Dark Summer. Jon Cleary
He went into the main bedroom, where Lisa was sitting on the side of the queen-sized bed with her arms round Maureen and Tom. She looked up at him and said accusingly, or so it seemed, ‘What’s happening?’
‘They’re all on their way, the local fellers, the Crime Scene team. They’ll all be here in minutes. Russ is coming, too.’
‘Can I watch, Dad?’ Tom was almost eight: the world, and everything in it, even the horrible, was for watching.
‘Not this time, Tom. Get dressed.’
Lisa rose to take the two younger children out of the room. As they passed him, Malone pressed Maureen’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, love.’
Both children looked at him, puzzled; but he saw that Lisa understood. ‘What for, Daddy? Sorry for what, the dead man?’
‘Yes, I guess so.’ It would be useless trying to explain his regret at what, through his police work, he had brought into their lives.
There was no time for a shower. Normally, at this time of morning, he would be in the pool; that, too, was out for the time being. He had a quick wash, throwing the cold water into his face as if to convince himself that he should be fully awake; which he was. He put on a short-sleeved shirt, cotton trousers and a pair of canvas shoes and went out to get the newspapers. He had no intention of reading them; it was force of habit. Today was Australia Day, a national holiday, when the natives, a notoriously phlegmatic lot, searched in themselves for a sediment of patriotism. This weekend, with the Gulf war promising to be more than a nine-day horror, with the country’s economy up to its crotch in recession and sinking further, the flag-waving would be even more desultory than usual. He glanced at the headlines. Saddam, the medieval thug, was playing dirty: he was flooding the Gulf with oil. President Bush, always with an eye to the vote, was calling him an environment terrorist. Malone, taking a narrow view, wondered which was worse, oil in the Gulf or a dead man in your kids’ swimming pool.
He was about to go back into the house when the two police cars, silent and with no blue and red lights flashing, pulled up at the kerb. Detective Sergeant Wal Dukes got out of the first car.
‘I was just knocking off, Scobie, when they told me you had a problem.’ He was a big man, a one-time Olympic heavyweight boxer now run a little to fat; he was reliable, but sometimes a bit heavy-handed, as if he thought he still had a few rounds to go in his last bout. ‘Crime Scene on their way?’
‘Yeah.’ Physical Evidence was still called Crime Scene by the older men in the Department: change for change’s sake was something they didn’t favour. Malone closed the front door. ‘Let’s go round the side. I want to keep the kids out of this. The bloody place is going to be over-run in a while. Stick to the path, in case there are some shoe prints in that grass strip there.’
They went round to the back of the house, followed by Dukes’ junior, a young detective named Lazarus, and the two uniformed men who had come in the second car. Grime was still out in the middle of the pool, the skim-net still over his face, looking for all the world like a drunk who had decided to have a floating sleep.
‘He’s Normie Grime, Scungy they called him. I’ve been using him as an informant for the past three months, since he got out of the Bay.’
‘What was he in for?’
‘Passing dud notes. He was into everything, but he was always just a hanger-on, never big time.’
‘What were you using him for?’
‘I’ve been on a homicide, a young Vietnamese was murdered in a back lane in Surry Hills. He was into drugs, the Asian, and I hoped Scungy could give me a lead or two. Scungy himself, as far as I know, never sold the hard stuff, but he knew everyone who did.’
‘Was he coming here to see you?’
Malone looked at him as if he had been accused of corruption. ‘Here? Wal, I don’t even let cops come here! Except Russ Clements.’
‘Well, we’re here now.’ But Dukes said it as gently as he could, though gentleness was not one of his talents. He looked out at the drifting Grime, who had floated close to the far side of the pool and was now staring up through the skim-net at one of the uniformed men as he reached out for the long pole. ‘Watch out, Kenny, you’re gunna fall in!’
Kenny fell in, with a loud splash and a muffled curse. Dukes turned back to Malone. ‘How do we divide this one up? It’s in my territory, but he’s your property, as it were.’
‘I’ll hang on to him, Wal, if it’s okay with you. If I need any help –?’
‘Sure, all you need.’ The uniformed cop, Kenny, had pushed the body to the side of the pool. It was now floating at the feet of the two senior detectives. Dukes looked down at it. ‘Fuck ‘em!’
‘Who?’
‘Crims. Why don’t they go out into the middle of the Nullabor Plain when they wanna bump each other off?’
Ten minutes later Russ Clements and the Physical Evidence team arrived simultaneously. All at once the back garden was seething with activity, a police production; for the first and last time in this life Scungy Grime was a star. The Cayburn family stood on their balcony, the parents and their two teenage sons, Gloria Cayburn with her hand over her mouth as if stifling a scream; beyond the opposite side fence the Malones’ other neighbours, an elderly couple named Bass who normally minded their own business, stood on a ladder, one above the other, like a geriatric trapeze pair about to climb to the high wire. Malone, catching a glimpse of them, waved to them, then looked sourly at Clements.
‘You reckon we should charge admission?’
‘Take it easy, mate. They’re neighbours, for Crissake. You’d rather they turned their backs on you?’ But the big, rumpled man knew what was causing the tension in Malone; he had gone into the house as soon as he had arrived and spoken to Lisa and the children. He was the surrogate uncle and he was as anxious as Malone to see that this murder did not throw too long a shadow over this house. ‘Let’s go inside.’
Then he looked past Malone and suddenly smiled, an expression of abrupt pleasure out of keeping with his sombre mood of a moment ago. ‘G’day, Romy. You didn’t say you were on call today.’
‘They’ve given all the Old Australians the day off. We’ve been told we can wave the flag next year.’ She was smiling as she said it, there was no sourness. She was the GMO, one of the government medical officers from the Division of Forensic Medicine in the State Department of Health. She was Romy Keller, slim and attractive, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with just a trace of accent, ten years out of Germany and still trying to be an Australian. ‘I didn’t know this was your place, Inspector. When they called me, they just gave me an address . . . When did it happen?’
‘The murder? I don’t know. My daughter found him in the pool.’
‘Poor child.’ She glanced towards the body, which was now lying on the bricks beside the pool, a green plastic sheet thrown over it. ‘Anyone looked at the body?’
‘Sergeant Dukes gave him a once-over,’ said Clements. ‘There’s no sign of any wound. It could be a heart attack.’
‘Then it wouldn’t be murder, would it?’ She looked at Malone.
He nodded. ‘Righto, you’re right. I jumped to conclusions. Maybe it’s some sick joke. Some mate of his found him dead and decided to dump him in my pool. I just don’t think that’s the way it is.’
She sensed the tension in him, gave him no immediate answer, looked once more at the sheet-covered body, then said, ‘Okay, we’ll take him away and look at him in the morgue. I’d rather do it there than give a show for them.’
She made a sweeping gesture, at the Cayburns, the Basses and at the back fence, where a family whose name Malone didn’t know were lined up, all seven of them, on chairs, their faces hung above the palings like pumpkin halves.
‘Take