Читать книгу Dark Summer - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

1

‘Daddy, there’s a dead man floating in our pool.’

Malone came awake, dimly conscious of his relief that what he had heard had been only a part of a dream. He had stayed up late, looking, almost against his will, at the latest newsreels on the Gulf war; the images had gone to bed with him, the camera eye in the dream becoming his own eye. Now he felt the hand still on his shoulder, the grip tight, and he opened his eyes to see Maureen standing by the bed in her swimsuit.

‘What?’ He sat up, feeling Lisa stir beside him.

‘There’s a dead man in our pool.’

His first thought was for the effect on his middle child: he looked at her for the marks of shock or fear. She was ten years old, a tomboy usually bursting with energy and curiosity; the one of his three children who, he had thought, would never be vulnerable to what life threw at her. But he had been looking at the future: not at now, a hot January Monday morning when she was only ten years old and had got up for nothing more threatening than an early morning swim.

‘You all right?’ She nodded; and he turned to Lisa, now wide awake. ‘Keep her here, darl. Stay with Mum.’

Lisa said, voice still thick with sleep, ‘I hope this isn’t some stupid joke –’

He shook his head warningly, pushed Maureen into the bed as he got out of it. He could feel the trembling in the thin body and he felt a sudden spasm of anger. Any intrusion that cracked the peace of the life he had built for Lisa and the kids always angered him.

In his pyjama trousers and bare feet he went out to the back of the house, opened the screen door and stepped out into the back garden. It was not a large area, maybe eighty feet by fifty, and a good part of it was taken up by the swimming pool and its fence-enclosed surrounds. He went through the spring-loaded gate, feeling the bricks beneath his feet still warm from yesterday’s scorcher, and stood on the side of the pool and looked down at the small, fully clothed man floating face-up in the blue-tinted water. It was Scungy Grime.

Malone picked up the long pole with its skim-net, hooked the net over Grime’s head and pulled the body in to the side of the pool. There was no doubt that the little man was dead, but, routinely, he knelt down and felt for a pulse in Grime’s neck.

‘Hi, Scobie. Going to be another scorcher, looks like – What’s that?’

Keith Cayburn was the Malones’ next-door neighbour. His house was two-storeyed and from the rear balcony, where he now stood in his pyjamas, he could look down on the Malones’ garden.

‘A dead man. Keep Gloria inside the house till I get him out of sight.’

‘Sure. Holy shit! Can I do anything to help?’

‘Maybe later, Keith.’ Though how he could help, Malone had no idea. Dead small-time criminals in swimming pools were not common in Randwick, not objects for community action by Neighbourhood Watch.

He left the body in the water for the Physical Evidence team and hoped that Gloria Cayburn, an hysterical type, would not come out on the balcony, despite her husband’s pleas, and throw a fit. As he went back into the house to call the police (call the police? Dammit, I am the police! But that was the way the system worked), Scungy Grime, in death as in life an incorrigible, drifted away towards the middle of the pool again, the skim-net still over his head like a fly-net, the long pole now caught in the crook of his limp arm.

Malone picked up the phone in the kitchen and rang Randwick police station. He spoke to a young constable, who said ‘Holy shit!’ and that he would get the local detectives round there right away. Malone hung up, rang Police Centre and got the duty officer in Physical Evidence, who said ‘Holy shit!’ evidently the religious thought for the day, and told him the team was on its way. Then Malone rang Russ Clements, who, half-asleep but still awake enough to be concerned for the Malone family, said only, ‘Lisa and the kids all right? Okay, I’ll be there soon’s I can.’

Malone hung up the phone and turned round. Claire, in her shortie nightgown, stood in the kitchen doorway, frightened and puzzled. ‘Is it true, Dad? Is there a dead man in our pool?’

‘It’s true. Where’s Tom?’

‘In with Mum.’

‘How’s Maureen?’

‘Quiet. It’s not like her, she’s not saying a word.’

‘Get dressed, the police will be here soon.’ He hoped they would not arrive with sirens blaring, lights flaring; sometimes the theatricals of police work, though necessary, embarrassed him. This section of Randwick, mostly white-collared and comfortable, was a quiet neighbourhood and so far he and Lisa had fitted in. ‘And don’t go outside, understand?’

‘I’ve never seen a dead person.’

She was fourteen, on the verge of becoming a beautiful woman; sometimes, forgetting the contribution of Lisa, he was amazed he could have sired such a beauty. There was also a matter-of-fact serenity to her that she had inherited from Lisa; or there normally was. But not now. The death of strangers, he knew, though not as shattering as that of loved ones, never left any but the most callous untouched.

‘You’re not going to start now,’ he said, trying to keep his tone gentle. ‘Go and get dressed.’

He went into the main bedroom, where Lisa was sitting on the side of the queen-sized bed with her arms round Maureen and Tom. She looked up at him and said accusingly, or so it seemed, ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re all on their way, the local fellers, the Crime Scene team. They’ll all be here in minutes. Russ is coming, too.’

‘Can I watch, Dad?’ Tom was almost eight: the world, and everything in it, even the horrible, was for watching.

‘Not this time, Tom. Get dressed.’

Lisa rose to take the two younger children out of the room. As they passed him, Malone pressed Maureen’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, love.’

Both children looked at him, puzzled; but he saw that Lisa understood. ‘What for, Daddy? Sorry for what, the dead man?’

‘Yes, I guess so.’ It would be useless trying to explain his regret at what, through his police work, he had brought into their lives.

There was no time for a shower. Normally, at this time of morning, he would be in the pool; that, too, was out for the time being. He had a quick wash, throwing the cold water into his face as if to convince himself that he should be fully awake; which he was. He put on a short-sleeved shirt, cotton trousers and a pair of canvas shoes and went out to get the newspapers. He had no intention of reading them; it was force of habit. Today was Australia Day, a national holiday, when the natives, a notoriously phlegmatic lot, searched in themselves for a sediment of patriotism. This weekend, with the Gulf war promising to be more than a nine-day horror, with the country’s economy up to its crotch in recession and sinking further, the flag-waving would be even more desultory than usual. He glanced at the headlines. Saddam, the medieval thug, was playing dirty: he was flooding the Gulf with oil. President Bush, always with an eye to the vote, was calling him an environment terrorist. Malone, taking a narrow view, wondered which was worse, oil in the Gulf or a dead man in your kids’ swimming pool.

He was about to go back into the house when the two police cars, silent and with no blue and red lights flashing, pulled up at the kerb. Detective Sergeant Wal Dukes got out of the first car.

‘I was just knocking off, Scobie, when they told me you had a problem.’ He was a big man, a one-time Olympic heavyweight boxer now run a little to fat; he was reliable, but sometimes a bit heavy-handed, as if he thought he still had a few rounds to go in his last bout. ‘Crime Scene on their way?’

‘Yeah.’ Physical Evidence was still called Crime Scene by the older men in the Department: change for change’s sake was something they didn’t favour. Malone closed the front door. ‘Let’s go round the side. I want to keep the kids out of this. The bloody place is going to be over-run in a while. Stick to the path, in case there are some shoe prints in that grass strip there.’

They went round to the back of the house, followed by Dukes’ junior, a young detective named Lazarus, and the two uniformed men who had come in the second car. Grime was still out in the middle of the pool, the skim-net still over his face, looking for all the world like a drunk who had decided to have a floating sleep.

‘He’s Normie Grime, Scungy they called him. I’ve been using him as an informant for the past three months, since he got out of the Bay.’

‘What was he in for?’

‘Passing dud notes. He was into everything, but he was always just a hanger-on, never big time.’

‘What were you using him for?’

‘I’ve been on a homicide, a young Vietnamese was murdered in a back lane in Surry Hills. He was into drugs, the Asian, and I hoped Scungy could give me a lead or two. Scungy himself, as far as I know, never sold the hard stuff, but he knew everyone who did.’

‘Was he coming here to see you?’

Malone looked at him as if he had been accused of corruption. ‘Here? Wal, I don’t even let cops come here! Except Russ Clements.’

‘Well, we’re here now.’ But Dukes said it as gently as he could, though gentleness was not one of his talents. He looked out at the drifting Grime, who had floated close to the far side of the pool and was now staring up through the skim-net at one of the uniformed men as he reached out for the long pole. ‘Watch out, Kenny, you’re gunna fall in!’

Kenny fell in, with a loud splash and a muffled curse. Dukes turned back to Malone. ‘How do we divide this one up? It’s in my territory, but he’s your property, as it were.’

‘I’ll hang on to him, Wal, if it’s okay with you. If I need any help –?’

‘Sure, all you need.’ The uniformed cop, Kenny, had pushed the body to the side of the pool. It was now floating at the feet of the two senior detectives. Dukes looked down at it. ‘Fuck ‘em!’

‘Who?’

‘Crims. Why don’t they go out into the middle of the Nullabor Plain when they wanna bump each other off?’

Ten minutes later Russ Clements and the Physical Evidence team arrived simultaneously. All at once the back garden was seething with activity, a police production; for the first and last time in this life Scungy Grime was a star. The Cayburn family stood on their balcony, the parents and their two teenage sons, Gloria Cayburn with her hand over her mouth as if stifling a scream; beyond the opposite side fence the Malones’ other neighbours, an elderly couple named Bass who normally minded their own business, stood on a ladder, one above the other, like a geriatric trapeze pair about to climb to the high wire. Malone, catching a glimpse of them, waved to them, then looked sourly at Clements.

‘You reckon we should charge admission?’

‘Take it easy, mate. They’re neighbours, for Crissake. You’d rather they turned their backs on you?’ But the big, rumpled man knew what was causing the tension in Malone; he had gone into the house as soon as he had arrived and spoken to Lisa and the children. He was the surrogate uncle and he was as anxious as Malone to see that this murder did not throw too long a shadow over this house. ‘Let’s go inside.’

Then he looked past Malone and suddenly smiled, an expression of abrupt pleasure out of keeping with his sombre mood of a moment ago. ‘G’day, Romy. You didn’t say you were on call today.’

‘They’ve given all the Old Australians the day off. We’ve been told we can wave the flag next year.’ She was smiling as she said it, there was no sourness. She was the GMO, one of the government medical officers from the Division of Forensic Medicine in the State Department of Health. She was Romy Keller, slim and attractive, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with just a trace of accent, ten years out of Germany and still trying to be an Australian. ‘I didn’t know this was your place, Inspector. When they called me, they just gave me an address . . . When did it happen?’

‘The murder? I don’t know. My daughter found him in the pool.’

‘Poor child.’ She glanced towards the body, which was now lying on the bricks beside the pool, a green plastic sheet thrown over it. ‘Anyone looked at the body?’

‘Sergeant Dukes gave him a once-over,’ said Clements. ‘There’s no sign of any wound. It could be a heart attack.’

‘Then it wouldn’t be murder, would it?’ She looked at Malone.

He nodded. ‘Righto, you’re right. I jumped to conclusions. Maybe it’s some sick joke. Some mate of his found him dead and decided to dump him in my pool. I just don’t think that’s the way it is.’

She sensed the tension in him, gave him no immediate answer, looked once more at the sheet-covered body, then said, ‘Okay, we’ll take him away and look at him in the morgue. I’d rather do it there than give a show for them.’

She made a sweeping gesture, at the Cayburns, the Basses and at the back fence, where a family whose name Malone didn’t know were lined up, all seven of them, on chairs, their faces hung above the palings like pumpkin halves.

‘Take him away then,’ said Clements. ‘You doing anything tonight?’

She glanced at Malone before she answered Clements. ‘No. Call me at the morgue.’

‘I’ve never had a girl say that to me before.’

‘You haven’t lived, Russ.’ She smiled at him and Malone and left them.

Malone opened the screen door and ushered Clements into the kitchen ahead of him. ‘Is there something on between you and her?’

‘Just the last coupla weeks.’

‘You kept that pretty quiet.’

‘You know what it’s like. It gets out you’re dating someone connected with the Department and they put out an ASM. There’s nothing in it. She’s just a good sort.’

‘Who’s a good sort?’ said Lisa, coming into the kitchen. She was dressed in slacks and shirt and her hair was pulled back from her face by a bright blue band. She looked composed enough, but Malone, a sixteen-year veteran of marriage and a policeman to boot, could recognize the signs of tension.

‘You are,’ said Clements and pressed her arm. Over the years he had gradually fallen in love with Lisa Malone, but neither she nor Malone thought it was anything more than just affection.

‘Where are the kids?’ said Malone.

‘I told them to stay in our bedroom, not to come sticky-beaking out here. At least till they’ve taken the – the body away.’

‘I think it’d be an idea if you took ’em over to your parents’ for the day. The Crime Scene lot could be here for a while.’

‘I’ve already rung Mother. We’ll go over to Vaucluse after I’ve made breakfast. Have you eaten, Russ?’

Malone left the two of them in the kitchen and went into the main bedroom at the front of the house. The two girls, dressed in shorts and shirts, were lolling on the bed; Lisa, with her Dutch neatness, had already made it up. Tom, in shorts and T-shirt, was flopped like a rag doll in the armchair in the corner by the window. Occasionally he would raise his head and peer out at the police cars in the street and the small knots of people outside the neighbouring houses. Disappointment clouded his small face: all that excitement going on outside and here he was stuck in the house as if he was sick or something!

‘What’s happening, Daddy?’ Maureen had regained her natural curiosity; she would never allow the world to keep its secrets from her. Of course she would never know even half its secrets; but Malone knew her questioning would never cease. She still had not regained her normal bouncing energy, but at least she no longer seemed frightened. ‘Have they taken the corpse away?’

‘Not yet. When they take it out, don’t hang out the window like a lot of ghouls, okay?’

‘What’s a ghoul?’ said Tom, who had his own curiosity, not about the world but about words.

‘Explain it to him,’ Malone said to Claire. ‘Don’t lay it on too thick.’

She gave him her fourteen-year-old-woman-of-the-world look. ‘I’m not stupid, Inspector. But what was that man doing in our pool anyway?’

‘I wish I knew,’ said Malone and went out into the hallway and rang Superintendent Greg Random, commander of the Regional Crime Squad.

‘Sorry to ring you at home, Greg, but I’ve got a problem.’

Random listened to what Malone told him, then said in his slow voice, ‘You want to stay on the case? Not to be too obvious, it’s a bit close to home.’

‘Grime was my pigeon, Greg. I’m not sure it’s murder yet, I’m only guessing. But if it is, whoever did him in has got something against me. I’d like to find out who it is.’

Random took his time; silences were part of his personality and character. Then: ‘Okay, stay with him. But if this gets any closer to home, I mean if there are any threats against your family, you’re off the case, understand? Who’s assisting you?’

‘Russ Clements is already here.’

‘I might’ve guessed it. Are you two holding hands?’

‘Only when my wife isn’t looking.’

He hung up and went back out to the kitchen. Lisa had drawn down the blinds on the window that looked out on the swimming pool; Clements and the children were now seated at the kitchen table waiting for her to serve breakfast. The scene looked cosy enough, but there was an alertness to everyone, that stillness of the head and stiffening of the neck of someone listening for a warning cry. Outside the house the Physical Evidence team were keeping their voices to a low murmur, as if this crime was on a new level, committed in an environment that had to be protected.

Dr Keller came to the screen door. ‘Inspector Malone? I’m finished here, we’re taking him away.’

Malone pushed open the door and went out, aware of Lisa’s and the children’s eyes following him. ‘You find anything on the body?’ He kept his voice low. ‘Any needle-marks or anything?’

‘Not so far.’ She moved away back to the pool fence and he followed her, thankful for her discretion. She had a low pleasant voice; she stood close to him, as if sharing an intimacy. Which they were, in a way: the death of Scungy Grime. She was wearing some sort of light perfume, a sweet-smelling GMO; he wondered if she wore it against the pervasion of formaldehyde and other laboratory odours. ‘Was he a drug-user?’

‘Not as far as I know. You don’t use junkies as informers, unless you have to. They’re too much of a risk.’

‘He could have died of just a heart attack – I shan’t know till I get to work on him.’ She looked after the green-shrouded body as it was carried past them. Crumbs, thought Malone, we all finish up looking like garbage; the body-bags of war were made by manufacturers of garbage-bags. Suddenly he felt a pang of pity for the dead man.

Wal Dukes and the senior constable in charge of the Physical Evidence team joined them. Constable Murrow was a chunky man in his early thirties with a pale blond moustache and almost white eyebrows; yet his eyes were dark brown. The first impression of his face was that his features were totally unrelated, that he could be the mix of half a dozen fathers. He had the air of a man not quite sure of source or destination, but Malone knew that he was, at least, on top of his job.

‘What have you got, Wayne?’

‘We found some heel impressions around the side of the house. It looks like he was carried in here by one guy.’

‘He was small enough,’ said Wal Dukes, who was big enough to have carried a couple of men of Grime’s size.

Malone looked past him, saw the TV cameraman come round the back corner of the house, camera already whirring. ‘No!’

‘I’ll fix him.’ Clements had come out of the screen door, was moving on heavy, deliberate feet towards the cameraman, who was still glued to his eye-piece when he was grabbed by the shoulders from behind and spun round out of sight beyond the corner.

‘Jesus!’ Malone could feel himself quivering.

Romy Keller and the two policemen looked at him sympathetically; he was surprised that it was the GMO, the outsider, who put her hand on his arm. ‘They’re always scavenging, you know that. It’s part of the business.’

‘I’ll see there’s a guy posted out the front to keep the vultures out,’ said Dukes. Relations between the Department and the media were always touchy. The media were fortunate, they were responsible only to toothless tribunals. The police were responsible to public opinion, which has fangs. ‘I think it’d be an idea if you moved out for a day or two, Scobie.’

‘No!’

Then Malone abruptly simmered down. It was unusual for him to allow his anger to erupt as it had; he was not without anger, but normally he could put a lid on it as soon as it started to bubble. But these were not normal circumstances; not that murder in itself was a normal circumstance. His home had been invaded, his family threatened: he did not immediately think in such melodramatic phrases, he was too laconic for that, but his feelings were dramatic enough. Now he had himself under control again, he was mapping out the immediate future.

‘No.’ His voice was quieter. ‘That’d be a point scored for whoever did this.’ He gestured at the pool, empty now of Scungy Grime but still surrounded by members of the PE team. ‘I’m moving my wife and kids over to the in-laws, but I’ll stay here.’

‘Have it your way then,’ said Dukes. ‘I think I’d probably do the same. We can’t let the shit get away with it. Sorry, Doc.’ He was the old-fashioned sort who didn’t swear in front of women, at least women he didn’t know.

Romy smiled. ‘I think I’d better be going. I’ll call you, Inspector, at Homicide as soon as I have something.’

She left them, stopping at the corner of the house to speak to Clements as he came round from evicting the cameraman. Then she was gone, but not before she had put her hand on the big man’s arm and left it there a moment, a gesture of intimacy beyond her sympathetic touch towards Malone.

Clements looked at Murrow as he joined the three men. ‘Any prints or anything, Wayne?’

‘They’re trying to get some prints off the pool gate. Did you touch the gate, Inspector?’

Malone nodded. ‘I wasn’t thinking . . . Whoever dumped him in the pool made sure of the security lock when he was leaving.’

‘Nice of him,’ said Clements. ‘Didn’t want some toddler from up the street wandering in and falling in with Scungy.’

‘Anything on Scungy?’ Malone asked. ‘Wallet or anything?’

‘Nothing,’ said Murrow. ‘He’s skint. Anyone know where he lived?’

‘I do,’ said Malone and looked at Clements. ‘I’ll get changed. You and I can go and have a look at his flat.’

‘You haven’t had breakfast.’

‘I don’t feel like it.’

‘Tell that to Lisa.’ Clements was not only an adopted uncle, he was sometimes an adoptive brother. ‘Get something into you. You know she won’t let you leave the house till you’ve eaten.’

‘Women!’ Dukes and Murrow, both married men, looked at Malone with sour understanding. Then Dukes said, ‘I’ve got men interviewing everyone in your street, in case they saw something, a car or something.’

Malone was grateful that he had not had to go out and confront the neighbours. He valued his privacy and respected theirs. Last week, in the northern suburbs, a small tornado had struck; neighbours had rallied together, help had been generous and welcome. But murder was another storm altogether.

‘I’ll get things tidied up here, Scobie, then I’ll hand the running sheets over to you and Russ. Call on me if there’s anything further. Or do you want me to set up a Crime Scene room down at the station?’

‘Let’s keep it small for the moment. Handle it without too much fuss, Wal. I don’t want our street turned into the Mardi Gras.’

Lisa had Malone’s breakfast on the table when he went back into the kitchen: apple juice, muesli with sliced mango, toast, honey and coffee. ‘I heard those remarks out there. You’re right, I wouldn’t let you leave the house with an empty belly.’

‘Any clues, Daddy?’ Maureen had recovered. Given her head, she would have been out in the street giving interviews to the media. Her father had the most interesting job in the world: solving murders was heaps better than making a fortune buying and selling crummy old buildings or being a general fighting a crummy war. ‘I heard you say his name. Scungy something. Scungy – what a name!’

‘What’s it mean?’ said Tom, adding another word to his catholic vocabulary.

‘Creepy,’ said Claire, his teacher. ‘Sleazy. God, tomorrow it’s going to be absolutely stoking at school! First day of term and all everyone will want to talk about is our murder!’

‘What’s wrong with that?’ said Maureen, story already rehearsed.

‘Our murder?’ said Lisa, looking at Malone from the other end of the table. ‘If I hear anyone say that again, there’ll be another murder. Okay?’

The children suddenly sensed their mother’s displeasure; what disturbed them was that it seemed to be directed against their father and not them. Malone himself felt the impact. He chewed on a mouthful of muesli, chewing on the right words too: ‘There’ll be no more cops here, I promise. They’ll get everything cleared up today and that’ll be it.’

‘I wanted to take pictures.’ Tom had been given a camera at Christmas, a present from Lisa’s parents who, in Malone’s view, always lavished too much on the children. The pool outside had been a present from Jan and Elisabeth Pretorius and when Malone had first dived into it the water had stung him like a bathful of vinegar.

‘If he’s going to take pictures, I’d like copies of the running sheets,’ said Maureen. ‘I’ll write an essay for Social Studies –’

Malone abruptly got up from the table and as he went out of the kitchen he heard Claire say, ‘Shut up, motor-mouth. This is a domestic.’

God, he thought, they’ve even learned the jargon. What have I done to them? Then he was aware of Lisa behind him in the hallway. He stopped at their bedroom door.

‘It’s not my fault, y’know.’

‘I know that. But whom do I bitch to?’ Whom: Dutch-born, she had a respect for English grammar that the natives had recently tossed into the waste-basket.

‘Did you hear what Claire said? This is a domestic. Are you going to beat the hell out of me?’

‘I always thought it was the other way round, husbands beating up their wives.’ She put her arms round his neck. ‘This doesn’t mean they’ll be looking for you next, does it?’

He went stiff in her embrace. ‘Start thinking like that, I will beat the hell out of you! Jesus, darl –’ Then he relaxed, feeling the stiffness in her; he was only increasing her fear, his denial sounded too forced. ‘Putting Scungy in the pool is just some sort of sick joke, that’s all. Even his name is a sick joke.’

She was not convinced. She knew that he loved her as deeply as any man could love; but she knew too that a man’s passion is rarely as deep, never as consuming as a woman’s can be. Scobie would die for her, she knew; she would do the same for him, but gladly. She wasn’t sure that men ever died gladly, least of all for love.

She kissed him. ‘I want everyone out of the place by tomorrow morning, the Crime Scene tapes taken down, everything gone. I’m coming back to my home first thing tomorrow morning and I want Scungy whatever-his-name-is scrubbed right out, not a trace of him. I love you.’

‘I was beginning to wonder.’ He grinned, though it was an effort, and returned her kiss.

2

The heat was already building up as Clements drove them into the city, to Woolloomooloo. The morning sun, reflected from the sheer glass walls of one building to the glass walls of another (Malone had begun to suspect that lately architects were turning Sydney into a City of Glass. Some day in the future they would find a singer who could hit an absolute top note, they would amplify it all over the city, all the buildings would shatter and the architects could start in all over again), till it seemed there were dozens of small suns, all striking at the eye. There was no breeze, the flags would hang limp on this Australia Day.

‘How did you get Scungy on side?’ Clements asked.

‘When he came out of Long Bay, Fraud were waiting to send him up on two more charges. I talked ’em out of it and told him he owed me.’

‘Did he come up with anything?’

‘Nothing I could use. He said he knew Joey Trang, the Vietnamese, but he didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I saw him last week and he said he was on to something, but he’d let me know when he was sure. He didn’t seem to believe what he’d heard.’

‘You didn’t try to squeeze it out of him?’ Then Clements shook his head. ‘No, you’re too soft, mate. A belt under the ear works wonders, you should try it some time.’

Malone looked at him seriously. ‘You really think I’m too soft?’

‘I dunno, to tell you the truth.’ Clements took the car down the curve at the bottom of Macleay Street and along the waterfront where the navy ships were moored. A large crowd already lined the tall wire fence, most of them there to celebrate the national holiday, a few protesters holding up banners demanding Peace in the Gulf! Beyond the ships the waters of the small bay glinted like broken blue glass. ‘When did you last clock a villain, give him a real going-over?’

Malone thought a while. ‘About ten years ago. But I tell you what – if I find the bastard who tossed Scungy into our pool, I’ll beat the shit out of him before I book him.’

‘Good. I’ll hold your coat. If he’s too big and young for you, I’ll hold him.’

Woolloomooloo is a pocket between two shoulders just east of the city centre. For over a hundred years before Malone was born ships, sealers, traders and passenger liners had docked in the small ’Loo Bay; pubs and brothels had for years put a ceiling on real-estate values. Sailors and prostitutes met in a common market and it was said that even a decent girl, if she slipped and fell on the broken pavements, would earn a quid before she was back on her feet. Gangs used to whet their razors on the local rocks before going up the eastern hill to Darlinghurst and Kings Cross to carve up the competition. For years poverty had hung over the ’Loo like a harbour mist. Across on the western ridge, on the edge of the Domain, one of the city’s parks, stands a statue of Henry Lawson, the proletarians’ poet. He had once written, ‘Sorrow and poverty taught me to sing’; but only drunken bawdy songs had come out of the ’Loo. Lawson, an alcoholic, might have understood and wept for those who sang them.

In recent years there had been efforts to coat the ’Loo with respectability. Old terrace houses had been gentrified, crones taken to a beauty parlour; blocks of Housing Commission flats had been built under the lee of the eastern hill. The merchant sailors no longer came to this part of the port of Sydney and the girls, or their daughters or granddaughters, had moved up the road to William Street or the Cross. Still, there were reminders of poverty: a men’s hostel stood in the shadow of the railway viaduct and every night the derelict and homeless stood in line waiting for a bed. They would be the skulls, the memento mori, at today’s anniversary party.

Scungy Grime had lived in one of the Commission flats. Up the road some winos sat in the gutter in the morning sun, sweating out last night’s plonk. When Malone and Clements got out of their car the bleary eyes sharpened for a moment and the red noses lifted like those of pointer dogs waiting to be put down. They hadn’t lost their sense of smell of a mug copper.

The two detectives went into the block of flats, found the superintendent and had him let them into Grime’s flat. ‘He was murdered, you say?’

‘No, we didn’t say that,’ said Malone. ‘What made you say it?’

‘I dunno. I guess I just jumped to conclusions.’ He was a fat man whose stained panama hat looked as if it would be a permanent fixture on his head; it had a screwed-on look, Malone thought, like a jar-lid. He was not surprised by his tenant’s death; he was a ’Loo resident, born and bred, he was familiar with a dozen ways of dying. ‘Someone come looking for him last night, but he’d already gone out –’

‘You see who it was?’

‘Nah. He was out there on the landing, the light was out – bastards around here are always pinching the globes. I was down the stairs, I just saw him knocking on Normie’s door. I sang out there was nobody home, I’d seen Normie go out –’

‘Describe the man.’

‘I can’t.’ The fat shoulders shook in a shrug. ‘I told you, the light was out, there was only the light from the landing below. He didn’t even look down at me, he just went along that hallway outside and disappeared – there’s another flight of stairs further along . . . Normie always looked a bit jumpy, you know what I mean? He come home Sat’day night and I spoke to him, he didn’t see me, and he jumped like I’d jabbed him with a needle or something. I got the idea, talking to him occasionally, he’d made some enemies when he was out at the Bay.’

‘You knew he’d been in jail?’

‘Oh, sure. You work here long as I have, you get to know everyone’s history.’ He would make a point of it, it was one of the perks of the job. He went to sit down in Grime’s small living room, to take a load off his feet, as he put it, but Clements stood holding open the front door.

‘We’ll check with you on our way out, Mr Shanagan.’

Shanagan could take a hint; in the ’Loo, if you didn’t, you often took something else, like a fist in the face. ‘Sure, sure. You know where to find me. Take your time.’

Clements closed the door on him and Malone said, ‘We’ll talk to him later. He’s busting to tell us anything we want to know.’

‘You think he knows any more than he’s told us?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’d say no. He’s a bull artist, the sort who’ll break their neck to be called as a witness. We’ll send one of the young blokes back to talk to him.’

The flat was small. A bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen: you could swing a cat in it, but the terrified beast would have been scratching the walls with each swing. It was neat, a place for everything and everything in its place. Including a diary and an address book, one placed neatly on the other; the morbid thought struck Malone that perhaps Grime had laid everything out for them. He had always thought Grime a cheerful little man, one who would have turned a blind eye to the possibility of his own death. But maybe he had been wrong about the little man.

‘Nothing’s been disturbed,’ said Clements, coming back from the bedroom. ‘Doesn’t look as if he died here. The bed’s still made, with the cover on it. He’s even got his pyjamas laid out on it!’

‘Where do you lay yours out? On the floor?’

Malone looked around. This was a lonely man’s home; one could feel the loneliness, like a sad current in the air. There was a solitary photo: a young Grime between a couple who could have been his parents. All three were smiling: a happy day long ago. Malone wondered if Grime had remembered when the photo was taken. He turned it over. On the back was a date: 1963, November 22. Not really a happy day, though he doubted that Scungy Grime, even then, would have been upset by the assassination of a President. He had always had a limited view of the world.

‘Did you know he worked on the wharves?’ Clements held up a card. ‘This is a WLU ticket.’

Malone shook his head. ‘He told me he was still on the dole. How would he get into the Wharf Labourers Union? He couldn’t lift a box of cornflakes.’

‘You’re living in the past, mate.’

‘My old man’s past. He worked on the wharves. Yeah, I know it’s all mechanized these days, but they still look for muscle.’

‘He could’ve been a tally clerk.’

‘If he was, God help the balance of payments. Put a pencil in his hand and he couldn’t do anything else but make two and two add up to five. Check with the WLU.’

‘What about his family? Did he have any?’

‘He had a wife one time, down in Melbourne. He came up here about ten years ago. He had a record down there, the same things he did up here, small-time stuff.’

He was looking through Grime’s diary. No full names were mentioned, as if the dead man stood by the old army and criminal code: no names, no pack drill. But occasionally a given name appeared in front of an initial, as if to distinguish that person from someone with the same initials. One name and initial figured twice in the diary, the last entry only two nights ago. Ring Jack A . . . ‘Where would a 905 number be?’

Clements was a grab-bag of inconsequential information, with a mind like the waste-bin of a computer. He frowned, bit his lower lip, then said, ‘Somewhere around Manly. Maybe Harbord, around there.’

‘Who do we know named Jack A. who lives in Harbord?’ But they both knew and they looked at each other with that cynical surprise that passes for excitement with cops of long experience. ‘Jack Aldwych. Why would Scungy be ringing our friend Jack? He told me he’d given up working for Jack even before he went into the Bay.’

‘You think Jack had him done in?’

‘I hope not.’

He did not want to take on the biggest crim in the country, not if Scungy Grime had been Jack Aldwych’s calling card left on the doorstep of the Malone home.

3

He and Clements drove over the Harbour Bridge and out to Harbord, one of the closest of the northern beaches. The main road was clogged with holiday traffic. The northern beaches were supposed to be cleaner than the beaches south of the harbour, the sewage spill apparently knowing where the fortunate northerners swam and obligingly avoiding them. So people came from the south and the west and piddled in the northern waters and everyone cursed the Water Board and the government for not doing their job. The sun blazed down and everyone was slowly dying of sun cancer, but what better way was there to spend a hot summer holiday?

The air-conditioning in Clements’ car suddenly stopped working. Clements, patience exhausted as he halted for the fifth time in a traffic jam, reached for the blue light that he wasn’t supposed to carry in his private vehicle, put it on the roof and blared his horn. At once two youths jumped out of a stolen car and ran off down a side street and half a dozen other drivers looked guilty, wondering if they had been chased all this way for breaking the speed limit over the Bridge. Clements pulled his Nissan out on to the wrong side of the road and drove down against the oncoming traffic.

‘You’re going to get us booked for this,’ said Malone. ‘I’ll tell ’em you did it against my express orders.’

‘Tell ’em I went mad with the heat. Hello, we’ve got company.’

Up ahead a motorcycle cop, straddling his bike, was waiting for them directly in their path. Clements pulled up, got out and approached the officer. He was back in less than a minute.

‘Righto, what bull did you feed him this time?’ said Malone.

‘I told him the truth – or anyway, half of it. I said a dead man had been dumped in your pool and we had to get to the chief suspect before he packed up and fled the country. Hang on!’

‘You mention Jack Aldwych’s name?’

‘Who else? It’ll make that motorcycle cop’s day. Better than picking up mug lairs exceeding the speed limit.’

‘You’re exceeding it. What if he radios Manly and we get half their strength as back-up?’

‘I told him we’d already called Manly.’

Half-truths are weapons police and criminals use against each other; they have learned from the black-belt masters, the lawyers. Malone hoped that the motorcycle cop up ahead, siren now screaming, showed a sense of humour when he learned the full truth.

The motorcycle cop took them out of the main stream of traffic, through side streets, and within five minutes brought them, his siren still screaming, to the front gates of Jack Aldwych’s mansion. It was a big two-storeyed house with verandahs right round it on both levels. It had been built at the turn of the century by a circus-owning family and it was said that the ghosts of acrobats still tumbled around the grounds at night and a high-wire spirit had been seen flying across the face of the moon. Ghosts didn’t protect Jack Aldwych, just a black-haired minder built like a small elephant.

He stood inside the big iron-barred gates, shaking his head at Malone and Clements. ‘Mr Aldwych aint here. No, I dunno I can tell you where he is, he don’t like being disturbed.’

Clements said, ‘Would he be disturbed if we ran you in?’

‘What fucking for?’

‘Swearing at an officer. Come on – Blackie Ovens, isn’t it? You better tell us where we can find him or we’re gunna camp here till he comes home. It’ll lower the tone of the neighbourhood. Jack wouldn’t like that.’

Ovens pondered, then shrugged. ‘Geez, youse guys are hard. Okay, he’s out at the Cricket Ground. He’s got a private box in the Brewongle Stand.’

‘He’s a cricket fan?’ Malone’s voice cracked with surprise.

‘Nuts about it. I’ll tell him you’re coming.’ He unhitched a hand-phone from his belt. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll wait for you. He wouldn’t leave a cricket match even to see the Police Commissioner bumped off.’ He grinned to show he was only joking; the three officers stared back at him. ‘Sorry.’

As Malone and Clements got back into the Nissan, the motorcycle cop, already astride his machine, eased in beside them. ‘So you were afraid the chief suspect was gunna split overseas? He’s out at the cricket! Next time you come over this side of the harbour, go through the proper fucking channels!’

He roared off and Clements looked at Malone. ‘They’re not very polite this side of the harbour, are they?’

‘What are you going to do, pull rank on him? Forget it. We asked for it and we got it. Take me out to the Cricket Ground and then go on out to my place and see if they’re finished there. Lisa wants everyone out by this evening. Make sure she gets what she wants.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Rustle up someone and send him down to talk to that caretaker at Scungy’s flats. Get him to talk to the other people in Scungy’s block.’

‘What if he just died of a heart attack or something?’

‘I still want the bastard who dumped him in my pool. Maureen was shivering when she came in to tell me she’d found him. What are you doing?’

Clements was getting out of the Nissan. ‘I don’t run to a car-phone, I’ve just got the radio connected to Police Centre.’

He went back to the gates, spoke to Blackie Ovens, who handed him his hand-phone. Clements punched a number, waited, then spoke into the mouthpiece. Malone was too far away to hear whom he was calling or what was being said. Then Clements handed the phone back to Ovens and came back to the car.

‘I just called Romy Keller. She thinks Scungy was poisoned. It looks as if you’re gunna get your murder after all.’

When Clements dropped Malone at the Cricket Ground people were still queuing to get into the ground. Malone flashed his badge at the attendants on the turnstiles into the Brewongle Stand, but his name meant nothing to them. He had played for the State on this ground twenty years ago, but these men would have been only boys then and he had never been big enough to be a boyhood hero. He went up in the lift to the floor where the private boxes were situated, flashed his badge again at the floor attendant, an older man who remembered him, and knocked on the door of the suite marked Saltbush Investments. It was opened by a waiter in a white jacket, whose small thin face went whiter than the jacket when he saw Malone.

‘Hello, Larry. You do a waiter’s course last time you were inside?’

‘G’day, Inspector.’ Larry Quick gave his con man’s smile. ‘You wanna see me or Mr Aldwych?’

‘The boss. I think he might be expecting me. Didn’t he get a phone call?’

‘Yeah, but he doesn’t always tell me everything.’

Malone followed Quick through the small private lounge and out to the seats on the balcony. Jack Aldwych, tall and heavily built, broad-brimmed white panama on his silver hair, regal in a cannibal chief way, sat there alone.

‘Inspector Malone.’ His dead wife Shirl, a respectable woman, had taught him to be polite; it was an effort, but occasionally he succeeded. ‘I got a message you were on your way. Come to see the match? You must wish you were out there now, eh?’

Malone looked out at the famous ground, a bright green lake surrounded by cliffs of stands speckled, as if with the child’s decoration of hundreds and thousands, with the huge crowd’s colours. In the middle two Australians, in green and gold, were batting; spread around them, in two shades of blue, were the eleven Englishmen. This was a one-day match, a type of game that hadn’t been invented when Malone was playing. Its accelerated pace, the almost desperate chase for runs, the pyjama-like uniforms, the hoopla and exaggerated behaviour of the players, all of it had brought the crowds back to cricket, but Malone was one of the old school. If a team-mate had kissed him when he had taken a wicket, he would have run a stump through the molester.

‘No. I was a bowler, Jack. One-day games aren’t meant for bowlers, they’re for batsmen. You never hear of a groundsman these days preparing a wicket for bowlers – the Cricket Board would have him jailed. All the crowd wants to see is big hitting. It’s Happy Hour for the batsmen and bugger-you-Bill for the bowlers. You come here often?’

‘Every day there’s a match, one-day games, Sheffield Shield, Test matches. I’m a cricket-lover. Most of the crims you and I know, they all go to the races, the horses or the dogs. But I love cricket. A gentleman’s game – or it used to be.’ He smiled an old crim’s smile, full of wry irony. ‘I bought this private box through one of my companies and I come here as a guest of meself and watch in comfort. I tried to become a member here, but they always found a reason why I couldn’t make it. It’s okay if you’re a white-collar crim, but not if you’re a blue-collar one like I was. So I pay forty-two thousand bucks a year, but I don’t have to sit down there amongst the hoi-polloi, God love ‘em, and I can sit here and jerk my thumb at them across there in the Members’ Stand. What d’you want?’ he said abruptly, turning his head sharply to stare at Malone, who had sat down two seats along from him.

There were no dividing walls between the boxes out here on the balcony, only iron railings. Too much privacy might suggest elitism and that, God knew, was worse than bloody multiculturism. The neighbouring boxes were packed, mostly with men; the few women amongst them were watching Jack Aldwych, having been told who he was; they could hear nothing for the chatter of their own menfolk, who were already well oiled by the free grog of their hosts in the corporation boxes. Still, Malone dropped his voice almost to a murmur: ‘Jack, one of your fellers, Scungy Grime, turned up in my swimming pool at home this morning. Dead.’

‘Scungy? Poor little bugger.’ Aldwych showed no surprise. ‘You want something to drink?’

The morning heat struck into the balcony; the ground was slowly turning into a cauldron. Malone had taken off his jacket, but his armpits were marshes of sweat. ‘I’d like a light beer, if you’ve got one.’

Aldwych looked up at Quick, who had appeared in the doorway to the lounge. ‘A light beer for Mr Malone . . . Larry’s become my handyman. He’s lost his nerve. Makes you wanna laugh, a con artist who’s lost his nerve. But it’s sad, don’t you reckon? There aint too many artists left these days in our game.’

‘Jack, don’t change the subject. What about Scungy? That’s sad, being dead.’

‘Oh, you’re right about that. But you’re wrong about him being one of my fellers. Scungy wasn’t working for me for at least three months before he went in last time. He started talking drugs.’

‘Scungy? Thanks, Larry.’ Malone took the light beer, slaked his thirst. ‘He was talking drugs before he went in?’

Aldwych nodded, sipping his own beer. ‘Yeah. Why, was he talking to you about them recently?’

Malone hesitated; then decided to give a little information in the hope of some in return. ‘I’ve been using him, Jack, since he got out of the Bay.’

‘T’ch, t’ch,’ chided Aldwych, watching the game out in the middle. ‘Blokes who give information to coppers aint my favourites. Oh, nice shot! You see that?’

‘I saw it,’ said Malone sourly. Alan Border had clipped the English fast bowler in the air between slips and gully for four. ‘He’d never think of risking a shot like that in a real game. If it’s any consolation, Scungy never mentioned your name to me.’

‘Then why are you here?’ Aldwych looked back at Malone.

‘I came across your initials and your phone number in a diary he kept.’

‘Did he say anything about me in the diary?’

‘Jack, I’m not laying all my cards on the table, not yet.’

‘There would have been nothing Scungy had on me.’ He tipped his panama back. ‘I’m retired, Scobie – you mind if I call you Scobie? I’m seventy-five years old, my wife died eight months ago, and I’m tired. I’ve been a crim for over sixty years, I started when I was fifteen – they could call me the Godfather, if we went in for that sorta stuff out here. But for the last year, when I knew my wife was dying of cancer, I been as clean as a young nun. What could Scungy tell you about me that would interest you? Do you think I killed him?’

Beyond Aldwych, Malone saw a woman in the next box lean forward, ears popping out of her blow-wave like rabbits out of long yellow grass. ‘The thought occurred to me when I saw your initials in his diary.’

‘Scobie, I don’t kill people.’ He was a liar, but a good one; honesty shone out of his rheumy blue eyes like a smuggler’s beacon. When he was younger he had killed four men, but he had been acquitted of two of the murders and never been charged with the others. In later years he had hired other men to do the killing, as a good general should. ‘I’m sorry Scungy is dead, but if he was dealing in shit he deserved what he got. I’ve done everything else in my time –’ He suddenly looked over his shoulder at the eavesdropping woman. ‘Am I talking loud enough, madam?’

Malone almost burst out laughing at the look on the woman’s face. She reared back, the blow-wave bobbing on her head as if a strong wind had blown through it. She said something to her husband, a man recognized as one of the town’s top stockbrokers, but he, a man who knew when to buy and when to sell, was not buying into this. He said something to her, obviously a caution, and went back to watching the cricket, a much safer occupation than trying to pick a fight with a top crim. The woman abruptly got up and went back into the lounge.

Aldwych turned back, winked at Malone and went on as if there had been no interruption. ‘I’ve done the lot, Scobie. Sly grog, SP betting, robbed banks, run whores, you name it, I’ve done it. You blokes know all that, but you aint been able to put me away in years. One thing I never touched was shit. Shirl, that was my wife, she made me promise never to do that and I never did. Oh shit, Border’s gone! We’re in trouble now. What’s that? Four for fifty after, what, fifteen overs?’

‘The bowlers look like they’re on top,’ said Malone, licking his lips. The Indians were beating the bejesus out of the 7th Cavalry; or, in this morning’s headlines, it was as if the Iraqis had suddenly started to win the Gulf war. ‘Good.’

‘You didn’t say how Scungy was killed.’

All along the balcony people were standing up to stretch their legs while they waited for the incoming batsman. In the boxes immediately on either side of the Aldwych box, men and women had their heads in peculiar positions, as if they had become paralysed, as they tried to catch the conversation in Box 3A; ears were being dislocated and peripheral vision was strained to the point where one could imagine eyeball muscles twanging. One or two of them would cheat or swindle in business, but they could not bear to be caught eavesdropping.

Malone had a quiet voice; he made it even quieter. ‘He was poisoned, we think.’

‘Poisoned? And you think I might of done it? Or had it done? Inspector, I belong to the old school – you know what I mean.’ He put out his forefinger, made a rough imitation of a gun; then he raised the finger to his throat, turned it into a razor. He was smiling all the time, sharing the joke with a cop. Then he looked up behind Malone. ‘Oh, hello. You dunno my son, do you, Scobie? Jack Junior, this is Inspector Malone.’

Jack Aldwych Junior was as tall as his father but trimmer. He was about thirty, good-looking in a manufactured way, as if he had been put together by a hairdresser, a cosmetician and a tailor rather than just sired and borne. But his smile was genuine, if everything else about him looked artificial.

‘Inspector.’ His handshake was firm. He was casually dressed in sports shirt, blazer, slacks and loafers, but he was labelled all over: Dunhill, Ralph Lauren, Gucci. Malone, whom Gucci would have looked at and sent away barefoot, wondered if the Aldwych underwear was labelled. ‘Has Dad been up to something he shouldn’t have?’

‘He’s just been telling me he could run for Pope.’

‘Jack Junior runs the family companies. The legitimate ones.’ Aldwych smiled, a robber baron safe in his keep. He was one of the richest men in the country, but he never figured in any of the business magazines’ Rich Lists. Some of the other robber barons who had figured in those lists were now bankrupt and disgraced, but Jack Aldwych still had standing with some of the leading banks, though none of them would have wanted to be quoted as saying so. ‘This year he’s up for president of the Young Presidents.’

‘Then he wouldn’t have known Scungy Grime?’ Malone addressed the question to Jack Senior, but he had one eye on Jack Junior.

‘Who’s he?’ said Jack Junior.

‘A small-timer,’ said his father. ‘He worked for me once upon a time. Who’ve you got with you today?’

Jack Junior glanced back through the wide window into the inner lounge. ‘Her name’s Janis Eden, she’s a social worker.’

‘That’s a change. They’re usually models or society layabouts,’ Aldwych told Malone. He had his class distinctions, it came of being a self-made man.

Then the girl, a glass of champagne in her hand, came out on to the balcony. She was no startling beauty, but she had made the most of what looks she had; and somehow she looked less artificially handsome than Jack Junior. She was well dressed, in a casual way, and Malone wondered if she looked as elegant as this, Monday to Friday, when handing out comfort and advice to the battlers. But perhaps her welfare clients were bankrupt robber barons.

She pushed her thick auburn hair back with her free hand and gave Malone a cool nod when they were introduced. Malone knew that a lot of social workers were antagonistic to the police, but he had hoped for a little more sociability on a national holiday and here at the cricket.

‘Inspector Malone had a murdered man dumped in his swimming pool this morning,’ Aldwych offered. ‘It’s no way to start the day.’

‘It was this Scungy what’s-his-name?’ Jack Junior shook his head; not a hair in the thick dark mane moved. The girl’s hand moved towards the head, then she seemed to think that might not be appreciated and it landed on his shoulder. ‘I’m glad Dad’s put all that behind him.’

Malone looked at the girl, wondering if she knew who Jack Junior’s dad really was. She read the question in his face: ‘Oh, I know all about Mr Aldwych.’ She gave the old man a sweet smile. ‘Jack didn’t tell me about you. I read up on you.’

Aldwych didn’t appear to be put out; his reputation had never been a hair-shirt. ‘You mean there’s a file on me? In Social Services? You got one on me, too, Scobie?’

‘Not yet,’ said Malone, trying to sound good-humoured and sociable.

Janis Eden looked at him from above the rim of her champagne glass. She had certain studied mannerisms, as if somewhere there was a hidden camera photographing her for a television commercial. They would not go down well at Social Services, but maybe she used them only at weekends.

‘How do you police feel when crime lands, more or less, on your doorstep?’

‘We don’t like it. I hear you’re a social worker. What field?’

‘Drug rehabilitation. We’re kept busy.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ Malone stood up. The new batsman, Mark Waugh, had just begun his innings by belting three fours off the first three balls he had received. It was time for an old bowler to depart, before the insults started. ‘Well, I better be looking busy, too. Sitting here isn’t going to tell me who dumped Scungy Grime in my pool.’

Aldwych had been looking at the action out on the field, but he turned his head as Malone stood up. ‘Don’t you really wish you were out there now?’

‘No, Jack. I’m like you, I retired at the right time.’

He left them on that before they saw the lie in his face. He would dearly have liked to be out there on the field, even wearing coloured pyjamas and being belted all over the field by those hated bastards, batsmen. Life then, though it paid peanuts in those days, had been simple, uncomplicated and uncorrupted.

But as he went down in the lift he had the itchy feeling that Jack Aldwych, retired or not, knew more about the last months of Scungy Grime’s life than he had told.

4

When Malone had gone Jack Junior saw some acquaintances in one of the private boxes farther along the balcony and said he would go and say hello to them.

‘You want to come, Janis? It’s a chance for you to meet some of the guys who make the wheels go round in this town.’

‘No, thanks,’ she said, moving into the seat next to Aldwych Senior and settling herself. ‘I’ll stay and talk to your father. I think he made more wheels go round than those men along there, no matter who they are. Am I right, Mr Aldwych?’ She gave him a full smile.

He nodded to his son. ‘You go along there, Jack. Janis and I are gunna get to know each other a little better.’

Jack Junior hesitated, like a man who did not trust either one or the other or both of them; then he smiled. ‘Don’t let her rehabilitate you, Dad.’

When his son had gone, Aldwych said, ‘You’re not afraid of my reputation, Janis?’

‘That’s past, Mr Aldwych. You’ve reformed.’

He shook his big silver head. He had always been too beefy to be strictly handsome, but age had found some bone in his face and now he had the craggy look of a chipped and cracked Roman bust. But he never went to museums, so he never saw the resemblance. ‘No, I’m not reformed. Retired. There’s a difference.’

He turned his head for a moment as there was a roar from the crowd; one of the Australian batsmen had cracked another boundary. Then he looked back at her, his gaze as impenetrable as smoked glass. It was the look his enemies had seen when their fate hung in the balance.

But she did not seem disturbed by it. ‘Well, whatever. The law is no longer chasing you, is it?’

Only his wife Shirl had spoken to him like this; but she had not had the education and poise of this girl. He was not used to dealing with today’s generation, especially the female side of it. He had known some tough women in his younger days, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine had been two of them, but they had been rough and ready, their sense of gender equality based on the razor- and knuckle-men they employed. They had had none of the smooth arrogance of this young woman.

‘Would you be going out with Jack Junior if the law was still chasing me?’

‘For one thing, I don’t think of him as Jack Junior. That implies he’s not his own person. Have you ever thought of that?’ She turned and looked back through the plate-glass at Larry Quick and held up her champagne flute.

Aldwych was annoyed at her self-confidence. Women, he thought, had too much independence these days; he was glad he was in the home stretch of his life. Though he was not given to metaphors of the turf: horses and jockeys were as unreliable as women. Women in general, that is: he had never lumped Shirl with the rest of them. ‘No, I haven’t. His mother christened him, not me. He’s done all right.’

Her glass refilled, she turned back to him. She had no interest at all in what was going on out in the middle of the ground; that, too, annoyed him. In his youth she was the sort of girl he would have belted; but Jack Junior would never do that, he was sure. His son, he sometimes thought, was a wimp, too influenced by his mother, who had believed in Christian morals and respect for girls and other hopeless ideas.

‘To answer your question, yes, I’d still go out with Jack, whether the law was after you or not. I’m very single-minded, Mr Aldwych. Much like you used to be, I’d guess.’

They were now sitting in the middle seats of the back row on the balcony, several seats distant from the boxes on either side. The inquisitive woman had not reappeared and the men on both sides were more interested in the cricket than in trying to listen to the conversation between the attractive young girl and the old criminal. Old men rarely have interesting conversations with young girls, not unless they’re dirty old men, and the young girl looked too composed to be listening to that sort of approach.

‘Are you after his money? He’s gunna be a rich man some day.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am, in a way. I’m in danger of losing my job, the State’s cutting back on welfare, and the thought of being poor and out of work doesn’t appeal to me.’

‘Well, one thing, you’re honest.’

‘No, I used to be. I’ve reformed.’ She sipped her champagne, her eyes smiling at him above the flute. There was no coquetry to it; it puzzled him at first what it was. Then he recognized it: it was the look of another criminal, or anyway a potential one. He began to worry for Jack Junior, if only for Shirl’s sake.

‘You’ve never been poor?’ he said.

‘No. I come from a family that could afford to send me to a good school and then to university. But my father committed suicide after the stock market crash in eighty-seven and we found he’d left us no money at all. My mother now draws the pension and I have a brother who works as a barman in a pub, the only job he could get with a PhD in archaeology.’

Aldwych wondered why anyone in Australia would want to take a degree in archaeology; but he had never been one for digging up anything, unless it could be used for blackmail. ‘So you’ve set your sights on my son?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does he know it?’

‘He’d be dumb if he didn’t. And I don’t think he is. Why did you become what you are?’

‘You mean a crim or a success?’

Out on the field another Australian wicket had fallen; things were going from bad to worse, the bloody Poms were on top. He hated the English, despite his English name and lineage. His convict great-great-grandfather had spat on England the day they had transported him for assaulting and robbing a gentleman, and the family ever since had carried on the tradition. Three years ago, during the height of the Bicentennial celebrations, Aldwych had applied for membership of the First Fleet Pioneers, a society of the descendants of the first settlers; but he had been rejected. It was permitted to have had a convict as an ancestor, but the stain was supposed to have been washed out in succeeding generations. Criminality was not supposed to be part of the national heritage, though other nationalities were loud in their doubts of that belief.

Janis said, ‘I know why you became a success – you were ruthless. Why did you become a criminal? Was it because you had a deprived childhood? That’s what I hear a lot from the junkies I counsel.’

He laughed, a sound that still had some volume despite his age; some men in the box on their right turned their heads, wondering if the old crim was laughing at what was happening to Australia out there on the field. You never knew where a crim’s loyalties lay.

‘I was born what I grew up to be. My mother reckoned I was bad from the day I was weaned. I belted other kids and pinched whatever they had. I went to a State School and hated it and the teachers. I left soon’s I turned fourteen and I joined the old Railway Gang with Chow Hayes and Kicker Kelly and other blokes, all of ’em older than me. Then I become a stand-over man for Tilly Devine and her sly-grog racket . . . You want me to go on?’

She was smiling; it was difficult to tell whether she was impressed or disgusted. ‘You’re really proud of what you were, aren’t you?’

‘No. I’m not ashamed of it, either. It’s a fact and you never get anywhere in life denying facts. That’s why this country is in the mess it is right now, the politicians keep denying facts. One thing I never had was conceit. That was what killed more than half the crims I come up against. They thought they were better than me and they weren’t. That was a fact they denied.’

‘Did conceit kill them or did you?’

He looked at her steadily. ‘I thought you said you’d read up on me?’

‘I did. It said you were charged with two murders, but were acquitted.’

‘Don’t you believe in the jury system? Twelve of your peers who judge you innocent or guilty?’

‘No,’ she said, her own gaze as steady as his. ‘I’ve gone into court with junkies and seen the jury condemn them before they’ve heard the evidence. We’re all full of prejudices, Mr Aldwych.’

He continued to stare at her, then he said, ‘You and me are gunna get on all right, Janis. Now let’s watch the cricket.’

As he turned away to watch the play out on the field, he wondered if he had retired too soon. This girl had enough conceit, if that was the word, to smother Jack Junior.