Peter Corris - Wet Graves

“How’s Jess?” I said.

“Just great. Sends her best. She coul0dn’t come, one of the kids is crook…”

“What?” Paul Guthrie almost jumped from his chair.

“Take it easy, Paul,” Ray said. “It’s nothing. She just needs her mum tonight.”

“All right, but keep an eye on her.”

Ray drank some beer and looked at his stepfather with affection. “You know, Cliff, he’d send to New York for the best fingernail man if one of them had some-thing wrong with a fingernail.”

Too much fond family feeling embarrasses me after a while. I hid the discomfort behind my can and an interest in the view from the window. The last of the daylight flickered out over the water The lights on the moored boats in Middle Harbour and the glow in the sky across the water above Seaforth began to provide the sort of nightscape that justifies the mortgages. Paul Guthrie and his stepson were on such good terms that their casual talk was easy to drop in and out of. Pat came in and sat with a dry sherry for a while, and then she and Paul went off to put the finishing touches on the dinner.

“So,” Ray said, “I told you how to get to the Pavarotti and you got bashed up?”

“Finished the job, though. It was useful information.” I looked at Ray’s solid, jeans-and-windbreaker-covered figure. “I could’ve used you along at a couple of points, I admit.”

“Try me now. What’re you after?”

“Did Paul give you a hint?”

Ray shook his head. “Mister Discretion, Paul. I’ve come to realise that a good stepfather is better than a real father in a way. He can move aside, let you grow up. Both Chris and me have benefited.”

I nodded. Chris was Ray’s brother, who’d also struck trouble a few years back. Now he was graduate in something or other and employed in New Guinea. Their real father, who knew too many things, had been killed in what had been called an accident in the industrial section of Long Bay prison.

“Done any scuba diving, Ray?”

“Plenty. Love it.”

“What’s the depth of the water under the harbour bridge?”

Ray fiddled with his empty can, crushing its sides. Unlike his brother, he was a practical man who liked to have something to see and handle in front of him. Theoretical questions, or those requiring information to be transferred from one track to another, made him uncomfortable. “I’ve got a Maritime Services Board chart on the boat that’d tell me,” he said. “At a guess, twenty metres. Certainly not more. That’s average-high and low tide.”

“Is that a deep dive?”

“Are you kidding? Piece of piss. ‘Course, it’d be murky down there. Lot of crap in the harbour.”

“What about at night?”

He leaned forward in his chair. “ Very murky. But you can take down a light that makes it OK.”

“What about a camera?”

“Christ, Cliff.” He leaned back and crushed the can vertically. When he’d reduced it to the size of a doughnut he looked at me and grinned. “Why not?”

“This isn’t Mission Impossible, Ray. If it’s too bloody hard to handle, I’ll come at it another way.”

“I can dive around the bridge at night and take photos,” Ray said. “When d’you want it done?”

“Tonight,” I said.

That’s when Paul Guthrie called us in to dinner.

Fish, naturally, in that company. All I know about fish is that when it’s fresh and well cooked I like it, and when it’s not I don’t. This was great. The Guthries treated each other as a group of special friends might-quick to understand and sympathise, happy to chide and be chided. But I didn’t feel excluded. I enjoyed the talk and the meal and the dry white. Ray, I noticed, drank mineral water and talked less than the rest of us. Ate less, too.

Almost as soon as he decently could, he wiped his mouth on the paper towel provided, collected his couple of plates and stood. “Excuse me. Great dinner…”

“You hardly touched it,” Pat Guthrie said. “Are you sure you’re not sick too?”

“I’m fine. I just have to make a few phone calls.” His nod was more for me than his parents as he left the room.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’ve asked Ray for some help. He seems to have taken it very seriously.”

“It’s all right, Cliff,” Paul said. “Ray’s like that. He takes things seriously. I remember once when he…”

“Don’t start, Paul,” his wife said. “And don’t keep things from me. What are you asking Ray to do, Cliff?”

I told her as we cleared up the dishes and took them to the kitchen, where she stacked them in the washer. “Aren’t there regulations about that?” she said. “I mean, can anyone just go diving around the bridge? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Ray’ll know,” Paul Guthrie said from the doorway. “Or he’d know someone who will know. Don’t worry.”

Pat turned on the machine. “It sounds dangerous. At night. No preparation. Why does it have to be like that?”

Paul Guthrie was spooning coffee into a glass beaker. He poured in the boiling water and set the plunger in place. “ Is it dangerous, Cliff?”

“Ray doesn’t seem to think so. But I’ll call it off if it gets tricky. Don’t worry, I’m too old for cowboy stuff.”

“So we’ve noticed,” Paul said. He touched his own forehead, which wasn’t scratched and scraped like mine.

I grinned. “I was assisting the police. Pat, it has to be at night to avoid publicity. The woman I’m working for has a right to that. Anything to do with mysterious deaths brings headlines. Team that up with the bridge and you’ve got a tabloid reporter’s dream.”

Guthrie pressed the plunger down. He set the pot, cups, sugar and milk on a tray. “Let’s go through to the sitting room. I saw them building the bridge, you know. Went to the opening ceremony and every-thing.”

We got settled with the coffee. Paul took some artificial sweeteners from a shelf and dropped in two tablets. “I’m seventy this year,” he said. “Milk, Cliff?”

Pat laughed as she took a half spoon of sugar. “He’ll take it black, Paul. He’s a tough guy.” For a moment I thought that Pat Guthrie might be turning against me, protecting her young from the sort of disruption I represented. But she included me in the amusement. “And don’t you come the smart-arse old-timer. Tell us about the bridge.”

“They say a million people went across it on the first day,” I said. “I never really believed that.”

“I do,” Paul said. “I can’t tell you much about the ceremony. I was there, but way back in the crowd. I know I’ve never seen so many people in one place before. I didn’t see de Groot. There was just a series of yells and shouts and screams. I think I fell asleep that afternoon, some-where along the line.”

“I’m more interested in the industrial aspects”, I said.

Guthrie’s thumb and third finger probed the grooves in his cheeks. “My father was captain of one of the tugboats that helped to build the bridge.”

“What did the tugboats do?” Pat asked.

“A lot of the superstructure was built on shore and taken out to where it was needed on barges. Then it was hoisted up into place. The tugs pulled the barges.”

“I’ve seen some photographs of that operation,” I said. “Must’ve been pretty tricky in bad weather.”

Guthrie nodded. “It was. The whole bloody thing was tricky. It’s a wonder more people weren’t killed.”

Pat was about to sip her coffee but she stopped the movement. “I didn’t know people were killed.”

“Quite a few,” Guthrie said. “In the quarry at Moruya, in the workshop, on the bridge. I saw all of it. I was only a nipper but my Dad was interested and he took me around. He could go anywhere he liked, of course.”