‘Bathurst?’ Megan said when I phoned her. ‘Never been there. Didn’t they have some trouble about water a while back?’
‘Yeah, I think they held a vote on whether to recycle sewage.’
‘How did it go?’
‘I think the nos won it.’
‘That’d be right. Well, take care, Cliff. How long’ll you be away?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘That’d be right, too. Should be nice out there at this time of year. Bit bracing perhaps. Be sure to take all your pills with you.’
~ * ~
5
Town planners and social engineers lament that our population is concentrated in the capital cities of each state. They say the maximum functional size of a city is about two million and it’s crazy that Sydney has five million plus people while Bathurst, only a couple of hundred kilometres away, has barely thirty thousand. It’s different in America and better, they say, where regional cities help to spread the population out. They’re probably right but it’s a bit late now to make that change.
I was looking forward to the drive. Like most Sydneysiders, I don’t want to live west of the Blue Mountains, but I like to visit. It can be cold out there so I packed some warm clothes in a bag, a bottle of Haig scotch and a carton of Camel cigarettes. I’d stopped smoking longer ago than I could remember, but, in my experience, many prisoners still smoked and wanted the hardest hit they could get. Camels were about the only unfiltered cigarettes easily available. Some gaols will allow you to take things in to prisoners, some won’t.
I had other things—my mobile, a laptop and a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. No Uzi, no shotgun. I hadn’t fired the .38 since I’d been relicensed to carry it and I didn’t want to start now, but Jobe Tanner had a formidable reputation. Even if Braithwaite was right and Tanner had ways to learn about Twizell’s visitors, those networks—of prisoners, ex-prisoners and gaol staff—tend to be slow, and I hoped to be in and out before he got wind of me.
Four hundred kilometres isn’t a long round trip, but my Falcon had a lot on the clock already. Besides, there’d been times when I’d set off expecting to be back in two days and had been away for a month. I had the car thoroughly checked over. I had a worn tyre and an air filter replaced and considered whether to charge them to Wakefield. It depended on how things panned out. He was certainly up for the cost of the petrol.
~ * ~
The car behaved itself and the traffic cooperated so that I made good time on the Great Western Highway out of the Sydney basin and over the Blue Mountains. It got colder, but that works for an old engine. I stopped for lunch in Katoomba at the Blue Moon cafe, that carried memories— some good, some bad—and pushed on, listening to a couple of Lead Belly CDs I’d bought cheap at a garage sale in my street. eBay has cut the legs out from under garage sales and this one had been a flop as they mostly are now, but there was a good selection of CDs and DVDs and I bought some, promising myself I’d find time to listen and watch.
Lead Belly sang: There’s a man goin’ round takin’ names and I couldn’t help thinking that’s what I did a lot of the time. The road had some rough spots and the thumping six-string guitar music seemed appropriate, especially as Huddie Ledbetter had spent a good part of his life in prison.
I rolled into Bathurst in the early afternoon expecting that nothing much would have changed since my last visit maybe ten years before, and I was right. Bathurst was created by the gold rushes of the 1850s. Like Bendigo and Ballarat, it has expanded, but again, like them, with its solid, Victorian centre, it seems to have resisted fundamental change. I booked into the first central motel I spotted and Wakefield’s bill went up a serious notch.
Strictly speaking, a private detective arriving in a country town would be wise to check in with the local police. But there are times to do this and times not to. Braithwaite had warned me that the Tanners kept an eye on Twizell and it was more than possible that the Bathurst police did the same. That’s not to say that the two interests intersected, but they might. The police and the crims need each other the way fleas need a host and I wasn’t keen to advertise my presence any more than necessary.
I made sure the shower, television and radio worked, tested the bed and checked the mini-bar, a feature of Australian motels unknown in the rest of the world. The trick to countering the depressive sameness of motel rooms—the bland decor, the plastic fittings—is to make it as untidy as possible by scattering your belongings around, especially books, newspapers and magazines. Within a few minutes I had the bed rumpled, shirts hung over the backs of chairs and a table carrying a paper open at the crossword and a bookmarked copy of Lord Jim. I was going back to the old guys.