The Dying Trade (22 page)

“That's right.”

“He left us when he was sixteen, he was earning a wage, boarding with a respectable family, time to go.”

“Did you ever see him after he left, or hear from him?”

“Never.”

“What was your relationship with him like?”

“Quite good, as far as he'd let it be. I used to nag him a bit about not trying his best, but I gave that up. He was his own man from a very early age.”

“At some time he discovered who his mother was, or became convinced he knew. Could you pin-point a time when that might have happened?”

Cavendish looked across at his wife. “You remember Haines dear,” he said, “can you help with this?”

She took off her gold rimmed spectacles and polished them on the sleeve of her cardigan. “Yes,” she said quietly, “I believe I can.” She replaced the glasses precisely. “Haines was involved in the office incident, wasn't he? About the same time as the television idea came up. He was in a state over that and his part in the affair was never clear.”

I sat up, this sounded like it. “Could you please explain, office breaking . . .?”

“There was what I believe is called a sit-in at the orphanage,” said Cavendish. “Some of the boys were protesting about being denied access to their personal records. They aren't permitted to see them, that's the law. Right or wrong, that's the law. Some of the older boys broke into the office, barricaded themselves in there and ransacked the filing cabinets.”

“Haines was one of them?”

“No, his part in it was curious. He volunteered to act as negotiator. The boys were on hunger strike in the office. Haines went in and talked to them and they came out. He was in there for about an hour. It wasn't a popular act.”

“Why not?”

“There was some talk that Haines had put the others up to it. He denied it and it was never confirmed, the accusation was put down to spite. But there were whispers. Some of the boys were eager for a fight, and the intermediary was seen as something of a spoilsport.”

“Haines could have seen a file on him when he was in the office?”

“Yes.”

“What information would that carry?”

“Date and place of birth, parents' name or names if available, medical details.”

“Haines' file, did that have his mother's name on it?”

“I don't know but almost certainly it would. Such records are very precise and very private.”

“And a marked change in Haines' behaviour dates from this time?”

Cavendish spread his hands out on the table, there were fine white hairs across the backs and the nails were broad and strong, no nicotine stains, no tremors.

“It does, Mr Hardy. We put it down to the idea of going on television. The impact of that on him seemed more dramatic than the other affair which only lasted a couple of hours. But it could have been due to the discovery of his mother's name.” Cavendish paused, then he rapped his knuckles against the table. “No, no, how stupid of me. Those records were all computer coded in the late sixties. Haines couldn't have got a name from his file, just a number. Still, that might have been enough to set him off, certainly the psychologists said he was obsessed with the parentage problem.”

I leaned forward grasping at it. “Just a minute sir, two things. How could a number set him off?”

“Some of the files would have had a multiple zero number—parents unknown.”

“I see. Now, Haines was examined by psychologists?”

“Yes, several times. A team from the University was working on a study of orphaned children, their psychological problems and so on. They were very interested in Haines and examined him at some length. I can't remember the details, I recall one of the team telling me that Haines was positive that his people were wealthy, substantial citizens, but that's a very common complex I gather.”

“Was this examination done before or after the office sit-in?”

He raised his eyes to the sky, then glanced at his wife.

“Dear?”

“After, I think,” she said, “soon after.”

“I really can't remember, Mr Hardy. I'd trust my wife's recollection though, steel trap mind she has.”

I smiled. “I can see that,” I said glancing at the blocked in crossword. “It's interesting, and fills in a lot of gaps.”

“I don't know whether it will help you much though. Haines was a very complicated boy, an unusual individual in every way. I'm sorry to hear he's in trouble, but I can't say I'm surprised.”

I was only half-listening now. “Oh, why's that?”

“Colossal determination combined with a very passive, yielding streak. Very odd combination, unstable elements I'd say. No, I shouldn't say that, that's what the psychologist said.”

I nodded. “Were the results of this study ever published?”

“Yes,” he said, “in something called
The Canadian Journal of Psychology.
I understand it's a periodical of repute. I've never read the paper, should have I suppose, but it was a full-time job running that place.”

“Will you have some coffee, Mr Hardy, or a drink, it's after eleven?” Lady Cavendish obviously thought it was time to wind the show up.

“No thank you, I've taken up enough time and you've been very helpful.”

There must have been an inconclusive note in my voice because Cavendish leaned forward with a quiet smile on his face.

“But you haven't finished?”

“No. You might think this impertinent, but I must ask you something else.”

“Let me guess,” he said. He got up and took a few springy steps across to where the lawn began, he bent down, picked up a pebble and juggled it up and down in his palm. “When we live in such style why did I spend twenty-five years running an orphanage?”

“Right,” I said.

“Easy,” he looked at his wife and they exchanged smiles, “we've only had this place for a couple of years and we'll only have it a couple more the way the rates are going. I inherited it from an uncle, title too, the old boy lived to ninety-six, still thought of Australia as a colony. When I left the army, Mr Hardy, the deferred pay was negligible and I had a large, bright gaggle of a family to educate. The orphanage directorship was the best thing offering. I tried to do it in an intelligent fashion, it wasn't always easy.”

“I'm sure you did,” I said. I got up and shook hands with them.

Cavendish flicked the pebble away, he looked sad. “You might drop me a line to let me know how it works out,” he said quietly.

I said I would. They walked with me down an overgrown path beside the house and we said our goodbyes near the front verandah. I went down the path to the gate and looked around before I opened it; they'd half-turned and he had his arm down across her thin straight shoulders.

CHAPTER 27

I drove back into town and checked out of the Colonial. The Avis people took their car back and gave me enough refund money to pay for a bottle of beer and a sandwich in the airport bar. I killed the waiting time there, pouring the Cooper's ale carefully so as not to get the sediment, and pushing the crumbs of the sandwich around on my plate. I watched the sediment settle in the bottle thinking that the bits and pieces of this case were starting to
settle into place, but not satisfactorily. The whole thing needed a violent shake if it was going to be resolved in the Gutteridge woman's favour. I might have to give that shake myself, but I had a feeling that it might be done for me and pretty soon.

I finished the Forsyth book just before we landed at Mascot. I settled back into a taxi seat and almost fell asleep on the ride to Glebe. I kicked an old clothes appeal and several monster sale leaflets out of the doorway and stomped through the kitchen to make some coffee. I dumped the overnight bag under the table knowing that it'd stay there for days and hating myself for it. A newsboy yelled out in the street and I went out to the gate and bought a paper. I read it while I drank the coffee—the election was still in doubt, there was an earthquake in Greece, a cricketer had his shoulder packed in ice and Dr Ian Brave was still being hunted by the police. I finished the coffee and the telephone rang. I grabbed it and got Ailsa's voice, panicky and barely coherent over the wire.

“Cliff, Cliff, thank Christ, I've been ringing for hours and minutes . . . no . . .”

“Hold it, Ailsa, hold it. Where are you?”

“Hospital. I've seen Brave.''

“What!” I shouted. “Where?”

“Here, right here. I saw him when I was going to the toilet. He didn't see me, but Jesus I went cold all over. It took me a while to calm down and ring you and you weren't there!” Her voice went up to the panic level again.

“I'm just back from Adelaide. Look, when was this?”

“I don't know, I didn't know the time. Half an hour ago?”

“What was Brave doing?”

“He was leaving, but I know what he
had
been doing.”

“What?”

“Seeing Susan.”

I let out a breath and my mind went blank.

“Cliff, Cliff!”

I came back and muttered something into the phone. She almost screamed the thing apart.

“What are you going to do?” Her anger and fear pulled me together. I got some control into my voice, told her I was getting a gun and lots of help and that everything would be all right. She wasn't happy but she rang off after I promised to call her as soon as anything happened.

I got the Colt out of the oilskin cloth I'd wrapped it in and pushed the cloth back behind the bookshelf. I grabbed an old army jacket with deep zipped pockets and headed for the back courtyard. Before I reached the door the phone rang again.

“Sweet suffering Jesus,” I shouted into it, “what?”

“Hardy, it's Tickener. I've just seen Brave.”

“Shit, not again, where? No, don't tell me, at the hospital.”

“Right, how did you know?”

“Never mind, how did you get on to him?”

“I've been following that black girl, you know, Pali?”

“Yeah, and . . .?”

“She came streaking out of her flat, first time she's been there in days. I picked her up in Redfern, spotted the car. Then she drove to the hospital and picked up Brave. I've got them both in sight but they're going to split. He's hiring a car. Who should I stay with?”

“What else have they done?”

“She went to a bank.”

“Who's holding the money?”

“He is, she handed it over to him.”

“Stay with him, he's going for a fix. I know where she's going. See you.” I hung up and belted out to the car. In the rear vision mirror I saw a drawn, yellowish face that looked tired and frightened.

A different black kid was playing ball against the same wall when I pulled into Haines' street. I drove around the back and saw that his car slot was occupied by a white Mini. I parked up near the end of the street beside a set of sandstone steps which led up an embankment and ended with an iron railed landing a good thirty feet up from street level. I got the jacket from the back seat of the car and the Colt from under the dashboard. I put the gun in a pocket, slung the jacket over my shoulder and went up the steps. The landing was overhung with shrubs that had rooted in the thin soil of the embankment. It was after six o'clock and the sun was just starting to sneak down to the high points of the building line. I hung the jacket on the railing, rolled and lit a cigarette and waited.

Half an hour and two cigarettes later, a red Volkswagen turned into the street. It did a circuit of the block the way I had and stopped opposite Haines' house. A girl got out. She was wearing pink slacks and shoes and had a lacey, fringed poncho affair over her shoulders. From where I was crouched I could see that her skin was the colour of polished teak and the inky frizz of her wig stood out a foot from her head. I started down the steps as she went through the front gate. I stumbled on a step and my jacket hit the metal rail with a terrific clang. I swore and crouched down but the sound hadn't carried far enough to alarm Naumeta Pali. I crossed the street and went up the side of the house to the back stairs that led up to Haines' door. I heard the door close above me and climbed the stairs quietly taking two at a time. I heard the sound of voices in the flat and then the ringing click of a telephone being lifted. The girl spoke again but what she said was inaudible. I pressed up close to the wall beside the door and tucked my ear into the doorframe. The receiver banged down and I heard the girl speak in her smoky, French accented voice.

“Come on, Rossy,” she purred, “we're going to the mountains.”

I took the steps four at a time on the way down.

I was down behind a car parked twenty feet away from the Volkswagen when they came out. Haines was walking a little ahead of the girl with his hands in the front pockets of a windcheater jacket. Pali had her arms under her cloak but from the way it bulged out about waist high it was obvious that she was holding a gun on him.

There were a few people in the street but she ignored them. She walked Haines to the driver's door and said something to him, emphasising the words by moving her hands under the poncho. Haines opened the door and got in, another gesture from the girl and he buckled on the seat belt. She moved around the front of the car with the gun held up chest high and levelled at Haines' head through the windscreen. She'd handled a gun before. She opened the passenger door and got in. She sat slightly swivelled round. I heard the engine kick and saw a puff of smoke from the exhaust. The car started off in a series of kangaroo hops. Haines was nervous and who could blame him? I kept low and under the protection of other cars as much as possible and ducked and swerved my way back to the Falcon. I slung the jacket into the front seat, started the engine and was moving up the alley in time to see the VW making a right turn out of the street into the main road.

The mountains were probably the Blue Mountains which meant that we had a couple of hours driving ahead of us. The route the VW took along the roads in this part of the city seemed to confirm that destination. I had plenty of gas and plenty of gun, I should have felt reasonably confident but I didn't. Pali's phone call from Haines' flat nagged at me like a hangnail. I supposed it was to Brave and it was reasonable to assume that he was coming to the party too. I was covered there to some extent, by Tickener, but I couldn't be sure that the reporter would be able to control the junkie psychologist in a tight spot. Then again, Brave and Pali could have agreed on the meeting beforehand and the phone call could have been to a third party who I didn't have covered at all. I couldn't call for police help unless the VW stopped and even then my story was thin and only Grant Evans could help me. I didn't even know if he was back from his enforced leave.

This potentially dangerous loose end kept worrying and distracting me as I drove so that I almost lost the Volkswagen at a three way junction. I pulled myself together and concentrated on keeping back and varying my lanes and position among the other cars in the traffic stream. Haines was driving better now, quite fast and tight and making good use of the gears. We hit the Katoomba road as the last flickers of daylight died in the trees beside the highway.

The easy time to tail cars is at dusk and later. There's not much possibility of them spotting you or of you losing them if you stay alert, but there is a kind of lulling feeling about it which introduces the chance that you might ram your subject up the back number plate while in a hypnotic trance. I fought this feeling as I trailed up the hills and coasted down the “use low gear” grades. The traffic thinned after Penrith but there was enough of it to provide cover and the winding road and glaring oncoming headlights demanded concentration. We passed through Katoomba after eight o'clock; the real estate agents had closed so half of the town's business was under wraps, only the usual pinball places and take-away-food shops kept the neon going in the streets. The pubs emitted a soft, alluring light through the lead-glass windows which reminded me that I hadn't had a drink in hours and was heading away from sources of it fast.

After Katoomba it got harder. There was a little chopping and changing on the highway as cars peeled off to houses in the hills whence their occupants commuted to Sydney at the risk of their sanity. I'd taken a fix on the peculiarity of the VW's tail light which was a bit brighter on the right side than on the left and I clung to it like a mariner to a beacon. I had my doubts about it twice, once after oncoming lights on high beam dazzled me, and again when a lighter coloured Volkswagen surged up in the right hand lane to pass everything in sight and I started to go with it. A truck coming round a bend lit it up as a grey or light blue job and I slipped back and picked up Haines and Pali who weren't doing anything so fancy.

They pottered uncertainly along in the left lane for a while and I had no choice but to dribble along behind them. Cars sped past us and I was starting to feel conspicuous when the VW's left indicator flashed and the car shot off up a steep road that left the highway at a forty-five degree angle. I looked quickly in the rear vision mirror. There was no one behind me so I didn't touch the indicator arm, I just slammed the Falcon down into second, killed the lights and took the turn praying that the road didn't fork three ways or end in a ditch. The lights ahead bobbed and danced in front of me;
the road was rutted and lumpy and the Falcon's springs and shockers took a beating as I ground along in second. At one point the road moved back close to the highway except that we were now above it. Cars scuttled along below like phosphorescent ants beating a path to and from their nest.

We were driving through thickly timbered country, still climbing steeply and following wide, looping bends to left and right. The nearly full moon sailed clear of the clouds and illuminated the classic Blue Mountains landscape—tall, arrow-like gums and sheer-faced ridges that had defeated a score of explorers until Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth had brought a little imagination to the job. The moonlight gave me a look at the road and allowed me to give the other car a bit more leeway. It also increased the risk of being spotted because moonlight can gleam on chrome like sunlight on a steel mirror. Fortunately, the Falcon's chrome was rusted and dull. Then the Volkswagen disappeared. I hit my brakes and pulled up well back from where I'd last seen the lights. If I'd spotted someone tailing me up there in the mountains I'd kill my lights and engine and coast down a bit waiting for the bastard to come blundering through. I had to assume something like that was happening now, at least until I proved otherwise. I turned off the interior light switch that operates when the door is opened, slipped my arms into the service jacket and eased open the driver's door. I dropped out and rolled under the car. Nothing happened so I worked my way back to the wheels, got my feet under me and scooted across to the other side of the road.

People expect other people to get carefully out of cars on the non-traffic side and keep to that side of the road, sometimes people have to break that rule or they get dead. I hunkered down in the grass and scrub beside the road and peered into the blackness ahead of me. Nothing to be seen, but that didn't mean a thing. I took the pistol out and crept forward with it held stiffly in front of me; still nothing visible and not a sound except my breathing and soft scuffling in the bush where some species were doing their best to exterminate others. Very sensitive stuff, I thought, totally in tune with the environment, Hardy. But a waste of talent. Where I'd seen the last flash of the car's lights was a dirt track running off into the scrub. The grass in the middle had been scythed down between the wheel ruts by the underside of cars and back from the road was a tree with the word HAINES painted vertically down it in white.

My flashlight was at home, corroded to blazes, and the moon had decided to play it coy among the clouds. It was close to pitch black when I started up the track to what was evidently Haines' weekender. Judging by the distance from the road to the shack and trying to remember when I'd last seen a house light, it was a fair sized block. The house wasn't much, a fibro and galvanised iron structure with decking around it on three sides. It looked self-built, but Haines had put his main stamp on the place in the garden. When my eyes got used to the dark I could see terraced vegetable beds and trellises with tendrils twining through them. Almost outside the door, hanging over the decking was a huge clump of bamboo, the leaf tips tall and waving just slightly in the night breeze. Water from the roof, a few chickens and a still out the back and the place would be self-sufficient.

I picked my way carefully through the vegetable beds and staked plants and did a circuit of the shack. It had a door in front, one at the back and a single window in each side. The track from the road came up and looped around the house, the Volkswagen was parked on this path at the back. A brick path from the back door led to a fibro dunny and there was a lean-to shed holding what felt like garden tools. An axe was embedded in a chopping block outside the shed. The wood pile was healthy, a big stack of the kind you use in a stove or sealed heater. I crept up to the decking out from the left side window and tested it with my foot. It was solidly built and didn't creak. I eased the Colt back out of my pocket and moved over the boards to the window which was about chest height from the deck level, too low to stand, too high to kneel. I crouched and inched my head up to get half an eyeball's worth of look-in.