Babylon South

by Jon Cleary

  “I was working for the Age in those days. I was chief political hack.” Montgomery had a gentle sardonic way of putting himself down; he was the general commanding on this floor, but he would never write self-extolling memoirs.

  “What year are we talking about? The year Walter Springfellow disappeared? That was 1966.”

  Malone was impressed that the newspaperman hadn’t paused in remembering the date. “March 28, 1966. That same weekend a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy dropped out of sight. A cove named Alexis Uritzsky.”

  Montgomery frowned, chewed on his pipe. The flat drawl and the pipe constantly in his mouth made him difficult to understand; Malone wondered how foreigners ever carried on a conversation with him. “Yeah, I remember that. Not very clearly—I had no facts to go on. A feller in External Affairs tipped me off that a Russian just wasn’t around any more—I think it was about a week or so after Springfellow disappeared. I tried to get something out of the Russians, but they were worse then than they are now—they hadn’t coined the word glasnost back then. There was a rumour that Uritzsky—that his name?—was a KGB man, but I was never able to check that—you never can. He was a bit of a party-goer, even in those days—he liked the cocktail circuit. I can’t remember him too well—he was young and he liked women. I did a piece on his disappearance, but the story was spiked. I learned later that ASIO had offered some reasons why it shouldn’t run—I didn’t learn what the reasons were. Just after that I came up to Sydney to join the Herald and I never followed it up. There was a lot of funny stuff went on about then. The Springfellow thing was allowed to die as if Springfellow himself was no more than some wino who’d disappeared from Belmore Park.”

  “You said Uritzsky liked women. Did he have any particular girlfriend?”

  “I couldn’t say, Scobie. I never cultivated him—he only became interesting after he disappeared. And then only for a week or two.”

  “Did you connect him with Springfellow?”

  “I suppose I thought about it—that was probably the reason I wrote the story. But I got no encouragement, so I didn’t pursue it. The Age in those days wasn’t interested in investigative journalism. Muck-raking, if you like.”

  The two detectives stood up. “I’m all for muck-raking, Jack, so long as you don’t run the rake through us cops.”

  Montgomery took the pipe out of his mouth. “Scobie, you’re safe. Just do me a favour. If you crack this case, or cases, let me know. I’d love to show these hot-shot kids who work for me that some old coves still know a good story when they see it. Some of them think editor-in-chief is a euphemism for pensioner-in-chief.”

  When they got outside the Herald building, Clements said, “Where next? ASIO?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  They drove over to Kirribilli through a brilliant day, one that invited an escape to the beach. Fortague, the ASIO chief, was not pleased that the two policemen had dropped in on him without warning.

  “I’d have liked a little notice, Inspector.”

  “Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t that what they say? I’m sure you security fellers work on that principle.”

  “So you’re trying to catch me on the hop, is that it?” It was hard to tell whether Fortague was genuinely annoyed or putting on an act to discourage Malone and Clements from further unannounced visits. He certainly wasn’t offering them a drink, though the sun was well over the yard-arm; he didn’t offer them even a cup of coffee. “I take it we’re still talking about the Springfellow case? Sir Walter’s, not his sister’s. That was tragic,” he said, softening for a moment. “I never met the poor woman, but women don’t seem safe any more, do they? Not even in their own homes.”

  “That’s where most of them are killed.” But Malone wasn’t here to discuss the demography of murder. “Let’s go back to March 1966. When Sir Walter disappeared, at the same time a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy, a cove named Alexis Uritzsky, vanished. Do you remember that?”

  Fortague was stone-faced. “Jog my memory a bit.”

  “The story never got into the papers. It was all hushed up and as far as we can tell Foreign Affairs—or External Affairs as they were called then—went along with the act. So must have ASIO. Why?”

  “And you expect me to know the answer?”

  “Not off the top of your head, no. But I thought you might help us find the answer. Look, Guy—” Malone tried the old mates’ act. It is no different from the old boy network, just more proletarian. It binds Australia together more than blood ties or school ties ever could. “I’ve got to get to the bottom of this—the Commissioner is breathing down my neck.” Which was only partly true: John Leeds was certainly breathing down his neck but for a different reason. “Russ and I are a stubborn pair of bastards—we’ve got to keep at it, otherwise we’ll finish up out at Tibooburra. Where do they send spy chiefs when they foul up?”

  Fortague suddenly smiled. “Haven’t you read all the spy books? They usually promote us. Okay, Scobie, I’ll see what I can do. But it’s not my decision. I’ll have to contact the Director-General in Canberra. What exactly do you want to know?”

  “Why a black-out was put on Uritzsky’s disappearance, why did External Affairs co-operate, was there any connection between Uritzsky and Springfellow, does anyone know where Uritzsky is now.”

  Fortague smiled again. “And that’s all? Canberra may not co-operate.”

  “Tell them that if they don’t, a certain newspaper may start asking whether ASIO wants to know who murdered its former chief or doesn’t it care any more.”

  “You’ve been to the newspapers with this?”

  “No,” lied Malone. “But I know there’s a certain journalist who’d like to talk to me about it. I’ve been dodging him up till now.”

  Fortague thought a moment, then promised to do what he could. Then he offered them a drink. When Malone and Clements left twenty minutes later, they felt they had the ASIO Sydney chief on their side. But Malone knew that a lone player in the espionage business was like a lone player in a police force: more often than not, they took the ball away from him.

  When they got back to Homicide, two visitors were waiting for them.

  “How’s that for service?” said Sergeant Don Cheshire from Fingerprints. “Right to your door.”

  Malone looked at the other visitor, Constable Jason James from Ballistics, who said, “I’m here for the same reason as Sergeant Cheshire, sir. Anything to get out of the office.”

  “That’s it, Scobie. You get service and we get a break from the office.”

  Malone grinned. He had pulled the same trick himself when they had tried to chain him to a desk in his junior days. It was the old army and police academy trick of going walkabout; so long as you carried a piece of paper, nobody queried what you were doing. “Righto, where are your pieces of paper?”

  Cheshire, the senior man, produced his first. He was a thirty-year veteran of the force, the last twenty years in Fingerprints. He was a big man, at least twenty kilos overweight, with a double chin and bloated cheeks hiding what once might have been a handsome face. He had a rough, gruff voice and, having been passed over for promotion in favour of younger, better educated officers, he had no respect for anyone. There was, however, still no one better than he at his job.

  “Well, I’ve come up with some matching prints. I took the prints off of that drink coaster you gave me—they were clear. You didn’t give me any name on them, so I’ve marked them down as Print X. Then I had a look at the gun, the Walther.”

  Malone wondered why he felt such trepidation at what Cheshire might say next.

  “The butt of the gun’s been wiped clean, but I got a fraction of a print off of the end of the barrel. It was a faint one, but it come up under the Xeon lights. I can’t say it’s a man’s print—it’s too faint and there’s not enough of it to be sure. It could be a woman’s. It’s not someone who’s ever done any hard yakka, that’s for sure. You get some little bloke with soft hands, som
e poofter ballet dancer or something like that, and you’d have trouble telling his prints from some woman’s, especially a female with big hands like some of those Wog peasants.”

  Malone, Clements and James kept their faces blank. Cheshire knew all there was to know about fingerprints, but he knew nothing about community relations.

  “Okay, that second one is Print Y. Then I started looking for what else I could find. Like I said, the butt and trigger had been wiped clean. So I took out the magazine from the butt and lo and behold—” He was a dreadful actor, a navvy playing Shakespeare. “Lo and behold, there was another print. I give it the beery breath treatment.” He gave a demonstration, breathing heavily on the imaginary magazine. “A fingerprint is 99 per cent moisture, oils et cetera. You give it a little humidity and it shows up, even after it’s faded.”

  “How old would this print on the magazine have been?” said Malone.

  “It don’t matter, Scobie, so long as it’s been protected from drying out completely. Like as if it had been lying out in the sun. A coupla years ago they brought me a pile of silver coins that had been under a house for eight years, where it was pretty damp. They were the proceeds from a bank robbery that the guy didn’t want. I found a print on one of the coins and it matched the suspect’s. It wasn’t easy, but we did it. He’s doing six at Parramatta.”

  Malone shut his mind to the thought of Justine doing time in some women’s prison. “So what about this print on the magazine?”

  “Well, whoever fired the gun hadn’t taken the magazine out to wipe it clean. Stuck up inside the butt, it was protected and so was the print. Lo and behold—” He raised his hands again. “It matches Print X on the drink coaster. They’re the same, I’ll swear in court, if you like. No argument.”

  “Good,” said Malone, trying to sound convincing. “Thanks, Don. That gets us halfway there. Now what about you, Constable?”

  “I’m afraid my job was much easier, sir.” James was a young man who looked too small to be a policeman; one could not imagine his being called in to help with crowd control. He was baby-faced, with small delicate hands; he was lucky Sergeant Cheshire had not already branded him a poofter. “The weapon’s serial number checks with that on the Springfellow inventory. The bullets hadn’t been damaged going into the body and they remained there. I checked the lands and grooves, the rifling, and there’s no doubt those bullets came from that particular Walther PPK .380.”

  “You’d go into court on that?”

  “Yes, sir.” He hesitated a moment: “There’s just one thing. I think a silencer might have been used. The outside of the barrel has been threaded to screw on a silencer.”

  “There was no mention of a silencer in the insurance inventory. But then they’re illegal in New South Wales, so it wouldn’t be in it, anyway.”

  “The threading looks pretty new,” said James. “Silencers on automatics work okay, but not as you see in the movies.”

  “Silencers mean premeditation.” Clements looked directly at Malone from the other side of the desk. “It’s beginning to look bad for you-know-who.”

  Malone nodded reluctantly, knowing there was nothing more he could do to hold back any further investigation of Justine Springfellow. “Righto, have you got copies of your reports for me? Good, leave them with Russ, plus the evidence. I’ll let you know when we make an arrest and you can hold yourselves ready for the magistrate’s hearing.”

  “You don’t want us for the coroner’s inquest?”

  “No, not that soon.” Putting off the evil day.

  “Who’s the suspect, Scobie?” said Cheshire.

  Malone sat back in his chair. He would have preferred to have brushed the question aside till he had seen John Leeds; but he couldn’t do that, not with Clements sitting across from him. “Keep it under your hat—we still have a few things to tie up. It’s Emma Springfellow’s niece, Justine.”

  Cheshire pursed his lips, but didn’t whistle; he was long past surprise in the matter of murder. “Christ, the media is gunna make a meal of this.”

  “Just don’t give them an early serving, Don. Keep it under your hat, like I say. Don’t even tell your mates in your section. The same goes for you, Jason.”

  Both policemen promised to remain silent and went away looking as if they were egg-bound. “They’ll rupture themselves if they can’t tell someone,” said Clements.

  “I know. It’s a risk we’ve got to take.”

  “So do we go and bring in Justine and charge her?”

  “Let’s hold off a day or two, till we hear from ASIO.”

  “What are you trying to do?” Clements looked puzzled; or suspicious.

  “I’m trying to see if there’s any connection between the two murders.” He hoped he sounded convincing; at least there was some truth in what he said. He hoped he could see the Commissioner before he had to take another step. “Let’s wait till we hear from Fortague. Take a breather, spend the rest of the day counting your money. You must be the richest cop in Australia by now. The richest honest one.”

  “I went into the bank this morning to put in my Melbourne Cup cheque. The girl behind the counter asked me if I was married or anything. She did everything but rip the buttons off her blouse for me.”

  “They do that with all the male customers now. It’s part of the new competition amongst banks.”

  Feeble jokes were part of the cement that bound their friendship; it was the lighter side of the old mates’ act. Yet Malone felt a troubling sense of disloyalty towards Clements.

  “Do we tell Greg now what we’re going to do?” said Clements.

  “I guess we’d better.”

  Malone, however, felt relieved when one of the other detectives told him that Chief Inspector Random had gone home with an early summer virus.

  II

  Clements went out to the toilets and Malone picked up his phone and asked for the Commissioner. “I’d like to see you, sir. Something’s come up.”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. “I think it would be better if we didn’t meet here. Did you bring your own car in today?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, pick me up. I’m not in uniform today. I’ll see you in ten minutes up in Oxford Street, opposite the Koala Hotel. You can take me for a ride.”

  More likely you’re taking me for a ride. “I’ll be there, sir. I have a grey Commodore.”

  He left a note on Clements’s desk saying he had gone to do some shopping for Lisa, and escaped before Clements came back. He would be glad when he could start telling Clements the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me, Commissioner.

  Leeds, neatly dressed as always, looking like a successful lawyer or doctor, was waiting as Malone brought the Commodore into the kerb. “Don’t look at the mess in the back, sir. I have three kids—”

  “So have I, all at high school. Old enough to—” Then he said no more, his lean, strong-jawed face clouding over.

  Malone drove up Oxford Street. It was the homosexual community’s Main Street, but in today’s hot sunlight it looked only shabby and dully suburban. A couple of punk girls crossed at the Taylor Square traffic lights, hair bright green and red, their black stockings polka-dotted with holes, but they were the only exotic wildlife to be seen. Malone turned south and drove on out to Centennial Park, the huge green oasis only four miles from the heart of the city.

  He parked by a line of palm trees that bordered one end of the park’s longer lakes. Brown ducks, mallards and a couple of black swans glided in on the lake’s still waters towards two elderly women who had just got out of a car with two large plastic bags full of bread scraps. The bread flew through the air and the wildfowl started a riotous assembly.

  “I hope there’re no undercover photographers out here,” said Leeds.

  Malone grinned, remembering photos taken of a prominent lawyer meeting an even more prominent underworld figure under some of the park’s trees. “I think we’re safe, sir.”
>
  “I don’t think so, Scobie,” said Leeds, and Malone caught his other meaning.

  “Well, no, maybe not. We’ve built a case against Justine.” He outlined it as it would be presented to a magistrate. “It doesn’t look good.”

  “She didn’t do it, you know.”

  “How do you know?”

  Leeds looked away for a moment, out at the two elderly women still throwing manna to the ducks and the swans. Some gulls had arrived from somewhere and, more aggressive than the ducks, were throwing their weight around. Leeds noticed that they stayed away from the two majestic swans. There were always king-pins who had to be left alone: it had been the story of his official life once he had got to a certain rank. But now things were different. He was fighting to protect the girl who might be his daughter, but, let’s face it, he was fighting to protect himself, too. He was a king-pin who might be exposed.

  Up till a few weeks ago his personal life had been as smooth as the lake on which the waterfowl floated. There had been the family life, as solid as the house in which they lived in Waverton. on the lower North Shore: his wife Rosemary, his daughter, his two sons. The sins of the past—he was a churchgoing High Anglican who thought in terms of sin, which, as a policeman, he knew was different from crime—the sins of the past were in the past, almost forgotten, certainly never thought about. He had been startled when, coming home from Walter’s funeral, he had been asked by Rosemary if there had ever been anything between him and Venetia Springfellow. He had laughed at the suggestion, but he had wondered how good a liar he was. He was not by nature a liar: he remembered the pain of his deceit all those years ago.

  “I don’t know,” he confessed, “I don’t even know the girl. I’ve met her only once, just for a few moments.”

  “I have to ask this, sir. What’s your interest in this? If you and Lady Springfellow were—friends all those years ago, what do you owe her?”

  A third swan was crossing the road, its black neck curved in a question mark. Leeds watched it as if its destination was important to him. It came up behind one of the elderly women and nipped at her behind. She jumped and swung round, showering the swan with bread; some of it lay on its black back like a tiny snowfall. Malone, also watching the scene, smiled, but Leeds’s face remained stiff.