Beware of the Dog by Peter Corris Read Free Book Online

tapestry that seemed to depict some major military event. Maybe one of his wives had found herself with time on her hands.
    The other rooms weren’t much. The smallest of them wasn’t more than about twice the size of my bedroom in Glebe. One of them had evidently been occupied by a woman.
    There was a soiled feminine silk dressing gown hanging on the back of the door and several items of make-up lay scattered on top of a chest standing beside a full-length mirror. Unlike the other rooms I’d seen in the house, this one was dusty and untidy—books on the floor beside the roughly made bed, a hairbrush and a coffee mug on the dresser. I made a thorough search but found nothing—no letters under loose floorboards, no photograph taped to the back of the mirror, no nightclub book matches. Very little scope for detecting. The hairbrush was almost the only thing worth looking at. It held several verylong strands of very blonde hair. The room looked like a place to crash rather than to live in.
    I went up a smaller staircase to the top level. The attic rooms were used for storage. Tea chests, cardboard boxes and old furniture lay around wearing an air of rejection. I pushed my way through to the window of the room on the right side of the house, rubbed dust from the pane and looked out. I could see all the way over the slate, tile and iron rooftops to Coogee. Under a clear sky, the water was a deep tourist-attracting blue and sunlight bounced off the buildings along the foreshore. Somehow it was natural to look at the distant seascape, an automatic response, but the foreground was just as pleasing. Most of the houses and streets boasted luxuriant trees and the recent rain had given the area a lush, pampered look. The elevation was ideal. I scanned the streets to the west and north, then moved to the other room and surveyed the scene in the other directions. No tall loose-limbed blondes hanging about, no white Honda Civic.
    â€˜Find anything interesting?’ Sir Phillip Wilberforce said when I rejoined him in the solarium. This time I’d removed my leather jacket.
    â€˜Yes and no. You’re very free with your house. I’m a total stranger.’
    He smiled and removed a mobile telephone from underneath the cane lounge. ‘I checked on you while you were up there, Mr Hardy. If there had been any reason for concern. I would have had help by the time you came down.’
    â€˜I’m impressed,’ I said.
    â€˜So am I. I was contemplating asking you what this exercise was going to cost me, but my information is that you are relatively honest.’
    â€˜I could resent the “relatively”.’
    He shrugged and replaced the phone. ‘You have to allow for the natural resentment of public officials. The more intelligent of them know that outside their institutions they’d starve in the midst of plenty.’
    I might have agreed, partly, but he was starting to bore me. Rampant free-enterprisers have only one song to sing. ‘When did you last see Paula?’ I said.
    He laughed. A million wrinkles broke out on his face and spread like ripples in a pool. ‘I’m not going to be questioned by you. Instead, answer this: how much would you accept to desist?’
    I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The shadows had advanced but the solarium was still a hot box. ‘Sir Phillip,’ I said, ‘I
want
to desist. I’ve got other things to do. But I have to see her. Money doesn’t enter into it.’
    â€˜I hoped you’d say that.’ He was wearing his shades again. Now he took them off and gave me a blast from the Wilberforce baby blues. ‘I haven’t seen my daughter for some weeks. She’s the only one of my children I care a damn about. I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, Mr Hardy, to find her.’

6
    There’s nothing in the Commercial Agents and Private Enquiry Agents Act to say you can’t take on two important