I’ll have crowbars coming at me from all directions.
Fanfani saw the way I’d taken it and hastened to put the other side. ‘I know men who can protect you, watch places, follow people. Very useful men.’
I had to admit that did sound useful. The whole business had got very complicated and I needed time and more congenial surroundings to think it through. I stood up. ‘Thanks for the drink, Mr Fanfani. I’ll think over what you’ve told me.’
‘Think of me, Mr Hardy, and of my wife. We have suffered enough.’
‘You realise that none of this may connect up. It could all be coincidence and misunderstanding.’
Fanfani’s lean, eroded head nodded. ‘But I do not think so. And neither do you. Rory will give you my telephone numbers. Thank you for your time, Mr Hardy’
Coleman stood, too. He shook hands with Fanfani and ushered me out of the room. We walked down the passages and stairs and I caught glimpses of the bush. The late afternoon sky had darkened as if a storm was moving in. Mrs Fanfani didn’t appear and we let ourselves out.
‘What’re your thoughts?’ Coleman said as we walked on the circles towards front gate.
‘A very unhappy man,’ I said. ‘He just rang you, did he? Out of the blue?’
‘Yes,’ Coleman said. ‘I see what you’re getting at. No, he hasn’t had any wild theories over the years. No use of clairvoyants. None of that. He’s a very good man. He sounds bitter now, but he’s given thousands to the church.’
‘Uh huh. What was the trouble between him and the daughter? Anything specific, apart from the contraceptives?’
‘It was over a boy, of course. He was a student at a school near Angela’s. She went to the convent, of course. I don’t know how far it had gone but you heard him. We fathers of daughters… we transfer our own feelings… I’ve read a great deal about it. It’s very complicated.’
We stood on the side of the road. No sign of Richard or the Merc. ‘The cops checked out the boy?’
‘Of course. Exhaustively. He was born here but of Italian parents
‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘From the south?’
‘Yes.’
‘Give me strength.’
The Mercedes cruised up and Richard jumped out to open the back door for us. Coleman slid into the seat and I slammed the door.
‘Mind if I ride up front with you, Richard?’
‘Not at all, sir.’
‘I get carsick in the back sometimes,’ I said.
‘Very unpleasant for you, sir.’
‘Right. No good for the leather either.’
Thanking Rory Coleman was like trying to eat custard with a fork. It was all ‘god’s will’ and ‘god’s work’ and in the end ‘godspeed’. I drove away from Nuke Castle with a sense of relief and a desperate need for some good, honest sin. The nearest and cheapest sin was a pub in Sutherland I remembered from when I’d had a case in the area. A teenage runaway had been tormenting her parents by making raids on the house, leaving booby-traps and breaking things. The super-respectable parents hadn’t wanted the cops involved and I’d had to hang around the neighbourhood for a few weeks until I caught her.
The beer garden of this pub had been a perfect watching post and I’d soaked up a fair bit of expense account beer in the sun. It hadn’t been a bad job, especially when it turned out the kid had wanted to be caught anyway. I drove to the pub, which hadn’t changed much. I bought a small carafe of white wine and a couple of sandwiches and took them out into the beer garden. It was late in the afternoon and there were only three other drinkers, a man and a woman in deep conversation and an elderly man drinking champagne. They seemed to want to mind their own business and so did I. I sat where I’d sat before but the clear view to the house I’d staked out had gone. Trees and bushes had grown bigger with the passing years. I wondered if the family was still there. Probably not.
I figured I could drink the wine slowly, eat the sandwiches, sit and think a while and not be over the. 05 limit. A responsible citizen. It’s getting harder to be a sinner. It was cool in the beer garden but the storm I’d anticipated was blowing over the way it can in Sydney. The dark clouds were moving fast towards the eastern horizon and big patches of open, bright sky promised well for tomorrow. I chewed and swallowed, jotted some more notes, underlined things and crossed things out. It’s all a substitute for smoking. It doesn’t mean a thing.
By the time I’d finished the wine and food and visited the toilet and washed my face and rejected the idea of another drink, I had a few things more or less straight. Odds were, Fanfani’s caller was Renato Costi. He fitted the picture in some ways-Australian-born so maybe his Italian wasn’t so flash, a boozer, a bad boy. It was enough to go on, a star to steer by. I could ask Glen Withers to check him out. Against every good principle of investigation, I was building a case against him. I went on doing it as I drove back to Glebe. Maybe he had a record for intimidation and extortion. Maybe he’d been putting the squeeze on Bach and things had gone wrong-the ground shaking underfoot at just the wrong moment.
I drove badly, shaken myself by thoughts of desperate fathers, lovers and friends. Sometimes it seemed that my work threw me in at the deep end with all the floundering lovers and haters and left me to thrash around, trying to save a few of them, and myself. I realised that I was tired and not thinking anything useful. I occupied myself for the rest of the drive with impressions of Glen Withers-her smell and the texture of her skin, how it had felt as our bodies slapped together. That kept me occupied for the rest of the way to Glebe. I went into the house warmed by the recollections and looking forward to ringing her. The cat wasn’t around, there was no mail, nothing to distract me. I took out my notebook, stripped off my jacket and threw it in the direction of the hooks on the wall under the stairs. Sometimes I hit, sometimes I don’t. This time I missed. There was a dull thump and I remembered that I’d put my pistol in the pocket of the jacket as I left the car. Sloppy. I went to the phone. There was one message on the answering machine. I pushed play as I opened the notebook to look for Glen’s number.
My voice delivered the message, the beep sounded and then Helen’s voice came through: ‘Cliff. Helen. I’m sorry for the way I left it when we spoke. Give me a call, hey? I’d like to hear from you and the latest on the Jacobs case. Hope you’re having fun.’
I was reaching for the phone when a punch landed in the region of my kidneys and a kick collapsed my right knee. I went down and a voice said, ‘Fun’s over, Cliff.’
18
It’s strange the way physical attack affects you. Sometimes you just go under, recognising superior force’ and hoping to fight another day. Or you kick back against the same odds and take a bad beating. Other times, training, anger, desperation or something else cut in and you can’t be stopped. I was tired, stressed, in a confused state of sexual excitement and not ready to lie down for anyone. I came back up off the floor, ricked knee and all, and threw myself against Ralph Jacobs as if I wanted to hammer him through the wall.
I hit him hard and low in his softening gut. There was a whoosh as the air went out of him and I hit him again, higher, wilder, hurting my hand against bone. I yelled and used the pain and the momentum I had to butt him, elbow him, bring my knee up, all in a sequence that would have delighted Sergeant O’Malley. Ralph had no answer. He staggered back, bleeding and defensive and I hacked his feet out from under him with a sweep that brought him down. I fell over myself as the knee gave out.
This might have spoiled the effect except that I landed near where my jacket lay on the floor. I realised then that I hadn’t just missed the pegs-I’d hit Ralph as he waited under the stairs. So what? I pulled the Smith amp; Wesson out of the pocket and jammed it up into the blood flowing from Ralph’s nose.
‘You’re wrong, Ralphie,’ I said, ‘the fun’s just beginning. See these?’ I touched the cuts on my face. ‘Your boy with the crowbar gave them to me.’ I jiggled the gun. ‘How about I work you over a bit with this by way of
