bush location. No girls, no boys, no drink, no drugs. Featherstone was edgy about it, but when he heard that a pitch from another management group had fallen on deaf ears, he agreed to go along.
Daniel Murphy died six weeks after our first interview. I’d seen him a few times subsequently, did a bit of ball collecting. Cameron contacted me when his father died and I went up there and helped him with the burial. We put Daniel Murphy deep in the ground in the national park at a place where the birds sing and the insects buzz and the leaves fall softly.
Worst case scenario
Come on, Cliff,’ Lily said, ‘tell me about your worst case, your worst cock-up.’
‘Why?’
‘Confession’s good for the soul.’
‘I don’t have a soul.’
‘Neither do I. Tell me anyway.’
Lily Truscott and I are partners, sort of. Separate houses-Glebe and Greenwich-and we’re together in one or another by arrangement dictated by work. Lily is a journalist and often out of Sydney. My work can take me anywhere at any time with very little notice, but we were together in Glebe one evening, just talking, drinking a bit. The case was a long time ago and the scars had healed, so I told her about it.
I’d cleaned the desk in my Darlinghurst office, not that there was much to clean, when the knock came on the door. A Mormon, I thought, or a JW or an SDA. They’re
everywhere. I needed a sign: NO JUNK MAIL-NO GOD SQUAD.
I got up to repel the invader at the threshold. I opened the door to find a man who certainly didn’t have a Pentecostal look about him. He was casually dressed in jeans and a flannie, with sneakers. He was tall, a little soft-looking, with thin fair hair. His hand came out tentatively.
‘Mr Hardy, my name is John Turner. Mario Ongarello suggested I see you.’
‘I know Mario, known him for years. Please come in, Mr Turner.’
Mario was a florist at the Cross. Way back, my then wife, Cyn, was in St Vincent’s with encephalitis and complications. I bought flowers every couple of days and struck up a friendship with Mario. Cyn recovered. Maybe the flowers helped. Anyway, over the years we’d have a drink together, talk boxing, disagree about soccer versus rugby. Good bloke, apart from that, but I’d never expected anyone in his line of work to present me with a client.
Turner stepped into the office, looked around briefly and took the chair I pointed to. He put his hands on the desk as if to steady himself.
I went behind my desk, opened a notebook, picked up a pen. Just props.
‘What’s the problem?’
He took a few seconds to answer. ‘I’ll try to be as clear and concise as I can,’ he said. ‘My wife died four years ago. She drove her car off the Great Ocean Road down in Victoria. D’you know it?’
‘I was there once a long time back. Dangerous then.’
‘It still is, especially if you drive a high-powered car at speed and haven’t quite got the skill to go with it. Paula drove a Porsche. The car went through the rail and down into the water. It was winter and the sea was wild. The car, what was left of it, washed up, but Paula’s body was never found.’
‘Like Harold Holt.’
‘What? Yes, I suppose, something similar.’
Prime Minister Holt had vanished in the surf at Cheviot Beach in 1967-quite a long way east of where he was talking about. I was young at the time and barely remembered it, but the event was regularly revived in the media on the anniversary. It’d be well and truly history to him, but it’s always worthwhile to test a potential client’s grasp. Politically incorrect, but who cares? I guessed his age at forty-max.
He went on. ‘Paula was a wealthy woman. She was a little older than me and she’d built up a sporting goods consultancy business. She negotiated with the management of sports stars for their endorsements and helped to organise the manufacture of equipment bearing their names. All done overseas on the cheap, of course. Then she was involved in handling the importation, the advertising and distribution.’
‘It sounds lucrative.’
He nodded. ‘Very. But she worked incredibly hard to get it that way. She was a triathlete in her younger days and she had the contacts and the respect-both very important in that business.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘I worked for her. I had the qualifications as well-a business degree and I’d swum competitively at a high level. I worked hard, too, and we… clicked. We appreciated each other’s abilities. We married. Standard stuff-boss marries worker, except in reverse, gender-wise. When everything was running smoothly, she… we began to have fun-holidays, beach house, the Porsche for her, an Audi for me. She was thinking of branching out into wine tourism. And so the trip to Victoria on her own-I hate the cold. It was a new challenge.’
I nodded. I’d always tried to avoid new challenges, finding the old and present ones quite enough
‘Paula’s will left me very well provided for. The house, the consultancy in its entirety. There were no children. Her mother was still alive but they’d had a falling out years back and hadn’t had any contact, although Paula knew where she lived-in Darlinghurst. There was no mention of her in the will. I ran the business for a while but gradually eased out of it and sold it eventually. There were cashed-up bidders, and I judged that it had needed Paula’s special touch. I’m taking a long time to get to the point, aren’t I?’
He smiled and his bland, composed face came alive. Easy to see why the boss’d go for him. There was charm in the smile. He reminded me of an actor whose name I couldn’t quite call to mind-someone who could play on the emotions with a look.
‘Take the time you need.’
‘When the business was sold it was worth less than I’d thought. There were… encumbrances-outstanding debts and loans that were hard to trace. The house carried a bigger mortgage than I’d expected. I admit I didn’t try too hard or get my people to pursue it. I had enough. Plenty. I began to take an interest in the stock market and did pretty well. Do I sound cold?’
He did, a bit, but you have to cut a potential client some slack. ‘I wouldn’t say so necessarily, Mr Turner. You sound sane and sensible. Grief has its place, I guess, but it never did anyone any good in the long run. After a while it’s mostly just self-pity.’
‘True. I was very fond of Paula and we got along well, but it was never a grand passion. Anyway, as I say, I soldiered on. Then just last week I happened to see in the paper that Paula’s mother had died. I’d never met her, you understand, but the name and the address matched. I have a lawyer friend-he made discreet enquiries. She suicided apparently and left quite a bit of money and instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes scattered from Tom Ugly’s Bridge over the Georges River-she and Paula had lived in Sylvania when it wasn’t as expensive as it is now. She’d made arrangements in advance with a funeral parlour.’
He stopped talking and drew a breath. ‘Sorry I’m still being so long-winded.’
‘Don’t be. Better to get the details upfront. And it’s interesting-the Tom Ugly’s touch.’
‘It gets more interesting. I don’t know why, but I found out when the cremation was to take place and I went along. I never got to say goodbye to Paula, so I suppose I was sort of filling in that gap in a funny way. Well, I was the only person there and I bought a wreath on the way, but there was another wreath. I mean, she, Claudia Ramanascus, didn’t know anyone. She didn’t know her neighbours. She was dead in the flat for a week before anybody
‘You’re saying?’
‘The wreath had to be from Paula. I know it’s a guess, an assumption, but as I see it there’s no other possibility.’
I could have told him there were always other possibilities, but the story interested me too much. I doodled on the pad, giving him time to collect himself.
‘The wreath came from Mr Ongarello’s shop down the road from here,’ he said finally. ‘I went to see him and
