Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary
bystanders at an interview like this the better. There were just himself, Ellsworth and the uniformed constable standing outside the open door. Olive Rockne was entitled to as much privacy as he could give her.
‘What happened?’
Olive was regaining her composure, reefing it in inch by inch; only the raised knuckles of her tightly clenched hands showed the effort. ‘I got out of the car – ’
‘First, Olive – why were you out here?’
She frowned, as if she didn’t quite understand the reason herself: ‘Sentiment. Does that sound silly or stupid?’
‘No, not if you explain it.’
‘It was out here on the beach that Will – ’ her voice choked for a moment ‘ – that he proposed to me. When we came out of the school, he suggested we drive out here before going home. We were going to go for a walk along the beach.’
‘Where were you when Will was shot?’
She took her time, trying to get everything straight in her mind: ‘I don’t know – maybe twenty or thirty yards from the car, I’m not sure. I got Out and so did Will. But then he went back – he’d forgotten to turn the lights off. Then I heard the shot – ’
‘Were the lights still on when you heard the shot?’
‘No.’
‘Did you see anyone running away from the car? That car park out there is pretty well lit.’
‘I don’t know, I’m not sure . . .’ She was reliving the first moments of her husband’s death; Malone knew they were always the hardest to erase, whether the death was gentle or violent. ‘I think I saw a shadow, but I can’t be sure. There were other cars between me and ours . . . Then I got to the car and saw Will . . . I screamed – ’
She shuddered, opened her mouth as if she were about to vomit, and Malone said, ‘Take it easy for a while. Would you like a cup of tea or something?’ An electric kettle and some cups and saucers stood on a narrow table against a wall. ‘It might help.’
‘No.’ She shook her head determinedly. ‘All I want to do is go home, Scobie. There are Jason and Shelley – ’
‘Where was Jason? Did you drop him off at home?’
‘No, he’d already gone by the time we left the school – he said he’d walk. I should go home, tell ’em what’s happened – Oh, my God!’ She put a hand to her eyes, hit by the enormity of what she had to do.
‘We’d better get in touch with someone to look after them. What about your parents?’
‘There’s just my mother. And I have a married sister – she lives at Cronulla. Her name’s Rose Cadogan – ’ She gave a phone number without having to search her memory for it. Malone noticed that she was having alternate moments of calm control and nervous tension; but that was not unusual. It had struck him on their first meeting some months ago that there was a certain preciseness to her; and habit, whether acquired or natural, was hard to lose.
‘What about Will’s family?’
‘Just his father, he lives out at Carlingford with Will’s stepmother. I suppose we’d better call him.’
She sounded callous, but Malone kept his reaction to himself. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ellsworth purse his lips, making him suddenly look prim. ‘Didn’t Will and his father get on?’
‘They haven’t spoken for, I dunno, three or four years. His father is George Rockne. You know – ’
‘The ex-communist union boss?’
‘Ex-union boss. He’s still a communist.’
‘Will was so – right-wing. Was that why they didn’t get on?’
She nodded. ‘I’ll ring him. May I go?’ She stood up, wavered a moment, then was steady.
Malone looked at Ellsworth. ‘Do you have a woman PC?’
‘Constable Rojeski is outside somewhere. She can take Mrs Rockne home.’
Malone took Olive’s arm as they went out of the caretaker’s office. ‘I’ll have to come and see you tomorrow morning.’
She looked sideways at him; she looked her age now, she had caught up with her birthdays, gone past them. ‘This is just the start, isn’t it?’
‘The start of the investigation? Yes.’
‘No, I didn’t mean that.’ But she didn’t explain what she had meant.
She left him, let herself be led away by the young policewoman. ‘What’s Rojeski like?’ he asked Ellsworth. ‘Can she handle something like this?’
‘She’s okay, sir. I’ve used her a coupla times before in a situation like this. Females come in handy.’
‘Yes, don’t they?’ But Ellsworth missed the dry note. ‘Let’s see if Physical Evidence have come up with anything.’
The car park now was as busy as a shopping mall on Thursday night. It was bathed in light, police cars stood about, blue and red lights spinning on their roofs; revellers from the social club across the road were collecting their cars, and knots of spectators, those ubiquitous watchers-on-the-fringe that appear at the scene of every urban crime, as if called up by computer, were in place. The silver Volvo stood roped off by blue and white tape like the latest model at a motor show.
Romy Keller, the government medical officer, was examining the body, still in the car, when Malone approached. She straightened up and turned round, her dark coat swinging open to reveal a low-cut green dinner dress underneath.
‘All dressed up?’
She drew the coat around her. ‘Russ and I were at a medical dinner. I’m on call.’
‘Like me. Where’s Russ?’
‘Over there in his car. He didn’t get out, he’s in black tie. He thought one of us in fancy dress was enough . . . It looks like just the one shot, through the right eye and out the top of the cranium. Death would have been instantaneous, I’d say.’
He looked past her at the dead Will Rockne. The body was slumped backwards and sideways, one hand in its lap, the other resting on the dislodged car phone, as if he had made a last desperate call for help, from God knew whom. The car keys were in the ignition and the steering wheel was twisted to the left, as if Rockne might have tried to drive away before he died. The dead man’s face and the front of his shirt and jacket were a bloody mess.
‘We’ve got the bullet, Inspector.’ That was Chris Gooch, of the Physical Evidence team, a bulky young man with more muscles than he knew what to do with; he was forever strenuously denying he was on steroids, but no one believed him. ‘Looks like a Twenty-two. It was in the roof. Looks like the killer shoved the gun upwards at the victim, maybe at his throat, but missed and shot him in the eye.’
‘You done with the body?’ Malone asked Romy.
She nodded towards the government contractors who had now arrived. ‘They can take it away.’
She drew the high collar of her coat up round her throat against the wind; her dark hair ruffled about her face. She looked glamorous, ice-cool, she whose own father had been a four-times murderer and a suicide. Malone did not understand why she had stayed on as a GMO at the city morgue, but he had never asked Russ Clements if he knew the reason. She still worked with cool efficiency and a detachment that Malone, when he saw it, found troubling. But she was Clements’s problem, not his. It was Russ who was in love with her.
He walked across to the green Toyota where Clements, in dinner jacket, black tie unloosened, sat behind the wheel like a moulting king penguin. ‘They tell me it’s a guy named Rockne. You know someone with that name, don’t you?’
‘It’s