The Big Drop Read online

  ‘I’ve been screwing my brains out,’ she said.

  ‘Is that right? It made you hard to find—I spoke to Kevin today.’

  She drank some more, then she put the glass down and assumed a mock demure pose; she half-closed and dimmed her eyes and pressed her knees together. It disconcerted me; I wondered if she was drunk, but her co-ordination seemed perfect and she appeared to be under tight control.

  ‘Tell me everything about it.’

  ‘Well, he’s in Sydney . . . and, ah . . . he hasn’t been in touch for a good reason. He thought the cops’d be watching you and . . .’

  ‘I’m a sort of decoy, is that right?’ She said it brightly but with an edge of hate.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’ She picked up her drink and took a hefty belt. ‘I always liked you, Cliff. Why don’t I just slip into your shower and then nip into your bed? You know, I can make it seem like I never did it before.’ She laughed. ‘Or only once or twice. What d’you say?’

  Any other time I’d have been tempted. I can be a sucker for fantasy and I hadn’t been to bed with a woman that month or the month before. But the ulterior motive was just a bit too obvious.

  ‘Cut it out, Cathy. This is a serious situation.’

  Her mood changed instantly. She knocked off the rest of the Scotch and stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going to have a shower anyway, to wash off the last of you bastards.’

  Water ran; she had an instinct for where bathrooms were. I put some more Black Label in my glass and waited for her to come back clean and explain to me. I seemed to do a fair bit of that—waiting to be explained to—and it sometimes made me feel like a foreigner with an imperfect grasp of the language.

  The make up was gone when she came back; her hair was damp and she’d pulled the exotic clothes on as if they were a sweater and jeans. She looked, without the gloss, tough in a different way. She made herself another drink and got a cigarette going.

  ‘I know all about it,’ she said.

  I stared at her.

  ‘I mean, I know about the job. Five Dock?’

  I nodded. ‘How?’

  She drank and her smile reminded me of Kevin’s laugh over the phone—no fun in it. ‘I knew you were good, that you’d find something, but I wasn’t sure you’d be straight with me. So I had someone not as good as you trailing you around. He reported in to me this afternoon—all the details. It wasn’t hard to work out what the job was. D’you know what they’re lifting?’

  I shook my head.

  She gave that smile again and held up both hands. ‘This, and this—booze and smokes. It’s a hot load, going to get hotter. So you don’t have to worry about honest citizens getting hurt.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Wasn’t hard once I knew it was trucks and who the Queensland money was.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s a pretty dumb game though—bloody well-guarded that shipment’ll be. You did some good snooping, Cliff. The other bloke was impressed—you didn’t spot him?’

  ‘Maybe. Just at the end. Couldn’t be sure. Cathy . . . did you try to talk Kevin out of this?’

  She shook her head and drew on her cigarette.

  ‘Why not? I did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not interested. Seemed very sure of himself.’

  She consulted her watch again.

  ‘Why d’you keep doing that?’

  She got up. ‘You won’t go to bed, least you can do is take a girl for a drive.’

  We were rolling past the Leichhardt Town Hall when she told me. ‘You won’t be able to get too close,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be staked out. I told the cops.’

  ‘God, Cathy! Why?’

  She didn’t answer; she just sucked on her cigarette and stared ahead through my dirty windscreen.

  It was near midnight and a mist was rising off the canals and grass. Wednesday night, quiet, a good night for crime. The question of getting close never arose because it all happened as we skirted the park. The highway turn-off was in full view and I saw the high shape of a semi-trailer heading down the road. Then lights pointed crazily to the sky and there were flashes and flares out of the darkness. There was a sputtering of bright orange from up the hill where I’d seen the two heavies reconnoitring. The truck seemed to meander slowly down the grade, then pick up speed abruptly. Too abruptly: it skidded, lurched and rolled. There were dark shapes moving fast from the park and pairs of headlights suddenly cut through the dark mists. I stopped and braked without knowing it; the whole thing seemed to take an age with each separate part occupying its own bit of time, but in fact it must have been all over within a couple of minutes.

  Cathy sat still and stared, and then she jumped and swore as her cigarette burned down to her fingers. She jerked open the door.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I reached across for the handle.

  ‘I want to see. I was the fizzgig, I’ve got the right!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool! You don’t know what’s going to happen. Who’s dead, who’s alive. You know what’ll happen to you if they find out you put them in.’

  She broke my grip on the handle and opened the door. ‘Who cares?’ she said.

  I got out and followed her down the road and across a broad strip of grass. We were challenged a hundred yards from the scene by a shape that rose up from behind a bush. Cathy walked unblinkingly towards the gun.

  ‘I want to see Matthiesson,’ she said.

  The cop fell in behind us and we went the rest of the way to the overturned truck and the cars each with flashing warning lights and one blue eye blinking tracers of light over still and moving figures.

  Matthiesson was a bulky man in a flak jacket and bullet proof gear. He held an automatic rifle and let its muzzle point to the ground when he saw Cathy.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘A friend,’ Cathy said dully. ‘Where’s Kevin?’

  ‘He was hit. I’m sorry. I told you I couldn’t make any promises.’

  ‘Yes, you did. I want to see him.’

  Matthiesson guided us across behind the truck. One of its wheels was still turning slowly and bits of gravel were still falling from it. The overturned truck smelt strongly of liquor, and there were rivulets running from it and soaking into the small, dark, twisted shape on the ground. Kevin was on his back; his face was blotched with blood and one eye socket was a brimming pool. He looked like the death photo of Bugsy Spiegel. Cathy looked down at him and the tears started and fell down her face and onto the body. She just stood there, slightly bent over, and looked and wept. I moved over, put my arm around her and gently eased her away; she went, on feet that moved in a slow, hobbled shuffle.

  Sirens started howling and the ambulances arrived and a team came to right the truck. There was a lot of swearing and one scream of pain as someone with bullets in him was moved. I got Cathy back to my car, gave her a cigarette and drove back to Glebe. She resisted nothing, accepted everything. Her shoes had blood on them and I made her kick them off at the door. I sat her down and wiped her face and made us both a drink. She drank it in a gulp and held out the glass for more.

  ‘You asked why?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I went there to see him this afternoon. To Enmore. Just as I got there this girl came out. Great tall thing, all in pink. Kevin always liked them tall, pink’s his favourite colour. Kevin came out with her. His hair was different and he had a beard. He shaved it off, did y’see?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘He came out with her and I watched.’

  ‘Cathy, you couldn’t be sure. She might have been with one of the other blokes. Anything . . .’

  ‘She copped his special big feel just before she got into her car. I should know. I know what it meant.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  What Would You Do?

  I mis
sed a forehand volley that came at me slow, loopy and as big as a basketball. That gave Terry the set 6-2 which was at least two games more than she usually beat me by. But then, she’s a professional and I’m a roughie; she says she only plays me to get practice against a kicking serve and a good lob.

  ‘No lobs,’ she said as we walked off the court. ‘You were lousy. What’s wrong, Cliff?’

  ‘I’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Later.’

  Later turned out to be quite a lot later. We were in my bed, slick with massage oil and sweat. Terry had come and I hadn’t but that was all right. Sometimes it was the other way around, sometimes both of us came, sometimes neither. It was all good. Terry put a pillow on my shoulder and nestled her head in there; she put her hand between my legs.

  ‘We’ve got all night,’ she said. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Finding young missing persons is either easy or impossible. Many of them want to be found, and all you have to do is locate a friend and squeeze a little. Other names and addresses pop out like pips and the kid turns out to be living on junk food three blocks from home. The hard ones stay hard: the boy or girl goes a long way off and goes for ever. Mothers weep.

  The Portia Stevenson case looked like a hard one. Jessie Stevenson of Cammeray was a woman in her late thirties who worked hard at looking ten years younger and did pretty well at it. She came into my office wearing a tailored white suit, high heels and a lot of subtle make up. She slipped into the clients’ chair and put her nice legs nicely on display.

  ‘I hope it’s not painful to you to mention this,’ she said, ‘but your ex-wife recommended you to me when she heard about our problem. We go sailing together, you see.’

  ‘It’s not painful. How is Cyn?’

  ‘Oh, she’s wonderful. She’s married to Simon Theodore, he’s . . .’

  ‘In advertising. Yes, I know. If she’s sailing she must have got over her sea sickness. That’s wonderful—I’m glad. Tell me about the problem, Mrs Stevenson.’

  ‘Jessie, please. After all Cynthia’s told me, I feel I know you.’

  I thought Cyn’s version of our marriage would be a tale of bottles and battles, signifying nothing, but perhaps I was wrong.

  ‘Jessie,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got a seventeen-year-old daughter. Her name is Portia. I haven’t seen her for three months. She hasn’t been at school and none of her friends know where she is. There’s been nothing—not a card or a phone call. Nothing. The police have done all the things they do. Nothing.’

  ‘Any trouble with her? I mean before she went?’

  ‘Oh, the usual—sulks, squabbles about money and going out. Nothing to speak of. She was a normal teenager. I’ve exhausted myself thinking about what might have made her go. I can’t come up with anything. I’ve been distraught. I’m on medication now.’

  There seemed to be an unnatural air to her—a combination of a surface over-alertness and a background dullness. She spoke flatly, without emotion, as if that part of her response had been blocked off or re-routed. I judged her to be very vain and very troubled—not a good combination.

  ‘I’ll need quite a few things, Jessie. An introduction to someone at her school, a picture of course, a handwriting specimen, and I’ll have to have a pretty thorough session with you and her father to go over her life. Runaway kids usually run back to something—some memory, something like that.’

  ‘Her father’s dead. He was killed in an accident when Portia was little. I re-married a few years later—Jeff’s been like a father to her for . . . nearly ten years.’

  ‘Okay. When can I come out to see you both? Oh, any other kids?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m going sailing this afternoon. I think Jeff’s home tonight. You could come tonight.’

  She gave me the address in Cammeray and we fixed on 8.30 for my visit. She got up and moved to the door; she was tall and she moved well but with that same distracted style, as if not all of her was really there. She transferred the leather drawstring bag she carried to her right hand in order to use the left to open the door. Left-handed, I thought, big advantage for tennis. I wondered if the kid was left-handed too; I was already working on the case—but not quite yet.

  ‘Can I get a cheque from you tonight?’ I asked.

  She hesitated and her composed mask dropped momentarily; behind it there was confusion and’ distress to spare.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Hardy, Yes, yes, of course. Jeff will give you a cheque. Whatever you ask, anything . . .’

  ‘Cliff,’ I said. ‘There’s a standard rate. I’ll see you tonight.’

  She went out and I made a few notes and then picked up the phone. Good manners and good sense required me to contact the missing persons department in the police force. I’ve never encountered a competitive feeling from the cops in these matters; they have too many cases on their files to care about a private enquiry into one of them. Their manpower is stretched thin and a case they can cross off the books is just so many more hours they can put in elsewhere. The case officer on the Stevenson matter was Detective Constable Burns, and she was as nice as pie.

  ‘Not a whisper,’ she told me. ‘The girl was doing quite well at school.’ She named a north shore private school better known for placing its students in the society pages than the professions. ‘Reasonable student, they said. We tracked down five or six friends, nothing. Just didn’t turn up at school one day.’

  ‘Boyfriends?’

  ‘Not really. She went out a couple of times with a kid from Shore. Bit of a wimp. Didn’t know a thing. Wouldn’t have been one of the bunch with an income under a hundred thousand.’

  I grunted. ‘You checked the usual?’

  ‘All negative: horses, drugs, booze, religion—all negative.’

  ‘What did she take?’

  ‘Clothes, records, video cassettes.’

  ‘Diary?’

  There was a silence at the other end, then she spoke slowly. ‘No mention of any diary, no.’

  ‘What did you make of the parents?’

  ‘Rock solid. The stepfather’s a partner in an ad agency, doing well. The mother . . .’

  ‘Fills in her time.’

  ‘That’s right. Sailing, aerobic dancing, bit of gardening, reads a lot. Looks after herself.’

  ‘Thanks. Did she have a bank account, Portia I mean. Christ, what a name!’

  Detective Constable Burns laughed. ‘Yeah, she hated the name. Called herself Ann. She had a passbook savings account with a couple of hundred bucks in it—didn’t even take the book. It’s a tough one, and you know the toughest part?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘She made it in one jump. Usually they have a dry run or two and you can get a line on what’s bugging them and what they’re likely to do. Not Portia. She wouldn’t have spent ten nights away from home in the last ten years, the way they tell it.’

  ‘Over-protected?’

  ‘Could be.’

  I thanked her and put the phone down. What she’d told me jelled pretty well with what I knew from the missing persons cases I’d handled over the past fourteen years. Not many of them had been juveniles, but the principles were the same. A high proportion of the runaways just wanted to get attention—the run was a call for help; some had reached a temporary impasse in their lives and used the run to break the log-jam and get some movement going from which they could draw comfort or a course of action. A few go for good; they go a long way off, burrow and pull the hole in over them. A few meet with foul play and it worried me that no one had made any mention of that so far.

  I read over a selection of cases including the handful of juveniles, made some notes and put through some calls to get a picture of the Stevensons. Jeff Stevenson was a partner in Armstrong & Stevenson, which was a biggish advertising agency with an office in North Sydney. His credit rating was tops, and his firm had good accounts with brewers and distillers and other pillars of our social life like a J
apanese car manufacturer and a Taiwan-based toy importer.

  It was mid-winter, which meant that Sydney turned on fine, bright days, ideal for tennis-playing in the morning and afternoon, but cold and dark by 5 p.m. In the mid-afternoon I drove out to Castlecrag to take a look at the school. The suburb’s roads have military names like The Ramparts and The Bastion and the area has a defensive, fortressed look. The wealth and property behind the high walls and beyond the deep, verdant gardens would be worth defending.

  The school looked like a stately home, somewhat on the large side. It boasted a high wall and massive gate house; the main building was a rambling, pseudo-Georgian affair with enough ivy on it to camouflage Ayers Rock. Playing fields stretched away and flagstoned paths wound between tennis courts, garden beds and an artificial pond.

  I took this in from my car which I stopped on the other side of the road from the huge iron gates, and from a stroll along the west perimeter. As I watched, the place came to life. Schoolgirls suddenly spilled out of the main building from a couple of doors and started straggling along the paths—some towards the main gate and others off to two new buildings in the far distance which I took to be dormitories. I wondered if things had changed in the dorm since Anne Of Green Gables, a book of my sister’s which I’d read with guilt and longing.

  Even a brief loiter outside a girls’ school is difficult to explain, so I moved the car a hundred yards to where I could observe a few of the novitiate socialites heading for the bus stop. They ranged in age from about twelve to seventeen; they wore a uniform—dark-blue tunic with white trimming and a hat—but most had managed to contrive some individuality through the cut of the clothes and the accessories. Some were trying for a Boy George look, others opted for Princess Diana. They fell over each other, screamed, punched and lounged at the bus stop as if their parents weren’t paying two thousand bucks a term.

  I drove a half-circuit of the school grounds and spotted the stables which had been mentioned in a booklet called Selecting Schools in NSW which I’d picked up in a newsagent. The establishment boasted a gymnasium, swimming pool, computer room, archery range, putting green, film and video studios and a theatrette. Social contacts with the leaders of tomorrow at the brother school were encouraged: unless she was on heroin or heavily into S&M, it didn’t sound like such a bad place for a seventeen-year-old girl to be.