The Torch

by Peter Twohig

  The lanky rozzer looked up. ‘And you haven’t seen him since.’ His pen hovered and swayed in the air like the only visible twig on an otherwise invisible tree. The copper was, I realised, three parts stung.

  ‘That’s what he said,’ said Granddad.

  ‘Got to follow procedures.’

  ‘You’ve got what you want. Now piss off,’ said Granddad, who’d been on the good and bad side of coppers all his life, but never in the middle. He obviously had the wood on this no-hoper.

  ‘Just following procedures, Arch. No need to get testy. I’ve got to tell him —’

  ‘No you don’t; I’ll tell him. Give my regards to the boys at CID.’

  The copper allowed himself to be shown the door, and everyone settled down. There were only two people in Richmond who could talk to coppers like that: their wives and Granddad.

  Suddenly, Granddad’s house was like the six o’clock swill at the King Brian. As the copper was being given the bum’s rush, in walked Aunty Daffy, and they squeezed past each other like ships in the night, or rather, like a black torpedo shooting past a lamp-post with steel wool on top.

  Aunty Daffy had returned from her visit to the blind people’s home.

  ‘Was she there?’ asked Mum from the living-room doorway, where she was directing traffic.

  ‘Yep. Her usual surly self. She hasn’t changed a bit — mind you, she’s off the grog.’

  ‘I’d be surly too if I’d just lost my house and my son.’

  ‘I think it’d take more than that to get you down, Jeannie love,’ said Aunty Daffy, getting Mum mixed up with Helen Keller. ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘He was looking for Keith too. They’ll probably award you a damehood when you take him away.’

  Granddad went into the kitchen to put a cuppa on. It was all getting away from me. As much as I hated telling the truth — nothing good ever comes from it — I thought I might just this once, seeing as half the population of Richmond was now involved.

  ‘Mum, that wasn’t exactly right, what I told that copper. I have seen Keith since our house burnt down.’

  ‘When?’ asked Mum.

  ‘An hour ago,’ I said, trying to put a happy spin on it. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those moments when the evil scientist has captured you and your daughter, and throws the big switch on the Doom Machine, and the serial suddenly stops. Well, that’s more or less what happened when I said that.

  ‘I told him his aunty was here, and at first he was keen to go home with Aunty … Mrs … Aunty Daphne. Then he changed his mind and said he thought it was a trick.’

  They were staring at me — girls do that — so I pushed on.

  ‘I said I’d meet him at Rooney Park tomorrow.’

  I knew he wouldn’t be at Rooney Park the next day, but I didn’t want him getting put in a full nelson by Aunty Daffy and dragged away before he had a chance to choose for himself.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us all this?’ said Mum, except it came out sounding like: When I get my bloody hands on you, I’ll murder you.

  ‘I just did.’

  ‘Don’t you get smart with me, young man.’

  ‘No, Jean, it’s all right. Where is he?’

  ‘He’s hiding all over the place. The neighbours are giving him food.’

  ‘Who’s giving him food?’ That was Mum.

  ‘Dunno. That’s what he told me.’

  The conversation went quiet again.

  Meanwhile, Granddad returned, and looked around.

  ‘What’d I miss?’

  Mum nodded towards me. ‘He knows where the boy’s hiding.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Granddad, with a wink at me. ‘He wouldn’t dob in a mate. He can keep an eye on Keith for us until it’s time for Daphne to take him home.’

  ‘He’s not keen on going,’ I said. ‘Thinks it’s all bull about his aunty being here.’

  ‘Oh, he’ll go, he’ll go. Now, was he injured in the fire? Is he okay?’

  ‘No, he’s okay. He’s just worried.’

  ‘Worried! I’ll give him worried,’ said Mum.

  ‘I think the sooner we take him home, the better,’ said Aunty Daffy. ‘I’ll go with you to the park tomorrow. What is it?’

  ‘It’s just that when he sees you coming he’ll scoot,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  Mum suddenly came up with a suggestion — for me, I think — but Aunty Daffy made her pause just by raising a finger. I decided to devote the rest of my life to learning that trick.

  ‘Granddad, what did that copper have to tell me?’

  It was something bad. I had that funny feeling in my guts, like when you’re on the Big Dipper.

  ‘There’s someone else looking for him now. Things could get complicated if the other bloke finds him first.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘His father, Fergus Kavanagh.’

  ‘You said he was in the loony bin.’

  ‘Dad! What have you been telling him?’

  ‘Just local history, girl. Best he get the drum from the horse’s mouth.’

  ‘I’m not sending him to St Dom’s for nothing. I’m trying to teach him the right things.’

  ‘It’s practically family history, Jeannie.’

  He gave Aunty Daffy a wink. He knew that Mum liked to be called Jeannie. But nobody else in the family could do it. It was like lion taming: it looks easy — chair, whip, lots of yelling the lion’s name (usually Simba, or something African) — but if the fairy floss lady tried it, she’d get torn limb from limb.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, turning to me, ‘he just got out.’

  ‘They let him go?’

  ‘No fear: he escaped — I told you he would.’

  ‘It didn’t mention it in the paper.’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘How’d he give ’em the slip?’

  ‘How do ya think? Burnt the place down and made a run for it. It’s his trademark move.’

  ‘But you said he wasn’t a firebug.’

  ‘He isn’t. Your real firebug always hangs around to watch. Kavanagh would have made himself scarce.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll go to Tasmania,’ I said hopefully. I knew a lot of crims had ended up there.

  ‘And maybe Fitzroy’ll win the premiership.’

  9 The Creepy Crawleys

  My visit to the match factory, where I was surrounded by danger of the kind you could actually smell, made me think of the world of Torches and their sons. Suddenly, Flame Boy appeared in a new light. It seemed his old man — now he had an old man — was really not some kind of lunatic who lights fires, unlike his son, who definitely was a lunatic, but just a crim who happened to include fire lighting in his toolkit. There’s a big difference.

  You could easily see how people might draw certain conclusions about the kid, as he always had that weird look on his face, as if he’d just been to the dentist and the anaesthetic hadn’t worn off yet. I had always thought of him as a kind of superhero, not for what he liked to do, though that took guts, but for getting out there amongst it, in a dangerous world, and making his mark. I had done the same thing in my way, and as a result I was known far and wide as a scallywag who needed to be watched carefully. It’s a sort of badge we superheroes wear, though you can’t see it.

  I took Aunty Daffy down to Rooney Park, just as I said I would, and Flame Boy was nowhere to be seen, of course — I knew we wouldn’t spot him: he was a chip off the old block in the sneakiness department — so after waiting in the blazing hot sun for half an hour, while I played dumb, she pushed off. I still hadn’t figured out what was best for Flame Boy, but I reckoned if he was watching, he would at least get a chance to size up Aunty Daffy.

  It was Mr Kavanagh, father of the real Torch — I like to call a spade a spade — I was really interested in. He had busted out of the nut house to be with his long-lost son; and also because his old house had burnt down, and he was probably worried about his family; and al
so because he had probably remembered that Flame Boy would be looking after his briefcase for him. I couldn’t think of a better reason to bust out of a place, unless it was because Mum was the cook there, and she wasn’t. Also, I had heard all about it from Granddad, who was more reliable than the Channel Nine News. So it all added up. I had come close to falling for the oldest trick in the world: let’s tell the kid something to make him lose interest. But I hadn’t.

  Yet busted out he certainly had, and heading for Richmond he probably was. Granddad reckoned he hadn’t seen so many police in Richmond since the Great Footy Riot of ’48. It was making it bloody hard for an honest man to earn a quid, he said. As for Barney, the unexpected appearance of extra uniforms caused him to become a law-abiding citizen, and the next time I saw him was around at Nanna Blayney’s place the following Sunday morning. But before that some very weird things happened.

  On Saturday, when I next dropped into Raffi’s place, he told me that they had friends in Kipling Street as well, and he asked me if I would like to visit. It turned out that these people lived next door to the Sandersons, and were called the Crawleys.

  ‘Like centipedes ’n’ stuff?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, except they’re nice. We knew them before we moved from Cremorne. Mr Crawley used to be in the Navy, and builds model ships.’

  ‘What about Mrs Crawley?’

  ‘I don’t think she was in the Navy.’

  ‘Okay.’

  So we went up Kipling Lane and into the Crawleys’ back yard, which was a lot like the Sandersons’, only with a pond full of goldfish and a place to sit and have lunch in the shade.

  ‘Have they got a dog?’ I asked, as yours truly is afraid of most dogs (among other things), though he would not like that fact to get around.

  ‘Nuh. They’ve got a cat, but. It’s called Harry. It bashes up dogs.’

  I was instantly worried all over again. My own cat, Abbotsford, though extremely browned off about life in general, had always steered clear of Zac, sensing his secret violent nature.

  The Crawleys turned out to be about a hundred years old and covered in wrinkles, so that I wondered if Mr Crawley had been in one of those navies that had sailing ships. Their house was dark inside as all the blinds were down, and everything looked old and worn. Mr Crawley’s claim to fame appeared to be his eyebrows, which would have got him the silver cup at a factory picnic eyebrow comp, if they had them, while Mrs Crawley had a way of looking at you as if she was wondering whether she would have to take your shoes off to get you into her oven. She was a kind of shrivelled-up version of Mrs Hutchinson, the well-known witch, but without the cigarettes.

  They were very pleased to see Raffi, and instantly began wheeling out the old scones and jam, which the young superhero is incapable of resisting.

  When they saw me, they looked at each other, but said nothing. I felt like telling them to stay well clear of racecourses and fan-tan parlours, because they wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  Their house was of great interest to me, as I had once seen a girl inside it while at the Sandersons’, and I mentioned this. What I did not tell them was that this girl was not wearing anything (unless she had her shoes on), as I was trying to make a good impression.

  ‘That would be our granddaughter,’ said Mrs C. Her teeth clicked between the words, as if she had a little word machine inside her.

  There was a silence. The Crawleys did not say a lot, though I wished they would.

  ‘Blayney,’ said Mr Crawley, staring at me and nodding. ‘Jean’s son.’ He clicked as well.

  I waited but he said nothing further, and I wondered if he had run out of oxygen. I also wondered if it was Mum he knew or my reputation, because as I say I had become what sundry officials call a ‘person of interest’. I felt that it was my job to fill in the blanks.

  ‘I —’

  ‘We’ve known Mr and Mrs Sanderson for years,’ said Mr C, suddenly coming to life like a zombie at sundown. ‘Who were those foreign friends of theirs – the ones who stayed with them?’

  Friends, relatives and neighbours: that’s all old people ever talked about. I looked at Raffi and he at me and we reached for the scones.

  ‘The Larsons,’ said Mrs C, also coming to life. It looked as if they stopped breathing between sentences. ‘They were there for months. Lovely people. Greta was a painter, and Anders was a car salesman — what kind of cars were they?’

  ‘Volvos,’ said Mr C.

  ‘He built his wife a little studio out the back, for something to do, and she used to paint in it.’

  I knew the place Mrs C was talking about, because on the inside it smelt terrific, a lot like St Felix’s church. I reckon it would get a nine on the Blayney Scale of Smells and Pongs, which will give you an idea of how good it was. The floor was covered with a million little and not-so-little drops and blobs of paint of various colours, which I suppose Mrs Larson made while she was making paintings of whatever Swedish ladies painted — Swedish babies with wings was my guess. I had often wondered what its story was, and now I had the facts. It’s not often you hear something interesting from an old person who is not involved in some way with crime.

  ‘I wonder what happened to them?’ clicked Mrs C, as her motor was still running.

  ‘They went back to Sweden, didn’t they?’ said Mr C.

  ‘Lovely people. They never went out. Not allowed, were they?’ Mrs C was now in top gear, and conducting both sides of the conversation, leaving Mr C in the mounting yard.

  ‘Not for a second, and they were there for months. Russell was very funny about that. And he never invited us in. Not like them at all.’

  ‘We did ask them in once, you know, to be polite, but apparently they weren’t allowed. Not allowed!’

  She paused to sip her tea. We would have fallen asleep, but she kept remembering, and revving her motor.

  ‘They finally disappeared in the middle of the night — thought we wouldn’t notice.’

  ‘It was all very funny, if you ask us.’

  I could tell by the whole tone of the conversation that the appearance and disappearance of the Larsons was the biggest thing that had happened to the Crawleys since the invention of the tea cosy. Boring they might have been, but they were sharp. And I liked them the way you like those engines in the museum that you started just by pressing a button. Also, their house smelt like a cross between Zac’s favourite mat and a sausage you find in the bottom of your school bag on Sunday night. I gave it a five.

  I was dying to tell them that I had witnessed the murder at the Sandersons’ place the year before, but I thought they might give me the old heave-ho, and there still seemed to be plenty of cream left. And besides, I hadn’t told Raffi. I liked being his friend, and didn’t want Bob Herbert, the murderer, to kill him, despite Mr Sanderson having assured me that he was probably living overseas by now. It didn’t seem to matter what Mr S said: just knowing that Herbert was still running around loose had caused me to have a whole new kind of nightmare, one that I didn’t want Raffi to experience.

  When there were exactly two scones left, Raffi and I looked at each other and Raffi made a face that said: ‘Well, I don’t know about you but I’m full as a tick, and just about bored to tears, so I reckon it’s time I shot through, as I’m supposed to go with Mum to visit Aunty Olive over in Cremorne.’ Or something. So after promising to give our best to our parents, we trickled out into Kipling Lane, where I gave Raffi exactly the same look, which in my case meant that I had to do something too. And we knew that it was okay. Then we went in different directions.

  The whole time the Crawleys had been clicking and clanking about the old days, I had been getting the funniest feeling, like I needed to get away and get stuck into my investigations. My head was full of pictures of mysterious Swedish people, naked girls, and model ships, which had been all over the place like a museum; and my stomach was full of Devonshire Tea, which was not unpleasant, just unexpected. I needed a walk.

  My walk
took me down to Flame Boy’s old house, where I had decided to check for clues. When I got to his street, it was jam-packed with black cars, all Holdens, my mortal enemy. When I crept down the little walkway that led to what was left of the house after the Fire Brigade was finished with it, I saw a lot of guys down there, most of them in overalls, going through the rubble, while an excavator removed what was left of the house and loaded it into a tip truck that had been brought in through the back fence.

  I looked around and saw propped up against the fence a big row of mattocks and shovels. I had dug up enough things to know what they were for. Under their overalls the blokes were wearing shirts and ties, all of which told me that something was rotten in the State of Denmark, as Mum says, though I knew from my stamp collection that Denmark was not a state.

  What these blokes reminded me of — a lot — were the blokes I saw Mr Sanderson hanging around with the year before, when he had been looking for Bob Herbert, the well-known murderer and knocker-off of counterfeit money plates (though, like a true Richmond resident, Mr Sanderson was a lot less interested in the murder than the plates). Those blokes hadn’t seemed too bad, though I knew they were some kind of coppers, the kind that drove very flash cars. But I wasn’t taking any chances. I hurried back up the walkway and turned the corner, heading for the Sandersons’ place.

  Just at that moment I bumped into Gary Turner, who was hanging around the cars, giving them the once-over. Normally, if I saw one of the local bodgies hanging around a car, I would shortly after expect to see that car disappear around the nearest corner. But Gazza — what? — already had a car, a fantastic green and white Ford Customline (which was the main reason I hated Holdens). I walked up to Gazza and leant on the nearest car, to show that I knew all about leaning on cars.

  Gazza was wearing a cream cardigan with the sleeves shoved up, even though it was ninety in the shade, and a pink shirt. His hair was brushed back at the sides, but not at the front — what we called an elephant trunk — and he had a tailor-made behind his ear. He put a foot up on a bumper bar as if the car was his. He was wearing bright yellow socks.