Peter Corris - White Meat

“Why don’t you?”

“Too scared.” He put the cigar down; a thin column of smoke rose up from it like an Apache signal. “Macleay… not too hard to name the big one, bank job in… sixty-six.”

“What happened?”

“Two men did a Commonwealth bank on a Friday. Took away fifty thousand dollars.”

“Never caught?”

“Not a sign.”

“The money?”

“Never found. The bank put up a big reward but heard nothing.”

“That’s strange. Did you cover it yourself?”

Green picked up the cigar again. There was a faint curl of smoke coming from the end and he sucked it into life, blowing out an enormous cloud. He looked at it virtuously. “Yeah. I went up there and looked around. Thought I might get onto something and make a big man of myself. Nothing doing. It was a pretty amateurish job. They got away on foot. Dead lucky.”

“How did the cops figure it?”

“Same as me, two roughies who got lucky. The cops dragged in everyone they could think of but got nowhere. I wrote a piece on it… hang on.”

He lumbered over to a battered filing cabinet under the window. He pulled out a drawer and riffled through the folders standing up inside it. He took one out and back to the desk where he opened it and leafed through some foolscap sheets with news cuttings pasted to them.

“Yeah, here it is.” He handed the sheet across to me and I ran my eye over the columns of newsprint. It was a straight recital of the facts including a description of the bandits who’d worn stocking masks and carried sawn-off shotguns. I pushed the sheet back across the desk. Green fiddled with his cigar and looked at the wall over my head. His eyes screwed up and he let out a tired sigh. His first drink was still a good way off.

“Yes?” I said.

“I remember now, there was a whisper about it. They were trying to fit someone up with it, a standover man with some local form.”

He butted his cigar and a smell that would soon be a vile reek started to sneak across the desk towards me. I thought that it might help his anti-drawback campaign if he smoked better cigars. I was about to say so when he started drumming his fingers on the desk.

“I’m slipping,” he grumbled. “Can’t remember his name. Look Hardy, I’m rambling. This of interest to you, this the one?”

“It could be – missing money sounds right. What about the standover man?”

“The name’s gone but he went up for rape in Newcastle, young kid. He got ten years.”

I heard something click inside my head like a combination lock tumbler coming into place. I sat up sharply. Green looked amusedly at my reaction.

“That’s right, they didn’t have anything much on him for the Macleay job as I recall, just something about the company he kept. The cops were just as happy to do him on the rape charge. It was open and shut.” He leered at me and I winced at the joke. He laughed. “Now you look interested.”

“I am. I see a connection. How can I get some dope on this rape case?”

“I thought you were interested in lost money.”

“Yes, and lost women. Let me get it straight before I go off half-cocked. What was that about the company he kept, the rapist?”

“Jesus Hardy, it’s twelve years ago. I might be confusing it with something else.” He picked up the sheets of paper, aligned them and tucked them back in the folder. Handling the relics of the time gave him assurance. “I think it was just that this bloke, whoever he was, used to hang about with an Abo up Macleay way.”

“So what? There’s lots of them up there.”

“That’s right but you didn’t read the story very thoroughly did you?” He handed it back to me and I read it word by word. One of the tellers said that one of the bandits looked dark under the mask, like an Aborigine. The thing was coming together now. I passed the cutting back.

“Pretty thin.”

“That’s what I said,” Green barked. “Macleay’s a racist hole; was then anyway, probably still is. It wasn’t much to go on but it was the only whiff the coppers had.” He blew a kiss at the wall. “But it died on them.”

I leaned forward, excited. “I’m sorry to press you, but the names are important, is there any way to get on to them?”

“Sally Fitch would be your best bet. Get at it from the rape angle. What she doesn’t know about criminal fucking isn’t worth knowing. I’ll take you along.”

We left the room and he moved along the corridor in that light, fast way that some big men can. He must have weighed sixteen stone and no-one got in his way. He nodded to people and I kept an eye out for the crew-cut redhead but she didn’t show. Green poked his head through a door then went in and I followed. It was another thirty-desk room with a good deal of noise and screwed up paper. Green ushered me across to a corner where a pot plant, a hat stand and a filing cabinet sheltered one desk a bit from the hurly-burly. He introduced me to the woman behind the desk; they ribbed each other about their drinking, smoking and other vices. Green shook my hand again and went away.

Sally Fitch was a lean blonde in her thirties. Her hair was rather faded and she showed signs of wear and tear; there was a scar running down the left side of her face that she covered with make-up. She was a good-looking woman, nonetheless. She lit a cigarette and looked me over with steady green eyes that wouldn’t be surprised at anything, not even if I leaped up that minute and threw myself out the window.

“What can I tell you that Garth can’t, Mr Hardy?” she asked. “Like those virtuous private eyes I can say I don’t do divorce work.”

I laughed. “I do when I can get it. It’s getting rarer.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Divorce is?”

“No, the dirty work those virtuous private eyes say ‘I don’t do’ to.”

She tapped ash off her cigarette and pushed it about in the glass ashtray. “Good thing too. Mine was as dirty as you’d hope to see. Well then, what?”

“I want to know all you can tell me about a rape case in Newcastle around 1966 or ‘67 – all the names, all the details. I don’t have time to look up the papers and my guess is it wouldn’t have made the papers anyway.”

“Why?”

“If I’m on the right track, the girl involved would have been a juvenile, very much so.”

She drew on her cigarette and let the smoke trickle out through her nostrils, an unusual thing for a woman to do. On her it looked amusing and I grinned. She didn’t notice. She scribbled “1967” and “Newcastle” on a blotter in front of her and drew lines around it. She embellished the lines, producing an ornate, curly doodle, then she got up and pulled a drawer out of her filing cabinet. Two drawers and some vivid swearing later she lifted out a thin manilla folder. A glossy photograph slipped out and I bent to pick it up.

“Hold on!” She came around the desk and retrieved the picture. “I don’t just hand this stuff out willy-nilly.” She smiled and softened her voice. “Anyway, don’t steal my thunder.”

I nodded and waited while she looked through the papers. There wasn’t much to it and it didn’t take her long. She closed the file and looked up.

“I think this is the one you want. The girl was fifteen, Newcastle, May 1967. It was a bit out of the ordinary; the girl knew the man who raped her. She knew the woman he lived with better. And the girl reported the rape to the police herself. There was a short piece, no details, in the Newcastle paper. No reporting on the trial, that’s the law.”

“Yes. You’ve got the names though?”

“Uh-huh. The girl was Naomi Rouble, the man was Joseph Berrigan. The woman he lived with was Patricia Baker.”

I nodded. “That’s it. It makes sense in a crazy way. What about the photo?”