“Hold on!” She came around the desk and retrieved the picture. “I don’t just hand this stuff out willy-nilly.” She smiled and softened her voice. “Anyway, don’t steal my thunder.”
I nodded and waited while she looked through the papers. There wasn’t much to it and it didn’t take her long. She closed the file and looked up.
“I think this is the one you want. The girl was fifteen, Newcastle, May 1967. It was a bit out of the ordinary; the girl knew the man who raped her. She knew the woman he lived with better. And the girl reported the rape to the police herself. There was a short piece, no details, in the Newcastle paper. No reporting on the trial, that’s the law.”
“Yes. You’ve got the names though?”
“Uh-huh. The girl was Naomi Rouble, the man was Joseph Berrigan. The woman he lived with was Patricia Baker.”
I nodded. “That’s it. It makes sense in a crazy way. What about the photo?”
“The girl. It was taken when she came out of the police station – suppressed of course.” She slid it across the desk. The hair was wild and dishevelled, the eyes were puffy from crying and it was eleven long years ago, but the face was unmistakably that of Noni Tarelton.
13
By the time I’d thanked Sally Fitch, looked in on Tickener and cleared the building (no sight of the redhead), it was midday. The streets were crowded with people doing their lunchtime shopping and gawking. George Street was a solid wall of bodies coming the other way and I gave up the battle and ducked into a pub to drink my lunch and do some thinking. I had a steak with the wine and turned the case over in my mind. A constant stream of smooth-voiced chatter from the businessmen pushing out their waistcoats with expense account lunches didn’t help, but then there wasn’t much to think about. Noni Rouble-Tarelton was on the run with a man who’d raped her eleven years before. He’d killed one person since getting out of jail and savagely beaten two more, both women. Now it looked like he was a blackmailer. There were still questions on all this but a few answers were coming in; the bank robbery and fifty thousand dollars was part of it. On the ethical side was the question of when to let the police in. That troubled me. It always does.
I walked up George Street through the thinning ranks as the slaves went back to work. The rain had cleared away and a pale sunlight was dappling the footpaths and glinting on the oil slicks on the road. I hailed a cruising cab and said I wanted to go to La Perouse. The cabbie was a chunky, greying veteran who looked as if he’d been born behind a steering wheel. He was reluctant about the trip.
“It’ll cost you.”
“La Perouse,” I repeated. “You could get lucky.”
He grunted and dropped the flag. He was sour at the possibility of having to drive back to town without a fare, but every profession has its perils. I settled back and endured his company. The traffic was light and we made good time. Long Bay didn’t look too bad in the sunlight, especially with the new outside walls. Inside them it was a different matter. I directed the driver through La Perouse’s neglected streets and we found the pub where I’d drunk with Jimmy Sunday. I tipped the driver and he forced out some thanks before slamming the door harder than he needed to.
A dark woman was behind the bar. She was sitting on a stool smoking and reading a magazine. Apart from her the bar was empty. I went up and laid a five dollar note on the counter and ordered a middy. She pulled it.
“Jimmy Sunday around?” I asked before she could get her hand on the money. She drew on her cigarette and expelled smoke over my head.
“Might be.”
“Will you have one yourself?”
“Tah.” She flicked out a glass and slid it under the gin bottle in a smooth, practised movement. I waited while she splashed tonic into the glass, dropped in some ice and made change from the five. She took a sip of the drink and sighed appreciatively.
“You know Jimmy?” she said.
“A bit. I was drinking with him here the night before last. Thought I’d run into him again.”
“What’s your name?”
I told her. She drank some gin and pulled on the cigarette, it burned down to the filter and she dropped it at her feet. She was a big woman wearing a blouse and jeans. A packet of cigarettes was in the top pocket of the blouse resting on the shelf of her big, stiffly brassiered bosom. She pulled out the cigarettes and got another one going.
“Jimmy’s around. Could give ‘im a ring if you like.”
“Thanks.” I drank some beer while she went off to the telephone at the far end of the bar. I wandered over to the wall and looked at the sporting photographs that are a part of the decor of all genuine Australian pubs, symbolising some mystic connection between athleticism and alcohol. The pictures were mostly of racehorses, stretched out near the winning post and standing in the victory ring with flowers around their necks. One of the winning jockeys was an Aborigine but none of the proud owners was anything but true-blue Caucasian. There was a collection of boxing pictures and a cartoonist’s attempt at capturing the mystique of the Sands brothers: Dave, Alfie, Clem, George and Russell stood in a ring with their gloved hands clasped above their heads in the fighter’s victory salute. There was a close-up of dark little Elley Bennett landing one of his famous knockout punches on “Mustard” Coleman and another of Bobby Sinn, face wrinkled with concentration, picking off a bewildered Jimmy Carruthers with a classic straight left.
I turned when I heard the door to the bar slapping shut. I suppose I’d expected Sunday and had arranged my face in a grin but it slid away when I saw who’d come in and what they were doing. Ted Williams was slamming home the top bolt on the door. His companion was making shoo-ing gestures at the barmaid. She ducked under the bar and went out through a back door. I heard a key turn in its lock. Williams’ mate was an Aborigine, very dark and not young. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-six tall but he must have weighed fifteen stone. He had massive shoulders and a chest like a grizzly bear. He was wearing thongs, jeans and an outsize black T-shirt; his black, wavy hair was slicked down with water as if he’d got out of the shower in a hurry. Williams hadn’t changed a bit which meant that he was still a black Goliath. The only difference was that he’d left his smile in Redfern. I opened my mouth to say something but Williams cut me off.
“You said your name was Tickener mate. Now it’s Hardy. We don’t like gubbs who hang around bullshitting us, do we Tommy?”
The bulldozer shook his head and shuffled forward a few inches.
“No suh, wese don’t.”
I tried to smile but the joke wasn’t for me and my mouth was desert dry. I backed off towards the bar with my near-empty glass in my hand. I wished it was a gun. I wished I were somewhere else. Tommy looked me up and down and came forward again, this time with the light, balletic step of a trained fighter. His massive arms swung loose at his sides and he turned them over like a man cranking a car engine. The bar top ground hard into my spine and there was nowhere else to go.
“Who’re you?” I croaked. “I was expecting Jimmy Sunday.”
He grinned and slammed one fist into a palm.
“Jimmy’s busy,” he growled, “I come to take care of you meself.”
“You know Jimmy?” I was desperate, using Sunday’s name as a talisman.
He moved closer and from the way he moved I could tell that he wasn’t planning to waste any more breath on words. It wasn’t a negotiable situation. I wished I had Carlo’s blackjack. The glass in my hand felt as useless as a yo-yo. His eyes under heavy bushy brows were focused on my hands and feet the way every bar-room heavyweight knows to do. To hell with the look in the eyes – if you know your business that’s going to be fear. I slid along the bar just to stop myself from freezing up and to give him a moving target. But I had to stop somewhere and I did so where the bar met the wall. I let him get within punching distance and made a shaping-up gesture with about as much threat in it as a pas-de-deux. His punch came in hard and fast but he was a little
