Peter Corris - The Empty Beach

I was working again.

I was under strict medical instructions not to move around more than necessary, but who ever took any notice of strict medical instructions? When I see a rise in the percentage of thin, fit doctors, I’ll start paying more attention to their strict instructions. Besides, the physical good I might have got by sitting on my bum at home would have been countered by the emotional disturbance. I had to know what was going on. I took a few red Codrals for the pain and put myself and my stick in a taxi. First stop was the bank for cash in various denominations, then Randwick.

The taxi driver naturally assumed I was going to the races and that I was a man of leisure.

‘Got anything good?’ He spoke with the mixture of respect and distrust a working man feels for someone who comes out of his house casually dressed in the middle of a weekday. I hadn’t looked at the horses since the Singer case started.

‘Is Roderick Dhu running?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘In the fourth.’

The horse was trained by a friend of mine, an ex-boxer who hardly ever fought an honest fight or ran a dishonest horse. ‘Get on that, each way.’

The Royal Oaks is just far enough from the track for someone to walk over, forget his or her losses and think about punting another day. I limped from the taxi into the back bar, knocked the knee on a chair and was glad to get up on a bar stool and start work on a scotch. The lady in pink was there all right, in mauve that day, drinking and smoking in an experienced sort of way. She had a companion who looked middle-aged, but after Ann’s revelation of my subject’s age I was not confident about reading how many years these women had on the clock. She wasn’t young. They were both blowing the smoke around and not talking much; it didn’t look like anything that couldn’t be broken up with a little money. Ann had told me that she was going by the name of Peggy Harrison just then and that old Peg was a barrel of fun.

They finished the round and the companion came up to the bar and bought the next one. I drank slowly and when Peggy came up for her shout I had a ten-dollar note out and flapping in the breeze.

‘Peggy?’ I said.

‘Two Bacardis and coke, sport,’ she said to the barman, then she turned a magnificently bloodshot eye at me. ‘Yes? Do I know you?’

‘I was at Leon’s wake with Ann Winter.’

The drinks came and naturally that was what she was most interested in. She grabbed them with the excessive caution of someone who has a slight load on board. But she’d caught sight of the ten.

‘Nice girl, Ann.’

‘Yes. Would this buy a little information?’ I nudged the note. The barman was interested and trying to hover within earshot. I looked at him as if he had something in his nose and he backed off.

‘Depends.’ Her mate shouted, ‘Peg!’ from across the room and Peg ducked her head at her angrily. Peg’s hair was dyed red, she wore a lot of makeup and her body was strapped in tight. She looked as if she’d spent a little money on herself since I’d last seen her. ‘Depends,’ she repeated. ‘It might buy a little bit of some information.’

I took out another ten. ‘Get rid of your friend and we’ll have a chat.’

The friend didn’t like it much, but she put her Bacardi down fast and went out. I walked across to the table with my second scotch and a fresh Bacardi.

‘Cripple, are you?’

‘Just temporary,’ I said. ‘Hang gliding.’ I gave her the twenty dollars straight off and she offered me a menthol cigarette in return. I refused.

She sucked in the smoke. ‘Safer than hang gliding.’ She gave the sort of cackle that no person under sixty should be able to produce. Where the makeup had flaked off, her skin was a raddled ruin; her hair was thin and retreating like Glenda Jackson’s as Elizabeth I, and all the alcohol and tobacco on her breath couldn’t disguise the smell of poor teeth and lousy food. But through all that you could see she had once been beautiful, that her ruined features had once had a sort of perfection. And she still had guts.

‘Don’t look at me,’ she said sharply. ‘I look like garbage. What d’you want from me?’

She pulled hard on the cigarette and took a deep drink as if she wanted to hasten the decay.

‘Singer,’ I said. ‘John Singer and his wife. I understand you know a bit about them.’

‘Knew. Singer’s dead.’

‘Okay, knew.’

‘Any more money?’

‘It’s my turn to say “It depends”, Peggy. I’ll pay well for something interesting.’ I tapped her glass. ‘Bit flush, aren’t you?’

She sighed. ‘Good double and had both of ‘em each way. Once in a bloody blue moon. Nearly all gone now. What’s your game?’

‘Private investigator. Did you read about that house in Clovelly?’

She was wearing a thin yellow cardigan draped over her shoulders. She pulled the sleeves across her chest and shivered. ‘I read about it.’

‘I helped close it down. That’s where I got the dicky knee.’

‘You must be all right, then. Shit, what a place! Were they really

…”

I didn’t want to go down memory lane so I cut her off. ‘The Singers, Peggy. What do you know?’

‘I know a bit.’

‘How come?’ I hadn’t meant to let the implication slip in- that she was light years removed from the Singers socially and financially, but she was smart and she caught it.

‘I’m a mess, I know. Wasn’t always. But my girl Sandy was on with Singer for a year or more. Then he dumped her. She was just a kid, eighteen or so, and she took it bad.’

‘Singer’d be a bit long in the tooth for an eighteen-year-old, wouldn’t he?’ I said sceptically.

She finished her drink. ‘Didn’t look it, didn’t act it. Sandy had no complaints, not at first. What’re you drinking?’ She got up with one of my tens in her hand. That’s where it would go, dollar by dollar.

‘Scotch.’ My knee was hurting. When she came back with the drinks, she gave me a smile that still had a trace of the old power in it, but it would be a sloppy grimace soon.

‘Singer wasn’t so bad himself,’ she said as soon as she’d lit another cigarette. ‘Gave Sandy plenty of money, bought her a car. It was that bitch of a wife who was the real trouble.’

I sipped my drink and let her tell it.

‘I got this from Sandy, see? She said something happened to Singer. He lost his… don’t know what you’d call it. He couldn’t get it up. All that. Depression, isn’t that what they call it? Sandy reckoned the wife was behind it, driving him mad. Hard bitch.’

‘Do you know her?’

‘Yeah, I did. She’s older than me but I don’t suppose she looks it. Well, she knocked around a bit before she got on to Singer. I knew her then and for a few years after that.’ Her voice trailed off. They would have been the bad years, when things started to slide and people started to avoid her and every problem needed two or three drinks instead of one. She snapped back to the present. ‘I tell you she’s as hard as they come. Singer always liked the girls, see? And Marion used to sort them out. I saw her do it once at a party. Bloody near ripped this kid apart.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘Like this.’ She made claws of her fingers and lifted them. The skin on her hands was yellow and cracked, her nails were bright red and some of the paint had got on the skin around them. She made a slashing movement and I got the idea. It was disconcerting stuff for a loyal and faithful employee to hear about the boss. If Mrs S had turned the violence against the philanderer that would explain why Singer wasn’t out boating and banging the birds any more. But it wouldn’t explain calling me in. I was aware again of how much I didn’t know about Singer; too much. That set me to thinking about people who would have known him.