by Jon Cleary
“Why there?”
“At eight o’clock at night he thinks that’s the last place we’ll see any reporters hanging about. Are they still camped outside our gates?”
“No.” The Archbishop, for whom publicity had once been like another state of grace, was tired, even afraid, of it now. “They’ve given up. They’ll be back as soon as something else starts up. What’s Jonathan got on me this time?”
“He didn’t say.” Fingal went out to the entrance hall, put on his topcoat and hat, picked up the silver walking-stick. He looked over his shoulder as Brigid came down the stairs. “Kerry and I are going out for a while. Jonathan wants to see us at the office.”
“You businessmen—why can’t you keep business hours?”
“This is different sort of business.” He paused as he opened the front door. “All of a sudden I feel tired.”
“Stay home,” said Brigid gently.
“No, not that sort of tired. Just as if . . .” But he couldn’t explain the weariness that had abruptly overtaken him. “Come on, Kerry. Wait dinner for us, Bridie. We’ll have it together.”
Bridie. Oh Dad, why did you leave it so late?
In the car going into the city Kerry said, “Why didn’t you tell Jonathan to go to hell? You’re bone-tired . . .”
Fingal looked out at the drizzling rain. The roadway was a black mirror patterned with moving white, amber and red lights; he was dazzled by it and had to shut his eyes. Small things were beginning to defeat him; this was the way healthy old men died, bit by bit. Was there any point to anything any more? Maybe he should have told Jonathan Tewsday to go to hell. But he had not been able to resist the opportunity to give the screw one last turn. He had no fear that Tewsday could do any more damage to himself or Kerry; the man was beaten. Still . . .
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said “We don’t know what the sonofabitch might do.”
“It doesn’t matter any more. I’m finished with Paredes and Domecq.”
“There are others. You can’t give up now!” He had to whip up the protest, though with a tired hand.
“I’ll wait and see. I’m still young—they don’t elect young popes any more. I still have to make cardinal.” But he had begun to lose hope; or ambition. Someone (Galen?) had once said that the temperaments of the body led the faculties of the soul. If so, his body was winning out, leading him to resignation. He had been running towards Rome for years and now he was suddenly as tired as his father. He had been caught up in the greatest sin of all, murder, and he could not give himself absolution. Especially since one of the victims had been his own sister’s child.
“Don’t give up,” Fingal insisted, but he knew in his heart that it really didn’t matter any more. He would not live long enough to see the dream.
The Phantom V pulled into the basement garage of Ballyduff House, gliding in like a royal barge. There were half a dozen other cars in the garage, plus two vans; the contract cleaners were at work. As the chauffeur opened the door for Fingal to get out, the old man paused and looked around the garage.
“I can’t see Jonathan’s car.”
“It would be like him to keep us waiting.” The Archbishop decided this was no time for Christian charity. He began to look forward to being a sonofabitch, though he was not sure how one went about it. Then he reasoned that all he had to do was mimic Jonathan Tewsday. Up till now he had not realized how much he disliked the man. He might even come to hate him, as his father did.
They rode up in the lift to the sixty-ninth floor. As they got out, a thin balding man in white overalls was waiting to go down. He was carrying a heavy vacuum cleaner, the long cord rolled in loops over his shoulder.
“You finished on this floor?” said Fingal.
“Not quite. You’re Mr. Hourigan, right?” There was no touching the forelock, even if he’d had one; he didn’t work for this big shot, he worked for his own boss. “There’s a guy waiting in your office. He told me to come back later. I like to keep me routine, you know what I mean? Start at the top and work down.”
“You’ll never get anywhere that way,” said Fingal.
He walked on down the wide corridor, unbuttoning his topcoat but not taking it off; the meeting with Tewsday would be short. Kerry followed him, wondering what lay ahead. He was tired of scenes, he who had dreamed of a coronation.
Fingal opened the door into his secretary’s office, crossed the room unhurriedly and opened the door into his own office.
“Tewsday?”
The man at the big window turned, Sydney brightly lit at his back. “Sir Jonathan couldn’t make it, Mr. Hourigan.” Then he saw Kerry standing in the doorway behind his father. “Ah shit!”
Fingal stepped into the room and, after a moment’s hesitation, Kerry followed him. “Gawler? What the hell are you doing in my office?”
Gawler moved quickly and lightly away from the window; before the Hourigans could move, he was between them and the door. He closed the door, took out a long-bladed knife.
“Two for the price of one. It wasn’t in the contract, but I guess you’re out of luck, Your Grace.” It was a black joke, but he didn’t smile.
“Why?” Kerry was shocked, but, to his own surprise, he was not frightened.
“I don’t even know,” said Gawler. “With me, I got problems and I need the money. It’s an old story—for me, anyway. Ever since I was a kid in Chicago.” He wasn’t about to reminisce. He had come prepared for one killing, now he had to adjust himself to two.
“You’re from Chicago?” Fingal was the coolest of the three of them. Or maybe just the most tired. After all these years he recognized fate when it was in the same room with him.
“Yeah, Chicago originally. What’s that got to do with it?”
Fingal nodded. “I might have guessed. Now and then.”
“What?” But puzzlement wasn’t going to stop Gawler. He stepped towards Fingal, the knife blade sweeping upwards.
VII
“Where’s Paredes now?” said Malone.
“He’s in the Crest Hotel up at the Cross,” said Clements. “Andy Graham’s in the lobby and he’s got someone watching out the back. It looks as if Paredes isn’t going to do a bunk, not yet.”
“He’s a cool bastard. I thought he’d be on the first plane out of Sydney as soon as we charged Domecq. I was hoping he’d try it. Then we could have picked him up on suspicion.”
“We still could.”
Malone shook his head. “We had no luck with Tewsday. He’s free till we pick up Gawler.”
“Are the two murders connected?”
“I still don’t know. The bloke in the middle of it all is the Archbishop and it seems he’s the only innocent one, excepting for getting all these buggers together.”
“Him or his old man,” said Clements. “There’s someone else we never really questioned. Brigid Hourigan.”
Malone pondered the suggestion; then he looked in his notebook for a number. He rang the house at Stokes Point and the phone was picked up almost immediately. “Pronto? Is that you, signorina?”
“No, it’s Inspector Malone. Where is Signorina Hourigan?”
“She is at her father’s house—”
Malone hung up in Michele’s ear, quickly dialled the Vaucluse house before the houseman could call his mistress and warn her that the police wanted to speak to her again. Mrs. Kelly, another keeper of the flame, answered this time. “Miss Brigid? Yes, she’s here. Who’s calling? Oh, it’s you.” Malone felt like the Devil himself. “You don’t give a soul any peace, do you? I’ll get her.”
Brigid Hourigan came to the phone. “No, Inspector, I really don’t have anything further to say. Perhaps when you’ve caught whoever murdered my daughter—”
“We’re still trying to do that, Miss Hourigan. That’s why I want to ask you some questions. About Sir Jonathan Tewsday, for a start—”
“You should ask my father about him, not me.”
“We’ll do that, too. Is your fa
ther at home now?”
“No.”
“Where is he?”
“Do I have to answer that? He’s not under house arrest or anything—”
“Where is he?
“He—he’s gone into his office with my brother. Sir Jonathan called him, asked him to meet him there.”
“How long ago did they leave?”
“Not more than ten minutes—”
Malone hung up, was on his feet, dragging on his jacket. “Ballyduff House, as fast as we can make it!”
“What’s going on?” Clements was running after him down the aisle between the desks.
“I don’t know! But I bet we’re going to find the answer to everything in the next ten minutes!”
VIII
Fingal died instantly as the knife went in under his ribs and upwards. It was not an easy stab for Gawler; he had to drive in through the thickness of the topcoat. Fingal said something that sounded like Now and Then, Amen, but it was indistinct in what also sounded like a laugh, though there was no mirth in his face or the wide blue eyes. He stepped away from Gawler and, the fugitive from Chicago winters of long ago, fell into the coldest, darkest winter of all.
Gawler withdrew the knife and spun round as Kerry, a huge black figure of terrible rage, came at him with a roar. He swung with the knife, but Kerry took it on his left arm. He fell on Gawler, crashing him to the floor. The killer went down, but he had no hope under the bulk on top of him. The Archbishop was astride him, smashing at his face with a bloodied fist, when the door burst open and Malone and Clements came in. It took their combined strength to drag him off the unconscious Gawler.
“That’s enough, Your Grace,” said Malone. “That’s the last of it.”
13
I
“WE’LL GIVE him a State funeral,” Premier Hans Vanderberg told his Cabinet colleagues.
“Y-y-you c-c-can’t do th-that!” The Minister for Culture had a shaky voice and an even shakier Department.
“All the unions will go out on strike,” said the Minister for Industrial Relations, an ex-union man. “A State funeral for a boss! You must be joking.”
“He gave the Party over a million dollars at one time or another,” said the Treasurer.
“H-he g-g-gave the other side tw-twice as m-much,” said the Minister for Culture.
“You’d like a State funeral when you go, wouldn’t you?” said the Premier.
“I-I wasn’t th-thinking of g-g-going,” said the Minister for Culture, but felt the knife already in his back.
So Fingal Hourigan had a State funeral. The country’s richest man could not be buried without a salute in a country where wealth, till something better was recognized, was the main yardstick. Fingal, a clear-eyed cynic, would have understood. The obituaries put his fortune at between two and four billion dollars, but they were only guessing. Obituaries are never meant to be truly accurate: the laws of libel are too strict, something for which the heirs are always watching. Nobody would ever know the full truth about Fingal Hourigan. Which was the one thing he had in common with the rest of us.
Domecq, Gawler and Jonathan Tewsday were all sentenced to life imprisonment; the judges marked them all eligible for parole at the turn of the century, an appropriate time to start all over again. Paredes, against whom no charges were laid in New South Wales, went back to Miami, where the FBI picked him up at once; the law, with that talent it has for eventually finding the right charge, sent him to Federal prison for ten years for tax evasion, a crime that, as a Latin American, he had always thought was a joke. Fiona Tewsday sold up the house in Pymble, the property at Bowral, the sixty-foot cruiser and took her three daughters, Sally Gawler and the Rolls-Royce back to New Zealand, where the All Blacks turned out and did a haka for her on Eden Park. She was forgiven eventually for marrying an Australian.
Archbishop Hourigan went back to Rome, where he is still head of the Department for the Defence Against Subversive Religions. On his return he had a private audience of the Pope and came out looking like an elderly choirboy, as Monsignor Lindwall wrote to Malone. “We forgive our sinners, Scobie. If they didn’t, what church, of any persuasion, would last even a decade, let alone two thousand years?”
Brigid Hourigan sent her Italian houseman back to Italy. Then, unexpectedly revealing to the world that she was more her father’s daughter than it had suspected, she became nonexecutive chairwoman of Ballyduff Holdings. Kerry, at last succumbing, after a great deal of soul-searching, to vows of poverty (well, almost; he still lived in the palazzo apartment), turned over the bulk of his inherited trust to Brigid. She thus became Australia’s richest person and the land was loud with feminist hallelujahs. She was, however, still poor in spirit, though she hid it well. Part of her had died with Teresa, the young nun who might have taught them all true love.
One night at the end of winter Malone was sitting in the living-room in the house in Randwick. It had been a dull day at Homicide, just as he liked it; nobody dead, no attempts at murder. The front door was open, letting in the cold night air, but he hadn’t the heart to yell at the children to come in and close it. He could hear them:
“Look at the stars!” said Tom. “Tens of „em!”
“Millions!” said Maureen. “There are millions of „em!”
“I can’t count that much,” said Tom. “Tens is good enough for me.”
On television an old, old man was being interviewed on The 7.30 Report. It was his hundredth birthday, but he looked much older, his face blotched and pinched and wrinkled by centuries. Malone turned up the sound:
“And what do you think is the secret of your great age?”
“No sex.”
“You mean you have been celibate all your life?”
“No, I mean I ain’t (beeped) a woman since I was ninety!” The wrinkled old face broke into a wicked grin, then disintegrated as the toothless old mouth opened up and a happy, happy cackle came up out of a hundred years’ of memories. Malone switched off the sound and fell back laughing. Lisa came in from the kitchen. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing! Nothing.” He reached for her, pulled her down on to the couch beside him as the children came in from the front veranda, slamming the door behind them. “Everything’s normal!”
“What’s normal?” said Tom.
“We are,” said Claire, and her father looked at her gratefully. That was something she had worked out for herself, Choice hadn’t had to tell her.
Then the phone rang. Lisa got up, went out to the hallway and answered it. Then she put her head in the doorway, sighed. “It’s Russ Clements. Normal?”
THE END
FREE PREVIEW OF THE NEXT SCOBIE MALONE MYSTERY:
BABYLON SOUTH
Prologue
ON MONDAY March 28, 1966, Sir Walter Springfellow, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, left his home in Mosman in the city of Sydney to return to Melbourne and the then headquarters of ASIO. An ex-Justice of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, he had been Director-General of Security for only a year. It was his habit to fly up from Melbourne each Friday evening, spend the weekend with his wife and return to Melbourne on the 8 a.m. Monday flight of TAA. A Commonwealth car picked him up at his home this Monday morning, as it usually did, and delivered him to Kingsford Smith Airport at Mascot at 7.45. He got out of the car, said his usual courteous thank you to the driver, walked into the terminal and was never heard of again.
It had been a stormy weekend, though not, according to his wife, in the Springfellow home. A huge storm had blown up along the New South Wales coast and there had been considerable damage north of Sydney; the sea had been such that big swells had rolled into Sydney Harbour and for the first time surfies had ridden their boards down Middle Harbour. The storm, however, had not got beyond the Blue Mountains fifty miles west of the city and out on the plains there were cloudless skies and one of the worst droughts in twenty years. Down in Melbourne there had been an ugly demonstration against
the sending of draftees to Vietnam and the Prime Minister, Harold Holt, had suffered a barrage of eggs and tomatoes, something a little softer than the draftees would have to face. The report on the demonstration and photographs of the egg and tomato bombardiers were waiting on the Director-General’s desk for him. He would have smiled at such criminal acts, but only to himself.
He was fifty years old, handsome, came of a wealthy established family and had made a considerable reputation as a Queen’s Counsel before being appointed a judge five years before. His appointment as Director-General had been welcomed by both major political parties, but the public were not invited to comment: national security was thought, in those days, too esoteric for public intelligence to comprehend. Sir Walter, who had been knighted just before his appointment, was considered by his own organization to have no enemies except, of course, the hundreds of criminals he had prosecuted or sentenced and the countless foreigners, traitors and activists his organization was seeking.
He had been married for two years to a beautiful wife, twenty-five years his junior, and it seemed that he lived in the best of all possible worlds. Though, naturally, he did not boast of that during his five days a week in Melbourne, a city which thought it was the best of all possible worlds.
“We were perfectly happy,” said Lady Springfellow. “He must have been kidnapped or something. I just can’t believe what’s happened. When he took this job he warned me there might sometimes be trouble. But this . . . !”
The Commonwealth Police, who were in charge of airport security, had called in the New South Wales Police after consultation with ASIO. Scobie Malone was then a 21-year-old constable on temporary duty with the Missing Persons Bureau. Sergeant Harry Danforth, who couldn’t trace a missing bull in a cattle chute, was in charge of the Bureau, but his men found that no handicap; a lazy man, he left them to their instinctive guesses and hunches. Missing persons usually leave fewer clues than murderers and the police assigned to trace them more often than not have to rely on guesswork. There were dozens of hunches as to the reason for the disappearance of Sir Walter Springfellow, but none of them led anywhere.