Bleak Spring (25 page)

“Inspector, we'll need more than faith to beat the hell out of Mrs. Bodalle. I've seen her in action.”

“I'm Irish. We take in faith at our mother's breast.” He didn't believe that, but he liked this girl and he wanted her on his side, though he secretly hoped that by the time Olive Rockne was brought to trial the DPP would have brought in one of its big guns.

“I'm Jewish, Inspector. You don't think Moses accepted the tablets of stone on faith, do you? He negotiated.”

Malone shook his head, no longer smiling. “No negotiation, Sally.”

Outside the court he hurried down the broad steps towards his own Commodore, where Clements stood waiting for him.

“Scobie, what's the hurry? You look as if
you've
just been let out on bail.”

“I don't want to face the Rockne kids—”

“There's one right behind you,” said Clements.

Malone, about to open the door of his car, turned round. Jason, in jeans, open-necked shirt and blazer, stood there, the morning sun like a cruel spotlight on his puzzled, angry face. “Jesus, Mr. Malone, why did you have to do this to us?”

“I didn't do it, Jay. The law did it. Or rather, your mother did it to you.”

“She'd never kill Dad—it's unbelievable!” He flailed his arms, as if he were about to strike out at anything, even the sun-filled air about him. On the other side of the street the monorail carriages went silently by; he stared at them high above the street, but his eyes were full of tears and Malone realized the
boy
had seen nothing. In one of the carriages there was a solitary passenger, a Japanese; he turned round, camera at the ready, recording one of the sights of the tour: captors and captives coming out of a courthouse.

Clements could see the agony in Malone's stiff face; he said gently, “Jay, wait for your grandmother and then go home with her. She'll need you from now on.”

“What fucking use will I be?” the boy said, more despairingly than angrily, then he turned and shuffled away, as if his large Reebok-shod feet would never again bounce him high towards the basket.

Malone looked up the steps, through the shadows of the big plane trees, saw Mrs. Carss and Shelley and Angela Bodalle come out of the courthouse. There were no television crews circling around like metal-headed jackals, but there was a single girl reporter and a photographer. The latter raised his camera and there was a flash. Mrs. Carss raised her handbag as if she were going to sling it at him and said something that Malone, too far away, could not hear.

“It'll soon be over,” said Clements.

“Balls. It could drag on for months. You know what I'm talking about?”

“Sure. The Rockne kids, what you feel for them. I'd feel the same way, if I had kids of my own.”

Malone stood leaning on the roof of his car. Across the road was the huge pit of World Square and what was to have been another temple, this time to commerce: the biggest development in the city. But industrial trouble and the recession had put a stop to it. It remained a huge hole with a partially completed lift-shaft rising out of it like the ruins of some memorial to the future, a future that had stopped dead yesterday.

“I'll see you Monday. I'm going home, turn my mind off and enjoy Tom's birthday party. Then tomorrow I'm taking him to the footy.”

“To the grand final? How'd you get tickets this late—you didn't have 'em when I asked you last week?”

“Influence. How'd you get yours?”

“I'm taking Romy. I bought 'em off a scalper.”

“
That's against the law.”

“Yeah, terrible, ain't it? Enjoy the game. And Scobie?”

“Yeah?”

“Forget the Rockne kids. They're not your responsibility.”

Malone went home to his son's birthday party, sat with a beer in his hand and looked at the dozen shouting kids who didn't have a care in the world, the ones with safe, law-abiding parents, and saw in the faces of each of the laughing boys another face, that of the anguished, weeping Jason.

Lisa tried to ask him about the court hearing, but he just shook his head and told her he didn't want to discuss it till tonight, when they were in bed. She didn't press the point; she knew that if he promised to talk to her, he would.

When finally, both worn out from the party, they were in bed, he told her about the morning at court, everything, including the encounter with Jason. She said nothing, just held him to her and wept inside with gladness that she had a man who could be so upset by other people's suffering.

Sunday, Malone took Tom to the rugby league grand final. The seats at the Stadium could not have been better, halfway up the western stand and level with the halfway line. Tom, who played soccer and only showed an interest in rugby league for his father's sake, was today wide-eyed with excitement. The big arena, with its swooping roof, like a plastic toilet seat warped by being left too long in the sun but still beautiful in its shape, was packed, every seat filled. Supporters from Penrith and Canberra, the two opposing teams, waved banners and ribbons and scarves: Agincourt had looked no more colourful nor had the passion been greater. Out on the field the pre-game entertainment was coming to an end: scantily clad girls danced, two bands played, gymnasts ran around like headless chooks, parachutists floated down, one of them missing the playing area and landing on the roof of the stand, to cheers from the crowd. On the huge replay screen at the northern end of the ground Tina Turner, an old rugby league fan if ever Malone had seen one, did things with a football that would have put her in the sin bin under some of the game's old referees. It was rugby league's circus day and Malone, suddenly feeling old and remembering going to a 1950s' final with his own father, pined for the good old days without the razzamatazz.

“
Gee, Dad, ain't it great! I think I'll give up soccer if league is always like this!”

Malone looked at his son, not knowing whether to be pleased or disappointed in him. “Next year they're putting on lions and tigers eating any player who's a Christian. And there are going to be girls high-diving into pools with no water in them.”

Tom, wise as a nine-year-old can sometimes annoyingly be, said, “You're old-fashioned, Dad. Anyhow, how did you get the tickets?”

They had arrived by courier at home yesterday morning. There had been no sender's name on the small envelope; just a card inside that said,
Take your son, I'm taking mine.
Malone had made one guess at who had sent him the tickets: Jack Aldwych. His first reaction had been to shove the tickets back into the envelope. An honest cop didn't take presents, no matter how small, from a crime boss, even if the latter was retired (or so he said). Lisa had seen the reaction in his face and said, “Keep them, take Tom to the match.”

“But I know who they're from.”

“If he asks anything of you in the future, all you have to do is say no. Go, and forget what you've had to do to Olive or are going to do. Go and take Tom and be thankful that this villain, whoever he is, is a man who understands that on certain days a father and son should be together.”

He looked at her, loving her till it hurt, then he kissed her. “It's Jack Aldwych, I'm sure. And you've just made him sound like Santa Claus.”

Now, sitting here beside his son in the roaring crush, he said, “Do they still tell you about manna from heaven at school?”

“Sure. But football tickets are
manna
?”

“They are on grand final day.”

Tom suddenly grinned, the dimple showing in his right cheek, and Malone wanted to hug and kiss him. But real men didn't do that with their sons, at least not the Malone men; that sort of schoolgirl stuff was left to the 100-kilogram mastodons out on the field. Penrith won, 14-12, and Malone and Tom went home satisfied the result was just and right. Any victory over Canberra, the seat of conceit, of Federal
government,
the cause of the nation's recession, was to be cheered and welcomed.

III

It is history now that that Sunday night Penrith, a town thirty kilometres west of Sydney, called a city but really a distant suburb of Sydney, went wild. The Panthers had never won a grand final; history had to be celebrated. There was another reason: the recession had hit this area as badly as anywhere in the State, hope was dying on the vine, people fought with each other because there was nothing else to fight against. They grasped at the good news, fleeting though it might be, meaningless even, and started a party that lasted for three days.

There was a party going on at the house next door to the Dunnes' and at the house behind it. Kelpie, his plastered leg up on a chair, and Claudia were sitting in their kitchen, both drinking tea and Kelpie eating a slice of Sara Lee's blueberry pie. Claudia was not a good housekeeper and the kitchen resembled a way-station, as if the occupants of the house stopped here only to eat and run. She was a machinist at a clothing factory down by the railway line, lucky still to have a job, and, though she was clean in her personal habits, she preferred factory work to housework. Kelpie, possibly because of his jail training, was, on the other hand, meticulous about keeping the house clean. Except for the kitchen: it was understood between them that that was her turf and he was not to interfere. So he tolerated her untidiness and lack of method and never complained if he had to go looking for a packet of tea or the washing powder or a clean saucepan. He loved her, in a way he didn't understand and had never tried to.

“I won some money on the Panthers today.” They had watched a TV replay of the match and he had sat through it wondering when or whether he should tell her of his good fortune.

“I thought you'd given up gambling,” she said accusingly but without rancour. “Listen to 'em next door!”

Through the slightly opened kitchen window the music and laughter from next door came in blasts. He grinned. “If we complained, you think they'd listen to us?”

“So you had a bet?”

“
Just this once, for the occasion.” He loved her, but he lied to her regularly; which is not incompatible and not unusual. He had lied to her last Saturday night, yesterday week, when he had told her he had to see the boss at Hamill's about going to the country to do some work on a client's Jaguar.

“How much did you win?” She was practical about money, even though they never seemed to have any to spare.

“Three thousand bucks.”

“Three thousand! Where'd you get . . .?”

“I know a bookie, he gimme good odds early in the piece. He'd of lost a packet today—he'll be quivering like a huge jelly tonight.”

He was smiling at her when, beyond her, he saw the silencer come through the narrow opening at the bottom of the window. Anchored by his leg, he could not move in time: the bullet hit him just below his widow's peak and he died with Claudia just in the corner of his eye, her face half turned to see what had startled him. Then she, too, died, with a bullet in her right temple.

8

I

CLEMENTS HAD
never heard Malone so angry. “Jesus Christ Almighty! Where was the bloody surveillance?” He went on through a stream of obscenities that would have made even a street kid's eyes pop. “I'll have someone's neck for this—”

“Get off the boil, Inspector,” said Clements, waiting till the fury at the other end of the line had eased a little. “Scobie, you'll be wasting your time looking for someone's neck over this. It's just been a monumental cock-up and I dunno you could find someone specific to point the finger at. The sergeant in charge of the detail at Penrith had enough on his hands—he needed every man he could muster to handle what's been going on out there, the town's a madhouse. He informed West Region at Parramatta, he comes under them, not us, what he was doing. They were to inform us, which they say they did, but it was lost somewhere in the computer. They couldn't supply anyone to keep watch on Kelpie—they had to send men out to Penrith to help there. Kelpie and his wife would still be alive if the Panthers had lost.”

“Is Olive still in custody?”

“That was the first thing I checked. She's in the cells at Police Centre.”

Malone had simmered down. “All I need now is for you to tell me you won a bundle on the Panthers.”

Clements grinned to himself. “Fifteen hundred bucks. I'll go out to Penrith, see what they've come up with. I'll see you in the office.”

It was seven o'clock on Monday morning. Malone hung up the bedside phone and lay back on his pillow, his thoughts whirling like socks in a washing machine; some thoughts, like some socks, would be missing when his mind settled down. Then he was aware of Lisa, wide awake beside him.

“
That was a choice selection of language. Just as well the kids are still asleep. What brought it on? Has Olive tried to escape or something? Oh God, she didn't try to commit suicide, did she?”

“No.” He told her the news. “We thought we had an open-and-shut case against Olive. We'd have put Kelpie Dunne up against her and one of them would've cracked in the end, trying to save his or her own neck. But now . . .”

“Well, it must prove that this chap Dunne must have had
something
to do with Will's murder. He probably did it and then someone killed him to keep his mouth shut.”

He didn't tell her she was stating the obvious.
“That
we can bet on. But Olive's still in custody, so she couldn't have done it. And if Kelpie Dunne was her paid hitman, how many other hitmen does she know?”

“It could have been that Mr. Jones you told me about. Which means Olive could be next on his list.”

II

There was a certain tension to the Monday morning conference. Malone, normally calm, almost placid, was sharp and irritable. Detectives were cut by the edge of his tongue, were told that results were wanted today, not tomorrow or next week. When the conference broke up, the air in the big room at Homicide would have soured milk.