Peter Corris - The Big Score

‘Bastards! What can we do now?’

I replayed the footage. Another person had entered the shop as the thieves were leaving. I froze the frame.

‘Who’s that? She might have seen something about them that could be useful.’

Craig riffled through the order slips. ‘She chose something. Here it is-Oscar, Picture of Dorian Grey -MasterCard.’

‘Give me the number. I can track her down.’

‘How?’

‘Trade secret. You know how to operate that equipment. Pick out a couple of the clearest shots and blow them up. Could be something we’ve missed. I’ll get back to you if I turn up anything useful.’

I was mostly humouring him, but he seemed to take a little heart. He scribbled down the credit card number.

‘Thanks anyway, Cliff.’

‘We ain’t done yet.’

At home, with Lily away on her journalistic assignment, I poured a solid scotch over ice and was ready to turn on Lateline when there was a knock at the door. I opened it, drink in hand. A medium-sized man wearing a long coat and a hat and carrying an overnight bag stood there.

‘Mr Hardy,’ he said, ‘my name is Sylvester Browne- Browne with an e.’ He dug in the bag and held up a book- Northern Trekking. ‘I think we should have a talk, don’t you?’

I ushered him through to the living room. He opened the bag and stacked a number of the books on a chair.

‘Fourteen copies. The total in Australia.’ He opened his wallet and laid three one hundred dollar notes on top of the pile. ‘Payment for the damage to three glass cases.’

My jaw must have dropped. All I could think to do was offer him a drink.

‘Thank you. Whatever you’re having. May I take off my hat and coat?’

I nodded and he draped the coat over the stair rail and put the hat on the post. I recovered my wits and asked him to sit down.

I came back with his drink and the bottle and a bowl of ice and sat opposite him.

‘Cheers,’ he said.

He was pale, thin-faced, with sandy hair neatly parted. Horn-rimmed glasses. He wore a fawn v-neck sweater with a collar and tie, brown trousers and black Oxfords-not a good look. He took a solid swig of the scotch and let out a contented sigh.

‘I’m glad you brought the bottle in, Mr Hardy, because I have a peculiar tale to tell and it may take some time.’

I guessed him to be in his fifties. There was an accent, South African or thereabouts, and the slight clicking of false teeth. I drank, nodded, indicated my willingness to listen.

‘I am a bookworm, Mr Hardy…’

He told me that he was South African, an academic historian who specialised in nineteenth-century history. During his researches he had come across a letter written by EB Lyell to a friend in Cape Town. Lyell’s vessel, the Esmeralda, was held up for repairs in Mauritius and Lyell had sent a letter home by another ship that would get there earlier. This friend was a mining engineer of no importance until he went into politics and became a minister in the post Boer War government. The letter was included among his papers, which Browne was studying.

‘The letter was discursive, rambling even, and I have a suspicion that Lyell may have been under the influence.’ Browne raised his glass. ‘He alluded to his book and said that he had arranged to send some copies ahead of him and some to England and left some in Australia in the care of a man named Carter whom he described as his agent. He said that he had discovered a rich reef of gold while on his expedition in northern Australia and that he’d marked the spot on a map in one of the copies of the book, which he’d intended to keep with him at all times.’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ve been told that he faked those expeditions.’

‘Not the first one. That was genuine. May I continue?’

I topped him up and he went on. ‘Lyell was in distress when he wrote this letter. He’d found, to his dismay, that the three copies of the book he had with him did not have the marked map. He’d been drinking a good deal after being exposed as a fraud in Australia, something he freely admitted to his friend, and now he didn’t know where the marked book was. Possibly still in Australia, or on its way to England or South Africa.

‘I took early retirement from the university on a generous settlement and I’ve devoted the last few years to tracking down the copies of Lyell s book. Fifty, as you know. I found twenty-three copies in South Africa and fourteen here in Australia. Three went down with the Esmeralda, leaving ten.’

‘Always assuming some haven’t just been lost or are mouldering away somewhere.’

‘Remarkably, that’s not the case. I located the papers of Richard Carter, Lyell’s agent, in the Oxley Library in Brisbane. They clearly show that he dispatched ten copies to his agent in England.’

‘You’ve been thorough.’

‘It’s something I pride myself on.’

‘Also criminal. Why didn’t you just buy up the copies as you found them here? You say you’ve got the money.’

‘I haven’t had a lot of excitement in my life, Mr Hardy. I was a dud at sport, which was all that counted when I was at school. I’m a bachelor with no children and only a few relatively insignificant books to my credit. I did it to see if I could do something out of the ordinary. I did it for fun, and now I’ve made recompense.’

I poured us some more scotch and asked him how he’d known what was going on at Craig’s shop. He said he smelled a rat when Craig’s catalogue came out and he conducted a careful surveillance of the shop. He’d seen me arrive, followed me to my office and knew my profession. He knew where the cameras were positioned and he found someone to help him disable the power supply.

‘Who?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘Just a friend. Someone who’s helped me in my little escapade.’

He was determined to construct the whole thing as a sort of goofy adventure and I couldn’t blame him. It was, and Craig and I were both going to come out of it okay. Craig could restore the books to his colleagues and I could take credit for having resolved the matter. He read my mind.

‘Mr Minson will be satisfied with your efforts, won’t he?’

‘I guess so.’

‘You can imagine my disappointment when this last volume turned out not to be the one. I had high hopes of it. I always intended to return the books or to pay handsomely for the right one if I found it. But seeing that Mr Minson took the matter so seriously and went to some expense, it seems only fitting to return them to him.’

‘He’ll be grateful.’

‘Yes, but it would embarrass me to do it in person and his reaction might be problematical. I thought it best to ask you to do it.’

‘How did you know I wouldn’t be problematical?’

‘I’ve observed you. You strike me as someone with a sense of humour and of course what I’m doing is comical, ridiculous. You’ve been hospitable and patient, bearing out my judgement. I have a favour to ask. Could you please not reveal what I was about until you next hear from me? I’m off to England tomorrow. I don’t know how long the search will take me, could be months or years. But I’d be glad if you could keep it a secret until I let you know the result, one way or another.’

He was obsessed, more than a little mad, but somehow likeable. I thought of El Dorado and Lasseter’s lost reef. ‘It’s a deal,’ I said. ‘And good luck to you, Mr Browne with an e.’

Clayton Harrison was someone I’d known in the army. He was a fairly gung-ho type who stayed in longer than me. But we’d got along. We hadn’t exactly saved each other’s lives, but when you’ve been together in mutual support in some of those dangerous spots, there’s a bond. Now he was the editor of a couple of magazines of the outdoor persuasion-shooting, fishing, climbing. His office was in Newtown where I’d recently moved my modest operation and we ran into each other, had an occasional drink, yarned. Then he phoned, sounding serious, and asked me to come and see him.