There wasn’t much of the morning left when I woke up and what there was of it was pretty nasty. The storm of last night must have moved out to sea and come back again, bigger and better. The sky was dark and the wind and rain were lashing at the trees that overgrow my balcony. I struggled out of bed, pulled on a tracksuit and went downstairs to make coffee and see if the cat had survived the night. It had, of course. The house is even more vulnerable than Ralph Jacobs thought. The cat had found a way in through a broken section of fibro in the bathroom wall. It was curled up asleep close to the hot water service. Smart cat.
With the coffee came normalcy. Which is to say, confusion. I had enquiries to make in Newcastle and a source of official help-Glen Withers, who by now might have found out other things herself. Then there was Horrie and May and Ralph and Antonio, all expecting things of me and likely to be disappointed. I could have done with some sunshine but the sky stayed dark even though the rain and wind eased a little. I saw myself driving north on the fairly new steel-belted radials. And then what? I reached for the phone to call Glen and saw that the message light wasn’t blinking. I must have hit the reset button by accident when Ralph hit me, deliberately. Through the fog of the encounter with Ralph and the drugged sleep, I tried to remember Helen’s message. ‘Call me, hey?’ was as much as I could recall. Welcoming. More confusion.
I dialled Glen’s work number and waited an age before the phone was picked up. Male voice. ‘Sergeant Withers’ phone.’
‘I’m calling from Sydney. Is Sergeant Withers around?’
‘What is it in connection with, sir?’
‘I’m not at liberty to say’
‘Sergeant Withers is in a meeting. Can I get her to call you back?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell her I’m on my way to Newcastle and that I’ll call her when I arrive.’
His tone changed from the one he used for the innocent public to the one for the villains and fizzgigs. ‘What name?’
‘Write this down,’ I said. ‘Oscar Jacob Dudley Schmidt.’
‘Would you care to spell that?’
I hung up and went off to shave and to locate some clean clothes. A little of Ralph’s blood had got on the shirt and trousers I’d been wearing yesterday. I felt some satisfaction when I saw it. I was getting a little tired of being pushed around, threatened and offered blandishments. I felt like doing some pushing back and a Newcastle lair bikie seemed as good a subject as any. I knew it was all displaced sexual energy working, but what the hell? You have to do something with it.
It was hard to believe I’d been getting sunburned on Redhead Beach a few days before. The rain lashed down all the way up the North Shore and for most of the way to Gosford. I drove carefully but impatiently. I tried the radio but the ABC annoyed me-I felt I’d heard all the talk and opinions and recipes for improvement a hundred times before-and the commercial stations made me want to be on a desert island where no radio wave could ever reach. Plus my back ached. I broke a rule of some years’ standing and had a swig of rum at 10.30 a.m. My old Mum always said I’d join her in the other place-in Nick’s pub, most likely.
The weather cleared after Gosford and by Wyong the sun was making the road steam and I was hot inside my shirt and denim jacket. Impossible to please. I shrugged out of the jacket as I drove and lost a little control, to the justified annoyance of a truckie, who tooted me and gave me the finger as he streamed past.
I diverged off the freeway at the Newcastle sign and hadn’t gone more than a half kilometre before the motor cycle cop picked me up. I checked the speedo and swore. I’d been a fraction over the speed limit, encouraged by the dry road with no traffic on it. I slowed as he hit the siren and roared up beside me, making a macho ‘pull over’ sign with his black-gloved hand. I sometimes have a problem with authority when it’s wearing black leather boots, but sanity prevailed. I slowed down and pulled over like a good, solid citizen.
The cop’s boots crunched on the gravel. ‘May I see your licence, sir?’
I handed him the plastic card with the photograph that makes me look like a Long Bay resident on day release. He examined it carefully. ‘Do you have a weapon, Mr Hardy?’
That was unusual and I took a closer look at him to make sure he was the genuine article. Cap, vizor up as per regulations, badge in evidence, youngish face carrying a little too much fat. The real thing. I opened the glove box and let him see the. 38 sitting there inside its holster. ‘I’m licensed to carry it,’ I said.
‘Not concealed.’
‘It’s in the glove box, for Christ’s sake. What is this?’
‘Please hand me the weapon.’
‘Why?’
‘I have instructions to escort you to Police Headquarters in Newcastle,’ he said. ‘No private citizen entering the building is permitted to carry a weapon.’
‘Why, again?’
‘I’m simply obeying orders, Mr Hardy. If you surrender the weapon you can drive in and everything will be all right. If you resist, I’ll call for help and you’ll be placed under restraint and someone else will drive your car. Either way, you and the gun won’t be together. Which is it to be, sir?’
The ‘sir’ was heavily ironical. He wasn’t as much of an android as he liked to pretend. I gave him marks for that and passed the pistol out through the open window. Quick as a flash I pulled out a felt pen and scribbled on my wrist. ‘I’ve got your badge number, son,’ I said. ‘I hope your saddlebag hasn’t got a hole in it.’
He snapped the vizor down. ‘Follow me, Mr Hardy’
Quick trip. I was parking the car inside the ‘reserved for police’ section within the hour. The motor cycle cop escorted me to the front desk and handed my pistol over to a civilian clerk who made an entry in a ruled book. One black leather finger touched his cap and he was gone. I was ushered into a lift and up several floors to a conference room. Sitting around the big table with carafes of water and the leavings of a morning tea were two men and a woman. Detective Inspector Withers looked a bit the worse for wear and tear; his tie knot had slipped down and his collar was wrinkled. He hung up a telephone, one of three on the table, as I came in. His daughter looked pretty fresh. The other man at the table was a thin, beak-nosed individual in an elaborate cop uniform with lots of brass and braid. No-one stood up when I entered which didn’t surprise me. I nodded at the two members of the Withers family and sat down at the table a few places away from any of them.
‘This is Assistant Commissioner Morton, Mr Hardy,’ Edward Withers said.
I nodded in the direction of the brass and braid. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to him?’
‘I know who you are, Mr Hardy’ Morton said. ‘I’ve heard all about you from your friends and enemies in Sydney.’
‘Always good to get a balanced view,’ I said. ‘Would someone tell me what this is all about? I was doing ninety-seven in a ninety-five zone, but I hardly think that could be it.’
Withers sighed. ‘I told you he was a smartarse, Leslie.’
I looked at Morton who was reading notes on a pad in front of him. He seemed not to hear what Withers had said. The arrogance of command.
‘I’ll call you Les,’ I said. ‘I don’t take too kindly to being disarmed and escorted into town by an SS type who likes to admire his face in his shiny boots, Les. You tell me what this is about right now, or I walk out and phone my lawyer and a reporter or two.’
Glen shot me a surprised and angry look and I favoured her with one of my best smiles-one with a bit of the back pain and broken nose in it but with lots of promise of laughs to come. She sat back and didn’t react.
‘Take it easy, Hardy,’ Morton said smoothly. ‘The boy may have been a bit over-eager, but better that than sloppy. Wouldn’t you agree?’
I got to my feet. ‘I said I wanted explanations, not blarney.’
‘Oscar Bach may have killed four women,’ Glen blurted out. ‘Maybe more.’
I sat down and shut up and let them tell it. Glen had checked on the four locations marked on the map and come up with missing females, foul play suspected, in each. The circumstances tallied pretty closely with the details of the crime for which Werner Schmidt had been convicted. The females, teenagers, girls, had been last seen on roads around the districts in which they lived. There had been the usual sightings of strangers and vehicles, but the disappearances had remained unsolved. Common to three of the cases was the sighting of a dusty Bedford panel van. Withers slid a piece of paper across towards me-on it was written three different versions of the van’s number plate. I got out my notebook. One of the numbers was way off, but the others were within a digit or two of the number of Oscar Bach’s van.
‘We’ve got a big problem, Hardy,’ Morton said. ‘Nobody’ll be happy about sheeting these crimes home to a dead man. The relations of the victims least of all.’
Withers tapped his shirt pocket as if feeling for cigarettes. Then he shook his head. He exchanged glances with his daughter, who wasn’t smoking either. I guessed that Ted had quit and Glen approved.
‘They’ll feel cheated of their revenge,’ Withers said.
Glen tidied the papers in front of her. ‘It’s more than that. The friends and relations want some details.’
‘Ghouls,’ Withers said.
‘No, Dad… Inspector. It’s not ghoulish. They need to know in order to get over it. To rule a line.’
I nodded at that and Morton evidently thought the time was right for me to contribute. ‘Right, Hardy. Now what can you tell us?’
‘About what?’
‘About what you’ve been doing in Sydney.’
Problem time. I’d given Antonio Fanfani some sort of an undertaking which would be hard to fulfil if I had to spill my guts to the police now. But four more deaths changed things somewhat. I could feel Glen’s eyes on me. I tried to remember how much I’d told her about the Costis and couldn’t quite do it. Had I given her chapter and verse, all the names?
‘Cliff,’ she said. ‘I had to take it higher up when the locations and probable deaths started to tally up. You understand?’
I nodded. Withers gave us both a long look but Morton chose not to react. ‘We need information, Hardy,’ he said. ‘All we can get. Sergei Costi’s an important man in this town and prominent in the Italian community’
‘What about his son, Renato?’
Morton leaned forward. ‘Tell us.’
I told them, without giving away any more than I needed to. I told them about Mark Roper’s fear of Renato and about the phone call to Fanfani from someone whose Italian wasn’t so hot and who might have been drunk.
‘Ronny,’ Withers said. ‘Has to be.’
Glen shuffled papers and found what she wanted. ‘But he hasn’t come after Roper.’
Morton looked at me.
‘Roper’s not a very reliable character,’ I said. ‘Costi might have threatened him or blackmailed him. He mightn’t have told me about it. Might have hoped I’d get Ronny off his back in some way.’
‘Or,’ Morton said, ‘after he killed Schmidt he might’ve got scared and gone quiet. Perhaps he thought he’d squared the account, and going after Roper was unnecessary.’
Withers’ body language screamed impatience. He fidgeted, touched his tie knot, re-rolled a shirt sleeve. He wanted to go out and start clapping on handcuffs. Glen’s professional attitude was intact but she seemed to be reaching for some other level of understanding. ‘Could it be,’ she said slowly, ‘that Renato’s main concern was with his sister’s honour, as publicly perceived, and with Bach dead and Roper scared, the dishonour wouldn’t become known?’
I could see sense in that, and also danger. But what we were doing now threatened to blow things apart. An irrelevant thought came to me. ‘Where’s the box and the other stuff?’
‘Being analysed,’ Morton said. ‘Which brings us to the next point. We’ve put a stop on the work at the Ocean Street house and our blokes have had a quick look. They say there’s blood in the bathroom.’