The High Commissioner. Jon Cleary
go the long way round. Fly over to Perth and pick up a plane there for Darwin. In Darwin you can catch the plane for London. If any of the airport reporters saw you getting on a plane for London, here in Sydney, they’d want to know the ins and outs of it all. But going to Perth – well, that’s where your grandmother is dying.”
Malone, still a little bemused, couldn’t resist one more question: “But why all the secrecy, sir?”
Leeds looked at Flannery again: it’s your question, you answer it. Flannery didn’t mind in the least: “Because if it’s at all possible I’d like Quentin back here in Sydney before his arrest is announced. I want to have the pleasure of ringing up someone and telling him myself.” For a moment malevolence made a ruin of his face. Malone stared at him and all at once thought: why, you old bastard, you’re a murderer, too. “I’ve waited a long time for this.”
Leeds interrupted, a little too sharply, as if he were trying to stop the old man from exposing himself any further. This was the sort of indecent exposure for which there was no legal penalty, yet it was more shocking than any sex perversion. “I’ll impress on Sergeant Malone that there has to be absolute secrecy. He’ll be back here within a week. And he’ll have the High Commissioner with him.”
Flannery sat nodding for a moment, a mote of sunlight from the window behind him rolling on the freckled dome of his bald head like a thin drop of yellow oil. “In a way I feel sorry for Quentin. I met him a couple of times down in Canberra. He’s not a bad bloke at all.”
Leeds stood up. One look at his face told Malone that the Commissioner had had enough of the room’s atmosphere; he looked like a man choking for air. He reached out a hand for the file on the desk and Flannery, after a moment’s hesitation, gave it to him.
“I want it done as quickly and quietly as possible, Jack.” Then he looked up at Malone. “Quentin may make a fuss. You may have to go to Scotland Yard, get them to bring him before an English court and get an extradition order. If that has to happen, get on the phone to the Commissioner here right away, before the London newspapers get wind of it. I don’t want a certain someone to hear about it before I have the chance of telling him myself.”
“I’ll watch it, sir.” Malone was sickened by the look on the old man’s face.
“I just hope you can talk him into coming back without any fuss, any need for extradition. If he’s got any sense of dignity he’ll see it’s better for him as High Commissioner to be arrested here in Sydney than in London. We’ve got to think of Australia’s good name. Don’t forget that, Sergeant.”
II
“Australia’s good name!” Leeds seemed to gasp for air as he and Malone came out into the bright early winter sunlight. He waved away the car that stood waiting for him at the kerb, as if even its large interior would be too confining for him in his present state of mind. “You mind walking?”
“I started on the beat. I haven’t lost the habit.”
“You were practically begging to be put back on the beat, a couple of those questions you put to him.”
“I’m not querying your judgment, sir, but do you think I’m the right man for this job?”
Leeds looked at the man beside him. Malone was tall, six feet, big in the shoulders and chest but not top-heavy; perhaps the well-shaped head, carried high, kept the feeling of balance. The face was too bony to be handsome but Leeds guessed women would find the eyes attractive: they were dark, almost Latin, and they were friendly. The mouth, too, was friendly: smiling was a natural exercise, not a studied social habit. Behind the façade Leeds knew there was a shrewd intelligence that could be relied upon in almost any circumstance. Malone gave the impression of being easy-going, but there was a competence about him that had marked him for promotion from his first days in the force.
“You’re the man, all right” Leeds said. “What’s worrying you?”
They walked up Macquarie Street, past the discreet tradesmen’s signs of the doctors’ brass plates. People went reluctantly, almost stealthily into the sombre doorways, taking their cancers, their coronaries, their troubled minds, in with them. Why was it, Malone wondered, that people always looked as if they were smuggling their illnesses into doctors’ consulting rooms? Or was it that he had suddenly become infected by secrecy, saw it even in the faces of strangers? He looked away from the doorways, at the cuter edge of the pavement where the young girls, on their way to the Botanical Gardens in their lunch-hour break, went by, carrying their youth and vitality and beauty like bold banners: no secrecy there. God, he thought, how young and wonderful they look. Then he wondered what had happened to him that he had begun to think of himself as old.
“I don’t know, sir. This smells of politics and I’ve never been mixed up in that sort of thing before.” He knew of the rivalry and antagonism that existed between State and Federal political parties. “Another thing. How did the High Commissioner get away with this for so long? Is the file on him really fair dinkum?”
“It’s about as factual and unarguable as you can get. Take my word for it, Scobie. I checked it and rechecked it before I put us out on a limb. As for Quentin getting away with it for so long. This is a big empty country. Western Australia where he’s officially supposed to come from, I mean as Quentin, that’s practically another country in itself. Perth is two thousand miles from Canberra or Sydney. On top of that, Australians never seem to take much interest in where their public men were born or how they grew up. Take Flannery, for instance. I’d bet not one per cent of this State’s population could tell you anything about his early life. They couldn’t care less. It’s what you are today that counts in this country, not what you were.”
Malone nodded, realising for the first time his own ignorance of the men who, one way or another, had ruled his life: they were just names and faces and nothing more. But something else made him uneasy:
“What’s behind all this?” he asked Leeds. “Why does the State Premier have a murder investigation conducted by one of his own political hacks? Why all the secrecy?”
Leeds took another breath of air. He was a big man, bigger than Malone, and usually he walked with a slow ambling roll, reminding one of a retired sea captain whose rough seas were behind him for ever. But today he was battling the storm of his own feelings.
“It’s pure political malice!” He looked at Malone fiercely from under the grey wire brushes of his brows. “Don’t you quote me to anyone or you’ll be working a bush beat before you know what hit you!”
“I have some faults, sir,” said Malone, trying not to sound priggish, “but indiscretion is not one of them.”
“Don’t sound so blasted priggish.”
“No, sir,” said Malone, and grinned.
Leeds nodded, then abruptly his reddish face, that could so often be as threatening as a clenched fist, broke into a smile. He walked in silence for a few yards as they turned down Hunter Street towards Police Headquarters; then he appeared to relax, began to roll a little as he walked. “You’re right, Scobie. That was one of the reasons I picked you for this job, your discretion.”
A young couple, blind with love, came towards them; the two policemen walked round them, respecting their selfishness. Leeds, interrupted, fell silent for a few more yards, and Malone paced beside him, silently patient. Patience had never been one of Malone’s early virtues, but he had learned to cultivate it, just as Flannery had learned to cultivate his warm sincere grin. Some virtues, Malone thought, were often only hypocrisy under another name.
“Pure political malice,” Leeds repeated. “He’s never forgiven the Prime Minister for crossing the floor back in the 1930s. You wouldn’t remember that.”
“In the 1930s I was still in short pants and both my grandmothers were still alive. I didn’t even know such things as politicians existed. What happened?”
“The P.M. was a Labour man in those days, here in