Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  “I’ll see they bring everything to you that they’ve found. I have to go up to Blackheath now.”

  “To the scene of the crime?” said Dircks, once more saying the wrong thing.

  “Crime?” Justine spoke for the first time since she had sat down. She had just been presented with the discovery of the skeleton of the father she had never known. All her life she had felt a sense of loss at never knowing him and often, even these days, she sat in front of the photograph of him in the Springfellow drawing-room and wondered how much she would have loved the rather stern-looking, handsome man who had sired her. She had dreamed as a child, as a schoolgirl, even now as a young woman, that he was still alive, that some day he would come out of the past, like a figure in a mirage, and into their lives again. It gave her a shock and a terrible sense of final loss to learn that only his bones were left. “What crime?”

  Venetia looked at Malone: there were certain things a mother should not have to tell her daughter. He caught her unspoken plea and said, “We think your father was murdered. I’m going up to Blackheath to start the investigation.”

  “Murdered?” All her conversation so far had been questions. Malone had seen it before; shock could leave some people only with questions.

  “It’s only a guess at the moment,” he said gently. “It’s not going to be easy to find out exactly what happened, not after so long.”

  He was at the door when Dircks, foot in mouth again, said, “You didn’t tell us what’s wrong with our series.”

  Malone noticed that, though Venetia was annoyed, she was waiting on his reply. “The cops solve everything too easily. It never happens that way, not in real life.”

  II

  A studio car had picked up Malone each week and brought him out here to Carlingford on the inner edge of the western suburbs. The studio, surrounded by landscaped grounds, backed on to a Housing Commission development; the Commission residents, battlers all, looked over their back fences at the factory where their dreams were made. They waved to the stars of the soaps who drove in every day; stars dim and tiny, but any galaxy is a relief from the kitchen sink and the ironing-board and a husband who thinks foreplay is a rugby league warm-up. One morning a woman had waved to Malone and he had waved back, hoping she had not recognized her mistake. He hated to disappoint people.

  The driver got out of his car when he saw Malone come out of the front door of the administration building; but the detective waved him back. He stood on the front steps, savouring the mild sunny day. October was a good month; it brought the jacaranda blooms, one of his favourite sights. The landscape designer had planted jacarandas, interspersed with the occasional flame tree, all along the front fence of the big gardens; Malone wondered if, with the new owner, he would be told to replace them with pink blossom trees and grey gums. But Venetia Springfellow, he guessed, was an indoors person and probably never noticed the outdoors through which she passed. The seasons would mean nothing to her, except the financial ones. He wondered if he was going to finish up disliking her.

  Russ Clements arrived fifteen minutes later in the unmarked police Falcon. It was a new car, so far with not a scratch or a dent in it. The State government, with an election due within months, had embarked on a new law and order policy; the police had benefited, with new cars, new computers, even a couple of new helicopters. There were fewer muggings in the streets but more in the gaols, which the government was claiming was an improvement. The voters, cynical of politics, gave no hint of how they would vote in the elections. They knew when they were being mugged.

  Malone got into the car and Clements headed west towards the Blue Mountains. The new car had not improved his appearance; he was as unkempt as ever, a big lumbering man who looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was the same age as Malone, still a bachelor, and Lisa Malone was forever promising to find him a wife, an offer he always received with a grin but no enthusiasm.

  “So how’d the Queen Bee take it?” A gossip columnist in the financial pages of the Herald, a man of infinite imagination, had given her that name and now it was common usage, even amongst those who were not her drones.

  “She’s a cool bitch.” Why had he called her a bitch? He would have to watch out, to kill his prejudices before they grew too far. “But I think she was shocked.”

  “I was in the Springfellow offices this morning. They’re my stockbrokers.” He grinned at Malone’s querying eyebrow. “It’s not coincidence. I’ve been with them since the beginning of the year. They can’t get over having me as a client. I have to keep telling „em I’m not with the Fraud Squad.”

  “She has nothing to do with the broking firm, has she?”

  “Only as the biggest shareholder in the holding corporation. She has nothing to do with the day-to-day running of it.”

  “So what are you doing with a broker?”

  Clements’s grin widened. “I’ve been winning so much on the ponies, it was getting embarrassing. I was going into the bank every Monday morning putting in three or four hundred bucks every time. The tellers were starting to look suspicious. How could I tell „em I was just an honest cop having luck at the races? So I started investing some of it on the stock market—this boom looks too good to be true.”

  “The boom can’t last.”

  Clements nodded. “That’s why I was in their office this morning. I’m thinking of selling everything. All good stuff, Amcor, Boral, Brambles—but even they can’t keep going up and up. You should’ve got into the market.”

  “That’s what Lisa’s dad told me. But they won’t take mortgages as a payment.”

  “From what I hear, some of the yuppies have paid with nothing else. They’re buying futures.”

  “It’s not for me.” He had never dreamed of wealth and so he would always be an honest cop.

  They drove on out of the city up into the mountains where lay the bones of a man whose future had ended twenty-one years ago. Two local police were waiting for them, a detective-sergeant and a uniformed constable. They led the way in their marked car out through the small town, past the comfortable homes of retirees and the holiday guest-houses, to bushland that showed the occasional black scars of the past summer’s fires. The two cars turned down a narrow side-road that led down to thick bush. Beyond and below was the Grose Valley, its perpendicular rock walls glinting in the sun like stacked metal, its grey-green forest floor thick and daunting as quicksand. Hikers were being lost in it every weekend, the police always being called in to help find them.

  They started down the track that had been hacked out of the bush when they had carried out the bones yesterday. The young constable went ahead, occasionally slowing up to look back sympathetically at the three older men. He was all lean muscle and Malone wondered if he spent his spare time rock-climbing. This was the ideal beat for it.

  The detective, Sam Pilbrow, pulled up to get his breath. “There used to be a track right down here years ago. You could drive a vehicle down it for another half a mile.” He was in his middle forties, years and circumference, and walking obviously was not a hobby with him. He would never volunteer to find a lost hiker. “Well, I guess we gotta keep going.”

  At last they came to a tiny clearing where the bushes had been chopped off and thrown aside. White taping fenced the clearing, but no attempt had been made to outline where the skeleton had been.

  “We didn’t reckon it was worth it.” Pilbrow was a cop who would always weigh up the worth of doing anything. He had started in this town and would finish here. “We’ve combed the area—” He swung a big thick arm. “All we come up with were the ring and the briefcase and one shell. My guess is it was probably from a Colt .45. That would account for the way the jaw was smashed, with the gun held close. It could have been an execution.”

  “Judges aren’t executed, except by terrorists,” said Clements. “And we didn’t have any of them back in the Sixties.”

  “Well, he was ASIO, wasn’t he? You never know what happens in that game.” P
ilbrow read spy stories.

  “Who found him?”

  “Some hikers. By accident—they got off the track that leads down into the valley. He could have laid here for another twenty years or whatever it was.” He really wasn’t interested in such an old case.

  “Any sign of clothes?”

  “Nothing. If everything he wore was natural fibre, if it was all cotton and wool, the weather would have destroyed it. Or birds might’ve taken it for their nests. Even his shoes were gone. The briefcase is pretty worn.”

  “Any bushfires through this part?”

  “Not down here on the lip. If there had been, we’d probably have found the bones years ago.”

  Malone looked out at the valley, wondering what peculiar fate had brought Sir Walter Springfellow to this lonely spot. Down below him two currawongs planed along, their ululating cries somehow matching in sound their oddly swooping flight. Out above the valley a hawk hung in the blue air like a brown cross looking for an altar; far down amongst the trees the sun caught a pool of water and for a moment a bright silver shard lay amidst the grey-green quicksand. He could see no sign for miles of any human activity.

  “You questioned any of the locals?”

  “Who’d remember back that far?” said Pilbrow. “Yeah, we questioned them. This used to be a lovers’ lane in those days, but there were no lovers down here the night he was killed. Or if there was, they’re married to someone else now and got kids and moved elsewhere. I don’t think you’re gunna get far with this one. Inspector. There’s bugger-all to start with.”

  Malone nodded; then said, “Maybe this isn’t the place to start.”

  He thanked Pilbrow and the constable for their help, said he’d be in touch if he wanted any more information, nodded to Clements and led the way back up the track, not bothering to wait for the toiling Pilbrow. He knew the local detective would think him rude and arrogant, a typical bastard from the city, but he felt he owed the lazy, overweight man nothing. Pilbrow would just as soon see the file on Sir Walter Springfellow remain closed.

  Malone and Clements drove back to Sydney. It started to rain as they got to the outskirts and Malone looked back at the mountains, gone now in the grey drizzle. It somehow seemed an omen, a mist that would perhaps hide for ever the mystery of Sir Walter Springfellow.

  “What’s happening to the, er, remains?”

  “They’re at the City Morgue,” said Clements, “I guess the family will reclaim them. They’ll bury „em, I suppose. You can’t cremate bones, can you?”

  “They do. Whatever they do, it all seems a bit late now. If there’s a funeral, we’ll go to it. See who turns up to pay their respects.”

  “Where to now? I’ve never worked on a homicide that’s twenty-one years old. I feel like a bloody archaeologist.”

  “That’s where we start, then. Twenty-one years ago. When we get back to town, go to Missing Persons and dig out the file on Walter Springfellow.”

  They reached the city, threaded their way through the traffic and turned into the Remington Rand building where Homicide, incongruously, rented its headquarters space amongst other government branches. Sydney had started as a convict settlement two hundred years ago and it seemed to Malone that it was only back then that the police had been together as a cohesive unit.

  Clements went across to Missing Persons in Police Headquarters in Liverpool Street. The NSW Police Department was spread around the city as if its various divisions and bureaux could not abide each other, a decentralization of jealousies.

  He was back within half an hour. “The file on Springfellow is missing. It just ain’t there.”

  “When did it go missing?”

  “That’s what I’ve been looking up. A file is usually kept for twenty to twenty-five years, there’s no set time. Every five years they go through them, cull them. There’s an index. Springfellow’s name disappeared from the index a year after he went missing, which means someone lifted his file before then.”

  “Do we go back to the family, then?” Malone asked the question of himself as much as Clements. “No, we’ll let them bury him first. They’ve been waiting a long time to do that.”

  Clements looked at him, but he had meant no more than he had said.

  III

  “Oh Daddy! You’ve resigned from TV? And I’ve told everyone at school you were the director!” Maureen, the eight-year-old TV addict, was devastated.

  “Well, it was crap anyway,” said Claire, the thirteen-year-old who was reading modern playwrights at school this year.

  “Everything’s crap,” said Tom, the six-year-old who read nothing but majored in listening.

  Lisa cuffed both of them across the ear, a smack that hurt. She was totally unlike the mothers one saw on television, especially American moms who had never been seen to raise a hand against even child monsters. She had left Holland as an infant and there was none of the new Dutch permissiveness about her. Had she lived in Amsterdam she would have cleaned up the city in a week. Instead, she lived in this eighty-year-old house in Randwick, one of Sydney’s less affluent eastern suburbs, and she kept it as unpolluted as she could. Malone sometimes referred to her as his Old Dutch Cleanser.

  “Watch your language,” he said, “or I’ll run the lot of you in.”

  “Isn’t there any bad language in Sydney Beat?” asked Maureen. “Oh God, Daddy, I’m so angry with you! I was going to bring all the girls home for your autograph. I wanted Mum to have Justin Muldoon home for dinner one night—” Justin Muldoon was the star of the show, an actor who, Malone had told Clements, changed expressions by numbers.

  “That’s enough of that,” said Lisa. “Dad’s on a case. That’s a detective’s job, not sitting around a TV studio.”

  “Talking to actresses, you mean?” said Claire, a junior cadet getting ready for the battle of the sexes.

  “Is that what you do?” said Lisa.

  “Sometimes they sit in my lap, but it’s all official duty.” They smiled at each other, knowing how much they trusted one another.

  “Are you on another homicide?” said Tom, who had just learned what the word meant.

  “No,” said Malone, who tried to keep any mention of murder out of the house. This was his haven, something that Lisa did her best to maintain.

  Later, while the two girls were doing the washing-up and Tom was having his shower, Lisa came into the living-room and sat beside Malone in front of the television set. “Anything on the news?”

  “Nothing that interests us. Which is the way I like it.”

  He held her hand, lifting it and kissing it. In public he was held back by the stiffness with affection he had inherited from his mother and father, but in private he was full of affectionate gestures towards Lisa and the children. In his heart he knew he was making up for the lack of affection shown by his parents towards him, their one and only. They loved him, he knew that, but they were both too awkward to express it. He never wanted Lisa or the children to say that about him.

  Lisa stroked his cheek, not needing to say anything. She was close to forty, but had kept her looks: regular features, faintly tanned skin, blonde hair worn long this year and pulled back in a chignon, blue eyes that could be both shrewd and sexy, and a full figure that still excited him. She could hold the world at bay; but, he hoped, never him.

  “The stock market’s still going up,” he said, but, having no money invested, it meant nothing to either of them. “Your father must . . . Ah, I wondered if they were going to mention it.”

  Richard Morecroft, the ABC news announcer, was saying, “The skeleton of a man was found today in the bush near Blackheath. Police say it could be that of Sir Walter Springfellow, Director-General of ASIO, who disappeared in March l966 . . .”

  “Nothing about his being murdered,” said Lisa.

  “We’re holding back on that as far as the press goes—we’re not sure of anything. We—hold it!” He held up a hand.

  Morecroft picked up a sheet of paper that had been
thrust into his hand from off-camera. “A late piece of news has just come to hand. Charles (Chilla) Dural was today released from Parramatta Gaol, where he had been serving a life sentence for murder. A one-time notorious criminal, Dural was the last man sentenced by Sir Walter Springfellow before he left the Bench to become head of ASIO. Police would make no comment on the ironic coincidence of the two events occurring on the same day . . .”

  “Bugger!” said Malone and switched off the set.

  “What’s the matter? It’s just as they said, a coincidence—”

  “It’ll give the media another handle to hang on to. They’ve got enough as it is—Springfellow turning up as a skeleton, his missus now a tycoon and up to her neck in a family takeover—”

  “It’s supposed to be the daughter who’s trying to take over the family firm.” Lisa read everything in the daily newspaper but the sports pages; she knew when BHP or News Ltd went up or down, what knives were being sharpened in politics, but she knew nothing of Pat Cash’s form or what horse was fancied for the Melbourne Cup. Though not mercenary, she had a Dutch respect for money and the making of it. “Justine Springfellow is only trying to emulate her mother. Two tycoons in the family are better than one.”

  He looked at her. “Who said that?”

  “Someone in Perth.” Where tycoons bred like credit-rated rabbits.

  “Don’t believe what you read about the daughter. I met her today. She’d do everything her mother told her.”

  Lisa had picked up the financial pages of the Herald, knew exactly where to turn to. “Springfellow Corporation was at its highest price ever yesterday. What’s this prisoner Dural like?” Lately she had developed a talent for non-sequiturs, and Malone, being a man, had wondered if she was at the beginning of her menopause. Which thought was a male non-sequitur.

  “I haven’t a clue. He was before my time. I’ve heard of him—I think he killed a cove in prison about ten years ago. But he’s a stranger to me.” And I hope he stays that way.