Kick Back

Twenty-Five

Wyatt stopped at a customer carpark behind the shops that fronted onto Toorak Road, backed in, switched off the engine and opened a newspaper. He looked like a man waiting for his wife.

At first, Quiller Place seemed to be dead, but bit by bit Wyatt gained an impression of the daily rhythms of the little street. A postwoman came by soon after he started his watch. She wore a slicker, though it was not raining, and pushed her cart with an air of contempt for the street, the postcode. As soon as she had gone, all the elderly people in the houses on either side of Finn’s office came out to check their mail boxes. They greeted one another, or stopped to talk. One disappointed woman looked twice in her box, stepped out to watch the postie’s departing back, looked sourly up and down Quiller Place. An old man in a walking frame crossed to the shops. Five minutes later, a home-care nurse ran out, looking around wildly for him.

Between twelve-thirty and one, sales assistants and managers straggled into Quiller Place from the Toorak Road shops. They sat in their cars to eat sandwiches or drove somewhere for lunch. Most were back by two.

Then came a wave of afternoon shoppers. Wyatt watched them above his newspaper, young mothers mostly, creeping down Quiller Place in glossy Range Rovers, Volvos and Mercedes wagons with ski racks. They parked in the street or the customer parking areas and locked their cars, braced for the chilly wind in Italian leather coats or bright ski parkas and high boots and gloves. They were away for long periods, and emerged from the lanes leading to Toorak Road laden with parcels. One or two with small children met lovers, mummy’s friend.

Five people visited Finn’s office. Wyatt tried and failed to guess whose clients they were. They were well-dressed-two yuppies and three smart, middle-aged women-and if they were distressed or in trouble you’d never know it from looking at them. He checked his watch each time: five minutes to the hour, five minutes to the half hour.

Did Anna Reid inspire trust in her clients? Suddenly Wyatt wanted to see and touch her. The feeling came so hard and strong that he realised he had been suppressing it. He remembered how it had been last night, her swinging hair and her long throat and the smell of her skin. Within minutes of his arrival she had been wearing nothing under her skirt and was hoisting herself onto the kitchen bench to let him nuzzle her while she held him there in the clamp of her gleaming legs, her back arched. It had been rich and humid and now Wyatt wanted her again. He tried concentrating, willing her to appear. But she did not, and he felt foolish.

Ten past three. No one paid Wyatt or his shabby car any attention. The people here were too self-absorbed for that. But he knew they were not so self-absorbed as to overlook a car that never moved, or a man who never shopped or picked up his wife or finished reading his newspaper. That’s why the three shifts each day, the three different vehicles.

At three-fifteen a police car turned in at the top end of Quiller Place. Two young constables, a man and a woman, examined both sides of the street. Wyatt started the Falcon, drove forward at an awkward angle, and, looking behind him, his arm stretched out along the seat, backed up as if to correct the angle.

He did this three times while the patrol car cruised along and out of the street. Nothing unusual-just someone who has muffed his parking.

Wyatt thought about it. A cop car on a side street in the middle of the afternoon? A regular beat? Just in case, he got out of the Falcon and stood out of sight near the ornamental shrubbery behind a bookshop. He would wait for Hobba there. If the cops came back, he would abandon the car and slip through to Toorak Road.

Fifteen minutes went by. At three-thirty Finn came out of his office, crossed Quiller Place, and went into the rear entrance of the cafe. His coffee break. Wyatt wrote down the time. The cops would have been back by now, surely.

When Hobba appeared, passing slowly down the street in the Econovan, Wyatt put away his notebook and got into the Falcon. He didn’t acknowledge Hobba but drove out of the street. He was hungry and thirsty and cold and the day wasn’t over yet.