Babylon South (14 page)

“I'd shoot him if ever he brought back that Karl Marx,” said Brigid from the back seat, sitting back there like the poor man's Queen Mary, hat on head, hands folded over her handbag as if it held the crown jewels.

“That's the only thing you've ever given me,” Malone told his father. “Bloody-mindedness.”

“I've always said that,” said Brigid. “He was bloody-minded the day I married him. He wanted to knock the priest down on the altar. I've forgotten why.”

“He wanted to lecture me,” said Con, who would knock God down if He tried to lecture him. “So you're gunna keep on with the case? What good will it do?”

“I don't know,” said Malone. “A cop only gives himself a headache when he asks a question like that.”

“That only proves what I've always said about coppers,” said Con, satisfied.

They drew up outside the narrow house in the narrow street in Erskineville. There were no front gardens here, no vacuumed lawns, no blazing banks of azaleas. Behind the narrow terrace houses were tiny back yards backing on to other back yards; the biggest blooms there were the washing on the lines. Malone looked out at the house where he had been born and grown up and tried to be sentimental about it. But sentiment becomes a dry fruit when squeezed.

“I wish you'd move away from here.”

The elder Malones got out of the car. Con looked up and down the terrace. “They're all strangers. The street's full of Wogs, we even got some of the bloody yellow peril here, too. But it'd be just as bad, no matter where we went.”

“One thing,” grinned Malone, “you've got no capitalist bludgers down here.”

“Give „em time, give „em time. The Wogs and the Chinks will always make money. Thanks for bringing us home.”

“Good-night, Scobie.” Brigid half-raised a hand as if she might pat his shoulder, then let it drop. “Don't take no notice of Dad. I actually seen him talking to Mrs. Van Trong the other day.”

“
I was only asking her wasn't there any boats going back to Vietnam,” said Con, never giving up.

Malone laughed and drove off before he embarrassed both of them by getting out of the car and kissing them.

On the way home to Randwick he thought about Walter Springfellow. By the time he had turned into his garage he had made up his mind. He would be bloody-minded, he would not give up.

4

I

HE GOT
nowhere in the next two weeks. He sent Andy Graham, one of the junior detectives in Homicide, up to the State Library to ferret his way through newspapers for the period March-April 1966.

“Find out if anyone else went missing at that time. If they did, check Missing Persons here and ask the Victorians if they'd check theirs—maybe someone from Melbourne, a crim or a radical, was gunning for him.”

While Graham lost himself in the State Library, Malone and Clements kept losing themselves in dead ends. Malone rang ASIO, but was told Mr. Fortague had been called down to Canberra to headquarters; no, they didn't know when he would be back. He tried to make an appointment with Venetia, but, one of her secretaries said, Lady Springfellow was interstate. He rang Edwin Springfellow at Springfellow and Company, but met a blank wall—“We have nothing more to say, Inspector,” said Edwin politely and, impolitely, hung up in his ear. Twice he called at the Springfellow apartment in The Vanderbilt in Macquarie Street and twice the doorman told him that Miss Emma Springfellow was away.

Trying to take his mind off the case, he went one night with Lisa to see
Les Misérables,
a booking Lisa had made months in advance. He sat there depressed by the whole show, sympathizing not with Valjean but with Inspector Javert; thirty-nine dollars a ticket to see a cop give up and jump off a bridge. He had noticed several of the more respectable crims in the audience and they all clapped at the death of Javert. He went to work the next morning wondering if he should give up, though he would not jump off any bridge.

“I feel like trying for a warrant and bringing them all in here and keeping „em here till they tell
us
something.” He and Clements were sitting facing each other across their adjoining desks in the big room at Homicide, lunching on pizza. “That's what they'd do in
Woolloomooloo Vice.”

“What about the daughter?”

“What would be the point with her? She wasn't born when her old man disappeared. How are she and her mother going on their takeover bid?”

“I dunno. There's been nothing in the papers and nobody's talking at the brokers. I gather they're all running around like headless chooks since the Crash. The young guy who sold my shares for me says he wishes he'd followed my example. That made me feel good, coming from someone I pay commission to for advice. Do I look smug and self-satisfied?”

“Every inch of you. My old man would hate you as a capitalist bludger.”

Clements grinned, reached for his phone. “I think I'll call my bookie. I've made up my mind for the Cup.”

It was the first Tuesday in November, Melbourne Cup Day, the country's holiest day of the year; down in Melbourne, south of the border, it was a public holiday. Elsewhere in the nation, at 2.40 this afternoon, everything would come to a standstill. Right-wing bosses and left-wing shop stewards would stand arm-in-arm in front of television sets; patients on operating tables would be left wide open while doctors and nurses turned up their transistors; bank hold-ups would go into freeze-frame while robbers and staff watched the horse race. If Judgement Day arrived on the first Tuesday in November, the Lord Almighty would have to wait. Unless He, too, was a punter. Which, when one looked at some of those He had created, He might very well be.

“What's your tip?”

“I think I'll go for Kensei. You want me to put a bet on for you?”

“The last time I backed a horse he bit his jockey and raped the mare in front of him. It was like being back on the beat in Newtown.”

Then Chief Inspector Random came down towards them. Clements put down the phone. Random was a tall bony man, with hair that had started to turn grey when he was twenty-one and eyes
that
had been middle-aged all his life. He had a slow way of moving, as if sleep-walking, but his mind was always a street ahead of his appearance. He was chief of the thirty-six detectives in Homicide, but soon, with the Department's reorganization into regions, he was ticketed for transfer. Malone, as the next senior man, already holding a rank that should have taken him off day-to-day investigation, was tipped to succeed him here in this office. A prospect that Malone was not looking forward to.

“Don't get up.” Malone and Clements hadn't moved. “Pizza, eh? I thought only pimply kids ate that, and gummy Italians.”

“What's your problem, Greg?” said Malone. “You look even more unhappy than usual.”

“The wife's gone down to Melbourne with her sister. She's spent five hundred dollars on an outfit she won't be game to wear anywhere else and she'll put two bucks on a horse and come back and say she's had a wonderful time.” He grinned, showing slightly buck teeth. “Actually, I was glad to get rid of her. I can catch up on my reading—I've got five Elmore Leonards. You ever read him? Oh, there's a homicide.”

Malone was not surprised at Random's way of telling them they had a job; it was his habit, his way of saying that murder was nothing to get excited about. Random hated excitable cops.

“They've found the body of a woman in her apartment in The Vanderbilt in Macquarie Street. Emma Springfellow.”

Malone choked on his slice of pizza and Random looked at him out of those aged grey eyes. “I thought that might spoil your lunch. Get down there as soon's you can. I'll alert Scientific and the rest of „em. Can I try a piece of that?”

Malone handed him the rest of the pizza. “Watch your pimples.” Then he looked soberly at Random. “Emma Springfellow. They sure it's murder?”

“What makes you say that?”

“It wasn't suicide?”

“I don't know. The uniformed chap who phoned it in said it was murder. A bullet in the chest. You make up your own mind.”

“
Greg, can I stay with this one? I'm still on the Walter Springfellow homicide.”

“I wasn't thinking of putting you on anything else. Why?”

“I just want to be bloody-minded.”

Random looked at him, then grinned his slow grin. “You were always that. Why change?”

He went away back up the room to his own desk. Malone stood up, put on his jacket after wiping his fingers on a paper napkin. “Righto, lunchtime's over.”

“Hold it a minute.” Clements dialled his phone. He waited a moment, jotting down some figures on a slip of paper, then: “Sid? Russ Clements. I want five hundred each way on Kensei.” He hung up, saw Malone's raised eyebrows and grinned. “Okay, it's more than I usually bet. But it's the one day of the year. And while my luck's in . . .”

Malone led the way out of the room, wondering what his own luck was going to be from here on in.

II

Clements parked their unmarked car under a No Standing sign in the lane beside The Vanderbilt. They got out of the car and the heat instantly wilted them. Coming down from Homicide, Clements had switched on the car radio and a news report had told them that the temperature was 34 degrees Celsius (“94 on the old scale,” the announcer advised for the benefit of any ancient who might be listening) and still climbing. Malone hoped that Emma Springfellow's body was in an air-conditioned room.

They walked back into Macquarie Street and up the steps into the old but well-preserved apartment building. The doorman saw them coming and opened the glass doors to them at once. He was a small, thin man and his brown uniform, shiny at the elbows and knees, hung on him as if he had lost weight since the original fitting. He had bright friendly eyes that couldn't be dimmed by the pain and puzzlement in the rest of his face. This was the most exclusive apartment block in the city: murder, most of all, should have been excluded.

“
Police?” He had a thin, chirpy voice. “Oh yes, I remember you, Inspector. I'm Joe Garfield, I found Miss Springfellow. I went up—”

“Can you get someone to relieve you down here?” said Malone. “We'd like to see you upstairs. What floor is it on?”

“The tenth. She owns—owned the whole floor. I'll be up in a jiffy, soon's I get someone.”

Malone and Clements went up in the automatic, timber-panelled lift, one that climbed slowly, as if it had been designed not to bring on giddiness in anyone who travelled in it. There were residents in the building who had lived here for fifty years or more, elderly voters who had no wish to travel speedily, especially towards heaven. The two detectives stepped out into a small hall, also panelled, and went through the open front door into the Springfellow apartment.

“She lived here all alone?” said Clements to no one in particular.

There were eight rooms to the apartment, every one of them expensively furnished; it was difficult to place the sour, dark woman amidst all this light elegance. There was nothing modern about it; this was the past at its best. There were two shieldback chairs by Chippendale, a sideboard by Hepplewhite, other furniture in the style of those craftsmen by the best of Australian makers; there was no wall-to-wall carpet, but rugs that covered almost the same area. On the silk-papered walls hung a Pissarro, a Degas, a Monet, all paintings that would not offend the sensibilities of a maiden lady; there were no robust Tom Roberts or any of the vulgar later Australians. The robust policemen, capable of vulgarity, were all that was out of place.

The uniformed sergeant had met Malone on other cases. “She's in the main bedroom, Scobie. Two bullets, I think. They couldn't have missed her heart.”

Malone stood in front of the air-conditioning in the window, cooling off. The building had been built long before built-in central air-conditioning; every window, as far as Malone could see, had its own small unit. They were effective and he was glad for Emma Springfellow's sake. She might offend people while she was alive, but she would not want to offend when she was dead.

“G'day, Jack. How long's she been dead?”

“
Hard to say. Some time last night, I'd guess. The rigor mortis is starting to loosen up.”

“Any weapon?”

“No sign of it so far.”

“Go through the flat, Russ. I'll have a look at the body. Which way, Jack?”

Jack Greenup, the sergeant, led the way down a narrow hallway to a big room that looked out over the Botanical Gardens to the harbour. Malone's first thought was: all the Springfellows, while they lived, had to have a view of the harbour. It must have been a pool from which they loved to drink. But then there were three million other voters who, if they could have afforded it, would have loved to drink at the same pool.

“There she is.” Greenup was a heavily built man with a battered face; but law-abiding footballers had done that to him, not criminals. He had been a prominent rugby league forward up till a couple of years ago and still missed the roar of the crowd and the sweet malice of an uppercut in a scrum. But he was not without feeling and he looked down now at Emma Springfellow with compassion. “Poor woman.”

Malone looked at the bedroom first. This was as elegant as the outer rooms, though more feminine: a room, he guessed, in which any woman, even a punk rocker, would delight to waken. The bed was queen-sized, though he wondered with whom Emma would ever have shared it; the silk coverlet had been half-dragged off it and one of the bedside tables had been knocked over. Two or three books lay scattered on the floor. Malone remarked the title of one of them:
Unquiet Souls.

Then he walked round the bed and looked down at Emma. She lay on her back, one hand still clutching the coverlet, an ugly dark stain on the breast of her white blouse. Malone looked at the mask out of which she would never look again; there was no malice on it, no contortion, just a cold still peace. She looked strangely young, but then corpses often did.