LOOKING AROUND FELICITY’S CELL, I saw the amenities were fair to good. Sure, she had the traditional bunk set in one corner, but I could see that no one had forced her to make the bed, as the coverings were pushed back against a wall. The floral sheet and matching light doona were colourful for prison issue. She also had her own shower and toilet block; its door was ajar, revealing a towel and nightgown hanging over a Perspex sliding door. The handcuffs I was not too sure about. In these surroundings, they looked more kinky than threatening.
‘It’s true what they say,’ I said to the embarrassed Felicity. ‘They are mollycoddling prisoners these days.’
She waved the spoon in her hand. ‘Hello, Steele,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, Flick,’ I replied. ‘Though, as your official rescuer, we might have to embellish our account at the bravery awards.’
‘I’m not really a prisoner,’ she said.
‘You’re joking,’ I replied, with a huge dollop of sarcasm.
‘It wasn’t my idea,’ she continued. ‘Well, I suppose it sort of was. I wanted to get back at Greg. It was bad enough I had to pretend I didn’t know what was going on, but when I heard people on the racetrack were laughing behind my back . . .’ She stopped there.
‘Awlright, Felicity, you wanted to get back at your cheating pig of a husband. That’s fair enough. But where did you come up with this kidnapping scheme?’
She began to smile, and put her lips together to cover it. ‘That was Dad,’ she said, in a voice half ashamed and half proud.
As it turned out, Felicity was privy only to her part in the hoax. Her Dad had found her crying one night, shortly before he came to me looking for confirmation of her husband’s infidelity. In the end, father and daughter decided that enough circumstantial evidence against Sailor warranted retribution. Smith would tell the jockey he had kidnapped Felicity. If Sailor could convince him he had ended his affair, and would transgress the marital vows no more, Bill would let his daughter go.
His friends the Calders were on an overseas holiday, and had asked Bill to look after the place, and this presented an opportunity not to be wasted.
I asked Felicity twice whether there was any more to the story. She seemed to know nothing about the race fix and how her husband was blackmailed into swapping mounts on Saturday. As Mick said, Bill was a cagey bee. He knew Flick might see the potential dangers of the full plot, which only three of us were aware of. I suspected, given Bill’s form, that he still had an ace up his sleeve, to reveal to Mick and me when he felt the time was right.
Felicity explained that her errant husband had souvenired the authentic police handcuffs from a buck’s party, and had long forgotten them in the bottom of a drawer. She had found them and shown them to her father as a joke, only, months later, to have him suggest the prisoner idea.
Bill had allowed her to pack enough clothes, linen and toiletries for a fortnight, and driven her to the Calders’. He took a photo of her, feigning misery shackled in the cuffs. He said she should put herself back in them whenever she heard a noise, in case one of Gregory Sailor’s few mates managed to track her down.
Three days into the caper, Flick had tired of it. She bought herself a small television and some junk food, to provide a change from the set of classic Russian novels Bill had provided for her. Her father suggested she should ‘start with an easy one’, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, before progressing to Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
‘I grew up on Rage and Summer Bay. What do I know about classic Russian literature, Steele? Give me a good soapie or a few hours of music clips, any day,’ Flick said. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. Greg should have learned his lesson by now. If you or Dad can pick me up tomorrow morning, I’ll go home.’
‘That’s not a good idea, Felicity,’ I said, straining to think of a plausible reason why going home before Sunday was not an option.
I came up with: ‘I saw your father today and he said he thinks Greg hasn’t told his girlfriend it’s over yet.’
I needed a better reason than that. If Felicity was really sick of being cooped up here, she might storm back home and tell Sailor their marriage was finished, and that she would take him for half his accumulated worth plus a healthy weekly sum for their child when it was born.
‘I am really pissed off at your Dad, you know,’ I added. ‘He could have told me this was all a put-up, so I wouldn’t have been racing around all over Brisbane looking for you. I want to teach both him and your husband a lesson neither of them will forget.’
That cheered her up.
I continued. ‘Why don’t you use your credit card to book into a four-star hotel until Sunday, Flick? I promise I will pay the full bill on Sunday morning. You’ll still have to stay out of sight, but that’s pretty easy in a good hotel. You won’t run into anyone Gregory knows and, even if you do, just duck out of sight.’
‘You sure you can afford that, Steele?’ was Felicity’s astute question.
To show good faith, I emptied my wallet of its thirty bucks, for Felicity’s incidental spending money until the next morning when she could start running up her credit card.
‘By the way as part of your Dad’s discussion with your husband, Gregory has to ride Who Loves Yer Baby on Saturday,’ I told Flick.
‘Aw, isn’t that nice. I’ll have to listen to the race.’
Driving us to Brisbane’s inner city and the Sheraton Hotel, I explained I was due a big bonus on Saturday. It was worth it for me to spend the money, to get back at her father with a practical joke he would remember forever. The bonus I was thinking of was clearing it with Mick for me to take $500 out of the twenty grand for expenses after I explained the latest unplanned twist in our carefully laid and gently unravelling plans.
It was around midnight when I went to bed. Before I fell asleep, I promised myself, after all this was over, six nights straight of live entertainment with Nat and whoever else could tolerate my barely adequate company.
I would contact Mick Clarence in the morning. Bill Smith I would let stew for at least a couple of days, wondering where his daughter was. I suspected Felicity would ring her dad before I let him off the hook, though I asked her not to. I would be quite happy if Bill called off the fix, now I had wrestled a few of the puppet-master’s strings from his fingers.
As a student of form, I was picking crazed mathematician Mick Clarence to be putting twenty grand on a premonition rather than cold science. I figured a human emotion deeper than solving a complicated equation lay at his desire to roll for such big stakes. As he was young, at race’s end with a bad result, Mick could shrug and calculate how many weeks it would take to get his money back.
Bill Smith, on the other hand, was betting the lot on Saturday. I heard Mecklam was threatening to drum Bill out of Australian racing, which, at the Russian’s age, would destroy him financially. That might urge him to keep going with the plan, which had a big, if unlikely, reward. As it was, he stood to lose his life’s savings, his career, his family and his liberty. He would not be recovering from that. The Russian who had jumped ship on a whim had one life raft left, an unlikely win on Saturday. This made him a most dangerous man.
Me, I was along for the ride. I might have been in it even if I wasn’t playing the noble knight on a mission to rescue the soon-to-be fair matron Felicity.
Ignoring much evidence to the contrary, I saw myself as a survivor. Whether I was or not, I believed I had that air about me, and that was why someone like Bill Smith, riding a million-to-one shot, wanted me around. For a survivor, I was light on back-up strategies for covering my arse as I followed Smith into the unknown.
Happily, such worries would be cast aside the next day as I headed to honest toil in the Ipswich suburb of Bundamba, an Aboriginal word for ‘place of the stone axe.’ I hope that’s what it means because I read Aboriginals sometimes, for a bit of fun, fibbed when asked what a word meant. Maybe Bundamba means ‘place of the stoned white fella, leaving the Racecourse Hotel’.
___o0o___
I HEADED SOUTHWEST along the Ipswich Motorway to, you guessed it, Ipswich, where Bundamba racetrack hosts regular mid-week races. The crowds are rarely big and my bookie fielded mainly to cover expenses and give us all a day out. I tuned in the car radio to a romantic duet.
It was about the next time I fall in love, repeated a few times, with a verse full of ooo ooo ooo and that it was you I would love.
Believe it or not, this was smash hit of the day. I put it down to the verse consisting entirely of ooos. I imagine the first pop songwriters stuck ooos, aahs or lalas in their work, intending to come back later to fill in the words, only to find that those meaningless fillers were paving stones on the road to gold records.
Switching channels on the radio, I found British actor-come-singer Nick Berry trying to convince us that Every Loser Wins. I could not quite follow his reasoning, how losers were actually winning just because we poor sods had a go. Sounded like young Nick got beaten by a few lengths in the Love Handicap, but was being quite the British stoic about it all.
Trying for third-time-lucky on another station, Aussie pop veteran John Farnham had returned from the dead, or at least from the club circuit, to front aging pop rockers The Little River Band. His enormous solo hit You’re The Voice had some pretty left-of-centre lyrics for a pop anthem, disguised by the trademark cheery Farnham delivery. The ditty declared we should stop staring at each other down the barrel of a gun, and give up living in fear.
The words might have been a rallying cry for the suburban punter to pacifism, but if you took the hostility out of the burbs, they just would not be the same, would they? Buddha, I dislike pop music, but at least its Aussie exponents were having a go at making it mean something. Besides, how could our John-oh go wrong-oh, with a couple of interjections in his song-oh?
I parked the ute, flashed my pass into the race course and found my bookie having a soft drink and checking the odds he was likely to put up for the first couple of races.
We enjoyed a fairly peaceful afternoon on the track. The few professional punters who showed weren’t too keen to lash out on second-string horses.
We had a fright in Ipswich race four, when a group of punters came for a horse called Mum’s Darling. I did not recognise any of the blokes betting in hundreds, when other gamblers on the race were hitting us with tens, twenties and the occasional fifty. In between the bets, I heard our bookie tell our payout man that the horse came from northern New South Wales. It hadn’t raced for three months, and had won only one race.
It is funny how the mind works, but I immediately associated northern New South Wales with our outing, picking magic mushies. It was ridiculous, but I started thinking that these southerners knew about doping with gold tops.
We won on two of the first three races, and did little damage on the one we lost. So we laid the southern horse I supposed was doped to the eyeballs on shrooms. It ran second last. They must have fed it toadstools by mistake.