by Jon Cleary
“Both of them, or just the wife?”
Ellsworth looked at him curiously. “Why the wife? It’s the husband who’s dead, shot in the face. A real mess.”
Why had he expected Olive Rockne to be the victim? And why did he feel no shock that something terrible had happened to the Rocknes out here on this windswept car park four or five miles from their home? “Where’s Mrs. Rockne? I’d better explain. I know them, we saw them tonight at our kids’ school.”
“She’s over in the caretaker’s office at the surf club. She’s pretty shocked.”
“You questioned her yet?”
“Not yet, other than the basics. What happened, that sorta thing. I thought we’d give her time to get her nerves together.”
The Physical Evidence team had arrived and the crime scene had been cordoned off by blue and white tapes. There were still forty or fifty cars parked in the big lot despite the late hour, the overflow from the car park of the big social club across the road, where the usual Saturday night dance and entertainment had finished half an hour ago. People stood about in groups, the night’s revelry oozing out of them like air out of a pinpricked balloon. From the darkness beyond the surf club there came the dull boom of the waves, a barrage that threw up no frightening glare.
As Malone and Ellsworth walked across towards the surf club, the younger man said, “We haven’t dug up a witness yet. If anyone saw what happened, they haven’t come forward.”
Malone paused and looked around. “I used to come here when I was younger, to surf. At night, too. They used to hold dances at the surf club in those days. You’d take a girl outside, along the beach or out here in one of the cars . . . Don’t the kids today go in for nooky in the back seat or out in the sandhills?”
Ellsworth’s grin showed no teeth. “Not tonight, evidently. I think the girls object to getting sand in it.”
The surf club’s pavilion stretched across the eastern end of the car park, separating it from the beach. It was built in the newly popular Australian style, with curved corrugated-iron roofs over its two wings and a similar roof, like an arch, over the breezeway that separated the two wings. Atop one of the wings was a look-out tower, glass-enclosed, a major improvement on the wooden ladder stuck in the sands of Malone’s youth.
The caretaker’s small office smelt of salt air and wet sand, even though its door faced away from the sea. Its corners were cluttered with cleaning equipment; a wet-suit hung like a black suicide from a hook on one wall; the other walls were papered with posters on how to save lives in every situation from drowning to snakebite. There was none on what to do in the case of a gunshot wound.
Olive Rockne sat stiffly on a stiff-backed chair, spine straight, knees together, hands tightly clasped; if she was in shock, she was decorously so, not like some Malone had seen. “You all right, Olive?”
She looked at him as if she did not recognize him; then she blinked, wet her lips and nodded. “I can’t believe it’s happened . . . Are you here as a friend or a detective?”
“Both, I guess.” It was a question he had never been asked before. “You feel up to telling me what happened?”
“I’ve already told him.” She nodded at Ellsworth, who stood against a wall, the wet-suit hanging in a macabre fashion behind him.
“I know, Olive. But I’m in charge now and I like to do things my way.”
He sat down opposite her, behind the caretaker’s desk. There was a scrawl pad on the desk; scrawled on it in rough script was: Monday—Sack Jack. He didn’t know where the caretaker was nor was he interested; the fewer bystanders at an interview like this the better. There were just himself, Ellsworth and the uniformed constable standing outside the open door. Olive Rockne was entitled to as much privacy as he could give her.
“What happened?”
Olive was regaining her composure, reefing it in inch by inch; only the raised knuckles of her tightly clenched hands showed the effort. “I got out of the car—”
“First, Olive—why were you out here?”
She frowned, as if she didn’t quite understand the reason herself: “Sentiment. Does that sound silly or stupid?”
“No, not if you explain it.”
“It was out here on the beach that Will—” her voice choked for a moment “—that he proposed to me. When we came out of the school, he suggested we drive out here before going home. We were going to go for a walk along the beach.”
“Where were you when Will was shot?”
She took her time, trying to get everything straight in her mind: “I don’t know—maybe twenty or thirty yards from the car, I’m not sure. I got out and so did Will. But then he went back—he’d forgotten to turn the lights off. Then I heard the shot—”
“Were the lights still on when you heard the shot?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone running away from the car? That car park out there is pretty well lit.”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure . . .” She was reliving the first moments of her husband’s death; Malone knew they were always the hardest to erase, whether the death was gentle or violent. “I think I saw a shadow, but I can’t be sure. There were other cars between me and ours . . . Then I got to the car and saw Will . . . I screamed—”
She shuddered, opened her mouth as if she were about to vomit, and Malone said, “Take it easy for a while. Would you like a cup of tea or something?” An electric kettle and some cups and saucers stood on a narrow table against a wall. “It might help.”
“No.” She shook her head determinedly. “All I want to do is go home, Scobie. There are Jason and Shelley—”
“Where was Jason? Did you drop him off at home?”
“No, he’d already gone by the time we left the school—he said he’d walk. I should go home, tell ’em what’s happened—Oh, my God!” She put a hand to her eyes, hit by the enormity of what she had to do.
“We’d better get in touch with someone to look after them. What about your parents?”
“There’s just my mother. And I have a married sister—she lives at Cronulla. Her name’s Rose Cadogan—” She gave a phone number without having to search her memory for it. Malone noticed that she was having alternate moments of calm control and nervous tension; but that was not unusual. It had struck him on their first meeting some months ago that there was a certain preciseness to her; and habit, whether acquired or natural, was hard to lose.
“What about Will’s family?”
“Just his father, he lives out at Carlingford with Will’s stepmother. I suppose we’d better call him.”
She sounded callous, but Malone kept his reaction to himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ellsworth purse his lips, making him suddenly look prim. “Didn’t Will and his father get on?”
“They haven’t spoken for, I dunno, three or four years. His father is George Rockne. You know—”
“The ex-communist union boss?”
“Ex-union boss. He’s still a communist.”
“Will was so—right-wing. Was that why they didn’t get on?”
She nodded. “I’ll ring him. May I go?” She stood up, wavered a moment, then was steady.
Malone looked at Ellsworth. “Do you have a woman PC?”
“Constable Rojeski is outside somewhere. She can take Mrs. Rockne home.”
Malone took Olive’s arm as they went out of the caretaker’s office. “I’ll have to come and see you tomorrow morning.”
She looked sideways at him; she looked her age now, she had caught up with her birthdays, gone past them. “This is just the start, isn’t it?”
“The start of the investigation? Yes.”
“No, I didn’t mean that.” But she didn’t explain what she had meant.
She left him, let herself be led away by the young policewoman. “What’s Rojeski like?” he asked Ellsworth. “Can she handle something like this?”
“She’s okay, sir. I’ve used her a coupla times before in a situation like this. Females com
e in handy.”
“Yes, don’t they?” But Ellsworth missed the dry note. “Let’s see if Physical Evidence have come up with anything.”
The car park now was as busy as a shopping mall on Thursday night. It was bathed in light, police cars stood about, blue and red lights spinning on their roofs; revellers from the social club across the road were collecting their cars, and knots of spectators, those ubiquitous watchers-on-the-fringe that appear at the scene of every urban crime, as if called up by computer, were in place. The silver Volvo stood roped off by blue and white tape like the latest model at a motor show.
Romy Keller, the government medical officer, was examining the body, still in the car, when Malone approached. She straightened up and turned round, her dark coat swinging open to reveal a low-cut green dinner dress underneath.
“All dressed up?”
She drew the coat around her. “Russ and I were at a medical dinner. I’m on call.”
“Like me. Where’s Russ?”
“Over there in his car. He didn’t get out, he’s in black tie. He thought one of us in fancy dress was enough . . . It looks like just the one shot, through the right eye and out the top of the cranium. Death would have been instantaneous, I’d say.”
He looked past her at the dead Will Rockne. The body was slumped backwards and sideways, one hand in its lap, the other resting on the dislodged car phone, as if he had made a last desperate call for help, from God knew whom. The car keys were in the ignition and the steering wheel was twisted to the left, as if Rockne might have tried to drive away before he died. The dead man’s face and the front of his shirt and jacket were a bloody mess.
“We’ve got the bullet, Inspector.” That was Chris Gooch, of the Physical Evidence team, a bulky young man with more muscles than he knew what to do with; he was forever strenuously denying he was on steroids, but no one believed him. “Looks like a Twenty-two. It was in the roof. Looks like the killer shoved the gun upwards at the victim, maybe at his throat, but missed and shot him in the eye.”
“You done with the body?” Malone asked Romy.
She nodded towards the government contractors who had now arrived. “They can take it away.”
She drew the high collar of her coat up round her throat against the wind; her dark hair ruffled about her face. She looked glamorous, ice-cool, she whose own father had been a four-times murderer and a suicide. Malone did not understand why she had stayed on as a GMO at the city morgue, but he had never asked Russ Clements if he knew the reason. She still worked with cool efficiency and a detachment that Malone, when he saw it, found troubling. But she was Clements’s problem, not his. It was Russ who was in love with her.
He walked across to the green Toyota where Clements, in dinner jacket, black tie unloosened, sat behind the wheel like a moulting king penguin. “They tell me it’s a guy named Rockne. You know someone with that name, don’t you?”
“It’s the same one. We were with them at Holy Spirit tonight. They’ve just taken the wife home. Are you on call tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Clements looked at Romy, who had got into the car beside him. “It looks like he’s gunna spoil our Sunday.”
She smiled at him, then at Malone. They were the men who had caught her father, who had been there when he had committed suicide; yet she loved one and almost loved the other. They, and Lisa, were the ones who had reconstructed the floor of her life when everything had fallen apart around her. “Why don’t the three of us open a post office or something? Five days a week and no overtime.”
Clements smiled at her. He had had countless women friends, but Malone had never seen him so openly in love as with Romy. “With our luck, there’d be a body in the parcel post.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Malone told him. “You’re on this one with me. Don’t bother to come dressed up.”
The Toyota pulled out of the car park and Malone turned as Ellsworth stepped up beside him. “Do I work with you on this, sir?”
“I guess so—Carl, isn’t it? I’ll see Mrs. Rockne in the morning, but I’d rather do it on my own. I know her, slightly anyway, and I think she’ll talk more freely to me if no one else is there. You do the legwork on what the Crime Scene fellers give you.” He still sometimes slipped into the old name for the Physical Evidence team. In recent years the New South Wales Police Service had undergone so many reorganizations and name changes that some joker had fed it into the police computer system as the AKA Force. “Mrs. Rockne may give us a lead. In the meantime set up a van here, see if anyone comes forward with any information.”
“She’s a bit odd, don’t you think? Mrs. Rockne.”
“Most wives are a bit odd when their husbands get blasted. You married?”
“Divorced.”
“How long were you married?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Not long enough. You’ll learn, Carl. About wives, I mean.”
He left Ellsworth and walked across to his car. He leant on the roof, cold as ice under the wind, and looked at the scene, at the silver Volvo at the centre of it. For the next few days, maybe weeks, this was where his attention and effort would be focused. As the officer in charge of Homicide, Regional Crime Squad, South Region, he would be supervising other murders, but this one would be his major concern. On the other side of the world an empire was falling apart; putty-faced old men had attempted to turn the clock back in a last-minute coup, only to find the clock had no works; hundreds of thousands of people were filling the squares of Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev, filling the world’s television screens: the century was going out as it had begun, in turmoil. The murder of Will Rockne would not be marked as history, but it had to be witnessed, recorded, and, maybe, solved.
He got into the Commodore and drove towards home, where the effects of history were peripheral.
III
He went to early Mass, dragged there by Claire, who didn’t want her day delayed by late church-going. On the way home he told her of Will Rockne’s murder—“Oh no, Dad! Jason’s father?”
On the way to Mass he had debated with himself when he should tell her; he had put it off because, he had told himself, she was not yet wide awake enough to take in the dreadful news. She took it in now, slumping sideways in the seat. “Oh God, poor Jay and Shelley!”
“Poor Mrs. Rockne.”
“Yes, her too. Are you on the case?” He nodded. “Can’t you let someone else do it? Uncle Russ. for instance?”
“Why?”
“I dunno, it’s just—well, you’re going to bring it home every night.”
“I’ve never done that before. You know I never discuss a case in front of you kids.”
“I know that. But . . . will you tell me how it’s going if I ask you?”
“No.”
She looked at him with Lisa’s eyes. “Does being a Homicide detective wear you down?”
They had pulled up at an intersection; he looked at the red traffic light, a warning sign. But he had to tell her the truth: “Yes.”
“Then why do you keep on with it?”
“I ask myself that at least a dozen times a year.” The light turned green. “I think it’s because I feel I’d be deserting the victim if I walked away from it. Do you understand that?”
“Of course,” she said, and he realized his elder daughter had grown up, almost.
When he reached home Lisa was up, getting ready to go over and collect Tom and Maureen. Claire went out to make breakfast for herself and her father, while Malone leaned in the bedroom door and watched his wife dress. After seventeen years of marriage he still got delight watching her first thing in the morning, it was the proper start to a day. She still had her figure, a little fuller now than when they had first married, and, as with some women, the beauty of her face had increased as she had got older. She was forty now and he hoped her beauty would last till the grave, an end that didn’t bear thinking about. For her, not for himself: he was not afraid of death, though he would not welcome
it, not if it meant leaving her and the children alone.
“I wonder if Will Rockne looked at Olive every morning like I look at you?”
“I doubt it.” She pulled on her skirt, a tan twill. “He wasn’t the sort to appreciate what he had.”
She had been shocked when he came home last night and told her who had been murdered. But this morning she seemed to have accepted the fact. A certain callousness was necessary for a Homicide detective, but he hoped none of his was beginning to rub off on her.
She slipped a yellow sweater over her head, then fluffed out her blonde hair. “Do you think I should call Olive?”
“No, I’ll do the sympathy bit for both of us. Tell Claire not to call Jason, not till I’ve got the police bit sorted out down at their place. I’ll be home for lunch, I hope.”
She came round the bed and kissed him. “Don’t be too hard on Olive.”
“Why should I be?”
It was 9.30 when he knocked on the door of the Rockne home in Coogee Bay Road. It was a solid bluebrick and sandstone house, built with the wide verandahs of the nineteen-twenties, when sunlight in a house was as welcome as white ants. It stood on a wide block, thirty metres at least, behind a garden where early spring petunias, marigolds and azaleas mocked the gloom he knew must be in the house itself.
The door was opened by a middle-aged woman instantly recognizable as Olive’s sister, though she was plumper and had kept pace with her birthdays. “I’m Rose Cadogan. We’ve been expecting you.” She looked past him, seemed surprised. “You’re on your own?”
“I thought Olive would prefer it that way.”
“Oh, sure. Come in. But what one sees on TV, police are always swarming over everything . . . This is our mother, Mrs. Carss. And this is Angela Bodalle, a friend of Olive’s. I’ll get Olive, she’s with the kids. They’re taking it pretty bad.”
“We all are,” said the mother, the mould from which her daughters had been struck. Ruby Carss was in her sixties, had henna hair worn thin by too much dye and too many perms, was thin and full of nervous energy and looked as if she had suddenly been faced with the prospect of her own death.
