with lots of nods and murmurs of agreement. Bob Loggins showed up briefly. He didn’t talk to me but I saw him shake a very pale and stressed-looking Ian Gallagher by the hand. My. 38 went into a plastic bag and I never saw it again. A bloke with a medical chest came over to me and did what he could for my cuts and abrasions. He gave me a sling for my wrenched shoulder and I wore it. Why not? Why should Colin Pascoe hog all the heroism?
Eventually they had all the pictures and measurements and fingerprints they needed and, as the movie people say, they called it a wrap. I was just about asleep by this time, with a blanket around my shoulders. I’d had some hot coffee from a thermos, but the caffeine was losing the battle. I climbed into the back of a police car and settled down into its comfort. Just before we left the door opened and I was looking into Pascoe’s ugly, bristled face, smelling the whisky and tobacco on his breath and knowing my breath would smell much the same.
‘I’ll drop in tomorrow,’ he said quietly. ‘Until then, your door and your mouth are shut. You don’t use the phone, you don’t write anything down. Understood?’
‘What about Henry Wilton?’
He put his fingers to his lips and slammed the door shut. I don’t remember anything about the ride back to Glebe. I must have slept through it. A cop escorted me to my front door and helped me to open it. The cord they’d used on my wrists had scraped skin away and I realised that my fingers had been tingling unpleasantly ever since the circulation had been restored.
‘Will you be all right, Mr Hardy?’
‘I’ll be OK, Constable. Thank you.’
‘Goodnight.’
I stood at the door and watched him go down the path, through the gate to the police car. A solidly-built young man, competent, a public servant. It was 2.00 a.m. or thereabouts and the street was quiet. The strangeness of it all struck me-here I was in my scarcely renovated terrace in Glebe, with money being made and upward mobility getting going all around me, and I’d come within a hair’s breadth of being buried in a Campbelltown paddock. I was bleeding in ten places and smelled like an all-in wrestler after a night on the town. I didn’t belong here, but then again, with an architect wife and a small business to operate, I did. I closed the door and limped towards the back of the quiet house.
A jacket of Cyn’s was hanging on a doorknob and I sniffed at it as I went past. Ma Griffe or Rive Gauche, I could never tell the difference. But it was a Cyn smell and I missed her powerfully. What would I tell her if she’d been here? Would I say, ‘I came this close’? I knew I wouldn’t. I’d make a joke about the steepness of the McElhone steps and the exorbitant cost of dry cleaning and throw down as much white wine as I could. I climbed the stairs, stripping off my clothes as I went and fell on the bed and dragged a sheet across me. An hour later I woke up out of a nightmare which faded immediately. I was cold and the room seemed unnaturally dark. I found a blanket and turned on the bedside light and slept fitfully for another couple of hours like a frightened kid.
As it happened, Pascoe’s rules weren’t hard to live by. I wasn’t in any shape to go out walking, there was food and drink in the house and I was too demoralised to want to talk to anybody. The phone rang a couple of times and I ignored it. I didn’t stick to the letter of the law. I opened the front door to collect the paper. A car I’d never seen before was parked across the street and it was still there later when I checked for mail. I read the paper from cover to cover. They were talking about introducing late-night shopping on Thursdays on a trial basis. There was a story about the opening of Sydney’s first sex shop selling ‘fantasy apparel’, ‘erotic literature’ and ‘marital aids’. Probably go well on Thursday nights. The operational phase of Australia’s military presence in Vietnam was drawing to a close. I read that piece several times to see what it meant about the war, apart from the fact that the boys were coming home. Between the armyese and the journalese it was impossible to tell.
The mail consisted of several bills and a postcard from Cyn. The picture was a collage of the attractions of Cairns, which seemed to consist of nightclubbing, fishing, water skiing and playing golf. There didn’t seem to be anything I’d want to do. Cyn had written a few lines in her impeccable private schoolgirl script to the effect that the weather was great and the job was interesting and Queenslanders were funny folk who called bags ‘ports’ and said ‘eh?’ at the end of every sentence. She missed me, she said. She ended with. ‘Why don’t you pack a port and come up, eh?’
I turned the TV on and off, listened to a few news broadcasts on the radio and tried to read Manning Clark’s Short History of Australia to make up for one of my many educational deficiencies. I liked the book but my mind kept wandering to the business I’d been through and wasn’t finished with yet. It was embarrassing to have misread Pascoe and Gallagher so completely and to have been jerked around like a puppet. I resolved to be a lot more cautious-downright mistrustful-if I stayed in the private inquiry game. That was a big question I shied away from. I showered but my face was too badly roughed-up to shave. I put Savlon cream on my lacerations and probed at my bad tooth with my tongue. It felt loose. Another one on its way. The shoulder felt better, though, and I did without the sling.
Pascoe arrived late in the afternoon. He plonked himself down on the sofa. ‘Got any beer?’
I opened some Coopers ale I’d bought for a South Australian friend of Cyn’s who turned out not to drink beer. Pascoe took a big, appreciative gulp. I sat in a saucer chair and rolled a cigarette. Pascoe pulled out his Craven A’s. Man-talk time.
‘Did you do as I told you, Hardy?’
‘You know I did. You had one of your blokes outside all day. And I bet a couple of the phone calls I didn’t take were from you.’
He grunted and drank some more beer. ‘Well, it was a shitty mess you got yourself into. Some big names and some big money there.’
‘I’m sure you can handle it. What’s going to happen to Gallagher?’
‘Nothing. As I said, he was working undercover.’
‘Bullshit. He was right there in the middle of it.’
‘That’s not the way we want it to be. The force can’t afford all that to come out just now. But we’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘Wilton’ll put him in.’
Pascoe drank some more beer and shook his head.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘This was a bloody big conspiracy. Lawyers, politicians, a cop, God knows who else. And you’re just going to leave it at two dead hoods?’
‘There’s no evidence against Wilton.’
‘I was there.’
‘So was Ian Gallagher. Forget it, Hardy. Like you say, it’s big. Too big for you. It’s being handled… institutionally, like.’
I looked at him, big, solid, not at all stupid as I’d thought and doing what he thought was best. I wished I’d had some similar conviction. The phone rang. Pascoe held up his hand to stop me moving and reached for it himself.
‘Yeah? This is Pascoe. We’re having a drink and a talk right now.’
He cradled the phone under his ear and picked up his glass. Somehow, he was able to drink from it with his head in that position. He looked at me as if I was asking him a big favour. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Oh, I reckon he’ll be all right. Yeah, I’m sure he will be. Thanks.’
He hung up and held out his glass for more beer. I poured. The room was smoky now, smelling of hops and still warm from the heat of the day, but it was beginning to take on some of the atmospherics of the Campbelltown paddock. Pascoe looked critically at his beer- there was too big a head.
‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I play ball and I’m safe.’
Pascoe drank. ‘That’s right. Don’t worry about it, Hardy. It’s all just part of the very difficult business of law enforcement. All you have to do is nothing.’
That was more than tempting, it was compelling. There were loose threads though, and pride demanded that I pull a few of them. ‘Gallagher told me that a man named Vernon Morris in Alistair Menzies’ office had put him on to the divorce deal. Anything in that?’
‘No. He was lying. You should’ve checked up on that, Hardy. Could have saved you some grief. Mind you, we mightn’t have got this result if you had.’
‘That’s all that matters.’
‘I’ll give you something for free. It was Dick Maxwell put you on to Chalky, right?’
