Comeback - [Cliff Hardy 37]

by Peter Corris

  ‘Nothing direct?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And you believe she’s capable of carrying out these threats?’

  ‘That’s the trouble, I don’t know. But I can’t afford to take the risk. I’m embarrassed about all this. The only person I’ve been able to talk to about it was my dad. Can you help me?’

  ~ * ~

  2

  It didn’t feel like such a big deal. It was a reversal of the usual stalker scenario, but what could I expect? It was the twenty-first century and we had climate change, an unwinnable war supported by both sides of politics, a minority government and a female prime minister. Change was everywhere.

  Bobby said he’d been back to Miranda’s flat but she wasn’t there. He felt too angry to reply to her emails or phone calls because he was worried she might record him saying something he shouldn’t. He mentioned his bad temper. He wanted me to find Miranda and talk to her. Persuade her that the course she was following would only get her into serious trouble.

  ‘Would you take legal action?’

  He finished his drink as he thought about it. ‘I’d be reluctant. It’d be embarrassing and Jane would find out all about it. But Dad says you’re good at getting through to people. If you thought she was serious about the threats and wouldn’t listen, then yes, I’d take legal action.’

  That was sensible. He was smarter than he thought. I had him sign a contract and pay over a retainer. I asked him for more details on how the particular dating website he’d used worked and he filled me in. I took notes. I got his email address and his postal address, his landline and his mobile number.

  Jane’s surname was Devereaux and I got her details, including the publishing company she worked for as a commissioning editor. I got Bobby’s agent’s details and those for his father. Bobby and I shook hands and he thanked me effusively. So far all he’d had was a sympathetic ear, and the retainer he’d given me, in line with what I’d learned was the new scale of fees, was steep. I felt I had to have something to contribute immediately. I asked him if Miranda had given him a deadline for carrying out her threats.

  ‘Not exactly, but she implied I didn’t have long.’

  ‘If I have trouble finding her, another way might be for you to contact her and arrange to meet. I could step in then.’

  He looked dismayed at the prospect, almost angry when I told him that if it came to making contact with Miranda it would be better to do it by phone in case Jane read his emails.

  ‘She wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘You never know what a person will do.’

  The anger subsided. A flush had come over his face and he’d gripped the arms of his chair so that the structure creaked. He drew in a deep breath. ‘I don’t think I could meet her. I think if I did I might...’

  ‘Do what?’

  He shook his head and didn’t answer.

  ‘How strong is this feeling of being followed?’

  ‘Pretty strong. I haven’t known what to do about it with Jane there in case it was Miranda herself. I mean, she talked about knowing people...’

  He was suddenly anxious to go and I let him. I stared at the closed door and wondered what he’d been going to say. Was it, I might try to prove my manhood, or I might harm her?

  ■ ■ ■

  After he left I scanned my notes and the signed contract into the computer and created a file for it. I scanned the photos of Miranda and Jane into the computer and made copies. Then I threw the notes away They say the paperless office didn’t happen; I kept the signed contract but otherwise I was prepared to get as close to paperless as I could.

  I checked the site Bobby had used. The drill was to choose a username which could include a bit of your real name or not. The instructions suggested that it was a good idea to give a hint of your main interests at this stage. Then you set up a profile with a list of your interests, likes and dislikes. At this point you also sketch in the kind of person you’re looking for. You get an ‘inbox’ so people can send you messages through the site and you can respond to them. No email address or contact details until you get responses and have communicated back and forth enough to feel confident you’ve latched on to a ’possible’. Then contact details and face-to-face meetings are up to you. Photographs are optional in the profile but you can protect them from being looked at by all and sundry and restrict access to them to people who take your fancy. You can pay a subscription, and Bobby’s was pretty heavy, or just buy credits and pay message by message.

  Bobby, looking shamefaced, had told me that Miranda’s photograph had attracted him and her list of interests included acting and several sports he was keen on. He’d ‘messaged’ her, got a response and they communicated a few times before arranging a meeting at a wine bar in Coogee. He’d given her his email address and mobile number. Once bitten, he’d been more cautious with Jane and they’d spent more time providing details and filling in backgrounds before they’d arranged to meet. He said he hadn’t been disappointed by her looks when they met at a coffee shop in Randwick. He described her face as fascinating. She hadn’t objected to his intellectual shortcomings. He said they’d laughed a lot and at the same sorts of things. He’d agreed to read some books and she’d agreed to let him teach her to play golf. They went to bed on their third meeting and hit the jackpot.

  It all sounded potentially very dangerous to me unless you played strictly by the rules and exercised a great deal of common sense. But I suppose that applied to the old style of meetings between the sexes. How many mistakes had I made in connecting up with women and how many women had made mistakes in connecting up with me?

  First things first. I had to know more about Bobby Forrest. His website was just a photo, a few broad-brush details and a list of his film and TV credits. I’d never heard of the films or the television shows. His agent, Sophie Marjoram, I did know from back when I did security work for film crews. I rang her and arranged to meet her the following morning. That left me sitting in the office at 6 pm with a paying client, a glass of scotch and a nagging half-memory. When I focused on it the name Ray Frost rang a bell but nothing more. Over the years I’ve done favours for people that haven’t needed a documentary record. I guess everybody has. If the name had cropped up in that context I’d have to rely on my uncertain memory, but I had a feeling that it was something more than that.

  My filing system has never been well organised and, what with moving office a couple of times and a spell of working from home, it’d become a bit chaotic. So it took me more than an hour and another drink to track down Ray Frost. It was twenty-five years ago. All it took was a glance at one of the notes I’d made to bring the whole thing back to me.

  ■ ■ ■

  Frost had been in gaol, on remand for involvement in an armed robbery.

  ‘He’s innocent,’ Frost’s lawyer, Charles Bickford, had told me. ‘I want you to prove it.’

  It was a bit unusual for a lawyer to be so adamant about the innocence of a client and I asked Bickford why he thought so.

  ‘The police have it in for him. He’s been in trouble before and he’s a maverick sort of character. Won’t take shit from anyone, including me. I can’t help liking him.’

  I’d dealt with Bickford before and more or less trusted his judgement, so I took his money and the case. Three men had robbed an armoured car delivery to a business in the CBD very early in the morning. They’d been masked and were efficient. They didn’t injure the guards and got away with about sixty thousand dollars—probably less than they’d expected. A witness said the mask on one of the robbers had slipped and he identified Frost in a lineup. I went to see Frost in Long Bay.

  ‘It’s bullshit,’ he said. ‘I was at home asleep. I’ve never worn a mask in my life.’

  ‘How do you figure it, then?’

  Frost was a big, solid man, handsome in a rugged way. He was very calm, which isn’t easy to be when you’re on remand facing a serious charge. I knew because I’d been there. He didn’t fidget or
avoid my eyes. He smoked, as so many did back then, including me, but not compulsively.

  ‘Must’ve been someone who looked like me. Plenty do.’

  That was true enough. He said he was alone in the house at the time of the robbery. His wife had just had a premature baby and was still in the hospital with it. He’d been awake for two days through the crisis and was grabbing some sleep.

  ‘How d’you read it?’ I asked.

  ‘To be honest, I see it as payback. I’m no angel and the cops haven’t managed to nail me for a few things I have done. They’re causing me grief for something I didn’t do.’

  There were a lot of dodgy police back then, many of them capable of framing people and using their powers and the courts to pay old debts.

  ‘What about the other two?’

  He shrugged. ‘No idea who those guys are but I could hazard a guess.’

  ‘That might help.’

  ‘No, I’m not a dog, but you know how it works, Hardy. They could’ve green-lighted the job and set me up to take the blame.’

  He was right about that. It happened. If it had, the weak spot in the arrangement was the witness. I poked around and got enough on him for Bickford to cast serious doubt on his evidence if the case came to trial. It didn’t. Wheels turned and the charges were dropped. It made me popular with Bickford, who put work my way for the next few years. Frost had thanked me. It made me unpopular with the police but that was nothing new.

  ■ ■ ■

  The files were arranged in chronological order so I could see that other matters had come along hard on the heels of that one. It had been a busy time and the details had been crowded out long ago. I made some notes, put the old file back in its place, and copied the notes into the Forrest file and then to the memory stick. I fitted the memory stick onto my key ring. It felt like a day’s work so that’s what I called it.

  I felt good about Bobby’s case. It had an interesting texture to it. The phone rang as I was about to leave the office. It was Sarah Kelly, a woman I’d met down in the Illawarra on a brief holiday a while back.

  ‘You said you’d call me,’ she said.

  ‘I should have,’ I said.

  ‘When are you likely to be down here again? I want to see you, Cliff.’

  I realised that I wanted to see her, too. Badly. Being back at work and on something interesting was all very well, but I needed warmth. Viv had said I was sour. I didn’t feel sour, especially when I heard Sarah’s voice. She was a part-time soul singer and her voice had a special quality.

  ‘I’m back in business, Sarah. It’s great to hear from you.’

  ‘Busy, eh, baby? Well get here soon.’

  I went to the Toxteth in an uppish mood, didn’t drink too much and Daphne Rowley and I held the pool table until our eyes got crossed.

  ■ ■ ■

  Sophie Marjoram had an office in Paddington not far from the Five Ways. It was wedged between an art gallery and an antique dealer with a pub just across the street and a coffee shop half a block away. Ideal location. Sophie specialised in all aspects of the film and television business. She was an agent for writers, directors, actors, sound engineers, special effects people, stunt persons, you name it. It was a good niche that enabled her, sometimes, to get quite a few of her clients in on the one film or TV production and guarantee stability and reliability. And lock in good commissions for herself. She didn’t have any of the big names.

  ‘Don’t want ’em,’ she’d told me when I first met her. ’Nothing but ego, ego, ego. I’ve had a few on the way up who’ve left me when they made it, and come back to me on the way down. A microcosm of life’s what it feels like sometimes.’

  Our appointment was for 10 am. I showed up on time and she was late. She came hurrying along the street, high-heeled boots tapping, flowing skirt flapping and with a mobile phone glued to her ear. Still listening and talking she dug keys out of her bag, opened the door and waved me inside.

  ‘Fuck you,’ she said and switched off the phone.

  ‘Another successful negotiation, Soph?’

  ‘It will be, it will be.’

  We went down a short passage to an open plan office holding three desks.

  ‘You’ve expanded,’ I said. ‘You used to have half this space.’

  ‘I’m doing okay. I’ve got two part-timers. I get a government subsidy for employing them, would you believe? You ought to be in on it.’

  ‘I’m just starting up again after a break. Barely enough work for me so far.’

  She sat behind the biggest, most cluttered desk and pointed to a chair.

  ‘Good to see you, anyway. I guess one of my people must be in trouble. Who is it?’

  Direct, that’s Sophie, at least when she was sober, which wasn’t always. She was in her fifties, overweight, vividly made up, energetic. She’d done most of the jobs she now handled as an agent herself in her time except for stunting, and she could be hard as nails or marshmallow soft as required.

  ‘Bobby Forrest,’ I said. ‘Trouble not really of his own making.’

  ‘It never is. Well, I know how it works. You won’t tell me a thing about it, and I have to tell you everything I know about him.’

  ‘Not quite like that. He hasn’t committed any crimes, isn’t a drunk or on drugs or a pedophile, as far as I know.’

  ‘That’s a relief. I can tell you that he’s a good kid. Good actor, a natural. Limited range but he’s working on that. In a way he’s got too many skills. He can do just about anything and the producers use him a lot, but in snatches, if you know what I mean. He’s yet to get any good, solid roles but he keeps busy.’

  ‘How bright is he?’

  ‘How bright are any of them? Not very.’

  I showed Sophie the photograph of Miranda and asked if she’d ever seen her. She put on glasses and studied it carefully.

  ‘Chocolate box,’ she said. ‘No, don’t know her.’

  ‘Is Forrest, let’s say . . . prone to violence?’

  ‘Ah, now we’re getting to it, are we? It’s not what he’s done, it’s what he might do.’

  ‘You’re talking. Go on.’

  Sophie fiddled with the pens and pencils standing up in a jar on her desk. She selected one and ran her fingers along its length. It had an eraser at the end and she used it to bounce the pencil on the desk.

  ‘As far as I know, Cliff,’ she said slowly, weighing her words, ‘you’re one of the good guys, although your record doesn’t quite show that, I’m told. You’ve cut some corners, trodden on some toes.’

  I nodded. ‘Corners that needed cutting, toes that needed treading on.’

  ‘You always did a good job for me, sometimes under difficult circumstances. You could’ve picked up money talking juicy stuff to the media.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘So I’m going to trust you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  She laughed. ‘Had you going, didn’t I? You thought I was going to reveal some deep, dark secret about Bobby.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘No, there’s nothing. He is what he seems to be.’

  Sophie had been an actress but apparently not a very good one. I thought she was acting now, but I couldn’t be sure in what kind of role. That’s the trouble with theatrical people. When are they acting and when are they being straight? If ever, either way?

  ‘Come on, Soph. Is there something?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  I simply didn’t know whether to believe her or not and I let it go. We talked a bit more. I thanked her and left her still stroking and bouncing her pencil. In books and movies the private eye seeking information lurks outside the door to listen to the subject pick up the phone and give the game away. I’d never done it and, anyway, in Sophie’s office there was nowhere to lurk.

  ■ ■ ■

  The simplest way of meeting up with Miranda, if it worked, was to check whether she was following Bobby I rang him on his mobile.

  ‘This is Cliff Hard
y, Bobby. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m out at Fox Studios doing some voice-overs.’

  ‘What’re your plans for the rest of the day?’

  ‘I’m going to play a round at Anzac Park with a mate and then go home and read and then pick up Jane and go out to eat. Why?’

  ‘I want to check whether you’re being followed.’