Beyond the Horizon Read Free Page A

the seedy back streets of Sydney, but his unexpected transfer niggled at George as it seemed to smack of distrust. Had the intelligence agencies smelled a conspiracy between him and the police officer?
    There was one advantage to having the policeman back on his old beat and that was George was once again able to collect useful information about his business competitors – which of them kept mistresses, which visited prostitutes on Saturday night and then attended church services on Sunday as respectable members of the community. George wanted to know all the seamy details – after all, you never knew when that kind of information would come in very handy indeed. Today George would ask Firth to investigate Major Sean Duffy; the man must have a few secrets in his past worth knowing about.
    *
    Sean Duffy had never liked being referred to as ‘Major’. He was a solicitor, and the choice of profession had been opportune for a man who had lost both legs fighting on the Western Front. But the people he worked with were proud that they had a genuine war hero in their ranks and wouldn’t let him be plain Mr Duffy. He tried to take it in the spirit which it was meant – and he was grateful they were prepared to overlook his occasional bout with the bottle. Several times he had faced up in court bleary-eyed and hungover, leaning on his walking stick even more than usual. He still managed to deliver sharp and incisive defence rebukes to the prosecution arguments.
    Sean was still a young man with a lot of life ahead of him, but when sleep came to him at nights he would relive the hell of trench warfare, crying out, his body covered in sweat and jerking as if he had been electrocuted. It was perhaps fortunate that Sean slept alone in his flat in the city. The last person to share his bed had been the wife of another man – George Macintosh – but Louise had broken off their affair for the sake of her seeing her son and Sean had retreated to his work and the relative peace that came with too much alcohol.
    It was early afternoon now and many workers were returning from lunch to open shops for the day’s trading. It was a pleasant autumn day and smoke lay as a haze over the city from the tanneries and other factories along the harbour shore.
    Sitting in a chair beside the window in Sean’s office was Harry Griffiths. Harry had lost an eye in the trenches. He had been a Sydney policeman before the war and the stipend he received from Sean for gathering information kept his small family off the streets. Harry was a big, tough man in his mid-thirties and he was fiercely loyal to Sean, who had saved him from a life of petty crime and destitution.
    â€˜Well, Harry, what have we got on the Morgan case?’ Sean asked and Harry took a small, crumpled notebook from his jacket pocket.
    â€˜The shopkeeper couldn’t have seen Morgan in the street that night,’ he said. ‘The streetlights were out.’
    Sean smiled. ‘Good, there goes the positive identification of Morgan as the one who broke into his shop.’
    â€˜Morgan is a good bloke, boss,’ Harry said. ‘He was one of us at Fromelles.’
    Sean had developed a reputation for defending former servicemen who had returned to a world indifferent to their suffering. Many carried the unseen wounds of war in their heads and turned to alcohol for relief. Some had slipped into petty crime to pay for the drink that kept them sane. These were shadow people, disregarded by those who had done well out of the war.
    â€˜Any decorations?’ Sean asked.
    â€˜He got an MID for Fromelles,’ Harry said, referring to his notes. ‘He was a battalion runner.’
    Sean knew from personal experience how dangerous it was to be a runner in the trenches; they were often exposed to rifle and shell fire getting vital messages between headquarters and the front lines. A Mentioned in Dispatches was not a high award but it would show