Murder Song. Jon Cleary
started a first one yet,’ said Maureen.
‘No, I was going to, but.’
‘Who mentioned homicide?’ said Malone. ‘Who was that on the phone?’
‘Uncle Russ,’ said Claire. ‘He’s still hanging there.’
Muttering an incoherent curse, picturing the 100-kilogram Russ Clements hanging by his neck from a phone cord, Malone got up and went out into the hallway. ‘Russ? How many times have I bloody told you – don’t mention homicide in front of the kids!’
‘Get off the boil, Inspector,’ said Sergeant Clements in a patient voice that made a gentle mockery of Malone’s rank. There had once been a Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force, as it was then known, who had insisted on the use of rank when addressing another officer; he had given rank another of its meanings when he had been found, on retirement, to have been the State’s patron saint of corruption. He, however, had been before Malone’s and Clements’ time, though his legend persisted. ‘Claire’s got too much imagination. Where does she get it from?’
‘Her mother. Go on. Is there a homicide or not?’
‘Yeah, there is. But all I asked Claire was whether you had left for the office. You know how I feel about your kids, Scobie –’
‘Yeah, I know. Sorry. Where’s the job this time?’
‘Down at The Warehouse in Clarence Street, it’s an apartment block. It seems routine, a woman shot.’
‘If it’s routine, why ring me? Take Andy Graham or someone and get down there.’
‘Scobie, there’s three guys off with ’flu. I need a back-up.’
‘An inspector backing up a sergeant? You trying to ruin my day? Righto, I’ll be there. But I’m going to finish my breakfast first. It’s a privilege of rank.’
He hung up and went back into the kitchen. It was a big old-fashioned room that, despite all its modern appliances, suggested another time, almost another country. The house was eighty years old, built just after Federation, part-sandstone, part-redbrick. It was of a style that had become fashionable again with its pitched slate roof, its wide front verandah, its eaves embellishments and its hint of conservative values, though not in dollar terms. The Malones had bought the house eight years ago and now it was worth three times what they had paid for it. With its backyard pool, a gift from Lisa’s parents, adding to its worth, Malone sometimes wondered if the neighbours thought he might be a policeman on the take. Easy money had been a national gift for several years and suspicion of a neighbour’s good fortune had become endemic.
‘I’ll have another cup of coffee,’ he said, spreading some of Lisa’s home-made marmalade on a slice of wholegrain toast.
‘So where’s the murder?’ Maureen was almost ten, going on twenty; she lived in a world of TV cop shows and soap operas. She had a mind as lively as an aviary full of swallows, but she was no bird-brain; Malone felt that, somehow, she would grow up to be the least vulnerable of his three children. ‘God, why did we have to have a cop as a father? He never wants to talk about his work with us.’
‘You think Alan Bond sits down at breakfast and discusses take-overs with his grandkids?’
‘What about the Pope?’ said Tom, the seven-year-old.
‘I’ve told you before – the Pope doesn’t have kids. What sort of Catholic school do you go to? What do you do during religious instruction?’
‘Play noughts and crosses.’
‘Holy Jesus,’ said Malone, then added, ‘That was supposed to be a prayer.’
‘Just as well,’ said Tom piously. ‘You know what Grandma Malone thinks about swearing.’
‘She should come up to Holy Spirit some day and listen to the senior girls,’ said Maureen. ‘Holy –’
‘Watch it,’ said Lisa, who swore only in bed under and on top of Malone and never within the hearing of the children, which meant she sometimes got up in the morning with a hoarse throat.
‘Dad,’ said Claire, going on fourteen, more than halfway to being a beautiful woman and beginning to be aware of it, ‘what about my fifty dollars? I’ve got to pay the deposit for the skiing holiday.’
‘Who’s taking your class on this trip?’
‘Sister Philomena, Speedy Gonzalez’s sister.’
‘A sixty-year-old skiing nun? Does the Pope know about this emancipation?’
‘What’s emancipation?’ asked Tom, who had a keen interest in words if not in Catholic politics.
‘Forget it,’ said Malone and took a fifty-dollar note from his wallet. ‘That skins me. I can remember my school holidays, we went to Coogee Beach.’
‘Not in winter, you didn’t,’ said Claire, as practical-minded as her mother. She took the note and put it carefully away in her wallet, which, Malone noticed, was fatter than his own. She had inherited his reluctance to spend, but somehow, even at going-on-fourteen, she always seemed to be richer than he.
‘Don’t let the light get to the moths in there,’ said Maureen, the spendthrift. ‘Now tell us about the murder, Daddy.’
‘When I’m retired and got nothing better to do. Now get ready for school.’
Later, when the children had left to walk to school, an exercise that Lisa insisted upon, Malone stood at the front door with Lisa. ‘It’s unhealthy, the way they keep harping what murder I’m on.’
‘What do you expect, a father’s who’s been ten years in Homicide? You could always ask for a transfer, to Traffic or something unexciting. Or Administration, that’d be nice. Nine to five and you wouldn’t have to wear a gun.’ She patted the bulge of his holster, as she might a large tumour.
It was a sore point between them; he couldn’t blame her for her point of view. Cops everywhere in the world probably had this sort of conversation with their wives or lovers. ‘You’d be bored stiff if I turned into a stuffy office manager.’
‘Try me.’ She kissed him, gave him her usual warning, which was more than a cliché for her: ‘Take care.’
He drove into town in the six-year-old Holden Commodore. Like himself, it was always slow to start on a winter morning; they were a summertime pair. The car was beginning to show its age; and on mornings like this he sometimes felt his. He was in his early forties, with a fast bowler’s bulky shoulders and still reasonably slim round the waist; he had been rawboned and lithe in his cricketing days, and he sometimes felt the ghost of that youth in his bones and extra flesh. But that was all in the past and he knew as well as anyone that one couldn’t go back. Lately he had found himself observing Lisa, forty and still in her prime but just beginning to fade round the edges, and praying for her sake (and, selfishly, for his) that age would come slowly and kindly to her.
Randwick, where he lived, was eight kilometres from the heart of the city; in the morning peak hour traffic it took him twenty-five minutes to get to the scene of the murder. Clarence Street was one of the north-bound arteries of the central business district; it was one of four such streets named after English dukes in the early nineteenth century, a tugging of the colonial forelock of those days. Originally it had been the site of the colony’s troop barracks; pubs and brothels had been close at hand to provide the usual comforts. Then the barracks and brothels had been cleaned out, but not all the pubs. Merchants had moved in to build their narrow-fronted warehouses and showrooms; silks and satins had replaced sex in the market, salesmen had taken over from the soldiers. There had been a tea-and-coffee warehouse that Malone could remember passing as a boy; there had also been the scent of spices from another warehouse; he had stopped to breathe deeply and dream of Zanzibar and Ceylon and dusky girls amongst the bushes. He had matured early, a common occurrence amongst fast bowlers: matured physically, that is.
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