Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  “Bewdy,” said Malone, and couldn’t have wished for a better sidekick.

  Malone had only a faint memory of his first visit to the Springfellow house, but he couldn’t remember any security guards in those days. But there was one now: he came down the driveway to the big iron gates when Malone tried to open them and found them locked electronically. Malone introduced himself and Clements and the security guard switched on his walkie-talkie and spoke to someone in the house. Then he unlocked the gates.

  “Is this usual in Mosman?” said Clements.

  “I dunno,” said the guard, an overweight, middle-aged man who looked as if he had borrowed a smaller man’s uniform, “I come, I do me job and I go. That’s all I’m paid for.”

  “Just like us,” said Clements. He had a cop’s dislike of security guards; they were growing into another police force.

  “I thought you’d be in pink and grey,” said Malone, and the security guard just refrained from jerking his thumb at the mug copper.

  The two detectives walked up the driveway, past the rhododendrons, the banks of azaleas, the camellias, the Iiquidambars and the lawns that looked like green carpets that had been vacuumed rather than mowed. The house was a monument to Federation; one would not have been surprised to see a group of turn-of-the-century politicians, all beards and walrus moustaches, standing on the front steps. It had been built by Sir Archibald Springfellow, the grandfather of Walter, Edwin and Emma, and, true to then current ideas, had wide verandahs and narrow windows. The fierce Australian sun was to be avoided: sun worship, a later religion, was only for Aborigines and the odd health crank, neither of whom dared show his face in Mosman. At the back there was a magnificent view of the harbour, but one had to step outside the house to look at it in those days. Lady Myrtle Springfellow had never been known to take a long view; very little beyond the end of her patrician nose, usually held at a socially acute angle, had interested her. The house, like the family, suggested secrets to the occasional picnickers who came to the neighbouring bush reserve that ran down to the harbour cliffs.

  The housekeeper who opened the front door to Malone and Clements was of a social mind with Lady Myrtle, whom she had never met. She looked down her blunt, unpatrician nose at the two detectives as if they were door-to-door salesmen.

  “We’d like to see Lady Springfellow. We understand she is at home.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Police intuition.” He had rung the Springfellow head office and he guessed that Venetia knew they were coming.

  The housekeeper continued to look at them with suspicion, but before she could say anything further she was gently pushed aside by a good-looking grey-haired woman who might have problems with her weight but wouldn’t let them worry her.

  “Police? I’m Alice Magee, Venetia’s mother.” She was the sort of friendly woman who would always use Christian names, even if dealing with the Pope or non-Christians such as Khomeini. “Come in, come in.”

  Malone could only dimly recall the dimness of the Springfellow house on his last visit. All the shadows had now gone. Venetia had widened the windows, letting in the light. All the dark panelling had been removed and replaced by grey French wallpaper that had cost as much as the original brick walls. The heavy Victorian furniture had been sold or given away; in its place were elegant Regency pieces, some genuine, some reproductions. Only the paintings on the walls, the Boyds and the Tuckers with their fear-stricken creatures and their threatening shadows, seemed out of place. But then, as Emma Springfellow often said, Venetia had never believed in making anyone completely comfortable. Emma herself was uncomfortable for a different reason. She secretly thought the house had been improved by Venetia’s changes, but she would never say so. It made her uncomfortable to keep an opinion to herself. But she was not here in the house right now and Malone and Clements still had to come to know her.

  “My daughter’s on the phone,” said Alice Magee, leading them into a big bright sun-room that looked out on to the gardens and the harbour. There was only one picture on the wall here, a Streeton that was a painting of the scene immediately below them. “She’s always on the phone. Overseas. London or New York or Los Angeles, somewhere. I can’t get used to calling the rest of the world, just like that—” She snapped her fingers; several diamond rings were a miniature flash of lightning. “I still time myself when I’m calling Cobar—that’s where we come from originally . . . Would you like a drink? Beer, whisky, tea, coffee?”

  She would have made a great air hostess, Malone thought; he liked her at once. “No thanks, Mrs. Magee. How is your daughter taking the—news?”

  “The—? Oh, Walter’s remains. Dreadful, isn’t it? Lying up there in the Blue Mountains all those years . . . I’d like to be buried as soon as I’m gone, wouldn’t you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” said Malone and didn’t dare look at Clements who, trying to stifle a smile, looked as agonized as one of the men in a Tucker painting.

  “When are they going to let us bury him?”

  “It’ll probably be a couple of weeks before the coroner releases the—remains.” A skeleton wasn’t a body or a corpse; or was it? “Did you know Sir Walter well?”

  “Not really. I don’t think anyone knew him well. He was a bit stand-offish, you know what I mean? Not with my daughter, of course.” Her answers would always be prompt; there was no guile about Alice Magee. “He was a nice man, but.”

  Malone had sized her up now. Despite the diamond rings, the expensive dress and the immaculate hair-do, she was still one of life’s battlers. She still had the dried skin from the heat of the western plains, still had the Cobar dust in her voice; her daughter might be the richest woman in Australia, but Alice Magee would never forget the need to scratch for a penny. Under her painted fingernails was invisible dirt that could never be cleaned out. Her spirit was stouter than her figure, though the latter was catching up.

  Then Venetia, looking disarmingly soft in pink and grey, came out to the sun-room in good humour; she had just made another million or two. “Inspector Malone! Has my mother told you all you want to know?”

  “Give me another ten minutes,” said her mother. “I was just about to start with the year you were born.”

  The relationship between them was good, evident at once to the two outsiders. Rough-and-ready mother, smooth-as-cream (though it might turn sour occasionally) daughter: they were an odd team, Malone thought, and he wondered what the conservative, but nice, Walter Springfellow had thought of the combination.

  Malone decided to waste no time; Venetia looked as if she had already put a stop-watch on him. “We have to go right back to the beginning, Lady Springfellow. For the time being we are assuming your husband was murdered. But there are other possibilities—”

  “Suicide, you mean?”

  He nodded.

  She shook her head. “You didn’t know my husband. He would never do that.”

  “Righto, we’ll scratch that off the list.” But he wouldn’t: nothing was ever dismissed till something else was proved. “Blackmail—would someone have tried that on him?”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at.”

  “Someone might have been trying to blackmail him, he refused and they killed him.”

  “You’re making this sound as if it was all a personal matter. Aren’t you overlooking his ASIO job? Spies disappear all the time.”

  “Not spy chiefs. So ASIO tells us.”

  “Not unless they defect,” said Clements.

  Venetia gave him a look that should have increased his creases. “You just have no idea what my husband was like, do you? He was a patriot, the sort that’s out of fashion nowadays.”

  “Have ASIO ever been to question you?”

  Venetia shook her head again; Malone found himself liking the way her thick golden hair moved. “Never. Not since he first disappeared. They’ve just—ignored me.” She sounded as if the fact didn’t disturb her too much. But, Malone thought,
that could partly explain why the file on Walter Springfellow was so thin.

  “What about his relationship with you, Lady Springfellow?” He had looked directly at Venetia, but when he glanced at Alice Magee he saw the reaction he had hoped for. The plump face was frowning, the unsubtle mind remembering. “Do you recall something that might help us, Mrs. Magee?”

  But Alice Magee knew where her loyalties lay; the frown cleared, her face was as bland as the swimming-pool out in the garden. “No, I don’t remember anything. They were real love-birds.”

  On a table behind Venetia was a photo of her and Walter: she young and smiling, he cool and aloof: he was a love-eagle, if at all avian. “I’m sorry I have to continue this line, Lady Springfellow. But he had no romantic interest before you?”

  “You mean a jilted lover?” She laughed. “That’s mid-Victorian, Inspector.”

  “It isn’t,” said Clements. “It happens at least once a month, sometimes once a week.”

  “But those are the people we let in from overseas,” said Alice Magee. “Aussies don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  She had her xenophobia, though she wouldn’t have recognized it by that name. She was a cousin by prejudice to Malone’s own mother and father; the country was now made up of us and them, and there were too many of them.

  “Yes,” said Venetia. “My husband did go out with other women. After all, he was a very masculine man and his first wife had died ten years before he met me.”

  “What did she die of?”

  “She was killed in a shooting accident. She and my husband were on a safari in Kenya.”

  “An inquest was held, I suppose?”

  She gave him a sudden hard look, “I presume so. What are you getting at?”

  Malone held back a sigh. “Lady Springfellow, if we’re going to find out what happened to your husband, we’re going to have to get at a lot of things. Some of them may offend or even hurt you, but it’s nothing personal on our part. Sergeant Clements and I are just trying to do our job. Part of that is finding out as much as we can about the victim—that’s the way we police work. Just give us a little credit for knowing the best way to go about it.”

  “It’s not the best way for the victim’s widow, is it?” That was from the widow’s mother.

  “Go on,” said Venetia coldly.

  Tread carefully here, Malone. “Did your husband know much about firearms?”

  “Yes. He had a collection of guns, they’re still in his study. He used to go up to the Northern Territory every year, shooting crocodiles and buffalo. Until he married me, that is.”

  “Is the collection still intact? There was nothing missing after he disappeared?”

  Venetia hesitated only a split-second, but Malone picked it up. “There are one or two blank spaces. I don’t know when they went missing. I—I’m frightened of guns. I’ve often thought of selling the collection, but they were my husband’s . . .”

  “May we look?”

  Venetia looked at her watch. “This has gone on longer than I expected, Inspector. I’m due in the city in half an hour.”

  “This’ll only take a few minutes. If needs be, we’ll give you an escort into town. Sergeant Clements likes to use the siren.”

  “Any time.” Clements grinned at Alice Magee, who smiled back; but the smile seemed forced, she no longer looked cheerful and unafraid.

  Venetia led the way out of the sun-room, back across a wide hallway and into the study; Alice, worried-looking, brought up the rear. Clements was watching her now, no expression on his big beefy face except for an occasional chew at his lower lip, an old habit.

  The study had been stripped of its panelling; it was now a woman’s room, except for the incongruous collection of guns in the large glass-fronted cabinet standing against one wall. Incongruous only if the woman was not Annie Oakley or one of the more ruthless prime ministers of other lands.

  Malone looked at Clements, the gun expert. “A good lot?”

  Clements was examining the collection. “As good as I’ve seen. A Mannlicher, a Springfield, a Sako. Even a Purdy. And these hand-guns . . . Yeah, quite a collection.”

  There were two blank spaces in the array of guns, both of them amongst the hand-pieces. “Two missing,” said Malone. “How long have they been gone, Lady Springfellow?”

  “I couldn’t tell you. One of them—one of them has been missing for years.”

  “I can see that.” The felt lining behind the guns showed the faint outlines. “What d’you reckon they were, Russ?”

  “The smaller one could have been a Walther or something like it.”

  “Was that the one that’s been missing for years?” Malone looked at Venetia.

  “No. It was the other one.”

  “I’d guess,” said Clements, looking directly at Malone, “it was a Colt .45 or something as big.”

  “What does that mean?” said Venetia.

  “We think a Colt .45 or something like it was used to kill your husband.”

  IV

  “It would be an odd sort of justice if an ex-judge was killed with his own gun. Some crim would laugh his head off at that.”

  “That collection—” Clements shook his head. “Somehow you don’t expect a judge to keep an armoury. The only thing he didn’t have in that case was a machine-gun and a howitzer.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder if we’ll ever know who the real Sir Walter was.”

  They watched as Venetia went down the gravel driveway in the grey Bentley. She had declined Malone’s offer of an escort, though she had not been sure that he wasn’t joking. Her chauffeur would get her to the city on time; a whole forest had been chopped down to provide the paper for the tickets for speeding and illegal parking that he had accumulated. Venetia had her own traffic laws.

  “Hey!” Malone and Clements, about to go down the driveway, turned. Alice Magee stood at the top of the steps. “The other Springfellows are at home across the road, if you want to see them.”

  “Why do you suggest that, Mrs. Magee?”

  She waved an airy hand: diamond lightning flashed again. “Just trying to help my daughter. And you too, of course.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Magee,” said Malone, trying to sound truly grateful. “Tell me—did you know those guns were missing?”

  She hesitated, suddenly not so keen to be helpful. “Well . . . Yes. I dunno I ever thought much about the one that’s been missing for years. But yes, I knew about the other one.”

  “When did you notice it was gone?”

  “A week ago.”

  “Did you report it to the local police?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Stolen property?”

  She laughed, but nervously. “I didn’t think it was stolen. I just thought someone had borrowed it or it’d been sent away to be cleaned or something.”

  “Did you ask the housekeeper about it?”

  “Ye-es. She didn’t know anything about it. Then I told Venetia—she didn’t know anything about it, either.”

  “And none of you were worried about a gun being stolen from your house?”

  “Of course we were!” She sounded suddenly snappish; Malone imagined he heard her false teeth click. “But then we got the news about Walter . . .”

  “You said it went missing a week ago.”

  “Well, a week, three or four days ago—I dunno.” All at once she was flustered, the guileless mind caught up in an attempt at deceit. “We’re all knocked off our feet by the news . . .”

  Malone decided not to press it for the moment; let Alice Magee get her story straight and then knock it down in one blow, preferably in front of another witness, such as Venetia Springfellow. He had his own guile, born of experience.

  “Can we always find you here if we want you?”

  “Most of the time. I’m a bush girl at heart. I like to go down to my daughter’s property at Exeter. Keeps me outa mischief.” She had regained her bounce, or some of it. Malone waited for her to
wink, but she didn’t. “Good luck. I suppose you coppers need it.”

  “All the time,” said Clements.

  They went down the driveway, nodded to the surly security guard, waited for him to let them out of the big gates, then crossed the street to a slightly smaller house, also approached by a driveway. Sir Archibald’s son, the father of Walter, Edwin and Emma, had built this one in 1915, the year he had returned from Gallipoli minus half his right arm, and married the daughter of another prominent Mosman family. This house, too, had wide verandahs and narrow windows; its windows were still narrow, like the viewpoint of its present chatelaine, Ruth Springfellow, Edwin’s wife. Its garden was not as elaborate as the one the two detectives had just left, but it was just as ordered. Nothing grew wild in Mosman, not even weeds.

  The door was opened by Emma Springfellow. Malone introduced himself and Clements and she looked at him as if puzzled they should be on the doorstep. “Yes?”

  “We’d like to talk to you and Mr. and Mrs. Springfellow, if they’re at home. It’s about your brother Walter.”

  He had forgotten that he had ever met her. All he saw now was a dark-haired woman, with a single broad streak of grey along one temple, who might once have been on the way to being beautiful but had decided, of her own free will, against it. He did not see the inner woman. She was secretive, without even the phlebotomy of gossip. She had chosen loneliness and now couldn’t find her way out of it.

  “Who is it, Emma?” Edwin Springfellow came into the hall behind his sister; behind him was his wife. The three of them stood stockstill, like statues waiting to be moved around in the museum that was their home. “Police? Do come in, please.”

  The house was indeed a museum; everything in it seemed older than its occupants. It was all quality and in its day had probably been expensive; it had not been neglected and the timber of the tables and chairs shone with years of polishing. If there was a television set, that icon of today, in the house it was not in evidence. People, like pets, sometimes are owned by their homes and take on their appearance. The Springfellows were all quality and polish but suggested the past.