Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  “You threw me up at her—” Then she sighed and gathered up the pearls in her hands. “No, you’re right. Don’t expect me to forgive you for what you’ve done. But you’re right—we must forget her. I’ll try if you will.”

  “That will be easy—”

  “Will it?” She had more capacity for self-torture than he had, she was a woman; but she realized what she was doing to herself and she stopped: “No, I shan’t ask you that. If you stop seeing her—”

  “I have to see her again,” he said. “J ust once. To give her the money. Unless you want to give it to her?” Then he saw the look on her face and he added hastily, “No, that was stupid. I’m sorry, very sorry indeed. I didn’t mean anything—”

  “Can’t you post it to her?”

  He shook his head. “She could say she never received it. We’re going to pay her once and once only.”

  “Not we,” she said. “You’re paying her the money.”

  “It’s for both of us.”

  “It might be. But I don’t want to think that I ever paid a penny to her. I hate her, Wally, and whether we talk about her or not, nothing is ever going to change that.” She opened her hands and looked down at them and the pearls that lay in her palms. She saw the picture of herself crawling around the carpet looking for the pearls and she shuddered. Oh God, how could I have degraded myself so much? Suddenly she opened her hands flat and let the pearls fall to the floor. She stood up and went out of the living room. A moment later he heard her shut the door of their bedroom.

  Helidon made a move to follow her, then stopped. Better to leave her to herself; he wouldn’t know what to say, anyway, if he did go into the bedroom after her. It was coming home to him now that he had never really made a success of the politics of their marriage; he knew how to canvass for votes, but he had never realized that it was sometimes necessary to canvass for love and understanding. Ambition had always been his disease and he had infected Norma with it. For the last ten years that had been all they had had in common. It had left him without words, or even the gestures, that would be needed if he went into the bedroom.

  He jumped as he heard a shot. But it came from the back

  of the house: someone had been shot between the commercials. He made a step to go and tell Rosa to tone down the volume of her set, then decided against it: while she was out there, wrapped up in whatever was going on on the screen, she wouldn’t care what was going on in here. He and Norma had not had their money long enough for him to feel completely at ease with their servants; an egalitarian society never drew a clear enough line between servants and their employers. Should you fight with your wife with a maid in the house?

  He turned back and went into the small study off the living room. He sat down at the leather-topped antique desk and wrote out a check for twenty thousand dollars payable to Helga Brand Proprietary Limited. He stared at it: the price of stupidity. He had read somewhere that no man in public life was entitled to a private life and he had scoffed at the idea; but now he was beginning to realize that the man who had expounded the principle had not been such a fool. He wondered how much Helga would have asked for if he had been just a private individual.

  He got up, went through into their bedroom and knocked on the door. There was no answer and for a moment he felt a sick panic: had Norma done something foolish like trying to commit suicide? He turned the knob, pushing against the door expecting it to be locked; but it opened at once and he almost fell into the room, only saving himself by holding on to the door. Norma lay on her back on the bed staring at the ceiling.

  “I’m going out,” he said, and his voice trembled with relief at finding she was all right. “I’ll take the check to her, get it over and done with. I’ll be back in an hour.” She made no answer, didn’t even look at him. He hesitated, fumbling for the words he knew he didn’t have. “I mean it, darl. Only an hour. I won’t stay there. Just give her the check and come straight back. Will you be all right?”

  She still did not look at him, but she said, “When you come back, I don’t want to hear a word of what’s happened. We never mention her again.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re finished with her.”

  He went out to the car. He drove carefully into the city, over the Harbour Bridge and out through the neon-lit congestion of King’s Cross. American servicemen on leave from Vietnam wandered the pavements of the Cross; they were all dressed in civilian slacks and shirts, but there was no mistaking them. They were just boys and they all had a look of innocence about them; it was strange, but Helidon had noticed that all of them seemed to look like country boys. It was as if the months of war in Vietnam had stripped them of any sophistication they might have had. They wandered the pavements looking for girls and Helidon, passing them in the Mercedes, hoped they found none like Helga. But even as he wished better for the young Americans, there was the lingering regret, only half-confessed, that it was all over with Helga.

  He drove out to Double Bay, parked the car in Helga’s street, feeling secure now in the darkness, and crossed to the block of flats. He took his dark glasses out of his pocket, then dropped them back again. He would look more conspicuous wearing dark glasses at night than if he were without them. He went into the building and ran quickly up the stairs. By the time he was outside Helga’s door he was puffing; he’d do better from now on to spend his Monday and Thursday evenings at some gymnasium. He would do just that; he glowed with the self-righteousness of the newly reformed. He let himself into the flat with his key, closing the door behind him. He switched on the light, then stopped, staring through into the living room.

  Norma had told him she and Helga had fought, but they couldn’t have caused this much destruction. The room looked as if a battle, not just a struggle between two women, had been fought in it. A glass lay shattered on the floor; he could see the mark where it had been hurled against the wall. All the chairs but the heavy lounge chair had been overturned; the coffee table lay on its side, two of its legs snapped off. A chocolate box was upturned on the floor, its contents scattered about and crushed into dark stains on the yellow carpet. One of the heavy drapes that curtained off the small dining recess had been pulled down and lay like a bundled body behind the heavy lounge chair. He felt sick, shutting his eyes against the picture that suddenly sprang into his mind of Norma and Helga fighting, rolling and tumbling about this room like two savages and causing this chaos.

  Then he opened his eyes and called, “Helga?”

  He waited, then moved towards the bedroom. But it was empty; so were all the other rooms. He came back into the living room, frightened now. Where had Helga gone? Had she decided not to wait for the money, was already on her way to see one of the publishers of the political scandal sheets?

  He picked up the phone, dialled his home number. He waited for what seemed a long time; he began to wonder if Norma was going to answer the phone and once again he got the sick feeling of panic. Then the ringing stopped and she said, “Hello?”

  “Darl, it’s me. She’s not here.” He looked around the room again as if expecting Helga to appear from some corner he had overlooked. “Darl, the place is a wreck. You must have had a terrible donnybrook with her.”

  There was silence for a moment; then she said, “I cant remember doing any damage—”

  “You must have. You probably didn’t notice. The coffee table has a couple of legs broken, you tore down a curtain. And there’s a broken glass—Did she throw a glass at you?”

  “Nothing like that. I tell you, as far as I can remember we didn’t damage the place at all—” She broke off; then her voice faltered as she came on the line again: “Darling, come home. Quickly!”

  He looked around the room again, feeling even more afraid. He would not come here again, but he did not look around trying to store memories. It would be best if he could forget everything that had happened in this flat. “I’ll be right home, darl.”

  He was at the door when he paused, wondering if there was a
nything in the flat that belonged to him. He went back into the living room, then through into the bedroom and bathroom: he could find nothing that could be identified with him, that she could produce as any sort of evidence that he had been a regular visitor here. He took his key out of his pocket and dropped it on the small table beside the front door. He looked at it for a moment, felt the temptation of it. Then he turned his back on it; he had told Norma he was finished with Helga and he meant it. He would call Helga tomorrow, meet her somewhere else and give her the check. But he would not come back here again. Someone else besides Norma and himself had been here this evening and only God knew what had happened after Norma had left.

  He went out of the flat, closing the door after him. He was halfway down the stairs when he heard the man and the woman, the woman talking continuously without seeming to draw breath, coming up the stairs. There was no way of avoiding them. He missed his step, recovered, and went on down. He nodded to the couple as he passed them; then he had reached the lobby. He opened the glass door and as he went out he heard the woman, her voice magnified in the stairwell, say, “His face looked sorta familiar—”

  He was out in the street, halfway to his car, when he remembered the check he had given Helga this afternoon, the one she had torn up.

  But it was too late now to go back and search for the pieces. His key was inside the flat.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Friday, December 13

  1

  “Making progress?” asked Kerslake, mouth working; he had a week’s questions bottled up. “See you’ve learned the name of the girl. Read nothing else, though. Not getting far?” “It takes time,” said Malone. “The Opera House wasn’t built in a day.”

  Kerslake jerked his head under the jab, acknowledged it.

  ”True, true. Well, if we can help-”

  Malone and Clements had driven back from Pymble and Norma Helidon to headquarters. Malone had given the pipe he had taken from Helidon’s rack to Clements and asked him to take it up to Fingerprints at the CIB. Then he had lapsed into silence and Clements, miserable with his cold, had con- centrated on his driving. He had automatically slid behind the wheel when they had come out of the Helidon house and now he was wishing he had given the wheel to Malone. But he recognized that Malone had something on his mind, some- thing that was worrying the Irishman more than his owri cold was worrying himself.

  “What’s eating you, Scobie?” he said at last.

  Malone hedged. “If you had to put all that money of yours on the murderer right now, where would you lay it?”

  “You mean out of Helidon, Gibson and Savanna?”

  “There are two other starters—Mrs. Helidon and the bloke who chewed those matches/’

  Clements pulled up at a red light, glanced out at two longhaired youths in a souped-up Holden. The passenger grinned insolently across at him, while the driver kept revving the engine; then all at once recognition dawned in the eye of the passenger and he spoke out of the side of his mouth to the driver. The latter took his foot off the accelerator and the two of them slouched down in their seats, gentlemen of leisure out for a breath of fresh air. The light turned green and Clements took off; in his mirror he saw the Holden ambling away from the light at no more than twenty miles an hour, holding up traffic in the lane behind it.

  “Forget them.” Malone had noticed Clements’ reaction to the two youths; Clements at twenty-six was well on his way to being an arch-conservative. “They were doing nothing.”

  “It’s the long hair. I’d like to run ‘em all in just on suspicion.”

  “Of what?”

  Clements had not yet reached the fossilized stage of conservatism: he could still laugh at himself. “Anything. But—” He stopped smiling and said, “You’re letting your own suspicions get away a bit, aren’t you?”

  “How’s that?” said Malone, at once on the defensive.

  “I think you’ve already decided one or both of the Helidons killed Helga.” Malone said nothing and Clements took the car up the approach to the Harbour Bridge and through the toll gates before he went on: “I’ll admit I’m a bit with you. I can’t see any connection Gibson would have had with her. And Savanna—well, I guess he could have done her in. He could have had reason to—if she was blackmailing him, going to tell his wife or something. Still—” He shook his head. “I think it was one of the Helidons. Or both. But we’re supposed to be objective. And it still doesn’t account for the bloke who chewed those matches. He could have been another one of her customers, you know. Her Saturday or Sunday bloke.”

  Malone shook his head. “Not unless he came on the wrong day. She was done in some time on the Monday. She’d have cleaned up the remains of any Sunday visitor. The living room was a shambles, but you heard what Savanna told us— she was house-proud. The rest of the flat looked it. The kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom—they were like exhibition rooms. She wouldn’t have left any dirty ashtrays overnight from Saturday or Sunday. The other feller was there on Monday, all right. But we don’t know who he was or what motive he had—unless he’d just been called in to help get rid of her body. We know Helidon had a motive—if she was blackmailing him, as I think she was. Mrs. Helidon had a motive, too. She wouldn’t be the first wife who’d killed her husband’s girl friend.”

  “Yeah, I’d lay money she’d been to Helga’s flat. She was too nervous all the time we were looking at those pearls. And they matched, all right. She could have had them down to the jeweler’s any day last week and had them re-strung in a hurry.”

  “That maid would know. Try and trace her. Try the Italian social clubs. These migrants usually go to their own community clubs when they first come out here. Someone at one of them might know her.”

  Clements sniffled and made a face. “I was thinking of going home to bed.”

  “Go home afterwards. Go round the clubs first, sample some of that Chianti and garlic. It’s supposed to be good for colds.”

  Clements took the car down the Cahill Expressway, flying across the glass face of the city. “What are you gunna do?”

  “I think I’ll go and see my Old Man. Ask him to help me do a bit of detective work.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  Con Malone didn’t. When Malone left Kerslake and went

  down into the basement of the Opera House, having borrowed a helmet and a torch, Con was with him, grumbling and muttering like an old soldier who for the tenth day running had drawn latrine duty. “Dunno why you cant do your own dirty work.”

  “I’m trying to show you that not all police work is dirty,” said Malone, grinning in the gloom at his father. “Now, can you string me up some lights in here?”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A chewed matchstick.” He took a match from the box in his pocket, chewed one end, then showed it to his father. “Like that.”

  Con Malone looked around the chamber, at the debris of timber and old newspapers, milk bottles, beer bottles and one wine bottle, lengths of rope and sheets of corrugated iron, and the single iron bed-head that leaned against one wall like the bars for a window that had never been constructed in this dungeon. “You want your bloody head read! Find a match here?”

  But he went away to get the lights and Malone sat down on a length of timber, the torch at his feet, and waited. He slipped the chewed match back into his pocket. The room was as silent as a tomb; what sounds could be heard from outside had the ghostly effect of echoes, calls from another world. What a place to finish up, he thought; and once again felt sympathy for Helga Brand. I’m in the wrong game. If I expected gentle deaths for everyone, I should have gone into a seminary, as Mum wanted me to. But even as he had the thought, he knew there was no guarantee that the deaths in a seminary were any less violent than Helga’s had been. The priest might die with no marks on his throat, but no one knew the hemorrhage of despair there might have been in the man’s heart. For all he knew of Helga, deep inside her she might have welcomed her own death. />
  I wonder if Helidon could give me the answer to that one

  if I asked him? But here I go again: why do I keep choosing him as the murderer? It was okay to arrest vagrants and loiterers on suspicion; maybe not strictly legal, but it came under the heading of prevention of crime and that was a good enough reason. I told Mrs. Helidon this morning: you go against the rules when they get in the way. But you couldn’t afford to go against the rules when it came to arresting a man for murder. There was no death sentence in New South Wales, but if Helidon were arrested his life would be finished as surely as if the rope had been strung round his neck. The case against Helidon had to be watertight, had to be based on evidence that would be even more convincing to Malone himself than to a jury. When he laid the charge against Helidon there must be no doubt in his own mind about the facts. Suspicion, prejudice if you like, mus be entirely eliminated. Whatever Helidon had got away with seven or eight years ago in the land deal case had no bearing on this case. Charlie Duggan, the cynical con man, had once said, “Looked at from my side of the fence, justice is nothing more than civilized revenge.” Well, he must see he did not prove Charlie had been right.

  Con Malone came back with a long lead to which were connected two high-wattage globes. The room abruptly took shape: hard, cold, uninviting, lacking any mystery. “What are the police rates for casuals?” Con Malone wanted to know.

  “You’re doing this as a public duty, didn’t you know?”

  “Am I?” Con made a rude remark about that; but he made no attempt to walk out. “Well, we better start over where the body was, then work back in a line towards the door. Right?”

  Malone looked admiringly at his father. “Didn’t I tell you? I got all my detective talent from you.”

  “I had more bloody pride than to join the police force, but, your Uncle Seamus, he killed a copper in The Troubles back home in the Ould Country, you know that? They put up a statue to him, my word they did.”