in a corner. We both looked at it and laughed.
11
I started by getting myself fit enough to do more than get out of bed and feed the cat-long walks in the warm part of the day with my shirt off, up and down the Wigram Road hill several times a day, plenty of protein and sleep. After a week of that I felt well enough to reclaim my car from the Chatswood police compound. The cops were barely civil, compliant rather than cooperative. My profession still wasn’t popular with the custodians of the law. They slapped me with a towing charge, a fee for holding the vehicle and an unroadworthy notice. With the taxi fare from Glebe, it was turning out to be an expensive morning. They gave me the notice before I saw the car.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘Can read, can’t you?’ the senior constable said. ‘One bald tyre, defective wiper, broken tail-light.’
‘How can you tell the wiper’s defective unless you turn on the ignition? And the tail-light wasn’t broken when I left it.’
‘On your way, Mr Hardy,’ the senior said. ‘And don’t get stopped between here and home with the vehicle in that condition.’
‘No wonder you’re so popular,’ I said.
‘Just be sure the cheques you write to the Police Department and the Road Traffic Authority don’t bounce.’
I let him feel like a winner as he scratched his second chin. The Falcon’s engine purred immediately into life and the wipers worked fine. ‘Like being with the cops, do you?’ I said. ‘Be careful or I’ll trade you in.’
More out of curiosity than anything else, I drove to Lindfield. The For Sale sign had been taken down and work had been done in the garden. New owners were putting their stamp on the place. A Mitsubishi Colt was parked in the driveway and a security screen had been installed across the front door. I wondered who had bought the house, who had got the money and what had happened to the broken easel and the paintings. On past experience, Climpson amp; Carter were unlikely to enlighten me.
The drive back to Glebe didn’t phase me. I found I could put my own seat-belt on and everything. I celebrated by skipping the Wigram Road hike and having a couple of glasses of wine with lunch. Then I phoned Sir Phillip Wilberforce.
‘Yes?’ an old, cracked voice said carefully. It sounded as if he’d suddenly aged twenty years.
‘Sir Phillip, this is Cliff Hardy. Do you…’
‘Remember you? Of course I do. I haven’t gone gaga, despite what they’re trying to say. I’ve been hoping you’d call. We have things to talk about.’
This was better than I’d hoped for. It sounded as if I was still on the payroll. ‘Has there been any word of your daughter?’
‘Daughter,’ he spoke slowly, dragging the word out. ‘No. No. Can you come to see me?’
I said I could but I needed another day to collect something which I hoped I could find.
‘You’re being cryptic, your privilege, I suppose. What?’
‘A photograph. I hope you can identify the subject and the photographer.’
‘Intriguing. Well, tomorrow then?’
‘Tomorrow evening. Have you got someone looking after you?’
‘Yes, damn and blast her. I’ll tell her you’re coming and with a bit of luck she’ll let you in. Do you need any money?’
I said I didn’t and he seemed not to care, one way or the other. The best kind of client. I rang off and rang Verity Lamberte’s home and business numbers-no answer at the one, no information at the other, as expected. Glen had gone to Goulburn again but before she left she’d ascertained that the Land Cruiser was being held by the police in Katoomba and that there was no obstruction to my going and getting it. Like the good bloke he was, Terry Reeves hadn’t made a peep. I rang him and told him I’d have the vehicle back tomorrow.
‘No worries. How’s things, Cliff?’
A question you normally answer without a thought. I couldn’t do it. I said something meaningless, maybe cryptic again. Terry sounded puzzled.
The next day I caught the 8.03 to the Blue Mountains. Rabbit at Rest was one of the paperbacks Glen had bought me and I was working slowly through it. It was a good book to read when you were on the right side of fifty and didn’t look like dying just yet. The book held my attention, but I looked up from time to time to observe the passengers coming and going, boarding and alighting. It was good to feel like part of the moving scene again, not confined within walls. To be out there in the world where something interesting might happen. On the train, nothing did, except that Rabbit’s son came back from the drug rehabilitation program as a born-again Christian. Not for the first time, I was glad I hadn’t had any kids.
I was in Katoomba shortly after ten. In the city it had been overcast and gloomy but the day was clear and bright in the mountains. And cold. I’d come prepared for it in a thick shirt and heavy sweater but the cold cut through the layers of cotton and wool and I could feel the places where I’d been burned and lacerated stiffening. I walked up the steep main street to the police station thinking that it was a different world up here-Sydney belonged to the ocean, the mountains belonged to the enormous country behind them. Dangerous thoughts, these, they tend to make you feel that human beings have no place on the continent at all.
The reception I got from the Katoomba cops couldn’t have been more different from that in Sydney. Here, I was something of a hero-the man who’d dragged the woman from the inferno and might have saved her life if help had arrived in time. No fault of his. Some city cops had been up, asking around and making themselves unpopular. Nobody gave a shit about the Loggins and Brewster case up here. There was no question of charges for bringing the Cruiser in or housing it. They told me they’d started it up every few days or so and that it was running fine. I thanked them, produced my ID, accepted their good wishes for my recovery from my injuries, and that was virtually that. I started the Cruiser and drove it out of the police car park.
A hundred metres down the road I pulled over to the kerb. I got out and opened the back of the truck. There were all the things I had hastily thrown together that morning four weeks ago-the bedroll, sleeping bag, thermos. There was no sign of the leather jacket. I was sure I’d left it in the back. I yanked open the back door and looked on the seat. The newspaper I’d bought was there along with the binoculars, which must have been taken from where I’d been observing the house. They were back in their case, safely tucked away. No whisky, that’d have been too much to ask, but where was the jacket? I swore and searched again but it wasn’t in the Land Cruiser.
I sat behind the wheel while the light morning traffic crawled past. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry. I’d been feeling fine when I’d arrived in Katoomba, now I didn’t feel so good. The morning sun coming through the windscreen made me hot inside my sweater but I’d been warned against sudden changes in temperature so I didn’t take it off. I sat, sweated and swore. I’d been warned about getting emotionally upset, too, but I kept on swearing. You nearly died and were on drugs for a couple of weeks, I thought. That could have screwed up your memory. I tried to recall in detail my actions before I’d gone up the rock pile and I found that I couldn’t.
I started the motor and headed towards Mount Victoria. The weather changed abruptly the way it can in the mountains. Some cloud came over and some mist came down, a heavy mist, needing an occasional swipe from the windscreen wipers. Not ideal conditions for searching for something brown in a couple of hundred hectares of bush. I took the back way in and bumped along the tracks until I found where I’d parked before going up to watch the house. This was the right place, surely-right rocks, right trees. I convinced myself and got out to search. The mist was almost a drizzle. I grabbed the groundsheet from among the camping gear and draped it over my head.
There had been a fair bit of rain up there and the ground was slushy. Things started to come back to me as I probed around. I’d worn the jacket into town but I’d put the parka on when I got back here because I’d thought I might have a long cold wait up on the rocks. I’d got the binoculars and the whisky from the seat, put them on the ground and taken off the jacket. Then… I remembered. I’d slung the jacket up onto the top of the Cruiser intending
