Читать книгу Murder Song - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 7

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?’