When I’d cleared Yancey Street and made a few turns I stopped to take stock of things. The notebook was still in the glove box and the lock was intact. It was more than I could say for myself. My head needed a dressing and I needed a shave. That was what showed; my teeth were scummy from a day’s drinking and my body was stiff and sore from lack of sleep — lying like a log for a couple of hours in wet grass doesn’t count. My head ached fiercely. I looked at the whisky and shuddered. Then I salvaged a couple of aspirin out of the rubbish on the back seat and swilled them down with the whisky. I almost gagged but I grabbed the steering wheel and hung on to everything. After a minute or two I didn’t feel any worse, maybe even better. Time to tackle Dr Osborn.
He was in front of his house, bending to pick up a newspaper. He wore a checked dressing gown and the white trousers of striped cotton pyjamas flopped around his ankles. He bent like an old man, stiffly and slowly, but he bent. I walked over and called out something polite. He looked in my direction but I had the feeling that he couldn’t see me. I reached the gate and called out again.
‘Dr Osborn.’
‘Yes, wait a minute.’ There was still a faint Scots tang in the words despite fifty years of exposure to Australian speech. He moved slowly down the path towards me holding the rolled-up newspaper in his hand. I waited by the gate and watched his face. A certain blankness was in it until he was about ten feet away, then interest came into his eyes. He fished out a pair of spectacles from the dressing gown pocket and hooked them on.
‘Yes young man?’
‘I have to talk to you doctor, about Gertrude Callaghan.’
‘You’ll do me the favour of telling me who you are.’
‘I’m sorry — my name is Hardy. I’m a private investigator from Sydney. Does the name Chatterton mean anything to you?’
‘You’ll not be referring to the poet?’
‘No, not the poet, the Judge.’ I rattled the gate a fraction. ‘Can I come in and ask you a few questions?’
‘Perhaps. You mentioned Gertrude. What of Gertrude?’
‘She’s dead, doctor. She died this morning. I came from Sydney to see her but I didn’t make it in time. That’s why I’m here.’
Emotional control of the kind that is generations deep fell away from him in a split second. He clutched at the gate and the newspaper fell; I held his arm to steady him and we stood there like father and son mourning a wife and mother. I opened the gate with my free hand and helped him up the path towards the house. He was a portly man with a weatherbeaten face. His eye sockets were sunken and surrounded with dark, puckered skin as though a stain was seeping out of the eyes into the tissue. Flesh sagged on his cheeks but his chin and neck were firm; it was as if he’d aged selectively, in patches.
The house was a big, plain weatherboard, painted white with a glassed-in verandah running along three sides. I eased him up three steps and across to a cane chair. He sat down stiffly, like an old horse sinking to its knees for the last time.
‘Can I get you something doctor?’
He spoke slowly and remotely, as if from far away. ‘I was making coffee.’
‘I’ll get it.’ I went into the house and through a couple of well-ordered rooms to a neat, bright kitchen. I collected mugs, milk and sugar and took the pot off the stove. When I got back to the verandah Osborn had straightened up a little in the chair, lifted his head and seemed to be looking through the window to a far distant point. I poured a black coffee for him and he nodded and took it. I made one for myself and sat down opposite him.
‘I’m sorry to hit you with it like that.’
He seemed not to hear me. ‘Forty years,’ he said. He moved his head and looked directly at me. ‘It was her, you’re sure?’
‘Yancey Street,’ I said. ‘A handsome old lady, white hair.’
The coffee slopped and he set the mug down before covering his eyes with his hand. I drank some coffee and waited. After a minute or so he made an effort, palmed tears from his face and drank the coffee. He didn’t look at me but pulled himself up out of the chair.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. He walked slowly through into the other room and I heard him lift the phone and dial. There was silence and then the sound of the phone being put down. I poured more coffee and sipped it while he resumed his chair.
‘No answer,’ he said. ‘I can’t just leave her there, all alone.’
‘I’m sorry doctor, I’ve got the living to consider.’
‘Yes. You’re a detective you said? A policeman?’
‘No, I’m a private detective. I’m sorry about Nurse Callaghan.’
‘Nurse, Sister, Matron,’ he said softly. ‘The most wonderful woman.’ I drank some more coffee and he watched me critically.
‘You should put milk and sugar in it,’ he said. ‘I’d guess you were a drinker, a drinker with an empty stomach. Your metabolism needs something to fuel it.’
‘I’ve also been hit on the head,’ I said defensively. I leaned forward to give him a look. He put down his cup and eased the hair gently aside. I brought my head up and he looked directly into my eyes.
‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘A possible concussion. You should be at a hospital. I’m afraid I don’t practise any more.’
‘You did though, until recently.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘From the medical register.’
‘You’ve been researching then. You’re right, I retired two years ago. You should go to the hospital, there’s a good one here.’
‘Maybe later.’ I sipped some coffee. ‘I want to ask you about Gertrude Callaghan and things that happened here thirty years ago.’
‘Do you now? You come here bleeding and smelling of spirits and you ask me that. How do I know you didn’t kill Gertrude?’
‘Would I have come here and told you about her if I had?’
‘Perhaps not,’ he said wearily. ‘But I doubt I have anything to tell you.’
‘I think you do. Thirty years is a long time but I need information and you’re the man that knows where the bodies are buried.’
He winced and a sharp breath came out of him; he tried to cover it by lifting his cup to his mouth.
‘Just an expression doctor. Why does it startle you?’ He didn’t answer and I pressed on. ‘I’ll dig for it doctor. I’ll be working in the dark and things will just have to fall out as they may. It doesn’t have to be that way though.’
‘What are you saying?’
He was good, very good. Without trying he’d got me to say more than I meant to while he hadn’t volunteered a damn thing himself. I had to plunge on with my uncertain knowledge and try to flush him out. I had hints, clues and guesses and just one piece of hard information on him — knowledge of his feelings for Gertrude Callaghan.
‘I’ve seen a photograph of Nurse Callaghan with a pregnant woman taken down here. The photograph was authentic and I’ve identified the locality.’ This was a lie but it seemed like a safe one. ‘My interest is in that woman specifically and the child, I’m not concerned with the wider issues.’ I chose the words carefully but they still sounded thin.
‘May I see this photograph?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘And why not?’
‘It’s a crucial piece of evidence and I don’t carry it around with me.’
He leaned back in his chair and drank some coffee. ‘You mean you don’t have it,’ he said confidently.
‘The man who had it is dead. He was murdered, probably by the same person who killed Nurse Callaghan.’
The smugness left his face. ‘Murdered! You didn’t say that before. No, not Gertrude. Did she…’
‘Tell me anything? I’m not going to answer that doctor, it’s time for you to open up a little.’
I finished the coffee, thought about a cigarette and decided against it. It wasn’t a time for betraying weaknesses. He sat back further in the chair and his eyes seemed to sink deeper into those cavernous, dark-rimmed sockets. He looked like a man letting his mind run back. I waited. When he spoke it was carefully and slowly with the Scots accent more pronounced.
‘I’m going to talk in generalities Mr Hardy, at least to start with. Do you understand? A lot of reputations and lives, good lives, are at stake in this. A lot of harm could be done.’
I nodded.
‘Let me say for a start that I know nothing about anyone by the name of Chatterton. I might have had some dealings with a Chatterton but if so I’ve forgotten. I’m an old man and I have forgotten many names.’
‘But you remember some?’
‘Aye, and with good reason.’ He ran a hand over his head and plucked at the dewlaps on his face. ‘This is hard for me. I’m not sure I’m doing the right thing. I know nothing about you.’ He groaned. ‘Tell me about Gertrude, was she… hurt?’
‘She was in bed. I didn’t see any signs of violence but someone had searched her house, probably the same person that hit me. Something happened up there.’
He suddenly looked every day of his age. Gertrude Callaghan was woven into his past and he wanted to talk about it, but secrecy had become a habit.
‘You seem to be having some trouble starting your story doctor,’ I said. ‘Let me help a little. There was an establishment of some sort down here thirty years ago, a place where women came to have babies. Or not to have them. I assume it was a well-regulated place. I’m not a moralist.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Myself, I’m a radical, a reformer and a radical. I am a moralist you might say.’ His eyes, which had been focused on my face, drifted away. It looked like he was going into the mind-cranking stage again. I was impatient but judged it better to let him set the pace. I leaned forward to get some more coffee. He didn’t notice.
‘I love this place Mr Hardy, these people, I’ve been here nearly fifty years. Did you know that?’
I nodded, took milk.
‘I went back to Edinburgh once, detested it! I found the Scots ungenerous and narrow. Well, that’s by the way. Do you know what used to be the single greatest cause of human misery in a place like this?’
I said ‘No’, which was true.
He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. ‘Unwanted children. Forced marriages and unwanted children. It was behind most of the crime, nearly all the drunkenness, most of the trouble.’
‘A problem,’ I agreed. ‘Still is, I suppose.’
‘It’s different now, more information, better methods. And there’s some support for the girls bringing up the babies.’
‘Come down to cases doctor,’ I said gently.
‘Aye. I ran a clinic here for twenty years, abortions and births, adoptions. Proud of it.’
‘It was a secret though.’
‘It was. A secret entrusted to a few.’
‘Nurse Callaghan?’
‘Helped me, the whole time. Wonderful woman, she believed in the work.’
It was more than that and I tried to keep the knowledge out of my response. Unsuccessfully.
‘I was unhappily married,’ he said simply. ‘A daughter died in childbirth with no one to help her.’
It explained a lot but I wasn’t happy with the drift of his account. Too much flavour of abortion in it; abortion wasn’t what I needed.
‘How many abortions did you perform doctor?’
‘Hundreds.’
‘How many births and… adoptions?’
‘Fewer.’
‘It’s the adoptions I’m interested in.’
‘Both things were illegal.’
‘I don’t imagine anyone cares now.’
He misinterpreted me and flared. ‘But I must explain what went wrong, how my ideals were perverted.’
The craving overtook the tact; I pulled out my tobacco and made a cigarette. I said ‘Go ahead’ more roughly than I’d intended.
He glanced at me sharply, annoyed, as though I wasn’t worthy to be his confessor. But he was too far into confession to stop. ‘I did this community a great service for twenty years. A law-abiding community. Blackman’s Bay, very low incidence of violence, disruption. But they wouldn’t let me be.’
‘They? The locals?’
‘No, the others, from Canberra and Sydney. Men and lasses, some terrible stories I can tell you.’
We seemed to be moving into the right area. I blew smoke away from him and juggled the ash.
‘What did they do, blackmail you?’
‘Aye, and worse. Terrible place Sydney, full of the lowest people.’ He looked hard at me and I felt I had the harbour bridge growing out of my head and Kings Cross painted on my face. I knew I had a day’s beard and a very dirty shirt.
‘How do I know I can trust you?’ he said harshly. Some of the power he must have had when younger suddenly seemed to flow back into him. ‘You’re a man for hire.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ I said, then I corrected quickly. ‘I’m only partly for hire. There are things I won’t do. I don’t cause unnecessary pain.’
‘A fine speech,’ he sneered. ‘Who judges what is necessary, you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aye. I thought so. That won’t do. What are your standards? What would you know of a lifetime’s dedication to an ideal?’
Not much, I thought, and thank God for it. Ideals should change like everything else. But he felt he had got some sort of moral and ethical drop on me and in a funny way I felt it too. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep.
‘You come down here out of nowhere,’ he went on, ‘telling about my oldest friend. You could be lying.’
He was pacing up and down the verandah now; his slippers flapped on the floor and his pyjamas swished around his white, bony shanks. His voice became more vehement as he moved as if the pacing was giving him strength and purpose.
‘Nurse Callaghan is dead,’ I said dully. ‘You’ll get news of that soon enough.’ I fingered my cut head. ‘This is real.’
He snorted, still pacing. ‘You could have done it yourself.’
‘You’re going in circles doctor, a minute ago you accepted that she was dead…’
‘Don’t you dare criticise my logic. I’ll thank you to know that I’m in full possession of my senses.’
I doubted it. He was getting more excited by the second and trying to construct defences against me. I’d lost him, just like that, in a sentence or two.
‘I’ll say no more Mr Hardy, and I’ll be obliged if you’d go. I have nothing to say to you.’
I spoke quietly, trying to calm him down. ‘That’s not true doctor. I must know more. I know a good deal already. It’s vital to my investigation…’
‘You’re threatening me!’ His voice rose and cracked. ‘I won’t stand for it. You come here and threaten me.’ He whipped across the floor and through the door into the house. I stood up wondering what my next move should be. He came back and he wasn’t alone — he had a double-barrelled shotgun for company and he levelled it at my chest.
‘Go Mr Hardy.’ He jerked the gun at the door. ‘And don’t come back.’
I make a point of not arguing with old men waving shotguns. I went.