‘Only a few pounds for snacks and the tram.’
You couldn’t get far on that. Billie leaned back in her chair again. The woman had barely touched her tea. ‘Is there anything else you think I ought to know?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’ The tone was almost accusing.
‘I don’t mean anything by it. The more I have to go on, the better,’ she explained.
‘He’s a good boy, Miss Walker. I . . .’ She trailed off, unable to finish her sentence, and looked down, her brow creased. The large brown eyes looked wet again.
‘I’ll do my best to find your son for you, Mrs Brown, and quickly. We’ll start right away.’
‘Tonight?’ It was now after four.
Billie nodded. ‘Yes. Normal business hours don’t apply to this work. And we’ll work through the weekend.’
Mrs Brown’s features perked up a little, her mouth relaxing, the sense of immediacy seeming to put her more at ease. Or perhaps it was that Billie had accepted the retainer and something was being done. Billie stood and opened the communicating door for her, and bade her new client good day. Sam was sitting at his desk, pretending he hadn’t been doing his best to listen through the door. He opened the office door and stepped back to allow Mrs Brown into the hallway.
‘Thank you, Miss Walker,’ Netanya Brown said again, and disappeared towards the lift as they watched, that fur stole having never left her shoulders.
Sam shut the door gently. ‘Nervy one,’ he commented.
Billie nodded thoughtfully and wondered if she was the one who had called that morning. She was just nervy enough to hang up on Sam when she heard a male voice.
‘She is quite anxious. Not without reason, perhaps,’ she mused. ‘How much of that didn’t you catch?’
He smiled. ‘The amount of the retainer.’
Billie laughed out loud. ‘Ten pounds, Sam. Ten. We won’t have to close up shop just yet. I could have pressed her for more but that will do for now. There isn’t exactly a stampede rushing the door today.
‘I want you to head to the hospitals as soon as you’re ready,’ she continued. He was good with the nurses, she’d noticed, and it wasn’t necessary for her to go with him. He knew that drill well enough by now. ‘Take this photograph with you. We’re looking for an Adin Brown, age seventeen. Five foot nine, slim build, no tattoos or identifying scars.’ She handed over the photo. ‘Check out the main city hospitals: Sydney, RPA, Prince of Wales, Prince Henry and St Vinnies. Royal South Sydney, too. Have a good chat and find out about any male patient who came in during the past two days – since Wednesday night – and might vaguely fit the description of our boy. Don’t bother heading across the bridge yet, but I might send you out there tomorrow, and to the smaller hospitals if we must, though a ring around might suffice for some of them. I’ll make a visit to some of his friends, and tonight I’ll drop in to see if he’s—’
‘In the death house,’ he said, completing her sentence.
She nodded. ‘Yes. Let’s hope not.’
The first ports of call for missing persons were always the places you hoped you wouldn’t find them. Billie would make a visit to the Sydney City Morgue, but not until well after dark, when she knew she would be welcomed by the man at the desk. It was all about who was on the shift, and if she was right, the best timing would be after eleven when everyone else was gone. But if Adin was lucky he’d be with one of his friends, or perhaps being harboured by a lady love his mother wouldn’t approve of. If Netanya Brown was right – there was no girlfriend, his friends hadn’t seen him and he only had a few pounds to his name – that did indeed spell trouble.
‘You’re sure you don’t want me to tag along?’ Sam asked.
Billie looked at the list of friends. ‘I can handle these boys,’ she said. ‘Much as I like having a case to pay our rent, time is of the essence with something like this.’ Stretching it out was no good. Billie glanced at the clock again. ‘When you’re finished I want you to have a good meal, but give me a call at eight o’clock sharp – try the office and then my flat – and tell me what you’ve found. Hopefully then you’ll be able to knock off, but I can’t promise you’ll have much time off this weekend. If there’s no dice tonight, we’ll be visiting the fur company tomorrow.’
She grabbed her trench coat off the rack. ‘You’ve enough petrol coupons for your motor car?’ she asked. The rationing allowance was around fifteen gallons each month. They could share coupons normally, but Billie was out for the month.
He nodded, not seeming overly disappointed that his work day had not ended early after all, or that his weekend would be busy. An hour’s wage was an hour’s wage. They locked up and set off.
Chapter Two
Billie stepped off the tram on Parramatta Road in Stanmore and took in the sounds of the summer evening: cicadas singing, dogs barking, children playing.
Her trench coat was over her arm. The breeze was refreshing, and she stood for a moment as it gently lifted her wavy hair from her neckline, wondering if Sam had already found the missing boy, Adin Brown, laid up in one of the city hospitals. This was her last stop before a reheated dinner and a date with the death house. It might sound grim on paper, but in fact she felt quite buoyed untangling the pieces of this new puzzle. She liked puzzles. Particularly the paid kind.
Since Netanya Brown walked out of her office some hours earlier, she’d been working through the list of Adin’s close friends. So far the work had been singularly uneventful, yet Billie was rarely happier than when embarking on a new investigation, hunting down the answers to a mystery or the hidden details of some story she knew she could break open. It was true that her cases were often frustratingly small, involving domestic and sometimes depressing issues, but she was her own boss and that counted for a lot. The banality of much of the work did not dampen her spirits. And as for returning to work as a reporter – something she’d given considerable thought to before taking over her father’s inquiry agency – the Sydney newspapers had dismissed most of their women reporters home once the men started to return from the war, or else confined them to the social pages, or covering the Easter Show, which was a bit too steep a downgrade for Billie after she’d chased Nazi activity across Europe, built a good portfolio of published articles, and worked alongside the likes of Lee Miller and Clare Hollingworth. No, she wouldn’t last in that kind of work. It was an imperfect world and her chosen profession was decidedly imperfect, but for now she had a hint of that spark again, that sense of doing something that mattered to someone. In these moments she felt that answers could be just around the next corner. This had been true whenever she’d been assigned a new story in Europe, and it was true now that she was funnelling those skills into her work as a private investigator in the city of her birth. Perhaps it was something in the blood, but launching into a case excited her more than any ticket to the pictures. In that respect she was her father’s daughter.
Let’s hope this kid knows something.
In the past two hours Billie had ticked off the first two friends on the list Mrs Brown had given her. One boy had convincingly sworn that he hadn’t seen Adin in over a week, and the other friend hadn’t seen him since Saturday. Neither had thought anything was amiss until Adin’s mother had rung them and asked if they’d seen him. With Billie’s arrival, they seemed genuinely concerned. Having a PI on the case made it more real, more pressing. So far, everything she’d learned had confirmed what Mrs Brown had told her, and that left this third friend, Maurice, whom she hoped would have something helpful to say and would not already be out on the town this early Friday evening.