Peter Corris - The Big Score

I parked above the site where I could get a good view of it through my field glasses. A big, expensive, apparently brand new boat that looked ready to go was tied up at the wharf with people clustered around it. Three men in casual dress, two more in overalls and a woman. I trained my camera on her and adjusted the focus and the zoom. A bit older, a bit leaner and more tanned, but the woman was definitely Paula Turner, nee Ramanascus. I took several photographs of her in profile and then two full-face when she turned away, with a nod at one of the overall-wearers, from the river. Job done-hers and mine. She shook hands with the non-workers who stood looking at the boat and strode back towards the shed. She moved like an athlete, long striding, loose.

I had a boozy, slightly troubled night in Byron just for the hell of it and flew back the next day. I thought about it. From what I remembered of the Great Ocean Road, the ‘accident’ would have been difficult to stage. She must have needed help at that point and perhaps at other points. Resourceful woman. Was it any of my business? I couldn’t decide. I had the photos developed, typed up a report and Turner came by after I phoned him. The retainer had covered everything but he thanked me and gave me a bonus.

When I finished talking Lily looked disappointed. ‘What’s so bad about that? Cliff works fast, does good.’

‘Turner shot them all.’

‘Jesus. Who?’

‘His wife, her lover up in Ballina, and Amherst, the lawyer who helped her set it all up. And himself.’

Craig Minson runs a second-hand book shop in King Street, Newtown. I go in there occasionally to pick up something I’ve noticed in the review sections of the papers. Craig deals with a couple of the writers who flog him books they’ve reviewed. One is a specialist in sports books and the other mostly reviews biographies, so I stand a fair chance of running across something I’m interested in. He also stocks fiction at reasonable prices. Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, Tim Winton, Bernard Cornwall-my kind of thing. Usually when I go in he has a book set aside as a suggestion for me. Not this time.

Craig beckoned me over to the counter before I could even browse. ‘I’ve got something for you, Cliff,’ he said.

‘Let’s see it.’

He shook his head and his tangled greying locks flew. Craig is stocky, fortyish, with a grey beard and grey hair. He once told me he always wanted to run a bookshop and he was pleased when he went prematurely grey because it was the right look.

‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘It’s a mystery-something for you to investigate.’

‘I investigate professionally, Craig. For money.’

‘I think a few of us can come to some arrangement.’

‘Us?’

‘Booksellers. There’s someone stealing books from our shops.’

‘I thought you told me you wrote a certain amount off to pilfering.’

‘I do, we all do. But this is different. Whoever the thief is, he steals the same book from everyone. I’m talking about ten bookshops here in Sydney, one in Canberra, a couple in the country and who knows where else. Could be more but not many because there aren’t many copies around.’

‘That’s strange. Valuable book?’

‘Fairly. Worth three or four hundred dollars in good condition. It’s EB Lyell’s Northern Trekking. Ever heard of it?’

I shook my head. ‘Never heard of him, if it is a him, or it.’

‘Lyell was a him all right. Amazing man. He went looking for the Leichhardt expedition in the 1890s, or said he did.’

‘How’s that?’

A bell rang, signalling that someone had entered the shop. Craig went forward to offer his help and I looked around the book-filled space. The room was lined with bookshelves reaching almost to the ceiling and there were several aisles of shelving down the middle. Footstools and ladders, good lighting, labels written in large type, pull-out reading supports-everything a bookshop should have. Craig got deep into conversation with his customer and I headed for the Australian history section. It covered several metres and was divided chronologically and, within that, alphabetically by author. As with the other categories, there was a collection of books locked inside a glass case. I wondered whether the book in question had been in there and, if so, how the theft had been managed. I was beginning to get interested.

Craig made a sale, wrapped the book and the customer went on her way.

‘Good one?’

‘Pretty good. Nice to see someone who knows what they’re after, and I made a tidy profit. Now, about Lyell. He claimed to have conducted three expeditions in search of Leichhardt. He certainly made one that didn’t get very far. In his book he details two other treks, as he calls them-he was South African, by the way-that got a lot further. And he reckoned he found some relics.

‘But it became pretty clear that these journeys were fantasies, or fabrications. He tried to claim the reward that was on offer for evidence about Leichhardt but some experts pointed out problems with the things he claimed to have seen. He was disgraced, threatened with prosecution for fraud, but before he went back to South Africa he published this book in a signed and numbered limited edition of fifty copies.’

‘Of which you had number…?’

‘One. It’s a curiosity really, not a significant historical document. Most of the copies have disappeared over the years. I suppose there’re still a few in private hands. As far as I know, none of the libraries, even the Mitchell, holds copies.’

‘I thought they got everything.’

‘There are reasons apart from self-published books being obscure. Lyell included some stuff about him and his men having sexual contact with Aboriginal women, and some drawings. Pornographic, really-the high-minded gentlemen librarians of the time wouldn’t have touched it, even if they’d known about it, which they probably didn’t.’

‘It’s interesting, Craig, but I can’t see what help I could be. Maybe it’s just some nutter of a descendant upset about the sex and wanting to eliminate all the copies as blots on the family escutcheon.’

‘No way. Lyell was an only child and he was drowned when his ship went down on the passage from Australia to South Africa. He was only thirty, unmarried, no issue, as they say.’

I shrugged. ‘Okay.’

‘There’s something else. Whoever stole the book has an accomplice.’

‘How do you figure that?’

‘The Lyell volume was in one of my locked cases. Somehow the glass was cut and the book taken. The thief must have got someone to distract me. I checked with a couple of the other booksellers and much the same thing happened in their places. We had a bit of an email conference and they agreed to let me have a go at… nabbing the culprit and getting the books back. Of course everyone’s interested in why.’

‘Yeah, but how would you, or I, go about doing that?’

Craig looked pleased with himself. He ran his fingers through his wild hair and tapped the side of his nose in an old-fashioned gesture. Running a bookshop can throw you back to the last century, apparently. He was about to speak when the bell sounded again and he moved away.

I returned to the Australian history section and, sure enough, a glass panel in the locked case had recently been replaced. Not that I doubted Craig’s word, but confirmation is the name of the game in my business. There were plenty of other explorers’ published journals in the bookcase and out on the shelves-Eyre, Stuart, Sturt, Leichhardt himself, Giles and others-and books about them. Some were handsomely leather-bound with gold lettering, collectors’ items. I wondered what could be motivating Craig’s mysterious thief. Some kind of obsession, but what?