With my occasional offsider Hank Bachelor, I was staking out a sports store in Marrickville. The owner had somehow got word that yet another ram raid-he’d already endured two-was to happen. He’d lost faith in the police and hired us to catch the raiders red-handed. We did, two kids in a stolen 4WD. Nothing to it. We blocked them off and they gave up without a murmur. We handed them over to the police, made our statements, collected our fee and that was that. They were too young to go before an adult court and, for one reason or another, we weren’t required to give evidence. One of the kids was a Brian Fremantle.
I had a contact in the relevant section of the justice department and I phoned her to enquire about young Brian.
‘Normally,’ Bronwen Armstrong said, ‘I would be breaking all the rules to tell you anything.’
‘But…?’ I said with a sinking feeling.
‘He’s dead. He was sentenced to a year in juvenile detention and was stabbed to death resisting a rape.’
I let out a long, sour breath. I was at home with a drink I thought I might need to hand. I took a pull on it.
‘Thanks, Bron. Do your records give you the names of the parents?’
They did of course. Cleve Harvey had been Brian Fremantles father. Brian had taken his mother’s name. I doubt that Cleve had done anything much for his boy along the way, but in his own twisted fashion he’d tried to exact a bit of revenge as he went out.
Copper nails
I stood on the balcony in a block of flats in Dover Heights. The view back towards the city was spectacular-a swathe of suburbs grading into city high rise with the promise of the Blue Mountains far beyond. The view towards the water was blocked by a double-row stand of lofty trees. Not quite blocked-there was almost a gap where one of the trees appeared to have withered.