wardrobe in the room that doubles as a study and guest bedroom and saw some of Lily’s clothes-a couple of pairs of pants, a blouse, a dress, a jacket. Her toothbrush and a few bits of makeup were in the upstairs bathroom. There’d be a few of her books lying around. I’d be willing to bet I’d find a pair of shoes kicked under a chair. Probably some knickers and tights in the dirty clothes basket.
I was overseas in the army fighting for freedom when my mother died. My sister told me later how disposing of her clothes and other things had broken my father up, even though they’d been at odds with each other for decades. Different in every way. It’d be the work of a few minutes for me, but I had some idea now of how he must have felt. The emptiness was making me think back further than I cared to go. Filling in the spaces. It’d been a strange household to grow up in, requiring deception and negotiation between the parents every step of the way. Perhaps it had stood me in good stead for my profession.
I drank some wine and didn’t taste it. I had no appetite. Lily had given me a book for my birthday- 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I sat with it on my lap, turning over the pages, looking at the pictures. It helped: I thought about some of the films- Casablanca, The Magnificent Seven, The Third Man, Rocco and His Brothers, Chariots of Fire, Manhattan — and the images took me away from where I was and what would never happen again with Lily and what I was going to do next.
Eventually, the tiredness became terminal, but, after the day’s events, I was afraid of dreams and disturbances. My most recent injury-of many-had been a badly sprained ankle when I’d attempted a triple jump, something at which I’d once been a good performer, on the sand at Byron Bay. Showing off for Lily. The ligaments were damaged and the ankle hurt like hell for a couple of weeks. Ian Sangster had prescribed some sleeping pills, which I’d taken for as long as I’d needed to. Now I found a few left over in their foil in the bathroom cupboard and took one with a light scotch and soda. I tidied up a bit, erased the phone messages, put the movie book on the shelves and made it up the stairs to bed. Just.
Hilde rang in the morning to say that the crisis for Peter and his family in Bangladesh was over.
‘Good news,’ I said.
‘How are you making out, Cliff?’
‘I’m okay. I need to speak to Frank. Is he around?’
Frank came on the line. I said, ‘What can you tell me about Vincent Gregory?’
‘What do you need to know and why?’
‘I’m looking into Lily’s murder.’
‘You’ve got no standing, mate.’
‘You think I care about that? Anyway, I’m working with someone who has got standing.’
That was stretching it, but at least it got past Frank’s first objection. He was silent for a while. Once a cop, always a cop. Frank hadn’t exactly been squeaky clean for the whole of his time in the force. Back in the seventies it was almost impossible to avoid a bit of this and a bit of that. Do a Nelson. Turn a blind eye, go with the flow, set a thief to catch a thief. Frank had never taken a dollar and he despised those who did, but there was still that thing called the police culture. In the past, Frank had given me information about ex-cops, some of whom had gravitated to my profession, but Gregory was a serving officer and Frank knew what pressures that implied.
‘You’d better tell me what you’ve got and maybe I can contribute something.’
‘I’ll have to think about that. Thanks. I’ll get back to you.’
‘Hey, Cliff-come on…’
‘Listen. Lily left me half of what she’s worth. That’s a lot and I never gave a thought to doing the same. I feel ratshit about that on top of everything else, and I reckon the police investigation’s a dud. I don’t give a flying fuck about Inspector Gregory’s reputation or his future or the New South Wales Police Service in general. Why should I? They scrubbed me for doing my job. I’ll find out some other way.’
I hung up on my best friend.
I had to get out of the house. I drove to the Redgum gym in Leichhardt and threw myself into a workout routine much more severe than usual-double sets on the machines, longer on the treadmill. I worked up a sweat and stuck at the free weights until I reached ‘fail’-when you can’t do another lift-something I usually avoid like the plague. Wesley Scott, the West Indian proprietor and trainer, gave me a massage. Deep tissue. Hurt like hell.
‘You’re strung tight, man,’ he said. ‘What’s troubling you?’
I told him with as few details as possible.
‘That’s tough. So you think putting yourself through this kinda pain is going to help?’
‘I’ll tell you something, Wes,’ I said as I rolled off the table. ‘I’m going to put some bugger through pain, no mistake.’
I showered and went home, denying myself the usual after-workout coffee in the Bar Napoli a few doors away. The activity had done me good. I went straight to the computer and began to look for Lily’s files. I didn’t find any current ones, just a couple of incomplete drafts of stories already published.
Lily could be secretive about her work, one of the reasons I never questioned her too closely. Had she been more so lately? I couldn’t remember. I got up and opened the wardrobe, thinking I’d better do something about the clothes. St Vincent de Paul seemed the best bet-Lily hadn’t gone in for Donna Karan power dressing. I took out the hanger holding the jacket and prepared to drop it over the back of the typing chair while I reached in for the next hanger. Something fell out of the jacket pocket-a packet of cigarettes. Like me, Lily had given up smoking years before. I hung the jacket back up, retrieved the packet from the floor and opened it. Hard pack. Twenty-three king size filter cigarettes. Two missing. Had she taken to the fags on the q.t.? I doubted it. But then I didn’t know she’d put me in her will.
The packet felt funny. I’d lapsed myself once or twice and had also bought them often enough for informants to know what they felt like, even though my own preference had been for rollies. I took the packet to the desk and shook it. Twenty-three cigarettes about two-thirds of their true length came out, then a layer of foil. Wedged in the bottom of the packet was a thumb drive.
Lily’s files were a chaos of notes, interview transcripts, downloaded material and draft paragraphs. How she honed them into the clear, insightful stories she produced was a mystery. The stuff bore her unmistakable imprint- frequent swearwords, wry asides and capitals for emphasis, the way she’d written in notes left for me and in her emails and postcards. I made a pot of coffee and sat down to work out what she’d been doing. One thing was clear: she’d kept a running record of the dates of the writing and research in reference to the deadlines she entered at the top of the files. This was all very recent work.
As always, Lily had been working on several stories at once. There appeared to be three-a piece about money laundering by a media personality, an investigation of a political figure suspected of running interference with the immigration authorities for a mate in the sex-slave business, and a publisher with a couple of current best-seller non-fiction books on his list, but no royalties paid to the writers or wages to his staff or the printers, and the publisher nowhere to be found.
I scratched the last one as being of interest only to the chattering classes and unlikely to involve the police, whose interest in literature is limited to say the least. The other two stories had distinct possibilities of a police connection. I scrolled through them, making notes on the dates, initials and financial details. Lily had told me that she used initials in the early stages of her investigations, partly for security purposes, partly because it amused her. She also said that she reversed and scrambled the initials which could be unscrambled by a key known only to herself. I’d laughed at her and told her she was bullshitting. She hadn’t contradicted me, but she’d winked and called me a naive gumshoe.
So I was left with two investigations of serious crimes and a jumble of initials which might relate directly to the people involved or might not. Probably not. The image of Lily winking came back to me in full force. She’d meant it. I dealt mostly with the obvious, she plumbed some dodgy depths. I copied the notes and the two files onto a disk and tried to see if Lily had accessed any emails via my computer. I knew her address and logged on. Nothing. Careful Lily, I thought, but you protected your work better than yourself, and I wasn’t there
…
I’d drunk three cups of strong black coffee and was a bit wired. I took the disk out of the computer and put it on the desk with the thumb drive. I was buzzing, connecting, jumping ahead of myself. There was an obvious way to flush out Lily’s killer, if it had anything to do with what she’d been working on-it had to have, didn’t it? — and
