what can you tell us?’
‘About what?’
‘About what you’ve been doing in Sydney.’
Problem time. I’d given Antonio Fanfani some sort of an undertaking which would be hard to fulfil if I had to spill my guts to the police now. But four more deaths changed things somewhat. I could feel Glen’s eyes on me. I tried to remember how much I’d told her about the Costis and couldn’t quite do it. Had I given her chapter and verse, all the names?
‘Cliff,’ she said. ‘I had to take it higher up when the locations and probable deaths started to tally up. You understand?’
I nodded. Withers gave us both a long look but Morton chose not to react. ‘We need information, Hardy,’ he said. ‘All we can get. Sergei Costi’s an important man in this town and prominent in the Italian community’
‘What about his son, Renato?’
Morton leaned forward. ‘Tell us.’
I told them, without giving away any more than I needed to. I told them about Mark Roper’s fear of Renato and about the phone call to Fanfani from someone whose Italian wasn’t so hot and who might have been drunk.
‘Ronny,’ Withers said. ‘Has to be.’
Glen shuffled papers and found what she wanted. ‘But he hasn’t come after Roper.’
Morton looked at me.
‘Roper’s not a very reliable character,’ I said. ‘Costi might have threatened him or blackmailed him. He mightn’t have told me about it. Might have hoped I’d get Ronny off his back in some way.’
‘Or,’ Morton said, ‘after he killed Schmidt he might’ve got scared and gone quiet. Perhaps he thought he’d squared the account, and going after Roper was unnecessary.’
Withers’ body language screamed impatience. He fidgeted, touched his tie knot, re-rolled a shirt sleeve. He wanted to go out and start clapping on handcuffs. Glen’s professional attitude was intact but she seemed to be reaching for some other level of understanding. ‘Could it be,’ she said slowly, ‘that Renato’s main concern was with his sister’s honour, as publicly perceived, and with Bach dead and Roper scared, the dishonour wouldn’t become known?’
I could see sense in that, and also danger. But what we were doing now threatened to blow things apart. An irrelevant thought came to me. ‘Where’s the box and the other stuff?’
‘Being analysed,’ Morton said. ‘Which brings us to the next point. We’ve put a stop on the work at the Ocean Street house and our blokes have had a quick look. They say there’s blood in the bathroom.’
20
The telephone closest to Morton rang and he answered it. He grunted several times. I looked at Glen who gave me a half-smile before playing with her notes again. Some ground to make up there, I thought. Morton put the phone down and shifted in his seat the way chairmen do when the meeting is almost over.
‘The Ocean Street house is owned by Sergei Costi,’ he said. ‘He ordered the renovations to be done.’
‘When he heard Cliff was poking around,’ Glen said.
Morton nodded. He seemed cool, calm and collected inside his flash uniform, even though it was starting to get warm in the the room. ‘As I say, this is very tricky in several directions. I’m declaring this group an informal task force. We have to keep a lid on things for as long as we can.’
‘I’m a civilian,’ I said. ‘You can’t declare me an anything, Les.’
‘I’m asking for your co-operation, Hardy. You’ve been the thin end of the wedge into this mess. If everything works out all right, the community will be in your debt.’
‘You’re a politician.’
‘I’m an Assistant Commissioner of Police,’ Morton said. ‘If I weren’t a politician, I’d be a Senior Constable in Woop Woop. I also want to appeal to your better instincts. This community has been through a lot-the earthquake, the bus crash up north-it’s under strain and doesn’t need any more bad news. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to cover anything up, I just don’t want rumours, and reporters going off half-cocked and citizens getting scared.’
‘I’ll play’ I said. ‘But I have to tell you that I’ve got a commitment to a client to let him talk to the man who killed Oscar Bach. He’s hoping for the sort of information the Senior Sergeant here was talking about before.’
‘Noted,’ Morton said. ‘We’ll see what we can do. For now, I want you, Senior Sergeant, to locate the Costi girl and have a talk with her. We need to know whether she told her brother about what had happened and how he reacted.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Glen said.
‘I’m going to tackle Sergei. Not directly, of course. I’ll come at him through a few of our mutual acquaintances. For the moment, we leave Renato Costi alone, beyond making sure we know where he is.’
‘Do we know that now?’ I said.
Morton looked at Withers who shook his head. ‘It’s being seen to,’ he said.
‘Right.’ Morton half-rose from his chair and then sat back. ‘You don’t look happy, Mr Hardy.’
‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘What do you expect me to do while you’re all running around being official?’
‘I want you to stay close to Detective Inspector Withers. He’s going out to supervise the work at Ocean Street. I think you might find that interesting.’
I annoyed Withers by insisting on reclaiming my pistol at the desk and strapping it on. To my surprise, Morton accompanied us to the car park and shook hands with me before going about his business. The drive to Dudley wasn’t the most comfortable I’d ever taken. I tried to think whether I’d had any dealings with the fathers of women I’d been involved with since I was about eighteen, and couldn’t come up with any. We exchanged a few grunts about the weather and Morton’s style of doing things. As if by mutual agreement, neither of us mentioned Glen, but she was in the minds of both of us. Withers had freshened himself up a bit and I fancied there was a slight tang of whisky about him. Very slight. We sat in the back of the car and let a constable do the driving.
I was under no illusions as to why I was accompanying Withers-Morton had teamed us up to prevent me going off and doing anything on my own. Withers stared out the window. He sighed and turned his head towards me. ‘I’m three years from my pension,’ he said too quietly for the driver, a youth who looked fresh from the Academy, to hear.
‘Good for you.’
‘I don’t want anything to fuck up.’
‘Understandable.’
‘Do you know what I’m saying?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
Another sigh. ‘Sergei Costi’s been around for a long time. He’s had his fingers in a lot of pies.’
‘Business is like that,’ I said. ‘I’m a small businessman myself.’
‘Don’t play dumb with me, Hardy,’ Withers hissed. ‘You know what I’m driving at.’
‘I’m a bit slow, Ted. Spell it out for me.’
‘It wouldn’t be easy to squeeze Costi hard- he’d be able to squeeze back.’
‘What about Ronny?’
‘With that mob-same thing. Hurt one, you hurt ‘em all. I’m worried.’
‘For your pension?’
‘Yeah, but not only that.’ He touched his shirt pocket again with the same result as before. ‘Shit, I stopped smoking a couple of weeks back. Glen’s idea. I dunno… I can’t seem to think straight since.’
The name had been spoken and it seemed to break some kind of knot in Withers. He tapped the constable on the shoulder, botted a cigarette from him and lit up. ‘Jesus, that’s better. Turn on the radio, son, and keep yourself amused. Me and Mr Hardy are talking old farts’ stuff back here.’
The radio came on and Withers spoke quickly and urgently. He was worried, he said, about Glen. If things got sticky between the police and Sergei Costi it was more than likely that Costi would go down. He would
