Endpeace

‘Just like those bumper stickers, Shit Happens?’

‘Usually a little more tragic than that. And sometimes messier.’

‘Don’t fence with him, Charlie,’ said Sheila Custer. ‘He has already put me in my place.’ She put her hand on Malone’s. ‘Only joking, Mr Malone.’

Malone gave her a smile, but he continued to look at Bentsen. Crumbs, he thought, why is everyone in this house so bloody aggressive? What’s scratching at them?

Bentsen said, ‘I read murder mysteries, they’re my relaxation. The old-fashioned sort, not the ones written by muscle-flexing authors.’

‘I get enough of it during the course of a week. I can’t remember when I last read a murder mystery – reading our running sheets is about as close as I get. Do you read books about business leaders?’

‘Only those that fail,’ said Bentsen and looked around him as if one or two fallen heroes might be here in the room.

On the other side of the room Lisa was resisting, without effort, the charm of Nigel Huxwood. In another location she might have good-humouredly responded to him; but not in this house. While pretending to listen to him, she had been taking in her surroundings. There were treasures in this room with which she would have liked to have surrounded herself: the two Renoirs on opposite walls, the Rupert Bunny portrait of two women who might have been earlier Huxwoods. The chairs and couches and small tables were antiques, though the upholstery had been renewed; the drapes were French silk. The room reeked of wealth well spent and, against the grain of her nature, she suddenly felt envious. This house was working on her in a way that made her angry.

She looked up almost with relief, any distraction was welcome, as the two female in-laws, who had been missing since dinner, came back into the drawing-room. They bore down on Lisa and Nigel, drawing up chairs to sit side by side like twins who always did everything together. Yet in looks they could not have been more dissimilar.

Brenda Huxwood was an almost archetypal Irish beauty; the only thing that stopped her face from being perfect was that her upper lip was too Irish, just a little too long. She had been an actress, but her talent had never matched her looks and British producers had always shied away from promoting an actress on beauty alone. She was Nigel’s third wife and, if Lisa had asked her, would have said she was determined to be his last. She had started life with no money but always with an eye to attaining some; now she had grasped it she had no intention of losing it; her credit was that she loved Nigel, despite his faults. The brogue in her voice was only faint, like a touch of make-up to enhance the general appeal, though it could thicken into a soup of anger as others in the room knew.

Cordelia Huxwood, on the other hand, had had to borrow her looks: from hairdressers, beauty salons, aerobics classes. Her mouse-brown hair was tinted, her pale blue eyes somehow made to seem larger than they actually were, her figure, inclined to plumpness, slimmed down by only-God-and-gym-instructors-knew how many hours on exercise machines. The package was artificial, yet sincerity shone out of her so that one instantly liked her. She was inclined to blame herself for too much that might go wrong, to wear hairshirts, but since they were usually by Valentino or Hermès she got little sympathy, especially from her mother-in-law.

‘Where have you two been?’ said Nigel.

‘Talking business,’ said Brenda and made it sound as if she and Cordelia had been composing a poem. Everything with her, Lisa decided, was for effect.

‘We in-laws needed to get a few things straightened out,’ said Cordelia.

Lisa was never sure whether she had been born with a sharp eye, had acquired it as a diplomat’s secretary or had learned it from Scobie: whichever, she did not miss Nigel’s warning glance. ‘You must tell me about it. Later.’

‘Oh, we’ll do that,’ said his wife. ‘Voices will be heard.’

‘They may even be strident,’ said Cordelia. ‘But we mustn’t puzzle Mrs Malone with family problems. Do you have children?’

‘Three. Eighteen, fifteen and thirteen. Two girls and a boy. So far, thank God, giving us no problems.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Cordelia. ‘I hope it stays that way. How’s Mother Dragon?’ she said to Nigel.

‘Starting to yawn openly.’

‘She always does. She has a patent on the open yawn.’

Lisa couldn’t help herself: she giggled. Both Cordelia and Brenda looked at her and smiled widely, as if pleased that an outsider had seen a family joke. But neither said anything and Nigel, covering hastily, turned the conversation off at right angles.

Malone, abruptly left out of a sudden conversation between Sheila and Bentsen, excused himself and headed for the door. Sir Harry, after a final pat of Gloria Bentsen, this time on her attractive knee, rose and followed him. ‘Going, Mr Malone?’

‘Soon, Sir Harry. But first I’d like to use the bathroom.’

‘There’s a lavatory off the library.’ The old-fashioned word brought a grin to Malone’s lips. His mother was the only other person he knew who talked of the lavatory instead of the toilet or the loo. ‘This way.’

The library was a big room with the high ceiling that the rest of the ground floor of the house seemed to possess. It was the sort of room Malone saw in films and, secretly, yearned for; for some reason he had never confessed the yearning to anyone, even Lisa. In a room like this he would gather together all the books he had let slip by him, would wrap himself in the education that Lisa had and he had missed, would listen to the music that his heart would understand but that his ear had yet to interpret. He wondered if Sir Harry, with all his advantages, would understand his yearning.

A leather-covered door was let into a wall of books; Sir Harry gestured at it and Malone went in, under a complete set of Winston Churchill, for a piss. When he came out Sir Harry was standing at the tall bow-window that looked out on to the tiny bay and beyond that to the harbour. The only lighting in the dark brown room came from a brass lamp on the wide leather-topped desk. When Sir Harry turned back to face Malone, he looked suddenly much older in the yellow glow. The lines in his face had become gullies, the eyes had no gleam in them.

‘A good piss is one of life’s little pleasures.’ Even his smile looked ghastly. Then he sat down at the desk, there was more light on his face and he suddenly appeared less frail. ‘Were you and my son Derek ever close, Mr Malone?’

‘Scobie ... No, not really. We got on well, but there was the age difference. In sport six years is quite a gap. He’d been playing for five or six years before I got into the State team. We weren’t real professionals back then, none of us earned the money they do these days.’

‘I don’t think Derek ever gave a thought to what he earned as a cricketer.’

‘He could afford not to.’

The old man accepted the rebuke. ‘Sorry. So you and he were not close?’

‘Not as bosom friends, no. He was my – well, I guess my mentor.’

Sir Harry nodded. ‘He was always good at that. Mentoring, or whatever the verb is. Except with his siblings.’

That was another old-fashioned word that, unlike lavatory, had come back into fashion. Malone, having no siblings, could think of nothing to say and, as he often did in interrogations, stood and waited. The old man seemed not to notice his silence; he went on, ‘What’s your heritage, Scobie?’

The question made Malone pause; he could not remember ever having been asked it before. ‘Not much, I’m afraid. I’ve never bothered to trace the family further back than my grandparents. And even that far back I’m in the dark on a lot of things.’ Including my own mother’s early life; or anyway her early love. ‘I’m of Irish descent, the name tells you that. I guess all I’ve really inherited, if I knew about it, is a lot of pain and trouble. That’s Ireland, isn’t it?’

‘It doesn’t seem to have affected you. On the surface.’

‘Maybe it’s because I don’t think too much about it. Maybe I should.’

Sir Harry shook his head. ‘If you don’t have to, don’t. Heritage, I’m beginning to think, is like history – it’s bunk. Henry Ford, one of history’s worst philosophers, said that. But perhaps, who knows, he had a point.’ He had an occasional stiff way of putting his thoughts into words, as if he were writing an editorial. Then he smiled and stood up. ‘I’d like you to come again, Scobie. I don’t get to talk enough to –’ Then he smiled again, without embarrassment. ‘I was going to say the common folk. Does that offend you?’

‘I’m a republican, Sir Harry. We’re all common folk.’

‘You must debate some time with my wife. She’s a monarchist through and through. At Runnymede she would have been on side with King John. You’ve heard of Magna Carta?’

There it was again, the arrogance: unwitting, perhaps in Sir Harry’s case, but endemic. ‘They were still teaching English history when I was at school. I had to study it in a plain brown wrapper, so my father wouldn’t throw a fit. He hates the Brits.’

‘Perhaps you should bring him here to debate with my wife.’

‘Are you a monarchist, Sir Harry?’ All at once Malone was interested in the older man, wanted to put him in front of the video recorder in one of the interrogation rooms at Homicide. Take him apart, perhaps take a hundred and fifty years of Huxwoods apart. This family, this man, had wielded influence that had toppled governments, that had sent young men to a war they didn’t believe in, that had, in various ways, influenced the running of the force in which Malone himself served.

‘Mr Malone, I fear that all my beliefs, whatever they were, have somehow turned to water.’ Then abruptly it seemed that he had revealed enough of himself: ‘Shall we rejoin the others?’

They went out into the wide tessellated hallway. A curving staircase went up to the first floor, its polished walnut banister following it like a python heading for the upper galleries of a rain-forest. Four of the family stood in the hallway: Derek, Nigel, Sheila and Linden. Halfway up the staircase Lady Huxwood had paused, stood with one hand on the banister and stared down at her children. Malone, the outsider, unconnected to whatever demons were stirring in the family, was struck with a sudden image: he had seen it all before on some late night movie, The Magnificent Ambersons or The Little Foxes, Bette Davis or some other over-the-top actress pouring venom from a great height.

‘You deserve nothing, none of you! I should have aborted the lot of you!’

Then she went on up the stairs, paused on the gallery that ran round the upper level of the hallway and looked back down into the pit. Malone waited for another spit of spite, was surprised when she looked directly at him and snapped, ‘Goodnight, Mr Malone. I’m sure you won’t come again.’

Then she was gone. There was absolute silence and stillness for a long moment, then the four siblings let out a collective sigh. Sir Harry touched Malone’s arm, said, ‘Forgive us, Mr Malone,’ and went on up the stairs, moving stiffly and not looking back at his sons and daughters.

Malone had known embarrassment, but nothing like this. He looked for an exit, some way he could skirt the four Huxwoods and be ignored by them. Then Lisa appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, coat over her dinner dress. If she had heard what had just been said in the hallway, she gave no sign of it.

She held out her hand to Derek. ‘Thank you, Derek, A most entertaining evening.’

Nigel and his sisters slipped away, not even looking at the Malones, just disappearing into the shadows of the house. Derek shook hands with Lisa, did the same with Malone, then escorted them towards the heavy front door.

‘I’m glad you thought it was entertaining.’ He was smiling, that whimsical grin just short of a sneer. ‘Like Macbeth or King Lear. You should see us when we’re in top form. Our paper’s cartoonists could get a month’s run out of us.’

3

Driving home Lisa said, ‘Don’t ever accept an invitation to that house again, understand? Never!’

‘There’s no chance of that. What happened while I was out with Sir Harry?’

‘I don’t know. All of a sudden the four of them were down one end of the room with Lady Huxwood, arguing in whispers. The rest of us were at the other end, trying to look as if we hadn’t been left there like – what’s that expression you use?’

‘Like shags on a rock?’

‘That’s it. We never go there again, understand?’

He knew how adamant she could be, but never about anything as unimportant as a dinner invitation. He had, however, noticed a gradual change in her over the past few months. Last year she had been operated on for cervical cancer; the operation had been successful and there had been no metastasis since. She had undergone chemotherapy and it had had a temporary effect: there had been the recurring bouts of vomiting and she had lost some of her lustrous blonde hair. The hair had grown back, as thick as ever, and she was once again healthily vibrant; but her patience had thinned, she had less time for inconsequentialities. It was as if she had looked at the clock and decided it was closer to midnight than she had thought. She had not become self-centred, but she had begun to ration her time, her attention and her charity. He couldn’t blame her: she had been fortunate to come out on the lucky side of a fifty-fifty chance.

‘What drives them to be like that, for God’s sake?’ She was stirred, more than she should be. ‘They have everything, there’s nothing missing in their lives. Not the way ordinary people count things. And yet ... Have you ever met such a bunch?’

‘There’s lots more around like them, I’m sure. We just never meet them. When we do, it’s usually after a homicide and by then they’ve called a truce.’

‘Lady Huxwood invites homicide. Anyhow, we never go there again. Watch the red light.’

‘You’re the one who’s driving. You watch it.’

Chapter Two

1

For several years the Homicide Unit of the Major Crime Squad, South Region, had been housed in the Hat Factory, a one-time commercial building where the ambience had suggested that the Police Service was down on its luck, that the hat had had to be passed around before the rent could be raised. Recently Homicide, along with other units in the Major Crime Squad, had been moved to quarters that, for the first few weeks, had brought on delusions that money had been thrown at the Service which the State government had actually meant for more deserving causes such as casino construction or pork-barrelling in marginal electorates.

Strawberry Hills was the enticing name of the new location, though no strawberry had ever been grown there nor had it ever been really enticing. It had begun as clay-topped sandhills held together by blackbutts, blood-woods, angophoras and banksias, but those trees had soon disappeared as the men with axes arrived and development raised its ugly shacks. ‘Environment’, in its modern meaning, had just been adopted in England, but so far word, or the word, had not reached the colony. For years there was a slow battle between the sandhills and the houses built on them, but that did not stop a developer from naming his estate after the sylvan Strawberry Hill in England where Horace Walpole, in between writing letters to addressees still to be chosen, had built a villa that would never have got above foundation level if it had been built on the colony’s sandhills. Time passed and gradually Strawberry Hills, like the sandhills, virtually disappeared off maps. The city reached out and swamped it. A vast mail exchange was built where once tenement houses had stood, but though Australia Post could sort a million letters an hour it couldn’t sort out the industrial troubles in the exchange. Eventually the huge ugly structure was closed as a mail exchange, an impressive glass facade was added, as if to mask what a problem place it had been. Six huge Canary Islands date palms stood sentinel in the forecourt, looking as out of place as Nubian palace guards would have been. The winos across the street in Prince Alfred Park suffered the DTs for a week or two, but became accustomed to the new vista and soon settled back into the comfort of the bottle.

Australia Post moved its administrative staff back in and then looked around for tenants who would be less of a problem than its unions had been. Whether it was conscious of the irony or not, it chose the Major Crime Squad. Level Four in the refurbished building was almost too rich in its space and comfort for the Squad’s members, but it is difficult to be stoical against luxury. One of the pleasures for those in Homicide on night duty was to put their feet up on their brand-new desks, lean back and, on the Unit’s television set, watch re-runs of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue and pity the poor bastards who had to work in such conditions.

The morning after the Huxwood dinner Malone overslept, but, a creature of certain habits, he still went for his five-kilometre walk before breakfast. It was nine-thirty before he reached Homicide and let himself in through the security door. Russ Clements was waiting for him, looking worried.

‘You sick or something? I rang Lisa ten minutes ago -’

‘I’m okay. I knew there was nothing in the synopsis -’

‘There is now. Four murders in our Region alone, two in North Region’s. You and I are on our way out to Vaucluse –’

‘I’m not going out on any job. That’s for you –’

The big man shook his head. ‘I think you’d better come on this one, Scobie.’

Malone frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Lisa told me where you were last night. Malmaison House. That’s where we’re going. Kate Arletti’s out there waiting for us – I sent her out as soon as Rose Bay called in. It’s their turf, theirs and Waverley’s.’

‘A homicide at Malmaison?’ Lady Huxwood invites homicide. ‘Who? Lady Huxwood?’

Clements looked at him curiously. ‘What made you say that?’

‘Lisa and I were talking about her on our way home ... It was a bugger of a night, you’ve got no idea. She’s the – she was the Dragon Lady of all time.’

‘She probably still is. It was the old man, Sir Harry, who was done in.’

Malone managed not to look surprised. No one knew better than he that murder always held surprises, not least to the victim. But Sir Harry? ‘How?’

‘I’m not sure yet. Rose Bay called in, said there was a homicide, but gave no details other than that it was Sir Harry who copped it. The place is probably already overrun with the media clowns.’

‘What about the other murders?’

‘I’ve organized those. I’ll tell you about them on the way out to Vaucluse.’

Homicide had been re-organized late last year in another of the Service’s constant changes. Modern life, Malone thought, had been taken over by planners; they were everywhere, termites in the woodwork of progress. Change for change’s sake had become a battle cry: if it ain’t broke, let’s fix it before it does break. Malone was still the Inspector in charge of Homicide, but he was now called Co-ordinator and his job, supposedly, was now more desk-bound. Clements had been promoted to senior-sergeant and was now the Field Supervisor. Murder was still committed, evidence was still collected, the pattern never changed; only the paperwork. Malone knew that conservatism was creeping over him like a slow rash, but he didn’t mind. The itch, actually, was a pleasure.

The two detectives drove in an unmarked car out to the farthest of the affluent eastern suburbs. Vaucluse lies within the shoulder of the ridge that runs out to end in South Head at the gateway to the harbour; it is a small area facing down the harbour like a dowager gladly distant from the hoi polloi. The suburb is named after a property once owned by a titled convict who was as thick in the head as the timber that grew down the slope from the ridge. He built a small stone house and surrounded it with a moat filled with soil shipped out from the Irish bogs – ‘to keep out the snakes’. The area has had several notable eccentrics since then, but Sir Henry Brown Hayes had established the standard. The Wentworths, a family with its own quota of eccentrics, were the first to give the suburb its social tone, which it has never lost.

The first Huxwood arrived in 1838, bought five acres along the shore and built the first stage of what was to become La Malmaison. Huxwoods still owned the five acres, paying local taxes that exceeded the annual entertainment allowance of the entire local council. There were three houses on the estate, which had not been subdivided: the Big House, Little House One and Little House Two. Tradesmen, coming to the estate for the first time, had been known to expect fairies at the bottom of the extensive gardens and were surprised to find the family appeared to be both sensible and heterosexual.

Huxwood Road had been named by the founder of the family, determined to have his name on the map; in the 1840s, when he had suffered his first delusion of grandeur, it had been no more than a dirt track. Some years ago, Sir Harry, at the urging of his wife, had attempted to have the council change the name, insisting the family was not interested in advertising or being on any map. But Huxwood Road was now the street in Vaucluse, if not in Sydney, and the residents, having paid fortunes for the address, were not going to find themselves at a location that nobody would recognize. One didn’t pay thousands of dollars a year in taxes to live in Wattle Avenue or, God forbid, Coronation Street.

When Malone and Clements arrived, the street had gone down several hundred thousand dollars in rateable value, at least temporarily. It was chockablock with police cars, press and radio cars, TV vans and an assorted crowd of two or three hundred spectators, most of whom looked as if they had rushed here from nearby Neilsen Park beach. The street had not looked so low grade since the titled convict’s day. The snakes had taken over the Garden of Eden, Irish bog soil notwithstanding.

‘Christ Almighty,’ said Clements. ‘It looks like the finish to the City to Surf gallop.’

He nudged the car through the crowd, in through the wide gates of the estate and down the driveway to the front of the house. Several vehicles were parked there, including three police cars and a private ambulance. As Clements pulled up, another car came down the driveway behind them. Romy Clements got out.

‘What’re you doing here?’ It had the directness of a husband-to-wife remark.

Romy gave Clements a brush-off smile, looked instead at Malone. ‘I thought I’d have a look at how the other two per cent lives. I used rank and told Len Paul I’d do the job.’ She was the Deputy-Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine and ran the day-to-day routine of the city morgue; normally she would not respond to a call for a government medical officer in a homicide. ‘Shall we go in?’

‘I’ll bet she fingers the curtains first,’ Clements told Malone. ‘Then she’ll look at the kitchen. Then she’ll look at the corpse.’

Malone was glad there was nobody close enough to hear the banter. Outsiders might not appreciate that no disrespect was intended, just that murder was part of the day’s work. They went in through the open door, beneath a carved stone replica, like a coat-of-arms, of the Huxwood Press logo: an open book marked with a bookmark, inscribed Only the Truth. The wide hallway inside seemed crowded with people standing around looking lost. It reminded Malone of a theatre lobby and latecomers wondering if seats were still available.

Kate Arletti pushed her way into Malone’s path. ‘Morning, sir. The Rose Bay officers are here and between us we’ve got a few facts. Can we go into that room there?’

It was the library, where Sir Harry last night had said his beliefs had turned to water. The room now had none of last night’s shadows; the summer sun streamed in through the big bay window. Out in the tiny bay a small yacht rocked daintily in the wake from a passing ferry. Then a launch hove into view, crowded with photographers trying to capture the house from the water. Two uniformed policemen appeared down on the shoreline and waved them away. With the policemen was an elderly gardener holding a spade like an axe. Malone nodded, condoning the gardener’s threat of assault and battery.