by Peter Corris
I finished the cigarette and looked out across the water in a mood of mild self-congratulation. I checked back over my reconstruction and didn’t find anything too inconvenient although the Chatterton heir’s character was looking blacker every minute. I walked quickly back to the restaurant and suddenly I was breaking all my own rules, moving hastily and obtrusively for cover at the foot of the steps — under a harsh neon light the big man with the bandaged face and his dark-eyed friend were stepping it out towards their car.
21
Verna Reid and Russell James were quarrelling; they kept well apart and their heads jerked as they snapped and snarled. Watching them, I dodged about on the other side of the road like a boxer trying to stay out of trouble on the ropes. James slipped quickly into his mildly aggressive driving style. The Toyota took the corners with practised ease and pulled familiarly up into Richard and Bettina Selby’s driveway. I skulked on for a hundred yards before killing the lights, putting the keys under the seat, arming myself and heading up the street to do some genuine, in the field, sleuthing.
No front gate, no alert dog in the front yard, no kids’ toys to trip over. I padded up past the Toyota; the Honda Accord was missing but a Chev was there instead. Lights were on in the back of the house and there was a soft, green glow from the pool which looked cool, inviting and uncomplicated. A heavy thumping, like a fist beating on tin, caused me to duck down into the shadows near the garage. I poked my head around the corner and saw the man in the fawn suit knocking his knuckles on the back door.
‘Richard!’ His voice was high and urgent. ‘Richard, where the hell are you?’
Where indeed? It hadn’t looked like a chance call and I’d expected to find them cosy over a beer with their ties loosened.
He kept on knocking and nothing kept happening, then he started to swear rather nastily and display a considerable bad temper by kicking the door. The gun. was biting into my gut and I was getting cramped in the squatting position; I uncoiled cautiously and inched along trying to get a better view of the man assaulting the door. It ail happened very fast — a car door slammed and I spun around and then something hit me in the stomach very hard. It bent me over and I had an impression of a wide, light shape near me and then my upper right arm was stinging like hell and I was throwing a long punch that went on and on to nowhere.
I was only a quarter of a man or less after that: the two of them dragged me into the house. I couldn’t move but I could hear all right.
‘She’s away with the kids,’ Selby said.
My head bumped against something as the other man spoke.
‘Easy,’ Selby grunted. ‘Albie phoned, I was ready for this bastard half an hour ago.’
Albie, I thought. Rotten little Albie, fucking Albie…
They let me down roughly onto carpet that felt like marble.
‘How long’ll he be out?’
‘It varies,’ Selby said. ‘That stuff puts some people under for hours and others hardly go out at all. Let’s have a look at him.’
The smart thing seemed to be one of the susceptible; I let my eyelids drop and my head loll. I felt hands grab bits of my face and then I was on the carpet slab again.
I didn’t have to act too hard: I was lying still but felt as if I was swimming and there was a roaring in my head like an eternal wave breaking over me. I heard snatches of their conversation through the foam.
‘What are we going to do with this character?’
‘You were supposed to find out tonight,’ Selby said.
Then Verna Reid chipped in: ‘He tried but I just don’t know! She’s kept it all to herself.’
I snuck a look through a shuttered eye; they were in armchairs but tense and nervous. Verna Reid was wearing her basic black which suited her fierce, hostile mood. Selby was wearing jeans and a white shirt, his face was scarlet above the snowy cloth. He was drinking what looked like scotch and the other man clinked bottles and ice and made himself something, too. I was parched and hearing a howling wind now along with the boom of the surf. I was slipping under and coming up, hearing words and missing some, and I was suddenly cold from my scalp to my big toes.
‘We have to settle it,’ Selby was saying. ‘Is he up at the river?’
‘Should be by now. But what if…’
‘It’s all ifs. We have to make a move, we have to find out.’
‘What about him?’
The roaring and booming blotted out the rest of it and I felt them take hold of me again and move me. I summoned up everything and tried to fight them but for all the difference it made I might have been a butterfly. They dragged me easily with their weight-lifters’ strength and they didn’t care when parts of me hit things. I didn’t care much either. I wanted to sleep, to curl up in a ball and sleep, and then I remembered Kay and that I hadn’t called her and I heaved and strained at them and said uncomplimentary words that felt like stones in my mouth. They must have bumped me into something then or hit me because it all slid away; the noises stopped and I tobogganed down into darkness and silence.
Coming to was like being born — I struggled down a long, dark tunnel, not wanting to get to the end but not in control of what was happening. I was pushed and pulled towards a circle of light which grew bigger and bigger until it filled my whole field of vision and blinded me. I felt as if I’d been folded in half and put in a box. In fact I was sitting with my knees drawn up to my chin: I tried to lower my legs but they only got half way before they bumped into something. I shook my head and forced my eyes open and saw a wall; I felt a wall behind me and a hard surface under me. I was in a shower stall, my hands were tied behind me and my feet were strapped together at the ankles. Pains like cramps were shooting through me and my throat was as dry as a chalk duster. At first I thought the light tapping I could hear was inside my head but I found it was a steady drip from the shower rose. The drop fell about a foot in front of me but I couldn’t lean far enough forward to get my tongue out to it — my whole body was thirsty. It was torture.
I had no idea of the time, lights were on in the room but I couldn’t see a window. It could have been midnight or midday. I wasted some time cursing myself for carelessness and incompetence, and wasted some breath by shouting for help. Then I calmed down and became more practical: I listened, the house was dead quiet. I pulled at the cord holding my ankles and at whatever was around my wrists — nothing gave. I looked around as best I could but the stall was tiled and smooth, there was nothing to cut with or rub against. So I shouted again and choked and was sick all over my legs and everything was just that much worse. I tried kicking at the wall but the thing was built solid and I only succeeded in sending jarring pains shooting up into my crutch. I tried to roll and found that my wrists were tied to something firm — no rolling.
It was hard. The thirst and the cramps and the smell were bad but the feeling of helplessness was destructive. It washed over me in waves making me rave and struggle and then leaving me defeated, almost indifferent. The drug was still working; I blanked out a few times. I had bursts of cold anger and mushy self-pity; I did no clear thinking. I was in one of the indifferent stages when I heard the noises — a door opened far away, there were footsteps and other indeterminate sounds. I hardly cared, or thought I was imagining it. I smiled and felt the caked vomit on my face crack — ho hum. Then the noises were closer and then they were going away with a final sound to them. They were real. I shouted and thumped my feet on the wall; I howled like a wolf.
High heels rang on the tiles and the shower curtain jerked aside: Bettina Selby stood there, the most wonderful person in the world, a goddess, a saint.
‘Jesus Christ,’ she breathed.
I croaked up at her: ‘Water, and get a knife.’
An hour later I was sitting in her kitchen with a third cup of coffee and wearing one of her husband’s shirts. I was shaved, fairly clean and if not quite back to normal at least I could remember what normal felt like. Bettina had been fast and cool with the necessari
es. She told me that she’d planned to stay a week with a friend but had come back for something she’d forgotten — the thought of a week in the shower stall made my guts turn over. I drank coffee and made a cigarette; I hadn’t explained one damn thing to her and it was time. She was wearing an off the shoulder dress in a floral print and big wedge heels and looked good enough to eat. It was 11 a.m. on Tuesday, she told me, as she poured herself a hefty brandy. I accepted a slug of the same in my coffee.
‘So, Mr Kennedy, was it?’
‘Hardy,’ I said. ‘That was all a line. What did your husband say after our fracas?’
‘Business trouble. But it’s not is it?’
‘No. It’s family trouble, I’m working for your mother — I’m a private detective.’
She’d seen me flatten her husband and she’d found me trussed up like a chicken and covered in vomit. She knew I’d lied to her once; she drank some brandy and looked interested but sceptical. I got out the photoprints, unfolded them and passed them across. She took a quick look.
‘A boy and a man,’ she said. ‘Not bad looking. So what?’
‘That’s your son, Betty.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped, and then the message reached her and she pulled hard on her drink.
‘Ridiculous.’
‘It’s true. He’s thirty-one years old. Take another look, he’s the dead spit of your Dad.’
She looked, looked hard and nodded slowly. Her knuckles were white around the glass and beads of sweat broke out along her hairline. She reached for the bottle.
‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘Try and face it. This should interest you, it’s a change from booze and bad husbands.’
She smiled and that strength and intelligence that made her arresting shaped the planes of her face.
‘I really gave you the business the other day didn’t I?’
‘You weren’t yourself. I suppose you can guess what this’s all about now?’
‘Some of it. The old battle-axe wants to find him,’ she tapped the pictures, ‘and cut him in.’
‘I think she intends to give him the lot.’
Her eyes opened and she took a thoughtful, not desperate, sip of her drink. ‘How would you know that?’
‘It’s a guess really. There seems to be something strange about your father’s will, or maybe your mother’s. Your hubby’s had a good sniff at that. Miss Reid is out for herself and there’s someone else in there looking for an angle.’
She touched the pictures again. ‘Him?’
‘Could be.’
I told her everything then, more or less the way it had happened. She took Henry Brain’s demise without a blink and cried a bit over Nurse Callaghan. She asked me what I knew about her son.
‘Nothing good,’ I said. ‘He was a star athlete and pretty bright but he got lost somewhere. There was no serious score against him before all this that I know of, but he might have killed the old people. It’s tricky.’
‘I can see that. You want to deliver him all clean and shiny.’
‘That doesn’t look very likely now. Happy endings are hard to come by but you never know. Have you got a place on the river?’
‘Yes, I mean…’
‘Come on, it’s out in the open, you’ve got to see it through now.’
She looked stubborn and we both drank some more and kicked it around for a while. She confirmed that her husband was keenly interested in her mother’s property and had big plans for using it. I told her that it looked as if her husband was trying to get control of it one way or another — through her, or Verna Reid or the grandson.
‘That’s the way he thinks,’ she said, ‘he likes to cover all the angles.’
‘He’s doing all right isn’t he?’ I let my eyes drift around the gadget-laden kitchen.
‘Yes, but he’s ambitious, he wants to be big.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘Don’t know, something to do I suppose. He’s not interested in me or the girls. What’s your next move, Mr Hardy?’ She looked at the bottle and I had the feeling that she was the sort of boozer who rewarded herself with a drink before she tackled anything hard just in case she didn’t make it. I moved the brandy out of reach.
‘I’m going after them, it’s time to break up their little game, get the thing running my way. Where’s this river place?’
She looked at me with her mother’s eyes, calculating.
‘Would you like to go to bed with me?’
‘Sure. Some other time.’ I thought of Kay again as soon as I spoke. I was fifteen hours late with my call; I felt impatient, eager to get the Chatterton case wrapped up, anxious to get on with what might be called my life.
She sighed. ‘I thought you might say that. I’ll take you to the river. If you don’t let me come you can go to hell. It’d take you a while to find out where it is.’
True, I thought, and she might be useful. It was a hell of a situation, impossible to lay down rules for. I was going up against two men I didn’t know. It was important that one of them didn’t get hurt. To take the wife and maybe-mother along could be a good move, she could anticipate how Selby might behave. Or it could be a recipe for disaster.
‘Are there any guns in the place?’
‘Yes, a couple.’
Great. They already had one of mine, I assumed, and there was the drug angle to think about. Who was using the stuff — Selby, Baudin, both of them?
‘Maybe we should get the police,’ Bettina said.
That decided me. The police were out, the last thing Lady C wanted was the prying eye of officialdom — there’d be no bonus for Hardy in that event.
‘No police,’ I said. ‘Let’s keep it in the family. You can come but you do exactly as I say. Right?’
‘All right. D’you want to go now? I’ll change.’
I nodded. She got up with the grace I’d noticed before — when she wasn’t drunk or traumatised she moved like a dancer. When she’d gone I grabbed a phone and dialled Kay’s home number; it rang and rang hopelessly. I hung up feeling numb and empty, also resentful — the Chattertons with their dynastic ambitions and hang-ups and middle class boredoms were a pain in the arse. I felt like a mercenary, disaffected but with no other side to switch to. I was in the mood for Baudin and Selby, guns and all.
Bettina came back wearing jeans and a white Indian shirt; her hair was pulled back and tied and her make-up was subdued. She carried a big leather shoulder bag and looked ready for action.
I picked up my tobacco and other things while she waited; I was still stiff and my arm hurt where the syringe had gone in; otherwise I was in fair shape.
‘Is there much grass up there?’ I asked her.
‘Plenty, why?’
I grabbed the brandy bottle. ‘We’ll take this for snakebite.’
22
I got my other gun, the Colt, from the Falcon. It’s an illegal gun but a good one. We took the Honda north. The Selbys’ weekender was at Wisemans Ferry, Bettina told me, but that’s all she’d say. She drove well; there wasn’t a lot of traffic but there were a few curly spots and she put the Honda through them with style. As we went I tried to reconstruct what I’d heard while the drug was working on me, but I was aware of gaps. ‘Up the river’ was clear and the intention to come to some decision about things, but not much more than that. I had a feeling that another person was involved — Leonidas Green? Albie Logan? I hoped it was Albie.
Bettina was quiet for a while, concentrating on her driving, and then she started spewing questions at me — about her mother, Henry Brain, Blackman’s Bay. I had a sense of someone pent-up and thirsty for self-knowledge. One thing was clear, she knew that this was a crisis in her life and that the old round of booze and parties and battles with her husband over trivialities was over. I asked her what she’d do with the Chatterton estate if it came to her.
‘I’d like to set up somewhere in the country,’ she said. ‘A farm, you know? Horses… it’d be good for the girls an
d might straighten me out. I don’t suppose it’ll happen.’
‘Hard to say. It’s your son she’s lining up for the dough.’
‘He could hardly be expected to care about me, I only saw him once.’
I shrugged. ‘He might be tickled pink to meet his Mum.’
‘That isn’t funny,’ she snarled.
‘Sorry, just trying to keep it bright.’
She slammed the Honda through a corner using gears and engine, no brake. ‘Are you ever serious, Hardy?’
‘Nup, I meet too many crooks and liars to be serious.’
She sighed. ‘I think you carry on like that because you’re nervous and don’t know what to do.’
‘That’s what I said.’
We left the highway and began the descent to the river which is big and bold the way rivers ought to be. The Hawkesbury is tidal, salt-water a good way up and has lots of sharks in it — there are also fashionable islands and a prison farm island where they send fashionable offenders like defaulting solicitors. We crept down the road to Wisemans Ferry — the place has been going for about 150 years but still consists of only a few stores and petrol pump. She turned left before the run down to the township and we bounced along a couple of hundred yards of track before she stopped and set the handbrake. We were on a steep hill running down to the river.
‘We’re close,’ she said.
