The deft, unhurried movements she used to help Guthrie tie up the boat seemed to be second nature to her. She was tall and athletic; the short hair, shirt and jeans gave her a practical look and made no concessions to the usual ideas of femininity, but she was as female as you’d want-which is better. She had Paul Guthrie’s full approval, apparent in every movement he made. He nipped up the ladder, hugged her and made the introductions enthusiastically.
‘Cliff Hardy, Jess Polansky. He’s going to look for Ray, Jess.’
This news didn’t seem to fill her with delight. She brushed back her light-brown hair and looked at me as if I was the understudy, not the star. ‘I thought… oh hell, I saw you take the Satisfaction out, and I thought it might mean Ray was coming back. Or something…’
She burst into tears and Guthrie eased his shoulder over for her to huddle into. She had to bend to do it. As I looked at them I tried to interpret what I was seeing. Does a son want the girl his father so obviously wants for him? It struck me that I was getting out of my depth with fathers and sons, although I was old enough to have a son of Ray Guthrie’s age. As I’d told Cy Sackville, I didn’t even have a brother, and my own memories of my relationship with my father weren’t likely to be of much help. He was twenty-plus years dead, a quiet inner sort of man who didn’t seem to approve of anything much. I still occasionally had dreams in which I tried to win his approval, and failed.
Guthrie pulled back, put his hands up on the girl’s shoulders and held her out at arm’s length. ‘Talk to Cliff, Jess, give him all the help you can.’
Off the boat, facing the realities on dry land, Guthrie lost some of his bounce. He let go of Jess, swivelled and spoke to me with his head turned half-away. ‘Ray was last seen in the Noble Briton in the Cross. Friday of last week. He was drunk. That’s all I know. Stay in touch.’ He walked away with his hands in his pockets and his head down.
Jess Polansky wiped her eyes with her hand and looked at me suspiciously.
“What does he mean-you’re going to look for Ray?’
‘Just that. I’m a private investigator; I’ve found missing people before, quite a few.’
‘Ray’s not really missing though, is he? I mean, Mr Guthrie says someone saw him last week. That’s not missing.’
‘No. You’re half-right. There’s missing and missing. Look, can we talk now? Would you like a drink or something?’
She shrugged. ‘All right. I’m on my lunch break. I might as well have a drink.’
She pulled on one of the mooring lines that held the Satisfaction; muscle swelled and sinew tensed in her slim arm. She let the rope go and moved down the jetty.
‘Ray loves that boat’, she said.
‘Yeah. How old are you, Jess?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘What d’you do?’
‘I work part-time for Mr Guthrie at the marina, and I teach water-skiing.’
That explained the muscle and sinew. ‘You must be good- Ray any good at it?’
We climbed steps to the walkway that took us past the boatshed. I paused and looked back down at the boats gently pulling at their ropes, rising and falling in the placid water. Too dull for a spirited youth? I thought. Then I remember the order on the boat, the finely tuned engines and the anthology of sea verse. Jess Polansky moved ahead of me, exuding health and strength and I decided that Ray Guthrie couldn’t have been bored here. She didn’t answer my question until we were walking through the car park.
‘Ray’s good at everything.’ Her look challenged me to make something of it.
We went into the beer garden and I asked her what she wanted, expecting her to go for something soft in keeping with the athletic image.
‘Gin and tonic, please.’
I got one of those and a glass of white wine for me, and carried the drinks over to where she was sitting. The stone wall she sat on was the one in the photograph. I handed her the glass.
‘You and Ray come here much?’
‘Hardly ever; why?’
‘He’s got a photo of you sitting on that wall.’
‘Oh, I remember that. I’d got third in the state slalom titles.’ She gulped down a good deal of her drink, inexpertly. ‘Ray didn’t drink much, neither do I.’
The tenses were becoming confused, as if she was unconsciously getting ready to put him in the past.
‘Have you got any idea why he took off, Jess? Or why he’d be drunk in a Kings Cross pub?’
‘I’ve been trying to think. He didn’t just vanish overnight, you know. He was sort of around less, always pissing off somewhere. This went on for a while. Then he was just… gone.’
‘He didn’t explain? Say what was on his mind?’
She shook her head. ‘Not a great talker, Ray. Quiet bloke. Terrific bloke.’
It was another weighty tribute to him and I let it have its moment. I drank some wine and thought of Helen Broadway and her one smoke a day. I could’ve done with one now to use as I’d used them for twenty years-to help the wandering mind to focus. But I’d decided some time back that a focussing mind was no good without functioning lungs.
‘What was the set up between you and Ray, Jess? Any plans?’
She had dark eyes, slightly slanted, a straight nose and a firm, well-shaped mouth. When she smiled the slant of the eyes was accentuated and her face became lively and optimistic. She smiled now.
‘People don’t make plans anymore. They just live day to day or look, say, a few months ahead. Don’t you know that?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it. Sorry for the personal question, then. This might be another-did Ray have any unusual visitors, or mention meeting anyone out of the ordinary?’
The smile went and with it the optimism. She was getting a little out of practice at optimism. She concentrated. ‘I think there was someone like that’, she said slowly. ‘Two men went out with Ray on the boat one day.’
‘What for? Fishing, or what?’
‘He didn’t say. They were out a fair while-all afternoon. They didn’t look like fisherman or scuba divers. They wore suits.’
‘When was this, Jess?’
I’d finished my wine; she had forgotten her drink in the effort of remembering life. She stared past me, past the stunted beer-garden trees, straight out and up the channel.
‘Hard to fix on it… Ray was…’ she snapped her fingers; the sound was like a gunshot-all that water-skiing. ‘Got it! It was a week before I competed in the state titles. I hadn’t seen Ray for a few days. I did lousy. That makes it the first week of September.’
‘Would there be a record of the boat hire for that afternoon?’
‘Should be. A whole afternoon’d be pricey. Should be a receipt and everything. You think it’s important?’
I nodded. ‘Could be.’
‘Let’s go and see. I have to get back anyhow.’ She abandoned the drink and we went quickly back to the marina. The office was freshly painted, with new glass in the big windows; all the equipment-phones, desks, filing cabinets-were those of a prosperous business. Jess nodded hello to a woman who was talking on one of the phones, smoking, making notes and drinking coffee. I wondered what she was doing with her feet. Jess ran out a long file-drawer, riffled through the contents and pulled out a spring-backed folder marked Satisfaction.
‘We’re computerising soon’, Jess said.
‘Everyone is’, I said. ‘Except me.’
She carried the folder across to a desk and starting going through it, muttering, ‘September, September’
‘Here it is!’ She snapped the folder open impatiently and spread the loose sheets. There was one for each day-morning, afternoon and all-day hirings were noted along with fuel costs, equipment hire and the name of the hirer. In the first week of September, the Satisfaction had had a scattering of morning and evening hirings, with one all-day job. There was no record of an afternoon session of the kind Jess had described. She looked at the spread sheets and then she thumped them with her fist.
‘That’s bloody strange.’
‘Describe the men’, I said.
‘I can’t. Suits. Ordinary.’
‘Big or small, young or old?’
‘One of each: one big, one small.’
‘Fair or dark?’
She shook her head. ‘Uh huh, don’t remember.’
‘Anything else.’
She frowned and looked again out over the water.
‘Shit, I don’t know. Nothing. No! I remember now, one of them had a sort of shine to his suit. Yech! And he wore white shoes. Does that help?’
The busy woman at the other desk hung up her phone noisily. We both looked at her.
‘I don’t mean to stickybeak, Jess, but…’
‘Don’t worry, Val. What?’
I was amazed that she could stickybeak as well as doing all those other things. I wished I could get a look at her feet.
‘Couldn’t help hearing’, Val said. ‘I saw that man in the awful-looking shiny suit. He had those terrible shoes on, too.’
‘You saw him when?’ I said.
‘Just last week. Right here. He came in here, and asked for Ray.’
‘What did you say?’ Jess asked.
Val stubbed out her cigarette and got ready to get another going. ‘I told him I didn’t know where Ray was. I said I wished I did know. It was lovely having him around here. Oh, sorry, Jess…’
Jess was looking upset again, frowning and shuffling the Satisfaction sheets. I took them from her and made a neat stack of them. Compulsive. She pulled herself together.
‘Did you ask his name. Val?’
‘No, sorry, I didn’t.’
‘Don’t worry’, I said. ‘I know his name.’
It was my turn to gaze out over the comforting water. Of course, he wasn’t the only spiv in town; but shiny suit and white shoes precisely fitted my recollection of the unwelcome appearance of Liam Catchpole.
That gave me plenty to chew on as I drove back to the city. Big and small meant Spotswood and Catchpole, and I’d never heard that either was a fisherman, although the scuttlebutt had it that Spotswood wasn’t a stranger to the waters of Sydney Harbour at night. Ray Guthrie’s connection with Catchpole went back to the time when he first exhibited signs of disturbance, as the psychologists would say. But it wasn’t continuous; and since Val hadn’t said that Catchpole was obnoxious (apart from his suit), that meant he was on good behaviour-which meant that he was seriously concerned. It was reasonable to assume that Catchpole was a part of whatever was bugging Ray Guthrie. But Catchpole was involved in everything-drugs, prostitution, intimidation, the lot. There were no clues there, except that we could rule out anything honest.
One side of my face had got sunburned while I was on the boat; it felt flushed and uncomfortable on the drive back and it reminded me that I’d missed my day on the beach. My tan would fade; would that make me less desirable for Helen Broadway? Was I desirable to Helen Broadway? Did I want to be? This kind of stop-start thinking was appropriate to the movement of the traffic, which was heavy and impatient. I was weary from the gear and clutch pedal work when I got back to town. The soft-top should be an automatic, I found myself thinking.
A weaker man, one less dedicated to his craft, might have heeded the over-heated engine and the ache in his bones and headed for home and a drink. But not Hardy-with a client’s cheque in the pocket and a puzzler in the brain he goes on and on, like Christopher Columbus. I found myself sliding into this nonsense as the city skyline came in view. Maybe it was the motor fumes, maybe I couldn’t handle a can of light beer and a glass of white wine in the middle of a working day anymore. Disturbing thoughts to be pushed aside as I ploughed on to police headquarters to have a chat with my favourite law-enforcement officer, Detective Sergeant Frank Parker. We could talk about under-convicted villains and the corruption of youth. Besides, Frank might ask me over to his pub for a drink.
Frank Parker had impressed me with his flair and imagination when we’d first met a little over a year ago. By that I mean that he didn’t arrest me on principle, and didn’t try to prove that he was tougher than me or better at staying up late at night answering meaningless questions in unpleasant surroundings. I’d helped him and he’d helped me on that occasion; we had a drink together from time to time, and there was an understanding between us that one would help the other again if the time came. This looked like it, for me.
I parked near the police building in a section they keep set aside for impounded vehicles. I’ve never had any trouble in this spot-coming or going-and I’ve never known why. I told the cop on the desk which bars the way to the stairs and lifts who I wanted to see, and he looked at me oddly.
‘You sure?’ he said.
‘Yeah. Why?’
He shrugged and called the detectives’ room. Parker must have given him the okay because he pointed his thumb suavely at the lifts. I rode up two levels and went along the corridor where the thick clumps of multi-coloured official paper hang off the notice boards like grapes.
I knocked on the door of the room Frank recently acquired when he moved up a grade: he only had to share it with one other detective.
‘Come in, Cliff.’
I pushed at the door which only went halfway before it was stopped by a cardboard box on the floor. Parker was in his shirt sleeves, shovelling papers into another box. There was a bulging green garbag on top of the swept-clean desk. Parker lived and worked in a blizzard of paper; it was his habitat. To see him in a bare, stripped room was a shock.
‘Moving again, Frank?’ I said. ‘You a Deputy Commissioner or something, now?’
He grinned at me and dusted his hands. ‘You’re behind the times, Cliff. You see me at the end of what looks like being my last day in the New South Wales Police Force.’