We unlooped the ropes; Guthrie started and warmed the engines and then took the boat smoothly out into the channel. Although I grew up by the water, at Bronte and Maroubra, I wouldn’t say I had boating in the blood. The inner tubes from car tyres were the first craft I remembered, and I didn’t rate the inflatable rafts and boats we’d trained in as soldiers much higher. I spent a very tricky night and a day in one of those things up a river in Malaya, and being afloat wasn’t my favourite sensation. But at least I wasn’t a lunch-loser.
After doing some suitable appreciation of the scenery, I ducked my head and went into the saloon section and from there down a short set of steps to the cabin. The circumscribed space held a two-tiered bunk, built-in shelves and a cupboard. There were two portholes and between them a shaving mirror, a wineskin, a belt with a knife in a scabbard and a heavy oilskin were hanging on hooks. The books on the shelves were mostly paperback thrillers but there were also a few navigation manuals and an anthology of sea poems. There was a plastic coat, a work shirt, a sweater and a pair of very greasy and stained overalls in the cupboard. The bed was neatly made on the bottom bunk; the top bunk was covered with a single blanket.
Ray’s personal belongings were in a tin chest under the bunk. I pulled it out and teased open the cheap padlock with a pocket-knife blade. I turned the bits and pieces over thinking how alike we all are-how we all keep the same things, the bits of paper and objects that mark the staging posts of our lives. Ray had stored away a couple of not discreditable school reports, a learner-driver permit, a swimming proficiency certificate, a half-empty box of long rifle. 22 bullets and some photographs.
I stood up from my crouch with creaking muscles, and spread the snapshots out at eye level on the tight blanket on the top bunk. There were five: one showed a big-looking, blonde kid at the wheel of the Satisfaction; another was of the same boy with a younger and slightly smaller and darker version of himself, sitting in the yacht’s dinghy; there was one of a small, handsome woman in early-middle age standing with her hands on her hips and looking amused at the camera and a fourth snap showed a teenage girl with long legs and short shorts sitting on a low stone wall. She was smiling at the camera and displaying good teeth, shining mid-length hair and an optimistic glow. If Paul Guthrie had given me intimations of hope about getting old, she was a reminder of the joys of being young. She was the sort of girl song-writers used to write songs about before they discovered Freud and drugs.
The fifth photograph was the maverick in the bunch; it was old, not so old as to be sepia-tinted, but it looked as if it had just escaped that photographic era. It was also cracked and creased as if it had once had a less loving home. The picture showed a man in army uniform caught in the act of lighting a cigarette. He was bare-headed, short-back-and-sided and his face was half-hidden in his cupped hands. A sergeant’s chevrons were on his jacket sleeve; an expert might have been able to tell from the other insignia which unit he belonged to-I couldn’t. The interior shown in the photograph looked like a pub; there was a window with reversed lettering on it behind the military figure. It was impossible to tell anything about the man except in the most general terms-not old, not ugly, not fat.
I took the pictures up on deck to where Guthrie was standing with his legs slightly spread and his hands lightly on the wheel. He breathed a sigh when I spread the photographs in front of him on a flat surface in front of the wheel.
‘You sound relieved’, I said.
‘I am. I was dreading you coming up with something like drugs or
…’
‘Nothing like that. Can you give these your attention for a minute?’
He glanced at his course, decided all was well and looked down. He came barely up to my shoulder, but his easy command of the boat seemed to give him extra stature. ‘No problem’, he said. ‘What have you got there?’ He stabbed one picture. ‘That’s Ray.’
‘Thought so. His brother and your wife?’
He nodded.
‘This the girlfriend?’
Another nod.
I nudged the old picture. ‘What about this?’
He peered at it. ‘No idea.’ He flipped it over as I had already done, but there was no writing on the back. I made a stack of the pictures with the one of Ray on top.
‘Big lad’, I said.
‘Six two. No way he could’ve been mine-we used to make a joke of it. Chris’s a bit smaller.’
Six foot two, I thought, nineteen years of age and a boat worker-that meant ropes, oars and muscles. I hoped my usual verbal persuasive methods would be adequate for the task. I didn’t fancy trying to make him do anything he didn’t want to. Guthrie checked his course; I separated out the old photograph and the one of Ray at the wheel.
‘Can I hang on to these?’
‘Sure. Here we go, got to check this.’
He flicked the wheel, cut the motor and brought the yacht close up to a buoy that looked like a giant, floating truck wheel. A flipped switch sent the anchor rattling down through the clear, green water. Guthrie went to the stem, hauled in the dinghy, slipped down into it and skipped across to the mooring buoy with a few easy strokes. I felt useless, so I went back to the cabin and replaced the three photos. When I got back on deck I watched Guthrie circumnavigating the buoy, pulling and testing ropes, car tyre buffers and metal stanchions. When he was satisfied, he rowed back.
After a few more similar stops, Guthrie anchored in deep water and pulled two cans of light beer out of a cooler in the saloon. He had a plastic-wrapped package of sandwiches in there, too. We ate and drank under the awning.
‘Brought you out here because I wanted you to see what kind of a boy Ray is. You think I’m pretty good in a boat?’
I was chewing; I nodded.
‘He’s better. Faster and sharper, and he sticks at it. One time we got a mooring rope wrapped around the propeller shaft, just before we tied up. Getting on for winter it was, dark, cold. Ray stayed in the water, down under there, for as long as it took to work the rope free. Could have cut it but he wouldn’t. Bit of a perfectionist, likes to do things right. You don’t see that all that often.’
‘That’s right’, I said. ‘You don’t.’
‘Pig-stubborn, mind. But stubborn to a purpose.’
He sucked his can dry and put it down carefully on the deck. He went into the saloon and came out with a big cheque book and a gold pen.
‘I can’t bear to think of that boy ruining his life. I can’t do anything directly about it myself-too old. I don’t trust the police, not in this instance anyway. All I can do is write a bloody cheque and hope you’re as useful as you look and as they say you are.’
‘Before you write it’, I said, ‘you have to ask yourself a few questions you might not like the answers to. Why’s he hanging around with Catchpole and company? What’s his trouble? If you hire me, that’s what you’re going to find out, maybe. The picture of him I get comes from you-he’s stubborn; you won’t just be able to say ‘stop’ to him. I won’t, if I find him. You might not like what happens. Your wife mightn’t like it either.’
He looked at me as if he was sifting the whole of his life inside his head-the good and the bad bits, and wondering how much of each there was still to come. He made a weighing-up gesture with his hands.
‘I accept that’, he said. He opened the cheque book, scribbled, tore out the slip and handed it across.
‘That’s more than I asked for.’
‘You don’t ask enough. You’re not the only one who can check up on a bloke. I checked on you. They say you stick at things and that’s what I want. I want your full attention. You’ve got my resources behind you-if you need a thousand suddenly or whatever, you’ve got it. Understand?’
I nodded and put the cheque away. He seemed to regard money as something to help him get what he wanted rather than as something good in itself or something that conferred a virtue on him. That’s healthy; that’s how I’d regard money-if I had any.