Swifty Taylor and the Missing Child – Episode 6

 

Confessions

 

The back door had been left open an inch or two, like it was expecting me to me enter while hinting that it was dangerous to do so. I had no inhibitions, and certainly held no fears. I always did get a little bit excited when I was unsure what might be coming next.

 

 

“I didn’t think that he would send someone like you.” The words didn’t bother to ask my ears if they could enter, they just bustled on into my head uninvited. I was still deciding whether I should be offended or proud or ask for clarification. Maybe it was a little bit of all three. She continued on: “But I am getting to the stage where I am tired of hiding, tired of looking over my shoulder to see if he – or someone he has sent – is following me.” She smiled bitterly. “And now, here you are…” Her voice tailed off, and a sigh escaped from her pretty throat, just loud enough for me to hear.

 

She was sitting on a small settee in the corner of a large room. Beside her, a lamp glowed beneath a dark lilac lampshade which painted the room the colour of a day-old bruise. In another corner of the room lay a large dog. It opened an eye to assess me, decided for the moment that I posed no threat to its owner’s safety, and went back to snoozing. Beyond the canopy of trees outside the window the whitecaps on the river were trying their darndest to unleash the sailing boats from their moorings. “Please, Swifty, take a seat.” She motioned to a chair opposite, and I sat in it as she directed. “I have a few things to tell you.” I had an old memory of the last time I went to confession at church. I was still in secondary school, and I’d nervously whispered to the priest “Bless me father, for I have sinned…”

 

 

She was a good talker, which in my experience meant that she probably wasn’t a good listener. But to my surprise, she was both. And had Isabella Harris taken a knife and prised out her heart from her chest and thrown it on the floor between us, it might have been only slightly less painful than the story that she laid out before me. She started slowly, as if gauging my level of compassion. Satisfied, she continued on. “I was employed as Rogers’ personal assistant,” began her tale of woe. “We travelled often. I was single, he was unhappily married, one thing led to another, and then we were no longer staying in separate hotel rooms.” She paused, and whenever she did so, I wanted nothing more than for her to keep talking. She had the kind of voice that made honest men consider a life of crime. “But as we grew closer, I discovered that behind the façade, Mick Rogers was a very bad man indeed.” She told of dodgy business deals, of bribed politicians, of the mistreatment of employees on working visas in his abattoirs, of half-truths and outright corruption. “Even as his p.a., I didn’t know how terrible a man he was. Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it. But just as I was about to tell him that it was all over, I discovered that I was pregnant.”

 

It seemed that Rogers didn’t want a bar of a kid conceived during an affair, and he told her as much. “But I wanted this baby. Yes, it was his. But, more so, it was mine.” She looked at me, a flicker of fear passing through her eyes. And then annoyance that she had been weak enough not to hide it. “Oliver, the baby, was never healthy. He was born premature, lived in the hospital for weeks, and he never really got better. When he was two, he developed an infection, and just wasn’t strong enough to fight it.” She was crying a river of tears now, her voice a mixture of words and sobs. I turned my head to gaze out into the darkness. It was all I could do to stop myself from sitting to next to her on that settee and placing my arms around her. “Yeah,” she went on, “he paid me well. But you’ve met my mother. I did it all own my own. The pregnancy, the birth, the sickness, the death.” She paused again. “And the grief.” She decided not to tell Rogers that his illegitimate son had passed away. Two hours had passed. We had concluded that, if nothing else, we had in common the fact that we were both taking money from Mick Rogers. It was a certainty that he would be putting an end to this unsustainable situation. Sooner rather than later.

 

“Why should I tell him?” It was almost a demand. “I owe him nothing.” I considered this for a moment. “Do you not owe him the truth?” The room fell silent, the lampshade reminding me of every bruise that my life choices had collected on the road to this point. Had I prodded too much? She looked across at me. “You know what your problem is, Swifty Taylor?” I stifled a chuckle before answering: “I have got plenty!” My mouth was dry. I could have murdered a Jameson right then. She had started to brighten, and like the cutest doctor I ever laid eyes on she continued with her diagnosis. “Your problem is that you seem to think there is some good in everyone, no matter how minute.”

 

“And what about you?” I asked the tearful, sad, but disarmingly attractive woman who sat only a metre or so from me. The room felt suddenly smaller. Her eyes met mine, piercingly. “Me?” she responded haughtily, “I know better. Now.” She patted the vacant cushion beside her, and beckoned for me to accompany her on the settee. The mutt looked up from its resting place, silently lifting its head to stare at me, its mournful eyes heavy with wise and foreboding messages. Messages that, for the moment, I was choosing to ignore. Because in my head, another message was dancing about my addled brain cells. It went something along the lines of “Bless me father, for I am about to sin…”