Burn, and Other Stories

by Peter Corris

  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?’

  ‘I was there,’ I said. ‘Brian took a shot at me. I made a statement to the police. I can make one to your insurance company. You won’t get a bean.’

  Scammell’s loose, floppy mouth tightened. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I thought a cheque made out to SOS.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘I had a little talk with Brian last week. He’s not too happy with you, leaving the country like that.’

  Scammell slid open a drawer and took out a chequebook.

  ‘Make it $10,000,’ I said, ‘and write it big and clear. I’ve got a photographer and a reporter downstairs. They might want a close-up of the cheque.’

  Eye Doctor

  ‘An eye doctor?’ I said. ‘I had some dealings with one once a little while back. Mind you, I didn’t see much of him, especially when he was operating on me.’

  ‘You always liked your little joke, Cliff,’ Ian Sangster said. ‘But this is important. Could you be serious for a minute?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, but I couldn’t help myself, I was in such a good mood. ‘I also knew an undertaker, but he’s dead.’

  I burst out laughing. Dr Ian Sangster looked at me the way he might at a victim of brain damage. ‘Am I going to have to give you something to calm you down? What’re you on? I’ve probably got the antidote.’

  ‘Glen and I are going up to her place on the coast next week. We’re going to catch fish and swim and rub oil all over each other, day and night.’

  ‘When next week?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Good. Ten days away. That’ll give you time to do this job. It’ll pay well, not that you need much money for what you’ve got planned. Mind you, if it comes to rings …’

  I held up my hand. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Money wouldn’t hurt, but I couldn’t take any from you.’

  Sangster has been my doctor for most of the last twenty years. He’s patched me and other people up at unlikely hours and in unlikely places, and provided other extracurricular services. He hasn’t filed reports or charged the going rates. Now, he pushed aside his scotch and leaned forward—two signs that he really was serious.

  ‘It’s not for me. It’s for Jonas Buckawa. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’

  I had. Buckawa was a Bougainvillean lawyer and politician who was holding up the works in a big way. A major petroleum strike had been made in the strait between the islands of Buka and Bougainville and financial interests in Papua New Guinea, Australia and Singapore were falling over themselves to get the drills down and the barrels filling. Buckawa had found a dozen different objections to the contracts—in terms of the environment, traditional ownership and usage of the waters, the terms decided between the contracting parties and their governments—as well as doubts about the reliability of the survey work estimate of the reserves. He’d filed his objections in a series of courts, including the International Court, and he’d got the media interested and the locals stirred up so that the prospective field was constantly under surveillance. The PNG government wanted to send in troops. Singapore, it was said, supported that; Australia could not.

  ‘What’s his problem?’ I said. ‘He seems to have the ball at his feet.’

  ‘He does, in a sense. He stands a good chance of winning his court battles and bringing a stop to all this oil-drilling bullshit.’

  Ian is a conservationist, worried about greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, pollution, everything. I tried to think of when I’d last read anything about Buckawa and realised that it had been some time. I’d assumed it was just a matter of legal wheels turning slowly. Evidently not.

  ‘Jonas has had severe eye trouble for some time—cataracts and glaucoma. It’s got worse. He needs an operation, a tricky one. It has to be kept secret though. If word got out that he has these problems the campaign’d collapse, it’s all on his shoulders. That’s where Professor Frank Harkness comes in. He’s worked in Bougainville, Jonas knows and trusts him. He can do the job and keep his mouth shut. He’s a bit of a stirrer himself.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I was sceptical. I didn’t associate eye surgeons with much except clever hands and big bank accounts. ‘I still don’t see why you need me.’

  ‘We—I’m on the Buka Strait Committee—need someone to protect Harkness. Jonas is getting into Sydney the day after tomorrow, very much on the quiet, illegally in fact. The PNG government took away hi
s passport. We’ve got people to look after him but the same sort of people can’t be seen to be hanging around Harkness.’

  ‘Bougainvilleans, you mean?’

  Ian nodded. ‘Not everyone up there’s on side, not by a long shot. If someone unsympathetic in Sydney spotted odd comings and goings around Harkness they might put two and two together. Jonas’ eye problems aren’t a total secret, although only a very few people know how bad they are.’

  I took a drink and thought about it. Babysit a professor of ophthalmology for a few days. How hard could it be? ‘These unsympathetic people,’ I said, ‘what would they be likely to do to Harkness?’

  ‘There’s a hell of a lot of money and influence involved. They’d be prepared to damage his hands, maybe even kill him. But if everything goes right nothing at all will happen.’

  ‘Who’s paying?’

  ‘Funds are available.’

  ‘Come on, Ian. There’s paperwork to do.’

  ‘Do it afterwards—wouldn’t be the first time.’

  That’s the trouble with being flexible, people know you’ll flex. I told Sangster I’d take the job. ‘The professor, what hospital does he work at?’

  ‘Prince of Wales.’

  ‘And he has a big house where?’

  ‘Clovelly.’

  ‘So, he goes between them in his BMW. It doesn’t sound so hard.’

  ‘Harkness works hard and plays hard. He’s a billiards nut, a golfer, and he likes to drink whisky. He also goes in for bushwalking and climbing mountains. You might find it a bit hard to keep up with him, Cliff.’

  I grunted. My whisky drinking isn’t what it used to be, but I play snooker and I’ve climbed the odd rock. Maybe I could teach the professor to surf. I said so.

  Sangster grinned. ‘Your first problem is getting Harkness to agree. He doesn’t want to hear about having a bodyguard.’

  ‘Who’re you?’

  The man moving towards me was short, about 175 centimetres; he was squarely built with wide shoulders and a thatch of thick grey hair. He wore a white doctor’s coat over jeans and an open-necked shirt; his teeth gripped a curved pipe and his voice was like a pop riveter, working hard.

  ‘I’m Cliff Hardy, professor. I’m …’

  ‘Oh, yeah. The private detective. I thought I told Ian Sangster and those other fuckin’ old women I didn’t need a bodyguard.’

  The Ophthalmology Department was in a big old stone building in the grounds of the hospital. It was nothing flash, just a small lecture theatre and a collection of offices where work seemed to go on. We were standing outside the department secretary’s room. The adjoining door to Harkness’s office was open and I could see crammed bookcases, piles of papers, several coffee mugs and a set of golf clubs.

  ‘Things have changed.’ Lowering my voice, I added, ‘It looks like word has got out that the man’s in Sydney.’

  ‘Shit. You’d better come in.’

  The secretary, a slim, good-looking, dark-haired young woman, was on the phone. Harkness winked at her and we went into his room. He pulled off his coat and dropped it on a filing cabinet, waved me into a chair, sat behind his desk and began excavating his pipe. ‘Ever been to Bougainville?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Cunt of a place, a lot of it. Some beautiful bits. Good people—tough and smart. Jonas is a good guy. None of this Catholic or traditionalist bullshit. He wants the place to go ahead, but he reckons turning the Buka Strait into a sewer isn’t the way to do it.’

  ‘That sounds right,’ I said.

  He tapped ashes out of the pipe into a metal wastepaper bin, packed it from a tin of Erinmore flake and lit it with a match. Puffing, he said, ‘They’ve got a lot of eye problems up there—cataract, bit of follicular trachoma and diet-related things. A couple of good regular clinics with operating teams could clear it up pretty quickly but those pricks in Moresby don’t give a stuff. Jonas’ mob does.’

  ‘That makes him important,’ I said. ‘So it’s important that you operate on him without interference. Where’s it going to happen? Not here, at the hospital?’

  ‘Shit, no. This place is run by medical bureaucrats who never put a finger up a bum in anger. We’re going to do it in a little private joint in Bondi. What’s your background—not an ex-copper, are you?’

  ‘No. Army for a bit, insurance investigator, then into this. You’ve got something against the police?’

  ‘Plenty. Used to see them use Redfern as a training ground for the heavy squads. And I got the piss beaten out of me a few times on demos and that. I suppose some of them’re all right. What did you do in the fuckin’ army?’

  ‘Fought in Malaya. Have you got something against the army, too?’

  The smoke was coming out in short, quick puffs. ‘Mostly a waste of time and money. The medical corps paint wounds on people and practise washing them off. Bullshit. But the army did some bloody tremendous work for us on the Aboriginal eye health project. Set up these field hospitals in the bush. Great stuff.’

  ‘I read about that. And I knew one of the blokes you used in liaison work, Jacko Moody.’

  ‘Great guy. Did you ever see him fight?’

  I nodded. ‘He could’ve gone a long way. Still, maybe it’s good he didn’t. He’s got all his marbles.’

  ‘I fixed his retinas. He came close to the white cane. What’re you looking at?’

  I was gazing over his head at a picture on the wall. It showed Harkness in bathers, looking chunky but firm-fleshed, on a beach with a blonde woman and two snowy-haired children.

  Harkness screwed around to look at the picture. He put down his pipe and massaged the bridge of his nose where there was a red indentation. Suddenly, he looked his age, which was fifty-six, and tired. ‘I sent them down to Victoria for a while.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That was smart. Why not be smart about yourself, too? What’s that mark on your nose?’

  He stopped the rubbing. ‘It’s where you strap on the magnifying apparatus for operating. You’re observant, Cliff. D’you play billiards?’

  ‘Snooker.’

  ‘Better than nothing. Drink whisky?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Over the next few days I drank a little whisky with Frank Harkness and played some snooker with him—on the table in the basement of his house—but what he mostly did was work. The man was a tiger for it—early morning ward rounds, lectures, clinics, consulting, operations, administration. He was at it from 6.00 a.m. to nine o’clock at night and how he had the energy to lift a glass or a cue was beyond me. But he did, and when he went up to bed I noticed that he took sheaves of papers and journals with him. He was brusque and abrasive at times, extraordinarily patient and kind at others. I quickly found out that the thing to do was to stand up to him. Toe to toe, he’d listen to a contrary argument and sometimes take notice. Otherwise, he went completely his own way. I judged that he was a man who’d made mistakes, but not very often.

  I almost made one myself on the third night. I was sleeping in one of the spare rooms in the house and, before going to bed, I checked all the doors and windows. I was in bed, reading the paperback of Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, which I’d found on Harkness’ shelves, when something began to niggle at me. My .38 was on a chair near the bed; I was sleeping in a light tracksuit and had a pair of slip-on sneakers at the ready. The front gate was locked; the cars were locked; the doors were locked, but something was wrong. I put the book down, pulled on my shoes and went out into the passage. Light was showing under Harkness’ door and I could smell his pipe. That jogged my memory. We’d been playing snooker in the basement and the fug from the pipe had got to me. I’d opened a small window onto a light shaft and had forgotten to close it. Just a small aperture, but enough. I padded down to the basement and closed the window. Harkness was standing at the top of the stairs when I returned. He wore a striped, knee-length nightshirt. His calf muscles bulged.

  ‘What?’ he rasped.

  ‘Nothing.’ />
  He nodded and went back into his room but I could tell that he was edgy. So was I.

  The call came the next day. My job was to get Harkness, in the mid-afternoon, to an address in Bondi without anyone knowing where he was going to be or following us. Harder to do than it sounds—Harkness’ day was mapped out in half-hour grids, but we managed it. I had to hope that the people looking after Buckawa were doing the same.

  The place was a small cluster of two-storey, cream-brick buildings set behind a high fence. It looked like a garden furniture factory, with all the chrome and plastic chairs scattered around, but in fact it was the William O. White Private Hospital.

  ‘Supposed to be closed for renovation,’ Harkness said as we mounted the front steps. ‘But it’s got a good working theatre.’

  ‘How many people to do the op?’

  Harkness took a last suck on his pipe and knocked the ashes out into a flower pot. ‘Just you and me.’

  He laughed at my reaction and we went through the front door into a tiled lobby where Ian Sangster was waiting with three black men and one black woman. Ian did the introductions but the only name that stuck with me was that of the biggest of the bunch, a 190-centimetre heavyweight named John Kelo, who seemed somehow to be in charge. Sangster looked worried, I thought. Harkness was in his element, shaking hands, turning on the rough charm for the woman who was evidently a nurse.

  We trooped up a staircase, Harkness in front with the nurse, then Sangster and me, then Kelo and his pals.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed in Sangster’s ear.

  He shook his head and didn’t reply.

  Along a corridor, Harkness talking animatedly, snatches of pidgin, laughter. One of the Bougainvilleans moved swiftly past, opened a door and stood aside. The room was brightly lit; there was a small desk, several pieces of overhead equipment that could be swung into place and a chair something like the kind dentists use. A man got up from the chair and extended his hand to Harkness, ignoring everybody else. He was built along the same lines as the doctor, but bullet-headed, bald and his skin was the colour of tar.