Peter Corris - Comeback

‘Threatened how?’ I said.

‘They had arguments the couple of times he called. He woke her up in the morning and I could hear their voices raised.’

I bet you could hear them , I thought. Raised or not .

‘Then one afternoon he came and they went outside. It looked as though he was trying to make her get into his car. I was watching from the side window. She wouldn’t go. He got into the car and he tried to run her over. He drove the car over the gutter and up onto the nature strip and she had to jump out of the way. She fell over and he drove off. You can still see the marks the car wheels made on the grass.’

‘Did you go out to her?’

‘No, I was too frightened. I thought he might come back.’

And you didn’t want to get involved . ‘What happened then?’

‘She came in and I heard her crying in her room for a while. I went shopping and when I came back she was gone. No note. She took the key to the house and her room. I had to change the lock on the front door and get. . two more keys cut.’

And then some , I thought. I felt sure she knew more than she was telling me but had no idea how to tease it out other than by being direct. I stood and then sat down abruptly. She almost yelped in alarm.

‘There’s something you’re not telling me. What is it? Quickly.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Will you leave if I do?’

‘Probably.’

‘Wait here.’

I didn’t. I followed her out of the room and down the passage to the kitchen. Her purse was sitting on a bench. She opened it, took out a banknote and handed it to me. It was a Fijian fifty-dollar note.

‘I found it down behind the bureau in her room. Please take it and go.’

I put the note in my pocket and moved away. ‘Why did you try to keep this from me? Don’t tell me you thought she might come back for it.’

‘Because I don’t like you.’

‘It’s mutual.’

I left the house and went around the corner. There were two deep gouges in the grass on the nature strip about a metre in from the kerb. Impossible to tell whether it had been a serious attempt to run the woman down, but it was certainly enough to give anyone a hell of a fright. I looked up and saw the woman watching me from the house. The curtain twitched back closed when she saw me looking. I wondered if she’d reconsider her next tax return. Probably not, that kind of greed is ingrained.

Back in the car I looked again at the photo of Mary Oberon. Her skin appeared to be dark but not very dark, her eyes slanted slightly and she had a fine blade of a nose. A strong suggestion of Indian ancestry I hadn’t noticed before. I started the engine and at that moment what had swum at the edge of my consciousness about the driver of the Commodore came into clear focus. The man had a jutting chin and a beard.

On the drive back to the city I considered the information I’d picked up. An Indian prostitute being threatened by a man who looked likely to be the one who’d killed Bobby Forrest. Hard to make sense of, but it suggested a course of action if I was inclined to take it. Should I? I knew I wasn’t directly responsible for Bobby’s death. He wouldn’t have wanted me to bodyguard him. I anticipated that he might be under surveillance and had warned him, but I hadn’t thought he was in mortal danger. But that raised another concern. Had he put himself in that danger by hiring me? That possibility nagged at me all the way back to Pyrmont.

My mobile had been buzzing and chirping practically all day. I sat in my office, scrolled through and thought about deleting all the unfamiliar numbers and names. Most of them were bound to be media people, calling and texting, looking for dirt on Bobby Forrest, but you never can tell. I worked through them, deleting the media stuff, which left me with calls from Frank Parker and Megan and a text with the source blocked that read: leave it alone. he had it coming.

I rang Frank and assured him that I was okay and probably not facing any serious problems with the police. He offered to help in any way he could and I told him I’d keep that in mind.

‘You’re not going to follow this up, are you?’

‘Only if it follows me.’

‘Jesus, Cliff. Let it go.’

‘Probably will.’

It was a constant theme with my friends-advising me to stick to the nuts and bolts of my business and not go involving myself in the labyrinth of people’s problems. My ex-wife Cyn had said it was a psychological quirk that I should try to do something about.

‘How?’ I’d asked.

‘See a psychiatrist.’

‘I’ve seen too many Woody Allen movies to take them seriously.’

That started a fight, one of many. Cyn didn’t find Woody funny.

Megan didn’t join the ‘leave it be’ chorus, not explicitly, but she did want to know whether I’d need the couch again and I told her I wouldn’t. Part of me wanted to let it go and just maybe I would have if it hadn’t been for the text message. That made it personal and Bobby had paid for at least a few days’ more work. I scribbled down the text message and looked at it. ‘Had it coming’ suggested something in the past rather than the trouble Bobby had brought to me, but I had no handle on that. Sophie Marjoram hadn’t helped.

I left the office still undecided about what to do. I drove to Glebe and took a careful look along the street before pulling up at my house. Still no sign of the media pack. I got out of the car and was about to lock it with the remote control when I became aware of someone bearing down on me from across the road. He was big and moving fast.

‘You bastard,’ he shouted and swung his fist at me.

It’s a good idea to be moving forward when you punch but only if it’s a straight punch. Move forward and swing roundhouse and you’re liable to lose your balance. That’s what he did. The punch missed anyway because I swayed back away from it. I caught his fist as it moved past, twisted his arm and had him pinned against the car with one bent arm and the other flapping ineffectively. I leaned my weight against the bent arm. He swore and the fight went out of him.

‘All right, all right. Let me go.’

He was big but a lot of the bulk was fat. He was breathing hard from just a few rushed steps and a poor attempt at a punch. I didn’t think he could cause me much grief. I released him, stepped back and let him unwind himself. He grabbed at the car for support. He was red in the face and older than I’d expected. It was my day for putting the moves on unequal opponents.

He was wearing a dark suit over a black T-shirt; a pair of heavy sunglasses stuck out of the pocket where people used to wear display handkerchiefs. Maybe some still do. If he put them on he’d have something like the hoodlum look, but one who should leave the heavy work to younger men. He brushed himself down.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘For what? That you didn’t break my jaw? Who the hell are you?’

‘You don’t recognise me?’

‘No.’

‘Yeah, well, I’ve stacked on the kilos a bit. You don’t look all that much different, Hardy. Greyer, few more wrinkles, but I knew you straight off. I’m Ray Frost-Bobby Forrest’s father.’

We went into the house and I made coffee while he used the toilet.

‘Crook prostate,’ he said when he came out. ‘Crook just about every other bloody thing but I’m still here.’

I poured coffee into two mugs. He refused milk and sugar.

‘Got anything to give it a lift?’

I put heavy slugs of Hennessy brandy into both mugs and we went into the sitting room. He put his mug on the coffee table and felt in his jacket pocket.

‘All right to smoke?’