The Dying Trade Read online

  PETER CORRIS was born in Victoria in 1942, and did his undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne. He took a doctorate in history from the ANU, but in the mid-1970s he left academia for journalism. From 1980 to 1981 he was literary editor of the National Times.

  Corris’s first Cliff Hardy novel, The Dying Trade, was published in 1980. It not only introduced a sleuth who was to become an enduring legend, but was also a long love letter to the seamy side of Sydney itself. Over more than three decades Corris has now written thirty- eight Cliff Hardy books, and the city of Sydney is as significant a presence in the books as the figure of Hardy. The third in the series, The Empty Beach, was in 1985 made into a film starring Bryan Brown. In 1999 Corris was presented with a Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.

  Peter Corris is the author of more than sixty titles in all. He has written both historical fiction and other crime series. He has also

  worked extensively in non-fiction, including an as-told-to autobiography of the Australian eye surgeon Fred Hollows, and books on sport and history. He lives in New South Wales with his family.

  CHARLES WATERSTREET is author of the memoirs Precious Bodily Fluids and Repeating the Leaving. He was co-creator of Rake, the award-winning ABC series. He is currently writing the third volume of his memoirs.

  ALSO BY PETER CORRIS

  Recent titles from the Cliff Hardy Series

  Comeback

  Follow the Money

  Torn Apart

  Deep Water

  Selected non-fiction

  Heart Matters: Personal stories about that heart-stopping moment

  (ed. with Michael Wilding)

  Fred Hollows: an autobiography (with Fred Hollows)

  Fighting for Fraser Island: the autobiography of John Sinclair

  (with John Sinclair)

  Ray Barrett (with Ray Barrett)

  Best on Ground: Great writers on the great game (ed. with

  John Dale)

  Lords of the Ring: A social history of prize fighting in Australia

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

  petercorris.net

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Peter Corris 1980

  Introduction copyright © Charles Waterstreet 2012

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by McGraw Hill Australia 1980

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922176

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921981339

  This book is printed on paper certified against the Forest Stewardship Council® Standards. Griffin Press holds FSC chain-of-custody certification SGS-COC-005088. FSC promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.

  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Brick by Brick by Charles Waterstreet

  The Dying Trade

  AUSTRALIA started its white life at a distinct advantage in the telling of criminal stories. Everyone was a criminal. But until Peter Corris invented Cliff Hardy and introduced him in The Dying Trade in 1980, we had, as with many of our natural resources, left great seams of these stories in the ground for others to find. Corris may have forged the international reputation of Australian crime fiction almost single-handedly, but I could be wrong, as he uses two hands to type. The waters of the Mississippi and the Potomac might flow through his novels, but his work tastes definitely and defiantly of the Murray Darling, or rather the big beautiful bowl of salty blue water contained in Sydney Harbour. Hardy patrols the city shoreline as if it were his own private verandah. He knows that crime infects all levels of society, under every rock is a paedophile spider, money is always in the wrong hands, the rich abuse their privileges and the poor, physically, sexually and socially. Hardy must work in a conspiracy of one to carve the rot from the good fruit. He does not solve cases so much as create a chaos within the frenzy of plot until secrets fall out of the characters’ pockets when he turns their worlds upside down.

  The Atlantic recently published a song of praise to the brilliant strangeness of Australian crime fiction. Corris was identified as one who gives ‘no special thought to the foreign reader’. This accounts for the celebration of his work in literary circles. He writes in Australia, about Australia and about Australians, and by being specific he communicates something that can be read internationally. Australian films have flopped, year after year, by following and imitating American trends. The Atlantic identified the mateship tradition in the fierce ‘joshing camaraderie’ that exists in Australia generally but not in America, save occasionally in frat houses. In our country there is a subterranean reflexive prickliness between everyone. Stephen Knight talks of ‘dryly aggressive wit’. Our verbal blows often fall on deaf ears in foreign countries. We are a nation of smart-arses, ready to joust with anyone.

  All this gives Corris another colour to add to the mix. He brings a quick-drying cement to his sentences, where his genius for metaphor lays the words down, brick by brick. We read with a constant suppressed smile, admiring every simile, aghast such serious detective work could be so funny and deadly at the same time. His writing is as arresting and as easy on the eyes as a blonde tanning on Bondi Beach. He captures the permanent smirk on Australian faces and puts it into short bursts of language like rapid fire from a machine-gun. Everyone is in on the joke, all coppers are crooked. It’s just a matter of degree.

  In The Dying Trade Corris’s hero travels in traffic ‘which was thick and moving as slow as a senile snail’. His women clients are femmes fatale: one of them has her ‘eyes shut tight as if she wanted to blind herself’. Detail is king in crime fiction. On arriving at a small coastal town, Hardy discovers that ‘the streets were as quiet as a Trappist prayer meeting’. Corris is even-handed in dispensing the best lines to his characters. He is a democratic author; his hero is often outwitted, out-wisecracked and out-thought. He has ethical standards and like Adlai Stevenson he is a man of principle but his first principle is flexibility. Corris gives Hardy’s client Ailsa, with whom he has more conflicts of interest than a bookie taking his own bets, this exchange:

  I rolled two cigarettes, gave one to Ailsa and lit them. After a few puffs she butted it out.

  ‘I’m going to stop smoking, really! Stop tempting me!’

  ‘You never know how strong you are
till you know how weak you are.’

  ‘Bullshit!’

  ‘Yes, yes it is.’

  I sat down on the bed and ran my fingertips down her arm.

  ‘I’m getting better,’ she said, ‘I won’t break.’

  I leaned down and kissed her. After a minute she pushed me back. She smoothed down her cap of hair and gave me a look that reminded me that she was paying my hire.

  ‘Well, you certainly broke her up,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t mean to, but it was bound to happen.’

  ‘I suppose so, I’ve never had any children, you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They make you vulnerable.’

  ‘You’re vulnerable anyway.’

  ‘Oh, profound.’

  ‘That’s me.’

  I meant it though and I was considering how to face her with her own little piece of vulnerability right then. I couldn’t think of any subtle way and it probably wasn’t necessary.

  ‘Do you want to know who Susan’s son is?’

  ‘Yes of course, you’ve been detecting?’

  His characters couldn’t be played by foreign stars. Bryan Brown, who portrayed him in The Empty Beach, even smells like Cliff Hardy. When we read Corris, we see ourselves, we laugh at ourselves, we cringe at ourselves, and finally we understand ourselves a little better. He reflects the way in which the Australian psyche is imprisoned by its past, the way we walk as if in invisible shackles, our arms handcuffed by our sides instead of raised in outrage. He holds the mirror up to Australian society at a very funny angle that seems about right, a slight angle to the universe. Try this:

  Ailsa was sitting up in bed wearing a white cheese-cloth nightgown. She had no make-up on and had lost a lot of colour in her face, her eyes were shadowed and huge so that she looked pale and fragile like a French mime. The bronze hair was newly washed and a bit curly and she had a scrubbed clean look as if she was about to be delivered somewhere. Her face and lips were still puffy and bruised, but when she looked up from her book she managed to work her features into a smile.

  ‘Hardy,’ she said, ‘the great protector.’

  Corris has won a Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award for Crime Writing. He has been called the ‘godfather of Australian crime writing’. He has written thirty-nine crime novels and has made more out of crime than any barrister I know. What is remarkable is the consistency of excellence in tone and in his impeccable ear for the peculiarities of dialogue between strangers, friends, lovers and enemies. Without Corris, there would be no Underbelly series, or dare I say Rake, no Australian accent in our crime fighters, criminals, victims, coppers; no Australian point of view in the very stuff of our own restless history.

  Cliff Hardy represents the true Australian male at his best: a larrikin, despising greed and conservatism, living hand-to-mouth while cursing the affluence around him. He treats every client as if he or she were a potential hostile witness who will be giving evidence against him one dark day in the future. He has the perfect CV for a PI: ex-army (Malaya), law school drop-out, a real Bra Boy in Maroubra before they had to gang up to make an impression, an ex-insurance investigator who asked too many questions; and finally, like his creator, he comes equipped with an inbuilt bullshit detector.

  Corris has outstanding academic qualifications in history and journalism that he does not allow to infect his writing at all. He writes with no hint of self-importance or showing off. He hides his many bright lights under many bushels. He draws chalk lines around victims while they are still walking and talking. In The Dying Trade we experience foreboding, dread, prickly anticipation and a real sense of satisfaction that we are in the hands of a master storyteller, a true magician who could pull a rabbit out of a hat at any time—and shoot it dead.

  For Jean

  CHAPTER 1

  I was feeling fresh as a rose that Monday at 9.30 a.m. My booze supply had run out on Saturday night. I had no way of replenishing it on the Sabbath because we still had Sunday prohibition in Sydney then. I didn’t have a club; that’d gone a while before, along with my job as an insurance investigator. I also didn’t have a wife—not any more—or friends with well-filled refrigerators. Unless I could be bothered driving twenty-five miles to become a bona fide traveller, Sunday could be as dry as a Mormon meeting hall. I didn’t travel. I spent the day on Bondi beach and the evening with tonic water and Le Carré, so I was clear-headed and clean-shaven, doodling on the desk blotter, when the phone rang.

  “Hardy Investigations?”

  “Yes, Cliff Hardy speaking.”

  “Good. Mr Hardy, I need your help. You’ve been recommended.”

  I could think of perhaps ten people who’d mildly recommend me. None of them would know the owner of this voice—eight hundred dollars a term, plenty of ordering people about and international travel.

  “Yeah, who by?”

  He named a name and I heard a faint bell ring. An insurance area boss or something, a hundred years ago. Still, it was a better start than the faded wives whose husbands had taken a walk or the small businessmen with payroll panic.

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “My name is Gutteridge, Bryn Gutteridge.”

  That didn’t mean anything to me. There are three million people in Sydney, maybe a hundred are named Gutteridge and I didn’t know any of them.

  “What can I do for you, Mr Gutteridge?”

  Mr Gutteridge didn’t want to say too much on the phone. The matter was delicate, urgent and not for the police. He said he wanted advice and possibly action and asked if I could come out to see him that morning. Maybe he wanted to see if I was the advising or the active type. I felt active.

  “I ask for a retainer of two hundred dollars, my fees are sixty dollars a day and expenses. The retainer’s returnable if nothing works out, the daily rate starts now.”

  He spoke as if he hadn’t heard me.

  “I’m glad you’re free. The address is 10 Peninsula Road, Vaucluse. I’ll expect you in an hour.”

  “The money’s OK then?”

  “Oh yes, fine.”

  He hung up. I leaned back in my chair and dropped the receiver onto the handset. I traced a dollar sign with my little finger in the dust beside the dial. Money would be no object to that voice; it came from a world of Bible-fat cheque books and credit cards that would get you anything, anytime.

  I left the office, went down two flights of stairs and out into St Peters Street. It was hot already, and a dry wind was pushing the exhaust fumes and chemical particles down the throats of the people in the street. I went round the corner, down a lane and into the backyard behind the tattoo parlour. The tattooist lets me park my car there for ten bucks a week. I backed the Falcon out into the lane and headed north.

  Gutteridge’s address fitted his voice. Vaucluse is several million tons of sandstone sticking out into Port Jackson. The sun always shines on it and the residents think it vulgar to talk about the view. I permitted myself a few vulgar thoughts as I pushed my old Falcon along the sculptured divided highway which wound up to the tasteful mansions and shaven lawns. Mercs and Jags slipped out of driveways. The only other under-ten-thousand-dollar drivers I saw were in a police Holden and they were probably there to see that the white lines on the road weren’t getting dirty.

  Bryn Gutteridge’s house was a steel, glass and timber fantasy poised on the very point of a Vaucluse headland. It stretched its sundeck out over the sandstone cliff as if rebuking Nature for lack of imagination. The Falcon coughed its way through the twenty-foot high iron gates which were standing open and I stopped in front of the house wondering what they’d think about the oil on the drive after I’d gone.

  I walked up a long wood-block path to the house. A gardener working on a rose bed looked at me as if I was spoiling the landscaping. I went up fifty or
sixty oregon timber steps to the porch. You could have subdivided the porch for house lots and marched six wide-shouldered men abreast through the front door. I stabbed the bell with a finger and a wide-shouldered man opened the door while the soft chimes were still echoing about in the house. He was about six feet two, which gave him an inch on me, and he looked like he’d been the stroke of the first rowing eight maybe ten years before when the school had won the Head of the River. His suit had cost five times as much as my lightweight grey model, but he still wasn’t the real money.

  “Mr Gutteridge is expecting me.” I passed a card across into his perfectly manicured hand and waited. He opened the door with a piece of body language which stamped him as a man of breeding but a servant nonetheless. His voice was a deep, musical throb, like a finely played bass.

  “Mr Gutteridge is on the east balcony.” He handed the card back. “If you wouldn’t mind following me?”

  “I’d never find it on my own.”

  He let go a smile as thin as a surgeon’s glove and we set off to discover the east balcony. The rich always have lots of mirrors in their houses because they like what they see in them. We passed at least six full-length jobs on the trek which put expensive frames around a thinnish man with dark wiry hair, scuffed suede shoes and an air of not much money being spent on upkeep.

  The rowing Blue led me into the library cum billiard room cum bar. He stepped behind the bar and did neat, fast things with bottles, ice and glasses. He handed me two tall glasses filled with tinkling amber liquid and nodded towards a green tinted glass door. “Mr Gutteridge is through there sir,” he said. “The door will open automatically.”

  That was nice. Perhaps I could have both drinks and take the glasses home with me if I asked. The oarsman shot his cuffs and went off somewhere, no doubt to fold up some untidy money. The door slid apart and I went out into the harsh sun. The balcony was got up like the deck of a ship with railings and ropes and bits of canvas draped about. I started to walk towards a man sitting by the railing in a deck-chair about twenty feet away. Abruptly I stopped. He was a picture of concentration, resting his arm on the railing and taking careful sight along it and the barrel of an air pistol. His target was a seagull, fat and white, sitting on a coil of rope ten yards from his chair. He squeezed the trigger, there was a sound like a knuckle cracking and the seagull’s black-rimmed eye exploded into a scarlet blotch. The bird flopped down onto the deck and the man got up quickly from his chair. He took a dozen long, gliding strides and kicked the corpse under the rail out into the bushes below.