Golden Relic

by Lindy Cameron

  “They’re my taxes too,” Sam reminded her. “The ACB is a Federal organisation, Jacqui, that’s why I have to go to Canberra to be briefed for this new position. And even though I’ll still be based in Melbourne, I could be sent anywhere. At least my new boss, the Minister himself,” Sam said, straightening her back in mock respect, “doesn’t deem it necessary for me to actually live in Canberra in order to do my job.”

  “God forbid!” Jacqui exclaimed.

  “Having explained all that to you again, there’s a couple of other things I’d like to clear up. I’m a detective not an agent. I hope you’re not still telling your friends, and god knows who else, that I’m a spy.”

  Jacqui rolled her eyes and looked everywhere but at Sam. “Not since you became a ‘Special’ Detective.”

  “That was only last week,” Sam said. Jacqui shrugged.

  Sam ran her hands through her short dark hair and gazed at the redheaded fruitloop opposite her, wondering for the umpteenth time which of them had been adopted, because they couldn’t possibly have come from the same gene pool. “I’m a cop, Jacqui. An ordinary, common or garden variety cop. I like what I do, you don’t have to make it more glamorous for me.”

  “I don’t do it for you Sam, I do it for me. And I doubt your fellow Feds would appreciate being called common.”

  “And another thing,” Sam stated, “Ben is not boring, he’s preoccupied.”

  “With tedium,” Jacqui stated, taking her coat off again.

  “What I don’t understand,” Sam said, moving a wine glass out of the way of her sister’s flailing arms, “is why you insisted we eat outside when you’re not dressed for this weather.”

  “This weather?” Jacqui repeated. “But it’s Spring, it’s glorious!”

  “Yes, but it’s Melbourne Spring, which means warm, bright sunshine accompanied by a chilly wind straight off Bass Strait, followed by a serious hot flush and a cooling shower of rain - all in the space of one hour, with the likelihood of a hail storm later just for fun.”

  “Ha, ha,” Jacqui said. “Will you answer your phone before I relieve you of it and chuck it in the Yarra.”

  Sam was already reaching into the pocket of her jacket for her mobile. “Diamond,” she answered curtly.

  “My name is Diamond. Sam Diamond.” Jacqui’s attempt at Sean Connery sounded a lot more like Mae West.

  “Oh, hi Ben,” Sam was saying. “We were just talking about you. My sister thinks���”

  Jacqui groaned and tried to hide behind her wine glass. “���that your life could do with a bit of spicing up.” Sam listened then put her hand over the receiver. “Ben wants to know if you’d like to have dinner with him.”

  “Yeah, sure, why not,” Jacqui said, waving her hands around. “How about tonight?”

  “She says she’d love to, Ben, but tonight’s out because she has to take me to the airport.”

  Watching Sam’s raised eyebrows and knowing look, Jacqui started getting quite antsy until she realised the half of the conversation she could hear obviously had nothing to do with her anymore, consisting mostly as it did of responses like: “Really? Which boss? Why? Okay, put him on. Yes sir. Well I’m not really dressed for work. No, yes I am dressed, but I’m at a restaurant. Of course, sir. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” She hung up.

  “Your plane leaves at 8 pm. I could have gone to dinner tonight,” Jacqui stated.

  “I’m not going to Canberra. At least not today,” Sam said, pulling her wallet out of the back pocket of her jeans. “I have to go check out a body at the museum.”

  “A body?” exclaimed Jacqui, a little too loud for Sam’s liking. “But you don’t do that any more. You’re with the Cultural Affairs Department now. Or have they changed their bloody minds again?”

  “No, they haven’t. Perhaps a dead body in the museum comes under the category of cultural murder. Whatever the reason, this is officially my first assignment for the CAD, so I have to love you and leave you. Here’s my share of the bill,” Sam said standing up and slipping a $20 note under the salt shaker so it wouldn’t be whisked into the river by the breeze that had just arrived from the Tropics by way of the Antarctic.

  “Do you want a lift?” Jacqui offered, not in the least concerned that the rest of her day had just been casually unarranged by the person who’d arranged it in the first place.

  “No thanks. I have to go to the office first, for a quick briefing, so I’ll walk.” Sam bent down and gave Jacqui a peck on the cheek. “See you at home later. Unless of course you ring that little cubicle of mine and arrange a date with the ‘boring Ben Muldoon’.”

  “Hey,” Jacqui shrugged. “I usually get my thrills vicariously by regaling my friends with lurid and fictitious accounts of your adventures as a secret agent. Even boring Ben has got to be better than that.”

  An hour later Sam alighted from a Swanston Street tram in front of the sweeping steps of the green-domed State Library of Victoria. She was still trying to work out how a ‘museum curator’ had been found murdered in a building that hadn’t been a museum for over 12 months, but then the rather disjointed briefing she’d been given from her new boss in Canberra via her old boss in Melbourne had been confusing on almost every level.

  A man was dead, ‘possibly’ murdered but probably not, in a building that no longer had anything to do with the museum, yet someone from the museum had bypassed the Victoria Police and the State Government completely and placed a call directly to the Federal Minister for Cultural Affairs, Sam’s soon-to-be boss. And why? Because that someone was convinced the man’s death was an ‘act of sabotage with international ramifications’.

  Good grief! Sam thought, passing between the columns of the Library’s imposing facade. She was often perplexed by how fast the paranoia virus was spreading through society as it rushed towards the new millennium, and sometimes worried that it might be contagious. As if to confirm her thoughts a woman - well-spoken, middle-aged, wearing a twin-set, pearls and a crisp tartan skirt - stopped in front of her, nodded and said: “The government will get you, you mark my words.”

  Sam couldn’t help herself. “It’s my job to get you,” she said.

  Mrs-Middle-Class sidled away, swearing under her breath, and listing what sounded like the ingredients for a batch of lamingtons.

  Sam muttered a few words to herself, like “dipstick” and “one too many diet pills”, to reassure herself that all was hunky-dory in her world and then turned back to the task at hand. She calculated that it had been at least fifteen years since she’d set foot in this grand old building but she knew well the peace and quiet that lay beyond those unpretentious front doors. She’d spent several months at a desk under the impossibly high vaulted ceiling of the Library’s Reading Room while she finished her Criminology thesis and wondered how they cleaned the windows.

  Sam’s memories fled in several horrified directions as she entered the foyer to find it packed with a noisy, ratty, pubescent horde in untidy uniforms. Her initial head count produced a tally of 1003 high school students; her second count was a more realistic 33 - and one poor demented teacher.

  Sam made her way over to a uniformed police officer who was guarding against any incursions into the roped-off hallway behind him and, judging by the look on his face, was also responsible for scanning the crowd for terrorists. When she flashed her badge he smiled with relief, however, and explained he was her escort.

  “Can you fill me in?” Sam asked as they made their way into the section of the building that had, for nearly a century until the previous year, housed the various collections of the Museum of Victoria. Sam wondered where all those artefacts, those wondrous things she recalled from childhood visits, were being stored while the new Melbourne Museum was being built.

  ‘British flintlock cavalry pistol, .590 calibre, recovered after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Brought to Victoria by Viscount Canning, Governor General of India 1856-1862.’

  Sam could picture the label for the
handgun as clearly as if she was looking at it now. Then there was her favourite exhibit: stuffed, encased in glass and towering over her, Sam had been no less impressed by Australia’s greatest racehorse than her grandfather who had actually watched Phar Lap win the 1930 Melbourne Cup.

  “Where’s Phar Lap?” Sam asked, interrupting Constable Rivers who had been telling her he couldn’t tell her much, except that the deceased’s body, lying by his work bench in one of the storage rooms, had been found by an assistant curator at nine that morning.

  “I’ve no idea where he is,” Rivers stated.

  “What does the forensic pathologist say about the cause of death?”

  “Phar Lap’s or the guy downstairs?” Rivers asked.

  “Phar Lap was allegedly poisoned,” Sam said, as if this was a perfectly logical conversation. “How about the guy downstairs?”

  “I don’t know about him,” Rivers shrugged and waited while a museum guard used a security card to open a door for them before continuing. “The forensics team have only been here about half an hour and the pathologist arrived just before you did.”

  Sam gave him a sideways glance and then looked at her watch. “It’s nearly 2.30.”

  “Ah well, apparently,” Rivers explained, escorting Sam down a wide staircase to their left, “the assistant curator, named Duncan Jones, found the body and informed the security boss, who came and had a look at it. He notified the Chief Librarian who also came and looked at it, and when she saw who it was she rang the Director of the Museum, who was in a whole other building in the city. After he too came and checked out the deceased, he called us. That was 11 am. We attended the scene and then called Homicide who arrived just before noon. Forensics have only just got here because they were tied up on another job.”

  “And the fp?” Sam asked.

  “He was doing lunch with the Commissioner, the Police Minister, the Premier and members of a citizen’s group lobbying for���something,” Rivers said, running out of details.

  “That’s a pretty sound alibi, if he needs one,” Sam said dryly.

  “Yeah, but only for lunchtime,” Rivers laughed. “Where he was before that, is anyone’s guess.”

  They passed through a door on the next landing and entered another hallway at the end of which Sam could see and hear the obvious signs of a crime scene investigation in progress: police tape, police officers, police cameras and a familiar voice booming at everyone to get the hell out of the way.

  “Am I allowed to know why you’re here, Detective Diamond?” Rivers asked. “I mean, what interest does the ACB have in all this?”

  “Somewhere amongst all those phone calls this morning,” Sam explained, “someone also rang my boss - in Canberra - who rang me, at lunch on my day off, and said ‘get down there and have a look at that body’. So here I am, at the end of a rather long queue of spectators by the sounds of it.”

  “Is that Sam?” It was those familiar bellowing tones again, fast approaching the doorway Sam and Rivers were about to enter. “It’s about bloody time she got here.”

  Detective-Sergeant Jack Rigby, all six-foot-five and three miles wide of him, came barrelling out of the room. Sam stepped aside; the Constable didn’t stand a chance.

  “Damn it Jack,” Sam said, helping Rivers up from the floor, “this is not a football field.”

  “The boy is half my size and age Sam, he should have better reflexes.” Rigby placed a hand on Rivers’ shoulder. “Isn’t that right son?”

  “Yes sir. Whatever you say,” Rivers smiled.

  “Good. Now step aside,” Rigby commanded and then wrapped Sam in a bear hug that left her breathless. “Completely unprofessional, I know,” he said, letting her go. “But it is so good to see you.”

  “And it’s reassuring to find you haven’t changed a bit, Jack,” Sam stated, giving him the once over. Jack Rigby’s clear blue and ever-watchful eyes were the most noticeable things about him, apart from his height and despite the almost comical distortion of his ex-boxer’s nose. His crew cut had turned quite grey since she’d last seen him but Sam felt sure that her mother, who’d met him briefly two years before, would still describe him as a fine and handsome man.

  Despite Rigby’s sheer bulk, which was all bone and muscle, not an ounce of fat, and his loud, irascible and at times downright stubborn personality, he was an agile and surprisingly gentle man. He’d probably seen the results of more terminally violent crime than anyone else in the city, yet away from work his relaxed demeanour and untroubled personality was more akin to someone who’d spent his life working in the Botanic Gardens.

  “Now that the pleasantries are over,” Rigby began, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  “It’s just a guess Jack, but I’d say it’s probably the same thing you’re doing,” Sam stated.

  Rigby cocked his head on the side and squinted down at Sam. “Doc Baird says the guy probably had a stroke, so it looks like even we’re not needed here,” he said. “And if it does turn out to be murder then you can’t get more local than a homicide in the heart of the city. This is barely State-related let alone Federal. Therefore I’ll rephrase my question: why are you here? What interest does the Australian Crime Bureau have in the demise of Professor Marsden in there?”

  Sam shrugged. “Jim Pilger called me at Walter’s Wine Bar, where I was enjoying my day off, and told me to get down here and check things out.”

  “Pilger? The Minister of ���Whatever. That Pilger?” Rigby was baffled.

  “Yes, Pilger the Minister for Cultural Affairs,” Sam agreed. “He’s my new boss, in that he is top of the tree when it comes to the Bureau’s Cultural Affairs Department.”

  Rigby looked blank, which was a rare occurrence.

  “I’ve been transferred from Major Crimes to the ACB’s CAD,” Sam explained. “I was going to Canberra this evening, for six weeks, to be briefed on my new job but instead I find myself here: still standing in the hallway; still lacking any real information about this situation; in fact, still without having laid eyes on the actual body - homicide victim or not.”

  “Cultural Affairs? That explains the way you’re dressed,” Rigby stated.

  Sam looked down at her leather jacket, cotton shirt, jeans and runners. “I did mention it was my day off, didn’t I?”

  “So, Pilger rang you. How did he find out about this? He’s in Canberra for goodness sake!”

  “Someone rang him, Jack,” Sam said.

  “Who?”

  “That would have been me,” came a soft-spoken voice from behind Sam.

  “Ah,” Rigby said, as Sam turned around and found that after looking up at Rigby, she had to crick her neck to be able to look comfortably at someone slightly shorter than her own height of five-foot-six.

  “This is the Director of the Museum, Mr���ah,” Rigby faltered.

  “Daley Prescott,” the Director said. “Assistant Director,” he amended.

  “Special Detective Sam Diamond,” Sam said, shaking hands with the first person she’d ever met to whom she felt she could apply the word ‘dapper’. Prescott was neatness personified from his trim grey suit to his perfectly styled and perfectly white, collar-length hair.

  “Can you tell me anything yet Detective Diamond? I am simply dreading the ramifications of this should it turn out to be a case of murder,” Prescott said and then added, almost as an afterthought, “not to mention what poor Lloyd must have gone through.”

  Sam tried to keep her face expressionless as she glanced at Rigby and then back to Prescott.

  “We’ll discuss the possible ramifications after we ascertain the cause of death, Mr Prescott,” she said. “I can’t give you any details until Detective Rigby brings me up to speed on the investigation so far.”

  “Well, we haven’t done much yet,” Rigby stated. “We were told to wait for you.”

  “Who told you that?” Sam asked in surprise.

  “I’m afraid I did. Is that a problem?” Prescott asked. On seei
ng Sam’s amusement and the annoyed look on Rigby’s face, he continued hurriedly, “Of course it is not official. I was simply advising you, Detective Rigby, of the imminent arrival of a representative from the ACB and mistakenly, so it seems, assumed her authority would supersede yours.”

  “It’s a common mistake Mr Prescott,” Rigby said through clenched teeth. “Now, if you could keep yourself available, or let Constable Rivers here know of your whereabouts, we’ll get back to you when we have more information.” He turned to Sam and rolled his eyes. “The body?” he suggested.

  “The body,” Sam echoed in agreement.

  The crime scene, for it would be treated as such until facts proved otherwise, was a long, narrow room lined with and divided by temporary shelving filled with labelled boxes and a variety of stone and wooden artefacts. At the far end Sam could see Doctor Ian Baird, the forensic pathologist, consulting with his team members, one of whom was busy taking photographs. Extra lights had obviously been brought in to illuminate what she guessed was normally a fairly dingy space.

  “What’s your best guess Doc? Can we go home and let the family take over?” Rigby asked hopefully.

  “Sorry Jack. Definitely suspicious circumstances here. Foul play is evident,” Baird replied, his Scottish accent, even after 20 years in the country, still unconsciously fighting any Australian influences. “Hello Sam, long time no see,” he added.

  “Ian, it’s good to see you,” Sam acknowledged, stepping forward to take a look at the body and the evidence of foul play.

  Professor Lloyd Marsden lay almost in a foetal position on his left side, although his body had rolled slightly so that his chest and right arm were also touching the floor. He was holding a pen in his right hand, his right shoulder obscured the lower part of his face and the weight of his body was squashing his nose against the dusty floorboards.

  To the right of the body, about two metres from the head, was a gruesome-looking stone statue of a squatting figure with very large toenails. It was much too heavy to be wielded by even the most determined assailant. To the left about one metre was an overturned chair, a cluttered work bench and a drafting table. There was no likely-looking weapon, no blood and no signs of violence. It looked to Sam like the least suspicious of circumstances.