‘You’re right there. I do. Is there anything in this, really?’
‘I’m sick of being asked the same thing. Another minute and you’ll have me saying it’s a clear case of suicide, just for the variation. I simply don’t know, and I have to admit I’m a bit thrown. I’m not accustomed to dealing with policewomen.’
‘What’s the difference? You’re lying to me just as you’d lie to a man.’
I sipped some of the thin, bitter coffee. ‘That’s not true. I mean, it’s been known, but…’
‘This is getting tricky,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ve got a few things to follow up?’
‘One, at least.’
‘Why don’t you do that and get in touch with me again? I might have something more to add myself.’
That suited me. Her tone was neutral, not unfriendly. I fished out my Mastercard and waved it at the waitress. ‘You wouldn’t like to tell me what that something more might be?’
She smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Thank you for the lunch.’
10
In the old days if you booked into a motel, took off in the afternoon and didn’t come back by midday, the manager would open up the room and start inventorying your belongings. Not any more. At the Hillside they held a signed credit card slip and they could play it any way they chose. The manager gave me a casual wave as I drove in and went back to supervising the cleaning of the pool. Good move.
I lay on the bed with my brain in neutral and only my digestion working. My head ached and I thought about taking some painkillers but fell asleep before I could translate the thought into action. It was late afternoon before I woke up and I tried to tell myself that an interview with the client, an investigation of the subject’s possessions and a consultation with an officer of the law constituted a day’s work and entitled me to an evening with Lonesome Dove and the TV. I failed to convince myself. I showered, cleaned up the cuts on my face, changed my shirt and headed for Lambton.
Lambton is to Newcastle what Erskineville is to Sydney. Close in, old established, traditionally working class and by-passed by the trendies. I drove through the look-alike streets until I located Yorkshire Road which must have been named by someone stabbing a map of England with a pin. There were no moors, no pubs, no pits- nothing here for Freddy Trueman. Mark Roper’s place was a double-fronted fibro bungalow-iron roof, chimney at the side, garage at the rear-pretty much like the one next to it and the one next to that. As I got out of the car I was aware of two unrelated thoughts in my head: I’d never gone calling on a pest exterminator before, and I wondered what Glenys Withers was doing just then.
I stepped over the low gate and walked up the cracked cement path towards the front of the house. Weeds sprouted through the cracks. The porch was just a scrap of wood and fibro tacked onto the front of the place- post-war austerity. I went up the brick steps and the porch boards sagged under my weight. They also creaked loudly enough to make it unnecessary to knock on the door. I did, anyway, and it was opened by a tall, thin man with shoulder-length dark hair. He looked to be in his early twenties, wore a blue overall and smelled of beer and tobacco. He was visibly shaking which wouldn’t have concerned me overmuch except that he was holding a rifle and pointing it at my navel.
‘Are… are you Cliff Hardy?’
I had to consider this question. Maybe he’d shoot if I said I was and I knew a rifle bullet would travel faster over one and half metres than me.
I said, ‘Are you Mark Roper?’
His nod seemed to accentuate his general shakiness. He didn’t lower the weapon. He wasn’t a bad-looking young man except for the close set of his eyes. I raised my hands in a parody of the ‘hands up’ movement. I thought he might follow my hands with the muzzle of the rifle. Worth a try, but he didn’t do it. I took a step forward, putting me squarely within the doorframe. Sergeant O’Malley, my old army unarmed combat instructor would have been ashamed of me.
‘Stop,’ he said.
But he also moved back and O’Malley had taught me what to do when that happens. A backward moving person is halfway beaten. I twisted, came further forward, flattened myself against the wall and brought both hands down in hard-edged chops on the flexed bones and tendons of his forearms just above the wrists. He screamed with pain and dropped the rifle. I was ready for the movement and almost caught it cleanly. Bit of a fumble, but I got it on the half-volley and had the muzzle up under his chin before he could get any feeling back into his hands.
I pressed up into the tight skin of his jaw. ‘Let’s continue this discussion inside, Mr Roper,’ I said. ‘Anyone else around?’
He shook his head; the stretched skin scraped on the rifle muzzle and hurt him. Pain registered in his eyes and I believed him. He backed away down the passage and I eased off with the rifle. It was. 22 semi-automatic with the safety off. Fourteen shot magazine at a guess. Could do an awful lot of damage at close range. Roper knew it and as his chin came down and he looked into the business end of the barrel he shook so hard I thought his knees would buckle. I flipped the rifle up onto my shoulder.
‘I’m not going to shoot you,’ I said. ‘Let’s talk. Back here to the kitchen?’
He nodded and we moved down the passage, where damp had affected the pale green paint job, into the kind of chrome, laminex and lino kitchen I had had my first few thousand meals in. Except that my mum had kept the kitchen floor as clean as an operating table and this one was sticky with spilt food and drink. Roper slumped down into a chrome and plastic chair and I put the rifle in the corner by the sink and took up a position where I could stop him if he bolted for the door. But the confrontation had drained him and he didn’t look as if he had any bolting in him. Making a cup of coffee might be his limit.
‘Suppose you tell me what’s the big idea,’ I said. ‘Do you usually meet people at the door with a rifle?’
He shook his head and reached into the pocket of his overall. He took out a packet of Marlboros and a lighter and got one lit. He drew the smoke in deeply and the shaking began to diminish. I passed him a saucer from the sink and he flicked ash into it. It had been a deep first draw.
‘I know who you are,’ he said. ‘You’re a detective from Sydney. Horrie Jacobs hired you because he thinks I killed Mr Bach.’
I did a quick mental resume of the things that had happened so far. I couldn’t place Mark Roper anywhere in the chain of information. With nowhere else to look for him, I asked myself if he could have been one of the kids in the Commodore at the level crossing and concluded that he wasn’t. Too old. Wrong colouring. Puzzlement. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘You’re getting way ahead of me. You’re right about who I am and who I’m working for. But where did you get this other idea?’
‘I worked for Mr Bach. Now I’ve got his business. I’m the logical suspect, right?’
‘Let me tell you something. There’s no such thing as a logical suspect except in domestic killings. The logical suspect is the person who slept with the victim. Nine times out of ten that turns out to be the one who did it.’
He was most of the way through his Marlboro, listening hard. His skin was pale to the point of unhealthiness and he looked as if he had difficulty in maintaining an acceptable standard of grooming and hygiene. He made it, just, and I wondered about his domestic arrangements. The house bore all the traces of the parental home, gone to seed. Was Mark a loner, a middle-aged bachelor twenty years early, misfit and psychotic killer? Somehow, I couldn’t see it.
He lit another cigarette and his voice was a thin, strained whisper. ‘Are you saying I’m a homosexual? I’m not. I’ve got a girlfriend.’
I struggled to follow his logic, then I got it. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t implying anything like that. I don’t know anything about you, Mr Roper. And I don’t know enough about Oscar Bach.’
He snorted through the smoke. ‘He wasn’t a homo either, believe me, he wasn’t.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He opened his mouth as if he was going to speak more than two sentences. Then he half shut it. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘Nothing.’
I was getting impatient with him. This man knew something I didn’t and was being paid to find out. That
