Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  Then he said, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain this. Scobie, Justine could be my daughter.”

  Malone was silent, moving his lips up and down over his teeth, as if words were stuck between them. At last he said, “Do you know that for sure?”

  “No, and I’ll never know. But there’s a fifty-fifty chance that she is. If you put her to trial and you get a conviction, how do you think I’m going to feel for the rest of my life?”

  Malone slumped in his seat, bounced his hands up and down on the steering wheel. “Jesus, I think I’d rather be in Tibooburra . . . I can’t ditch the evidence we have. Russ Clements would start asking questions . . . There’s something else I’d better tell you. We’re picking up evidence against Lady Springfellow—I mean about her husband’s murder.”

  Leeds, who had been half-watching the swan harassing the two women, suddenly jerked his head round. “You’re crazy! God Almighty, Scobie, what started you on that track?” He was even more agitated than he had been in his office three days ago. He put a hand on the dashboard; it was shaking, like that of an old man with ague. “You’re getting carried away with this—you’re letting suspicion get the better of you! You’re—”

  Malone interrupted: there was no rank between them now. “You’re letting your feelings get the better of you. Why the hell do you think I’d have any axe to grind on this, on either of these cases? I’m not some bloody left-wing crank out to chop down the silvertails. Christ, I thought you had more respect for me than that!”

  It was no way to speak to one’s Commissioner; but Leeds was in mufti, plainclothes as it was called, they both were, and Malone’s anger was anger plain, man to man. Leeds, an honest, sincere man, recognized Malone’s right to say what he sincerely thought. He backed down.

  “I’m sorry—I apologize . . . But how? How can you come up with that sort of charge against her?”

  “I’m a long way from charging her.” Malone cooled down. He valued Leeds’s friendship, though it would always be constrained by the difference in their rank. Perhaps, when they were both retired, they could become real friends; but by then, Malone knew, it would be too late. This confidence Leeds had given him would always stand in the way of other, more relaxed confidences. “All I have against her at the moment is that she gave money, quite a bundle of it, to some feller, a bloke with a foreign accent who’d never been to the house before. About then the Colt .45 went missing from Sir Walter’s gun collection. The following Monday he disappeared. Twenty-one years later we find his bones, with the lower half of the skull blown away by what could have been a large-calibre gun, a Colt .45.”

  Leeds shook his head. “Are you trying to say she hired a hit man?”

  “I don’t know at this stage what she did. There’s another angle.” He told of Uritzsky’s disappearance. “He could have been the cove who came to see her, the one she gave the money to.”

  “Why would she give money to a Russian? I told you, you’re—no, I’m sorry. You’re not prejudiced against her. Are you?” he asked doubtfully.

  “No, I’m not. She rubs me up the wrong way occasionally, but that’s been happening to me ever since I became a cop.”

  “She’s—harder than when I first knew her. She was never exactly, well, vulnerable, but she was much softer than she is now. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you make your first hundred million.” He sounded suddenly cynical, an endemic condition with policemen; but this was personal. “I wonder what Walter would think of her now? He wanted her to give up her career when they married. In those days she wasn’t a tycoon.”

  The elderly ladies had distributed all their bread upon the waters; the ducks and swans and gulls had picked the waters clean. The women smiled at each other, folded their plastic bags neatly and walked back to their car, an old square-nosed Rover as sedate as themselves. The ducks and swans glided away without a backward glance, unbothered by having to look grateful for the charity. The gulls squabbled amongst themselves for the crumbs left on the grass and two currawongs flew down to watch the proceedings, like lawyers looking for clients.

  “Well,” said Leeds after a long silence, “what are you going to do? Arrest Justine and charge her? And then her mother?”

  “Forget the mother for the time being. I’ll bring Justine in and question her again. But I can’t see any way out of it—I’ll have to charge her on the evidence. The motive was there. Emma left a diary and there are some pretty incriminating entries in it about Justine. Incidentally, she refers to Justine as „Venetia’s bastard child.’”

  “Bastard child? That’s an old-fashioned phrase.”

  “Biblical, Russ Clements called it. Russ is our problem. He knows as much about this case as I do. He’s flat out to bring in Justine.”

  “Am I mentioned in the diary?”

  “No. She mentions „Venetia’s old friend,’ but that could be anyone. Unless they question Lady Springfellow and she dobs you in. There’s an entry that says, J. threatened me. J. could be John, but I don’t think any Crown Prosecutor is going to read it that way. He’ll read it as Justine.”

  “I had a row with Emma the night she was murdered, but I didn’t threaten her.”

  “No, this was an earlier entry. She was killed before she wrote down anything for the last day and night.”

  “Are there any other diaries? For other years?”

  “We haven’t found any so far, but I’m sure there were. They could be in a safe deposit box somewhere. There is a safe deposit we’ve turned up, but it only had her jewellery in it and some papers.”

  Leeds was silent again; then he sighed. “Okay, Scobie, do what you have to do. All I can do is pray my name is kept out of it. I’m happily married and I have three kids I love very much. I don’t want something I did years ago, before I was married, to ruin their lives. It was reprehensible, betraying a friend the way I did Walter. But . . .” His voice trailed off; decent men sometimes cannot understand their sins. It’s the bastards of the world, thought Malone, who can afford peace of mind. “Let’s go back.”

  Malone started up the car, but had to wait while a black swan crossed the road in front of them with pompous flat-footed dignity, its neck arched in another question mark.

  III

  “It’s strong enough.” Chief Inspector Random blew his nose for the third time since Malone had sat down opposite him. He should not have come to the office this morning; Malone wished he had not. “You could put a case against her and any magistrate would listen to it. It’s going to have the media howling like a pack of wolves. If you put it up, you’ll have to make it stick. They’ll be looking for a conviction, especially since she’s Venetia Springfellow’s daughter. You know what they’re like—if they can’t chop down a tall poppy, get the tall poppy’s son or daughter. You see it all the time, but especially since the stock market crash. There is an air of sort of malicious revenge.”

  “There’s another thing,” said Malone, getting everything off his chest; why did he feel he was confessing some sort of sin? It was like being back at the Marist Brothers school, going to Confession every first Friday in the hope of the salvation that the brothers thought you so desperately needed. “I’m building up half a case against Lady S. herself on the disappearance of her husband.”

  Random blew his nose again; it sounded like a snort of derision. “Are you developing some sort of vendetta against the Springfellow women? Are you anti-feminist?”

  “You’ve met Lisa, Greg. She’d cut my balls off if I showed anything like that.”

  “You’re not anti-the-rich?”

  Malone’s grin was lopsided, like his feelings, “I accused someone else of that. No, I’m not. I don’t love „em, but I’m not going to go out of my way to shoot „em down.”

  “Okay, what have you got against the mother?”

  Malone told him. “I’m waiting to see how much further I can get with ASIO.”

  “As you said, you’ve only got half a case. Not even that. Watch
your step, Scobie. This lady has friends in Canberra, like all those tycoons.”

  She has a friend right here in the Department. “I’m not going to shove my neck out, Greg. I’ll only bring something against her when I’m absolutely certain.

  “Are you absolutely certain about the daughter?”

  Malone hesitated before replying: “Ninety-nine per cent. Do I bring her in now?1

  Random blew his nose again, sighed loudly with irritation. “Bloody virus—I feel lousy. I think “I’ll go home again. You take over. Do whatever you want.”

  “I think I’ll wait till we get the coroner’s report.”

  “Okay. Just keep an eye on her, in case she tries to piss off out of the country. We don’t want another bloody extradition foul-up.” The Department had not had much luck with its last few extraditions of wanted criminals. “I think we should take some lessons from the Israelis. Just go in and grab who you want.”

  “Go home, Greg. You’re starting to sound like Rambo.”

  Random, still blowing his nose, went home and Malone was left in charge of the bureau. He did not want, however, to sit at his desk making decisions on other detectives’ cases. When Fortague rang and invited him to come over to Kirribilli, he went, taking Clements with him. He was not afraid of assuming responsibility; like Random’s virus, it was something he did not want, at least for the moment. When in doubt, go out.

  He and Clements went out to Kirribilli, to the air-conditioned view from Fortague’s office. It seemed, from the ASIO chief’s demeanour, that he had turned up the cold air in his room.

  “I’m afraid the black-out remains on Uritzsky. The file was closed a month after he disappeared.”

  “Why are you defending a Russian? Did he come over to our side and have you given him a new identity?”

  “I can give you no explanation. The matter has been marked Top Secret.”

  Malone and Clements looked at each other. Every bureaucracy has its secrets. The Chinese, who invented bureaucracy, understood the reasons for secrecy: it is the sauce that makes dull work palatable. Sometimes, of course, it makes corruption palatable. The two detectives had dealt in secrets of their own, but that didn’t make them sympathetic towards ASIO and its clandestine frame of mind. Murder was a public affair, or so the policemen thought.

  Clements said, “Then did Springfellow defect? If he did, why was he shot?”

  “I told you, I can tell you nothing.” The air-conditioner hummed in the background, getting chillier.

  “Let me tell you something,” said Malone, coolness creeping into his own voice, “we’re working on the possibility that there was a contract out on Springfellow, that he was killed by a hit man.”

  “Who put out the contract? Uritzsky?”

  Malone grinned. “For the moment, that’s Top Secret.”

  Fortague was silent for a moment, head cocked as if listening to the air-conditioner; its humming seemed softer, as if someone somewhere else in the building had decided the chill was too much. Fortague must have decided the same.

  He smiled. “We’re playing games, aren’t we?”

  “I guess we are,” said Malone, relaxing; he could tell when a man was going to talk. Twenty years of interrogation teaches you a lot about the looseness of the human tongue; its natural function is to say something. Fortague, whose trade was secrecy, was only a little different from all the other men with whom Malone had sat in rooms, waiting for questions to be answered. “But we’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  Fortague nodded. “I should hope so. Look, I can’t tell you everything I know—you appreciate that. Furthermore, I don’t know everything. I’m 2 i/c of ASIO, but I doubt if I’ll ever know, not unless I get to be Director-General.”

  “Tell us what you do know. We’ve got to put the lid on this case one way or the other. The newspapers aren’t going to let us alone.” It was an empty threat.

  “Stuff the newspapers,” said Fortague. “If we took any notice of them, we might as well go out of business . . . All I can tell you, because there was talk of it at the time, it was no secret, at least not then, was that Uritzsky had a girlfriend. Her name was—Jennifer—” He turned over a small pad on his desk. “Jennifer Acton.”

  Malone remarked that Fortague had had the name at hand: he must have been half-prepared to make a concession or two. The room had warmed up a little. “What happened to her?”

  “She hung around Canberra for several months after he disappeared, then she moved to Sydney. She was a very pretty girl, but apparently didn’t have much up top. She was a hostess, he met her in some restaurant. I don’t think his interest in her was serious, he just liked to go to bed with pretty girls and she was the most available. Evidently she was in love with him.”

  “Have you kept tabs on her?”

  “We did up till about ten years ago. By then she’d married and had kids and forgotten all about Uritzsky.”

  “What was her married name?”

  Fortague looked at the pad again. “Mrs. Clive Ventnor. He was a truck driver.”

  “A flash name for a truckie,” said Clements. “I thought he’d be at least a banker with a monicker like that.”

  “No, this guy was a tough one. A wife-beater.”

  “So are some bankers.”

  Fortague looked surprised, as if he thought bankers were like spies, gentlemen through and through. “Well, I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  Malone wondered if the world of spies was much smaller than he had imagined. “Where was Mrs. Ventnor when you last heard of her?”

  Fortague once more looked at his pad. “She lived out at Paradise Valley. It’s a Housing Commission estate out past Mount Druitt.”

  “She still there?”

  “I couldn’t say. We gave up surveillance ten years ago.”

  Malone stood up. “Thanks, Guy. Tell me something—why did you decide to be on our side and tell us about Mrs. Ventnor?”

  Fortague was tearing up the sheet from his pad, dropping the tiny pieces into his waste basket; from there, Malone guessed, they would go into a shredder. “I decided to show you and Russ that we’re human. Not all of us think that you and the rest of them out there—” he waved at the window “—are a mob of subversives. I don’t think you’re going to find Uritzsky by interviewing Mrs. Ventnor, but at least you can’t say I was a totally obstructive bastard.”

  “Oh, I never thought of you as that,” grinned Malone.

  Fortague’s rugged face broadened in an answering grin. “Thanks. Incidentally, Alexis Uritzsky was a grand-nephew of the Petrograd chief of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. He was shot in 1918.”

  “Is that what the KGB did to our Uritzsky?”

  The ASIO man’s grin was now enigmatic. “I wouldn’t know, Scobie. Good luck.”

  Fifty yards up from where Clements had parked the police car was a phone-box. Malone walked up to it, found the phone-books inside it were intact; Kirribilli must be an area that vandals hadn’t yet discovered. He looked up the Ventnors: there was a C. Ventnor at a street in Paradise Valley. Then he called Jack Montgomery at the Herald.

  “Jack, did you know Alexis Uritzsky had a girlfriend called Jennifer Acton?”

  Montgomery drawled an obscenity; Malone sometimes wondered if his farmer’s image was an act. “I’d forgotten all about her. Yeah. I tracked her down once, but I didn’t get much out of her.”

  “She was a restaurant hostess, pretty but on the dumb side.”

  “I wouldn’t know about the dumb bit—I can never fathom women.”

  “You should read your women’s pages. Jack, keep turning your memory over. If you come up with something, anything, let me know.”

  “If you come up with something, let me know.”

  “Don’t write anything for the moment, Jack.”

  “Scobie, have I ever stabbed you in the back? Okay, I’ll keep mum. But if anything breaks, you owe me.”

  “You’ll be the first to know, Jack.�
��

  He went from the phone-box back to where Clements waited in the car. “The bloody airconditioner’s gone on the blink again,” said Clements. “We going back to the office?”

  “We’re going out to Paradise Valley.”

  “The bloody Outback? Burke and Wills died out there.”

  They drove out to the far western suburbs, into heat that seemed to increase a degree for every kilometre they covered. They went beyond Parramatta, out along the Western Highway and at last turned off and drove several kilometres across gently rolling terrain where drab houses seemed to crouch exhausted beneath the burning heat. Then they came to Paradise Valley, several hundred acres of planned living that had never come to life. Houses that had all the charm of large packing cases stood in tiny plots where grass struggled to punctuate the hard yellow-brown earth; a few householders had tried to cultivate gardens, but the flowers and shrubs had the withered look of those in untended cemeteries. The police car drove through a small shopping centre, but the shops looked deserted; two of them had For Lease signs plastered across their windows. Malone caught a glimpse of a poster in the window of a video shop—ESCAPE . . . He couldn’t read the rest of it and he didn’t know whether it was the title of a movie or a shout of desperate advice. There was no McDonald’s, no Pizza Hut, no sign of a cinema or a community centre. The planners, secure in their inner-city environment, had lost either their enthusiasm or their imagination before the pioneers had moved into Paradise Valley for the new life that died at birth.

  The Ventnors lived in one of the drabbest of the packing cases, on a plot where no attempt had been made to grow a lawn or start a garden. A battered, dirty Toyota, wheelless, squatted on blocks in the narrow space beside the house. A mongrel dog under the car growled at the two detectives as they came in the wire front gate, but was too listless to come out and challenge them. Maybe nothing and nobody inside the house was worth defending.