Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “Has the widow been left well provided for?”

  “Not really.” Malone glanced at Clements. They waited while the waiter, middle-aged and brusque, no frills on him, cleared away their plates. He took Clements’s order for dessert, the only one, and went away without a word. The waiters here never flattered to deceive one into leaving a large tip. “How are you going on the tip we gave you on the money in the Shahriver Bank?”

  Grace Ditcham knew how to read between the lines; she was not only a reporter, she had a sub-editor’s mind. “So the widow has an interest in that, has she? The bank gave me the bum’s rush. In the nicest possible way, of course. Their managing director is so oily, OPEC should keep an eye on him. I’ve got nothing specific I can turn into a story, not at the moment, but they know I’m getting ready to write one. I let them know—in the nicest possible way, of course—that they were under investigation about the transfer of illegal money out of the country. I think they’ll play it safe—for a while, anyway. They’ll keep all their money here, no matter what instructions they get from their clients, and try to look respectable. I dropped a hint that our London office was looking into their other branches. Mr. Palady, the managing director, looked as if he’d like to cut my throat.”

  “Not him,” said Malone. “He’d get others to do that. When we clear up this Rockne case, we’ll give you the lowdown on what’s there in the Shahriver Bank. You might even have enough to make a book out of it.”

  “I’ll follow up the bank story. But Angela’s the one who’s got me intrigued. I think I might delve a little more into the private life of a female silk.”

  “That’s what we were hoping you’d say. Two male chauvinists like us would be too obvious.”

  II

  Once back at Homicide Malone called Blackheath police. A voice that sounded young enough to be a Boy Scout’s said, “I’m sorry, Inspector, there’s no one stationed here now who’s been here longer than five, maybe six years. How long ago was the accident?”

  “Twelve years ago. June, nineteen seventy-nine.”

  “I could try, but I don’t think there’d be anything still here in the records.”

  Malone looked at the notes he had taken from the clippings. “A Sergeant Reiffel gave evidence at the inquest. Where’s he now?”

  “Oh, the sarge retired three years ago, just after I came here. He lives up at Colony Bay, on the Central Coast. Hold on a minute, I think we’ve got a number for him. Here we are, no problem. It’s . . .”

  Malone put down the phone, looked across his desk at Clements. “Am I on a wild-goose chase?” “Every year in police work there’s a wild-goose season.”

  “A philosopher as well as a punter? Is that Romy’s influence?”

  “She tells me all German philosophers are pessimists. That doesn’t fit a punter’s philosophy. Let’s be optimistic and assume the goose isn’t just flying overhead and shitting on us.”

  Malone shook his head. “Romy’s turning you into someone, pretty soon, I won’t recognize . . .” He dialled an 043 number on the Central Coast and got an answer at once, as if the man at the other end of the line had been waiting anxiously for a call. “Mr. Reiffel? Sergeant Reiffel?”

  The voice was an almost ridiculous contrast to that which had been on the line from Blackheath; it was as rough and deep as a coalmine cave-in. “Yeah, who’s this . . . Malone, Scobie Malone? Sure, I’ve heard of you . . . No, I’m not busy.” There was something that sounded like a choked laugh. “Sure, tomorrow morning’ll be fine. You know how to get here?”

  Malone hung up, said to Clements, “I’ll go in my own car. You run the office tomorrow. I’ll try and be back by lunchtime.”

  “Wasn’t there a song once called ’Wild Geese?’ Didn’t Frankie Laine used to sing it?”

  “No, it was Tiny Tim. It was called ’Wild Canaries.’”

  It was just chaff tossed between them; they were trying to tell each other, and themselves, that things were not as discouraging as they seemed. It was ever thus: the first grunt ever uttered by man had to be positive. The first curse only came later, when the wild goose shat on him. One had to be in positive mode, Malone thought, as the radio girl could have told him.

  He went home, enjoyed dinner and Lisa and the children. When Claire, the last of the children to go to bed, came to kiss him goodnight, he said, “Have you heard from Jason?”

  “He went back to school today. I saw him at Brick’s this afternoon.”

  “How was he?”

  “I dunno—quiet. He’s never loud, like some of the other boys. But today . . .”

  “Did he say anything about how things were at home?”

  She drew away from him. “Dad, are you training me to be an informer or something?”

  “Sorry, love. I’d never do that to you.”

  “Feel sorry for Jay, Dad. He told me it was awful at school today. Nobody said anything to him, not directly, but he said it was just whispers all around him all day.”

  Wait for the whispers when word gets out that his mother is a lesbian.

  “That was all he said?”

  “Yes. Why, was there something else?”

  “No, nothing. Goodnight, love.”

  Later he and Lisa watched In the Heat of the Night and he wondered what it would be like to be the chief of police in a small town, where the pressures might be even greater because they were more concentrated. Tomorrow he would ask ex-Sergeant Reiffel that question.

  In bed, their limbs locked in their usual pretzel of love, Lisa said, “So what’s on your mind now?”

  “That obvious again?”

  “You told Claire the other night—the night of the murder, God!” She was silent a moment, then she went on. “You told her you’re an open book. You are. Sometimes.”

  He told her what he knew of the Olive Rockne-Angela Bodalle relationship. She said nothing, taking her legs out of his and lying on her back looking at the ceiling. The bedside lamps were still on and he could see the frown on her night-creamed face. “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “Oh, I’m surprised all right. I don’t know why, but I am. I’m not very familiar with lesbians. When I was at boarding school there were one or two girls we suspected. But gay women weren’t coming out of the closet, not back then. How do you feel about them, Olive and Angela Bodalle?”

  “I’ve thought about them and I don’t really care a damn about what they are to each other. If they’re genuinely in love, that’s their business. But besides being lesbians, I think they are also murderers.”

  She rolled over, raised herself on one elbow. “They killed Will together?”

  “I don’t know whether they did it together or whether they both paid Kelpie Dunne to kill him. But I think Angela might’ve killed Kelpie.”

  She lay back on her pillow. “God, what other couples have pillow-talk like this?”

  “Righto,” he said huffily and put out his bedside lamp. “Forget it.”

  “Come on, don’t get shirty with me. Save that for the office. Why would Angela have killed this man—Kelpie?”

  “Kelpie Dunne. And his missus. To keep his mouth shut. And his wife’s in case he’d talked to her. Kelpie died on Sunday night and yesterday morning Olive walked free. All they have to do now is sit tight and make no mistakes.”

  “What happens if they set up house together? Won’t that be a mistake?”

  “Depends. It’ll start gossip, but gossip never convicted anyone in a court of law.”

  “They won’t have to set up house. They can go on living just the way they do. Men keep their mistresses secret—why can’t a woman? So what are you going to do?”

  “Start finding out what Angela was like before she became Mrs. Bodalle, QC.” He kissed her cheek, then grimaced. “What’s that? Dairy Farmers or King Island?”

  “Ella Baché,” she said and smeared him with love.

  Next morning he left at seven thirty in the family Commodore. It took him forty-five minutes to g
et over the Harbour Bridge and up Pacific Highway: surely, he thought, one of the slowest exit routes from a major city anywhere in the world. But once on the freeway at Wahroonga he took the Commodore up just above a hundred k’s an hour and sat on that till the Gosford turn-off. He drove with his window down and the drive and the wind cleared his mind, so that by the time he got to Colony Bay he felt almost optimistic that something positive would come out of this two-hour trip to see ex-Sergeant Reiffel.

  Colony Bay was a small community on Brisbane Water, one of the very good boating stretches behind the headlands of the Central Coast. The entire area had burgeoned since World War Two, had become a mixture of retirement villages, modest weatherboard and fibro cottages that had survived from prewar and expensive would-be mansions that were too big for the plots on which they had been built. Tad Reiffel’s house was a modest weatherboard on a waterfront lot that, Malone guessed, was worth three times the value of the house.

  “Tad for Thaddeus. Whoever heard of a copper named Thaddeus? My old man was Austrian. I suppose he could of called me Amadeus or Wolfgang. Let’s sit outside, the wife’ll bring us coffee.” He was bald-headed and red-faced and had a white beard, grown since his retirement; he was also tall and had a beer-belly, another portrait of the Great Australian Profile. He looked more like Malone’s image of an Austrian innkeeper than a retired Aussie cop. His voice was just as deep and rough as it had sounded over the phone, the sort of voice that would never have needed a bullhorn. “Oh thanks, hon. This is Inspector Malone, I told you about him.”

  Mrs. Reiffel was almost as tall as her husband, built on similar lines; they would have made a formidable pair heading the rush at bargain sales. She was pleasant-looking and her smile was as welcoming as her husband’s had been. Malone wondered how happy they were in their retirement, a state of living for which so many were unprepared. Including himself, even though it was twenty years down the track.

  Mrs. Reiffel left them sitting on the small porch looking out on the broad stretch of water. Reiffel wasted no time: “The Bodalle accident, right? After you spoke to me yesterday, I spent last night putting my memories in order. I used to drive the blokes who worked under me up the wall, being so methodical. Are you methodical?”

  “Yes and no. I’m mostly Irish. Does that answer your question?”

  Reiffel laughed, a landslide of mirth. “It does, my oath it does. Yeah, well, the Bodalle accident. I was the first on the scene, me and one of the junior constables. A bloody mess, in every meaning of the term. A charred wreck, I think they called it in the newspapers. Including Mr. Bodalle’s body.”

  “Did anyone see the accident occur?”

  “Not directly, no. I’ll tell you about that in a minute.” He had got his memories in order; he wasn’t going to have them shuffled around. “It happened on a back road. The Bodalles owned a holiday place up there, nothing big, but nice and comfortable. They didn’t have much to do with the locals, all their entertaining was for friends up from Sydney. A coupla times my blokes pulled him over for driving with too much in his system, but we never charged him, just gave him a warning.”

  “How’d he take that? The warning?”

  “Oh, he took it okay. He was smart enough to know that if he tried to toss his weight around, he’d of found my blokes sitting on his tail every time he got into his car. A pity they weren’t sitting on his tail the night he got killed.”

  “What came out at the inquest? You were there?”

  “I was the principal witness. Me and Mrs. Bodalle. The autopsy found alcohol in his system, despite how badly burnt he was. Evidently it’s only high-temperature fires, like a chemical fire, that boils the blood, well, sorta dry. Mrs. Bodalle admitted he was probably too drunk to drive, but she couldn’t stop him. It looked like an open-and-shut case to the coroner and that was the way he found it. But—” He looked out at the shining water, where two pelicans planed down like old-time flying-boats. A tourist launch went slowly by and he waved to the passengers, who waved back as if they, like him, were short of company. It was all so peaceful, a long way from the harrowing scene of his memories.

  “But?” said Malone.

  Reiffel turned away from his contemplation, a scene that, Malone guessed, he looked at every day with the same lost gaze. There was a certain sadness about the big man, for all his cheerful demeanour. “But? Yes, but . . . The doctor who did the autopsy found that Bodalle’s skull had been fractured, right there—” He put a huge hand on the front of his bald pate. “He told me he made no emphasis about it, because he couldn’t be sure whether it had been done before the crash or when the car crashed and Bodalle was catapulted out of his seat. He wasn’t wearing his seat-belt.”

  “How did the accident occur? You said it was on the back road.”

  “Yeah, it was a gravel road, it didn’t get much traffic, except from the few people who lived on the other side of the valley—they’d drive up it to do their shopping in Blackheath. It ran—I suppose it still does—it ran straight down across the face of the escarpment, maybe a third of a mile, maybe a bit more. There was a sharp bend at the bottom—that was where Bodalle’s car went off, straight into a tree.”

  “You think someone may have clobbered him, then started up the car and let it go?”

  “More than that. You want more coffee?” Malone shook his head, waited patiently while Reiffel got up and went into the house taking his empty cup with him. This is what happens to cops when they retire, Malone told himself: they stretch out their memories, rethink their mistakes. He had seen it happen before; it would happen to him some day. He would be sitting in the sun like this, making some young cop wait while he regretted what he might have done in the past: the past which was now the present.

  Reiffel came back with a fresh cup of coffee, sat down and said, as if he hadn’t moved from his chair, “A year after the accident we picked up a young bloke from the other side of the valley, a hippy, one of those drop-outs for the alternative lifestyle. He was growing marijuana, acres of it up there in the timber on that side. He told me that a year before, the night of the accident, he saw a car going full pelt down that road, it hit the bend and burst into flames. The only thing was—” Reiffel paused, took a sip of his coffee. “The only thing was, he said the car was on fire all the way down the road, right from the top.”

  “So why didn’t he come forward?”

  “The marijuana. He was growing it then, he didn’t want us coming across the valley to question him.”

  “Did you report what he told you?”

  “Not officially. I talked it over with a coupla senior officers and they said they’d look into it. I never heard any more on it, so I let it lay and forgot about it. Except that every now and again I remember it. Like yesterday, when you called up. I didn’t sleep last night,” he said and sounded guilty.

  “Why do you think nothing was done about investigating it further?”

  “I dunno. Scobie, you know how things are. About that time, the Force was having the shit kicked out of it. Senior officers were being investigated, there were corruption charges . . . Things got buried or pushed aside, you know that. Maybe it was just put in the Too Hard basket and nobody’s ever bothered to take it out.”

  “How did Mrs. Bodalle take everything? I mean, when you gave her the bad news about her husband’s death? And then at the inquest?”

  “You mean did she throw a fit, get hysterical? I’m pushing my memory a bit on this, but no, I can’t remember she did anything like that. She was upset, as far’s I can remember, but she was always calm. The neighbours, some locals lived on either side of their holiday home, they said she was always like that. Even those mornings after they’d heard her husband belting hell out of her the night before. Bodalle was a very violent man when he was drunk.”

  It was Malone’s turn to stare at the water. Several hundred yards away there was a flat island crowded with villas, miniature mansions that advertised their owners’ success. A Hills hoist whirled
slowly on one of the front lawns, the laundry on it a mockery of the national flag fluttering from the tall flagpole on the neighbouring lawn. Way beyond the island, high up on the escarpment above Woy Woy, there was a sudden flash. Sun on a windscreen, a car on fire? He waited, but nothing in flames ran down the road that he had come down an hour before.

  He told Tad Reiffel everything that had happened so far on the Rockne case. “It’s just between you and me, Tad, okay? Not even a word to your wife, I’m too far yet from winding up the case.”

  “Ellie never asks questions, not about police work. All our married life I worked in country stations—Murwillumbah, Dungog, the last twelve years in Blackheath. In a country town, you talk police business to your wife and in no time she’s looking at everyone sideways, no matter how good a woman she is. Better she doesn’t know. Ellie’s not inside now with her ear pinned to the wall. She may ask me a thing or two after you’ve gone, but she won’t be upset if I tell her I can’t tell her anything.”

  Malone nodded. “Thanks for that, Tad. I wondered what it would be like working in a country town—I’ve been to a couple on one or two cases. I was thinking about it last night when I was watching In the Heat of the Night. You ever watch it?”

  “Never miss it. Life was like that, only we didn’t have a major crime every week. And I never managed to be as wise as Chief Gillespie.”

  “We’re never as wise as the TV cops, none of us. Why did you retire here?”

  “I was born here, in this house—my old man was the local plumber, in the days before plumbers became millionaires. I thought we’d come back here and I’d do just what my old man used to do when he retired, sit out there in the boat and fish, read all the books I’d put off, listen to music . . . Worst decision we ever made. We should of stayed in Blackheath among all the friends and enemies we’d made in those twelve years. Retirement shouldn’t be a matter of running away.”

  “I’m going after Angela Bodalle, Tad. If I have to call on you, will you give evidence, tell what you’ve just told me?”

  “A pleasure.” His laugh rumbled through his big body, his red face shone. “I always hated unfinished business.”