Blood was still dripping from my hand when the police arrived and it was an edgy business for the next hour or so. I explained that I knew the dead woman as Susannah Morgan. I had met her long before when I was working as an insurance claims investigator. She had made a claim for a fire she’d clearly started herself. She’d also made a claim on me although I’d barely exchanged ten words with her. I’d forgotten her entirely-partly a matter of not thinking much about the things I’d done before I’d become a private detective. It was hard to believe that such a hatred and self-destructive force had festered for all that time, but when the cops entered her house they found news clippings about me, photos taken with a long lens, letters pinched from my mailbox. She had been receiving treatment for paranoiac schizophrenia for years and apparently had recently stopped taking her medication. They found my fax on her bed with blood, spittle and shit smeared over it.
Liz Richards was successful in her action against Tommy Aarons. The settlement put him out of business and he now works as a security guard for wages. On reflection, I think he was railroaded and I never had the heart to send him an account. I think Ms Richards discovered that I was on the job and she and Ms Jacobi threw up a smokescreen for those two nights. A setup. All in all, it was one of those episodes you try to forget. But can’t.
Close Enough
‘I’ve got to know, Mr Hardy.’
‘You remind me of that Clint Eastwood movie,’ I said. ‘Where Dirty Harry doesn’t remember whether there’s any bullets in his gun and the punk says, “I gots to know”. Did you see it?’
‘No,’ Sean Trumble said. ‘I…’
‘Harry pulls the trigger and the gun’s empty. Good scene. It always gets a laugh. You ought to see it.’
‘Why are you telling me this? I came here to hire you to do an investigation.’
I fiddled with a paperclip on my desk. No need to worry about scratching the surface. The desk hasn’t got a surface. Trumble, a prosperous-looking type in his fifties, sat uncomfortably in my client chair. The chair was only partly to blame for his discomfort. He had a problem.
‘I’m trying to laugh you out of it,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it. From what you’ve told me I can guarantee you that it isn’t worth the grief.’
‘I’ve got to know. If you won’t do it I’ll go to someone who will. It’s just that I’ve been told you’re honest and capable.’
Put it like that and what could I say? If I could have dissuaded him altogether I would have felt that I’d performed a service, but business wasn’t so good I could afford to turn away a client who’d just cross the road and get someone else to make him unhappy. I got him to sign the standard form and took a cheque from him. Then I took notes, trying to get the names straight and spell the addresses correctly. Basic efficiency. He’d been pretty efficient himself, coming equipped with photographs and documents. I assembled a considerable file on the matter before I’d put a foot through a door. Because physical resemblance was at the heart of the trouble, I studied Trumble closely as he got to his feet and reached for my hand. He was medium-tall, about 180 centimetres and a bit overweight at around 85 kilos. His suit was expensive and his curly grey hair was styled rather than just cut. Square jaw, slightly crooked nose, deep-set blue eyes with crow’s feet. He wore the air of a well-polished rough diamond.
We shook hands, he lifted his smart trench coat from the back of the chair and went out. I settled back to look over the documents and consider what I’d let myself in for.
Sean Trumble had served in Vietnam, two tours as a volunteer. He was a fervent anti-communist who loved soldiering and at that time there was plenty of work around for men of this persuasion. With his long-term mate, Lee North, also a Vietnam vet, he went off to Angola as a mercenary to fight against the Marxist MPLA. Just before leaving he married Clara Moon, his childhood sweetheart. North was best man.
The two mercenaries had barely fired a shot in anger before, along with a dozen or so others, they were captured by Cubans fighting for the MPLA. They were given a swift trial for ‘crimes against humanity’. All were found guilty but the sentences were somewhat arbitrary. Trumble got twenty years, North was executed by firing squad. Trumble served three years in some Luandan hellhole and was released after a swap of prisoners was arranged between the contestants in the civil war. While in prison he learned of the birth of his son, David, and the boy and his mother were waiting for Trumble when he finally got home in the Eighties. He was cured of soldiering and settled down to become a manufacturer of barbecues which sold like crazy through the good times of the Eighties.
Trumble had been lucky in Vietnam and Africa, but his luck ran out in 1987 when his wife died suddenly of cancer. They had no other children and David became the focus of his father’s life. Trumble sold his business at a massive profit in 1990 in order to give himself more time to devote to the boy. David shaped up to be a winner- very bright at school, an outstanding athlete, musically talented.
‘I can play the mouth organ a bit,’ Trumble had told me. ‘That’s about it, but David can pick up any musical instrument and get a tune out of it right away.’
To add to all this, Trumble said that he and David got on well. Then he pulled a tortured face. ‘Like mates,’ he said.
That was the problem. As he got older David began to resemble Trumble’s dead mate, Lee North, more and more until by now, at sixteen, he was the spitting image of him. I spread the photographs Trumble had left on the desk. One showed Trumble and North as ten-year-olds, in football kit. They were of similar size and build, but North was dark and had longer, leaner features. Trumble was fair-headed and had the blocky look he still retained. Another snap of them as teenagers, dressed up for a night on the town, emphasised the difference. Trumble had filled out and looked pugnacious; North was slim with an amused, sceptical cast to his face. There were three photographs of David, carefully annotated on the back-at two years, ten years and sixteen. The little boy’s fair hair had turned progressively darker and his initial chubbiness had given way to a wiry slimness and cleanly etched features.
I stared at the pictures for a long time. They weren’t peas in a pod, Lee North and David Trumble. The hairlines were different, and North’s ears stuck out a bit whereas David’s were standard issue. But the resemblance was startlingly close.
How the hell was I to set about this? Trumble had provided birth certificates for himself, Lee North and the son he suspected was not his son. Sean Trumble, son of Eric and May, nee Douglas; Lee North, son of Percy and Rose, nee Valletta; David Trumble, son of Sean and Clara, nee Moon. Trumble’s parents were both dead and he had been an only child. Rose North was alive at the age of seventy-seven, having survived her husband by ten years. Lee North had a brother, Peter, and a sister, Maria. Trumble had provided addresses in Sydney for both but said he hadn’t spoken to either for many years.
There were two more photographs. One a conventional studio-style portrait of Sean and Clara in their wedding outfits. He looked uncomfortable in the slightly too tight tuxedo, she cool and elegant in a white lace dress with her veil pushed back. She was a very attractive young woman with light hair and skin. There was a frailty about her, but that may have been my imagination, working backwards from the knowledge that she had died very young. The other picture was the one that must have given Trumble nightmares since his suspicions were aroused. It showed his bride in the arms of the best man. You could read it either way-a high-spirited kiss on an emotional day, or a passionate embrace that had nothing to do with the occasion.
One of the great advantages of working for yourself is that you can choose how hard you want to work, how long and how little. I decided that I would do no more than go through the motions for Sean Trumble. It was highly unlikely that I’d be able to find anything out anyway and, I told myself, Trumble probably didn’t want to know anything, not really. The more I thought about it the more I convinced myself that he’d be satisfied with a non- result-nothing proven, forget it.
I cooked up a thin cover story in my head and dialled the number he’d given me for Mrs Rose North.
‘Carlingford Nursing Home.’
That was a surprise. ‘Ah, my name is Hardy. I’m a journalist. Do you have a Mrs Rose North with you
