Deep Water Read Free Page B

now I had that feeling for real, and very strongly.
    Naturally the flat had a computer connected to the internet and a printer and scanner and other hardware unfamiliar to me. I’d kept my email address so as to stay in touch while I was overseas and I sent a message to Margaret McKinley to establish the contact.
    I was never much of a web user but now I read some newspapers and blogs from home and was pleased to see that the conservative government was in trouble at the polls. The opposition was scoring better on most counts and the commentators were predicting a close election, with some reading it one way and some the other. I’d be back in time to cast my vote for change. It was well past time.
    Margaret’s message came through with a number of attachments—two photographs of Henry McKinley, one obviously taken a few years back showing him with his daughter and grand-daughter, who looked to be about ten. There was a photostat of his driver’s licence and several newspaper clippings recording his winning a number of awards—one for a book on water management in the Sydney basin, another some kind of medal from the Australasian Geological Society, and one for the first over-55 finisher in the Sydney to Wollongong cycling race.
    Margaret’s notes said that her father owned the town-house he lived in at Rose Bay, that he had no pets and that his mail went to a post office box, so there was nothing at the flat to indicate that it was unoccupied. She included the phone number and URL of the corporation he worked for and documented the times she had made calls and emailedenquiring about her father. She listed the friends she had referred to when we spoke, and a number for the secretary of the Four Bays Cycling Club. It was an impressive dossier—she was obviously highly organised as well as very worried.
    Henry McKinley was tall and lean with tightly curled fair hair. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles and his expression would best be described as good-humoured. Hard to judge from the snapshots and newspaper photos, but he looked weather-beaten, which I guess is natural for a geologist and a cyclist. He was born in Canberra, the son of a public servant father and an academic mother. He did his bachelor and master’s degrees at the ANU, topped off with a PhD from Cambridge. He’d worked briefly as an academic but then branched out into consultancy, taking on commissions from state and local governments and the private sector. He’d worked for mining companies, presumably for big fees, and advised,
pro bono
, a couple of major archaeological excavations on the geology of their sites. In recent years he’d accepted a post as chief geologist in the Tarelton Explorations and Development Company.
    I eased back from the screen after absorbing this information.
    â€˜A good bloke,’ I said.
    Spending too many days alone, I was beginning to talk to myself. It was definitely time to get in touch with other people. I phoned Margaret McKinley and told her I’d found the material she’d sent both helpful and worrying and that I was relaying it to a colleague in Australia with a recommendation that he begin an enquiry.
    â€˜Thanks, Cliff. Won’t he need … what’s it called? A retainer?’
    â€˜He’ll need a contract, but we can deal with all that later. I’m booking a flight home for next week and I’ll take it up with him then. His name’s Hank Bachelor. He’s an American, as it happens. Resident in Australia. The reverse of you.’
    â€˜Globalisation,’ she said.
    I laughed. ‘Right. Can I see you before I head off?’
    We met at a middle-range restaurant of her choice on the edge of the old town, walking distance from my flat. Margaret wore a dress, heels and a linen jacket; I wore a blazer, freshly dry-cleaned trousers and shirt, no tie. We’d dressed for what it was—somewhere between a date and a business meeting. That