Read Online Beware of the Dog by Peter Corris - Free Book Online Page B

left.’
    â€˜Shit.’ The phone buzzed with static.
    â€˜Cliff! Cliff! What’s all that? Are you using a car phone?’
    â€˜Yes. How’s Wilberforce?’
    â€˜Weak, in and out of it. But they say he’ll pull through. Seems to be a tough old bird. It’s a weird family, but I suppose you know that.’
    â€˜No, I know bugger-all about them. This whole thing has just sort of blown up around me. I can tell you one thing, Wilberforce hired me to find his daughter.’
    â€˜You don’t say. Big news. They found the cheque book. They’re not totally stupid. But finding a cheque stub made out to you for a grand hasn’t exactly helped you so far, Cliff.’
    â€˜Look, love, I just can’t be of any use right now. If I could talk to Wilberforce …’
    I let it hang there. She didn’t respond. We both knew that there was no way to bring that off. I could feel her hostility and anger. Telephones don’t facilitate calm and understanding.
    â€˜That means you
have
got some ideas. Please, Cliff, let me come and see you. We can talk …’
    â€˜No, Glen. Give me a couple of days.’ 
    â€˜To do what, where, for Christ’s sake? Do you know who I feel like? Who I sympathise with?’ 
    â€˜Tell me.’
    â€˜Your poor starving fucking cat!’
    She hung up. I clutched the dead handset and looked out through the windscreen at the highway. I could pull out onto it and head back to the city. Talk to Glen, get into bed with her. Do a deal with Detective Inspector somebody-or-other in the morning. Tell them what little I knew. Get myself side-lined. I couldn’t do it. 
    I started the engine and headed for the mountains. Every kilometre produced a new rationalisation and justification. No one could talk to Wilberforce until he was better—therefore, the photograph wasn’t any use. Paula had either one round in the .38 or none. If none, fine; if one, she might not even know about it. If she did know she’d probably think long and hard about using it. Wouldn’t she?
    I remember seeing a mini-series in which Michael York played a German doctor who’d been forced to do bad things by the Nazis. He’d got to Australia illegally and was working in a Gippsland timber camp. The script forced him into utterances like, ‘Der air is like vine.’ By Blackheath the mountain air was like wine all right, but very cold wine. There was an almost full moon, no clouds and a strong chilly wind. I stopped for a piss in a public toilet and the wind cut straight through my jacket and shirt. It seemed like a long time since I’d been out of the city and, despite my problems, it was exhilarating to feelthe mountains all around, with more trees than houses and the sky huge and clear overhead.
    There was almost no traffic on the road on the rest of the drive up to Mount Victoria. I shut down the heater because it made me drowsy. I turned off the radio as well and denied myself the swig on the whisky I would have welcomed. This was no holiday, no pleasure jaunt. Unless I was smart and careful I’d be spotted immediately, transported to Sydney and subjected to that peculiar scepticism that cops acquire through their mother’s milk or start learning from their first day on the job.
    Mount Victoria was still and quiet. The last train had left and the lights were out in the pub and the couple of large guest houses on the edge of the town. The residents were inside around their fires and potbelly stoves and TV sets. The blue light outside the nice old double-fronted police station was glowing but the building was in darkness. I rolled on through and took the Mount York Road. All street lighting ceased after two more right turns and then I was on the thin, rutted track called Salisbury Road that ran past the Lamberte holding.
    A square block of four acres gives you a frontage of roughly two hundred yards—I retained that