Autumn Maze

by Jon Cleary

  “It wouldn’t be very dignified for the woman, either,” she said and they both laughed. “How’d we get into this conversation?”

  “You were telling me about Ophelia. And Cormac.”

  “He’s too old for her, he couldn’t keep up with her. Not in bed.”

  He waited till the waiter had put their main courses in front of them, rack of lamb for her and fish for him. “You’re full up tonight?” He had looked around the suddenly crowded dining room.

  “Yes, sir,” said the waiter. “It’s a change. There’s an international bankers’ convention. Mint sauce, madame?”

  When the waiter had gone, Aldwych said, “How do you know what goes on in their bedroom?”

  “Ophelia can’t help boasting. Not directly, she doesn’t exactly come out and tell you what she’s done. But another woman can tell. She’s had half a dozen lovers since she married Cormac. I’ll bet Rob was one of them.”

  “Are you saying she might have had a hand in killing the young bastard?” He asked the question as casually as he might have asked her if she was liking her lamb.

  She was shocked at how she had let the conversation run away with her. Because he was an old criminal, must they talk of things criminal? But then the businessmen she had gone to dinner with had talked business, the horse trainer had talked horses. “No. I wouldn’t accuse anyone of murder unless I actually saw them do it.”

  “That’s always a dangerous thing, seeing someone commit murder.” The ocean trout was over-cooked, but he wouldn’t embarrass her by sending it back. Shirl wouldn’t have let him. “If ever you see a murder, turn your back and walk away.”

  You couldn’t ask for anyone better than he to give that sort of advice; but she didn’t say that. He went on: “She didn’t kill him, it was a professional job. Unless she paid to have it done.”

  She felt a mixture of queasiness and excitement; the rack of lamb was under-cooked, she could see blood. “We shouldn’t be talking about a friend like this—”

  “She’s no friend of mine. But I like Cormac—I’d hate to see him mixed up in anything as dirty as murder.”

  “He was almost killed himself.”

  “A rich man’s risk.”

  “Did you only rob the rich?”

  “What’s the point in robbing the poor? Like the Bible says, the poor are always with us. But they’re bloody useless if you’re trying to make a living.” He was a reactionary, the only sensible stance for a professional criminal. He had no time for the welfare state; it only encouraged bludgers. Socialism bred its own crims, members of the ruling clique; there was no place for outsiders; he was amused when he read that the only successes in the old Soviet Union, now that socialism was dead, were the Russian Mafia. “Cormac copped it because he advertised he was rich.”

  “No, Jack, he’s always been discreet about how much he is worth.”

  “That was before he married Ophelia. Jack Junior told me about him. He never had a private jet, he didn’t own a string of polo ponies, he didn’t let the world know when he bought a valuable painting. He had a yacht, I think, but Jack tells me he was only part-owner of that. Then Ophelia comes along and next thing they’ve got that penthouse in The Wharf and a new place in the country and the Bentley . . . I dunno what he thought of it all, he’d be too conservative to tell you anyway, but Ophelia made sure of the advertising. Muggers like those kids who tried to burn him, they go by appearances. He looked rich, so they did him.”

  She looked around the dining room, now full. “You look like a rich man. Aren’t you afraid the muggers might—do you? Or do they all know who you are and they wouldn’t dare?”

  “Today’s muggers and street kids wouldn’t know me from Ned Kelly. I was before their time. I take my chances, like everyone else. There’s gunna be more and more muggers, the world’s going to the dogs. History repeats itself—I read that. The only difference now is you got muggers and hookers out in the suburbs. It wasn’t like that in my day.”

  Then they got off mugging and murders and crime in general; the subject bored him after a while. But Ophelia Casement stayed in a corner of his mind, suddenly a suspect. It shocked him that he was thinking in terms of justice, like a policeman.

  He paid the bill with cash, as he always did; credit cards were like fingerprints. He left no tip, which would have upset Shirl; he hadn’t liked the condescension of the waiters, which Shirl would have counteracted by over-tipping. As he and Emily walked out of the dining room several diners turned to look after them. Like a true male chauvinist he was all at once immensely proud of the beautiful woman he was escorting; he saw her through the eyes of the men staring at them, not through those of the women. Some of the latter, recognizing Emily from the Sunday social pages, marvelled at how she carried her age. None of them, men or women, recognized Aldwych. His minders had always smashed the cameras of anyone who tried to take photos of him. Photos of him had appeared in the newspapers, but he had always been walking away from the camera.

  As they waited outside the lobby of the hotel for their hire car, another hire car, a stretch limousine, drew into the kerb. Aldwych glanced at it, wondering why anyone would want to ride in anything so conspicuous. He grinned at Emily. “Would you have come out with me if I’d called for you in that battleship?”

  Then three men, all Japanese, came out of the hotel lobby, down the steps and into the car. Two of them were middle-aged; the third was the young Japanese who had abducted him. They got into the limousine, disappearing behind its dark windows and the long car drew out of the driveway and into the street. But not before Aldwych had noted its number; he took out a small notebook and biro and wrote it down. Then he was aware of Emily looking hard at him.

  “Do you often do that? Take down a car’s registration?”

  He smiled. “It’s a hobby, like train-watching. Here’s our car.”

  “Have you got its number?”

  His smile broadened. He knew now that if he had met Emily twenty years ago he would have been unfaithful to Shirl. The thought hurt him, so that the smile was more a grimace.

  IV

  This late in the evening the morgue was deserted, at least of the living. Malone walked down the long main room towards the murder room, past the stainless steel tables now washed clean of the blood and tissue of the day. Insect-killers hung from the ceiling like blue honeycomb and on one wall a row of white rubber aprons were draped like corpses that had been gutted. The air reeked of death, disguised as disinfectant.

  Romy Keller and Clements were in the murder room with the body of Kim Weetbix. It lay on a stainless steel table under the bright light of a green-domed lamp. Face down, arms by her side, Kim looked much thinner than she had in life.

  “I haven’t touched her yet.” Romy, in a white coat but with no rubber apron, blew a kiss to Malone across the corpse. “I’m waiting on the HIV or hepatitis test. I don’t think it matters—the autopsy, I mean. She was killed the same way as Mr. Sweden and Mr. Kornsey.”

  She lifted the short hair on the girl’s neck and Malone saw the small wound. “Who found her, Russ? Mrs. Kornsey?”

  “She came back to the house, she’d been to pick up her niece, and there was this girl on her doorstep. Just dumped there on the mat. She’s hysterical, Mrs. Kornsey, so the local D’s said. I didn’t go out to see her—”

  “Leave her, her family will look after her. Why’d the buggers do this to her? Is it some sort of warning?”

  “I’d say so. Telling her to lay off, not try for the twenty-five million.”

  Romy had been listening to this without comment, but now she whistled softly. “Twenty-five million? This girl was mixed up in something as big as that? I thought she was supposed to be a street-kid?”

  “She was. If she knew anything about the money we’re talking about, it was by accident. Maybe whoever killed her thought she knew more than she did.”

  “She’d been tortured. There are burns, they look like cigarette marks, on her breasts. An
d there are bruises on her arms—she’d been pretty heavily handled.”

  Malone leaned with his back against the wall looking at the thin pitiful body; it looked more yellow than white, as if her mother was asserting herself. He knew nothing of the girl’s background, but he guessed it had been neither happy nor promising. But she had not deserved to finish up, tortured and dead, on this table in this pitiless room. “I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone to claim the body for the burial?”

  Clements shrugged. “Who? Some street-kid?”

  “Do you expect to find anything, Romy, when you do the autopsy?”

  “Not really. All that’ll help you is what you see there.”

  “Anything in her clothes?”

  “I’ve got the PE guys on that,” said Clements. “Fibres, dirt, anything. But I don’t think we’re gunna come up with anything that’ll help. There was nothing in her pockets, not even a handkerchief.”

  Malone heaved himself off the wall. He could feel the weight of these cases building up; he was an unwilling weightlifter as the kilos were added to the bar. “We’d better mount security on Mrs. Kornsey, we don’t want her finishing up in here.”

  Romy was attaching a label to one of Kim’s big toes. “I’ll park her in the body room till morning.”

  “And let’s hope nobody comes trying to steal her,” said Clements.

  Romy pushed the wheeled table out of the murder room and down the long main room. She looked back as the men followed her. “Has Russ told you we’re being married in July?”

  Malone waited for the corpse to roll over and sit up. “No. When did you decide that?”

  “While we were waiting for you back there.” She jerked her head back towards the murder room. “We want you to be the best man and Lisa matron of honour and the girls to be our bridesmaids.”

  They had reached the door to the body room. She unlocked it, pushed the table ahead of her and the three of them went into the chilled room. “Will you?” She gestured for the men to help her move the body on to one of the shelves. “I’ll talk to Lisa later.”

  “Why couldn’t you have talked to me later?” Kim was a cold dead weight on Malone’s hands. “Where are you holding the reception? In here?”

  “Droll.” Then she looked at the two men. “Sorry. Have I upset you too, liebchen?”

  Clements grinned. “Wait’ll I tell my mum. She proposed to my dad while he was castrating a sheep.”

  V

  In the Police Minister’s office the possibility of political murder, which is merely a misdemeanour and not a felony, was being canvassed.

  “Derek, listen to me,” said Hans Vanderberg. “I’m doing the decent thing, I’m offering you an honourable way out. That doesn’t happen often in politics, does it?”

  “Hans, you’re holding a gun at my head and you’re doing the decent thing? Come off it, cut out the crap.”

  The Dutchman was unoffended; insults, blunt talk, were his conversational forte. He could be annoyed if an opponent impugned his dishonesty, but that was only because it spoiled the political game. Idealists, sticklers for the truth, were the bane of his life.

  “You can resign, like I said, you can say your son’s death has been too much for you. Who’s gunna be wise? You’ve been in parliament long enough, you’ve gotta be getting how much superannuation? Not to mention what we’ve been talking about.”

  “You’ve already mentioned that. Twice. Where did you get your information?”

  The old man smoothed down his quiff. “Derek, where does anyone in our game get their information? The walls don’t only have ears, they’ve got lips, too. Don’t you hear the whispers? I’ve got friends, you got enemies. And vice versa. A friend of mine and an enemy of yours told me about your insider trading. Four million dollars, that’s better than the going rate to buy one of us.”

  “You mean a Labor man?”

  The Dutchman smiled, a horrible sight. “I mean any politician, meaning you government fellers. Us on the Labor side can’t be bought, you know that. I’ve never taken a penny.”

  Which, unfortunately, was true. Sweden knew that many things could be charged against the Opposition Leader, but a charge of taking a bribe would never stick. “You could never prove anything, Hans.”

  “Who needs proof? You throw a little mud, someone picks it up and adds to it, pretty soon you’ve got a mud-bath and you’re in it up to your neck.”

  He sat back, sipped the mineral water that he had asked for, looked around the Minister’s office. When his party had been in government and he had been Police Minister as well as Premier, he had operated out of the Premier’s office downtown. Once back in power he would give this room back to the police administration; it would be a good public relations ploy. He must be getting old: there had been a time when he had scoffed at the idea of public relations. But that had been in the good old days before the rise of pressure groups and that double-headed, brainless monster, the swinging voter.

  Sweden, for his part, saw nothing of the room but only this vindictive, unscrupulous old man opposite him. Well, maybe not unscrupulous: what he was suggesting was legitimate politics. It was, of course, murder: resign or I’ll cut your throat. But Sweden had read enough history to know that when it came to a question of power, the voting booth was only a prop in the drama. In his own party throats had been cut and backs stabbed; he himself bore previous scars. But he did not want to be murdered now, not now.

  “Hans, if I resigned, you fellers couldn’t win my seat. It’s been ours for years.”

  “Oh, we can win it all right. We’ll get an Independent to run, they come in useful sometimes—” He had the party politician’s contempt for any Independent running for office, all they did was clutter up the place and most of them, as he had been heard to say, didn’t know their arse from their green thumb. “He’ll take enough votes away from you fellers and we’ll sneak in. We’ve done our sums, mate. We win your seat, then we’re all square in the Assembly and we’ll demand an election. Then we’ll gallop in.”

  Sweden took his time; after all, one doesn’t go bungy-jumping without making sure the rubber rope will stand the strain. “Hans, I’m not going to resign. Try your luck, throw your mud. But if I resigned now, it wouldn’t say much for me as Police Minister nor for my faith in the police. I want my son’s murder solved and I’d cut my throat before I’d let you announce it as Police Minister.”

  Vanderberg shrugged, put his glass down on the desk. “Have it your way. I see your point, I’m a father m’self. But you blokes are buggering up this State and it’s my duty to see you don’t bugger it up even more.”

  “Bullshit, Hans. Your only idea of duty is what you pay on a bottle of Bols gin when you bring it into the country.”

  “Maybe.” The old man grinned again. “But it sounds good, doesn’t it? Have a second think, Derek, I’ll give you another day or two. There’s nothing personal in this, y’know. You were just the easiest target. You haven’t done a bad job as Minister, the little time you’ve been in it.” Then he stopped, his grin widening till it looked as if his jaw might fall off. “There’s an alternative. You could resign from your crowd, cross the floor and become one of ours. We’re all birds of a birdcage these days, the voters dunno the difference between us, not since we got rid of our Loony Left. Have a think about it. Give my regards to your wife.” He was at the door when he turned back. “Incidentally, if the police solve the murder and it’s close to home, what’re you gunna do? Maybe you’ll have to resign after all.”

  Then he was gone, the door shut behind him. Sweden went limp in his chair, his hand reaching automatically for the button on his desk. But then he remembered that all his staff, including Tucker, had gone. Vanderberg had waited till he was sure there would be no interruptions. Sweden was alone with his pictures of himself and Rosalind in the Dunhill frames on his desk and on the bookcases behind him. He closed his eyes and, to his surprise, saw his first wife, Rob’s mother, on the darkness of his lids. He
suddenly wished she were alive, to help him as she so often had in the past.

  14

  I

  “SCOBIE, ARE these calls taped?”

  Aldwych hadn’t named himself, but Malone had recognized the voice. “No, Jack. We only do that with politicians and smartarse lawyers. What’s on your mind?”

  “If ever you call me up before ICAC, I’ll deny I ever spoke to you. I couldn’t go to my grave, people thinking I was a dog.”

  “You going to dob someone in?”

  “I dunno. Yeah, I guess I am. Last night I was at the Congress, the hotel. On my way out I saw the young Jap who took me for that ride the other day. He was coming out with two other Japs, older blokes. They got into a stretch limo, a hire job, and drove off. You want the number?”

  Malone never let excitement boil his blood; too often, tip-offs and stumbled-upon clues had led nowhere. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s HC—” Aldwych gave him the number. “The hire company’d have a record of who hired it.”

  “Thanks, Jack.” A cop always loved having a crim tell him how to do his job. “If we pick up the young bloke, I’ll want you to identify him.”

  “What for? He just took me for a drive. I’m not laying any charges, Scobie. I’m only telling you about him because it might help you clear up them murders you’re working on.”

  “There was another one last night. The young girl who tried to burn Cormac Casement.”

  “I read about it this morning. They’re keeping you busy.” Aldwych hung up abruptly, as if still suspicious his call was being taped.

  Malone put down the phone and stared out through the glass wall of his office at the outer office. The linked cases were now all coordinated into the one investigation and Peta Smith had set up a room across the hall where charts, diagrams and photos gave facts but no solution, where the police work was on display. And now it might all fall into place on a single clue given by an old crim. Malone had to smile, though it hurt.