by Peter Corris
‘But not for me?’
‘Not yet.’
We made love. It was slower this time but just as good. Only other difference was that she was careful with her clothes—new underwear, too. Amazing what a change a bit of good luck can make. She didn’t even mention the legal advice she’d had from Viv until after we’d dressed and were thinking of where to go for dinner. We agreed on walking to the Indian in Glebe Point Road.
‘Your lawyer mate was helpful,’ she said.
‘Done anything about it yet?’
‘No, but on the strength of this job I’ll be able to get someone good, not poor old Harvey. What have you been doing with yourself?’
I told her about my possible nemesis, Szabo, and the reason for carrying the gun. Didn’t mention the parcels from the UK or the night in the lock-up. She smoothed down her dress and glanced at the cupboard where I’d put the pistol.
‘Are you going to take it with you now?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
I shook my head, didn’t want to go into the details.
‘Might help me to get in character,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I know it’s serious. That’s the trouble with this business, confusing make-believe with reality.’
I thought about that as we walked. She took my arm proprietorily. With her height, stylish clothes and gleaming hair, she turned heads. Was this make-believe or reality? We all play roles, but actors can play them more convincingly than most.
I ate my fill; she ate much less.
‘Have to watch my figure. This bitch I’m playing’s thin as a snake, acts like one, too. Have to do some jogging, which I hate. What d’you do to the keep the flab down?’
‘Gym, walking, bit of tennis. Light on the carbs.’
She pointed to my plate. ‘I didn’t notice.’
‘You ate so little I didn’t want them to think we didn’t enjoy the meal.’
We walked back briskly against a cold wind. We turned into my street and she stopped. ‘I’m parked just here, Cliff. Do you want me to stay the night?’
I put my arm around her. ‘I insist.’
I turned on a couple of heaters and made coffee while she wandered around looking at the books, the DVDs and CDs. She examined the photograph of Lily I had propped up on a shelf but made no comment. She went over to the corkboard and stopped in her tracks. She pointed to the photograph of the malevolent Sean Cassidy at the céilidh.
‘Jesus Christ, what’s this doing here?’
I poised the plunger over the coffee. ‘It was taken in Ireland. That guy was staring at Patrick as if he wanted to kill him. I just wondered . . .’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘You know him?’
‘I should. That’s Seamus Cummings. Older. And God he’s got thin, but that’s him.’
I forgot about the coffee. ‘How do you know him?’
She turned away from the board and got milk from the fridge.
‘Sheila?’
‘I thought from the way we . . . went about things, we weren’t going into our past histories.’ She pointed to Lily’s photograph.
‘This is different.’
She poured milk into the mugs. ‘How?’
‘I still want to find out who killed Patrick.’
‘I thought you’d decided he was trying to kill you.’
‘I haven’t decided anything.’
She lowered the plunger, waited the required time and poured. ‘Mmm, me either. I don’t know if I want to go into it.’
It was one of those moments when something, apparently promising, potentially solid, can fracture at a word or a gesture. I was still unsure about Sheila but I didn’t want that to happen. My feelings for her and the hope I felt were too strong. I’d blown these moments too often in the past by reacting too quickly. I slowed down, picked up the mug and blew gently on the surface to cool it. She took her mug and did the same, looking past me, back at the photograph.
‘It’s all right, Sheila,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
She smiled. We were both tired and affected by the emotional pulls and tugs. Some strands of her well-managed hair had come loose and made her look younger, more vulnerable. I wanted badly to touch her and I think she sensed this.
‘Cost you a bit to say that, lover, didn’t it?’
I shrugged, drank some coffee.
‘Tough guy. Our break-up, Paddy’s and mine, was a protracted business, with infidelities on both sides and brief reconciliations. One of my affairs—didn’t last and I went back to Paddy briefly—was with him. Seamus Cummings.’
Sheila told me that the man she knew as Seamus Cummings, known to Angela Warburton as Sean Cassidy, was, or had been, a soldier. She didn’t know in what army he’d served—who he’d fought for or against.
‘He was sexy,’ she said.
Looking at the photograph, I could see the cause of the attraction, especially when he had a bit more flesh on his bones. He looked confident, and that means more to a lot of women than good looks. Certainly more than a full head of hair or the other things that men worry about and put store in. She said Cummings had never met Patrick as far as she knew, but had seen his photograph.
‘He went wild when I told him I was dropping him for Paddy.’
‘Violent wild?’
‘Not to me; more to himself. He did threaten Paddy, but instead of doing anything he went on a week-long drunk and finished up in jail.’
‘This was where?’
‘Brisbane. I was buggering around in a crummy little theatre company and Paddy was still in the army but getting ready to leave.’
We’d finished the coffee and were on the sofa. I was sitting; she was lying with her head on my lap. I stroked her hair. We’d got past the point of antagonism or misunderstanding. She saw that I wasn’t probing her, just pursuing a line of inquiry.
‘Did Patrick have a beard back then? Say, in the photograph this guy, whatever he calls himself, saw? He certainly recognised him at the céilidh.’
‘It’s a lovely word for a piss-up, isn’t it? Let me think. Yeah, I think so. They weren’t allowed to have beards in the army, but he was on leave. Paddy’s beards were sort of reverse deciduous—on in winter, off in summer.’
We were both tired, more than a little drained by the recent events in our separate and combined lives. Our hands moved, independently, to the places we wanted to touch. Tired can be good.
‘One last question,’ I said. ‘What was Cummings doing in Australia?’
‘Jesus, you detective, you. He had family here. People who’d emigrated. He said he came out pretty often to look them up. He wouldn’t kill Paddy over something that happened that many years ago, surely.’
Sheila was up early, before me. She spent a lot of time in the bathroom and then on her mobile phone. She skipped breakfast and took off in a hurry. I’d found recently that I needed something in my stomach for the heart medications to lie comfortably, so I sat down to two poached eggs and coffee with my notebook. I drew a firm line through Sheila’s name, cancelling her as a suspect. It wasn’t just the feelings I had for her. She’d scarcely mentioned her claim on Patrick’s estate and was clearly more excited by her acting prospects than anything else, including, I suspected, our relationship. I was sure she wasn’t acting now. If she was, she was better than Meryl Streep.
Men don’t commit murder over failed love affairs twenty years in the past. I was down to two possibilities—Frank Szabo, or someone connected with Patrick’s smuggling activities. The latter seemed more likely but I was unsure how to go about investigating it and, anyway, that would be what the police were concentrating on. I logged on and brought up the Western Warriors website. ‘Up Hawkesbury way’ translated into a property on the river above Wisemans Ferry
.
The web entry gave details of the property and fairly precise directions to it. A photograph of what was called ‘The Compound’ showed a high cyclone fence with a reception booth. There were telephone and fax numbers for the Commander and the Personnel Officer. Didn’t look like a place where you just dropped in.
The WW, as it was styled, described itself as ‘dedicated to masculinity, courage, resourcefulness and survival’. The activities included physical training, orienteering, rafting, scuba diving, unarmed combat and war games. It sounded like one of the ‘Iron John’ outfits popular in the nineties in the US. They spouted right-wing political agendas, of course, but were basically harmless—run by fantasists catering to the insecurities of other fantasists. I’d read that these organisations generally morphed into mechanisms for extracting money from those who signed up. Some switched focus and became wacko cults. It was hard to see Szabo playing those games, but Marvis Marshall had hinted at something more serious with his mention of soldiers of fortune and ordnance. And there was that reference on the website to war games.
Hank called in, checked my landline and gave it the all-clear. He spent some time with the computer and told me he’d installed firewall protection for my emails—whatever that meant. He used the upstairs bathroom and came down sniffing ostentatiously.
‘You’ve got a lady friend, or you’re turning weird on us.’
‘Mind your own business.’
‘Megan’ll be pleased. She said she couldn’t see you as a long-term celibate.’
I packed a bag, fuelled the Camry and headed north. I had no particular plan for getting inside the WW stronghold, but you can sometimes talk your way past caretakers, concierges, even armed guards. And I’d been over, under and through cyclone fences before.
It was mid-week on a mild, cloudy day. Traffic on the highway is never light but it wasn’t too bad and the car handled well. I played some Kasey Chambers, the Whitlams and Perry Keyes’ album, The Last Ghost Train Home. It rained and the road grew slippery and the trucks threw up oily spray. I turned the music off and concentrated on my driving, glad to leave the freeway at Hornsby.
The road wriggles up past Galston and through Glenorie and Maroota. Nice country and pretty restful driving so that I could play the music again. Not that I really heard it. I was running possible courses of action through my mind. The toy soldiers, for all their openness, might not welcome me or give me time with one of their number. I could ask about them in the place nearest their property—a hamlet called Battle, which might have inspired their choice of site—and feel my way into the situation.
I resisted the impulse to have a drink in one of the Wisemans Ferry pubs, crossed the river on the cable ferry, and pushed on up a road that degenerated from tarmac to dirt to gravel and clay. The country looked lush after recent rain and the river had a strong flow. The road skirted the edge of the national park as the land rose with every kilometre west. I rounded a bend as the road veered away from the river and Battle came into view—from this distance just a collection of tin roofs with some smoke rising in the cold, still air.
The place consisted of a general store with a petrol bowser attached and a handicrafts shop. The shop was closed and looked as though it only opened at its owner’s whim, but the store was open for business. It served as a DVD hire, post office, fast food outlet, bottle shop and pool hall. A gossip and information centre if ever I saw one. I was in cords, boots, a flannel shirt and denim jacket and the car had acquired a coating of mud and dust on the trip. I hadn’t shaved that morning and I fancied I didn’t look like a city slicker.
A man and a woman were working behind the several counters—both overweight, both talking loudly to the four or five customers needing their services. Loudly, because a TV tuned to a game show was blaring. The patrons divided their attention between the TV and their orders, and they ignored me after a cursory glance. Both shopkeepers were flat out, and I wandered around, inspecting the DVDs, a rack of second-hand paperbacks and the pool set-up: two tables with battered surfaces, the cloth lifting in some spots and worn almost bare in others. It was a fair bet that the cues were warped.
Toasted sandwiches, loaves of bread, litres of milk, beer and cigarettes dispensed, the customers filed out one by one after taking last looks at the screen. I was about to approach the counter to buy a six-pack and ask my question when I heard the scrape of boots on the coir mat at the door. A tall man, heavily bearded and wearing a bush hat, modified military fatigues and a Driza-Bone walked in. He saw me, mock saluted, and pulled off his hat.
‘Paddy Malloy,’ he said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
I must have gaped and my jaw probably dropped. It took me a beat to recover, but by then he’d grabbed my hand and was shaking it hard. He ran his other hand over his bald skull.
‘It’s Colin Kennedy. Didn’t recognise me without the mop, eh, Paddy? Well, it’s been a while and some of us’ve got more testosterone than others, eh? You’re looking great, Paddy. Bit greyer, but fit.’
He was a big bear of a man, wide and thick with shoulders like the old-time blacksmiths. There was a tattoo on the back of his left hand. Not a prison job: a flag and a chevron—army.
‘Gidday, Colin. Yeah, it’s been a while. How long would you say?’
‘I’d have to think. Look, I just have to pick up some mail for the camp and then we can have a beer and a yarn.’
‘Right, I’ll buy the beer. What’s your go these days?’
‘Fosters, same as ever. Hang on.’
The woman behind the counter was waving a thick stack of envelopes at him and he went across to collect them. I approached the man scraping grease from the hotplate.
‘A six-pack of Fosters, thanks, mate.’
‘Col only drinks long necks.’
‘Six of ’em, then.’
He opened the fridge, took out the bottles and put them in a plastic bag. Kennedy gave me a thumbs-up and we went outside.
‘Clem doesn’t mind if we crack a couple out here,’ Kennedy said. ‘The local copper doesn’t mind either if he gets one.’
We sat on the bench on the porch outside the shop. Kennedy found a bottle-opener among the metal objects dangling from his belt and whipped the caps off two bottles. We clinked them and drank.
‘You mentioned a camp, Col. Wouldn’t be the Western Warriors’ place, would it?’
‘Sure is. Hey, d’you remember that stoush we had with those poofy sailor boys in Townsville? That was a go, eh?’
I never liked Fosters, too sweet, but I downed a bit and undid the top buttons of my shirt to show the scars from my heart operation.
‘Fact is, Col,’ I said, ‘I had a heart attack a while back and it knocked me around a bit. Fucking eight-hour operation, would you believe? They pulled me through it but I lost a bit along the way. Memory’s not that flash. Sorry.’
‘Shit, mate, sorry to hear it. You were one of the fittest blokes in the unit. Fittest officer, that’s for sure, and you didn’t pull rank on us NCOs.’
I grinned. ‘Yeah. ’Less I had to.’
‘When the word came down from above. Right. Well, we were a wild bunch all right, but that was what we were supposed to be.’
I nodded. ‘So what’re you doing now?’
He had the level of the bottle well down and some of the ebullience was seeping out of him.
‘Ah, got into a bit of strife after I left the army. Wife trouble, grog trouble, money trouble, you know.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I’m in with this Western Warriors mob. Bit of a Mickey Mouse show to be honest, but they like a bloke with experience of the real thing. Hey, you haven’t said what you’re here for, Paddy.’
I thought. I didn’t know how long I could sustain the charade. Colin Kennedy obviously hadn’t been reading the newspapers. If there
were other former comrades of Patrick at the Western Warriors camp it was better than even money that one of them would know he was dead. But if it got me into the place it was worth the risk.
‘I’m trying to catch up with a bloke I want to talk to. I heard he was one of this mob, and I thought I’d come up to take a look.’
He drained his bottle. ‘Yeah? Who would that be?’
‘Frank Szabo.’
‘Frankie? Yeah, he’s here. How’d you hear about him, Paddy?’
I tapped the side of my head. ‘Like I say, I’m a bit vague about where and when.’
His voice took on a solicitous tone. ‘You been inside, Paddy?’
I nodded. ‘Berrima. While back.’
‘Hard case, Frankie, or was. I reckon he’d be glad to talk to you. How about you follow me up there? I’m in the Land Rover. That yours, the Camry?’
‘Hired. How’s the road?’
‘Okay since we put some work into it. Just take it easy.’
I gave him the bag with the remaining bottles. ‘For the mess.’
A battered khaki Land Rover stood a few metres from my car and a couple of others that had arrived while we were talking. I’d noticed it, but hadn’t seen the ‘WW’ painted on the door, half covered in mud, until I got closer. It had a vaguely military look, like Kennedy himself.
He reached the 4WD, tossed the mail inside and put the bottles on the passenger seat. He turned back to me and I tensed, because his manner had changed a little.
‘You were always a crafty bastard, Paddy. Thinking of joining up, are you?’
I shrugged. ‘Probably past it.’
He brushed the side of his nose in the old soldier’s gesture. ‘We’ll see. Stay back a bit and steer round the puddles.’
After a few kilometres the road deteriorated and Kennedy’s advice about staying back made sense. Then the surface improved with gravel filling in the potholes and a slight camber on the bends. The bush was thick on both sides as the road sloped up and the air got colder. I had the window down to enjoy the smells and the sounds. A little bit of country air, however cold, does you good. Kennedy speeded up on the better surface; we rounded a bend and the camp came into view.
