Читать книгу Murder Song - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 6

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?’