the prosecution deeply resented seeing months of painstakingly gathered evidence swept away by what they regarded as smooth-talking, pettifogging criminal lawyers.
Billy contemplated finding another place to sleep. He’d been sprung twice there in one morning. First by the kid, who on the face of it seemed harmless enough, then by the big cop. Was this a warning? You never could tell with street kids. What if the boy belonged to a gang? They’d come back on pension day to rob him.
Billy loved this part of the city, it was where he had practised as a barrister. The Botanic Gardens had been his private joy since he’d been a junior in a law firm when, each lunch break, he would take his cheese and pickle sandwiches and a bottle of milk to sit on a particular bench beside a small pond. The thought of moving from his summer residence, located as it was in this, the most beautiful part of the inner city, filled him with a terrible anxiety. The bench under the ficus tree beside the library wall and within spitting distance of the Gardens was now as much a home to him as the Eastern Suburbs mansion he’d once occupied.
He knew that he was taking a risk by staying; street kids depended on pension and dole days almost as much as the recipients themselves, and there could scarcely have been a drunk in the Woolloomooloo, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst or Surry Hills area who hadn’t been robbed by a bunch of feral kids. The dispossessed children roving the area lived without the luxury of conscience, they were ruthless and unfeeling and, like all predators, they looked for the already wounded, the easy victims. In a perverse sort of way, the feral kids were a part of the street culture, many already dependent on hard drugs, and while they were to be greatly feared, they were part of the environment in which the alcoholic learns to survive. There were worse around.
Like most homeless people, Billy feared the thrillseekers the most. They were the young hoons who came from a background of so-called respectable parents with homes in the outer suburbs. While the street kids robbed you, they usually left you unharmed. If you resisted, they’d give you a bit of a kicking, then leave you to sleep it off. It wasn’t nice, but then it wasn’t life-threatening. The feral kids weren’t silly enough to kill their major source of income. The rampaging youths who came into the inner city mostly on the weekends were quite a different matter. They liked to kick and maim, and if they found a drunk unconscious in an alley, they would soak him with the remains of the metho he’d been drinking and set him alight. They were more interested in persecution and gratuitous violence than the few dollars they might take from a drunk.
Now, on his own again, Billy began to feel somewhat calmer. The boy had seemed uninterested in his briefcase, dismissing it as commonplace, he also seemed quite intelligent so Billy argued with himself that there was a good chance he’d leave him alone. In the case of Sergeant Phillip Orr, had it not been for Billy’s sore knee, his need to urinate and his conversation with the boy, he would have been well gone before the policeman came off duty at six.
Billy sat himself down in a bus shelter and locked the handcuff back around his left wrist. Only when the briefcase was shackled to his person did he ever feel truly secure. His greatest fears were that the briefcase would be taken from him in a bashing or he’d forget where he’d left it during a drinking bout.
The scuffed briefcase carried an odd assortment of bits and pieces, each of which represented some small, sane purpose in his life, a reminder that he was still in contact with some aspects of reality. Some of it was essentially practical, such as a bottle-opener and corkscrew combination, a tin-opener, his spectacles, a pair of nail clippers, his knife, fork and spoon, a box of matches, as well as several short pieces of string and three corks of various sizes,