Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  had looked down at the crumpled heap, that he could not bring himself to believe was a dead man, in the bottom of the rowboat. What would happen if he just pushed the row-boat off, let it go with the ebbing tide? But he knew that would be leaving too much to chance. Shivering with fear and revulsion at what he had done, he determined not to leave any more to chance.

  He had gone down into the cabin of the yacht, found a spike and a wooden mallet. Then he had got down into the rowboat, tied the runabout on behind it, picked up the oars and stroked the rowboat out and away from the yacht. He did not know how long he rowed, nor where his strength came from; when he finally pulled in the oars he was exhausted. He sat slumped, a pain pulling his chest together: Christ, what if he should have a heart attack, if someone in the morning should find the two of them dead here in the same boat? He had raised himself then and got to work. He had taken Bixby’s legs, pulling them beneath the seat so that the body was firmly wedged there. There was a painter on the front of the rowboat and he had taken that and roped one of Bixby’s arms to the seat. Then he had got into the runabout, leaned over precariously and driven the spike into the bottom of the rowboat. He had almost fallen back into the rowboat as he had tried to wrench the spike free again, but at last it had come out in his hand and he heard the gurgle of water coming into the bottom of the rowboat. He had sat there in the runabout, shoulders hunched, head bent, and waited till the rowboat had sunk from sight. Then he had started up the motor of the runabout and cruised quietly back to the yacht. He would never know how Bixby’s body had got free of the sunken rowboat and been found by the police.

  “Isn’t there some law against taking a man’s possessions out of his house without his consent, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, I think there is,” said Malone. “But as I told Mrs.

  Helidon, we sometimes have to break the rules when they get in the way.”

  “Do you think my husband killed Miss Brand?”

  “We’re not supposed to answer leading questions like that, Mrs. Helidon.”

  “Is it against the rules?”

  Malone studied her carefully, searching for the crack in her; then he nodded. “I’ll ask you a question. Do you think your husband killed Miss Brand?”

  He ducked as Helidon’s fist swung past his ear. He fell off the seat, landing painfully on one knee, crouched waiting for Helidon to come out at him from behind the wheel. But Helidon made no further move; he had made his gesture in defense of his wife. He dropped his hands and sank back in his chair. His wife moved closer to him, put her hand in his. The two of them, blank-eyed with dark glasses, faced the detective as he still crouched in the well of the boat.

  Malone slowly stood up, picked up his jacket. “I’m sorry about that, Mrs. Helidon. I didn’t mean it as a nasty remark. I’m just trying to do my job, find out who killed Helga Brand. I think you had better come into Headquarters with me, Mr. Helidon.”

  “Do you have a warrant?” There was no further fight in Helidon: he seemed to ask the question more as a matter of form, as if he were demanding some sort of protocol due him as a Minister. He had lost and he knew that it was only a matter of time before they charged him with the murder of Bixby.

  When he had come ashore last night Norma had been waiting for him in the Mercedes in the car park. He had staggered up to the car, opened the door, thrown in the briefcases and fallen in on the seat beside Norma. She had put her arms round him and asked gently, “Is it all over?”

  “No, no.” He had shaken his head against her bosom and told her what had happened.

  She had said nothing for a long time, just sat holding him to her. Then at last she had said, “It’s a terrible thing, Wally, what you’ve done. But it might be the end. It might all be over for us now.”

  But she had been wrong.

  “That will depend on the answers you give to our questions/’ said Malone. “But I’ll warn you—I think we have enough evidence against you to ask for a warrant.”

  “Thank you,” said Helidon automatically, as if Malone had granted him some concession. “May my wife come with us?”

  “I’m coming, darling,” Norma Helidon said before Malone could reply. She stood up, moved to the stern of the yacht, took hold of a rope and pulled in a small dinghy. “After you, Sergeant.”

  Malone went to clamber over the side, then suddenly stopped. He bent down, ran his finger along a groove beneath the seat on which he had been sitting. When he straightened up he was holding a broken and chewed match.

  “Who did you kill, Mr. Helidon? Helga or Bixby? Or both of them?”

  2

  The Premier sat behind his desk with the Attorney-General just beside him. The Police Commissioner was to Ma-lone’s right and just in front of him; Fulmer, the junior man in the room other than Malone, sat on a leather couch against one wall. Malone himself sat on a stiffbacked chair in the center of the room and by now, twenty minutes after entering the Premier’s office, felt that he, and not Helidon, was on trial. When he had arrived back at Y Division with the Heli-dons, Fulmer had still been up at the Commissioner’s office. He had called there and had been put on to Fulmer.

  “We’ve just come out,” said Fulmer. Then: “The Helidons? You have them down there? I think you’ve been a bit hasty.”

  “I’ve only brought him in for questioning. You said to treat it as a routine case.” I won’t call him sir till Monday.

  “You should have waited to see me. Hold it a minute.” But it was five minutes or more before Fulmer came back on the line. “The Commissioner has just been on to the Premier and the Attorney-General. Bring Mr. Helidon up to the Premier’s office in half an hour.”

  “Tom, I don’t want to front the Premier yet. I haven’t put all my questions to Helidon—”

  “You should have thought of that, Sergeant. Half an hour.”

  Now Malone shifted uncomfortably on his chair, made a move to cross his legs, then decided against it. I’ll bet even the Opposition Leader gets something more comfortable than this when he comes here. Out of the corner of his eye he saw John Leeds, the Commissioner, watching him closely but it was impossible to tell whether Leeds was sympathetic or critical of him. There was some comfort that Fulmer was in the room to back him up, but so far Fulmer had said nothing at all.

  “Well, you have a good case against Mr. Helidon, Sergeant.” The Attorney-General was a small, bald-headed man who had the reputation of knowing the law backwards but had difficulty in remembering even his wife’s name. “But what do you think—do you think Mr. Helidon killed this girl —this—” he looked at the file in front of him “—this Helga Brand?”

  “Well—well, all the evidence points that way,” Malone said; then felt abruptly angry and said more forcibly, “You’ve just implied as much yourself, sir.”

  The Attorney-General glanced at the Premier and the Commissioner, then looked back at Malone. “Yes, yes. But with this new development with this man—” again he referred to the file “—this Bixby—what do you think now?”

  “Is it for me to decide, sir?”

  “No.” Leeds had said very little since they had sat down, but his nod to Malone had been a friendly one when the latter had entered the room. Now he sat forward as if he had decided he was Malone’s advocate. “I’m sorry, Mr. Croydon, but I never ask my men to make those sort of decisions. He would not have been asked to make it if we had been dealing with someone else but Mr. Helidon. He’d have gone to his superior officer, in this case Superintendent Fulmer, and Tom would have made the decision as to whether a warrant was justified. But even he would not be deciding whether the man charged was a murderer. All he would be doing would be deciding whether there was a case for the man to answer.”

  “I’m sure Joe knows the law, John.” The Premier smiled at both the Attorney-General and the Commissioner: he had been carrying oil for troubled waters so long that he was known to political journalists as Tanker Smith. He was a sharp-featured man with a lock of hair that always hun
g down over one brow, giving him a boyish air; but he had been in politics for thirty years and no boy could have survived the in-fighting he had been embroiled in during that time. He turned the smile on Malone. “You do seem to have a certain doubt, Sergeant—?”

  Is that the word for what I’m going through? Malone wondered. From the moment he had picked up the chewed match on Helidon’s yacht there had been the horns of a dilemma gouging at him such as he had never experienced before. He had repeated his question to Helidon, but then he realized he was going to get no more information out of the Minister: Helidon was like a man who had just suffered a severe stroke. Malone and Norma Helidon had had to help him down into the dinghy. Malone had started up the outboard motor and the three of them had ridden in in silence through the empty moorings to the club house jetty. Norma Helidon, taking her husband’s arm, had begun to lead him towards the blue Mercedes in the car park.

  Malone had shaken his head. “We’ll go in my car.”

  ”Don’t you trust us to follow you?”

  “Put away the knives, Mrs. Helidon. We’re a long way past the insult stage.”

  He opened the rear door of the Falcon, gestured for them to get in. Then he got in behind the wheel, gasping a little as the hot vinyl of the seat burnt him through his trousers. He reached out to turn on the ignition, then stopped and turned round.

  “If you’re not going to answer those direct questions, I’ll put it another way. Let’s suppose you didn’t kill Helga, but someone else, Bixby, had as much evidence as we’ve got that you did. Let’s suppose he tried to blackmail you and you killed him. How close would I come with that guess?”

  Norma Helidon looked at her husband, but he seemed still in a state of dumb shock. She pressed his arm, then turned back to Malone. “Which murder are you investigating? Miss Brand’s or this man Bixby’s?”

  I’m not fighting him any longer: he’s given up. I’m fighting her and she is going to break every rule in the book. Because she’s not a lawyer defending a client: she’s a wife fighting to save her husband. I’m not up against justice: I’m up against love. “I think they’re connected, Mrs. Helidon. I don’t think I’ll have much trouble putting them both in the same file.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Mr. Bixby might have killed Miss Brand?”

  You don’t trap me that way. “I’ve considered a lot of possibilities. They don’t change the fact that the evidence is strongest against your husband.”

  “You implied my husband might have killed Mr. Bixby. What’s your evidence for that?”

  None, except a chewed match found on your yacht. But he was not falling into that trap, either. “I only have to charge him with one murder, Mrs. Helidon.” He looked at Helidon, who lay back in the seat as remote from and unheeding of the conversation as if he were alone. All at once his dislike for and antagonism towards the man went. God damn it, Malorte, don’t get involved again. Brusquely he said, “One is enough.”

  But now, here in the Premier’s office, he wondered: which one? The murder of Helga Brand, on which there was almost certainly enough evidence to convict Helidon, but which he might not have committed; or the murder of Phil Bixby, on which there was practically no evidence, but which Malone was sure now Helidon had committed? You do seem to have a certain doubt, the Premier had said.

  Malone looked at Fulmer for support, but The Bishop was playing Pilate: he sat quietly on the couch, his washed hands in his lap. Christ, what’s happened to him? Malone thought. Treat it as another routine case, he had said; and now that it was no longer routine he just didn’t want to know. What the hell had gone on in the Commissioner’s office this morning?

  “Yes, sir,” Malone said at last. “I do have a doubt. I think Mr. Helidon killed Bixby. I’m not so sure now that he killed Helga Brand.”

  “Who do you think could have killed her?”

  “It could have been Bixby,” Malone said slowly, and began to sense that all the hard slogging that he and Clements had put in over the past week had been for nothing.

  Croydon rustled the file in front of him. “So we could be taking Mr. Helidon into court for a crime he didn’t commit?”

  Again Malone looked at Fulmer, but the latter was gazing steadily at the Premier and the Attorney-General. You bastard: you helped me climb way out here on the end of this limb. He iufned back to Smith and Croydon, shifting in his chair so that his back was half-turned to Fulmer. He saw the flicker in the Commissioner’s eyes, but he ignored it. I’m on my own here, so bugger them all.

  “That’s right, sir,” he said to Croydon. “Unless we charge him with the murder of Bixby.”

  “On which you have no evidence, at least none that would stand up in court ?”

  “None/’

  Croydon closed the file, but he wasn’t finished yet. “Are you sure you just don’t want a conviction of some sort, Sergeant? As a reward for all your undoubted hard work?”

  Malone went momentarily blind with fury. He clutched at the chair beneath him, clung to it till his vision cleared. Then he looked directly at John Leeds. “Am I on trial here, sir?”

  For a moment he thought he had gone too far. He saw the flush on the Commissioner’s face; then he realized Leeds’ anger sprang from the same cause as his own. “No, Sergeant, you’re not! Mr. Premier—”

  “I understand, John,” said Smith, hands throwing out oil on either side of him. “I’m sure Joe didn’t mean it the way it sounded. I think we’d better have a private session on this. Sergeant—” He gave Malone a friendly nod. “Would you mind waiting outside?”

  Malone, his anger only slowly subsiding, got up and went out of the room. In the outer office Helidon and his wife, sitting uncomfortably on chairs like a two-person delegation waiting on the Premier, looked up as he closed the door behind him.

  “Do they want to see me now?” Helidon, back in a political ambience, seemed to have recovered.

  “Not yet.”

  Malone went over to the window, stood looking out into the almost empty street. A derelict, seemingly oblivious of the heat, wrapped in a torn black overcoat against a perpetual winter of isolation, shuffled down the other side of the road, stopping to punch the parking meters as if he expected them to spill out a jackpot. A young couple, secure in the company of each other, laughed at him and went on up the street, too selfishly in love to spend even pity. Malone heard a movement and turned to find Helidon standing beside him.

  “Why do you think he hates those meters so much?”

  “Hates them? I thought he was just hoping for a windfall, even a five-cent one.”

  Helidon’s eyebrows went up behind the dark glasses he still wore. “You think a man that far gone still has some hope left?”

  Malone looked after the shambling bundle slowly making its way down the street. “I once sat and held the hand of a man who was trapped under his tractor. He’d had everything crushed out of him, but he still took an hour to die. The last word he said was, Tomorrow—”

  Helidon took off the glasses, pinched the inner corners of his eyes. “Maybe—” He went back and stood in front of his wife. “I’ll ask them to hurry it up, darl. They can’t keep us in suspense like this.”

  “We may as well get used to it,” said Norma Helidon. “This may be only the beginning.”

  Then the door opened and Fulmer looked out. “Could you come in, Mr. Helidon? And Mrs. Helidon, too, if she wishes.”

  Helidon took a comb from his pocket, ran it through his hair, tucked his shirt neatly into his slacks. He composed his face, disciplining it into the old urbane look. Norma Helidon took off her dark glasses, borrowed her husband’s comb, ran it through her hair, checked her lipstick in the mirror on the wall. Then they took each other’s hand and followed Fulmer into the Premier’s office.

  The door closed behind them and Malone was left in the outer office, feeling as alone and derelict as the overcoated wreck going down the street, still punching the meters and hoping for a five cent mir
acle.

  3

  It was another half-hour before the door to the Premier’s room opened. The Commissioner came out first and jerked his head at Malone. “Come with me, Sergeant.”

  He strode on out of the office with his rolling seaman’s walk and Malone, after a quick glance at the others still in the Premier’s room, followed him. Leeds didn’t look back; he seemed intent on getting out of a building that threatened to asphyxiate him. He went down the outside steps into the even more stifling heat of the street, turned the corner and went at the same fast rolling gait down towards Police Headquarters and his own office. Malone galloped to catch up, then fell into step beside him. Leeds stared straight ahead of him, saying nothing, and Malone, wise in the atmosphere of superiors, kept his own mouth shut.

  They went up to the Commissioner’s office and as soon as he thumped down in his chair behind his desk Leeds let fly. “Bugger and blast them!” Then he suddenly seemed to realize he had a junior officer with him; he looked up at Malone and glared. “You didn’t hear a word I said, Sergeant!”

  “Not a word, sir.”

  Leeds reached for the decanter of water on his desk, poured himself a glass. “Sit down, Scobie.” He was in control of himself now; his big reddish face lost some of its hue. He forced himself into the low gear that was his usual pace, became the relaxed, unflappable figure that was the public and police force image of him. “There’s going to be no charge.”

  Malone was glad of the chair beneath him. “On neither count?”

  “Neither. The A-G put a very good case for forgetting the whole thing—both murders. The gist of his argument was the truth of justice.” Leeds succeeded admirably in keeping any tone of comment out of his voice. “Should a man stand trial for a murder he didn’t commit because we couldn’t put him in the dock for a murder we know he did commit.”

  “Give me time, sir, and I think I could dig up enough evidence on the Bixby murder.” But Malone’s heart was not in it and he knew his voice gave him away.