Gun Control Read online

  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: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

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

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 206 6

  eISBN 978 1 92526 630 6

  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 som
e 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.