Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “Angela did tell me that she had kept the gun and one of the silencers—Mr. Dunne had made two silencers. She said she kept the gun in case he tried any funny business with us—like he did, with the blackmail. She also said she had taken the original silencer—I never saw any of this, the gun or the silencers—she took it back to Hamill’s and dumped it in a box there. She did that on the Monday morning, when she took her car, the Ferrari, there for servicing—that was her excuse for turning up there on the Monday. She thinks of everything—but then you probably have seen that. When she told me she’d killed Mr. Dunne—and his wife, too, poor woman . . . I, I dunno, I began to see another side to her. I still loved her, but . . . Women can love men who do terrible things—it happens all the time. Women can love women who do the same terrible things. But then . . . Well, then, things started to get out of hand immediately after the—the killing of my husband. The Russian money, for instance. That was a shock—at first I thought it was God playing an ironic joke. I believe in God. I’m not a good Catholic, I suppose I’m what you’d call a convenient Catholic. A lot of people use religion as a convenience, don’t you think? It helps them convince themselves they’re truly sorry for whatever they’ve done wrong. I think I’m sorry I killed Will. I know I am, if only for the children’s sake. But if everything had gone right, if we’d got away with it and I hadn’t found out about that dark side to Angela and had been happy with her—I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t be sorry . . .

  “All I ask now is that they don’t put me in the same prison as her—I don’t think I could bear that . . . As for Jason and Shelley—I just hope I haven’t lost them. Not forever . . .” Statement by Angela Bodalle:

  “Whatever they have said, I refuse to answer any questions on the fantasies of those two liars.”

  II

  Summer had come and almost gone, lingering on with high temperatures and high humidity into March. The football season had started again and players were collapsing from heat exhaustion while administrators sat in air-conditioned committee rooms and planned more ways of making more dollars. The USSR had gone the way of a dozen other empires and various peoples in its republics had discovered there were long-buried hatreds of each other that were far more virulent than any hatred they had felt for those in the West. The recession worldwide had got deeper and old men came out of the closets of history to tell how tough life had been in the Great Depression and that the spoiled generations of the postwar years “ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” From one end of Africa to the other, if people were not dying of starvation they were dying of AIDS or from the guns of rival tribes. Americans were finding that their President spent most of his time looking outwards instead of inwards, where their problems lay, and for the first time in years the White House went a paler shade of white at the possibility that the President might not be re-elected. Australia had a new Prime Minister, an abrasive man who rubbed voters up the wrong way but at least stirred them out of the smug apathy they had long thought was the true way to happiness. History stumbled on through its accidents, while in the news, which may or may not be history, men and women passed judgement on the criminals among them.

  Igor Dostoyevsky, having given damning evidence, was given free passage out of Australia and disappeared into Oblivion, with which there are no treaties of extradition. Olive Rockne received a life sentence for conspiracy to murder her husband and Angela Bodalle received a double life sentence, her papers marked never to be released, for the murders of Will Rockne, Garry Dunne and Claudia Dunne.

  Malone walked out of the Central Criminal Court, blinking for a moment in the bright sunlight. After a lifetime of going without them, he had started wearing dark glasses last summer; but he never wore them on duty. He knew from the experience of questioning crims who wore dark glasses that hidden eyes concealed hidden answers. This afternoon he wanted to wear an open face, no matter how difficult it might be.

  He saw the Rockne family standing in a group, doing their best to turn their backs on the photographers snapping at them. Jason detached himself from the small group and for a moment it looked as if he was going to hit the photographers nearest him, but he walked right through them and came towards Malone. The latter braced himself.

  Jason pulled up, said nothing, just stared at Malone. He was dressed in blazer, slacks, a blue shirt and a plain tie; not his school tie, Malone remarked. In the background two photographers and a TV cameraman came forward, but Clements suddenly appeared in front of them and said something. Whatever he said, threatening or appealing, had its effect: the men with their cameras turned back.

  At last Malone said, “I’m sorry, Jay. It had to happen.”

  The boy nodded. “I know, Mr. Malone. Shelley and I don’t blame you. Life, that’s a bloody long time when you actually say it. How long will Mum have to serve?”

  Malone shrugged, not wanting to give the boy too much hope. “Depends. I think it usually works out they serve only about eleven years.”

  “Only? Jesus! I’ll be twenty-nine, going on. Probably married, with kids. No, not with kids,” he said almost savagely.

  “Jay—” He hesitated; it wasn’t his place to tell someone else’s son what to do with his life. And yet: “Jay, don’t start now planning the rest of your life. What’s happened to you and Shelley won’t necessarily happen to your kids.”

  “Do any of us know what we’ll do or be doing ten or twenty years from now? I’ll bet when Mum married Dad—she wasn’t much older than me—she never dreamed she’d . . .” A big hand gestured.

  “What’s happening to you and Shelley? I mean, where are you going to live?”

  “It hasn’t been easy. Deciding, I mean. Gran Carss wanted to look after us, but I couldn’t stand that. Neither could Shelley, she told me. So we’re gunna live with Pa and Sugar. Or they’re gunna live with us—they’ve sold their house out at Cabramatta and they’re coming to live with us in Coogee. Gran didn’t like it, but she’s accepted it. It would never have worked out, she knows that. She still thinks Mum should’ve got off, that Mrs. Bodalle was the real murderer.”

  He had been looking down at his shoe scratching the ground; but now he looked up at Malone. The latter dodged the unspoken question: what do you think? He said, “You should be okay with your grandfather and Mrs. Rockne. Sugar.”

  “Yeah. Well—well, I can’t say thanks, can I? But I meant what I said—we don’t blame you. Oh, give my regards to Claire. Tell her I’ll call her. If that’s okay with you?” he added dubiously.

  “Come around any time, Jay. You’ll be welcome.”

  “Thanks. You wanna come over and speak to Pa?”

  Malone looked across to where George Rockne, the porter of broken dreams, stood slightly apart from Mrs. Carss, Olive’s sister, Shelley and Sugar. Even though he stood only a few feet from the women, he looked a lonely figure, like a man in a landscape where all familiar features had been obliterated.

  “No, Jay. Maybe I’ll drop in to see him when he moves to Coogee. Take care.”

  He walked away and in a moment Clements caught up with him. “You going home or coming back to the office?”

  Malone looked at his watch. “I think I’ll go home. School will be out pretty soon—I think I’ll collect Claire and Maureen from Holy Spirit, then go and get Tom at Marcellin. I’ll buy ’em all a drink at Brick’s.”

  Clements looked sideways at him. “Family’s great, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes,” said Malone, but didn’t look back.

  Kirribilli

  August 1991-March 1992

  THE END

  FREE PREVIEW OF THE NEXT SCOBIE MALONE MYSTERY:

  AUTUMN MAZE

  1

  I

  THE HEADLINE next day said, DEATH BY DEFENESTRATION. It was written by a veteran sub-editor who had cut his teeth on alliteration, an old tabloid habit. Strictly speaking, however, Robert Sweden did not die by defenestration, a custom made popular by Italians in the early 17th century: though there was an op
en window nearby, he was tossed off a balcony. Whatever the exit, the effect would have been the same. A fall from twenty storeys up, though the quickest, is not the best way of reaching the ground.

  Rob Sweden was charming, seemingly generous and gregarious; on the surface he had everything that was needed to hide the fact that, underneath, he was an unmitigated jerk, a sonofabitch and a scoundrel. Only a few people, however, knew this about him: including, presumably, the person who killed him.

  His watch, an expensive item that gave the date as well as the hour and was guaranteed to function at forty fathoms, a comfort to drowning swimmers still concerned about punctuality, was smashed to smithereens when he landed. His time of arrival, 9.27 p.m., was given to the police by a passing taxi driver cruising for a fare, though not from above.

  II

  At 1.05 a.m. that same night the duty mortuary assistant at the City Morgue was in the body storage room, checking the Completed Bodies list for the past twenty-four hours. Normally he did the check around 11 p.m., but with the arrival of Robert Sweden’s body and another two bodies, he had been busy and two hours had passed before the police had done their paperwork and departed.

  Frank Minto was a cheerful man in his late twenties, a half-blood Maori who spent his Saturday afternoons on the rugby field trying to add to the week’s roster of corpses. He had arrived in Sydney two years before and soon found work at the morgue; as he said, it was just like Sunday in Christchurch. Working alone at night he joked with his silent audience and would have been insulted if anyone had suggested his humour was macabre. He would have explained that the dead, rather than being offended by his jokes, laughed silently, knowing that their worries, unlike those of the rest of us, were over and done with. He was a fatalist, though he would be surprised when death came to him.

  He was joking with a middle-aged corpse, asking if it was comfortable, as he examined it. The corpse had been brought in just after Sweden’s body had arrived and he had made only a perfunctory examination of it. It was not his job to do a detailed report, but since he had started work at the morgue he had begun to dream of becoming a pathologist, of getting some professional standing. He was scribbling a note on the tiny wound he had found at the base of the dead man’s skull, when he heard the buzzer that told him there was someone at the big door to the morgue’s garage and loading dock.

  “I’ll be back, Jack. Don’t go away.”

  Whistling a Billy Ray Cyrus tune, he left the body storage room, closing the heavy door to keep in the chilled air, and went out to the big loading dock. It was empty except for his own battered Toyota. Through the grille of the wide, shuttered door he could see the dark panel van outside. He could also see the dim shape of a man standing by the recently installed intercom.

  “We have a body. A woman from a car accident.” The man had an accent, but that was not unusual these days. Aussies told him even New Zealanders had an accent, an insult if ever there was one.

  “Nobody told me to expect it.”

  “The police were supposed to tell you we were coming. Anyhow, here she is. Let us in, please.”

  Strapped for money by a succession of State governments that, unlike certain electorates overseas, could see no votes in the dead, the morgue’s security had for a long time been a staff joke. Only two months ago three men had walked in, as into an all-night delicatessen, and, after showing him a gun, had asked to see a particular body which had been brought in earlier in the evening. Satisfying themselves that the two bullets in the man’s head had indeed killed him, they had thanked Frank, given him twenty dollars, and departed. It turned out later that the dead man had been the victim of a gangland shooting and the three men were just checking the job had been done properly, conducting due diligence before they paid off the hit man.

  “Okay, bring her in. Are the cops on their way?” He pressed the switch that opened the big door.

  “We thought they’d be here by now.”

  Frank Minto went back up onto the loading dock and through to the receiving room where an empty stainless-steel trolley was always kept in readiness. He dropped his clipboard on the trolley, then wheeled the trolley out on to the dock. The panel van had been driven in to the foot of the dock and three men stood beside it, all of them in grey dustcoats, all of them wearing black hoods with eyeholes in them.

  The shortest of the three men came up on to the dock, took a gun with a silencer attached from under his dustcoat, said, “Sorry about this,” and shot Frank Minto twice in the chest.

  “Jesus!” said Frank Minto, though he wasn’t a Christian; and died.

  The other two men clambered up on to the dock and helped the man with the gun lift Frank Minto on to the trolley. Then they wheeled the trolley back into the receiving room.

  The killer unscrewed the silencer and put it and the gun back into the pocket of his dustcoat, doing it unhurriedly and with a tradesman’s skill. Then he neatly arranged the trolley beneath the camera fitted to the ceiling in the centre of the room. “They video all the bodies here before they put them in the body storage room.”

  “You’re not gunna fucking video him, are you?” Both of the other men, taller and heavier than the man with the gun, were visibly on edge, even though they still wore their hoods.

  “Of course not. But I think he’d like to be waiting in the proper place for his colleagues in the morning, don’t you?” He lifted Frank Minto’s feet and picked up the clipboard holding the Completed Bodies list. He ran a slim brown finger down the columns. “Here he is.”

  The entry showed: 7—E.50710—M—U/K—Canterbury—29/3—HOLD.

  “He’s on trolley number seven, he’s tagged E.50710. He’s down as “Unknown”, so that’s good. They’ve got him marked Hold, so that means they don’t know the cause of death yet, that would be done by the forensic people in the morning. Get him. The body storage room is through that door and the first door on the right.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us?”

  “I have to find the records and destroy them, I told you that.” The leader sounded irritated. “Now go get him!”

  The other two hoods looked at each other, then one of the men shrugged and the two of them went out of the receiving room. The leader, left alone, went to work with the ease of a man familiar with his surroundings. He turned to the small rack of shelves against one wall, flipped through the videotapes stacked there, found the one he wanted and put it in a pocket of his dustcoat. Then he went out to the adjoining office. Here, too, he worked with the ease of experience, as if certain that everything would be where he expected to find it. He found the register book where all details were entered by the police who brought in the bodies; he tore out the page with the details on the Unknown Male, E.50710, found at Canterbury. He crossed to another desk, searched through a hardboard folder marked CORONER and found what he was looking for: a Form P79A with the same details on E.50710. He put the form and the torn sheet from the register into the pocket with the videotape. Finally, he sat down before the computer which was on a bench against the wall, switched it on and then destroyed all data for the previous twenty-four hours. He sat back for a moment like a man well pleased with what he had done, though the hood showed no hint of what expression lay beneath its silk. For he wore silk, while the other two men wore black calico.

  He stood up, looked around him as if making sure he had forgotten nothing, then he went back to the receiving room and through to the corridor that led to the body storage room. The other two men were just coming out, pushing a trolley on which was a body in an unzipped green plastic bag.

  “Holy shit, it’s freezing in there!”

  “You’d be complaining more if it was heated in there. You should smell the bodies where I come from, the ones they leave lying out in the open because there’s no room for them.” The other two said nothing: killers both, they knew he had probably seen more death than they ever would. “Let’s have a look at him.”

  He merely glanced at the grey waxen face
of the middle-aged dead man; after all, he had never seen him before he had killed him. He lifted the thick black hair and looked at the back of the scalp. “Good. They haven’t even started an autopsy.”

  “How d’you know? They might of opened him up from the back.” The man had no idea how an autopsy was done and didn’t want to know; he was squeamish about what was done to the dead.

  “They’d have taken the brain-pan out.” The leader gestured at the stack of lidded white-plastic buckets along the corridor wall. “What do you think is in those buckets? Brains.”

  The man lifted a lid, then slapped it back on a bucket, his hood fluttering over his face. “Christ Almighty! That’s fucking disgusting!”

  “They have to wait to examine a brain. They keep it in formalin for six weeks.”

  “Six weeks? Jesus, why so long?”

  “They have to wait till it stops thinking.” Silk hood waited for the calico hoods to ripple with laughter, but nothing happened; he went on, “Usually they never let the relatives know what they’ve done. Some people, particularly the Christian fundamentalists, get very upset at the idea.”

  “So would I. Jesus, fancy having that done to you after you’re dead. Okay, what we gunna do with this guy?” He nudged the bagged body.

  “Feed him to the sharks.”

  ******

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