Meadowbank was looking at a nice slice.
I registered this as I drove past looking for a spot for my more modest vehicle. I found one further down the street, unshipped the camera and came back to take up a position behind a plane tree across from the flats which carried the name ‘Lapstone’. The house Cyn and I bought in Glebe was called ‘Waterloo’. Cyn took the name plate down, saying that it was twee. I’d quite liked it and as things were shaping, it was appropriate. I took a sighting on ‘Lapstone’. Despite daylight saving, which had just been introduced that month, the light was starting to fade under an overcast sky. The light in the street was poor but there were bright coachman’s lanterns mounted over the door to the flats. I had a fast film and a fast lens; the developer would have to push a bit to get good definition, but I felt pretty confident I could get a reasonable shot of Charles and his companion as they came through the door and a series as they made their way to the car.
If they came. I suddenly realised that I was making an assumption. It was a mild night, late spring with an evening breeze. The wife was away. Surely they’d go out to eat, get a slight buzz on before coming back to commit the offence of adultery. Charles looked like a man who didn’t stint on his pleasures. But what if I was wrong? What if his girlfriend had everything set up for fun and games inside? Candles and champagne and silk sheets. I took another look at the block of flats. A bastard to breach. I didn’t even know which flat he was in. Unless they came out onto a balcony and canoodled in the open air, I was stymied.
I wanted a cigarette the way I always did when faced with a problem. I fought the feeling down and considered my options. Even a contortionist couldn’t have got a shot taking in the number plate of the Mercedes and the front of the flats.
And what was that worth anyway? I anticipated Alistair Menzies’ contemptuous smirk. I could scout the block, maybe get a line on who lived there. I wasn’t looking for Brigadier and Mrs Top-Drawer after all. But it felt scrappy, not semi-professional. There were at least six flats in the block. I tried to tell myself that I’d achieved something-found an assignation point, a field for further investigation. I wasn’t convinced.
Minutes ticked on, but fewer of them, I found later, than I thought. Truth to tell, I was nervous and that distorts the sense of time. I was anxious not to screw up my first job.
‘Patience, Cliff,’ I muttered. ‘Turn your weaknesses into strengths.’
That’s when I became aware of the movement in front of me. It wasn’t much, just the half-caught motion of a branch, a lightening or deepening of shade. I’d fought the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya and learned to take notice of things like that because my life depended on it. There was someone else watching the flats, someone positioned closer than me. I squinted in the failing light, trying to isolate the spot. Not near the tree opposite mine on the other side of the street, not in the narrow garden fronting the flats, but somewhere. Two tall trees flanked the entrance to the driveway marked Residents Only. Poplars with bushy trunks. Maybe there.
I wasn’t really alarmed. When I’d worked as an insurance investigator it wasn’t so unusual to find more than one guy operating on different sides of the same street. You suspect a workers compensation claimant of faking and set out to prove it. He suspects his insurance company’s bad faith and you have competition and confrontation. It happens all the time. I’d got the range and was pretty sure the movement was in the poplars, when Charles Meadowbank and his companion came out of the flats. She was a tall brunette wearing a blue silk dress that shimmered as the overhead lights caught it. High cheekbones, sculptured features, up-swept hair. I got the camera into position.
The woman stumbled as she reached the first step. Meadowbank, immediately behind her, stepped quickly forward and around her to help. Then he crumpled and fell down the steps as two bullets blew his head apart.
3
I was moving while the sound of the shots was still reverberating. I shouted and ran forward as the gunman emerged from his hiding place. Time blurred and images shimmered and sound distorted. I threw the camera like a fielder trying to throw the wicket down on the run. The shout froze him; the camera hit his shoulder and jerked him out of his murderous concentration. He was small, wearing dark clothes and a stocking mask- I registered this in an eye-blink of time-and incredibly quick. I was rushing across the road, six-foot-one and twelve stone of frightened, bellowing, missile-throwing force and he seemed to have all the time in the world to turn and assess his situation. He took off like a top athlete exploding out of the blocks.
I took a few steps in pursuit but I’d done enough schoolboy sprinting to know when I was outclassed. He was all jet-propelled survival instinct and I was puzzled and already running out of fuel. Lights were going on in windows, voices were being raised and I could hear the twittering, muttering sounds of fear for life and property.
I was operating on adrenalin at that point, but it was time to switch to something else. Things had gone seriously wrong on my very first assignment as a private inquiry agent
People shrank away from me as I went back to the front of ‘Lapstone’. I ignored them. The tall woman was sitting on the steps. There was blood and brain matter all over her dress and her face was a ghastly white under the harsh lights. Meadowbank lay like a broken toy on the bottom couple of steps. His face was only slightly disfigured-a collapsed eye socket and a wound near his jaw-but the back of his head was a mess.
An elderly woman with more presence of mind than most, weighed up the situation. ‘I’ve called an ambulance and the police,’ she said to me. ‘I saw what happened.’
‘Good,’ I said. The police will need to talk to you.’
‘I saw you throw something. What were you doing there on the other side of the road?’
I didn’t answer. The woman on the steps was sitting rigidly, clutching her handbag and staring straight in front of her.
‘Could someone get her a blanket or a coat or something,’ I said. ‘She’s in shock.’
There was a murmuring in the growing crowd. A few people broke away and someone came back quickly with a big knitted shawl which was placed over a pair of beautifully shaped, utterly immobile shoulders. I looked around for my camera and saw it lying in a garden bed not far from the poplars. A man was wandering around in that area and he stooped to pick it up.
‘Don’t touch it,’ I said. ‘The police will want things to stay the way they are.’
The man looked up belligerently. He was middle-aged, solidly built and self-important. ‘Just who the hell are you?’
I pulled out my PEA licence and waved it. I didn’t expect it to carry much authority but it was the best I could do. The elderly woman was offering words of comfort.
‘The ambulance will be here soon, Miss Shaw,’ she said.
Miss Shaw didn’t respond.
I saw a metallic glint in the grass-probably a casing from one of the bullets that had killed Charles Meadowbank. The crowd was milling and rumbling, moving restlessly. The glint vanished as someone trod the object into the lawn. The cicadas suddenly burst into their concentrated racket and then we heard the sirens. There was a collective sigh of relief. I looked at Miss Shaw. Our eyes met for an instant but what hers were seeing I couldn’t tell.
The client of a private investigator has no right of confidentiality, and the detective himself has no protection from the ordinary processes of the law. The uniformed men who came to the Rose Bay crime scene treated me about as roughly as I expected. The elderly woman, who gave her name as Mrs James Calvert, tried to tell the cops that I was a sort of a hero who’d tried to intercept the gunman. Trouble was, she was old and confused and more concerned about Miss Shaw than anything or anybody else so that she made me sound more like an accomplice. I said as little as I could, waiting for the plain-clothes boys to arrive.
The Senior Constable didn’t like that, either, and we were close to going it toe-to-toe when the D’s from Darlinghurst station turned up.
Detective Sergeant Colin Pascoe was a big-gutted man with a boozer’s nose and late-night eyes. He was a long time out of uniform himself, and he knew all the right moves. He’d brought a photographer with him, and, after the scene was captured on film from every necessary angle, he allowed the ambulance men to take Mr
