Wet Graves

by Peter Corris

  “Easy, Ralph,” Loomis said. “No use blowing the boiler. Any bright ideas, Hardy?”

  “What about the victims? If they were all oldest sons of bridge men, that could narrow the field of possible future targets. At least they could be located and protected.”

  Wren shook his head. “Two of them weren’t oldest sons. There’s lots of them. Not as many as sons of men killed or injured on the bridge, but still too many to cover.”

  “There has to be a reason why he just started this up recently,” Meredith said.

  Wren checked his notes. “Fits with retirement. Time and money to track down and kill people.”

  “That boat of his looked expensive. He didn’t seem like a man to whom time and money were a big problem,” I said. “I should’ve picked up on that at the time but I didn’t. There were other odd things about him, too.”

  “Like what?” Wren snapped.

  I shook my head, trying to locate the source of the disquiet, the feeling that something I’d seen had been wrong. I couldn’t do it. “I don’t know. Can’t put my finger on it.”

  Meredith was suddenly looking tired, He blinked a few times and slid down on his pillows. “The other possibility is that he found something out recently. Something that triggered all this. Have there been any out-of-the-usual stories about the bridge in the last six months?”

  “Bloody toll and tunnel’s all I can think of,” Loomis grunted.

  Wren made a note. “We can check it.”

  Loomis smoothed the wrapping on his cigar. “Any more bright ideas, Lloyd?”

  Meredith glanced at me. “Only one.”

  I looked at the man who had saved my life and had taken two bullets the shooter would have been happy to have put in me. He had two tubes running out of him and all the energy and enthusiasm he would usually be exerting with his body was concentrated in the challenging look in his eyes. Our ten minutes were almost up. “I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

  21

  Ralph Wren got busy and he had very receptive media to deal with. Harbour bridge stories, apparently, rate just below quins and bimbos for ratings and newspaper sales, and what Wren served up was swallowed whole: BRIDGE KILLER INSANE, SAYS EXPERT was one headline. An unnamed psychologist hypothesised that the person responsible for the deaths of the bridge builders’ sons was ‘motivated by an irrational hatred of the bridge, which was undoubtedly a symbol for a deep sexual uncertainty’. The article went on to compare the killer to assorted psychopaths distinguished by sexual confusion and clinically tested low intelligence.

  A television report laid stress on the magnificent achievement of Bradfield, Ennis, Barclay, Glover and the others. It showed old, flickering black and white footage of the building and opening of the bridge and emphasised the safety and stability of the structure. “No one will ever sing The harbour bridge is falling down’,” the voice-over commentary ran, “and no one has ever disputed that the bridge is worth every cent and every drop of sweat it cost.” The report concluded with the statement that “the serial killer is offering an insult to the memories of great men, and an affront to all Australians who care about their country’s history”.

  This went on for two days. The killer was described as “probably impotent and mother-fixated” the bridge builders as “heroes” and their families as “devastated”. The artist’s drawing of Lithgow was circulated, but it had been modified to make him look brutish and humourless. The usual number of crank calls and letters were received by the police and the media, and several of the more inane and perverted of these received some publicity. The outstanding war records of some of the builders’ offspring, male and female, got a mention. This was at my suggestion. There was something about the photograph of Lithgow’s father, and his reaction when the topic of war came up, that worked in my mind like a stone in a shoe. But I still couldn’t make sense of it.

  Ray Guthrie was interviewed by the police but not troubled further. Louise Madden was not required to identify her father. My recognition plus dental records and the presence of a scar from a minor operation on Madden’s right knee was sufficient. The autopsy revealed that he had died from a blow to the temple, which had caused a massive haemorrhage.

  “That would have been quick and probably painless,” I told Louise. She was finishing off the job in Castlecrag and I’d driven out there to give her the news in person.

  She used a mallet to knock a heavy stone into place in a rockery she’d constructed. “That’s good. When can I bury him?”

  “Soon, I should think.”

  “Will you come?”

  “If you want me to.”

  She nodded and swung the mallet again. The dull thwacks reminded me of the sounds Helen Broadway made when she staked vines on her husband’s land. I’d pleaded with her to leave him and she wouldn’t. I’d pulled up some of the vines and we’d shouted at each other. Louise Madden stopped working and stared at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” I shook my head to clear the images.

  “This isn’t over for you, Cliff, is it?”

  “Not really. Not until he’s caught.”

  “And what’s happening on that front?”

  The police and I anticipated that Lithgow would have read my name in the press and put two and two together.

  “We’re waiting,” I said.

  Lithgow called on the third night. I was in my office.

  “You know who this is?” he said.

  “Yes.” I switched on the police-provided recording equipment. There was a similar hookup at home.

  “I realise you’ll be recording this, Mr Hardy. I’m not stupid, you see?”

  There was nothing to say to that and I didn’t try.

  “I want you to go out to a telephone box in William Street—the one opposite the Metropolitan hotel. Have you got that?”

  “Yes. When?”

  “Now, and don’t contact the police or bring anyone with you when we meet.”

  “We’re meeting, are we?” He hung up without answering and I replaced the receiver thoughtfully. I didn’t really want to go up against Lithgow single-handedly, but I also didn’t want to leave him running around loose to kill more people. And I wanted to know why he did it. That’s what he’d be counting on if he knew me. I had a chilling feeling that he did know me and that firmed up my resolve. He could find me whenever he wanted to, which gave me a distinctly uncomfortable feeling. The police had returned my gun. I checked it over carefully before replacing it in the holster under my arm and putting on my sports jacket and a plastic raincoat. The rain was beating steadily against the window and leaking in under the decayed sill. In a situation like this, it was important not to be confused and I wasn’t. I wasn’t doing this for the public or for Louise Madden or because I loved the Sydney Harbour Bridge. I was doing it for me.

  My feet were wet before I reached the phone box and I wondered how good a psychologist Lithgow was. Had he contrived to send me out in the cold and rain while he sat by a fire with one of his glasses of vintage red to hand? The lights from the traffic signals and the hotels and the car showrooms blurred in reflection on the wet road. The booth had lost a pane of glass to vandals, and the wind pushed spatters of rain inside, making the shelf and handset oily damp. The phone rang and it almost slipped from my grasp as I snatched it up.

  “Hardy.”

  “I want to explain.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wonder if you do. I wasn’t fooled by the stories you planted in the papers.”

  Again, it seemed best not to say anything.

  “I wasn’t fooled for an instant,” he went on. “It was very crude. But I admit I was hurt.”

  “Especially by references to your father.”

  His voice was almost a strangled sob. “What?”

  “This is all to do with your father, isn’t it?”

  “Y … yes.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ballantine.”

&nbs
p; I’d read over the names of the injured many times. I hadn’t retained them all, but Ballantine was the second name on the list. I couldn’t go on not responding and my mind raced to find something of sufficient weight to match what he’d revealed. Nothing came. “Ballantine,” I said. “We were working on Goulburn or Bathurst.”

  “I told you I wasn’t stupid. I want to talk with you.”

  “Okay, Where? When?”

  “Where else?”

  “On the bridge?”

  “I’ll meet you at the midpoint on the westside walkway. You come from the north. It’ll take you about twenty minutes to get there. Come alone, Mr Hardy, and don’t try to trick me. I’ll be watching you, and believe me I know every inch of the approaches and everything about the traffic flow at all times. Any sign that something is amiss will be immediately apparent to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve given you my name, which makes me vulnerable to you. Almost as vulnerable as you are to me.”

  “I think you want help, Mr Ballantine. I think you were asking me for it when you talked to me in the Pump Street house.”

  “Perhaps. I hope I can trust you.”

  I said, ‘You can,” but not before he’d hung up. I hurried back to my car and drove across the bridge. I left the car down near the North Sydney swimming pool and jogged up to the walkway. The rain had stopped and the sky had cleared; the wind was gusty and the water far below was choppy. Traffic on the bridge was very light. Not much of a night for walking. As I moved towards the centre of the bridge I was aware that I had the north end of the walkway to myself. Ballantine knew his business—there were a few joggers on the east side, but foot passengers preferred the side away from the trains. A train rambled past and I saw a figure, caught in its headlight, approaching from the south side.

  We met at about the middle of the span. Ballantine wore a short, padded coat with a fleecy collar turned up. His shoulders were hunched and his head was dipped. It was hard to see his face, but his solid figure was unmistakable. He wore a cloth cap with a short peak. He nodded when we were within a few feet of each other and kept coming. ‘We’ll walk across and back. This is going to take some time. Have you got a weapon?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re probably not telling the truth, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve got an iron bar in my pocket here. I hope it stays there.”

  I turned and we started to walk slowly back the way I’d come. “Whose idea was it to put those filthy stories in the papers?” Ballantine said.

  His voice was low and controlled. I couldn’t see any point in lying again. “A policeman named Meredith. He was investigating some of the disappearances—Samuel, Glover and so on. He’d made the bridge connection, or almost, when I blundered in.”

  “A policeman, you say? I wouldn’t have credited a policeman with the subtlety.”

  I felt I had to go on some sort of attack. “What happened with Glover? The body wasn’t wrapped and it broke free. That’s when things started to fall into place.”

  “To answer that I have to tell you how it all began. You see, I was brought up by my father, if you can call it an upbringing. I never knew my mother. She left when I was an infant. My father was crippled, in a wheelchair. He’d been severely wounded at Gallipoli and again in France. From the time I was about ten years old he was almost totally dependent on me. He couldn’t work but we had money. We lived in Drummoyne in a pleasant little house. Father told me he had inherited money, and he also had a service pension. Money wasn’t a problem. I went to a good school.”

  We were walking slowly, barely moving, as if Ballantine was going to need hours to tell his story. I was cold, but I wasn’t complaining. I was hearing the truth the way it’s seldom told, painfully and with minute honesty.

  “My father preached the military values ad nauseam. He said war was the true test of a man, the only real test. That women understood nothing and were worthless. I believed all these things. You do when you hear them from a man in a wheelchair who has ribbons and medals to back up what he says.”

  I nodded. Something about those words seemed immensely significant.

  “I turned eighteen in 1944. I’d done cadet training at school and was keen to join up. Father wouldn’t let me. He said he needed me to look after him. I pleaded with him but he wouldn’t relent. I tried to enlist under a false name but they found me out Father said he’d used his influence with the military authorities to stop me. I couldn’t understand his attitude and we had terrible fights over it. But he did need me. He seemed to get more frail by the day.”

  His voice was bitter now and his shoulders even more hunched. I wondered which pocket his iron bar was in.

  “I tried to enlist for Korea. They rejected me on medical grounds—a burst eardrum, a heart murmur, they found a lot of things wrong with me. I suspected Father of fixing things again and he didn’t deny it. After that things got worse. He began to taunt me for not having served my country. Over and over again.”

  We got to the end of the path and both automatically turned to walk back.

  “I had a nervous breakdown. I was institutionalised for a time. Then I went back to take care of Father again and so we went on, for years and years. It wasn’t a real life. No friends, no women. While I was … in hospital, I learned to build boats. There were boatyards around Rozelle and Balmain in those days. I have great talent for it. I’m a very successful yacht builder and restorer. I have a small works in Drummoyne.”

  Never left home, I thought. And what was it about that photograph of Ms father?

  “I don’t want to bore you. I looked after Father until he died three years ago. He was in his late eighties and he’d lived in a wheelchair for over sixty years. I hated him but I couldn’t help admiring his spirit. He was as nasty to me the day before he died as he had been the day the army rejected me. In a way, a sick way I suppose, that was what kept us together. Anyway, he died and I got used to being alone and I continued to work. But after a time some questions began to occur to me. What about the service pension? I never got any correspondence about it. And when the numbers of Gallipoli survivors started to get down to a handful, I wondered why Father’s name had never come up. Why the journalists hadn’t ever got onto him.

  “I went into his room and dug out all the papers and things of his I’d never looked at, that he’d never let me look at. The only thing from his past he’d ever let me see was the photograph. The one you saw in my room in the Rocks.”

  “The ribbons!” I said.

  Ballantine shook his head angrily. “Let me tell it. I dug through the papers and found that there never had been any inheritance. He’d won a lottery in 1934, bought the house and invested the rest in other property. We lived well on the dividends all those years until my business brought in more than enough for us. But the worst thing was this—he’d never served in the army at all. Never!”

  He was barely moving now and seemed unable to continue. I spoke softly, hoping to soothe him. “I was in the army. Did officer training and all that. We were supposed to know about the service ribbons, what they signified. Some of those ribbons in the photograph aren’t Australian. It’s been nagging at me ever since I saw the picture.”

  Ballantine nodded and began to speak quickly. “You’re right. They’re Canadian and New Zealand. It was all a fake, a fantasy. He worked on the bridge as a labourer from the late 1920s. He was injured in the fabrication workshop when a girder fell on him. He invented the war hero story, and I suffered because of it every day of my life. He was an evil man.”

  We were past the halfway point now, going south. I wondered how much longer the story would take and whether another crossing would be needed. Ballantine wasn’t moving any more quickly, but the words were tumbling out.

  “I met Barclay by accident. He came to me for some work on his boat. We talked. He told me about his father and the bridge. He was so pleased with himself in every way. His life had worked out so perfectl
y. His father had given him everything he’d ever wanted. And mine had taken everything away from me. I got into a rage and I … I killed him. I couldn’t believe that I’d done it at first, and then I couldn’t believe how wonderful it made me feel. I tried to resist the impulse, but it was too strong for me. I searched out the others and killed them too. I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it.”

  “What about Glover?” I said.

  “He was the worst. The most horrible person I ever met. The others weren’t so bad, just so … so comfortable and self-satisfied. They were dead when I put them in the water, but Glover wasn’t. I wanted him to be alive and aware of what was happening, so I didn’t wrap him. It seems I didn’t chain him properly either.”

  I didn’t know what to do. He seemed calm, but there was a pent-up energy in him and I knew how strong he was. He’d killed several fit, healthy men, and he said he had an iron bar in his pocket. I took a grip on the .38 in my pocket and plodded on.

  “I got in touch with Stan Livermore as a way of finding the people I wanted. Old Stan knew everything about everyone connected with the bridge. I thought I might be able to help some of the veterans, too. But I didn’t do anything for them. I’m sorry about old Stan. I didn’t mean to kill him, just to frighten him so that he wouldn’t say anything about me to you or anyone else. But I’d exhausted myself getting there before you and there wasn’t much time. I was a little panicked and too rough. He was very old and frail.”

  We were getting towards the south end of the bridge, and Ballantine suddenly speeded up.

  “I knew it was coming to an end. The feeling wasn’t the same. The old woman was an awful creature, but I’m sorry about what happened to her.”

  I was almost trotting now to keep up with him. Suddenly he thrust his shoulder at me and sent me spinning, crashing into the metal barrier on my left. He swept my feet out from under me with a kick and broke into a run. I shouted and struggled up on a twisted ankle; I hobbled on, but he’d gained ten metres on me. He stopped and his arm swung up. I ducked but he wasn’t offering a threat. He was reaching up for something above him, something attached to the metal superstructure arching above us. Then he was climbing rapidly, hands and feet, clear of the walkway. A rope ladder. I limped forward but before I could reach the spot, the ladder had been twitched up, up and away.