by Jon Cleary
“Up to Noosa, just Lisa and me.” He had told his mother and father about the planned trip; but their memories, like themselves, were fading. “A second honeymoon, I think they call it.”
“You’ve been lucky. Both of us, you and me. Mum’n I’ve been happy. Just like you and Lisa. That ain’t common, not these days. I read in this—” holding up the paper “—two blokes married. Blokes! You think they’ll be happy like we been?”
Malone shrugged. “They could be.”
“Bloody poofters. Wogs, slant-eyes—I’m in a foreign country. You back at work?” Con Malone, then working on the wharves, hadn’t been able to hold his head up when his only child had become a cop. The union had doubled his dues for three months. “That last job must of wore you out. Two women poofters killing one of them’s husband.”
“They’re called lesbians, Dad. Or dykes.”
It was Con’s turn to shrug. “Who cares? The cases get you down sometimes?”
“Sometimes.”
“What d’you do then? Hand ‘em on to someone else?”
“It doesn’t work like that. Not like on the wharves.” He grinned when he said it; he’d better or his father would be on his feet, two fists up. The wharves had been Con’s parish, the union his religion.
“So you’ve never walked away from a case?”
“Not so far. But . . .”
“Here comes Mum. Pious as hell. She’s just been talking to God or the Pope.”
Brigid Malone smiled as she approached, but she didn’t put out her hand or turn her cheek to be kissed. She kept that sort of affection for her grandchildren; she, too belonged to the nineteenth century. A long while ago she had been a handsome woman, maybe even close to a beauty; but that, too, somehow seemed as distant as the nineteenth century. Like Con, she had shrunk over the past six months. Lately she had begun to talk of Ireland, of her girlhood: but only to her grandchildren. To talk like that to Scobie, her son, would be too difficult. With him she was still trapped in the tight corset of her earlier feelings. She loved him, he knew that, but if she shed tears for him he had never seen them.
“How are Lisa and the children?”
“Fine. How’s the Pope?”
“I’ll ask him next time he writes. You coming in for a cuppa tea? I’ve made some scones.”
“Date scones?”
“What else?”
He followed them into the house. The safe house, where they had protected him as securely as he tried to do with his own children. Where crime, when it entered, could be handled with the simple logic of a cricket bat.
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Enjoy these Jon Cleary’s novels, as both Ebooks and Audiobooks!
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Scobie Malone Series
Dragons at the Party
Now and Then, Amen
Babylon South
Murder Song
Pride’s Harvest
Dark Summer
Bleak Spring
Autumn Maze
Winter Chill
Five-Ring Circus
Dilemma
The Bear Pit
Yesterday’s Shadow
The Easy Sin
Standalone Novels
The City of Fading Light
Spearfield’s Daughter
The Faraway Drums
