The telephone woke me. I caught sight of the clock as I rolled over to grab the receiver – six-thirty a.m. I put my head back on the pillow and tried to unscramble reality and dreams. I grunted into the mouthpiece and it sputtered back at me like a firecracker. I sat up.
“Easy, easy. James?”
More sputtering and incoherence on the other side of the wire.
“Stop it,” I yelled. “Shut up, take a breath and give it to me clearly.”
A pause, a long one, then the actor’s voice came through, still with a note of panic but under control.
“Noni’s been kidnapped. I’ve just got a note.”
“At six-thirty?”
“I couldn’t sleep, I was up early and found the note taped to the door.”
“What does it say?”
I heard a rustle over the line and then James’ voice, shaky, reading.
“We have got the girl. Five thousand dollars gets her back.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
It didn’t figure. Ted Tarelton could raise twenty times that. Why hit James? My silence made him panicky again and he almost stammered, asking if I was still there. I said I was.
“What should I do?”
“Can you raise it?”
“The money? Yes, just.”
“Will you?”
“Yes of course, of course.”
“Stay put. I’ll be right over.”
I hung up on him, jumped up and took a quick shower. I was pulling on some clothes when the phone rang again. I made a bet with myself and won. Madeline Tarelton.
“Mr Hardy? Just a minute. My husband wants to speak to you.”
I heard a click, waited and then Ted’s rich voice came in.
“Hardy? My girl’s been snatched.”
“I know. You got a note?”
“Yes, how…?”
I told him how and asked him to read out the note. It was the same as James’ except that it asked for a hundred thousand dollars and said a contact would be made at five p.m. the following day. Ted’s voice vibrated a bit and the idea occurred to me that he’d be on the Courvoisier a bit earlier today. I promised him I’d be over as soon as I’d seen James. He wasn’t too happy about that, claiming an employer’s rights but I soothed him. He seemed impressed that James had said he’d raise the five thousand, as if it was a bride price. I suppose it was, in a way. My cool competence was dented a bit by having to ask Ted for James’ address. I’d forgotten that I didn’t have it, but he gave it to me without seeming to take it amiss.
My perfectly good car was sitting in the Newcastle airport parking lot and it was raining again. I got a taxi to James’ place in Darlinghurst. It was a terrace house with a door that let straight out unto the street. It was painted white and had some new iron on the roof but it hadn’t been made over into anybody’s dream. A yellow Mini with a cracked rear window, taped up, was parked outside. I knocked at the door and James opened it with a buzzing electric shaver in his hand. Half his face was shaven and half not. He looked terrible. He ushered me in and started to gabble. I reached out and clicked off the shaver. That shut him up.
“Let’s see the note,” I said.
He went out to the kitchen and I followed him. The house wore the same look all the way through, pleasant enough but as if no-one cared. He pointed to a piece of paper on the table and I picked it up. The words he’d read out were printed across a cheap piece of notepaper in capitals. A black ballpoint pen had done the writing and there were no idiosyncrasies in it that I could see. Across the back of the paper, which had been folded in three, was a strip of cellulose tape. James resumed his shaving, wandering about the little room stroking his jaw. He was wearing drill slacks and an orange-coloured thing I think is called a shaving coat. He would. I waited until he’d finished shaving and turned the motor off, then I told him about Tarelton’s note. He ran his hand over his smooth face and frowned where he found a missed spot. I pushed the shaver out of reach and leaned on him.
“How soon can you get the money?”
“Today. I’d have to see my family’s lawyer, but I’m sure it can be arranged.”
“Good. Do it. Don’t tell anyone else.” I started for the passage but he came after me and caught me by the arm.
“God, don’t just walk out. What do you think of it? What’s going to happen?”
“I don’t know,” I growled. “I’ll talk to some people, then we’ll play it the best way we can.”
“It all seems so strange – I mean for this to happen so long after she disappeared. It seems – I don’t know – oddly managed.”
“You’re the theatre man,” I said.
I brushed him off and left the house saying I’d call him at the theatre when things had been decided. I caught a taxi to Armstrong Street and wondered why I’d replied the way I had to his last remark. I didn’t know. Maybe just to be rude.
Madeline Tarelton opened the door again. She was wearing a lime green trouser suit today and nothing about her had deteriorated since I’d seen her last. She seemed to be bearing up under the strain and her voice was edged with contempt when she spoke.
“Ted’s still in bed. He’ll see you there.”
“Where’s the room?”
“Upstairs, in front.”
I went up. The room was big with two glass-panelled doors letting out onto a balcony. The water was visible through them, shining dull and grey under the thick white sky. In bed Ted was not nearly as impressive as he was when up and around and properly togged up. The skin around his jaw sagged, his rumpled hair looked thin and his body under the bedclothes was lumpy and powerless. The room had pale candy striped wallpaper and a deep pile carpet; it was too fussy and frilled, with fringed lampshades and a brocade bedcover, for my taste and Ted looked uncomfortable in it. I sat on a bentwood chair cushioned with satin while Ted folded up the newspaper and pulled himself straighter in the bed.
“Bad business this, Hardy,” he said. “Fair knocked me. I took a bit of a turn. Crook heart.” He placed his hand over his chest. I nodded.
“Got the note?”
He produced it from the breast pocket of his puce pajamas and handed it over. Identical to James’ except for the extra information.
“I was up early. Meeting on today at Randwick. I went for the papers and there it was, stuck to the door. Madeline had to bloody nearly carry me back here.”
The experience had swept away his usual bluster; I couldn’t tell whether he was most upset by the kidnapping of his daughter or the reminder of his own mortality, but it was obviously the right time to pressure him a bit.
“You can raise the money?” I asked.
“Easy. Reckon I should?”
“Yes. But there’s something weird about this. It doesn’t smell right.”
“How do you mean?” he said listlessly.
“Could the girl be shaking you down?”
Colour flooded his face and he looked about to sound off at me which he undoubtedly would have done if he’d been feeling his usual, successful self. Now he flopped back against the pillows and fidgeted with the quilt.
“Possible, I suppose,” he said lamely. “Is that your theory?”
“I haven’t got a theory, just a feeling. It’s a strange one. I never heard of two ransoms being asked before. Complicates things. Not that they’re not messy enough already.”
“Madeline told me you’d rung the other night. By complicated you mean about the Abo? What’s happened since then?”
I gave him an outline leaving Coluzzi out and not going into details about Noni’s reputation in Newcastle. He couldn’t help on that score; he’d practically lost all touch with the girl from the time his wife had left to when Noni turned up motherless. Ted’s instincts, bred in the SP game and sly grogging, were to avoid the police, so he fell in with my suggestion that we keep the police out of it for the time. I had a feeling, which I was backing, that the girl wasn’t in danger. But the cops wanted to talk to her in connection with Simmonds’ death and if they started poking around and stirring things up it could all turn sour and Noni might suddenly become dispensable. I gave Ted the gist of this and he agreed to raise the money and wait for the contact.
“I think that’s just plain stupid,” Madeline Tarelton said from the doorway. She came in carrying a glass of water and some pills on a tray. She set them down on the bed and gestured at her husband to take them. He did. I pocketed the note and got up from my chair.
“Just a minute,” Madeline said quickly. “This is insane, you must go to the police.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “And your husband agrees with me.”
She snorted. “You’re playing games. I have my doubts about you Mr Hardy. This is a mistake.”
“Keep out of it Madeline,” Ted said sharply. Maybe the pills had done him some good. Madeline swung round on him, surprised, but he cut her off.
“You don’t give a damn about the girl, she’s nothing to you. Alright, fair enough, but she’s my daughter and I want her back safe. We’ll do it Hardy’s way.”
“That’s not fair!” Her composure was disturbed which looked like a rare event. “That girl is a menace, the dregs, she…”
“Shut up!” Ted roared. His face turned purple.
“Don’t shout, you’ll have another attack.”
I left them to it and went down the stairs and out of the house.
I pulled up the hood of the light, plastic parka I was wearing and walked through the drizzle to Oxford Street where I caught a bus to the city. On the bus I read yesterday’s paper. Simmonds’ death got a small notice on page four in between an item on rail fares going up and the birth of an elephant at the zoo. The police appealed to the blonde woman who’d found the body to come forward. The Chev Biscayne was described. The woman and the car were the police’s only lines of investigation. I couldn’t imagine the La Perouse blacks identifying Noni to the police, however much they disliked her, but some back-tracking by the cops could turn her name up soon and then the heat would be on me.
I got off the bus outside The News building and bought the morning paper. There was nothing more on Simmonds but the discovery of an injured woman on her farm near Macleay got a mention. The woman was in a critical condition in Macleay hospital and police were anxious to interview a tall dark man wearing light-coloured clothes and carrying a dark coat. If they were any good it wasn’t going to take the local police long to trace that man from his taxi to his breakfast to his shave. I’d used the name Colin Hocking for the plane ticket but a quick scout about at Newcastle would turn my car up and then I could expect visitors. On the sporting page there was a preview of the fight coming up between Jacko Moody and Tony Rosso. It would be the first main event for them both. They had good, rather similar records, but Moody had KO’d two men whom Rosso had only decisioned and he was favoured to win. It reminded me that I had to get tickets from Harry Tickener for Ted Williams.
The News building is a standard glass, concrete and plastic tower which creates a canyon without and neuroses within. The lobby was hung about with glossy blow-ups of press photographs that showed politicians with beer bellies and worn-out smiles, football players spattered with mud and fashion models of unbearable thinness. I went up to the fourth floor where Harry shares some cramped office space with thirty other reporters. They steal each other’s cigarettes and listen to each other’s phone conversations. I wound through the desks and wastepaper bins. Harry’s typewriter was blasting.
“Hallo Cliff – hang on a second.” He pushed a lock of his thin yellow hair back and stabbed at his keyboard with long, tobacco-stained fingers; three of them.
“Carry on exposing,” I said. I sat down in the hard chair drawn up in front of the desk and rolled a cigarette. The old tobacco had tasted bad enough last night; this morning it was disgusting. Tickener stopped pounding and stretched both hands up in the air. Nothing creaked, he was still young.
“What can I do for you Cliff?”
“Two things; tickets to the Moody fight – a pair. OK?”
“Yeah, no trouble. You coming with me?”
“I hope so. I’ve got something on but it should be worked out by then, one way or another. Remember the guy we met at Trueman’s?”
“Oh yeah, the actor. His bird was missing. Flushed her?”
“Not yet. Now the other favour.”
He looked quickly down at his typewriter, picked up a pencil and made a note on the copy.
“Are you sure you’ve got the time Harry? I’d hate to throw your schedule out.”
He looked embarrassed. “Shit. Sorry Cliff. It’s this piece on Moody. I want to get it right.”
“Read A. J. Liebling. Who’s your top crime man?”
“Garth Green.”
“Good memory? Knows the files?”
“Steel trap.”
“Will you introduce me to him?”
“Sure, when?”
“Now.”
He looked relieved and jumped up from his chair.
“Steady,” I said. “Are you sure he’ll be in?”
“He’ll be in.” Tickener came around the desk. “He works till two p.m. and drinks till two a.m. Let’s go.”
I followed him. There were a few people walking about in the corridor and a small clutch of reporters was grouped talking in a doorway. They parted like the waters when a six-foot girl with close-cropped red hair walked through the door. She was wearing boots, a long dark skirt and a tight-fitting jacket and she carried her head like a Queen. She had a high, proud nose and big dark eyes in a face as pale as a lily. I gaped with the journos but Harry seemed not to notice her and kept on his way. I wondered about Harry. He knocked on a door which had stuck to it a file card with the name garth green typed on it in lower case.
Tickener pushed the door open and I went in after him. A big man in shirtsleeves with heavy striped braces was sitting in a swivel chair looking out the window. With his grizzled balding head and meaty arms he looked like a cop which probably helped him in his calling. Looking out the window was probably a good idea for a crime reporter too. As sure as hell there’d be some of it going on out there. He turned slowly round to face us.
“Hello boy wonder,” he said.
Harry laughed a little more heartily than he needed to. “Garth, this is Cliff Hardy, he…”
“Private man, I know.” He leaned forward to shake hands. “Glad to meet you.” I trusted him with my hand and he gave it back to me undamaged.
“Hardy’s on a case Garth, and he could use some help. I thought you might have something for him. OK?”
Green waved at him and pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket.
“I’ve got a piece on the run,” Tickener went on. “I’ll just get back to it.”
Green waved again and Harry gave me a nod before he scampered off.
“Good bloke, Harry,” Green said. He lit the cigar. “Doing well too. What can I do for you? Who do you want the shit on?”
“Not like that. It’s criminal history I’m after.”
“Why don’t you ask your mate Evans?”
“You’re well informed.”
“Good memory,” he grunted. “Read Harry’s stuff on the Costello case. You’ve got the right contact there. Evans is an honest cop.”
“That’s right and so I can’t use him right now. I’m in a bit too deep and there’s things I’d rather not say.”
He grinned; his big, boozy face broke up into amiable creases and more grizzled grey hair poked out of his nostrils. “I get like that myself sometimes. Let’s hear it. I’ll help if I can.”
I reached over and stubbed out my cigarette in the half tobacco tin he used for an ashtray. “It’s pretty general. What do you know about crimes, solved and unsolved, up around Macleay way?”
“A bit – when are we talking about?”
“Twelve years ago, maybe longer.”
He leaned back, took a drag on the cigar, sucked the smoke in and blew it at the ceiling. The action brought on a coughing fit which left him red in the face and clutching the edge of his desk. “I’ve tried everything… fucking pipes… these things.” He waved the cigar. “All the same, I have to do the drawback. All I want to do is smoke fifty plain Turf a day like I used to.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Too scared.” He put the cigar down; a thin column of smoke rose up from it like an Apache signal. “Macleay… not too hard to name the big one, bank job in… sixty-six.”
“What happened?”
“Two men did a Commonwealth bank on a Friday. Took away fifty thousand dollars.”
“Never caught?”
“Not a sign.”
“The money?”
“Never found. The bank put up a big reward but heard nothing.”
“That’s strange. Did you cover it yourself?”
Green picked up the cigar again. There was a faint curl of smoke coming from the end and he sucked it into life, blowing out an enormous cloud. He looked at it virtuously. “Yeah. I went up there and looked around. Thought I might get onto something and make a big man of myself. Nothing doing. It was a pretty amateurish job. They got away on foot. Dead lucky.”
“How did the cops figure it?”
“Same as me, two roughies who got lucky. The cops dragged in everyone they could think of but got nowhere. I wrote a piece on it… hang on.”
He lumbered over to a battered filing cabinet under the window. He pulled out a drawer and riffled through the folders standing up inside it. He took one out and back to the desk where he opened it and leafed through some foolscap sheets with news cuttings pasted to them.
“Yeah, here it is.” He handed the sheet across to me and I ran my eye over the columns of newsprint. It was a straight recital of the facts including a description of the bandits who’d worn stocking masks and carried sawn-off shotguns. I pushed the sheet back across the desk. Green fiddled with his cigar and looked at the wall over my head. His eyes screwed up and he let out a tired sigh. His first drink was still a good way off.
“Yes?” I said.
“I remember now, there was a whisper about it. They were trying to fit someone up with it, a standover man with some local form.”
He butted his cigar and a smell that would soon be a vile reek started to sneak across the desk towards me. I thought that it might help his anti-drawback campaign if he smoked better cigars. I was about to say so when he started drumming his fingers on the desk.
“I’m slipping,” he grumbled. “Can’t remember his name. Look Hardy, I’m rambling. This of interest to you, this the one?”
“It could be – missing money sounds right. What about the standover man?”
“The name’s gone but he went up for rape in Newcastle, young kid. He got ten years.”
I heard something click inside my head like a combination lock tumbler coming into place. I sat up sharply. Green looked amusedly at my reaction.
“That’s right, they didn’t have anything much on him for the Macleay job as I recall, just something about the company he kept. The cops were just as happy to do him on the rape charge. It was open and shut.” He leered at me and I winced at the joke. He laughed. “Now you look interested.”
“I am. I see a connection. How can I get some dope on this rape case?”
“I thought you were interested in lost money.”
“Yes, and lost women. Let me get it straight before I go off half-cocked. What was that about the company he kept, the rapist?”
“Jesus Hardy, it’s twelve years ago. I might be confusing it with something else.” He picked up the sheets of paper, aligned them and tucked them back in the folder. Handling the relics of the time gave him assurance. “I think it was just that this bloke, whoever he was, used to hang about with an Abo up Macleay way.”
“So what? There’s lots of them up there.”
“That’s right but you didn’t read the story very thoroughly did you?” He handed it back to me and I read it word by word. One of the tellers said that one of the bandits looked dark under the mask, like an Aborigine. The thing was coming together now. I passed the cutting back.
“Pretty thin.”
“That’s what I said,” Green barked. “Macleay’s a racist hole; was then anyway, probably still is. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the only whiff the coppers had.” He blew a kiss at the wall. “But it died on them.”
I leaned forward, excited. “I’m sorry to press you, but the names are important, is there any way to get on to them?”
“Sally Fitch would be your best bet. Get at it from the rape angle. What she doesn’t know about criminal fucking isn’t worth knowing. I’ll take you along.”
We left the room and he moved along the corridor in that light, fast way that some big men can. He must have weighed sixteen stone and no-one got in his way. He nodded to people and I kept an eye out for the crew-cut redhead but she didn’t show. Green poked his head through a door then went in and I followed. It was another thirty-desk room with a good deal of noise and screwed up paper. Green ushered me across to a corner where a pot plant, a hat stand and a filing cabinet sheltered one desk a bit from the hurly-burly. He introduced me to the woman behind the desk; they ribbed each other about their drinking, smoking and other vices. Green shook my hand again and went away.
Sally Fitch was a lean blonde in her thirties. Her hair was rather faded and she showed signs of wear and tear; there was a scar running down the left side of her face that she covered with make-up. She was a good-looking woman, nonetheless. She lit a cigarette and looked me over with steady green eyes that wouldn’t be surprised at anything, not even if I leaped up that minute and threw myself out the window.
“What can I tell you that Garth can’t, Mr Hardy?” she asked. “Like those virtuous private eyes I can say I don’t do divorce work.”
I laughed. “I do when I can get it. It’s getting rarer.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Divorce is?”
“No, the dirty work those virtuous private eyes say ‘I don’t do’ to.”
She tapped ash off her cigarette and pushed it about in the glass ashtray. “Good thing too. Mine was as dirty as you’d hope to see. Well then, what?”
“I want to know all you can tell me about a rape case in Newcastle around 1966 or ‘67 – all the names, all the details. I don’t have time to look up the papers and my guess is it wouldn’t have made the papers anyway.”
“Why?”
“If I’m on the right track, the girl involved would have been a juvenile, very much so.”
She drew on her cigarette and let the smoke trickle out through her nostrils, an unusual thing for a woman to do. On her it looked amusing and I grinned. She didn’t notice. She scribbled “1967” and “Newcastle” on a blotter in front of her and drew lines around it. She embellished the lines, producing an ornate, curly doodle, then she got up and pulled a drawer out of her filing cabinet. Two drawers and some vivid swearing later she lifted out a thin manilla folder. A glossy photograph slipped out and I bent to pick it up.
“Hold on!” She came around the desk and retrieved the picture. “I don’t just hand this stuff out willy-nilly.” She smiled and softened her voice. “Anyway, don’t steal my thunder.”
I nodded and waited while she looked through the papers. There wasn’t much to it and it didn’t take her long. She closed the file and looked up.
“I think this is the one you want. The girl was fifteen, Newcastle, May 1967. It was a bit out of the ordinary; the girl knew the man who raped her. She knew the woman he lived with better. And the girl reported the rape to the police herself. There was a short piece, no details, in the Newcastle paper. No reporting on the trial, that’s the law.”
“Yes. You’ve got the names though?”
“Uh-huh. The girl was Naomi Rouble, the man was Joseph Berrigan. The woman he lived with was Patricia Baker.”
I nodded. “That’s it. It makes sense in a crazy way. What about the photo?”
“The girl. It was taken when she came out of the police station – suppressed of course.” She slid it across the desk. The hair was wild and dishevelled, the eyes were puffy from crying and it was eleven long years ago, but the face was unmistakably that of Noni Tarelton.