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they do provoke questions. In this instance a couple jumped out. Warren and Rodney Harkness were the only children of Sir Ralph and Lady Rachel, but did Warren have any offspring? Living with his mum like that it seemed unlikely, so wouldn’t Rodney’s daughter be the logical heir to the Harkness millions? If not, how come? And if so, why stay out of touch with her for seven years?
    I didn’t know much about wills and inheritance except that they were a frequent cause of family friction. My understanding was that you couldn’t cut a blood relation out of your will without good cause and such an action could be readily challenged in the courts. I wondered if Lucille Hammond had divorced Rodney and made a note to find out. Even if she had, and wanted nothing to do with the Harknesses, wouldn’t she still have an eye to her daughter’s inheritance?
    I had an impulse to send Glen another email about these questions but I suppressed it. She’d most likely have thought of them herself and if she hadn’t she’d probably resent my interference. But it chafed at me and reminded me why I preferred to work alone—two heads might be better than one, but they can’t instantly swap what’s inside them.
    As I mulled things over I thought how little of people’s lives show on the surface. I remember the people in our street in Maroubra and how my mother used to gossip about them while smoking her endless Craven A filters and sipping her Penfolds sweet sherries. Fred Harrison two doors away was sleeping with his wife’s sister with the wife’s knowledge and consent; Dulcie Lamb, the Salvation Army sergeant across the street, was an ex-prostitute; Sammy Porter on the corner, aspiring Eastern Suburbs footballer, wore his fat sister’s clothes to parties, and so on. My father, who preferred to take people at their face value, claimed that she made a lot of it up, but these days I’m inclined to think that she was right on the money.
    Driving north to Bilgola on a Sunday isn’t as much fun as it should be or as it once was. Crazy laws back then. In the seventies we used to drive to Newport and register as bona fide travellers in order to drink. My ex-wife Cyn and I used to make the trip quite often. We’d meet up with friends in the beer garden of the pub. Cyn would get tanked on three gins and tonic and I’d drink far too much full-strength beer, there being no other kind, and drive home with a blood alcohol reading that would earn you a lifetime suspension today. The cops turned a blind eye quite literally, with a good number of them being pissed on duty themselves in those far-off days.
    The problem now is the number of people who live and have business the length of the northern beaches. The road was clogged most of the way and many of the drivers apparently only gotbehind the wheel at the weekend. Their skills were minimal and their patience short. The day was warm, getting towards hot. The Falcon has no air conditioning and with the window down I was taking a dozen different carcinogens into my lungs with every kilometre. A man might as well smoke. I’d recently had the cassette player fixed by possibly the last man in Sydney who knew how to do it, and I played an old Ry Cooder tape in which he sang about seeing famous people. Maybe I could do the same up on the northern beaches—run a bit further up to Palm Beach, get a glimpse of Rachel Ward or Bob Ellis; preferably Rachel.
    The real Rutherford House resembled the place depicted on the website but not that closely. The photograph had been taken from the most flattering angle in a golden light. Up close it appeared much smaller and rather faded. The grounds could have done with a decent clean-up—some mowing, pruning and weeding—and the gravel on the drive had worn thin in spots, revealing cracked clay beneath. I tried to remember whether the website had boasted views of Pittwater. I thought it