Wet Graves Read Free

ticket. Without it, I couldn’t earn Ms Madden’s thousand bucks or anyone else’s. I had a mortgage to pay and a Ford Falcon to support. I had bills on the noticeboard at home and I needed about 2000 calories a day to keep going. I folded the letter and put it in the pocket of my sports jacket which hung on the back of the chair I sat on. No doubt about it, I was neat and tidy today. I could drop in on my mate, Detective Inspector Frank Parker, and get a look at the missing persons file on on Brian Madden and talk over the Hardy licence lifting case at the same time. Maybe I’d meet a nice, friendly woman at police headquarters and bump into someone at the bottle shop who was looking for a clean, light room in Glebe—$80 a week, share the bills and feed the cat.
    I got up and put on my jacket. Then I saw the jury duty notice and bent over to fill in the form attached. I ran my eye down the fine print and discovered that licensed enquiry agents were ineligible to serve on juries. I crumpled the letter and scored a direct hit on the wastepaper basket.

2
    The letter from Detective Sergeant Griffin had invited me to contact his office for more information about my court appearance, but I had something of Ms Madden’s caution about writers of official letters. “Bypass A Bureaucrat Today” is my motto. There ought to be a T-shirt.
    I set out to walk to the new police fortress in Goulburn Street, partly for the exercise and partly because I like to see how my law and order tax dollar is being spent. I went down William Street and cut up Yurong to Oxford. It was July but warm and dry after a few weeks of cold and wet, and the lightly dressed and briskly moving people seemed to be relishing the change. These days I feel like closing my eyes when I walk through the city. You can’t rely on a building you visited on Friday afternoon still being there on Monday morning, and most of the new stuff going up looks as if it has been designed by architects who stalled at cubism.
    As I turned out of Oxford Street I almost collided with a man who was so wide he almost took up half of the footpath. If the woman standing behind him had been at his side they would have had to erect a detour sign.
    â€œSay, buddy. Can you direct us to your Sydney Harbour Bridge?”
    I pointed and tried to use language they would understand. “Walk north,” I said. “It’s a mile or so.”
    His mouth dropped open and the fat on his cheeks sagged towards his neck. “Walk? Did you hear that, honey? We have to walk.”
    The woman, wearing a white sweatshirt and black trousers, looked like a two-tone bowling ball. “Isn’t there a bus or a streetcar?”
    I shook my head. “Better to walk. The buses are full of muggers.” I nodded, stepped onto the road to get around them and headed towards the police building. I regretted being a smartarse before I got there and turned around to make amends, but they were getting into a cab, him in front, her in the back. I made a mental note to be nice to the next tourist I met.
    From a distance, the Sydney Police Centre looks all right—a combination of grey shapes, more or less inoffensive. Up close the slim pillars and the boxy structures behind them look like a house of cards propped up by king-size cigarettes. The architects have inserted grass and bricks everywhere grass and bricks can go, and haven’t stinted on polished marble and automatic doors. I went into the lobby, which looks like a cross between a bank, heavy on the bulletproof glass, and a five-star hotel, heavy on the pile carpet and rounded edges. The place bristles with pamphlets emphasising community policing, and the lighting is soft to suggest that harmony and understanding begin here. The only thing to suggest that crime is being fought here too is that the cops in the glass and aluminium bunkers wear their caps.
    I presented my credentials to a series of interceptors