Peter Corris - Forget Me If You Can

Back to Rose Bay. George scrapes his MG on the brick wall of the flats and they both get out laughing. What’s a few hundred bucks to George? I drove on. I hadn’t quite finished the job but what the hell? I was more interested in the bloke in the Mini. I parked further up the street and came back quickly on foot. Lucky. George and Bea were having a smoke out in the open, looking from the street down towards the water, before going in to co-respond. The little bloke got a shot of George lighting her up. Then he looked around nervously. He was looking for me but he had no chance. He raced around the back when they went down the drive and got a picture of Bea opening the door to her flat. Nice work. It occurred to me that if I grabbed his camera I’d have the best series of sneak photos since the world began.

I scooted away back to the street and crouched down behind the Mini. When he put his key in the lock I came up behind him and gave him the old forearm-bar. It works particularly well on little men, cuts off the wind and the resistance. In New Guinea we used it on Jap sentries, before slipping the knife in.

I said, ‘Put the camera on the roof of the car. Leave the key in the lock and stay very still. If you don’t, I’ll break your bloody neck.’

He does what he’s told, very meek and careful. I slid my hand away long enough to get inside his jacket and grab his wallet. Then it was chin up again and don’t move a muscle.

‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. We’re in the same game. I’m Ted Pike.’

‘What game would that be, Ted?’

‘Private enquiries. My ticket’s in the wallet.’

I let him go and grabbed hold of his car keys and the camera. He turned around slowly and faced me-pale, pixie features, bat-wing ears, a face only a mother could love. But not distinctive. He stood about five foot six and would’ve weighed about nine stone. Slip in anywhere, you’d never notice him. I took my time opening his wallet. He wasn’t going away, not with me in charge of his car and his camera and his cash. He had a fair bit of money in his wallet and his PEA licence. Besides, he’d been waiting for me.

‘So,’ Ted said. ‘Do we talk?’

‘You talk, I’ll listen.’

He sniffed. ‘Tough guy. This is a matrimonial, right?’

I nodded.

‘I’m on Mrs Butterworth. Her husband wants a divorce. You know the drill, he needs repeated acts of infidelity.’

‘No, he doesn’t. He only needs the one. She needs repeated acts. Besides, Butterworth’s wasting his money. I’m on the bloke, Lucan-Paget. His wife’s citing Mrs B as co-respondent. The divorce isn’t going to be contested, so your bloke’s got his cause, cut and dried.’

‘That’s not the way I hear it,’ Pike said.

I gave him his things back and we shook hands. ‘I’m Archie Merrett, Ted. Hope I didn’t hurt you. I think we better have that talk.’

The pubs were closed. We went to a club Pike knew in Darlinghurst and started to compare notes. He knew a lot more about what was going on than me, and some of the names he started dropping were big ones-newspaper bigwigs like Alexander Farfrae, doctors like Molesworth and Hamilton, politicians like Redding, Bothwick, the judge. Lucan-Paget as I already knew, was a vice-president of the AJC; Mrs Butterworth’s husband, although I hadn’t made the connection until we started chatting like this, was Sir Peter, chairman of Allied Industries Proprietary Limited.

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘I like to move in the best circles. Now tell me what you meant when you said you were waiting for me.’

‘Not you, yourself, Arch,’ Pike said. ‘I mean, I didn’t know who you were. But we knew there’d be someone working for Mrs Paget-Lucan.’

‘Lucan-Paget,’ I said. ‘Who’s we?’

‘I’ve got some mates I think you’d better meet. All good blokes. I’m sure you’ve heard of some of them. Ross Martin? Frankie Bourke?’

They were PEAs. And not the most ethical ones either. I got a sniff of it then, but Pike wasn’t about to tell me any more. He suggested a meeting at the club the following night. I agreed and asked him if I could have a couple of his shots of the happy couple.

He grinned. ‘I wasn’t taking pictures, Arch. Like I said, I was waiting for you.’

There were five of us at the club the next night-me, Pike, Bourke, Martin and Dick Maxwell. Bells would have started ringing in the heads of any cops or lawyers who saw us together, but it wasn’t that kind of a club. Pike, as I discovered, was a sly type, always looking for an angle; Martin and Bourke were both ex-cops, resentful, lazy and dishonest; Maxwell was a queer and a drunk with family connections to some top people. I was an old soldier with short wind and starting to put on weight. Getting past it. An unholy bunch. We ate a bit, particularly Maxwell and Bourke, sailed into the beer and the Scotch, wrapped ourselves in cigarette smoke and got down to it.

Pike and Maxwell laid it out. This bunch of filthy rich eastern suburbs snobs had all started rooting each other’s wives. The men were all boardroom and club bar chums; the women were all younger than the men. Things got out of hand and thoughts turned towards divorce. The problems were, the disputed custody of a fair number of kids, a hell of a lot of property involved, reputations at stake in areas like the law and politics where reputations mattered, and a fair amount of bitterness. Naturally, these types tended to have the same lawyers, or at least members of the same firms. Things got sticky.

‘The chaps attempted to stitch things up neatly,’ Maxwell said. ‘Make arrangements, come to agreements, one gentleman to another. Worked well up to a point.’

I said, ‘I never heard a whisper until I got my little piece.’

Maxwell nodded. ‘Right. That’s one of the things that worked. All very hush-hush, nothing in the papers.’

Pike grinned, showing that he’d reached the good bit. ‘But the women weren’t having a bar of it. They got their own lawyers and that’s where nasty, low-life types like us come in.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Martin said, and got a laugh.

Dick Maxwell said, ‘He was, dear boy’ and got another laugh. Maxwell and Pike went on to explain how a deal had finally been put together by the nobs and the lawyers. A clutch of men and women had agreed to become the official co-respondents so that none of the people who couldn’t afford to be named would be.

‘That’s not right,’ I said. “The solicitor told me Mrs Butterworth would be cited as the correspondent in Lucan-Paget vs Lucan-Paget, and that the divorce would be uncontested.’

‘Who’s the lawyer?’ Maxwell asked.

‘Alistair McLachlan.’

‘When you go and see Mac with your snaps, Archie old love, you’ll find out things have changed a trifle. I imagine Mrs Butterworth needed a little pressure to bring her into line. That’s what all of us have been doing-getting the goods on this one and that so that the shysters can apply the screws.’

‘Right,’ Pike said. ‘The upshot’s something like this: Redding will divorce his wife but he won’t cite the judge. He’ll cite Joe Blow, who’ll get a pay-off.’

Maxwell chortled. ‘I’d like to meet him-Joe Blow.’

Pike ignored that and went on, ‘Mrs Molesworth will divorce the doctor, but she won’t cite Mrs Hamilton, the other doctor’s wife…’

Maxwell took a big swig of gin and exploded into laughter. ‘She’ll cite Henrietta Head, or May Kum, the Chinese…’

I laughed along with everyone else. Maxwell wore green suede shoes, hung around gymnasiums and drank neat gin as if it was iced water, but he was a funny bastard until he got nasty and then got too pissed to move. Pike lit a cigarette from the stub of the last, a temptation I’ve always avoided, and went on with his report.