Murder Song (37 page)

She nodded vigorously, almost as if trying to convince herself. “Oh yes. Yes.” Then she said in a despairing plea, “You're sure about what he's done?”

“I'm sure.” He looked up as Clements came back into the flat. “Everything okay?”

Clements put three packets of ammunition on the arm of Malone's chair. “We found those in a steel box in the garage, bolted to the floor. Bill Killop had to bust it open. They're .243s. The gun's gone.”

“A gun?” said Julie. “He had a gun down there?”

“You didn't know about the steel box?”

“Of course. But Colin said he kept his spare tapes and lenses in it. I—I never saw him open it.”

Clements was as uncomfortable as Malone with Julie's anguish. He looked at Malone. “Bill Killop wants to know how long it's likely to be.”

“Did your husband take any gear with him?” Malone said.

“Some extra shirts and a sweater. He asked for extra money, but then he said he'd use his bank card.” She stared at them with no hope at all in her pinched, pale face. “I thought he was only going for a couple of days.”

Malone tried to tone down the pity in his voice: “I don't think he'll be back at all, Mrs. Malloy.”

11

I

“HE'S GOT
to be disposed of, Arnie, no two ways about it. We'll kill him.”

“Jack, isn't there some other way? Jesus, can't we just buy him off? He'll listen to the sound of money. Everybody does.” Arnold Debbs judged everyone by his own standards: he liked a yardstick he could trust.

“Arnie, he's not some local councilman—” Jack Aldwych almost said,
He's not some local politician
; but you couldn't insult a politician to his face, not in his own home. Shirl had tried to teach him some manners and, to a certain extend, she had succeeded. “No, O'Brien's got more money than we could offer him to keep him quiet. I've been talking to someone in his organization—”

“Who?”

Aldwych smiled. “Arnie, do you tell me who gives you leaks out of Cabinet? This feller knows everything that's going on. O'Brien has money salted away overseas—”

“Then why the fuck doesn't he pay what should be coming to us?” Debbs could feel his temper rising, as much with Jack Aldwych as with O'Brien. Sometimes he wondered if Aldwych thought he was just the office boy, the messenger from Canberra. But he was a small man in a plump, large frame and such small men have their own invisible mirror. He knew his limitations and they gave him a headache.

“Arnie, he's like the rest of us, greedy. I've never criticized anyone for being greedy, it's a natural condition, like dandruff or piles.” Lately, in the evenings, Aldwych had taken to becoming philosophical. Which was why he rarely did business after dark nowadays.

He had come out here this Sunday evening to visit Arnold Debbs; Jack Junior had driven him and was still outside sitting in the dark blue Jaguar, which was Shirl's car. The Debbs lived in Strathfield,
in
Sydney's inner west, a middle-class area that had once had higher aspirations. It had originally attracted the professional classes who, for various reasons, had wished to avoid the more socially conscious eastern suburbs; it was not that they were against keeping up with the Joneses, they were careful about spending their money to do so. At one time, it was said, 50 per cent of the local population had consisted of solicitors and accountants, each keeping an eye on the other. The area was conservative in politics, even if voting Labour, and once had been conservative in religion; now, religion found the going a little harder, as if, like the Joneses, it was no longer a necessary beacon. There were several grand mansions in the district, but these were now mostly taken over by institutions, private schools and nursing homes. Postwar immigrants who had made good had built large houses on small blocks, many of them distinguished by more balustrade work than one would find in a day's drive in the Florentine hills. The Debbs lived in a blue-brick one-storey house, built in the 1920s; it was bourgeoisly solid, but not grand enough to earn a curled lip from any Labour voter who might stray into their quiet, tree-lined bourgeois street. Democracy is elastic: it doesn't insist that its representatives have to be humble. Except at election time.

Aldwych sipped the twelve-year-old Chivas Regal he had brought as a gift: Debbs, a good host, had opened it at once, realizing that that was what Aldwych wanted him to do. “Arnie, Les Chung saw O'Brien today. He went up to O'Brien's stud—he's holed up there with Scobie Malone. Les got the idea that they're playing at stake-out goats to this other feller who's trying to bump off the two of them.”

“The two of „em? I'm surprised the Police Department would go along with that.”

“I hear from my contact in the Department that they're getting pretty desperate. Anyhow, we're gunna have to do something. Les gave O'Brien a warning, but it wasn't worth a pinch of shit, according to Les. So, I've got a feller going up there tonight. A couple of „em, in fact. One's gunna create a diversion, to get the police and the security guards over his way, while the other guy goes in and does O'Brien.”

“Won't that be risky, with all the police hanging around?”

“Arnie, the risk will be for the guy who's gunna do the hit. And he doesn't know who's paying him.”

“And Malone?” Debbs could feel the whisky splashing in his glass.

“
Yeah, he'll do Malone too, if he has to. Don't worry, Arnie,” said Aldwych, as if he could see Debbs' trembling hand in the gloom of the living-room. “It'll be done and nobody'll ever connect us with it.”

Then Penelope Debbs came to the door of the room, peered in at them. “What are you doing sitting in the dark?”

She switched on the ceiling light; the room sprang up around the two men. It was a big comfortable room, panelled halfway up the walls; there were old-fashioned picture-rails round the walls a couple of feet below the moulded metal ceiling. The furniture was much better than one would find in the homes of the majority of the Debbs' voters; both politicians were careful never to have any party branch committee meetings here. All the paintings were Australian landscapes, including a subdued Pro Hart and a Hans Heysen without a gum tree; there was a photo of Penelope with the Queen, she looking more regal than the Royal; and there was a glass-fronted cabinet in one corner in which was Penelope's collection of Lalique crystal, her main indulgence outside of her own self-promotion.

“Do you usually sit in the dark at home, Mr. Aldwych?”

“A lot of the time, Mrs. Debbs. My wife is on at me all the time, asking me if I'm trying to save electricity.”

Penelope had never met Jack Aldwych before this evening; had never wanted to. She was not afraid of him; indeed, of any man, gangster or saint; she would have put both Jenghis Khan and Jesus Christ in their places if they had tried to boss her around. She was careful with whom she brushed her well-clad shoulders; she had made one or two bad choices, including O'Brien, but she had always avoided criminals. She had known that Arnold knew Aldwych, but she had been shocked when she had gone to the front door an hour ago and a young man had stood there, introducing himself as Jack Aldwych Junior and saying that his father was outside in their car and would like to come in to see Mr. Debbs. Arnold had come into the hall behind her and, though he had tried to disguise the surprise in his voice, had said, yes, ask your father to come in, by all means. When the old man had come up on to their front verandah she had been surprised at how amiable and polite he had seemed. She didn't know why, but she had expected
a
gorilla in a trenchcoat. She had greeted him just as politely, then excused herself and gone out to the kitchen. Whatever he had come to discuss with Arnold, she did not want to hear it first hand. Later would do, when she and Arnold were in bed. They slept in twin beds and they never had sex on Sunday nights, so their talk could be cool and political.

Aldwych stood up, rising slowly. “Well, I better be getting back. I'm keeping my son away from his girl.”

Penelope wondered what sort of girl would go with a gangster's son. “He seemed a nice boy. He's got a charming smile.”

“His mother's smile. He's all right—it's just a pity he's got me for a dad.” He looked at her, giving her his old man's smile, as if waiting for her to contradict him. But she had learned just how far you could take politeness; he would recognize hypocrisy far quicker than any voter. She let her opinion of him hang in the air like a looped rope. He recognized a woman as formidable as himself and thanked Christ that Shirl was nothing like her. “Well, good-night. I've just been telling Arnold that all our troubles will soon be over.”

“That'll be a relief. Good-night, Mr. Aldwych.”

“Good-night, Mrs. Debbs.”

Arnold Debbs showed him out of the house, then came back into the living-room, where Penelope hadn't moved, stood still and waiting. “So what did he mean by saying all our troubles will soon be over?”

“He's going to attend to Mr. O'Brien.”

“How?” But she knew at once; and quickly she said, “Don't tell me! I don't want to know.”

He poured himself half a glass of the Chivas Regal, took a long gulp of it. “How did we ever get into this fucking mess?”

But that's a question that has been echoing down history ever since Adam, without the adjective, first asked it.

II

Malone and Clements got back to Cossack Lodge at midnight. Julie Malloy had called a girlfriend, who had arrived to stay the night with her; her sister would be coming over from Adelaide first thing tomorrow morning. The media had been sent away with a few sparse facts but no pictures; the SWOS men had gone back to Police Centre and most of the local police had been retired. A roster of two men at a time was to stake out the Malloy flat in case Malloy came back to see his wife.

“But I think there's one chance in a thousand of that,” Malone had told Sergeant Safire. “She's seen the last of him, unless we manage to take him alive.”

“If he turns up,” said Safire, “I'll be on to you right away. You'd like to be in at the kill, I reckon.”

“Yes,” said Malone, but wished Safire had used another word.

The two detectives had said very little to each other on the drive back from the city. As Clements turned the car in at the stud gates, a security guard approached them from the side, flashing a torch in their faces. “Oh, it's you, Inspector. Everything's okay, nothing's happening. Looks like a quiet night.”

Clements drove on up to the house. The lights were still on in the front room and O'Brien opened the front door as they stepped up on to the verandah. “You didn't get him?”

“Let's talk inside,” said Malone. “We don't want to be standing against the light—”

Then there was a shot somewhere across the paddocks. Malone pushed O'Brien ahead of him back into the hallway; Clements followed them, slamming the door shut behind him. “Turn out the lights—all of them!”

O'Brien reacted as quickly as the two policemen; in a few seconds all the lights in the house were out. Outside, Malone heard a car start up, heard shouting; then the car went roaring down the drive. A horse whinnied, almost a scream of terror, then there was the sound of running feet and more shouts as the stud staff rushed out of their quarters to try to quieten the restless horses in the stables. O'Brien said with real concern, “I hope the horses out in the paddocks aren't going crazy.”

“
Would it be any of the locals shooting? Do they come out here at night to knock off wallabies or anything?”

“I dunno. This is the first time I've heard any shooting.”

“I'll go out and have a look,” said Malone.

“No, you won't,” said Clements. “You stay here.”

He didn't give Malone time to argue; he went out through the back of the house, stumbling in the dark in the unfamiliar surroundings, cursing as he bumped into furniture. He opened the back door and stepped out into a yard which, even in the moonless night, looked more uncluttered than the usual farmhouse yard. There was no rusting machinery, no discarded bales and oil-drums; the yard was part of the showcase stud. He turned left and went towards the corner of the house just as the dark figure came running up from one of the rear paddocks. He halted and waited, taking his gun from its holster.

The man vaulted the white-railed fence that separated the yard from the paddock, landed on rubber-soled shoes and came swiftly across the yard towards the back door. Clements stepped silently behind the large water-tank at the corner of the house, a still-useful relic from the days before town water had been connected to the stud. He raised the Smith & Wesson and said, “Don't move! Police!”

The man was alert for any danger; he fell flat at once, facing Clements, and the latter saw the gun come up. There was no flash; he just heard the bullet strike the water-tank like a quick flick on a drum; it hit above the water-line inside. He fired at the prostrate figure, but the man rolled to one side an instant before. Another bullet hit the tank, ricocheting off with a thin whine; a third bullet speared the corrugated iron, lower down this time, and a jet of water spouted out past Clements' face. The gunman had rolled close to the wall of the house; he was pressed up against the back step. Clements dropped flat to the ground, grunting as he did so; he had too much belly to lie perfectly flat. He took aim through the wooden legs of the tank stand; then saw the back door open right above the gunman. The man rolled over on his back, his gun coming up to point straight at Malone's shadowy figure in the doorway. Clements' first shot was a lucky one; it knocked the gun out of the man's hand. The second shot hit him in the head.