Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  Malone, to fill in the time till Fulmer returned, got up and moved across to the ancient typewriter and began to type out a new, more precise report on the Helga Brand case. As the facts came up on the paper under the pressure of his fingers, he felt his relief increasing: the evidence against Heli-don was irrefutable, would stand up to even the most objective searching. Prejudice didn’t enter into it: Helidon was the murderer.

  Then the phone rang. “Sergeant Malone? This is the Commissioner’s secretary. Inspector Fulmer asked me to give you a message. He said not to wait, that nothing more was going to develop on the case you and he were discussing. He said he would see you first thing Monday morning.”

  “Can I speak to him?”

  “I’m afraid not. He’s still with the Commissioner.”

  Malone hung up, looked across at Clements, who had sat up in his chair. “We can go home. There’s something going on up at the Commissioner’s office and they don’t want us to know about it. We stop work till Monday morning.”

  “Do we keep a tail on Helidon? I mean, say he decides to do a bunk. Bixby’s gone into smoke somewhere. What if Helidon decides to follow him?”

  “We’re going to do what we’re told, mate. You go home and enjoy your cold in bed and I’ll take Lisa out to the beach. I’ll see you Monday morning.”

  Clements looked as if he needed to be further convinced; then he sneezed, blew his nose and gave up. “Righto. But if Helidon disappears over the weekend, you can get someone else to help you find him. I think I’ll spread this cold into a month’s sick leave.”

  Wiping his eyes, he went home. Malone turned back to the typewriter, finished off the last page of his report. As he pulled the sheet out of the typewriter two other detectives, Kildare and Welch, both of them perspiring freely, came into the office. They had the look of men who had been expecting a free weekend and had suddenly discovered they were going to be working overtime.

  “What a bloody scorcher!” Kildare gasped, dragging off his jacket. “I was gunna go out to Bondi this afternoon, spend all the time in the water. You finished with the typewriter, Scobie?”

  “All yours.” Malone shook his new sheets together, found a new manila folder for them; he couldn’t remember ever having been as neat and careful about a report. “You got to work?”

  “The Water boys have just fished a feller out of the harbour. Had his skull bashed in.”

  “Well, he’s your pigeon,” said Malone, closing the manila folder and laying it on his desk. He felt suddenly glad now of the opportunity to spend the weekend with Lisa. Helidon

  could wait. “I’ll have that swim at Bondi for you, while you’re tearing around in the heat trying to find out who he is.” “Oh, we know that already,” said Kildare, sitting down at the typewriter. “The Water boys recognized him. He was a trawler captain named Phil Bixby.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Thursday, December 12

  1

  “They’ve just been here,” said Savanna. “They’re probably on their way to see you now.”

  “Did you know she had a picture of me and Glenda in that file of hers?”

  “Les, I didn’t know a thing about any file. Not till the police mentioned it. She evidently had other pictures in it, too-”

  “Who of?” Gibson’s voice crackled over the wire: the sharp old mind was already at work.

  “I-I don’t know. They didn’t say.” A newly-found caution took a slippery hold on Savanna; if he could avoid it, he was not going to be involved in any further conspiracy. If Walter Helidon’s photograph had been in Helga’s file, if he had been her man from some other day in the week, that was Helidon’s business and he didn’t want to know. This whole disaster had started because he had been burdened bv a knowledge he hadn’t sought. “Christ, Les, why did you l;ave to let this happen?”

  “Pull your head in, Jack,” Gibson said evenly; he could have been discussing a minor business deal that had gone wrong. “I had nothing to do with Lhis. And neither did you,” he added as a grudging concession; Savanna remarked the reluctance in the rough old voice. “We’ll go and see our friend, see what went wrong. You better pick me up—we don’t wanna be too conspicuous.” Rolls-Royces have their disadvantages then, Savanna thought, dredging some dry humour up out of the wreck of himself: they are not the best car in the world for someone trying to make discreet inquiries about a possible murderer. “I’ll phone you when the demons have left here. Stay there at your office. Don’t go home. We don’t want Josie in on this.”

  Leave me something to decide for myself, Les. Let me be the one to protect Josie; I don’t need you to tell me how to look after my wife. But he said nothing because he knew the old man was right: he hadn’t looked after his wife. “I’ll wait, Les.”

  An hour and a half later he picked Gibson up at the entrance to Eureka Towers. The old man came out of the front doors as soon as the Jaguar pulled into the forecourt, opened the car door and slid in with the agility of a man half his age. “Righto, don’t let’s waste any time. Bixby lives out at Bondi. I’ve rung him, but there’s no answer. We’ll call on him.”

  “Bixby? For Christ’s sake—you didn’t get him to warn off Helga?”

  “It was the best idea at the time. He was the one gunna get into trouble, not you or me, for bringing in the drugs.”

  “Yes. But him—” Savanna shook his head. “He’s a thug. I don’t think he’d give a second thought about belting a woman. And that’s what he’s done.”

  “We don’t know he even laid a hand on her. That’s what we’re gunna find out.”

  “And if he did-?”

  “Then we just make sure we’re not connected with it. Leave it to me, Jack.”

  Savanna, despite his sick depression, could not help but marvel at the change in Gibson. The old bastard has shed twenty years. Is this what makes a man a success in business,

  the ability to thrive on a crisis? No wonder you never made it, Jack: a crisis always set you back on your bum, like a good hard tackle in football. Or maybe it was just that there had been too many of them. A crisis a day never kept the bailiffs away. Quit the sick jokes, Jack. You are right in the middle of the sickest joke of all.

  “How do you feel about the girl being dead?” It was hard to tell whether Gibsons question was a kindly one or just a matter-of-fact attempt to put everything into perspective.

  “Sick/’

  Gibson looked appraisingly at the younger man, who at this moment, with his grey hair and his sallow face, looked the older. “You had more time for her than you admit, didn’t you?”

  “Les, you don’t have to love a girl to be upset because she’s been murdered. There’s such a thing as charity.” He found enough courage to shoot a weak barb: “As distinct from philanthropy.”

  “You and I had better give up sparring with each other,” said Gibson, unoffended: he knew why he gave his money away. “We’ve gotta stick together on this.” He smiled, a spasm on his thin lips. “I never thought the bloody day’d come when I’d have you as a partner.”

  “I’m no happier about it than you are. How did you get on with the police?”

  “All right, I think. That Malone, the sergeant, he’s no idiot. He mentioned, too, that there were other pictures in that file. I wonder who else she was trying to put the bite on?”

  Savanna made a pretense of concentrating on his driving. If Walter Helidon was involved with Helga, it was no concern of his and Gibson’s. But he knew he was deluding himself, shutting the door on something he did not want to know about. He had been involved with Helga, had half-loved her if the truth had to be faced, and if there was any decency left in him he could not say it was no concern of his who had killed her. And Walter Helidon might have killed her … His hands shook on the wheel and the Jaguar momentarily slipped sideways.

  “Christ, you drive like this all the time?” Gibson sounded only irritated, not scared. “You better pull yourself together, Jack. When we see Bixby—”


  “I’m not going to see him.” Savanna slid the car into the curb, switched off the engine. This street in Bondi had the bare, treeless look of so many streets in Sydney’s seaside suburbs: sun-baked arroyos whose walls were the red-brick flats that lined either side of the roads. We’re developing our own pueblo dwellers, Savanna thought; and looked out at the particular pueblo in which lived Bixby, the probable murderer. He turned in his seat, faced Gibson directly. “You go in and see him on your own, Les. I’m not shirking any of my responsibility for this whole mess, except for this bit. I told you I didn’t want Helga hurt.”

  Gibson returned the stare. “What are you planning on doing? Doing a bunk, hiding out till it all blows over?”

  “I’m not entirely gutless. Despite what you may think,” he added as he saw the smear of contempt in Gibson’s eyes. “I’ll be around to answer the police any time they want to see me. But I’m having nothing to do with Bixby.”

  “You scared he might take to you?”

  “I don’t know. But if it came to a donnybrook, I wouldn’t lie down and take it. I’ve been sitting in my office ever since the police left, thinking about the last twenty-odd years. And, yes, thinking about the next twenty, or however many I’ve got left. I decided I’d got about as far down as I could go. Or anyway, as far as I wanted to go.” He paused and looked out through the windscreen at the deserted street. The pueblo dwellers were inside at their evening meal; their empty cars lined the curb like barricades. The street ran down to the promenade and from the beach beyond there came the faint thunder, like the rumble of a distant war, of a

  rolling surf. A distant war, he thought: Christ, when was I ever out of a war? We all carry our small wars with us, like original sin. I wonder what Father Wrigley would make of that one, coming from a full-time atheist? “I once won a medal—”

  He paused again, as if embarrassed to bring up his war experiences. But Gibson said nothing, showed no expression. It was no encouragement for Savanna to go on; but at least Gibson had not moved to get out of the car. He might never talk to Gibson again and he wanted to put the old man straight on a few things.

  “They gave it to me for being brave, they said. That wasn’t what the citation said, but that was what they meant. I wasn’t brave, or if I was, it was a reflex action. I went in and killed four Japs in a machine-gun post—it was them or me and the six chaps with me. Now I think it’s cowardice to lie down and let someone kill you, but I don’t think it’s bravery to stand up and try and stop the other feller from chopping off your head. But don’t ask me to define the difference. Perhaps it’s no more than taking a gamble on which way you die. I remember we were pinned down in the mud for half an hour by those Japs before I decided I’d had enough. Well, I’m like that now, Les. I’ve had enough. I haven’t a single bloody idea what I’m going to do, but I’m not lying down any more. And if I went in there—” He nodded at the block of flats where Bixby lived. “If I went in there and Bixby started to throw his weight around, who knows, I might try for another medal. And that might bring the police back to us quicker than we want them/’

  Gibson continued to gaze steadily at Savanna, his face showing nothing of what was going on in the sharp old brain. Jesus, what a waste, he thought. This bloke might have been something; but somewhere along the line they took the marrow out of his backbone. But who? Or what? But he said nothing, asked nothing; just looked hard at the stranger

  named Jack Savanna. Then he nodded abruptly, got out of the car and went into the flats.

  He was back in less than five minutes. “Not there.”

  “Do we wait?”

  “No, we’ll go home. Well wait for him to come to us. If he did do in the girl and the demons get on to him, he’ll come to me, put the bite on me for money to get out of the country.”

  “Will you give it to him?”

  “No. I gave him some money—it was supposed to have been for the girl’s air fare back to Germany. I checked with my bank this afternoon—he cashed the check first thing Monday morning. That’s all I’ll give him. If I gave him any more, that would be aiding and abetting a felony, or something just as bad. If they caught him, they’d be on to me and I might get anything from three to five years. I’ve stayed out of jail so far. I’m not gunna spoil the record this late in the piece.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “If he killed the girl, I’ll turn him over to the police.”

  “But you sent him to see her—!”

  “Not to kill her. That was never on the ticket. I told him to scare her onto a plane out of the country—I didn’t tell him to do her in. When that happened, if he was the one who did kill her, then he was on his own.”

  “We’ll still be dragged into it.”

  “I’ve survived worse things.” Then it was his turn to stare out through the windscreen. “I just hope it won’t tear the guts out of Glenda, that’s all. She’s always telling me it’s too late now for us to have any more trouble.”

  Savanna said, “You can put the blame on me. Tell her you were trying to get me out of trouble.”

  Gibson glanced sideways at him. “How would Josie take that?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it does to her, it’ll be the last hurt I’ll ever give her. There’s Margaret, you see. I think I’ve already lost her. I’m not sure, but I think so. She never writes to me, only to her mother. You can sometimes get over losing your wife—” Sometimes, but not always: not the wife you would love till the day you died. But Silver was not Margaret’s mother; and he knew now, had finally accepted it, that Silver was gone forever. From now on there had to be only Josie. “You don’t get over losing a daughter. Or a son, I guess. I’m standing up on my hind legs again—for Margaret, I suppose, as much as anything. If ever she comes back to Sydney and she sees that her mother and I are trying to make a go of it, that I’m only half the bastard I used to be—well—” He turned his hands over on the wheel in a gesture of supplication to a God in whom he didn’t believe; but there was some fate, something, in which you finally had to place your faith. “You never know. In time she may regret losing me as much as I’ve regretted losing her.”

  The two men sat there in a silence that had nothing to do with the quietness of the street outside the car. They were like explorers who had come across each other in an alien country: their discovery of each other was made suspicious by the surface familiarity. Each knew he had found more in the other than he had been looking for and they were embarrassed by it: one did not look for bonuses in a relationship that had been closer to enmity than friendship. A car came slowly down the street, the two youths and two girls in it peering out at the names of the flats: Ideal Haven, Beauview Hall—“There it is!” The car jerked to a halt and the four young people fell out and ran into Paradise (the rest of the name, Court or Hall, had fallen off the front of the flats: even Paradise was jerry-built). A dog chased a cat across the road, suddenly lost interest in the pursuit, came back, raised a leg against the front wheel of the Jaguar, then trotted on down the street. A man and a woman came out of the flats where Bixby lived and went down towards the beach, carrying a low-voiced argument between them like something of which they were ashamed. A television set suddenly blared somewhere—“Thirteen people died today in bushfires”—and at once the street seemed to come alive. The evening meal was over: time for television, for argument, for going out. People came out, got into cars, roared off down the street, racing to God knew what destinations. Children came out to escape the heat of their homes, ran around in the only slightly less stuffy heat of the evening. It’s another country, thought Gibson; not snobbishly but only because he was suddenly lonely for Glenda.

  “Let’s go home, Jack/’

  They rode home without any talk between them; yet each man felt that at last there was some communication between them. Neither of them might ever admit it and the tenuous contact might die for want of further understanding; but each man rode back to Point Piper nursing his own small disc
overy of the other. Explorers of wider continents than a single man had returned home with less.

  Just before he got out of the car Gibson said, “Can you have lunch with me tomorrow?”

  Savanna hid his surprise: Gibson had never before invited him even to have a drink. “What time?”

  “One o’clock. The Union Club.” Gibson had achieved membership of the citadel of the Establishment during the war years when, as a wounded hero and a pioneer from New Guinea, he had been admitted because the club committee had thought it would be unpatriotic not to do so. By the time they had realized the true side of him, his vulgarity, his don’t-give-a-damn-for-anyone and his financial skulduggery, he was too rich and powerful to be disbarred without causing a scandal. But if his connection with the murder of Helga Brand ever came out into the open, he would certainly be asked to resign. He wouldn’t miss the club, since he had no friends there, had no friends anywhere; but he might as well get as much as he could out of his membership subscription while it lasted. “You ever been there?”

  “My father used to belong to it.”

  Gibson raised an eyebrow, then grinned. “Your point, Jack. He probably belonged there more than I do. Goodnight. Don’t lose any sleep over Bixby.”

  I shan’t sleep, Savanna thought: that’s asking too much. But it won’t be Bixby who’ll keep me awake. There are too many other figures in my nightmares. Including myself.

  2

  Friday,December 13

  Walter Helidon saw the calendar as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning. It was a small day-by-day calendar in a silver-plated frame, a Christmas present from Norma; the frame also held a small notepad and a silver pencil. He raised his head from the pillow and saw his nervous scrawl on the pad: Bixby will call office at 4:30.

  Norma came into the bedroom carrying a breakfast tray. She was in her dressing gown and had done her hair, but he noticed she wore no make-up. Normally she put on powder and lipstick as soon as she got up in the morning; in one of their more acrimonious moments he had once told her that a woman’s unmade-up face at breakfast was less appetizing than cold soggy toast. But this morning it did not trouble him and he was just glad she was there.