Peter Corris - Forget Me If You Can

Bourke said, ‘Not in hospital. Somewhere else.’

Maxwell said, ‘I’m hurt. But point taken.’

Pike sat very still. ‘Frankie knows the court from his police days. He can look things over and make the contact with the clerk, name of Patterson.’

Bourke nodded.

‘My office is in the Rocks. Hop skip and a jump from the court. I’ve hired a photocopying machine.’

‘A what?’ Martin said.

‘You’ll see,’ Pike said. ‘We’ll copy the documents and get them back quick smart. Then Dick will make contact with the marks through his lawyer mate.’

‘Dick and me,’ I said.

Everyone nodded. If we’d been more friendly we’d have clinked glasses. But we weren’t friends-just partners in crime, which is an altogether more serious thing.

And that’s where the tape ended. There were some scribbled notes on the conversation pinned to the bill from Azim’s in Elizabeth Street-kebabs, kefta, felafel, hommos, salad and bread, Turkish delight, $22.90-not bad for five.

I couldn’t leave it there. I had to know. I phoned Arch’s solicitor with some politely framed enquiries about his late client’s circumstances. Not polite enough. The solicitor must have had a deep distrust for our profession. He probably feared I would challenge the will on the basis of something I’d found in the files. I did my best to reassure him, but all I got out of him in the end was that Arch had owned his substantial waterview apartment outright and had some quality investments. His estate had gone to a relative. The solicitor wouldn’t say who.

I could almost hear Arch’s harsh, cracked voice gently mocking me. ‘You’re an investigator aren’t you, boyo? Investigate!’

‘Right, Arch,’ I said. I wrote down all the names and tried to assemble information about them. I knew that Sir Alexander Farfrae, the press baron, and Colin Redding, the politico, were both dead. The Who was Who told me that George Lucan-Paget was dead too. I’d never heard of the doctors, but neither was listed in the current register-presumably gone to join ordinary mortals. A couple of phone calls got me the unhelpful intelligence that Sir Arthur Bothwick, the judge, was alive, but in a nursing home suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s.

The women were all said to have been younger, therefore probably still around, but a quick check on a couple of them showed several subsequent marriages and name changes. Too complicated, and it was unlikely that they would talk to me, anyway. That left the lawyer, Terry Farmer, and the private dicks. I rang Richard Adcock who runs a magazine called Seneca, which is dedicated to keeping law-makers and lawyers in line.

‘Hello, Cliff Hardy, private eye,’ Richard said. ‘About as popular as…’

‘Don’t, Richard. Please don’t. Terry Farmer. What d’you know?’

‘Interesting. What do you know?’

‘Nothing. I’m looking into something that happened a quarter of a century ago. So far, everyone’s dead.’

‘Send out for a ouija board, Cliff,’ Richard said. ‘Farmer’s dead, too. Of AIDS last year. One of the oldest victims.’

‘Shit. Alistair McLachlan?’

‘Barrister, solicitor or what?’

‘Solicitor.’

‘Hang on.’

I was at home, nursing the ankle. I judged I had time. I limped to the kitchen and tapped the cask of white. When I returned Richard was back on the line-waiting, very keen.

‘Cliff,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to go tit for tat on this.’

‘It’s ancient history,’ I said.

‘I like a good story.’

‘I’ll buy you lunch and tell you all, when I’ve got to the bottom of it.’

‘What if I want to print?’

I thought about it-about Arch and the big names involved. Some of that old power might still be lurking about and Arch had deemed me his ‘friend and confidant’. ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I can’t promise.’

Richard sighed. He’s a great radio and TV performer and knows how to sigh, even into a telephone. ‘I’m too intrigued to hold back. I accept your risible terms. Alistair McLachlan had a very big eastern suburbs practice. He committed suicide the hard way twenty-four years ago. The cops said he must have nearly ruptured his soft palate with the gun muzzle. He left a lot of very unhappy people behind him. Cliff?’

‘I’ll call you,’ I said.

There were no current listings for Pike, Bourke or Martin as private enquiry agents. That didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t still active-working for big security firms or trading under names like Ace Detective Agency. But I had never heard of them and, from the sound of Arch’s notes, they were contemporaries of his-highly strung men with chequered pasts and some very bad habits. The odds against them still being around were long. But Dick Maxwell was still around and still working, after a fashion. What’s more, I knew where he was. The problem was whether to take him a packet of Earl Grey tea or a bottle of Beefeater gin.

I bought both and drove up to Springwood in the Blue Mountains, where Maxwell had got himself a job as ‘security manager’ of an estate owned by Peter Blain, a wealthy man who had made a lot of enemies. Blain was tough, but getting along in years. He was also a homosexual which was probably how Dick Maxwell got the job. When sober, Dick Maxwell could do a decent job, but he hadn’t been sober very much in the last ten years. One month you’d hear that he’d taken the cure, was going to AA and drinking nothing but tea with lemon; the next you’d see him in the Journalists’ Club, spinning yams, lying his head off, totally pissed.

I drove past the Lindsay house, where the tourists’ cars were parked higgledy-piggledy all along the track, down deeper into the valley. The Blain estate was vast-a high drystone wall fronted the unmade road and the twenty or so hectares of cleared land were surrounded by dense bush. I pulled up outside the elaborate iron gates, a small one for people on foot and a big one for motor traffic, both set in a stone arch, remote-controlled and electrified to the hilt. Birds circled overhead, then settled back into the trees. Some of them whistled and called and were answered from, deeper in the forest. I sucked in deep breaths of the cool, clean April air. Every time I go to the Blue Mountains I think the same thing: What the hell am I doing, living in that city shithole when this is all here and available? Then I go back to the shithole and it throws a lot of very confusing answers at me.

The booth behind the small gate was empty but there was a squawk box to talk into.

I pressed the button. ‘Cliff Hardy to see Mr Maxwell.’

Maxwell’s fruity tones came through: ‘Clifford. How nice. What would it be about, this unexpected call?’

‘Arch Merrett,’ I said.

The pause at the other end spoke volumes. ‘Ah, well, I don’t quite know…’

Peter Corris

CH20 — Forget Me If You Can

‘He’s dead, Dick. He left me some files and you know what an inquisitive type I am.’

‘Best to let old Archie rest in peace, don’t you think?’

‘No, I don’t. Let me in, Dick, or I’ll make a hell of a lot of trouble. I can see a greenhouse through the gate here. How about I put a few thirty-eight slugs into it for openers?’

‘You, ah… wouldn’t have a drink on you by any chance, would you?’

‘Beefeaters,’ I said. ‘Half bottle.’

The buzzer sounded and I pushed open the smaller of the two gates. I tramped up a gravel path that ran beside the bricked driveway. The house was a huge, rambling two-storey affair, all windows, stone and wood, half-covered in creeper. I was still a hundred metres from it when I saw Maxwell coming down the path. He was wearing country squire gear-tweed jacket, drill trousers, boots-and carrying a shotgun. I stopped and took out my pistol. Maxwell stopped, too. We were both out of effective range, but I fancied my chances better than his. As a target, he was approximately twice as wide. Maxwell stared at me for a few long seconds, then he broke open the gun and came forward with it hanging limply over his arm.