Читать книгу Autumn Maze - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 7

1

All the men had gone and the three Bruna sisters were alone. Said Rosalind, ‘You two didn’t show much concern over Rob’s death.’

‘’Lind,’ said Ophelia, ‘your stepson was a shit.’

‘Why did Cormac give him a job then?’

‘Because he wanted a favour from your Derek, something political. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Or your son’s.’

Rosalind did not question that. She and Juliet nodded understandingly; they were, after all, Roumanian, though long removed. They had arrived in Australia when Juliet was six months old, Rosalind five years old and Ophelia ten, but there were centuries of intrigue in their blood. Their mother, Ileana, had come of a family noted for its political chicanery; she had died of sunstroke six months after her arrival in Sydney, sad to depart but happy in the thought that her daughters would grow up in a community where the politicians of the time were as buyable as those back home. She had been ten years older than her sculptor husband, Adam, and, though not expecting to go so soon, had told him she would die before he turned to chasing younger women. He, distraught at the thought of losing her, had asked for advice on how to bring up their daughters. She, with her last breath but still aware of the world’s opportunities, especially amongst the native barbarians, had murmured, ‘See that they marry rich.’ The sisters had done their best to honour their mother’s wish. The blood of their mother’s family ran like liquid gold through them, their vote was always buyable if the price was right.

‘Did Derek arrange it? The political favour?’

‘I suppose he must have. Cormac doesn’t tell me everything that goes on, though I’m often tempted to ask.’

Ophelia was the impulsive one of the three sisters. On the spur of the moment she had asked Cormac Casement to marry her; a spur of a different sort had been that he had as much money as her dreams were made on. They had gone to bed on their second meeting, she experimenting with an older lover, wondering if his technique would be so simple as to be puritanical; he wondering if his heart would stand up to the demands of what the feminists called a ‘woman in her post-menopausal prime’. Each had surprised the other and a month after they had met she proposed. He, not given to impulsiveness, further surprised himself by accepting.

‘But Cormac did say something last week that I didn’t take much notice of. He said Rob was up to something and he’d have to speak to him.’

‘Rob was always up to something,’ said Juliet. ‘Or up something.’

‘Don’t be vulgar,’ said Rosalind, who could be as vulgar as any gypsy when her temper got away from her. Aware of this, she had cultivated a cautiousness that sometimes made her seem much more callous than her sisters. ‘He liked girls, but that’s healthy. Or it used to be.’

Juliet, who even as a child in a bath had liked to make waves, said, ‘’Lind, he liked women, not just girls. Any age. His fly was permanently unzipped.’

Ophelia, who could catch a nuance as if it were floodlit, said, ‘You too?’

The two sisters, the youngest and the eldest, exchanged glances, then both looked at Rosalind. ‘He got me into bed four or five times,’ said Juliet. ‘He was a marvellous lover, so long as he kept his mouth shut. He always sounded like that loud-mouthed football commentator. He would give a description they could hear down in Melbourne. As if I didn’t know what was going on. What about you, ’Phelia?’

‘The same. I always felt I was in the middle of an All Blacks-Wallabies scrum.’ She knew that rugby was played in Roumania and, though she had no interest in the game, she went to rugby internationals with Cormac because he had in his youth been a representative player and still followed the sport. She never went to rugby league matches, that was the peasants’ game. Her mother would have approved of her discrimination. ‘Twice was enough. I blew the whistle after that, told him the game was over. Well?’

The eldest and the youngest waited for Rosalind to comment. She sighed, then nodded. ‘Me, too. His stepmother.’ She was less Roumanian than her sisters, almost as if a Methodist had somehow got into the bloodstream. At times she even displayed a conscience, something her husband found disconcerting. ‘Just the once. Too noisy. It’s the first time I’ve been cheered for what I was doing to someone.’

‘Did he ever suggest he might tell Derek?’

‘Never. Derek would have killed him—’ Rosalind broke off sharply and she frowned. ‘God, why did I say that?’

‘Do you think Derek found out?’ said Juliet, scooping up some small waves.

Rosalind shook her head vigorously. ‘He would have spoken to me first. He’s like that. He can be sweet, but he’ll always blame the women for everything.’

‘Balls,’ said Ophelia, who had fondled more than her share. ‘It takes two to seduce.’

‘Did Cormac suspect anything between you and Rob?’

‘No. When he told me he thought Rob was up to something, I wondered for a moment if he meant with me. But Cormac, dear old soul, can be read like a book – there wasn’t a glint of suspicion about me. I’ve never understood why they say the Irish are like the Roumanians and vice versa. They’re children, really.’

Her sisters nodded: innocence had never bothered them. At their convent school in Rose Bay the nuns had been convinced that, in succession, all three of them were headed for Hell. The sisters had been unperturbed. That was where most of the rich finished up, anyway.

‘So who killed Rob?’ said Juliet. ‘Or would it be better if we didn’t know?’

2

When Malone and Clements came out of The Wharf they turned into the side street. Two council workers in overalls were cleaning the pavement, scrubbing it with hard brooms. The Crime Scene tapes had been removed and there was no sign of any police. Two young girls paused on the other side of the street, shuddered and moved on, heads close together in a whisper, as if the council workers were gravediggers throwing the last sod on Rob Sweden.

One of the sweepers leaned on his broom and looked at the two detectives. ‘You guys stopped for a bit of ghouling?’

Malone had never heard the gerund before; the recession had brought the educated to the gutter. ‘We’re police, not ghouls.’

‘Sorry.’ He was a young man, young enough to be the son of his fellow worker, who looked as if he had been sweeping the streets all his life. ‘This job is shitty enough, without having to clean up something like this.’

Malone looked up at the stack of balconies above them. ‘They must’ve tossed him out wide so he wouldn’t hit the lower balconies.’

‘It was a neat throw,’ said Clements. ‘Three feet further out and he’d of landed on any car parked here.’

The young cleaner was still leaning on his broom, an occupational habit. ‘Are you guys always so clinical about something like this?’

Malone wanted to tell him how they felt when they investigated the murder of a child or a woman, but all he said was, it’s like you and your street sweeping, it’s a job.’

‘You put your finger on it, mate.’ The older worker had stopped sweeping, leaned on his broom with the ease of long practice. ‘I keep telling him, don’t ever look too hard at what your broom picks up. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Clements, and he and Malone grinned at each other and walked back down the short hill.

‘Where to now?’

Malone paused on the corner, looked along Circular Quay and up at the tall tower of the Casement building. ‘While we’re down here, why don’t we drop in on Mr Casement? Young Sweden worked for him.’

They crossed the road, stopping to allow a group of Japanese tourists, herded together by their guides as if the local natives were expected to attack at any moment, to make their way towards a waiting cruise ferry at one of the wharves. Clements, a man who couldn’t help his prejudices, shook his head but said nothing to Malone. The latter, who fought his inherited prejudices and usually won, just smiled at the Japanese and was rewarded by the bobbing of several heads.

‘Our salvation,’ he said.

‘Japs?’

‘Tourists.’

The Casement building, like The Wharf, had been built in the boom of the early Eighties. There were fifty storeys, seven of them occupied by Casement Trust, the merchant bank, and Casement and Co., the stockbrokers. In the big entrance lobby there was enough Italian marble to re-fill the Carrara quarries; thick columns soared three storeys, like branchless marble trees. An overalled cleaner with a toy broom and a tiny scoop shuffled about the lobby keeping the marble dirt-free and butt-free. Visitors were welcome, but expected to be impressed or else.

A uniformed security guard asked the two detectives if he might help them. ‘We’d like to see Mr Casement?’

‘You have an appointment?’ The guard looked at a book on his counter. ‘Nobody is allowed on the fiftieth floor without an appointment.’

Malone produced his badge. ‘Is that a good enough reference?’

‘It’s good enough for me. I’ll see if it’s good enough for Mr Casement’s secretary. She’s the Wicked Witch. Don’t quote me.’

There was a short conversation with the Wicked Witch, a wait, then the guard put down the phone. ‘It’s okay. Ask for Mrs Pallister. It’s about the ugly business over the road, right?’

Malone just nodded, then led Clements along to the private lift pointed out to them by the guard. They rode to the fiftieth floor in ten feet square of luxury: no marble, but top quality leather for which any craftsman would have given his awl. The carpet on the floor looked as if it were newly laid each morning, fresh from the merino’s back. Clements looked around admiringly.

‘I think I’ve got a split personality. I get into something like this and I hate the bastards it’s made for, yet I like it.’

When they stepped out of the lift they were in a reception area that suggested luxury was the norm on the fiftieth floor. A dark-haired receptionist turned from her word processor and gave them a pleasant smile. ‘Mrs Pallister is expecting you.’ Not Mr Casement is expecting you: everybody these days had minders. The receptionist stood up, opened a door in the oak-lined wall behind her. ‘The police.’

The police went through into an inner office, three walls oak-lined and the fourth a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out on to the harbour. A blonde woman sat with her back to the view, a paper-strewn desk in front of her. The mess on her desk contrasted sharply with her too-neat appearance. She rose as the two men came into her office, but that was her only hint of politeness.

‘Gentlemen.’ Her vowels came from eastern-suburbs’ private schools, but there was an edge to her voice that suggested it could cut throats if needs be. ‘I think it would have been better if you had telephoned so that I could have fitted you into Mr Casement’s schedule. He can give you only ten minutes.’

‘We’ll keep that in mind,’ said Malone, instantly forgetting it.

Mrs Pallister was middle-aged and would have been attractive if she had not frozen her face ten years before. Divorce had turned her 180 degrees; her career had become her life. She made forty-five thousand dollars a year, ten thousand a year less than Malone made as an inspector, but she had the air of an assistant commissioner. ‘Mr Casement is a busy man.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Malone.

She looked at him down her nose, which, snub as it was, rather destroyed the effect intended. She led them through into an office that surprised Malone with its lack of size; he had expected to be led into a luxurious auditorium. But this room was not much bigger than the Wicked Witch’s, though there was no denying the luxury of it. Even to Malone’s inexpert eye, the paintings on two of the walls were worth a fortune: a Streeton, a Bunny, a Renoir and a Monet. The mix showed that the man who worked in this office did not want to be disturbed by any angst-spattered artwork. The furniture was equally comforting, rich in leather and timber. This was a man’s room, but Malone, who was learning to be more observant about surroundings, guessed it had been furnished by a woman.

‘Inspector Malone?’ Cormac Casement stood up from behind the large desk that was almost a barricade. ‘This is about poor Rob Sweden’s death? A dreadful accident.’

He was twenty-five years older than his second wife, but, as the old shoe-polish advertisement said, though he was well-worn he had worn well. He was shorter than Malone had expected from the photos he had seen of the older man, just medium height and barrel-shaped. He had thin iron-grey hair, a square face that sagged under the chin, and he wore designer glasses that looked out of place on him, much too young for him, as if he were wearing Reeboks on his small dainty feet. The eyes behind the glasses, however, suggested they could open a steel safe without any twirling of a combination lock. His wife was wrong when she claimed she could read him like a book. There were some pages of him still uncut and only he knew what, if anything, was written there.

‘Not an accident, Mr Casement. It was murder. We’ve just come from giving Mr and Mrs Sweden the bad news.’

‘Murder?’ Casement did not look surprised; which surprised Malone. ‘Really? Oh well …’ He sat down again, waved to the two detectives to take the chairs opposite him. ‘You never can tell what’s going to happen with today’s youth, can you?’

‘Do you know much about today’s youth, Mr Casement?’

‘Only what I read in the newspapers.’ The old eyes were steady behind the young man’s glasses. ‘If you’re asking me what I knew about young Rob, the answer’s not much. You should be asking someone who worked with him. The general manager of our stockbroking firm, for instance. He would be the one who saw Rob from day to day.’

‘He transferred to your banking side a few weeks ago.’

The glasses flashed as he lifted his head. ‘Did he? I didn’t know that. I don’t have any executive position in the bank any more, I’m just chairman of the board. I only saw him on social occasions, he never mentioned it.’

‘How did he strike you? On social occasions?’

Casement pondered; he appeared as if he had never really been interested in young Sweden. ‘Gregarious, I suppose one would say. He was very popular with the ladies.’

‘Any particular one?’

Casement shook his head. ‘Not that I noticed.’

‘Was he ambitious? I mean, he worked for you, would he have gone far in your corporation, the stockbrokers or the bank?’

‘I really don’t know, Inspector. I told you, I’m only involved at board level, the day-to-day stuff is behind me. To tell you the truth, I was never interested in the boy’s future.’

Cormac Casement came of a rare species in the country’s pioneer society, the rich Irish. He was not one of the bog Irish, not one of those driven out of Ireland by the potato famine of the 1840’s. An ancestor had landed in the colony of New South Wales in 1842 and been given a large land grant on the southern slopes a couple of hundred miles south of Sydney. Wool had been the first interest, but gradually the family had widened its grasp, into cattle, mining, sugar and banking. There was no major corporation in the nation that had not had a Casement as an original investor. Society, which is a corporation in itself, had taken them up; or rather, the Casements allowed themselves to be taken up, for, though Irish, they had been gentlemen and ladies long before the colonials had learned how to handle a full teacup or an empty compliment. Theirs had been old money when the later fortunes of other colonists were still just dreams based on mortgages.

‘Did he appear to you to take drugs?’

‘Why do you ask me that?’

‘You’re an observant man.’

Casement shook his head, turned away and looked out through the big window behind him. The glass here did not extend from floor to ceiling; Casement wanted some privacy, did not want to be spied upon by someone with binoculars. Still, the view was breathtaking. A container ship was passing under the Harbour Bridge, its decks half-empty; exports this year were still down, the foreign debt steady on the graph like a dead man’s heart signature. He was too old to be distressed by election results, though he had been disappointed when the Coalition had, as every cliché-ridden columnist put it, snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The country would continue to go downhill under Labor; he could not bring himself to believe that men from the wrong side of the street could run a country. He turned back to the two detectives, glad of his age, glad that, though born rich, he was not starting life over again.

‘You shouldn’t be asking me about Rob. I took as little notice of him as I could. I tolerated him because of his father and because of my wife. I didn’t like him at all.’

‘That’s an honest opinion, Mr Casement.’

‘You make it sound as if you haven’t heard too many honest opinions this morning.’

‘You could say that. But we’re used to them, aren’t we, Russ?’

Clements had been taking notes in his peculiar shorthand; he looked up and smiled. ‘It’s the other opinions that help us more than the honest ones.’

The shrewd eyes abruptly showed amusement as Casement remembered the Eighties. ‘I wish there had been more honest opinions a few years ago.’

‘Did you have a visitor at home last night?’ said Clements.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘We’re trying to find out how the murderer got into the building. The security is said to be pretty tight.’

It is. Or it has been up till now. Except—’ He stopped. ‘I haven’t thought about it before. It could be better down in the basement, in the garage. The service lift comes up from there. Yes, Alice?’

Mrs Pallister had silently opened the door from her office without knocking, stood there like a headmistress. ‘Time to leave for your luncheon. Your ten minutes are up, Inspector.’

Malone had an elaborate look at his watch. ‘Doesn’t time fly! Well, thank you, Mr Casement. Maybe we can come back when you have more time.’

‘Telephone first,’ said the Wicked Witch.

‘No, no, Alice. Let them come whenever they wish. I’m interested in how Inspector Malone and Sergeant Clements will proceed from here. Anything for a change,’ said Casement and sounded wistful.

At the door Malone paused. ‘Are you related at all to Roger Casement?’

‘The traitor? Or the patriot, depending on your point of view? You know something of Irish history?’ Casement seemed surprised that a cop should know anything of history outside of police files.

‘A little. My mother was Irish-born and my father likes to think he was. At least he says he was conceived in Ireland.’

Casement smiled. ‘No, I’m not related to Sir Roger, although I’ve always admired him. Honour is always to be admired, don’t you think?’

‘Honour and justice don’t always mix. Any cop will tell you that. The British hanged Sir Roger, they said that was justice.’

‘Well, let’s hope justice is done when you find young Rob’s murderer.’

When the two detectives had gone, Casement said, ‘Cancel that lunch, Alice. I have no appetite, for food or those dreary people I was going to lunch with.’

‘You’re upset by those two policemen coming in here, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t start guessing my feelings, Alice. You sound like my wife.’

‘I’ve been guessing your feelings for ten years. That’s what private secretaries are for, isn’t it?’

‘Alice, Alice—’ He shook his head, spun his chair slowly and looked out the window, at nothing. ‘Make me some tea and a sandwich. And cancel the rest of the day. I think I’ll go home and hold my wife’s hand.’ He swung his chair back again. ‘What are you smiling at?’

‘You haven’t needed to have your hand held since you were two years old.’

He smiled, humouring her. ‘That wasn’t what I said. I’m going home to hold my wife’s hand, not she hold mine.’

Going down in the lift Malone said, ‘How much would he be worth?’

Clements shrugged. ‘It’d be anybody’s guess. Even the so-called experts, when they put him on that Rich List in that financial magazine, they’re only guessing. Could be half-a-billion, a billion, maybe more. People like the Casements hide what they’re worth. Not to dodge taxes, but just because they think it’s vulgar to let anyone know. I’d be the same,’ he said with a grin.

‘So one of the Bruna sisters did all right for herself?’

‘All three of them have. She’s just done better than the others.’

They came out into the sunlight; the earlier clouds had disappeared. Three or four smokers, the new lepers, stood near the entrance, snatching a few puffs of cancer before they went back to their non-smoking offices; butts lay about them like scraps of fossilized lung. That, of course, was the impression of Malone, a non-smoker.

He paused, looking across at the lunchtime crowd moving towards the cafés along the Quay. Along the waterfront itself parents with children, tourist groups and loafers drifted with slow movements, as if responding to the harbour’s gentle tide. Buskers sang or played instruments; with the recession, busking had become a new form of self-employment. Malone remembered stories his father had told him of the Depression: Con Malone had sung in the streets, ‘Mother Mchree’ torn limb from limb by a tuneless baritone. The Good Old Days: they were coming back, dark as ever. But at least here the sun shone, nobody starved, there was music instead of machine-gun fire. Europe was crumbling, Russia was falling apart, the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims of Bosnia were making their own hell.

Malone crossed the road, Clements hurrying to catch up with him, and dropped a dollar in the violin-case of a young girl playing some country-and-western number. He looked at Clements, who reluctantly took out a fifty-cent piece and dropped it in the violin-case. ‘I hate that sorta music,’ he said as they walked away. ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘I’m having lunch first. Or luncheon. Over a meat pie, you can tell me whether you think someone in the family killed young Sweden. Or had him killed.’

‘And what about Frank Minto and the stiff stolen from the morgue?’

‘You’ve just spoiled lunch.’

3

At Casement & Co., Stockbrokers, the general manager was not available. ‘He’s up at the Futures Exchange, that’s in Grosvenor Street.’

‘Did you know Rob Sweden?’ said Malone.

The pretty girl, an Indian, behind the reception desk closed her big dark eyes for a moment, opened them again, then nodded. ‘We’re all—’ She gestured with a graceful hand, looked for a moment as if she might weep. Then she recovered: ‘Yes, I knew him.’

‘Did you ever meet him outside the office?’

‘You mean, did I go out with him?’ Her father had been a Bombay lawyer; but she was more direct. Circumlocution never got you anywhere with Australians, they didn’t understand the uses of it. ‘No, he never went out with any of the girls from the office. He was – discreet? – that way. He always treated us politely. No, you know, harassment.’

‘A gentleman?’

‘Oh yes. They’re scarce today.’ She sounded as if she might show them her bruises.

‘Not amongst us older types,’ said Malone, thanked her and he and Clements left.

The Futures Exchange was hidden behind the facade of a building that belonged to another age, when a future had no value to anyone but the person whose dream it was. The building had been gutted and turned into a temple owned and run by the money-changers: Jesus Christ would never have got past the security guards at the entrance.

Malone and Clements, being police and not messiahs, were admitted. They found Jim Ondelli, Casement’s general manager, in the ten-year-bond pit. He was in his early forties, thin-faced and curly-haired, his trader’s vest of purple-and-pink stripes worn over what looked to Malone like a very expensive shirt. He handed his clipboard to a younger man, a mere boy, and came towards Malone and Clements.

‘You’re from the police? They rang me from the office.’

Malone introduced himself and Clements. ‘Is this a good time to talk?’

‘Oh sure, no worries. The bond market, especially the ten-year-one, is pretty slack at the moment, everyone’s waiting to see what the Japanese are going to do. What can I do for you? I mean about Rob Sweden. Poor bugger.’

It was like being in an aviary; or, as Clements, a chauvinist, would have described it, at a women’s luncheon party. Chatter chipped the air, shouts bounced like invisible rubber balls. Ondelli led the two detectives under a balcony where, somehow, the noise was less overwhelming.

‘Are you doing what young Sweden did?’

‘Yeah. He was one of our traders, not the best but good enough. He might’ve developed, I dunno. I tried him on several of the pits, they all handle a different commodity. He wasn’t quite quick enough for the really volatile pit, say the share-index one over there.’

‘Was that why you transferred him to the bank?’

‘That was his own idea, not mine.’

‘What would he have earned?’ said Clements, a punter.

‘Here? It varied. He’d have earned less at the bank. The clerks here, the young ones hoping to be traders, they’re usually on around forty thousand a year. A trader like Rob would get sixty to a hundred thousand, depending on how good he is. The “gun” trader – that kid over there, for instance—’ Ondelli pointed to the share-index pit, where a group of traders, most of them young, stood in a semi-circle facing another young man in a green-and-white jacket. ‘That kid is as good as anyone on the floor. He’s with—’ He named one of the major banks. ‘He has the money to play with. When he bids, the others jump in – that’s why they’re watching him as if he’s some sort of orchestra leader. He’d be on a hundred and fifty thousand, probably plus bonuses.’

The two detectives looked at each other and Ondelli grinned. ‘It’s bloody obscene, is that what you’re thinking?’

In these times, yes. But all Malone said was, ‘We’re in the wrong game.’

Ondelli went on, ‘This is, in effect, no more than a gambling den, a legitimate one. It has its uses, though. It can guarantee a price for a farmer, for instance, for his produce, say six months down the track. It can protect him against a poor harvest or a glut harvest – up to a point, that is. We can do nothing about the low prices right now for wool and wheat. As for the rest of it—’ He shrugged. ‘It’s gambling, a casino.’

‘How much money passes through here each day?’ Clements, the bookies’ friend, was hooked: this was one form of gambling he had never examined. It also opened up the possibility that, somewhere on this crowded, noisy floor, lay the reason for Rob Sweden’s murder.

‘The transactions? We’re the ninth largest futures exchange in the world. We handle about seventy thousand transactions a day, about thirty billion dollars’ worth.’

The two detectives, feeling more poverty stricken by the moment, looked at each other again. Then Malone said, ‘What would the largest do?’

‘That’s the Chicago Board of Trade. It does a million transactions a day. There’s also the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Between them they do just on sixty-five trillion dollars a year in contracts. That’s sixty times the value of all the shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange.’

Malone looked at Clements. ‘You going to leave the bookies and try your luck here? He’s the scourge of the bookies,’ he explained to Ondelli.

‘Can anyone make money on the side here?’ asked Clements.

‘You mean trade for themselves? No, that’s a no-no. The Exchange is very strict on that. Rob Sweden wouldn’t have been into that.’

‘What about scams?’ Ondelli frowned as if offended and Clements added, ‘I’m not suggesting young Sweden was in any scam. But can they work them?’

‘Sure,’ Ondelli admitted. ‘Any business where money is traded, there’s always the opportunity for a scam. Cornering the market in something, for instance. That’s been tried everywhere. The Japanese invented the first futures market, in Osaka back in 1650, and they invented the first corner about the same time.’

‘What about other scams?’

Ondelli looked dubious. ‘I dunno whether I should be telling you all this, I’m putting a bad odour on the Exchange. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of what goes on here every day is honest trading. But there’s the exception, there always is. A futures exchange is a convenient place for laundering money, you know what I mean?’

‘We know what you mean,’ said Malone. ‘Go on.’

‘Say someone wants to launder a million dollars, some drug dealer or some guy who’s wondering how he can avoid tax. He picks some trader who’s got a blind eye, gives him the million and tells him to trade in some futures that are never going to move, something like New Zealand wool futures or North American lumber. They’re not volatile, they go up or down only a few cents, but they’re nothing to get excited about. The guy leaves his money with the trader for, say, a month, three weeks. Then he comes back, says he’s decided to get out of the market. The trader writes him a cheque for a million dollars, less commission, a clean cheque, and the guy walks away with his money all nicely laundered.’

‘Who polices something like that?’

‘The Exchange itself. It has an audit staff, they keep an eye on everything going on. See those screens up there above each of the pits? That young girl in the middle of each pit, they’re kids virtually straight out of high school, she records every transaction that takes place in her pit. She speaks into that mike she’s wearing and the computer translates her voice into those figures you see on the screen. That information goes around the world simultaneously, to every major futures exchange – a guy in Chicago or Tokyo or London knows at once what’s happening down here in Sydney. Everything on those screens comes before the audit staff and over a week or a month they pick up any blips in what should be normal trading. They inform the trading broker in question and he has twenty-one days to reply. If he can give no satisfactory answer, he goes before a tribunal of the Exchange’s chief executive and two outside members of the board. They can fine the broker up to a quarter of a million dollars and take away his licence. At the same time he might be investigated by the Securities Commission, that’s a separate thing. They can prosecute the broker and he can get up to five years in jail. The Exchange is self-regulating, but it’s tough. Not like some of these other self-regulating bodies.’

‘Has anyone been caught laundering money?’

‘Not as far as I know. But that’s not to say it hasn’t happened.’ He looked at them shrewdly. ‘You’re not telling me Rob Sweden might’ve been into something like that?’

‘So far we’re not suggesting anything. Why did he transfer to the Casement bank?’

‘That puzzled me. He wasn’t the banking type – he wouldn’t get the excitement in the bank’s foreign currency department that he got here. He just sprung the news on me.’

‘You know he was murdered?’

There was one of those inexplicable moments when the world is suddenly silent: the noise in the pits abruptly stopped, as if everyone on the floor had heard what Malone had just said. Ondelli gave an audible gasp and his eyes almost disappeared as his thick brows came down. Then the noise started up again and his voice was only a whisper: ‘Murdered?’

‘Yes, he was murdered before he was tossed off that balcony.’

‘Jesus!’ Ondelli shook his head; his curls bounced. It’ll be the talk in the pub this evening. So does that alter the picture on Rob? Do you mean something here—’ he waved a hand around him ‘– maybe had something to do with his death?’

‘Could be,’ said Malone. ‘Here’s my card. If a blip, as you call it, comes up on those screens in the next week or two, a scam or something that Rob Sweden might’ve been connected with, let me know.’

Malone and Clements went back to Homicide in Surry Hills. Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region was in a refurbished commercial building that had once been a hat factory; Sydney, the oldest of the colonies, had long ago given up trying to keep all its services in government buildings. One advantage to working in the Hat Factory was that big heads from Administration rarely ventured there.

Malone rang Lisa to see if he was still in the doghouse. Her voice was cool: ‘Tom says he understands, there’s duty and all that.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘He’s in his room listening to the radio. They’re playing that Ice-T song about killing cops. He’s dancing to it, seems to be enjoying himself.’

He sighed. ‘You should’ve married someone on the dole, they’re home all the time.’

‘Oh, now we’ve joined the New Right, have we?’

‘I dunno why, but I still love you.’

But when he hung up he knew he had been forgiven; seventeen years of marriage had inured Lisa to the vagaries of a cop’s wife’s life. The children sometimes had trouble adjusting to his abrupt coming and going, the broken promises on outings; but Lisa, despite her own occasional annoyance, acted his advocate with them. He was well aware and grateful that she was the rock on which the family stood.

He called Peta Smith in to his small corner office. She came in, briskly cool but with an understated deference to him. She was twenty-nine, a year older than John Kagal, attractive without being either pretty or beautiful, with thick blonde hair cut short, a wide jaw and alert blue eyes. She always wore, no matter what the season, a suit and a blouse; she was neat. She had been with Homicide six months and had proved as efficient as any of the men; yet Malone, aware of the chauvinism amongst the majority of the men under him, was protective of her and so hindered her chances to show how good she was. He was uncertain of her feelings towards him, whether she resented his protection of her.

‘Peta—’ He explained that there now might be a connection between the Sweden murder and that of the missing corpse from the morgue. ‘The Rocks station will run the day-to-day stuff on the Sweden murder and Campsie will do the same on this feller they picked up out at Canterbury. But I want you to keep a flow chart, bringing in the bits and pieces from The Rocks and Campsie.’

She nodded. ‘The media are starting to ask questions—’

‘Check with Russ, then you handle ’em.’ She got up to go, but he checked her: ‘Down at The Wharf, did you have a look at the service entrance to the apartments?’

Again she nodded, briskly. ‘I went down in the service lift, it goes right down to the basement garage. The PE team had been down there, but said they found nothing.’

‘What’s the security like?’

She grimaced. ‘Pretty lousy, considering what it’s like in the rest of the building. There’s a grille door at the top of a ramp, it’s operated electronically by a card-in-the-slot. There’s a smaller door in that large one, its latch is loose, anyone could open the door. It’s a joke, security down in that garage.’

‘One other thing – would anyone hear the service lift when it’s going up or down? I mean from the front desk?’

‘I checked that with the doorman. He said no, everything in the building is supposed to be for the comfort of the tenants. Silent lifts, things like that.’

He sat back. ‘Peta, do you ever fall down on anything?’

‘Only in the guys I choose.’ She smiled and left him wondering if she was having love trouble here in Homicide.

Clements came in with the preliminary report from the Physical Evidence team on the Sweden case. ‘They haven’t come up with much. There are fingerprints all over the apartment – evidently the maid goes pretty light on with the duster, she just re-arranges the dust. Fingerprints will check ’em out with everyone who comes and goes in the apartment, including all those we talked to this morning. I asked ’em to get Cormac Casement’s – that’ll go down well with the Wicked Witch when our guys walk in with their little pads.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They found a trace of blood on the fancy coverlet in the second bedroom, where there might of been a struggle. Just a faint smear, as if a needle or something with blood on it had fallen on the coverlet. It’s a fancy pattern, they say, and the killer could of missed the smear in it. There’s nothing else. If Rob Sweden had a visitor he knew, we don’t know if he offered him a drink. The maid said she washed up all the glasses this morning, Mrs Sweden told her to. Evidently Mr and Mrs Sweden had a drink when they got home from the opera and the uniformed boys were there to tell them what had happened. I’d have a drink, too.’

‘Righto, I’ve told Peta to start drawing up a chart. The Rocks can set up a command room, it’s on their turf. I don’t know why their D’s weren’t there when we were down there.’

Clements bit his lip, an old habit. ‘Wayne Murrow gave me the word on that.’

Murrow was a senior constable with the Physical Evidence Section. ‘Yes?’

‘Seems that AC Zanuch got in first. He laid down that it was to be handled directly by Police Centre. I think he also suspected it could be more than an accident. He wants to keep a rein on what goes on.’

‘Fred Falkender’s not going to like that.’ Falkender was the Assistant Commissioner, Crime, one of the seven ACs and no less senior than Zanuch, though without his ambition. Politics was part of the weather in this State and Malone could see the clouds already beginning to loom.

‘Scobie, let them work it out between them. Pull your head in.’

‘It’s right in, I’m not starting any fights on this one. We’ll do the donkey-work and let them up above make the decisions. In the meantime we’ll start talking to everyone connected to young Sweden. We’ll do them individually. The three sisters, their husbands – who do you want?’

‘Not the women. I’ve got Romy on my mind at the moment. One’s enough.’

‘Propose to her and all your worries will be over. Righto, I’ll take the sisters. I’ll also take young Jack Aldwych. We’ll leave Casement, we’ve got enough out of him for the moment.’

‘That leaves me the Minister. Thanks.’

‘No, we’ll skip him, too, for a while. There’s someone else you’ve forgotten. The cove they pinched from the morgue. If he was killed by the same method as young Sweden, then I’ll bet on it, he was connected to him. Try your luck.’

Frank Minto was on the running sheet in the computer, but he was likely to be overlooked if pressure increased on the Sweden case. It was not true that death made a level playing field.

4

That morning, coming back late from its all-night fishing, a trawler turned seawards to dodge the huge waterspout heading for it. It dragged in the last of its nets: in it was a badly mutilated leg.

‘We t’ought the spout, it gonna send us down,’ the Italian skipper reported to the police. ‘We said the prayers, pretty hard. Da spout, it missed us. Den we look in da net and dere was dis horrible t’ing!’

Though the leg was badly mangled, the foot was intact. Attached to the big toe was a tag, the figures on it almost washed out but decipherable under a microscope: E.50710.