Salt and Blood

by Peter Corris

  ‘A day at a time,’ Sherrin said.

  Glen shook her head as she picked up her handbag and zipped the laptop bag shut. ‘The way I feel it’s an hour at a time.’

  I carried her overnight bag out to Sherrin’s car, a white Pulsar, and we stood around in the cool night air trying to find something to say. Eventually Sherrin couldn’t hold it in any longer. ‘What about this bloke?’

  ‘I’ll look for him,’ I said.

  He looked at my Falcon and the three other cars lined up at the units. ‘He’s stolen Glen’s car, right? I could put out a call on him.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Glen said. ‘I let him drive it. You could say he’s just … borrowed it.’

  Plus, I thought, he’s drunk, hasn’t got a licence and has marijuana on him. If the cops caught him he was headed back to the institution and that didn’t suit me. I wanted to find out what was behind all this crazed behaviour, whether it worked out well for Warren St John and his bitch of a mother or not.

  Glen rubbed her eyes and shivered. ‘Cliff, I can’t go on with this.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll talk to the brother. Don’t worry. Just get yourself together again. We’ll see how it works out.’

  She got into the car and sat straight, looking pale and fragile through the tinted glass.

  Sherrin said, ‘Thanks, Hardy.’

  We didn’t shake hands, as if we both sensed it would make Glen look like some kind of goods, handed over. He drove off and I went into the unit and dug out the Black Douglas. About two inches left. I poured it out and added an ice cube. I kicked off my shoes, dimmed the lights and sat on the bed, propped up against the pillows, to drink it but I was asleep after two sips.

  21

  The insistent ringing of my mobile woke me. It was close to 4 a.m. so I’d had about three hours sleep, enough to make me dopey and slow to respond but not enough to be refreshing. I fumbled for the phone, knocked it to the floor and swore several times before I was able to answer.

  ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  ‘Cliff, it’s Jerry. Where are you?’

  That got my attention. I swallowed the rest of the drink and tried to clear my head. ‘Jerry. I’m up Newcastle way still. What’s happening.’

  ‘Oh God, I hoped you were closer. Rod’s been here. It was … terrible.’

  ‘Are you all right? Did he hurt you?’

  ‘Yes, a bit. He tried to kill me, I thought. He was drunk and crazy. He …’

  ‘Are you safe now? Are you locked in?’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m safe, but I don’t understand. He was raving about you and this woman, Glen and his wife.’

  ‘Stay put. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in a couple of hours, say three.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I …’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m leaving now. Ring me any time if you need to. I’m coming. Do you need a doctor?’ She almost laughed and the sound made me feel relieved. ‘I am a doctor. Thanks, Cliff. I’ll see you soon then.’

  I grabbed the few things I’d taken into the unit, threw them in the car and was off within a couple of minutes. Underfed and underslept, with a dull ache in my head and pain through my upper body, I was in no condition for driving, but the traffic on the highway was light and I made good time. Rod was running out of control but there must have been some reason for him to go to Jerry. Maybe there’d been more between them than she’d let on. I decided not to worry about that and to concentrate on driving.

  Dawn broke when I was halfway there and it was fully light by the time I got to Mosman. I went up to the house as quickly as I could, given my battered condition, and rang the bell. Jerry opened the door. She was barefoot, pale and swathed in a black velvet dressing-gown. She had a black eye and a bandaged head and her throat was bruised. She reached for me and wrapped her arms around me. I gave a gasp of pain but grabbed her when she tried to pull away.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  I held her and kissed her hair, keeping clear of the bandage. ‘I had a run-in with Rod as well. He flattened me. What happened here?’

  She drew me inside and closed the door. I examined her injuries in the light flooding in from the skylight. ‘Jesus, he throttled you.’

  ‘Tried to. I fought him off. I can fight and I was terrified. Look.’ She showed me her right hand. The knuckles were skinned and three of the nails were broken.

  ‘You did better than me. How much damage did you do to him?’

  ‘Not much. Drew a bit of blood from his mouth and I think I loosened a couple of teeth. I got my knee in his groin as well.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It seemed to pull him out of his frenzy at least. Then he landed one last swing.’ She touched her eye.

  We went through to the living room and she noticed the stiffness in my movement. I told her what had happened and she examined the back of my head and made me take off my shirt and breathe in and out.

  ‘We’ll mend,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know about him now.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  ‘In a minute. You’re going to stay for a while, aren’t you?’

  ‘If you want me to.’

  ‘I do. I’ll make some tea. Uh, do you drink tea?’

  ‘If you’ve got some brandy to put in it.’

  She made the tea and I spiked mine and she told me that Rod had arrived some time around midnight and hammered on the door. He was drunk and stoned and hysterical and she tried to calm him down but he got more and more worked up. When she mentioned me he assaulted her.

  ‘It wasn’t a sexual attack. It was just an assault. He hit me but there wasn’t too much force in it.’ She touched her eye, then the bandage. ‘I almost ducked under this one. Then he had me by the throat and it got serious. He was raving about you and Glen and his wife.’

  I sipped the laced tea and it tasted pretty good and soothing. The only problem was too much soothing and I’d be out on my feet. I struggled to concentrate. ‘You’re the psychiatrist, what would you say was driving him? Apart from the booze and the dope.’

  She considered the question. ‘Jealousy.’

  I nodded. ‘You tell me he hated his wife and I’ve learned that she had a number of lovers. We’ve seen how violent he can be and now you say he’s subject to jealousy. Have to consider the possibility that he did kill his wife. You said the hypnotism stuff isn’t infallible.’

  ‘That’s right, but there’s something that doesn’t fit.’

  ‘I know. The kid. He wouldn’t kill the kid.’

  ‘I don’t think so, but have you ever heard him talk about her?’

  I thought back. ‘No, not once.’

  ‘He didn’t with me either, or couldn’t. It was as if …’

  I was having trouble staying awake. The brandy had taken the edge off the pain in my head and chest and was beckoning me towards sleep. But Jerry was working at it and I had to try to stay with her. ‘As if what?’

  ‘I’ve done some grief counselling in my time. It seemed to me that Rodney’s attitude to his daughter was very like that of people who’ve lost a child. Refusal to even mention the name isn’t uncommon. In some societies it’s institutionalised for all sorts of reasons.’

  Anthropology was just too heavy for me and I felt my eyes closing. I felt guilty; she’d been knocked around as much as me and had probably had as little sleep. Women are tougher and she was younger. I was dimly aware of my shoes being pulled off and my body being laid out on the couch and something soft being put under my head. That did it. I was gone.

  The brandy did a good job. I slept deeply and the dreams I had were those silly, rather pleasant ones that don’t make any sense but aren’t threatening. I was in the middle of one about building a sandcastle on a beach when Jerry shook me gently awake.

  ‘Cliff, there’s a call on your mobile. I answered it because I didn’t want it to wake you up but he says it’s urgent. You’d better take it.’

  I’d put the mobile with my car keys on
the coffee table. It was less than a metre from my head but I hadn’t heard it ring. I picked it up.

  ‘Cliff, Frank Parker here.’

  ‘Frank? What’s up?’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Mosman.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘C’mon, Frank. What’s this about?’

  ‘You’d better get back to Glebe and go straight to the station. They want to talk to you. Rodney Harkness has been murdered.’

  PART 3

  22

  Rod had been found in Randwick in the workshop of a service station that had been closed pending redevelopment of the site. An attempt had been made to set fire to the building but a heavy shower of rain had prevented the fire getting hold. A Detective Sergeant Lance Matthiesson from the Eastern command was in charge of the investigation and he interviewed me at the Glebe station where I’d reported on Frank’s instructions.

  Matthiesson was a stocky, no-nonsense type who knew his job. ‘The body was identified from the contents of the wallet,’ he said. ‘We contacted the brother and he told us about you and Glen Withers. I knew you were mates with Parker so I rang him to locate you. Save sending someone round or stopping you on the road.’

  That was Matthiesson’s style. No bullshit mystifying about how they’d got on to me. A straight answer to a straight question of mine, so I tried another.

  ‘What about Glen?’

  ‘She’s very ill apparently. Kevin Sherrin’s vouched for her whereabouts last night and he guarantees she’ll talk to us as soon as she’s fit. You don’t look too flash yourself, by the way.’

  I’d come straight from Jerry’s place and must have looked as bad as I felt. ‘I’m okay. Sherrin can vouch for me up to a certain time as well. After that I was on the road to Sydney and then with someone in Mosman.’

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Dr Jerry Weir. She’s a psychiatrist who treated Harkness when he was in the bin.’

  I gave him the address and he wrote it all down. We were in a corner of the detectives’ room and had it pretty much to ourselves, with just the odd person wandering in and out briefly. ‘I hope you’re going to be as helpful as possible on this,’ Matthiesson said.

  ‘How much did Frank Parker tell you?’

  ‘Quite a bit, but I want to hear it all again from you.’

  ‘Fair enough, but first tell me how he was killed.’

  The room was getting warm and Matthiesson took off his blazer and hung it over the back of the chair he was using. Plain grey trousers, blue shirt, no tie. Since the latest round of corruption investigations cops have been dressing down. ‘It was pretty. He’d been tied to a workbench. Stripped. Bolt-cutters had been used.’

  ‘Not …?’

  ‘No. A little finger, part of. Cigarette burns. He’d been tortured, then shot in the head. That must’ve been welcome.’

  ‘Poor bastard. All right, I’ll tell you what I know.’

  I ran through it all, sticking to the facts and leaving out things like my speculations about why the Harknesses had hired Glen in the first place. Matthiesson got it all on tape and made notes from time to time as I was talking. He stopped the tape a few times to ask questions; nothing I couldn’t answer. As I spoke I realised how badly Glen and I had bungled the assignment and I started to feel a build-up of anger at Rod’s torturer and assassin.

  ‘So all you’ve got on this bloke, if he’s the murderer, is that he can shoot a rifle, drives first a 4WD then a red Camry and looks like a cop. No idea of why he wanted Harkness dead?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did you check on the rego of the Camry?’

  I looked innocent.

  ‘C’mon, Hardy.’

  ‘I tried. My source wasn’t available.’

  ‘Leave it alone, then. Leave it all alone. Just make sure you’re available if needed.’

  I said I would be. We didn’t shake hands. Maybe handshaking was going out of fashion with cops. I left the station and drove home. The house looked shabby, not up to scratch; the way I felt.

  After ten days I was out of the loop. I had a few more sessions with Matthiesson when he tried to pump me for more information. I didn’t have much to give him but got a bit more myself. The police hadn’t been able to locate Craig, the junkie Mr Fixit. The address he’d given me was either a fake or he’d moved on. I’d told them about the broken door and Craig’s repair job and where the key was. They found the key and searched the flat with no result. Rodney Harkness had been abducted somewhere between Mosman and where his body was found. The numberplate on the red Camry belonged to a white Commodore stolen some months back and never recovered, like Glen’s Pajero.

  Kevin Sherrin had taken some leave and was looking after Glen. I left a phone message of support but I heard nothing back. I got an email which had been sent to Glen and copied to me from Warren Harkness severing all connection, declaring the contract null and void and stating that no money was owing. It was what I expected but, like the whole business, it left a nasty taste in my mouth.

  For want of something better to talk about, I told Matthiesson my suspicions about why the Harknesses had instigated the investigation. I had a little support for it in the form of the last of Lucille née Hammond’s notes, received almost seven years before Glen was contacted by Warren St John. It seemed to confirm that they were looking to have Lucille and the daughter declared dead.

  ‘Nothing illegal about that,’ Matthiesson said.

  ‘No, but they didn’t level with us.’

  Matthiesson shrugged uninterestedly and I brought up the matter of the suspicions surrounding the old man’s death. We were in the pub on the corner of Carlisle and Norton Streets in Leichhardt—I’d just finished my workout and Matthiesson had agreed to meet me there as he had other business in the area. It was 11 a.m. and we were sitting over a couple of judicious light beers on a very hot morning.

  Matthiesson took a sip and wiped his mouth. ‘Yeah, I looked into that when I was backgrounding this fucking business. The word was the wife had offed him somehow but there was no way to prove it.’

  ‘Nice people.’

  ‘You’re thinking Warren got his brother out to get rid of him. Hired Glen to muddy the waters.’

  ‘I hadn’t gone quite that far, but what d’you reckon?’

  ‘You know what’s against it?’

  I took a drink and tried to pretend I enjoyed light beer. ‘Yeah, for one thing, Warren claims he resisted his brother’s release.’

  ‘Could be lying. I can tell you we drew a complete blank there. That Rutherford joint would hardly tell us a thing and we’d have Buckley’s of getting an order to search. From what little they did say, we got the impression that the civil liberties lawyers were acting under confidential instructions from another set of lawyers who were acting blah, blah.’

  We both knew what the other objection was but I spelled it out anyway. ‘Plus the way he was killed. Tortured for information. It looks personal.’

  ‘Or was made to look that way to deflect attention away from the brother.’

  I shook my head. ‘Only the hit man would know.’

  Jerry used almost the same phrase but with a different spin when we talked it over. ‘Only the person who killed him knows what Rodney’s secret was. That’s assuming he learned it. We’ll never know unless he’s caught.’

  I nodded. ‘Seems unlikely.’

  ‘It irks you, Cliff, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Everything about the whole bloody business irks me.’

  We were in the backyard of her Mosman place in the cool of an evening. We were seeing each other regularly and making love again as soon as our injuries mended. The relationship was going well. We shared some interests—tennis, reading, old films, resolute atheism, Radio National. Our backgrounds were very different; she was the only daughter of a husband and wife doctor team and had disappointed them by not becoming a surgeon after taking her medical degrees. She said she’d rather talk to people than cut them
up. Her parents were dead and she owned the house. An early marriage hadn’t worked and seeing so many damaged people had made her wary. She was smart and funny and liked a drink and sex. Despite the comfort she’d grown up in and still enjoyed, she was disenchanted left Labor in politics. Full steam ahead, but we both knew that the ghost of Rodney Harkness hovered over us.

  We were sitting on old but still solid garden furniture drinking wine. The light was dying and the house was a solid shape against a clear sky. It doesn’t get much better than Sydney in mid-Spring.

  ‘Not an auspicious beginning was it?’ Jerry said. ‘You coming to grill me about a patient and me admitting I’d had an affair with him.’

  ‘And then him knocking both of us about. No, but we’re doing all right.’

  ‘Are we? I suppose I shouldn’t feel like this, given that what I do doesn’t often make for endings of any kind, happy or unhappy, but I’d feel more … at ease with you if we knew why.’

  ‘Not who?’

  She slapped at a mosquito. ‘Not so much that. I’m more interested in the secret that killed him. It must have been … potent.’

  I remembered that she’d said she was writing a book about people who compulsively confessed and I wondered if her interest was academic. Unworthy thought. I had the same feeling. We needed some closure. A few more mosquitos buzzed in and we gathered up the bottle and glasses and moved towards the house.

  ‘The weird thing is,’ I said, ‘I have a feeling there’s something I know, or I’ve heard, some connection that could help to make sense of it, but I can’t grasp it. You know, like when you can’t remember the name of a book or a movie.’

  ‘Keep trying,’ she said.

  I did try. I read back over my notes many times and tried to recall my conversations with Rod and everyone else in as much detail as I could. There were irritating loose ends. For example, no identification of the bullet that had lodged in the upholstery of my car. Not that it would’ve helped. Thoughts of Glen kept intruding. Thoughts of how close we’d been and then how hurt. I wanted to break Sherrin’s embargo but I didn’t. There was still something that I couldn’t put my finger on. I tried the old trick of clearing my mind of everything to do with things Harkness and hoping the thing I was searching for would jump into the space, but no luck.