The Other Side of Sorrow Read Online Free PDF Page A

the slightly damp mail from the slightly leaky letterbox. Although I hadn’t seen it for so long I recognised Cyn’s handwriting on one of the letters. There was no mistaking that precise backhand. I ripped it open and swore when I saw that as well as a note it contained a cheque for $3000. The cheque fell to the floor as I read the note:
    Â 
    Dear Cliff
    Don’t be offended. I know this business won’t be easy for you, but I want you to treat it as a job as much as you can. I know you’re good at your job and that you love it. I hated it as you know, but that’s ancient history.
    Please do your very best. You never know, we might have done something right after all.
    Â 
    My first impulse was to tear up the cheque but I resisted it. A private enquiry agent needs a client to validate his activities and there’s no better validation than money. The rules state that there should be a signed contract as well, but who ever heard of a game where everyone played by the rules? I put the cheque away in my wallet. When I got to the office I’d open a file labelled ‘Samuels’ and put the cheque and the note and a copy of the photograph of Eve in it.
    Waiting for the call from the RTA, I made coffee and sat looking out at the rain and trying to find other explanations for the woman who was watching Cyn, or other identities for her. Both my parents were only children so there were no first cousins resembling Eve or myself to consider. I was as sure as any man who’d led a reasonably active sex life can be that I’d fathered no children. The question was—had Eve ever had an illegitimate child? I thought it highly unlikely. As a teenager Eve entered a god-bothering phase that lasted until she went to university at the age of twenty-two. She was evangelical and puritanical until she plunged into left-wing politics in her first year. She married Luke, a fellow radical, in her second year and they had the first of their two sons within a year of that. I’d found Eve the Christian pretty hard to take, but I’d kept in touch with her. I saw more of her after she swapped the Bible for Gramsci. I didn’t take Gramsci on board any more than I had the Bible, but it made her easier to make fun of. I couldn’t see where Eve could’ve squeezed in a kid.
    A doppelgänger? Sure, they exist, but why would my sister’s doppelgänger be watching my ex-wife? The world is crazy, but not that crazy.
    The call came through as I was contemplating making a second pot of coffee as a way of heading off the impulse to have a drink. Like many people in this suspicious age, I tend to use the answering machine to screen calls, but this time I picked up.
    â€˜Xerox and bingo, Cliff.’
    This meant that the call was unmonitored and that the vehicle wasn’t registered to some subsidiary of some other string of companies that would make the enquiry amount to a paper chase.
    â€˜Tell me.’
    â€˜Damien Talbot, unit 3, number 12, George Avenue, Homebush. Age twenty-six. The vehicle was purchased a year ago for two thousand five hundred dollars from a dealer in Homebush. Must be a bomb.’
    I grunted. ‘Anything else?’
    â€˜Your meter’s ticking.’
    â€˜Remember ICAC.’
    â€˜Fuck ICAC. Yep, our Damien has a shitload of unpaid parking tickets out on him, plus an unroadworthy citation. As we speak, being followed up by the boys and girls in blue.’
    â€˜Thank you.’
    â€˜Up yours. Good punting.’
    This was a reference to the method of payment—a deposit in her TAB account. I hung up and studied my notes. I doubted that Cyn would like what I’d turned up so far, particularly the location. Cyn used to regard Leichhardt as the western suburbs and so beneath contempt.
    Homebush was much further west.
    I’d never spent much time in Homebush, had hardly ever been out there. Despite the attractive name, as far as I knew—and