Endpeace

He didn’t take the bait, if there was any. ‘Yes, I think it is, Phillipa. But we’ll find whoever killed Harry. I promise you that.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I’d like that,’ she said, as if he had promised her no more than a small gift. ‘I’ll miss him, Bill. We fought, oh, often we fought ... But we loved each other. Those downstairs don’t know what love is. Do you?’

But she didn’t wait for his answer. He wondered if she talked to her children, those downstairs, as she was now to him. He knew how people could sometimes confide in strangers thoughts they would never expose to those close to them. But why had she chosen him?

‘I’ll have to go down soon and face them all, I suppose. I’m the matriarch, they’ll expect it. When we first built the other two houses, Derek and Cordelia and Ned and Sheila used to come here every evening, we’d dine en famille. It was Harry’s idea. I’ve never liked the idea of matriarch -’

You could have fooled me.

‘– but Harry saw himself as the patriarch. He always wanted to fill his father’s shoes and there never was a patriarch like Old John. You met him?’

‘Once.’ Twenty-five years ago.

‘He was Biblical, he and I never got on. The en famille idea lasted a year, no more. The nuclear family is a pain in the uterus.’

He loved social gossip; but this was not gossip. ‘Phillipa, don’t tire yourself –’

She gave him the sly look again. ‘I’m talking too much, you mean? Why did you come up here if you didn’t want to talk to me?’

He was wearing out his welcome, she would turn nasty in a moment; he had seen it once or twice over the years. ‘Phillipa, did you hear the shot next door?’

She stared into space, the myopic eyes blank; then she blinked and looked back at him. ‘I’d taken two sleeping pills, I was upset last night. I heard nothing, the roof could have fallen in ...’

He began to move towards the door. ‘Fair enough. We’ll leave you alone now, you and the family.’

‘But you’ll be back?’

‘Not me, but Inspector Malone and one or two of the other detectives.’

‘I wish you would take charge. You can be circumspect.’

Now he knew why she was taking him into her confidence. She had said exactly that, you can be circumspect, twenty-five years ago.

Chapter Three

1

The air waves shivered with indignation and horror at the news of Sir Harry’s murder. Nobody was safe if as important a figure as Sir Harry could be murdered in his own home, said another important figure, Premier Bevan Bigelow, unsafe in his own House. Editorials sang the praises of the dead man but had nothing to say in praise of law and order. Only the columnists, as plentiful on the ground in modern journalism as Indian mynahs and just as raucous, mentioned rumours of a possible sale of the Huxwood empire. The coming election was pushed to the edges of the front pages, to the relief of the voters.

‘Law and order doesn’t apply,’ said Clements, ‘when the throat-cutting is in the family. Don’t they know that?’

‘We don’t know anyone in the family killed him,’ said Malone.

‘No, but I’d make book on it.’

They were at a morning conference the day after the discovery of the murder. All nineteen detectives from Homicide were there, plus Greg Random, Chief Superintendent in charge of the Major Crime Squad. Some of the detectives had been assigned to the three other murders that had occurred in South Region, but the main topic was the Huxwood homicide. Notabilities were not frequent visitors on the Sydney murder scene. True, it was only a press baron who had been done in: had it been a star jockey or footballer of the status of O. J. Simpson there would have been a special session of parliament, the Minister and Commissioner would have brought camp beds into their offices and the media contingent outside Homicide would have looked like a grand final crowd. Still, the pressure was bad enough as it was.

‘I think,’ said Random, sucking on his pipe which no one had ever seen him light, ‘we’d better not start pointing the finger just yet. Let the newspapers do that, they have more experts than we do.’

‘Righto,’ said Malone. ‘What’ve we got? Kate?’

‘I’ve been right through the family, grandkids and all. God, what a bunch!’ Her antipathy towards the Huxwood clan seemed to have increased since yesterday. ‘There are six grandkids, three of them with minor records. Car-stealing –’

‘Car-stealing?’ said Andy Graham. ‘With their money? They’d all own Porsches at least.’

Kate Arletti shrugged. ‘Rebellion, I guess. They’re a rebellious lot, most of them. Two of them have drug charges against them, possession of. None of them says he or she knows anything of what happened the night before last.’

‘What about the rest of the family, the kids’ parents?’ asked Clements.

‘They were mine.’ Phil Truach coughed, a hint that the meeting had gone on long enough without his having had a smoke. He and Random were the only two grey-heads in the group: Random the senior by five years and a chief superintendent, Truach only recently promoted to sergeant. But rank had seemingly never worried Phil Truach and if he never hurried himself, there was no one in Homicide more thorough than he. ‘Nobody heard nothing, nobody has a clue why the old man should’ve been shot. They’ve all got their backs to the wall, a blank wall.’

‘Not entirely blank,’ said Malone. ‘Derek let his hair down a bit to me and so did the Number One son-in-law Ned Custer. The rumours of a sell-off of Huxwood Press are true and it’s turning into a dog-fight in the family.’

‘Who’s for it and who’s against it?’ John Kagal was the handsomest and smartest dressed in the group. He was also the only detective with a university degree, a distinction he had once quietly flaunted but which he had now learned to hide. Elitism is tolerated and admired in the criminal classes, but in the rest of the native working class, including the police, it is looked upon as a criminal offence. Some day, as inevitably as crime would continue to be committed, Kagal would have Greg Random’s rank, but he had learned, too, to hide his ambition. He had been given a lesson in police service culture: that seniority was as sanctified as motherhood. Wedded motherhood, that is.

‘I don’t know who’s for or against it,’ said Malone. ‘Who checked the butler and his wife?’

‘I did,’ said Kagal. ‘They’re clean. They’ve been in Australia eighteen years, they’re Australian citizens. They’ve worked for the Huxwoods for five years, got good reports.’

‘I checked the gardener,’ said Malone. ‘That leaves only the under-gardener as a regular on the place. Plus the security guards who patrol each night.’

‘I’ve checked them,’ said Andy Graham, restless as ever on his chair. He was always ready to be up and away, usually like a bull at a gate. ‘The first lot check on the hour through the night, the other lot on the half-hour. There’d be a gap of, say, twenty minutes between each check. Time for an outsider, if it was an outsider and knew the routine, to nip in and do the deed.’

‘That leaves the under-gardener. He didn’t come in yesterday. Why?’

‘He’s in today,’ said Kate Arletti. ‘I was out there early this morning, double-checking.’ Her diligence equalled that of Andy Graham, though she managed to be more restrained than he. ‘He had a virus or something yesterday, he said. He’s okay today.’

I’ll talk to him, Malone told himself. He didn’t, however, tell that to Kate; he didn’t believe in implying that a job was only well done when he did it himself. ‘What’s the report from Ballistics?’

‘One bullet, a Thirty-two. If a pillow was used to muffle the shot, Clarrie Binyan thinks the gun could be a Browning, or something like it.’

‘Any shell?’

‘No sign of one. He collected it, looks like.’ Clements closed his notebook. ‘It doesn’t look like a professional job, not if he didn’t use a silencer.’

‘Would an amateur collect the shell? Why would he go in for housekeeping like that?’

Clements shrugged. ‘I dunno. I still think the answer’s in the family.’

‘Don’t harp on that,’ said Random. ‘The family has a friend upstairs.’

Malone kept quiet, but Truach said, ‘The Minister?’

‘No, AC Zanuch.’

‘Oh shit!’

‘Exactly. And that’s what’ll hit the fan if we start talking about the family. I’ll see you outside, Scobie.’ He rose, unhurried as usual, nodded at the group in general and left.

Malone got up from behind the table where he had presided over the meeting, made an I-don’t-know gesture at Clements and followed Random out of the room. The chief superintendent led the way down towards the lifts. He had put his pipe in a side pocket, as if he no longer needed a prop in a man-to-man conversation.

‘Nobody wants this one, Scobie. Steve Lozelle, out at Waverley, it’s in his command. They’ll set up the incident room and do the donkey work. But he wants us to run it, subject to him being in nominal charge. Okay?’

Malone nodded, wondering why the usual jealousy of turf was being sacrificed in this case. Perhaps the Waverley commander already knew that AC Zanuch might interfere.

‘There’s another thing.’ Random took his pipe out of his pocket, had it halfway to his mouth when he had second thoughts and put it away again. ‘Have you seen the Tele-Mirror this morning? They say you were a dinner guest at the Huxwoods’ night before last. They’re playing it up as if you’re that guy in Burke’s Law, the cop with the stiff neck and the corset. My wife tells me Alan Jones had something about it on 2.UE this morning, that you’re a friend of the family –’

‘Balls! I’d never met the family till two nights ago. I hadn’t seen Derek Huxwood in years –’ He explained the circumstances of the dinner invitation.

‘Well –’ Random took the pipe out of his pocket, tapped it in the palm of his hand. He looked almost nervous, something Malone had never seen before. ‘It’s too late now – that would only confirm what they’re hinting, if we took you off it. Just watch it, that’s all. Any hint of the family being suspected is out, okay? Bill Zanuch is leaning on me –’

‘How close is he to them?’

‘I don’t know. But you know him – if he’d been alive at the time he’d have been at the Last Supper. Then he’d have gone to lunch with Pontius Pilate the next day.’ He looked around him to make sure he wasn’t overheard; then he let go his slow smile. ‘Christ help us if ever he becomes Commissioner. We won’t be able to arrest anyone without first checking with the social editors.’

Both men were silent a while, contemplating an awful future. Then the lift doors opened; the lift was empty. ‘Ride down with me.’ The doors closed, locking them in a small chamber where secrets could be exchanged. ‘I don’t know whether he knows anything, but he’s protecting the Huxwoods. I don’t like it any more than you and Russ do, but I’ve got to wear it. Zanuch’s been specific. He wants none of what we had last year with the Cabramatta murder.’ A prominent politician, campaigning against gang crimes in his electorate, had been shot in a western suburb where there was a large Asian community. ‘From the first the media started pointing the finger at the Vietnamese, there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support it –’

‘We still haven’t nabbed who did it.’

‘Nonetheless, we had to keep denying it. Just watch it, Scobie.’ They had reached the ground floor, the doors opened. ‘Let me know everything, everything, that turns up. ’Luck.’

‘Thanks,’ said Malone drily and pressed the button to go back upstairs again.

Clements was waiting for him. ‘What’d he have to say?’

‘The usual. We tread carefully about the family.’

Clements bit his lip. ‘What d’you think? One of them did it?’

Malone took his time. ‘I dunno. An amateur wouldn’t take the time to collect the cartridge shell. But you never know – TV shows you how to do everything, including commit murder ... I’d like to see the family lined up all together. I still haven’t met the grandkids. I gather they’re all old enough to have pulled a trigger. I’m going out there, see if I can round up one or two of them. You want to come?’

Clements shook his big head. Since he had become the Unit Supervisor, had had to assume more paperwork, he appeared to have lost his once-habitual unhurried approach. The re-organization in Homicide had not worked quite the way the planners had planned it, but that has been the way of the world since ivory towers were first built and graphs took the place of commonsense.

‘I’ve got too much to do here. You should be here, too,’ he said almost critically. ‘You’re supposed to be the Co-ordinator.’

‘I’m the most unco-ordinated bastard you ever met,’ said Malone, remembering his loose tongue.

He picked up his hat and left. Downstairs Kate Arletti was crossing the lobby towards the front doors. ‘Where are you heading, Kate?’

‘Out to Vaucluse, sir. I’m going to talk to that under-gardener, Harod or whatever his name is.’

‘Cancel your transport. You can come with me.’ He had a police car of his own, unmarked, but he did not like driving if he could persuade someone else to drive him. One of the advantages was that he never had a parking problem. ‘You can drive.’

They left Strawberry Hills and drove towards the far eastern suburbs, the city changing gradually as they drove, housescapes merging into housescapes, fresco secco into buon fresco, till at last they reached Huxwood Road, still cordoned off by a police barrier with a uniformed officer there to allow only residents and tradesmen past the barrier. Yesterday morning’s crowd had gone but Malone noticed that in several houses owners and their guests were having morning coffee on the front verandahs, some even out on their front lawns under large umbrellas. Curiosity was endemic, not just a disease amongst the lower classes.

Malone paused as he and Kate Arletti got out of the car. ‘Kate, you heard what Chief Superintendent Random said – don’t lean too heavily on the family. You’re developing a thing about them.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ She looked neat this morning, but it was still early in the day. She was in a linen dress with a matching jacket; there didn’t appear to be any buttons that could come undone or a sleeve unrolled. ‘It’s just –’

He didn’t move. ‘Go on, Kate. What’s on your mind?’

She looked away from him, at no place in particular. She reminded him of all the young actors in movies and television these days who, every time they were asked a question by another actor, looked off-screen as if their next line was written on some blackboard there. But Kate Arletti had obviously been chewing over her lines for the past two days; she looked back at him, her jaw set:

‘The Chronicle ruined my father, killed him. He was Italian, you know that, he was much older than my mother. As a young man he was a Fascist, Mussolini was his hero, but once he came to Australia he put all that behind him. He started his own business, he was a job printer. Then he decided, after he’d become a citizen, to run for local government, the local council, he never stopped being political-minded. The Chronicle was doing a series on local government, the sort of people who ran for council aldermen. Alderpersons. Somehow they dug up Dad’s past, they really dug the dirt on him. All of it was true, I’ll admit, but it was past, dead and buried. They buried Dad with it, literally. He lost his business and then he committed suicide. I was ten years old, I was the one who found him -’ She stopped and looked away again, put up a hand to wipe away tears.

‘Kate –’ He waited till she looked back at him. ‘You’re off this case. I’m sorry.’

She shook her head angrily, almost like a child being denied. ‘No, sir! Please.’

‘Kate, you’re biassed –’

‘All police are biassed, we can’t help it-’ Then she broke off, drew a heavy breath. ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean you-’

Less than an hour ago, Greg Random had suggested he might be less than disinterested. But it was true: it was a rare cop who could deny bias once he was into a case. Sometimes it was no more than a counter to bafflement, the effort to find an answer, any answer.

She was more in control of herself now: ‘This is my first big case, sir. I’ve made a mistake, but I think I can overcome it. Give me today. If you still think I’m biassed against the Huxwoods –’

‘It wasn’t the family who would have written that series.’

‘It was. I looked them up when I was older, when I understood what had gone on. The series was written by Derek Huxwood. The editorial that summed them up was written by Sir Harry, that was the most unfair of the lot. It wasn’t signed, but I found out who’d written it.’

There was silence between them. At the wide gates into the Huxwood estate Crime Scene tapes fluttered in the slight breeze, like the long tail of a child’s kite lost amongst the shrubbery. A kookaburra in a nearby jacaranda laughed hollowly; mynahs, the foreigners, instantly swooped on it and chased it away. On the opposite side of the road a woman paused in the act of pouring coffee for two guests and looked across at the man and the girl beside the unmarked car, looked at them, Malone thought, as if they were trespassers.

He nodded at Kate Arletti. ‘Righto, today’s your test. But if I see any –’

‘You won’t, sir. I promise. Thanks.’ She moved towards him and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she went by him and ducked under the tapes. ‘The under-gardener or the family – who’s first?’

‘The under-gardener. Dwayne the Turk.’

Malone had never heard the term under-gardener before; he would have called the man the assistant gardener, if he called him anything. He could only surmise that it was an English term.

Dwayne Harod was short and slim and outgoing; hawk-faced but handsome, dark-skinned and dark-haired and in his early twenties. He was working amongst the roses when the two detectives approached him, having skirted the house and, so far, avoided any of the family.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard it on the radio yesterday morning. It sorta floored me.’ His accent was broad Australian; Anatolia was somewhere back in the memory mist of childhood. ‘I was pretty sick, anyway, I got this virus that’s been going around. Or maybe it’s an allergy, I dunno. That’d be a joke, eh? If I was allergic to flowers.’ He waved an arm; he was waist-deep in the last roses of summer. Long-stemmed blooms, already cut, lay on a sheet of plastic. ‘These are for inside the house. Lady Huxwood wants them, same as usual.’

‘We understand you’ve been here only two weeks, Dwayne. Is that your real name?’

He had a charming smile. ‘I give it to m’self when I was fifteen, sixteen. My old man named me Kemal. He was a great admirer of Kemal Atatürk. You heard of him?’

‘Vaguely.’ This seemed to be Old Dictators Week. Malone glanced at Kate Arletti, whose father had admired a dictator, but she was apparently ignorant of Kemal Atatürk. Malone only knew of the Father of modern Turkey because he had once spent a month unsuccessfully chasing two Turks who had killed a man in a botched bank robbery and who had somehow escaped the nets at airports and vanished back to Turkey. ‘Does Kemal mean anything?’

There was an embarrassed smile. ‘It means “perfect”.’

‘I don’t blame you for changing it. Are you legally Dwayne then?’

‘Well, no. Legally, I’m still – perfect.’ The smile this time was not so embarrassed.

‘Bully for you. How did you get this job? Have you been a gardener before?’

‘I answered the ad in the paper. There were eight of us come for it and they picked me. No, I never been a gardener before. I used to work in the canefields up in Queensland till I come down here.’

‘How long have you been in Sydney?’

‘A month. I live with my uncle and aunty out in Marrickville.’ He was laying himself out like an open book, almost a little too eagerly. Malone had seen this before, when kids had been afraid of the cops, but Dwayne Harod gave the impression that he was afraid of no one. ‘I was lucky to get this job so soon, considering.’

‘Considering what?’

Harod looked puzzled, as if he didn’t understand why Malone didn’t know the state of the nation. ‘The unemployed. The recession’s supposed to be over, but it ain’t by a long chalk, not for guys with no education or training. That’s why I’m grateful for Mr Derek giving me the job –’

‘Mr Derek took you on?’

‘Well, he was the one told me I had the job. But the Old Lady – I mean Lady Huxwood, I think she had a say in it –’ He gave another smile, an old lady’s favourite.

‘Righto, Dwayne. Can we have your home address, just in case?’

‘I have that,’ said Kate Arletti.

Harod looked at her in surprise, then said, ‘I might be moving from there soon, now I’ve got a job. Is that all you want?’

Malone told him that was all they wanted for the time being and he and Kate walked away, going round the northern corner and coming out on the wide lawn that ran down to the water’s edge. There were no cruising cameramen today, the invasion had been put on hold.

‘What d’you think, Kate?’

‘He’s pretty cheerful, isn’t he?’

‘That’s what I thought. He said the news of the murder when he heard it on the radio floored him, but he seems to have picked up pretty quick. He’s got over his virus, too.’

‘He didn’t mention the murder again. He also didn’t mention Sir Harry once by name.’

Malone nodded. The girl was learning to develop a police ear, to hear what was unsaid as much as what was said. ‘Don’t cross him off our list, we’ll get back to him. Now who’s next?’

‘If you want to see the grandkids, there’s probably only one of them home – he’s a uni student. All the others have jobs.’

‘In the company?’

‘Only three of them. The youngest, Ross, Derek’s son, is doing economics at Sydney. He’s one of the rebels, a real tearaway, I’m told.’

Malone sighed. ‘I love tearaways. They’re a real pain in the butt. Righto, let’s see if he’s home.’

Ross Huxwood was home, sunning himself on the terrace of Little House One with his mother Cordelia. He was a big lad, taller than Malone and bulkier, most of it muscle though there was a hint of beer fat round his middle; Malone had seen scores like him around the rugby clubs and the better watering holes, the elite of ockerism. He was blond and good-looking in a beefy way, his cheeks and jaw too heavy, his wide mouth sullen. But he had been taught to be polite: he stood up as Malone and Kate Arletti came up on to the terrace.

‘Ah, the lady detective! Mum –’

Cordelia must have been dozing behind her dark glasses. Her head jerked and she sat up on the lounge where she had been stretched out. She was in a sleeveless yellow sun-dress and her son was in a tight pair of blue shorts. So far, it seemed, the mourning weeds were still in the wardrobe.

‘Oh Scobie! Or do I have to call you Inspector? Do sit down. You too, Miss – ?’

‘Detective-Constable Arletti.’ Kate’s voice was chill.

Cordelia lowered her dark glasses to look at Kate over the top of them; but she said nothing. The two detectives sat down at a wrought-iron table under a blue umbrella. Ross, at his mother’s command, went away to get coffee and Malone said, ‘I think we’d better keep it on an official basis, Mrs Huxwood.’

Cordelia looked disappointed; Malone wondered now if that was her normal expression. ‘Well, I suppose it’s to be expected ... Have you come up with anything? I don’t know how the police work – how would I? – but have you made any progress?’

‘Very little.’ He paused before he went on, ‘Except that we’ve heard there is a lot of tension in the family about the sell-off.’

‘Where did you hear that?’ she said sharply. ‘Over there?’ She nodded across the lawn towards the hedges that half-hid Little House Two.

He didn’t answer that directly: don’t point the finger. ‘We’ve had detectives here for the past twenty-four hours. Including Detective Arletti. How many people have you interviewed, Kate?’