Port Vila Blues

Twenty-five

Would he call someone to say where she could be found? Would he come back for her? Liz Redding had wanted to be able to answer yes to either question, but she had seen the transformation in Wyatt, and told herself no. Life for Wyatt was not a matter of expansive gestures, throwing care to the winds for the sake of desire, but of tactics.

She had rotated her bound wrists uselessly after he’d disappeared through the door. Nylon restraining cuffs, lightweight, a little flexible, but nevertheless tough and effective. She’d have to cut them somehow. If a caretaker had lived here, maybe he’d left tools behind when he’d moved out?

She glanced at the mattress, now sad and dusty-looking. What would it be like to sleep regularly with a man who was mostly silent, who lived in some private reserve of the mind where you could never reach him? Whose face-as soon as the striking smile faded-was cruel rather than appealing, the contrast swift and unsettling?

She got to her knees, lifted the little cot onto its side, and tumbled the mattress into the corner. The tubular frame sat on U-shaped fold-down legs, one at each end. By hooking with her feet she was able to close the legs flush with the frame. The cot was more manoeuvrable now; Liz lifted it off the floor and waddled with it into the depressing kitchen.

She hadn’t realised how much she relied upon independent action in each arm. With her wrists manacled together around the metal frame of a camping cot, opening drawers and cupboard doors required great patience, strength and dexterity. And a sense of humour, for the cuffs chafed her badly and the cot knocked painfully against her shins. Once when a drawer fell out her hands fell with it before she could stop herself, which dropped the bottom edge of the frame with a solid smack across the toecap of her shoes. She jerked so fiercely on the cuffs in response that the nylon broke the skin and blood began to leak stickily over her fingers.

‘Eureka,’ she muttered, opening another drawer. A little tenon saw, the blade rusty, the handle held together with black electrical tape. Raising her right foot to support the weight of the cot while she worked with her hands, she flicked aside a file and a packet of nails, then propped the tenon saw blade upright, its teeth outermost, and nudged the drawer home until it clamped the blade in place. This gave her a twenty-centimetre cutting edge. She began to raise and lower her arms, running the nylon link along the saw teeth, the metal cot knocking the cupboard, her thighs. When the link finally snapped open, the bed dropped like a stone, falling from her supporting foot and onto the other again. The pain and regret and humiliation brought on blinding tears.

She recovered, freed her wrists, gathered her things. Wyatt had left both guns, including the little revolver he’d found in her crotch holster. It was a.22 Colt Cobra weighing fifteen ounces, with a six-shot chamber and two-inch barrel. It had weighed slightly more before she’d filed down the hammer and front sight. She put it in her bag. She would have to lose the other gun now that it tied her to the shooting-or at least lose it until she knew who the dead man was and who had sent him and until she had her story right. Then she washed her hands and forearms, getting rid of any telltale powder residue that might be detected by a paraffin test.

There was a heating-oil tank growing out of weeds at the rear of the building. Liz prised open the lid, dropped the gun, heard a dull slap as it landed in sludge at the bottom.

One minute later she was out on the main road, flagging down a bus. In Belgrave she caught a train, express to the city. She should have gone in and reported to someone then. Instead, she went home and made herself a drink. She was in the mood for rebellion and proud lament. She clacked through her CDs, the Chieftains, Sinead O’Connor, the Dubliners, settling on Clanad. She’d have some explaining to do to Internal Investigations and her boss when this was over but, until she knew who she could trust, she wouldn’t be going by the book.

Not for the first time, Liz wondered how much the job had changed her, how much she’d lost. Working undercover meant that she sometimes had to remind herself that she was a cop, after all. She rarely spent time at the police complex in Elizabeth Street, and then only entered by way of an underground corridor from a building around the corner. She tended to meet other coppers in pubs, parks or restaurants. The rest of the time she played a drug dealer, a fence, a street girl. It was a nervy double life and it took its toll on her. She was resented by some elements inside the force and only trusted outside it after painstaking groundwork. She encountered cops who didn’t like her because she was young, female, got results, had letters after her name, and she encountered crims who would want her dead if they knew what she did for a living. The ID in her shoe had saved her life twice in drug deals that had gone haywire; she’d flashed it, and hard men had put up their guns and backed off rather than kill a cop, but that didn’t mean there weren’t also hard men walking the streets who had too much to lose or wanted a payback or simply hated cops too much to care about an ID card.

Liz could feel the scotch burning away the tension. At least by working burglary she had a margin of safety that hadn’t existed when she’d worked for the drug squad. Dealers, buyers, they feared ripoffs, not cops, and always went armed. They were jumpy people to deal with and the days were long. She’d often worked eighteen-hour days, from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m., setting up a deal and an arrest, then paperwork until 10 a.m.

Not that the drug element didn’t exist behind the city’s burglaries. All crime flowed to and from drugs these days. The street scum burgled TV sets to buy drugs. White collar addicts committed fraud to feed their habits or pay their debts. The profits from armed robberies and stolen car and art rackets were used to buy into drug distribution networks. And the stakes were so high, the profits so great, the effects of the drugs themselves so destabilising, that crims now were more vicious, more unpredictable than they’d ever been.

Liz Redding sipped her scotch and thought of Wyatt and Jardine. They represented an older, cleaner time and were rapidly going out of date. Jardine’s ill-health, Wyatt’s sharkish grin and urgency with her on the dusty mattress-she felt an ambiguous regard for each man, she felt closer to them than to her colleagues, her dirty double life. She didn’t want to see them caught or hurt. All she’d wanted was to trace the Tiffany, trace it back to the magnetic drill gang.

She guessed she’d taken this latest assignment as far as it would go. Springett had arranged crash courses for her in fencing jewellery and assessing the weight and worth and provenance of precious stones and metals, and had told her to go around the pawnshops, certain pubs and clubs, seeing who was flash, who had money, cars, clothes, who the party animals were. All it had got her were a couple of small busts until finally a whisper that Frank Jardine, poor, sick sod, was the man to see.

It occurred to Liz then that she might be making a bad mistake about Wyatt and Jardine. Never romanticise these bastards: she’d had that drummed into her at briefing sessions often enough. It was entirely possible that Wyatt had ripped off Jardine and Jardine had sent a killer after him. Or that Jardine had discovered who she was, sent a killer to get both of them and keep the Tiffany and the reward money for himself.

She glanced at her watch. Three o’clock. Still a lot of the afternoon left.

She took her own car this time. First, she called on Pardoe, her contact in the insurance company. He was pleased to get the Tiffany back. He smiled at her attentively across his desk, a pale, watery man with red lips and fingers he liked to steeple beneath his chin.

‘We’re very pleased. The question remains, is this gang getting its information from one of our employees? Have you been able to establish that one way or the other?’

Liz didn’t return the smile. She felt jumpy and trusted no one. ‘Your people are clean. As far as anyone knows-in here and out in the street-I am a fence who can be trusted, so I’d have heard something by now. Besides, the Asahi Collection wasn’t insured by your firm.’

Pardoe nodded gravely. ‘Fortunately. That little lot won’t be seen again. So, who? I’m not asking for police secrets, you understand. I’m merely curious.’

Her expression neutral, Liz rose to leave. ‘We’re still working on that.’

She left the building. According to the files, a crowd using an electromagnet and a drill had been active in Victoria way back in the seventies, hitting office safes, banks, jewellers and credit unions. Those men would be almost twenty years older now. Maybe they were back in action. Maybe they’d passed on their know-how to a younger crowd. Even so, they were getting their information from someone with inside knowledge of the alarm systems, holdings and security weaknesses of a range of places.

Her second visit was to Jardine’s house in Coburg. The skinny, harrowed, bitter sister opened the door and told her that she was too late. A hard man had come calling at about the time Wyatt was gliding inside her. The sister had been visiting the house across the road, sitting in the front room drinking tea, and seen the man leave her house. The thing was, she hadn’t seen him go in, so she’d excused herself and hurried across.

‘I found my brother dead,’ she said. ‘Stroke. He had this look of fear on his face you wouldn’t believe. He was literally frightened to death, I don’t care what anyone thinks.’

Liz was prepared to believe her. She asked for a description of the man.

‘Sort of tall, neat, wore a suit, had this smile on his face.’

‘Not Wyatt,’ Liz muttered, half to herself.

Jardine’s sister sniffed bitterly. ‘Ultimately Wyatt,’ she said, slamming the door.

Next stop, headquarters.