‘We’d have bought it if we could, wouldn’t we, darling?’ Greg said to Fiona.
‘Oh, yes. But Mr Russell didn’t want to sell.’
I told them I was staying with Mr Russell. I didn’t tell them what he thought about their pole house.
The house behind Bert’s was unoccupied and had a ‘For Sale’ sign with a ‘Sold’ sticker across it. The place wore an air of neglect and disappointment and I went along with Greg and Fiona’s suspicion that the sale had fallen through. Bert was right about the increase in value. This house, not as big or as well-placed as Bert’s, had fetched two hundred and twenty thousand, theoretically.
The boatsheds were set into the rock behind the dunes and comprised every kind of building material known to Australian man-galvanised iron, weatherboard, flattened kerosene tins, masonite and malthoid. They had the look of structures built during the Great Depression when people found and made shelters wherever they could. These were classics, with slipways down to the water made from railway sleepers and hooks cemented into the rocks that had evidently supported blocks and tackle.
Two men were sitting on the rocks in the thin shade provided by a spindly banksia. They wore singlets, baggy shorts and grey stubble. One of the men was scrubbing at a pair of once-white, now-grey sandshoes with a piece of soap-impregnated steel wool; the other was smoking and looking at the water.
‘Gidday,’ I said.
‘Gidday, mate,’ the smoker said. ‘Want a beer?’
‘No, thanks.’ I squatted down, took off my Sydney Swans cap and used it to dry the sweat on my face. ‘Mind answering a few questions?’
‘Shit,’ the smoker said. ‘You from the Council?’
‘Private detective. No trouble for you and your mate.’ I took out two twenty-dollar notes and fanned myself with them. ‘You blokes been coming down here long?’
The scrubber looked at the money and put his ratty bit of steel wool down on a rock, anxious to please. ‘Fuckin’ years, mate. In the nice weather. Mind you, it’s good weather here most of the time.’
I pointed back behind the rocks. ‘You come through Bert Russell’s place to get here?’
The smoker butted his rollie, got out his tin and prepared to make what was probably his millionth cigarette. He coughed cavernously as he did it, but his fingers were rock steady. ‘That’s right. Good bloke, Bert. He doesn’t mind. Slings us the odd can.’
‘Did you ever see anything unusual going on up at Bert’s place when he wasn’t there?’
‘Whaddya mean, unusual?’ the scrubber said.
I shrugged. ‘People around. Cars you hadn’t seen before. Anyone scratching about.’
The smoker shook his head. “The young bloke comes up with his mates and gets pissed. That’s about all.’
‘I mean further back than that. Years ago.’
I was banking on the fact that elderly people have sharper memories of the distant past than last week or the week before. The scrubber seemed interested all of a sudden. He took two cans from the esky and tossed one to his mate, who caught it deftly.
‘Hang on, Merv.’ The scrubber stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Clarrie an’ this is Merv, by the way.’
I shook both hands. ‘Cliff.’
“There was this one time,’ Clarrie said. ‘There was a flash car and that woman, you remember Merv.’
Merv grunted, lit his cigarette and blew smoke.
Clarrie opened his can. ‘His memory’s not as good as mine, ‘specially for women. Can’t get it up any more, can you mate.’
‘Get fucked,’ Merv said, popping his can.
Clarrie cackled. ‘Wish I could. Anyway, I’m a bit forgetful about yesterday and the day before, like, but I can remember things real clear back a bit. We were coming down here from the pub, real late. Fuckin’ hot night and we saw this car parked near Bert’s place. Big, flash car. And there was a woman in it. She opened the door and I seen her in the light. A bloody good-looker. Not Bert’s missus. She was a good sort, mind, that Jessie when she was young, but this was a real looker.’
‘Bullshit,’ Merv said and drank at least half of his can.
Clarrie was trying hard not to look at the money but he wanted it badly, and that made it hard to judge his story. ‘When was this?’ I said.
‘Now I can tell you that, sort of. It was the night that Gough Whitlam beat that little bat-eared cunt. What was his name? What year was that?’
‘McMahon,’ I said. ‘1972.’ Good news, Bert, I thought. Near enough to twenty-five years.
‘That’s right.’
‘What kind of a car?’
‘Jeez, what was it, Merv?’
‘A Merc. White Merc’
‘I thought you didn’t see it,’ I said.
‘I remember now.’ Merv drained his can and made as if to throw it into the scrub. He remembered I was there and just crushed it in his hard hands.
‘Good on you, mate,’ Clarrie said.
It was impossible to tell now what weight to give to the story. I questioned them about what the occupants of the car were doing but Clarrie admitted that he didn’t know. There was a man around but he thought he might have just been taking a piss in the bushes.
Merv laughed. ‘ You were taking a few pisses in the bush that night. Shit, we were shickered after winnin’ the fuckin’ election.’
Which might have been a confirmation of a kind, but didn’t really increase my confidence in the information. I took the photograph out of the plastic sleeve and showed it to Clarrie, keeping my hand across the woman’s body and showing only her face. ‘Could this be the woman you saw, Clarrie?’
He rubbed his eyes and tried to blink away the effect of decades of sun, salt, sand and booze. Merv reached into the esky for another can but Clarrie seemed to have forgotten his.
‘Yeah,’ he said, drawing the word out. ‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘The woman I saw looked like this one. She had on this tight dress. Great tits. Let’s see her tits.’
I put the picture away, gave them the money and took a can of beer from the esky. I plodded away along the dunes to the track that led up to the shack on Bert’s block. I’d have bet any money that Merv’s can went into the ti-tree as soon as my back was turned.
It was hot, even in the shade, and there was no breeze to speak of. The shack was more solidly built than the boatsheds and had been less exposed to the weather, but it was still a crumbling ruin with cracked and broken window panes, a sagging roof and a list to the right where some hardy vine was trying to pull it down.
There was only one door and it opened as I put my foot on the plastic milk crate that served as a doorstep. The man who stood there had once been an athlete; you could tell from the set of his shoulders and the lines of his body inside a gaping, buttonless pair of pyjamas. But that was a long time and many bottles ago. He was a once-sound but now battered and faded ruin, like his house.
‘Who’re you?’
‘Name’s Cliff Hardy. I’m doing a job of work for Bert Russell.’ I stuck out my right hand to be shaken and held the can of beer close by in the left. If you wanted the one you had to take the other. ‘Merv and Clarrie sent this up for you.’
We shook hands. The bones stuck out through the thin, dry skin. He dropped my hand, grabbed the can and popped the top immediately. He slightly tilted his grey, grizzled head; the faded pale blue eyes slid back as he raised the can to a mouth that was just a space, the lips having sunk into the toothless hole. He sucked the beer down in three long gulps, barely pausing to take in two wheezy breaths. I produced another twenty-dollar note.
‘I need to talk to you, Stan.’
He wiped his mouth and looked at me as if he’d been waiting for me to arrive. ‘It’s happened, has it?’
‘What?’
The pale, red-rimmed eyes went shrewd. ‘You first. Better sit down.’
I thought he meant we should go inside but he merely kicked the milk crate away from the door with his bare foot and squatted down in the doorway with his feet dangling. I sat on the milk crate while he took a last, pessimistic suck on the can.