The Refuge Read Free Page A

typewriters in the general room where I sat sounded suddenly loud and many.
    ‘Hullo, Fitz. Nothing much in your line. A gent drove his car over an embankment half an hour ago in Chatswood. Minor injuries. I’ll give you details in a minute. A bit of a do at Kings Cross—the patrol car’s there now, if you can wait half an hour. No details yet. No sign of the chap who got out of the Bay—yes, Manser. Still loose. I’ll let you have some reassuring words about that, too . . . And that’s about the lot. Dull life, isn’t it?’
    Sergeant Hubble I liked. He had put more than one good thing in my way, and given me valuable leads without betraying the trust placed in him by his organization. Tonight, however, his cheery and casual voice was that of a stranger, that of a man I was trying without words to persuade to tell me something he did not know, though I knew it. A sudden compelling desire to prompt him had to be suppressed so strongly that I found my teeth were clenched painfully, my body rigid with a species of helpless anguish.
    ‘Just a minute, Harry,’ I said. ‘I’ll have that Chatswood smash. Is it worth a picture?’
    ‘Not unless you’re light on. A ten-foot drop, not much damage, no one of importance—not even a pinched car. Are you right?’
    Moving into the chair, I changed the receiver to my left hand so that I could write. In his most official voice, deep and clear above the bang and rush and ring of the typewriter in the room with him, Sergeant Hubble gave me the story, and then some pointers about the escapee, Manser, who was also a nobody—not even a dangerous criminal. Because the public (which has a perverse and nervous sympathy for those who evade that justice the public itself has decreed) enjoys reading about such evasions, as well as for the reputation of the force, the police are extremely touchy in the matter of these escapes; and this was the fourth in the State in less than three months. My paper’s policy has always been to play up the police efforts in such cases—in all cases, in fact, from murder down—and in return we have had a most satisfactory co-operation from those strange, suspicious, arrogant and often frightened men whom I have known to be as brave as at times they have been brutal. I listened and made notes; or perhaps I should say Lloyd Fitzherbert listened and made notes, in a neat shorthand on a tidy block of paper, while I, the secret self of that efficient, experienced and even esteemed police roundsman of the
Sydney Gazette
, stood aside watching with renewed anguish of mind the swift performance of a routine night task. For I had not heard from Hubble what I must hear if I hoped to sleep that night (or, said the subdued, unreasoning voice of despair, to sleep ever again); and, thinking of the tide in the harbour, how it must now be approaching its fullness, I knew it was time; it was time . . .
    ‘And that’s that,’ Hubble said at last. ‘Make what you like of Manser. He’s been sighted, which means we ought to have him by tomorrow night at the latest. They’re coming in now from the Cross after putting two men and a woman in Darlinghurst for the night. I think it was only a bun-fight. Ring you back. So long.’
    He hung up before I could speak again; but that did not matter, for I had nothing to say that could be said to a police sergeant, however friendly. The nauseated sensation came over me again, and the dark and as it were drunken despair of mind. I put the receiver back on its trestle and sat looking at it. This period was one I had only half-foreseen, knowing it must be lived through but not realizing that a nervous exhaustion such as I had known only once before in my life—when Alan was born and my wife of less than two years’ marriage died—would make the endurance of it so hard.
    Behind me, the last man on late duty was packing up to go. In the big room, with its barren spread of now vacant tables under the insufficient ceiling lights of