Gun Control E-Book

Peter Corris

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Cliff Hardy Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 243

Beschreibung

The fortieth book in the Cliff Hardy series Is Sydney gun city? It certainly seems so when Cliff Hardy is hired by entrepreneur and one-time pistol-shooting champion Timothy Greenhall to investigate the violent death of his troubled son. Soon Hardy is pitched into a world of crooked cops - former members of the Gun Control Unit - outlaw bikers and honest police trying to quietly clean the stables. Two more murders raise the stakes and relationships are stretched to breaking point. Hardy hooks up with a determined policewoman and forms an unlikely alliance with a charismatic biker chief. Uncovering the tangled conspiracy behind the murders takes Hardy to the Blue Mountains and Camden, to plush legal chambers and a confrontation in an inner-west park - all against the roar of 750cc engines.

Leseprobe

PETER CORRIS is known as the ‘godfather’ of Australian crime fiction through his Cliff Hardy detective stories. He has written in many other areas, including a co-authored autobiography of the late Professor Fred Hollows, a history of boxing in Australia, spy novels, historical novels and a collection of short stories about golf (see www.petercorris.net). In 2009, Peter Corris was awarded the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction by the Crime Writers Association of Australia. He is married to writer Jean Bedford and has lived in Sydney for most of his life. They have three daughters and six grandsons.

Peter Corris’s Cliff Hardy novels include The Empty Beach, Master’s Mates, The Coast Road, Saving Billie, The Undertow, Appeal Denied, The Big Score, Open File, Deep Water, Torn Apart, Follow the Money, Comeback, The Dunbar Case and Silent Kill. Gun Control is his fortieth Cliff Hardy novel.

He writes a regular weekly column for the online journal Newtown Review of Books (www.newtownreviewofbooks.com.au).

Thanks to Jean Bedford

and to many at Allen & Unwin

First published in 2015

Copyright © Peter Corris 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: [phone]

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.allenandunwin.com/uk

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

Paperback ISBN 978 1 76029 106 8

E-book ISBN 978 1 92557 584 2

Internal design by Emily O’Neill

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Cover design: Emily O'Neill/Lisa White

Cover image: iStockphoto

For Ruth, Dan, Heath and Eckhart

My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.

—Humphrey Bogart, in

The Big Sleep (1946)

CONTENTS

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part Two

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Part Three

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

part one

1

Mr Timothy Greenhall looked very uncomfortable. I knew why. I’d spent money on the fittings of my Pyrmont office and he was sitting in a well-made chair with his feet on decent carpet and clean windows to look out of. He was facing a clean-shaven, recently barbered man in a fresh shirt sitting behind a desk that had only had one previous owner. True, there was no secretary or receptionist and if he was to get coffee or a drink I’d have to make it. But discomfort was built in—only a tiny percentage of people ever go into a private detective’s office and they mostly wish they hadn’t needed to.

‘I deliberated long and hard before coming here, Mr Hardy,’ Greenhall said.

I just nodded; nothing else to do with a statement like that.

Greenhall was a tidy-looking man in his late fifties or early sixties—neat grey suit, conservative haircut. He was thin in a way that suggested a disciplined life rather than athleticism. He took a deep breath as if he needed oxygen to fuel him for what he’d come to say.

‘My son suicided five months ago.’

I still didn’t say anything but I arranged my face in what I hoped was a sympathetic expression.

‘Patrick was nearly thirty years old—the upper limit statistically for the cohort of young male suicides.’

Statistics? Cohort? I thought. An accountant? He hadn’t mentioned his profession when he’d made the appointment earlier in the day by phone.

‘You’ve done some research,’ I said.

‘A lot. I’m a businessman and I look very carefully at all the conditions and circumstances before I take any action.’

Again, I thought a nod would do.

‘I know why Patrick killed himself. He was depressed; his affairs were in chaos, he was worried about his sexuality. We were . . . estranged.’

‘That’s a heavy load to carry.’

‘Yes, and Patrick wasn’t designed to carry heavy loads. He was what people call sensitive.’

I was getting a new fix on Greenhall. At first I’d thought he was a dry stick but his last sentence was charged with emotion. It was loving, critical and ironic all at once.

‘Do you have doubts about whether your son suicided?’

‘No, it was cut and dried. He shot himself through the temple.’

Greenhall surprised me again by demonstrating the action, right-handed with a cocked thumb and a pointed finger. He left the hand up at his head for what seemed like a long time before dropping it and giving a dismissive wave.

‘He made a good job of it. For all his . . . youthful sensitivity and other problems he was an efficient person, like me. He liked things neat and tidy. Shit!’

He broke down then; his shoulders shook, sobs bobbed his head up and down and his eyes streamed with tears. He clenched his fists and babbled a muffled stream of swearwords with spittle flying from his lips. I got out of my chair to offer some help and he gestured for me to stay where I was. I pushed a box of tissues towards him but he took the handkerchief he had folded neatly in the top pocket of his suit coat and used it to blot his tears.

He lifted his tear-stained face. ‘Do you have any children?’

‘One, a daughter, and two grandchildren. Have you . . .?’

‘Patrick was my youngest and his health was delicate in his early years. We spoiled him of course, gave him everything and . . . in the end, I suppose . . . nothing.’

I had to wonder where this was going. Seeing an apparently composed, even chilly, man break down wasn’t something entirely new to me, but from what he’d said I couldn’t see how I could be of use. Maybe he just needed to talk and I was wasting time and not making any money.

‘That’s being very hard on yourself, Mr Greenhall. I . . .’

He made a physical effort to pull himself together. He straightened his back and shoulders, shoved the damp handkerchief into a pocket and looked me in the eye. He’d made a remarkable recovery and now it was as if he’d never admit that he’d let himself go.

‘I want to hire you, Mr Hardy, to find whoever it was who supplied my son with a gun.’

He was all manned-up now, tears wiped away and forgotten.

‘And?’ I said.

He smiled and there it was again, a complete change. He had a winning smile that reminded me of great actors like Rod Steiger and Jack Nicholson—a smile that won you over although you knew you didn’t know exactly what it meant and couldn’t trust it.

‘I want you to kill him. Or her.’

2

Timothy Greenhall was a very wealthy man. He headed a company that made high-tech medical equipment and held a couple of patents for devices he’d invented which were used in operating theatres all over the world. He told me this after making his proposal and watching me shake my head.

‘You’re not serious,’ I said.

He straightened his jacket and tie, which had got a bit rumpled. ‘No, I just wanted to try to shock you but I see you’re unshockable, which is good. Have you had such propositions put to you before?’

‘And worse,’ I said.

‘All right. What I want is for you to find out who supplied the gun and see that the person is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I imagine a pretty heavy sentence would be the result.’

‘It’d be a toss-up,’ I said. ‘Assisting a suicide is a criminal offence but it’s a dodgy area with voluntary euthanasia advocates in the mix . . .’

‘I’m in favour of voluntary euthanasia.’

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘So is almost everyone except gutless politicians and God-botherers, but you know what I mean. Lawyers can do all sorts of things when there’s an ethical dimension to play around with.’

‘What about possession of and supplying an unregistered gun?’

‘That’s a crime, certainly, but not exactly a hanging matter. Was the gun unregistered?’

‘So the police said.’

‘What sort of gun was it—rifle, pistol, what?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You didn’t see it?’

‘No. I got a nearly hysterical . . . no, to be honest I shouldn’t say that . . . an emotional call from Patrick’s partner, but by the time I got to the flat the police were there and a swarm of other people. Patrick had been covered up and it was pandemonium. At the coronial inquest a police witness referred to an unregistered . . . weapon, I think he said, but I was busy comforting her—Alicia—and I scarcely followed the proceedings. If the make of the gun was mentioned I didn’t take it in.’

After so long in the job, suspicion is an automatic reflex, and I had to ask what was a frequent question.

‘Why have you come specifically to me with this?’

He told me he’d had business dealings with a guy I’d worked for a few years back on a case involving a shooting accident.

‘I was told you seemed to know about guns and used police contacts in your investigation with some success. I thought you could be the man to handle this.’

‘I’d have to probe into your son’s life, talk to his partner and friends. I might turn up things you wouldn’t want to hear.’

‘He’s dead. I’ll never see him again. That’s as bad as bad can be. People talk about closure. I always thought it was sentimental nonsense but I was wrong. That’s what I want, closure. Call it revenge, if you like, I don’t care.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with revenge.’

‘I agree and I’m glad you think so. Will you help me, Mr Hardy?’

I was interested. Gun control was constantly in the news with drive-by shootings happening regularly and a conservative government trumpeting its law-and-order credentials while allowing amateur hunting in national parks. I had no liking for guns and regretted it every time I’d had to use one. I’d once thrown a pistol as far as I could out into Balmoral Bay and that pretty well summed up what I thought of firearms, but Greenhall’s case presented interesting possibilities.

I had him sign my standard contract and he agreed to do an electronic transfer of a sizeable retainer to my bank account. I got the full name of his dead son, the partner’s name and her address. He’d worked as what Greenhall termed ‘a sort of administrator’ at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

‘What about friends?’ I asked.

‘I wouldn’t know. I doubt if he had any, but his . . . partner . . . would be able to tell you that.’

He gave me the date of his son’s death five months before, and said he’d stewed about the matter until he’d come to this decision. From memory, I’d been up in the Northern Territory on a case at around that time. I told him I hadn’t seen any press reports of the suicide.

‘It coincided with a couple of headline news stories,’ he said. ‘A big jewel robbery, I believe. That, and a major art scandal. What was it? A fake Old Master or the theft of a real one? I can’t remember. We tried to keep the press, those that were interested, at bay, and not encourage the sort of lurid speculation that goes on in these matters.’

I got his details and told him I’d submit regular reports on my investigation by email.

‘Last thing, your family. Do you have other children?’

‘Yes, a daughter, Kate, unmarried. She lives at Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains. She runs an organic plant nursery.’

He gave me her address and contact details but when I asked him what sort of terms the brother and sister were on he said he didn’t know. The Greenhall family obviously wasn’t harmony incorporated.

‘Does your wife know you’re intending to pursue this?’

He shook his head. ‘She had a breakdown and she’s under treatment at a facility in Nowra. Kate visits occasionally, I believe; she’s got a big heart, Kate. I pay for it and I go when I can. This . . . event helped to blow a fragile family apart, Mr Hardy.’

‘Fragile?’

‘Very. I worked like a slave, twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year to get my business established. I tried to make up for that with . . . material things . . . when I’d succeeded professionally and financially, but it was too late.’

He gave me the address of the Nowra clinic; we shook hands and I saw him to the door. He walked stiffly and held himself erect, like a man who was determined that nothing was going to tear him apart because he’d been there, suffered and survived, and had bolted himself back together.

I did the web searches you do as soon as the client is out the door. Greenhall’s company, Precision Instruments Pty Ltd, had been the recipient of awards and commendations from the medical profession, export organisations and economists. It employed a large number of highly qualified people at a state-of-the-art laboratory and factory complex in Alexandria. Its stock price was high and several articles in professionally related magazines made the point that the company had prospered without government subsidy.

A trawl through the print media sites turned up coverage of Patrick Greenhall’s suicide. An ambulance and the police had been called to a flat in Balmain, where a man had been found with a gunshot wound to the head. He could not be resuscitated. Names emerged over a series of low-key reports—Timothy Greenhall, Patrick Greenhall, his partner Alicia Troy. The coroner found that Patrick William Greenhall had committed suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed. As the father had said, his son’s death had low news value, especially with other more sensational things going on.

Unusually, there were no photos. It looked as though the Greenhalls’ attempt to downplay the event had worked. Neither Alicia Troy nor Kate Greenhall came up in my search. The only discordant note raised was with the Nowra Revitality Centre, which had been investigated a few years back for having an unqualified doctor practising on the staff. Reading between the lines, it looked as though the place was a detoxification clinic.

I sat back and thought about what I’d learned. As always, the client never tells you the full story. ‘Sensitive’ could mean a lot of things—sexual, psychological, artistic. I’d been hired to discover some of the ‘how’ of Patrick’s death but that was inextricable from the ‘why’. It takes something powerful to compel you to shoot yourself; more flinch at it than succeed.

Hell is other people, someone once said. That’s true in my experience, but it can be complicated. Hell can be the presence of other people or their absence. You can be alone in a crowd or a family or in a marriage.

I was going to have to talk to some of those physically present and perhaps emotionally absent people. Tricky territory, but at least I had one solid starting point—to find the provenance of the gun that had killed Patrick Greenhall.

3

Greenhall was right about me having police contacts. I’d carefully cultivated a few over recent years, getting back the relationships lost or strained in a couple of messy cases and making one or two new ones. Apart from my long-standing friendship with Frank Parker, formerly a Deputy Commissioner and now retired, these associations were always uneasy. Some were simply spin-offs from the friendship with Parker, a respected, even revered figure. Others were just what you might call drinking acquaintances.

It was now late on a Wednesday afternoon, a time when, like most people, cops are winding down and looking forward to their first drink. Some, no doubt, had already had their first, if not their second. I poured myself a glass of red wine and washed down some of the medication I’d have to take for the rest of my life after my heart attack and quadruple bypass. It wasn’t the recommended way to take the pills but my cardiologist said red wine in moderation was good for the ticker. He didn’t say anything about white wine, beer or scotch.

I had mobile numbers for the cops I knew and over the next hour or so, and two glasses, I got through to all but one of them with two simple questions: who would’ve been present following the Greenhall suicide and did they have any leads on who supplied the gun? The reactions surprised and puzzled me; none of them was willing to talk to me once I’d mentioned a gun. They pretended the call was breaking up or said they were busy and would call me back. It was a blue-and-white-checked dead end. Very frustrating.

I rang Frank Parker and got his wife, Hilde. I’d brought them together. I was anti-godfather to their son, Peter, and anti-grand-godfather to Peter’s twins. Apart from my connection to my daughter Megan, her partner Hank and my grandsons Ben and Jack, it was my closest set of relationships, but one I’d neglected a bit lately in favour of my own family.

‘Hello, Cliff,’ Hilde said, her voice still German-accented after decades in the country. ‘We’ve not seen you for some time.’

‘Yeah, sorry, one thing and another.’

‘You sound stressed. How’s your heart?’

Fuck my heart, I thought, just get me Frank. But I said something polite and meaningless.

‘Cliff,’ Frank said when he came on the line. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Why does there have to be trouble?’

‘Hilde said you sounded stressed.’

‘Just angry,’ I said. ‘I’ve been getting the runaround.’ I took a deep breath and gave Frank an outline of what I’d been hired to look into and the reception I’d had from my police contacts.

‘I didn’t expect them to pour out their hearts, Frank, but I thought I might get a name or a point in the right direction at least.’

I heard what sounded like a long, exasperated sigh before Frank spoke again. ‘Can’t talk about this on the phone, mate. You’d better come over here.’

‘When?’

‘Soon as you can.’

It was getting late and with two sizeable glasses of wine inside me I didn’t fancy driving to Frank’s place in Paddington. I told him I’d be there mid-morning.

There are many things I’m unsure of, but I’m as sure as I know the sun will come up that Frank Parker never took a dishonest dollar in his forty years of police service. It just wasn’t in his nature to do it, which is not to say that he’d always played by the book. In the old days he’d probably committed his share of physical violence and used threats and intimidation. His friendship with me hadn’t helped his career but his honesty, energy and success rate had overcome that disability. In his retirement he was regularly consulted for advice by serving police.

I had these thoughts as I walked from Pyrmont to Glebe. I enjoyed the walk to and from the office on days I wasn’t expecting to be driving anywhere, especially on a mild spring night like this. It gave me time to think and helped keep my weight down. The fish market was doing a roaring trade and I bought some dory fillets to cook for dinner.

I answered the knock at the front door at around 7 am. I’d slept for almost seven hours, pretty good these days, when I seem to sleep less than when I was younger. I was in pyjamas and a dressing gown and had been about to make coffee.

‘Cliff Hardy?’

There were two men at the door. The one who’d spoken wasn’t in uniform, the other one was and it didn’t belong to the army, the navy, the air force or St John’s Ambulance.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s see the warrant card.’

He took out his wallet, flipped it open and held it close enough for me to read.

‘Detective Sergeant Stuart McLean,’ I read.

He pronounced it the Scottish way, ‘McLain’.

I looked over his shoulder, not hard to do because he was only about 175 centimetres tall and I’m 190. ‘And you are?’

The uniformed man was tall enough to look me in the eye. ‘Senior Constable Hawes,’ he said.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘We’ve come to inspect how you secure the .38 Smith & Wesson pistol you’re licensed to own.’

‘Secure?’

‘That’s right. You’ll be aware of the regulation that requires you to keep the gun under lock and key and the ammunition similarly secured separately.’

‘That’s a tongue twister,’ I said. ‘Similarly secured separately . . . I’d have to say it slowly.’

McLean sighed. ‘You’re known for your pissy little jokes, Hardy. I have the authority to look at the gun.’

There was nothing else for it. I led them down the passage to the cupboard under the stairs and showed them where I kept the gun—zipped into a pocket of a leather jacket hanging deep in the cupboard. The .38 was fully loaded; I had ten bullets zipped into another pocket.

‘Separate,’ I said.

McLean almost smiled. ‘But hardly secured. This is a serious violation. I’m confiscating the weapon and ammunition. You can apply to have it returned when you can demonstrate that you have two storing boxes, separately located.’

I shrugged. ‘Sounds like a visit to Mitre 10. Well, I wasn’t planning on shooting anyone today.’

With evident satisfaction McLean said, ‘You’ll find they’re a speciality item and quite expensive.’

Constable Hawes produced a heavy plastic bag from a pocket and dropped the pistol and the bullets into it while McLean wrote out a receipt.

Hawes had a gruff bark but his manner, in contrast to McLean’s, was almost friendly. ‘Combination or key lock, Mr Hardy. Your choice.’

I escorted them back to the door.

‘Please don’t say “Have a nice day”,’ I said.

McLean didn’t even look back as he avoided the broken tiles on the path. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I won’t.’

‘Quick work,’ Frank Parker said when I told him about the visit later that morning. We were sitting outside near his small pool, drinking coffee. Frank was getting up from time to time to scoop leaves out of the pool with a net attached to a long pole.

‘What’s going on, Frank?’

He got up to do a scoop and to give himself time to think. He deposited the leaves in a box and came back to his chair and the coffee.

‘It’s one of those if-I-told-you-I’d-have-to-kill-you situations.’

‘But you will tell me.’

‘Reluctantly. Cliff, I know you have dealings with media people like Harry Tickener and trade information with them, but I’m serious—not a word of this to anyone, ever.’

I nodded. Frank was basically a very serious guy but what he’d said had struck a more than serious note, even for him. With a touch of warning about it.

‘You know there’s a lot of political pressure coming down about gun control. It’s mostly bullshit but there are a few real problems. Handguns are coming in from unlikely sources, even from New Zealand, would you believe. A couple of the bikie gangs have established new chapters there and gun know-how is part of their recruiting procedure. Trading in guns makes them feel good. Apparently they get into New Zealand cheaply somehow from Eastern Europe and there’s money to be made off-loading them over here. And now the network exists.’

‘I didn’t know anything about this.’

‘You’re not supposed to. That’s the way the GC unit wants to keep it.’

‘I’m guessing you mean a gun control unit,’ I said. ‘An undercover mob.’

‘Yes and no. It has an undercover layer and a more public face, but some of its operations are completely covert.’

‘That sounds very dodgy to me. What about accountability?’

Frank didn’t answer.

‘So McLean and Hawes are part of the public face?’

‘I’d say so.’

‘But why would they target me? I was just making an enquiry about a piece of evidence connected with a sad event with no suspicious circumstances.’

Frank drained his cup, got up and went in pursuit of more leaves that had dropped from a tree with a branch that reached close to the pool. He performed the action he’d done a thousand times before with a long stroke and the flick of a wrist.

‘I wish you’d stop doing that. Let the fucking Kreepy Krawly deal with the leaves.’

He shook the leaves into the box and sat back down. ‘You are stressed.’

‘I just don’t like being targeted by the cops for a technicality. Okay, a careless mistake.’

‘There’s a special sensitivity about anything to do with the police and guns.’

‘Now we’re getting to it. Why?’

‘The unit’s had its problems, apparently. I’m not in the loop but I hear things. Questions have been asked about its . . . accountability, as you called it.’

‘And that’s all you’ll tell me?’

‘No, I’m also telling you to be careful.’

‘It was a simple factual enquiry,’ I said. ‘It just needed a couple of simple answers. Are you saying that particular gun could have been . . . improperly disposed of?’

‘I have no idea, but you’re not the person to find out. You’ve been flagged, mate. You did a bit of time for destroying evidence—a gun—and you came very close to being prosecuted. You tried to shoot that bloke at Balmoral and chucked the gun in the bay.’

‘I was upset then and I’m getting upset now.’

‘Leave it alone. My sense is that it’s political, which means dirty. All I know is that certain structures and people are under pressure.’

‘Like who?’

He shook his head.

‘Are you protecting your pension, Frank?’

He looked at me and I raised my hands defensively. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

‘Forget it. I didn’t hear what you said. I’m getting old and deaf.’

4

Frank went back to scooping. I said my goodbyes to him and Hilde and left. I’d been warned off investigations before but usually by people on the wrong side of the law, not by those sworn to uphold it. I’d signed a contract to do something and I didn’t like the idea of reneging on it. There were other people I could approach if I knew what type of gun Patrick Greenhall had used.

I knew an ex-stuntman and bikie, rendered paraplegic by an accident, who dealt in illegal guns. He knew others in the same game and their specialities. But without knowing whether the gun was a rifle or an automatic pistol or a revolver, I was flying blind at take-off.

I decided on a two-pronged approach. I went to the gun shop in George Street in the city and bought two combination-lock strongboxes. They came with lock bolts to allow them to be fixed to walls or floors. I cleaned out a kitchen cupboard. My handyman skills are limited but they were enough for me to be able to sink a couple of bolts through the gyprock into the masonry and fix the boxes side by side to the wall. Separated only by a few centimetres, but separated.

I called my lawyer, Viv Garner, told him the story and left him to contact the police about how to proceed in getting my pistol back now that I had the right set-up.

‘If you have any problems, Viv,’ I said, ‘just let me know.’

‘Problems? You? Okay, what problems? It’s just a matter of . . . where were the police who took the bloody thing from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t ask?’

‘They took me by surprise. I’ve got their names though.’ I gave him the names.

‘There’s a bit of work in this,’ he said. ‘I hope you’re getting paid.’

‘I hope so, too.’

As I cut the call I had a fleeting thought that I might have exposed Viv to some danger or pressure. I dismissed the idea; he was a highly respected member of his profession and big in several legal associations. The only black mark against him was his association with me, which his colleagues put down to a touch of eccentricity. Viv said it pleased him to be provided with a spark of excitement in his otherwise dull, dutiful life.