Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel (2 page)

‘Yeah, and the wolf ’s slinking towards the door.’

‘I’ve had you in mind. Did some web research. You can work as a PEA in the ACT without a licence. At least for now. How would you feel about Canberra?’

‘Much the same as I’d feel about Hobart.’

‘You know the solution. Sell the crumbling Glebe fortress to some IT couple with money coming out their arseholes. Buy a townhouse in Coogee. Learn to surf.’

‘I was surfing when I was ten years old.’

‘How often since then?’

‘Not often.’

‘There you go, learn to surf again. Or how about bush-walking? You could meet up with Bob Carr.’

‘Yesterday’s man. What does the new bloke do when he takes off his suit?’

‘No idea. But you have to find something that you want to do, that you’re good at and will bring in a buck.’

‘I know. Thanks, Frank. I’ll think about it.’

But I didn’t have to think about it because two days later Lily was murdered.

2

T
he sequence of events went like this: at 10.30 am I got a telephone call.

‘Mr Cliff Hardy?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is Detective Constable Farrow of the Northern Crimes Unit. Ms Lillian Truscott had your name in her passport as the person to contact in the event of an accident.’

That was news to me. ‘She’s had an accident?’

‘I’m sorry to tell you, sir, that Ms Truscott is dead.’

I felt the room spin and I had to lean against the wall. I gripped the phone so hard my knuckles cracked. Lily had always been a wild driver and inclined to take risks with the breathalyser. ‘A car accident?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What then? When?’

Constable Farrow didn’t answer and I could hear muted mutterings as she shielded the phone. Then her voice came through, shakily but clear. ‘Ms Truscott’s body has been taken to the mortuary in Glebe. We’d be obliged if you could identify her.’ Police-person Farrow sounded about twenty.

‘How did she die?’

‘Would you like a police car to pick you up, sir?’

‘Listen, Constable, I was in the army and I’ve been a private investigator for longer than you’ve been alive. I’ve been around death. How did she fucking die?’

Maybe Farrow was twenty-five. Her tone hardened. ‘Detective Colin Williams will meet you at the mortuary in half an hour. Thank you, Mr Hardy.’

It was just down the road. I didn’t know the morgue was in Glebe when I moved there. It’s an odd fact, but not many Sydney people know where it is—probably don’t want to know. I was there in fifteen minutes with grief and anger raging. I parked in a no-standing zone and walked across to where a man in a suit stood near the entrance to the building. He was youngish and fit-looking with a face arranged for compassion. Maybe. He put out his hand.

‘Mr Hardy?’

I ignored the hand. ‘You Williams?’

He was young but he’d been in the job long enough not to take any shit. The hand dropped and the body straightened. ‘DS Williams, yes.’

‘How was she killed?’

I was older, greyer, unshaven, dressed sloppily, driving a beat-up car, but he was bright or experienced enough to know an angry and potentially violent man when he saw one. And he wasn’t going to give any more ground than he had to. He turned away and took a step towards the entrance.

Almost over his shoulder he said, ‘She was murdered. Come with me, please.’

I followed him through the heavy street doors, past a desk where he flashed his credentials and down corridors with vinyl flooring and fluorescent lights. Let’s go artificial when we’re dealing with the essential reality of death. I’d been here before and knew it wasn’t anything like on TV, where they slot the dead into freezers and people stand around in green scrubs and white hats waiting to perform autopsies and mutter into microphones in hushed, concerned tones. Sydney doesn’t have enough suspicious deaths to justify the dramatics.

Williams led me to a small, plain, antiseptic room of the sort you might go to for a blood test. A body, covered by a sheet, lay on a trolley.

‘Show me,’ I said.

An attendant in white overalls was standing nearby and Williams gave him a nod. He went to the trolley and pulled back the plastic sheet.

It was Lily and it wasn’t Lily. The same features, hair, throat, lines and the asymmetries that make up a face. But no living face is that still, showing that the life current has been turned off. I’d seen corpses embalmed and made ready for the ground or the flames, and she didn’t have that frozen, painted look. In a strange way that difference helped to give me some distance at a moment when I needed it. I nodded at Williams and stepped back.

We retraced our steps until we were outside the building again. I hadn’t noticed the cold when I left my house in a shirt and jeans but I did now. I shivered as the wind hit me. Williams turned his back to the wind and lit a cigarette. He held out the packet to me and I was tempted but refused.

He took a few deep draws, exhaled and the wind carried the smoke away. ‘We have to talk,’ he said. ‘This is your turf, Hardy. Where?’

I told him to follow me and I drove to the coffee place in Glebe Point Road next to where the Valhalla Cinema used to be. A lot of places in Glebe used to be where they aren’t anymore. Too many. I found a parking spot in Hereford Street, went inside and ordered a long black. Williams must have parked well away because he took ten minutes to arrive and looked pissed off. Maybe because I hadn’t ordered him a coffee. The place was thinly populated and I picked a corner furthest from the other patrons. Williams ordered at the counter and sat down. We didn’t speak until the coffees arrived, mine only thirty seconds before his. Service can be slow but cops have a way of speeding it up and a savvy Glebe coffee bar worker can usually spot a cop.

Williams flipped open his notebook. ‘Ms Truscott was found in her home at eight am this morning by a woman who’d come to clean. She was in her bed in an upstairs room. She’d been shot in the temple at close range.’

Lily’s bedroom: upstairs like mine, sparsely furnished and untidy like mine—books by the bed, clothes on chairs, coffee mugs, baby oil, tissues … I put two spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, stirred it and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak; the picture in my head was too stark, too wrong.

Williams sipped his flat white and then finished it in a couple of gulps, as if he needed the fuel for what he had to do. He drew in a deep breath. ‘I’m going to have to get a statement from you about your relationship with Ms Truscott, about where you’ve been over the past twenty-four hours, and I have to take possession of the pistol registered to you as a private investigator but that you are no longer entitled to use or possess.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

It jolted him. ‘Just okay?’

I drank some coffee and found it bitter despite the sugar. ‘No, it’s not okay. As of now nothing in the fucking world is okay, but I’ll play along until you piss me off so much that I’ll do something everybody will regret—you, me, my lawyer, everybody except the media. Understand?’

He didn’t respond.

‘Enjoying this, are you?’ I said.

It was just a throwaway, letting-off-steam remark, but his reaction was strange, as if he’d been seriously challenged. He recovered quickly, though.

‘I was told you were difficult,’ he said.

The Glebe police station was only two blocks away. Williams used his mobile to get the loan of a room and recording equipment and we walked there. He lit a cigarette as soon as he closed the phone. I was glad he didn’t offer me one because I might have weakened. On the walk I scarcely heard the traffic or felt the pavement under my feet. I was numb, dead to sensation. Williams had to haul me back before I stepped out against a red light into the path of a bus.

The adrenalin rush from the near-miss got my brain working again. Two women I’d loved had died early—my ex-wife Cyn of cancer, and Glen Withers, who had virtually suicided. But I hadn’t been emotionally close to either of them at the time they died. This was emotionally different. I found myself calculating how long it had been since Lily and I had last made love.

Williams tugged at my arm. ‘First you nearly walk into a bus, then you go catatonic. Come on.’

We crossed the road and waited for the light to cross again. I was starting to take things in. Williams was older than he looked and not a bad guy. He shot me a couple of concerned looks. He didn’t swagger the way some cops do, and he didn’t expect people to step out of his way. He paused to stub his cigarette on the rim of a bin and drop it in.

‘You all right, Mr Hardy?’ he said. ‘You look cold. You should have put on a jacket.’

‘I’m all right. Let’s get this over with.’

I’ve been in the Glebe police station quite a few times, never for drinks and nibbles. It’s been tarted up more than once over the years, but something of its essence always comes back—a look, smell and feel that speak of long hours, tiredness, loss, anger, frustration and takeaway food.

Williams spoke to the woman at the desk and we were shown up a set of stairs to an interview room.

‘Water?’ Williams said.

I nodded. He went out and came back with two plastic cups. He’d done this before and more times than me: he set up the video, adjusted the focus and the angle and we got down to it.

‘Detective Sergeant Colin Williams, Northern Crimes Unit, card number W781, interviewing Mr Cliff Hardy at Glebe police station.’ He glanced at his watch and announced the time and date.

I identified myself, said I’d waived the right to have a solicitor present, and that I’d known Lillian Truscott for a little over two years. I said that we didn’t live together but spent a lot of time in each other’s company. I said that we’d taken a couple of short holidays together—to Byron Bay and North Queensland—and that I’d last seen her three nights before when she’d stayed at my place. I said that I’d spent time in my Newtown office in the afternoon of the previous day, had then driven home and from there walked to the Toxteth Hotel where I’d had a few drinks and played pool with my regular pool partner, Daphne Rowley. I went home, heated up some leftovers, watched television, read a book and went to bed.

Williams was watching me and listening intently. He was confident that the equipment was working. I kept my head up and didn’t fidget.

I said, ‘This morning I read the paper, did the crossword, drank coffee and then Constable Farrow called me. Following that, I met DS Williams at the Glebe mortuary.’

I sipped some water and stopped talking.

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s my statement. Oh, the pistol’s at home under lock and key. You can come by and collect it.’

‘I will, but first I’d like to ask you some questions.’

‘Ask. I’ll consider whether to answer.’

‘You’ve said when you last saw Ms Truscott. When did you last contact her?’

‘The night before last. We spoke on the phone.’

‘Planning to meet when?’

‘No plan, we played it by ear.’

‘It seems a very loose relationship.’

‘Think what you like.’

‘Ms Truscott was a journalist. Do you know what she was working on?’

‘Financial stories.’

‘Specifically?’

‘I don’t know. You’ll have to check her computer, if it’s still there.’

‘Do you have any reason to think it’s not?’

My patience was running out. ‘Use your head.’

‘Speaking of finance, you’ve been barred as a private investigator. How are you making a living?’

I drank some more water and sucked in a sour breath. ‘I’m not. I’m living on savings and trying to call in some unpaid debts.’

‘Did you and Ms Truscott ever quarrel?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about?’

‘She thought Anthony Mundine had a future. I wasn’t so sure.’

I made a cutting motion and folded my arms. Williams turned off the video.

‘That doesn’t leave the best impression,’ he said.

‘I don’t give a shit. I’ll talk to you off the record if you’ll answer some questions for me.’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

I stood up. ‘That’s it then. Pop your cassette and we’ll get the gun. That’s if I can remember where it is.’

‘You’d better.’

I let him have the last word. He had the body language of a man preoccupied with something other than what he was doing. Two preoccupied men together.

3

W
illiams followed me in his red Camry. He didn’t look too impressed with my house. Most don’t, unless they’re thinking
potential
. I gave him the .38 and he put it in a paper bag. Contrary to what people see on television, evidence bags are not made out of plastic. This isn’t environmentalism, just a matter of reducing the risk of contamination.

As he was leaving, Williams said, ‘Why did you waive the right to a lawyer?’

‘I’ve caused mine enough trouble lately and run up more than enough expense for myself. I’ll swim along solo until I get out of my depth.’

‘You’re not what I expected.’

‘What did you expect?’

With his hand on the front gate, he allowed himself a thin smile. ‘I said I wouldn’t answer any questions. I hope you’re not going to mount some sort of vigilante action on this, Mr Hardy.’

‘No chance of that, if you catch and convict the person responsible.’

‘We’ll do our best. We may need your … further help.’ He handed me his card.

‘Sergeant, that’s a two-way street.’

Later that day Tony Truscott, Lily’s boxing brother, who was a good deal younger than her, rang me.

‘Cliff, I just got back from Fiji and got the message on my phone. Jesus, how could this happen?’

‘I don’t know, Tony. They were on to me because she’d put my name in her passport as the one to contact, you being out of the country so often and all that.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Jesus, Lily …’

‘I identified her and I gave a statement to the cops. What’re they asking you to do?’

‘Nothing. They say they’re doing a fucking autopsy.

Jesus …’ ‘That’s standard, mate. All I know is that she was shot at close range, probably when she was asleep. It doesn’t help, but … you know.’

‘I dunno what to do.’