Torn Apart by Peter Corris Read Free Book Online

head and held out his hand. ‘No names.’
    I gave him three hundreds but he didn’t look happy. He drained his third schooner and left.
    I only had to go a block to South Dowling Street and then cross to Moore Park and I fancied a contemplative walk, even though the day was cold and windy. On the paths the trees dripped on me from the morning rain and the fallen leaves were slushy underfoot. I think of myself as a summer rather than a winter person but for some reason the conditions suited my mood. I walked briskly and warmed up.
    Barclay’s information was interesting and would be easy enough to check, at least in its outline. I knew James O’Day, who’d fought as Jimmy O’Day, some years back. A good, careful fighter with a good, careful manager who’d picked his fights. Never won a serious title, but he’d made money and got out of the game before any damage was done and turned to his other talent—music. The Currawongs were a moderately successful band. I’d seen them live once in Bulli in the course of an investigation and talked to O’Day a few times. I owned a couple of their albums, one of them signed by James. I could ask him about the Hamilton gig and the fire and I could go there and ask questions. A man who lost a wife in a fire caused by someone playing a dodgy game might well want revenge. I felt enlivened as I went up the steep path towards the golf course. Bugger golf, I had work to do.
    I phoned O’Day, spoke to one of his girlfriends, and arranged to meet him at his place in Newtown that evening. She said he was just back from a tour and was chilling. I spent part of the afternoon in the gym and the rest loading the photographs from my mobile onto the computer. I flicked through them, slotting the right paper into the printer, and printed out the shot of Patrick pretending to play his fiddle with an appropriate Dublin scene in the background—a pub. I wasn’t really concentrating and was about to close down when something I’d seen in passing nagged at me.
    I went through the shots more slowly until I came to the photos showing the tavern where the céilidh had taken place. The light wasn’t the best and the pictures were fuzzy. The one of Angela Warburton in profile didn’t do her justice. I found the one that had almost captured my attention—a wide-angle shot that showed Patrick with a group in the middle of a wild leap with his eyes closed in joy, and in drink. A man sitting behind him was staring at Patrick with a look of sheer malevolence on his face. He was thin, dark, not young, and not obviously one of the Travellers. Although there were other people sitting near him he gave the impression of being on his own.
    I blew the image up and studied it. The hostility was unmistakable, made more emphatic by the bony thinness of his face. He had a barely touched pint of beer in front of him and a cigarette in his hand, but he didn’t look drunk or as if he was about to do anything. He just stared and hated.
    The next photo in the sequence was only moments later and covered the same scene, but the man was gone and Patrick had taken a breather. I ran off a copy of the photo. In the old days I’d have opened a file and the photo would have gone into it. But that was then and this was now. I pinned the céilidh photo and the one of Patrick with his fiddle to the corkboard in the kitchen where I could look at and think about them.
    James O’Day and assorted members of the Currawongs, their road crew and girlfriends, occupied a big terrace house in Newtown close to Camperdown Park. I rolled up at about 7 pm with half a slab of beer—the acceptable calling card. A young woman let me in and took the beer. She wore modified goth gear—black clothes and shining metal—but didn’t have the sullen, the-world-is-a-shitheap look. I actually got a smile.
    â€˜James is in the kitchen,’ she