‘Are you finding Hector useful?’
‘He will be when we need to launder the money.’
‘What if I bring the police along?’
‘We’d know.’
‘What if I do nothing?’
‘If that happens, your girlfriend’ll never write her book. I wouldn’t hurt her but I guarantee you every note she’s taken, every tape she’s recorded, every photo, will go up in smoke and it’ll be all your fault. Happy to live with that? This is a clean operation, Hardy. Win, win all around.’
‘With a lot of trust involved.’
‘Some, yes.’
‘I want a safeguard. Is Hector listening to this?’
‘You bet he is. Like what?’
‘I’ll tell you when we get to where we’re going.’
Again there was a pause before he replied. ‘You’re a tricky bastard, Hardy.’
‘Dealing with people like you I have to be.’
His short laugh was harsh. ‘Okay, go north, cross the bridge over the channel and you’ll see us. One hour.’
That made time tight. I collected a few things and told Marisha what was happening in bare outline. She took it in her stride.
‘Ring Hector,’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Just do it. He’s good at all this. Hasn’t put a foot wrong so far.’
She tried.
‘Nothing.’
I tried the number she’d given me for Templeton but there was no answer.
‘Throwaway phones,’ I said.
‘As you expected.’
‘Yeah. Templeton’d be able to organise cheap pay-as-you-go phones under false IDs. He’d have had the training.’
‘But?’
‘He will, I hope.’
Her hard shell seemed to crack. She put her arms around me and pressed close against me. ‘You’re not doing this for me, are you?’
I’d come this far and I wanted to see it through. I told her the truth—that I was doing it for me.
~ * ~
24
In the car I reached into my pocket for my keys and to check that I had my phone and found that Marisha had slipped a miniature tape recorder in there. Always working, Marisha. The phone rang.
‘On the way, Hardy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t fuck up.’
I did as I was instructed, crossed the North Channel and saw a white SUV stopped at the side of the road. It was pulling a trailer carrying a Bobcat earth mover. I pulled up fifty metres behind it. Templeton stepped out just long enough for me to identify him and then the SUV, a Mitsubishi Triton, I now saw, moved off. Traffic was light and we edged at just a notch below the speed limit. I drew up close enough a couple of times to be sure there were three men in the car. The last thing I wanted to see was Clem with his bolt-cutters. But somehow I thought the delicacy of this operation would rule Clem out.
Following the Bobcat that swayed a bit on the trailer wasn’t a comfortable feeling. I’m not particularly claustrophobic, but I didn’t much like the idea of going down into a cave that had proved unstable and had to be dug out. It’s not unusual when I faced unpleasant situations that something I’ve read pops into my mind. Driving along I recalled Henry Lawson’s story ‘His Father’s Mate’, in which a boy falls into a shaft when a windlass breaks. The story touched me when I read it as a schoolkid and the memory wasn’t welcome now.
We passed Nelson Bay and other bijou Central Coast playgrounds and pushed north to a stretch where the road moved away from the coast. Templeton signalled and we turned off the highway down a secondary and through some heavy bush that was almost like rainforest. It couldn’t have been far from the coast but it felt more like the Blue Mountains, with tall trees and outcrops of weathered rock. Well, Australia’s like that, with patches of mini-climate and accompanying vegetation.
The paved road ended abruptly and poorly graded gravel took over. A sharp turn, which the Mitsubishi and trailer negotiated carefully, and we were on a bush track that only ran for a hundred metres before there was a gate.
Again, I pulled up short of the others. I thought of taking the .38 out of its compartment but changed my mind. I had another idea. I watched while Hector Tanner, looking not quite like himself out of his suit and in casual clothes, climbed down, glanced briefly back at me and opened the gate. A battered sign said private property keep out, but from the length of the grass on the track it didn’t look as though anyone had been there in quite a while.
Through a break in the trees I saw what looked like an iron roof with afternoon sun glinting on it, but we swung off on a still rougher track and climbed a steep slope. We stopped where a clearing, which the bush was rapidly reclaiming, had been hacked out. I sat in the car and waited for them to come to me. I wanted to see exactly how they moved. You can tell a lot from that.