Peter Corris - Burn and Other Stories

Richmond shook his head. ‘He didn’t have a family. He was a very secretive, lonely type. Always going off on his own. Hard to get to know. Hard to understand.’

‘He had a wife and a kid,’ I said. ‘She spotted a photo of you.’

‘Jesus. I didn’t know.’

I poured us both some more scotch. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, the operation folded. We’d both taken a good whack out of it. Col comes to me one day and tells me he’s sent most of his money to the wife of the bloke he’d run over. Then he breaks down. I try to steady him but he rushes off. Next I hear, he’s drowned off some beach. I got scared. I thought he might have left a letter for the police or a lawyer or something. He might have put us all in the shit. I didn’t know about the wife and kid. I thought he’d offed himself. Was it an accident?’

‘That’s what the insurance company decided.’ I put my hand up to my face, tapping my cheek. ‘What about this?’

‘Col and me looked pretty much alike as it happened. When he shot through that night he left some stuff behind, including his passport. I didn’t have one. I went to this doctor in Melbourne and got a bit of plastic surgery done. Didn’t take long or cost that much. I used the passport and went to Thailand.’

‘Why Thailand?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve got friends there and plenty of Aussies pass through. You can get the news from home. Six months and no news, so I came back, settled in up here.’

I sat and thought about the story. It could have been true. On the other hand, Richmond might have killed Colin Cook and stolen his money. He looked prosperous-the Volvo was newish, his clothes were good. For a man who had done a little criminal activity six years ago his behaviour when I turned up seemed like an over-reaction.

He saw my scepticism and touched his face. ‘Plastic job turned out not so good.’

‘You could have it done again,’ I said. ‘You look to have the money.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’m wondering whether to believe your story.’

‘I left the gun in the car, didn’t I?’

‘I’m wondering why you had it in the first place.’

He looked around the room. ‘You could be taping me.’

I laughed. ‘The only tapes here go from Benny Goodman to Dire Straits.’

He sighed. ‘OK. OK. I made a couple of deliveries from Thailand. No problems. I’ve burned the passport and I’m a hundred per cent legitimate now, but… it leaves you edgy.’

‘So it should,’ I said. ‘Drug couriers are arseholes in my book. So you chopped down your rabbit shooter and came to see if I was a narc or someone connected with your deliveries?’

‘Yeah. I improvised.’

‘You seem to be pretty good at doing that. I still don’t know whether to buy your story or not.’

He put his glass carefully on the floor and stood up. ‘What difference does it make? We don’t have any beef, do we?’

‘I suppose not. What’s this legitimate business you’re in now?’

‘I’ve got a little health farm and sports centre at Bowral. I’m the tennis coach, as well as the proprietor. I keep a flat in Petersham, too. I like those grass courts. Do you play tennis?’

‘Not in your league,’ I said. ‘OK, Richmond. I don’t like you but I believe you. Why don’t you grow a moustache? There’s a nice woman in Sydney who doesn’t need to see that face in the papers.’

We were in the hallway, moving towards the front door. He stared at me with his oddly bland eyes. ‘You’re a strange man, Hardy.’

‘I’m in a strange business,’ I said.

‹‹Contents››

Robert Adamo was a slender, medium-sized man with a slow, disconnected way of speaking. ‘Mr Hardy, I hope you can help me,’ he drawled. ‘I’ve never hired a private detective before.’

‘There’s a first time for everything, Mr Adamo,’ I said. ‘I don’t ask as many questions as an accountant or cost as much as a plumber. What’s the problem?’

He glanced around my office for a moment, which is all the time it takes to register the minimal furniture and non-existent decoration. ‘I want to find someone. That is, I saw her yesterday, but…’

‘Hold on. Who’re we talking about?’ I’d already written Adamo’s name and address on a foolscap pad, along with the fact that he ran a picture framing and art restoration business in Paddington. Then I’d written MP for missing person, and drawn the male and female symbols and a question mark.

‘Valerie Hammond. She’s my fiancee. We were going to be married in two months.’

I scratched out the male symbol. It took a bit of hacking and slashing through Adamo’s reticence and shyness, but I eventually got something I could put down in point form on the pad. Adamo and Valerie Hammond had met when she’d come to collect a painting she’d had framed. They got engaged after six months. The date was set; then Valerie Hammond disappeared. She moved out of Adamo’s house, where she’d been living for three months, quit her executive job with Air France and dropped out of sight.

‘So you had an argument,’ I said. ‘What about?’

‘No argument. Nothing. I asked her to marry me. She said yes. Then she was gone.’

‘What did you do?’ I said.

His long, bony hands were in his lap now, twisting and flexing. They were strong-looking hands, and Adamo himself was a strong-looking-man-straight dark hair, firm chin, high cheekbones. ‘I… I looked for her, but I didn’t know what to do. She took her clothes and she got a reference from Air France. She’s very good at languages.’

It was a better start than some. Adamo was a very well organised guy: he had a recent photograph of his girl, who was a blonde with a high forehead, big eyes and a sexy mouth-165 centimetres, fifty-five kilos. I did the conversions to the old system on my pad. Valerie was twenty-five to Adamo’s twenty-nine; she’d learned French, German and Italian from her Swiss mother, and she and Robert had had a lot of fun in Leichhardt restaurants. His people were Italians who’d come out in the sixties when Roberto was a small boy. He was Robert now, and his Italian was rusty. I got the rest of the dope on Valerie-parents both dead, no siblings, only friends known to Adamo were Air France people he’d already talked to with no result. Valerie Hammond seemed to lead a quiet, very constrained life.

‘Sorry to have to ask,’ I said, ‘but does she have any… peculiarities? I mean does she smoke a lot, or drink or gamble?’ I gave a little laugh to help the medicine go down.

Adamo shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. She is very quiet, a very private person. That’s why I’m dealing with you rather than the police.’

‘What does she spend her money on? She’d be on a good salary with the airline.’

‘Don’t know. We never talked about money. I’m very careful about money. Running a small business isn’t easy.’ His eyes flicked around the office again and I could sense him weighing up incomings and outgoings the way I did myself, periodically. ‘All I can tell you is that she’s careful about it, too.’

I made a note on the pad. ‘She must’ve saved a bit then. You don’t know what bank she used?’

He shook his head. ‘She didn’t have any money.’

‘Excuse me, Mr Adamo, but you don’t seem to have known a lot about the woman you were going to marry.’

‘ Am going to many,’ he said fiercely, ‘when you find her.’

I nodded. His firmness deflected me from that approach. ‘Tell me about seeing her yesterday.’

‘In Terrey Hills. Mona Vale Road.’ He checked his watch. ‘At half-past three. She got in a Redline taxi and drove away. I was in my van. I’d been delivering a picture I’d restored.’