Peter Corris: Burn and Other Stories

‘Mr Hardy, I can’t believe he did it, not Jason. George? Sure, all the bloody time. But not Jason.’

‘He’s run away,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t mean he’s guilty necessarily, but it doesn’t help.’

Mavis Wishart looked around my office with its faded walls and battered furniture. And this is my new office, down the hall from the old one which kind of died after a shotgun went off in it, several times. Mavis was comfortable here; you could tell she’d seen plenty of faded walls in her time. She was a small, dark woman of around forty, possibly part Aboriginal or Islander, but she looked as if she’d been too busy all her life to notice. She’d raised two sons without either father to help. Now the younger son was accused of setting fire to his school. He’d run away and she wanted me to find him.

I looked at the notes I’d made. ‘Thirteen, fourteen next month. 175 centimetres. That’s tall for thirteen.’

Mavis shrugged. ‘His father was tall.’

‘Nearly fourteen, isn’t that a bit old for sixth class?’

‘His father was dumb.’ Mavis grinned as she spoke. ‘Nah, he’s not dumb. Jase missed a lot of school early, so did George. We moved around a lot and they were always sick.’

‘The fire was ten days ago. You saw him that night and not since.’

‘Right. The cops were round in the morning, I went up to get Jase out of bed, but he must have heard them coming. The window was open and he was gone. Look, Mr Hardy, Jason’s a good kid, but you know how things are these days. A push in the wrong direction and they’re gone. Ma Parker told me you’d got her Annie out of trouble once.’

‘Once,’ I said. It didn’t work out so well in the end.’

‘Have a shot at this,’ Mavis said. ‘It might turn out better. His brother, George, burnt down three schools. That’s why the cops came after Jase.’

She was a game, good-humoured woman, so I took the case. Mavis wrote me a cheque for $300 — two days, maybe three at my soft-boiled rate. I had a description of the kid, names and addresses of his mates and the location of the pinball joints and pubs he frequented; this was Sydney’s inner west, and Jason Wishart was nearly fourteen after all.

I spent two days on it, then a third day. I checked on the other kids and the hangouts. With runaways, usually, that’s all it takes-they’re either in the near neighbourhood or they’re long gone. When the names and addresses yielded nothing, I tried the institutions. The patience of Detective Sergeant Hubbard of the Darlington police station was stretched to breaking point by a hundred different frustrations, but he gave me the time of day. He admitted that he’d had a tip-off about Jason Wishart after the fire at the local primary school.

‘When?’ I said.

‘That night.’

‘Isn’t that a bit quick?’

Hubbard sighed and blinked tired eyes. I could guess at the relationship between the eyes and the piles of paper on his desk. ‘Look, Hardy, if you knew someone was screwing your wife and you got a tip it was me, what would you do?’

‘I might make a mental note that she’d dropped her standards. My wife left me years ago. Are you trying to be offensive?’

‘I’m trying to get you to piss off. Georgie Wishart torched schools around here like they were named Guy Fawkes Primary. I’m told he’s in the Navy now. God help them. His brother was and is the chief suspect.’

If that took me into ancient history, the talk with the headmistress of the school took me into politics. Clarissa Fielding was large, grey-haired and imposing. “The fire didn’t help,’ she said. ‘The school’s under threat of closing. I doubt if we’ll get the money to fix the damage.’

I sat in her office, which looked as if it had doubled as a storeroom, and gazed out at the kids playing in the school grounds-if you could call a couple of hundred square metres of unshaded asphalt that. ‘Closing? Why?’

‘Declining numbers.’ Mrs Fielding waved an ironical hand at the window. A ball bounced off the glass as if underlining her point.

‘Looks busy to me.’

‘It’s nonsense. All the projections are that in two years’ time this area will have more children than it had five years ago.’

‘Ah,’ I murmured, ‘rationalisation.’

Mrs Fielding snorted. ‘Exploitation. The plan is to sell the closed schools. This site is worth millions to the developers and, believe me, they know it.’

I was about to ask more questions but she forestalled me by standing up. ‘If you’re really interested, Mr Hardy, you can come to one of the protest meetings. They’re widely advertised. I’m afraid I can’t help you about Jason Wishart. His attendance wasn’t good. His teachers’ reports suggest he could have done better.’

I stood, too. They always say that. They said that about me.’

‘I expect they were right.’

I left the school by the west gate. I could hear the roar of the Cleveland Street traffic but the area was gentrifying nevertheless. I looked back at the old building-most likely it’d be flattened in favour of townhouses or office blocks plus parking. A woman standing by the gate thrust a pamphlet into my hand.

‘Save our school.’

‘Hear, hear,’ I said.

I glanced at the pamphlet which called for a halt to the selling of school sites and named developers and real estate agents who’d expressed ‘unseemly interest in our school’. I put the paper in my pocket.

It was pretty much blank wall time, but I decided to pay a call on Jason Wishart’s brother, although everyone told me that the Wishart boys weren’t close. George Wishart shared a flat in Marrickville with two other sailors. His mother had told me that he was on shore leave.

‘Not that he’ll bother to come and see me.’

The red brick block was small and the flats had no view, but I suppose if you’re at sea most of the time, you can do without views on land. The hungover, fair, fattish young man who answered my knock looked nothing like Mavis or the dark whippet of a boy that was Jason in the photo she had given me.

‘I’m looking for George Wishart.’

‘Why?’

That reply told me I’d found him. People are incurious on the whole. ‘Your mother gave me your address. Your brother’s in trouble.’

‘Too bad.’ He tried to close the door but maybe he was used to bulkheads. I had my foot in the gap and my shoulder pushing against him before he could get set. I shoved the door in and he almost lost balance.

‘Hey,’ he yelped, ‘this is a break-in.’

‘Don’t be silly.’ His fat, vacant face annoyed me. I was also feeling frustrated by the inquiry. That’s a bad combination in my game-meeting someone uncongenial when frustrated. I brushed him aside and looked quickly through the flat: the place was a shit-hole-dirty beds, floors, tables, and a kitchen that was a health hazard.

George was sitting on the arm of a chair smoking a cigarette when I came back into the living room.

‘You didn’t look in the dunny,’ he said.

‘It’s all a dunny. When did you last see Jason?’

His eyes flickered to the telephone standing on top of a pile of current and out-of-date directories. ‘Months ago. Who’re you?’

‘Captain Bligh. He was here, wasn’t he? What did he want-money?’

‘I wouldn’t give the little…’

George was smart enough to see that he’d made a mistake. He flicked ash on the floor. ‘He was in his bloody pyjamas. He wanted to make a phone call. I let him and then I told him to piss off.’

‘Brotherly love. Who did he call?’

‘I dunno. STD. He had the number in his head, then he wrote it down in the book and rang it.’