Murder Song (41 page)

“Oh, come off it! He's not that!”

“You read the wrong women's magazines. Anyway, Philip thinks he is and his minders have convinced most of the voters that he is. We're the Number One couple, Jo—I don't like it, but it's a fact. Since Philip has been PM and we've been travelling overseas, you'd be surprised at what I've found out about some presidents and prime ministers and their wives. They're farther apart than Philip and me, but they've had to stay together. Like I told you, I'm stuck with him till at least the next election. All I can hope for is that he loses the election.”

“
God, you're making the voters sound like a jury in the Family Court—if they have juries there.” She would never resort to the law courts to resolve her marital problems; she had given her previous husbands everything they had asked for without any public appearance on her part. Public opinion never troubled her, but she parted from her men in private. She reached forward to take her sister's hand. “Well, then, all you can do is try to forget your lover. Bury him and forget him.”

“Could you do that?”

“I've done it,” said Joanna, but didn't say whom she had put out of her life and memory.

Anita shook her head. “I'll never be able to do that. I remember reading a poem once on radio, I can't remember who by. It had a line in it that went something like—” She paused and her breath seemed to catch for a moment.
“The heart can never bury its dead
.”

II

Two weeks before, on that Monday evening, Harry Danforth had made a call from a public box. “Jack, it's me. Harry.”

“No names, mate. You know what the police are like.” Jack Aldwych was sitting out on his verandah, feeling the cold but reluctant to go indoors; as if he knew he had a rapidly diminishing number of evenings and was trying to hold on to them. Jack Junior had brought him the telephone and he had taken it with irritation at being disturbed. “They're likely to tap my phone, with or without a court order. What's on your mind?”

“Everything's been taken care of. You owe me for this one.”

“You mean we have nothing to worry about? Well, he won't be missed. Yeah, I do owe you. You can start thinking about retirement now, mate.”

“I been doing that, all afternoon. It's time I was getting out. A nice place up on the Gold Coast.”

“Leave it with me, mate. No more phone calls, no more visits. You understand? Look after yourself.”

Harry
Danforth hung up and stepped out of the phone box. He suddenly felt cold, as if he had walked by a newly opened grave.

III

“Uncle Russ, what are you
doing
?”

Clements took the bottle away from his lips and grinned self-consciously. “I was giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The wine wasn't breathing.”

Claire rolled her eyes and looked at her mother, who said, “Who writes your jokes, Russ?”

Three months had passed and November was warming up into December. It was a Sunday and the Malones were having a barbecue beside their pool. Clements had brought six kilos of steak and three kilos of sausages, enough to feed a football team, and now, decked out in shorts, thongs and a brightly patterned shirt, an ocker Beau Brummel, he was supervising Maureen as she and Tom turned the steak and sausages on the barbecue. He had brought a girl with him; the nineteenth, Lisa, who kept count, had whispered to Malone. Her name was Sheila, a long-legged blonde who, Malone thought traitorously, looked too classy and intelligent for Russ but who obviously was more than just amused by him. Lisa was working overtime as matchmaker.

“You'll have to cure him of those dreadful jokes, Sheila. One can't live with a man like that.”

“Steady on,” said Clements through the smoke and sizzle of the barbecue. “Sheila and I are just holding intellectual discussions, not living together.”

“What do you do, Sheila?” said Con Malone, one of the four other guests for lunch. He was wearing a bright green shirt and white slacks and, to Malone's delight, looked as if he were on his way to a St. Patrick's Day celebration; the outfit had been a birthday gift from his daughter-in-law and he didn't like to tell her that he wore it only when he came to her place. Brigid, though she liked the green shirt, would have preferred him to wear his usual brown trousers. The white trousers, she thought, made him look like the oldest stroller on Oxford Street, a beat she had once ridden through on a bus with her eyes averted. “Are you in the police?”

“
I'm a pathologist in the Forensic Science bureau.”

Con, Brigid and the two elder Pretoriuses all looked impressed; the world today was a different one from the one they had grown up in. Russ, they all silently agreed, was a lucky man.

Lisa came and sat down on the bottom half of the sun lounge where Malone, in swim trunks, was stretched out. She turned her back on the others, as if closing a door on them. “You're quiet.”

“That was Brian O'Brien's father on the phone.” He had gone inside to take a call ten minutes before.

“What did he want?”

“He said George Bousakis had been at him again. He asked me what I thought he should do.”

“What did you tell him?”

Malone put on his dark glasses, then took Lisa's hand and held it. “I told him to tell Bousakis to get stuffed.”

A month ago Malone had been in his office at Police Centre when a call had come from the reception desk. “There's a man here says he'd like to see you urgently, Inspector. A Mr. O'Brien. He says it's about his son.”

When Horrie O'Brien Senior walked into his office Malone at once saw the resemblance: the son had been almost a carbon copy of his father. The same long lean face, the wide smile, the thick hair, almost white on the father: all that was missing was the quiet swagger of the son.

“I'm Horrie O'Brien, Inspector. I saw you at my son's funeral, but I didn't introduce m'self, I didn't want anyone taking pictures of me. Can I come straight to the point?”

“Go ahead, Mr. O'Brien.”

“Well, I gather you know Brian and I didn't get along. He wrote me a long letter a coupla days before he was—he was killed. Or killed himself?” There was no mistaking that the last was a question.

Malone didn't commit himself; Harry Danforth had already resigned and left the Department. “I think we'd better stick to the coroner's verdict, Mr. O'Brien.”

Horrie O'Brien hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Well . . . I got this letter, it was written on his
stud'
s notepaper, it was almost like he had a premonition. He said he was sorry for what we'd missed between us and he hoped that, if everything went all right for him, we'd shake hands and let bygones be bygones. I might of, at that—” He looked down at his big hands; they were like his son's, wrapping and unwrapping each other. “Being bitter doesn't get you very far, does it?” Malone didn't answer; and O'Brien went on, “He said if anything happened to him I was to get in touch with his lawyers, he give me their name. I didn't do that, not till this week. I've been to see „em this morning and they told me what's in his will. He left me everything, lock stock and barrel. I'm a bus driver, with overtime and shift work, I take home roughly five hundred bucks a week. And now he's made me a bloody millionaire!”

Malone felt a sudden warm glow of satisfaction. “I think Brian would've been pleased.”

“I dunno. Because there's a problem or two, the lawyers tell me. The National something-or-other—”

“The NCSC?”

“Yeah, that's it. They want to grab what they can. I don't mind that, if Brian owed it to „em. That was one of the things him and me disagreed about. I try to be honest . . .” He stopped and looked at Malone with embarrassment. “Does that sound old-fashioned?”

“Not really. Not to me. But why did you come to me, Mr. O'Brien?”

The older man's embarrassment didn't entirely fade. “Because Brian spoke a lot about you in his letter. He said he'd made a friend, but too late—there was that premonition thing again, I guess. He mentioned a man named Bousakis, George Bousakis, a Greek he sounds like, and he said if I had any trouble with him I oughta come to you.”

“Are you having trouble with Mr. Bousakis?”

“Not yet. I haven't met him so far. But the lawyers said he wants to buy out all Brian's holdings here in Australia. The lawyers say no one else will make me an offer and even if I wait I won't get anything better than Bousakis will offer me.”

“What do you think you'd like to do?”

“Mr. Malone,” the older man said slowly and gravely, “I'm due to retire—truth is, I'm past
retiring
age for a driver, but they don't know my real age. When the wife died I just wanted to keep working, keep my mind off her going like she did. I haven't got over losing her and now I'm trying to get used to the idea that I've just lost my son, my only kid. I'm not thinking too straight. The money don't mean that much to me. All I think I want to do is do what Brian asked. I disagreed with him enough when he was alive. Now he's dead, I'd like to make it up to him.”

Malone said nothing, looking at the man across the desk from him, seeing him fade into the younger O'Brien, Brian Boru, Horrie Junior. Then at last he said quietly, and he had to choke off the sweet venom in his voice, “Mr. O'Brien, I'd tell George Bousakis to get stuffed.”

And now, sitting beside the pool, he said, “I told him what I told him a month ago. To tell George Bousakis to get stuffed.”

Lisa pressed his hand. “So no one comes out a winner?”

“No one, at least as far as making money out of Brian's murder. It's just a pity he never got to name names to the NCSC, but you can't have everything.”

Lisa looked across the pool at the children, then back at him. “I have everything.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. Then she got up, went to the bucket of ice beside the back door and came back with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She poured the wine, then saw the direction of his gaze.

“What are you looking at?”

“It's a green bottle. Have you got any more? Let's keep them as souvenirs.” As soon as he said it he knew it was a stupid, insensitive remark.

“No,” she said and bent down and kissed him again, this time on the lips. “It's the last green bottle. And I'm going to break it when it's empty.”

THE
END

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PRIDE'S HARVEST

1

I

“YOU SHOULD
take a week's leave and come out here,” said Lisa. “It's so restful, just what you need.”

That had been the day before the murder; Lisa's timing, usually so reliable, had been way off. Scobie Malone, missing his wife and children, already weary after only four days of getting his own meals, making his bed and trying to iron his shirts so that they didn't look as if he had pressed them by sleeping on them, had hung up the phone and thought seriously of applying for a week's leave. Murder had taken one of its rare holidays in the city and now would be as good a time as any to ask for a few days off. Then the very next day the routine telexed report had come in of the murder at Collamundra and later that afternoon there had been the telephoned request to Regional Crime Squad, South Region, in Sydney, asking for assistance.

Malone was the acting officer-in-charge of Homicide and he had assigned himself to the case without mentioning to any of his superiors at Police Centre that his wife and family were staying in the district where the murder had occurred. He had learned one thing, amongst others, from crims he had interviewed: the less police, especially superior officers, know, the better.

“We'll leave first thing in the morning,” he told Russ Clements.

“We flying or driving?”

“We'll drive. Another day won't matter, and I'd rather have our own wheels out there than
borrow
some. The tracks are probably cold, anyway. They didn't mention any suspects.”

“Collamundra. Isn't that where Lisa and the kids are staying?”

“Keep your voice down. Why do you think I want to load myself with a homicide out in the bush? The last time we went bush the local cops were as unco-operative as the cow cockies.”

“This is a Jap cow cocky who's been murdered. Does that make any difference?”

“He wasn't a cow cocky, he was the manager of a cotton farm and gin. Yeah, that does make it interesting.”

“So seeing Lisa and the kids wasn't what interested you?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Are you taking your laundry with you? You're beginning to look like me, a bachelor.”

Now Malone and Clements, in their unmarked police car, were approaching the end of the four-hundred-kilometre drive from Sydney to Collamundra. They had left early this Thursday morning, come over the Blue Mountains through the charred landscape of the summer bushfires, down the western slopes and out here to the rolling country that, beyond Collamundra, became the vast flat terrain of the western plains. The holdings hereabouts were not as huge as those farther west, but they were big enough; this was rich country and men had made comfortable fortunes on as little as five thousand acres. The landscape had begun to open out, unfolding till the eye could not take it all in without turning the head, and the sky had become immense, not anchored as it was on the coast by city skylines but dropping away behind the distant horizon to what one knew was eternity.

“You know anything about trees, one from another?” Malone was a city boy and sometimes he was ashamed at his ignorance of the native flora. Australia was still at least ninety per cent open space and he was almost as ignorant of it as the most recently arrived immigrant from over-crowded Europe and Asia. Crocodile Dundee, though the creation of a city-bred comedian, would have turned his back on him.