by Garry Disher
He leaned over the desk and reached past Henri to scroll through the images. ‘This is the house. According to a neighbour, it belongs to a man named Edward Oberin.’
‘Oberin, Oberin. I’ve heard of him,’ Henri said, ‘but I’d always thought he was a fence, a back room kind of guy.’
‘Here we have Danielle knocking on his door. Sometime later, this man appeared.’
Le Page operated the zoom function until the face filled the screen, a dark force in the room. ‘I have no idea who that is,’ Henri said, flinching a little.
Le Page grunted. ‘You can put together one hundred and twenty thousand dollars?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Tomorrow morning you will gather this amount and wait for instructions.’
‘Christ, we’re not paying, are we?’
‘We need to get close,’ snarled Le Page, ‘if we want the bonds and the money.’
Henri Furneaux’s courage had been ebbing all day. Now it came creeping back. ‘Okay.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ Joe said, barging in and looking hot and bothered. Seeing Le Page there he blanched and retreated. ‘Sorry. I’ll come back.’
Le Page grabbed his wrist and yanked on it. ‘Sorry for what?’
Joe swallowed. ‘I think Danielle’s done a runner.’
Le Page didn’t care about that. He pointed at the monitor screen. ‘Do you know this man?’
Joe peered, recoiled. ‘Jesus, that’s Wyatt.’
‘Who is Wyatt?’
Joseph launched into a nervy explanation but, at the end of it, all Le Page had was a name and the configurations of a myth.
* * * *
25
Lydia was feverish overnight, tossing in pain, sometimes calling out. Wyatt went to her each time, stood watching. He didn’t want a dead body on his hands. He was also not sure that he trusted her. He was curious to find himself capable of a range of fugitive emotions, old, lost and new. Desire was one of them. She was hardly beautiful—in distress, her head lolling—but he was intensely aware of her.
Thursday morning saw him ragged with sleep loss. When she awoke he was observing her from a chair in a corner of the room. Her fever had passed, her colour was better. She croaked ‘Hello’ but then he saw her eyes close, her fingers clench, as the pain hit.
He stood over her and said nothing. She opened her eyes again. ‘What day is it?’
‘Thursday.’
She said, ‘My head still aches. Like it’s in the bone.’
‘The doctor will call again later today.’
Lydia patted the wound dressing with the slim fingers of her right hand. ’Tell me again what happened.’
‘I think you turned your head to face the window just as Eddie’s girlfriend pulled the trigger, so the bullet creased you. If you hadn’t, you’d be dead.’
Her gaze flickered past his face, taking in the room. She said, barely moving her lower jaw, ‘I need to eat and drink, but I feel if I move anything it’s going to hurt.’
‘Yes.’
Tears came into her eyes. ‘I need a bath. I stink.’
‘Eat and drink first.’
He fed her soup and sugary tea. Some of the fluids ran from the sides of her mouth and gathered in the hollow of her throat, to escape beneath her shirtfront, which rose and fell as she breathed. He mopped her dry unselfconsciously and all was silent bar the sounds of her throat and the spoon tapping her teeth.
He took the dishes to the kitchen and then he ran water into the bath. He returned to the bedroom in time to see her sit up, swing her legs out until her feet touched the floor, and reel, both hands going to her temples. He went to her and helped her to stand.
‘How are we going to do this?’
‘You’ll get undressed and into the bath and I’ll wait out here. Leave the door open. I need to see that you don’t faint.’
She looked at him and decided that she trusted him. ‘I need fresh clothes.’
‘I collected some from your house yesterday.’
She didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a kindness but she didn’t suppose it was. Like her, he was tall and thin; she could have borrowed his tracksuit pants and a T-shirt, even if she swam in them a little. She said, ‘Thank you.’
He walked her to the bath. He tested the water and turned off the tap. Her back to him, Lydia stepped out of her knickers. She grabbed the hem of the T-shirt and pulled it gingerly up over her face, her voice muffled as she said, ‘Ouch.’
Her trunk was slim and pale, the hair damp and limp on her neck, her spine knobbly. The skin on her back was creased here and there from tossing in bed all night. Buttocks and thighs, too. As a courtesy Wyatt stepped away from her and began to turn, so that when Lydia swayed and stumbled he was late getting to her. He caught and steadied her, helped her to step over the side of the bath, then settle into the water. Her skin was warm but the bath warmer, and he saw the fine hairs stand up from the temperature difference. She bent her knees to conceal herself and he turned to leave the room.
She stayed in the bath for thirty minutes. Now and then she ran the hot water and he could hear soapy splashes and long silences. During the silences she would sometimes call out, ‘Still alive.’
As he waited for her to finish, Wyatt brewed coffee and tried to place himself in Eddie Oberin’s shoes. Thinking that women were a constant in Eddie’s life, he went to the crack in the bathroom door and said, ‘Does Eddie have a sister?’
‘In Perth. They don’t speak.’
‘Female cousins?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Old girlfriends?’
‘Only about five hundred of them. You know what he’s like.’
Wyatt did. He also knew that Eddie Oberin was a creature of many habits, and exercising them probably accounted for how and where he’d met the shooter. ‘You didn’t know about the store manager?’
‘No, I swear.’
‘Anyway, she’s in the wind now,’ said Wyatt.
Lydia said nothing.
‘And Eddie never mentioned a club named Blue Poles?’
‘No.’
Splashing sounds, Lydia saying, after a pause, ‘Yesterday you said you saw Le Page at Eddie’s house.’
Wondering if she’d only just remembered it, or had some stake in the matter and needed to know what he knew, Wyatt said, ‘Yes.’
Silence.
‘If he followed the girl, they must suspect an inside job.’
‘Yes.’
Another pause. ‘It won’t be hard for them to learn Eddie’s name.’
‘No.’
‘And eventually mine.’
It was all true, so Wyatt didn’t say anything. He was about to move from the door when he thought of another question. ‘Did you and Eddie have a favourite holiday place?’
‘Wyatt, that was ten years ago.’
‘Where?’
‘He liked the Gold Coast, I liked the Sunshine Coast.’
Her voice saying so was a little lost and desolate, but Wyatt wasn’t ready to feel or express sympathy. She hadn’t known she would be left for dead by her ex-husband, but she might well have thought Wyatt would be. As he turned to go he heard angry splashing. He stood at the door. ‘Do you need help?’
Her voice was teary. ‘My hair.’
He understood. Her head wore a bandage, but she wanted to wash her hair. She needed his help and that was a final stroke of humiliation and vulnerability. She hated to be like that and just then she hated him. ‘Get dressed,’ he said, ‘and let me wash your hair over the basin.’
He waited and she relented. ‘You sure?’
‘Yes. Do you need help getting out?’
There was silence again. ‘Yes.’
He found her on her knees in the water, spine bowed and glistening, shoulder blades poking back as she braced her arms on each edge of the bath. He crouched and lifted her out in stages, first to a standing position and then, before she could recover and stiffen against him, out onto the
bathmat, where he mopped her with a towel.
He waited a moment while she rocked on her feet. Presently she recovered and began the gentle motions of drying her back. The bath sheet concealed all but her head and her slender calves.
‘Your clothes,’ he said, pointing to a pile on the white cane basket beside the basin.
‘Thanks,’ she muttered.
The room was scented and steamy. He supposed the scent was from his soap. He’d barely noticed it before.
He returned to his note pad and empty cup. Before he could brew fresh coffee, she called, ‘Ready.’
Sensations came to him as he washed her hair, sounds, images and textures. Perhaps he’d seen other women bent like this over a basin, although he was certain he’d never assisted them. Or perhaps his mother had done this when he was a child. To him? His sister? That was a long time ago and he didn’t know them anymore, or even if they were alive or dead. He didn’t trust his memories. He had no use for memories like these. He made himself concentrate on what he was doing with Lydia’s hair, the water and the shampoo and the rinsing off. But if this ever became a memory, he wouldn’t push it away.
‘Coffee?’ he said when he was finished.
She was patting her face with the towel, patting dry the damp bandage tinged now with blood. She was pale and in pain and he said, ‘I’ll call the doctor.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and fainted.
And so the long morning passed. This time he didn’t watch over her but fell into a deep sleep.
* * * *
26
In the CIU office, Lynette Rigby’s inspector was saying, ‘I want you to drop it.’
Rigby kept a damper on her feelings, which were anger, disappointment and sulkiness. ‘But boss—’
‘No wire taps, he said, ‘we don’t have the money for it. No search warrants, we don’t have the evidence. And no, you can’t have a couple of uniforms.’
‘These guys are up to something,’ Rigby muttered, shifting in the chair opposite his desk. Her bra didn’t fit; coffee burned like acid in her stomach. She loathed the guy’s family, their sunny smiles and well-adjusted personalities looking out at her from the picture frames on his desk.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said. ‘Plenty are. But their lawyer’s going to argue they were simply the victim of vehicle theft yesterday morning. There’s no evidence that a shipment of any kind was in the vehicle or that it was hijacked by professionals.’
‘They’re bent.’
‘I know they’re bent,’ the inspector said, ‘but we need evidence.’
‘How can I get evidence if you won’t authorise a wire tap or a search?’
‘Sergeant,’ the inspector said.
‘Sorry, sir.’
A glass-ceiling thing, Rigby thought. Bright women make their male colleagues nervous and envious.
‘I said no to everything yesterday,’ the inspector said, ‘and I’m giving you the same answer today. Blame your lefty pals in government. We’re short of money, time, equipment and manpower. And you want me to mount a full-scale search and surveillance on a couple of crooked jewellers? Get on with something that will bring results.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Rigby went to the ladies’ toilet, slipped her bra off through her sleeve and splashed water on her face. She returned to her office and put in a request to Interpol, anything they had on the French courier. Then she signed out an unmarked white Falcon and drove to High Street. Before long she picked up Henri Furneaux making the rounds of three banks, one on High Street, the others in Malvern and Toorak. The time was 10 a.m.
After tailing Furneaux back to his shop, she returned to the banks and flashed her ID and bluffed about warrants. The jeweller had made largish withdrawals from two banks, and asked to use his safe-deposit box at the third. She wondered how—or if—it related to the torching of his four-wheel-drive. Had he lost a shipment yesterday? Drugs? Guns? Jewellery? Maybe he needed to buy new stock? Or was he working with hard people who wanted their money back?
To hell with her boss. Watch and learn.
* * * *
Meanwhile Khandi had torn through the glove box, rear seats, floor and boot of the Commodore. Slamming back into the kitchen, she said, ‘No fucking street directory.’
Eddie crinkled his eyes at her through the smoke drifting from his cigarette. ‘So we steal one.’
But the Yarra Junction newsagent went on full alert when they walked into her shop, hovered over them, her hands on her hips. ‘Bitch,’ said Khandi, out on the footpath. ‘What now?’
‘Check on-line,’ Eddie said.
But all of the library’s computers were taken. ‘That’s just great,’ Khandi said.
Eddie hated it when she was like this. He fronted up to the main desk. ‘Got a Melways, by any chance?’
‘It can’t leave the building,’ the librarian said, reaching around to a shelf of telephone books and street directories.
‘No worries.’
With all of the main tables taken by the geriatric genealogists, they were forced to sit at a knee-high table in the kids’ section.
‘We need an open space,’ Khandi said, ‘with plenty of escape routes, near roads that will get us back here quickly.’
She flipped through the Melways in a kind of fury. She hated the library, the street directory and the general imposition of restrictions, and was generally pissed off at the effort everything was costing her. Finally she finger-stabbed the maps on a two-page spread. ‘Ringwood,’ she said. ‘Jacaranda Park. There’s a lake, footbridge, walking tracks, and it’s right on Whitehorse Road.’
Whitehorse Road became the Maroondah Highway and was one of the main routes through the eastern sprawl of Melbourne, eventually running out through farmland to the Yarra Valley. Khandi traced it with a hooked talon. ‘We can be back at the cabin in no time,’ she told Eddie. ‘Meanwhile, look at all the intersecting routes near the park: Warrandyte Road, Wantirna Road, Mount Dandenong Road, Whitehorse Road itself. They won’t know where the hell we’ve gone.’
Photocopying was twenty cents per page, A3 thirty cents. Fuck that: Khandi ripped out both maps, shoved them into her knickers and said, ‘Let’s go.’
They returned to the cabin for further planning, but first she wanted sex to release built-up tension. Then, moist and still amorous, she placed the creased pages on the greasy table and bumped hips with Eddie. ‘How do you see it, big boy?’
Eddie was staring at the maps. She watched him, appreciating his unshaven Hollywood look, and rubbed her tingling groin against him. His slender forefinger traced the paths, lake, barbecues, scout hall and parking areas. She waited. She’d already seen the answer.
‘We use motorbikes,’ Eddie said.
Khandi drew his face to her breasts, which were fifty per cent real. ‘Good thinking, Batman.’
Late morning they contacted Furneaux from a public phone outside the post office in the next town and gave him the instructions. ‘Ringwood? That’s way out in the boondocks.’
‘Seven this evening,’ Khandi said. ‘Come alone.’
‘You’re not getting the money until I see the bonds.’
‘You’re not seeing the bonds until I see the money,’ Khandi said.
‘Where in the park?’
‘The footbridge over the lake.’
After that it was about waiting. Khandi hated to wait.
* * * *
‘Ringwood,’ said Henri Furneaux, replacing the handset.
On the other side of his desk, Le Page was dead-eyed. ‘So?’
Henri shook his head. His world was old-money suburbs near the river. Ringwood to him was like a hellish foreign country, an endless tract of uninspired family homes, highways and used-car yards.
‘Where in Ringwood?’ said Joe.
Joseph Furneaux was a mess, his buck teeth prominent, his lips dry and his breath whistling, his eyes streaked red, his hair arranged in tufts and knots, all marks of guilt for leaving the back gate unlock
ed, not finding Danielle and being a general fuck-up. He needed to make amends. ‘I know Ringwood pretty well,’ he said. ‘Buy all my cars out that way.’
