The Easy Sin

by Jon Cleary

  It was then that he had let out the scream of anguish that had no meaning but the sound of the emptiness into which he had fallen.

  Corey Briskin, wrench in hand, was down at the road, tightening the bolts that held the sagging gate to its upright. He was a natural handyman, something his father had never been, and he was always looking for things to be fixed. He had seen the state of the gate when he had been down here earlier and now he was doing something about it.

  Then he saw the police car coming at a steady pace up the road. He stiffened, the wrench tight on a bolt; but all his strength had drained out of him. The car drew in at the gate and Constable Haywood got out. He was a handsome young man, the sort featured on posters; but they were all bastards underneath, Corey knew for a fact. Haywood bent to reach in for his cap, then decided against it and left it on the front seat. He came round the car bare-headed, smiling warmly. This was an informal visit, police public relations, as the Commissioner kept advising.

  “You come down here often? I haven't seen you before.”

  “We don't use the place much.” Corey straightened up, satisfied all the bolts had been tightened; his stomach, too, was tight. He wasn't going to offer the bastard a cup of tea or a beer. “We're thinking of putting it up for sale.”

  Haywood looked up towards the house. “Yeah? I might be interested. I'm renting at the moment.”

  Don’t ask to look over the place. “Yeah, well, you'd have to talk to me mum about that.”

  “You heard yet from her? How your brother is?”

  “Not yet. She'd of only just got to the hospital, I think.”

  Then there was the terrible yell, scream or whatever it was from up in the house. It seemed to Corey that everything around them had fallen silent, so that the yell was amplified. Constable Haywood's chin shot up.

  “What was that? It sounded like a yell for help! Who's up there?”

  Without thinking Corey hit him on the side of the head with the wrench. Constable Haywood, a tall man, went down like a falling tree, slowly at first, then crashing into the dirt. Corey looked down at him, then at the wrench as if it were something that had suddenly and uninvited appeared in his hand.

  “Oh Jesus Christ!” He cursed himself, as if he were twins. His father, the fucking hothead, had come out in him; his mother would never have lifted the wrench, would have planned how to distract and get rid of Constable Haywood. He knelt down and felt the pulse in the policeman's neck: he was still alive, but absolutely dead to the world. A case for intensive care . . .

  So am I, he thought with a brain that was a stew. He looked wildly around him; but only the timber stared back at him. Then his mother, the planner, abruptly took over in him. He opened the second gate, the one on to the track that led up to the house. He picked up Constable Haywood, staggering a little under the bigger man's weight, carried him to the police car and dumped him on the back seat. Then he got into the car and drove it up to the house. His mind, his mother's mind, was beginning to work.

  He got out of the car, went up into the house and put on a hood. He picked up a second hood and went into the bedroom where Errol Magee, exhausted by his thoughts and his scream, lolled in the chair.

  “You should of kept your mouth shut, sport. What the bloody hell was all the yelling about?”

  “I'm fed up,” said Magee. “Kill me.”

  “Don't be fucking stupid. What would you be worth dead? Here, put this on. Back to front, sport. I don't want you to see where we're going.”

  He slipped the hood over Magee's head and instantly there was a protest inside it. He lifted the hood. “What's the matter?”

  “I'm going to smother in that—”

  “Jesus, you're a whinger!” He slipped the hood back over Magee's head. “Shut up and save your breath.” There was another murmur from inside the hood. Corey put his ear against it. “What'd you say?”

  It was smothered but it was distinct: “I said, fuck you.”

  “Yeah,” said Corey but to himself, “I'm doing that without any help from you. What now, for Crissake?”

  He put his ear close to the hood again: “Where're we going?”

  “I dunno. I'll let you know when we get there.” The planning, so far, didn't extend to a destination. Where did you dump an unconscious cop you'd just clouted?

  He undid the straps, but bound Magee's hands together behind his back. Then he led him out to the police car, guiding him down the front steps, opened the boot and pushed him in.

  “Just lay still, mate, and you'll be okay.”

  He closed the boot, went round and checked on Constable Haywood. The big young copper was still, but he didn't look too hot. Corey stared at him a long moment; shook his head at how things today had suddenly started to go wrong. Then he stripped off Haywood's shirt, with some difficulty, and slipped it on over his own.

  Then he walked away from the car, so that Magee wouldn't hear him, and called Darlene on his mobile. It seemed forever before she answered: “Yes? Who's that?”

  “It's me, Sis. We got a problem—”

  “What sort of problem?”

  “Listen. Are you with Mum?”

  “Yes, we're at the hospital. Pheeny looks as if he's going to be okay, but only just. Corey, what's the problem?”

  “I'll tell you when I see you. Get the car from Mum and head south. Just after you pass Heathcote—” He paused, closing his eyes, seeing the main road in his mind. “Just after you pass Heathcote, maybe less, there's a road goes off to the right into the bush. Take it and keep going up till you see a police car—”

  “Till I see a WHAT?”

  “I'll be in it—I'll explain when I see you. Leave now.” He clicked off the mobile, closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun. But there was no sun. Just low dark clouds that had crept up on him like everyfuckingthing else. Then it began to rain.

  Only then, his mind working again like his mum's, did he recognize that the rain might be his one piece of luck. It would wipe out the tyre-marks of the police car if anyone should come up here looking for Constable Haywood.

  Ten minutes later, behind the wheel of the police car, capless but wearing Haywood's shirt with the insignia on the shoulders, he turned out of the side road into the main road and headed north. The rain was heavy, flooding gutters, smearing his view of the road ahead. His inclination was to put his foot down hard, but he restrained himself and kept the car going at a steady seventy. He went through Dapto, circled Wollongong and began the long climb up the Bulli Pass. He had just reached the crest when, through the rain, he saw the other police car coming towards him. It flashed its lights and, without panicking, he flashed his own lights in return. Then in his rear-vision mirror he saw the other car do a U-turn and come after him.

  Oh Christ, he was done for! His first reaction was to run for it, to put the foot down and try to lose them. But the foot and the leg were paralysed. And then the white Subaru Impreza, trailing a comet's- tail of water, went by as if his own car were standing still. A moment, then the police car behind him drew out and, siren wailing, lights flashing on the roof, fanning a blue-and-red kaleidoscope of water, went after the disappearing Subaru. Corey hadn't realized he had stopped breathing; suddenly the air spat out of him in a long gasp. Saved by an idiot revhead!

  He drove on through the rain, passed the Subaru and the other police car by the side of the road several kilometres further on, flashed his lights at them and continued north. Twenty minutes later, now out of the rain and into thin sunlight, he came to the turn-off into the bush. He swung off and drove up the narrow tarred road, which he knew led nowhere. He turned into a cleared patch surrounded on three sides by thick bush that was like a rough wall. He had come here with girls, parked in this clearing at night and done them in the back seat where their cries of ecstacy had got puzzled replies from the wakened birds in the trees. The good old days, or nights, the last time only a week ago . . . But he had forgotten her name. He was going senile at twenty-two.

&n
bsp; Darlene arrived ten minutes later. She came cautiously up the road in the grey Toyota, pulled in behind the police car and got out as if expecting to be arrested. There had been no traffic on the narrow road while Corey had been waiting, but with their luck breaking the way it had been he would not be surprised if a gay Mardi Gras procession suddenly appeared.

  “Corey, what's going on?”

  He led Darlene away from the police car so that Magee, in the boot, would not hear what he had to say. He explained as quickly as he could, trying to stay calm but the words spewing out of him as if they were choking him.

  “Jesus!” Darlene threw up her hands. “Christ Almighty, how did I ever cop you two as brothers? Corey, do you know the shit we're in?”

  He nodded. “You think I haven't thought about it?”

  “How's the cop?” Darlene walked back to the police car, opened the rear door and looked in. Then she bent forward and put her finger against Haywood's neck pulse. She stayed like that, as if she couldn't straighten, as if her back had suddenly locked. Then she came up slowly, turned and said: “He's dead, Corey.”

  6

  I

  STRIKE FORCE RLS had been formed.

  “Why RLS, sir?” asked a young detective.

  “Robert Louis Stevenson,” said Chief Superintendent Random. “He wrote Kidnapped.”

  “Ah yes,” said the young officer, a postmodernist graduate who hadn't a clue who Robert (Louie?) Stevenson was. Probably some FBI guy who'd written a thesis on abduction. They were always writing something on something or other.

  Random, dry and unruffled as usual, who sailed always on an even keel through rough seas of crime, took Malone aside in the big room at Police Central. On a wall near them the map of the latest crime had been laid out: pictures of the murder victim, of the two kidnappees, plans of the Magee apartment, a potted history of I-Saw. Malone stood with his back to the wall, wanting no reminders.

  “You're in this, Scobie, but the maid's murder isn't the major event.”

  “That's interesting. Murder is now just a misdemeanour?”

  “None of your Irish wit. You know what I'm getting at. Magee and his girlfriend may already be dead—in which case you take over. But while there's a possibility they're both still alive, finding them is the prime objective. We've got two experienced negotiators on hand to deal with the kidnappers, if and when they get in touch with us again. One'll be at I-Saw and the other at the Kunishima Bank.”

  “Kunishima won't like that.”

  “Tough titty.”

  Kylie Doolan's kidnapping had been the major item on this morning's radio and TV news; tomorrow morning's press editorials were right now being written with whip-handles. Talk-back hosts were asking what the police were doing to protect the citizens of this great city; the great city's citizens, Gert and Sid and Larry and Aunty Kate, were responding with advice on how much better they could run things than the mug coppers. Random had advised the strike force to read no newspapers, listen to no radio, look at no television. The public could always run things better: politics, crime prevention, the economy, everything. All it was waiting for was a leader to organize the anarchy.

  “The Commissioner would like all this cleared up by yesterday.”

  “No problem. Nothing is impossible.”

  “Ever tried to snap one finger?” Random illustrated.

  “Tell me about one hand clapping. You can get the sound of applause by slapping one hand on your bare bum. How come you Welsh are so bloody philosophical?”

  “We're melancholy. Like you Irish.”

  “Not any more. The Irish are laughing all the way to the bank. We're now the rich cousins of Europe. My old man, who's been a socialist, almost a communist, all his life, is now talking like Kerry Packer.”

  “Seduced. You tossed off the Catholic Church and you're in the grip of Mammon.”

  “And enjoying every dollar or punt or whatever they're spending. Like the bastards in this case, till the bottom fell out of the bucket. How's my promotion coming?”

  “It's on hold till we wrap this up. Find out who murdered the maid, bring back Magee and his girlfriend alive and you can go straight to Assistant Commissioner.” Then he said seriously, “Do you think the yakuza have taken the girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do the media know who are behind Kunishima?”

  “I don't know. Maybe some of the financial columnists do. But libel is another game for the greedy guts and they're not going to mention it in their columns. There are blokes out on the street who'll tell you all the banks are run by yakuza of some sort.”

  “Does Four Corners know? About Kunishima?”

  “You mean does my daughter Mo know? If she does, she hasn't told me. And I haven't told her.”

  “Don't get shirty. I had to ask.” Random changed the subject: “Keep a couple of your people standing by—Wollongong command may call them. They were on to me at Crime Agency this morning.”

  “That murdered officer? They got any leads?”

  “They're working on a couple, pretty slim ones, they said.”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Some woman phoned in, said she'd been bird-watching in some bush near Heathcote and she came across his body.”

  “They interviewing her?”

  “They don't know who she is, she hung up on them. Said she didn't want to be involved in the killing of a cop. Whoever did it might come looking for her. You can see her viewpoint, but that's no help.”

  “Are we going to be involved, as the lady describes it?”

  “Us? They probably won't need us, it's none of our business. But tell Russ to have someone on hand if they call.”

  “I might take it myself, just to get away from this.”

  “No, you won't. Where are you heading now?”

  “Over to I-Saw offices. I have a date with a sexpot my son brought home last night. She's meeting me there.”

  “You'll have none of those thrills when you get to Superintendent. You meet only old boilers.”

  “Lisa will be glad to hear that.”

  Malone debated whether to take someone with him, decided to go alone. Now that he was leaving the job, heading for a desk, he wanted more time with his thoughts, not with a colleague. He was wrapping up a large part of his life and he preferred to do it alone.

  He drove over to Milson's Point. Last night's rain had cleared the air; the day was polished for new uses. The buildings, too, looked as if they had been scrubbed for new uses. Bankruptcy maybe, he cynically wondered. He rode up in an empty lift that seemed surrounded by emptiness, as if the building were only a shell. Yet on other floors but those of I-Saw other companies, still solvent, were at work.

  The executive floor looked deserted when he stepped out of the lift. Then at the far end of the room he saw the four people around Jared Cragg's desk. He was halfway towards them before he recognized the three women with Cragg: Caroline Magee, Daniela Bonicelli and Louise Cobcroft.

  “We were going to call you, Inspector,” said Caroline Magee while he was still approaching them. “The news about Miss Doolan being kidnapped.”

  The three women all looked too friendly, like witches with a common stew in the cauldron. Poor Errol Magee, he thought, but said, “We don't know she's been kidnapped. She's missing, that's all.”

  “That's all?” said Cragg.

  Is he the witch-master here? But then Magee thought, I'm not on top of this. He had been thrown off-balance to find the three Magee women, wife and ex-girlfriends, together. “That's what we're telling the media. You think we should tell ‘em more?”

  “The whole bloody thing's getting out of hand!”

  “I'm scared,” said Daniela Bonicelli, but didn't look it.

  “So am I,” said Louise Cobcroft, who did look very scared. Or was a very good actress. “Can we ask for police protection?”

  “Miss Doolan had it,” said Caroline. “It apparently didn't help.”

  Malone smiled at h
er; or grimaced. “Miss Doolan was a smartarse, Mrs. Magee. Most people, when we're protecting them, try to cooperate with us. She slipped away while our backs were turned. If we give you protection, I hope you’ll cooperate.”

  “Me, too?” said Cragg.

  “You feel you're in danger, Mr. Cragg?”

  Today he was more formally dressed than yesterday: a collar-and-tie job, suit trousers instead of jeans. Maybe, Malone thought, one dressed formally for the final rites of receivership. He wondered where Joe Smith, of Ballantine, Ballantine and Kowinsky was. Downstairs laying out the corpse?

  “No,” said Cragg, tightening the yellow tie that lay like spilled egg against his blue shirt. “No, I'll be okay. I'm walking out of here today and Errol can take care of himself.”

  “And Miss Doolan, too?”

  “She was never part of I-Saw. She's his responsibility.”

  “And what about these three ladies?”

  “I've just told them, they look after themselves.”

  He didn't look at the three women and they ignored him. Malone had read about the mass sackings in the IT game over the past year and he wondered if they had all been as heartless as Cragg made it sound. There was one thing about the public service: when it came to sacking, downsizing, whatever one called it, you never met the real axeman. He was somewhere out there in the fog of bureaucracy.

  “We'll look after ourselves,” said Daniela. “You'd better believe it, Jared.”

  “What does Errol owe you three ladies?” asked Malone.