Murder Song

JON CLEARY

Murder Song

Dedication

For Kathleen and Bob Parrish

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

1

It was a perfect day for aviators, bird watchers, photographers and sniping murderers. The air had that clean bright light that occurs on some days in Sydney in the winter month of August; the wind blows out of the west, across the dry flat continent, and scours the skies to a brilliant blue shine. Thin-blooded citizens turn up their coat collars and look east to the sea or north for the coming of spring. But hardier souls, depending upon their pay or their inclinations, welcome the wind-polished days of August.

The construction worker, in hard hat and thick lumber jacket, was alone on the steel beam of the framework of the twentieth floor of the new insurance building in Chatswood, a northern suburb. He was leaning against the wind, holding tightly to the safety rope, looking north, when the bullet hit him in the chest. He did not see it coming, despite the clear light; if he cried out as he died, no one heard him. He fell backwards, away from the safety rope, was already dead as he went down in a clear fall to the ground two hundred feet below.

Several of his workmates, horrified, saw him fall. None of them at that moment knew he had been shot. None of them looked for the murderer, so none of them saw him. The shot could have come from any one of half a dozen neighbouring buildings, all of them occupied, but the time was 9.10 in the morning and bosses and workers were still settling down at their desks. It was too early in the day to be staring out of windows.

The dead man was Harry Gardner, a cheerful extrovert with a wife and four children and not an enemy in the world. Except the unknown man who had killed him.

2

A week later, on a cold rainy night when no one had a good word to say about August, Terry Sugar, a twenty-four-year veteran of the New South Wales Police Department, was getting out of his car in the driveway of his home in Mount Druitt, a western suburb of Sydney, when the bullet hit him in the neck, went down through his chest, came out and lodged in the car seat. He saw his killer, though he did not recognize him, but he died almost instantly and had no time to tell anyone.

First Class Sergeant Sugar was married and had two sons, one at high school and the other in his first year at university. Naturally, as a policeman, not everyone was his friend: that was the Australian way. He had, however, received no death threats; for the last year he had been in charge of the desk at the Parramatta Police Centre and had been working on no outside cases. The detectives assigned to the murder attempted no written guesses, but amongst themselves they put the killing down as the work of a crank who had a grudge against all police, a thrill-killer or someone who had mistaken his victim for someone else.

Detective-Inspector Scobie Malone and Detective-Sergeant Russ Clements, both of whom had known Terry Sugar, attended the funeral. There was a police guard of honour and four of Sergeant Sugar’s fellow officers were the pall-bearers; Police Commissioner John Leeds and several other senior officers and a hundred uniformed officers marched in the cortège. Around Parramatta there were four break-ins, two bag-snatchings and an attempted bank hold-up during the forty-five-minute church service.

It was another fine clear day, but the wind, coming today from the south-west, had a touch of Antarctica to it; tears were cold on the cheeks. The light was ideal for the press photographers and the newsreel cameramen, though funerals don’t photograph as well as fashion parades.

Malone and Clements, the Commissioner and other outsiders dropped out after the token march down the main street; the family had requested that the actual burial be as private as could be arranged. As he stepped aside Malone bumped into one of the television cameramen, a tall, bald, overweight man with a beard.

‘Sorry.’ The man took his eye away from the view-finder. ‘I didn’t see you, Inspector.’

Malone didn’t know the man’s name, but he had seen him occasionally at the scenes of crimes; he recognized the logo on the camera. ‘Will it be on Channel 15’s news tonight?’

‘Probably.’

Malone glanced at Clements. ‘Remind me not to look.’

The man smiled through his thick black beard. ‘I understand. But I have a job to do, just like everyone else. I don’t enjoy these jobs.’

‘Maybe,’ said Malone. ‘I just don’t like my kids to see their father following another cop’s coffin.’

Chapter Two

1

‘There’s been another one,’ said Claire, coming into the kitchen.

‘Another what?’ said her mother.

‘Homicide. Pass the Weet-Bix.’

‘Terrific!’ said Maureen. ‘He’s gunna have his name in the papers again.’

‘I think I’ll start another scrapbook,’ said Tom.

‘You haven’t started a first one yet,’ said Maureen.

‘No, I was going to, but.’

‘Who mentioned homicide?’ said Malone. ‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘Uncle Russ,’ said Claire. ‘He’s still hanging there.’

Muttering an incoherent curse, picturing the 100-kilogram Russ Clements hanging by his neck from a phone cord, Malone got up and went out into the hallway. ‘Russ? How many times have I bloody told you – don’t mention homicide in front of the kids!’

‘Get off the boil, Inspector,’ said Sergeant Clements in a patient voice that made a gentle mockery of Malone’s rank. There had once been a Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force, as it was then known, who had insisted on the use of rank when addressing another officer; he had given rank another of its meanings when he had been found, on retirement, to have been the State’s patron saint of corruption. He, however, had been before Malone’s and Clements’ time, though his legend persisted. ‘Claire’s got too much imagination. Where does she get it from?’

‘Her mother. Go on. Is there a homicide or not?’

‘Yeah, there is. But all I asked Claire was whether you had left for the office. You know how I feel about your kids, Scobie –’

‘Yeah, I know. Sorry. Where’s the job this time?’

‘Down at The Warehouse in Clarence Street, it’s an apartment block. It seems routine, a woman shot.’

‘If it’s routine, why ring me? Take Andy Graham or someone and get down there.’

‘Scobie, there’s three guys off with ’flu. I need a back-up.’

‘An inspector backing up a sergeant? You trying to ruin my day? Righto, I’ll be there. But I’m going to finish my breakfast first. It’s a privilege of rank.’

He hung up and went back into the kitchen. It was a big old-fashioned room that, despite all its modern appliances, suggested another time, almost another country. The house was eighty years old, built just after Federation, part-sandstone, part-redbrick. It was of a style that had become fashionable again with its pitched slate roof, its wide front verandah, its eaves embellishments and its hint of conservative values, though not in dollar terms. The Malones had bought the house eight years ago and now it was worth three times what they had paid for it. With its backyard pool, a gift from Lisa’s parents, adding to its worth, Malone sometimes wondered if the neighbours thought he might be a policeman on the take. Easy money had been a national gift for several years and suspicion of a neighbour’s good fortune had become endemic.

‘I’ll have another cup of coffee,’ he said, spreading some of Lisa’s home-made marmalade on a slice of wholegrain toast.

‘So where’s the murder?’ Maureen was almost ten, going on twenty; she lived in a world of TV cop shows and soap operas. She had a mind as lively as an aviary full of swallows, but she was no bird-brain; Malone felt that, somehow, she would grow up to be the least vulnerable of his three children. ‘God, why did we have to have a cop as a father? He never wants to talk about his work with us.’

‘You think Alan Bond sits down at breakfast and discusses take-overs with his grandkids?’

‘What about the Pope?’ said Tom, the seven-year-old.

‘I’ve told you before – the Pope doesn’t have kids. What sort of Catholic school do you go to? What do you do during religious instruction?’

‘Play noughts and crosses.’

‘Holy Jesus,’ said Malone, then added, ‘That was supposed to be a prayer.’

‘Just as well,’ said Tom piously. ‘You know what Grandma Malone thinks about swearing.’

‘She should come up to Holy Spirit some day and listen to the senior girls,’ said Maureen. ‘Holy –’

‘Watch it,’ said Lisa, who swore only in bed under and on top of Malone and never within the hearing of the children, which meant she sometimes got up in the morning with a hoarse throat.

‘Dad,’ said Claire, going on fourteen, more than halfway to being a beautiful woman and beginning to be aware of it, ‘what about my fifty dollars? I’ve got to pay the deposit for the skiing holiday.’

‘Who’s taking your class on this trip?’

‘Sister Philomena, Speedy Gonzalez’s sister.’

‘A sixty-year-old skiing nun? Does the Pope know about this emancipation?’

‘What’s emancipation?’ asked Tom, who had a keen interest in words if not in Catholic politics.

‘Forget it,’ said Malone and took a fifty-dollar note from his wallet. ‘That skins me. I can remember my school holidays, we went to Coogee Beach.’

‘Not in winter, you didn’t,’ said Claire, as practical-minded as her mother. She took the note and put it carefully away in her wallet, which, Malone noticed, was fatter than his own. She had inherited his reluctance to spend, but somehow, even at going-on-fourteen, she always seemed to be richer than he.

‘Don’t let the light get to the moths in there,’ said Maureen, the spendthrift. ‘Now tell us about the murder, Daddy.’

‘When I’m retired and got nothing better to do. Now get ready for school.’

Later, when the children had left to walk to school, an exercise that Lisa insisted upon, Malone stood at the front door with Lisa. ‘It’s unhealthy, the way they keep harping what murder I’m on.’

‘What do you expect, a father’s who’s been ten years in Homicide? You could always ask for a transfer, to Traffic or something unexciting. Or Administration, that’d be nice. Nine to five and you wouldn’t have to wear a gun.’ She patted the bulge of his holster, as she might a large tumour.

It was a sore point between them; he couldn’t blame her for her point of view. Cops everywhere in the world probably had this sort of conversation with their wives or lovers. ‘You’d be bored stiff if I turned into a stuffy office manager.’

‘Try me.’ She kissed him, gave him her usual warning, which was more than a cliché for her: ‘Take care.’

He drove into town in the six-year-old Holden Commodore. Like himself, it was always slow to start on a winter morning; they were a summertime pair. The car was beginning to show its age; and on mornings like this he sometimes felt his. He was in his early forties, with a fast bowler’s bulky shoulders and still reasonably slim round the waist; he had been rawboned and lithe in his cricketing days, and he sometimes felt the ghost of that youth in his bones and extra flesh. But that was all in the past and he knew as well as anyone that one couldn’t go back. Lately he had found himself observing Lisa, forty and still in her prime but just beginning to fade round the edges, and praying for her sake (and, selfishly, for his) that age would come slowly and kindly to her.

Randwick, where he lived, was eight kilometres from the heart of the city; in the morning peak hour traffic it took him twenty-five minutes to get to the scene of the murder. Clarence Street was one of the north-bound arteries of the central business district; it was one of four such streets named after English dukes in the early nineteenth century, a tugging of the colonial forelock of those days. Originally it had been the site of the colony’s troop barracks; pubs and brothels had been close at hand to provide the usual comforts. Then the barracks and brothels had been cleaned out, but not all the pubs. Merchants had moved in to build their narrow-fronted warehouses and showrooms; silks and satins had replaced sex in the market, salesmen had taken over from the soldiers. There had been a tea-and-coffee warehouse that Malone could remember passing as a boy; there had also been the scent of spices from another warehouse; he had stopped to breathe deeply and dream of Zanzibar and Ceylon and dusky girls amongst the bushes. He had matured early, a common occurrence amongst fast bowlers: matured physically, that is.

The Warehouse was not a warehouse at all, but a block of expensive apartments built where two commercial houses had once stood. Two police cars were parked by the kerb ahead of two unmarked cars on meters with the Expired sign showing: they, too, would be police cars, probably the government medical officer and staff members from Crime Scene. He parked the Commodore in a Loading Zone strip, grinned at the van driver who pulled up and yelled at him to get his fucking car out of there, and went into the apartment block. A uniformed policeman was in the small foyer.

‘Morning, Inspector. It’s up on the ninth floor. They’re all up there, the doctor, the photographer, everyone.’

Malone looked around. ‘Is there a porter or anyone?’

‘No, sir. Everything here is automatic, the security, the lifts, everything.’ He was a fresh-faced young man, still a probationary, still eager to be eager.

‘This your first homicide?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It won’t be your last. Keep everyone out but our people. Oh, and any of the tenants. Get their names if any of them appear.’

He went up in the lift to the ninth floor and the murder scene. It was a two-bedroom apartment with a living-dining-room, a small kitchen and an even smaller bathroom. It had a balcony that looked west towards the Darling Harbour entertainment and convention complex; in the distance was the Balmain ridge, with the tower of the local town hall jutting up like a secular minaret beneath which more abuse than prayers was exchanged. The furniture of the flat was good but undistinguished; the carpet was thick but not expensive and was stained in several spots; the prints on the walls were of birds but one had the feeling they had been chosen by a decorator who didn’t know a budgerigar from a bald crow. It was a pied-à-terre, not a home: no one had left a handprint on it.

The body was lying just inside the closed glass doors that led out to the small balcony. There was a silver sunburst in one of the doors, like the sketch for a motif on a headstone. Russ Clements pulled back the sheet.

‘Her name’s Mardi Jack, her driving licence says she lived out in Paddington. She was thirty-three.’

Malone looked down at the dead woman. She had dark red hair, cut short in a shingle style, tinted, he guessed; she had a broad sensual face, pinched a little in pain; her body, too, might have been sensual when she was alive, but death had turned it into a limp ugly heap. Her clothes looked expensive but flashy, the sort bought in boutiques that catered to the disco crowd; Malone, knowing nothing about fashion, was conservative in his taste, though his wife and elder daughter said he had no taste at all. Mardi Jack’s green sequinned blouse was low-cut, her cleavage made ugly by the congealed blood from her wound; her black trousers were too tight, too suggestive, Malone thought. The dead woman had not come to the flat expecting to spend the night or the weekend alone.

‘There’s a black fox coat, dyed, I think, in the main bedroom,’ said Clements.

‘How do you know so much about dyed fox coats?’

‘I bought one once that fell off the back of a truck. For my mum.’

Malone looked down again at Mardi Jack, then drew the sheet back over her. ‘How long’s she been dead?’

Clements glanced at the government medical officer, who had come in from the kitchen, where he had just made himself a cup of coffee. ‘How long, doc?’

‘Thirty-six hours, maybe a bit more. Saturday night, I’d say.’ The GMO was a man who looked ready to burst from years of good living; belly, cheeks, chins all protruded and his breath wheezed out of a fat throat. Malone often wondered why Doc Gilbey had chosen an area where most of the corpses he examined were at ankle-height. One day the GMO, bending down, was going to collapse and die on top of one of the bodies. ‘Just the one bullet in her, right into her heart, I’d say. A lucky shot. It’s still in the body.’

‘Let me know when you’ve sent it on to Ballistics.’

Gilbey slurped his coffee. ‘They’ll have it today.’

The small apartment was becoming crowded; two men from the funeral contractors had arrived to join the Crime Scene men, the girl photographer and the two uniformed officers. Malone pulled back one of the glass doors and stepped out on to the balcony, jerking his head for Clements to follow him.

‘What have you got so far?’

‘Bugger-all.’ Clements bit his bottom lip, an old habit. He was a big, plain-looking man, a couple of inches taller than Malone and almost twenty kilos heavier. He was a bachelor, afraid of commitment to a woman but envying Malone his comfortable family life. He was mildly bigoted and racist, but kindly; he could complain sourly about too many Asians being allowed into the country, then tenderly, if awkwardly, console a Vietnamese woman who had lost her son in a gang battle. At that he was no more complex than Malone and sixteen million other Australians, including the Asian-born.

‘Who found her?’

‘The cleaning lady.’ Clements belonged to that class which thought that to call a woman a ‘woman’ was demeaning to her; it was another manifestation that contradicted the native myth that Australians did not believe in class distinction. ‘I’ve interviewed her and let her go home. She’s a Greek, a bit excitable about dead bodies.’

‘So am I. I don’t like them. You talk to anyone else?’

‘I’ve got a coupla the uniformed guys going through the building. So far they haven’t brought anyone up here.’

‘The flat belong to her?’ Malone nodded in at the corpse, now being covered in a green plastic shroud.

‘No, it’s a company flat. There’s some notepaper and envelopes in a desk inside. Kensay Proprietary Limited. Their offices are in Cossack House in Bridge Street. She had a key, though.’

Malone, raincoat collar turned up against the wind coming across the western reaches of the harbour, looked out at the buildings surrounding them; then he looked at the bullet hole in the glass door. ‘A high-powered rifle?’

‘I’d bet on it. I don’t think anyone would have been standing here and shot her through the glass. There’s a lot of dust and dirt here on the balcony – looks like the cleaning lady doesn’t come out here in winter. There’s no sign of any footmarks.’

Malone looked down at the marks his own and Clements’ shoes had made. Then he looked out again at the neighbouring buildings. ‘Where do you reckon the shot came from?’

‘Over there.’ Clements pointed at a block of offices in Kent Street, the next street west. ‘He’d have had an ideal spot there on that flat roof. It’s about a hundred and fifty metres away, no more. If he was experienced, with a good gun and a night ’scope, she’d have been an easy target.’

‘Righto, send for Andy Graham, get him to do the donkey work, tell him to search that roof and next door to it for any cartridge cases. Stay here till he turns up. I’m going out to Paddington, see if there’s anyone there to tell the bad news to.’

‘Better you than me.’

‘Some day you’re going to have to do it.’ I just hope to Christ you don’t have to tell the bad news to Lisa.

He left Clements, went down in the lift with the two men from the funeral contractors and the body of Mardi Jack. The lift wasn’t big enough to take the stretcher horizontally and one of the men was holding Mardi Jack in his arms as if she were a drunken dancer.

‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ he said over the green plastic shoulder to Malone. ‘The bloody service lift isn’t working. I guess it’s gunna be one of them weeks.’

‘At least you’re still breathing,’ said Malone.

The man, tall and painfully thin, a living cadaver, wasn’t offended; his trade brought more abusive jokes than even a policeman’s lot. ‘Sometimes I wonder who’s better off,’ he said and looked reproachfully at the shrouded corpse as if Mardi Jack had missed a crucial step in their dance.

Malone went out into Clarence Street, pushing through the small crowd that had stopped to see why an ambulance was double-parked in the busy street. There were also two TV vans double-parked behind it; a cameraman aimed his camera at Malone, but he shook his head and put a hand up to his face. Two reporters came at him, but he just smiled and said, ‘See Sergeant Clements, he’s in charge,’ and dodged round them.

There were two parking tickets on the Commodore; the Grey Bombers, the parking police, must be making blanket raids this morning. He lifted them off, stuck them under a windscreen wiper of one of the TV vans, got into the car and pulled out into the traffic. He glanced in his driving mirror as he drove away and saw the body of Mardi Jack, now on the stretcher, being pushed into the ambulance.

The start of another week, another job. He wondered how senior men felt in Traffic or Administration each Monday morning. But even as he drove towards that aspect of murder he always hated, the telling of the dreadful news to the victim’s family, he knew he would always prefer people to paper. The living and the dead were part of him.

2

Goodwood Street was a narrow one-way street lined on both sides by narrow-fronted terrace houses. Paddington in the last century had been a mix of solid merchants’ houses and workmen’s cottages and terraces; perched on a ridge, the merchants and one or two of the workmen had had a distant view of the harbour, but most of the citizens had just stared across the street at each other, not always the best of sights, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the drunks came rolling home. Then in the twenties and thirties of this century it had become almost solely a working man’s domain, the narrow houses crowded with large families, constant debt and a solid Labour vote. In the last twenty years it had been invaded by artists moving closer to the wealthy buyers of the eastern suburbs, by writers who weren’t intellectual enough for Balmain and by yuppies turning the terrace houses into shrunken mansions. Houses with sixteen-foot frontages now brought prices that would have kept the families of years ago for a lifetime. It was another turn of the wheel in the history of any city that manages to survive.

Malone had to park again in a No Standing zone; the Commodore, in a year, collected more parking tickets than it did bird-crap. He knocked on a bright yellow door in a dark green house; the iron lacework on the upstairs balcony was painted white. As he was about to knock for the third time the door was opened by a girl in a terry-towelling dressing-gown; she had frizzled yellow hair and sleep in her eyes. She blinked in the morning sun.