forerunners of the tent and caravan cities that would spring up soon and last until April. It was after six o’clock when I reached Wollongong; I checked into a motel down near the beach and went for a swim. My body was winter pale and the water was icy cold. It was a brief visit to the beach. I went back to the motel, showered and changed and watched the evening news on TV. After a couple of beers and a barbecued steak at the pub opposite the motel I was ready to go to work.
Dr William Dempsey lived in one of the fashionable hillside suburbs of Wollongong. I spoke on the telephone to his wife, who was also a New Zealander, and easily intrigued by the story of her husband’s long lost brother. Dr Dempsey was lecturing at the university that evening and expected home soon after eight; I was invited for nine. As soon as I hung up I regretted that I hadn’t asked what subject he taught-in my experience physicists and historians are as different as Afrikaners and Bantus. I arrived on time, and a thirtyish woman with a well-dressed, good figure let me in and took me through to a room which had a big window occupying most of one wall. The house was well up, and in the day the window would be full of first-class ocean view.
She got me a Scotch and soda which was about three times too strong. She stood in the doorway looking agitated, her carefully prepared black hair was a bit astray.
‘I’m sorry he’s late, Mr Hardy. He’s never late as a rule. The meal’s ruined.’
There was a noise from the back of the house and she went off to deal with it. The room had some comfortable chairs, a TV set and a coffee table; there were magazines and books on the table and more books on the floor near one chair and a whole lot more in a big bookcase. I took a sip of the Scotch and went over to look- they were mostly novels and biographies, but here and there other books had been stuck in or lain across the top of the rows. These were studies of workplaces, unions and aspects of the labour movement. Some had Dempsey’s name in them and so did some of the novels. He could be a political scientist, economist or sociologist, it’s hard to tell these days, but the novels ruled out physics.
Mrs Dempsey, who’d introduced herself as Rosemary, came back carrying a Scotch that looked nearly as strong as mine. She was very edgy.
‘That was Graham, our eldest’, she said, Td promised him his father would come in and say goodnight, I don’t know what to do.’
‘Have a drink and sit down.’ She was in that distracted state that comes from listening to your own fears. An outside voice is welcome and usually obeyed. She sat down and sipped mechanically.
‘Have you rung the university?’
‘Yes, just before you arrived. He left the lecture theatre on time.’
‘Would he stop off on the way, for cigarettes, wine?’
She shook her head.
‘Might have had a breakdown.’
‘He’s more than an hour late? She looked at me as if I were an idiotic child. ‘If he had a breakdown he’d call the NRMA and he’d call me!’
‘Let’s give him a few minutes.’ I forced her to talk and learned that Dempsey was a senior lecturer in sociology. He had a PhD from the ANU and they’d been in Wollongong for five years. I sipped the Scotch and tried to think of more to say but her eyes were screaming at me. I got up.
‘Okay, I’ll go and have a look for him. I’m sort of retained by the family anyway.’
She told me that Dempsey was a tall, thin man with spectacles, who’d been wearing light drill trousers and an army-style shirt. The car was a red VW beetle. I told her I’d call as soon as I knew anything and advised her to get a friend over for support. She said she would. I drove the obvious route to the university and heard no sirens, saw no flashing red or blue lights. It was a Monday night, quiet, with four TV channels available.
Dempsey was teaching a special course in industrial sociology, his wife had told me, and most of the students were adults who’d be rushing off to their own families and activities. The lectures were held in a set of halls at the northern end of the campus. I located them on the campus map and parked in the roadway at the front. The lights in the grounds were modern and bright but the lecture halls were in darkness. The doors were heavy jobs of the self-locking kind that could be operated by the last person out. I walked around the building and found a car park about fifty yards back surround by a chest-high hedge. I saw the shape of a VW in the corner of the park and broke into a run.
William Dempsey was lying on the ground beside the car with his feet under the hedge. One side of his face was covered with blood and it had flowed up into his hair and down into his shirt, soaking into one of the pockets. He wasn’t wearing spectacles. He was breathing evenly and the blood still oozed from a cut running along where his hair was parted. I opened the car door; there was a set of keys in the ignition and a briefcase on the passenger seat. Light from the car washed over Dempsey and he groaned. I squatted down beside him and told him to lie still.
He lifted one hand and let it flop back, then he tried a leg. ‘Who’re you?’
I told him and said I was going to ring for an ambulance.
‘No, wait.’ His voice was weak but urgent. ‘Rosemary told me you’d be coming.’ He screwed up his eyes and looked at me. The eye on the blood-smeared side came into life as well as the other, which was a comfort. ‘Don’t call an ambulance, just help me.’
‘Nothing doing’, I said. ‘Your skull might be cracked, you could die in an hour. Lie back and wait.’
‘I won’t.’ Something in the way he said it, something petulant, almost childish and yet determined, made me listen to him. ‘If you go off I’ll get in that car and drive it.’
‘You wouldn’t get out of the car park.’
He lifted his head, groaned and let it fall back. His voice was weaker. ‘Hardy, if you ring my wife she’ll have a doctor waiting for us at home. If he says so, I’ll go to hospital; but I don’t want to if I don’t have to. This is political.’
The last word was spoken so softly I had to bend down to hear it.
‘This bashing, it’s political?’
‘Yes’, he whispered.
It sounded like everything I usually like to avoid. But he meant what he said enough to take a risk and incur some pain saying it. That was worth something, also I admired his taste in novels.
‘I’ll bring my car around, it’s bigger. Take it easy.’ I jogged back to the road and drove around behind the lecture halls to the car park. Dempsey clenched his teeth as I lifted him into the back seat but he didn’t make a sound. Moving him I noticed more blood, down one side of his chest and on his back. I got him more or less stretched out with something soft under his head. He closed his eyes and I lifted the unbloodied lid with a finger; it looked all right.
‘Bag’, he said.
I got his case from the VW and took the keys out of the lock. There was a crook-lock lying on the floor and I put it on and secured it, then I locked the car. I looked back at him before starting; he opened his eyes and tried to give me a wink. I thought about the strong Scotch I’d left on Rosemary Dempsey’s table, and hoped it would still be there. I drove out of the quiet campus and through the almost empty streets as smoothly as you can in a fifteen-year-old Falcon.
Dempsey’s house was unnaturally bright, the way houses are when there’s a crisis on. Rosemary Dempsey had a neighbour, a woman as well-turned-out as herself, with her and they were drinking coffee and smoking when I walked in. When I got into the light I saw that some of Dempsey’s blood had got on my shirt. Rosemary went white when she saw me.
‘Oh, Christ.’ She jumped up and knocked her coffee over, the dark liquid soaked the cloth and dripped on the floor. ‘What happened? Where is he?’
‘Calm down’, I said. ‘He’s in the car and he’s alive.’
We got him into the house and on to a divan on the sun porch. The neighbour turned out to be a nurse and she got busy cleaning Dempsey up and checking him over. He was conscious, but in a lot of pain and not making much sense.
‘He said there was a doctor you could contact’, I said.
Rosemary looked at the other woman. ‘Zelda?’
‘The cut needs stitching’, Zelda said.
‘I’ll call Archie.’ She went out quickly and I followed her through to the sitting room. My Scotch was sitting
