Читать книгу A Different Turf - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 4

‘A typical woman,’ said Clements, but with affection. ‘You ask her a question in the dark and all she does is nod her head.’

‘If she doesn’t have a headache,’ said Lisa, ‘that’s all you need.’

‘Don’t be crude,’ said Malone. ‘Not in front of the b-a-b-y.’

It was hospital bedside chat, just another coverlet to keep the patient warm. Romy Clements, breast-feeding her day-old daughter, smiled at the three of them. She was a goodlooking, square-jawed woman, dark-haired and looking still a little peaked from what had been a difficult birth. She had insisted on a natural birth and had given the doctor the edge of her tongue when he had suggested a caesarean. She had wanted to tell him she knew all about pain, both mental and physical, but she did not have that kind of conceit. She had wondered, but not discussed it with the doctor or any of the mid-wives, if her aversion to the knife on her own body had something to do with the fact that, as Deputy-Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, she assisted in the use of the knife on bodies in the city morgue almost every day in the week.

‘Russ’, parents are coming up from Cootamundra tomorrow. Their first granddaughter.’

Clements explained: ‘My two sisters have five boys between them. Mum will be out of her mind with this one. It’s a pity—’ Then he abruptly shut up, tripping over his tongue.

Romy put out a hand to him. ‘It’s all right. As you say, it’s a pity my mother couldn’t have seen her. But …’ Her mother had been dead twelve years. No mention was made of her father, who had suicided after committing three murders. Malone, looking at the infant Clements, wondered how she would be protected against her heritage.

Clements was a big man, over six feet tall and weighing more than a hundred kilos. His forte was untidiness, though since his marriage to Romy two years ago there had been some improvement in his outward appearance. His mind, however, was a stuffed garbage bag; he could fossick in it and come up with a fact that nailed a piece of evidence to any number of courtroom walls. He was a senior-sergeant, the field supervisor in Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region, and some day he might make chief inspector. But he would go no further, he had left his run too late, and by then the Young Turks, with their tertiary education degrees and untainted by the old police culture, would be running the Service.

‘Have you decided on a name?’ asked Lisa Malone, who liked life to be neatly catalogued. She was Dutch, though she had spent very little of her life in Holland, and there was a Dutch neatness to her that Malone and their children gently derided, though they would not have wanted her any other way.

‘Russ wanted to call her Marlene. He has some idea that all German girls are called Marlene or Romy or Brunhilde. She’s going to be Amanda.’

‘She’ll be called Mandy,’ said Malone, who liked Amanda but not the diminutive.

‘No, she won’t,’ said the new mother and Malone knew Amanda Clements would never be called Mandy. Not if the child had her mother’s willpower.

‘The girls and Tom will be in to see you,’ said Lisa. ‘They are already looking on her as their cousin.’

Malone looked again at the new baby, tiny face pressed against its mother’s breast. He tried to remember his first sight of his own three, but couldn’t and felt a certain shame. A man should remember something like that; after all, he was partly responsible for their entry into this life. He did remember that at the time he had had no worries about them, not even for Tom, the youngest, now almost fifteen; when they had come into the world the future had still looked reasonably bright. Sure, Australia had been on the verge of a recession when Tom arrived, but the country had weathered earlier recessions and two Great Depressions, in the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties; the national anthem had always been She’ll Be Right, Mate and somehow things had always come right, mate. But now the new century was just round the corner of the calendar and the future was a mess of lines on a computer screen. Old certainties had been shattered and Malone had begun to worry now for Claire, Maureen and Tom. And, because of his love for Russ Clements and Romy, he would worry for Amanda.

‘Time we were going.’ He stood up. ‘Can I kiss your wife while she’s got her breast bared?’

‘I dunno,’ said Clements. ‘Ask your wife.’

As the Malones walked down the corridor of the hospital Lisa said, ‘I’m glad for Romy. Today she starts a new life.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘That’s what I meant. She can forget her father now.’

‘I hope so. If she doesn’t, then her old life isn’t over.’

Lisa looked at him with love, put her hand in his. ‘There are things about you that still touch me. Don’t ever change.’

They were a handsome couple, though they never thought of themselves as such. He was tall and broad-shouldered and still reasonably presentable round the waist; he had the sort of face that, because it did not run to fat would look handsomer as he grew older. Lisa was of medium height tending towards tallness, which was accentuated by her upright carriage. She was better than merely goodlooking, but she had no vanity about it. She had kept her figure with diet and once-a-week aerobics; she ran a tight house and kept her husband and her children from ever being slobs. Appearance counted with her, but not for appearances’ sake. She just had, as Malone did, standards.

‘This way.’

Malone opened a door that led to a flight of stairs. Romy was in the private wing of St Sebastian’s, but Malone, ignoring the hospital’s underground garage, had parked the car in the doctors’ section outside the main general wing. Anything to save a dollar or two, Lisa had said, but had gone along with his parsimony. She had lived with it so long she had palpitations on the rare occasion when he splurged money.

The stairs ended at a door that opened into the reception area of the Emergency ward. It was Saturday night – Butchers’ Picnic Night, as Malone had heard one ambulance medic describe it – and the casualties had already begun arriving. A young boy with a broken arm; a motorcyclist who, helmetless, had gone through the windscreen of a car; a woman who had cut her wrists and was screaming she wanted to die: they stood, sat, lay in the waiting area like wreckage from Bosnia. Then, stretched out on an ambulance gurney, Malone saw a man he recognized, though his face was a bloody mess beneath the pads taped to it.

‘Just a minute,’ he told Lisa and stepped across to the Triage desk. He had once looked up the word triage: the act of assorting according to quality. He could only assume that its use was designed not to hurt the feelings of those who thought they deserved first attention, that no one was more damaged than they. An ambulance medic was giving details to me duty nurse.

He finished, turned round and pulled up when he saw Malone. ‘Scobie! How’re things?’

‘All right with me, Billy.’ He looked around at the casualties, then at the man on the gurney. ‘But you look as if you’re already having a busy night.’

‘And it’s only eight-thirty.’ Billy Logan was a wiry middle-aged man with close-cropped sandy hair and a lined face that could have been a mask; he had once told Malone that it was the only face he could wear on duty. ‘It’s starting to wear me down, this job. It’s about time I applied for promotion and got into administration.’

‘The feller over there, what happened to him?’

‘You know him?’

‘His name’s Bob Anders, he helped me on a case once. He’s with – or he was, maybe still – the Securities Commission. He’s one of their investigators.’

‘A-N-D-E-R-S?’ The medic turned back to the nurse, gave her the name; then he turned back to Malone. ‘He was bashed in Oxford Street about half an hour ago. A bit early in the night, they usually don’t go around bashing ’em till later.’

‘They?’

‘He’s gay, isn’t he? This time they rolled him as well, took his wallet. That’s why we had no identification. Poor bugger.’ He looked across at Anders, then back at Malone. ‘But there’s gunna be a job for you, I’d say. The kid leading the bashers, he was shot’

‘Dead?’

‘The third in two months. Looks like you’ve got a serial killer. Or a gay vigilante. Depends which way you look at it.’

2

Sunday morning Malone went to Mass with Lisa and the children. Lisa appeared to pay attention to the sermon, but Malone and the children all had the blank expressions of minds that were elsewhere. The sermon was based on a letter of St Paul to the Ephesians; Paul, whom Malone considered one of the Great Know-Alls, was not one of the family’s favourites. Malone often idly wondered if anyone from Ephesus ever wrote back. Did an Ephesian ever come in from his mailbox and grumble to his wife, ‘More bloody junk mail’? Such thoughts enabled him to get through a dull sermon.

Coming out of Mass his pager beeped. ‘Oh, God,’ said Maureen; and Lisa, Claire and Tom all rolled their eyes. There were disadvantages to being the family of an inspector, the Co-ordinator in charge of Homicide. There were, of course, advantages: seventy thousand plus dollars a year, good superannuation, the occasional chance that one might be a hero, a surviving one, that is. Yet, for all their complaints, Malone knew that none of them would want him to be anything else but a Homicide detective. Not so long as it was his own sole desire, which it was. Even though he could never fully explain to himself why.

In the church car park he unlocked the car and they all got in. It was a new car – his first in ten years – a Fairlane this time instead of the Holden Commodore he had driven for so long. It had hurt him to go out and buy the new car; he was not a car man, a petrolhead, and any vehicle that continued to go without falling apart was good enough for him. But the family, pleading social disgrace, had finally prevailed. And now they had the new car, complete with car phone.

Detective-Senior-Constable John Kagal was at Strawberry Hills. ‘I was beeped to come in, sir. Surry Hills wants us to come in with their task force on the guy who’s killing the gay-bashers.’

‘Did you know your friend Bob Anders was bashed last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Righto, I’ll be in.’ He hung up, cutting short any further discussion. He always tried to keep police business, especially murder, as remote from the family as possible. ‘Sorry. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ll meet you for lunch – where are we going?’

‘Doyles at Watson’s Bay,’ said Lisa. ‘If you’re not there, I’ll charge it to the Commissioner.’

‘I love you four. I read about a family like you. The Borgias.’

‘They’d have finished you off right quick.’ Claire was twenty, as goodlooking as her mother and as serene.

‘Can I come with you?’ Tom was going on fifteen, almost six feet tall and broad with it; Malone hoped that his son might be a better fast bowler than he himself had once been. He saw more to laugh at in the world than either of his sisters, but he was not careless of its traps. ‘I won’t get in your way.’

‘You can come with me the day you join the Service.’

‘Oh, God.’ Maureen was seventeen, more vivacious than the rest of them, a happy cynic who was beginning to trouble her father. ‘Two of them in the family! Big Cop and Little Cop.’

Malone left the car with them and caught a taxi into Strawberry Hills. The glass-fronted building had once been a mail-sorting exchange, notorious for its union troubles, but now it housed an administration section of Australia Post and several Police Service units, including Homicide. The ghosts of union organizers still wandered the building, depressed by all the peace.

John Kagal was waiting for him, as immaculate and handsome as ever. He was dressed this morning in a blue cotton skivvy, well-cut navy blazer, grey slacks and black loafers. Lately he had adopted the fashionable haircut of Hugh Grant, but his eyes were too shrewd for the floppy, little-boy look. He was masquerading, but Malone felt that was his natural pose. He did his best to like the younger man, but something always intruded on his good intentions. Perhaps it was Kagal’s slightly superior air, the knowledge that he had two university degrees and nobody else in Homicide had even one; perhaps it was that he had been to one of the more expensive private schools, that somewhere in his background was a family with money. Though he rarely, if ever, spoke of them. He was intensely private and that did not mesh with the police culture.

‘Garry Peeples at Surry Hills asked us to come in.’ It was typical of Kagal that he named rank only for chief inspectors and above; his own rank, or lack of it, seemed to trouble him. Peeples, Malone remembered, was a senior-sergeant in charge of detectives at Surry Hills. ‘He seemed to think that the killings are getting out of hand.’

‘Righto, let’s get over there. Anyone else in here today?’ Homicide did not run a duty officer at night and weekends, but there were always three detectives on call should local command detectives need them.

‘Kate is coming in, just in case we need her.’

Kate Arletti was one of two women members of Homicide, a girl who held her own against the chauvinism, repressed but still occasionally visible, in the seventeen-men-plus-two-women unit. She and Kagal got on well together, often working as partners, and Malone had begun to suspect mere might be something more than police work going on between them. So long as they didn’t start holding hands in the office, he didn’t mind. That was one of his standards.

On the way over to Surry Hills in an unmarked police car, Malone said, ‘I saw Bob Anders last night at St Sebastian’s. I was there saying hello to Russ’s new daughter.’

‘They both well, the baby and Dr Clements?’ Malone had noticed in the past that Kagal always gave Romy her rank.

‘Thriving. Your friend wasn’t. He looked badly bashed up.’

Kagal nodded. ‘I saw him first thing this morning. The bastards did a job on him. But he got one of them.’

‘Who? Bob Anders? He did the shooting?’

‘No, no. The killer. Or killers. There have been three in the past two months and there was one last year when we were working on the Huxwood case.’

‘Why weren’t we called in before this?’ But he knew why. There was nothing so sacred as a patrol commander’s turf; it was the civilized version of the animal kingdom’s territorial imperative. ‘No, don’t tell me. Let’s try and look like guests.’

Surry Hills police station was part of the complex known as Police Centre, a fortress-like building presumably designed to let the voters know that the police had a fortress-like mentality. A recent royal commission into police corruption, however, had shown that cracks were appearing in the mental fortress.

The patrol commander, a tall thin chief inspector named Neil Kovax, greeted Malone as an old friend and just nodded at Kagal.

‘I’ll get Garry Peeples in here.’ He made the call on his phone, then sat back. He was bald on top but had full grey hair along the sides; he had a thick military-style moustache which, over the years Malone had known Kovax, he had seen turn from black to grey to now almost-white. He was an old-style cop who, Malone guessed, had taken some time to come to terms with his current turf, a major part of which was the homosexual community’s territory. ‘This is a puzzling one, Scobie. I think we might be dealing with vigilantes.’

‘An ambulance feller said that to me last night.’

Then Senior-Sergeant Peeples came in. He was tall, taller by a couple of inches than Malone, with broad shoulders and muscular arms that seemed to bulge out of his shirt. Malone, abruptly aware of the territory they were now in, could see Peeples being asked to strip for a photo in the gay press. He wondered how Peeples would react to such a request.

‘Inspector—’ He nodded at Malone and Kagal. ‘Has the boss filled you in? No? Well, we’re not sure where we’re heading on these murders. Last night’s was committed by a woman, the three previous ones by three different men. The connection on the three earlier ones was that the bullets came from the same gun – we think a Browning Thirty-two. There hasn’t been an autopsy on last night’s victim, so we’re still waiting on the bullet. But we picked up a shell that’s the casing for a Thirty-two.’

‘The killings, they were all connected to a gay-bashing?’ said Malone.

‘The four we’re concerned with. There’ve been other bashings, some gays, some straights, but they were usually just people being rolled for whatever they had on ’em.’

‘And all four homicides were done by different persons?’ said Kagal. ‘Using the same gun? Assuming last night’s gun was the same one.’

‘That’s the puzzle,’ said Peeples. ‘What’ve we got here? A group of gay vigilantes?’

‘Was last night’s killer a lesbian, maybe?’ said Malone. ‘Or a transvestite?’

‘Could’ve been. The kids we interviewed all had different versions. You know what it’s like.’

Malone indeed knew what it was like. No gaze was so fractured as that of a crowd. He had once interrogated ten witnesses to a murder in broad daylight and come up with ten descriptions of the murderer. Who, when he was finally arrested, proved to look like none of the descriptions.

‘Who was shot last night?’

‘Kid named Justin Langtry, seventeen. Lives – lived – in Erskineville with his mother and three other kids, she’s a single parent. I sent one of our girls out to see her last night. I thought I’d go out this morning. Unless you’d like to?’ he said hopefully.

Malone knew when the buck was being passed; he’d lost count of the number of times he had knocked on doors to talk to bereaved wives and mothers. ‘Okay, I’ll do it. But first John and I’ll go up and talk to last night’s victim, Bob Anders.’

‘You know him?’ said Kovax.

‘He’s a friend of John’s,’ said Malone, and Kovax and Peeples looked at Kagal with wary interest. ‘Then we’ll go out and see – what’s her name? Mrs Langtry? – in Erskineville. What’s the address?’

‘Billyard Street, it’s off—’

‘I know it,’ said Malone. ‘I was born in the next street.’

Driving the half a dozen blocks up to St Sebastian’s, Malone looked out at Oxford Street, the main artery that led from the city out to the beach suburbs. Twenty, thirty years ago this had been a working class shopping area: small shops that even then had been wondering what their future would be. Now it was gay territory, from Whitlam Square, named after an ex-Prime Minister of liberal persuasion, up across Taylor Square where drunks had once congregated like seals on the small island in its centre, to the slope past Victoria Barracks, where the vestiges of an army command still lingered like faint memories of wars that everyone else had forgotten. The first few blocks up from Whitlam Square had a mixture of shops, small restaurants and pubs that catered for the gay community; there were also baths and the offices of a gay newspaper. Beyond Taylor Square were more gay hotels and in a side street The Wall, the high stone wall of an old gaol where male hookers now paraded. It was all territory which Malone, carrying the baggage of another generation’s moral sense, had always avoided, glad that he had never been posted to Surry Hills or Kings Cross, the other turf on to which the gay community spilled over.

St Sebastian’s was one of the older hospitals that had survived, aided by additions and face-lifts. Anders was in one of the general wards, his battered face half-hidden by dressings. He smiled wanly at Malone and Kagal as they approached his bed and put out a hand to Kagal, who took it and pressed it.

‘Hi, Inspector,’ he said through bruised and swollen lips. ‘I’m a sight for sore eyes, the nurses tell me.’

Malone remembered him as a tall, goodlooking man who had worn an earring; his right ear was now a torn mess painted with yellow medication. The dark moustache above the swollen lips had none of the bristly defiance Malone remembered; it looked limp and drab, like the shadow of a glum mouth. He was still holding Kagal’s hand, clutching it with – love? Malone wondered.

‘Bob, we have to ask you a few questions. Do you know the woman who came to your rescue last night?’

Anders moved his head slowly on the pillow. ‘I hardly saw her. I was on the ground, the young shits were kicking me—’

‘Where was this?’

‘Up by the barracks. I was walking down from Paddington town hall, I was heading for the Albury—’

Malone knew of it: a pub mainly for drag queens. Something must have shown in his face because Anders said, ‘I’m not into drag, Inspector. I had to meet someone there, a guy who’s a nurse. I have a sick friend—’

All at once he closed his eyes, looked ready to weep and Kagal squeezed his hand. ‘It’s all right, Bob. But we have to ask questions, we have to find out who’s doing these murders.’

Anders opened his eyes; mere was a shine of tears at the corners. ‘Why?’

Kagal looked at Malone. There was a sudden silence in the ward; the other three patients lay in their beds looking at Malone as if waiting on his answer. ‘We are cops, not judges,’ he said and even in his own ears he sounded limp and priggish.

One of the patients got out of bed, pulled on a faded dressing-gown and went unsteadily out into the corridor. The other two men turned away, one to a book, the other to stare out the window.

‘So you can tell us nothing about the killer?’ said Malone.

‘I’m sorry, Inspector – no. I was too busy trying to protect myself – the shits were trying to kill me, that was all I was thinking …’ His voice trailed off; then he recovered: ‘What will you do about the kids who weren’t shot? Who did this to me?’

‘I presume they’ll be charged. But that’s not in mine and John’s area, we’re strictly homicides.’

‘They’ll be taken care of,’ said Kagal and pressed Anders’ hand. ‘I’ll see to it, Bob.’

They said goodbye to Anders and walked out into the corridor. There the man who had got out of bed was waiting for them. He was in his sixties, a small hard nugget of a man, crumbling at the edges but with a core of bitter prejudices. Malone recognized his own father in the man: the hatred of bosses, of police, of anything and anyone who tried to run his life. Us and Them would be his motto. And Them would include everyone outside the norm of his narrow outlook. Malone had seen it so many times in Con Malone.

‘That poofter in there, has he got AIDS?’ His voice was as rough as his looks. ‘The nurses won’t tell us.’

‘No,’ said Kagal and Malone marvelled at the younger man’s control. ‘He just has a bad case of assault and battery. Any more questions?’

Then he walked on and Malone was left with the bigot ‘No one deserves what that man has had done to him. Not even poofters.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said the man and stomped back into the ward.

Outside, where the brightness of the November day mocked the misery and pain in the hospital, Kagal was standing by the police car parked in the section reserved for doctors. A hospital security guard was reading the letter of the law to him.

‘You’ll have to speak to the inspector,’ said Kagal. ‘He’s the senior officer.’

The security guard was a young man who took his duties seriously: ‘You know you can’t park here, sir—’

‘No, I didn’t know that,’ said Malone. ‘If you look up the Police Service Act, section seventy-seven – paragraph B, I think it is – you’ll find that police on duty can park anywhere they like.’

He said no more, got into the car, waited for Kagal to get in behind the wheel, men they drove out of the small parking lot, leaving the security guard staring angrily after them.

‘What does section seventy-seven say?’ asked Kagal.

‘I have no idea. But then neither does he. Let’s go up to the crime scene.’

They swung into Oxford Street again, passed the Albury Hotel where Anders had been heading last night, and drove the quarter-mile up to the entrance of Victoria Barracks and turned in. A uniformed sentry barred their way.

Malone introduced himself. ‘We’re investigating the murder last night, the one just down the road there. Can we park in here for ten or fifteen minutes?’

‘I guess so, sir. You don’t intend to arrest the GOC, do you?’

‘Not today. If he starts another war, we will. Were you on duty here last night around eight o’clock?’

‘No, sir.’ He was no more than twenty, fresh-faced under his digger’s hat: too young for war. But then, Malone remembered, though he had never been a soldier, it was the young who fought wars. ‘The guy who was, he’s on leave today. But he was interviewed last night by the police. I understand he saw nothing, heard nothing.’

So much for the defence of the nation; but Malone didn’t voice the thought. ‘Righto, we’ll be back in a few minutes.’

Fifty yards down, on the lawn that ran below the high stone wall of the barracks, the Crime Scene tapes still fluttered in the breeze. A police van was parked on the footpath and as the two detectives approached, a uniformed cop stepped out of the van and began to take down the tapes.

‘You’re from Surry Hills?’ said Malone, introducing himself and Kagal.

‘No, sir.’ He, too, was young, no more than twenty; but his face had none of the fresh-faced innocence of the soldier. He had already seen the dregs of the life the other was supposed to defend. ‘We’re from Paddington, up the road. We were called in to stake this out. The job’s finished now – for us, I mean.’

‘Lucky you. Has anyone come forward with any information?’

The young cop shook his head as he wound up the blue-and-white tape: the gift tape, as Malone thought of it, that wrapped up a death. ‘Hear no evil, see no evil … You don’t get much co-operation, not in this street.’

After a few more minutes with the young officer and his colleague, a senior-constable, Malone and Kagal walked back up and in through the gates of the barracks.

‘We’ll be a few minutes,’ Malone told the sentry. ‘We want to compare notes.’

He and Kagal got into the car and wound down the windows. Malone sat gazing out at the scene before him. He had played in a charity cricket match here on the parade lawn years ago; before the game, because he was history-minded, he had looked up the story of the barracks. It was built in the eighteen forties by convict gangs and some of the first senior officers who came to occupy it had fought at Waterloo. Though it was named after the new Queen, the style was Regency; it was built in time to escape the heavy fashion of later years. He sat in the car and looked across the wide parade ground at the main building, the length of two football fields. This morning, a Sunday rest day, the barracks looked deserted. It was peaceful, no suggestion of what it was designed for, the training and accommodation of soldiers. The high stone walls even closed out the sound of traffic in busy Oxford Street A boy had died and a man had been almost kicked to death not a hundred yards from where he and Kagal now sat; but this, built for the military, was an oasis of peace.

‘What notes have we to compare?’ said Kagal, breaking the silence. He had sat quiet, knowing Malone had something on his mind.

Malone turned to him. ‘John, I’ve got to ask you this. You are a – a close friend of Bob Anders, right?’

‘Yes.’ Malone could almost see the young man close up, tighten.

‘I have to ask you this, too. Are you homosexual?’

Kagal looked at him sideways. ‘Does it matter?’

‘On this case, yes, I think it does.’

Kagal didn’t answer at once. He looked across the parade ground at some movement on the far side. A small detachment of soldiers was falling in; it was time for changing of the guard. A shout floated towards them, as unintelligible as all military commands, like an animal bark. The detachment began to march along the far side of the ground.

At last he turned back to Malone. ‘I’m half-and-half. Bisexual – double-gaited, if you want to call it that. Fluid is the in-word.’ He was silent a moment, then went on, ‘Okay, so I guess you can call me gay. I don’t like to be called homosexual.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just don’t, that’s all.’

‘I don’t like to use the term “gay”. You – you people took away a word that used to be one of the – well, one of the most evocative in the language. Nobody talks about Gay Paree any more or having a gay time, things like that What bloke would sing a song like A Bachelor Gay Am I these days?’

Kagal gave a small smile, though he was not relaxed. ‘I know quite a few guys who would.’

Malone didn’t return the smile; he, too, was uptight. ‘That’s why straights don’t use the word any more for fear of being misunderstood.’

‘That’s your – their problem, isn’t it?’

‘Have you ever researched the origin of gay as a slang word? I have. We’re taught as detectives to do research, right? The original slang use of gay was coined in the sixteenth century in London – maybe earlier. It meant the cheapest sort of whore you could buy in the alleys off the Strand, the up-against-the-wall knee-tremblers. An English poet and playwright named Christopher Marlowe—’

‘I’ve read Marlowe.’

Which was more than Malone had ever done; it had been enough while at school to plough through Shakespeare. ‘He used to use the gays, the women hookers. Whores were called gays up till about the end of the last century.’

‘You’re sure Marlowe didn’t use the word the way we do? The first speech in one of his plays, Edward the Second, is about as close as you can get to a male love song.’

Malone didn’t answer; his education went only so far.

‘You seem pretty interested, doing all that research.’

‘It was just curiosity. I’m not a closet queer.’

‘Is that the sort of word you’d prefer? Queer, fag, pansy? Maybe I can give you a lesson in etymology. You call yourself a heterosexual?’

Malone nodded.

‘That word was coined in the eighteen nineties – about the same time, I guess, that the word “gay” stopped meaning a whore. Heterosexuality was used to denote sexual perversion – “hetero” means “other” or “different”. How does that strike you? It was meant to describe someone like me, a double-gaiter. It was not until the nineteen fifties or sixties that the meaning was changed. And it was gays who gave it the meaning that’s acceptable to you now.’

It was no longer a dialogue between a senior and a junior officer. The guard detachment was now closer, the sergeant in charge barking to the rhythm of the marching. Behind the police car the sentry had come to attention, then dropped stiffly into the at-ease stance.

‘Righto, I don’t like fag or queer, either. I just wish you had chosen another word but “gay”. It’s a cruel thought, but I’ve sometimes wondered if a man dying of AIDS still feels gay – in the original meaning.’

Kagal’s face had stiffened, but he said nothing. The guard detachment was close now; it went by with a thump-thump of boots, came to a stamping halt. The two detectives sat in silence while the guard was changed; then the detachment moved on, the sergeant’s bark dying away as it moved on down the long parade ground. The defence forces were currently debating whether personnel suffering from HIV-infection should be allowed to stay in the army.

‘In your language—’ Kagal was now distinctly, if coldly, hostile. ‘In your language, are you homophobic?’

‘No, I’m not. People’s sexuality is their own business. Except for paedophiles and fellers who bugger sheep.’

‘Like New Zealanders?’

‘So you’re racist, too? Or nationality-biassed, whatever they call it.’

‘It’s a joke, for Crissakes!’ Kagal was angry; then he struggled to relax. It suddenly occurred to Malone that this conversation was as awkward for the younger man as it was for himself. ‘Look, the Kiwis say the same thing about us, only we have more sheep, more opportunity, they say. It was an Aussie joke originally, that you only got virgin wool from the sheep that could run faster than the shepherd.’

Malone laughed, not at the old joke but as a release. ‘There’s the one about the bachelor farmer counting his sheep as they go into the pen – sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine – hullo, darling – seventy-one, seventy-two …’

The time-worn jokes seemed to oil the tension. They sat in silence for a while, men Malone said, ‘I’m anti some of the things you get up to—’

‘You don’t know what I get up to.’ The tension crept back in.

‘Right. Gays then, full gays.’

‘The Mardi Gras – I know you’re against that’

‘Yes. I think it’s a grown-up version of the game that five-year-olds play – you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. But my two daughters think it’s just a load of fun.’

‘And your boy – Tom?’

‘He’s like me.’

‘Is he going to grow up to be a poofter-basher?’

‘You think I might encourage him to?’

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

There was another long awkward silence; then Malone said, ‘John, I’m dead against poofter-bashing, gay-bashing, whatever you want to call it.’ He was walking on eggshells; or anyway on words that kept tripping him up. ‘But cops my age, we carry a lot of baggage – prejudice, if you like. Though I hope I’d never be like that old bloke in the hospital corridor this morning.’

He paused and after a long moment Kagal said, ‘Go on.’

Jesus, he thought, this is like confession used to be when I was at school. But all he said was, ‘Righto, let’s get back to Bob Anders. Are you and he—?’

Kagal smiled without amusement ‘Lovers? Is that the word you can’t get out? No, we’re just friends, the best of friends. He’s had his own partner for ten years, he’s never played the field. Unfortunately his partner did – he’s dying of AIDS. That was why he was on his way to the Albury to see the nurse. He’s been looking after his partner on his own.’

That, for the moment, left Malone without words. An officer, a major, appeared from somewhere, coming at them from the back of the car. He leaned in and looked at Malone on the passenger’s side. ‘Are you going to remain parked here for long? If so, we’d prefer you moved over there.’ He waved a swagger stick towards the far side of the ground.

‘Are we cluttering up the place?’ The words slipped out; Malone was still caught in the tension with Kagal.

‘Since you ask, yes.’

Just in time, Malone caught a retort; instead, he nodded at Kagal. The latter started up the engine, turned the car round and drove out through the gates. The sentry came to attention and saluted; Malone didn’t know whether it was from habit or whether it was satirical. Though he belonged to a service that had its own discipline, its own play-by-the-rules culture, he didn’t think he would ever have been happy in the army. For the next few weeks he was not even sure mat he was going to be happy in the Police Service, not in the wash from this latest case.

They had driven a mile or more back towards Strawberry Hills before Kagal said, ‘Am I still on the case, then?’

‘Do you want to be?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you are.’ It struck him that he would need Kagal to lead him through the shoals of prejudice, on both sides, that lay ahead.

Kagal nodded; then said, ‘Erskineville now?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ He looked at his watch. Time to be heading for lunch with the family; he had broken enough eggshells this morning. Normally he liked to keep at a case, not to let it cool; but: ‘Let Mrs Langtry have another twenty-four hours to get over it I’m not up to treading on someone’s grief this morning.’

Gazing straight ahead he felt, rather than saw, Kagal glance curiously at him.

3

Kate Arletti offered to drive him out to Watson’s Bay in time for lunch.

‘In your what? Goggomobile? G-O-G-G-O—’ He spelled it out as in a well-known Yellow Pages TV commercial.

‘The very same. Unless, boss, you’d rather not’

‘No, I’m game. My kids will love to see it.’

As he struggled to fit himself into the tiny bubble-car he thought of an old joke – ‘I’ve been in bigger women than this’ – but didn’t tell it to Kate. He was always decorous in dealing with women staff and not just because of the current wave of sexual harassment cases.

Driving out to the farthest of the eastern suburbs in the thick Sunday traffic, Malone felt as exposed as if he were on a Mardi Gras float. At traffic lights Mercedes and Volvos loomed up on either side of them like behemoths; the drivers and passengers looked down on them with superior amusement. At one traffic light a turbo Bentley pulled up beside them and Malone waited for the driver, a burly man with a fierce moustache, to lean down and pat them on the bubble.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ Kate Arletti was a small blonde Italian, neat in body but not in dress; she seemed to have great trouble keeping her shirt buttoned and her skirt seams straight. Today she was in slim dark blue slacks and a pink shirt that, as usual, had a button or two undone; her hair was hanging loose, not in its usual chignon, and she looked casual and pretty. Beside her, still carrying the weight of his discussion with John Kagal, Malone wondered if he looked as old as he felt. He found himself hoping that the people in other cars, staring at the two in the plastic bubble, took Kate for his daughter, not his date.

‘It’s my brother’s car, he bought it and rebuilt it. It’s a family joke. He’s on holiday down in Victoria, I’m looking after it for him. You’d be surprised the number of thumbs have been raised for a lift when they see me in it.’

‘They’re interested in you, Kate, not the car.’

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes. ‘Don’t flatter me, boss.’

He felt suddenly protective of her. ‘Have you taken John Kagal for a ride in this?’

She gave him the sidelong glance again. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘You go out with him occasionally, don’t you?’ Why had he not minded his own business?

‘Occasionally.’

‘Sorry,’ he said, abruptly retreating. ‘It’s none of my business.’

She didn’t answer, all at once appearing to find the thick traffic threatening. She concentrated on her driving, only relaxing for a moment to raise her middle finger as a carload of youths, surfboards on the roof of their battered Holden like warriors’ shields, went by with a yell of derision. Then she glanced at Malone again. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘What?’

‘The finger. I suppose in your day a girl would’ve poked out her tongue.’

In my day … ‘Probably. Though I never went out with aggressive girls.’

‘You think I’m aggressive? In this?’

The Goggomobile crawled up the Rose Bay hill like a translucent bug, the sun shining on its plastic bubble and Malone, inside, wishing he had taken off his jacket. The traffic whirled by them, but Kate seemed unperturbed, even when some of the cars, driven by jokey show-off drivers, came perilously close. She seems able to handle anything, Malone thought, but how will she handle it when she finds out John Kagal is double-gaited? Or does she already know?

When Kate dropped him at the parking lot outside the famous fish restaurant, Lisa and the children were just getting out of the Falcon. Then beyond them Malone saw Lisa’s father and mother getting out of their green Jaguar. Oh crumbs! He had forgotten that Elisabeth and Jan Pretorius were coming to lunch with them. He opened the Goggomobile’s bubble and stepped out.

‘Thanks, Kate. Hold it a moment while the kids admire their dad’s chariot.’

‘Oh, my God, it’s so cool!’ yelped Maureen.

‘It isn’t actually. It’s bloody hot’

‘How did you get him into it Kate?’ said Claire.

‘He just commandeered me and the car,’ said Kate and flashed a smile at Malone. ‘Bye, sir. Have a nice lunch.’

On the spur of the moment Malone said, and later he wouldn’t know why, ‘What are you doing for lunch? Have it with us.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Lisa behind him in that wife’s voice that said she hadn’t been consulted.

‘Come on, Kate.’ Tom was walking round and round the car, shaking his head in admiration. ‘Dad’ll buy you lunch and then you can drive me home in this.’

Kate got out of the tiny car, grinned at Lisa and the two girls. ‘He knows how to woo a girl, doesn’t he?’

Malone had gone across to greet Lisa’s parents. Elisabeth was close to seventy, but she had inherited good bonework and married money and the two had kept her looking attractive. She had never aspired to High Society, if there was such a thing in Sydney; but she swam on the edges of what passed for it and, as far as Malone could see, was happy in the shallows where she had made her life. Jan was in his seventies, goodlooking in a heavy way, with a thick thatch of iron-grey hair. He was a serious man who still dreamed, however sadly, of the Dutch colonial life into which he had been born and in which he had grown up. Emigrating to Australia after Indonesian independence, he had worked for Dunlop, then gone into his own business and made a fortune in rubber heels. He was conservative in every way and once, half-drunk on wine from his expensive cellar, had confided to Malone that he would be happy if the world ended before the new century began. Still, Malone conceded and was glad, he wore his disappointment and pessimism with dignity.

Malone kissed Elisabeth, smelling the expensive perfume she always wore. Earlier in the year, when there had been a minor boycott of French goods because of the bomb tests at Mururoa, she had stopped wearing the perfume; but it had been like giving up something for Lent, not really a protest at the French. ‘You look frizzled, Scobie. Is it mat tiny car?’

‘Yes,’ he said, because it was easier. Whenever he was on a job he always wore temporary scars from it, but this was the first time he had been frizzled.

‘A pretty girl,’ said Jan, who never let his conservatism blind his roving eye. ‘She’s a policewoman? I always thought they looked like Marie Dressier.’

‘Who?’

Jan smiled. One of the few things he and Con Malone had in common was a memory for old-time film stars. ‘Some time, over a bottle or two of wine, I’ll tell you about the loves of my youth. Claudette Colbert, Kay Francis – so elegant, the rumour was she was a nymphomaniac—’

‘Who was?’ said Tom, suddenly at his grandfather’s side. Jan Pretorius gently punched his grandson’s arm. ‘I thought they only taught you computer sciences at school these days?’

They went into the big restaurant, packed as usual on a Sunday. Closest to the harbour view, with the city skyline in the distance like a row of ancient monuments, Stonehenge on the Harbour, were a large group of Japanese and an equally large group of Koreans; they were the ones who ordered crayfish or crab, the two most expensive items on the menu. The rest of the diners were a mixture of natives, all of them able to afford the prices, even if at the lower end. Waiters and waitresses whirled amongst the tables like tail-borne dolphins. It was noisy, but with no walls to hold in the sound it was bearable, unlike some other restaurants Malone had visited where noise, apparently, was designed as part of the menu. I’m getting old and cranky, he told himself, a sentiment seconded by his children.

Lunch went well until Jan, on his third glass of semillon and holding it well, said, ‘What case are you on now, Scobie?’

Malone saw Lisa’s look of disapproval, but her father missed it. Malone said, trying to sound casual, ‘The murder of a boy last night in Oxford Street.’

‘Oxford Street? A homosexual?’ Jan Pretorius was another who rarely used the word gay.

‘No. He was with a gang bashing up a – a homosexual.’

‘Poofter-bashing?’ said Tom. ‘You’re gunna be mixed up in that?’

‘Where do they learn these expressions?’ Elisabeth asked Lisa.

‘That will be the – what? Third murder like that?’ Jan, retired and waiting for the end of the world, read the Herald and The Australian right through every morning, beginning with the obituaries. Malone, too, occasionally read the obituaries, but murder as the cause of death was virtually never mentioned in the notices.

‘Four, actually,’ said Malone. ‘Could we change the subject, Jan? I’m just about to cut up a dead fish.’

Jan changed direction, if not the subject. ‘Are you on the case, Miss Arletti?’

Kate looked at Malone. ‘I don’t know yet, Mr Pretorius—’

‘Possibly,’ said Malone, cutting into his barramundi.

‘Dad’s anti-gay,’ said Maureen.

‘So am I,’ said Tom.

‘How do you feel about them, Kate?’ asked Claire.

Kate shrugged. ‘I’m neither for them nor ag’in ’em. But I don’t like the idea of them taking the law into their own hands, which is what seems to be happening in these cases.’

Has she been reading the running sheets? Malone wondered. Or talking them over with John Kagal? He wanted to get off the subject. He looked imploringly along the table at Lisa, but for once she didn’t read his expression. Instead she seemed to want to enlarge the subject:

‘Is there much bashing of lesbians?’ she said.

‘A little, so I understand,’ said Kate. ‘But dykes, it seems, are not so conspicuous. Or maybe the bashers don’t recognize them so easily. Maybe the gangs just like to harass their own gender, their own form of sexual harassment, I guess you’d call it. I don’t know, really.’

Elisabeth delicately turned over her John Dory, lifted a forkful to her mourn. ‘However did we get on to this subject?’

‘The world isn’t full of nice subjects,’ said her husband. ‘When else do I get the opportunity to talk to Scobie about his work? I’m interested in other people’s jobs. I was always willing to talk about my work.’

‘Rubber heels?’ said Lisa.

‘Do you know any gay guys, Kate?’ said Maureen.

Malone glanced at Kate; but she seemed to be avoiding his gaze. ‘One or two.’

‘I know a couple,’ said Maureen. ‘Guys I met at a disco. Nice guys, treated you with respect, no fooling around.’

‘Urk,’ said Tom.

‘Grow up,’ said his sister.

Claire glanced at her father. ‘You’re quiet, Dad.’

‘I just don’t like working seven days a week, that’s why.’

Jan Pretorius took the hint: ‘Sorry, Scobie. I should have thought of that.’

‘Indeed,’ said Elisabeth round a mouthful of fish.

‘Will you like working amongst the gays, Kate?’ Maureen persisted.

‘We’ll handle it, I’m sure,’ said Kate and once again appeared to avoid Malone’s eye.

He had the sudden feeling that the days, maybe the weeks ahead, were going to bind themselves tightly round him, that he could find himself floating on a stream that would run down to the place Lisa had once pointed out to him on an ancient map, the Sea of Doubt. It wouldn’t be the first time, but always in the past the company had been straight, if criminal.

The Japanese had stood up and photographed the Koreans; the latter in turn stood up and photographed the Japanese. Then both groups turned their cameras on the natives, there were blinding flashes and the natives turned their smiles on the tourist dollar.