Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary
Sunday.’
She smiled at him, then at Malone. They were the men who had caught her father, who had been there when he had committed suicide; yet she loved one and almost loved the other. They, and Lisa, were the ones who had reconstructed the floor of her life when everything had fallen apart around her. ‘Why don’t the three of us open a post office or something? Five days a week and no overtime.’
Clements smiled at her. He had had countless women friends, but Malone had never seen him so openly in love as with Romy. ‘With our luck, there’d be a body in the parcel post.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning,’ Malone told him. ‘You’re on this one with me. Don’t bother to come dressed up.’
The Toyota pulled out of the car park and Malone turned as Ellsworth stepped up beside him. ‘Do I work with you on this, sir?’
‘I guess so – Carl, isn’t it? I’ll see Mrs Rockne in the morning, but I’d rather do it on my own. I know her, slightly anyway, and I think she’ll talk more freely to me if no one else is there. You do the legwork on what the Crime Scene fellers give you.’ He still sometimes slipped into the old name for the Physical Evidence team. In recent years the New South Wales Police Service had undergone so many reorganizations and name changes that some joker had fed it into the police computer system as the AKA Force. ‘Mrs Rockne may give us a lead. In the meantime set up a van here, see if anyone comes forward with any information.’
‘She’s a bit odd, don’t you think? Mrs Rockne.’
‘Most wives are a bit odd when their husbands get blasted. You married?’
‘Divorced.’
‘How long were you married?’
‘Eighteen months.’
‘Not long enough. You’ll learn, Carl. About wives, I mean.’
He left Ellsworth and walked across to his car. He leant on the roof, cold as ice under the wind, and looked at the scene, at the silver Volvo at the centre of it. For the next few days, maybe weeks, this was where his attention and effort would be focused. As the officer in charge of Homicide, Regional Crime Squad, South Region, he would be supervising other murders, but this one would be his major concern. On the other side of the world an empire was falling apart; putty-faced old men had attempted to turn the clock back in a last-minute coup, only to find the clock had no works; hundreds of thousands of people were filling the squares of Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev, filling the world’s television screens: the century was going out as it had begun, in turmoil. The murder of Will Rockne would not be marked as history, but it had to be witnessed, recorded, and, maybe, solved.
He got into the Commodore and drove towards home, where the effects of history were peripheral.
3
He went to early Mass, dragged there by Claire, who didn’t want her day delayed by late church-going. On the way home he told her of Will Rockne’s murder – ‘Oh no, Dad! Jason’s father?’
On the way to Mass he had debated with himself when he should tell her; he had put it off because, he had told himself, she was not yet wide awake enough to take in the dreadful news. She took it in now, slumping sideways in the seat. ‘Oh God, poor Jay and Shelley!’
‘Poor Mrs Rockne.’
‘Yes, her too. Are you on the case?’ He nodded. ‘Can’t you let someone else do it? Uncle Russ, for instance?’
‘Why?’
‘I dunno, it’s just – well, you’re going to bring it home every night.’
‘I’ve never done that before. You know I never discuss a case in front of you kids.’
‘I know that. But . . . will you tell me how it’s going if I ask you?’
‘No.’
She looked at him with Lisa’s eyes. ‘Does being a Homicide detective wear you down?’
They had pulled up at an intersection; he looked at the red traffic light, a warning sign. But he had to tell her the truth: ‘Yes.’
‘Then why do you keep on with it?’
‘I ask myself that at least a dozen times a year.’ The light turned green. ‘I think it’s because I feel I’d be deserting the victim if I walked away from it. Do you understand that?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and he realized his elder daughter had grown up, almost.
When he reached home Lisa was up, getting ready to go over and collect Tom and Maureen. Claire went out to make breakfast for herself and her father, while Malone leaned in the bedroom door and watched his wife dress. After seventeen years of marriage he still got delight watching her first thing in the morning, it was the proper start to a day. She still had her figure, a little fuller now than when they had first married, and, as with some women, the beauty of her face had increased as she had got older. She was forty now and he hoped her beauty would last till the grave, an end that didn’t bear thinking about. For her, not for himself: he was not afraid of death, though he would not welcome it, not if it meant leaving her and the children alone.
‘I wonder if Will Rockne looked at Olive every morning like I look at you?’
‘I doubt it.’ She pulled on her skirt, a tan twill. ‘He wasn’t the sort to appreciate what he had.’
She had been shocked when he came home last night and told her who had been murdered. But this morning she seemed to have accepted the fact. A certain callousness was necessary for a Homicide detective, but he hoped none of his was beginning to rub off on her.
She slipped a yellow sweater over her head, then fluffed out her blonde hair. ‘Do you think I should call Olive?’
‘No, I’ll do the sympathy bit for both of us. Tell Claire not to call Jason, not till I’ve got the police bit sorted out down at their place. I’ll be home for lunch, I hope.’
She came round the bed and kissed him. ‘Don’t be too hard on Olive.’
‘Why should I be?’
It was 9.30 when he knocked on the door of the Rockne home in Coogee Bay Road. It was a solid bluebrick and sandstone house, built with the wide verandahs of the nineteen-twenties, when sunlight in a house was as Welcome as white ants. It stood on a wide block, thirty metres at least, behind a garden where early spring petunias, marigolds and azaleas mocked the gloom he knew must be in the house itself.
The door was opened by a middle-aged woman instantly recognizable as Olive’s sister, though she was plumper and had kept pace with her birthdays. ‘I’m Rose Cadogan. We’ve been expecting you.’ She looked past him, seemed surprised. ‘You’re on your own?’
‘I thought Olive would prefer it that way.’
‘Oh, sure. Come in. But what one sees on TV, police are always swarming over everything . . . This is our mother, Mrs Carss. And this is Angela Bodalle, a friend of Olive’s. I’ll get Olive, she’s with the kids. They’re taking it pretty bad.’
‘We all are,’ said the mother, the mould from which her daughters had been struck. Ruby Carss was in her sixties, had henna hair worn thin by too much dye and too many perms, was thin and full of nervous energy and looked as if she had suddenly been faced with the prospect of her own death.
Malone sat down, looked at Angela Bodalle. ‘I didn’t expect to see you, Mrs Bodalle.’
‘I’m here as a friend of the family, Inspector, that’s all.’
She was, Malone thought, the most decorative, if not the best-looking, of the barristers who fronted the Bar in the State’s courts. There were only five female silks in New South Wales and she was the most successful of them. She was in her late thirties or early forties, he guessed, a widow whose husband had already made his name as a Queen’s Counsel when he had been killed in a car accident some