Free The Washington Club by Peter Corris Page A

whisky bottle wasn’t far away and I was beginning to feel I’d have to bring it closer soon. ‘It sounds lame,’ I said, ‘but I can quite honestly say that the matter never came up. I was married for a while but she was a career woman and the marriage went bad pretty early. The women I’ve known since then have either had children of their own or not wanted them. My childlessness is circumstantial.’
    â€˜Do you want a drink?’
    Observant of her.
My eyes must have been straying. ‘Yes.’
    â€˜Help yourself.’
    I poured some whisky into the glass I’d used before and added a little of the water produced by the melted ice. She held out her coffee mug and I gave her a healthy slug.
    She sipped, then spoke very slowly. ‘I can’tprove any of this, but I believe that Julius had some kind of hold over my parents. I believe that he told them he wanted to marry me and they opposed him. I believe that he worried them to death.’
    I was glad I had the Scotch. I drank some and felt it slide down, warm and comforting. I wished that we weren’t talking this way. I wished we were discussing driving up to Medlow Bath to stay in the Hydo Majestic for the weekend, or flying to the Barrier Reef for the snorkelling and sun-bathing and gins and tonic.
    â€˜You think I’m mad, paranoid or something.’
    She’d pulled her hair back and caught it behind with a clip of some kind, all except for those strands and wisps that were doing their own thing again. I’ve seen and dealt with a lot of disturbed and delusional people and usually you can spot them. It’s not that the eyes glitter or the lips twitch, it’s more a sense you get that they are not really talking to you at all, that they’re engaged in an ever-lasting, ever-circling dialogue with themselves. I felt nothing of that about Claudia Fleischman.
    Against that, she’d lied pretty comprehensively to the police and to Sackville and to me, by omission. If I was going to accept what she told me now I’d have to start from scratch with her story, clear away all the undergrowth and get to what was left standing. I drank some more Scotch and forced myself to think of thelatest turn of events. Women fifteen years younger than me are not generally falling at my feet. I had to consider that Claudia had put on her little black dress and her perfume the way tennis players put on their sneakers and sweatbands—the better to do a job they know how to do. There was no way to come at it gently.
    â€˜Two questions,’ I said. ‘Why did you have these suspicions about your husband and why did you lie about Van Kep?’
    â€˜And if I satisfy you on those two points you’ll fuck me again?’
    â€˜Claudia . . .?’
    â€˜I know how all this must look to you.’
    â€˜No, you don’t. I’ve spent twenty years dealing with things that sometimes weren’t what they seemed and sometimes were exactly that. For better or for worse. I’m sorry if I’m starting to sound to you like a professional investigator and not . . . something else. I’m a bit confused. Bear with me.’
    She lit the cigarette, which looked a bit tired after the work she’d already put in on it. She tried to puff but she’d made a hole in the paper and it wouldn’t draw. She put it out in the glass ashtray and it lay there like a long white worm with its back broken. ‘I inherited the house in Edgecliff. I just let it stand empty for ages and didn’t do anything about it until after I was married. Julius told me to put a professional on the job but I wanted to tidy things up myself. The house turned out tohave a big mortgage on it. That didn’t surprise me too much. They’d always lived well, taken trips overseas and they were big donors to various causes—Amnesty International, things like that.
    â€˜But even to a non-accountant like me it