Something Fishy

by Shane Maloney

  PRAISE FOR SHANE MALONEY AND MURRAY WHELAN

  ‘One of our best and most consistently original crime writers. Highly recommended.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Maloney, the great exponent of the Australian crime genre, has done it again. The Big Ask is full of laugh-out-loud humour as well as jaw-dropping accuracy in describing Australian political life.’ marie claire

  ‘The great joy of Maloney is that he seems effortlessly to marry tightly constructed crime stories to great satirical vision…there’s no doubting the brilliance of the writing.’ Ian Rankin, Age

  ‘There is only one Australian crime writer on my list this year—Shane Maloney. His satires on Australian political life are always hilarious.’ Examiner

  ‘Maloney is top shelf.’ Australian

  ‘Whelan’s wry social commentaries, ironic observations and many failed attempts at getting the girl make him one of Australian crime fiction’s most attractive characters, and Maloney one of the genre’s most gifted writers.’ Who Weekly

  ‘I look forward to the next Murray Whelan book with the same anticipation of pleasure that I feel for the new Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Maloney is a literary writer who…takes characters that are stereotypes (the public servant, the minister, the arty type) and depicts them with subtlety and originality and compassionate humour. He also writes a ripping yarn.’ Eureka Street

  ‘To the list that contains Charles Willeford’s Florida Keys, Jim Thompson’s West Texas, Pete Dexter’s Philadelphia, James Crumley’s Montana and Carl Hiaasen’s Miami, you can add Shane Maloney’s Melbourne. Maloney has created a fictional city that contains the best of the real and the not quite real.’ Herald Sun

  ‘Maloney is a born writer…For the first time, in the vicinity of Australian crime-writing, we hear the true national voice of comic futility, a literary voice which is rich, ridiculous and tawdry, which can set itself up with a soaring rhetoric and slide on the banana skin of its own piss-elegance… Maloney is terrific.’ Age

  ‘A writer who seems to have been sitting on a thousand observations now unleashed.’ Sunday Age

  ‘The pure pleasure of Maloney’s book lies in being plunged so thoroughly into the complicated byways of Australian politics…a fast-paced, fresh, unerringly funny book… Murray is a great creation, one that takes the wisecracking wise guy into a whole new realm.’ Houston Chronicle

  ‘Maloney has a quirky eye for descriptive details that lend frequent humor to a fascinating and adventurous plot. Highly recommended.’ Library Journal

  SOMETHING FISHY

  Shane Maloney’s novels

  include Stiff, The Brush-Off,

  winner of the Ned Kelly Prize

  for Crime Fiction, Nice Try

  and The Big Ask.

  SHANE

  MALONEY

  something fishy

  A MURRAY WHELAN THRILLER

  The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  www.textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Shane Maloney 2002

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 2002

  This edition 2003, reprinted 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Designed by Chong Weng-ho

  Typeset in Baskerville MT by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Maloney, Shane.

  Something fishy.

  1. Whelan, Murray (Fictitious character) - Fiction. 2. Abalone fisheries - Australia - Fiction. 3. Australia - Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title.

  A823.3

  ISBN 978 1 877008 70 2

  Politicians also have no leisure, because they are

  always aiming at something beyond political

  life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

  Aristotle, Ethics

  The author of this book, its setting

  and characters are entirely fictitious.

  There is no such place as the state of Victoria.

  The Australian Labor Party exists

  only in the imagination of its members.

  A fraction of a second, that’s all it takes.

  By my reckoning, Rodney Syce and Adrian Parish began their break-out from the Melbourne Remand Centre at precisely the moment I emerged from the trees in the Fitzroy Gardens and found Lyndal Luscombe sitting on the bench beside the birdbath fountain.

  Her message said she’d wait there until six, hoping the Hon. Murray Whelan could make it. A personal matter. The Legislative Council usher must have liked that bit because he was even more inscrutable than usual when he passed me the note during the third reading of the Administrative Resources Amendment Bill (1994).

  I got the note just after five-thirty, a welcome distraction from the drone of the Minister for Administrative Services. Rising from my place in the back row of the opposition benches, I bowed to the Speaker and sidled out of the chamber, hoping the party whip wouldn’t notice I was gone.

  Not that my presence in the upper house of the state legislature made a skerrick of difference, of course. Since our disastrous defeat at the last election, there were so few of us left in parliament that to describe the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party as an impotent rump would have seriously overstated both our size and influence.

  I left Parliament House by the rear door, dodged a snaggle of peak-hour trams and made my way through Treasury Place, the pavement thick with homeward-bound public servants. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty important for Lyndal to summon me like this. Why not wait until parliament adjourned for dinner at seven, talk to me then? And why the gardens?

  Oh Christ, I thought, picking up my pace as I entered the long avenue of overarching elms. She’s in the gardens because of what borders them. The Freemasons Hospital. The Mercy. Medical suites and day-procedure centres and rows of Victorian terraces filled with specialists. She’s been to a medico of some sort. Something’s wrong and she wants to talk about it. Somewhere quiet, somewhere she’ll have my full attention.

  I came out of the trees and saw her before she saw me, bathed in a pool of late-afternoon sunshine, the light catching the chestnut hues in her hair. Her eyes were downcast and she was fiddling with the hem of her knit skirt where it ended just above her knees. Her lips were moving as if she were rehearsing lines. She definitely had something on her mind.

  It was about then that the alarm must have gone off at the Remand Centre. Not that I could hear it, three kilometres away on the other side of the downtown grid. I was attending to my own, inner alarm bells. Don’t panic, I told myself, wait until you hear what she has to say.

  ‘Hi,’ I said cheerfully, bending to plant a kiss on her cheek. Act natural, let her take her own sweet time.

  Lyndal met my descending smile with a brisk, open-palmed slap. ‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned. ‘You filthy beast.’

  I rocked back on my heels, jaw slack. What had I done to deserve this? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t tried to kiss her before. Or worse. And succeeded.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ I said, hand pressed to my face.

  Quickly glancing around, I checked th
at nobody was watching. Not exactly good for the parliamentary image, copping a biff from a woman, especially one as attractive as Lyndal. But the gardens were deserted. A mid-autumn chill was already rising from the lawns. A spill of white-clad nurses emerged from the Mercy Hospital across the road, but none of them looked our way. Cars rolled past, their drivers intent on making good time to the freeway.

  ‘What’s got into me?’ said Lyndal. ‘I’ll tell you what’s got into me. You have, Mr Sexpot. I’m pregnant.’

  My jaw resumed the slack position. ‘Pregnant?’

  ‘Potted. Up the duff. Preggers. Bun in the oven. Expecting.’

  Pressing both cheeks, I sank onto the seat beside her. ‘Goodness,’ I said.

  Lyndal inched away. ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it, pal.’ Her counterfeit ire dissolved into a self-congratulatory grin.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure as spermatozoa,’ she nodded. ‘And I’ve got the picture to prove it.’ She fished in her handbag and thrust a Polaroid at me. It looked like an underexposed satellite reconnaissance photograph of atmospheric turbulence over the South China Sea. ‘She’s the spitting image of you, don’t you think?’

  ‘She?’ A grainy blob occupied the north-west quadrant of the photograph, a furball in a blizzard. ‘How?’ I said. ‘I mean when?’

  Lyndal’s expression had become beatific, placid, wise. Christ, freshly duffed and she was already turning into the Earth Mother. ‘By the usual method,’ she said. ‘Last January, during the summer holidays. One of those lazy afternoons with nothing better to do than.’

  ‘Not that when,’ I said. ‘I mean, when’s it due? I mean she.’

  ‘Nine months from the time of conception, Murray,’ she said patiently. ‘Even you should be able to figure it out.’

  My fingers did the sums. ‘October.’ But it was already April. ‘How long have you known? And why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I wanted to be one hundred per cent sure that everything was okay before I told you.’ She nodded towards the building beside the hospital. ‘I’ve just seen the obstetrician. It’s too early for amniocentesis but the ultrasound indicates a normal baby.’

  ‘Normal?’ I said, incredulous. ‘With you for a mother? A sneaky minx who doesn’t even bother to tell her poor dumb paramour that she’s gone and got herself knocked up.’

  Waves of relief broke over me, a treacly ocean of love and pleasure and pride. My feet executed a little jig. Slipping my forearm beneath Lyndal’s thighs, I swung her legs up onto the bench and tilted her sideways so she sprawled on her back the length of the slatted seat. I dropped to my knees and gently pinned her shoulders.

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ I said, ‘I don’t see how you’ve got any choice but to marry me forthwith.’

  She smirked back. ‘Determined to make an honest woman of me, are you, Murray Whelan, MLC?’

  Oh yes, indeed. I lowered my face to hers. She yielded, squirming beneath my caress, ripe and lush, letting her arms dangle. I laid a hand on her breast. ‘Now that you mention it, I do detect a certain womanly fulsomeness.’

  She smacked my hand away and swung her feet to the ground. ‘Get up,’ she commanded. ‘You look ridiculous. Forty-two-year-old politician in a double-breasted suit, down on his knees, slobbering like a teenage Romeo.’

  I stayed exactly where I was. ‘Groping the tits of the fiercely independent thirty-five-year-old public policy analyst whose swelling belly is heavy with his love child.’

  Lyndal tugged down her hem and smoothed her dress. ‘Who are you calling heavy?’ Her hands lingered on her abdomen for a moment longer than necessary as she adjusted the fall of her skirt. ‘Let’s go and have a celebratory drink. We’ve got things to talk about.’

  I gave her my hands and let her haul me to my feet. ‘Should you be drinking?’ I tutted.

  ‘Believe me, Murray,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t for drink, I wouldn’t be in this condition.’

  Hand in hand, we ambled towards the Hilton, the nearest licensed premises. ‘This’ll mean a lot of changes,’ said Lyndal.

  ‘About twenty a day for the first few months,’ I agreed. ‘There’ll be crap everywhere. We’ll need nappy service. Lucky for you I already have some experience in these matters.’

  ‘That’s one of the things we need to talk about,’ said Lyndal. ‘How do you think Red will react to the news?’

  Red was my thirteen-year-old son, the only good thing to come out of my marriage. After several years of Olympic-standard wrestling for custody with his mother, Wendy, I won the prime-parent medal when Red reached high-school age. Very convenient for Wendy, who had meanwhile plighted her imperious troth to a silvertail Sydney lawyer and spawned a brood of twins.

  ‘Red adores you,’ I said. ‘He’ll be just as pleased as I am.’ An exaggeration, but only a slight one. Fact was, the two of them got along like a house on fire.

  ‘He won’t mind that his father has knocked up the babysitter?’

  ‘That was a low blow. Red doesn’t think of you like that.’

  But it was a role she played well, tending to the home fires and riding herd on the lad’s homework when duty compelled my attendance at an all-night sitting of parliament, a party meeting or a commitment in the constituency.

  At a break in the traffic, we skipped across the road, hands still linked. The day was drawing to a close, the last beams of the sun slipping between the office towers of the central city, catching the filigree of cast-iron lacework on the rows of terrace houses that faced across the gardens. Had I looked over my shoulder, I might have noticed the police helicopter, a distant speck, still inaudible, coming fast out of the setting sun.

  We entered East Melbourne, a district of well-heeled gentility, its appearance largely unchanged since the 1890s. A block away, down a slight incline, lay the Hilton.

  Conrad’s pleasure-dome was a recent interloper, a tower of shit-brown bricks erected in the 1960s on the ruins of the Cliveden Mansions, an elegantly loopy late-Victorian lodging house for gentlemen bachelors. In place of four-poster beds and brass-potted aspidistras, the Hilton offered weekend-getaway packages and express checkout. Hardly our usual watering hole. But these were exceptional circumstances. Lyndal’s news required immediate access to a flute of Moët.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘You never complained about keeping an eye on Red from time to time.’

  And she hadn’t, of course. After all, we’d been shacked up together for the best part of a year. Informally at first, a matter of convenience. Then, after I sold the cramped little workman’s terrace I shared with Red in Fitzroy and moved to a larger place in the electorate, officially.

  We sauntered, our arms around each other’s waists, our hips moulded together. ‘If you’re going to be a cry-baby,’ she said, ‘you’d better make the most of it before the real thing arrives.’

  ‘Show me the picture again,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t read the name-tag.’

  Lyndal pulled the Polaroid from her bag and dangled it in front of my eyes. ‘Lysistrata,’ she said. ‘See. Says it right there. Lysistrata Luscombe.’

  I snatched it away and tilted it to the light. ‘Lysistrata Luscombe-Whelan, don’t you mean?’ I said. ‘A bit of a tongue-twister but it’s got a certain ring. Wasn’t Lysistrata that Greek chick who went on a sex strike? I hope you’re not getting any ideas along those lines.’

  To assure myself otherwise, I backed her against the cast-iron fence rails of the nearest terrace, pressed my lips to her neck and began to work my way upwards. Lyndal squirmed against me in a gratifying manner. ‘Get it while you can,’ I whispered. ‘Before your body is devastated by stretch marks and the ravages of childbirth.’

  A car horn bleated in the distance, followed by screeching tyres and the faint metallic clump of a low-speed fender-bender. My head turned at the sound and Lyndal blew a raspberry in my ear. Snatching the Polaroid from my hand, she wriggled free.

  I lurched after her, the two of us playing tig
gy-tiggy-touchwood in the golden light. The only thing missing was a veil of gauze over the lens and a soundtrack of violins.

  But it wasn’t Mantovani and His Orchestra that surged in the background. It was the thunder of an approaching motor, a swelling chorus of sirens, the bass thump of a helicopter.

  As we turned, wondering at the sudden ruckus, a powerful motorbike erupted from the gardens, its rider hunched low over the handlebars. A passenger straddled the pillion, the two helmeted figures clad in identical orange coveralls. Rocketing across the kerb, the bike cut the path of the oncoming traffic, then banked sharply to the right, coming our way.

  A police car flashed past us, speeding to intercept, siren wailing, lights flashing. Cut off, the bike swerved and went into a skid, spilling its riders as it toppled over and skittered across the roadway. It came to rest against a parked van. The prowl car braked and two uniformed cops jumped out. Drawing sidearms, they crouched behind their open doors, bellowing for the riders to halt.

  But the boiler-suited men were already back on their feet. One sprinted for the bike, the other hobbled to catch up. The cops were yelling, more sirens were converging, horns blared, tyres screeched. The first rider reached the bike, wrestled it upright and climbed aboard. His limping confederate struggled to cover the distance. A shot rang out. He was shooting at the cops. They returned fire. Pam, pam, pam.

  We were thirty metres away. It didn’t seem nearly enough. I caught Lyndal by the wrist and pushed at the front gate of the nearest terrace. The iron latch was down. I fumbled with it, letting go of her. Pam, pam, pam. Above the sound of the shots, the bike roared into action. My mind was clear but my fingers were putty. My legs turned liquid. The bike reared, front wheel spinning, then it burned rubber and shot forward, past the police car, up over the gutter and along the footpath, heading straight for us.

  Lyndal pressed herself back against me as I finally managed to lift the latch. The gate sprang open and I stumbled through, reaching back to drag Lyndal with me. As I grabbed her elbow, the speeding motorcycle slammed into her, tearing her from my grasp and flinging her into the air like a doll.