Free The Undertow by Peter Corris

her out before she got her first period. She was a grade one troublemaking bitch.’
    In a perverse way, that was a ringing endorsement from Ruby, who has a low opinion of humankind in general, and women in particular. For Pixie to be worthy of such an assessment, she had to be a person of some force. I thanked Ruby and promised to introduce her after I’d told her about Lily.
    â€˜I need someone to write my autobiography, Cliff,’ Ruby said. ‘Journalists do that sort of thing, don’t they?’
    â€˜They do. Not sure Lily would. She’s more on the financial side.’
    â€˜Shit, you think I’m not financial? I get all sorts of tips from the market high-flyers and do bloody well out of them. Your girlfriend’d be surprised about the financial stuff that goes on here, and the money side of this business.’
    â€˜I’ll talk to her,’ I said. ‘What about dinner at the Bourbon and Beefsteak? On me?’
    â€˜You’re on. I could go a chateaubriand. Make it a night early in the week.’
    My day’s work had given me plenty to think about— connections that could be important, possible survivors to seek out, questions needing answers. I drove to my office in Newtown to do the thinking and the computer work if that seemed likely to be helpful. The office is two floors up in a building at the non-trendy end of King Street. The creeping gentrification that has transformed Newtown seems to have stalled at the moment, but no doubt it’ll get on the move again, like the cane toad up north.
    Before going to the office I collected my mail from the post office box and, as usual, was able to dispose of a good deal of it in a street bin. The bills were accumulating as they do, but there was a decent cheque as well to help things along. Bpay had taken some of the nuisance and expense out of paying accounts, but the equation was just the same. What was coming in versus what was going out. So far this year, with about a third of it gone, I was holding my own. That was good going, because summer and spring are bad for business generally. Things pick up in winter when people tend to have darker, more suspicious thoughts.
    The office is conducive to thinking—spartan, functional, with the coffee maker as the only comfort item since the bar fridge went on the blink. I booted up the computer and wrote down as many of the words spoken by all parties in the interviews as I could remember. This is a new technique for me, as advised by Lily. She says that exact, direct quotes can sometimes get you to the heart of the matter. Hasn’t happened yet, but it might. For Lil, the words on the screen are totally real. Me, I need to print things out to get the feel.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon going over what I’d written together with Frank’s extensive notes, trying to piece things together. If Dr Karl Lubeck was associated with Rafael Padrone’s sister, then the removal of his medical file was unlikely to be an accident—incidental to the removal of incriminating material—as Roma Brown had thought. If Pixie Padrone had pulled herself out of addiction through expensive detoxification treatment and had had some bodywork, again expensive, that suggested she’d got her hands on some money. Maybe some of her brother’s twenty thousand?
    But what light, if any, did this throw on the possibility of Gregory Heysen being innocent of conspiracy to murder Peter Bellamy? My one thought to date was that Heysen could have been framed as a consequence of something going wrong in the clandestine makeover racket. Not easy to investigate, let alone prove. But there was another connection, confirming Ruby’s linking of Pixie with someone with a German name said to be a doctor and, therefore, possibly Lubeck—plastic surgery.
    It felt like progress, but of a very cobwebbed kind, not something to report back to Frank on. I checked on the America’s