Dark Summer. Jon Cleary
uniforms, the hoopla and exaggerated behaviour of the players, all of it had brought the crowds back to cricket, but Malone was one of the old school. If a team-mate had kissed him when he had taken a wicket, he would have run a stump through the molester.
‘No. I was a bowler, Jack. One-day games aren’t meant for bowlers, they’re for batsmen. You never hear of a groundsman these days preparing a wicket for bowlers – the Cricket Board would have him jailed. All the crowd wants to see is big hitting. It’s Happy Hour for the batsmen and bugger-you-Bill for the bowlers. You come here often?’
‘Every day there’s a match, one-day games, Sheffield Shield, Test matches. I’m a cricket-lover. Most of the crims you and I know, they all go to the races, the horses or the dogs. But I love cricket. A gentleman’s game – or it used to be.’ He smiled an old crim’s smile, full of wry irony. ‘I bought this private box through one of my companies and I come here as a guest of meself and watch in comfort. I tried to become a member here, but they always found a reason why I couldn’t make it. It’s okay if you’re a white-collar crim, but not if you’re a blue-collar one like I was. So I pay forty-two thousand bucks a year, but I don’t have to sit down there amongst the hoi-polloi, God love ‘em, and I can sit here and jerk my thumb at them across there in the Members’ Stand. What d’you want?’ he said abruptly, turning his head sharply to stare at Malone, who had sat down two seats along from him.
There were no dividing walls between the boxes out here on the balcony, only iron railings. Too much privacy might suggest elitism and that, God knew, was worse than bloody multiculturism. The neighbouring boxes were packed, mostly with men; the few women amongst them were watching Jack Aldwych, having been told who he was; they could hear nothing for the chatter of their own menfolk, who were already well oiled by the free grog of their hosts in the corporation boxes. Still, Malone dropped his voice almost to a murmur: ‘Jack, one of your fellers, Scungy Grime, turned up in my swimming pool at home this morning. Dead.’
‘Scungy? Poor little bugger.’ Aldwych showed no surprise. ‘You want something to drink?’
The morning heat struck into the balcony; the ground was slowly turning into a cauldron. Malone had taken off his jacket, but his armpits were marshes of sweat. ‘I’d like a light beer, if you’ve got one.’
Aldwych looked up at Quick, who had appeared in the doorway to the lounge. ‘A light beer for Mr Malone . . . Larry’s become my handyman. He’s lost his nerve. Makes you wanna laugh, a con artist who’s lost his nerve. But it’s sad, don’t you reckon? There aint too many artists left these days in our game.’
‘Jack, don’t change the subject. What about Scungy? That’s sad, being dead.’
‘Oh, you’re right about that. But you’re wrong about him being one of my fellers. Scungy wasn’t working for me for at least three months before he went in last time. He started talking drugs.’
‘Scungy? Thanks, Larry.’ Malone took the light beer, slaked his thirst. ‘He was talking drugs before he went in?’
Aldwych nodded, sipping his own beer. ‘Yeah. Why, was he talking to you about them recently?’
Malone hesitated; then decided to give a little information in the hope of some in return. ‘I’ve been using him, Jack, since he got out of the Bay.’
‘T’ch, t’ch,’ chided Aldwych, watching the game out in the middle. ‘Blokes who give information to coppers aint my favourites. Oh, nice shot! You see that?’
‘I saw it,’ said Malone sourly. Alan Border had clipped the English fast bowler in the air between slips and gully for four. ‘He’d never think of risking a shot like that in a real game. If it’s any consolation, Scungy never mentioned your name to me.’
‘Then why are you here?’ Aldwych looked back at Malone.
‘I came across your initials and your phone number in a diary he kept.’
‘Did he say anything about me in the diary?’
‘Jack, I’m not laying all my cards on the table, not yet.’
‘There would have been nothing Scungy had on me.’ He tipped his panama back. ‘I’m retired, Scobie – you mind if I call you Scobie? I’m seventy-five years old, my wife died eight months ago, and I’m tired. I’ve been a crim for over sixty years, I started when I was fifteen – they could call me the Godfather, if we went in for that sorta stuff out here. But for the last year, when I knew my wife was dying of cancer, I been as clean as a young nun. What could Scungy tell you about me that would interest you? Do you think I killed him?’
Beyond Aldwych, Malone saw a woman in the next box lean forward, ears popping out of her blow-wave like rabbits out of long yellow grass. ‘The thought occurred to me when I saw your initials in his diary.’
‘Scobie, I don’t kill people.’ He was a liar, but a good one; honesty shone out of his rheumy blue eyes like a smuggler’s beacon. When he was younger he had killed four men, but he had been acquitted of two of the murders and never been charged with the others. In later years he had hired other men to do the killing, as a good general should. ‘I’m sorry Scungy is dead, but if he was dealing in shit he deserved what he got. I’ve done everything else in my time –’ He suddenly looked over his shoulder at the eavesdropping woman. ‘Am I talking loud enough, madam?’
Malone almost burst out laughing at the look on the woman’s face. She reared back, the blow-wave bobbing on her head as if a strong wind had blown through it. She said something to her husband, a man recognized as one of the town’s top stockbrokers, but he, a man who knew when to buy and when to sell, was not buying into this. He said something to her, obviously a caution, and went back to watching the cricket, a much safer occupation than trying to pick a fight with a top crim. The woman abruptly got up and went back into the lounge.
Aldwych turned back, winked at Malone and went on as if there had been no interruption. ‘I’ve done the lot, Scobie. Sly grog, SP betting, robbed banks, run whores, you name it, I’ve done it. You blokes know all that, but you aint been able to put me away in years. One thing I never touched was shit. Shirl, that was my wife, she made me promise never to do that and I never did. Oh shit, Border’s gone! We’re in trouble now. What’s that? Four for fifty after, what, fifteen overs?’
‘The bowlers look like they’re on top,’ said Malone, licking his lips. The Indians were beating the bejesus out of the 7th Cavalry; or, in this morning’s headlines, it was as if the Iraqis had suddenly started to win the Gulf war. ‘Good.’
‘You didn’t say how Scungy was killed.’
All along the balcony people were standing up to stretch their legs while they waited for the incoming batsman. In the boxes immediately on either side of the Aldwych box, men and women had their heads in peculiar positions, as if they had become paralysed, as they tried to catch the conversation in Box 3A; ears were being dislocated and peripheral vision was strained to the point where one could imagine eyeball muscles twanging. One or two of them would cheat or swindle in business, but they could not bear to be caught eavesdropping.
Malone had a quiet voice; he made it even quieter. ‘He was poisoned, we think.’
‘Poisoned? And you think I might of done it? Or had it done? Inspector, I belong to the old school – you know what I mean.’ He put out his forefinger, made a rough imitation of a gun; then he raised the finger to his throat, turned it into a razor. He was smiling all the time, sharing the joke with a cop. Then he looked up behind Malone. ‘Oh, hello. You dunno my son, do you, Scobie? Jack Junior, this is Inspector Malone.’
Jack Aldwych Junior was as tall as his father but trimmer. He was about thirty, good-looking in a manufactured way, as if he had been put together by a hairdresser, a cosmetician and a tailor rather than just sired and borne. But his smile was genuine, if everything else about him looked artificial.
‘Inspector.’ His handshake was firm. He was casually dressed in sports shirt, blazer, slacks and loafers, but he was labelled all over: Dunhill, Ralph