In the Frame (16 page)

In spite of a battery of pills and various ministering angels I spent a viciously uncomfortable and wideawake night. Unable to lie flat. Feverishly hot on the pendulum from shock. Throbbing in fifteen places. Every little movement screechingly sticky, like an engine without oil. No wonder the hospital had told me it would be better to stay.

I counted my blessings until daybreak. It could have been so very much worse.

What was most alarming was not the murderous nature of the attackers, but the speed with which they’d found us. I’d known ever since I’d seen Regina’s head that the directing mind was ruthlessly violent. The acts of the team always reflected the nature of the boss. A less savage attitude would have left Regina gagged and bound, not brutally dead.

I had to conclude that it was chiefly this pervading callousness which had led to my being thrown over the balcony. As a positive means of murder, it was too chancy. It was quite possible to survive a fall from such a height, even without a cushioning tree. The two men had not as far as I could remember bothered to see whether I was alive or dead, and they had not, while I lay half-unconscious and immobile, come along to finish the job.

So it had either been simply a shattering way of getting
rid of me while they robbed my room, or they’d had the deliberate intention of injuring me so badly that I would have to stop poking my nose into their affairs.

Or both.

And how had they found us?

I puzzled over it for some time but could arrive at no definite answer. It seemed most likely that Wexford or Greene had telephoned from Melbourne and told Harley Renbo to be on his guard in case I turned up. Even the panic which would have followed the realisation that I’d seen the Munnings and the fresh Millais copy, and actually carried away a specimen of Renbo’s work, could not have transported two toughs from Melbourne to Alice Springs in the time available.

There had only been about four hours between purchase and attack, and some of that would have had to be spent on finding out which motel we were in, and which rooms, and waiting for me to go upstairs from the pool.

Perhaps we had after all been followed all the way from Flemington racecourse, or traced from the aeroplane passenger lists. But if that were the case, surely Renbo would have been warned we were on our way, and would never have let us see what we had.

I gave it up. I didn’t even know if I would recognise my attackers again if I saw them. Certainly not the one who had been behind me, because I hadn’t had a single straight look at him.

They could, though, reasonably believe they had done a good job of putting me out of action: and indeed, if I had any sense, they had.

If they wanted time, what for?

To tighten up their security, and cover their tracks, so that any investigation I might persuade the police to make into a paintings-robbery link would come up against the most respectable of brick walls.

Even if they knew I’d survived, they would not expect any action from me in the immediate future: therefore the immediate future was the best time to act.

Right.

Easy enough to convince my brain. From the neck down, a different story.

Jik and Sarah didn’t turn up until eleven, and I was still in bed. Sitting up, but not exactly perky.

‘God,’ Sarah said, ‘You look much worse than yesterday.’

‘So kind.’

‘You’re never going to make it to Melbourne.’ She sounded despondent. ‘So goodbye Cup.’

‘Nothing to stop you going,’ I said.

She stood beside the bed. ‘Do you expect us just to leave you here… like this… and go and enjoy ourselves?’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’

Jik sprawled in a visitor’s chair. ‘It isn’t our responsibility if he gets himself thrown from heights,’ he said.

Sarah whirled on him. ‘How
can
you say such a thing?’

‘We don’t want to be involved,’ Jik said.

I grinned. Sarah heard the sardonic echo of what she’d said so passionately herself only three days ago. She flung out her arms in exasperated realisation.

‘You absolutely bloody beast,’ she said.

Jik smiled like a cream-fed cat. ‘We went round to the gallery,’ he said. ‘It’s still shut. We also found our way round into the back garden, and looked in through the glass door, and you can guess what we saw.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Dead right. No easel with imitation Millais. Everything dodgy carefully hidden out of sight. Everything else, respectable and normal.’

I shifted a bit to relieve one lot of aches, and set up protests from another. ‘Even if you’d got in, I doubt if you’d’ve found anything dodgy. I’ll bet everything the least bit incriminating disappeared yesterday afternoon.’

Jik nodded. ‘Sure to.’

Sarah said, ‘We asked the girl in the reception desk at the motel if anyone had been asking for us.’

‘And they had?’

She nodded. ‘A man telephoned. She thought it was soon after ten o’ clock. He asked if a Mr Charles Todd was staying there with two friends, and when she said yes, he asked for your room number. He said he had something to deliver to you.’

‘Christ.’ Some delivery. Express. Downwards.

‘She told him the room number but said if he left the package at the desk, she would see you got it.’

‘He must have laughed.’

‘He wouldn’t have that much sense of humour,’ Jik said.

‘Soon after ten?’ said, considering.

‘While we were out,’ Sarah said, nodding. ‘It must have been fairly soon after we’d left the gallery… and while we were buying the swimming things.’

‘Why didn’t the girl tell us someone had been enquiring for us?’

‘She went off for a coffee break, and didn’t see us when we came back. And after that, she forgot. She hadn’t anyway thought it of any importance.’

‘There aren’t all that many motels in Alice,’ Jik said. ‘It wouldn’t have taken long to find us, once they knew we were in the town. I suppose the Melbourne lot telephoned Renbo, and that set the bomb ticking.’

‘They must have been apoplectic when they heard you’d bought that picture.’

‘I wish I’d hidden it,’ I said. The words reminded me
briefly of Maisie, who had hidden her picture, and had her house burnt.

Sarah sighed. ‘Well… what are we going to do?’

‘Last chance to go home,’ I said.

‘Are you going?’ she demanded.

I listened briefly to the fierce plea from my battered shell, and I thought too of Donald in his cold house. I didn’t actually answer her at all.

She listened to my silence. ‘Quite,’ she said. ‘So what do we do next?’

‘Well…’ I said. ‘First of all, tell the girl in the reception desk at the motel that I’m in a pretty poor state and likely to be in hospital for at least a week.’

‘No exaggeration,’ Jik murmured.

‘Tell her it’s O.K. to pass on that news, if anyone enquires. Tell her You’re leaving for Melbourne, pay all our bills, confirm your bookings on the afternoon flight, and cancel mine, and make a normal exit to the airport bus.’

‘But what about you?’ Sarah said. ‘When will you be fit to go?’

‘With you,’ I said. ‘If between you you can think of some unobtrusive way of getting a bandaged mummy on to an aeroplane without anyone noticing.’

‘Jesus,’ Jik said. He looked delighted. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘Telephone the airport and book a seat for me under a different name.’

‘Right.’

‘Buy me a shirt and some trousers. Mine are in the dustbin.’

‘It shall be done.’

‘And reckon all the time that you may be watched.’

‘Put on sad faces, do you mean?’ Sarah said.

I grinned. ‘I’d be honoured.’

‘And after we get to Melbourne, what then?’ Jik said.

I chewed my lip. ‘I think we’ll have to go back to the Hilton. All our clothes are there, not to mention my passport and money. We don’t know if Wexford and Greene ever knew we were staying there, so it may well be a hundred per cent safe. And anyway, where else in Melbourne are we likely to get beds on the night before the Melbourne Cup?’

‘If you get thrown out of the Hilton’s windows, you won’t be alive to tell the tale,’ he said cheerfully.

‘They don’t open far enough,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible.’

‘How reassuring.’

‘And tomorrow,’ Sarah said. ‘What about tomorrow?’

Hesitantly, with a pause or two, I outlined what I had in mind for Cup day. When I had finished, they were both silent.

‘So now,’ I said. ‘Do you want to go home?’

Sarah stood up. ‘We’ll talk it over,’ she said soberly. ‘We’ll come back and let you know.’

Jik stood also, but I knew from the jut of his beard which way he’d vote. It had been he who’d chosen the bad-weather routes we’d taken into the Atlantic and the North Sea. At heart he was more reckless than I.

They came back at two o’clock lugging a large fruit-shop carrier with a bottle of scotch and a pineapple sticking out of the top.

‘Provisions for hospitalised friend,’ said Jik, whisking them out and putting them on the end of the bed. ‘How do you feel?’

‘With every nerve ending.’

‘You don’t say. Well, Sarah says we go ahead.’

I looked searchingly at her face. Her dark eyes stared steadily back, giving assent without joy. There was no antagonism, but no excitement. She was committed, but from determination, not conviction.

‘O.K.,’ I said.

‘Item,’ said Jik, busy with the carrier, ‘One pair of medium grey trousers. One light blue cotton shirt.’

‘Great.’

‘You won’t be wearing those, though, until you get to Melbourne. For leaving Alice Springs, we bought something else.’

I saw the amusement in both their faces. I said with misgiving, ‘What else?’

With rising glee they laid out what they had brought for my unobtrusive exit from Alice Springs.

Which was how I came to stroll around the little airport, in the time-gap between signing in and boarding, with the full attention of everyone in the place. Wearing faded jeans cut-off and busily frayed at mid-calf. No socks. Flip-flop rope-soled sandals. A brilliant orange, red and magenta poncho-type garment which hung loosely over both arms like a cape from shoulders to crutch. A sloppy white T-shirt underneath. A large pair of sunglasses. Artificial suntan on every bit of skin. And to top it all, a large straw sunhat with a two inch raffia fringe round the brim, the sort of hat in favour out in the bush for keeping flies away. Flies were the torment of Australia. The brushing-away-of-flies movement of the right hand was known as The Great Australian Salute.

On this hat there was a tourist-type hat-band, bright and distinctly legible. It said ‘I Climbed Ayers Rock’.

Accompanying all this jazz I carried the Trans-Australian airline bag Sarah had bought on the way up. Inside it, the garments of sanity and discretion.

‘No one,’ Jik had said with satisfaction, laying out my wardrobe, ‘will guess you’re a walking stretcher case, if you’re wearing these.’

‘More like a nut case.’

‘Not far out,’ Sarah said dryly.

They were both at the airport, sitting down and looking glum, when I arrived. They gave me a flickering glance and gazed thereafter at the floor, both of them, they told me later, fighting off terrible fits of giggles at seeing all that finery on the march.

I walked composedly down to the postcard stand and waited there on my feet, for truth to tell it was more comfortable than sitting. Most of the postcards seemed to be endless views of the huge crouching orange monolith out in the desert: Ayers Rock at dawn, at sunset, and every five minutes in between.

Alternatively with inspecting the merchandise I took stock of the room. About fifty prospective passengers, highly assorted. Some airline groundstaff, calm and unhurried. A couple of aborigines with shadowed eyes and patient black faces, waiting for the airport bus back to dreamtime. Air-conditioning doing fine, but everyone inside still moving with the slow walk of life out in the sun.

No one remotely threatening.

The flight was called. The assorted passengers, including Jik and Sarah, stood up, picked up their hand luggage and straggled out to the tarmac.

It was then, and then only, that I saw him.

The man who had come towards me on the balcony to throw me over.

I was almost sure at once, and then certain. He had been sitting among the waiting passengers, reading a newspaper which he was now folding up. He stood still, watching Jik and Sarah present their boarding passes at the door and go through to the tarmac. His eyes followed them right across to the aircraft. When they’d filed up the steps and vanished, he peeled off and made a bee-line in my direction.

My heart lurched painfully. I absolutely could not run.

He looked just the same. Exactly the same. Young,
strong, purposeful, as well-co-ordinated as a cat. Coming towards me.

As Jik would have said,
Jesus
.

He didn’t even give me a glance. Three yards before he reached me he came to a stop beside a wall telephone, and fished in his pocket for coins.

My feet didn’t want to move. I was still sure he would see me, look at me carefully, recognise me… and do something I would regret. I could feel the sweat prickling under the bandages.

‘Last call for flight to Adelaide and Melbourne.’

I would have to, I thought. Have to walk past him to get to the door.

I unstuck my feet. Walked. Waiting with every awful step to hear his voice shouting after me. Or even worse, his heavy hand.

I got to the door, presented the boarding pass, made it out on to the tarmac.

Couldn’t resist glancing back. I could see him through the glass, earnestly telephoning, and not even looking my way.

The walk to the aircraft was all the same quite far enough. God help us all, I thought, if the slightest fright is going to leave me so weak.

I had a window seat near the rear of the aircraft, and spent the first part of the journey in the same sort of fascination as on the way up, watching the empty red miles of the ancient land roll away underneath. A desert with water underneath it in most places; with huge lakes and many rock pools. A desert which could carry dormant seeds for years in its burning dust, and bloom like a garden when it rained. A place of pulverising heat, harsh and unforgiving, and in scattered places, beautiful.