Port Vila Blues

Sixteen

This time they drove through the night, dumped the van on the outskirts of Sydney, and collected Mansell’s Toyota. They entered the fuming traffic again, the spine of the Harbour Bridge an impossible distance ahead of them.

Mansell yawned. They’d been on the road for ten hours. He needed a shave. They both needed a wash and a change of clothing. He felt constipated and his eyes were prickly. They sat there in the creeping lanes of cars and buses, approaching the city in short, weak spurts between traffic lights.

After a while Mansell said, ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

‘Me? Same old shit,’ Riggs said indifferently, as though the night behind him had never happened. ‘Solicitors milking their trust funds, bank clerks ripping off cheques. There’s this one case, a bloke sets up a dummy company, gets his mates to invest in it, promising them it’s going to merge with a bigger company, meaning the shares will rise, only it’s all bullshit and his mates lose the lot. He’s into them for five million.’

Mansell shrugged. “Throw the book at him.’

‘Not that simple-he disappeared swimming off Palm Beach last month.’

Mansell looked at him briefly. ‘Faked it?’

‘A gut feeling.’

‘Follow the paper trail.’

‘Yeah. Piece of cake.’

For a while then they stared ahead. They were tired, their necks stiff with tension and hours of sitting. Riggs said, ‘What about you?’

‘Glebe doctor runs a hose from the exhaust pipe of the family car parked in the garage at the side of the house into the spare room where his wife’s sleeping-a room the size of a shoebox, the door and window easily sealed-then when she’s dead he carts her out to the car, runs a shorter hose into the car itself. Bingo. Verdict suicide.’

‘Will you get him?’

‘He left her too long on the bed. Her blood settled where it wouldn’t have settled if she’d died sitting upright, like we found her. We’re pulling him in this morning.’ He rolled his shoulders. ‘Shit I wish I’d rostered myself two days off instead of one.’

Riggs grunted.

They reached the harbour tunnel and the white car slipped like an oiled pellet past the slick tiles, drawn by the curving lights. Mansell tried to picture the metres of sludge above their heads, composed of mud, plastic bags, hubcaps, guns and skeletons, then metres of harbour water, all of it pressing down, down.

The light quality began to alter and the car climbed toward the sunlight. The sun was weak in the grey sky but Mansell was glad to see it. He took the North Sydney exit, winding automatically through the little streets. They had nothing to say to each other.

Until Riggs stiffened in the seat next to him. ‘Did you see that? Pull over, back up. Something’s going down in that side street.’

‘Riggsy-’

‘Just do it. There’s a punk down there about to get the shock of his life.’