“This was tucked away in Adin’s clothing. Do you think it could be the photograph taken from the frame in your office?”
Husband and wife looked at each other. There was nodding. “Yes, I think so,” Nettie said.
“I must ask you again, does anything about this advertisement look familiar or ring a bell of any kind?” Billie smoothed out the folded clipping on the tabletop, between the plate of biscuits and the pot of tea.
“Well...” Nettie blinked and bent closer. “My goodness. That looks like the same necklace, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does appear to be the same necklace,” Billie agreed, and watched her. The Kleemann design was quite distinctive. Those batwing shapes. Surely there couldn’t be too many like it?
“I... I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention. What would he have to do with an auction?” Nettie asked, shaking her head. Billie recalled her frustration when she’d first been presented with the clipping, her inability to accept a connection. “But it is impossible. This was made by Georg Kleemann in Pforzheim, far from here. It was a prized possession of Margarethe’s. How could it be the same one?”
Billie thought she knew how. And she thought Adin knew, too.
Twenty-five
Billie was stationed at thesmall corner balcony of her sixth-floor office, leaning against one of the Roman-style pillars, smoking a Lucky Strike and sipping Sam’s perfect tea as if it held the key to her restoration—and perhaps it did—when she heard the telephone ring. Today was a smoking day, she’d decided. She kept her eyes on Sydney city, on the miniaturized people coming and going on the streets below, on the morning sunlight falling on the tall buildings, as her assistant answered the call. After a moment Sam filled the doorway with a look of concern in his baby blues.
“There’s a telephone call for you, Billie,” he said. “It’s the police.”
Billie strolled back inside, cigarette dangling from her Fighting Red. They’d spent a few too many hours with the police in Katoomba, but it wasn’t over yet, she felt sure. Between their overjoyed client, the less-than-overjoyed police, and the shocked hospital staff, it had been quite the evening. She put her empty teacup on the edge of her desk, then sat in her chair and picked up the receiver. “Billie Walker speaking. How may I help you?” She leaned back, put heroxford-clad feet up, and cast her eyes over the front page ofTheSydney Morning Heraldagain, with its dramatic artist’s impression of the Oldsmobile flying off Victoria Pass.
“This is Detective Inspector Cooper,” said a deep voice down the line. “Our colleagues in Katoomba informed me about yesterday’s events.”
And the papers, too,Billie thought. He couldn’t have missed the part where it said: “Lady Inquiry Agent Billie Walker, daughter of the late former detective Barry Walker, was reportedly involved in what witnesses described as a ‘shootout’ and ‘dramatic car chase’ that led to the double fatality.” It featured a clear photograph of her in a nipped-skirt suit and tilt hat, leaving Central Court on a divorce matter she had assisted with earlier in the year. They’d only just fallen short of giving out her number and office hours.
“I’d like you to come down to the station today, if possible,” the inspector said.
Billie cocked her head and adjusted a stocking seam. This was no real surprise, though the deaths of those two men did seem to be somewhat outside what she imagined the detective inspector’s usual jurisdiction would be. “Of course, Inspector. I can be there soon, if that suits,” she replied. She took another drag of her smoldering cigarette, felt the smoke fill her lungs, felt her shoulders drop. If she was in any real trouble they would be at her door, taking her to the station. The inspector’s approach implied that this would not be an interrogation with both barrels, as it were.
“Yes. I’m at Central Police Station. I’ll wait,” the inspector said and hung up.
Billie placed the telephone receiver back in its cradle. She took another puff of her cigarette, a rare second one, then held it betweenher fingers, thinking. The gesture reminded her of her father, she realized. She was becoming more like him each day. She smiled her very best serene smile. “Sam, I need to head to the police station. Will you hold the fort?”
Her assistant nodded. “Absolutely. I hope everything will be—”
“It will be fine,” she assured him. He was worried about having brandished a gun in front of witnesses, but he needn’t have been. The mountain cops seemed more suspicious of her driving than of this returned soldier’s attempts to bring down a couple of criminals with his long-barreled farm gun. Men shot guns. That was easy enough to fathom. But women like Billie driving cars and whatnot? She turned and checked her hat in the oval mirror near her desk and, satisfied, slipped on her smoked glasses, cigarette dangling from her lips again. She took it out to touch up her Fighting Red, then replaced it. Blast. It was almost down to a stub. She placed it embers down in Sam’s ashtray. He pulled one from his pack and silently offered it, and she nodded.
Yes, today is a smoking day.
“I should be back in an hour or so; otherwise, I will telephone,” Billie said, grabbing her handbag. “Oh, and if a flood of clients pours in waving ten-pound notes around, get them all some very good tea and don’t let them leave,” she said dryly. “Our rate is now twelve pounds per day.”
Billie knew Central Police Station well. Her father had worked there in his days as a detective before she was born, and his work had brought him back there plenty of times in her youth. The Walkers and this place went way back. The three-story police station buildingwas a short walk up George Street from her office, and Billie chose to take the stroll rather than waste the precious petrol coupons she so enjoyed using on drives in the country—recent notorious events notwithstanding.
The station got its name from both its location and its purpose. The inner-city sandstone building had long acted as central police headquarters. The station housed the criminal investigation offices and other special branches, and backed onto the Central Police Court in Liverpool Street. Belowground the buildings were connected, allowing prisoners to be taken to court and back through a maze of dark corridors and holding cells filled with stinking, dangerous men—and the occasional deadly woman. At least that was how Billie remembered it from her father’s vivid stories when she was younger. But while the courthouse on Liverpool Street had the impressive frontage one expected of a civic building, the public entrance to Central Police Station, with its grand masonry arch, was incongruously on narrow Central Street, in reality more lane than street, as if the city had collectively decided not to look at the police station or think about Sydney’s underbelly of drunks, brawlers, thieves, rapists, petty criminals, and crime bosses. It was the architectural equivalent of being swept under the carpet.
There weren’t a lot of women walking in or out of Sydney’s Central Police Station on a Tuesday morning. At this hour there wasn’t even the common presence of women and children in the waiting room that Billie routinely saw on weekends, or worst of all during the holidays, when tensions at home tended to go off the rails into violence. In fact, there was only Billie, and her distinctly female presence did not go unnoticed. Billie felt the heads turn as she walked beneath the masonry arch in her nipped suit with itsrelatively modest hem, her stacked-heel oxfords, and seamed stockings, dozens of male eyes clocking her movements as she walked past the waiting room on the left and the charge room on the right and stopped at the main receiving desk. The stares at her back were as palpable as hands. She could almost smell the testosterone. Not a terrible scent, but certainly distinctive, and in this context, almost overpowering.
This was what happened when you excluded an entire sex from a line of work for far too many decades, she supposed. If you placed all the private inquiry agents in Sydney in one building, it would be much the same.
It was with some relief that Billie spotted the welcoming face of Constable Annabelle Primrose behind the reception desk. She was a resourceful young woman of about twenty-two with a stocky, athletic build, a square and determined jaw, curly blond hair, and the brightest blue eyes Billie had ever seen. Her skin shone with wholesome radiance. She was from the country, somewhere out west, Billie recalled, and Billie fancied she played a set of tennis, rode a trick pony, and ran to work, all before breakfast. The police force had parked her at a desk job, as it had a lot of other women who’d joined up, assuming that the girls would get married and be forced to resign before long. Primrose could have wrestled bank robbers with one arm, if only they’d let her.
“Good morning,” Billie said and looked round. “Quite the atmosphere in here today.” The stares were only slowly easing.
The constable nodded. “Oh, Ms. Billie, it is good to see you.”
“I understand Detective Inspector Cooper wants a word,” Billie said. The inspector would be on the third floor, in the offices of the Criminal Investigation Branch, she imagined.
“Yes. I heard what happened yesterday,” the younger woman said with wide eyes. “And it’s all over the papers. You’re famous. I’ll let him know you’re here.”
