‘I’m not in the mood for jokes. Turn around and keep moving.’
‘I prefer to keep an eye on you and I’m telling you I haven’t…’
He raised the pistol an inch. His hand was steady.
‘You’re lucky I don’t make you fucking crawl. You saw Rose North and Maria today. Had a good long talk with the both of them.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘Think I’m stupid? Think I’d trust someone in your stinking business?’
‘You didn’t follow me. I’d have spotted you.’
‘ I didn’t, but the other guy I hired did. I guess he knows the tricks of the trade as well as you, maybe better.’
It wasn’t as much of a blow to my pride as if Trumble himself had tailed me, but it was bad enough. I turned around and went back to the living room and my glass of wine. Trumble watched me but there was indecision written all over him. He couldn’t be sure there wasn’t anyone else in the house and if he shot me he might not learn what he was burning to know. I emptied my glass.
‘Want a drink, Sean?’
‘Fuck you, I… ‘
I tossed the glass from one hand to the other. An old trick but he was so agitated he fell for it. His eyes followed the glass for an instant, long enough for me to take a long step and chop down on his forearm with a clenched fist. If you hit the right spot in the right way, the nerves jump and the hand opens. He dropped the pistol and I shirt-fronted him, throwing him back against the stairwell. He hit awkwardly and the breath whooshed out of him. I picked up the pistol and ejected the magazine before tossing it to him. He tried for it, but he dropped the catch.
‘I’ll get you a drink anyway. You’re going to need it.’
I put three fingers of Scotch on top of a couple of ice cubes and drew off another glass of wine for myself. When I got back he was slumped in a chair, rubbing his forearm. He accepted the glass and took a gulp.
‘There was no need for that. I wouldn’t have shot you.’
‘Matter of professional pride.’
He’d closed off my options, so I told him what the two women had told me-straight, word for word as close as I could remember it, no punches pulled, no embellishments. He sipped his whisky as he listened. I finished about the same time he emptied the glass. He swilled the ice cubes, clockwise, then anti-clockwise. My nerves were screaming but he seemed to relax.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ I said.
He stared at the floor and appeared to go into a kind of trance. When he spoke his voice seemed to be coming from far away. ‘So David’s not my son. He’s my father’s grandson. And he’s my… nephew.’
I nodded.
He smiled, put the glass down on the floor, stood and held out his hand. ‘That’s close enough. Thanks, Hardy.’
‹‹Contents››
Archie’s Last Case
Archie Merrett lived in a Glebe flat a few streets away from my place. I used to see him pretty often in the pub. We’d have a drink or two, pass the time. Archie had plenty of time to pass and he appeared to have lots of money to spend as he was doing it. He was about sixty-five when I first met him ten years ago; he had no hobbies apart from the horses and drinking, and he said he’d come back to Sydney after retiring and living on the Gold Coast for a time.
‘It was all different in my day, boyo,’ he told me almost every time we talked. ‘We earned our dough.’
I’d nod and drink some beer and try to catch what he was saying above the noise of the television. He was usually saying the same thing.
‘What’ve you done today, Cliff?’
‘Served a summons or two, collected a debt, held a guy’s hand while he had a meeting with some people he’d never met before.’
Archie’s old eyes, peeping out between puckered wrinkles, would light up. ‘Any trouble?’
‘No.’
‘Different in my day.’
‘When you were all boyos.’
‘You can laugh, but it used to be a tough racket.’
He was referring to the private enquiry agent business which he’d been in from the time he got back from New Guinea in ‘46 until his retirement about twenty years later. In those days, according to Arch, most of the work was in divorce-although Arch preferred to call it ‘matrimonial’.
‘It scarred a man, Cliff, all that climbing in and out of windows, taking photos, going to court and hearing the terrible things men and women said and did to each other. It put me off marriage, I can tell you.’
I liked to hear his stories about the Fifties when I’d been body-surfing, boxing and thinking about girls and adventures in foreign parts, so I’d often egg him on with a remark like, ‘Ruined a few suits too, eh, Arch?’
A throaty, fifty-a-day chuckle. ‘You bet. Did I ever tell you about the time I was under a bedroom, down with the cat shit and spiders, with a stopwatch in my hand.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well I was. I’d got a bit of stick from a judge about being vague in my evidence and I’d decided to go scientific. I was going to time those bloody bed squeaks-so many to the minute.’
“What happened?’
‘Bloke must’ve weighed twenty stone, wharfie he was, and this little slip of a woman. Don’t know how she survived it. Anyway, I’ve got the stopwatch out and the torch on and I’m counting the squeaks and suddenly the whole bloody lot’s coming down on top of me. Bloody borer in the bearers.’
Arch’s wheezes and gasps would overwhelm him for a few minutes until he caught enough breath to light another cigarette. Then he’d tell me about the time he was out on a window ledge and felt a sneeze coming on, or when the grandmother kidnapped her baby grandson from her Protestant daughter-in-law so she could have him baptised as a Catholic. I liked Arch and his stories. The emphysema and circulation problems got him in the end, of course. I visited him in hospital a few times. They put a hole in his neck and took off one of his legs. Then he died and I missed him.
A few weeks later I was surprised to get a call from a solicitor who said he was the executor of the estate of the late Mr Archibald Ronald Merrett, deceased as of 1/5/90. It took me a second for the name to register.
‘Arch,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes. What can I do for you?’
It turned out Arch had left his case files to ‘my friend and confidant, Mr Clifford Hardy, for his education’. The solicitor sent them round the next day-three cardboard boxes which had formerly contained bottles of Reschs Pilsener and were now jammed full of manilla folders, some bulging, some containing only a single sheet. I stacked the boxes under the stairs and didn’t look at them for months until I was laid up with a sprained ankle, the result of jumping for a smash that Yannick Noah couldn’t have reached. Just for something to do, I dragged out the boxes and started reading. I forgot about the ankle and the pain and about how I had to be careful not to take too many pethidines with alcohol. I could hear Arch’s ruined voice talking to me from the pages. Especially when I got to the last file in the third box. It was a thick file: transcripts of interviews, memos, photographs, receipts. I read it all through. There was also a tape. I put it in the machine, poured out a glass of white and sat back to listen. I’d heard old Arch tell a hundred stories, but it was an eerie feeling to hear him telling one last yarn…
Alistair McLachlan gave me the drum. He was the solicitor representing Mrs Thelma Lucan-Paget in her divorce action against her hubby, George. Thelma had the goods on George- notes, receipts for presents, a hotel bill. The core was Mrs Beatrice Butterworth.
