Man in the Shadows

by Peter Corris

  Two police cars roared into the street, swung on to the grass and braked centimetres from Krey’s neighbour’s fence. The constables got in some practice at crowd control. It was the most excitement Seventh Street had ever seen and everybody turned out. A hot dog seller could have done very well. I got cold standing around and was short-tempered when a detective arrived to take charge. He ignored everybody while he looked at bodies and guns. Then he listened to the most articulate of the uniformed men.

  He nodded. ‘Bag them,’ he said. ‘Get these two to town. Don’t be rough.’

  ‘That’s because he respects our civil rights,’ I said to Greenway who needed cheering up.

  The detective lit a cigarette. ‘I couldn’t give a shit about your civil rights, Hardy,’ he said. He waved the cigarette at a van pulling up across the street. ‘The TV boys’ve arrived. I wouldn’t want them to get the wrong impression.’ He squared his shoulders, straightened his tie and took a last drag on his smoke. He’d stubbed it out when a blonde reporter with cabaret makeup, a trench coat and spike heels shoved a microphone under his nose.

  ‘Could you give us a statement, please.’ She smiled winningly for the camera and the cop.

  ‘Yes. We received a report . . . ’

  I turned away and dived into the back of the nearest car. The last thing I need in my game is TV pictures of me being taken in for questioning. Greenway was right behind me; he seemed to have forgotten his former profession.

  They took us to the new police headquarters, gave us coffee and brought in a smooth talking type to take statements and sniff the air. Greenway wanted to go back to day one but he tied himself in knots within a few sentences. I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Mr Hardy?’ Smoothie said.

  ‘I think we should give our accounts separately. I also think my lawyer should be here. He could represent us both.’

  Greenway protested. ‘I can’t afford . . . ’

  ‘You can’t afford not to,’ I said. ‘Sackville—here’s the number.’

  Smoothie nodded. He wasn’t like a cop at all. ‘Very wise,’ he said.

  It took a long time for them to find Cy Sackville and nothing could keep Greenway quiet. When he mentioned the hospital I glared at him.

  ‘Don’t worry, Hardy,’ Smoothie said. ‘We’ve got the documents from your car. We can put two and two together.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot more than two and two in this.’

  Sackville arrived; we made statements and were charged with trespass, illegal entry, arson and burglary. Greenway was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm. Sackville tried to get us out that night but it was no go. We were held in the headquarters lockup, went before the magistrate in Glebe in the morning and were given bail.

  When we walked out of the court Greenway and I were unshaven and rumpled. Sackville was his usual dapper self. Frank Parker was waiting in the sunshine. We shook hands. He nodded to Greenway and Sackville.

  ‘I told you to be careful,’ he said.

  ‘I was. Now tell me about Southwood Hospital.’

  ‘We paid a visit. Dr Smith got very confused about this bloke Pope. He made some damaging admissions.’

  ‘This won’t come to trial,’ Sackville said. ‘I’m rather sorry in a way.’

  ‘How’s that?’ I said. ‘You hate courts, hate and fear ’em.’

  ‘True. But I would’ve liked to see how the prosecution handled the matter of arson of a swimming pool.’

  Like most things in life, I never came to a full understanding of it. Dr Krey wasn’t the most rational of individuals and his movements and motives in regard to his hiring and watching of Greenway, his surveillance of my house and some of his other thought processes could only be guessed at. Investigations showed he had a record of intellectual brilliance and emotional instability. Some years back he’d been at the centre of an investigation into radical drug-based techniques for relieving anxiety and depression. He’d come out of the investigation with major financial and personality damage.

  Legal proceedings over Smith and Southwood Hospital became very involved. Smith was charged with conspiracy to murder Dr Krey but there was insufficient evidence to sustain the charge. Greenway and I concluded that Smith must have connected Krey with our raid on the hospital, but no one seemed very interested. The hospital’s records had been confiscated but Smith had destroyed or removed some of them in the hours between our break-in and the arrival of the police.

  ‘That was a terrible job,’ Frank told me. ‘You should’ve made the records secure. It’s a dog’s breakfast now.’

  ‘I had other things on my mind. That Pope was a dangerous type.’

  ‘Yeah. Doc Krey got off a lucky shot. Pope’d been shot before and he’d done some shooting. He was a hard case. Southwood had a few of them. And dodgy doctors. A real shithole.’

  We were having this conversation in Hyde Park, eating sandwiches and trying to stay warm on a bench in a patch of sunlight on a cold May day. I flipped a crust at a seagull with pleasant markings and watched sourly while another bird got it first. ‘What about the patients who went missing?’

  Parker shrugged. ‘Dead is my guess. You know how many people pop off in New South Wales every year?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Over forty thousand. It’s a big deck to shuffle and Smith’d be just the boy to shuffle it.’

  ‘Krey said he found out something about them from Annie Parker. He reckoned Smith’d do anything to get into the big research grants.’

  ‘Yeah, you told me. And Pope netted junkies like butterflies. That’s not much use to us now, is it?’ Frank crumpled his paper bag and threw it five metres into a bin. ‘That Annie was a second cousin of mine. Didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither did I before this. That’s modern life—we’ve got kin we don’t know about all over the place. I’ve probably put a few of mine away. How about your mate, Greenway? What’s he doing?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him.’

  Greenway phoned me a few days later. He told me he’d gone back to acting and had a part in a stage musical. It was in rehearsal. He’d get me tickets.

  Helen likes musicals, I thought. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You can sing, can you?’

  ‘And dance. And tell you what, I took the AIDS test. I’m clear.’

  ‘Great. Now you just have to find somebody the same.’

  ‘I’ve found him,’ Greenway said.

  Cloudburst

  OLD habits are hard to kill, like old memories. I was sitting in my car waiting for a city light to change so the traffic could trickle ahead. The city fathers were experimenting with traffic arrangements to cope with the construction of the Pitt Street mall. I’m looking forward to the mall but I wasn’t enjoying the stop-start motoring. It started to rain and I instinctively reached for a rag I keep as a stopper for the window where the rubber seal has rotted away. But there was no need; I was in my new Falcon that doesn’t leak. That was better but not everything was better. Back when I had a leaky car I had Helen, more hopes and the traffic moved. I sat and waited, warm and dry, and remembered.

  The rain had started at 6 pm on Saturday September 10 and it hadn’t stopped by the following weekend. Everyone could remember the moment of the cloudburst the way you can remember what you were doing when Kerr sacked Gough. I was taking a walk to get a cup of coffee at the Bar Napoli in Leichhardt. I was halfway between home and the coffee and I decided to go on for the coffee. The rain fell as if it had been stored up there for ten years. The floor of the coffee bar was awash when I arrived and the place was crowded with people seeking shelter from the storm. We stood around and drank our coffee and looked out at the sheeting rain and agreed we’d never seen anything like it.

  People kept saying it.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ A week later that’s what the NRMA guy who came after a three hour wait to help me start my Falcon said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I
said.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Helen Broadway said that night. Helen was with me for six months, on leave from her husband as per her arrangement with him and me. ‘Have you?’

  I kissed the back of her neck. ‘That’s what I like about you,’ I said. ‘You’re different. Everybody’s saying they’ve never seen anything like it—you’re the first one to say “have you?”’

  She turned away from the omelette she was making and looked at me. ‘Well, have you?’

  ‘Not in Sydney. I’ve seen it as heavy in Malaya but there it lasts for half an hour, this has been going on for what—eight days?’

  ‘Mm. It’s a funny thing, you know. I was reading that this is common in Sydney, happens every year. You all just forget about it from one year to the next.’

  ‘Could be. We’re a feckless lot.’

  She put the pan under the grill and waved at me to set the table. ‘This is the last of the eggs. We’re going to have to go out again for provisions. You reckon the car’ll start?’

  ‘Worse than that. I’m going to have to go to the office. I need work.’

  ‘Nobody’ll want anything done in this weather.’

  ‘They might. There might be a job for a Senior Swimming Certificate holding detective who rode the waves at Maroubra on a surfboard made of fence palings.’

  ‘You didn’t, did you?’

  ‘So legend has it.’

  ‘You can’t go out, you haven’t got any dry shoes.’

  ‘I’ll dry some tonight, wrap them in plastic, go out barefoot and put the shoes on when I’m inside. That way anyone coming to see me will know I’m smart because I’ve got dry shoes.’

  ‘No one will come. You’ll sit there in your dry shoes all alone when you could be in bed with me.’

  Helen was wrong. I did have a client. She arrived within two minutes of me sitting down behind my desk and struggling into the sneakers I’d dried on top of the heater. They were stiff and cracked and didn’t look good with the rest of my clothes. I was still wiggling my toes when she walked into the office. Into means into: she came through the door after a quick knock and that took her straight up to my desk. No anterooms, secretary’s nooks, conversation pits for Cliff Hardy, the low rent detective with integrity and cracked sneakers.

  ‘Come in and sit down,’ I said. ‘I’m glad of the company.’ I peered at her through the gloom which had settled over the city and seeped into all rooms not floodlit.

  ‘The building did seem very quiet,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure it was inhabited.’

  ‘It is and it isn’t,’ I said. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Adjusting to the murk, I could see that she was in early middle age, middle sized and middle class. She wore a wide brimmed hat and a coat of the same shiny black material that shed water. She had on a long dark skirt and black boots—a trifle funereal but functional. She took off the hat and shook out a head of blonde-streaked, mid-brown hair.

  ‘Roberta Landy-Drake gave me your name, Mr Hardy. She said you could handle . . . celebrities.’

  ‘Did you know she was joking?’

  She frowned. Her handsome face creased up and I got the idea that she’d been doing a good deal of frowning lately. ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘I’ve been the chucker-out at some of her parties. I’ve handled celebrities, literally.’

  ‘Oh, I see. It doesn’t matter. The point is, Roberta says you don’t go off selling gossip to the papers or blackmail people.’

  I nodded. ‘You’ll have to forgive me. If you’re a celebrity I’m afraid I don’t know you. Maybe it’s a bore but you’ll have to tell me your name.’

  ‘My name is Barbara Winslow. I’m not a celebrity but my husband is.’

  ‘Oh, god,’ I said.

  Ian Winslow was the flavour of the month politician. He’d been to the right schools, had the right degree and looked good on television. What he thought was anybody’s guess, what he said reflected his deep concern. He was deeply concerned about everything, particularly about ethnic affairs which was his current portfolio, but also about health and police and any other headline worthy subject you chose. To me, he seemed to care deeply for his teeth and brushing his hair boyishly.

  ‘You don’t approve of him?’ Barbara Winslow said. ‘I’d be surprised if you supported the other side.’

  She was looking at my sneakers. Fair enough; politics is class-based or should be. My credentials were all around me—on my feet, on the pitted surface of my desk, on the windows which looked dirtier inside now that the outside had been washed and rinsed by God.

  ‘It’s not that. I just don’t like having anything to do with politics . . . ’

  ‘This is a man in trouble.’

  ‘Politicians aren’t men, they’re networks of obligations and enmities.’

  ‘They have families.’

  So do axe murderers, I thought. I said nothing; she stood and walked over to the window. There was so much water pounding the glass and moving on its surface that the window itself looked liquid and insubstantial. When she turned around her eyes were wet.

  ‘You have to help me. Roberta said you would.’

  I nodded, took a note pad from my desk and offered her a cigarette from the office packet. She refused which was wise because they were stale. But she was comforted by the gesture; she left the window and sat down again. She was eager to talk, eager to see me write, eager to pay me money.

  ‘Ian Winslow,’ I said and wrote the name in block capitals. ‘By this time next year he’ll probably be in charge of the department that licenses me. Self interest suggests I should help you.’

  ‘The year after that and he could be in charge of the state.’

  ‘Well . . .?’

  ‘He’s behaving strangely, going out at odd times, not accounting for his movements. He’s nervy and . . . ’

  ‘Off his food?’

  ‘Roberta said you’d joke and not to mind. But this isn’t a joke.’

  ‘Okay. Politicians have a million worries; people ring them up at all hours; they have to breathe other people’s air a lot.’

  ‘I know. This is different. I want you to follow him when he goes out at night and find out what he does.’

  ‘I could just ask one of his security boys.’

  ‘He’s called them off. He goes out alone.’

  That was strange; politicians like a huddle—it helps absorb the egg or lead and makes them feel important. You almost never see one silhouetted against the sky like Clint Eastwood. As she put it the job didn’t sound so hard. At least I wouldn’t be craning to look over the heads of a lot of guys with thick waists and short haircuts. But if she wanted an early start I’d have to wear goggles and a snorkel. She began taking hundred dollar notes out of an envelope.

  ‘I suppose you want me to start when the weather clears up.’

  ‘I want you to start tonight.’

  At 10 pm I was sitting in my car watching the exit to the car park of The Belvedere which is one of the new, tall apartment blocks they’ve built overlooking Darling Harbour. Eventually, when a few hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money has been spent on beautifying everything around there, the people who’ve spent big bucks on their apartments will have a lovely view instead of scraped earth and stained concrete. The rain hadn’t let up so that for now they had acres of pale mud to look at. Tough.

  I’d left Helen at home with a stack of video recordings of movies she’d missed because she lived half the year in the bush. She’d promised to keep me some wine and to hold off on ‘Night Moves’ until I got back. She’d keep the promise but I knew I didn’t have to worry about her waiting censoriously up for me. If I got home by midnight or thereabouts, fine; if not, I could find her in the bed.

  I was listening to a smart-arse radio hack being rude to his callers. The things the people who called wanted to talk about got sillier and sillier so I couldn’t blame him. No one wants to do silly things—like sit in a leaking car i
n a rainstorm watching a hole in the ground when there’s a woman and a cask and ‘North by Northwest’ waiting at home.

  At 11 pm a white Commodore carrying the number plate Barbara Winslow had given me roared up the ramp. It barely paused at the footpath and swung right past me with indicator lights blinking brightly through the steady rain. I started the Falcon, indicated right as I pulled away from the kerb, and kept the indicators flashing as I followed the Commodore. We drove east, past the dark, silent department stores and the bottomless mine shafts they’re sinking as part of the renovation of the Queen Victoria Building.

  The rubbers on the Falcon’s windscreen wipers weren’t new and they didn’t do a good job on the clean water falling from the sky or the dirty stuff being splashed up from the road. I had to squint, rub the glass and drive closer to the Commodore than I would have liked. I’d caught a glimpse of the driver when the car first appeared and I could see the line of his head and shoulders as we sloshed through the city. It was Winslow all right, fair hair, chin up and no slouching.

  We went up through Taylor Square, skirted Paddington and swished into those streets near Trumper Park where the kids would be odds on not to know who the park commemorated. The Commodore turned into a street lined with Moreton Bay fig trees. The rain had stripped a lot of the leaves and left them as mush in the gutters and on the road but there was enough foliage left to hood the street lights already dimmed by rain. Nothing wrong with the Commodore’s stop lights though; they flashed at me bright and early enough to allow me to drop back and pull in to the kerb well before Winslow parked.

  Ignoring the rain, I wound down the window to get a clearer view as Winslow flicked the car door closed and scooted through a gate to a deep verandah running the width of a well-kept, double-fronted terrace house. Winslow shook water from his light rain coat by flapping it and jerking his shoulders. He looked nervous as he knocked. A light came on over his head and a woman appeared in the doorway. Winslow grabbed her as if his life depended on trapping her where she stood. Her slender bare arms wrapped around him and I could see her face before she buried it in his shoulder: black hair gleamed under the porch light; teeth and eyes shone against a skin the colour of a ripe plum.