She had lost most of the smartness and dash she’d displayed when she’d come to my office. How long ago was it? It seemed like months. She was thinner, her hair was lank and in trousers, jumper and padded jacket she looked drab. But it was still her. Instinctively, I reached out to grab her arm and stop her from running. But she stood there with no thought of flight. The man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped blood from his face. My punch had caused his nose to bleed.
‘Mr Hardy,’ Verity Lamberte said.
‘The same.’ I gestured towards the man. ‘Who’s this?’
‘My step-brother, Robert. We… we just wanted to talk.’
‘To talk,’ Robert said.
On closer inspection, he wasn’t so big. Only a fraction taller than me and some of the bulk was in his clothes. Still, he’d made some pretty good moves. He was pale-faced and a touch weak-chinned. I was relieved to see that he wasn’t wearing glasses.
‘Talk is right,’ I said. ‘What the hell’s going on here? Where have you been?’
‘Hiding. With Robert.’
‘Great. And what’re you doing here? Don’t tell me you’ve followed me all day like your crazy sister did. I couldn’t stand it.’
She stared at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Karen followed you?’
‘Not Karen, Paula.’
‘She’s not… I haven’t seen her for years.’
Robert put his handkerchief away. His eyes drifted to the albums lying on the nature strip. ‘We came to see him.’ He pointed at the Wilberforce mansion. ‘We thought he might be able to help.’
‘You can’t see him now. He’s asleep.’
‘Maybe you can help me,’ Verity said.
Robert shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea.’
‘I think it’s a great idea,’ I said. I was still holding her arm. I released her and bent to pick up the albums. When I had them under my arm I took hold of her again. ‘Where can we go to talk?’
I drove with Verity in the Land Cruiser following Robert in his Audi. Our talking place proved to be Robert Crosbie’s three-bedroom flat in Bellevue Hill. Robert turned out to be a computer programmer and electrical engineer who’d inherited money from about three different directions the way the rich do. He was a bachelor, running his own small business and very attached to his step-sister, Verity. She had been staying with him since the visit from the police to tell her of her husband’s death. Verity’s mother, who was Selina Livermore before she became Wilberforce (she was subsequently Ashley-Hawkins, I was told), was keeping an eye on the two children. They had temporarily become boarders at their respective private schools which they found a great lark.
‘I loved being a boarder,’ Verity said.
Robert nodded.
I had nothing to contribute at this point, having walked to Maroubra High for five years from our semi. All this information had poured out almost as soon as we entered the flat. Step-brother and step-sister were dead keen to show how solid their family was, how caring and protective. I dumped the albums on the living room table and asked if there was anything to eat. The half sandwich consumed in Katoomba seemed like an experience from another lifetime.
Robert said, ‘Sure, sure,’ and went off to busy himself in his bachelor kitchen.
Verity and I sat in armchairs a metre apart. Although her looks had suffered, for a woman who had lost a husband and a sister and whose kids were on hold, she was bearing up pretty well. I thought she could take some direct action. I said, ‘Did you know he was screwing Karen?’
She shook her head. ‘No. But she was very attractive.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I saw her in all her fucking togs. Trouble was.. her hair was on fire.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Do you have to be offensive?’
‘Widow Lamberte,’ I said. ‘I went into that house when it was going up like a bonfire. I got Karen out but she was too badly burnt and smoke-affected to live. I nearly died myself. The cops very naturally wanted to know what I was doing up there with my binoculars and survival gear. I told them, but you weren’t around to back up my story.’
‘I was afraid. The police came and told me there’d been a fire and that Patrick was dead. They didn’t mention you. But I thought… when they heard about you and the bullets and everything, they’d blame me. They’d think I killed them. You know what they do! You know how they falsely accuse people and ruin their lives.’
She was right. There had been a rash of cases of just that kind lately, affecting people of all classes and walks of life. My own insecurities derived from problems within the law enforcement structure.
‘I was so scared,’ she said. ‘I came to Robert and asked mother to help. She told me about Karen when the police told her. That made me even more frightened. I tried to get in touch with you but your phones didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to do, so I just hid here. Robert’s the one who’s held this crazy family together. The only one!’
Robert came back bearing a wooden platter with five different varieties of cheese, dry biscuits, sliced salami, black olives and a bottle of Wolf Blass red.
‘Will this do?’ he said.
I ate and drank, fuelling up, and didn’t say anything at all for a few minutes. Robert and Verity sipped their wine and nibbled.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I was running on empty. D’you know who shot Phillip Wilberforce?’
Both shook their heads.
Robert said, ‘Verity was getting edgy about just… hiding. She thought he might be able to help her to deal with the police, you know? But he was in hospital for quite some time. We waited until tonight to visit. Then we saw you.’
A lateral thinker.
‘Who shot him?’ Verity said.
I took a swig of Wolf Blass. ‘Paula.’
Verity almost dropped her glass. ‘God, does that mean she…’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Had anything to do with Patrick and Karen’s deaths?’
‘Big jump,’ I said. ‘You’d like that, would you?’
Robert put his glass on the table. ‘Hardy…’
‘Shut up. I’ve been hired by your sometime stepfather to find Paula.’
‘That’d be right,’ Verity said. ‘She was the only fruit of his loins. The only one of us he ever cared a fuck about.’
‘Verity!’
‘Shut up, Robert.’
‘Happy families,’ I said. ‘Let’s look at some snaps.’ I opened the first of the albums. Our three heads craned forward as we examined the first page. Four photographs were carefully mounted by means of the old stickdown corners method. The pictures were of children, in twos and threes, grouped around a birthday cake. Robert pulled back sharply.
‘What’s the point of this?’ he said.
I began to flick over the leaves as Verity gazed, rapt. ‘I don’t know. To try to spot something that might suggest where Paula is, or what she might do next.’
Verity laughed. ‘If you really knew Paula you wouldn’t even think that.’
Robert grabbed the second album. ‘I’ll show you something. If there was anyone she wanted to kill it was Verity. Where are they? Yes, here.’
He opened the book at a double-page spread of ten photographs, all of the same subject-a dead dog.
Verity gasped. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to kill him.’
‘He was a nasty vicious brute,’ Robert said. ‘The rest of us were glad you did.’
The dog was a whitish bull terrier. It lay on its side with its tongue hanging out. There was a dark, gaping wound the size of a fist in its neck.
‘It happened at this place in the country we used to go to. I found a shotgun in a shed. It was old and very rusty. I pointed it at Rudi and it went off. I was terrified by the noise and the gun hurt me when it fired. I was terrified of Paula, too. Rudi was her dog. She came running up. She grabbed the gun and I think she would have beaten my brains in with it if someone hadn’t stopped her.’
‘Mummy,’ Robert said, which, under the circumstances, wasn’t very enlightening.
‘Instead, she took dozens of pictures of Rudi. She used to leave them on my bed, put them in my books. It was sickening.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You all used to hang around together, even after the divorces and so on?’
Robert nodded. ‘It was horrible. The Brady Bunch was on TV then. Verity and Nadia and I used to look at it and laugh. Our lives weren’t anything like that.’
Verity turned the page. ‘I suppose they were trying to make some sort of family life, even though they’d screwed up their own lives. I mean Paula’s father and my mother and Robert’s.’
‘Is that what you called him-Paula’s father?’
‘I didn’t call him anything to his face,’ Robert said. ‘I just couldn’t. I never saw my own father after they divorced. It…’
He retreated to a chair and sat down. ‘God,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ve never married. I never wanted to put anyone through any of that. The fights they had, the savagery. It was all lawyers and courts and houses being sold.’
Verity was crying now. ‘And kids being put in boarding school. I hated boarding school.’
I turned over the pages of the albums, occasionally asking for an identification or a date, which one or the other of them gave me indifferently. They were both sunk in depression induced by memories of childhood. It was sad to see but I had work to do. Eventually I accumulated pictures of all the wives and kids. A tall, dark girl with a gypsy mane of hair was identified by Verity as Nadia.
‘She’s dead,’ Robert said. ‘She had an accident.’
‘What sort of accident?’
He thrust out his underslung chin, ready to take another unhappy memory on it. ‘She was washed off some rocks in Queensland. She drowned.’
I grunted sympathetically and made a note. ‘No pictures of Paula herself. Why’s that?’
‘Paula never let anyone touch her camera,’ Verity said.
‘There must have been other cameras around.’
Robert shook his head. ‘Paula never let herself be photographed. She wouldn’t even sit for the school photograph session. I remember we once tried to force her
‘Who’s we?’ I said.
‘Nadia and I. I tried to hold her while Nadia took the snap. Paula fought like a tiger. I couldn’t hold her. She scratched Nadia’s face and broke the camera. No-one tried again after that.’
‘What was Paula’s attitude to you?’
‘She despised me, as she despised all men.’
‘What about her and Karen?’
They exchanged looks as if considering cooking up a story. Then Verity shrugged. ‘She and Karen got on fine. Karen was the only one of us Paula had any time for.’
‘It was strange,’ Robert said. ‘Karen wasn’t his child any more than the rest of us, although Paula said she was. They looked rather alike, but Karen’s mother had been such a slut anyone could’ve been the father. Paula called Karen her real sister, but I think it was just because she shared her liking for dogs.’
I was drawing lines on the page of my notebook, connecting names. ‘I don’t get it. You were just kids. You couldn’t have known anything about…’
‘We did!’ Verity snapped. ‘We knew all about it. They never talked about anything else except who was screwing who, and who had whose nose and eyes. It was sick.’
‘It was baronial,’ Robert said. ‘He liked to accumulate the women and children and dogs and cats around him like a medieval baron. Actually, I think the Wilberforces ran cotton factories or something.’
‘Barons need acres.’ I tapped the photograph I’d detached of the dead dog. ‘This place in the country, Does Wilberforce still own it?’
‘Fitzroy House, near Mittagong,’ Verity said. ‘No, it was sold off some time back in one of the divorce settlements. I’m not sure, but I don’t think he’s got anything left now except that ghastly place in Randwick. Randwick!’
I drank some more of the wine and felt a terminal tiredness creeping over me. Running into dead ends didn’t help. I asked them if they could give me the names of any of Paula’s friends. Verity cracked the first smile I’d seen from her that night.
‘None,’ she said. ‘Zero.’
‘Come on. Her father told me she’d lived with a man for a time.’
Verity shook her head. ‘Not in that way. I’d bet anything she’s a virgin.’
Robert blushed and plucked at the skin on a bit of salami. ‘I’m getting a bit sick of all this about Paula. We’ve spent more time thinking about her tonight than she’d have spent thinking about anyone else in her whole bloody life. What’s so important about Paula? What about Verity’s problem?’
I could see his point. I told them about the gun and how Paula had used it to shoot Phillip Wilberforce. I told them that the pistol might still be loaded. They were both stunned.
‘She couldn’t have meant to kill him,’ Verity said. ‘Not unless she’s gone completely crazy. If you kill someone you can’t inherit their estate, right?’
‘As far as I know,’ I said. ‘I thought there wasn’t much of an estate. Just the house.’
For some reason, all the talk and drama had restored some vitality to Verity. She pushed back her hair; the wine had done something for her colour and her eyes were brighter. ‘D’you realise what that dreadful pile is worth? I remember Patrick put a valuation on it once-a couple of million.’
‘Not in this market,’ I said.
‘Still, a million five, at least.’
Robert seemed to find all this distasteful, or perhaps he just had good powers of concentration. ‘Verity, Hardy-what’s she going to do?’
I rubbed my long dark stubble and felt my injured back stiffening, the skin on the burnt patches growing tight. The itch in my fingers where the split skin had only just healed made me want to scratch. ‘Paula’s psychotic, it looks like. She’s got things against you both. She had something against Patrick Lamberte.’
Verity snorted derisively. ‘She didn’t! Patrick? She scarcely ever met him.’
I took the defaced photograph from my pocket and spread it out on the table. ‘This is Paula’s work. I’ve reason to believe that she treated a painting of Patrick in the same way.’
Verity gaped at the creased, well-worn picture.
‘He’s naked. I can’t believe it. Patrick and Paula? No.’
‘What’re those shapes in the background?’ Robert said.
‘Who cares about fucking shapes in the background?’ Verity screamed. ‘This is my husband, posing naked for that crazy bitch.’
‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘She could have air-brushed the photo, doctored it in some way. I haven’t had a chance yet to find out.’
Verity slumped back in her chair. ‘That bastard! That slut! I want a cigarette.’
‘You don’t smoke,’ Robert said.
‘I stopped, now I want to start again.’
Robert stopped staring at the photograph and flapped his hands uselessly. ‘Hardy?’
I shook my head. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go and see your solicitor, Mrs Lamberte. Then we’ll trot along and you’ll make a statement to the police. I’ll support everything you say. You’ll be off the hook, I’m sure. You can get to see your kids again.’
Verity let go a long sigh. ‘Thank God.’ Robert was the only one who didn’t seem to think it was a brilliant strategy.