Peter Corris: Aftershock

‘Bloody right I’m not. I saw Oscar in the street outside that church a couple of minutes after the whole bloody place had stopped shaking. What’s more, he saw me.’

‘He waved or something?’

‘No, but I could tell he saw me. Then he moved towards the back of the church. That’s when I took off for home.’

‘The clipping says the church was in Hamilton.’

‘That’s right, Holy Cross in Beaumont Street. I own a little house near there, place May and me raised our family in. I rent it out to an old miner I worked with. Don’t charge him much, just enough so’s he can keep his pride, understand?’ I nodded, I was beginning to like Horrie Jacobs more and more, and not just for his cheque book.

‘Look, Mr Hardy, they’ve got it all stacked against me. I’m not young and my eyesight’s not a hundred per cent. Also it was a bloody madhouse in the street, like I said. Glass flying, bricks… I didn’t stand there with a pair of binoculars trained on Oscar’s face. But I saw him!’

Horrie wasn’t the sort of man you’d call a fool or a liar. He obviously believed that what he was saying was true, which didn’t mean it was, but meant it’d take some kind of proof to make him think otherwise. An investigation, in other words. I was convincing myself that there was a job here, but Horrie had bowled up one formidable obstacle.

‘You say they’ve stacked the cards against you. Who’s they?’

He seemed to be considering another cigarette. He rejected the idea and pushed the packet away. That was an interesting sign- refusing the props when the tough time came. ‘You name ‘em,’ he said.

‘What does your wife think?’

‘She didn’t like Oscar. That buggers up her judgement. She doesn’t believe me. Thinks the concussion made me muddle up things that happened before the quake and after. I can’t talk to her about it anymore. It upsets us too much. Ralph’s even worse.’

‘Ralph?’

‘My son. Told you I had four kids-one son, three daughters. Ralph’s been more trouble than the three girls put together, but he’s all right. Doesn’t want to hear about me seeing Oscar, but.’

‘You talked to the police?’

‘Too right. Soon as I heard what they were saying about Oscar. They didn’t want to know. You hear anything about the stink over the emergency services and so on?’

I tried to remember. ‘There was some criticism-the ambulance men against the police, or the police against the fire brigade. I didn’t really follow it. I remember the stuff about developers knocking down buildings that didn’t need to go.’

Horrie nodded vigorously. ‘That’s another story. Don’t get me started on that. Yeah, there were some balls-ups in the rescue job. Seems the cops went in a bit heavy-handed. It’s hard to say. They probably did their best and it can’t have been much bloody fun poking around in those buildings not knowing if a wall was going to fall on you. The whisper was the police knocked down a wall a bit early and might have made it harder to get some people out. I don’t know. But anyway, the last thing they wanted was someone saying everything wasn’t on the up and up as far as the dead were concerned…’

‘I see. There was some looting, wasn’t there?’

‘Right. Would you believe it? Some bastard pinched a few cases of beer out of the club where people had lost their lives. Bloody terrible. My point is, the whole town got its wits back pretty quick and started to pull together-committees, funds set up, relief centres, all that. I kicked in a few dollars myself. But no-one wanted to hear anything new or different. The whole thing was wrapped up, see?’

‘Yes. What would you want me to do, Mr Jacobs?’

Horrie was agitated and suddenly looked his years. He took a cigarette now and lit it slowly, the way a tired person does. The first draw seemed to calm him. ‘Mrs Broadway said she wasn’t going to just drop it. Said she’d do some poking around, but she also told me how good you were at your job. She said you had a knack for talking to people and finding things out. I want you to find out about Oscar.’

‘You were his friend,’ I said. ‘You must…’

He waved the cigarette dismissively. ‘I knew bugger all about him. What I can tell you’d take two minutes. But I know this-someone killed him and shoved him into that rubble. Did it bloody quick and smooth, too. He must’ve had an enemy. I want to know who it was.’

I watched him as he puffed on his cigarette and resumed looking at my dirty window. I thought I knew what was going through his head. Sure, he wanted to know who had killed his friend as any normal person would. But there was more to it than that. An old, proud man had had his reliability, physical and mental, challenged and he wanted to meet the challenge. I judged that it had taken a lot of soul-searching for him to ask for my kind of help. I was in. I took the standard client form from the top drawer in the desk and scribbled in Horrie’s details while he continued to smoke and look north. In the space for nature of investigation I wrote: ‘O. Bach-circumstances of death of.’ I slid the form across the desk and he signed it. He wrote me a cheque for eight hundred and forty dollars and I agreed to meet him in Beaumont Street, Hamilton tomorrow, at midday. He collected his paper from the floor, his hat from the desk and put away his wallet and cheque book. We shook hands and he left.

Down by the filing cabinet I had a case of Lindeman’s claret a satisfied client had given me three months back. That is to say, I had what was left of the case-three bottles. I uncorked one of them and poured the wine into one of the number of mis-matched glasses I keep around the office. This was a pub middy glass and I half-filled it. I sipped the drink as I sat at my desk with the evidence of a job in front of me-a story, questions that needed answering, conflicts, a signature and a cheque. Intriguing. Your lucky day, Cliff. And remember that you like Newcastle. I drank some wine but I wasn’t thinking about earthquakes and falling bricks, I was thinking about Helen Broadway.

It had been three years since the last angry words, the last door slamming and terse telephone conversation. Since then, nothing. As far as I knew she was still with her husband, the gentleman vintner, still a part-time producer at Radio Kempsey, still a mother. Now it sounded as if she’d made a switch and was on the air herself. I could see it-she was well-read, insatiably curious and had a knack of making people feel good. I could imagine her getting some redneck National Party politician talking until he wished he hadn’t. I wondered if she’d made any other changes. Knowing that she’d recommended me to Horrie Jacobs gave me the best feeling I’d had in a long time. It frightened me, too. The pain of our break-up was still with me. Like the Malayan War and my stint in Long Bay, it wasn’t something I wanted to go through again. Then, I found myself thinking about the distance between Newcastle and Kempsey. Five hundred kilometres? Less?

I finished the wine and pushed the cork firmly into the bottle. I tidied up the few bits of paperwork I had lying about and took Horrie’s cheque to the bank. His eight hundred and forty dollars didn’t have much company in my operating account, but my credit cards were paid up and I’d met the mortgage for that month. The Falcon was newly registered and I hadn’t been really drunk for a month. Things could’ve been worse. I strolled along Crown Street and down into Surry Hills to the office of the Challenger, an independent monthly started by Harry Tickener after he left the corporate clutches of the News organisation. Harry runs the tabloid with a skeleton staff from an office in Kippax Street, not far from where the big boys of the media game play. He’d recruited some of the best people he’d worked with in the palmy days of radical journalism and the Challenger looked fresh and exciting every month. So far. The paper was in its crucial second year, with a rising circulation, good advertising support but battling against the economic tides like everything else.