by Peter Corris
I paid for the coffee and thought again about a Greek island. Maybe I’d get a bonus if I found young Chatterton. I put my notebook and .38 in the glovebox of the car and locked it. My jacket went on the seat along with three rolled cigarettes and the half-empty bottle. I got petrol and oil and water for the Falcon and told it we were going south and that it’d have a few hills to climb.
9
Blackman’s Bay is on the coast, about a hundred and fifty miles south of Sydney. It’s at the mouth of a river and was once a whaling port. After that it kept on with deep sea fishing for export, local fishing and tourism. I’d been through the place a few times and liked the look of it. I remembered it as a good-looking little town with a long timber and iron bridge over the river. At a pub a mile or so upstream, I’d eaten some memorable oysters. Not a Greek island, but then I wasn’t on holiday.
I drove down the Princes Highway and took the freeway that skirts Wollongong and Port Kembla. The steelworks were a glowing, flame-spurting delirium too close for comfort. I hadn’t been out of the city in a long time, and south of the smoke and steel I began to feel some benefit from the drive and the sense of space around me. The Falcon coughed and protested on the hills. It was adapted to the harsh, stop and start grind of city driving. I nursed it. The air tasted cleaner by the mile and drunks on the road thinned out the further south I went. I’d smoked the cigarettes and now I took a careful pull on the bottle. The clean air blew into my face sharp and fresh and I felt good.
It was a clear night; the road slid down to the coast and the stars went on forever out to sea. I hit the Blackman’s Bay bridge sometime around 3.00 a.m. The planks rattled as I passed over them and I thought I could feel a slight swinging motion in the bridge. The main street was quiet; there were no all-night joints and most of the shops still used ordinary electric light which was switched off. A few neon tubes glowed prophetically in signs and windows. There was an extra service station and a shop or two, otherwise the town didn’t seem to have changed much. I drove down to the park near the beach where there was a town map on a board the way there always is in these places.
I located Yancey Street and went back to the car. Call it intuition, call it experience, but I was confident that she still lived there. There was no reason she should but I had a feeling I was dealing with something frozen in time and space. The nurse would still be there and so would the doctor. I realised I’d forgotten to check the doctor’s address and I went back to the board. A big wave lifted up and crashed on the beach and I could hear the bridge creaking in the light wind. I took a few steps onto the sand and looked out to sea. I could make out a few lights moving slowly a long way out. Off to the left a cliff dropped sharply down to the water. For no reason I thought of it as a jumping-off place for suicides. Suddenly I didn’t want to disturb the old ghosts, didn’t want to check on whether people still lived where they had once lived and knew about things that happened thirty years ago. I wanted a future, I didn’t want to rake over a painful past. I wished I was on the ship and at sea. I shook the thought off and went back to the car.
The roads threaded up behind the town into the hills. I bore left at a crossroad; Yancey Street was an unpaved track with no town lighting. I crept down it trying to pick up its features in the headlights. There were only a few houses as far as I could tell from gateposts and signboards and they were located well back from the track. Number eleven was identifiable by a sign painted on a handsome gum near a bend in the road. There were no houses opposite and it seemed to be flanked by vacant lots. There was a lot of pampas grass along the front boundary and no welcoming lights winking beyond it. If I’d been an old lady I wouldn’t have felt secure there; I was a middle-aged man with a middle-sized gun and I still didn’t feel secure.
I got the gun from the glove box and a torch and locked up the note book and the spare ammunition. The trunk of the gum tree was broad and pale and reassuring in the beam of the torch. I put the car keys on top of the offside front wheel and moved towards Nurse Callaghan’s abode. It was no time to go calling on an old lady, but I could poke around, get the feel of the place. And some old ladies get up very early in the morning, especially in the country.
The light danced over the springy grass and picked up a straggling track where vehicles had brushed Nature aside. I started up the incline, flicking the light to each side and bringing it back to the rough drive. Away down the hill the sea moved convulsively. Up here the only thing moving was me. Everything thickened in front of me suddenly and I realised that the track had taken a turn. I rounded the bend and was pulled up by a shape looming in front of me. I swung the torch, got an impression of shape, a car, and colour, blue, and then the starry heavens fell in on me. Pain sketched a searing yellow and red diagram in front of my eyes, all zigzags and angles, and then it blacked out and so did I.
When I came out of it a salty seaside dew had settled on me. My clothes and hair were moist and my skin was tacky and cold. It was still dark but the sky was lightening over what had to be the east. It all swam around when I lifted my head and I crunched dirt between aching teeth. Everything ached. I stretched out my hand and felt about in a wide arc. The torch was still there and still working. The car was gone. It had passed over me or around me—I was still in one piece. I pulled myself up and stood swaying, getting my bearings. I began to walk up towards the house which someone hadn’t wanted me to visit—not before they’d left, anyhow. It couldn’t be good. Daylight was seeping in, a couple of birds started up singing and I swore at them. My head hurt.
The house was a modest fibro-cement job that had been reasonably well looked after. A garden bed running across the front of it had had loving care. It was a showpiece of pruned rose bushes and other flowers that didn’t get that way on their own.
The house was on three-foot brick pillars and I looked under at intervals as I skirted around. Nothing moved under the house and I couldn’t hear anything moving inside. I went to the front door, knocked quietly and waited. Nothing. The door was locked. I went round to the back; a flywire screen had a tear in it near the door handle. I reached through and turned. I went into a small enclosed porch cluttered with gardening tools and fishing tackle. I went through a kitchen which was tidy and neat into a short passageway with two doors off it. The door on the left let into a sitting room; in the dawn light I could make out a fireplace, some easy chairs, a television set. There was a low table with a pile of plastic-jacketed library books on it.
The other door opened onto a bedroom. An old woman was lying on her back on the big bed, her hands were stretched out on the cover with the palms up. I cleared my throat and knocked on the door jamb. She didn’t move. I went closer. The gardening and the fishing and the TV and the reading were all over for her. She was dead.
There was no sign of violence on her face or in the room; the only unnatural thing was the position of her hands. I looked closely at her face but her eyes seemed to have closed naturally and the light beside the bed was soft enough to have been a night light. The bed cover was smooth but not too smooth. I went back to the kitchen and looked at the pile of bills on the spike—they covered the usual things and were made out to Gertrude Callaghan. I looked at the tear in the screen door but if there’s a way to tell whether fine plastic mesh had been cut recently I don’t know it.
Back in the bedroom I stood at the end of the bed and wondered if she’d died naturally or not. It seemed unlikely that she had and I felt guilty as if I’d brought this on her. It wasn’t true of course; totally innocent victims are few, but that’s how I felt. She was an impressive-looking old person with snow-white hair and a strong, intelligent face. The signs were around of an active and meaningful old age that should have ended better. I read somewhere about some people—Indians I think—who used to put their problems to the newly dead. I think they arranged the corpse in such a way that its head or arm could move involuntarily and a man with special powers would interpret the movements. I looked down at the old nurse.
“Did Bettina Chatterton have a son?” I asked quietly.
Not a hair stirred.
“Is he still alive?”
Nothing. I’d have to do it the hard way. I searched the place thoroughly—drawers, cupboards, books, floor coverings—for evidence of a connection between the nurse and the Chattertons after 1946. There was nothing. I found the Judge’s reference which gave Gertrude a good character and the documentation of her employment, all on the coast, over the following twenty years. There were photographs showing how the Liverpool girl had turned into the nurse and the old gardener and fisherwoman but nothing pointing to a grandson for the late Sir Clive. There were two things of interest: a flock of intimate notes, spanning three decades, from Dr. Osborn to Nurse Callaghan and signs that someone had gone through the place before me.
It was almost daylight when I left the house but the sky was overcast and a thin fog was hanging around the tops of the trees. I went down the track and poked around in the grass until I found my gun. Nothing was stirring in Yancey Street except the birds. My head still hurt. I touched the spot and felt dried, caked blood. I was getting less presentable by the hour but there was no one around to notice. Everything was quiet and serene like Nurse Callaghan sleeping the last sleep.
10
When I’d cleared Yancey Street and made a few turns I stopped to take stock of things. The notebook was still in the glove box and the lock was intact. It was more than I could say for myself. My head needed a dressing and I needed a shave. That was what showed; my teeth were scummy from a day’s drinking and my body was stiff and sore from lack of sleep—lying like a log for a couple of hours in wet grass doesn’t count. My head ached fiercely. I looked at the whisky and shuddered. Then I salvaged a couple of aspirin out of the rubbish on the back seat and swilled them down with the whisky. I almost gagged but I grabbed the steering wheel and hung on to everything. After a minute or two I didn’t feel any worse, maybe even better. Time to tackle Dr. Osborn.
He was in front of his house, bending to pick up a newspaper. He wore a checked dressing gown and the wide trousers of striped cotton pyjamas flopped around his ankles. He bent like an old man, stiffly and slowly, but he bent. I walked over and called out something polite. He looked in my direction but I had the feeling that he couldn’t see me. I reached the gate and called out again.
“Dr. Osborn.”
“Yes, wait a minute.” There was still a faint Scots twang in the words despite fifty years of exposure to Australian speech. He moved slowly down the path towards me holding the rolled-up newspaper in his hand. I waited by the gate and watched his face. A certain blankness was in it until he was about ten feet away, then interest came into his eyes. He fished out a pair of spectacles from the dressing gown pocket and hooked them on.
“Yes young man?”
“I have to talk to you, Doctor, about Gertrude Callaghan.”
“You’ll do me the favour of telling me who you are.”
“I’m sorry—my name is Hardy. I’m a private investigator from Sydney. Does the name Chatterton mean anything to you?”
“You’ll not be referring to the poet?”
“No, not the poet, the Judge.” I rattled the gate a fraction. “Can I come in and ask you a few questions?”
“Perhaps. You mentioned Gertrude. What of Gertrude?”
“She’s dead, Doctor. She died this morning. I came from Sydney to see her but I didn’t make it in time. That’s why I’m here.”
Emotional control of the kind that is generations deep fell away from him in a split second. He clutched at the gate and the newspaper fell; I held his arm to steady him and we stood there like father and son mourning a wife and mother. I opened the gate with my free hand and helped him up the path towards the house. He was a portly man with a weatherbeaten face. His eye sockets were sunken and surrounded with dark, puckered skin as though a stain was seeping out of the eyes into the tissue. Flesh sagged on his cheeks but his chin and neck were firm; it was as if he’d aged selectively, in patches.
The house was a big, plain weatherboard, painted white with a glassed-in verandah running along three sides. I eased him up three steps and across to a cane chair. He sat down stiffly, like an old horse sinking to its knees for the last time.
“Can I get you something, Doctor?”
He spoke slowly and remotely, as if from far away. “I was making coffee.”
“I’ll get it.” I went into the house and through a couple of well-ordered rooms to a neat, bright kitchen. I collected mugs, milk and sugar and took the pot off the stove. When I got back to the verandah Osborn had straightened up a little in the chair, lifted his head and seemed to be looking through the window to a far distant point. I poured a black coffee for him and he nodded and took it. I made one for myself and sat down opposite him.
“I’m sorry to hit you with it like that.”
He seemed not to hear me. “Forty years,” he said. He moved his head and looked directly at me. “It was her, you’re sure?”
“Yancey Street,” I said. “A handsome old lady, white hair.”
The coffee slopped and he set the mug down before covering his eyes with his hand. I drank some coffee and waited. After a minute or so he made an effort, palmed tears from his face and drank the coffee. He didn’t look at me but pulled himself up out of the chair.
“Excuse me,” he said. He walked slowly through into the other room and I heard him lift the phone and dial. There was silence and then the sound of the phone being put down. I poured more coffee and sipped it while he resumed his chair.
“No answer,” he said. “I can’t just leave her there, all alone.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I’ve got the living to consider.”
“Yes. You’re a detective you said? A policeman?”
“No, I’m a private detective. I’m sorry about Nurse Callaghan.”
“Nurse, Sister, Matron,” he said softly. “The most wonderful woman.” I drank some more coffee and he watched me critically.
“You should put milk and sugar in it,” he said. “I’d guess you were a drinker, a drinker with an empty stomach. Your metabolism needs something to fuel it.”
“I’ve also been hit on the head,” I said defensively. I leaned forward to give him a look. He put down his cup and eased the hair gently aside. I brought my head up and he looked directly into my eyes.
“Nasty,” he said. “A possible concussion. You should be at a hospital. I’m afraid I don’t practise any more.”
“You did though, until recently.”
“And how would you know that?”
“From the medical register.”
“You’ve been researching then. You’re right, I retired two years ago. You should go to the hospital, there’s a good one here.”
“Maybe later.” I sipped some coffee. “I want to ask you about Gertrude Callaghan and things that happened here thirty years ago.”
“Do you now? You come here bleeding and smelling of spirits and you ask me that. How do I know you didn’t kill Gertrude?”
“Would I have come here and told you about her if I had?”
“Perhaps not,” he said wearily. “But I doubt I have anything to tell you.”
“I think you do. Thirty years is a long time but I need information and you’re the man that knows where the bodies are buried.”
He winced and a sharp breath came out of him; he tried to cover it by lifting his cup to his mouth.
“Just an expression, Doctor. Why does it startle you?” He didn’t answer and I pressed on. “I’ll dig for it, Doctor. I’ll be working in the dark and things will just have to fall out as they may. It doesn’t have to be that way though.”
“What are you saying?”
He was good, very good. Without trying he’d got me to say more than I meant to while he hadn’t volunteered a damn thing himself. I had to plunge on with my uncertain knowledge and try to flush him out. I had hints, clues and guesses and just one piece of ha
rd information on him—knowledge of his feelings for Gertrude Callaghan.
“I’ve seen a photograph of Nurse Callaghan with a pregnant woman taken down here. The photograph was authentic and I’ve identified the locality.” This was a lie but it seemed like a safe one. “My interest is in that woman specifically and the child, I’m not concerned with the wider issues.” I chose the words carefully but they still sounded thin.
“May I see this photograph?” he said.
“No.”
“And why not?”
“It’s a crucial piece of evidence and I don’t carry it around with me.”
He leaned back in his chair and drank some coffee. “You mean you don’t have it,” he said confidently.
“The man who had it is dead. He was murdered, probably by the same person who killed Nurse Callaghan.”
The smugness left his face. “Murdered! You didn’t say that before. No, not Gertrude. Did she . . .”
“Tell me anything? I’m not going to answer that, Doctor, it’s time for you to open up a little.”
I finished the coffee, thought about a cigarette and decided against it. It wasn’t a time for betraying weaknesses. He sat back further in the chair and his eyes seemed to sink deeper into those cavernous, dark-rimmed sockets. He looked like a man letting his mind run back. I waited. When he spoke it was carefully and slowly with the Scots accent more pronounced.
“I’m going to talk in generalities, Mr. Hardy, at least to start with. Do you understand? A lot of reputations and lives, good lives, are at stake in this. A lot of harm could be done.”
I nodded.
“Let me say for a start that I know nothing about anyone by the name of Chatterton. I might have had some dealings with a Chatterton but if so I’ve forgotten. I’m an old man and I have forgotten many names.”
“But you remember some?”
