Wet Graves (10 page)

“Hardy,” she said, reading the licence from a distance of a couple of feet. “Knew a woman named Hardy once. Silly bitch.”

“Mrs …?”

“Tracey, Betty Tracey. Have you got five dollars?”

“I already gave you five dollars. They're in your pocket.”

I was suddenly aware of sounds around and above me. A door had opened in the next house, and a couple of the louvre windows had been operated. I guessed what was going on—old Betty was putting on her show for an always-appreciative audience. It was called ‘Make the stranger look like an idiot' and it ran for as many acts as he was dopey enough to allow. I didn't feel like playing. I took out a twenty-dollar note and waved it in front of Betty's forty-five-degree face. Suddenly she was the bit player and I was the lead. I snapped the note. “If you want this, invite me in.”

She stepped back and let the door open wide enough to let me as well as my money pass through it. But that was as much as she was willing to concede. She let the door sit ajar and moved only a few feet down the hallway. There was almost no light; I had an impression of narrow, steep stairs at the end of the passage and one room off to the right.

“Are you going to give me the money or rape me? Did you see that Lady whatshername got raped? She was older than me.”

She was referring to a wealthy titled north shore woman whose life had ended the way no one's should—raped, robbed, bashed to death. The recollection made me disinclined to any kind of coercion. Risking the chance that she'd suddenly stand up straight and waltz away up the stairs, I handed her the twenty. “I want to talk to Stan Livermore. I was given this as his address. Does he live here?”

“Old Stan?”

Oh, Christ, not again
, I thought. “Yes, old Stan. Is he here?”

“No.”

“Does he live here?”

She folded the note three times and put it in the pocket along with the coins. “Yes.”

“Where is he now?”

She sucked in a deep breath and sniffed. Slowly, she swivelled her head around in a ninety degree turn so that instead of looking up with her head cocked towards her right shoulder, it was cocked towards her left. The manoeuvre seemed to take a full minute. When she was ready she sniffed again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “What's the time?”

Here we go
, I thought. I looked at my watch. “Nearly half-past four.”

“You've got about three-quarters of an hour to catch him, then.”

“What d'you mean?”

“I know where he'll be till quarter past five, after that it's anybody's guess. Might come back here tonight, might not.”

“Right Understood. Where will he be until five-fifteen?”

She paused and I waited for more sniffs, more citations of rape cases or more requests for money. Maybe she considered all three but she settled for a sniff. “He'll be in the Botanic Gardens, watching the bloody sun go down behind the bloody bridge. Does it every day it isn't pissing down rain. Silly old bugger.”

“So he's still the secretary of this Veterans of the Bridge thing?”

“Course he is. All he thinks about. Him and a coupla others just as mad.”

“Where in the gardens?”

She shrugged, which in her case was more of a horizontal movement than a vertical one. “Anywhere he can get a good view. Could be Mrs Macquarie's Chair, could be closer to the Opera House. Anywhere. Took me to see it once. Silly old bugger. Sun goin' down behind the bloody bridge. So what?”

I was moving towards the door, calculating time and distance. “How will I recognise him?”

“Old Stan? Easy, only one of his kind in captivity. White beard down to here.” She bunched her cardigan together at the waist. The coins fell out on the floor. Well, she didn't have far to go to pick them up. I hit the footpath running.

Getting a cab in the Rocks at half-past four in the afternoon is no easy matter, especially when a cold wind has started to blow. That's how it was as I ran along Pump Street towards the nearest corner. No luck; a bus and some private cars threw muddy water from the recently passed street sweeper over my feet. I ran in the direction of the nearest set of lights and moved from one corner of the intersection to the other, trying to second-guess the traffic stream. It took ten minutes, but I finally grabbed a Legion cab which was stopped at the lights. I overcame the driver's reluctance with another twenty-dollar note—Louise Madden was spending some serious money now.

As well as muggers and drunk vomiters, taxi drivers dislike passengers who don't know where they're going and passengers who do know and tell them street by street how to get there. I wanted the Botanic Gardens, and the only instruction I could give was, “The nearest gate”.

He dropped me opposite the old State Library building, and I battled the wind past the fountain, which wasn't spurting, and through the gate. A newish sign inside told me that this was the Morshead Fountain gate and that the gardens this month were closed to the public at 5 p.m. I took the first path that seemed to promise a view of the bridge, almost fell on the first long set of steps and dashed past another fountain and several statues of Greek gods doing godlike things.

The sky was clear and rapidly turning pink and orange in the west as the sun sank—a good bridge-viewing sky. I had no idea of where the best vantage points would be, and the bridge itself kept disappearing behind trees as I hurried along the paths. A few people straggling up towards the south gate looked at me oddly as I bustled along. The light was fading fast, and the wind's cutting edge seemed to get keener by the minute. I kept heading towards the higher ground, and some instinct or memory told me that keeping the duck pond and kiosk on my right was the proper thing to do.

An avenue of thick, high-reaching palms blocked my view of everything and brought visibility down to murky. Ever since an eye accident a few years ago I've had trouble adapting quickly to changes in light level, and the sudden brightness of direct sunrays that hit the gardens as I emerged from the avenue almost blinded me. I stopped, shaded my eyes and scanned the lawns and flower beds. For a moment I thought that a rotunda up ahead might provide a good view but then I realised that a stand of trees was in the way. I moved to the left and got a clear view through a gap in the trees. A path a little further along led towards a rise in the land and a garden bench. From the bench there would be a clear view through the trees west to the bridge. There was no one on the bench, but a shape lay on the ground beside it. I hurdled a plot of native something-or-others and ran across the grass to the bench.

He was lying on his back, very still, a thin, frail figure with a big overcoat spread out around him. The long white beard hung down below the V-neck of a torn and darned red sweater. The beard was red too, in the places where blood from the gash on his forehead had splashed onto it. His old, pale blue eyes were open and so was his mouth; a bottom denture had fallen out and the lower part of his face had a puckered, eroded look. I bent down and felt his thin wrist and put my watch face near his nose and mouth, but there was no pulse and no breath. People say things like “the body was still warm”; that doesn't make much sense on a cold night. His hands and face were as cold as mine. I looked up and saw the bridge etched clearly against the sunset. It was the first time I'd ever seen it but Stan Livermore would never see it again.

I had no doubt that the dead man was Livermore. In the fading light I could see a lot of blood on the grass, but no signs of a struggle or a weapon. There was more blood and a few hairs on the edge of the bench; a cloth cap lay on the grass a few feet from the body. A pair of spectacles was half-covered by the spread skirt of the overcoat. A fall, then? An old, near-sighted man lost his footing, fell and struck his head? Happens every day. I looked up as a uniformed man came running along the path in the direction opposite from the way I'd come. He was heavy, red-faced and breathless when he reached the spot.

“Oh, gawd,” he said, “it's old Stan.”

I straightened up. “You know him?”

“Yeah.” He pulled down the waistband of his uniform jacket, which had ridden up as he ran. The jacket had flashes bearing the word ‘Ranger' sewn onto the sleeves and the breast pocket. “I know him. Well, we just call him old Stan. Don't know his full name. Comes in every night to watch the sun going down behind the bridge. Done it for years. Poor old bugger must've taken a tumble.”

He peered at the bench and saw the blood. Then he unhooked a walkie-talkie from his belt and put in a call for an ambulance.

“He's dead,” I said.

“Just following procedure, sir. Could I have your name, please?”

It was the walkie-talkie that did for me. If he'd had to go off somewhere to sound the alert I might have faded into the distance, but what could I do with him standing there, all ‘Ranger' flashes, notebook and self-importance? I gave him my name and he lit a cigarette and we waited in the gathering dark. I looked west and the bridge changed from a dark, abstract outline to a big, simple piece of machinery as the lights came on.

9

There was just enough room on the path for the ambulance. The paramedics agreed with me and the ranger that the poor old bugger was dead. Then the cops arrived—plenty of space for them. They parked so that their headlights played over the scene, and after a fairly brief look around and collections of items such as the glasses and cap, they told the paramedics to take the corpse away. It all seemed a bit perfunctory to me, but it turned out that the senior constable knew old Stan too, and he was satisfied with the “fell and hit head” explanation.

“And what were you doing in the gardens, Mr Hardy?” he asked.

“Just taking a walk,” I said.

“Funny time of day for a walk.”

“I had things to think about, constable.”

Satisfied was the senior constable's middle name. He nodded, copied down the name and address from my driver's licence and told me that I should accompany them to the Woolloomooloo police station to sign my statement.

“I haven't made a statement.”

The senior looked at his colleague, who read from his notebook, using his torch to read his notes. “I can take shorthand, Mr Hardy. Your name is Cliff Hardy, I have your address as it appears on your driver's licence. You were taking a walk in the Botanic Gardens at approximately 4.45 pm, and you discovered the body of a man identified as Stan Livermore.”

“That's right. I'm impressed.”

“Just accompany us to the station, sir,” the senior said. He turned to the ranger. “And you too, sir, if you don't mind.”

The ranger seemed to enjoy the ceremony; he spoke briefly into his walkie-talkie, and then we climbed into the back of the police car and drove slowly along the paths to the Victoria Lodge gate.

“I'm going to be late home,” the ranger said.

I was playing the role of a solid, minding-my-own-business citizen. “Me, too,” I said.

The constable was doing the driving, the senior was doing the investigating. “Did Stan have a family, d'you bow?” he asked.

If it was a trap for me it was too obvious. I said nothing and let the long, pale grey shape of a warship docked opposite the Boy Charlton pool take my attention.

“Doubt it,” the ranger said. “How long's this going to take?”

The senior shifted in his seat to let the pistol on his hip settle more comfortably. “Step on it, Charlie,” he said. “The gentlemen want to get home for their tea.”

The 'Loo police station is new and reasonably high-tech, but rather undermanned. I noticed that the graffiti, a feature of the area, were starting to creep along nearby walls in its direction. They wouldn't have the manpower to spare to scrub it off, so that station will probably took pretty much like the rest of the neighbourhood soon. The shorthand expert typed up the ranger's statement and he signed it and left. The constable then sat down at a computer terminal and put the microchips through their paces. I expected him to turn his professional attention to me after that, but the sergeant distracted him with some questions about something else. Then he couldn't find the right form; then he had to answer the phone a few times.

I sat in a too-bright room which had too few things to look at. I soon got bored by the community policing notices. There weren't any of the ‘Wanted' posters—the ones with pictures of neanderthal-faced men—that used to decorate police stations. The coffee from the automatic machine tasted like cocoa. I hate cocoa. I was impatient and restless, but I didn't want to occasion any suspicion.
Wouldn't an ordinary citizen be impatient and restless?
I thought.
Yes. Would he demand to see his lawyer or try to sneak out when the cop wasn't looking? No.
I sat and waited until the form was found and put in the typewriter and the sergeant went away and the phone stopped ringing. The magic fingers went to work again and I was typed up, signed and countersigned before you could say police commissioner. I said that I was a real estate agent—but that was almost the only lie I told.

It was after eight o'clock when I left the police station, and as soon as I got out in the wind I realised how cold and hungry I was. Also dry. It had been a good day for non-alcoholic resolutions, if not for much else. I had a light beer and a steak with salad and a half carafe of wine in a cafe in William Street.

The wine relaxed me and helped me to shift my attention from the disappeared and the dead to the living. Myself. I walked up to St Peter's Lane and took a careful look around to see if anyone was lying in wait for me. I was in the mood. But not tonight, not yet at least I checked my notebook for the address Ray Guthrie had given me and located it in the
Gregory's
. The Falcon had been sitting all day and was slow to start in the cold air. I let the motor run and turned on the heater. Darling Point. Maybe I should have gone home to change and shave. But if the good people of Darling Point could put up with Rhino Jackson, who'd been known to spit on the pavement and worse, I couldn't see how they could object to me.