The Dying Trade

by Peter Corris

  After Katoomba it got harder. There was a little chopping and changing on the highway as cars peeled off to houses in the hills whence their occupants commuted to Sydney at the risk of their sanity. I’d taken a fix on the peculiarity of the VW’s tail light which was a bit brighter on the right side than on the left and I clung to it like a mariner to a beacon. I had my doubts about it twice, once after oncoming lights on high beam dazzled me, and again when a lighter coloured Volkswagen surged up in the right hand lane to pass everything in sight and I started to go with it. A truck coming round a bend lit it up as a grey or light blue job and I slipped back and picked up Haines and Pali who weren’t doing anything so fancy.

  They pottered uncertainly along in the left lane for a while and I had no choice but to dribble along behind them. Cars sped past us and I was starting to feel conspicuous when the VW’s left indicator flashed and the car shot off up a steep road that left the highway at a forty-five degree angle. I looked quickly in the rear vision mirror. There was no one behind me so I didn’t touch the indicator arm, I just slammed the Falcon down into second, killed the lights and took the turn praying that the road didn’t fork three ways or end in a ditch. The lights ahead bobbed and danced in front of me; the road was rutted and lumpy and the Falcon’s springs and shockers took a beating as I ground along in second. At one point the road moved back close to the highway except that we were now above it. Cars scuttled along below like phosphorescent ants beating a path to and from their nest.

  We were driving through thickly timbered country, still climbing steeply and following wide, looping bends to left and right. The nearly full moon sailed clear of the clouds and illuminated the classic Blue Mountains landscape—tall, arrow-like gums and sheer-faced ridges that had defeated a score of explorers until Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth had brought a little imagination to the job. The moonlight gave me a look at the road and allowed me to give the other car a bit more leeway. It also increased the risk of being spotted because moonlight can gleam on chrome like sunlight on a steel mirror. Fortunately, the Falcon’s chrome was rusted and dull. Then the Volkswagen disappeared. I hit my brakes and pulled up well back from where I’d last seen the lights. If I’d spotted someone tailing me up there in the mountains I’d kill my lights and engine and coast down a bit waiting for the bastard to come blundering through. I had to assume something like that was happening now, at least until I proved otherwise. I turned off the interior light switch that operates when the door is opened, slipped my arms into the service jacket and eased open the driver’s door. I dropped out and rolled under the car. Nothing happened so I worked my way back to the wheels, got my feet under me and scooted across to the other side of the road.

  People expect other people to get carefully out of cars on the non-traffic side and keep to that side of the road, sometimes people have to break that rule or they get dead. I hunkered down in the grass and scrub beside the road and peered into the blackness ahead of me. Nothing to be seen, but that didn’t mean a thing. I took the pistol out and crept forward with it held stiffly in front of me; still nothing visible and not a sound except my breathing and soft scuffling in the bush where some species were doing their best to exterminate others. Very sensitive stuff, I thought, totally in tune with the environment, Hardy. But a waste of talent. Where I’d seen the last flash of the car’s lights was a dirt track running off into the scrub. The grass in the middle had been scythed down between the wheel ruts by the underside of cars and back from the road was a tree with the word HAINES painted vertically down it in white.

  My flashlight was at home, corroded to blazes, and the moon had decided to play it coy among the clouds. It was close to pitch black when I started up the track to what was evidently Haines’ weekender. Judging by the distance from the road to the shack and trying to remember when I’d last seen a house light, it was a fair sized block. The house wasn’t much, a fibro and galvanised iron structure with decking around it on three sides. It looked self-built, but Haines had put his main stamp on the place in the garden. When my eyes got used to the dark I could see terraced vegetable beds and trellises with tendrils twining through them. Almost outside the door, hanging over the decking was a huge clump of bamboo, the leaf tips tall and waving just slightly in the night breeze. Water from the roof, a few chickens and a still out the back and the place would be self-sufficient.

  I picked my way carefully through the vegetable beds and staked plants and did a circuit of the shack. It had a door in front, one at the back and a single window in each side. The track from the road came up and looped around the house, the Volkswagen was parked on this path at the back. A brick path from the back door led to a fibro dunny and there was a lean-to shed holding what felt like garden tools. An axe was embedded in a chopping block outside the shed. The wood pile was healthy, a big stack of the kind you use in a stove or sealed heater. I crept up to the decking out from the left side window and tested it with my foot. It was solidly built and didn’t creak. I eased the Colt back out of my pocket and moved over the boards to the window which was about chest height from the deck level, too low to stand, too high to kneel. I crouched and inched my head up to get half an eyeball’s worth of look-in.

  CHAPTER 28

  The room I saw was the whole of the shack. It had a sink at one end flanked by a refrigerator and a small stove. There was seagrass matting on the floor. The girl was sitting in one of the two Chinese saucer chairs and Haines was sitting on the bed which looked like a pile of mattresses, maybe three, with a tartan blanket over them. I couldn’t see a telephone so Pali hadn’t set anything up here. The girl was nervous and Haines was frightened, they sat like figures in a painting that couldn’t move a muscle until the end of time. Haines’ mouth moved but I couldn’t catch what he said. The girl got up and moved smoothly across the room like a classy featherweight. She slammed Haines in the face with the gun and hit him again across the hands when he brought them up to shield his eyes. Haines collapsed on the bed and the girl moved back and half-turned away from him. From where I was I could see Haines fumbling behind the mattresses. There seemed like a good chance he was going for a gun and it was time to move if I wanted anybody left to talk to. I smashed the window in with the Colt barrel and made it to the door in two strides. I kicked it in and was inside the room while Haines and the girl were still interested in the broken glass. Haines had a gun in his hands but it was still tangled in the blanket. He’d never have made it. I pointed the Colt at the bridge of the girl’s broad, flaring nose.

  “Put the guns down,” I said harshly.

  Haines gave up the struggle with the blanket but the girl held on to her gun. She held it loosely, pointed nowhere in particular. She looked dazed, out of touch with what was happening, but dangerous. I raised my gun to send a bullet over her head and pulled the trigger. It stuck like a wrong key in a lock and I remembered the clang my jacket had made when it hit the iron railing. I threw the gun at her but I was way too slow, she ducked slightly and brought her pistol up so that the bullet would hit me in the throat.

  A thin, high voice shouted my name. I swayed out of Pali’s line of fire and she snapped at the trigger as a man appeared in the doorway. The bullet hit him in the eye and he screamed, blood welling out over his face. His hands scrabbled at the broken door jamb but couldn’t get hold, he staggered back over the deck and there was a thrashing, snapping noise as he collapsed into the stand of bamboo. The girl stood still, in shock, with her eyes staring, seeing nothing. I took the gun from her and pushed her down into a chair. Haines had blood dribbling down the side of his face from where Pali had hit him and he didn’t look like giving trouble. I heard a rustling outside.

  “Tickener?”

  “Yeah, you all right Hardy?’

  “I’m fine, come in.”

  He came in cautiously through the shattered door. He was even paler than when I’d first seen him and he was shaking as if he needed
a drink, a cigarette and a cup of coffee all at the same time. Me standing there with my hands full of guns didn’t help his nerves.

  “Couldn’t you put them down?” he said.

  “I will, just for you.” I put the pistols on a ledge above the window. I bent down and retrieved my Colt, I freed the action and put it in my pocket. “Thanks Harry, this one was going to shoot me when you sang out.” I pointed at the girl who was sitting stiffly in the chair with her knees drawn up.

  “So was Brave,” Tickener said, “there’s some kind of pistol out on the boards. Shit, you can’t move for guns around here.”

  “Is Brave dead?”

  “Very.”

  “You had no trouble keeping up with him?”

  “Not much, he went for a fix like you said, then straight up here.”

  “It was quite a procession,” I said.

  “I know a bit about the girl,” Tickener said. “Who’s he?”

  “Name’s Haines—bomber, gunman, hit and run merchant.”

  Haines snapped out of it and looked across at me.

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m none of those things.”

  “What about sending anonymous letters, that more in your line? Harassing women?”

  He answered slowly, taking the difference in tone and content of my words seriously. “Yes, I’ve done those things. I had reasons.”

  “I know you did. What about blackmail? What about Mark Gutteridge’s files?”

  He looked away and clamped his lips and jaw as if trying to give himself strength of character.

  “Look boy,” I said sharply, “you’ve lost control of this. You must be able to see that. This bitch was going to kill you, or at least she wasn’t going to cry if it worked out that way.”

  Haines looked across at Pali, she was still striving for the foetal position and not making it. Her hands were twisted in the strings of the poncho and she was looking intently at the knots and poking her fingers through the holes. I handed Haines a tissue from a box on the floor which had been heavily trampled in the last few minutes. He dabbed at the cut on his face.

  “I’ve got the files,” he said slowly. “I didn’t use them much, I got some money and I kept my word.”

  “Who did you squeeze?” Tickener asked.

  “Who’re you?” said Haines.

  “Keep quiet, Harry,” I said. “It’s all right, Haines, this is all between us, it doesn’t go any further. My job is to protect Ailsa and your mother, that’s what I’m interested in. I’m not playing God.”

  “You know.” His head jerked up. “How could you?”

  “I put it together. You tell me if I’m right. You were hung up on the idea of your family background, you couldn’t accept that you were a pleb. You read all the papers and the magazines, you saw pictures of Mark Gutteridge and saw the resemblance. You found out that Gutteridge had a daughter and that she was in Adelaide when you were born, I don’t know how you did that, but you concluded that she was your mother and you decided to destroy the Gutteridges.”

  “That’s pretty close,” Haines said softly. “I got a picture of her and showed it around the hospitals. I didn’t get a positive identification but a few people were pretty sure.”

  “You got something out of the orphanage file then?”

  He looked surprised. “You know a lot don’t you? Yes, I worked out that I was born at a hospital, I cracked that code, the rest was easy. You’re wrong when you say I wanted to destroy them though. Not at first, I wanted them to, to . . .”

  “Accept you?”

  “Yes. I tried, he refused to listen. I found out things about his son. I told him.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No, I didn’t! He killed himself I think, I don’t know. I still don’t know why he treated me like that. He beat me up.” He lifted his hands to the fine scars on his face and fingered his off-centre nose. “I found him dead. I got the files though.”

  “I don’t like to interrupt,” Tickener said nervously, “but I don’t understand any of this, and there’s a dead man outside.”

  “That’s all right, Harry,” I said. “You should stick around and learn something and he’s not going anywhere.”

  “I suppose not.” Tickener dropped into a saucer chair and I sat on the bed beside Haines. “Is there anything to drink?” he asked. I looked at Haines who nodded at a cupboard over the sink. Tickener went across, opened it and pulled down a bottle of Cutty Sark. He took four glasses from the draining rack on the sink and poured solid slugs into them. He brought them over, I accepted one, so did Haines and in one smooth, snakey movement Pali knocked the one he held out to her to the floor. Tickener shrugged.

  “Your loss, Miss,” he said.

  I took a pull at the whisky. It was good but it burned my dry throat and didn’t help a slight headache that was ticking away inside my skull. It was a bad way to feel when there were some sharp distinctions to be made. I rolled a cigarette and accepted a light from Tickener who lit up one of his stinking tailormades. Haines refused his offer of a cigarette and Pali didn’t even acknowledge it. She was starting to take an interest in proceedings again though. I drew a breath and started in again.

  “What happened after Mark Gutteridge died?”

  “I hid the files.” Haines took a sip of the whisky and nearly choked on it. He coughed and snorted into a tissue. Pali gave him a look of contempt and reached out her hand to Tickener.

  “Cigarette please.”

  Her voice startled him but he obliged her fairly smoothly. She leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs, the pink denim stretched tight over her thighs and her breasts lifted under the cloak as she lifted the cigarette to her lips.

  “Go on, boy,” she said, “this is damn interesting.”

  Haines made a better job of his next go at the Scotch. “I sat it out for a while. I hid the files, I could see what they were worth. I did some night classes, I got a job at Sleeman’s. I formed a relationship with Ailsa. I thought I could bankrupt her without any trouble. I used to watch Susan Gutteridge, I hated her and I wanted her dead. She looked very ill most of the time anyway.”

  “Yeah, that was Bryn’s work, Brave’s too maybe. You remember Brave, from Adelaide?”

  “No.”

  “You should. He was the psychologist you spilled the beans to in the orphanage. He’s been working the other side of the street.”

  He got that genuine puzzled look again. “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind, go on.”

  “I got some money from the politicians and lawyers, and a couple of policemen; I bought this place. I kept on at Susan Gutteridge, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do anymore.”

  “I was!” Pali’s voice was like snakeskin rippling through your fingers, beautiful and repellent.

  “Shut up you!” I snapped. “You’ll get your turn.” I looked at Haines. “Do you see it?” I said. “You told Ian Brave about your suspicions that you were a Gutteridge. You did some work on it and squeezed Mark Gutteridge. Brave also had something else on him that concerns you. He had information from Ailsa as well. Maybe he killed Gutteridge, maybe not, we’ll never know. That is, if you’re telling the truth and you didn’t kill him.”

  “I didn’t,” said Haines, “I wanted to but I didn’t.”

  “I believe you, well, anyway, Brave misses out on the files. He doesn’t know you’re around, you’ve got a beard and keep a low profile. Ailsa he can’t approach because he’s lost an old hold he had on her but she doesn’t seem to fit the bill. He suspects Susan, so does Bryn and they go to work on her. Brave turns up with this one.” I nodded at Pali. “She’s got political axes to grind, Ailsa and Susan have business interests in her country and Australia didn’t do much about the French atom tests. Right?”

&
nbsp; Pali sneered at me and blew smoke at the ceiling.

  “OK,” I went on, “I put it together this way: Bryn didn’t know about you Pali, and you started going it alone, making the heavy phone calls and so on. You fell out with Brave and he fell out with Bryn. Bryn panicked a bit, people Haines was squeezing started putting pressure on him. He called me in. Brave went right off, he killed Bryn’s boyfriend. Pali blows the whistle on Brave when she finds out he’s into mad sidelines like sheltering escaped crims. We raid Brave and he’s out of the picture for a while. Bryn goes on the rampage and finishes up dead. Then Brave gets a real line on Haines and the files and he and Pali get back again for one last fling. That brings us all here folks.”

  “What was all that stuff about bombing?” asked Tickener.

  “Ailsa Sleeman’s car got bombed and Susan Gutteridge was run down,” I replied. “At first I thought it had to be someone working in with Haines or Brave, now it looks as if it was his bird on her own hook. That right?”

  There was no getting under her skin. She turned to look at me, her face was beautifully boned and every fold and curve of her skin added up to the sort of beauty you don’t often see. She knew it too and her cool smile infuriated me.

  “Listen you savage,” I said violently, “you might think you’re Angela Davis, but you’re just another homicidal mess to me.” I ticked off the points with a forefinger across the palm of my hand. “One, I’ve got a gun with your fingerprints on it, that gun killed a man here tonight; two, your car will have signs on it of your running down Susan Gutteridge; three, I’ve traced where you got the materials for the bomb. You’re gone a million girlie, you’re in prison or deported if I tell what I know. You might leave Australia under your own steam if you co-operate now.”