Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  Maureen came into the living-room, “In this house a kid’s work is never done. None of my friends have to do the washing-up.”

  “Lucky them,” said Lisa. “Sunday you can do the washing and ironing. That will give me Monday free.”

  Malone grinned, loving the dry banter that went on in his family. He wondered what sort of banter went on among the silvertail Springfellows. Though perhaps tonight there would be nothing like that, not with the bones of a long-dead husband and father lying between them.

  2

  I

  “EXPLAIN TO me what’s happening,” said Malone. “You’re the stock market expert.”

  Next morning they were driving across the Harbour Bridge towards Kirribilli. Malone had called ASIO and they, reluctantly, it seemed to him, had invited him over. Intelligence organizations are always suspicious of police forces, who never seem to give mind to the bigger issues. Malone had read Gorky Park and knew how Inspector Arkady Renko had felt. But ASIO was no KGB: it could not afford to be on its shoe-string budget. Pinchpenny defence against any enemy, criminal or foreign, was a tenet of faith with all Australian governments.

  “Well,” said Clements, who up till recently had been an expert only on horses, jockeys, trainers and crims, “our Lady Springfellow owns her own company, Cobar Corporation—it’s a small family company, hers and her daughter’s. But now she’s trying to buy out the Springfellow family interests in the holding corporation which owns the main holdings in the merchant bank and the stockbroking firm. The stockbrokers, they’re the oldest brokers in Australia, own 49 per cent of the bank—the rest is owned by the public. She herself, or anyway Cobar, owns 18 per cent of the stockbrokers—she bought that when they went public a coupla years ago. The rest is owned 15 per cent by the Springfellow family, Sir Walter’s brother and sister, and the rest by institutions and the public.”

  Malone shook his head in wonder. “Does Corporate Affairs know about you? They might offer you a job.”

  “When you’ve tried to keep track of the form of horses and jockeys, the stock exchange is kids’ stuff. You wanna know more about Lady Springfellow? Well, she applied to inherit her husband’s estate three years after he disappeared. Her sister-in-law Emma tried to fight it but got nowhere. The irony of it was that she got her husband’s old law firm to prepare the affidavits.”

  “You’ve done your homework,” Malone said appreciatively. He was no longer surprised at the acumen and thoroughness of his partner, whom so many, at first acquaintance, took for an amiable oaf.

  “This one interests me. I like to see what happens when money’s involved. It’s the punter in me . . . When she inherited the estate, she just took off. She used that as a springboard—no pun—” he gave his slow grin “—to start buying everything else she now owns. The radio stations, the country and suburban newspapers, part of a diamond mine, all of a gold mine. And now she owns the Channel 15 network.”

  “What about the bank?”

  “Springfellow and Co. started that six years ago—they were one of the few who didn’t go overseas for a partner. It’s done okay, but not as well as it might. A London bank and a New York one have been eyeing it. The daughter claims she’s moving in to make sure it remains an Australian bank. A 21-year-old banker and a girl at that.” A true punter, he was a misogynist: he rarely backed mares.

  “What do you reckon?”

  “I reckon it’s just greed, but I’m old-fashioned. Greed is now an acceptable thing. I’m falling for it myself.”

  “So Venetia gained a whole lot when her old man disappeared?”

  “I guess so. All I’m telling you is gossip and what I’ve read in the Financial Review.”

  “The what? Have you given up on Best Bets? Have you sold all your shares?”

  “I’ve put „em on the market today. I’m ashamed of how much I’m gunna make. When I put the cheque in the bank, the tellers are gunna start ringing Evan Whitton at the Herald.” Whitton was a journalist who could turn over a spadeful of corruption with a VDU key.

  They turned off the Bridge approach and circled round on to the end of the tiny Kirribilli peninsula. This was an area of tall apartment buildings bum-to-cheek with squat old houses, some middle-class grand, some just workmen’s stone cottages. The population was a mix of incomes and ages, with no sleaze and mostly respectability. It also harboured the Sydney residences of the Prime Minister and the Governor-General, side by side, though the G-G’s was the larger and more imposing, as if to remind the politician next door that its occupant was not dependent on the whim of the voters.

  ASIO lived in a converted mansion on the waterfront: one had to look through barred windows, but the KGB would have given away half its secrets for such a vista. Malone and Clements were shown into the office of the chief executive, a room with a view that must have driven the Director-General, now headquartered in Canberra, subversive with envy.

  Guy Fortague, the Sydney Regional-Director, was big, rugged and all smiles as if making an all-out effort to prove that spy chiefs were not really spooky. There’s nothing to be frightened of, his smile assured them; a thought that had not occurred to either Malone or Clements. But he was certainly making their reception easier than they had expected.

  “We were surprised when you mentioned murder to us.” But Malone suspected he was not the sort of man to be surprised by anything; if he were, he would not be in this job. “We did think of it originally, of course.”

  “Why did you change your minds?” said Malone.

  “Well, we didn’t exactly change our minds.” Fortague retreated a little; he was no longer smiling. “But we had no evidence, just suspicions.”

  Malone thought that one of the bases for counter-espionage would have been suspicion; but he didn’t say so. “How was security in those days? I mean national security.”

  Fortague shrugged. “We were busy—I’d just joined the organization. The anti-Vietnam business was just beginning to warm up. But we never expected murder or terrorism or anything like that, not from those here in Australia. Their violence never seemed to extend beyond demonstrations on campus and in the streets.”

  “What about outsiders? Foreign agents?”

  Fortague smiled. “Foreign agents don’t kill the opposition’s boss—it’s one of the unwritten rules in our game. Just like in yours. How many police commissioners have been murdered by a criminal, a professional one?”

  Malone nodded, agreeing with the etiquette. “Our file on him is missing. Has been for twenty-odd years.”

  “Really?” Fortague’s tone implied that he wasn’t surprised; anything might go missing in the NSW Police Force.

  Malone nodded at the thin file on the desk in front of Fortague. “Is that your file on him? It’s pretty slim, isn’t it?”

  All that Fortague said was, “I’m afraid I can’t show it to you.”

  Behind that smile, Malone thought, there’s only just so much co-operation. They don’t want any coppers on their turf. “Well, maybe you can tell me one or two things that might be in it?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Fortague and smiled again.

  Malone hesitated, wondering where to go next. He decided to lay his cards on the table, a hand that was almost blank. “Righto, I’ll tell you what we’ve found. A skeleton. No weapon. No shoes, which might have been the one item of clothing that would have survived the weather. All that was left, the only things to identify the body, were the signet ring and the briefcase. But it was empty.”

  Fortague tapped his file without opening it. “I’ll add those details later.”

  “Righto, now the 64,000-dollar question—what was in the briefcase?”

  Fortague took his time, the smile now gone from his big rugged face. He looked faintly familiar and Malone suddenly remembered who he was, the odd name striking a bell. He had been one of the young university recruits who had sat in on this case at its beginning. He was now an old hand at intelligence, infected by the profession’s endemic sus
picion of outsiders, especially other investigators.

  At last he said, “I can’t tell you the specifics of what was in the briefcase—that’s classified. We know what he took home with him the previous Friday. It was all labelled Top Secret.”

  “He took stuff like that home with him?”

  “He was an independent-minded man.” Meaning: I would never do such a thing myself. “But I don’t mean to imply he was careless—nothing like that at all. He had his own way of working.”

  “What sort of man was he?”

  “Brilliant. A bit hard to get to know, but brilliant. He spoke French and German fluently and when he came to us started learning Chinese and Indonesian.”

  “What were his relations with the people he worked with in Melbourne?”

  Fortague hesitated a moment, “I’ll tell you something off the record. He was often impatient with the ex-military types who were then running our organization.”

  Malone smiled, trying to make himself an ally. “Oh, I remember them. You probably don’t remember, but you and I met here in this office twenty-one years ago. We were both rookies.”

  Fortague suddenly smiled again. “Of course! Christ—and we’ve both survived!” He looked at Clements. “Are you one of the old hands, too, Sergeant?”

  Clements nodded. “I thought the scars showed.”

  All at once the atmosphere had changed. Fortague looked at his watch, then out of the window at a submarine, sinister as a black shark, gliding by from the base round the point. “The sun’s well over the yard-arm on that sub. What’s your choice?”

  “I think you’d better make it a beer,” said Malone. “We don’t want to be picked up by the booze bus.”

  “I’ve had that happen to me twice,” said Clements, “It’s been bloody embarrassing for us both, them and me.”

  Fortague went to a cupboard and opened it, exposing a small fridge and two shelves of bottles and glasses. He poured a Scotch and two beers and came back with the drinks on a tray. They toasted each other’s health, then he sat down behind his desk again. He was all at once relaxed, but he had once more stopped smiling, “If Springfellow was murdered and the murderer took the papers that were in the briefcase . . . Why did he leave the briefcase?”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Clements, “It’s his own, not government issue. His initials are on it. It’s an expensive one.”

  “That may have been the reason,” said Malone. “My initials are S.M. If I’d stolen a briefcase with the initials W.S. on it, I wouldn’t carry it around with me.”

  Fortague nodded. “Feasible. But what about his wallet?”

  “We’re assuming the murderer took that. But what if the body was found by someone who didn’t want to get in touch with us? There are a lot of elements out there who have no time for the police.” Including the cast and crew of Sydney Beat, “I gather Springfellow was a pretty dandy dresser. His suits would have been pretty damn expensive—or they would have been by my standards.” He dressed off the rack at Fletcher Jones; he was lucky that his clothes fitted him, because it was the price that had to fit him first. He would never make a tailor rich. “Someone could have stolen the clothes and the shoes.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone stripping a dead man and then leaving him to rot in the bush.”

  Malone sipped his beer. “There are more animals out there than there are in the zoo. We come across at least one a week. Let’s forget about murder for a moment. Let’s say he committed suicide. So whoever took the papers and the wallet and maybe his clothes, he also took the gun.”

  “So that brings us back to taws,” said Clements. “Why would he commit suicide?”

  He and Malone looked at Fortague, but the ASIO man shook his head. “We asked ourselves that years ago. The answer was, he wouldn’t have done it. He wasn’t the type.”

  Malone said, “What was the domestic situation?”

  Fortague hesitated, took a sip of his own drink. He hated scandal, though sometimes his profession had to use it as a weapon. “We had no evidence that anything was wrong between him and his wife. But . . .”

  Malone and Clements waited with that patience learned from experience.

  “But Lady Springfellow didn’t keep the home fires burning while he was away on business. I don’t know whether you know, but she has the reputation of being something of a man-eater. That’s not a late development. She was always like that.”

  The two policemen were neither shocked nor impressed. They knew, with male certainty, that women were no more moral than men, just smarter in that fewer of them were caught. “Why did a sober, pillar-of-the-Establishment man like him marry someone like her?” said Clements.

  Malone knew the answer. Adam hadn’t followed Eve out of the Garden of Eden because God had told him to go. Forget the apple: there’s no temptation like a sinful woman.

  “Search me,” said Fortague and looked like a man who had gathered no intelligence at all about love or lust or whatever one called it.

  “I think we’ll go and see Lady Springfellow,” said Malone.

  “I suppose you have to follow it through?”

  “You don’t want to know what happened to your Director-General?”

  “Of course. But you know what it’s like in our game—the less publicity . . .”

  “That’s why you won’t show us what’s in that file?”

  “It’s not my decision. That came from Canberra.”

  “From Cabinet or ASIO headquarters?”

  “Ah,” said Fortague and this time the smile was forced. “That’s classified, I’m afraid.”

  II

  Chilla Dural sat alone in his room in the rooming-house in the side-street off William Street. He had come back to King’s Cross because that had been his departure point when he had begun the journey to the twenty-three years in Parramatta Gaol. It had not been a matter of coming home but of coming back to something recognizable, a landmark from which he could plan the direction of the rest of his life. In the old days he had been able to afford a two-bedroomed flat up in Macleay Street; now, at what he could afford to pay, the estate agent had told him, he was lucky to get this room in this seedy side-street. Inflation, amongst other things, was going to blur what had once been so familiar.

  He sat on the single bed, his opened suitcase beside him. It was not a large case and in it was everything he owned in the world except his bank balance and he had no idea what that was. He took out the framed photograph of his wife and two children, the woman and the two small girls as faded in his memory as they were in the frame. It had been taken his first year in prison, when Patti had still been writing to him; the girls, Arlene and Ava, had been—what? Five and six? Patti, Arlene and Ava: it had been like going home (when he had gone home at all) to a movie (though he had called them fillums in those days), a cheap movie in which he had never been the hero.

  He put the photo on the varnished whitewood chest of drawers and stared at it. He had been a real bastard in those days, an absolute shit. Patti had told him so, though she had never used four-letter words. No wonder she had finally left him to rot in prison and had gone to Western Australia. “I’m going to WA, Charlie, to try and start anew life for myself and the girls. I hope that in time the girls will forget you and I hope I do, too . . .”

  He had gone berserk when he had got the letter and had bashed up a screw. He had tried telling the prison superintendent that he had gone out of his mind at the thought of losing his children; but the plea hadn’t washed. The superintendent had known him as well as he knew himself. He cared for no one but himself and his anger had come from nothing more than the fact that, at long last, Patti had put something over on him.

  Five years later she had written to him, giving no address, that she had met another man (“a good man, Charlie, he loves the girls like they were his own) and she was filing for divorce (“for the girls’ sake, Charlie, don’t fight the divorce. For once in your life, think of them”). He hadn’t fought it; by then,
Patti was no more than a sexual memory. The girls were even dimmer in his mind, small fearful shades who had never rushed into his arms as kids did in fillums. The girls would be grown up now, probably married with kids of their own, kids who would never be told that their missing grandpa had once been the notorious Chilla Dural, stand-over man, bash artist and general thug for the biggest crim in Sydney.

  He had gone to prison because of Heinie Odets. A smalltime operator had been trying to muscle in on Odets’s drug territory; he had been warned but had ignored the warning. Dural had been given the job of eliminating the stupid bastard and had done it with his usual finesse: a blow to the head with an iron bar and then the body dumped in the harbour. Unfortunately, the murder had been witnessed by an honest off-duty cop, a species Chilla Dural hadn’t believed then existed in Sydney.

  Odets had hired the best criminal barrister in the State, but it had all been to no avail. Nothing had gone right; they had even copped the most bloody-minded judge on the Bench. Mr. Justice Springfellow had poured shit all over him, though in educated words, and then sentenced him to life. Odets had promised to look after him when he finally got out, but Heinie had never been a sentimental man. It had not taken Chilla Dural long to wake up to the fact that, once inside, he was forgotten.

  He had been inside seven years when he had killed another prisoner. Dural, by then, had been king of his section of the yard; the newcomer had had ambitions to be the same. He had made the mistake of challenging Dural and war had been declared. It had been a fair fight: each had had a knife and each waited till he thought the other’s back was turned. Dural had got another seven years, having the charge reduced to manslaughter, and his parole had been put back indefinitely. Heinie Odets had sent him a card that Christmas, hoping he was well, and that was all.

  Odets was dead now. He had been buried last year in holy ground and several politicians and retired police officers from the old days had turned up at the funeral. Half of Sydney’s criminal elements had been there, showing only the backs of their heads to the media cameramen. An elderly priest, who knew how to play to his congregation, had found qualities that nobody, least of all Heinie, had ever suspected in Heinie Odets. The congregation had sat stunned at the revelation that someone, especially a priest, could do a better con job than themselves. All this had been told to Chilla Dural by someone there that day who, a month after the funeral, had arrived at Parramatta to do a seven-year stretch for being, in his honest opinion, no more dishonest than the priest. Sin, he told Chilla, was a fucking class thing.