Babylon South. Jon Cleary
their long jaws and narrow eyes, gone? As Heinie Odets’s bodyguard (they called them minders now, so he’d been told) he had been a student of faces; it was one way of staying ahead of trouble, Heinie had advised him. He couldn’t get over the number of Chinks of some sort he saw; it was like being in some part of bloody Asia. And the black-haired wogs; there had been a fair number of them in Parramatta, but here on the outside (how long would he go on calling it that?) they seemed to make up half of those in the city streets. He was the stranger come home to a strange land.
He caught a taxi back to the rooming-house. As he stepped in the front door, two young Vietnamese came down the hallway and passed him with shy smiles. When they had gone out into the street he saw Jerry Killeen peering at him from a half-opened door.
‘You see ’em? the bloody Viet Cong. You wanna come in for a cuppa?’ His desire for company was pathetic, it hung on his wrinkled face like a beggar’s sign.
‘I gotta take a lay-down,’ said Dural. ‘Maybe later.’
The old man looked disappointed, but nodded and went back into his room, closing the door without another word. He reminded Dural of some of the pitiful old lags in prison, the ones who would always be lonely even in the close company of a thousand men.
Dural opened the door of his own room, picked up the newspapers lying just inside it and sat down on his bed. Then he glanced at the still-open door, frowned, got up and closed it. For so many years he had been accustomed to someone else closing the door on him: the sound of good-night was the clanging of iron on iron.
He leafed through the newspapers, but none of the news meant anything to him. He knew the names of the major politicians, but they were irrelevant to him; he was like an African heathen arriving in Rome, wondering at the importance of bishops and cardinals. The sports pages had a few names he recognized (sport had never been censored on the gaol’s TV and radio; football brawls and thuggery were enjoyed as much by the prison officers as by the prisoners), but the cricket season was starting and he had never been interested in cricket. The financial pages were a foreign language to him; once, in the prison library, a white-collar criminal had tried to explain to him how the financial world worked, but Dural had just shaken his head and said he would rather remain dumb. The newspapers, he decided, would lead him nowhere, at least nowhere that he wanted to go.
He was about to drop the papers on the floor when he remembered why the little old bloke next door had shoved them under his door. He leafed through the pages again, came to the six-inch item at the bottom of one of the inner pages of the Telegraph. There it was: his name and that of Sir Walter Springfellow, the released prisoner and the skeleton in the Blue Mountains bush. A strange coincidence, they called it: fucking reporters, they were always looking for an angle. He re-read the story, but there was no guts to it; even he could see that. He threw the paper on the floor and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and the single electric globe with its yellow paper shade. He had cursed Springfellow in court on the day the judge had sentenced him. The cold, stuck-up bastard had chopped him down, slice by slice, with words that had rung in his ears for months afterwards. He had raved for a couple of years against Springfellow, but in the end he had realized he was just shouting into a wind that blew back his abuse like piss in a gale. The rage and the wind had died down a long time ago and now, here, in this bare, lonely room there was only stillness. Only the skeleton in the bush could have been lonelier.
It suddenly came to him that he was lost.
3
Mosman was a suburb that, to an outsider, never seemed to change. It was a good address from end to end; unlike other parts of Sydney, it had no poor end. The houses, even the smaller ones, were solid and had their own gardens; the few semi-detached cottages had a shy look about them, as if their owners knew they were being tolerated only so long as they behaved themselves and kept themselves neat and tidy. Blocks of flats, known in the estate agents’ argot as home units, as if they were just cards in a game of Monopoly, were lumped about the district, but high-rise development was forbidden. Mosman prided itself on its conservatism; it was a suburb not given to spontaneity, at least not in the streets. Swingers from the eastern suburbs might have called it dull, but under the dull facade there was old, real money; and real money is never dull, least of all to the swingers from the eastern suburbs. Mosman was sure of its place in the sun; it was the suburb, its residents knew, where God would have resided if ever he had emigrated to Sydney from England. A thought that God had probably never had.
Clements parked the car in Springfellow Avenue and looked around at the houses at this end of the dead-end street. ‘Respectable, aren’t they? You can smell it from here – respectability. You think they make love with their clothes on?’
‘You look as if you do. Why don’t you come over some night and let Lisa run the iron over you?’
‘I’ always reading about the heights of fashion. Why doesn’t someone write about the depths? I see you’re wearing your best suit today. Is that for Lady Springfellow?’
‘Wait ’till you meet her. You’ll wish you’d been to the dry cleaner’s.’
Clements grinned, uninsulted, and got out of the car. He was not dirty in his habits; he was a regular at the dry cleaner’s. He just had the knack of being able to turn a suit into a mess of wrinkles within ten minutes of donning it. He had put polish on his shoes only once since buying them ten months ago, though he occasionally rubbed the toes of them on the bottoms of his trouser-legs. He straightened his tie and patted down the ends of his collar. ‘How about that? Bewdy Brummell.’
‘Bewdy,’ said Malone, and couldn’t have wished for a better sidekick.
Malone had only a faint memory of his first visit to the Springfellow house, but he couldn’t remember any security guards in those days. But there was one now: he came down the driveway to the big iron gates when Malone tried to open them and found them locked electronically. Malone introduced himself and Clements and the security guard switched on his walkie-talkie and spoke to someone in the house. Then he unlocked the gates.
‘Is this usual in Mosman?’ said Clements.
‘I dunno,’ said the guard, an overweight, middle-aged man who looked as if he had borrowed a smaller man’s uniform. ‘I come, I do me job and I go. That’s all I’m paid for.’
‘Just like us,’ said Clements. He had a cop’s dislike of security guards; they were growing into another police force.
‘I thought you’d be in pink and grey,’ said Malone, and the security guard just refrained from jerking his thumb at the mug copper.
The two detectives walked up the driveway, past the rhododendrons, the banks of azaleas, the camellias, the liquidambars and the lawns that looked like green carpets that had been vacuumed rather than mowed. The house was a monument to Federation; one would not have been surprised to see a group of turn-of-the-century politicians, all beards and walrus moustaches, standing on the front steps. It had been built by Sir Archibald Springfellow, the grandfather of Walter, Edwin and Emma, and, true to then current ideas, had wide verandahs and narrow windows. The fierce Australian sun was to be avoided: sun worship, a later religion, was only for Aborigines and the odd health crank, neither of whom dared show his face in Mosman. At the back there was a magnificent view of the harbour, but one had to step outside the house to look at it in those days. Lady Myrtle Springfellow had never been known to take a long view; very little beyond the end of her patrician nose, usually held at a socially acute angle, had interested her. The house, like the family, suggested secrets to the occasional picnickers who came to the neighbouring bush reserve that ran down to the harbour cliffs.
The housekeeper who opened the front door to Malone and Clements was of a social mind with Lady Myrtle, whom she had never met. She looked down her blunt, unpatrician nose at the two detectives as if they were door-to-door salesmen.
‘We’d like to see Lady Springfellow. We understand she is at home.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Police intuition.’ He had rung the Springfellow head office and he guessed that Venetia knew they were