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‘I gave a lift to the youngster who was there with her yesterday.’

‘Why on earth did you do that?’

‘It was raining. Sorry, what I mean, is I’ll get information any way I can. He told me about something Justin said to Sarah. I’d like to talk to her about it. And there’s another—’

‘Wait!’

I hung on to the phone and heard voices loud and soft, near and far, as well as music. Then Ms Pettigrew came back on the line.

‘She’s taken the day off. Not for the first time. She says she’ll talk to you but only in person. Really, I don’t know. Is it so important?’

‘It could be.’

‘Where are you now?’

I told her and she said I should come back to the house. That didn’t sound like the best of ideas and I said so. She had the answer.

‘The dragon mother will absent herself. She’ll be in the garden. It needs work.’

A lot of things around that place needed work but the arrangement sounded okay. I stopped at a liquor store and bought a can of draft Guinness. A chop in every glass. A kilometre short of the house I opened the can, carefully let it foam into a paper cup and drank it down. Ah, the gift of we Irish to the human race.

The rain had gone and the steps up to the house had dried out, but the water had caused crumbling in some places and a few of the bricks looked ready to head south. Angela was facing some serious maintenance problems. She opened the door to me, ushered me in without speaking, knocked on Sarah’s door as we went past and continued through to the sunroom. She was wearing jeans, rubber boots and a faded denim shirt. She picked up a straw hat and a can of insect repellent from a table near the door to the wooden steps leading down to the garden.

‘She smokes. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘A lot do. The smart ones stop.’

‘We live in hope.’ A quick smile and she was off.

Sarah came into the sunroom wearing white jeans and a black T-shirt with the face of Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes printed on it. She was barefoot but stood several centimetres taller than her mother. The makeup had gone and her long, fair hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She was a good-looking young woman with a generous mouth and big eyes that did not bulge in the slightest.

I met her in the centre of the room and we shook hands.

‘Hello,’ she smiled. ‘I’m sorry about what I said to you the other day. Ronny called and said you’d given him a lift. That was nice of you.’

‘It was raining pretty hard and he was sloshing along, but I admit I wanted information from him. That’s what I do. Let’s sit down, Sarah.’

She sat across the low coffee table from me and looked like the private schoolgirl she was—straight back, knees together. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Angela told me you’re trying to find Just.’

‘That’s right, working for your father.’

Her ‘Mmm,’ was sceptical.

‘I’ve seen a record of the interview you had with the police back then. You didn’t have much to say.’

‘I was a kid, and I didn’t know anything.’

‘Well, you might have known more than you thought. Justin said something to you about being a soldier of fortune. Ronny told me that.’

‘Jesus, that’s right. But I didn’t remember when I was talking to the policewoman. She wasn’t very smart. I don’t think she knew what she was doing, really.’

‘So what can you tell me about that?’

‘Hang on.’ She got up, hurried out and came back with a packet of Stuyvesant and a lighter. She offered them, I shook my head and she lit up. It was a bit studied but she was getting the hang of it. She moved the squeaky clean ashtray on the table closer and tapped off the minimal amount of ash produced by one draw, the way they do.

‘Just was always on about the army and how the Hampshires had fought in every bloody war under the sun. I used to tease him about it and say how America got beaten in Vietnam and how they burnt villages and raped women
and that. It made him angry and that’s what I wanted to do. I loved him, but . . .’ She smoked, tapped ash. ‘You know, brothers and sisters, especially after Dad left and Angela went round the bend. It all got a bit, you know, tense. Anyway, this time I said something like that and he just nodded. Then he swore and reckoned he wanted to do it properly, like a soldier of fortune.’

‘Did you know what he meant?’

‘Not really. I had some rough idea, from a movie or something. I said what about the army, and he said fuck the army.’

‘That’s all? He didn’t mention a country or a place?’

‘No, that was it. I thought it was just him sounding off. I didn’t even remember it when that dumb policewoman came along. Did I screw things up?’

‘No, I don’t think so. There’s another thing. At Justin’s school I was told that he was friendly with someone named Pierre Fontaine. D’you know anything about him?’

Her eyes opened wide and she dropped the cigarette on the glass-topped table. ‘Shit!’ She picked it up quickly and stubbed it out half smoked in the ashtray.

‘Who told you that?’

‘I won’t say, just as I won’t tell anybody else what you’re telling me. Them’s the rules.’

‘You must tell the person who’s paying you.’ She wasn’t dumb.

‘Well, there I use my discretion.’

‘Did Ronny say anything about Pierre?’

‘I hadn’t even heard the name until this morning at the school. Should I talk to Ronny about him?’

She shook her head and the ponytail swung. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Who is he? Why were you so surprised to hear the name?’

‘I was surprised that anyone would say that Just knew him. That guy, Pierre, was done for drugs. He’s the one that supplied Ronny with some hash that got him kicked out of Bryce. Justin hated drugs, he was a real pain in the arse about it.’ She tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and held it up. ‘He hated smoking and he didn’t drink, ever. I can’t believe he had anything to do with Pierre.’

‘Did you have anything to do with him, Sarah?’

She stood up and went to the louvre windows to check on her mother. ‘Sure, I scored some grass off him a couple of times.’

‘I have to talk to him to find out what went on between him and Justin. It might help me to trace your brother, although it’s worrying. D’you know where I can find him?’

She sat down. ‘Of course I do. He got caught supplying heroin to some kids. He’s in gaol.’

I sat back and let that sink in while Sarah smoked and looked less cooperative.

‘I can understand why Pierre Fontaine’s name didn’t come up when you and Justin’s friends talked to the police,’ I said.

She brushed that off with a wave of the cigarette hand. ‘Look, Just didn’t really have any friends. And I told you, the cops asked dumb questions. They didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.’

‘How long after Justin went missing did Fontaine get caught?’

Sarah finished her cigarette and gave some thought
to her answer. ‘If you go to see Pierre you won’t tell him I talked about him, will you? I mean, he won’t be in gaol forever and he’s a bad dude.’

‘Did I tell you who told me about Fontaine? No. The same goes for you. Like I won’t tell your mother you smoke grass.’

She laughed. ‘She knows, she just doesn’t want to know she knows. All right, let me think. The police got him about a year ago, so it was about a year after Just . . .’

‘Went missing.’

She nodded.

I stood. ‘Thanks, Sarah. You’ve been a big help.’

She stood as well and looked surprised to find herself on her feet, being polite. ‘Have I? I haven’t heard that said before by anyone around here.’

‘Give your mother a break. She’s holding in a lot of grief and anger. People like her, conventional people, find all this sort of stuff very confusing.’

‘You’re not conventional, are you, Mr Hardy?’

‘I can’t afford to be.’

‘And I don’t want to be.’

‘One more thing—Justin went on a school excursion to Bangara near the end of the year and something there seemed to affect him. Does Bangara mean anything to you?’

‘Bangara? Yeah, that’s where some fucking Hampshire hero came from. Great-grandfather or something. He got killed in the First World War.’

I thanked her again and asked her to thank her mother. She said she would and I believed her. She didn’t exactly escort me out, but she made more or less polite gestures along those lines. I gave her a goodbye nod in the passage
and she smiled and raised a hand almost shyly, like a schoolgirl.

I didn’t take any notes while talking to Sarah, not wanting to put her off, but I scribbled a few things down back in the car. Things to be done, and in this kind of investigation the more the better. I’d had enough of Pittwater and environs and was glad to be heading back to the city. I played some more Joni Mitchell but I was almost at the Spit Bridge before I realised that thinking about the Hampshire case had blotted out every word and note.

I drove to Rose Bay, parked as close as I could to the apartments where Hampshire was staying and asked for him at the service desk. He was out, but at least he was still staying there. I left a message for him to ring me. Back in my office, I phoned Gunnarson.

‘You’ll be pleased to hear that the dragon lady regards you as competent.’

‘I’m thrilled. Did you get anywhere?’

‘I might have, but I’m going to need some help.’

He sighed. ‘Why is there never any end to what you blokes want?’

‘We never sleep.’

I told him in outline about Pierre Fontaine and his possible place in the scheme of things. He swore and condemned all people who held back information from the police. I sympathised.

‘He’s in gaol somewhere. I don’t know where and I don’t know for how long. Be a big help if you could get me in to see him.’

‘Is that all? Shit, Hardy, haven’t you heard of lawyers, prisoners’ rights, civil liberties . . . ?’

‘Yeah, and I’ve heard of missing person case files closed.’

He wasn’t going to give in too easily. ‘How about Hampshire, the skinflint dad? Are you still in touch?’

I didn’t exactly lie. ‘Yes, but only by phone. He’s cagey.’

‘He fucking should be. All right, Hardy, leave it with me and I’ll get back to you. It could take a while to set up.
If
I can do it, and I’m not saying I can, you’ll owe me a big favour. Some serious cooperation with any useful developments might help to square it.’

My next stop was the Fisher Library at the university. Sure enough, it held a copy of the Brigadier-General’s
Monumental Art of Australia
. They tell me some self-publishers scatter their books like confetti. This one was a professionally produced effort, though, in a nice typeface with a ton of photos. The text was what you’d call reverent. No index, so I had to leaf through. I found the Bangara memorial arch on page 145. A big, ugly structure, it had been unveiled by the mothers of dead soldiers on Empire Day, 24 May 1924. The arch bore the names of 58 dead and 299 returned AIF members.

Things were coming together. Justin Hampshire knew about the arch and that his great-grandfather’s name should be on it. He got his chance to look at it and his behaviour changed after that. Then he went to Canberra to look at the war memorial there. ‘Fuck the army’, he’d said subsequently. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, but I needed confirmation. I felt sure I could find out from some official about the names on the Canberra memorial, but I didn’t know a soul in Bangara. Gunnarson had said it’d take time to set up a meeting with the Frenchman. Hampshire had said he had investments; I’d find out tomorrow whether his cheque had cleared. If it had, I’d go to Bangara
where Justin Hampshire had learned something that had changed him. I needed to know what it was. Perhaps it had drawn him back there. If the cheque hadn’t cleared I still wanted to know, but I’d give serious thought to dobbing Hampshire in for his child support arrears.

‘What you like about your crappy so-called profession is being able to piss off whenever it suits you.’

That was my ex-wife Cyn’s assessment of my attraction to my job and I couldn’t say that she was entirely wrong. There were other things—the interesting characters, the edginess, the satisfaction of bringing something to a conclusion—but they wouldn’t have cut any ice with Cyn even if I’d spoken about them. A lot of the time we weren’t on speaking terms. An architect, she’d blotted me out with cigarette smoke and scale drawings. Well, she had her North Shore stay-at-home advertising executive now, and her two kids, and I could still piss off.

In the morning I pulled out one of my collection of tattered road maps and plotted the route. Hadn’t been down that way in years. It was a long run but what the hell. With luck I’d get in a swim and a bodysurf. I filled the Falcon’s tank, checked the oil and water and cleaned the windscreen and the back window that had gathered dust on the way back from Pittwater. I also put air in the tyres and the spare. Never let it be said that Hardy went unprepared. But the Smith & Wesson .38 stayed in the house.
It wasn’t that kind of a trip, or at least I hoped not.

The weather was warm but the sky was iffy, with dark clouds building and then dissipating as the wind shifted around. I packed my usual summer travelling gear—a change of shirt and socks, a linen jacket, toiletries and shaving stuff, a towel, swimmers and thongs. Robert Hughes for company at night, unless something else turned up. I had a clutch of cassettes taken from the shelf at random, and a camera.

Even bypassing Wollongong on the freeway, it was a slow run through Kiama and Nowra. There was enough of the summer left over for holiday-makers and home-goers to still be using the highway. The traffic thinned out after Ulladulla, and the sky cleared as a strong easterly pushed the threatening clouds inland. I made Bangara by midafternoon and booked into yet another motel. What was the title of that Frank Zappa album—
200 Motels?
Tell me about it.

The memorial was easy to find. It formed the entrance to a large park a block back from the beach. The names of the serving soldiers were on the side away from the water, protecting them from the effects of salty winds and leaving them fairly well preserved after sixty-plus years. Graffitists and vandals had done a certain amount of damage to the edifice but not to the lists of names. Even the antisocial seem to have some respect for names etched in stone. It didn’t take long for me to find what Justin had found—the name Hampshire did not appear among the fallen or the returned. I took a couple of photographs.