Murder Song
Jon Cleary
From the award-winning Jon Cleary, a psychopath's killings converge with organized-crime efforts to wipe out a crooked financier before he talks in this taut, suspenseful addition to the series featuring Australia's detective-inspector Scobie Malone.When a sniper kills a classmate of Inspector Scobie Malone, and then attempts to kill another, Scobie begins to see a pattern emerging. Fearing for his family's safety and forced into hiding with his friend Boru O'Brien, Scobie must track down the the killer before he too becomes a victim.
JON CLEARY
Murder Song
Dedication (#ulink_7faa464b-6de2-58ab-8bcb-823d74b37c1d)
For Kathleen and Bob Parrish
Contents
Cover (#u6ce0c86a-6c0a-5632-adb5-99b52220bbfb)
Title Page (#u2201b0b4-8efe-55e6-a832-475f4da78a92)
Dedication (#ulink_642ce970-da65-56ca-b33f-e086a25d31bc)
Chapter One (#ulink_db85bc58-0a98-53a6-b119-448cb7275acc)
Chapter Two (#ulink_b494d42a-077c-58a1-ad9e-c16c90eda3c1)
Chapter Three (#ulink_62bd2d36-c528-527b-9d4b-686c900245a6)
Chapter Four (#ulink_47a037df-6b0f-57f1-b71b-da61392aab22)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#u51becc4f-f3c6-528a-bf50-82abda9fe3cf)
1
It was a perfect day for aviators, bird watchers, photographers and sniping murderers. The air had that clean bright light that occurs on some days in Sydney in the winter month of August; the wind blows out of the west, across the dry flat continent, and scours the skies to a brilliant blue shine. Thin-blooded citizens turn up their coat collars and look east to the sea or north for the coming of spring. But hardier souls, depending upon their pay or their inclinations, welcome the wind-polished days of August.
The construction worker, in hard hat and thick lumber jacket, was alone on the steel beam of the framework of the twentieth floor of the new insurance building in Chatswood, a northern suburb. He was leaning against the wind, holding tightly to the safety rope, looking north, when the bullet hit him in the chest. He did not see it coming, despite the clear light; if he cried out as he died, no one heard him. He fell backwards, away from the safety rope, was already dead as he went down in a clear fall to the ground two hundred feet below.
Several of his workmates, horrified, saw him fall. None of them at that moment knew he had been shot. None of them looked for the murderer, so none of them saw him. The shot could have come from any one of half a dozen neighbouring buildings, all of them occupied, but the time was 9.10 in the morning and bosses and workers were still settling down at their desks. It was too early in the day to be staring out of windows.
The dead man was Harry Gardner, a cheerful extrovert with a wife and four children and not an enemy in the world. Except the unknown man who had killed him.
2
A week later, on a cold rainy night when no one had a good word to say about August, Terry Sugar, a twenty-four-year veteran of the New South Wales Police Department, was getting out of his car in the driveway of his home in Mount Druitt, a western suburb of Sydney, when the bullet hit him in the neck, went down through his chest, came out and lodged in the car seat. He saw his killer, though he did not recognize him, but he died almost instantly and had no time to tell anyone.
First Class Sergeant Sugar was married and had two sons, one at high school and the other in his first year at university. Naturally, as a policeman, not everyone was his friend: that was the Australian way. He had, however, received no death threats; for the last year he had been in charge of the desk at the Parramatta Police Centre and had been working on no outside cases. The detectives assigned to the murder attempted no written guesses, but amongst themselves they put the killing down as the work of a crank who had a grudge against all police, a thrill-killer or someone who had mistaken his victim for someone else.
Detective-Inspector Scobie Malone and Detective-Sergeant Russ Clements, both of whom had known Terry Sugar, attended the funeral. There was a police guard of honour and four of Sergeant Sugar’s fellow officers were the pall-bearers; Police Commissioner John Leeds and several other senior officers and a hundred uniformed officers marched in the cortège. Around Parramatta there were four break-ins, two bag-snatchings and an attempted bank hold-up during the forty-five-minute church service.
It was another fine clear day, but the wind, coming today from the south-west, had a touch of Antarctica to it; tears were cold on the cheeks. The light was ideal for the press photographers and the newsreel cameramen, though funerals don’t photograph as well as fashion parades.
Malone and Clements, the Commissioner and other outsiders dropped out after the token march down the main street; the family had requested that the actual burial be as private as could be arranged. As he stepped aside Malone bumped into one of the television cameramen, a tall, bald, overweight man with a beard.
‘Sorry.’ The man took his eye away from the view-finder. ‘I didn’t see you, Inspector.’
Malone didn’t know the man’s name, but he had seen him occasionally at the scenes of crimes; he recognized the logo on the camera. ‘Will it be on Channel 15’s news tonight?’
‘Probably.’
Malone glanced at Clements. ‘Remind me not to look.’
The man smiled through his thick black beard. ‘I understand. But I have a job to do, just like everyone else. I don’t enjoy these jobs.’
‘Maybe,’ said Malone. ‘I just don’t like my kids to see their father following another cop’s coffin.’
Chapter Two (#u51becc4f-f3c6-528a-bf50-82abda9fe3cf)
1
‘There’s been another one,’ said Claire, coming into the kitchen.
‘Another what?’ said her mother.
‘Homicide. Pass the Weet-Bix.’
‘Terrific!’ said Maureen. ‘He’s gunna have his name in the papers again.’
‘I think I’ll start another scrapbook,’ said Tom.
‘You haven’t started a first one yet,’ said Maureen.
‘No, I was going to, but.’
‘Who mentioned homicide?’ said Malone. ‘Who was that on the phone?’
‘Uncle Russ,’ said Claire. ‘He’s still hanging there.’
Muttering an incoherent curse, picturing the 100-kilogram Russ Clements hanging by his neck from a phone cord, Malone got up and went out into the hallway. ‘Russ? How many times have I bloody told you – don’t mention homicide in front of the kids!’
‘Get off the boil, Inspector,’ said Sergeant Clements in a patient voice that made a gentle mockery of Malone’s rank. There had once been a Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force, as it was then known, who had insisted on the use of rank when addressing another officer; he had given rank another of its meanings when he had been found, on retirement, to have been the State’s patron saint of corruption. He, however, had been before Malone’s and Clements’ time, though his legend persisted. ‘Claire’s got too much imagination. Where does she get it from?’
‘Her mother. Go on. Is there a homicide or not?’
‘Yeah, there is. But all I asked Claire was whether you had left for the office. You know how I feel about your kids, Scobie –’
‘Yeah, I know. Sorry. Where’s the job this time?’
‘Down at The Warehouse in Clarence Street, it’s an apartment block. It seems routine, a woman shot.’
‘If it’s routine, why ring me? Take Andy Graham or someone and get down there.’
‘Scobie, there’s three guys off with ’flu. I need a back-up.’
‘An inspector backing up a sergeant? You trying to ruin my day? Righto, I’ll be there. But I’m going to finish my breakfast first. It’s a privilege of rank.’
He hung up and went back into the kitchen. It was a big old-fashioned room that, despite all its modern appliances, suggested another time, almost another country. The house was eighty years old, built just after Federation, part-sandstone, part-redbrick. It was of a style that had become fashionable again with its pitched slate roof, its wide front verandah, its eaves embellishments and its hint of conservative values, though not in dollar terms. The Malones had bought the house eight years ago and now it was worth three times what they had paid for it. With its backyard pool, a gift from Lisa’s parents, adding to its worth, Malone sometimes wondered if the neighbours thought he might be a policeman on the take. Easy money had been a national gift for several years and suspicion of a neighbour’s good fortune had become endemic.
‘I’ll have another cup of coffee,’ he said, spreading some of Lisa’s home-made marmalade on a slice of wholegrain toast.
‘So where’s the murder?’ Maureen was almost ten, going on twenty; she lived in a world of TV cop shows and soap operas. She had a mind as lively as an aviary full of swallows, but she was no bird-brain; Malone felt that, somehow, she would grow up to be the least vulnerable of his three children. ‘God, why did we have to have a cop as a father? He never wants to talk about his work with us.’
‘You think Alan Bond sits down at breakfast and discusses take-overs with his grandkids?’
‘What about the Pope?’ said Tom, the seven-year-old.
‘I’ve told you before – the Pope doesn’t have kids. What sort of Catholic school do you go to? What do you do during religious instruction?’
‘Play noughts and crosses.’
‘Holy Jesus,’ said Malone, then added, ‘That was supposed to be a prayer.’
‘Just as well,’ said Tom piously. ‘You know what Grandma Malone thinks about swearing.’
‘She should come up to Holy Spirit some day and listen to the senior girls,’ said Maureen. ‘Holy –’
‘Watch it,’ said Lisa, who swore only in bed under and on top of Malone and never within the hearing of the children, which meant she sometimes got up in the morning with a hoarse throat.
‘Dad,’ said Claire, going on fourteen, more than halfway to being a beautiful woman and beginning to be aware of it, ‘what about my fifty dollars? I’ve got to pay the deposit for the skiing holiday.’
‘Who’s taking your class on this trip?’
‘Sister Philomena, Speedy Gonzalez’s sister.’
‘A sixty-year-old skiing nun? Does the Pope know about this emancipation?’
‘What’s emancipation?’ asked Tom, who had a keen interest in words if not in Catholic politics.
‘Forget it,’ said Malone and took a fifty-dollar note from his wallet. ‘That skins me. I can remember my school holidays, we went to Coogee Beach.’
‘Not in winter, you didn’t,’ said Claire, as practical-minded as her mother. She took the note and put it carefully away in her wallet, which, Malone noticed, was fatter than his own. She had inherited his reluctance to spend, but somehow, even at going-on-fourteen, she always seemed to be richer than he.
‘Don’t let the light get to the moths in there,’ said Maureen, the spendthrift. ‘Now tell us about the murder, Daddy.’
‘When I’m retired and got nothing better to do. Now get ready for school.’
Later, when the children had left to walk to school, an exercise that Lisa insisted upon, Malone stood at the front door with Lisa. ‘It’s unhealthy, the way they keep harping what murder I’m on.’
‘What do you expect, a father’s who’s been ten years in Homicide? You could always ask for a transfer, to Traffic or something unexciting. Or Administration, that’d be nice. Nine to five and you wouldn’t have to wear a gun.’ She patted the bulge of his holster, as she might a large tumour.
It was a sore point between them; he couldn’t blame her for her point of view. Cops everywhere in the world probably had this sort of conversation with their wives or lovers. ‘You’d be bored stiff if I turned into a stuffy office manager.’
‘Try me.’ She kissed him, gave him her usual warning, which was more than a cliché for her: ‘Take care.’
He drove into town in the six-year-old Holden Commodore. Like himself, it was always slow to start on a winter morning; they were a summertime pair. The car was beginning to show its age; and on mornings like this he sometimes felt his. He was in his early forties, with a fast bowler’s bulky shoulders and still reasonably slim round the waist; he had been rawboned and lithe in his cricketing days, and he sometimes felt the ghost of that youth in his bones and extra flesh. But that was all in the past and he knew as well as anyone that one couldn’t go back. Lately he had found himself observing Lisa, forty and still in her prime but just beginning to fade round the edges, and praying for her sake (and, selfishly, for his) that age would come slowly and kindly to her.
Randwick, where he lived, was eight kilometres from the heart of the city; in the morning peak hour traffic it took him twenty-five minutes to get to the scene of the murder. Clarence Street was one of the north-bound arteries of the central business district; it was one of four such streets named after English dukes in the early nineteenth century, a tugging of the colonial forelock of those days. Originally it had been the site of the colony’s troop barracks; pubs and brothels had been close at hand to provide the usual comforts. Then the barracks and brothels had been cleaned out, but not all the pubs. Merchants had moved in to build their narrow-fronted warehouses and showrooms; silks and satins had replaced sex in the market, salesmen had taken over from the soldiers. There had been a tea-and-coffee warehouse that Malone could remember passing as a boy; there had also been the scent of spices from another warehouse; he had stopped to breathe deeply and dream of Zanzibar and Ceylon and dusky girls amongst the bushes. He had matured early, a common occurrence amongst fast bowlers: matured physically, that is.
The Warehouse was not a warehouse at all, but a block of expensive apartments built where two commercial houses had once stood. Two police cars were parked by the kerb ahead of two unmarked cars on meters with the Expired sign showing: they, too, would be police cars, probably the government medical officer and staff members from Crime Scene. He parked the Commodore in a Loading Zone strip, grinned at the van driver who pulled up and yelled at him to get his fucking car out of there, and went into the apartment block. A uniformed policeman was in the small foyer.
‘Morning, Inspector. It’s up on the ninth floor. They’re all up there, the doctor, the photographer, everyone.’
Malone looked around. ‘Is there a porter or anyone?’
‘No, sir. Everything here is automatic, the security, the lifts, everything.’ He was a fresh-faced young man, still a probationary, still eager to be eager.
‘This your first homicide?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘It won’t be your last. Keep everyone out but our people. Oh, and any of the tenants. Get their names if any of them appear.’
He went up in the lift to the ninth floor and the murder scene. It was a two-bedroom apartment with a living-dining-room, a small kitchen and an even smaller bathroom. It had a balcony that looked west towards the Darling Harbour entertainment and convention complex; in the distance was the Balmain ridge, with the tower of the local town hall jutting up like a secular minaret beneath which more abuse than prayers was exchanged. The furniture of the flat was good but undistinguished; the carpet was thick but not expensive and was stained in several spots; the prints on the walls were of birds but one had the feeling they had been chosen by a decorator who didn’t know a budgerigar from a bald crow. It was a pied-à-terre, not a home: no one had left a handprint on it.
The body was lying just inside the closed glass doors that led out to the small balcony. There was a silver sunburst in one of the doors, like the sketch for a motif on a headstone. Russ Clements pulled back the sheet.
‘Her name’s Mardi Jack, her driving licence says she lived out in Paddington. She was thirty-three.’
Malone looked down at the dead woman. She had dark red hair, cut short in a shingle style, tinted, he guessed; she had a broad sensual face, pinched a little in pain; her body, too, might have been sensual when she was alive, but death had turned it into a limp ugly heap. Her clothes looked expensive but flashy, the sort bought in boutiques that catered to the disco crowd; Malone, knowing nothing about fashion, was conservative in his taste, though his wife and elder daughter said he had no taste at all. Mardi Jack’s green sequinned blouse was low-cut, her cleavage made ugly by the congealed blood from her wound; her black trousers were too tight, too suggestive, Malone thought. The dead woman had not come to the flat expecting to spend the night or the weekend alone.
‘There’s a black fox coat, dyed, I think, in the main bedroom,’ said Clements.
‘How do you know so much about dyed fox coats?’
‘I bought one once that fell off the back of a truck. For my mum.’
Malone looked down again at Mardi Jack, then drew the sheet back over her. ‘How long’s she been dead?’
Clements glanced at the government medical officer, who had come in from the kitchen, where he had just made himself a cup of coffee. ‘How long, doc?’
‘Thirty-six hours, maybe a bit more. Saturday night, I’d say.’ The GMO was a man who looked ready to burst from years of good living; belly, cheeks, chins all protruded and his breath wheezed out of a fat throat. Malone often wondered why Doc Gilbey had chosen an area where most of the corpses he examined were at ankle-height. One day the GMO, bending down, was going to collapse and die on top of one of the bodies. ‘Just the one bullet in her, right into her heart, I’d say. A lucky shot. It’s still in the body.’
‘Let me know when you’ve sent it on to Ballistics.’
Gilbey slurped his coffee. ‘They’ll have it today.’
The small apartment was becoming crowded; two men from the funeral contractors had arrived to join the Crime Scene men, the girl photographer and the two uniformed officers. Malone pulled back one of the glass doors and stepped out on to the balcony, jerking his head for Clements to follow him.
‘What have you got so far?’
‘Bugger-all.’ Clements bit his bottom lip, an old habit. He was a big, plain-looking man, a couple of inches taller than Malone and almost twenty kilos heavier. He was a bachelor, afraid of commitment to a woman but envying Malone his comfortable family life. He was mildly bigoted and racist, but kindly; he could complain sourly about too many Asians being allowed into the country, then tenderly, if awkwardly, console a Vietnamese woman who had lost her son in a gang battle. At that he was no more complex than Malone and sixteen million other Australians, including the Asian-born.
‘Who found her?’
‘The cleaning lady.’ Clements belonged to that class which thought that to call a woman a ‘woman’ was demeaning to her; it was another manifestation that contradicted the native myth that Australians did not believe in class distinction. ‘I’ve interviewed her and let her go home. She’s a Greek, a bit excitable about dead bodies.’
‘So am I. I don’t like them. You talk to anyone else?’
‘I’ve got a coupla the uniformed guys going through the building. So far they haven’t brought anyone up here.’
‘The flat belong to her?’ Malone nodded in at the corpse, now being covered in a green plastic shroud.
‘No, it’s a company flat. There’s some notepaper and envelopes in a desk inside. Kensay Proprietary Limited. Their offices are in Cossack House in Bridge Street. She had a key, though.’
Malone, raincoat collar turned up against the wind coming across the western reaches of the harbour, looked out at the buildings surrounding them; then he looked at the bullet hole in the glass door. ‘A high-powered rifle?’
‘I’d bet on it. I don’t think anyone would have been standing here and shot her through the glass. There’s a lot of dust and dirt here on the balcony – looks like the cleaning lady doesn’t come out here in winter. There’s no sign of any footmarks.’
Malone looked down at the marks his own and Clements’ shoes had made. Then he looked out again at the neighbouring buildings. ‘Where do you reckon the shot came from?’
‘Over there.’ Clements pointed at a block of offices in Kent Street, the next street west. ‘He’d have had an ideal spot there on that flat roof. It’s about a hundred and fifty metres away, no more. If he was experienced, with a good gun and a night ’scope, she’d have been an easy target.’
‘Righto, send for Andy Graham, get him to do the donkey work, tell him to search that roof and next door to it for any cartridge cases. Stay here till he turns up. I’m going out to Paddington, see if there’s anyone there to tell the bad news to.’
‘Better you than me.’
‘Some day you’re going to have to do it.’ I just hope to Christ you don’t have to tell the bad news to Lisa.
He left Clements, went down in the lift with the two men from the funeral contractors and the body of Mardi Jack. The lift wasn’t big enough to take the stretcher horizontally and one of the men was holding Mardi Jack in his arms as if she were a drunken dancer.
‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ he said over the green plastic shoulder to Malone. ‘The bloody service lift isn’t working. I guess it’s gunna be one of them weeks.’
‘At least you’re still breathing,’ said Malone.
The man, tall and painfully thin, a living cadaver, wasn’t offended; his trade brought more abusive jokes than even a policeman’s lot. ‘Sometimes I wonder who’s better off,’ he said and looked reproachfully at the shrouded corpse as if Mardi Jack had missed a crucial step in their dance.
Malone went out into Clarence Street, pushing through the small crowd that had stopped to see why an ambulance was double-parked in the busy street. There were also two TV vans double-parked behind it; a cameraman aimed his camera at Malone, but he shook his head and put a hand up to his face. Two reporters came at him, but he just smiled and said, ‘See Sergeant Clements, he’s in charge,’ and dodged round them.
There were two parking tickets on the Commodore; the Grey Bombers, the parking police, must be making blanket raids this morning. He lifted them off, stuck them under a windscreen wiper of one of the TV vans, got into the car and pulled out into the traffic. He glanced in his driving mirror as he drove away and saw the body of Mardi Jack, now on the stretcher, being pushed into the ambulance.
The start of another week, another job. He wondered how senior men felt in Traffic or Administration each Monday morning. But even as he drove towards that aspect of murder he always hated, the telling of the dreadful news to the victim’s family, he knew he would always prefer people to paper. The living and the dead were part of him.
2
Goodwood Street was a narrow one-way street lined on both sides by narrow-fronted terrace houses. Paddington in the last century had been a mix of solid merchants’ houses and workmen’s cottages and terraces; perched on a ridge, the merchants and one or two of the workmen had had a distant view of the harbour, but most of the citizens had just stared across the street at each other, not always the best of sights, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the drunks came rolling home. Then in the twenties and thirties of this century it had become almost solely a working man’s domain, the narrow houses crowded with large families, constant debt and a solid Labour vote. In the last twenty years it had been invaded by artists moving closer to the wealthy buyers of the eastern suburbs, by writers who weren’t intellectual enough for Balmain and by yuppies turning the terrace houses into shrunken mansions. Houses with sixteen-foot frontages now brought prices that would have kept the families of years ago for a lifetime. It was another turn of the wheel in the history of any city that manages to survive.
Malone had to park again in a No Standing zone; the Commodore, in a year, collected more parking tickets than it did bird-crap. He knocked on a bright yellow door in a dark green house; the iron lacework on the upstairs balcony was painted white. As he was about to knock for the third time the door was opened by a girl in a terry-towelling dressing-gown; she had frizzled yellow hair and sleep in her eyes. She blinked in the morning sun.
‘Yeah, what is it?’ She had all the politeness of someone who hated her sleep being disturbed, even at ten o’clock in the morning.
Malone introduced himself. ‘Does Miss Mardi Jack live here?’
‘Yeah. But she’s not in. Why?’
‘Are you a relative?’
The sleep quickly cleared from the girl’s eyes; she was alertly intelligent. ‘Is something wrong? Is she in jail or something?’
Malone told her the bad news as gently as he could; he had had plenty of experience at this but it never became any easier. ‘Does she have a family? Parents or a husband?’
The girl leaned against the door as if mortally wounded by shock. ‘Oh my God! Shot?’ She had a husky voice that cracked now; she cleared her throat, wrapped her dressing-gown tighter round her as if she had just felt something more than the morning cold. ‘You wanna come in?’
She led the way down a narrow hall, through a small living-room and out into a kitchen that seemed to be about two hundred years ahead of the vintage front of the house. Beyond its glass wall was a neat courtyard, complete with trees in pots, a bird-bath and a gas barbecue on wheels. Tradition could be respected only just so far, about half the length of the house.
The girl prepared coffee. ‘Espresso or cappuccino?’
All mod cons, thought Malone; this girl, and probably Mardi Jack, knew how to live well. Except that Mardi Jack had gone where all mod cons counted for nothing. ‘Cappuccino. Do you mind if I ask who you are?’
‘I’m Gina Cazelli – Mardi and I share – shared this place. You asked about her family. She just had her father, he lives somewhere up on the Gold Coast. He and Mardi weren’t too close. Her parents separated when she was a little girl, then her mother died about, oh, I think it was five or six years ago.’
‘Did she have any close friends, I mean besides you. A boy-friend, an ex-husband?’
‘I don’t think she’d ever been married, at least she never mentioned that she had. She had no particular guy. She was – I shouldn’t say this about her, but I’m trying to help, I mean, find who shot her. She sorta played the field. Christ, that sounds disloyal, doesn’t it?’ She busied herself getting cups and saucers, got some croissants out of a bread-tin and put them in a microwave oven. Malone noticed that the kitchen was as tidy and spotless as Lisa’s; Gina Cazelli at the moment looked like a wreck, but either she or Mardi Jack had kept a neat house. ‘She wasn’t a whore. She was just unlucky with the men she fell in love with. She’d be absolutely nuts about some guy, it’d last three or four months and then he’d be gone. She’d bounce herself off other guys out of, I dunno, spite or self-pity or something. You know what women are like.’
She looked at him carefully and he smiled and nodded. ‘I try to know ’em. It ain’t easy.’
She nodded in reply, took the croissants out of the microwave. ‘I haven’t had breakfast. Yeah, you’re right. Men are easier to know.’
‘What did Mardi do? For a living?’
‘She was a singer. Good, but not good enough, I mean to be a top-liner. She sang around the clubs, you know, the girl who comes on and sings for the wives before the smutty comic comes on and tells sexist jokes. She hated it, but it paid the rent. Her main income came from singing jingles for commercials. That was how we met. I’m an assistant producer with a recording studio.’
‘Were you close? As friends, I mean.’
She handed him his coffee and a croissant, pushed strawberry jam in a small decorated crock towards him; he began to suspect that Gina was the one who kept the house up to House and Garden standards. She handed him a fancy paper napkin, yellow to match the front door and the colour strips on the kitchen cupboard doors and drawers.
‘No, we weren’t that close. We sorta lived our own lives. There was ten years’ difference between us – she was thirty-three. It made a difference. She liked older guys.’
Malone sipped his coffee, trying not to be too obvious as he studied Gina Cazelli. She was dumpy and plain, her plainness not helped by her frizzed-out hair; it was the sort of hair that would always look the same, in or out of bed, any time of day or night; it was the latest fashion, Claire, the fashion expert, had told him when he had commented on a certain TV actress’s hair-style. Malone had seen Gina’s type before when he had had to brush against the fringes of the entertainment industry: the too-willing, efficient plain jane whom everyone would use because they knew that what she was doing was her whole life, her only escape from whatever drudgery was her alternative.
‘Any particular older bloke?’ It was one of his idiosyncrasies that he never used the word guy; fighting a losing battle, he stuck to the slang of his rabidly patriotic father, Con Malone, who hated more foreigners than even the Aborigines did. ‘A recent one?’
Gina shook her head; the hair shivered like an unravelled string cap. ‘No, there’s been no one for at least four, maybe five months. Nobody she’s brought home.’ She munched on her croissant. ‘But –’
‘But what?’ he said patiently after waiting a few moments.
‘I think there’s been one guy. He used to ring her here, not often, but maybe two or three times. She never told me anything about him and I never asked. She had a call from him on Saturday morning at the studio, we were doing a recording for a TV commercial. God, when I think of it!’
‘What?’
‘The jingle was “I’ll be alive forever”!’ She gulped down a mouthful of coffee; for a moment she looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Then she shook her head again, the hair shivered. ‘Well, it was him. I took the call and he asked for her.’
‘Did he ever give his name when you took a call from him?’
‘No. When she came back from the phone she seemed upset, but she didn’t say anything. I had to work back and by the time I got home Saturday, about six, she’d gone out.’
Malone put down his empty cup, declined the offer of more coffee. Cappuccino and croissants on Monday morning in Paddington was okay for assistant recording producers and artists and ballet dancers, but not for working cops. ‘Could I have a look at her room?’
Gina hesitated, then nodded. ‘I suppose you’ve got to. But it’s like intruding on her, isn’t it?’
‘It’s better intruding on the dead than on the living, but we don’t enjoy any of it.’
She smiled, a painful one, and for a moment looked less plain. ‘Why do we call you pigs? Not all of you are.’
She led him up the narrow stairs to a back bedroom that looked out on to the courtyard. The room looked as if it had been freshly painted, but it was a mess, a sanitized rubbish tip. The bed was unmade, clothes were strewn over the two chairs, the dressing-table looked like a wrecked corner of a beauty parlour. He began to suspect that Mardi Jack’s life might have been just as unkempt.
‘She took two showers a day,’ said Gina Cazelli, ‘but she hadn’t the faintest idea what a coat-hanger was for.’
‘You mind if I look through here on my own? You can trust me.’
She looked around the room, sad and puzzled at what might be all that was left of her friend’s life; then abruptly she left him. Malone began the sort of search that always disturbed him, the turning over of a murder or suicide victim to see what was hidden beneath the body.
The closet was packed tightly with clothes, all of them expensive and, by his taste, a bit way out. There were leather and sequins and eye-dazzling silks and taffetas; Malone wondered how the man who never left his name could have had a discreet affair with her. Then he found a black woollen coat and remembered the black fox one in the flat where she had been murdered. He wondered if the man had bought them for her, thrown them over her to hide her.
He went through the drawers of the closet and the dressing-table. In the bottom drawer of the latter he found what a policeman always hopes for: the personal give-away that we always leave when we depart this life unexpectedly, the secret at last exposed to the light.
It was a journal rather than a diary; there were no dates other than the year, 1989, in gold figures on the green cover. There were no names, only initials; it seemed, however, that Mardi Jack wrote only about the men in her life, it was an all-male world except for herself. It seemed, too, that she fell in love, genuine love, as other people, fumble-footed, fall into holes that more nimble-footed elements avoid. The men, it also seemed, walked away, leaving her floundering; she would be bitter for a time, then the next temptation would appear. Christ, thought Malone, what makes women such masochists? He had forgotten that Lisa had already given him the answer: love is both a form of possession and a form of masochism and women feel the latter more deeply than men. Men once wore hair shirts, but it was women who had woven them and tried them on first.
The later entries spoke of B., ‘the love of my life’. He appeared sincere and gentle enough in the early days of their relationship – ‘He makes me feel as if I’m walking on clouds. All I want to do is sing love songs, happy ones. Get lost, Billie Holliday.’ Then the words and music started to change: ‘God, he is just like the rest of them. The second brushoff in a week.’ One could feel the anger in her pen; the writing was shaky. ‘No excuses. I just won’t be there tonight, he says. Jesus, why do I bother? Won’t I ever learn? Come back Billie Holliday, Edith Piaf, all you women who cry the blues! I know, boy do I know, what you mean!’
Malone was embarrassed by the melodrama of her feelings, the banality of the entries; but she hadn’t been writing for him or anyone else, not even the man who had dumped her. He should not expect the laconic reporting style of a police running sheet.
The last entry must have been written on Saturday just before she had gone out to her death; the writing seemed to quiver on the page: ‘I’m seeing B. tonight – I hope! We must have it out between us. Will this be our last meeting? Please God no! He says there is someone else … When I first met him all those years ago in London there was already someone else – ah, but he was a different man then and I wasn’t even a woman, just a different girl.’
Malone closed the journal, continued his search, found nothing else that was helpful. He took the journal downstairs with him. ‘I’ll be taking this with me. I’ll sign for it. Did you ever see her writing in this?’
Gina Cazelli shook her head; she sat at the kitchen table sipping a second cup of cappuccino or perhaps even a third. There was still the look of pain on her round face, almost like a bruise. ‘You find anything in it?’
‘Just a reference to someone called B. She never mentioned him?’
‘Never. But he was probably the guy she’s been seeing lately.’ She frowned, squeezing her memory. ‘I can’t remember any of the guys she brought home, none of their names started with a B. There was a Charlie and a Roger and a Raul – he was South American. They were all bums, fly-by-nights or in the morning, but she couldn’t see that and I never told her.’
‘Well, it’s too late to tell her now. I’ll send a police-woman out here to go through her things again. If you think of anything that might help, ring me.’ He dropped his card on the table. Then he said, as he might to Claire in five or six years’ time, ‘Be careful with your men, Gina.’
She smiled wearily, wryly. ‘What men?’
He left her then, went out to the Commodore; sure enough, there was another parking ticket stuck behind one of the wipers. There were also two splashes of bird-crap on the bonnet. Grey Bombers and their tickets were not universal; but birds were everywhere, always haunting him. If he took the Commodore to Antarctica, the penguins would be sure to leave their frozen mark on it.
3
Russ Clements was already back at Homicide waiting for him, cleaning out his murder box, a cardboard shoe box, of last week’s homicide and making room for this week’s bits and pieces that might add up to incriminating evidence. So far there was very little.
‘We went right through the apartment building, but came up with nothing. There’s only six permanent residents – the rest of the flats are company ones, used by company staff or visiting freeloaders. Nobody heard any shot, nobody saw Mardi Jack – the other two flats on that floor are also company ones. Andy Graham had a look at the roof of that building in Kent Street. Someone had been up there – there was a half-eaten sandwich and a Coke can.’
Malone looked at the murder box. ‘You got the sandwich in there?’
Clements grimaced. ‘You kidding? It’s gone to Scientific. They’ll hold it and we’ll match the bite prints against whoever we pick up.’
‘Any cartridge cases?’
‘None. Possibly a bolt-action rifle. He coulda been a pro or a semi-pro – he knew what he was about. One shot and he didn’t have to extract the shell. The roof is about twenty feet below the balcony, so he’d have been shooting upwards. That meant he was probably aiming to put the shot between the bars of the balcony railings.’
‘At night?’
‘The railings and Mardi Jack were both silhouetted against the lights in the living-room, assuming he shot her Saturday night. You ever use a night ’scope? You’d be surprised how accurate you can be with ’em.’ Clements was the gun expert of the two of them. Malone hated guns and spent the minimum allowable time on the practice range.
Malone sat down, taking off his jacket. After almost a year here in the new Police Centre, he was still getting accustomed to the extra space in his own office. For years the Police Department had been scattered over the inner city; Homicide at one time had been quartered in a leased commercial building. It had lent a certain informality to murder, an atmosphere not always appreciated by the murderers brought in, some of whom expected the Brueghel-like scenes of Hill Street Blues and felt cheated to look like no more than tax evaders. The Police Centre had an antiseptic look to it which Clements, a naturally untidy man, was doing his best to correct. Malone, for his part, kept his office neat, as if expecting Lisa to come in any day and do housework.
‘Anything on the company that owns the flat?’
‘Kensay. I’ve been on to Companies Registration. It’s one of ten companies that are subsidiaries of Cossack Holdings. That’s why it’s in the Cossack building.’
‘What does Kensay do?’
‘It owns a music publishing company and a recording studio and it makes TV commercials. It was registered in 1983.’
‘Cossack Holdings – who are they? You’re the big-time investor.’
It was a private joke between them that Clements was the richest honest cop in the NSW Police Department. He had always been a lucky horse punter and since the October 1987 market crash he had dabbled on the stock exchange, picking up some sweet bargains through his brokers. He was not greedy, did not even have an ambition to be rich; he just gambled because he loved gambling. He was also incorruptible.
‘They’re a public company, unlike Kensay. They’re the leading shareholder in the O’Brien Cossack. That’s a merchant bank. Their shares are very dicey at the moment – there are lots of rumours. The bank and the guy who started all the companies are being investigated by the National Companies and Securities Commission. Brian Boru O’Brien.’
‘Brian Boru. B …’
‘What?’
Malone told him about the B. in Mardi Jack’s journal, pushing the book across his desk at him. ‘It’s a long shot –’
Then he looked up as Chief Inspector Greg Random wandered into his office. Greg Random had never been a man in a hurry, but lately he had seemed to be ambling aimlessly up and down the corridors of the Centre. He had been the chief of the thirty-six detectives in the old Homicide Bureau; but regionalization had broken up the Bureau and reduced the staff to thirteen detectives, too few for a chief inspector to command. Random had been moved to a supernumerary position, where he was lost and unhappy. He had come in now because he could still smell a homicide a mile away.
‘What happened down in Clarence Street?’ He was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair and weary eyes. Nothing ever surprised him, neither the depravity of man nor the occasional kindnesses.
Malone told him. ‘We aren’t even in the starting blocks yet. All we know is she was shot by a high-powered rifle.’
‘Like those other two, the Gardner case and Terry Sugar?’
Malone raised his eyebrows. ‘I hadn’t thought about them.’
‘That’s all I’ve got, time to think. There’s bugger-all else for me to do.’
‘You think there’s some connection?’
‘I don’t know – that’s your job.’ Malone was now in charge of the remaining thirteen detectives and he sometimes wondered if Greg Random resented his luck. ‘Get Ballistics to get their finger out. Tell ’em you want a comparison of the bullets by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.’
Malone wanted to tell him that he no longer ran Homicide, but he couldn’t kick a man who was now virtually a pensioner, even if on a chief inspector’s 44,800 dollars a year. ‘Righto, Greg, thanks for the suggestion.’
Random hung around for another minute or two, then wandered out and disappeared. Malone looked at Clements. ‘Righto, you heard what the Chief Inspector said. Get your finger out.’
Clements sighed, picked up the phone and dialled Ballistics two floors above them. He spoke to someone there for a minute or two, trying to sound patient as he pressed his point, then he put down the phone. ‘They say they’re short-staffed – they’ve got two guys away in the bush and two off with the ’flu. They’ll do their best, but do we think all they have to do is help us solve homicide cases.’
Malone stood up, put on his jacket and raincoat and the battered rainhat he wore on wet days. ‘Come on, let’s go down and talk to Cossack Holdings. If nothing else, you might pick up some bargains.’
They drove down in an unmarked police car. The sun had disappeared and it was raining again, the rain riding a slanting wind down through the narrow streets of the central business district. Sydney was still a clean city compared to many, but high-rise development was doing its best to turn it into a city of shadows on sunny days and canyons of gloom on days such as today. The roadway and the pavements glistened like dirty grey ice; a red traffic light was bright as a desert sun in the dull day; a shoal of umbrellas made a shifting pattern as it drifted down Bridge Street. Clements parked the car, but ignored the threatening meter with its Expired red glare.
They rode up to the thirty-fifth floor, rising past the bank offices on the lower floors to the executive offices of Cossack Holdings. The reception lobby would not have been out of place in a five-star hotel. The black-haired girl behind the big desk was dressed in a beige suede suit that complemented the green suede walls. A Brett Whiteley hung on one wall; an Arthur Boyd faced it. This was not a reception lobby that welcomed would-be clients rattling a tin cup.
The girl did not look surprised that Cossack should be visited by the police. ‘May I tell Mr Bousakis the nature of your visit?’ Her vowels were as rounded as her figure.
‘Who’s Mr Bousakis?’ said Clements, who had made the introduction of himself and Malone.
‘The chief executive. You said you wanted to see the boss.’ She obviously thought all policemen were vulgar.
‘I think we’ll tell him the nature of our business when we see him,’ said Malone, smiling at her. ‘It won’t take long.’
She didn’t smile back, but got up and went into an inner office. It was almost a minute before she came back and held open the door. ‘Mr Bousakis will see you.’
The inner office was as big as the reception lobby; the shareholders in Cossack kept their executives in the style to which they aspired. George Bousakis did not rise from behind his big desk; from the bulk of him it looked as if he got to his feet only in an emergency. He was a huge man, at least six feet four and three hundred pounds: Malone still thought in the old measures when assessing a stranger. He was in his mid-forties with black slicked-back hair, a hint of handsome features behind the jowls and fat cheeks, and dark eyes that would miss nothing, even that which was hidden. He wore a pink shirt with white collar and cuffs, a blue tie with a thin red stripe in it, and a dark blue double-breasted suit. Converted to sailcloth, Malone reckoned there was enough material in the shirt and suit to have equipped a twelve-metre yacht.
‘Good morning. Miss Rogers didn’t say which section you were from.’ He had a pleasant voice, at least in timbre; but there was a hard edge to it.
‘Homicide,’ said Malone and explained the reason for their visit. ‘Miss Jack had a key to the flat. Who would have given her that?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Bousakis showed no shock at the news of murder in one of the company flats; Mardi Jack could have been something discovered missing from stock during an inventory check. ‘I wouldn’t know Miss – Jack? – if I fell over her.’
It would be the end of her if you did, Malone thought. ‘Do you ever use the flat yourself, Mr Bousakis?’
‘Never.’
‘Who does use it?’ Malone sat back, letting Clements take over the questioning. Their teamwork was invariably good: Malone always knew when it was time to change the bowling.
‘Some of our executives. Sales directors, people like that. And out-of-towners, people from our interstate offices. We put them up there instead of in hotels. We’re very cost-conscious,’ he said, evidently blind to the indulgence amidst which he sat. The room, green and grey, had suede-covered walls like the outer office; the carpet almost buried one’s shoes; the furniture was antique or a good reproduction of it. The paintings on the walls were from the traditional school: there was a Gruner, a Streeton, a Wakelin: they were familiar, but Malone did not know enough to name the artists.
‘Any of the O’Brien Cossack personnel?’
‘Occasionally. We try to keep ourselves separate from the bank.’
‘Why?’
Bousakis’ voice hardened just a little, his fat lips looked suddenly thin. ‘It’s just company policy.’
‘What about Mr Brian Boru O’Brien?’ Clements seemed to have a little difficulty in getting the name out.
Bousakis’ gaze was steady. ‘What about him?’
‘Would he use the flat?’ What a bowler to have at the other end, thought Malone in cricket terms: Clements thumped the ball down straight at the batsman’s head, the West Indians would have offered him full citizenship right off.
‘Why should he do that? Mr O’Brien has the penthouse suite at the Congress, only a couple of blocks from here.’
‘He lives there?’
‘Yes. Mr O’Brien’s not the sort of businessman who goes in for flamboyant mansions. He likes to live quietly, without too much self-advertisement. We have enough of that in this town,’ Bousakis added with a curled tongue, and Clements nodded in agreement.
Malone wondered what the penthouse suite at the Congress hotel would cost. Five thousand a week, six, seven, even allowing for corporate rates? It was an expensive way of living quietly, of being cost-conscious. He then began to wonder what the rumours were that Clements had mentioned about Cossack Holdings.
‘What does Mr O’Brien do? I mean in regard to Cossack?’
‘He’s the executive chairman. He leaves the day-to-day running to me, but he’s here every day, doing the strategic thinking. He wouldn’t even know we own that apartment you’re talking about.’
‘I think we’d like to see him,’ said Malone, taking over the bowling, deciding it was time to start seaming the ball.
‘I don’t think that can be arranged at such short notice –’
‘You mean your girl outside hasn’t already warned him we’re here?’ Clements was still thumping them down.
‘You’re pretty blunt, aren’t you, Sergeant?’
‘This is one of his milder days,’ said Malone, deciding that Clements had bowled enough bean-balls. ‘We don’t want to be rudely blunt, Mr Bousakis, but we are investigating a murder committed in a flat owned by one of your companies.’
Bousakis said nothing for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Sure. It’s a good point.’ It’s the only point, thought Malone; but didn’t press it. ‘I’ll take you up to him.’
He pushed back his chair from the leather-topped antique desk; only then did Malone notice the semicircle cut away in the desk-top to accommodate Bousakis’ belly. The big man looked down at it and smiled without embarrassment.
‘It’s an idea I picked up in London, at one of the clubs there. Brooks’. There’s a table where Charles James Fox, he was an eighteenth-century politician, used to play cards – they cut a piece out of the table so that he could fit his belly in. An admirable idea, I thought. I’ve always been built like this, even as a kid.’
‘How did you get on at a desk when you were working your way up to this?’ Clements was getting blunter by the minute. Malone had only thought of the question.
‘I sat sideways,’ said Bousakis and for the first time smiled. ‘That way I was able to keep an eye on the competition.’
The three of them went up in a private lift to the boardroom and the office of the executive chairman. The reception lobby here was much smaller; the board directors were either modest men or the chairman did not feel that visitors had to be impressed. A lone secretary sat at her desk, a girl as elegant as Miss Rogers downstairs but a few years older, experience written all over her. She stood up as soon as Bousakis led the way out of the lift and said, as if she had been expecting them, ‘I’ll tell Mr O’Brien you’re here.’
She went into the inner office and was back in a moment. Bousakis led the way in, filling the doorway as he passed through it and looming over the secretary like a dark blue hippo. This office was as large as Bousakis’, as elegantly furnished but more modern. There were expensive paintings here, too, and several pieces of abstract statuary. And, between two of the paintings, a gold record in what looked to be a gold frame.
Brian Boru O’Brien rose from behind his brass-and-glass desk. He was in his early forties, it seemed, lean and fit. For all his ultra-Irish name, he looked pure Australian: the long jaw, the cheekbones showing under the stringy flesh, the squint wrinkles round the narrow eyes. He had thick dark hair, a wide, thin-lipped mouth full of very white, rather big teeth and a smile that, used too much, would puzzle strangers as to its sincerity. He was not handsome, never would be, but more women than not might find him attractive.
He came round the desk and put out a large hand. ‘Hullo, Scobie. Remember me?’
Chapter Three (#u51becc4f-f3c6-528a-bf50-82abda9fe3cf)
1
Malone stared at him. He had trained himself to remember faces. In a game where names are just part of a criminal’s wardrobe, to be changed at will, a face is as important as a fingerprint. There was something faintly familiar about O’Brien, but it was a face seen through the dusty glass of many years.
‘Over twenty years ago,’ said O’Brien. ‘Twenty-three, twenty-four, whatever it was. At the police academy. I was Horrie O’Brien then, a cadet like you. A long long time ago,’ he said and seemed to be speaking to himself.
Malone relaxed, suddenly laughed. ‘Crumbs – you! That’s you – Brian Boru? Is that your real name? No wonder you didn’t use it at the academy.’
‘No, Horace is my real name. Horace Clarence. Or Clarence Horace, I’ve done my best to forget which.’ He looked at Bousakis and showed his big white teeth; it could have been either a smile or a snarl. ‘You mention that outside this room, George, and you’re out of a job. We all have our little secrets.’
‘Sure we do, Brian. My middle name’s Jason, if that’ll make you any happier. My mother was always telling me to go looking for the Golden Fleece.’ He sounded smug, as if he had found it. ‘Do you have a middle name, Sergeant?’
Malone felt the game was getting away from him; he chipped in before Clements could answer. ‘It’s Persistence. Can we see you alone, Brian?’
‘You want to talk about old times?’ O’Brien gave him a full smile.
‘Not exactly. If you’d excuse us, Mr Bousakis? We may be back to you.’
Bousakis flushed; he was not accustomed to being dismissed. He went out without a word, the bulk of his back seeming to tremble with indignation. O’Brien moved to the door, closed it and came back and waved Malone and Clements to green leather chairs set round a low glass coffee table.
‘George doesn’t like being shut out of things. He thinks this place can’t run without him.’
‘Can it?’ said Clements.
O’Brien seemed to freeze in mid-air for a split second as he sat down; then he dropped into a chair. ‘You mean the rumours? Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, Sergeant. Were you at the academy when I was there?’
‘You wouldn’t remember me. I was in another group. I moved across to Scobie’s group the week before we graduated.’
‘I never did graduate. I often wonder what would have happened to me if I’d hung on there. But you’re not here to talk about old times, you said. You’re not from the Fraud Squad or anything like that, are you?’
‘No,’ said Malone. ‘Homicide.’
For the first time O’Brien lost his composure. ‘Jesus! Homicide?’
Malone gave him a brief summary of why they were here. ‘Did you ever meet a woman named Mardi Jack?’
There was a moment’s hesitation; the frown of puzzlement came a little too late. ‘Mardi Jack? No. Has she murdered someone?’
‘No. She was the one who was murdered. Shot by a high-powered rifle in a flat owned by one of your companies in Clarence Street.’ Malone bowled a bumper of his own.
O’Brien didn’t duck. ‘I didn’t know her. I don’t even know anything about the flat.’
Malone had had no conviction that the B. in Mardi Jack’s journal stood for Brian; it could have been the initial for half a dozen other names, surnames as well as given names. It could even stand for Bousakis. He stumbled mentally in his run-up to his next question: it was difficult to imagine that a mistress could be so desperately in love with a man as huge as Bousakis. Which only showed the prejudice of a lean and fit man.
He started again: ‘This murder isn’t going to be good for your corporate image. I mean, in view of the rumours …’
‘You believe the rumours, too?’ Hardly any of the big white teeth showed in O’Brien’s dry smile.
I don’t even know what they are: Malone, a non-investor, rarely read the financial pages. ‘It’s what other people believe that counts, isn’t it? You want to hear what Sergeant Clements thinks? He’s the Department’s biggest investor, outside the police pension fund.’
O’Brien looked like a man who knew his leg was being pulled. ‘What sort of investor are you, Sergeant?’
‘A cautious one. I’ve also punted on a few of your horses.’
‘Cautiously?’
Clements nodded, but didn’t elaborate; the inference was that he did not take O’Brien’s horses at face value. ‘These rumours, Mr O’Brien. They involve a lot of people – I’ve heard a State cabinet minister mentioned and a Federal Opposition front-bencher. Insider trading.’
‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ said O’Brien, his leg safe but the rest of him now looking vulnerable. ‘And the wash will be cleaner than you’ve all expected. It’s the old tall poppy syndrome – chop down anyone who does better than the mediocre. That’s the sacred koala in this country – mediocrity.’
Malone had heard it all before; there was a certain truth to it. He wondered, however, if a nation dedicated to worship of the brilliant would have been any better. The jails weren’t full of just failures; there were a lot of over-achievers amongst them. Tall poppies who had lopped off their own heads.
‘Is the NCSC gunna hold an enquiry?’ said Clements.
‘They’ve already started.’ O’Brien appeared relaxed; but he was gently bouncing one big hand in the other. ‘I thought you’d know that.’
Clements took another tack, a wide outswinger: ‘Didn’t you have something to do with music at one time?’
The hands paused. ‘Yes. Quite some years ago. That was how I first got started.’
‘You managed and promoted pop stars in Britain and America?’
That explained O’Brien’s accent. Malone had been trying to place it: it had an Australian base, the vowels occasionally flattened, but there was something else laid over it, a transatlantic sound.
‘Yes,’ said O’Brien. ‘What’s this got to do with what happened today? The murder, I mean.’
Malone took up the attack again, seeing where Clements was leading. ‘Miss Jack was a singer. One of your firms, Kensay, owns a recording studio where she was working on Saturday before she was killed. How long ago were you in London – what do I call you, Horrie or Brian?’
‘Brian,’ said O’Brien coldly. ‘Horrie was someone I knew in another life. Someone I’ve just about forgotten.’
His voice had changed as he spoke, became almost English; it was a formal statement. There seemed a note of venom in what he said, but Malone couldn’t be sure. The hands now were locked together.
Malone repeated his question: ‘How long ago were you in London?’
‘I went there over twenty years ago, a couple of years after I dropped out of the police academy. I came home eight years ago.’
‘And you’ve built all this up in eight years?’ Malone waved a hand, as if the O’Brien empire was spread out below them.
‘I read all the stuff put out by Australia House in London. The Land of Opportunity. I figured if the Poms like Alan Bond and the Hungarians and the Balts could come out here and make fortunes, so could I.’
‘And you did.’ Flatly.
‘Yes.’ Just as flatly.
Malone eased his tone a little. ‘You still in pop music? I don’t keep up with the pop scene.’
‘I gave it up in the mid-seventies. I got out before it sent me deaf. I went into property – that’s silent and you don’t have to deal with little jerks who think they own the world because they’ve made a hit single. What’s all this leading up to?’
‘Mardi Jack was in love with a man she met in London ten years ago, maybe a bit more. A feller whose initial was B. It could’ve been Brian.’
‘It could have been Bill or Boris or Buster, any bloody name at all. You’re not making me too happy, chum.’
‘Maybe you’ve forgotten – they didn’t invent the police force to make people happy. They told us that at the academy. I’m just doing my job, Mr O’Brien, trying to find out who murdered a woman who’d be a bloody sight happier if she were still alive.’
O’Brien said nothing for a moment; then he nodded. ‘Sure, I understand. You’ve just caught me on the wrong foot. I’ve got so many other things on my mind –’ It was an admission that he seemed instantly to regret; he was the sort of man who would always claim to be in control of a situation. He waved one of his big awkward hands, taking in his office and everything that could be seen from its big picture windows. He stood up, walked to one of the windows; he had an aggressive walk, the way, Malone remembered, the police academy had taught them to approach a riotous assembly. But there was no riotous assembly here, just a crowd of suspicions. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to Miss Jack, but I’ve got enough bastards out there hounding me without you two trying to lay something else on me.’
‘Righto, one last question. Where did you spend the weekend?’
For a moment it seemed that O’Brien hadn’t heard the question; then he turned back from the window. It had started to rain once more; the glass looked as if it was dissolving, the city behind him was about to collapse. He had a sudden stricken look on his face. ‘I can’t tell you that, Scobie.’
‘Why not?’ Malone saw that Clements was scribbling in his notebook: negative answers were sometimes as helpful as positive ones.
‘I was with a lady. I’m not going to tell you her name.’
‘Are you married?’
‘I was. Twice. I’ve been divorced for, I don’t know, twelve years, I think.’
‘Your ex-wives – where are they?’
‘In London. They were both in the pop scene – one was a singer, the other was in PR. There were no kids, thank Christ. They’re married again, both of them, and, as far as I know, never give me a thought. Is this going to keep on? If it is, I think I’ll send for my lawyer.’
Malone rose and Clements followed him. ‘There’ll be no need for that, not yet. But we may have to come back, Mr O’Brien.’
‘Mr O’Brien? I suppose I’d better get used to calling you Inspector? We were mates once, remember? Well, almost.’
Bits of memory were coming back, like the jetsam of youth drifting in on a long-delayed tide. ‘I don’t think we were ever mates, Horrie. You were too much of a loner, you always had your eye on the main chance.’
2
‘Brian Boru –’ Except in passion, when she called him names even his mother would never have called him (or perhaps least of all his mother), he was always Brian Boru to her, as if the two words were hyphenated. It had a certain Gaelic-Gallic ring to it, if one could imagine the combination. ‘I can’t get there for at least an hour.’
‘Can’t you make it before then?’
‘It’s impossible. What’s so serious?’
But he said he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone, he would expect to see her in an hour. She hung up, stood for a moment looking out at the rain-drenched gardens without seeing them. He had sounded worried; more importantly, he had sounded as if he needed her. Almost every night, in the last moments before falling asleep, she asked herself why she had fallen so desperately in love with him. She had met many more physically attractive men, as many who were more attractive in their personality and their approach to women. But if love could be defined in definite terms, it would have died years ago: the psychoanalysts would have turned it into a clinical science. She had been in love before, with three men before her husband, and she knew in her heart, if not in her head, that part of the joy of love was that one could never truly fathom it. She no longer loved her husband: that was something she was definite about, had been for months before she had met Brian Boru. But there could be no thought of divorce from the Prime Minister, not while he was in office.
She could hear the chatter behind her in the main rooms of the house. Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister’s Sydney residence, had never been as much a favourite with her and Philip as it had been with previous Prime Ministers and their wives; she always compared it unfavourably with Admiralty House next door, the Governor-General’s residence. Both were harbourside mansions built by nineteenth-century men with delusions of grandeur; Gibbes, the Collector of Customs who had built Admiralty House, had had grander delusions than Feez, the merchant of Kirribilli House. Both the Norvals had aspirations to grandeur, though Anita kept hers more secret. It was difficult to compete with her husband’s conceit, but up till now she had not discouraged him in his ambition to some day be Governor-General. It would be even more difficult, as the wife of the G-G, to get a divorce.
She went out of the small study where she had taken the call and back to the main reception room. She paused in the doorway, caught the last of the gossip before this charity morning tea broke up. It was for one of her favourite charities, homes for deaf children, and she was glad the children couldn’t hear the gossip.
‘Have you met her husband? His idea of repartee is to pass wind.’
‘Why do we need men? I’m beginning to understand lesbians.’
‘That writer over there, what’s-her-name, she’s one, you know.’
‘Really? I thought they all looked like punk rockers.’
‘I tried to congratulate her on her new book, but she got in first. She writes her own reviews, so they say.’
‘They sleep in separate rooms,’ Anita heard from another corner. ‘She tells me they make love on their anniversary each year. I’m surprised they know where the essentials still are.’
The women began to file past Anita Norval, chattering, murmuring, gushing. She found groups of women no worse than groups of men; the men were a little more deferential to her, paying awkward court to her beauty and the position of her husband, if they were conservatives. Gossip was endemic to both sexes; the men varied it by trying to buy or sell influence with it. There were no men here this morning and she was glad of that; she did not want to compare any of them with Brian Boru. It was a weakness she recognized in herself that she was always comparing people. It had started when she had first gone into radio over twenty years ago.
Penelope Debbs, the last to leave, stood before her. ‘I always enjoy coming to Kirribilli House, Anita. You’re so fortunate.’
‘It comes with the territory, as they say.’ In her days in radio, when she had hosted her own chat show, she had perhaps used too many American expressions; she had cured herself of that since Philip had gone into politics, but some still clung. They put her very much on side with Philip’s minders, all of whom had done a quick course in Americana. ‘You should put forward a bill to have a permanent residence for the State Premier. There are several going around Point Piper for ten or twelve million.’
‘I’m Labour, remember? If ever I suggested anything like that, I’d be thrown out on my rear.’
She had been born a Whymper; with such a name she had been destined for some sort of climbing, though Alps were in short supply locally. Unfitted for mountaineering, she had taken up political climbing. She had driven her pitons into at least a dozen rivals on her way up, buried others in small avalanches started by her scrabbling boots.
‘Never you, Penelope.’ No one ever called her Penny, except one man: that would suggest a value much below that which she put on herself.
She was the State Minister for Development; her main development, it was said, was her own advancement. Her ambition was so naked that the Premier, Hans Vanderberg, had once remarked that it should be censored and not allowed on television in front of children; it was rumoured that when in the Cabinet Room with her, he wore a chain-mail vest and never turned his back on her. She was a goodlooking redhead till she turned her face full on to one: then one saw the green ball-bearings that were her eyes and the white steel smile. She gave Anita the smile now.
‘No, that’s true. It’s very comforting representing constituents who think I’m Mother Teresa.’
That was when God should have sent the bolt of lightning; but God, Anita often thought, was a Labour sponsor. ‘How’s Arnold? I rarely see him in Canberra.’
Arnold Debbs was a Federal Labour member, sitting on the front bench opposite Philip and his ministers. The Debbs were a formidable pair. ‘He finds Canberra boring – one always does when one is in Opposition. He tries to escape as often as he can. I’ll tell him you asked after him. Give Philip my love. How is he? Still playing God? Or is it the other way round?’
‘He’s busy.’ Though God knew what at or with whom. He had a new secretary who was either slow at her word processor or quick in bed; either way, Philip and she had been working an awful lot of overtime lately. Anita did not care, so long as Philip didn’t ask what she was doing. ‘I’ll tell him you asked after him.’
Then the house was empty but for the servants cleaning up, her secretary and the Federal policeman who was her security guard. All at once she wished she were rid of it all, it had all suddenly become tiring, tiresome and empty; she had tried to become a political animal but the metamorphosis had been too much for her, though few would have known. She longed now for escape with Brian Boru, away from the constant wearing of a face that was false, the rein on a tongue that wanted to be truthful, the politics.
She hurried upstairs, checked her make-up, went to the bathroom for a nervous pee, as if she were a teenager sneaking out on a date, put on a raincoat and hat, and as she came downstairs was met by her secretary, Grace Weldon.
‘Going out? I’ll tell Sergeant Long –’
‘No, Grace. I’ll drive myself. May I borrow your car?’
Each time they came up from Canberra for an extended stay, Grace Weldon drove up in her own car, a bright red Celica. Not really a car to be driving in to a secret assignation, but better that than to be driven there in a government car.
Grace looked dubious. ‘I don’t know – no, I don’t mean I don’t want to lend you my car. By all means, take it. But Sergeant Long will hit the roof when I tell him you’ve gone off –’
‘Then don’t tell him, not unless he asks.’
‘May I ask where you’re going?’ Grace was tentative, but she asked out of the best of intentions. ‘Ted Long said you were gone Saturday night and all day yesterday. He was nearly out of his mind. He rang me at my mother’s, wanted to know what I knew. Did he say anything to you?’
‘Yes, this morning. Very politely. I just told him I was visiting an old schoolfriend who’s in trouble and I thought the fewer people who knew about it, the better.’
‘Is that what you’re telling me now?’
She hesitated, then put her hand on Grace’s arm; it was almost as if she were speaking to her own daughter. ‘No, Grace. I’m going to meet a man I’m very much in love with.’
Grace pursed her lips as if she were about to whistle. She was a romantic, which, with being a cynic, is the best of two things to be in politics; it was the in-betweens, like Anita, who couldn’t stand the disillusion. She squeezed Anita’s hand. ‘You look marvellously happy. That’s good enough for me. Here are the keys. I’ll take care of Sergeant Long.’
Anita drove north up Pacific Highway, the main artery to the tree-thick suburbs of the North Shore. The area was called the North Shore, though it did not begin till one had travelled at least five or six miles from the actual north shore of the harbour. The Japanese business community, which had moved into the area in the last few years and started its own school, was still bewildered at the natives’ careless attitude to geography and put it down to the fact that the continent was so vast that a few miles here or there didn’t matter. There was no South Shore or West Shore; the underprivileged who lived in those desert regions had to find their own social status symbols. To live on (never in) the North Shore was a sign that one had arrived at a certain altitude on the social climb: half the climbers might be bent double under the back-pack of mortgages, but social status supplies an oxygen all its own.
Anita turned off into Killara, one of the older suburbs. She had grown up here and when she and Philip had bought their own small mansion in one of the quiet tree-lined streets, when Philip had been at the height of his TV fame, there had been no feeling, at least on her part, that she was a new arrival. Her mother and father, he a retired banker, lived half a dozen streets away. They were pillars of the local community, Doric columns of respectability, and they would have been frozen stiff with disapproval if they had known what she was doing.
She turned into the driveway. This was home to her: The Lodge in Canberra and Kirribilli House were only pieds-à-terre. All political leaders’ spouses felt the same, she guessed: the tenants of the White House and Camp David, of Number 10 Downing Street and Chequers could never think of those places as home. She loved the big old house, but just tolerated the extravagances Philip had added when the money had been rolling in: the 100-foot swimming pool, the cabana that her son and daughter had always called the Taj Mahal dolls’ house, the all-weather tennis court, the jacuzzi and the sauna. She had put her foot down only when Philip had ordered a haute cuisine barbecue. Though she had been in radio when she married him, she had been with the ABC, whose poor budget didn’t encourage extravagance and so had built for its stars a reputation for good taste.
She parked the red Celica in the triple garage, closed the doors to hide it and went across to the house. As she put her key in the front door Brian Boru came hurrying up the driveway, seeming to half-run on his toes, as if he did not want to arouse the neighbours with the sound of his shoes on the gravel. He was wearing a raincoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim turned down all round and looked like a minor character out of the Midnight Movie.
‘Where did you park your car?’
‘Quick, inside!’ He almost pushed her into the house, slammed the door shut behind them. ‘Is there anyone here?’
‘Of course not.’ She wanted to laugh at the melodramatic way he was acting; but reason told her he would not be acting like this without cause. ‘That’s why I suggested we come here. I don’t want to be found out, any more than you do. Now what’s this all about?’
He took off his hat and now she saw clearly the worry and concern in his bony face. She was a practical woman, even when wildly in love. She wanted to embrace him, hold him tight against her till she could feel the hardening of him; but, as always, she first wanted to know exactly where she was. The actual place didn’t matter, the situation did.
‘Has Philip found out about us? Has he been on to you?’
‘Christ, no! I could handle him.’ He took her by the hand and looked about him. He had met her here two or three times since they had fallen in love, but he still didn’t know his way round the house. It was one thing to know one’s way around a man’s wife, but another one altogether to invade his house willy-nilly. ‘Where can we go?’
She could feel the tension in him. ‘Relax, there’s no one here. Our cleaning woman comes in once a week when we’re not here, just to rearrange the dust. We’ll be all right,’ she said reassuringly. This was her first affair since she had married Philip, yet sometimes she felt so much more experienced than her lover. ‘Let’s go in here.’
She led him into the sun-room that looked out on to the back garden and the pool. As in almost every room in the house, there was a television set here; Philip never wanted to miss any screening of himself, no matter how brief. The screen now was, mercifully, grey and blank.
They sat down beside each other on a couch, still holding hands. He looked at their hands, then at her face. For weeks she had tried to put a name to that look: it was more than love. Suddenly she realized it was gratitude and the thought hurt her.
‘You’re a real comfort,’ he said. Then his grip tightened; she was always surprised at the strength in those big hands, they had often bruised her in their love-making. ‘I’m in trouble.’
‘Trouble?’ She had heard the rumours; even Philip had discussed them at the breakfast table as he read the financial pages. ‘You’ve never talked about the rumours –’
‘No, not them. Well, yes, maybe –’ A thought struck him, one that hadn’t occurred to him before. ‘A girl was murdered in our flat at the weekend.’
‘Our flat?’
Then she realized which one he meant. They had met there half a dozen times, he always making sure that none of his corporate executives ever tried to use it at the same time. She had felt sleazy at first, sharing a bed with God knew how many other lovers; the sheets were always clean, but she had seen the semen stains on the mattress, like dirty handprints. The flat was obviously as much a fringe benefit for the local executives as it was an accommodation for interstate and overseas executives. Then she had come to realize that all the beds they shared, with the exception of that here in her own house, would provoke a feeling of sleaze: she had never achieved the blind innocence of the really promiscuous. Even here she never took him into her and Philip’s bed; they always went into one of the spare bedrooms. As if he were no more than a visitor in her life. Which (and the thought chilled her) was all he might prove to be.
‘A girl – murdered? Which girl?’
‘One I used to know.’ He had known dozens, she knew that, though he had never boasted of them. Indeed, he had seemed almost ashamed of them, as if he would rather have come to her a virgin. You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, he had told her the second time he had made love to her, and she had believed him. He was a liar and a robber in business; she had heard the Minister for Business Affairs describe him that way to Philip. Yet with her (or was it conceit on her part?) he was sometimes self-scaldingly truthful. As he was now: ‘I told her it was all over, but she didn’t want to believe it.’
‘Who killed her?’
‘How the hell – sorry. I don’t know. The police are working on it.’
‘Have they been to see you?’ He nodded. ‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing. That’s where I was stupid – they’ll find out eventually. All I wanted to do, I was thinking on the spur of the moment, was to protect you.’
‘You told them you didn’t know the girl?’
‘I even told them I knew nothing about the flat. I was bloody stupid, but I could see them asking other questions …’ She wondered if men in desperate love were always so naïve. But naïveté, of course, was a part of love: that was one of its weaknesses.
‘She was murdered at the weekend? Did they ask where you’d spent Saturday and Sunday?’
‘I told them I’d spent it with a lady I wasn’t going to name.’ He could be very old-fashioned at times; it was one of the more endearing things about him. She wondered if the original Brian Boru had been chivalrous towards women, but decided it was unlikely: Irish and medieval, he would have been too busy fighting, drinking and talking.
She squeezed his hand in thanks; then felt ashamed that so far her concern had been only for themselves. ‘How was the poor girl killed? Was it an intruder or someone?’
‘The police said she’d been shot, it looked as if it was from a neighbouring building.’
‘Did you and – did she go to the flat regularly?’
‘Fairly regularly – up till I met you.’
‘Did she have a husband or a boy-friend?’
He looked at her with admiration; he was recovering his composure. ‘You would make a good detective.’
She hadn’t meant to sound like that. ‘You don’t want me playing detective – there’ll be enough of the real ones. You should have told them the truth right from the start. In the long run it’s always best.’
‘You don’t believe that.’ He was gently cynical for the moment. ‘Not with a husband in politics. This is the same, darling. There are always cover-ups in politics. I was trying to cover up on you.’
So far she had felt little fear; she was more concerned for the situation he had got himself into by his lying to protect her. Six months ago she would have laughed at the idea that she would be having a passionate clandestine affair with a man who was hated, even despised, more than he was admired. She was forty-five years old and a grandmother, even if only recently. True, she was still beautiful in face and figure, thanks to Jane Fonda’s videos and her own genes; her parents, in their late sixties, were still a handsome enough pair to look good even in the candid camera shots on the social pages. She was intelligent, could be witty, if sometimes waspish, and always rated in the top five of the list of Most Popular Women of the Year. She was married to the most popular prime minister in decades, a man who fitted perfectly into the Image, a quality that, his minders told her, was the most necessary qualification for today’s leaders. She had two children, one of whom had fled the Image of his father and was now working in a merchant bank in London, the other married to a doctor and living in the Northern Territory, where the Image never penetrated; she had two grandchildren, both too young to know what an Image was even when it interrupted their cartoons on television. She was moral and decent and had taken seriously her task of trying to set an example. Then she had met Brian Boru, the last man she would have thought she would fall for, and had stepped off a cliff.
And now, somehow, she was involved in a murder. For the first time she was suddenly, terribly afraid; but for him: ‘Was it someone trying to kill you?’
He hesitated, took his hand away and put his arm along the back of the couch behind her. ‘I thought of that, only a few moments ago. I’ve got enemies, but I never thought anyone’d want to kill me. Christ, I hate violence!’
She was studying him, looking for the stranger she hadn’t yet discovered: she knew there was one hidden there in Brian Boru O’Brien. He had none of Philip’s classical good looks; the only feature that gave him distinction were the streaks of grey thick hair along his temples; there was no grey in her own equally thick dark hair, yet she was two years older than he. In public he had a certain arrogance to him, but never with her: not even at the moment they had first met, she remembered. He had been extraordinarily successful in a generation that, it seemed to her, had bred successful men like too-fecund rabbits. Yet, unlike the country’s nouveaux riches, he did not flash his wealth. Sure, he lived in luxury at the Congress, but no one could drive or sail past and say, with sour envy, ‘There’s that bastard O’Brien’s ten-million-dollar waterfront palace.’ He owned no yacht, no Learjet, not even a car; once, he told her, he had owned a Rolls-Royce in London, but in those days in the pop world you were expected to own a Rolls. It wasn’t so much a status symbol, he had said, as a jerk of the thumb at the Establishment who had thought up till then they had owned the world. The financial columnists told her that his dealings with the business Establishment in this country were done with a jerk of the thumb; yet he was always a gentleman of the old school with her, though her father had belonged to the Establishment. He was not a gentleman in bed, but it was her guess that no man worth his balls was ever a gentleman in bed, even one of the old school: she couldn’t imagine anything more boring than being made love to by a gentleman. Brian Boru was a sum of contradictions and she hadn’t yet got them all in place. There was still a stranger hidden amongst them.
‘I think you should go to the police and tell them the truth.’
He shook his head emphatically. ‘I’ll never tell them about you.’
‘I don’t want you to – I hope you don’t have to. But if you have to explain where you were Saturday and Sunday …’
They had spent the weekend at a hotel on the Central Coast; in winter it had few guests and certainly none who would recognize O’Brien. She had worn a blonde wig and the rimless fashion glasses she wore when watching movies or television; they made her look older, but, she had told herself, she wasn’t spending the weekend with some youth half her age. The wig had been a joke gift from Dolly Parton, whom Philip had invited to dinner at The Lodge during one of the singer’s tours: she had got on like a fond sister with Dolly, a woman who understood men. She had trimmed the wig; she hadn’t wanted some guest at the hotel asking her to sing ‘We Had All the Good Things Going’. Brian Boru had laughed at her disguise, but not in an offensive way; it had been a wonderful weekend. At forty-five she had been like a young girl in love for the first time, keeping him in bed till she had exhausted him and then, laughing, mothering him.
‘Go and see the police. You may need their protection.’
‘Darling, the police don’t protect you – it’s not their job. Not unless they want you as a witness.’
‘They protect me –’ But she knew that was different. ‘No, you’re right. But I still think you should go to them, tell them you knew – what was her name?’
‘Mardi Jack. She was a singer, you’d have never heard of her.’
‘I wish I hadn’t.’ She couldn’t help that: there are several sorts of love-bites.
He nodded, understanding. She wondered if he had been so understanding with his other women. ‘I first met her in London years ago, just after my second marriage broke up.’
God, you and your women! All at once, for the first time, she was jealous. But all she said was, ‘Don’t tell me any more about her.’
‘You’ll read all about her in the papers, I suppose.’
‘I’ll try not to.’ But she knew she would: you didn’t know what masochism was till you were truly in love.
‘The papers will get on to me as soon as they find out who owns the flat. It’s going to be pretty harsh from now on.’
He looked out at the grey garden. The rain had stopped, but the trees and bushes were still dripping. Some leaves floated on the pool like scabs on the dark green water; a magpie strutted importantly across the big lawn. More rain was coming up from the south-west, thick grey drapes of it. He understood weather; it was one of the reasons he had come home from England. He had been only thirty-five then, but already he had known that he could never grow old in the English climate. Now, suddenly, he was in a climate that frightened him.
‘I think we’d better not see each other for a while. Just in case …’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’d never forgive myself if you were hurt.’
‘I’m going to be hurt if I can’t see you.’ But she knew he was right. ‘How did we two fall so much in love?’
3
It was the next afternoon, Tuesday, when Clements got the call from Ballistics. He listened to what they had to tell him; then he hung up and came into Malone’s office. Malone was reading the running sheets of three other cases being handled by Homicide in Southern Region. When the Department had been regionalized almost two years ago, no one had quite been able to work out how the State had been cut up; it had been described as a cross between a jigsaw and a gerrymander, with no winners. Southern Region covered most of Sydney south of the harbour, then ran in a narrow strip about a hundred and eighty kilometres down the coast, then cut in an almost straight line across the State to the border with South Australia, taking in the whole of the area down to the Victorian border. On the map on Malone’s office wall it looked like a huge axe stood on its head. An axe that many, including Malone, would like to have buried in the heads of the planners who had devised the regional plan.
Malone threw down the running sheets. ‘Well, what have you got?’
‘Ballistics. They match, all three bullets are from the same rifle. Jason James says they’re .243s, probably fired from a Winchester, but maybe a Tikka or one of the other European guns. He knows his guns, that kid.’
‘Interesting,’ said Malone. ‘But where does that leave us? Three people bumped off in three different locations by the same hitman. Did they know each other?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’ It was a cliché no policeman would ever repeat at a press conference.
‘Who would want to shoot a construction worker, a desk cop and a second-rate singer?’ Malone turned to look at the second map on his wall, one of metropolitan Sydney. ‘Those locations are all ten or twelve kilometres apart – Parramatta is more than that from Clarence Street. Where did the construction bloke live?’
‘I’m not sure. Somewhere down on the Illawarra line. We didn’t handle that one, the guys from Chatswood did it. We know where Terry Sugar and Mardi Jack lived. Can we tie O’Brien into that? I mean, say he was meant to be the target and not the girl?’
Malone shook his head. ‘That connection would be even further out than with the girl. If he was meant to be the target, how come the killer shot the girl by mistake? If he’s a pro, that is.’
‘I was at the flat before you, Scobie. The lights were still on. When the cleaning lady phoned in, they told her not to touch anything. She didn’t. There were two table lamps on, that was all – both against the inside wall. Mardi Jack was in pants and her hair was cut short – against the light she could have been mistaken for a man.’
‘Even through a ’scope?’
‘We don’t know the circumstances, maybe the guy thought he was gunna be disturbed and had to hurry things. There’s a security patrol checks all those buildings on that side of Kent Street every two hours.’
‘The roof-tops, too?’
‘No-o,’ Clements admitted grudgingly. ‘Look, I know I’m trying to drag O’Brien into this. I’d like to think he was the intended target. That’ll be a bloody sight easier than trying to nail him as the guy who hired the hitman to hurt Mardi Jack.’
‘You’re looking for an easy way out.’
Clements nodded. ‘It’s the weather. I’m sick of getting a wet arse. I’d just like to sit here and have the case come in and drop itself in my lap.’
Then Malone’s phone rang and he picked it up. It was Chief Superintendent Danforth. ‘Can you pop into my office, Scobie? I’d like to see you.’
‘Right now, Harry?’
‘Now, Scobie. I’ve got Sergeant Chew here with me from Northern Region and Sergeant Ludke from Parramatta.’
Malone hung up, cursing softly. Harry Danforth was one of the old-style cops who believed that the operative word in the phrase police force was the last word. He had been noted for his stand-over tactics; he never went in for strategy, because he didn’t know what it meant. Twice there had been departmental charges of corruption against him, but Internal Affairs had never been able to prove anything. He had remained under suspicion and had been offered the opportunity to resign on full pension, but he had refused. He was within a year now of the retiring age of sixty-five and the Department had, in its own fit of resignation, solved the problem of Harry Danforth by promoting him to chief superintendent and moving him upwards out of harm’s and the public’s way. He had an office in Police Centre and the title of Crime Co-ordinator, a caption no one quite understood but which was thought, in view of his past history, an apt description.
‘Danforth wants to see me. He’s got Jack Chew and Hans Ludke with him.’
Clements raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe we’re gunna draw a prize. Maybe they’ve got some connection.’
‘Now all we have to do is link it with Mardi Jack. While I’m gone, send someone down to one of the newspapers and have them dig out a photo of Brian Boru. Then have them go back to The Warehouse and go through all the tenants there, the permanent residents and the companies that own flats there, and show ’em O’Brien’s picture. If he’s used that flat at all, he’d have to have met someone going up and down in the lift.’
‘You don’t believe he didn’t know Mardi Jack?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘No,’ said Clements. ‘I’d never back a horse on intuition. But I’d lay money my intuition is right about him. He’s a born liar. I’m never wrong, tipping them.’
‘I’ll take you any day over forensic evidence,’ said Malone and went out of his office.
Chief Superintendent Harry Danforth was a big man, but most of his muscle now was fat. He had a pink, mottled face and cunning rather than shrewd eyes; he had a short-back-and-sides haircut and a voice foggy with years of free whiskies and cartons of purloined cigarettes. He was the last of his kind, out of place in the bright clean clinic that was Police Centre. He still had the suggestion about him of dark walls and fly-spattered lights and grime of old police stations.
‘You know Jack Chew and Hans Ludke?’
Malone had met Ludke on only one or two occasions; he was German-born but looked Latin: tall and dark with a bony handsome face and thick finger-waved hair that Malone thought had gone out with the advent of unisex salons. He had the reputation of being a good honest cop and a hard worker.
Jack Chew was an Australian-born Chinese, compactly built and with a face that, Malone was sure, had an acquired Oriental inscrutability. Russ Clements had once worked on a case with him and had come back with a story of Chew’s approach. The suspect, a part-Aboriginal, had taken one look at Chew, but the Chinese had got in first: ‘No Charlie Chan jokes or I’ll run you in for obscene language.’
‘What fucking obscene language?’
‘That’ll do for starters,’ Chew had said and grinned at Clements. ‘They fall for it every time.’
Malone said hullo to the two detectives and sat down. ‘What’s on, Chief?’
There were times when Danforth liked to be reminded, and have others reminded, of his rank. He was not unaware of his low standing with younger officers, but he was too lazy to attempt any strict discipline. Malone knew that so long as one touched the forelock occasionally, Danforth could be handled.
‘The Assistant Commissioner, Crime, has put me in charge of these three murders. Two of the victims were hit by the same rifle.’
‘So was the third,’ said Malone. ‘I just got the results from Ballistics.’
Chew and Ludke looked at each other, then all three officers looked at Danforth. He ran a ham of a hand over his head; it was a habit, as if he were trying to push his thoughts into some sort of working order. ‘Well, it looks like we’ve got something, doesn’t it?’
What? Malone wanted to ask.
‘Now we might be able to get somewhere.’ Danforth leaned forward on his desk. ‘You men will work independently on your own cases, okay? But you’ll send me copies of your running sheets each day and I’ll have ’em co-ordinated.’
‘What have you fellers got so far?’ Malone asked.
‘Not much,’ said Ludke and handed Malone a copy of his running sheets. ‘Everything’s in there, Terry Sugar had had no threats. Matter of fact, he was probably the most popular cop in the district. He had no connection, as far as we can trace, with any crims, drug pushers, scum like that. His family life was happy – his wife says she’d have known if he was carrying on with any other woman. There’s no motive so far, none that we can see.’
Malone glanced at the brief history of the life and death of Terence Ronald Sugar. Born 16 January 1945, two years in a factory after leaving high school, enlisted as a police cadet February 1965, steady promotion but career indistinguished except for two commendations for bravery … ‘How did he get on with the Asians out your way? You have some Vietnamese gangs out there.’
‘He wouldn’t have come in contact with them unless they were brought in and charged. The gangs have only started to operate in the last two or three years. He’d been on the desk all that time.’
‘They were my first suspects,’ said Danforth, putting in his two cents worth; it was worth no more. He had no time for anyone who wasn’t white, preferably of British stock and Protestant. He would never understand how Jack Chew, a Chink, had risen to be a sergeant. Chinese should only run restaurants or market gardens.
Chew passed over his sheets to Malone. ‘My guy is just as unexciting. He’d led a pretty nomadic life –’
‘What’s that?’ said Danforth, who had never learned to hide his ignorance.
‘Wandering. A drifter,’ said Chew with Oriental patience. ‘But once he married, he settled down, was a good husband and provider. As far as his wife knows and as far as we can find out, he never fooled around with other women. He was a good-looking guy and he was popular with the women at the leagues club near where he lived. But it never went beyond some mild flirting. No jealous husbands or boy-friends. The main point is, he had no connection with Terry Sugar, at least not for twenty years or more.’
‘What was the connection then?’
Chew nodded at the sheets in Malone’s hand. ‘It’s all in there. Compare the two of them.’
Malone saw it at once: Enlisted as a police cadet, February 1965. ‘He was at the academy? Harry Gardner?’
‘He dropped out as soon as he’d finished the course and then went walkabout for five years all over Australia.’
‘Where are your sheets?’ said Danforth to Malone.
‘You didn’t tell me to bring them –’ Malone was trying to picture the academy classes of twenty-four years ago. ‘I remember him now – dimly. He was in my group … Jesus!’
‘You remembered something?’ said Ludke.
‘There is a connection with my case. Mardi Jack, my girl, wasn’t the target.’ Russ Clements had been right after all. He told them about his visit to Brian Boru O’Brien. ‘One of his companies owns the flat where the murder happened. The killer was expecting O’Brien to be there.’
‘So?’ said Chew.
‘Terry Sugar, Gardner and O’Brien were all at the academy at the same time. They were all in my group.’
Danforth and the two junior officers sat back, saying nothing. Then Hans Ludke broke the silence: ‘Does that put you on the hitman’s list, too?’
Chapter Four (#u51becc4f-f3c6-528a-bf50-82abda9fe3cf)
1
Malone got out of the car, waited till Lisa and the children had got out, then set the alarm and locked it. He debated whether to remove the hub-caps and lock them in the boot, but decided it would be too much trouble. Everyone in the street knew he was a cop and he had to take the chance that they either feared him or respected him. Erskineville had never been an area, even when he was growing up here, that had loved cops. Even his father had hated them.
Con Malone, the cop-hater mortally ashamed of having a cop for a son, was waiting in the doorway of the narrow terrace house for them. This was a house much like Mardi Jack’s and Gina Cazelli’s in Paddington; but Erskineville had never become gentrified like that other inner city district. All that had changed since Malone had lived here was that European immigrants had replaced the old British and Irish stock and that brighter colours had been painted over the old standard brown. Con, an immigrant-hater as well, had only just become accustomed to the Italians and Greeks and Lebanese newcomers, when, you wouldn’t believe it, the bloody Asians had started to move in. What with one bias and another, he was in a state of constant warfare never quite declared.
‘G’day, kids.’ He was not a kissing grandfather; that was for the Wogs. He shook hands with Lisa, but just nodded to Malone. He was as afraid of sentiment as he was of foreign invasions. ‘Gran’s ready to put dinner on the table. You know what she’s like, no waiting around.’
‘No pre-dinner drinks?’ said Malone. ‘No canapés?’
‘None of your fancy stuff with Mum,’ said Con, but had enough sense of humour to grin. ‘You been busy?’
‘Same as usual,’ said Malone and followed his family and his father down the narrow hall, stepping back, as he did every time he came here, into another life. Even though he was an only child and had loved his parents in the same undemonstrative way they loved him, he had wanted to escape from this house ever since he could remember. The dark small rooms, the ever-present smell of cooking, the constant shouts and screams from the ever-warring couple next door which would keep him awake at night; he had known there was a better place to live somewhere out there. His mother and father, he had known even then, would never leave; not even now when the Wogs and the Yellow Horde were pressing in on them. They felt safe in the small, narrow house. And, he hated to admit it, he too had felt safe: the whole world, it seemed, had then been a safer place. At least there had been no hit lists with his name on them.
His mother had dinner on the table; they were expected to arrive on time. She clasped the children to her, as she had never clasped Scobie to her; then pushed them into their chairs around the dining table. She gave her cheek to Lisa’s kiss, but didn’t return the kiss; she loved Lisa as much as she did the children and Scobie, but, like Con, she could not handle public sentiment.
‘Get started! Don’t let it get cold.’
It was a roast lamb dinner, the usual: none of your foreign muck here. Con had bought a bottle of red, his compliment to Lisa, the sophisticate in the family. Malone noticed it was a good label and he wondered who had advised the Old Man. Gradually Con Malone was changing for the better, but his son knew it was too late.
When dinner was over Lisa went into the kitchen to help Brigid with the washing-up, the children went into the front room to watch television and Malone and his father sat on at the dinner table to finish the bottle of wine.
‘I notice someone shot a copper out at Parramatta last week. You working on that one?’
‘No, that’s for the Parramatta boys. I’ve got my own case.’
‘That singer they found in Clarence Street?’ Though he would never admit it, Con Malone followed all the police news. He knew the dangers of his son’s job and he was afraid for him, though he would never admit that, either. ‘They’re shooting a lotta coppers these days,’ he said, giving his wine a careful look, as if he were a wine-taster.
Malone remarked his father’s concern and was touched by it; but he could never let Con know. All at once he was struck with the sad, odd wonder at what he would say to the Old Man on his death-bed. Would there be a last moment when both of them would let the barrier down and they would admit the truth of the love that strangled them both?
‘It’s a different world, Dad.’
‘You ever get any threats?’ He had never asked that question before.
‘Once or twice.’ There had been more than that; but why worry his father with them? ‘You just have to pick the serious ones from the loud-mouths.’
‘You ever tell Lisa about ’em?’
‘No. When you were having those union fights on the wharves, did you tell Mum?’
‘No.’ Con drained his glass, took his time before he said, ‘If someone ever tries to get you, let me know.’
‘Why? What’ll you do?’
‘I dunno. Bugger-all, I suppose. But I’d just like to know.’
Malone looked at his own glass; the wine had the colour of drying blood. ‘No, Dad. I don’t bring my worries home to Lisa –’ Which wasn’t strictly true; she anticipated them. ‘I’m not going to do it with you. I can handle whatever comes up. But if something ever does happen to me, I hope you and Mum would help prop up Lisa and the kids.’
‘You think we wouldn’t?’ Con Malone looked offended. ‘Jesus Christ –’
‘Who’s swearing?’ said Brigid, coming in from the kitchen. ‘What if the children hear you?’ They were her angels, to be protected from the world. She sprayed the house with holy water, as if dampening down the dust of sin; her rosary beads were always in her pocket, more important than a handkerchief. All her life she had been religious, but little of it had rubbed off on her husband and only a little more on her son. But at least I’m a believer, Malone thought. He doubted that his father was.
Lisa ran a hand affectionately round the back of Con’s neck; his blunt wrinkled face coloured. ‘I don’t think you could teach them anything, Dad. They hear it all on TV these days.’
‘Not in this house,’ said Malone with a grin. ‘Mum’s got the TV aerial aimed straight at St Mary’s, the Cardinal’s her favourite news-reader. Sermons and hymns and no news unless it’s good news.’
They all laughed, including Brigid: unlike so many narrowly religious, she could laugh at herself. She had never believed that Christ had gone through life without a smile or a joke.
When it was time to go home Malone carried Tom, who was already asleep, out to the car and settled him in the back seat between Lisa and Maureen. Brigid kissed all the children good-night, gave her cheek to Lisa and smiled at Malone. Con stood with his hands in his pockets, but it was obvious he had enjoyed having the family, his and Brigid’s family, come to visit them.
An Asian man and woman passed the Malones, said good evening in soft shy voices and went into a house several doors up the street.
‘That’s Mr and Mrs Van Trang,’ said Brigid. ‘They’re a real nice couple. They’re Catholics,’ she added, naturalizing them, forgiving them for being foreigners.
Con had just nodded at the Vietnamese. He looked at his son as the latter said good-night to him across the roof of the Commodore.
‘Drive carefully,’ he said: it was the closest he could come to saying, I love you all.
‘Night, Dad. Look after yourself.’ Some day he would put his arms round his father, when he was dying or dead.
Claire got in beside Malone as he settled in beside the wheel. ‘Enjoy yourself?’ he said.
‘I shouldn’t say it, Daddy, but why does Grandma’s house always smell of cooking?’
He took the car out from the kerb, pausing to let another car, drawing out from the kerb some distance behind him, go past. But it too paused, and he pulled out and drove on down the narrow street.
‘There’s been about a hundred years of cooking in that house, my grandmother lived there before Gran. It sorts of hangs around, the smell.’
‘You think we should bring Grandma a can of Air-ozone next time we come?’
‘You’ll do no such thing!’ said Lisa sharply. ‘Just stop breathing if you don’t like it while you’re there. That’s Grandma’s home, smell and all.’
Malone turned into a main road; the car following him did the same. ‘It doesn’t smell like your cooking,’ Claire said. ‘I wouldn’t mind if it did. But it’s, I dunno, cabbage, stuff like that.’
‘Corned beef and cabbage,’ said Malone. ‘I grew up on it.’
‘Yuk,’ said Maureen from the back seat.
Malone was almost halfway home to Randwick before he realized that he was being tailed. At every turn he had made, another car had made the same turning. He was tired, he had not been alert; now all at once it came to him that the car following him was the same one that had pulled out from the kerb behind him in the street in Erskineville. Suddenly his hands felt clammy on the wheel.
What to do? He could continue on to the police station at Rand wick, but that would only alarm Lisa and the kids; he did not want to frighten them, in case his own fear was a false alarm. Hans Ludke’s question this afternoon, Does that put you on the hitman’s lisf?, had been at the back of his mind all evening, like the smell of his mother’s cooking.
He reached Randwick, turned into his own street as rain began falling again. He had led the hitman (if, indeed, he was the hitman) to his own home; but, he guessed, the man probably knew where he lived, anyway. Their phone number was in Lisa’s name, L. E. Malone, but that wouldn’t have fooled anyone really intent on finding out where he lived; if the hitman knew where Con and Brigid Malone lived, he certainly would know where their son lived.
Malone swung the Commodore in the entrance to his driveway; then braked sharply, throwing Tom forward and waking him. The driveway gates were closed. Time and again he had lectured Lisa and the kids against leaving them open. Now he wished for them and the garage door to be wide open.
He glanced back along the street. The other car had come round the corner and pulled into the kerb about fifty yards up the street, dousing its lights. Malone hesitated.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Lisa. ‘We don’t have automatic gates, remember?’
‘I told him we should get them,’ said Claire. ‘Everybody has them now.’
‘We can’t afford ’em on a cop’s pay,’ said Maureen. ‘He’s told us.’
‘I’ll open ’em,’ said Tom and fumbled with the door handle.
‘Stay where you are!’
There was a note of panic in Malone’s voice. He hastily got out of the car before Lisa could comment on it, hunched over as much to make himself a smaller target as against the rain, and moved quickly to open the gates. Too late he realized that he had stupidly left the headlights on: as he stood in their glare, fumbling with the bolt of the gates, he felt as exposed as if he were in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain in broad daylight. He was wearing no hat or raincoat; the rain fell on him in drenching sheets, he was almost blinded by the water pouring down his face. His fingers were frozen (by fear or cold?); the gates refused to open. Then he jerked the bolt up out of its socket, he dragged the gates open, swung them back and stumbled back to the front door of the car. As the other car, its lights now on, pulled out from the kerb and came at gathering speed down the street.
He turned to face it, his back against the closed front door of the Commodore; he spread his arms wide, trying to protect his family, as if he meant to gather the hail of bullets into himself. The approaching car swung towards the Commodore and for one horrible moment he thought it was going to crash into them, killing them all in a mad suicidal attack. Its headlights blazed at him, blinding him; then it swung abruptly away. It went past, spraying up a wave of water from the flooded gutter, and sped down the street. Malone staggered on rubbery legs to the back of the Commodore, tried to identify the make of car and its registration plate, but it was gone into the dark swirling night before he could get even a hint of identification. The driver had been too smart: he had known the blaze of headlights would blind Malone.
Still weak, Malone went back up the driveway, opened the garage door and came back to the Commodore. He got in, suddenly glad of the support of the seat beneath him.
‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ said Claire.
Malone noticed that Lisa, in the back seat, was sitting forward but saying nothing. ‘It was just a drunken driver – I thought he was going to smash into us.’
‘They shouldn’t drink and drive.’ Maureen had all the slogans at her tongue-tip.
Malone drove the car into the garage. Lisa got out, gave the front door key to Claire. ‘Get ready for bed. See Tom cleans his teeth and has a wet before he gets into bed.’
Maureen said, ‘What are you and Dad going to do? Wash the car?’
‘Inside!’
Claire took the key, looked thoughtfully at her mother and father but said nothing. She’ll make a good cop, Malone thought, she’s miles ahead of me in perception. And prayed that she would never want to follow in his footsteps.
When the children had gone inside Lisa put her hand on his arm. ‘That was no drunken driver. I’ve never seen you like that before.’
He sat back on the wet fender of the car; all the rest of him was wet through, a damp arse wouldn’t make much difference. All at once it came to him that he had been scared to death, not at the thought of his own death but that he would be murdered in front of his family. He could never leave them a legacy like that.
He knew this was one time when Lisa had to be told the truth: ‘I think I’m on a hit list.’
‘Oh God!’
She leaned against him and he put his arm round her, holding her tightly. It seemed to him that he could feel the heavy beat of her heart through their winter clothing and it was beating as much for him as for her.
2
‘You have to take the rough with the smooth,’ said O’Brien. ‘I never promised there would be no risk.’
‘Don’t give me any of that,’ said Arnold Debbs. ‘You’ve got me with my career on the line. If this blows up, I’m finished. I promise you, so will you be, too!’
Five years ago, even six months ago, O’Brien would have shrugged off such a threat. From the time he had moved out of the world of pop music into the bigger, rougher world where money and power and influence were concomitant he had more than held his own. In England there had been very few, if any, politicians who could be bought; the system didn’t work that way in Britain. But venal councillors and planning authorities could be found wherever development was growing; the skull-and-crossbones had flown from mastheads before the Union Jack was thought of and the Brits never forgot their heritage. When he had come home to Australia it was almost as if the politicians, hands held out, their convict heritage unashamedly displayed, had met him at the airport. It was, of course, nowhere near as bad. as that; but cynicism narrows one’s view. He had been introduced to his first crooked politician, Arnold Debbs, within two days of his return. A week later he had met his second crooked politician, Arnold’s wife, Penelope.
He had always known there was the chance of making enemies of them: bribes never bought friendship, that came free, if you were lucky. He had never been afraid of them because he had never been afraid of failure: he was a gambler, ready to go off somewhere else and start all over again. But that had been before he had met and fallen in love with Anita Norval. Now all he wanted was respectability and no one, least of all the Debbs, would or could offer him that.
‘You did us once, Brian, with that mining lease –’
‘Arnold, that was business. You got the profit you were promised –’
‘We didn’t get the profit we could have made!’ Debbs’ temper was notorious; it had always been held against him in Caucus. Political parties do not like hotheads; they can’t be controlled. Debbs had once had ambitions to be the leader of the party, to be Prime Minister when it returned to power in Canberra; but he had a head for figures and eventually he had realized he would never have the numbers to reach the top. Three times he had run for leader and three times he had finished bottom of the poll; it was then he had decided to be a Party of One, to look out for himself and use the front bench for all he could make from it. ‘You’re a robber, Brian, a fucking crook who should be locked up! Now you’ve got me and my wife linked to this investigation –’
‘I told you, Arnold, you and Penelope will be kept out of it. Your names are on nothing –’
‘The shares are in a company name, but they can be traced to us! These bloody young reporters these days – they’re muck-rakers! The Eye has already had a piece – no names but plenty of hints. How many others have you got strung up with my wife and me?’
‘You know how many there are, Arnold –’
‘You bet your fucking life I do!’ Debbs’ language, too, was notorious. The Sydney Morning Herald had once published a short verbatim statement from him that had contained as many dashes as words. The Anglican and Roman Catholic archbishops, the Festival of Light and half a dozen women’s organizations had written letters to the Editor in protest; even Prime Minister Norval had had an attack of mealy-mouth and deplored the lowering of standards. ‘I introduced them to you – they could fucking turn on me!’
‘Relax, Arnold,’ O’Brien said, then tensed as he saw the unfamiliar car coming up the long driveway between the paddocks towards the house. ‘Who’s this?’
Arnold Debbs turned. ‘I don’t know. Let’s hope to Christ it’s not some shitty reporter.’
It wasn’t. The unmarked police car pulled in besides Debbs’ blue Volvo and Malone got out. ‘Jesus!’ said O’Brien softly.
‘Who is it?’ said Debbs equally softly.
‘Police.’
Malone wondered why the familiar figure stiffened as he approached. He had never met Arnold Debbs, but no one could mistake him. Tall and heavily built, he had a pompadour of egg-white hair that made him look as if he had just been crowned with a large pavlova. Beneath it his lamp-bronzed face suggested not so much health as a bad case of brown jaundice. His wide smile was no more than a display case for his expensive dental-work; there was no humour or friendliness in it. Malone shook hands with an enemy who had already declared himself and he wondered why Debbs’ grip was so tense.
‘I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr O’Brien –’
‘It’s okay, Mr Debbs is just leaving. He came up to see one of his horses – we’ve got it on agistment here. I’ll see you to your car, Arnold.’
Malone watched the two men walk across to the Volvo, heads close together, voices low: they seemed to be arguing. But O’Brien, as if aware they were being watched, patted Debbs on the shoulder, waited till the older man had got into his car, then stood back and waved as the Volvo was driven away. Then he came back to Malone.
‘Bloody owners – they’re a pain!’
‘You’re one, aren’t you? A whole string of horses, Sergeant Clements tells me. You’ve done well, Horrie.’
‘Brian.’
‘No, it’s Horrie who’s done well. I’m not so sure how Brian Boru is doing.’
Malone looked out over the stud farm with its lush green paddocks, the white railing fences and the double row of stables of red brick. Mares and foals grazed amidst the grass; a stallion high-stepped along the length of a fence, as arrogant as any disco stud. Further up the red gravel driveway, the main house, a low colonial building with wide verandahs, looked as it must have looked when it was first built a hundred and fifty years ago. This district of Camden, about sixty kilometres south-west of Sydney, had been the birthplace of Australia’s sheep industry; now it had become almost a dormitory suburb of the city. But some pockets were still zoned for rural use and Cossack Lodge stud was one of the show places. Yet Malone could not remember ever having seen O’Brien featured in any newspaper or television story about the stud.
He remarked on that now. ‘How come? Most racehorse owners risk getting kicked in the head to be photographed with their horses.’
O’Brien smiled. He was dressed in checked cap, a dark blue turtleneck sweater, pale moleskin trousers and stockman’s boots: every inch the country gentleman except for the cynical eyes and a certain nervous energy that, had he been a grazier, would have knotted the wool of his sheep. He could never be totally relaxed, he would never adapt to the rhythm of rural seasons.
‘An Irish philosopher – there have been one or two – once said, Man who keep low profile rarely get egg on face. Have you come up here to try and smear some egg on me?’
They began to walk up towards the house. Two girl strappers passed them, smiled at O’Brien and went on to the stables. A man came out of a small office at the end of the stables and raised his hand to O’Brien.
‘Later, Bruce. He’s my foreman,’ O’Brien explained to Malone. ‘Why are you here, Scobie? Is it about Mardi Jack?’
‘Partly. You remembered her name?’
‘Yes. You want to sit out here in the sun? We’re out of the wind.’ It was a clear sunlit day, with the wind on the other side of the house. Yesterday’s rain had gone and the countryside looked as if it had been swept with a new broom. The rows of poplars that lined the driveway were just beginning to be tinged with green; they bowed before the wind like armless dancers. ‘I’ll get us some coffee.’
He went into the house and Malone sat down. O’Brien came back, they exchanged some chat about the stud until the foreman’s wife brought them coffee and cake, then O’Brien leaned forward, his cup and saucer held in front of him almost like a weapon.
‘I’d better tell you about Mardi Jack. Yes, I did know her. I used to meet her at that flat.’
‘I’d half-guessed that. Why did you try that stupid lie? We’d have found out eventually.’
‘I’m trying to protect someone.’
‘That the woman you mentioned, the one you spent the weekend with? Did she know Mardi Jack?’
‘She knew nothing about her.’
‘Knew? You mean you’ve told her about Mardi since we came to see you? How did she take it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Was she jealous? Was she shocked when you told her Mardi had been murdered?’
‘No, I don’t think she was jealous. Or maybe she was – I guess we’re all jealous of someone at one time or another. Shocked? Yes. She’s not the sort of lady who’s accustomed to murder.’
‘She’s married?’
‘Yes.’
Malone finished his coffee, held out his cup for a refill. He bit into a slice of the housekeeper’s carrot cake; the semi-country air was making him hungry. Or maybe he was just nervous: he had hardly slept last night.
‘I don’t think we’re interested in her for the moment. There’s something else that’s worrying us. I think you and I are on a hit list, Brian.’
O’Brien’s big hand tightened on his cup; for a moment Malone thought he was going to crush it. ‘Hit list? You and me?’
‘Are you surprised or were you expecting something like that?’
O’Brien put down his cup on the small table between them, stared at it a moment, then lifted his head. He took off his cap and kneaded it between his hands. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I were on someone’s list. I can’t understand why you and me together.’
Malone told him about the random murders. ‘We think you were the target in the latest one, not Mardi. Whoever he is, he’s going for fellers who were in our class at the police academy back in 1965.’
O’Brien frowned, was silent for a moment. Then: ‘Has he tried for you yet?’
‘Not yet. But –’ Malone told him about the car tailing him last night.
‘That must’ve scared the hell out of your wife and kids.’
‘Out of my wife, yes. I’m keeping it from the kids. What did you mean when you said you wouldn’t be surprised if you were on someone’s list?’
Again there was a silence, but for the occasional moan of the wind round the corners of the house. At last O’Brien said, ‘This thing I’m in with my bank and my companies. Some people think I doublecrossed them.’
‘Have you?’
‘What’s it to you, Scobie? You’re not on the Fraud Squad.’
‘If someone bumps you off, I don’t want to be following two trails all over Sydney. I’d rather just have one suspect, even if I don’t know who he is.’
O’Brien smiled without any humour. ‘You’re pretty bloody brutal, aren’t you?’
‘Brian, I’m not going to fart-arse about on this. It looks like an innocent bystander, Mardi Jack, was killed instead of you. He’s sure to come back and try for you again. He’s already killed two others, he may go for me and Christ knows how many others. That’s enough on my plate. I don’t want to be chasing some greedy bastards who think you’ve cheated them out of a million or two. Or some husband who’s found out you’re sleeping with his lady wife.’ That last was a dart tossed casually.
It landed on the board if not on the bull’s-eye. ‘Keep her out of this! She’s the only decent thing that’s happened to me in twenty fucking years!’
Malone pushed away the half-eaten slice of carrot cake; he was not as hungry as he had thought. ‘I’m going back to town, to Homicide. I think it might be an idea if you came with me.’
O’Brien continued to sit. ‘Not if I have to make any statement.’
Malone looked at him carefully. He hadn’t yet warmed to O’Brien: he was the free-wheeling entrepreneur that was a new breed, one for which Malone had little time. Unambitious himself, uninterested in being rich, he had tried to but had never understood greed, for either money or power: in today’s world he knew that made him a simpleton. O’Brien was the very epitome of the new breed, yet Malone fancied there was a slight crack in him through which decency, a long-dead seed, was trying to sprout. He remembered that, though Horrie O’Brien had been the rebel in the academy class, he had never been unpopular, neither with the cadets nor the instructors, though he had been a loner.
‘You’ll have to make a statement about knowing Mardi Jack and going to the flat with her – there’s no way you can dodge that. But we’ll keep quiet about your lady friend – I don’t want to bring her into it unless we have to.’
‘Not even then,’ said O’Brien quietly and vehemently. ‘No way.’
Malone was non-committal on that. ‘I want you to look at some names and photos with me. They’re being sent up from Goulburn this morning.’
‘Goulburn?’
‘The main academy is down there now, they only do secondary courses at Redfern. They keep the police library at Goulburn. You and I can look at the class of ’65.’
O’Brien hesitated, then stood up. ‘Okay. Can you give me a lift back to town? I don’t own a car. I usually have a hire car pick me up.’
‘I thought all you fellers had a Rolls or a Merc or both.’
O’Brien smiled, again without mirth. ‘I once bought my old man a Merc. He sent it back with a note telling me to drive it up the track where the sun never shines.’
He went into the house without saying any more about his relationship with his father. He came out two or three minutes later with a briefcase and walked across to where Malone was waiting for him by the police car.
‘You call your lawyer?’
‘No. If you must know, I rang my lady friend.’
Malone looked around the stud, admiring it and, yes, suddenly envying O’Brien his possession of it. He thought what it would be like to live here with Lisa and the kids, to breathe this clear air every morning, to live in this easy rhythm, never to have to think about homicides and the sleaze of human nature that irritated him every day like an incurable rash. He said, ‘I wouldn’t come up here again, not till we’ve nailed this killer.’
‘Why not? We have a security patrol here.’
‘All day, twenty-four hours a day?’
‘No, just at night.’
Malone pointed to a clump of trees bordering a side road beyond the main paddock. ‘He could park his car amongst those trees and you’d never notice him. He could pick you off right where you’re standing and he’d be gone before anyone knew where the shot came from.’
‘That’s a fair distance, three hundred yards at least.’
‘This bloke is an expert, Brian. With a ’scope, you’d be like a dummy in a shooting gallery. Take my advice. Don’t come up here unless you have to and then have your security guards here to meet you. Just warn them, this bloke might take them out, too.’
O’Brien stared across at the trees, as if the assassin was actually there. There was no sign of immediate fear on his face, but he was looking, for the first time, at the possibility of his own death. ‘I don’t want to die, Scobie. Not now.’
‘Who does?’
They drove back to the city, through the flat sprawl of suburbs and along the main roads too narrow for the traffic that clogged them. Freeways were being built, but for every mile of freeway laid down it seemed that a thousand cars had been newly spawned to flood it. They passed several miles of used car lots, metal beasts waiting to be released to add to the flood.
O’Brien was silent most of the way, not sullen but worried-looking. Malone kept the conversation casual. ‘My sidekick, Russ Clements, has been looking up your history. You were bigger than I thought you were on the pop scene.’
‘I was in it when it started to take off, just after the Beatles first appeared.’
‘Russ told me about some of the groups you managed. There was one called – was it the Salvation Four or something?’
‘The Salvation Four Plus Sinner. They were big.’
‘I asked my two girls about them – they’d never heard of them.’
‘How old are your girls?’
‘Nine and almost fourteen.’
‘Another generation. Pop groups are like Olympic swimmers – they hit gold once, then they sink without trace.’ There was no pity in his voice for the failed pop groups or Olympic swimmers.
‘Why did you get out of the game?’
‘Boredom. And greed,’ he said frankly, as if avarice was a virtue. ‘I was making a million a year, but that’s chicken-feed in the pop game.’
‘The chickens started to bite you?’
‘Scobie, a million bucks is like a short-handled umbrella – you can’t swagger with it. But fifty or a hundred million, that’s different.’
‘I thought you didn’t like to swagger? The low profile and all that.’
‘The richest guy in America doesn’t swagger. He lives in a small city in Oklahoma and drives a pick-up truck to his office. But when he lifts the phone, the banks fall on their knees and salaam.’
‘The banks salaaming you now?’
O’Brien smiled ruefully: there was some humour in it, even if it was as dry as a western creek-bed. ‘Not now. Not now.’
When they reached Police Centre Russ Clements was waiting for them with the file from Goulburn. The file cover was dark blue, the spine of it faded to a sky blue where it had been exposed to light on a shelf; the papers and the single photo in it were yellowing round the edges. Evidently no one had looked at the file since 1965.
The three men sat down in Malone’s office, but first Malone pointed out to O’Brien the three red pins on the map behind his chair. ‘Parramatta, Chatswood, City – three random murders. That’s what we thought at first. There’s going to be another one, I can feel it in my bones –’ He had Celtic bones, in which superstition was ingrained in the marrow.
‘We have a hundred and fifty-one names to choose from,’ said Clements. ‘Less Terry Sugar and Harry Gardner. We also have the same number of suspects, less, of course, those two and you two.’
‘Thanks,’ said Malone. ‘You always know how to keep the spirits up.’
‘I was in the class,’ said Clements soberly. ‘But not the same group. I think we can narrow it down to your group, if you can remember them all.’
‘The names aren’t classified in groups?’
‘No. We’re all lumped together.’
‘What about the photos?’
‘There’s only one, a class photo. There’s a caption on the back with all the names. Except there are only a hundred and fifty guys in the photo. They must have taken the names from the class roll without identifying them with individuals in the photo.’
O’Brien said sarcastically, ‘The police academy must’ve been pretty smart in those days. I can’t remember – did they teach us how to identify mug shots?’
Malone could feel Clements’ resentment even across the desk: no policeman likes the force being criticized, no matter how valid the criticism. He cut in before Clements could make a comment: ‘Have you worked out who’s missing?’
‘Not yet,’ said Clements. ‘I thought we’d start by you two trying to remember the names of all the guys in your group.’
Malone’s was the mind trained by experience in the use of memory, but it was O’Brien, the half-trained accountant turned entrepreneur, the man who lived by his wits and the dropped name, who remembered most of their group-mates. Clements wrote the names down and then Malone and O’Brien tried to match a face in the photo with a name. The whole procedure took them half an hour. Without remarking on it, both Malone and O’Brien spent as much time looking at themselves when young as they did identifying the other members of their group. Malone felt a sense of loss looking at the distant youth who was himself: he was a stranger whom he wished he knew better. What had he felt in those days, what had he thought about, what mistakes had he made? But it was all so long ago, it was like trying to draw pictures on water.
At last O’Brien said, ‘The guy who’s missing is Frank Blizzard.’
Malone frowned. ‘I remember the name. But I can’t remember what he looked like.’
‘That was him. As soon as he left you, you couldn’t remember what he looked like. There was something else –’
Malone waited.
‘We caught him cheating on an exam paper, remember? We hazed him, gave him a helluva hosing with a fire hose, then we kicked him out into – what was it, Bourke Street? – just in his underpants.’
‘I remember that,’ said Clements. ‘It was all around the academy the next morning.’
‘It was a stupid bloody thing to do,’ said Malone. ‘I mean, what we did.’
‘We were young,’ said O’Brien. ‘We thought cheating was against the rules.’
‘Wasn’t it? Isn’t it still?’
‘Not in the big wide world, chum. Frank Blizzard was just ahead of the rest of us.’
Out of the corner of his eye Malone saw Clements’ lip lift just a fraction; he did his best to show no expression himself. ‘Would what we did to him be enough for him to start killing for revenge?’
‘After all these years?’
‘You should’ve stayed in the force,’ said Clements; his dislike of O’Brien was blatant. ‘You’d have learned some people will wait for ever for revenge. Women are the worst.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Malone. ‘War veterans are as bad, some of them.’
‘We weren’t at war with Blizzard,’ said O’Brien.
He was aware of Clements’ feeling towards him; for a moment he had looked unexpectedly uncomfortable. His hands gripped the seat of the chair beneath him like anchors; then they slowly relaxed, like an arthritic’s whose pain had been conquered. He moved stiffly, showing his shoulder to Clements, and looked at Malone.
‘None of us reported his cheating, not until they called us in and put it to us about what they’d heard. I can’t remember who it was who grassed, but then all the rest of us could do was nod and say yes, we’d done it. There were six of us, as I remember.’
Malone nodded, remembering the scene in the Inspector’s office, hazy though the memory was, like a soft focus flashback in a television mini-series. At that time he thought they might all be dismissed from the academy; but Blizzard’s sin or crime or whatever you called it had been greater. Hazing, in those days, was tolerated in institutions as civilized barbarism, no worse than poofter-bashing. Blizzard had been doomed from the moment that – had it been Jim Knoble? – had opened his mouth and told about the cheating. Frank Blizzard had gone from the academy by lunchtime next day.
‘I was there when he went out the gates,’ said O’Brien. ‘He got out into Bourke Street and all of a sudden he went berserk, right off his bloody rocker. I couldn’t hear half of what he was saying, he was standing out in the middle of the road, in the traffic, but I did hear him yell he’d blow the place up. Then he caught sight of me and he put his arms up, like he was holding a rifle, and made out he was shooting me.’
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/jon-cleary/murder-song/) на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.