Burn, and Other Stories

by Peter Corris

  PETER CORRIS is known as the ‘godfather’ of Australian crime fiction through his Cliff Hardy detective stories. He has written in many other areas, including a co-authored autobiography of the late Professor Fred Hollows, a history of boxing in Australia, spy novels, historical novels and a collection of short stories about golf (see www.petercorris.net). In 2009, Peter Corris was awarded the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction by the Crime Writers Association of Australia. He is married to writer Jean Bedford and has lived in Sydney for most of his life. They have three daughters and six grandsons.

  The Cliff Hardy collection

  The Dying Trade (1980)

  White Meat (1981)

  The Marvellous Boy (1982)

  The Empty Beach (1983)

  Heroin Annie (1984)

  Make Me Rich (1985)

  The Big Drop (1985)

  Deal Me Out (1986)

  The Greenwich Apartments (1986)

  The January Zone (1987)

  Man in the Shadows (1988)

  O’Fear (1990)

  Wet Graves (1991)

  Aftershock (1991)

  Beware of the Dog (1992)

  Burn, and Other Stories (1993)

  Matrimonial Causes (1993)

  Casino (1994)

  The Washington Club (1997)

  Forget Me If You Can (1997)

  The Reward (1997)

  The Black Prince (1998)

  The Other Side of Sorrow (1999)

  Lugarno (2001)

  Salt and Blood (2002)

  Master’s Mates (2003)

  The Coast Road (2004)

  Taking Care of Business (2004)

  Saving Billie (2005)

  The Undertow (2006)

  Appeal Denied (2007)

  The Big Score (2007)

  Open File (2008)

  Deep Water (2009)

  Torn Apart (2010)

  Follow the Money (2011)

  Comeback (2012)

  The Dunbar Case (2013)

  Silent Kill (2014)

  PETER

  CORRIS

  BURN, AND OTHER STORIES

  This edition published by Allen & Unwin in 2014

  First published by Bantam Books, a division of Transworld Publishers, in 1993

  Copyright © Peter Corris 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 016 1 (pbk)

  ISBN 978 1 74343 798 8 (ebook)

  For Steve Wright and Marian Macgowan

  Several of the stories in this collection have been previously published in slightly different versions as follows: ‘Burn’ in the Bulletin December 1988; ‘The House of Ruby’ in Mean Streets 1, 1991; ‘Lost and Found’ in SPAN 31, 1991: ‘Cadigal Country’ in Homeland ed. George Papaellinas, Allen & Unwin 1991; ‘The Big Lie’ in More Crimes for a Summer Christmas ed. Stephen Knight, Allen & Unwin 1991; and ‘Ghost Writer’ in A Corpse at the Opera House ed. Stephen Knight, Allen & Unwin 1992.

  Contents

  Burn

  Eye Doctor

  Ghost Writer

  Airwaves

  Cadigal Country

  Kill Me Someone

  Lost and Found

  The Big Lie

  The House of Ruby

  Almost Wedded Bliss

  Burn

  ‘Mr Hardy, I can’t believe he did it, not Jason. George? Sure, all the bloody time. But not Jason.’

  ‘He’s run away,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t mean he’s guilty necessarily, but it doesn’t help.’

  Mavis Wishart looked around my office with its faded walls and battered furniture. And this is my new office, down the hall from the old one which kind of died after a shotgun went off in it, several times. Mavis was comfortable here; you could tell she’d seen plenty of faded walls in her time. She was a small, dark woman of around forty, possibly part Aboriginal or Islander, but she looked as if she’d been too busy all her life to notice. She’d raised two sons without either father to help. Now the younger son was accused of setting fire to his school. He’d run away and she wanted me to find him.

  I looked at the notes I’d made. ‘Thirteen, fourteen next month. 175 centimetres. That’s tall for thirteen.’

  Mavis shrugged ‘His father was tall.’

  ‘Nearly fourteen, isn’t that a bit old for sixth class?’

  ‘His father was dumb.’ Mavis grinned as she spoke. ‘Nah, he’s not dumb. Jase missed a lot of school early, so did George. We moved around a lot and they were always sick.’

  ‘The fire was ten days ago. You saw him that night and not since.’

  ‘Right. The cops were round in the morning, I went up to get Jase out of bed, but he must have heard them coming. The window was open and he was gone. Look, Mr Hardy, Jason’s a good kid, but you know how things are these days. A push in the wrong direction and they’re gone. Ma Parker told me you’d got her Annie out of trouble once.’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘It didn’t work out so well in the end.’

  ‘Have a shot at this,’ Mavis said. ‘It might turn out better. His brother, George, burnt down three schools. That’s why the cops came after Jase.’

  She was a game, good-humoured woman, so I took the case. Mavis wrote me a cheque for $300—two days, maybe three at my soft-boiled rate. I had a description of the kid, names and addresses of his mates and the location of the pinball joints and pubs he frequented; this was Sydney’s inner west, and Jason Wishart was nearly fourteen after all.

  I spent two days on it, then a third day. I checked on the other kids and the hangouts. With runaways, usually, that’s all it takes—they’re either in the near neighbourhood or they’re long gone. When the names and addresses yielded nothing, I tried the institutions. The patience of Detective Sergeant Hubbard of the Darlington police station was stretched to breaking point by a hundred different frustrations, but he gave me the time of day. He admitted that he’d had a tip-off about Jason Wishart after the fire at the local primary school.

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘That night.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit quick?’

  Hubbard sighed and blinked tired eyes. I could guess at the relationship between the eyes and the piles of paper on his desk. ‘Look, Hardy, if you knew someone was screwing your wife and you got a tip it was me, what would you do?’

  ‘I might make a mental note that she’d dropped her standards. My wife left me years ago. Are you trying to be offensive?’

  ‘I’m trying to get you to piss off. Georgie Wishart torched schools around here like they were named Guy Fawkes Primary. I’m told he’s in the Navy now. God help them. His brother was and is the chief suspect.’

  If that took me into ancient history, the talk with the headmistress of the school took me into politics. Clarissa Fielding was large, grey-haired and imposing. ‘The fire didn’t help,’ she said.
‘The school’s under threat of closing. I doubt if we’ll get the money to fix the damage.’

  I sat in her office, which looked as if it had doubled as a storeroom, and gazed out at the kids playing in the school grounds—if you could call a couple of hundred square metres of unshaded asphalt that. ‘Closing? Why?’

  ‘Declining numbers.’ Mrs Fielding waved an ironical hand at the window. A ball bounced off the glass as if underlining her point.

  ‘Looks busy to me.’

  ‘It’s nonsense. All the projections are that in two years’ time this area will have more children than it had five years ago.’

  ‘Ah,’ I murmured, ‘rationalisation.’

  Mrs Fielding snorted. ‘Exploitation. The plan is to sell the closed schools. This site is worth millions to the developers and, believe me, they know it.’

  I was about to ask more questions but she forestalled me by standing up. ‘If you’re really interested, Mr Hardy, you can come to one of the protest meetings. They’re widely advertised. I’m afraid I can’t help you about Jason Wishart. His attendance wasn’t good. His teachers’ reports suggest he could have done better.’

  I stood, too. ‘They always say that. They said that about me.’

  ‘I expect they were right.’

  I left the school by the west gate. I could hear the roar of the Cleveland Street traffic but the area was gentrifying nevertheless. I looked back at the old building—most likely it’d be flattened in favour of townhouses or office blocks plus parking. A woman standing by the gate thrust a pamphlet into my hand.

  ‘Save our school.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ I said.

  I glanced at the pamphlet which called for a halt to the selling of school sites and named developers and real estate agents who’d expressed ‘unseemly interest in our school’. I put the paper in my pocket.

  It was pretty much blank wall time, but I decided to pay a call on Jason Wishart’s brother, although everyone told me that the Wishart boys weren’t close. George Wishart shared a flat in Marrickville with two other sailors. His mother had told me that he was on shore leave.

  ‘Not that he’ll bother to come and see me.’

  The red brick block was small and the flats had no view, but I suppose if you’re at sea most of the time, you can do without views on land. The hungover, fair, fattish young man who answered my knock looked nothing like Mavis or the dark whippet of a boy that was Jason in the photo she had given me.

  ‘I’m looking for George Wishart.’

  ‘Why?’

  That reply told me I’d found him. People are incurious on the whole. ‘Your mother gave me your address. Your brother’s in trouble.’

  ‘Too bad.’ He tried to close the door but maybe he was used to bulkheads. I had my foot in the gap and my shoulder pushing against him before he could get set. I shoved the door in and he almost lost balance.

  ‘Hey,’ he yelped, ‘this is a break-in.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ His fat, vacant face annoyed me. I was also feeling frustrated by the inquiry. That’s a bad combination in my game—meeting someone uncongenial when frustrated. I brushed him aside and looked quickly through the flat: the place was a shit-hole—dirty beds, floors, tables, and a kitchen that was a health hazard.

  George was sitting on the arm of a chair smoking a cigarette when I came back into the living room.

  ‘You didn’t look in the dunny,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all a dunny. When did you last see Jason?’

  His eyes flickered to the telephone standing on top of a pile of current and out-of-date directories. ‘Months ago. Who’re you?’

  ‘Captain Bligh. He was here, wasn’t he? What did he want—money?’

  ‘I wouldn’t give the little …’

  George was smart enough to see that he’d made a mistake. He flicked ash on the floor. ‘He was in his bloody pyjamas. He wanted to make a phone call. I let him and then I told him to piss off.’

  ‘Brotherly love. Who did he call?’

  ‘I dunno. STD. He had the number in his head, then he wrote it down in the book and rang it.’

  I picked up the directories and thumbed through them. Numbers were scribbled at random in the margins and over the type. The only STD number was written in a childish pencil scrawl on the inside flap of the A-K volume—the prefix was 045.

  I read it out. ‘This it?’

  George shrugged and flicked more ash. I wrote the number in my notebook. ‘Did Jason say anything to you about setting fire to a school?’

  George sneered. ‘He wouldn’t have the guts.’

  ‘Did you tell this to the police?’

  Alarm flared in George’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I wasn’t here when they came.’

  I went past him, closing my nostrils against his frowsy, sweaty stink. ‘Why don’t you have a shave and a shower and go and see your mother.’

  ‘Why?’ he said.

  You can trace names from telephone numbers if you’ve got the right connections. I put through a call and got the information I needed. I knew from the prefix that the service was to the Richmond district—the subscriber was Mark Scammell of Lot 1, Brewer’s Lagoon Road, Richmond. If I hadn’t encountered the SOS woman at the school gate an hour earlier, the name wouldn’t have meant a thing to me. I dug the pamphlet from my pocket and confirmed my recollection that Scammell was named as one of the property developers intensely interested in the asphalt and bricks the Education Department was putting up for sale.

  It was mid-afternoon and warm. Driving west for a couple of hours would be no fun, but following a strong scent is fun in itself. I went home, showered and changed and did some quick research on Scammell. He operated two real estate agencies in Sydney, one in the Blue Mountains, another on the south coast, and was the managing director of Atlas Properties Inc.

  The sun was low in the sky when I set off. I stopped at a service station for petrol, a detailed map of Richmond and the paper. The headline was: ANOTHER SCHOOL GOES UP IN SMOKE! The sketchy report said that an inner west infants’ school had been severely damaged by a fire which bore resemblances to the one thirteen days previously. I put the paper in the glovebox on top of my .38 Smith & Wesson and headed for the Hawkesbury.

  City people hide in the country and country people hide in the city. Who said that? Maybe I did. Anyway, I’d played enough big-time hide-and-seek to believe that it was true. The commuter traffic, with its share of Brocks and Gardiners, kept me from thinking much about the connection between Scammell and the kid until I reached Blacktown. After that, on the Windsor Road, it should have been easier to think but a succession of trucks interrupted the process. Result was, I reached Richmond as the last of the daylight died, and located Brewer’s Lagoon Road without doing any significant analysis or planning. What the hell. As Jack Dempsey said, ‘Don’t think, punch.’

  I pulled off the road and into a dip about a hundred metres from the house lights. There were never going to be a lot of lots in Brewer’s Lagoon Road. In fact, indications were that Scammell’s place was the whole story. Mark seemed to have found himself a couple of acres wedged in between Commonwealth land, an agricultural college and a bit of national park. He had a lake about a good tee shot from his oiled teak front door and a river view from the brick patio at the back. Toss in a lot of grass, a tennis court, pool and three-car garage and you have some idea of the place.

  I put the gun in one jacket pocket, the keys in the other, opened and closed the car door softly and moved towards the house. The nearest lights from other houses were a long way off. I picked up a solid bit of wood as a dog persuader and began a careful perusal of the waist-high drystone fence that ran along the eastern border of the property. When I was sure it wasn’t wired or sensored, I climbed over it. I steered clear of the gravel driveway and the lights that picked out attractive features of the garden and aimed for the steps that led up to the patio. Patios have glass windows that are often left open and have crummy locks anyway. You can look thr
ough them, slide them open or break in, whatever.

  The patio and the back of the house were dark. I picked the lock on the glass door and slipped into a room big enough to play touch football in. The hallway was wide and short. I nipped down it towards the front of the house where I could hear voices.

  A woman said, ‘You wouldn’t dare say that if Ralph was here.’

  A man said, ‘I would.’

  I crept into a huge tiled kitchen. There was a serving hatch in one wall and I peeked through it into a big room with chairs and couches on a deep pile carpet square with polished wood surrounds. A stereo with about a hundred compact discs in a rack stood beside heavy drapes covering a window, and there was a TV set with a screen the size of a bedsheet. The voices were coming from the TV’s hi-fi speakers. Jason Wishart was sprawled in a chair sucking on a can of Fosters. Three crumpled cans lay on the floor beside him. A man sat opposite him watching the TV.

  Suddenly, Wishart moved his hand and the screen went blank.

  ‘Fuck you! I was watching that!’ The man moved smoothly across the room. He belted the boy in the face and swooped on the remote control. Wishart tried to lever himself up, but he got a jab in the ribs and sank back.

  ‘I want to get out of here, Brian.’

  ‘When he says so, not until. Relax and watch the show. Have another beer.’ The screen came alive again. ‘I’ll keep the remote. You don’t seem to know how to use it.’

  I waited until the talking heads had got back into affirming and denying things before I came up behind Brian. He was a tall, skinny type with thinning hair brushed back. With the muzzle of the .38, I tapped him on the head where the scalp was showing through.

  ‘Put your hands up there, Brian, and cover your bald spot.’

  He pitched forward into a dive roll, twisted as he came out of it and somehow pulled a gun. He got off one shot which went high and wide. I went down behind the chair.

  ‘This is crazy,’ I yelled. I sneaked a look around the chair. Maybe Brian was crazy—he was certainly trying to line up another shot. I braced myself and rushed at him, using the chair as a battering ram and shield. Brian fired again but missed by an even wider margin. The chair hit him in the knees and shins and he went over. I gave him another jolt with the chair before I left its cover. He’d dropped his gun and was scrabbling for it so I kicked it across the carpet into the corner of the room.