Peter Corris - Aftershock

She grinned sloppily and sang, in a passable imitation of the voice that used to close down one of the Sydney TV stations each night, back when the stations closed: ‘My city of Syd-ney, I’ve never been a-way. Great town, better than this hole.’

I got out my notebook, allowing me to put the dirty glass of warm wine down on the tiles. ‘Mrs…?’

‘Atkinson, Rhonda Atkinson, formerly of Sydney, now of Shitville.’

“You said there was reason to enquire about the damage to the church.’

‘That’s right. Finally getting the message, are they?’ She drank half of her glass in two gulps and waved her hand at the kitchen. ‘Would you get my smokes? They’re in there somewhere.’

I went into the kitchen and looked around among the debris. A packet of Sterling ultra-milds and a disposable lighter lay on a shelf above the sink along with an array of about twenty bottles with labels detailing the prescribed doses. ‘The capsules, for depression’; ‘the tablets, for sleeplessnness’, ‘the tonic…’ They were all prescribed for Mrs R. Atkinson and they did not make me feel hopeful. None of the labels recommended that they be taken with liberal quantities of cheap wine.

I took the cigarettes out to Mrs Atkinson. She flipped the box open and pulled one free with a practised pout of her full lips. I lit it for her.

‘Want one?’

I shook my head and went back to the chair.

‘Wowser, are you? Don’t drink neither?’

I couldn’t have that. I grabbed the glass and took a decent swig. I’d drunk it warmer and worse in my time, much worse. ‘Tell me about the church, Mrs Atkinson.’

She finished off her drink and rested the empty glass on her slight stomach roll. She blew smoke in the direction of Holy Cross. ‘My husband’s under there,’ she said, ‘only they won’t bloody-well admit it.’

Rhonda Atkinson was convinced, or pretended to be convinced, that her husband was beneath the collapsed foundations of the church across the road. To the suggestion that the wreckage had been cleared and only one body discovered she said, ‘Huh, with bloody great scoops and shovels as big as a room. They must’ve missed him. Dumped him in a truck like garbage.’ She knew nothing about Oscar Bach and cared less. She had not been at home when the earthquake struck. It took half an hour and lot of phony note scribbling and head nodding and the finishing off of the glass of warm white to get away from her.

I drove slowly around Hamilton thinking that the earthquake had claimed more victims than people realised. Mrs Atkinson was another one. Her kind is always produced by natural or man-made disasters. Ask around after any revolution and you’ll find wives whose husbands have seized the chance to slip away. The town was battered all right, almost every big building showed signs of damage. There must have been a lot of closing down sales and dust-damaged goods going cheap. Big, solid trees grew along the roads and in the parks; I thought of their roots going down and wrapping around house-sized boulders under the ground, gripping the bedrock. It made the 180-year-old city seem very impermanent.

Long and painful experience has taught me that the first thing to do when arriving in a town and preparing to annoy the citizens is to check in first with the cops. Newcastle is a nicely laid out place, a sort of ribbon running along a narrow spit of land with water-the Pacific Ocean and the Hunter River-on both sides. The Police Headquarters was on the corner of Church and Watt Streets, and my Gregory’s showed me how handy everything was for the authorities-the court house, a hospital and the morgue were all nearby. I parked legally, beginning as I meant to go on, and walked a couple of blocks to the police station. Nice wide streets, solid buildings; it must have filled the convicts with pride to have hacked all this out of the swamp and scrub.

No-one at Police HQ was overly impressed by my credentials, but they didn’t kick me down the steps. After some sitting, thumb twiddling and yawning in a waiting room that was about one step above a lockup for comfort, I was shown into the presence of Detective Inspector Edward Withers. That’s what it said on the nameplate on his desk. He didn’t look up from his paperwork, just pointed to a chair and said, ‘Ticket’.

I put the licence on the desk just out of his reach and sat down. He continued to flick through papers and make notes. I sat. To look at the licence he’d have to stop paper shuffling. Balding head hunched over, wide shoulders, shirt sleeves, loosened tie, wedding ring glinting as he methodically shifted a stack of papers and files from his left to his right. To talk to him would be like talking to a hay bailer. War of nerves.

Eventually he had transferred every sheet and folder from one side to the other. Had to do something with those big, meaty hands. He reached for the licence, glanced at it and dropped it as if it was something that needed wiping.

‘What’re you doing here, Hardy?’

The voice, coming out of a face that looked as if it had been kicked more often than kissed, was what you’d expect, a deep, don’t-bullshit-me rumble. I considered lying, running some line about insurance or worker’s compensation, but something about his manner deterred me. He was a cop of the old school-thirty years on the force, no more corrupt than anyone else and less than some, good at scaring the shit out of ninety per cent of the crims he dealt with and probably a good family man. Tell the truth and he might co-operate, lie and be caught out and you’d lose some teeth. ‘I’m working for Horrie Jacobs, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Know him?’

He nodded.

‘He thinks a mate of his wasn’t killed in the earthquake the way everyone else thinks.’

He picked up a pen and pulled a notepad closer. ‘Who would that be?’

‘A man named Oscar Bach.’

He dropped the pen, but I couldn’t tell whether he was surprised or just uninterested. ‘Inquest. Bit of a bloody church came down on him.’

‘That’s not what Mr Jacobs thinks.’

Withers sighed. He was bored already and I could imagine him lifting the phone and calling for another batch of papers. ‘D’you know how many problems we’ve had to deal with this year? Dodgy insurance claims, damaged vehicles, looters, squatters…’

‘Missing husbands,’ I said.

He raised his thin, fair eyebrows. His beaten-up, ugly face didn’t get any prettier but a bit more intelligence showed.

‘I met a woman in Hamilton who’s got a bee in her bonnet.’

‘Rhonda Atkinson,’ he said. ‘Have you been bothering people already? Before checking in with us?’

First slip, Cliff, I thought. Watch it. ‘No. We just had a chat. She did most of the talking.’

‘That’d be right. Well, what does Mr Jacobs want you to do for him?’

I gave him the gist of Horrie’s case, keeping it spare. I also said I’d talked to Ralph Jacobs. The name registered with him. I played it as crooked as I thought I could get away with, suggesting that I was sceptical about Horrie’s story and doing the family a favour if I found nothing to support it. He listened and even made a few notes. When I’d finished, he said, ‘Who can I ring in Sydney to get a reference on you? I’d prefer someone who’s not in the Bay.’

Cop humour, better than no humour at all. I smiled politely. I gave him Frank Parker’s name and number and stared out the window while he made the call. We were on the north side of the building and I could see out across commercial rooftops to the railway station and the harbour. It looked as if a lot of work had been done on the waterfront-I could see fresh paint and gleaming metal. The water was a deep blue and, in contrast to similar views in Sydney, the ships were cargo vessels, not a yacht in sight.