Peter Corris - The Undertow

'I saw Mrs Heysen in the hospital yesterday,' I said. 'She assured me she hadn't given your name to anyone but the police and me, and won't in the future. She respects your wish to remain anonymous. I'm trying to find out why she was shot at and-'

Lowenstein waved his hand to silence me. He'd lifted the spectacles suspended around his neck up to operational to study the documents. Apparently satisfied, he nodded, dropped the glasses back to their original position, and unlatched the screen door. 'Papers and notes can be forged,' he said, 'but I've seen you arrive at Mrs Heysen's house before, so I'm inclined to trust you. Please come in. How is the poor woman?'

I went into a dim hallway with a carpet runner. The walls were lined with paintings or framed photographs, I couldn't tell which. Lowenstein carefully relatched the screen door and let the other door swing closed. He moved well, considering his age, which I'd have put at closer to eighty than seventy. He glided past me, heading for some light at the end of the passage.

'She's recovering,' I said. 'Very grateful to you.'

'It was nothing, but I certainly don't want those television reporters who can't pronounce words correctly or speak a grammatical sentence swarming around.'

I'd recently heard an ABC newsreader pronounce the French name Georges as 'Jorgez', so I knew what he meant.

'That won't happen,' I said.

'Good.'

He opened a door leading to a kitchen stocked with scrubbed pine furniture and fittings and with light flooding in through large windows.

'I was having coffee. Would you like some? I must say you look a bit the worse for wear. Interesting how we seem unable to talk without drinking something. Have you noticed that?'

'I have. Yes, thank you.'

He poured the coffee and we sat at the table with the milk and sugar within reach. I took both; my system would be jumping with this much caffeine in me and I needed to dilute it and give the metabolism something to work on.

'Now, what do you want to ask?'

'I know the police will have put this to you already, but did you get a good look at the man who shot Mrs Heysen?'

'No.'

'Did you get an impression of size?'

'Good question. Put that way, yes. It was a biggish car and I could see head and shoulders well up, so I'd say-a big person, larger than average.'

'What kind of car was it?'

He smiled. 'There you have me. I can't identify cars at all, apart from Volvos and VW Beetles. Sorry. This was a large red sedan.'

'That helps,' I said. 'Would you mind telling me how long you've lived here, Mr Lowenstein?'

'Let me see. I bought it when I got my chair. That must be nearly forty years ago. I've been retired for fifteen years.'

'I'm sorry, I should be calling you Professor. What was your field?'

'Psychology. I had a chair at Sydney University.'

'So you knew Dr Heysen and everything that happened back then?'

'Yes and no. Are you having difficulty drinking with that damaged lip?'

'A little, but I'll manage. It's good coffee. What d'you mean by yes and no?'

'I took a sabbatical just before the matter broke, and then I took leave and worked in America for three years. I heard about it when I came back, but it had all more or less blown over by then. The Heysen house was rented. Mrs Heysen didn't return for some years after that.'

'What were your impressions of Heysen?'

'A detestable man-arrogant, conceited and an anti-Semite.'

'What makes you say that?'

'One can tell, Mr Hardy. One can tell.'

'So you can tell that I'm not?'

'Yes.'

'Good. What about the boy, William?'

'I'm tempted to trot out the clinical cliches-only child, precocious, a mother's boy without a valid male role model. All true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. He was nothing like his father in manner, nothing at all. He'd sky a ball over the fence now and then and come and ask for it. Very polite.'

'You aren't next door and they're wide blocks.'

'He told me he had his mother throw tennis balls to him in their yard for him to practise his defensive strokes. It's hard to imagine such an elegant creature doing that, but I suppose she did. Sometimes he caught one on the rise in the meat of the bat. I played grade cricket myself when I was young. I knew what he meant.'

I remembered playing backyard cricket in Maroubra with my mates. Over the fence was out for six. I don't think any of us ever put it over more than one fence, let alone two. But then, we were more interested in surfing.

'A big hit,' I said.

'He was an athletic young man. Mother-fixated, I should say, with all that that implies.'

'You mean that he loved and hated her at the same time?'

'Exactly. My wife thought very highly of him. She was Italian and she said he spoke the language fluently and well. The only child we had died as an infant and she liked to take young people under her wing. She thought William had an exceptional linguistic gift.'

It was one of those moments when you respect a person's emotional space and I was glad I had the coffee cup to fiddle with. The pause was brief.

'She's been dead for ten years,' he said. 'I should sell this place. I've had offers enough, God knows, but I can't seem to get around to it. Something about the sums they mention and the way they talk puts me off. And I must confess I take an interest in the rehabilitation of the river, slow as it is. It's never been clean in my time, but I believe it once was, with sandy banks. People swam and fished in it, I'm told.'

'Hard to believe,' I said.

'Yes. Would you mind telling me what you're actually doing for Mrs Heysen?'

'Several things.'

'Now you're being secretive. I thought frankness was your style.'

'You're right, Professor. As I said, I'm concerned about the attempt on Mrs Heysen's life and I don't know its source.' I touched my scabby lip. 'The shooting was a professional job gone wrong, and I've had a narrow miss as well. Apart from that, I'm trying to locate William Heysen. His mother hasn't had any contact with him for some months and there's a strong possibility he's in serious trouble.'

'I'm sorry to hear that. Are you saying he's… missing?'

'Effectively, yes. I've contacted people he lived with and worked with and none of them have-'

'Seen him, you're about to say. But I have. He was here, at the house. Just a few days ago.'

I almost dropped the coffee cup. 'You saw him? When was this?'

Professor of Psychology or not, he looked as pleased by my reaction to his statement as anyone would have been. 'Happily, I'm not afflicted by short-term memory loss like so many people my age. This was three days ago.'

'What happened?'

'I was sitting on the front verandah, reading. It catches the afternoon sun. I saw a car pull up outside the Heysen house. Cars, again. All I can say is that it wasn't the car William used to drive when he lived here. This was a big car, a four-wheel drive model-' he waved his hands to illustrate the style-'and black. As I say, not his old car, but definitely him.'

'Did you speak to him?'

'No, no. I'm sure he didn't even see me. I suppose I assumed he'd been to see his mother and was fetching something from the house for her. I didn't know anything about him being missing. He went in.'

'How long did he stay?'

'I'm afraid I don't know. I went inside to make some notes on what I'd been reading. I still do some research and writing, you see. I didn't go to the front again at all that day. The car had gone by the next day but he could have been there five minutes or five hours.'

'How did he look? Confident? Furtive?'

'Really, Mr Hardy, you ask the most extraordinary questions. I only glimpsed the boy for a few seconds.'