by Jon Cleary
“My God, it’ll kill him!” said Justine, who thought all deprivation was a mortal wound. “He’ll commit suicide!”
“No,” said Alice. “He’s shot himself in his white shoe. That is as far as he’ll go. You’re not going to shoot yourself, are you, Michael?”
“Why should I?” said Broad warily.
Alice tried to look innocent, but she missed by about seventy years, “I thought you were on the verge of bankruptcy.”
“Where on earth did you hear that?”
“Oh, I heard it.”
She didn’t look at Justine, but the latter gave herself away: she still suffered from innocence. Broad looked at her with a sudden hatred that shocked her.
Then Alice said, “We’d better move into the main gallery. It looks as if Phil Norval is ready to make one of his long, long speeches.”
As they moved as a group towards the congealing crowd in the main gallery, Dircks leaned down close to Alice’s ear. “Everybody seems to be falling apart. What else can happen?”
“A lot,” said Alice. “Quite a lot, I’m afraid.”
V
“I wish it didn’t have to be so public,” said Malone.
“It won’t be that bad. It would’ve been worse if we’d pinched her at the coroner’s inquest or at tomorrow’s funeral. At least tonight all the TV cameras have gone home. It’ll be in all the papers tomorrow, but nothing on TV.”
“That’ll disappoint you, won’t it?”
“You’re still shitty. What’s the matter with you, Scobie? If I’m doing something wrong, get it off your—There she is!”
The crowd had been leaking out of the Art Gallery for the past twenty minutes, flowing down the broad steps to their cars. Chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces and Mercedes lined up for their owners; rented Mercedes and Fords edged forward, the drivers not sure that they would recognize those who had hired them for the evening. Several couples crossed to their BMWs and Jaguars: the men got in behind the wheels of those cars, proclaiming their skill; they were drivers, men who didn’t need to be driven anywhere, except, perhaps, by their wives, whose driving sometimes was metaphorical. The grey Bentley drew up at the end of the waiting line.
Malone and Clements got out of the police car and crossed the road, Malone almost breaking into a trot to catch up with Clements. They reached the three Springfellow women as they were about to enter the big car.
“Could we see you for a moment, Miss Springfellow?” Clements kept his voice low, bending his head close to Justine’s like a lover arranging something for later in the night.
Venetia, about to enter first, turned back. She shot a quick glance at Justine, then looked at Clements. “Can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Then she saw Malone. “Oh, it’s you, Inspector. What the hell’s going on?”
“Sergeant Clements will tell you,” said Malone evenly.
Clements frowned at him, then turned back to the women. “We’d like you to come with us, Miss Springfellow, for questioning.”
“You’ve asked her enough questions!” Venetia was beginning to stiffen with rage. “Mum, go and find John Leeds—”
“He’s gone home,” said Alice. “I saw him leave before the PM made his speech. Can’t this wait till tomorrow, Sergeant?” She was the calmest of the three women.
“No,” said Clements flatly. “I think it’s better we do it tonight. We have our car over there. Don’t make a fuss—it’ll be better if you don’t—”
“Where does she have to go?” said Venetia in a more controlled voice.
“To Homicide, up in Liverpool Street.”
“We’ll follow you in our car. My daughter will ride with us. I’m not having her taken in in a police car.”
“Fair enough,” said Malone, deciding it was time he took charge again. Thank Christ, John Leeds had gone home, though he hadn’t seen him come out of the Art Gallery. “I’ll ride with the ladies, Russ. You bring our car in.”
Clements’s look, even in the semi-dark, was full of suspicion. But all he said as he walked away was, “I’ll be right behind you, Inspector.”
The three women got into the back of the Bentley and Malone got into the front seat beside Leyden, the chauffeur. The latter looked even more shocked than the women; or at least more shocked than two of them. Malone turned in the seat and looked back at Justine. She sat in the corner, hunched in on herself like a little girl, her full lips bitten into a straight line as if she were trying not to sob, her beautiful eyes staring at him as if they were sightless. He felt a sudden compassion for John Leeds: if this were my daughter, I’d be doing everything I could to protect her. Even if she was a murderess.
“You’d better get your lawyer,” he said to Venetia. “We’re going to charge Justine with the murder of her aunt.”
The chauffeur’s hands jerked on the wheel; the Bentley snaked along the road for a few yards. Venetia took her daughter’s hand, held it tightly. She knew the dangers of maintaining a rage; anger and clear thinking did not mesh. “You’re making a terrible mistake, Inspector.”
“It won’t be the first time. But all we can do is go on the evidence. Justine will have her chance to defend herself.”
“What evidence have you got?” said Alice. Malone noticed that she was the most at ease with the police; her husband, whoever he was, must have exposed her to plenty of experience.
“We’ll tell her lawyer that.” He turned back, said to the chauffeur, “Do you know where Homicide is?”
“No, sir,” said Leyden. “Why would I know that?”
VI
Chilla Dural had seen the Springfellow women come out of the Art Gallery and down the steps to their waiting Bentley. He was about to turn to hurry back to his own rented car when he saw the two vaguely familiar figures cross the road towards the Springfellow women. He stopped, then moved back towards the far end of the steps, watching the small group now gathered by the open door of the Bentley.
With a shock of disgust he recognized the two men with the women: the two bulls, Malone and the other guy—Clements? For a moment it looked as if an argument was going to develop between the women and the bulls. Then the women got into the Bentley and Malone got in beside the driver. The big guy almost ran back to his car on the opposite side of the road. A moment later the Bentley drove off, the unmarked police car doing a tyre-screeching U-turn and following it.
Dural let out a curse that turned the heads of two couples passing him on their way to their cars. He had been thwarted once again; his aim was to fail, but how could you fail if you couldn’t bloody well get started? He should have invested in the stock market; with his luck, the Crash would probably have made him a fortune. He cursed again and the two couples hurriedly fled to their cars, complaining to each other that crazies like the big thug back there should be locked up for life. The police, they said, were never around when you needed them.
10
I
THE SPRINGFELLOW lawyer was a sensible man who knew from experience that battles with the law were more often won if concessions were made at the beginning. He conceded that the evidence Clements presented was strong, though, of course, he didn’t believe it would be enough to convict Miss Springfellow.
“Convict me?”
Justine had recovered to some degree. She seemed to have drawn on some hidden steel within herself once her mother and grandmother had been excluded from the scene. Venetia and Alice had demanded that they be present while Justine was questioned, but Malone had firmly but adamantly told them to wait at the far end of the Bureau’s big room. Brownlow, the Springfellow lawyer, had quietly supported Malone.
“I’m speaking purely hypothetically, Justine.”
“Don’t you dare speak like that, even hypothetically! Jesus, Mr. Brownlow, don’t you realize what these men are trying to do to me?” Her control was suddenly on the point of collapse, the steel had proved flawed.
“Of course I do.” Brownlow was a small man with a thick moustache that grew down round the ends
of his small mouth, and a thick mop of dark hair; he wore unfashionably thick-rimmed glasses and one had the temptation to wrench him out from behind all the camouflage. He was not a criminal lawyer and in these murder waters he was treading carefully, looking for rocks to stand on. “But they are only doing their job.”
“I’m innocent, can’t you understand that? I’m not a bloody murderer!” Suddenly she burst into tears, hunched her shoulders as if trying to curl herself into a ball.
Brownlow looked at Malone, then he leaned across and tentatively touched Justine’s arm. “Tomorrow we’ll call in a barrister who’s experienced in matters like this. It may be that you’ll have no case to answer. In the meantime, you won’t object to bail, Inspector?”
“No,” said Malone. “We’ll take her over to Police Centre, charge her and fingerprint her. We’ll hold her overnight—”
Justine, face tear-streaked, all her beauty wrecked, looked up as if Malone had kicked her. “No! No, you’re not going to lock me up—I won’t go—”
Venetia came running down the room. She fell on her knees beside her daughter and gathered her to her. Alice Magee arrived a moment later, stood in front of Malone and glared at him.
“What are you doing to the girl?” Her voice was rough, like a smothered scream.
“We’re charging her with the murder of her aunt,” said Clements before Malone could reply. “We don’t want the onus of letting her go on bail, so we’ll hold her overnight—”
When it got through to the distraught Venetia what the police were planning to do with her daughter, she almost blew the top off the Remington Rand building. The use of money can be an explosive charge; the use of a lot of money has ambitions to be nuclear. She made phone calls in all directions, lighting fuses, but they all spluttered out. Malone noted that one call she did not make, though he had expected it to be her first, was to John Leeds. It was comforting, somehow, to find that someone else was intent on keeping the Commissioner’s name out of this. He was doing it out of respect; he wondered what prompted Venetia. Love? Everyone was capable of love: with some it just needed a major mining operation.
“Can’t we come to some arrangement?” said Brownlow, blinking behind his glasses, twitching his moustache as if it had suddenly begun to itch. “Lady Springfellow will go surety for her daughter—you know the family’s standing in the community—”
“No,” said Clements.
Jesus, thought Malone, come down off the barricades, Russ. There would never be a revolution in Australia; everyone would be at the beach or at the footy or on strike. Get used to the idea, Russ: the rich, like the poor, are always going to be with us.
“All right,” he said, not looking at Clements. “She can go home with Lady Springfellow tonight. But we’ll want her at Number One Magistrate’s Court tomorrow morning at nine sharp, on the dot. We’ll be asking for top bail, the surrender of her passport and that she report to the local police twice a week till the committal proceedings.”
“Emma is being buried tomorrow,” said Alice, who had been silent up till now.
“I’m sorry, she will have to miss the funeral.” He could not afford to appear too lenient in front of Clements. These people would be out of his life within six months at the outside; he would have to go on working with Russ Clements for God knew how many years yet. If he lasted so long . . .
Venetia was not insensitive; she grasped that there was some conflict between the two policemen. She tried for grace, but found it difficult: “Thank you, Inspector. My daughter and I will be at the Magistrate’s Court. I’d just ask one more favour—do the media have to be there waiting for us?”
“Sergeant Clements and I are not publicity hounds. If they’re there, it won’t be us who’ll have brought them.”
“You’re human after all,” said Alice Magee.
Malone sighed, smiled at her. “It’s an effort sometimes.”
When the Springfellow women and Brownlow had gone, Clements sat back in his chair, bit his lip and said, “That’s the first time I’ve been kicked in the arse by a mate.”
“I’m sorry, Russ.”
“Yeah, you could be. You look it. But it doesn’t explain why.”
“Trust me.”
Clements chewed his lip again, looked away down the long room. It was empty now, all the detectives gone home for the night or out on cases. Only the duty officer sat at his desk near the door. The room had the emptiness that comes much more late at night, as if the darkness beyond the windows had drained it of life. It would not remain like this all night: soon the night duty men would be returning with yet another homicide suspect.
It seemed that Clements felt the emptiness of the big room because when he looked back his big broad face seemed empty, too.
“I guess I’ll have to trust you. But it’s something I never expected you to ask me.”
II
Venetia lay in her big bed staring sightlessly at the sunlit window. The bed this morning felt empty, yet she had had no man in it with her since Walter had disappeared; all her affairs had been conducted elsewhere. Justine, when she had lived here in the house, would come in in the mornings and get into bed with her; but that no longer happened, not since Justine had moved to her own place in The Wharf. Alice never got into bed beside her: she would sometimes come in and sit on the end of the bed, but there was always something that held them back, each of them, from the warm intimacy of mother and child. That had not happened since the Cobar days and Cobar, now, had been left behind for ever.
She closed her eyes, felt the tears inside her lids, fought against the temptation to let herself go. She sat up abruptly, reached for the phone and opened the grey suede-covered book beside it. Then she began calling for, demanding, pleading for help. She called the State Attorney-General, who owed her favours: not sexual ones but financial ones. She called Premier Hans Vanderberg, who owed her no favours but had more power here in this State than she could ever even aspire to. She made other phone calls, getting some men out of bed, interrupting others at their breakfast, getting some in their cars on the way to their offices; but all to no avail. Suddenly all her wealth, all her connections, all her power, meant nothing. All the men she had called would, in other circumstances, have come to her aid; but not in the circumstance of murder. Even over the phone she had seen them drawing away from her. Their scruples in politics and business, she knew, were paper-thin; but murder, it seemed, especially a murder in the family, was a different thing. She put down the phone on the last call, utterly defeated. The one man she had not called was John Leeds.
III
Justine was granted bail of $100,000, her passport was surrendered, she was ordered to reside at her mother’s home and she had to report to the Mosman police twice a week. She and Venetia did not attend Emma’s funeral; the media cameramen attended, but decided there was no one worth wasting film or tape on. Edwin and Ruth were there, and Alice Magee and Michael Broad; but they weren’t considered newsworthy, not at a funeral, and so Emma was buried without fuss, as she would have wanted. Edwin and Ruth wept, but Alice and Broad remained dry-eyed. Malone did not attend, but sent Andy Graham instead.
The newspapers, who went to their morgues for pictures of Justine and Venetia, spread the story of Justine’s arrest across their pages as if she were Mary Magdalene resurrected and back in her original business. Reporters and cameramen camped in Springfellow Avenue; retired Mosman couples on their daily constitutionals extended their walks to come to the end of the street and watch the circus. It was a decorous circus, of course: Mosman was not like the eastern suburbs, where the rich were often raffish and the media were encouraged rather than discouraged. Neither Venetia nor Justine appeared in the three days that the circus was in the street, but Alice came to the front gates and, in a tone very restrained for her, made a statement that said Lady Springfellow and her daughter asked only that their privacy be respected and that, because the matter was sub judice, a phrase Alice had a little trouble with, not
hing could be said at the moment. The media men and women grumbled, but eventually gave up and went away. The local spectators, left exposed once the circus had gone, also went away. One had to show good manners, no matter how much one was bursting to be otherwise.
Malone and Clements, their relationship still a little stiff, kept their investigation simmering. A week after Justine was granted bail Andy Graham came to Malone’s desk.
“I’ve got nowhere trying to trace any other diaries by Emma. But the doorkeeper at The Vanderbilt says he now remembers that about six or eight months ago, Emma had some stuff moved out of the basement. All he can remember was that there were some pictures, but there was some other stuff. It wasn’t much, it went into a small van.”
“Where did it go?”
“He doesn’t know. But I thought it might be worth asking her brother Edwin.”
“Try him.”
Graham was back in the afternoon, lugging a heavy leather suitcase. “He was pretty upset, at first he didn’t want to answer any questions about whether Emma had sent him any stuff. His trouble is, he’s decent and honest.”
“You’re learning,” said Malone.
Graham blushed, as if he had been accused of being too just towards an ordinary citizen. “He really is. This job would be no strife at all if everyone was like him. Anyhow, finally he said yes, he had a suitcase full of Emma’s diaries. This is it.”
It was the sort of suitcase that, in these days of air travel, one never saw. It was solid leather, battered and scuffed but still strong. The labels on it were symbols of another age, of travelling not cruising: P & O stickers, Cunard, Matson; Emma, or her parents, had travelled sedately and in style. Andy Graham opened the suitcase and there were the diaries, leather-covered, some of them freckled with mildew, all with her initials stamped in gold on the covers. They were not loose, but bound in bundles of five by rubber bands, the years marked in a neat hand on strips of faded pink cardboard inserted in the rubber bands. Emma had arranged everything meticulously in her life, except her death.