by Jon Cleary
Gibson winked at Josie, an evil grimace. “Your point, Josie. You two women can go off to Mass as much as you like. Me and Jack will say our prayers over a beer.”
“Would you care to have me join you?” said Wrigley brightly.
“You better stick to the women,” said Gibson, nodding at the Savannas and heading for the front door. “They’re the ones keep you fellers in business.”
Glenda straightened her hat again, as if it had been blown off center by her husband’s rudeness to the priest, salvaged a smile for the Church, kissed Josie affectionately, pecked at Savanna as if she would prefer to bite him, and followed her husband out to their car. Father Wrigley, hide as thick as the cover of a family Bible, shook hands again, complimented Savanna on his whisky and scuttled out to the Rolls before
Gibson gave the order to the chauffeur to drive away.
The Savannas stood side by side in their front doorway watching the big black car glide away. It turned the corner at the end of the street, the late sun catching it for a moment: the golden reflections seemed to take on an extra carat or two from their source. “I’d love a Rolls-Royce,” Josie sighed.
I couldn’t bite him for that much, Savanna thought; not that and the money we really need. He had looked up the price of the Rolls when Grafter had bought the latest Silver Shadow: twenty-four thousand dollars; that had been the day the bank had sent him a particularly sharp note about Olympus’ overdraft, and he had almost turned Communist on the spot. Yet, in a way, he didn’t begrudge Grafter the car nor the way the old bastard lived; he would live that way himself if he could afford it. He put his arm about Josie’s plump shoulders and squeezed her. “Would you settle for a vintage Savanna?”
He could feel her body stiffen. She and Glenda have been talking about me, he thought again; or she’s been listening and Glenda has been doing the talking. But he kept his arm round her, his fingers working gently on her bare shoulder. Across the street a woman hosing her garden watched them, her eyes sore with the effort to be discreet; here in Rose Bay there were still pretensions of gentility; you did not stare at your neighbours unless you were wearing dark glasses. Savanna did stare across at the woman, telling her silently: I’m trying to seduce my wife and I’m a bastard. Then he felt Josie relax and he felt even more of a bastard. But what else can I offer her but some love-making? She knows I don’t love her, but she’s willing to take the substitute. She looked up at him, her eyes going blank, and said, “Now?”
She turned quickly and went inside. He stood at the front door, looking out across the shining scab of red-tiled roofs on the lower side of the street to the thin streak of water, a blue mote in the eye, that the estate agents called a harbour
view. He and Josie had moved here to Rose Bay when they had first married; she because, born and raised in Ashfield, a respectable lower middle class suburb, she hungered to move up to a higher scale of respectability; he because he had been born and raised in Rose Bay, anyway, and it was close to the city. They had paid five and a half thousand pounds for the house and he had not been too proud to finance it on a War Service loan. Today he could sell the house for fifty thousand dollars, or twenty-five thousand pounds, and wipe out all his debts with the sale. But they would be left with nothing to start all over again and he had no confidence in his powers of recovery. Unlike Grafter Gibson he had never really started at the bottom and at fifty-four he did not want to go looking for the experience of it. Beyond that there was another, more important reason why he would not sell the house. It was the one solid, constant thing in their marriage, Josie’s rock; she did not love it more than she did their daughter, but she depended on it more; it would always be there, but Margaret was already gone, was in England now and might never come back. If he took the house away from Josie, their marriage would be over. And he could not bring himself to do that to her.
He closed the front door, shutting out the scratched and dented Jaguar, the driveway that he couldn’t afford to have re-surfaced, the dusky sky whose serenity was a mockery. He would give Grafter a call in the next day or two, but first he would have to work out what to say. He had never spoken the commercial for blackmail.
“Hurry up, sweet— “
On his way to the bedroom he stopped by the phone, took it off its cradle and dialled two digits to break the dial tone. It had a habit of ringing at the worst possible moment. The Postmaster-General had caused more hernias than he knew of.
CHAPTER THREE
Monday, December 9
1
“I think you might’ve let your father off ,” said Brigid iIa- lone, doling out trifle in Irish-sized helpings. “Getting him mixed up with the police and things like that. There, Lisa. Is that too much?” She handed the plate to Lisa Pretorious, daring her to knock it back.
”I’m Dutch,” said Lisa.
“I know,” said Mrs. Malone, looking as if the knowledge gave her indigestion.
“We love big helpings. They never served me enough when
I was in London.”
“Not even at them big fancy dinners and things at the em- bassy houses and places like that?” Mrs. Malone shook her head in wonder at how the rich tried to economize.
“That wasn’t a bad picture of me in tonight’s Sun,” said Con Malone.
“It was a good one of Scobie, too,” said Lisa.
“Yeah, ” Con Malone said. “Pity they had to take us together, but.”
The visit had been awkward, but not quite as bad as Malone had expected. His father’s connection with the Opera House murder, slight though it was, had been enough to take the heat off Lisa, even if only occasionally. Brigid Malone, Irish as a peat-bog as she was, had missed out on one of her forebears’ talents: she could not wage war on more than one front. At last she had put aside her antagonism towards Lisa for another night and had concentrated on her son’s bad taste and lack of filial feeling in getting his father involved in police business.
But Malone knew how to handle that sort of situation and it had not worried him. He poured some more claret into his father’s glass and said, “I never talk business when I’m eating. Lisa says it’s bad for the digestion.”
“What do ambassadors and people like that talk about when they’re eating?” asked Mrs. Malone.
“About each other,” said Lisa. “Excepting the French. They only talk about themselves.”
In the house next door an argument suddenly started up, words booming and crackling beyond the thin kitchen wall like a distant barrage. Malone looked at Lisa and grinned. “There’s some diplomatic chitchat for you.”
A woman’s voice, strident as a cracked siren, yelled, “You drunken bastard! I dunno what I ever seen in you—” Her voice cut off sharply asyomething thudded against the wall with a metallic clunk.
“Something’s gunna cojfie right through the wall one night,” said Con Malone, sipping his claret, thinking maybe there was something to this business of gracious living or whatever they called it.
“Two or three times a week it happens,” said Mrs. Malone. “Next thing you’ll hear him clout her.”
On cue there was a scream from the woman. Lisa jumped and looked across at Malone. He shook his head. “If I went in there and interfered, they’d both go for me. That’s their own argument. They don’t want any outsider butting in.”
“Least of all a copper,” said Con Malone, taking another sip of the Cawarra Red, wondering what the wife would do
if one night he brought home a bottle of it. Probably throw him out of the house for being a pervert or something.
“But he might kill her!”
Mrs. Malone shook her head, an armchair general wise in the ways of such battles. “They never do. It’s the coldblooded ones do things like that. Like the one who killed your girl.” She nodded at Malone, giving him a proprietary interest in the dead girl of that morning. Then she noticed her mistake and for the first time looked s)*mpatheticalry at Lisa. “I didn’t mean you, dear. I meant the other one/�
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“I suppose in a way she is his girl,” said Lisa. “At least till he finds out who murdered her.”
“Dad tells me it ain’t gunna be easy.” Mrs. Malone attacked her trifle.
“We have to find out who she is, first,” said Malone.
“And if you don’t, you’ll just forget her.” Mrs. Malone’s teeth clicked as they slipped on a piece of loose custard. “Pigeonhole her.”
“They never try very hard when it’s a nobody,” said Con Malone.
“We don’t know she’s a nobody,” said Malone, used to this sort of criticism and still unoffended by it. “She could be a somebody, for all we know.” Thojigh in his mind he doubted it: somebodies didn’t have tattoos on their behinds.
“If she is, you still hush it up,” said Brigid Malone, her Irish logic breaking out like a rash tonight. “You hush up so many things. I don’t mean you. The police. You’ve never told us yet why you went to London that time.”
Malone felt Lisa look at him: he had never told her, either. “That was security business.”
“I don’t believe in security,” said Con Malone, a revolutionary from the age of ten. “In a real democracy there oughta be no secrecy.”
“In an Irish democracy there wouldn’t be,” said Malone, just beginning to be irritated. “Not with the Irish gabbiness.
Look, we’ll find out who this girl is. It may take us a while, but we’ll find out. And when we do, she won’t be pigeonholed. We’ll find out who killed her.”
Then the phone rang. Malone had had the phone put in when he had first joined the police force and when he left to live on his own he had insisted that it would remain in the house and he would continue to pay for it; it was another link with his parents and religiously he called them every day, as if to compensate for the disappointment he knew he had caused them when he had walked out to live alone. He got up now and went out into the narrow hallway in which the phone clamoured with what seemed twice the noise of phones elsewhere. When he lifted the phone, stilling the ringing, he noticed that the row next door had abruptly ceased. He could imagine the battling couple taking time out to press their ears against the wall.
Clements was on the other end of the line. “Scobie? We’re making a bit of progress. She was clean as far as we are concerned, nothing on her in the records. But that dry-cleaning tab, it belongs to a company that operates in the eastern suburbs, from Bondi back to the harbour. That should place where she lived.”
“Good,” said Malone, unimpressed. He had never yet met a case where some progress was not made, but that didn’t mean it would be solved. “What else?”
“Looks like she’s some sort of European, or she’s lived over there. Germany, the dentist thinks. The doc down at the morgue had a good look at her, then called in the dentist. She’s got what he called a jam-tin cap on one of her teeth. It’s a pretty cheap sort of cap and evidently they used it a lot in Europe up till a while ago.”
“What about her fingerprints?” Malone kept his voice to a whisper; he could almost hear the heavy breathing on the other side of the wall. “You get a good set?”
“Beaut,” said Clements. “Soon’s I heard the dentist say she
might be a European, I bunged a set off to Melbourne. They are already on the way to Interpol. Pity we gotta waste time routing the stuff through Melbourne, though.”
Malone clucked sympathetically, not being as parochial-minded as Clements. The Victorian Commissioner of Police was the Interpol representative in Australia and all other State forces had to work through him when requesting Interpol co-operation. It rankled with certain New South Wales men, who considered their own service far superior to that in any other State. Clements, in his own way, was as narrow-minded and bigoted as Con and Brigid Malone.
Malone said goodnight to Clements and hung up. He stared at the wall in front of him, then knocked loudly on it. “Righto! You can start fighting again!”
Then he thought, I’ll never leave here. No matter where I go, even if I finish up as Commissioner, there’ll still be a bit of Erskineville in me. And how will Lisa react to that? He stood a moment longer, regretting his shout of good-humoured abuse. He had felt no shame or embarrassment at bringing Lisa here to his old home; there had never been any snobbish awkwardness about his beginnings. Police work had taught him the impossibility of hiding your origins; the next few days would prove that when they learned where this morning’s dead girl had begun her life. But acknowledging one’s start in a slum district did not mean he had to act as if he had not learned there were some social graces worth cultivating.
Lisa, the product of a middle-class Dutch family and the best schools in Holland, a girl who had spent three years living at embassy level in London, had shown her own social graciousness when she had walked into the tenement house as if she had known such surroundings all her fife. Warned by him of the antagonism to be expected from his mother, she had greeted Mrs. Malone with a smooth friendliness that he could only imagine must be diplomacy at its best. Her reaction to the fight next door had been a humane rather than a
social one: she had been afraid for the safety of the woman with her drunken husband. Lisa had learned to adapt; he would have to learn to do the same. He walked back down the hall to the kitchen, determined to ignore the fight which had once more started up next door.
He stood in the hallway for a moment looking in at Lisa at the kitchen table. I don’t know how I ever did it, he thought. How did I get a girl like that to agree to marry me? Her blonde hair gleaming like a helmet under the hard electric light, she sat leaning forward to listen to his father. Her face in repose looked flawless to Malone; then when she smiled the perfection was not broken but, if possible, improved. But it was not just her looks that fascinated him. She had something else, a poise that placed her at ease with the world and the individual. At first he had thought it was what was called sophistication; then he had come to recognize that it was something deeper than mere social imperturbability. There was a tranquility about her; not a resignation but an acceptance that there were certain things, grief, duty, the demands of love, that would always have to be faced. Then he looked at the lined face of his mother and felt the pain: Brigid Malone would never achieve that serenity of spirit till she died. He loved them both, but he was glad he was not marrying a girl like his mother.
Later, as they were leaving, when Lisa had stepped outside into the tiny backyard to the outside toilet, he said to his mother, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, what do you think of her?”
“She’s all right.” Mrs. Malone was already tidying up, emptying the two old brass ashtrays that had been in the house as long as Malone could remember, straightening the two velvet cushions on the faded couch in the front room; it was as if she feared even the imprint left by visitors on her retre t. “She’s too good for you.”
“I thought you hinted this morning she wasn’t good enough for me. Not being a Tyke or an Australian.”
“I don’t mean religion and things like that. That way there’d be trouble, too. I mean, well, you know. Education, things like that. Position.”
“She’s well spoken,” said Con Malone, trying to say something not too extravagant in favour of Lisa. He had liked the girl, but he wasn’t going to get into any argument with the wife over her.
Malone shrugged in exasperation. He recognized what his mother and father were both trying to say. Without conceding that there was such a thing as class distinction in Australia, they were telling him Lisa was a class above him. His father had used the classic euphemism for breeding: Lisa was well spoken.
“For a couple who hate the Poms for having a Queen and an aristocracy, you don’t sound very democratic. Dad, ever since I was a kid you’ve always been telling me everyone is born equal.”
“They are,” said Con Malone, Labour Party to the core. “Only in the system like it is, some have advantages. She’s had ‘em.”
“It won’t
work,” said Mrs. Malone. “But it’s your life. You do what you like with it.”
Then Lisa came in from the backyard, aware that they had been talking about her but unruffled by it. Outside the toilet gushed noisily like a young Niagara; everyone in the terrace of houses knew when everyone else heard the call of nature. It gurgled, gave a final spasm that jangled the chain, then died away. Lisa, as composed as if she had come from the powder room at the Savoy in London, said goodnight to Mr. and Mrs. Malone.
“That was the best dinner I’ve had since I left Holland,” she said.
“Just what we always have,” said Brigid Malone, not taken in by diplomacy.
2
“They didn’t like me,” Lisa said as she and Malone drove away in the Holden. When he had come out he had seen the finger-scrawled message in the dust on the boot: Get stuffed, copper. He hadn’t said anything, but had helped Lisa into the car, bade a quick goodnight to his mother and father and driven away before some public-spirited citizen yelled a vocal postscript to the message. He had to educate Lisa gradually into what it was going to be like to be a copper’s wife.
He drove down Erskineville Road, a childhood trail, threading his way through the cars pulling away from the corner pub at closing time. He hoped there were no mugs out tonight to thumb their noses at the breathalyser test; he had too much on his mind to get caught up with a drunken driver. He swerved to avoid a car pulling out sharply from the curb and was thanked with a yell of abuse for his caution.
“Mum’s a little bit, well, conservative.” Then he made a confession that was also an excuse: “Actually, I’ve never known her to take to anyone first time up.”
Lisa put her hand on his knee. “Darling, I know it’s not going to be easy. But I’m marrying you, not your parents.”
“How d’you reckon your parents will go for me? Do they hate coppers, too?” Her parents lived in Melbourne and he had met them only once, when he had gone down to Melbourne on holiday a year ago and introduced himself to them. At that time they had not seen him as a possible fiance for their daughter, and they had been politely friendly but that was all. Hans Pretorious was the Australian general manager for a big Dutch textiles company, and though he and Mrs. Pretorious had been in Australia almost ten years they had given Malone the impression that eventually they would re-
