communities in the area or vigorous discounting policies. I’d hung around the centre at various times of the day and night poking my nose in where it wasn’t welcome. The Vietnamese couple in the hot bread shop liked me because I praised their croissants; the guy in the sporting goods store liked me because he was a boxing fan and we shot the shit together. Another on my side was Grant, the young man who collected the supermarket trolleys and who was thinking of doing the private enquiry agents course at TAFE, and hung on my every word and gesture.
The Braithwaite guards hated my guts. I’d annoyed them by insisting on inspecting all entrances and exits and running checks on some of the shops’ barcode alarm devices. I’d also made a few minor changes to the security arrangements. Just the night before, a fat guy who bulged in ugly fashion out of his grey and blue uniform told me to get lost when I asked him for a copy of his inspection itinerary. I showed him the pass and it only seemed to make him angrier.
‘What’s your problem, mate?’ I said. ‘We’re both just trying to do a job here.’
He gave me two fingers and stalked off with as much dignity as you can muster when you’re twenty kilos overweight. I used the administration’s computer to get his name-Roger Mason-and the times he was on duty. The computer threw up a picture of him in all his jowly, red-haired, freckled ugliness. Perhaps that was enough to make him angry.
The Christmas push was well underway when I showed up at the centre in the middle of a Tuesday morning that happened to be a pupil-free day for the local high schools. I didn’t think it likely that there was anything organised among the younger set, but I’d seen several groups of teenagers sporting some of the insignia of gangdom-reversed caps, earrings, studded jackets-and I reckoned that if trouble was going to come from that quarter a non-school day might provide the spark.
I mooched around the centre, calling in here and there, keeping an eye open for pickpockets and shoplifters, although they tell me the experts have got these occupations down to a fine, virtually undetectable with the naked eye, art. I saw nothing suspicious and if there was someone casing the hi-fi and video store with a view to staging a raid, I couldn’t spot it. The day was warm and the airconditioning was working hard. I rambled through the heat in the car park and was grateful for the cool of the interior. By midday, despite three cups of coffee, I was almost asleep when it happened. I heard shouts and breaking glass from a point about as far from where I was in the centre as it was possible to be. I sprinted towards the sound.
Glass was still breaking and women were screaming as I rounded a corner. About twenty youths were fighting in the middle of the concourse, throwing punches, wrestling and hurling bottles at each other. The windows of the hardware store, the beauty salon and the pet shop were smashed. Several of the youths had grabbed supermarket, trolleys and were using them like battering rams against their opponents. A big denim-clad type with a polka-dotted bandanna around his head was bellowing like a berserker as he lifted trolleys and threw them at the reinforced glass doors of the supermarket, which had apparently been closed and locked when the trouble started.
I waded in, breaking struggling kids apart with short punches and elbow work, tripping them and shouting at them to pack it in. There wasn’t as much resistance as I expected and I eventually confronted the berserker who had hurt his hand throwing a trolley. Nevertheless, he wrenched a pole from the collapsed awning of the pet shop and came at me swinging. I waited for him with my feet well spread and my body balanced. His wild swing went over my head and he made the mistake of trying to hang on to the pole. I jolted him the ribs, collapsed his right knee with a kick and thought he was finished. I turned to take on a kid squirting paint from an aerosol can and would have lost my head if it hadn’t been for Grant, the aspiring private enquiry agent.
The one I’d flattened had taken off his bandanna, wrapped it around one end of a metre-long shard of plate glass, and was coming at me on his gimpy leg like a crippled but deadly assassin. Grant cut a swathe through retreating battlers who were running out of energy fast and planted his right foot solidly in the lower back of my would-be executioner. The glass flew from his hand as he skidded across the tiled surface, now wet with blood and water spilling from broken fish tanks in the pet shop. I was about to thank Grant when a trolley propelled at speed caught me in the kidneys and sent me flying.
I crashed into the bench beside the escalator and banged my head against an arm rest as the wind left me in a rush. I lay on the ground fighting for breath while I watched, with dimmed vision, the invaders retreat before a belated, baton-wielding charge by Mason, the fat Braithwaite guard. I saw Grant bend down and unwrap the spotted bandanna from around what was left of the piece of glass as its owner limped away. If the bandanna was a trophy, he’d earned it.
Grant hurried over to help me and I thanked him as I came out of my fug. Mason stood among the debris and looked accusingly at me. For a man who’d arrived full of fight he was amazingly unrumpled and his uniform was innocent of the underarm sweat patches it usually displayed. There’d been some minor looting from the window of the hardware store, power tools mostly, but the greatest damage was the breakage inside the pet shop, the broken windows and some trashing of pot plants, rubbish bins and supermarket trolleys.
Mason supervised the clean-up efficiently enough. I put in a good word for Grant with the supermarket manager and went to the medical clinic to get some painkillers for my throbbing head. While I was waiting Grant turned up in need of a dressing for a cut on his hand. He had the bandanna wrapped around his fist and was looking pale.
‘I know that guy, Mr Hardy,’ he said.
‘Cliff. What guy?’
‘The one with the bit of glass. His name’s Lance Lee. He was caught shoplifting in the supermarket the day it opened. A guard let him go with a reprimand. He’s a bad guy-does and deals drugs, steals cars, bashes people…’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
He shook his head. ‘But I can find out.’
‘Safely?’
‘Sure.’
‘If you can do it safely that’d be a big help. But keep your distance. Don’t put yourself in it.’
A nurse arrived with a bandage for him and some Panadol for me. She unwrapped the dirty bandanna, cleaned and sterilised Grant’s cut, said there was a piece of glass in it and produced some tweezers. She probed. It must have hurt and he took it well.
Half an hour later I was sitting in a room in the administration area reviewing tapes from the centre’s several closed-circuit video cameras. I’d had these relocated from their existing positions, which hadn’t changed since they were installed. The original positioning hadn’t looked good enough to me. The first few tapes showed nothing of interest, but then one brought me to full alert. It was of an area near a rear entrance, somewhat shielded off from normal view. The picture quality was good and I watched Mason conferring with Lance Lee and one of the other youths. He gesticulated, pointed and made throwing motions, clearly giving instructions on what was to happen where.
‘Got you, you bastard,’ I said.
Then Mason showed the pair something which I couldn’t see. This was state-of-the-art equipment. I froze the frame and enhanced the picture until I could make out the detail. When the enlarged image came into sharp focus I could see that Mason had a copy of the photograph that had been taken for my security pass. It was a good likeness. Mason indicated my height by holding his hand up at about the level of Lance Lee’s head. Close enough. Lee and the other kid nodded. Lee showed decayed teeth in a grin, took his bandanna from his pocket and tied it around his head. He slammed his right fist into his cupped left palm. I knew how he felt-now it was personal.
I commandeered the tape of the confab between Mason and the two rioters and one showing the fracas in progress. There were several courses of action open to me. I could take the evidence to Braithwaite or to Brian Morgan or Tabitha Miles or all three. It was a fair bet that with Mason out of the picture the trouble would stop, but I couldn’t believe that the slob was running an agenda of his own. What was really important was to find out who was behind him and why.
The security roster told me that Mason’s shift ended at 3 pm. I was about to visit a friend who is a video expert when Tabitha Miles cornered me on my way to the car park.
‘You don’t seem to be making much progress, Mr Hardy,’ she said. ‘That brawl this morning probably drove away thousands of dollars of business.’
I was in no mood to be reproached. I nodded. ‘Could have. That was certainly the intention. That and
