I drive straight back into town after I leave Joe Riley. I think I’ll visit the dance hall and catch up with the Diamond Dolls, and my old mate Tommy Sharman while I’m there.
I pull up outside the Swing Time and walk up to the door, but it’s locked. I’m not really surprised. It’s probably still a bit early to expect anybody to be there.
As I return to my car, my thoughts turn to old Maud Percy, and it makes me cringe. King Street. I didn’t write down the number, because I never take much of what she has to say particularly seriously, but I’m at a loose end right now and nothing’s tying up.
You know what they say about idle hands.
Five minutes later, and I’m turning left onto King Street. Not for any specific reason, mind. You get to my age, and you start to feel things in your waters, whatever they are. Let’s say, I felt it in mine.
King Street’s not especially nice: it’s full of two-room miner’s cottages built out of corrugated iron and pretty much anything else the old miners could lay their hands on. Bare gardens, tumbledown fencing and filth: not somewhere anyone with a couple of quid would choose to call home.
I slow right down and inch past urchins playing cricket in the middle of the dirt road with sticks and rolled up rags. I think of Mikey, and how different I expect his life will be from theirs. Most of them ignore me, barely moving out of my way, but one of them calls me a sodding bastard, and I shake my head at him and mark him down for a return visit some day.
A swift boot up the arse, I’m reserving for that lad. It might just save his life.
I think about Mabelle’s mother and I can’t understand why, in all of Wangamba, she’d pick a house in this street to abandon her baby. Perhaps she was from here. If Gracie’s right and Bernadette Douglas was her mother, perhaps she chose it because it was about as far away from home as she could get.
I’m just past halfway down the street—the better end—where the cottages thin out. The blocks are larger now, and flaking timber houses sit in the middle of vine-riddled, overgrown gardens. There are no children here, just an old truck, a bicycle leaning against a fencepost, an Austin and a slick, black Buick, all huddled together like a witches’ conclave in front of number ten.
I speed up past them, hoping that nobody’s spotted me, and head back to the station.
‘Right,’ I tell two bored-looking constables. ‘How’d you like to raid a brothel?’
Mahoney looks like it’s Christmas morning and I’ve just handed him a present, and Higgins has already leapt to his feet.
‘When? Now?’ says Mahoney.
At any moment, I expect him to start dancing about, he’s so excited.
‘Right now. Shut up shop. Let’s go.’
Mahoney and I are in my car, and Higgins follows us in the ute. This time, I’m entering King Street from the other end. I sigh, relieved, as soon as the Buick comes into sight. It’s still there.
I pull up as near as I dare to one side of the Buick, and signal for Higgins to fence him in with the ute. Sharman’s not going anywhere, not in his car, at least. He wants to do a runner, he’ll have to do it on foot.
I send Higgins around the back, and Mahoney and I walk up the steps to a landing that’s never seen a broom. I chuckle at the memory of Mrs Singleton telling me how she found Mabelle in a box when she came out to sweep it. I signal Mahoney to stay hidden behind the overgrowth, while I rap on the door.
Mrs Singleton opens the door and she gawps when she realises it’s me. She’s lost for words. Eventually she yells, ‘Sergeant Furey!’ far too loud for it to be a greeting. ‘If…if this is about…’
Meanwhile, my size ten boot’s in the door. I press all my weight against it, and the door flies wide open. Mrs Singleton’s smacked flat against the wall of an entrance hall, which she’s set up like a doctor’s waiting room. Mahoney rushes past me and dives through the first door he sees, and I hear a woman scream. As I hurry past, I spot Snowy McIntyre sitting on one of the chairs. He notices me and hides his face.
Mrs Singleton’s now recovered, and she’s swinging a rounders bat at me. I grab it off her and push her down, and she tumbles backwards like a sack of manure. I toss the bat back out the door and into the garden, and she joins in the screaming that’s coming at me from every corner of the house.
Higgins has come in through the rear and he’s tearing up the back passage, just as a large, naked man escapes from one of the rooms and scurries down it. In a second, Higgins has forced him down and he straddles him. Together, they’re blocking all access to the back door. Higgins knocks him out with a right hook, flips him over and handcuffs the man.
For the first time in a long while, I’m actually glad he’s here.
In a matter of minutes, we’ve got one girl handcuffed to a bed post, and a second to a water pipe in the kitchen. Two Diggers are cooling their heels in one of the bedrooms. There’s a third girl wearing nothing but a pair of drawers, handcuffed to Mahoney, and he’s looking pleased as punch.
Just then, I see Tommy Sharman sitting in a closet off the hallway, watching the mayhem around him, mouth open, looking stunned. He’s stripped the closet of its shelves, and it seems that he’s been using it as his tiny office. Since Higgins knocked out the naked man right by the closet door, Sharman’s now wedged behind the small card table where he’s been counting money. He’s busy stuffing ten shilling notes into his breast pocket, while the coins clatter to the floor.
With the last of the notes stuffed into his shirt, he tries to wriggle out from behind the desk, but the closet door’s half shut and it’s pressing up against him.
‘Ah, Mr Sharman,’ I say as I climb over the naked man. ‘Good to see you again so soon.’
He’s staring daggers at me and, while I can’t hear what he’s saying, I can read his lips. What’s coming out of his mouth is as blue as a midsummer’s sky, so I slam the closet door in his face, and secure it with its barrel lock.