The High Commissioner. Jon Cleary
shouldn’t be long. In the meantime I’ll go across and have a look around the garden, just in case he dropped the gun.”
You’re wasting your time, mate, Malone thought; those boys weren’t the sort to leave anything behind. But he said nothing; he had to keep reminding himself that this was not his territory. The policeman saluted and retired as Joseph, seething with good grace at having to play nurse to a man below his own social station, returned with a bowl of hot water, a bottle of Dettol and a tin of Band-aids.
“Shall I attend to the gentleman, madame?” he asked Sheila, his tone suggesting he had other and better things to do. He looked completely unperturbed by what had happened outside in the street. Malone wondered if all butlers were so imperturbable. Then he remembered that Joseph was a Hungarian and he wondered how many shootings in the street he had experienced.
“I’ll do it,” said Lisa, and began to bathe the cut on Malone’s chin. He could smell the perfume she wore, sharpened by the heat of her fear and excitement of a few minutes ago, and he was uncomfortably aware of her bare shoulders and breast as she leaned close to him. He looked beyond her, focusing his gaze on the room around them. He recognised the two paintings on the walls: a Dobell and a Drysdale: Christmas cards had made him an expert on the more famous Australian artists. The furnishings here were richer than in the other two rooms of the house that Malone had seen. He lay back on the Thai silk cushions of the lounge where he sat; he was being trapped in a quicksand of luxury. He sat up quickly, his cheek bumping against Lisa’s arm, and looked over her shoulder at Quentin.
“Have you any idea who might have taken a shot at you?”
Quentin shook his head. He looked worried, but somehow Malone knew that it was not worry for himself: it was almost as if he thought of the assassination as something impersonal. He was not a career man, but he had already become poisoned by the foreign service officer’s resignation: nothing that happened to you must be judged in personal terms. Insult, overwork, attempted murder: it was little to ask for in return for a K.B.E. Policemen, Malone mused, were asked for the same things; but policemen were never made Knights of the British Empire. Quentin’s reward was probably to have been the Prime Ministership, but he had said good-bye to that earlier this evening. If the bullet had struck home, it might have solved the personal problem. But it hadn’t.
“The important thing is, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to make political capital out of it. If this should have anything to do with the conference – well, that’s why I want it kept out of the papers.” He looked steadily at Malone. “I should imagine you’d want it kept quiet, too.”
“What’s going on between you two?” Sheila looked curiously from one man to the other.
“Nothing, darling—”
“Don’t tell me nothing! Mr. Malone arrives out of nowhere, none of us knows he’s even coming—” She looked at Malone. “It was almost as if you didn’t expect yourself to come here. Where’s your luggage?”
Malone was held dumb by Lisa’s fingers as she pressed the Band-aid on his chin. Quentin answered for him: “Sheila, we’ll talk about it later—”
“Darling.” She had calmed down again; she put a hand on his arm. “You might have been killed tonight. Do you blame me for asking what’s going on? Why should something like this happen the very night the – forgive me” – she looked again at Malone – “the mysterious Mr. Malone arrives? I don’t want to pry into government affairs, but why are you two so secretive?”
Malone, still aware of the closeness of Lisa, his nostrils clogged with a mixture of Dettol and her perfume, sat quiet, waiting for Quentin to answer his wife’s question. Quentin, as if he were avoiding Malone’s stare, looked down into his Scotch and said, “Mr. Malone is a security man. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Secret Service?” Sheila sounded a little incredulous, almost amused.
Lisa, her medical aid done, stepped back, looked at Malone and smiled. “Somehow one never thinks of Australians as spies.”
Malone stood up. He went to open his mouth, to tell the truth, get it over and done with; then saw the look (of warning? Or of pleading?) on Quentin’s face. He took a sip from his glass and said almost lamely, “I am not a spy. All I have to do is look after your husband, Mrs. Quentin.”
“You mean you were expecting something like tonight to happen?” Sheila’s poise began to crack again; something like hysteria bubbled just below the surface of her. She had looked so intact, so self-possessed, that it was now like looking at another person, a relative with a family resemblance. “God, I can’t believe it! Why should anyone want to kill my husband?”
In the end everything is personal to a woman, Malone thought. Viewed from her angle it meant nothing that her husband was his country’s ambassador, that he was the influential man at a conference which, one way or another, was bound to have influence on the future of world peace. She could only see him as her husband: a wife had no diplomacy when she saw her marriage endangered. Malone looked at Quentin, a doomed man: Flannery was waiting for him in Sydney, someone outside in the London dark with a gun.
“I’ll do my best to see it doesn’t happen, Mrs. Quentin,” he said, and felt like a man promising to stop a landslide with a shovel.
Then Joseph knocked on the door. “There is a phone call from Sydney, sir, for Mr. Malone.”
“We’ll take it in the study.” Quentin put down his glass. He looked like a man who had reached the end of his endurance: he was being shot at from near and far, they had got his range.
“Tell them you need more protection,” Sheila said, then gestured helplessly. “Or ask them to recall you. Anything.”
Quentin nodded and patted her arm reassuringly. Then he smiled slightly at Malone as he stood aside to let the latter go ahead out of the room. They went into the study, closing the door after them, and Quentin said, “Do you have to tell the Commissioner about tonight?”
Malone put his hand over the phone. “Scotland Yard will tell him as soon as they learn who I am. You shouldn’t have told your wife I was a security man.”
“What else could I say in front of Lisa?”
Malone stared at him for a moment, having no answer; then he took his hand away from the phone and answered the operator. How much simpler the world must have been before Alexander Graham Bell, he thought.
Leeds came on the line, his voice shredded by static. “Scobie? I’ve seen our friend. He wasn’t happy, but he’s agreed. On patriotic grounds.” Despite the static the sarcasm came through loud and clear. “When will the conference finish?”
“It almost finished tonight,” said Malone, and told Leeds what had happened. The line was silent for a while but for the interference; Malone began to imagine that he was listening to the grinding of teeth. “Are you there, sir?”
Something like a sigh came from ten thousand miles away. “My first reaction is to say bring him home at once. But what comes first? Justice or patriotism?”
This has probably never happened before and will never happen again, Malone thought: the Commissioner asking a detective-sergeant for advice. Malone looked across at Quentin standing in front of the fireplace. Behind the older man the ormolu clock ticked quietly, like a slow teletype: time was running out, was the message. He looked disengaged, already resigned to the fates, a man already in the dock. Christ Almighty, Malone thought, I’ve just been elected to the jury. Don’t get involved, Leeds had advised; and now had tossed him the rope that could bind him to Quentin.
“I think we should stay on here, sir,” he said, and committed himself to Quentin. He cursed the Commissioner, cursed Flannery, thought of the simplicity of a murder in Bexley North: that had been his last case, the arresting of a garage mechanic who had killed a man with a tyre lever for sleeping with the mechanic’s wife. An open and shut case with no involvement at all: the mechanic, struck dumb by grief or hate, had never opened his mouth, never even looked