and catching them in his mouth.
‘You done good,’ I said.
‘Should’ve thrown myself between you and the bullet.’
DS Angela Roberts came and told me that the.38 I’d used had had one decayed round in the chamber and that I was lucky to have got off a shot at all.
‘Always been lucky,’ I said.
Josephine Dart, dressed to the nines in silk and with impeccable makeup, tapped her way into the room on her stilettos. She perched on the bed like the late Princess Diana visiting a cancer ward.
‘Those people killed my husband, didn’t they?’ she said.
‘Almost certainly, but there’ll never be any proof.’
‘What did you think of the Myall cottage?’
‘Stimulating. Henry’s daughter thought the same.’
She stared at me, her violet eyes blinking. ‘You didn’t.’
‘Not exactly,’ I said.
My recovery was slow, with setbacks when the infections flared. I fretted at the slowness and the confinement and read the newspapers from first page to last. The Sydney basin aquifer remained sealed, but the drought broke in parts of the state and the city got a lot of rain. There were two pieces of good news: Tony Truscott won the WBA welterweight title, and the outplayed, discredited federal government was emphatically shown the door.
Megan came to collect me on my discharge from the hospital. I’d read a shelf load of books, bought in the Glebe and Newtown second-hand shops by Megan, and I donated them to the hospital library. I signed my name on a batch of forms. My second big hit on the health fund. Well, they’d had a clear run for a long time. I shook hands with the surgeon who’d removed the bullet that had lodged dangerously near my spine.
I said, ‘I hope you don’t ever need my services, Doctor, but if you do. .’
‘Mr Hardy,’ he said, ‘you need to lead a quieter life.’
