Peter Corris: Wet Graves

“The man got around Sydney using the waterways,” Loomis told me. “He must’ve known the harbour like the back of his hand. And he was immensely strong. He killed those men with his bare hands, quickly and efficiently. He actually threw one of them over a high fence and into some bushes as a temporary hiding place. Handling them was no problem.”

“Tell me, when they fished him out, did he have an iron bar in his pocket?”

“No. Funny thing was, he had a bunch of military medals and ribbons, all crammed together in the pocket of his coat.”

“He’d have done better to have snuffed his father early on,” I said.

Loomis nodded. “The father must have been a monster, but make no mistake, Ballantine was very strange himself. Paranoid to an immense degree. He really thought the whole world was out to screw him. Beautiful craftsman, though. You should see some of the model boats he made. Beautiful.”

“Did you find his boat?”

“Sort of. He’d holed and sunk it in the water near his slipway. They tell me it was a butcher’s boat. Appropriate, eh?”

“A butchers boat,” I said. “What’s that?”

“Apparently the butchers used to race each other out to the ships in the old days. First aboard got the provisioning order. They had these light, fast boats. Lithgow had restored his down to the last nail. Ideal for dumping bodies. He was saying goodbye when he sank it, poor bastard.”

“How’s Lloyd Meredith?”

“Mending. We would have got Ballantine ourselves, Hardy. You realise that.”

“Sure,” I said. “While on the subject of getting people, what about Tobin?”

“Conspiracy to commit murder, attempted murder, he’s going inside for a long, long time.”

“Good,” I said. “Moody?”

“Resigned. Pissed off about something or other. It’s not a perfect world, Hardy.”

Louise Madden buried her father in the cemetery at Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, I drove up there for the occasion. It was a fine, cold day in the mountains and there were a lot of people present-Brian Madden’s former colleagues, some of his ex-students, a number of Louise’s friends, people from the golf club. I looked around for Dell Burton, the other woman who grieved for Madden, but she wasn’t there. We all stood in the small space available between other graves and watched the quiet, dignified ceremony. Louise held the handful of earth a long time before dropping it in on the box.

Later, back at her rambling weather-board house in Leura, she thanked me for giving her the chance to say goodbye to her father properly.

I sipped my drink and didn’t say anything.

She was almost smiling. “Cheer up, it means a lot to me, all this. Having people around. Do any of your cases have a really happy ending, Cliff?”

“Not lately,” I said. “But I keep hoping.”