Peter Corris - Forget Me If You Can

‘Cliff, old love! What a pleasure. How’d you like my country seat?’

‘Very nice, Dick,’ I said. ‘I like your attention to security, too.’

He jiggled the gun. ‘Force of habit. I’ve got nice little digs around the side here. Come along and we’ll have a natter.’

We followed the path past the greenhouse to a long walkway, bordered by flowers and topped by a pergola draped with vines and creepers. Maxwell had a small cottage set at a short distance from the house.

‘Servants’ quarters,’ he said as he opened the door. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

I went through into a neat living room, rather dark on account of the small windows which were half-obscured by creeper, but comfortably furnished. Maxwell took two shells from the gun, closed it up and rested it against the wall. He was looking at me closely and I produced the flat bottle from my pocket as I put my. 38 away.

‘Splendid.’ He bustled away into the deeper gloom and returned with two old-fashioned crystal glasses. ‘Good gin likes its own company best.’

I put the bottle on the low table in the middle of the room and sat down. ‘Like you, Dick?’

He was already turning the cap. ‘Perforce, these days,’ he said.

‘I want to talk about the old days.’

‘Cheers.’ Maxwell drank a double slug straight off and poured again.

I took a sip. ‘Don’t get pissed on me, Dick. It won’t work.’

‘There’s not enough in this little bottle to get me pissed. And there’s nothing else on hand. I’ve been drying out.’

I didn’t say anything, didn’t feel any guilt. A drunk finds reasons to drink, that’s the way it is. I got up and went through the cottage to the kitchen. The refrigerator held milk, yoghurt, low-fat cheese, fruit juice and diet soft drink. I found a plastic iceblock tray in the freezer, flexed it and filled a bowl with ice. On the way back to the sitting room I glanced into the bedroom-single bed, spartan fittings, not Dick Maxwell’s style at all. In the front room the level in the bottle was much lower and Dick was slipping the shells back into the shotgun. I came up quietly and put the muzzle of my. 38 into his fleshy neck.

‘Don’t be silly, Dick.’

‘For me, not for you.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘They’ve sent you, haven’t they? They’ve kept their word after all this time.’

I put my pistol away and relieved him of the shotgun. I set the bowl of ice on the table and steered him back to his chair. ‘Dick,’ I said. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. As I told you, Arch Merrett left me his files. Your name came up in the last one. A divorce case. I know something about it but I want to know more. It’s idle curiosity, that’s all.’

Maxwell’s hand shook as he poured himself more gin. He added a couple of ice cubes and his tremor rattled them against the sides of the glass. ‘I wish I could believe you.’

‘You can. Tell me about you and Arch and Pike and the others.’

‘It all went wrong.’

That didn’t surprise me. There was something too flash about the scheme as outlined in Arch’s notes-too many people in the know, too many to square. ‘How?’

‘Every bloody way. From the word go. Pike was supposed to copy…’

‘The discretion statements, I know. Just tell it, Dick. If I get lost, I’ll ask you for directions.’

It took him a while and the rest of the gin, but I got the full story. Photocopy machines were slow affairs in those days, requiring careful handling. Pike’s broke down and he was late getting the documents back to the court. This put the clerk under some kind of pressure and he talked to someone who talked to someone else. When the time came for the boyos to put the screws on, they met with delays and confused arrangements that taxed their nerves and stretched the bonds of friendship.

‘They got onto us,’ Maxwell said. ‘I never found out how, exactly.’

He waited for me to speak and when I didn’t he went on, ‘Through the lawyers, possibly. It’s usually the lawyers. I got a visit from a very nasty type who did me a considerable hurt. The same happened to the others, I shouldn’t wonder. We all left Sydney for a time. That was part of the arrangement.’

‘Did you get the money?’

Maxwell sniffed. ‘Some of it was paid, I believe. I didn’t see any. We all lost our licences, of course. That was easy for them. And they all got their divorces. Shits.’

‘But you got your licence back.’

‘Ten years later, dear boy, and I had to do some very smelly things to get it.’

‘What about the others?’

Maxwell shrugged. ‘Pike went back into the racing industry in some capacity. God knows what. Probably doping horses. Ross Martin got fifteen years for importing smack. He died in prison. Bourke drowned up at Coolangatta. Fell out of boat when he was fishing. And now you tell me Arch Merrett’s dead. He was a dark horse.’

‘Meaning?’

The bottle was practically empty and Maxwell was looking edgy again. ‘Hardy, you haven’t been stringing me along, have you? I’ve lived with this for twenty-four years.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘The word was that our lives were forfeit. I was given to understand that I could be snuffed out at any time. It was a threat, of course, designed to keep one’s trap shut, and I complied, believe me. But I always thought that it might happen. That one of those bastards might decide that today was the day.’

‘They’re all dead, Dick. Except one who’s in a hospital and doesn’t remember his own name.’

‘Sons, daughters, associates…’

‘Come on. It’s water under the bridge. No-one remembers. No-one cares.’

He was still suspicious. ‘Except you.’

‘I’m the curious kind. I like to know the end of a story. Besides, I liked Arch.’

One of Maxwell’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Did you? Well, yes, I suppose people did. He was a clever devil. Looked and sounded ordinary.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Maxwell emptied the last few drops of gin into his glass. I still had half an inch in mine and he reached over and took it. ‘You’ve heard what happened to Pike, Bourke, Martin and me. Tell me, just to satisfy my curiosity, where did Merrett go when he left Sydney.’

‘The Gold Coast.’

‘Is that so? And when he died was he reduced to the status of a servant, like me, or was he in comfortable circumstances?’

‘He was well fixed.’

Maxwell drained the gin and leaned back in his chair. ‘I leave you to draw your own conclusions.’

I thought about it on the drive back to the city. All circumstantial, but it added up: Arch Merrett ratted on his fellow conspirators and got away with at least some of the money and his hide intact. Frankie Bourke went looking for him up north and didn’t come back. Arch had left me the files for my ‘education’, but I think the lesson he wanted to teach me was one I had learned a long time ago.

The ‘back beach’ on the east coast of Fraser Island is a wide strip of white sand that runs for 125 kilometres from Waddy Point in the north to Hook Point in the south. The best time to see it is after the tide has wiped out the thousands of 4WD tyre tracks that turn the beach into a kind of temporary two-lane highway. The worst time is in the middle of the day with the sun beating down and the Toyotas and Land Rovers roaring along, scaring the birds and leaving behind fumes and traces of oil and rubber.

I’d seen it at both times and at all times in between for the past four days. I’d put ‘fishing’ on the Application to Camp form I’d lodged with the Parks and Wildlife people in Hervey Bay. I had the permit and all the gear-rods and reels, lines, hooks, sinkers, knives, buckets, net in my Land Cruiser. I also had a portable generator that ran a fridge to make ice for the esky. The equipment had come with the vehicle and I hadn’t touched it, apart from the ice and the esky. My idea of catching fish is to go to Doyles and put a fork in a couple of grilled fillets. I was a fisher of men.