Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  Also by Jon Cleary

  Remember Jack Hoxie

  Season of Doubt

  The Long Pursuit

  The High Commissioner

  The Pulse of Danger

  The Fall of an Eagle

  A Flight of Chariots

  Forests of the Night

  The Country of Marriage

  North from Thursday

  Justin Bayard

  The Sundowners

  You Can’t See Around Corners

  CHAPTER ONE

  Monday, December 9

  1

  “She’s not a Catholic,” Brigid Malone had said. “She’s not even an Australian!”

  “At least she’s white,” Scobie Malone had said. “I could . be marrying a black Zambian Methodist.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past you,” said Mrs. Malone, conceding nothing. “What’s a Zambian?”

  “Someone from Zambia. In Africa.”

  “Oh, one of them new places-” Dismissing three and a half million Zambians of all denominations, even the Catholics, Mrs. Malone turned back to her ironing. She never read the cable pages in her daily newspaper. The rest of the world was turning upside down day by day, but she neither knew nor cared about it; what mattered was only what turned up on Sydney’s doorstep and when it did she would read about it in the home news pages. She had given up reading the Catholic Weekly because lately it seemed to be full of nothing but what was going on in Rome.

  “Well, is it still on tonight?” Ialone said. “I mean, can I bring her home to meet you?”

  “Bring her home for tea,” said Mrs. Malone, slamming the iron onto one of Scobie’s shirts as if he were in it.” But don’t expect me to whip up any of that foreign muck for her. It’ll be chops. And I’ll make a trifle.” Which was something, Malone thought: it could have been rhubarb tart.

  “I’ll bring a bottle of wine.”

  “Please yourself. Don’t expect me to drink any of it.”

  Malone grinned at his mother behind her back. At least she was consistent: her prejudices extended to everything. She had lived all her life here in this same terrace house in a narrow street in Erskineville; she had borne him in the same bed where she herself had come into the world. No, not the world: her world. Long ago, long before she had married, she had drawn her boundaries and he would never know why. There had never been any desire to escape from this tenement district, to come to know what was outside and to understand it. And when the Italians and the Greeks, foreigners, had moved into Erskineville in the immigration years since the war, she had shut the front door of her house, which in Scobie’s childhood had always stood wide open, and retreated still further into the iron lung of her bigotry. Malone had learned that the only way to tolerate her narrow, myopic outlook was to smile at it. Sometimes the smile had to be forced, but it was better than getting angry with her. He did not want her to shut the door against him.

  “I’ll see you tonight, then.” He looked at the shrivelled back of her neck bent over the ironing table and wondered what she would do if he kissed it. He was an only child, but he couldn’t remember when he and his mother had last gone through the usual gestures of affection. Her prejudices ran even to a hatred of demonstrative sentiment. She kissed her rosary three times a day without embarrassment, but he had never seen her kiss his father.

  “Six o’clock. Your father likes his tea on the table when he comes in.”

  Malone wondered how Lisa would like that: dinner at six o’clock. In the month she had been back in Sydney she still lived to the pattern that had been established for her when she had been private secretary to the Australian High Commissioner in London: dinner at eight, wine on the table, conversation over the coffee cups. She was in for a shock tonight when his mother grabbed the plates as soon as the last mouthful of trifle had been eaten. Any after-dinner conversation in the Malone house was held at the kitchen sink above the rattle of dishes and the clink of cutlery.

  “You can pick up your ironing tonight.” Every week he took his washing to a laundromat, then brought it home to be ironed. He had once objected that he was imposing on her, but his mother had only got angry and grabbed the washing from him as if it were hers and not his. Since then he had come to recognize that it was some sort of bond between them, just as was the weekly visit to clean out his flat at King’s Cross. It was the only way she knew of showing love.

  He went out of the house, got into his car and drove away from the memories that still clung to him so stubbornly. When he had been growing up in this street there had been only one or two cars parked outside the terrace houses and those had been third- or fourth-hand, bought cheaply and made to go only by the ingenuity of their new owners. Now the street was lined with cars, none of them older than his own 1964 Holden and some of them looking brand-new. Not everyone in Australia was affluent, but hire purchase at least allowed some appearance of it; most of the population was infatuated with prosperity, even if it could not afford it. Con and Brigid Malone, both of whom had been brought up to believe that the hire purchase man was a relative of the Devil, were the only couple in the street without a car. When Malone came occasionally on a Sunday to take them for a drive, Brigid Malone boarded his car as if she were heading for a wedding or a funeral: it was an occasion. Con Malone, more exposed to the world than his wife, would get into the car with no show of expression at all; but the impassivity of his face was intended for the neighbours and not for Scobie. It was bad enough having a policeman for a son; it would not do to show that he was even on good terms with such a wayward bastard.

  As he drove down the street this morning Malone was aware of women and one or two men standing at their front doors staring silently at him as if he were a plague-carrier. Maybe I should turn in my badge, he thought, and start carrying a leper’s clapper. Even the Italians and Greeks living in the street, not knowing him, never having spoken to him, had learned to suspect him. Cop-hating was a good starting point for assimilation in Australia. We have our uses, Malone thought; and clashed his gears as he slowed to round the corner of the street. The people at their front doors only smiled and shook their heads: the bloody coppers didn’t even know how to drive properly.

  Now, an hour later, Malone sat in the detectives’ room at Sydney’s Y Division and once again wondered why he had become a policeman. His mother had prayed that he might become a priest, but God in his wisdom had recognized a religious no-hoper when he saw one: the Church had enough to worry about without recruiting a fellow who had trouble staying on his knees longer than two minutes. When Malone had come home and announced he had joined the police force, his mother had retired to her room and her rosary and his father had gone up to the local pub and got blind weeping drunk. In those circumstances it was difficult to believe that he had been driven to his decision by any sense of vocation or spiritual message visited upon him by the Police Commissioner. It had been a job and nothing else.

  “Why did you join the force, Russ?”

  Russ Clements looked up from his betting calculations. “I won another hundred and forty dollars Saturday. I’m beginning to wish I’d never become a cop. I’ve won fifteen hundred bloody dollars on the horses this past three months. Who’s gunna believe I’m not taking something under the counter?” He shook his big crew-cropped head, anguished at the thought of being a wealthy cop. Twenty-six years old and six feet two, he wasn’t yet old enough or strong enough to carry the weight of public opinion; Malone had noticed that it was the old and the atrophied who best stood up to public abuse. They had learned the uses of indifference. “Why’d I join? Christ, I dunno. The bird I was going out with at the time, she didn’t talk to me for a month after.”

  “You still going out with her?”

  “After six years? You’re kidding.
” Clements shook his head again, staring at the blackmail note in his hand: three winners, all at good odds. “It buggered up my social life completely. That was why I took to betting on the nags and dogs, just for something to do. I’d rather be in bed any day with a bird. People will take that, it’s natural. But a cop with a bank account with money in it, they won’t go for that.”

  Malone slumped further down in his chair, staring through the grimed window at the blank wall of the building next door. This police building had been erected in 1870, a year when the local public thought even less of its police than it did now. It sometimes seemed to Malone that every year since then had laid its cold, dusty dead hand on this room where he sat. Police circulars hung from the walls like peeling wallpaper; a fly-speckled picture of the Queen hung above four equally-speckled photographs of four Wanted men. Clements stood up and opened one of the lockers in the corner: it groaned like an ancient sarcophagus and Malone would not have been surprised if a convict from the First Fleet had fallen out. On Malone’s desk stood a typewriter in which he was expected to take some pride, as if he were some sort of antique dealer: it had been used to type out the first report on a famous murder case of the early Twenties. The only bright, new note in the room came from the early Christmas cards that Clements had now begun to arrange on the mantelpiece over the old blackened fireplace. It’s a job, Malone thought, but has it made me into a dull, stupid clot? Does Lisa really know what she’s marrying?

  Then Smiler Sparks, the duty sergeant, came into the room. “Better get down to the Opera House.”

  “Why?” said Malone. “They finished it at last?”

  Sergeant Sparks didn’t laugh; he had never been known to be amused by anything. “They found the body of a girl. Looks like murder. You owe me thirty cents, Scobie, for those meat pies I got you on Friday.”

  Malone shelled out thirty cents. “They were cold.”

  “Don’t blame me, mate. Anyone deserves cold pies if he spends an hour trying to give advice to a pro.”

  “She was only a kid. Sixteen.”

  “I checked on her card. She was nineteen and she’d had twenty-two convictions. She was laughing at you, mate.”

  “That’s more than I’ve ever seen you do,” said Malone, and went out of the room and out of the building, followed by Clements, his partner. He felt his mood improving as he went, glad as he always was to escape the sour, drab atmosphere that successive governments had considered the right environment for its law officers of Y Division.

  The early summer humidity swamped them at once; even by the time they had crossed the road to the parked police car Malone was damp under the armpits. People struggled up the small hill from the Quay, faces shining as if they had come straight out of the waters of the harbour, the older ones inwardly cursing the climate that, on cooler days, they claimed was the best in the world. Another police car drew up and Inspector Fulmer got out. The cold-blooded bastard, Malone thought, he looks as if he’s come straight from the ice-works. Malone told him where they were heading.

  “The Opera House’s first dramatic performance,” said Fulmer, and Malone and Clements smiled dutifully at his flat heavy humour. Fulmer did not go in very often for jokes and when he did they fell on the ear with a dull thump. “Well, I hope it’s a straightforward case, one that wont spoil your Christmas.”

  He left them, walking in his stiffbacked way that suggested he was leading a review past the Commissioner. Clements looked after him. “I wonder what he was like as a kid?”

  “I don’t think he ever was a kid,” said Malone. “He was born thirty years old and in uniform.”

  Clements nodded and got into the car. “Well, let’s go and have a look at this girl, see if she’s gunna give us an easy Christmas or not.”

  2

  Malone pulled the Falcon out from the curb, wondering if the force would ever run to air-conditioned cars for its officers. He went round the block and drove down Macquarie Street, the glittering window-eyes of new office blocks on one side of the road glaring down on the green oasis of the Botanical Gardens on the other. They drove into the work compound surrounding the Opera House. Clements showed his badge to the gatekeeper just as a uniformed policeman came down the road from the main building site.

  “Nobody in or out, Ted,” Malone told him. “And no outside phone calls, especially to the newspapers.”

  The policeman looked at the gatekeeper, who looked hurt, as if he had been accused of high treason. “You heard that. You’ve just been made a deputy marshal. Sergeant Malone will send you a badge for Christmas.”

  “You know what you can do with it,” said the gatekeeper. “I hope it has points on it.”

  The policeman gave him an official smile, then turned back to Malone. “I’ll keep an eye out, Scobie. Jack Radcliff is still down with the body.”

  Malone drove on. The Opera House loomed before them, the huge towering shells that were the roofs of the various

  concert halls seeming to Malone to be like giant ears turned to the sounds of the harbour and to the suspect whisperings of the local citizens. The building, over the years of its long checkered history, had become variously a joke, an object of anger at waste of public money, a source of tremendous excitement that at last Sydney was going to have a center for the performing arts: no one, except perhaps visitors from other States, remained indifferent to it. So far work on it had been in progress ten years and there was said to be at least another two years before it would be completed.

  “When opening night finally arrives,” said Malone, who blew hot and cold in his reactions to the project, “I wonder if God will be free to cut the ribbon? They wont be able to get anyone less than him, not after waiting this long.”

  “Not if Labour’s back in power,” said Clements, who had the usual policeman’s cynicism towards politicians. “Whoever heard of a Labour politician letting an outsider steal the limelight?”

  They drew up before the vast expanse of steps that led up to the open podiums below the shells. A short wiry man in shirt and tie, dark shorts, long socks and desert boots was waiting for them. He handed them each a construction worker’s helmet and slipped one on his own head. His hat was too big for him and with his thin legs tapering away beneath him he reminded Malone of a tight-headed toadstool.

  “Kerslake’s the name. One of the engineers. Bit of a shock.” He sounded as if he would have a continual mouthful of words, any one of which could be spilled out like a lottery marble. He led them up the steps, into a wide opening, then across what he told them was going to be the main concert hall. The concrete shell soared above them like a vast ribbed tent. A scaffolding staircase reached up to the fluted roof, like a tall metal reredos beneath the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. Workmen moved like bats among the high scaffolding catwalks, their voices and the clash of their tools on metal magnified in the huge chamber. It was the first time Malone had been so close to the project and for the moment he felt a sense of awe.

  Then Kerslake said, “The body’s down here,” and led them down a long flight of rough steps, talking all the way, sketching an angular embroidery of words: “Might never have found her. Just sheer chance. Old plans changed when Utzon, the original architect, left. Spaces down below, closed up, now being utilized. For new rooms. Watch your step.”

  He had switched on a workman’s lamp and Malone and Clements followed him carefully as he led them through a labyrinth of passages that were only occasionally fit by electric globes hanging like fungi from the concrete walls. Malone sniffed, conscious of the smell of sea water.

  “Below high tide level,” said Kerslake, and brought them to a small group of men standing like a queue of unemployed outside an opening in a wall. Timber had been torn out of the opening and lay scattered about. Somewhere far above them a pneumatic drill thumped away like an aural nerve. Malone sniffed again, but there wasn’t the sickly sweet smell he had expected.

  “She hardly smells at all.” A uniformed policeman, Jack Radclif
f, stepped out of the dark opening, balancing like an overweight ballet dancer on the pile of timber. “The air in there’s pretty dry, Scobie. And no light got to her.”

  “Who found her?”

  Everyone looked around; then the familiar lumpy figure leaning up against the wall said, “I did.”

  “G’day, Dad,” said Malone, and hoped he didn’t sound as surprised as he felt: policemen were never supposed to be surprised by anything. “When did you start work here?”

  “Your father?” Kerslake fired a couple of lottery marbles, bonus prizes. “What d’you know! Small world!”

  “Come in this morning,” said Con Malone, still leaning against the wall, his helmet tipped like a challenge over one eye. “I’m labouring for one of the sub-contractors. Just my bloody luck.”

  Malone didn’t ask what his father considered bloody luck: whether it was the fact of discovering the dead girl or having his own son as the investigating officer. Malone knew what the answer would be.

  He stepped gingerly over the heaped timber and, guided by several lamps, went into the large chamber.

  “Pretty appropriate,” said Clements. “This could be a tomb. What were they gunna do—bury politicians down here like those Egyptian kings?”

  “Break it down, Russ,” Malone said, and Clements blushed, abruptly aware that these men around him were not as used to murder as he and Malone. ,

  “It was going to be a dressing room,” said Kerslake. “But don’t know now. Know what theatrical types are like. Will reckon the place is haunted.”

  There’ll be other ghosts before this place falls down, Malone thought, this is just the first. The girl lay in the spotlight of two lamps, her nude body half-exposed beneath a green silk dressing gown, old newspapers and the fossilized remainders of workers’ sandwiches scattered about her like the debris of funeral tributes. Her blonde hair hung like straw beneath her curiously twisted head; her mouth was open for a scream that she might never have made. There were dark bruises on her throat and her wide-open eyes were veined with hemorrhaging. She had that peculiarly ugly look that only beautiful women get when they have met a violent death. Malone had noticed it before: the living ugly seem to get no uglier in death.