Babylon South. Jon Cleary
‘Police? I’m Alice Magee, Venetia’s mother.’ She was the sort of friendly woman who would always use Christian names, even if dealing with the Pope or non-Christians such as Khomeini. ‘Come in, come in.’
Malone could only dimly recall the dimness of the Springfellow house on his last visit. All the shadows had now gone. Venetia had widened the windows, letting in the light. All the dark panelling had been removed and replaced by grey French wallpaper that had cost as much as the original brick walls. The heavy Victorian furniture had been sold or given away; in its place were elegant Regency pieces, some genuine, some reproductions. Only the paintings on the walls, the Boyds and the tuckers with their fear-stricken creatures and their threatening shadows, seemed out of place. But then, as Emma Springfellow often said, Venetia had never believed in making anyone completely comfortable. Emma herself was uncomfortable for a different reason. She secretly thought the house had been improved by Venetia’s changes, but she would never say so. It made her uncomfortable to keep an opinion to herself. But she was not here in the house right now and Malone and Clements still had to come to know her.
‘My daughter’s on the phone,’ said Alice Magee, leading them into a big bright sun-room that looked out on to the gardens and the harbour. There was only one picture on the wall here, a Streeton that was a painting of the scene immediately below them. ‘She’s always on the phone. Overseas. London or New York or Los Angeles, somewhere. I can’t get used to calling the rest of the world, just like that—’ She snapped her fingers; several diamond rings were a miniature flash of lightning. ‘I still time myself when I’m calling Cobar – that’s where we come from originally … Would you like a drink? Beer, whisky, tea, coffee?’
She would have made a great air hostess, Malone thought; he liked her at once. ‘No thanks, Mrs Magee. How is your daughter taking the – news?’
‘The – ? Oh, Walter’s remains. Dreadful, isn’t it? Lying up there in the Blue Mountains all those years … I’d like to be buried as soon as I’m gone, wouldn’t you?’
‘I hadn’t thought about it,’ said Malone and didn’t dare look at Clements who, trying to stifle a smile, looked as agonized as one of the men in a Tucker painting.
‘When are they going to let us bury him?’
‘It’ll probably be a couple of weeks before the coroner releases the – remains.’ A skeleton wasn’t a body or a corpse; or was it? ‘Did you know Sir Walter well?’
‘Not really. I don’t think anyone knew him well. He was a bit stand-offish, you know what I mean? Not with my daughter, of course.’ Her answers would always be prompt; there was no guile about Alice Magee. ‘He was a nice man, but.’
Malone had sized her up now. Despite the diamond rings, the expensive dress and the immaculate hair-do, she was still one of life’s battlers. She still had the dried skin from the heat of the western plains, still had the Cobar dust in her voice; her daughter might be the richest woman in Australia, but Alice Magee would never forget the need to scratch for a penny. Under her painted fingernails was invisible dirt that could never be cleaned out. Her spirit was stouter than her figure, though the latter was catching up.
Then Venetia, looking disarmingly soft in pink and grey, came out to the sun-room in good humour; she had just made another million or two. ‘Inspector Malone! Has my mother told you all you want to know?’
‘Give me another ten minutes,’ said her mother. ‘I was just about to start with the year you were born.’
The relationship between them was good, evident at once to the two outsiders. Rough-and-ready mother, smooth-as-cream (though it might turn sour occasionally) daughter: they were an odd team, Malone thought, and he wondered what the conservative, but nice, Walter Springfellow had thought of the combination.
Malone decided to waste no time; Venetia looked as if she had already put a stop-watch on him. ‘We have to go right back to the beginning, Lady Springfellow. For the time being we are assuming your husband was murdered. But there are other possibilities—’
‘Suicide, you mean?’
He nodded.
She shook her head. ‘You didn’t know my husband. He would never do that.’
‘Righto, we’ll scratch that off the list.’ But he wouldn’t: nothing was ever dismissed till something else was proved. ‘Blackmail – would someone have tried that on him?’
‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘Someone might have been trying to blackmail him, he refused and they killed him.’
‘You’re making this sound as if it was all a personal matter. Aren’t you overlooking his ASIO job? Spies disappear all the time.’
‘Not spy chiefs. So ASIO tells us.’
‘Not unless they defect,’ said Clements.
Venetia gave him a look that should have increased his creases. ‘You just have no idea what my husband was like, do you? He was a patriot, the sort that’s out of fashion nowadays.’
‘Have ASIO ever been to question you?’
Venetia shook her head again; Malone found himself liking the way her thick golden hair moved. ‘Never. Not since he first disappeared. They’ve just – ignored me.’ She sounded as if the fact didn’t disturb her too much. But, Malone thought, that could partly explain why the file on Walter Springfellow was so thin.
‘What about his relationship with you, Lady Spring-fellow?’ He had looked directly at Venetia, but when he glanced at Alice Magee he saw the reaction he had hoped for. The plump face was frowning, the unsubtle mind remembering. ‘Do you recall something that might help us, Mrs Magee?’
But Alice Magee knew where her loyalties lay; the frown cleared, her face was as bland as the swimming-pool out in the garden. ‘No, I don’t remember anything. They were real love-birds.’
On a table behind Venetia was a photo of her and Walter: she young and smiling, he cool and aloof: he was a love-eagle, if at all avian. ‘I’ sorry I have to continue this line, Lady Springfellow. But he had no romantic interest before you?’
‘You mean a jilted lover?’ She laughed. ‘That’s mid-Victorian, Inspector.’
‘It isn’t,’ said Clements. ‘It happens at least once a month, sometimes once a week.’
‘But those are the people we let in from overseas,’ said Alice Magee. ‘Aussies don’t go in for that sort of thing.’
She had her xenophobia, though she wouldn’t have recognized it by that name. She was a cousin by prejudice to Malone’s own mother and father; the country was now made up of us and them, and there were too many of them.
‘Yes,’ said Venetia. ‘My husband did go out with other women. After all, he was a very masculine man and his first wife had died ten years before he met me.’
‘What did she die of ?’
‘She was killed in a shooting accident. She and my husband were on a safari in Kenya.’
‘An inquest was held, I suppose?’
She gave him a sudden hard look. ‘I presume so. What are you getting at?’
Malone held back a sigh. ‘Lady Springfellow, if we’re going to find out what happened to your husband, we’re going to have to get at a lot of things. Some of them may offend or even hurt you, but it’s nothing personal on our part. Sergeant Clements and I are just trying to do our job. Part of that is finding out as much as we can about the victim – that’s the way we police work. Just give us a little credit for knowing the best way to go about it.’
‘It’s not the best way for the victim’s widow, is it?’ That was from the widow’s mother.
‘Go on,’ said Venetia coldly.
Tread