be hard to fight and harder still to abduct. I didn’t have an ethics problem; the drug laws are stupid and a bit more grass on the market wouldn’t make any difference.
‘All right, Kezza,’ I said. ‘But I’m not letting you out of my sight until you front up in Sydney.’
‘Glad to have you along, Hardy.’
I should’ve taken more notice of that remark.
I spent the rest of that day and the night at Pike’s acres. His crop was planted over a wide area in small patches with a fair amount of tree cover. I assumed this was to beat air surveillance but Kerry said that was going out of fashion. ‘Too expensive, what with insurance liability and all that.’
I slept in the Land Rover and watched the harvesting get underway the next day. Pike’s mates Frank and Vince clearly knew what they were doing and he took his lead from them. They stripped the plants of leaves before chopping them down. Then they hung the stalks with the buds attached in a shed to dry. Some of the leaf was kept but not much. It sounds easy, but it wasn’t; they worked under a hot sun and got covered in dust and resin and were bothered by flies and other insects. They were earning their money.
With the crop in I thought Vince and Frank might take off but they didn’t. They hung around, drinking beer, smoking joints and checking on the drying. All three were very nervous and so was I. After three days they judged the stuff was ready and they collected the buds. It was all very professional; the best buds went into two large garbage bags and the rough stuff was mixed in with some leaf.
‘This is called kif,’ Vince explained. ‘It’s shit stuff but there’s a market for it. We’ve got a bit of the good stuff for personal consumption. Wanna try it, Cliff?’
‘I’ve tried it,’ I said. ‘Give me a single malt any day.’
‘Peasant,’ Frank said, but he grinned. Kerry had told them who I was and what I was about and they tolerated me.
The night after the packing was over I found out what Kerry had meant about me being welcome. Four men invaded the place. They were armed with bike chains. Vince had been keeping watch and his shrill whistle sent Kerry and Frank into action. They broke out some hard hats and axe handles and switched on a floodlight. The invaders, probably expecting to work in the dark against three men, found themselves up against four under strong light. Pike could always fight like a threshing machine and Vince and Frank were very willing. A bike chain is scary but not very effective. We waded into them and whacked them around the knees and the head. Pike went berserk and I had to dig my axe handle into his balls to stop him killing one of the attackers. Two of them ended up stunned and bleeding and we let the other two drag them away. Frank had a nasty gash on his arm. I had a bruised shoulder where a chain had caught me.
‘Good stoush,’ Vince said. ‘You pulled your weight, Cliff.’
Kerry glowered at me, clutching his groin. ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’
I chucked the axe handle away. ‘I want you in court in Sydney testifying, not in the dock up here for murder.’
The buyer came late the next day and he and Kerry settled their business very quickly. The buyer sampled the buds and sniffed at the kif. Money changed hands but no hands were shaken. Kerry paid off Vince, who agreed to look after the dog, and Frank, and that left him and me and a bundle of notes the size of half a brick. I used my mobile to book a flight to Sydney from Lismore at 6.30 am.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Pike said. ‘Why so early?’
‘Bird and worm,’ I said.
It hadn’t escaped my notice that he’d left his ute parked at the top of a slope that ran down to pick up the track into his property a hundred metres away from the house. He went to a shed and pulled out a big tarp.
‘Better cover ‘er up. Can’t tell how long I’ll be gone.’
I nodded and offered to help but he waved me away. ‘Go and have a swim in the creek. Be beaut about now.’
I grabbed a ratty towel from the outhouse bathroom and jogged away in the direction of the creek. As soon as I was out of sight I worked my way back close enough to watch Kerry make his plans.
We microwaved a pizza and had a few drinks to celebrate the closure of business and I pretended to be sleepy drunk.
Pike said, ‘I’ll set an alarm.’
I settled down fully clothed under a light blanket and got into a good snoring rhythm. At 2 am Pike checked on me and crept out of the house. I followed him and saw him retrieve something from the dog kennel. He moved quietly for such a big bloke working in the dark. He stripped the tarp from the ute and got in the cab, leaving the door open. Careful man-he’d killed the interior light.
I hit the floodlight switch and walked towards the ute with an axe handle in my fist.
Pike jumped down with a bike chain. ‘I’m going, Hardy.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘I warned you.’ He swung the chain. ‘Don’t try to stop me.’
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the money.’
He scrambled back into the ute, fumbled around and swore as he scattered newspaper on the ground. ‘You bastard.’
I moved closer. ‘We can go at it if you like. You might win but that won’t get you the money. Come along quietly and do what you have to do and I’ll hand it all over to you as soon as you’ve said your piece.’
Pike wasn’t stupid and it was a fair bet that he’d made enough to pay his debts and have something over. He threw the bike chain away and collected his bag from the ute.
‘That’s two to you, Hardy. How d’you reckon round three’ll turn out?’
‘I wonder,’ I said.
THE PEARL
Do you know much about the art world, Mr Hardy?’
‘Less than nothing,’ I said.
I was talking with Mr Charles Stevenson in his Vaucluse house. Mr Stevenson had had something stolen and wanted it back. Getting stolen items back is something I do know about. He led me through a few big rooms which let in views of the water at a million dollars a square metre, to a softly lit chamber near the back of the big house. Paintings hung on the walls, lots of paintings. Too many.
‘I’m a collector,’ he said. ‘Occasionally I sell in order to buy something I want more than that I’m selling. You understand?’
‘I guess so. I once traded up from a single fin to a thruster.’
Stevenson raised an enquiring eyebrow. He was in his fifties, tall and slender with a mane of white hair and a nifty little white goatee. He wore a dark suit with a tie and appeared to be as comfortable dressed that way as I was in drill slacks, an open-neck shirt and a linen jacket. The jacket was advertised as ‘unstructured’-read crumpled.
‘Surfboards,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes. Now if you’ll come over here.’ He drifted across the parquet floor to a wall that was less cluttered than the others. In fact it held only one painting. Beside the painting was a mounting where something else had been hung but it wasn’t there now. Painting to me means Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, a bit of Streeton and Tom Roberts, and the odd Brett Whiteley, so that initially I paid more attention to the vacant space than the painting.
‘It’s a Galliard,’ he said, ‘perhaps his best.’
It was my turn to say, ‘Ah.’ The painting was of a woman wearing a black velvet dress. She was pale and beautiful with dark hair, sitting very straight in an upholstered chair. The neckline of the dress came to just above her nipples and sitting there against her glowing skin was a pearl suspended on a black ribbon. The woman was
