fuckin’ Mr Slaney. You got a ciggy?’
I gave him one. He lit it and looked at me for the first time. ‘Thanks, mate. What are you here for?’
‘I don’t know.’
He nodded like he didn’t believe me, then went back to pacing the room, muttering to himself.
After twenty minutes, Slaney came back with another copper.
‘All right, come on, you two. You get to know each other, did you?’ I looked at Slaney and he laughed. ‘I mean, you’d’ve been wasting your time if you did.’ He walked over to the grubby bloke and punched him hard in the stomach. He fell to the floor. Slaney kicked him.
‘Get up, you scum.’
The little bloke slowly got to his feet. ‘It’s not fair, Mr Slaney, I never—’
Slaney head-butted him and then gave him another kicking.
It went on like that for five minutes or so, then Slaney said, ‘All right. We’d better get going now.’
The little bloke was lying on the floor, bleeding. Slaney said to me, ‘Give the little cunt a hand up.’
I helped him to his feet. The four of us went out to the courtyard. Slaney said, ‘You come in the car with me, Glasheen.’
We got in his car and he drove off. The sun had gone down and there was a gritty wind blowing. The bible bashers were in Park Street singing songs to a crowd of idlers. We drove into Clarence Street and over the Harbour Bridge. Sunday evening, it was quiet on the roads.
We took the first exit off the Bridge, left into Lavender Street and along to Blues Point Road. Slaney said nothing the whole time. But he was breathing noisily through his nose and his eyes were wide. Alcohol on his breath.
The police radio was on: there had been an accident at Broadway, a disturbance in a boarding-house at Redfern, a break-in at a gift shop in Mosman.
Slaney drove down to the end of Blues Point Road and pulled up outside a big building site, right down on the harbourfront.
‘Get out,’ he said.
The building site was surrounded by a white-painted ply fence. Slaney walked over to the entrance, a gate with a big chain across it. He pulled out a bundle of keys and tried them each until one opened the padlock. He pushed the gate open a couple of feet.
The other cop pulled up in his car then, with the shivery little bloke on board. They followed us in. There was a gatehouse, but no one there. The site was a huge hole in the ground, blasted out of the Sydney sandstone to a depth of maybe a hundred feet. There were a few lights about the place, but it was pretty dark.
Slaney and the other cop had a quick whispered conversation, then Slaney pulled the gate closed behind us.
‘All right, come on, you two.’
We walked down a steep, rough roadway which spiralled around the edge of the excavation, all the way to the bottom of the pit. There was earthmoving equipment down there and the ground had been roughly smoothed out, ready for construction to proceed. Steel reinforcing was in place over half the ground.
At the bottom of the roadway I stopped and said, ‘Are we going to talk business, Slaney?’
He punched me in the face. ‘Mister Slaney, maggot. So you think you might be able to say something of interest to me, do you?’
‘The way this seems to be developing indicates to me, you know, that maybe you’re considering acting on what you think the situation is, when maybe you’re not in possession of all the facts, and I was—’
‘Shut your mouth.’
Slaney turned to the little bloke, who was whimpering now, and pushed him in the chest a couple of times, away from the roadway. Slaney turned his head away, spat on the ground, then pinched his nostrils closed. ‘Phew, this little prick has shat himself.’ He put his hand into his coat, brought out a gun and shot the bloke in the head. He seemed to crumple in on himself. He twitched once and then was still, bent over in a position that no living body could ever have achieved. Slaney fired twice more into the body, which gave a little shake as each bullet went in. Blood trickled out from under the body, black and oily in the dim light.
‘Okay, Terry, you better put a couple in him too.’
The other copper was looking none too spry now, but he took out his gun and fired twice. Slaney pulled a half-bottle of scotch out of his back pocket and took a swig, handed it to the other copper. ‘All right, Terry, let’s see what you’re like with a bulldozer. The keys are supposed to be in it.’
When the cop had gone, Slaney looked around, rubbed his chin and said, ‘I did this in the wrong place. All right, Glasheen, it’s time to see how fit you are. Pick up that piece of shit there—’ he walked over to a pit, grave-size, which had been cut into the sandstone—‘and drop him into this hole. I’d be careful though, that feller’s leaking from everywhere.’ He laughed, a short, ugly sound.
I took the body by the feet, dragged it over to the edge of the pit, stopped.
‘Go on, drop him in.’
The body fell to the bottom, about four feet down.
‘Life is short and full of woe,’ said Slaney. He laughed again, turned around. ‘What’s holding Terry up?’
Right then the front-end loader started. The cop drove it towards us. Ten yards away he put the blade down and pushed a load of rubble into the pit, reversed up and did it again until the top was level. Then he drove over the spot a couple of times with the blade down to smooth it out and square it all off. He stopped the vehicle, got out and had a spew. But Slaney was in good spirits now.
‘The concrete pour is on first thing tomorrow. Fifty tons of concrete should shut the little fucker up. All right, Terry, you did well. You can shoot through.’ He turned to me, put his hand heavily on my shoulder. ‘Now, young Bill, you said something about doing business.’
Slaney drove us back to East Sydney. On the way he finished his account of his investigation into Ray Waters’ disappearance.
‘So I found this address among Waters’ things. It was a place up at Pittwater. I went there, took the ferry across the bay. No one home. The ferry driver recognised a photo of Ray Waters, remembered taking him across. But he couldn’t remember taking him back to Church Point.
‘I found out that you’re the owner of the place, and before that old Laurie O’Brien was. I knew who he was, but I’d never heard of you.’ He smiled at me. ‘But I know a bit more about you now.
‘So I had a bit of a walk around up there at your place, thought about it all. I saw the boat down there in the shed, looked at the water, the open sea just a few miles away. And then I pretty well knew what had happened: you and O’Brien killed him and dumped him in the briny. Now, I admit, it seemed unlikely, a bodgie petty crim and a broken-down old bookie taking on Ray Waters. But I was certain that was what happened.’
‘What if I didn’t kill him? What if I just happened to have been there? Hypothetically.’
‘Doesn’t matter a flying fuck. You were there and you failed to prevent it. That fact alone makes you as guilty as the perpetrator. And then, you benefited from it—maybe a judge would give you twenty years instead of life. You want to put it to the test?’
‘No, not really.’
He pulled up in William Street, turned off the engine.
‘Don’t get me wrong. As far as I’m concerned, your relationship with Ray Waters is your business. He was nothing special to me, and knowing Ray, he probably asked for it. Spoilsport old cunt that he was.’ Then he turned to me and leaned right over until he was inches from my face.
‘But you see, Glasheen, I never got my money. That’s what gives me the shits. I was counting on it.’
‘So