Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

Ten minutes went by to the whisper of the falling rain. The Rover slid out onto the road and went back to where it came from. I checked my reading of the number plate and found I had it right. The second car left and the third arrived almost simultaneously. The Fairlane lurched out onto the road, collected the kerb and almost collided with an Italianate sports model which was gliding up towards the clinic and me. The driver flicked out of the path of the Ford and neatly whipped around to stop perfectly aligned with the gates. The number plate was a blur through all this. I swore and settled down to wait for the car’s reappearance. I felt edgy and exposed, I was pushing my luck.

After eight minutes lights went on in the compound and I heard a dog bark. Warning bells rang in my head and the name of every prison I’d ever heard of flashed through my mind. I didn’t have all the information I wanted but I had enough.

The Falcon threatened to flood but relented. I revved it firmly, did a tight U turn and got the hell out of Longueville.

Mosman seemed a hundred miles away and all of it uphill. I washed down a few caffeine tablets with a swill of beer and concentrated on navigating the greasy roads. I was tired or I would have noticed it at least ten minutes sooner — an unchanging pair of headlights centred in my rear vision mirror like bright, sparkling diamonds. The driver knew nothing about tailing, which was comforting, but I felt I’d had enough of that scene for one day. He would have followed me down a sewer and it was child’s play to fake a right turn and then run him into the kerb. When he stopped his left front wheel was up on the concrete and the genteel, muted neon lights of the Waterson amp; Sons funeral parlour were flashing in his eyes.

I got out cautiously and kept the gun down in my jacket pocket. The car was an old FB Holden and the driver was not all that much older than it was. He had damp blond hair, pretty long, but there wasn’t enough of it to be worth spending much time on. There wasn’t much of him all round — he looked almost childlike sitting in the car with his sports jacket collar turned up. I could see a tight grin on his face and he was fumbling inside his breast pocket as I approached the car — he was so amateurish it was almost funny.

I leaned on the car and rapped on the driver’s window. A wallet and some papers spilled out on his lap as he pulled his hand out to wind down the window. He leaned forward to recover the papers presenting me with a thin, clean neck that I could have broken between my thumb and forefinger.

“I have identification.” His voice squeaked a bit and was young and educated.

“Let’s not worry about who you are first off,” I said. “Everybody has identification, everyone is someone if you get what I mean. Why were you following me?”

“That’s connected with who I am.”

He seemed determined to tell me and I thought I’d better sit down to receive the impact. I walked round the back of the car and climbed in on the passenger’s side at the front.

“Right. This is cosy. Now, who are you and why were you following me?”

He pushed the wallet over. Tucked in one of its compartments was a press identification card with photograph. The name on the card was Harry Tickener and it was him all right on the photograph; he had to be the only one of his kind in captivity.

“OK, you’re an artist. Let’s have the answers.”

“I work on The News. I just got up to the political reporting team last week, from sports, you might have seen the byline?”

“I don’t follow the volleyball all that closely. Come on, get to the point.”

“I haven’t done much yet in the political line. I’ve mostly run errands for Joe Barrett.”

Now that was a name with clout. Barrett was by way of being a crime-busting political reporter and he’d made some fat faces very red in his time. The News occasionally gave him his head on a story and he was very good for circulation when they did. He went a bit wild sometimes so they used him sparingly. Tickener pulled out some thick plain American cigarettes and got one lit after a struggle. He puffed, didn’t draw back and the Holden turned into a fair imitation of a second class smoking compartment on the New South Wales railways. I reached across, pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and threw it out the window.

“If you want me to say ‘Quit stalling’ I will. I’ll pull a rod and do a Cagney impression if you insist, but how about just telling me in plain and simple English what you’re up to.”

He nodded and the words tumbled fast. “I took a call for Joe. She must have thought she had got on to him direct, anyway I didn’t get time to say who I was. She said she had a tip on a big story and if I

… if Joe wanted to get in on it he should start taking an interest in Dr Ian Brave. She said she’d call again if she saw any signs of interest at our end.”

“So you took the job on?”

“Yes, there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. Joe’s in Canberra for a few days. I thought I could do the initial poking around and let Joe take it from there. Or maybe he’d let me follow it through, I don’t know. Anyway, it sounded interesting so I went out tonight to have a look at Brave’s place. I saw you parked and watching the clinic, so when you left I followed you. I thought you might lead me to someone, maybe the woman who rang.”

“Where were you?”

“My car was two blocks away. I watched you from the garden of the house on the corner of the street you were in.”

He looked wet enough for it to be true and the story sounded straight.

“Tell me about the woman’s voice.”

“It was nice, educated, with an accent.”

“What sort of accent?”

“European, not Italian, maybe French.”

It checked. The net was getting thrown wider all the time and it seemed like the moment to bring in some keen, unpaid help. I was thinking how to put it to him when I caught sight of my face in his rear vision mirror. It looked like it had been made out of a kerosene drum; my skin was pale and creased and my nose and jaw were sharp and cruel. I tried to produce a smile out of this unsuitable material and to get a half-way human tone into my voice.

“Look Tickener, we could get together on this. I think there is a story in it and you could have it. If I call you in it’s your story, not Barrett’s. That tip was incidental, get it?”

He nodded slowly. “It isn’t quite ethical, but…”

I broke in. “Ethical is what doesn’t keep you awake. It’s different from one person to another, that’s what’s interesting about it. Do you want to hear more?”

“Yes.”

I gave him some of the details, stressed the political implications and the likelihood of high level police involvement, hence the need for security at the investigative end. He came in like a well hooked trout. He was eager to do anything, he’d go anywhere, meet me anytime. I almost regretted the impulse to use him, faithful dogs can get in the way, but I felt that events to come would justify co-opting him. I gave him the licence numbers — of the Volkswagen and the cars that had visited the clinic that night — and told him his first assignment was to get the names and addresses of the people to whom they were registered. He said he had a contact in the right place for this dating from the days when he used to follow football players to get a line on what clubs they might defect to. I felt better about him. We agreed to be at our respective phone numbers at a certain time the next day. We shook hands. I got out of the car and he drove off, probably with dreams of Watergate in his head. I eased myself back into the traffic and headed for Mosman where the drizzle would look romantic falling on the lapping waves and the mansions.