Open File Read online

  ‘That’s all? He didn’t mention a country or a place?’

  ‘No, that was it. I thought it was just him sounding off. I didn’t even remember it when that dumb policewoman came along. Did I screw things up?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. There’s another thing. At Justin’s school I was told that he was friendly with someone named Pierre Fontaine. D’you know anything about him?’

  Her eyes opened wide and she dropped the cigarette on the glass-topped table. ‘Shit!’ She picked it up quickly and stubbed it out half smoked in the ashtray.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I won’t say, just as I won’t tell anybody else what you’re telling me. Them’s the rules.’

  ‘You must tell the person who’s paying you.’ She wasn’t dumb.

  ‘Well, there I use my discretion.’

  ‘Did Ronny say anything about Pierre?’

  ‘I hadn’t even heard the name until this morning at the school. Should I talk to Ronny about him?’

  She shook her head and the ponytail swung. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Who is he? Why were you so surprised to hear the name?’

  ‘I was surprised that anyone would say that Just knew him. That guy, Pierre, was done for drugs. He’s the one that supplied Ronny with some hash that got him kicked out of Bryce. Justin hated drugs, he was a real pain in the arse about it.’ She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and held it up. ‘He hated smoking and he didn’t drink, ever. I can’t believe he had anything to do with Pierre.’

  ‘Did you have anything to do with him, Sarah?’

  She stood up and went to the louvre windows to check on her mother. ‘Sure, I scored some grass off him a couple of times.’

  ‘I have to talk to him to find out what went on between him and Justin. It might help me to trace your brother, although it’s worrying. D’you know where I can find him?’

  She sat down. ‘Of course I do. He got caught supplying heroin to some kids. He’s in gaol.’

  I sat back and let that sink in while Sarah smoked and looked less cooperative.

  ‘I can understand why Pierre Fontaine’s name didn’t come up when you and Justin’s friends talked to the police,’ I said.

  She brushed that off with a wave of the cigarette hand. ‘Look, Just didn’t really have any friends. And I told you, the cops asked dumb questions. They didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.’

  ‘How long after Justin went missing did Fontaine get caught?’

  Sarah finished her cigarette and gave some thought to her answer. ‘If you go to see Pierre you won’t tell him I talked about him, will you? I mean, he won’t be in gaol forever and he’s a bad dude.’

  ‘Did I tell you who told me about Fontaine? No. The same goes for you. Like I won’t tell your mother you smoke grass.’

  She laughed. ‘She knows, she just doesn’t want to know she knows. All right, let me think. The police got him about a year ago, so it was about a year after Just . . .’

  ‘Went missing.’

  She nodded.

  I stood. ‘Thanks, Sarah. You’ve been a big help.’

  She stood as well and looked surprised to find herself on her feet, being polite. ‘Have I? I haven’t heard that said before by anyone around here.’

  ‘Give your mother a break. She’s holding in a lot of grief and anger. People like her, conventional people, find all this sort of stuff very confusing.’

  ‘You’re not conventional, are you, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘I can’t afford to be.’

  ‘And I don’t want to be.’

  ‘One more thing—Justin went on a school excursion to Bangara near the end of the year and something there seemed to affect him. Does Bangara mean anything to you?’

  ‘Bangara? Yeah, that’s where some fucking Hampshire hero came from. Great-grandfather or something. He got killed in the First World War.’

  I thanked her again and asked her to thank her mother. She said she would and I believed her. She didn’t exactly escort me out, but she made more or less polite gestures along those lines. I gave her a goodbye nod in the passage and she smiled and raised a hand almost shyly, like a schoolgirl.

  I didn’t take any notes while talking to Sarah, not wanting to put her off, but I scribbled a few things down back in the car. Things to be done, and in this kind of investigation the more the better. I’d had enough of Pittwater and environs and was glad to be heading back to the city. I played some more Joni Mitchell but I was almost at the Spit Bridge before I realised that thinking about the Hampshire case had blotted out every word and note.

  I drove to Rose Bay, parked as close as I could to the apartments where Hampshire was staying and asked for him at the service desk. He was out, but at least he was still staying there. I left a message for him to ring me. Back in my office, I phoned Gunnarson.

  ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that the dragon lady regards you as competent.’

  ‘I’m thrilled. Did you get anywhere?’

  ‘I might have, but I’m going to need some help.’

  He sighed. ‘Why is there never any end to what you blokes want?’

  ‘We never sleep.’

  I told him in outline about Pierre Fontaine and his possible place in the scheme of things. He swore and condemned all people who held back information from the police. I sympathised.

  ‘He’s in gaol somewhere. I don’t know where and I don’t know for how long. Be a big help if you could get me in to see him.’

  ‘Is that all? Shit, Hardy, haven’t you heard of lawyers, prisoners’ rights, civil liberties . . . ?’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve heard of missing person case files closed.’

  He wasn’t going to give in too easily. ‘How about Hampshire, the skinflint dad? Are you still in touch?’

  I didn’t exactly lie. ‘Yes, but only by phone. He’s cagey.’

  ‘He fucking should be. All right, Hardy, leave it with me and I’ll get back to you. It could take a while to set up. If I can do it, and I’m not saying I can, you’ll owe me a big favour. Some serious cooperation with any useful developments might help to square it.’

  My next stop was the Fisher Library at the university. Sure enough, it held a copy of the Brigadier-General’s Monumental Art of Australia. They tell me some self-publishers scatter their books like confetti. This one was a professionally produced effort, though, in a nice typeface with a ton of photos. The text was what you’d call reverent. No index, so I had to leaf through. I found the Bangara memorial arch on page 145. A big, ugly structure, it had been unveiled by the mothers of dead soldiers on Empire Day, 24 May 1924. The arch bore the names of 58 dead and 299 returned AIF members.

  Things were coming together. Justin Hampshire knew about the arch and that his great-grandfather’s name should be on it. He got his chance to look at it and his behaviour changed after that. Then he went to Canberra to look at the war memorial there. ‘Fuck the army’, he’d said subsequently. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, but I needed confirmation. I felt sure I could find out from some official about the names on the Canberra memorial, but I didn’t know a soul in Bangara. Gunnarson had said it’d take time to set up a meeting with the Frenchman. Hampshire had said he had investments; I’d find out tomorrow whether his cheque had cleared. If it had, I’d go to Bangara where Justin Hampshire had learned something that had changed him. I needed to know what it was. Perhaps it had drawn him back there. If the cheque hadn’t cleared I still wanted to know, but I’d give serious thought to dobbing Hampshire in for his child support arrears.

  6

  ‘What you like about your crappy so-called profession is being able to piss off whenever it suits you.’

  That was my ex-wife Cyn’s assessment of my attraction to my job and I couldn’t say that she was entirely wrong. There were other things—the interesting characters, the edginess, the satisfaction of bringing something to a conclusion—but they wouldn’t have cut any ice with Cyn even if I’d sp
oken about them. A lot of the time we weren’t on speaking terms. An architect, she’d blotted me out with cigarette smoke and scale drawings. Well, she had her North Shore stay-at-home advertising executive now, and her two kids, and I could still piss off.

  In the morning I pulled out one of my collection of tattered road maps and plotted the route. Hadn’t been down that way in years. It was a long run but what the hell. With luck I’d get in a swim and a bodysurf. I filled the Falcon’s tank, checked the oil and water and cleaned the windscreen and the back window that had gathered dust on the way back from Pittwater. I also put air in the tyres and the spare. Never let it be said that Hardy went unprepared. But the Smith & Wesson .38 stayed in the house. It wasn’t that kind of a trip, or at least I hoped not.

  The weather was warm but the sky was iffy, with dark clouds building and then dissipating as the wind shifted around. I packed my usual summer travelling gear—a change of shirt and socks, a linen jacket, toiletries and shaving stuff, a towel, swimmers and thongs. Robert Hughes for company at night, unless something else turned up. I had a clutch of cassettes taken from the shelf at random, and a camera.

  Even bypassing Wollongong on the freeway, it was a slow run through Kiama and Nowra. There was enough of the summer left over for holiday-makers and home-goers to still be using the highway. The traffic thinned out after Ulladulla, and the sky cleared as a strong easterly pushed the threatening clouds inland. I made Bangara by midafternoon and booked into yet another motel. What was the title of that Frank Zappa album—200 Motels? Tell me about it.

  The memorial was easy to find. It formed the entrance to a large park a block back from the beach. The names of the serving soldiers were on the side away from the water, protecting them from the effects of salty winds and leaving them fairly well preserved after sixty-plus years. Graffitists and vandals had done a certain amount of damage to the edifice but not to the lists of names. Even the antisocial seem to have some respect for names etched in stone. It didn’t take long for me to find what Justin had found—the name Hampshire did not appear among the fallen or the returned. I took a couple of photographs.

  I was a bit tired after the drive so I sat on a bench in the park under the shade of a tree I couldn’t identify and thought about this discovery, or non-discovery. The boy had been brought up to venerate a fallen hero antecedent and found he’d been sold a lie. Given what I’d learned about how locked in to the military traditions he’d been, I could imagine the impact on him. But why didn’t he say anything about it to anyone—his sister, his mother, his absent father? Shame perhaps, or anger?

  The wind gusted and leaves gathered around my feet and at the base of the arch. The sky clouded over. I wondered whether Justin had sat here before rejoining his party and remaining strangely silent on the return trip, so that even Simmons, not the most sensitive observer, had noticed it.

  Bangara had the best south coast features—an estuary formed by Wilson’s Creek, a back beach and a surf beach. The town swells in the holiday period and settles back into sleepiness for the rest of the year. Keen surfers come for the waves at off-season times and there is a certain amount of game fishing for those who can’t afford the prices further south at Bermagui, where Zane Grey fished in the 30s and Lee Marvin did more recently. I cherished the memory of a photo of Marvin, with his trademark grin, carrying a crate of Great Western champagne down to the boat. The only way to fish.

  I strolled along the foreshore and one look cured me of a wish to surf. Under the onshore wind the waves were rolling in as if they intended to build one upon another, collapse and wipe out the beach. Of course they didn’t, but they’d throw a bodysurfer around like a cork and there was no fun in that. A swim from the sandy banks of Wilson’s Creek looked like the best bet. The surf club building was the usual sturdy bricks and mortar, glass and aluminium structure with cement surrounds. I had Paul Hampshire’s photograph of his missing son in my shirt pocket and thought I’d try it on the surfing community. A way to check whether Justin had returned to the scene of his epiphany—a long shot.

  Half a dozen people were hanging around the club, four men and two women. They were waxing down boards, smoking, chatting and looking disgruntled at the state of the water. I approached with the photograph and my credentials. Surfers who can’t surf get bored easily and my arrival at least provided them with some interest. They were in their twenties, with one of the women, wearing a lifesaver’s cap and badge on her swimsuit, looking slightly older than the rest. I sympathised about the waves and told them my business, showing the photograph.

  ‘Surfer, was he?’ one of the men asked.

  ‘Yeah, good one apparently.’

  ‘Haven’t seen him around here.’

  The others looked at the photograph and shook their heads.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind, though,’ one of the women said.

  The older one, the lifesaver, called her a slut in a good-natured way. The first man I’d dealt with seemed reluctant to leave it at that and asked for the name. I told him and one of the others spoke up.

  ‘There’s a few of them in the graveyard. I do some gardening up there part-time and I’ve seen the headstones. Don’t know of any around by that name now, but.’

  I asked for directions to the graveyard and was told it was across from the park. Perhaps Justin had spent a little more time looking around after all. I thanked them and drove about until I found the entrance. The graveyard was shielded by a long stand of tall trees that were now casting deep shadows across the headstones. A sign said it closed at sunset. I had about an hour.

  Country graveyards tend to be overgrown, but this one was reasonably well cared for, with the grass kept under control and the iron railings showing signs of maintenance. Like the memorial arch, the place was partially protected from the salt-laden winds, but time had taken its toll of the inscriptions. Wandering in graveyards isn’t my favourite occupation but it has a certain interest. Poignant messages catch your eye, with lives tragically abbreviated by disease and drowning, intermingled with encouragingly long ones. As always, the women lived longer than the men.

  I found several Hampshires, husbands and wives and children, but they all dated back to the nineteenth century or the early twentieth at the latest. I took a few photographs for no good reason other than to show Paul Hampshire I’d been on the job. He just might be interested, although it was the absence of an inscription on the memorial that should really interest him.

  A longish day, kilometres covered and things learned. Call it satisfactory. I went back to the motel, showered and walked into the township to find somewhere to eat. Choices were few, and a bistro attached to the pub seemed the best bet. I ordered a steak and salad, bought a small carafe of red and settled down in a sheltered part of the beer garden to get mellow. The first glass went down slowly and well and I poured another.

  ‘Hello.’

  I looked up from the pouring to see the woman from the surf club—the slightly older lifesaver. She was carrying a tray with my steak, a napkin, cutlery and salt and pepper shakers on it. I half rose, the way you do, and helped her lay out the fixings.

  ‘You’re supposed to get the cutlery and the napkin yourself but I made an exception in your case.’

  I raised my glass. ‘Thanks. Why?’

  ‘I’m a Hampshire,’ she said, ‘but I’m from a bit of the family that changed its name quite a while back. We’re Petersens now—that’s with three e’s—but my great-grandad was a Hampshire.’

  ‘My name’s Cliff Hardy. I’d like to talk to you. You are . . . ?’

  She pointed to my plate. ‘Better eat while it’s hot. I’m Kathy Petersen. Gotta get back to work.’

  ‘When you finish?’

  ‘Sure, why not. Kitchen closes at nine thirty.’

  She walked off with her tray. She was tall and lean, sharp-featured, with a confident style. She wore loose trousers and sneakers and a knee-length blue smock with white piping. Her dark hair was cut short. Studs in both
ears; no rings.

  The steak was fair, the chips good and the salad very good—gave it seven out of ten overall. It was just after eight o’clock so I had time to kill. I ate slowly and went very quietly with the wine. I knew I was no oil painting, with grey creeping into my hair, an obviously broken nose and faint scar tissue over the eyebrows from my boxing days. I hadn’t shaved since early morning and the stubble wasn’t the careful designer kind, it was just stubble. But she’d seemed interested.

  As I’d hoped she would, she came back to collect plates from the few other diners and got to me last.

  ‘How was it?’

  ‘Pretty good.’

  ‘The pub stays open till eleven. I’ll meet you in the lounge bar.’

  ‘Right. What do you drink, Kathy?’

  She laughed. ‘Guess.’

  ‘Brandy and coke.’

  ‘Not bad. Brandy and dry.’

  I had her drink ready, and a scotch and soda for me, when she arrived. She’d changed into low heels and wore a red blouse that suited her colouring.

  ‘Well, a detective, eh? Thanks for the drink, I need it after a shift, even though we’re not busy.’

  We lifted our glasses. ‘So you save lives and serve food. Pretty useful.’

  She laughed. ‘And do relief teaching.’

  ‘Also useful.’

  ‘And you find missing people.’

  ‘Sometimes. Having trouble with this one because it’s a couple of years old.’

  Without going into too much detail, I told her a bit about the Hampshire case and its difficulties. She listened as she drank, not quickly, not slowly.

  ‘You’ll find a couple of Petersens on that arch from World War II and Korea,’ she said. ‘Great-uncles of mine and a cousin, I think.’

  ‘Do you know why your family name was changed? Or who did it?’

  ‘I knew you were going to ask that. Afraid I don’t. It was a few generations ago, as I said. Some sort of family scandal, I seem to remember, but I don’t have the details.’