by Peter Corris
‘Yes.’
‘I believe he had a conversation with Daniel Roberts in the Fisherman’s Rest hotel.’
That’s how it is in these small places. You can’t scratch yourself without someone noticing and passing the information on to somebody else. ‘Thank you. Where would I find Mr Roberts?’
‘You’ll find him in the Fisherman’s Rest hotel.’ Her voice was full of regret and disapproval.
I thanked her and rang off. Bingara town centre essentially consisted of a street running north-south crossed by two running east-west. I got out of the car, looked east and saw the hotel on the corner a block away. It was 11 a.m. on a hot day and the Fisherman’s Rest hotel didn’t sound like a bad port of call. I drove the block, parked in a skerrick of shade, and crossed the street to the pub. Its design was classical-two-storeyed with a wide balcony on the top level supported by skinny uprights. On a busy hot night the drinkers would spill out onto the tiled area under the balcony, lean on the posts and shoot the shit. But there was no-one out there now. The drinkers were all inside, sensibly sheltering from the midday sun.
I went in, took off my sunglasses and let my eyes adjust to the light. There’s something harmonious about an Australian country pub if the licensee gets it right. The parts all fit together- the tin and wood on the bar, the mottled mirror behind the spirits bottles, the blackboard with the counter lunch menu chalked up. There were four men in the bar lined up on stools with beers in front of them. Two were Aborigines, two were white men. The barmaid was middle-aged, fat, blonde and looked ready to cope with anything that came at her from the other side of the bar. She had an unlit cigarette in her mouth that jiggled when she spoke.
‘Morning. What can I do you for?’
One of the drinkers snorted his amusement at a greeting he must have heard a thousand times before.
‘Middy of Reschs, thanks. No, make it a schooner. She’s warm outside.’
She drew the beer expertly. ‘You’re a bit early for the holiday season. Mind you, we can get some lovely weather this time of year.’
I sipped the beer, the best drink on earth on a hot day and not so bad on a cold one. ‘I believe you. It’s a great spot. But I’m working.’
It suited me to bait her a little. In places like this the ice needed breaking and it was better that you answered questions rather than volunteer information. I was betting that the barmaid had had all the conversations she’d ever need to have with the four men present. I shot them a quick look as I worked on the schooner. They wore the air of absolutely comfortable regulars whose every word and gesture would be familiar and hold no surprises. The barmaid was a talker and needed stimulation. She reached under the counter, found two saucers, gave them a wipe with her cloth and took a couple of packets of beer nuts from the rack near the cigarettes. The drinkers watched her with interest. This was evidently something unusual. She spilled nuts into the saucers, placed the fullest one for the four locals to share and put the other in front of me.
‘Help yourself.’
‘Thanks.’ I took a few nuts and chewed them. They were stale but I didn’t let on.
‘You going to want lunch? We’ve got good fish, steak if you prefer.’
‘Yes, maybe.’ A noisy truck went by outside and I dropped my voice. ‘Would one of these blokes be Daniel Roberts?’
She looked at me closely, taking in the broken nose and other signs. ‘I should’ve known. Bloody boxing. Danny! Bloke here wants to talk to you.’
My face might bear the marks of a few fists and beatings with other objects, but the face that turned towards us was one sculptured by pugilism. His nose was a flattened ruin, the heavy eyebrow ridges were a mass of scar tissue and his mouth and ears had been pulped into shapelessness. He stood. I was expecting a drunken lurch but he advanced steadily and stuck out his hand. He was sober or very nearly so.
‘Gidday,’ he said. ‘I’m Danny Roberts. Journalist are you, mate?’
The name clicked then. Danny Roberts had been a journeyman welterweight in those years Joe Cousins had described as the doldrums. The fighters made lousy money, endured bad managers, mismatches and crooked promoters and were lucky to come out of it with their health. Whether Roberts had or not I couldn’t be sure. His speech was clear and he didn’t have any of the tics that afflict brain-damaged fighters.
I stuck out my hand and we shook. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a journalist. I’m a private detective.’
‘Yeah? Never met one of them before. I’ve met a few of the public ones.’
I grinned with him and felt at ease. I began to tell him what I was about but he stopped me and suggested that we go over to a table where we could talk in private.
‘Buy you a drink?’ I said.
‘Sure. Middy of light.’
I’d made a fair impact on the schooner. I tossed it down, got two middies of light and joined Roberts at a table. ‘Have to be careful talking Koori business in public,’ he said. ‘That bloke at the bar’d be all ears and probably get it wrong when he blabbed to the nutters.’
‘Nutters?’
‘There’s people around here, blackfellers, who reckon we should kick all the whitefellers out and take the country back.’
‘Big ask.’
‘Fuckin’ right. Madness. And most of ‘em’d be stuffed when the beer ran out. Me, I’m a moderate. Get everything we can, every bloody thing, and don’t worry about what we can’t get.’
‘Sounds right to me. Mind you, I can understand the other point of view.’
‘Me, too. But this isn’t fuckin’ South Africa. Now, what Kooris have you talked to about this?’
‘Only Joe Cousins and the woman on the phone at the Aboriginal Progressive Association.’
‘Beatrix,’ he said. ‘Good lady, but a dead-set wowser. Because I come in here for a couple of beers in the middle of the day she reckons I’m a lost cause. Okay, she steered you to me and she’s right. I talked to your bloke. Young feller, like you say, West Indian, but he said his name was George.’
I fished out the photo of Clinton and showed it to him.
‘Yeah, that’s him. Hair was longer but that’s him all right. Good looking kid, good build on him. Tall middleweight. Cruiser, maybe.’
‘What did he want to talk about?’
‘Ah… hold on, d’you want something to eat?’
I did. We went across to the counter and ordered steaks with chips and salad. I told Danny Roberts I could put the cost of the meal on my expenses and he shrugged his acceptance. When we sat down with our ticket I noticed that the other Aborigine had left the bar. A few drinkers and lunchers, white and black, had wandered in but we still had our privacy at the table.
‘All he wanted to talk about was Angie and the Cousinses. Now Angie, she’s my… fuck it, second cousin or something. We just call it family, you know? Julie, her mum, used to bring her down here for holidays when she was little. Beautiful little girl. She could run like a greyhound. And jump? You never seen anything like it. She jumped over this creek out in the bush once. I wasn’t there but the others told me about it and I went out and measured it. It was seventeen fuckin’ feet. Now that’s a hell of a jump for a thirteen-year-old in bare feet off grass onto grass.’
I drank some beer and nodded. ‘Did you know about what had happened to Angie when Clinton… George, was talking to you?’
Roberts shook his head. ‘Knew she was in hospital and pretty crook, but I didn’t know she was in a coma and that. The women would’ve known. Sometimes they keep things like that secret from the men.’
‘What else?’
The kitchen hand shouted our number and we went across and collected our plates. The steaks were big and well done. The chips were crisp and the salad contained slices of tinned beetroot and that was fine by me. We both ate a few mouthfuls and drank some beer.
‘All right?’
‘Bloody good.’
‘Mine’s all the fuckin’ better for being paid for by you. Okay, now George want
ed me to tell him things about the Koori way.’
‘What things?’
He masticated a mouthful of steak, plucked out a sliver of bone and grinned at me. ‘I couldn’t tell him and I can’t tell you. He might’ve had a brown skin but he was just as much a whitefeller as you as far as I was concerned. I showed him some blackfeller fishing tricks. No harm in that. Oh, and we had a day out in the bush and I learned him a bit about hunting and that, bush-tucker stuff. But he wanted to know how I felt about the country and what things mean to me. Couldn’t tell him much. Hard, because he was real sincere about it.’
‘How’d he take it?’
‘Bad. Very upset, like it was the end of the world. Got pissed. I have to tell you he was a terrible drinker. I mean, he fuckin’ tried to drink and he did. But it didn’t take much to get him rotten.’
‘How many times did you see him?’
‘A few times.’ He jabbed his fork at the table. ‘Mostly in here.’
‘And when was this, exactly?’
‘Mate, exactly is a bit hard for me. I’m on a pension, see. Do a bit of fishing and odd jobs, but one day’s much the same as the next and the weeks sort of run on. It was a fair while ago. That’s about all I can tell you.’
We kept eating, exchanged a few remarks about the food, finished our drinks and he got up to get another round. We were Cliff and Danny by now and I asked him if he’d liked Clinton.
‘Yeah, well enough. Nice young bloke when he wasn’t pissed. He got me to teach him a few things about boxing. Wish I hadn’t.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He got into a fight one night when he was drunk. Right here it was. Picked on a big blackfeller and got the shit beat out of him. He was knocked about real bad and on top of that he was the one got thrown in the lockup. I reckon the copper thought he was just another Abo.’
‘What happened to him after that?’
‘I dunno, mate. Like I told that young feller from the university, I never saw him again. Reckon you’d have to ask the copper.’
9
I was tossing up whether to pay Danny Roberts for the information he’d given me when he finished his last mouthful of food, downed his beer, wiped his mouth, put his knife and fork together and stood up.
‘Gotta catch the tide, Cliff. Should be a few sand whiting about.’
‘Good luck, Danny. And thanks. By the way, what’s the policeman’s name?’
We shook hands.
‘Pipe,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Pipe. Goes by the nickname of Copper, but not to his face, mind.’
‘Right.’
‘I hope you find the kid and that he’s not in too much trouble. But from the fuckin’ look of him I’d say that’s where he was headed. I know the signs. Thanks for the tucker. See you.’
He gave a wave to the fat barmaid as he walked out. I cleaned up my plate and put down the rest of the beer, thinking that to live on a pension in a place like this and do some fishing and odd jobs couldn’t be too bad. Then I remembered that he’d said he lived on his own and I knew the downside of that. He’d befriended a young man who’d got into trouble and left without saying goodbye. He had a lot of dignity and resilience: all things considered, Danny Roberts was one of life’s lucky people.
A passer-by directed me to the police station, a newish brick building with a well-maintained lawn around it and neatly trimmed hedges. I wondered if the temporary occupants of the lockup cut the grass and the privet. Probably. I went through a screen door that had ENTER painted on it. The interior was air-conditioned and smelled of floor polish and scented cleaner. Sergeant Pipe had some good backup. There was a high counter closing the working space off from the citizenry. A big man in the uniform of the NSW police force was sitting behind a desk reading a facsimile sheet. I cleared my throat. ‘Sergeant Pipe?’ He looked up. ‘Be with you in a minute, mate.’ He finished reading the sheet, made a note in the margin and put it aside. He took off his reading glasses and tucked them away in his shirt pocket. He got to his feet, not without effort. He was built big and overweight with it so that he had a lot to move. He shifted the pistol on his hip as he advanced to the counter but I was sure that was just for his own comfort. I’d taken my sunglasses off and couldn’t look threatening in my short-sleeved shirt and linen pants. I smelled of beer and onions, but he must’ve been used to that.
I opened up the folder with my PEA licence and laid it on the desk for him to inspect. He looked at it as if he wanted to put it through a shredder. He was about fifty and going to seed fast. Not open to new experiences, I judged, not a lover of humanity.
‘Yes?’ he growled.
‘I’m working on a missing person case,’ I said. I took out Clinton’s picture and held it up for him. ‘I understand this young man was here some time back and that you arrested him?’
His eyes flicked over the photograph but gave nothing away. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Danny Roberts.’
‘Should mind his own bloody business, but, yeah, I had him in for a night. So what?’
I produced the copy of the report Wesley had filed with the police at Helensburgh. The official document seemed to mollify him somewhat. He took the glasses out and scanned it. ‘Says here this bloke’s name’s Clinton Scott.’
‘Same man though. What name did you book him under, sergeant?’
‘Don’t remember.’ He reached under the counter and pulled up a heavy ledger book. ‘All in here. Have to put it on bloody computers nowadays. I get the wife to do that of a Sunday night, but I go by this.’
He wet his finger and turned over the leaves. ‘Here he is. Drunk and disorderly, 10 June. George Cousins.’
The date placed Clinton in Bingara shortly after the verdict was pronounced on Angela and was the only firm record of his existence after his disappearance from Helensburgh and the university. I made a note and tried to read the entry but the writing was faint and illegible.
‘What happened? Was he fined or what?’
Sergeant Pipe closed the ledger and for a moment I thought he was going to close off all information but the reverse happened. He removed his glasses and leaned on the counter, almost matey. ‘I’ll tell you. Just to show you city types that we don’t treat the blackfellers too bad around here. In the first place, he was banged up real bad in the fight he had with Ernie Carter. Silly bugger shouldn’ve never taken Ernie on. Had no chance. Anyway, he had a busted nose, cracked cheekbone, couple of teeth out and some cuts that needed stitches. I took him to the clinic here in town and got him fixed up. No charge.’
So I’d been dead wrong about Copper Pipe. ‘That was decent of you.’
‘Yeah. He’d lost some blood. I didn’t want him dying on me in the lockup, did I? Now normally, he would’ve gone up before the beak on the Monday, this was a Friday night, after a couple of nights in the lockup.’
And cut some grass and trimmed some hedges, I thought.
‘But he told me he had this job lined up on a boat that was leaving on the Saturday morning. Charter boat. One of the hands had got sick and young George had talked himself into the job. So, on the Saturday, I takes him down to the jetty and there she is, bloody great sea-going yacht. And I escort George on board. I explain that he’s been the victim of an assault. The owner’s all sympathy and he takes George on. Tells him to rest up. I reckon if George played it smart he could rest long enough to learn what he had to do, because he knew bugger-all about boats at that point.’
‘How did he get the job, d’you think?’
He sucked his teeth and the action seemed to trigger his need to smoke. He took a packet of cigarettes from his other shirt pocket and offered them to me. I shook my head. He extracted one and moved sideways to open a door that would take him around the counter. When he reappeared he had the cigarette in his mouth and a lighter in his hand.
‘Not allowed to smoke in me own station, would you believe? Time was when the man on the spot made the rules. Not now. Come outside.’
We
stood on the concrete porch overlooking the cut grass and the street. Pipe lit up and exhaled luxuriantly. ‘Something that feels so bloody good can’t be bad for you, that’s my philosophy. You’re a quiet sort of bloke, Hardy.’
‘I’m interested in what you’re telling me. I’ve got a couple more questions and I haven’t got an answer to the last one yet.’
‘Right, well this boat owner, I forget his name, was about my age and not in much better nick. His wife was a real good-looker and she was younger, a lot younger. I saw the way she looked at George. I reckon he got the job because of her. Just a guess, mind you. But in my game you pick up a bit on those things.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘I suppose so. Has George done anything, you know, dodgy? Struck me as a decent bloke who should stay off the grog.’
There didn’t seem to be any point in elaborating. I told Pipe that it was a straight family concern about a missing member.
‘Kids,’ he said. ‘Thank Christ mine’re all right. I’ve got a son in the military and a daughter who’s a nurse. You know, you’ve done me some good, Hardy. That missing person report’ll be on the computer. I can respond with a sighting of the subject here. Helps to be able to deal with that sort of stuff.’
‘Fine. Now the big questions. What was the name of the boat and where was it heading?’
‘She, mate, she. Boats are female. You’re as ignorant as that George was. Well, the name’s easy. She was the Coral Queen. Beautiful boat.’
‘And heading…’
‘North. That’s all I know. North.’
10
I thanked Sergeant Pipe and went in search of Danny Roberts. There were fishermen on the jetty and others strung out at long intervals on the beach. I asked one of the jetty men about Danny and he pointed north.
‘He’s along there like always. Best part of a mile.’
Walking the best part of a mile, or even the lesser part, in city shoes on soft sand is no fun. About halfway there I was sweating freely and cursing Roberts for not fishing closer to civilisation. When I got close enough to make him out I could see that he was in the act of catching a fish, reeling in, moving back and forward and sideways. I moved nearer and saw him win the battle. He brought the line in with a big flapping fish on the end of it. He unhooked it and tossed it still flapping into a battered Esky.
