Cooee (31 page)

‘How could I know? There was always plenty of money. Heaps of money.'

‘I imagine there was,' he said, dryly.

‘He told me — well, I told you what he told me. Consultancies, investment, properties. But you're saying there were illegal activities.'

‘We don't know the full extent. We suspect him of involvement in a number of illegal activities.'

‘Yes, but what
sort
of illegal activities? Are you saying he was a criminal? Is a criminal?'

‘I was hoping you could tell me some of those activities yourself, ma'am.'

‘Did he do drugs?' I ask, baldly.

Pritchard's eyes never left my face. ‘We don't think he did drugs himself, ma'am. We think he may have sold them, though: yes. Not a user. A dealer.'

He would give me no more information. Well, I had enough to cope with, I suppose. Before he left, looking at me narrowly, he said: ‘I didn't expect you to be so distressed, Ms Weaving.'

‘Didn't expect me to be distressed that I wasn't really married to a man I regarded as my husband for five years?'

‘No. By your own account, you didn't much care for him, by the end. You weren't much distressed, when he left. You were getting on with your life quite nicely, ma'am, according to you. Marriage had been going downhill for some time, you said. Inevitable outcome. So no, I didn't expect you to care so much.'

‘You overestimated me, I'm afraid. What I told you was true. It wasn't good. It had all been going downhill. But … but …'

To my immense relief, I felt the sobs coming. I let my voice shake; let the tears roll down. I'd felt frozen, until then. It was starting to come home to me, now. I didn't have to act at all.

‘It's been such a shock,' I managed to say. Well, that was certainly true.

After he left (he couldn't cope with tears, which was a useful thing to know, or might have been, if I'd been able to summon them at will), I felt as if the shock would never dissipate, that it would continue to reverberate through me all my days, a little continuous tremor that would never die down.
Two wives
, I kept saying to myself.
Two wives
.
At
least
two wives.
Bea's voice returned again and again.
What does he do? Where does all the money come from? Tax evasion? Prostitution? Drugs? White slave traffic? You know nothing, nothing about him. What in Christ's name are you doing?

What in Christ's name had I done?

I continued to unpack, stacking, tidying, folding, ordering, emptying, filling, smoothing, dusting, arranging, making hundreds of trivial decisions. Methodically I flattened the cardboard cartons as I took out all the household things, all the pots and pans and glasses and plates, the photographs and vases and books and pictures.

I'd thrown a lot out, but a lot remained. Kate offered to help, but I didn't accept: I wanted to sift through everything myself, to know exactly where everything was. It was part of the business of wresting back control over my life.

Now, as I sorted through all the flotsam, all the bits and pieces that turned out to be so much less important than I'd once thought, I kept thinking:
He'd been married twice before. He'd been married twice before.

What were they like, these wives of Max? Had they been like me? Physical attractions, sexual attractions, are supposed to remain consistent to type. Had they been dark and quick and slight? For some reason I found myself imagining them as statuesque blondes. I didn't want them to be like me. I understood none of it. I knew he had loved me; I knew this just as surely as I knew I had loved him.
What were you doing?
I screamed at him inside my head.
What were you thinking? How could you let this happen to me?

The fact that he had engaged in criminal pursuits (as Frank Pritchard would have put it) troubled me far less than did the previous marriages. I felt a little ashamed when I realised this was the case; still, it was so. Lindy Lou and Kylie and the rest of them had given me a nasty shock, but their presence in Max's life seemed to me a professional matter, as it were. I had absorbed the shock of their appearance. They were extraneous; they had not invaded his emotional life — or even, I thought, his sexual life. They posed no threat; they remained at a psychic distance from him and from me. I supposed he had made money out of them. Well, that was different from falling in love with them. It was the wives who bothered me.

Over the next six months or so, Frank Pritchard and I got to be on first-name terms. He dropped in rather a lot, after the visit in which he first told me about Max's wives.

Sometimes he had a cup of coffee. Sometimes he asked me questions: during the first couple of visits, he pressed me quite hard. I thought he was trying to exploit my new knowledge of Max's previous marriages: he was hoping my hurt and resentment would lead me to betray Max. I continued steadfast in my denial of knowledge of Max's activities or whereabouts, and gradually he came to believe me, or so I started tentatively to believe.

He let information slip, from time to time. Heroin, he said. Prostitution of minors. He said a number of pretty unpleasant things, which included embezzlement and fraud, but those two were probably the worst.

I thought of us as locked in deadly (albeit extremely civilised) battle, but sometimes we had quite pleasant chats. I didn't exactly relax with him, but I had to concentrate on not letting my guard down, which I was sure was his aim. I grew to know his knock — that businesslike knock on my door, which never failed to jolt my heart. The hardest thing was to open the door to him looking untroubled.

Once, Kate dropped by with Sophie while he was there. Unfortunately, he was in uniform at the time (sometimes he was, sometimes not). Her eyes popped when she saw him. I had to introduce them, to explain that Kate was my daughter. Frank's eyes flickered over her in the manner that had become so familiar to me. Taking everything in. He did the same to Sophie, but in a cursory way. I had one moment of sharp anxiety, in case he saw the likeness; but then I realised that Frank had never met Max, knew him only through photographs.

Sophie was just starting to walk then, I recall, and when Kate put her down her attempts to wobble around took centre stage in the way that young children can instantly manage.

Frank made a couple of admiring comments; there was some desultory small talk about toddlers. He started to leave, but stopped at the door, in that infuriating way he had of pretending (I was sure it was a pretence) that something had just occurred to him.

‘I don't suppose you've seen your stepfather recently?' he asked.

Flummoxed, Kate shook her head.

‘Or heard from him?'

‘No,' she said, all at sea. ‘Absolutely not.'

He fumbled in his inner pocket, brought out a card, gave it to her. ‘In case you do.'

Kate rounded on me when he had left.

‘What the hell was all that about?'

I was silently cursing Frank. I'd really wanted to get through all of this without having the rest of the family know anything about it, and I'd thought I was going to succeed.

‘He sometimes comes by,' I said, tiredly. ‘It seems there are things about Max's business affairs that they think aren't quite right.'

‘Why don't they ask Max, then?'

‘They can't find him.'

‘Well, you know where he is, don't you?'

‘No.'

She looked at me sideways. She knew she was on forbidden territory, that I didn't want to talk about Max, that she wasn't allowed to. But she didn't stop.

‘What sort of things aren't in order?'

‘I don't know. I think there's a couple of tax queries, things like that,' I lied.

Kate lunged at Sophie, who was heading for a low table with breakables on it. ‘You wouldn't have a policeman asking about tax stuff, would you?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Well, but you wouldn't,' she persisted. ‘You'd have someone from the tax office, not a policeman. Sophie, love, come here to Mummy and leave that alone. You wouldn't, Mum.'

‘I don't know about that,' I said, heading Sophie off at another pass. Sophie was very enterprising and surprisingly quick on her feet for one so unstable.

‘But listen —'

‘I'm not talking about it.'

‘For God's sake!' she said, in exasperation, whether aimed at me or at Sophie it was hard to say.

Sophie fell over and started to cry. I picked her up and comforted her, but she wanted her mother. I passed her over, with a prick of envy.

Kate cuddled her. ‘Just tell me this,' she said. ‘Do you honestly not know where he is?'

‘I don't have to tell you anything,' I said, just in case she hadn't got the point. ‘But no, I don't. And I don't want to. And that's all I'm saying.'

She wasn't satisfied; she wanted to go on talking. But I wouldn't, and she knew it. She gave in. Kate always gives in, eventually. She's got no spine.

Quite soon after that — a week or so, I think, Frank contacted me and asked me to go down to the local station with him. Some property had been recovered, he said. Property of Mr Knight's. He'd like it if I could identify it for him.

I thought it must be the car, and it was.

It was sad. Somebody had beaten the heart out of Max's beautiful Audi. It was on the back of a tow truck in the car park behind the station: it wasn't even driveable. The luxurious soft leather seats had been slashed; the windows were broken; the boot lid had been wrenched off; someone had lit a fire in the back seat.

I'd thought, after I'd driven it that last time, perhaps I ought to have worn gloves; perhaps they'd powder it or swab it or do whatever they do to get fingerprints off it and they'd be able to tell I'd been the last one to drive it. I needn't have worried. It would have been as difficult as trying to get fingerprints off a prickly pear.

Poor battered, blackened, ravaged Audi. Max would have wept. The registration plates were gone, but the police had traced it through the engine number, Frank said. Was it Max's, did I think?

I shrugged. ‘How can I tell?' I asked, walking around the poor devastated thing. ‘If the engine number is right, I guess it must be. But there's no way I can tell. There was a scratch on the duco at the back, I remember, that he was going to have fixed. But there's not much point in looking for a scratch on that now, is there?'

‘And Mr Knight drove this when he left?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you've not seen it since?'

‘No.'

‘Well,' he said, looking dissatisfied.

I didn't think he'd wanted me to identify it. What was the point? They had the engine number. That was enough. The car had been in Max's name: I'd seen the papers. What use was there in asking me to identify something that was nine-tenths destroyed and unrecognisable anyway? He wanted me to be upset; he wanted me to show emotion. I wasn't going to.

‘Does it concern you?' he asked, abruptly.

‘Seeing the car like this? Of course.'

‘But don't you worry, now, about what's happened to Mr Knight? He was fond of this car, wasn't he?'

‘Yes, he was.'

‘So he wouldn't have been responsible for this damage himself?'

‘Good heavens, no.'

‘Then what do you think has happened to him, ma'am? Aren't you concerned about that? Where do you think he is?'

‘Frank, we've been through this so many times. Given what you've told me, I imagine he's in Rio de Janeiro chatting up the local talent.'

‘He would have just ditched the car?'

‘No, he wouldn't. He would have been careful with it. He would have left it somewhere it would have been safe. It must have been stolen.'

‘He didn't report it.'

‘Well, you're always telling me he had good reason not to go anywhere near the police. Anyway, he probably doesn't know the car's been stolen. He's probably left the country.'

‘We have no record of his doing so,' said Frank.

‘How many thousands of people fly in and out of Australia every week?'

‘Not so many that we can't keep track of some of them,' he insisted, stubbornly. ‘Mr Knight hasn't left the country.'

‘You can't be sure,' I said. And, of course, he couldn't.

After this episode, Frank stopped coming for a while. It's as if it was his last fling, his last attempt to prise out of me all he can. I think he thought seeing the devastated Audi might make me crack. Having failed, I think he's given up. I even think he might finally accept that I know nothing more than I say I do. I almost stop listening for the knock on the door.

But it comes again. It comes one night, quite late. I've decided to have a drink. I've actually decided this quite early in the evening, and by the time Frank knocks at the door I'm right into it. Perhaps I'm on the fourth brandy? And the brandies have got bigger and less diluted on the way through the evening.