The sweep was smooth, methodical, made with the steady, quiet competence with which he stamped all his jobs. He didn’t let the tension of his situation work on his nerves. It helped that he didn’t see anything that he hadn’t expected to see. There were a few tourists like himself, a few local merchants, housewives doing the shopping, a couple of horticultural types in Land Rovers and here and there a stoned-looking sixties’ counter-culture throwback, probably from a hovel back in the hills somewhere. Wyatt preferred the pure, peeping bellbirds to any of them.
By now he had a clear picture of the Devonshire tea place. It had a first floor balcony with umbrellas open to the sun, but he wasn’t about to tree himself there. He’d meet Liz Redding on the ground floor: plenty of doors to the open, and plenty of windows if it should come to a dive through the plate glass, his jacket over his face and arms for protection. Otherwise there seemed to be a basement, a rose arbour at the side, a couple of shadowed porches and alcoves of greenish, weathered boards. He’d stay clear of places like that, just as he stayed clear of any place where he might find his exits blocked in front of him and some final threat coming hard behind him.
So, he was as safe as he could make himself. That left only the negotiation itself. Wyatt had no doubts about his strength there: he had the Tiffany, Liz Redding wanted it.
What else did she want? He wanted her, but that didn’t mean he was going to act on it. Then he stopped thinking those things and watched a car pull into the small asphalted area in front of the cafй. Liz Redding was driving but it was not the car she’d been driving the day he and Jardine had met her at the motel in Preston. No sticker of any kind in the rear window.
She got out. Plenty of loose material hanging on her slim frame today: baggy pants, a billowing white T-shirt reaching to her knees. She swung the strap of a black purse over one shoulder and strode into the cafй. He went in after her, knowing that he wouldn’t feel any more or less safe five minutes from now.
Twenty-one
Baker trailed Ms Goldman back to her office, and the moment he pulled the ugly vinyl chair up to her desk he blurted it out: ‘You know what he bloody well called me? Stupid, useless, lazy.’
She took some time to respond, his file spread open in front of her. He’d noticed that about her before. Getting her attention was like trying to turn a ship at sea, you had to allow plenty of room and time. Well, she was Legal Aid, the government was paying her, so he wasn’t going to get top priority. If he had plenty of dough, she’d be all over him. Finally she dragged her eyes away from the file, saying ‘Hmmm?’ absently, looking more or less past his right ear, not into his eyes.
‘Useless,’ Baker repeated. ‘He said I was stupid and lazy.’
‘I don’t recall that.’
‘That’s what he said. Shouldn’t be allowed. I mean, fair go, there’s a recession on.’ Baker waved his hand to indicate the masses huddled in the corridors and waiting rooms outside. ‘I bet fifty per cent of the poor bastards who come here haven’t got a job, so why have a go at me?’
‘I remember he asked if you were a loafer,’ the Goldman woman said, twinkling a little.
‘See? Like I said, he called me lazy.’
‘Oh, Terry, that’s just his little joke, a play on words. Your name is Baker, right? Bakers bake loaves, hence loafer.’
Baker wasn’t about to let her mollify him. He felt obscurely ashamed and bitter. ‘What about calling me stupid and useless? Anyhow, what kind of name’s De Lisle? Wog name, not even Australian.’
The lawyer refused to answer that. She was looking into his face now, all right, so he knew he’d hit a nerve. She held his gaze, cool and blank, and he looked away, trying to make it casual, masking it with a cough, a scratch, a realignment of his limbs in the orange chair.
Maybe the Goldman woman was relenting, for she said, ‘It was the luck of the draw that we got him today, rotten luck in fact. He does have a reputation.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Baker muttered. He looked into the distance to show that he didn’t give a shit.
‘But he’s highly regarded and he does his bit, which is more than you can say about a lot of others.’
‘Yeah? How?’ Baker demanded.
She shrugged. ‘Well, he’s a circuit magistrate in a couple of Pacific countries.’
Baker grunted. ‘Let’s hope a shark gets him.’
He added the shark to the fall off a cliff, the shorting light switch igniting built-up gas, the smacking front of a Mack truck, the sort of thing he could set up so it looked like an accident.
Ms Goldman laughed, a genuine laugh, as if they were on the same wavelength when it came to De Lisle and what he deserved. Maybe the guy had squeezed her one day without being asked, Baker thought, gazing at her, thinking he’d like a piece of that himself.
She read it in his eyes and something in her shut down again, her shoulders hunching forward, her forearms on the desk, effectively closing her body off from him. ‘Now, Terry, your defence,’ she said.
‘She had it coming,’ he said promptly.
The Goldman woman took that seriously, jotting something down in her notes. ‘In what way?’
‘Well, I mean, she come up behind me flashing her lights, blasting me with her horn. I mean, how was I to know she didn’t have a carload of skinheads on board, like, you know, an ambush or something?’
‘But, Terry, you stopped the car. You wouldn’t stop if you feared for your life. I have to ask this-were you high at the time? Had you taken anything, alcohol and drugs together perhaps?’
‘Jesus Christ, I thought you were my fucking lawyer.’
‘I’m not fucking anything,’ Ms Goldman said, and it was like a slap across the face to Baker.
He put up his hands. ‘Okay, I apologise. I just want to know how come you’re, like, taking this woman’s side.’
‘Terry, I’m simply doing what the prosecution will do to you in the courtroom.’
Baker considered that for a while. ‘All right, how about we argue self-defence?’
‘But you knocked her to the ground. A chipped tooth, lacerations, a mass of bruises. How do you explain that, except as an overreaction? The kind of overreaction one might expect from someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol, I might add.’
Baker closed his eyes, tightened his fists. A wave of blackness and heat swept through his head, sparks popping behind his eyelids. He fought it down. ‘Fucking lay off about the booze and drugs, will ya? Please? Just lay off?’ His voice was high, pained. ‘Everyone on at me, all the time, I’ve fucking had enough.’
He’d scared her. He didn’t want that. He waited for his heart to stop thumping, then took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, she come up behind me flashing her lights, tooting her horn, so naturally I thought I had a flat, or maybe the boot was open. Then we both stop and she gets out of her car and comes at me, sounding off about the blasted kid should be restrained, whatever. Like I said, self-defence.’
‘It’s you who should have been restrained, Terry.’
He looked at her and it was full of hate. ‘So that’s how it’s going to be, you’re all gunna have these digs at my expense, turning everything I say around. Yeah, thanks a lot.’
‘Terry, did she actually assault you?’
He shifted in his chair. ‘Sort of.’
‘How do you mean? Did she hit you, spit on you, threaten you with anything?’
‘If I’d’ve been closer I would’ve felt the spit coming off her. She was good and toey.’
‘Did she threaten you verbally?’