The Washington Club by Peter Corris Page A

nervous energy to see her through the police investigation and the charging procedure and the meeting with Cy Sackville and the first encounter with me. She told me she’d devised little mental games and pretences to keep her courage up, and now it was as if the props and supports had fallen away. Her hard drinking days must have been well behind her because, together with the emotional turmoil, the laced coffee on top of what we’d had before seemed to slow her down and bring her to a stop.
    I put her to bed in her kimono. Before she went to sleep she told me where to find a spare security card. I sat on the side of the bed in my pants and shirt and bare feet and smoothed some damp strands of hair awayfrom her face. The slanted dark eyes looked up at me and I could sense all the same emotions that were affecting me flowing and cross-currenting in her. Doubts, suspicions, sexual strings, a need to believe and trust. Her eyes closed and she went to sleep with her mouth falling slightly open, exposing the extraordinary teeth and making her look young and vulnerable.
    When I was sure she was under I got up and left the room, leaving on a bedside lamp turned towards the wall so that it created a pale pool of light. I prowled and snooped, taking care not to wake her. Few people welcome being probed the way a professional like me can do it. From long experience, I know the subterfuges, the strategies, hiding places, the ways the secrets are coded. Within an hour, I knew more about Claudia Fleischman, I suspected, than any other person living or dead had ever known about her apart from herself. What I found confirmed what I had from the sources and what I’d learned from her. She’d been a brilliant student and had got first-class honours for her combined degree. The sky seemed to be the limit for her as an academic or a legal practitioner. Then, with her parents’ death, the bottom fell out. She had several photographic albums and I was able to observe Claus and Julia Rosen over time, almost as if I had known them. Both were strikingly handsome, with regular features and alert, intelligent expressions. He had a fullhead of dark curly hair well into middle age and his wife’s looks seemed to improve with the years. It was hard to tell which of the two Claudia most favoured.
    She kept no diary as such, but had fallen years ago into making diary-type entries in an appointment book and keeping the books. I skimmed through a few and noted the names of three or four men (presumably the found-wanting lovers), but very few people who appeared as friends or even close acquaintances. As she’d said, she was very rarely unwell and when she was a couple of times over a long stretch, it clearly annoyed her. After her parents were killed the entries stopped.
    She wasn’t short of money but there was none to spare. The sale of her parents’ house had yielded only thirteen thousand dollars after the mortgage had been paid out and, although she’d saved money when she was working, the savings had been eaten into by several trips—to Vanuatu and New Caledonia—and by payments to a psychologist. She hadn’t told me about that. I browsed through her credit card statements and cheque book stubs. The statements are hard to interpret because a place that deals in fantasy underwear and marital aids can trade as ‘Products Incorporated’, but my snap judgement was that she hadn’t spent much money on having fun. The Pacific Islands trips seemed to have incurred expenses for sightseeing tours. I found only one example ofconcealment. The bank had sent her a new cheque book before she’d used all the forms in the previous book. Ten days before her husband died, Claudia had written a cash cheque for five thousand dollars in this new book and hidden the book inside a pair of knee-high boots. You don’t have to be a fetishist to take an interest in knee-high boots—funnel-web spiders and