The High Commissioner

by Jon Cleary

  “What’s behind all this?” he asked Leeds. “Why does the State Premier have a murder investigation conducted by one of his own political hacks? Why all the secrecy?”

  Leeds took another breath of air. He was a big man, bigger than Malone, and usually he walked with a slow ambling roll, reminding one of a retired sea captain whose rough seas were behind him for ever. But today he was battling the storm of his own feelings.

  “It’s pure political malice!” He looked at Malone fiercely from under the grey wire brushes of his brows. “Don’t you quote me to anyone or you’ll be working a bush beat before you know what hit you!”

  “I have some faults, sir,” said Malone, trying not to sound priggish, “but indiscretion is not one of them.”

  “Don’t sound so blasted priggish.”

  “No, sir,” said Malone, and grinned.

  Leeds nodded, then abruptly his reddish face, that could so often be as threatening as a clenched fist, broke into a smile. He walked in silence for a few yards as they turned down Hunter Street towards Police Headquarters; then he appeared to relax, began to roll a little as he walked. “You’re right, Scobie. That was one of the reasons I picked you for this job, your discretion.”

  A young couple, blind with love, came towards them; the two policemen walked round them, respecting their selfishness. Leeds, interrupted, fell silent for a few more yards, and Malone paced beside him, silently patient. Patience had never been one of Malone’s early virtues, but he had learned to cultivate it, just as Flannery had learned to cultivate his warm sincere grin. Some virtues, Malone thought, were often only hypocrisy under another name.

  “Pure political malice,” Leeds repeated. “He’s never forgiven the Prime Minister for crossing the floor back in the 1930s. You wouldn’t remember that.”

  “In the 1930s I was still in short pants and both my grandmothers were still alive. I didn’t even know such things as politicians existed. What happened?”

  “The P.M. was a Labour man in those days, here in State politics. That was before he moved down to Canberra – went into the Federal ring. There was a division in the House on some bill and he crossed the floor and voted with the Opposition. It brought the Government down.”

  “And Flannery’s never forgiven him for it?”

  “Scobie, woman hath no fury like that of a politician scorned.” Leeds smiled; he was almost fully himself again.

  “But how does he get back at the P.M.?”

  “Quentin has been the P.M.’s protégé. Some people think the P.M. has been grooming him to take over some day. Quentin had only been in Parliament two years when he was made a junior minister. If there were any overseas junkets, he was always on them. Then when the last High Commissioner in London thed suddenly, Quentin was sent there. It’s a diplomatic post, but it’s always filled by a politician. Either as a reward for past services or as a build-up for bigger things. Quentin is obviously meant for bigger things.” Then he corrected himself: “Or was.”

  Malone felt the light beginning to filter through; the atmosphere in Flannery’s office had fogged up his mind, but now he was out in the open again. “So with the Federal elections coming up in July, with the voting as close as they expect it to be – a nice juicy scandal could tip the scales, is that the idea?”

  “Elections have been won and lost on less. All Labour has to do is query the P.M.’s judgment of the men he appoints. He’s made one or two poor choices as Ministers. Add this one and Labour will ask if he really should be in charge of the country.”

  “Somehow it’s a bastard of a way to decide a country’s future.”

  “You should read more history, Scobie. That look of pain you sometimes see on a politician’s face has been caused by a stab in the back. Some of the most honoured men in history were very good with the knife.”

  “But Flannery, he’s not thinking of going into Federal politics, is he?”

  “Of course not. He’s king here in New South Wales. Why would he want to go down to Canberra, just be one of the princes? No, this is just a personal feud between him and the P.M.”

  “And Quentin – what’s he? The shuttlecock?”

  “He’s a murderer, Scobie. That’s all you have to think of him.”

  They had reached the entrance to the shabby old tenement that was Police Headquarters. Amid the blinding dazzle of the steel-and-glass cliffs that surrounded it, it looked like an ancient monument of dubious origin, perhaps the only building ever erected by the aborigines. The law in Australia had always been the poor cousin of government; what right had a copper to be comfortable? They went into the musty lobby and ascended in the antique lift that creaked like the machinery of law itself.

  As they got out of the lift Leeds handed Malone the file. “Read that, then bring it back to me. Keep the carbon of it, you might need it in London, but don’t let anyone here see it. It’s top secret. At least it is for another week. Then I shouldn’t be surprised if Flannery has posters made of it and stuck up all over Sydney.”

  Malone took the file and went looking for an empty office. Most of the staff were out at lunch, but he himself had no appetite for food just now. Disturbed by what he had witnessed and been told this morning, excited by the sudden prospect of his first trip abroad, he wanted only to get into this case at once. He found an empty room, sat down in one of the uncomfortable chairs, opened the file and began his acquaintance with John Quentin, born Corliss, ambassador and murderer.

  III

  In a comfortable chair in a luxury apartment on the other side of the world, Madame Cholon looked out at the soft London drizzle of rain and nodded her head emphatically.

  “The man to kill,” she said, “is the Australian High Commissioner.”

  The three men with her said nothing. Two of them had learned not to answer her till she looked directly at them for comment; the third, Pallain, was still feeling his way with her. She stood up and, the silk legs of her tailored slacks hissing together, she crossed to stand at the window. Down the road the Science Museum bulked like a dark cliff through the grey rain; Kensington was slowly being washed off the map. She had been in England a month now and she hated its greyness, its wetness and its cold. She shivered and pulled up the collar of her cashmere cardigan.

  “This conference is not going the way we want it.” She spoke French, in a high soft voice, for the benefit of Pallain; she knew that he could speak Vietnamese, but she had never heard him speak anything but French or English. He was a snob, but she was sometimes that herself. “Something has to be done to disrupt it. This man Quentin is the one who is now dominating it, so he is the obvious one to be eliminated.” Below her in the street an ice-cream van went slowly by, its bell tinkling with ridiculous optimism in the cold grey day. What optimists the English were, always confident the sun was about to shine! She preferred the French, with their cynicism and their pessimism; one always knew where one stood with pessimists. She turned back to the three men, all of them with at least a strain of French blood in them. “Do you not agree?”

  Pallain scratched the stubble of beard that always began to appear on his face at this time of day. He had more French in him than the other two men: his father had been a hairy sergeant from Carcassonne who had thed in the mud at Then Bien Phu, leaving behind him a twenty-year-old son whose birth he regretted as much as his own death. “I don’t see the point of killing the Australian.”

  Madame Cholon sighed, not attempting to hide her impatience with Pallain’s lack of imagination. Legs still hissing like singing snakes, she came back and sat down. “If he is killed, who is going to be accused of it? Not us, because no one knows of us. But everyone else with an interest in our country will be suspected. The Americans will accuse the Chinese and vice versa. The same with the South Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, the Catholics and the Buddhists. Why, even General de Gaulle might be suspected!” Her smooth schoolgirl’s face showed a schoolgirl’s spiteful humour. “And as soon as suspicion sets in, that is the end of
the usefulness of the conference. It will be adjourned, just like so many other conferences. The war may stumble on, but there will be no real government in Saigon, just as there has not been for the past two years. Anarchy is the climate we want.”

  “It may not be easy,” said Pallain. “I mean, killing the Australian.”

  The other two men nodded. Truong Tho and Pham Chinh were both small men, and the French blood in them was two generations old and poor vintage at that. They were not strangers to murder, but they were strangers to London and the big city made them ill at ease and even a little frightened.

  “I love to gamble,” said Madame Cholon. “But I do not think the odds in this case have to be against us.”

  The three men knew whom the betting would be against: themselves, not Madame Cholon. Pallain said, “London has a very clean record when it comes to assassination.”

  “Then it is time its record was spoiled. The English are too smug about their dull way of life. Reading their newspapers, one would think the rest of the world was made up of barbarians.”

  Pallain hid his smile, recognising a barbarian when he saw one and being afraid of her. “How soon do you want Quentin–er–eliminated?” He wanted to smile again, embarrassed by the gangster phrase. He had spent all his adult life with gangsters of one sort or another, but he read Racine and dreamed of a life among such people as Proust had known. “We shall have to make plans.”

  “Naturally,” said Madame Cholon, her voice tart with contempt for the dullards she had to employ. In the street below she heard the tinkling of the ice-cream van’s bell, and in her homesick ear it sounded like an echo of the temple bells along the Mekong River. She looked out of the window again, saw the thin explosion of sun behind the range of clouds far away to the west, and felt her own sudden flash of optimism. “One does not kill a man without making plans.”

  Chapter Two

  John James Quentin (Corliss):

  Born: Tumbarumba, New South Wales, July 15, 1915.

  Parents: Peter Corliss and Ida Fahey Corliss thed in car accident October 12, 1925. Corliss, only child, then raised by aunt, Mira Fahey, spinster, who thed January 22, 1934.

  Corliss moved to Sydney February 1934, joined Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board as trainee surveyor.

  Married Freda Wiseman, previously Weitzmann, August 20, 1936. No children of marriage. Weitzmann had arrived in Australia alone from Vienna January 1936. No relatives of hers have been traced.

  Stabbed corpse of Freda Corliss discovered by neighbour December 9, 1941. One wound in right breast, inflicted by sewing scissors.

  Corliss disappeared. Reappeared as John Quentin May 12, 1942, date of voluntary enlistment in Royal Australian Navy at Perth, Western Australia.

  Married Sheila Redmond, daughter of Leslie Redmond and Elizabeth Cousins Redmond, both deceased, Perth, July 10, 1942. No children of marriage . . .

  “Would you please fasten your seat belts? We shall be landing at London Airport—”

  Malone closed the file and put it back in his brief-case. It was a comprehensive file, sixty pages thick, a monument to the diligence of the researcher. On the trip over Malone had read it three times, reading it at night when the passenger beside him, a talkative grandmother, had been asleep. She had got off at Zürich (“Then I’m going down to Rome. To see the Pope. I’m a Presbyterian myself, but we can’t all be bigots, can we?”), and the seat beside Malone had since been empty. In this last half-hour, free from interruptions and the grandmother’s inquisitive eye, he had been trying to memorise the summary that was attached to the file. The more he read, the more he could taste the relish with which the researcher had worked: he really had enjoyed the change from dry political statistics and trying to guess the voters’ intentions. John Quentin (or Corliss) had been pinned to these pages like a dead butterfly.

  But the researcher had, in the final analysis, failed. He had pinned a specimen to a board, described its history, illustrated some of its characteristics; but John Quentin was still no more than a name (or two names) and a collection of facts; the researcher had not discovered what made him tick. And Malone had begun to feel the first stirring of an unease that had not troubled him since he had been sent out, years ago, to make his first arrest. Over the years he had come to appreciate that the less you knew about a man, the less you were involved emotionally when it came time to bring him in. Now, however, a personality, like a faint watermark, was hidden behind the typed facts; and, despite himself, Malone was intrigued by it. And for a policeman that way could lead to headaches. Subjectivity, he had heard Leeds say, was as corrupting as money.

  Twenty minutes later the immigration officer was looking at his passport. “Police officer? On duty, sir?”

  Malone shook his head. “Holiday.”

  “Enjoy yourself.”

  “Thanks,” said Malone, and wondered when he had last enjoyed an arrest. He could for a while hate a murderer who had committed a particularly horrible crime, the callous bashing of an old woman or the rape and killing of a young child; but later there would come the moments of doubt, the wonder at what had caused the flaw in the murderer. He didn’t believe all of the psychiatrists’ theories that the flaw in any man could be found in his childhood; he was old-fashioned enough to believe that some men were born bad. But why? he often asked himself, and left himself open to further questions that bothered him more than his colleagues suspected. He had often thought that he would like to have worked on the case of Cain. After that all other murder cases might have been simple.

  The flight had been delayed for hours by storms in Zürich, and now it was late afternoon as he rode in in the airport bus to London. He looked out at England, catching glimpses of it from the motorway. He had never dreamed of travelling the wide world; well aware of his insularity and able to smile at himself, he had always been content with Australia and what it offered him. He was no explorer. Columbus, Magellan, Cook were men who probably would never have been happy while there was a horizon to draw them. Up till now, at thirty-one, horizons had meant little to him.

  But England now was not something beyond the horizon; it was here around him. He could feel his excitement and interest growing; it was a pity that he was going to have no more than a day or two here. Perversely he began to hope that Quentin might fight the warrant, might ask for extradition procedure. It would play hell with Australia’s good name, but it would at least give Malone time to look at London. Then he cursed himself for his lack of patriotism. He was as hypocritical as Flannery.

  He checked in at a hotel in Cromwell Road in Kensington. The affable Irish porter showed him to his room, talking a torrent all the way. “Ah, we get a lot of Aussies here at the hotel, sir. It must be a grand country, the numbers of you that are always coming over here.” Malone looked at the porter, but the latter wasn’t being sarcastic, only Irish. “Would you be on business, sir?”

  “No, holiday.” Malone took out his note-book and looked at an address. “Is Belgrave Square far from here?”

  The porter put down the bags. “Not far, sir. Was it an embassy you were wanting?” He had an Irishman’s frank curiosity: no one in Multinahone had had any secrets.

  “No. Just friends.”

  The porter’s eyebrows went up. “It’s a posh area, that it is, sir.”

  “I have posh friends.”

  The Irishman recognised the rebuff: some Aussies were just like the bloody English, keeping everything to themselves. He gave Malone directions on how to get to Belgrave Square and went out of the room, wondering why a man who stayed in a thirty-bob bed-and-breakfast room and who gave only a shilling tip should have posh friends in Belgravia.

  Malone, a relaxed man who could sleep anywhere, even in an economy class airplane seat, was not tired by the long flight from Australia. He showered, changed into the light grey suit he had brought as a concession to the English summer, looked at his watch and decided to go and see Quentin at once. He had already made up his mind that h
e would confront Quentin with the arrest warrant at his home and not at his office at Australia House. He had never arrested a public official before and he did not want to be too public about it. Seven o’clock. The High Commissioner would probably be home now, doing whatever ambassadors did in their off-duty moments, having a bath, having a drink, wondering why they hadn’t taken up something easy like mountaineering or gun-running. It must be a bastard of a life, Malone thought: even the small diplomacies of a policeman’s life were difficult enough. But soon it would be over for Quentin.

  Riding in the taxi towards Belgravia Malone tried to rehearse what he would say to Quentin; and after a while gave up. How did you face a man, secure in a new life and a new identity, almost impregnable behind the importance of his office, with a crime that was distant in time and place, ten thousand miles and twenty-three years from here and now? “Your Excellency, in regard to an ancient murder . . .” Malone gazed out of the window of the taxi, trying to make his mind a blank, trusting that the right words would come by instinct when the moment arrived. Habit, sometimes, was a comfort.

  The taxi pulled in before the big four-storied house. Malone got out and conditioned by another habit paid the driver the exact amount on the meter.

  “You Aussies,” said the driver, an economist from Bethnal Green. “I bet you don’t have any balance of payments deficit.”

  Malone, who had never tipped a taxi-driver in his life, looked at the man blankly. “Belt up,” said the latter, and drove off, gnashing his gears instead of his teeth.

  Malone shrugged, beginning to appreciate why someone had once written that the English were incomprehensible, and turned towards the house. He was surprised at its size; he was a long way from the five-roomed house in Erskineville where he had grown up. Then he looked at the other houses in the square and saw that some of them were even bigger; this square was a manifestation of living that he had only read about. This was diplomatic territory; above almost every entrance there jutted a white flagpole, like a single blunt-tipped mammoth’s tusk; the huge front doors had the magnificent discouragement of a butler’s façade. The heavily elegant cliff-faces of the houses hid secrets that exercised the British Government; but none of them held such a secret as this house behind him. He turned, hesitated, then pressed the bell firmly.