Bleak Spring

by Jon Cleary

  “Theirs was what he said, Mum.” Jason looked at Malone. “I asked him who they were and he just told me to mind my own business. He looked as if he was gunna get pretty heavy.”

  Malone glanced at Olive and she nodded. “He was threatening us, yes.”

  “You never told me any of this!” Mrs. Carss looked affronted.

  “What did you say?” said Malone. “That he could have the money?”

  “No!” Then Olive seemed to realize her tone was too emphatic; she softened it: “I told him he would have to prove it belonged to him, to them, whoever they were.”

  “What did he say to that?”

  “We left it at that,” said Olive flatly.

  “I think we’re going to have to put you and the children under police protection, Olive.”

  “I should damn well think so!” Mrs. Carss put a protective arm round Shelley, who had stood silent during the interrogation, watching it with growing puzzlement, “I’m not going to have my grandchildren in danger from some crazy communist!”

  “I don’t think he’s a communist, Mrs. Carss, not any longer.”

  “They’re always communists, they never change. Like Will’s father, he’ll be one till he drops dead.”

  “That doesn’t make Pa a thug.” Jason wanted to shout at his dumb grandmother; God, she got up his nose! “This guy is different. Real cold,” he told Malone. “I think it’d be a good idea if you could give us protection, Mr. Malone.”

  “We’ll do that. Olive, could I see you outside? No, Jay, just your mother.”

  Jason stood back, rebuffed; he had thought Mr. Malone was on his side by now. He watched as his mother and Malone went out to stand beside the pool. He saw his mother look up sharply as Malone said something to her. What was going on?

  Malone had said, “Olive, what have you done with the five thousand dollars you withdrew last week?”

  She leaned back against the pool fence, not negligently but as if she needed its support. “Scobie, what is this?”

  “Just answer the question, Olive. Where’s the five thousand?”

  “I—I’ve spent it. I told you, the holiday up on the Reef, clothes. There’s some left, spending money.”

  “Did you book through a travel agency?”

  “Yes, Kidlers, down in the Bay.”

  “Would you care to show me the clothes you bought?”

  “Scobie, for God’s sake!” She came off the fence almost as if she were going to throw herself at him; he took a step back, not wanting any physical contact between them. “No, I can’t show them to you. I didn’t collect them after what happened to Will—I’d left them to be altered—”

  “Where’d you buy them?”

  “God, you really have no respect for me, have you?”

  “Where’d you buy the clothes, Olive?” He was cold with her: it was the only way to be when an interrogation reached this stage, when you knew she was lying.

  “At several places—” She put out a hand, grasping at the fence. There was a burst of music from the house next door as someone opened a door; then it was gone. She turned her head, as if glad of the distraction; when she looked back at Malone it seemed she had gathered her thoughts, and he noted it. “At David Jones. At a boutique called, I can’t remember, it’s in Castlereagh Street. At another shop over at Bondi Junction—Penthouse—” She was grabbing places out of the air, like someone in a quiz competition racing against the clock. She stopped, drew a deep breath and almost shouted at him, “I didn’t kill my husband!”

  “Righto, Olive.” His tone suggested neither acceptance nor denial of her plea. “You’ll get the police protection immediately. Has Mr. Jones phoned you?”

  She looked at him warily. “No. Why, are you going to tap my phone?”

  “It might be an idea,” he said. “Take care, Olive. You’re in much deeper water than you think.”

  He went down the side driveway, checked there was a phone in the Civic and went on out into the street. Since he had not noticed the brown Mercedes when he had entered the Rockne house, he did not remark that it was no longer parked up the street. He went round the corner to the unmarked Commodore and the two young detective-constables.

  “The family doesn’t know it’s been under surveillance. I’m going to ask Crime Squad to put them under police protection—you fellers from Maroubra and probably Randwick will get the job. I’ll be in touch with Sergeant Ellsworth and give him the details. In the meantime, if the family has any male visitors, especially a tall, well-dressed feller, intercept him and ask him his business. Hold him for me. He has an accent, he’s Russian, and he has several names—Dostoyevsky, Collins, Jones.”

  “Dostoyevsky?” said Tilleman, the burly one. “The guy who wrote Crime and Punishment?”

  “You’re a well-read lot out at Maroubra. Yes, that’s the one. Grab him and hold him for questioning. Ask him to autograph the running sheets.”

  II

  Malone caught a cab back to the Hat Factory, riding up front with the driver like a true-blue Aussie democrat. The driver, a young Chinese student, hadn’t a clue where the Hat Factory was; indeed, he seemed to have some trouble in knowing in which direction the inner city lay. “Don’t you fellers have to do a test to get a taxi licence any more?”

  “Sure.” He had a big smile; his glasses seemed to glint with humour. Life was a joke, at least outside China. “They put a map of Australia in front of you, ask you where Sydney is and that’s it.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Beijing.”

  “What’s the test for taxi drivers in Beijing?”

  “You belong to the Communist Party, that’s all. Corruption the same there, like here. This is the Hat Factory?” Then he saw the three uniformed policemen going in the door. “You the manager, you make hats for the police?”

  “No, I’m a cop. Being a communist, you’re not expecting a tip, are you?”

  He went into the squad room, settled down to paperwork and half an hour later Clements came in and flopped down in a chair.

  Malone looked up, glad of the interruption. “Any luck with Collins or Jones or whatever he calls himself up in Potts Point?”

  “He’s Boris Collins up there. Or was. He moved out this morning. He lived in a one-bedroom service flat and according to the caretaker was a quiet, well-behaved tenant who always paid his rent on time. He owns a brown Merc. He came down this morning with three suitcases, the caretaker helped him, put ’em in the Merc and drove off. Told the caretaker he was going up to the Gold Coast, he had a new job up there. On the off chance, we went out to the Soviet consulate in Woollahra, but they haven’t heard from him since he left the embassy. The guy there told me they’ve got their own problems. Said when you lose a country, losing one citizen doesn’t amount to much. How’d you go with the grieving widow?”

  Malone told him. “Put John Kagal on to checking the travel agency and DJ’s and the boutiques. I think Olive is lying herself blind. She’s getting panicky.”

  “You’ve gone back to thinking she did the killing? Or anyway, paid to have it done?”

  “Yes,” he said and couldn’t disguise the reluctance in his voice.

  The phone rang; it was Ric Bassano from Motor Squad. “Scobie, we’ve come up with something that might interest you. One of my guys was going through some stuff we hauled in from Hamill’s last night. In a box with a lot of gear in it, old car parts and stuff, he found a length of pipe. It looked like nothing, till he took a squint through it. It’s a home-made silencer, baffles in it and all. You wanna look at it?”

  “Send it over, Rick, soon’s you can.” He put down the phone, feeling the quiet excitement he always felt when things suddenly started to go right. He dialled Ballistics, got Clarrie Binyan. “Clarrie, that bullet that killed Will Rockne, did it have any markings on it?”

  “Just the normal lands and grooves identifying it with a particular gun. You give me the gun and I’ll mate them.”

  “Nothing else?�
�

  “Just a minute—” There was silence for a while, but Malone waited patiently; then Binyan came back on the line: “There was a slight mark on it—I ran it through the macroscope again. It could of been done by the baffle in a silencer. But you’ll have to produce the silencer.”

  “You’re my favourite Abo, Clarrie.”

  “We call ourselves Koories, mate, you know that. I’ll see you keep your job when we take the country back off you whiteys.”

  Malone put down the phone and looked across his desk at Clements. “I think I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” He told Clements what he had got from the two phone calls. “It’s time we kept an eye on Kelpie Dunne. Get on to Penrith, he lives out that way, ask their Ds if they’ll help out with some surveillance. We’ll pick him up when Clarrie has checked out the silencer against the marking on the bullet. Then . . .”

  Then he might have to pick up Olive; and he was not looking forward to that. He had looked at Jason and Shelley this morning and seen in their faces the bewilderment and fear that he would never want to see in the faces of his own children.

  III

  He didn’t sleep at all well that night. In the morning, lying beside him, Lisa said, “If you’re going to toss and turn like that till this Rockne case is over, you’d better sleep out in the living room.”

  “How do you know it had anything to do with the Rocknes? It could’ve been something I ate.”

  “Two helpings of beef burgundy with vegies, two helpings of French rice pudding, two glasses of red—why would that keep you awake?”

  “I had no lunch yesterday.” He held her to him, feeling the bed-warmth of her, the silkiness of her legs entwined in his. “You once said something to me. Those who were never in love, never were happy.”

  “Dr. Samuel Johnson. But I don’t know that I could ever have fallen in love with him. What made you think of that?”

  “I don’t know what Dr. Johnson knew about love, but he hit the nail on the head with that one. I’m very happy.”

  She kissed him. “So am I. Now get your knee out of my crotch before I wet on it. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Who said the Dutch weren’t romantic?”

  “Dr. Johnson?”

  Over breakfast he covertly watched his children. Or so he thought, till Maureen, who had eyes far sharper than any Aborigine’s, who would have seen Captain Cook’s ship when he was miles out at sea and aroused the tribe, said, “What’s the matter, Daddy? You’re looking at us as if you don’t know us.”

  He looked along the table at Lisa. “Where did you find these kids—at the Police Academy?” Then he said to Claire, “Have you seen Jason this week?”

  “Just the once. I—he’s avoiding me, I think. I can understand it. Everyone’s talking about the murder, they want to ask him about it.”

  He wondered how deep were her feelings for Jason. At fifteen he had been in love with three girls, each passion lasting a month; girls, he was sure, felt more deeply. “He’s upset and worried. I think it’d be an idea to leave him alone for a while.”

  “Have you got the murderer yet?” said Tom.

  “Not yet.”

  “Can I be there some time when you arrest a murderer?”

  “I’ll bring my camera,” said Maureen. “If you bought me a video camera for Christmas, that’d be even better. We could run it when the TV programmes aren’t worth watching.”

  “You’re raising a voyeur,” Malone told his child’s mother.

  “Voyeurs,” said the child, “are dirty old men who perv at naked people on nudist beaches.”

  “I knew that,” said Tom.

  “I give up,” said Malone, rising and then kissing each of the children and Lisa. “I’m going into Homicide, where all the fellers are angels compared to you lot.”

  Lisa followed him out of the house, waited while he raised the garage door. “What’s on your mind? Olive?”

  He nodded. “She’s making things worse and worse for herself every time I talk to her.”

  “If she did kill Will, she did the worst thing right at the beginning. Are you going to arrest her?”

  “Looks like it. It’ll depend what’s on my desk this morning.”

  She kissed him. “Don’t be too tough on her.”

  “Not even if she murdered her husband?”

  “I’m not thinking about her feelings. I’m thinking of Jason’s and Shelley’s.”

  He drove in through the peak-hour traffic, noticeably thinner than it used to be; there had been more bad unemployment news this morning. He had glanced at the headlines; they were as gloomy as the death notices in the back pages. The day was dry and cloudless, the sun brighter than a winter’s sun should be: spring was letting the voters know that it was early this year. The sunshine did nothing for him; he, too, was gloomy. But when he walked into his office the faces of Clements and Clarrie Binyan were as cheerful as lottery winners’. He took off his jacket, sat down and saw the reports on his desk.

  “I’ll go first,” said Binyan, putting a length of pipe in a plastic envelope on the desk. “That’s the silencer Ric Bassano sent over. I come in early, checked it against the bullet that killed Rockne. The markings match—one of the baffles must of been a millimetre out of alignment. I don’t think you’re gunna get a fingerprint off of it, it’s been handled too much. But I’ll go into court and swear it silenced the gun that killed Rockne.”

  “Thanks, Clarrie.”

  Binyan left to go back to Police Centre and Malone looked at Clements. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “It’s all there in those notes. I haven’t fed them into the computer yet, they’re John Kagal’s and my bits and pieces. Maroubra sent in that Telecom sheet. First, Olive made a booking with that travel agency in Coogee, but she never went near them to pay for it, they haven’t seen her in three weeks. DJ’s and the boutiques, likewise—she bought nothing from any of them, so she didn’t leave anything to be altered. So, as you said yesterday, she’s lying herself blind. Finally, take a look at the Telecom list of calls from her car phone. I’ve marked the three that should interest you.”

  Malone picked up the list. There were two 047 31 numbers, with the name Dunne scribbled beside them; and a 232 number, with Bodalle beside it. The first 047 31 call had been made last Thursday, two days before the murder; the second 047 31 call and the 232 call had been made yesterday. He looked across his desk at Clements. “It doesn’t look good for Olive, does it?”

  “I think we should pick up Kelpie first before we trouble her. Do I get a warrant to search his house out at Penrith for the gun?”

  “Go ahead. But why did she go out of the house to call Angela Bodalle, the friend of the family, as she keeps telling us?”

  “Maybe she’s already confessed to Bodalle what she did and she wanted to tell her the pressure’s on.”

  “From us or Kelpie or Mr. Jones? It doesn’t matter, anyway. Get the warrant, then go out and call on Kelpie. You’ll need back-up, just in case. Call Penrith and tell ’em you’d like a coupla men.”

  “You think Kelpie might start shooting?”

  “I don’t think so. Kelpie’s a mongrel, but he’s not a psycho. Until we get the gun, he’s still in the clear.”

  “You’re not coming?”

  Malone gestured at the files on his desk. “Everything’s coming to a climax at once. I’ve got to get the papers on the Lazarus and Paluzzi cases ready for the DPP. Bring Kelpie in and we’ll give him some coffee and biscuits.”

  “What about Olive?”

  “I think I might give her a call, tell her we’re bringing in a man for questioning. No names, just a feller we think might give us some information. It might stir her up a bit.”

  Clements left and Malone got down to the paperwork on his desk. The big room outside emptied till there were only a couple of detectives at their desks. There was a hush in the high-ceilinged room; the investigation of murder is not all sound and fury. The Hat Factory was a backwater
and at times it could have all the silence and tranquillity of a place where the currents were deep and did not cause waves; or so it appeared. Of course the currents did cause waves, but the effects were felt elsewhere: this morning, in places as far apart as Penrith and Coogee.

  At ten o’clock he rang the Rockne number. Jason answered. “Hello, Mr. Malone. No, Mum’s under the shower. The funeral’s today, remember?”

  “Of course.” He had forgotten; the days had slipped by. He hesitated, prompted for the moment by a reluctance to add to the burden of her day. But she had murdered the husband she was burying, or had had something to do with his killing, and compassion was something she did not deserve and he could not afford. “Tell her that we are bringing in a man for questioning, we think he can give us some information on your father’s death.”

  “Mr. Jones?”

  “No, Jay, not Mr. Jones. Another man. Just pass it on to your mother.”

  He hung up, then rang Ellsworth at Maroubra. “Are you fellers or someone from Randwick still with Mrs. Rockne?”

  “Around the clock,” said Ellsworth. “She had only one visitor last night, Mrs. Bodalle, the QC. She’s a family friend, I gather.”

  “Any more calls on the car phone?”

  “None. I’m going over to Coogee now, I’m joining my guys for the funeral, then I’ll have to come back here. We’ve got some break-and-enters we’ve got to look into. We pick ’em up and four outa five of ’em are kids out of work looking for spending money. My guys are earning more overtime with this recession than they ever did in good times.”

  “We’re bringing in Kelpie Dunne this morning for questioning. I’ll be in touch.”

  Kelpie Dunne came in an hour later, making waves, hobbling between crutches, swearing at the top of his voice, dressed in shirt and shorts and a sweater and with his right leg encased in plaster. He was led into the interview room and Malone followed Clements and Kagal in behind the aggressive, abusive suspect.

  “Quieten down, Kelpie. What happened to your leg? One of your mates try to kneecap you?”

  “Fucking funny! Look, Malone, what is all this shit?”

  The interview room had bare walls, a table and three chairs; it was not designed to make the interviewee comfortable. At one end of the table was a tape and video recorder; Clements pushed Dunne into a chair opposite it. The machine was a recent introduction, brought in to counteract charges against the police of “verballing,” the falsifying of written statements, a practice that older police had denied with their hands on their hearts and such looks of innocence that they had usually gone on sick leave a day or two later.