by Peter Corris
I looked out across the river to the rugged cliff face on the other side; we were only about ninety kilometres from Sydney but it wasn’t too hard to imagine an Aborigine sneaking along that cliff hoping to spear his lunch. I tried to remember all the guff in the instruction manuals they’d thrown at us in Malaya: study the topography, high points, cover, look for exits — it all mattered, but what counted in the end was luck and guts.
‘Where’s the house?’
She pointed down to where two tin roofs glinted in the sun through a canopy of gum leaves.
‘Down there, the house back from the road.’
There was a proprietorial note in her voice and I squinted to get the layout clear. One of the houses did sit a few yards further back from the road and apparently such details counted up here; me, I’d have called it the one with the fibro cement painted white rather than green.
She watched me nervously while I checked the Colt and attended to the basics, like tucking my trousers into my socks and making sure I wasn’t going to lose a shoe heel at a crucial moment.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘First, make sure I don’t get hurt, second try not to hurt anyone else. Try to give them a hell of a fright if I can. Anyone likely to be home next door?’
‘No, they’re real weekenders.’
‘Okay, where would the cars be?’
‘On the other side. We’re sort of near the back here.’
‘Can you show me the way in and let me get a look at the cars as well?’
She nodded. Her lips were tight and she’d lost a bit of her high colour but she looked determined rather than afraid.
‘Let’s go. Remember our deal — you do what you’re told.’
I reached over, took out the keys and dropped them into the door pocket; we got out and I motioned at her not to slam the door. We walked down the road a bit and then took a rabbit track off into the trees. It was steep and Bettina steadied herself expertly on the slim-trunked gums as we went down.
The back fence of the Selbys’ lot was three strands of barbed wire strung on half a dozen rough posts. The words of the old World War I song rang through my mind — ‘hanging on the old barbed wire’ — nasty stuff, anti-people. The scrub came up to within a foot of the fence and afforded cover along its length. I pulled Bettina down.
‘The cars?’
She pointed and set off, bent double, towards the other side of the lot; for a big woman, past her youth, she bent well. I followed and grabbed her arm.
‘You’re enjoying this,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ Her breathing was hard and short — exertion and excitement.
‘I hope you don’t tear your slacks on the wire.’
‘Fuck you.’
Through the feathery leaves I could see the cars parked beside the house — the Chev and the blue Toyota. The house was well maintained, good roof and guttering, fresh paint. I focused on a window and could see a moving shape inside.
‘Richard,’ Bettina whispered.
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Preparing food by the look of it — that’s the kitchen.’
‘This is as good a time as any,’ I said in Bettina’s ear. ‘I’m going in the front and try to catch them with their faces full of food. Give me fifteen minutes and come on in if you don’t hear more than one shot.’
‘What if I do hear shooting?’
‘Is there a town cop?’
‘I think so, yes, there is.’
‘Get him and anyone else useful you can find.’
‘Good luck,’ she said, then she giggled: ‘Wish I had my camera.’
Christ, I thought, that’s all I need, candid shots of Hardy creeping about in the scrub, gun at the ready. The idea relieved some of the tension though: it was a tricky situation going up against armed men I didn’t know, but it wasn’t full-scale war. I moved down the side of the lot towards the front. Beside the house and fifteen feet away was a thick screen of trees: a bird hovered and then dropped in a long, streaking dive behind them. I was snapping, scraping and tearing things as I moved, but I was doing the best I could. I worked down to the cars which had their windows open and the keys in the ignition — the way people leave cars in the country. I put the keys in my pocket.
The Selbys’ cottage was as simple and unpretentious as their suburban house was the opposite. It was a square fibro bungalow set up on brick piers with a deck running along the front. It was also hemmed in with trees so that I had cover up to the deck. I never saw a weekender yet with a decent lock on the door and this was no exception; the man who taught me could have opened it with his thumbnail. I used the stiff plastic and the lock slid in; I held it there, eased the door open, and then freed the lock slowly and without a sound.
The interior was painted cream and there was sea-grass matting on the floor; a door at the end of the passage led to the rooms at the back of the bungalow and, as I stood looking at it, it opened. The man with the bandages and sticking plaster on his face came through and turned his head back to say something in the direction he’d come from and then he became aware of me and his jaw dropped.
I lifted the Colt and put a shot into the wall about a foot above his head; the sound was like thunder in the enclosed space and he stood rock still. I bustled up and stuck the gun in his ribs.
‘Hey,’ he said weakly, ‘hey.’
‘Back up. Get back in there.’
He went like a lamb all the way back to where Richard Selby and Verna Reid were sitting. Selby was lifting a glass of beer to his mouth, the woman yelled and he dropped it; the beer went into his lap and the glass shattered on the floor. I prodded the tall man again.
‘Sit down.’
He did. He’d recovered from the shock and was starting to look me over carefully. His hands were big and thick around the knuckles and joints. He flexed them and shuffled his feet.
‘Don’t try any of that Bruce Lee stuff,’ I told him, ‘I owe you a bit and I’d be glad to get even.’
Selby looked up from mopping his pants. ‘This is overdue, Hardy. It’s time we had a talk.’
I gave him a hard look. They’d have called him Red Richard back in Norman days and admired him for a fine figure of a man. There was lard on him to my eyes and I thought I could see some pink scalp in places through the carefully arranged black locks.
‘I owe you something, too, for that nice work in the garage,’ I said, ‘and I’m a vindictive man. Don’t go smooth on me Selby, I can tie you into one murder, maybe two, and I will if that’s the way you want to play it.’
Verna Reid’s face was tight with malice. She looked at Selby with contempt. ‘I told you we’d have to kill him.’
It wasn’t clear whether he was talking to me or the woman but anyway Selby said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ It carried about as much conviction as the warning on a cigarette packet and I let it pass.
The boy with the bandages was more direct. ‘How did you get loose?’ he asked. His voice was deep and educated.
‘You’ll see,’ I said. I jerked the gun at him. ‘Now you are going to take those bandages off.’
Alarm leapt into the voice. ‘Why?’
‘Just do it.’
‘No! Russell no!’ Verna Reid sounded as if she’d heard someone threaten to knock a leg off the Venus de Milo.
James touched the bandages and looked nervously at Selby.
‘I can’t!’
I grinned and raised an eyebrow at him, his voice wasn’t as deep now or as educated.
‘I can’t, I’ve got bad cuts, that mirror at the gym — they’ll scar.’
‘Sonny boy you can end up like Quasimodo for all I care. I’m going to see your face now one way or another. If I have to do it myself I won’t be gentle.’
He looked appealingly at Selby who shrugged. ‘You better do it Russ,’ he said.
‘I’ll need scissors.’ He stood up quickly and pushed his chair back; he was dangerous, a nice mover and with en
ormous strength packed in the wide shoulders and arms. I needed to defuse him and quickly: I moved up closer raising the gun and then smacked him across the cheek with my left hand. He screamed and I thumped him on the shoulder with the gun.
‘Sit down and start unwrapping!’
He lifted his hand to his face and then let it drop. ‘I can’t.’
The bandages covered most of the upper part of his face leaving good sized slits for his eyes and going down around his chin. I grabbed an end of plaster and yanked. He screamed again and I pulled the tape free and held it in front of his eye slits.
‘Do it, or it’ll be like that all the way.’
He reached up and began fumbling for the ends of the plaster strips. I felt like wincing as he worked them slowly off the surface of the bandage; tears jumped into his eyes and all the fight seemed to have gone out of him. I took time out to look at Selby who was playing with a bread roll on his plate. He looked puzzled, as if he wanted to say something but wasn’t sure what language to speak in. It was a mistake to be distracted — James came at me suddenly, coiling up off the chair like a big cat, his hands out, stiff and deadly. He looked good but he was just a little slow; I side-stepped and swept the flat of the gun against the side of his face and he went down clutching and making tight little agonised grunts.
‘I told you not to be silly,’ I said. ‘Get up.’
He lifted himself up into the chair and his trembling hands worked at the wrappings. Selby didn’t say anything in any language, didn’t move. It took James five minutes and blood started to seep out pretty soon; Verna Reid sobbed quietly. Blood was flowing freely down his face when he eased off the last bandage but his features were plain. He wasn’t Warwick Baudin — nothing like him.
23
Disappointment hit me like an electric shock; I gaped and felt unsteady on my feet. Bettina Selby’s voice cut through the accumulated tension.
‘It’s not him.’ She stepped in from the passage and her husband’s eyes moved between us both as he got the connection.
‘Not who?’ Blood ran down Russell James’ face and spotted his cream silk shirt.
‘Yes, who?’ Selby got up and took a couple of steps out from the table. I moved and brought the Colt up to cover him but I was hopelessly unprepared. I’d let the gun drop while I’d watched the bandages come off and now I wasn’t sure enough where it was pointing; now there was an extra person in the room and one of the others was moving. These are excuses for the fact that I ended up with my back to a door which had opened. I knew that when I felt something hard and sharp bite into my neck.
‘Put the gun down, Hardy,’ Selby said smugly, ‘or he’ll blow your head off.’
I let the gun drop and turned slowly. The man holding the shotgun was nearly as tall as the one dabbing at his bloodied face. He had an enormous ballooning belly and three chins. His face still wore the idiot grin I’d seen in the health studio when he was cleaning a mirror but the light was better and my eyes were ready to see whatever there was to see — under the fat and behind the grin and the vacant, crazy eyes was Warwick Baudin.
He still wore the battered T shirt, he had old sandshoes on his feet and his jeans were unfastened at the waist to give extra room to his vast gut.
The room was dead quiet. Having made his entrance, the fat man didn’t seem to know what to do next; he looked at Selby and James who appeared to be as scared as I was.
‘I heard the noise,’ he said. His voice was slow and thick as if his tongue was too big for his mouth. He was in a bad way, his hair was lank and greasy and his skin pale and puffy. There was dirt in the folds of flesh on his neck and his pale grey eyes were bleary and rimmed with scum. He didn’t look much like a Chatterton now.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said quietly and I put out a tentative hand towards the shot gun.
He threw back his head and let out a high, giggling laugh, but the double barrel stayed where it would cut me in half. Selby who’d nominated himself master of ceremonies a minute ago had lost his confidence; he moved back behind the table and looked as if he’d have liked to crawl under it.
‘He’s ripped out of his mind,’ James said. He looked down at my Colt on the floor which was closer to him than me.
‘Easy,’ I said, ‘he could blast us both. This isn’t worth dying for.’
It was a crazy situation, like being bailed up against a wall by a child with a bazooka. Bettina and Verna Reid seemed almost uninterested, reserving all their attention, packed with malice, for each other. With an effort I called the old training into play and looked at his hands; in contrast to the rest of him they were clean and well maintained. It was a nice, sleuthly point but not of much use just now. Then I noticed something else and my breath started to come a little easier: only one of the hammers on the old gun was cocked and his finger was on the wrong trigger. That gave me all the time in the world.
Baudin turned his head a fraction to look at Bettina. ‘Who’s she?’ he said thickly.
I moved fast and punched his upper left arm and swooped on his right wrist with my other hand. The barrels swung down to the floor and his finger clawed convulsively: the gun roared and pellets sprayed up at us from the floor. I wrenched the shotgun free and dug Baudin hard with it in the belly. He went down with a grunt. I bent for my gun and then I was holding all the aces again. Also I was one of the three people not bleeding: Baudin had taken some pellets in the legs, Selby in the shoulder and James had both hands over his face and was moaning quietly. It was a bad day for James.
Bettina got busy. She dumped her bag and helped her husband and James into chairs. Baudin was shuffling back towards the wall and I let him get there and prop himself against it. I told Bettina to get some water and look for something to use as a bandage. I stood by the window and made and lit a cigarette. I wanted a drink. Bettina came back with a basin and a bottle of disinfectant and a shirt. She ripped and dabbed and swabbed and the wounded bore it stoically. Baudin had a few pellets embedded in the pudgy flesh of his right leg; Selby was only nicked; Russell James had taken a pellet in the face — it had ploughed up his cheek and veered off along the side of his head before reaching the eye. Lucky.
When she’d finished ministering, Bettina picked up her bag, opened it and pulled out the brandy. She cocked an eye at me and I nodded. She came back from the kitchen with five glasses and poured a generous slug into each. I hooked up a chair and sat in it with the shotgun across my lap and the handgun on the edge of the table. No one had spoken for some time and the grunters and moaners had fallen silent.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘All this is nasty but nothing fatal. I think it’s time we sorted this mess out.’
I looked across at Baudin who was staring down at his glass; he picked it up and drained it straight off. I motioned to Bettina to pour him another and he did the same again. He seemed uninterested in the proceedings, just keen to get as much alcohol inside him as was allowed.
I drank some brandy. ‘What have you got to say Russ?’
He sipped his drink and didn’t answer.
‘No, well you wouldn’t want to say too much because you’re the boy who’s really in trouble.’
‘Why?’ There was a whining tone in his voice now and all the polish had rubbed off him.
‘Henry Brain, the old man in Darlinghurst. You hit him. He died.’
‘I didn’t hit him. We struggled and he fell.’
‘You sure as hell didn’t send for a doctor. Look, maybe you’re telling the truth. There’ll be a medical report that might bear you out but either way you look bad — hitting or struggling, what’s the difference. It depends how we play it. Have you got a record?’
‘A bit, not much,’ he said sullenly.
‘But you see my point don’t you? My client carries a fair bit of weight still and I want to keep her happy. I might leave you out if I get co-operation.’ I drank some more brandy and looked down at the sad fat man with the empty glass on the floor. ‘He’s the grandson
, right?’
‘Don’t tell him, Russell,’ Verna Reid barked, ‘don’t tell him a thing.’
James looked down at Baudin who was playing with the glass in his big, meaty hands.
‘We think so,’ he said slowly. ‘It was all Richard’s idea.’
Selby opened his mouth to say something but I waved my glass at him and he shut it.
‘The way I see it,’ I said, ‘is that Brain spotted fatty here and blabbed something to you about his long-lost son. He told you that he’d been married to Mr Justice Chatterton’s daughter and you knew Selby here was married to her now and you thought he might be interested.’
James nodded and put down half his brandy. Bettina looked interested and hadn’t touched her drink yet.
‘That’s right,’ James said. ‘Richard took over then. We… he sent old Henry up to pressure the old lady but he made a mess of it. Then Henry dropped out of sight for a while, Richard had given him some money. Then the Judge died. We didn’t know what to do after that. Then Richard…” He stopped and took a nervous sip of his drink.
‘Richard came up with the idea of you latching onto Miss Reid,’ I said. ‘Dirty trick.’
Verna Reid’s face lost its boldness, her hands flew up and fluttered like the wings of a bird beating against bars. ‘I thought you…’ she said, ‘I thought that we…’
‘Charades, Verna,’ I said. ‘All charades. Do you know what Lady Catherine planned to do with the estate?’
‘Not really, she’s mad. One time she told me she’d leave it to me, another time she said she’d leave me nothing. She hinted that there was someone else, I knew she didn’t mean her.” She shot a look at Bettina who was nursing her drink and leaning forward as if she was watching a good play.
‘Just what did you have in mind then, Miss Reid?’ Bettina purred.
She didn’t answer; she looked at James who was staring down into his glass and at Selby who avoided her eyes. She seemed to know that she’d reached the end of things — a relationship, prospects, a job. Her eyes were empty and dull.
‘I slaved for that old bitch. The wages are a joke. She was always promising things, promising. Well, the place is pretty run down and she hasn’t got any money to speak of. The way things were going she’d have had to sell it sometime.’
