Burn and Other Stories ch-16

by Peter Corris

  Burn and Other Stories

  ( Cliff Hardy - 16 )

  Peter Corris

  Peter Corris

  Burn and Other Stories

  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 amp; 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 through 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 TVs 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.

  Brian was keen. He came up off the floor like a thin lion after a fat Christian. I sidestepped and tripped him as he went past. He cannoned into a stand that held a five-litre bottle of Johnny Walker scotch. The bottle hit the wall and broke and the room suddenly smelt like a distillery. I was getting set to issue orders when Jason Wishart picked up a box of matches from the floor, struck one and tossed it onto the scotch-soaked carpet. A sheet of flame leapt up and enveloped the heavy drapes across the windows. The fire licked at the oiled and polished woodwork, caught and jumped to the over-stuffed furniture and racks of compact discs. Bits of flaming plastic spat out around the room.

  I rushed at Wishart, hit him low and let him collapse onto my shoulder. I took him towards the door in a fireman’s lift.

  ‘Extinguisher? Where’s the fuckin’ extinguisher?’ Brian yelled.

  He was mobile and had enough breath to shout so I left him to it. I went out through the kitchen, across the patio and down onto the grass. Wishart couldn’t have weighed much more than forty-five kilos and in my adrenalin-rushed state he was no burden. I made it to my car and folded him into the front seat. I took a look back at the house before I drove off-Brian needed more than an extinguisher now, he needed four brigades. The place was burning like Dresden.

  I got the story from young Wishart as he sobered up on the drive back to Sydney. He hadn’t torched the school, but he had been in trouble earlier as a member of a graffiti gang that had broken into one of Scammell’s properties and caused some damage. Scammell’s security men had caught Wishart but Scammell had let him go.

  ‘He
was real nice to me. Helped me out a few times.’

  I asked him why he was getting into trouble in the first place.

  ‘I found out one of my grandads was a Maori. I’m confused.’

  ‘Both my grandmas were Irish,’ I said. ‘Imagine how I feel.’

  Scammell had given Wishart his number with an instruction to call him if he needed help. Wishart had done so after the cops came looking for him. He’d been held against his will in Richmond ever since.

  ‘He was setting you up as the Number One school arsonist. Probably would’ve dumped you in the lake eventually. The fires’d help to close down the schools. Big bucks for the developer- Scammell.’

  Wishart stroked the dark down on his upper lip and stared through the windscreen at the empty road. ‘That’s a real downer,’ he said.

  I delivered him back to his mother and sat in on a conference between them and Hubbard, the unsympathetic cop, the next day. Hubbard grunted, took notes and went away.

  ‘What now?’ Mavis Wishart said.

  ‘With luck,’ I said, ‘nothing.’

  I heard from police sources that Mark Scammell went interstate the night his Richmond villa burned down, and overseas shortly after that. No charges were brought in respect of the school fires and last I heard Jason Wishart’s school was still functioning while the SOS group fought the government’s closure plans.

  I kept digging a little in my spare time and when Scammell got back to Sydney in December I made an appointment to see him, saying that I was interested in selling my house in Glebe. No real estate agent could ignore that. He was a big, fleshy man with close-set, shrewd eyes.

  ‘What’s your equity?’ he said.

  I leaned back in the leather chair. ‘Bad luck about your place in Richmond,’ I said. ‘Big loss.’

  The shrewd eyes went hostile. ‘Insurance’ll cover it. Now…’

  ‘How about the clause that cancels the insurance if a criminal act is involved.’

  ‘What?’