I spent the rest of the afternoon re-stocking the fridge with fluids and solids. I bought some glasses and coffee mugs to replace the broken ones. I scotch-taped some books together and tidied up papers. The cat came home, got fed and went off again. I was moping and I knew it. I sat down with a pen and pad and some wine and tried to do some constructive thinking.
The results didn’t justify the amount of wine consumed. My brain felt slow and tired as if something connected with the Bill Mountain affair impeded its proper engagement. My thoughts kept drifting off onto other subjects, like Nice, the Melbourne gymnasium, Helen Broadway’s nose. In the end, after writing down the names of all the people so far involved and connecting some of them with arrows and covering a lot of paper with question marks, I gave it up. I decided to sleep on it, which sometimes brings results.
In the morning I had my results. Three thoughts had taken form: one, I could locate Mountain’s psychiatrist, Dr Holmes, and pump him; two, I could ask around about the men who’d attacked me in the car park and try to find out who they worked for; three, I needed to find a spa and sauna in Sydney-beating two men in unarmed combat had made me a convert.
Dr John Holmes’ rooms in Woollahra were in a road that seemed to be shooting for the ‘most leafy stretch in Sydney’ award. It was all high brick fences with overhanging trees; trees along the footpath, trees on a central strip dividing the wide road, trees waving up around the tops of the lofty houses. It cost big money to get a lot of leaves to rake in this neighbourhood, and Holmes had to be coining it-his brick fence was one of the highest and his trees were among the leafiest.
I parked outside Holmes’ place under a plane tree and reflected on how very differently people go about their business. I was here two days after I’d had the idea to come. Me, you can just ring up, and like as not you can come over and see me or I’ll come to you. Or, if you happen to be in St Peter’s Lane, you can walk through the tattoo parlour, romp up the stairs and knock on the door. Not so with Dr Holmes. I’d been given fifteen minutes. There were no free evenings, no lunches, no half-hour before the busy day began. It sounded obsessive to me. I imagined a pale, pudgy creature, eyes luminously intelligent with legs ready to drop off from disuse.
I pushed open the iron gate in the high fence and walked up the leaf-strewn path to the front door. The house was a wide, towering affair, built of sandstone blocks one size down from those used in the pyramids at Giza. It had gracious lines-bay windows, and a wide, bull-nosed verandah over an ornately tiled surface that swept away around both sides of the house.
The doorbell was answered by a tall, slim woman wearing a white silk shirt and jodhpurs. She had a mane of blonde hair and high, expensive-looking cheekbones. Her blue eyes were elaborately made up with long dark lashes that fluttered like car yard bunting.
‘Mr…?’ she said.
‘Hardy.’
‘Oh good-I think he’s ready to see you. I’m going riding.’
‘Not yachting?’
‘A joke. I don’t like jokes. D’you think I look right?’
She backed off; I stepped after her into an entrance hall big enough to canter horses in. She rotated slowly in front of a three metre square mirror.
‘Umm,’ she said. She seemed to have forgotten who I was, in the ecstasy of self-admiration.
‘Hardy. To see Dr Holmes.’
Oh, yes. You go up the stairs and it’s the first door on I he right or left. I can never remember which but you’ll be all right because there aren’t any doors on the side it’s not on. ‘kay?’
‘’kay,’ I said.’
I went up a few stairs and turned back to look at her. She was standing by the door peering out through the peep hole.
The stairs were covered in deep blue carpet and the banister rail was polished, old and grooved and a pleasure to lay your hand on. Like all the best staircases it had two flights with a flat central section at the turn-on these it was about the size of a boxing ring. The door was on the right if you were going up but on the left if you were going down-perhaps that was what had confused the lady in the jodhpurs. I knocked on the door and went inside when a deep, pulsating voice told me to.
The man standing behind the big desk was forty plus, six feet tall with bushy dark hair and a fairways and nineteenth hole complexion. His bulky, still spreading body, displayed in a blue and white striped shirt and grey trousers, owed more to the nineteenth hole than the fairways. He reached across the desk and we shook somewhere in the middle of the vast polished expanse. Strong grip.
‘Sit down, Mr Hardy, I can’t give you long.’
I thought he stressed give the way a man who charges a fortune by the hour might, but I could have been wrong. ‘This won’t take long. Doctor.’ I’d noticed the leather couch as soon as I entered the room but I was careful to avoid even touching it. I sat in a matching leather chair. The chair seemed to have been made exactly for the comfort of my often-stressed back. It immediately relaxed me which made me immediately wary.
He picked up a pencil. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Hardy?’
His voice was one of the best I’ve heard, rich and rewarding. If this voice gave you the news that you were dying of cancer it wouldn’t feel so bad.
‘I gather you haven’t come to see me in my professional capacity.’
‘No, more in mine, although I guess that’s semi-professional.’
He smiled showing the strong white teeth I’d have expected. ‘You’re defensive.’ He looked down at a note pad and touched it with his pencil. ‘A private enquiry agent. Interesting activity?’
‘Occasionally. Your professional path has crossed with my defensive semi-professional one-you have a patient named William Mountain.’
He nodded; on his scale of fees that was probably a ten dollar nod. It forced me to go on.
‘I need some information about him.’
A shake of the head-another ten bucks.
‘Or at least your opinion.’
‘I can’t discuss my patients with you, Mr Hardy. How could I? This is the most confidential branch of the medical profession as you must be aware.’
‘I doubt that it’s more confidential than mine though. Maybe it is. Let’s see. Maybe we can trade confidences.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘I leaned forward from the too-comfortable chair across the table. The table had a beautiful surface and some padding around its edges, like the good doctor. ‘A few days ago William Mountain beat a man to death using, among other things, a bottle. This is known to me and a very few other people. It is not known to the police. Can you get more confidential than that?’
His big, fleshy lips pursed and he ran a broad, capable-looking hand through his bushy hair. ‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, that tells me something. You think he’s a dangerous man?’
‘You can’t outfox me, Mr Hardy. I’m not going to confirm your guesses.’
‘Look, I’m not here to play word games. I’m trying to find this man. He’s in bad trouble and he needs help. His girlfriend wants to help him. I’m more concerned about other things, but I’ve seen some of the harm he’s done and I don’t only mean physical harm.’
That got a lifted eyebrow. No charge.
I think it’s better that he doesn’t do any more harm. There are two paths ahead of him-one leads to court and the other to the crematorium. Believe me. Either way you’re going to be called to talk to the authorities. If he gets a bullet in the head, it could be your fault for not talking to me now.’
‘You’re persuasive, Mr Hardy.’
I’m trying to be. I’m also telling you the truth.’
‘I believe you might be. Who would kill Mountain?’
‘Criminals, obviously.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s involved in something big and dirty. He’s being foolish. He’s threatening people who don’t know about turning cheeks.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me.’ He leaned back in his chair and then came abruptly forward. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘They’re your lungs.’
He got a long thin cigar out of a drawer, unwrapped it and lit. it with a gold lighter. The smoke went down into his barrel chest and came out in a thin hard stream that floated up towards the extravagant ceiling rose. With the cigar in his hand and framed against a big window that ran from knee height almost to the ceiling, he looked like a wrestler on his day off.
‘William Mountain is a very disturbed man. It’s hard to give a name to his central problem. You could call it an identity crisis but it would take a very broad definition of the word “identity” for that to cover it.’
‘Can you predict a likely outcome?’
‘To what?’
I gave him a summary of Mountain’s movements and actions; he drew on his cigar and listened patiently. I held back on the notes Mountain had kept on his sessions with Holmes, because I thought of that as a card I could play if I needed to. When I finished he sat quietly and puffed smoke. I assumed he was thinking, and God knows what his rate was for that. I let my eyes travel around the room taking in the bookcases with the glass fronts, the slimline electric typewriter on the desk and the Impressionist paintings on the walls. He stubbed out the cigar in an ashtray which he put back in the drawer he’d taken the cigar from.
‘It’s very difficult,’ he said melodiously. ‘I wish I could talk to him.’
‘Me too. Is he a likely suicide?’
He spread his hands non-committally.
‘What would you be advising him to do if he was here now?’
‘I don’t advise. I listen.’
‘Jesus, you’re doing pretty well out of listening.’
‘Don’t be offensive.’
For no good reason I looked again at the elegant typewriter on Holmes’ desk. I was letting my mind run free on the subject of Mountain, who had no doubt lain on the couch a few feet away and told Holmes a lot of things, some of them things it could be useful to know. I wondered if Holmes typed up his notes and where he kept them. Holmes followed my gaze. He looked impatiently at his watch.
‘Mr Hardy…’
I got up and took a closer look at the typewriter. It had a sheet in it with a couple of lines of typed verse about a red knight and blue blood that didn’t mean a thing to me. The typeface looked very similar to that on Bill Mountain’s postcard.
‘This is a super-portable, isn’t it-for travelling?’
Holmes sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Mountain wrote a note on a slip of paper and stuck it to a postcard. I thought he might have pecked it out in a shop but these cost a mint; they don’t leave demo models around.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Mountain’s got a traveller’s typewriter, expensive one. Means he expects to be writing.’
‘He’s a writer, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah, but he was totally blocked. He was obsessed with writing a novel; he couldn’t write it and it was eating at him. Right?’
Holmes nodded. ‘One of his obsessions.’
‘If he was actually writing this book, would that make a difference to him, to his behaviour?’
‘Conceivably. If it went well it could absorb him, calm him down. If it went badly it could push him in any direction.’
‘What if it went well and he managed to stay off the grog?’
‘That’s unlikely. Alcohol is one of his favourite, I might say most cherished, obsessions. And in case you think you’ve opened me up, I’d point out that Mountain is on the public record about that.’
‘Mm. But just say he was sober and writing well?’
He put the capable-looking hands on the desk and examined them as if he’d never seen them before. Then he looked at his watch.
‘I’ve got an appointment. I expected you to be some dim summons server, Hardy. I can see that you are not.’ He smiled and put a lot of warmth in it; the smile and the voice together would bowl over most women and a lot of men. ‘In fact I think you have a genuine interest in human character which is quite an unusual thing to have. So I will take a chance with you. This is a complete shot in the dark, but I’d say that if Mountain managed to achieve the sort of self-control you’re talking about he would be capable of extraordinary things-a great novel, a terrible crime. Almost anything.’
I stood up and he stood too. We were about the same height as we faced each other over the antique desk. I guessed he would get a lot of transference from his patients-that process where the progressing patient imagines that he or she is in love with the analyst. Hilde used to say that it happened a bit with dentists, too. It wasn’t a problem I’d had to contend with. He came around the desk to see me out and we shook hands again.
I couldn’t resist it; he was just too comfortable and secure for my liking. ‘Did you know that Mountain kept notes on his sessions with you, Doctor? He analysed you, spotted a few weaknesses too.’
His grizzled, pepper-and-salt eyebrows shot up and he looked positively pleased. ‘Really! How interesting. But I can’t say I’m at all surprised. I recommended just such an activity as part of his therapy.’