Billie looked up from the papers as Samuel came in with the tea tray, a morning routine which was always a pleasant distraction. Broad-shouldered and lanky, wearing a lightly pin-striped suit and a pleasing burgundy and sky-blue tie of the current style, he sprawled out in one of the two chairs opposite Billie’s desk and dropped a sugar cube into her tea, most of his professional formality evaporating when he left the outer office that was his guard post. His tea-making was surprisingly good, something he’d either mastered in the army or at the urging of a mother with good English sensibilities. He pushed her tea cup across to her.
‘What’s doing?’ he asked, absentmindedly rubbing some irritation under the glove that covered his left hand.
‘Very little, Sam, I have to say,’ Billie responded. She pushed her deep brunette curls back behind her ear and sipped her tea.
Sam was one of those earnest Aussie lads who had enrolled in the army young and had worked in a secretarial role for some time before war broke out and he was needed for more exciting work in the 2/23rd Battalion – exciting work in the war being the kind that set you up as cannon fodder if you didn’t have the right connections. Sam wasn’t a connected bloke, and had he been rich, he likely wouldn’t be working as a second to a PI now. He had many skills as a secretary, but truthfully he wasn’t a great typist. Anyone could see why, and clients had good-naturedly joked about it more than once. In Tobruk an Italian thermos bomb had finished off many of his comrades-in-arms and he’d come away with a few less fingers, and some terrible scarring on his hands – defensive wounds, Billie had surmised. His left hand was wrapped in a leather glove, filled in the necessary places with wooden prosthetic fingers. His right, though scarred, was whole and as steady as you could want on a trigger hand.
Typing aside, Sam’s role was varied. Sometimes it paid Billie to have a strong arm around. Sometimes it paid to have a tall man in the outer office to run interference if a disgruntled husband came in, angry that she’d helped his wife divorce him. And sometimes it simply paid to have a man for added cover when Billie was ‘in the field’, or to compensate for the fact that she was a woman working in a predominantly male business. It helped matters that Sam looked passingly like Alan Ladd, though much taller, which made him easy on the eye, and realistic as a partner for Billie when such a masquerade was required during an investigation. Most of the grizzled gents in her profession wouldn’t pass convincingly as a match for her, but she and Sam made an attractive pair, and that went a long way in certain circumstances. He didn’t know much about detective work yet, having been on the job only a few months, but he was great with orders, and unlike some other men he didn’t mind taking them from a woman – decent work being rather scarce even for able-bodied men, after all. And by some measure, working as a secretary for Billie was probably more exciting than in the forces, or at least that’s what Sam claimed. It wasn’t all filing cabinets and administrative work. He was getting to know all the bars, hotels, dosshouses and back alleys in the city. Not glamorous, exactly, but not dull either. And if he couldn’t type with ten fingers, well, that was just fine.
‘How was The Overlanders last night?’ Billie asked him. She hadn’t seen a lot of pictures lately, but it was something Sam enjoyed spending his pay cheques on. ‘Did Eunice like it?’ she added. He’d only just started dating Eunice, though he didn’t talk about her much.
Sam was expounding upon Chips Rafferty’s portrayal of a Western Australian drover when the telephone rang. He put down his cup, cleared his throat and answered in a professional tone. ‘B. Walker Private Inquiries, how may I . . .’
Sam trailed off and Billie raised an eyebrow, watching.
‘They hung up,’ he said, puzzled, and replaced the receiver in its cradle. ‘Or they were cut off.’
‘You didn’t hear anything?’
He shook his head. ‘The street, perhaps.’
* * *
It was just past three in the afternoon, only minutes after Billie had suggested Sam might leave early, when she heard a polite knock on the door of the outer office, and the sound of him letting someone in.
‘I . . . I understood it was a lady detective,’ said a small, panicked voice in the next room, emphasising the word lady as if it were terribly important. Not everyone knocked on that outer door. In fact, most people came walking straight in with their troubles and needs so Billie deduced that this was someone either especially polite or especially nervous. She rose swiftly from her desk and made her way to the open doorway of her inner office before Sam could explain. No sense in losing a customer who might skedaddle through nervousness, especially when business was a little too slow for comfort.
A tense woman in her late thirties or early forties stood in the outer office, giving the impression of a spooked deer, her feet planted slightly apart as if she might bolt at any moment. Billie took her appearance in quickly: she stood roughly five foot three and wore an impressive chocolate-brown fur stole clasped at the bust, probably mink or musquash, and fine quality at that. Beneath that was a brown suit of a light summer weight, a little drab and conservative in its design. Probably tailor made, but not recently. Her Peter Pan hat was pre-war in style, not the latest fashion. It was a slightly lighter brown than the suit and was finished with a chocolate-brown feather. The woman wore very little makeup, and a pair of round, plain spectacles made her brown eyes seem huge, adding to the impression of a startled doe. Like her attire, the woman’s hair was brown. Her shoes were good-quality reptile skin to match her handbag, but not flashy. The heels were low, sensible. A little worn, but nicely kept. Her gloved hands were clasped tightly over the handle of her small handbag, and both seemed as sealed shut as her mouth, which looked to have lately sucked a lemon.
Billie imagined her wearing a darker, heavier suit of similar utilitarian cut and colour in autumn and winter and this one throughout spring and summer, but her fur . . . now that was special, almost out of place on a person like this. For an Antipodean November, Sydney wasn’t too hot yet, but this accessory was by no means worn to ward off the cold. The hairs on the stole were gleaming and brushed down evenly. It seemed new and Billie wondered about the story behind it.
‘I’m Ms Walker, the principal here. This is my secretary and assistant, Mr Baker,’ Billie explained with a wave of her hand, and the woman’s eyes widened for a moment. ‘Would you like to come into my office, Mrs . . . ?’ The woman did not complete the question with a name. Nonetheless, Billie stepped smoothly back into her office and pulled a chair out for the woman before making her way around the wide wooden desk and waiting by her seat.
It took a moment for the woman to follow her from the outer office. Sam offered to take the woman’s stole, but she mumbled a thank you and refused. After an awkward silence, during which it seemed even odds whether the woman would sit down or bolt, she finally entered and took the offered seat across from Billie.
‘Please, make yourself comfortable,’ Billie said gently. ‘Samuel, would you please bring some tea?’ Billie hoped it might help settle her flighty companion.
Sam tactfully closed the inner office door.
‘How may I be of service to you?’ Billie asked, watching as the woman’s eyes went to the floor, then the globe on the filing cabinet, before finally settling on the big map of Sydney on the wall. Her lips remained sealed throughout.