Peter Corris - The Washington Club

When I was sure she was under I got up and left the room, leaving on a bedside lamp turned towards the wall so that it created a pale pool of light. I prowled and snooped, taking care not to wake her. Few people welcome being probed the way a professional like me can do it. From long experience, I know the subterfuges, the strategies, hiding places, the ways the secrets are coded. Within an hour, I knew more about Claudia Fleischman, I suspected, than any other person living or dead had ever known about her apart from herself. What I found confirmed what I had from the sources and what I’d learned from her. She’d been a brilliant student and had got first-class honours for her combined degree. The sky seemed to be the limit for her as an academic or a legal practitioner. Then, with her parents’ death, the bottom fell out. She had several photographic albums and I was able to observe Claus and Julia Rosen over time, almost as if I had known them. Both were strikingly handsome, with regular features and alert, intelligent expressions. He had a full head of dark curly hair well into middle age and his wife’s looks seemed to improve with the years. It was hard to tell which of the two Claudia most favoured.

She kept no diary as such, but had fallen years ago into making diary-type entries in an appointment book and keeping the books. I skimmed through a few and noted the names of three or four men (presumably the found-wanting lovers), but very few people who appeared as friends or even close acquaintances. As she’d said, she was very rarely unwell and when she was a couple of times over a long stretch, it clearly annoyed her. After her parents were killed the entries stopped.

She wasn’t short of money but there was none to spare. The sale of her parents’ house had yielded only thirteen thousand dollars after the mortgage had been paid out and, although she’d saved money when she was working, the savings had been eaten into by several trips-to Vanuatu and New Caledonia-and by payments to a psychologist. She hadn’t told me about that. I browsed through her credit card statements and cheque book stubs. The statements are hard to interpret because a place that deals in fantasy underwear and marital aids can trade as ‘Products Incorporated’, but my snap judgment was that she hadn’t spent much money on having fun. The Pacific Islands trips seemed to have incurred expenses for sightseeing tours. I found only one example of concealment. The bank had sent her a new cheque book before she’d used all the forms in the previous book. Ten days before her husband died, Claudia had written a cash cheque for five thousand dollars in this new book and hidden the book inside a pair of knee-high boots. You don’t have to be a fetishist to take an interest in knee-high boots-funnel-web spiders and private enquiry agents are very aware of their potential.

I finished my search, checked on Claudia- still sleeping-and went into the living room. It was after midnight but I phoned Cy Sackville at home. The answering machine picked up but I cut the call without leaving a message and did it again and again until Cy came on the line.

‘Jesus. What is it?’

‘Who, mate. This is Hardy.’

‘Cliff, it’s very, very late. I’m due in court tomorrow morning.’

‘We never sleep. I have to tell you things. This has all got very strange. Claudia’s telling me a different story from what she’s said up till now, and I believe her.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At her place.’

‘Cliff, you haven’t?’

‘Not important. The thing is, she…’

Have to hand it to Sackville, he was lightning fast in recovery. I could see him taking a sip from the water he kept by the bed, looking at his Rolex, blinking, tapping into his stockpile of energy. ‘You shouldn’t talk on the phone. The police might be bugging her.’

‘Or someone else.’

‘Ah. Right. I’m not far away. I’ll come over.’

‘No, not necessary. I just wanted to let you know that we’ve got problems and possibilities.’

‘Just what I love at one o’clock in the bloody morning. I’m awake now. I’m on my way.’

Cy lived in Neutral Bay, only a five-minute run at that time of night if you knew the directional lurks. I poured some coffee, still hot in the machine, and added a judicious shot of the Scotch. The speaker and camera for the security gate were activated by switches on the wall near the door. I wandered over there and began pushing buttons. The area in front of the gate came into slightly grainy, black and white view. Idly, I wondered what Sackville would be wearing for such an impromptu call. I bet on a tracksuit, sneakers.

It took closer to ten minutes before he arrived and I was all wrong on the dress code. Cy wore rumpled jeans, a white business shirt and espadrilles-you can never tell. His face was dark with stubble and I realised that I’d never seen him other than very closely shaven. With his dark, receding hair sticking up and his slight gut bulging at the waist of the too-tight jeans, he looked nothing like the sleek barrister feared by prosecutors and uncertain witnesses. He took off his distance glasses, put on his specs for close work and peered at the name tags. I grinned as I watched, took a sip of the coffee.

The buzzer was louder than I’d expected and I worried that it would wake Claudia.

‘You’re in, night owl,’ I responded. ‘Push the gate.’

He did. The gate opened and I’d half-turned away when I heard the three popping sounds, close together. At first I thought it was some kind of audio bleep. I swung back to look at the screen and say Cy sliding down with his hands clutching at the gate. His head jerked and his glasses came off. Dark splashes appeared on the back of his shirt as he hit the ground. He twitched a couple of times and then lay very still.

I shouted his name, ran across the deep pile carpet and threw myself at the telephone.

I rang 000 and raced down the stairs and out to the gate. Cy was lying face down; his head was holding the gate open. I crouched beside him and felt for his pulse but I knew it was no use. The shooter had put three bullets in a tight pattern through his back and into his heart. The entry wounds were small but I could tell from the blood and the tissue spattered around the gate that his chest had been blown open.

The noises I’d heard had been the impact of the bullets. The shots themselves had been silenced and had attracted no attention. The sirens brought out the first onlookers. Lights came on in the house behind the garden where Pete Marinos’ man had been placed and in other houses on that side of the street. Behind me I could hear windows opening onto the balconies in the apartment block. I ignored it all and stayed close to my ambitious, achieving friend of more than twenty years who’d gone out on many limbs for me and never once let me down. His hair was thinning slightly on top and his scalp showed through palely in the light above the gate; I knew Cy had had a horror of going bald. Wouldn’t matter now.

The paramedics arrived and they moved me aside from the body gently, talked to me in calm voices and confirmed what I already knew. They knew their business. People had started to appear on the footpath and from the apartments. The ambulance men waved torches at them and held them back until the police showed up with flashing lights, staticky radio signals, guns on hips and that authority most citizens respect, especially in high-priced places like Kirribilli.

I must have given them Cy’s name and profession and address and done the same for myself but I was barely aware of what I was saying. I was thinking, with no particular logic or orderliness, of Cy’s wife and his kids and even of Miss Mudlark. Who could say who would miss and grieve over him the most? Kids recover; wives re-marry. I was light-on for friends and always had been. I was missing him-the sporting challenges and bullshit that structured our relationship-already. I remembered that my ex-wife Cyn had liked Cy and she had detested almost everyone else I knew. That mattered. I felt the anger building inside me and a determination to find the person who’d done this and make him pay.