by her given name. ‘I’d like you to call and tell me about her. Our Mrs Pargetter has been my mentor all these years.’
18
Moss, Brenda and Sir Donald Bradman
TWO WEEKS AFTER MOSS AND Hamish met with Georgia, she rang Moss with welcome news. ‘Damara can help you, but you’ll need to buy her time,’ she said, and giving Moss the phone number, wished her luck. Moss could hardly wait for Georgia to finish. She hung up and called Damara straightaway.
‘Damara? My name is Miranda Sinclair. Georgia has spoken to you about me?’
The voice on the other end was cautious. ‘Yeah. I might be able to help, but it’ll cost you. I’ll need some money for expenses and loss of earnings.’
‘Georgia told me that. How much for an hour of your time?’
‘A hundred dollars. More if I’ve got the information you want. And you’ll have to throw in a nice lunch.’
Moss asked Hamish to come along, and he was more than happy to desert his studies. ‘Someone has to make sure you don’t do anything rash,’ he added. He wondered briefly how well she had thought through this quest. Nevertheless, he was pleased to see her when he picked her up from the station in his old Commodore.
‘Let’s get moving,’ she said. Hamish drove in his usual careful manner while Moss fretted. ‘You could have made that green light,’ she said impatiently, more than once. ‘You could overtake that truck.’
‘Plenty of time,’ Hamish responded curtly. ‘You can always catch the tram if you don’t like my driving.’
They arrived early at the small Greek restaurant that Damara had named, and looked curiously around at the other diners, in case she had already arrived.
‘I told her I’d be wearing a black jumper with an emerald-green scarf.’ Moss was rather enjoying the cloak-and-dagger aspect of their task. ‘She’ll be wearing a purple top.’
‘And the password is “The bird of night roosts in the banana palm”,’ Hamish muttered from the side of his mouth.
Moss giggled. ‘What an incredibly good guess! I . . . oh, this must be her.’
Damara sat down in the chair Hamish pulled out, and took off her sunglasses. Her dark brown eyes and olive skin indicated Mediterranean ancestry, and Moss and Hamish looked in awe at her pink mohawk, wondering why on earth she thought she’d needed to mention she’d be wearing a purple top. She met their astonished gaze with an ironic quirk of the eyebrow. She was clearly no fool.
‘I met Brenda just after the accident,’ she said, tucking into her calamari. ‘We both worked for Vince. What a fucking bastard he was. He’d beaten Brenda up real bad and she couldn’t work for weeks. Broke her jaw. I had to take her in. He nicked all her money and the other girl’s too.’
‘Amber-Lee’s?’
‘Yeah. He wanted Brenda to tell him where Amber-Lee hid her stash, but she swore she didn’t know. She wasn’t going to mess about with Vince, so she gave him a box from under the poor bitch’s mattress and he found her money in it. But he just wouldn’t believe there was no stash. So, as I said, he beat her up real bad.’ Damara spoke dispassionately, as though she were describing a business transaction, spearing the calamari rings to make her point.
Hamish watched her with narrowed eyes. She was betrayed only by a slight tremor in the hand holding her glass.
‘Did you keep in touch with Brenda?’ Moss asked without much hope.
‘Yeah, I did for a while. We went to Adelaide and worked together for nearly three years, then she met a bloke and they got married. He knew she was on the game, and he didn’t want her mixing with her old friends, so we sort of lost touch. Last I heard she had a couple of kids.’
‘Did she stay in Adelaide?’ Hamish asked.
‘Far as I know.’
‘Do you have an address?’
‘Nuh. Haven’t seen her for ages.’
‘What was her married name?’ Moss asked.
Damara had already told them more than she’d meant to, and recollected herself in time. ‘That sort of information doesn’t come cheap.’
‘How much?’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Five hundred.’
Hamish put a warning hand on Moss’s knee. This was where he could be useful. ‘One fifty. That’s more than fair.’
Threads ‘Three hundred.’
‘Two fifty. Final offer,’ said Hamish, preparing to stand up. ‘Take it or leave it.’
Moss held her breath. She would have been happy to pay the five hundred.
‘Okay. Two fifty.’ Damara waited while Moss counted out five fifty-dollar bills. ‘She married a man called Ivan