was confronting now-were they only the tip of an iceberg? How had the executions been managed and what justifications would the executioner have? The lane was cobblestoned in the same way as the area behind the houses in Pump Street. But here the worn-down stones were firmly set, and the gutters had been renewed where years of running water had eaten away the stone. One side of the lane was completely taken up by a succession of brick fences of varying heights. Gardening had been going on here, too. The fences were covered in leafless wisteria and other vines.
The houses were on the other side, facing towards the water. Cute, narrow terraces, very scrubbed up, with brass knockers and painted wrought iron. There were ten houses in the lane, numbering from one to ten. There was no number twenty-two, and this part of the Rocks had been untouched by developer or restorer. There never had been a number twenty-two.
As I rechecked the numbering of the houses in the lane and the streets at either end of it, certain impressions and recollections began to come together in my mind. Now that I was out of his presence, I felt some disturbing familiarity about Charles Lithgow that I hadn’t felt when I was with him. It was as if I’d met him before in another context and the re-meeting had blotted this out. I struggled to remember, to place the feeling, and failed. But I started to walk quickly back to Pump Street. Had I been conned? Had it all been too easy? Something else about Lithgow disturbed me. Some irritant, something not quite right. But I couldn’t locate it.
I re-entered number 43A by the back, went through the porch bedroom into the kitchen and almost fell as my feet tangled with something on the floor. I steadied myself by grabbing the doorjamb and looked down. Betty Tracey was lying on the floor. The back of her head was a dark pulpy mess. Her grey hair was stained a dark colour near the crown and was streaked dark red for the rest of its untidy length. I felt for signs of life at her wrist and neck the way I had with Stan Livermore, and got the same result. The little woman’s head was turned around so that she seemed almost to be looking back over her shoulder. She was even more twisted and hunched in death than she had been in life.
I straightened up and moved quickly to the stairs. All quiet topside. I went up and saw that the doors to both Livermore’s and Lithgow’s rooms were open. Old Stan’s room had been gone through, quickly but by someone who knew what was where. Most of the files were missing, along with some of the books and photographs. In Lithgow’s room almost nothing remained apart from the furniture and the wine rack. The papers, books, photographs, tool box and other things I’d remarked were all gone. I pulled out the drawers and opened the cupboards. They were empty but might always have been so. The waste-paper basket, which I now remembered as being crammed with paper, was empty and lying on its side. There was almost nothing of Mr Lithgow remaining, except his soup mug, sherry glasses and wine rack, which contained ten bottles, none of which would sell for less than twenty dollars.
There was no way of sliding out of this one; my fingerprints were in the house, my car had been parked in the street for an hour or more, and I’d been seen at the place previously. Besides, I didn’t want to make an anonymous phone call about Betty Tracey. She might have been an old sharpster, but she deserved more than that. I’d seen a killer and could identify him, although I’d have laid a hundred to one now that his name wasn’t Lithgow or anything like it. I found the house telephone in Mrs Tracey’s dark, musty front room and called the police. While I waited for them to come I did another quick search of Livermore’s and Lithgow’s rooms. Nothing in old Stan’s. In the other room I found a pair of socks that had been left under the bed. Handy if you were a sniffer dog. I gave the blankets a twitch and something dark and soft fell to the floor. The object was a woollen glove. For no good reason, I sniffed it. It smelt of the sea. For me, smell triggers recall better than any of the other senses- I remembered where I’d seen Charles Lithgow before.
The cops who came must have been reading the papers and going to com-munity policing class. They treated me with extreme gentleness, showed consideration to the older neighbours who were alarmed by the arrival of an ambulance and another police car, and listened patiently to an abbreviated version of my story. The second car brought two detectives, who talked briefly to the uniformed men. I sat on the stairs, feeling drained, tired of the stink of the house, light-headed.
One of the detectives showed me his card. “Campbell,” he said.
I rubbed my face and felt the hardness of the scabs that had formed over my scratches. “Fine Scots name, Campbell,” I said. “I’m Irish myself, mostly.”
“Have you been drinking, Mr Hardy?”
I held up my thumb and forefinger, an inch apart. “A tiny sherry.”
“I think you’d better come with us. Do you have a vehicle?”
I handed him the keys. “Blue Falcon across the street. Don’t put any dings in it, or I’ll sue.”
“Do you have a weapon, Mr Hardy?”
I held my jacket open. “Your blokes took it away from me a couple of nights ago. If I go quietly, d’you think you might give it back?”
“Just sit quietly there a minute, sir. We’re waiting for the technical people. When they come, we can go.”
I said, “The Campbells a’comin’.”
“What?”
“Nothing, sergeant. Don’t take offence.”
Campbell made a grunting sound and turned away from me. He nodded conspiratorially to his partner, and for a moment they and the uniformed policemen all stood in the narrow hallway, like train travellers for whom there were no seats. Two men in white coats walked through the front door. The cops all sprang into action.
“Photos, dusting, bagging, blood samples, all the usual things,” Campbell said.
One of the white coats mock-tugged his forelock. “Sir,” he said.
“Don’t be funny, Simmo. I’m not in the mood.” Campbell crooked a finger at me. “Mr Hardy.”
I got up and moved towards the door. I took the glove from my pocket and handed it to the white coat. “This is a glove worn by the killer, Simmo,” I said.
“You probably should check it for fingerprints.”
I was laughing fit to burst as Campbell and his mate hustled me through the door and into their car.
19
