Helga's Web (7 page)

“Least of all a copper,” said Con Malone, taking another sip of the Cawarra Red, wondering what the wife would do

if one night he brought home a bottle of it. Probably throw him out of the house for being a pervert or something.

“But he might kill her!”

Mrs. Malone shook her head, an armchair general wise in the ways of such battles. “They never do. It’s the coldblooded ones do things like that. Like the one who killed your girl.” She nodded at Malone, giving him a proprietary interest in the dead girl of that morning. Then she noticed her mistake and for the first time looked s)*mpatheticalry at Lisa. “I didn’t mean you, dear. I meant the other one/’

“I suppose in a way she is his girl,” said Lisa. “At least till he finds out who murdered her.”

“Dad tells me it ain’t gunna be easy.” Mrs. Malone attacked her trifle.

“We have to find out who she is, first,” said Malone.

“And if you don’t, you’ll just forget her.” Mrs. Malone’s teeth clicked as they slipped on a piece of loose custard. “Pigeonhole her.”

“They never try very hard when it’s a nobody,” said Con Malone.

“We don’t know she’s a nobody,” said Malone, used to this sort of criticism and still unoffended by it. “She could be a somebody, for all we know.” Thojigh in his mind he doubted it: somebodies didn’t have tattoos on their behinds.

“If she is, you still hush it up,” said Brigid Malone, her Irish logic breaking out like a rash tonight. “You hush up so many things. I don’t mean you. The police. You’ve never told us yet why you went to London that time.”

Malone felt Lisa look at him: he had never told her, either. “That was security business.”

“I don’t believe in security,” said Con Malone, a revolutionary from the age of ten. “In a real democracy there oughta be no secrecy.”

“In an Irish democracy there wouldn’t be,” said Malone, just beginning to be irritated. “Not with the Irish gabbiness.

Look, we’ll find out who this girl is. It may take us a while, but we’ll find out. And when we do, she won’t be pigeonholed. We’ll find out who killed her.”

Then the phone rang. Malone had had the phone put in when he had first joined the police force and when he left to live on his own he had insisted that it would remain in the house and he would continue to pay for it; it was another link with his parents and religiously he called them every day, as if to compensate for the disappointment he knew he had caused them when he had walked out to live alone. He got up now and went out into the narrow hallway in which the phone clamoured with what seemed twice the noise of phones elsewhere. When he lifted the phone, stilling the ringing, he noticed that the row next door had abruptly ceased. He could imagine the battling couple taking time out to press their ears against the wall.

Clements was on the other end of the line. “Scobie? We’re making a bit of progress. She was clean as far as we are concerned, nothing on her in the records. But that dry-cleaning tab, it belongs to a company that operates in the eastern suburbs, from Bondi back to the harbour. That should place where she lived.”

“Good,” said Malone, unimpressed. He had never yet met a case where some progress was not made, but that didn’t mean it would be solved. “What else?”

“Looks like she’s some sort of European, or she’s lived over there. Germany, the dentist thinks. The doc down at the morgue had a good look at her, then called in the dentist. She’s got what he called a jam-tin cap on one of her teeth. It’s a pretty cheap sort of cap and evidently they used it a lot in Europe up till a while ago.”

“What about her fingerprints?” Malone kept his voice to a whisper; he could almost hear the heavy breathing on the other side of the wall. “You get a good set?”

“Beaut,” said Clements. “Soon’s I heard the dentist say she

might be a European, I bunged a set off to Melbourne. They are already on the way to Interpol. Pity we gotta waste time routing the stuff through Melbourne, though.”

Malone clucked sympathetically, not being as parochial-minded as Clements. The Victorian Commissioner of Police was the Interpol representative in Australia and all other State forces had to work through him when requesting Interpol co-operation. It rankled with certain New South Wales men, who considered their own service far superior to that in any other State. Clements, in his own way, was as narrow-minded and bigoted as Con and Brigid Malone.

Malone said goodnight to Clements and hung up. He stared at the wall in front of him, then knocked loudly on it. “Righto! You can start fighting again!”

Then he thought, I’ll never leave here. No matter where I go, even if I finish up as Commissioner, there’ll still be a bit of Erskineville in me. And how will Lisa react to that? He stood a moment longer, regretting his shout of good-humoured abuse. He had felt no shame or embarrassment at bringing Lisa here to his old home; there had never been any snobbish awkwardness about his beginnings. Police work had taught him the impossibility of hiding your origins; the next few days would prove that when they learned where this morning’s dead girl had begun her life. But acknowledging one’s start in a slum district did not mean he had to act as if he had not learned there were some social graces worth cultivating.

Lisa, the product of a middle-class Dutch family and the best schools in Holland, a girl who had spent three years living at embassy level in London, had shown her own social graciousness when she had walked into the tenement house as if she had known such surroundings all her fife. Warned by him of the antagonism to be expected from his mother, she had greeted Mrs. Malone with a smooth friendliness that he could only imagine must be diplomacy at its best. Her reaction to the fight next door had been a humane rather than a

social one: she had been afraid for the safety of the woman with her drunken husband. Lisa had learned to adapt; he would have to learn to do the same. He walked back down the hall to the kitchen, determined to ignore the fight which had once more started up next door.

He stood in the hallway for a moment looking in at Lisa at the kitchen table. I don’t know how I ever did it, he thought. How did I get a girl like that to agree to marry me? Her blonde hair gleaming like a helmet under the hard electric light, she sat leaning forward to listen to his father. Her face in repose looked flawless to Malone; then when she smiled the perfection was not broken but, if possible, improved. But it was not just her looks that fascinated him. She had something else, a poise that placed her at ease with the world and the individual. At first he had thought it was what was called sophistication; then he had come to recognize that it was something deeper than mere social imperturbability. There was a tranquility about her; not a resignation but an acceptance that there were certain things, grief, duty, the demands of love, that would always have to be faced. Then he looked at the lined face of his mother and felt the pain: Brigid Malone would never achieve that serenity of spirit till she died. He loved them both, but he was glad he was not marrying a girl like his mother.

Later, as they were leaving, when Lisa had stepped outside into the tiny backyard to the outside toilet, he said to his mother, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, what do you think of her?”

“She’s all right.” Mrs. Malone was already tidying up, emptying the two old brass ashtrays that had been in the house as long as Malone could remember, straightening the two velvet cushions on the faded couch in the front room; it was as if she feared even the imprint left by visitors on her retre t. “She’s too good for you.”

“I thought you hinted this morning she wasn’t good enough for me. Not being a Tyke or an Australian.”

“I don’t mean religion and things like that. That way there’d be trouble, too. I mean, well, you know. Education, things like that. Position.”

“She’s well spoken,” said Con Malone, trying to say something not too extravagant in favour of Lisa. He had liked the girl, but he wasn’t going to get into any argument with the wife over her.

Malone shrugged in exasperation. He recognized what his mother and father were both trying to say. Without conceding that there was such a thing as class distinction in Australia, they were telling him Lisa was a class above him. His father had used the classic euphemism for breeding: Lisa was well spoken.

“For a couple who hate the Poms for having a Queen and an aristocracy, you don’t sound very democratic. Dad, ever since I was a kid you’ve always been telling me everyone is born equal.”

“They are,” said Con Malone, Labour Party to the core. “Only in the system like it is, some have advantages. She’s had ‘em.”

“It won’t work,” said Mrs. Malone. “But it’s your life. You do what you like with it.”

Then Lisa came in from the backyard, aware that they had been talking about her but unruffled by it. Outside the toilet gushed noisily like a young Niagara; everyone in the terrace of houses knew when everyone else heard the call of nature. It gurgled, gave a final spasm that jangled the chain, then died away. Lisa, as composed as if she had come from the powder room at the Savoy in London, said goodnight to Mr. and Mrs. Malone.

“That was the best dinner I’ve had since I left Holland,” she said.

“Just what we always have,” said Brigid Malone, not taken in by diplomacy.

“They didn’t like me,” Lisa said as she and Malone drove away in the Holden. When he had come out he had seen the finger-scrawled message in the dust on the boot: Get stuffed, copper. He hadn’t said anything, but had helped Lisa into the car, bade a quick goodnight to his mother and father and driven away before some public-spirited citizen yelled a vocal postscript to the message. He had to educate Lisa gradually into what it was going to be like to be a copper’s wife.

He drove down Erskineville Road, a childhood trail, threading his way through the cars pulling away from the corner pub at closing time. He hoped there were no mugs out tonight to thumb their noses at the breathalyser test; he had too much on his mind to get caught up with a drunken driver. He swerved to avoid a car pulling out sharply from the curb and was thanked with a yell of abuse for his caution.

“Mum’s a little bit, well, conservative.” Then he made a confession that was also an excuse: “Actually, I’ve never known her to take to anyone first time up.”

Lisa put her hand on his knee. “Darling, I know it’s not going to be easy. But I’m marrying you, not your parents.”

“How d’you reckon your parents will go for me? Do they hate coppers, too?” Her parents lived in Melbourne and he had met them only once, when he had gone down to Melbourne on holiday a year ago and introduced himself to them. At that time they had not seen him as a possible fiance for their daughter, and they had been politely friendly but that was all. Hans Pretorious was the Australian general manager for a big Dutch textiles company, and though he and Mrs. Pretorious had been in Australia almost ten years they had given Malone the impression that eventually they would re-

tire back to Holland. They had written him a polite note when he and Lisa had become engaged and told him how much they were looking forward to seeing him again when he and Lisa went down to Melbourne for Christmas.

“That worries me, you know/’ he said. “You marrying a cop. Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for?”

“I know that isn’t going to be easy, either. I’ve had a long time to think about it. I was thinking about marrying you long before you asked me. But someone has to marry policemen.” She smiled and leaned across to kiss him on the ear.

“That takes a load off my mind,” he said with gentle sarcasm. “You’re marrying me as a public duty.”

“That’s right. So we can have lots of little policemen and keep up the supply.” She moved her hand further up his leg, squeezing it.

“Don’t do that, or you’ll have me running us up a pole.” He cast a quick glance at her and smiled, and she smiled back. She wore a moderate mini-skirt that, though several inches longer than the fashionable mini’s, had raised Brigid Malone’s eyebrows a corresponding distance. The knees, to Brigid, were what ankles had been to her mother: no decent girl exposed them. As for the thighs that one saw walking the streets of Sydney these days, she kept her eyes averted and prayed that Sodom and Gomorrah would not burn down before she got back home to Erskineville. Lisa’s skirt had now crept up as she sat back in the car seat and Malone was seeing enough thigh to make him wish that Sodom and Gomorrah, Lisa’s flat, was only at the end of the street instead of another ten minutes’ drive.

He looked back at the road, drove for a while in silence, then said, “Is that the first time you’ve been to an outside toilet?”

“Yes. Do you want me to say I liked it?”

“No. But while you were out there, somehow it seemed to sum up the difference, the distance, if you like, between us.

I don’t know what your home was like in Rotterdam, but I’ll bet it didn’t have an outside toilet. Your home in South Yarra certainly doesn’t. Do you think we’ll make a go of it?”

She said nothing for a few moments and when she finally spoke she chose her words carefully. “Darling, we’re both intelligent, that’s the main thing. Ill admit I didn’t think I’d ever marry a policeman. I thought I might finish up marrying a diplomat—I know that was what Mother would have liked.” Even in the dim light from the dashboard she saw the expression on his face, as if he had flinched. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But as I said—we’re marrying each other, not our parents. I’m in love with you, and it doesn’t matter a damn to me whether you’re a policeman or a diplomat or a—a garbage man. You’re intelligent. And we both have something else—curiosity. We both want to know. About everything. I’ve had the advantages of an expensive education and I’ve travelled more than you have, and, well, there was that sort of life I lived in London.”

“That’s what I mean. You’re bound to miss all that. A Sunday barbecue at one of my mates’ place—that’s not much of a substitute for an embassy dinner.”

She looked at him coolly. “I hadn’t finished. I was going to say that I have an education, but you have it, too. In another way. You know more about people than I might ever know if I live to be a hundred. You aren’t as dumb as you try to make out, darling.”