Winter Chill. Jon Cleary

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that he could actually be talking about a murderer. ‘Well, someone had taped the button down and then must of jumped off. These trains only do about fifteen ks an hour. The door to the driver’s section was still open when I pulled it up.’

      ‘So you would suggest that whoever committed the murder, he knew how to run one of these trains?’

      ‘Well, I’m no detective—’ Then he ducked his ginger head again, gave an apologetic grin while the three detectives gave him smiles that told him he was right, he was no detective. ‘Sorry. Yeah, I’d say that. You don’t have to be a mechanical genius to drive one of these, but it’d help if you knew about the dead man’s handle principle. Dead man’s handle – that’s pretty funny … Well, not funny, exactly. You know what I mean, the dead guy …’ His voice trailed off.

      ‘Let’s have a look at the scene of the crime,’ suggested Malone. ‘Thanks, Mr Korda. Detective Smith will be in touch with you again.’ Then, as he and Clements walked along to the parked carriage: ‘First time I think we’ve had a mobile scene of the crime, isn’t it?’

      ‘It narrows the field a bit. We start looking for someone who knows how to operate a train like this. Would you know how?’

      ‘It takes me all my time to start our lawnmower.’

      ‘Who is your lawnmower – Lisa?’

      They grinned at each other, two old married men; then they grinned at Phil Truach, another old married man, who stood in the carriage doorway. He was their age, but he would not make sergeant or higher until he transferred to another section of the Police Service; he had been in Homicide twelve years and had twice refused promotion or transfer. Murder, he said, was a crossword puzzle, and he was addicted to puzzles, he also said, though neither Malone nor Clements had ever seen him indulging his addiction. He was tall and bony with a lean, gullied face; he smoked forty cigarettes a day and he had a smoker’s cough like the bark of a gun. Somehow he had so far avoided lung cancer or emphysema and the Homicide joke was that the Tobacco Institute paid him a monthly stipend for staying alive and on his feet. He was one of the best detectives on Malone’s roster.

      ‘Not a skerrick, Scobie.’ He never worried about protocol, no matter who was around. ‘No prints, nothing – everything’s been wiped clean.’

      ‘No shoeprints? It rained last night.’

      ‘There’s a welter of muddy prints on the floor, you could never sort ’em out. The monorail was packed all day yesterday, I gather – all the Yank lawyers and their wives. The cleaners don’t start work on the car till five a.m. By then we’d taken over this one.’

      ‘How many bullets?’

      ‘Just the one. It’s still in the body.’ Truach stamped out the cigarette he had been smoking; he knew how much the habit annoyed Malone, a lifelong non-smoker. ‘This bloke Brame, he’s top of the ladder, they tell me.’

      ‘Where’s the media, then?’ said Clements, though he looked relieved that none was in sight.

      ‘They’ve been and gone from here. Now they’re all along at the Novotel interviewing the thousand Yank lawyers.’

      ‘How many?’

      Truach looked at Peta Smith, who had come up behind Malone and Clements. ‘There’s a thousand of them,’ she said. ‘Spread around every hotel in Sydney. This is the first international convention that’s been in Australia and it seems everyone wanted to come. Plus their wives and girlfriends. And boyfriends, too, I guess,’ she added, and Malone wondered if there was a note of prejudice in her voice.

      ‘Who’s home minding the store?’

      ‘There are eight hundred thousand lawyers in the United States,’ said Clements, grabbing in his mental bag again. ‘I was reading the Law Society’s Journal one day. One lawyer for every three and a half thousand of the population. There’ll be enough left home to mind the store and chase ambulances.’

      ‘Eight hundred thousand!’ Malone shook his head. ‘We don’t have that many crims registered out here.’

      The four detectives were silent a moment, aghast at the thought of the legal poison ivy spreading across the US. Malone had few prejudices, but one of them, as with most cops, was an aversion to lawyers.

      He stepped past Truach into the carriage and looked around. There were three blue-upholstered seats facing three similar seats in the small compartment. There was none of the disorder one so often found at a murder scene; the compartment was neat and tidy, with none of the vandalism that occurred on the city’s urban trains.

      ‘When can we have the car?’ said Korda, behind him. ‘I wanna get it cleaned. We’ll need it today, all the traffic.’

      ‘Not today,’ said Clements. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

      The technical manager’s face closed up, but if he was annoyed he kept it to himself. ‘Well, okay, if you say so … But you know what a head office is like – at the end of the day all they’re interested in is the bottom line.’

      ‘You should work for the government,’ said Clements. ‘It’s even worse. They can’t find the bottom line.’

      ‘Let’s go along and talk to the thousand lawyers,’ said Malone. ‘If we can get one of them to confess, you can have the carriage back today.’

      He and Clements went down to his car. On the opposite side of the road, atop a low cliff, was a row of warehouses, some of them now converted into apartment complexes; these had been the wool stores when wool had been the wealth of the country, but those days were gone, probably for ever.

      The two detectives drove along to the hotel. It was French-owned and was one of the many-roomed hotels that had been built in the city in the past five or six years, completed just as the recession had begun and hotel rooms became as much a glut as wool and wheat. Malone gave the Commodore over to a parking valet who, though Australian, had a Frenchman’s hauteur, especially when it came to cars that should have been traded in years ago.

      ‘Leave it up here on the ramp,’ said Malone, showing his badge. ‘It’ll give the place some tone.’

      The two men walked, or were blown, in through glass doors to the concierge’s desk; the architects, whoever they were, had not allowed for winter’s south-west winds. The concierge referred them to Reception on the first level. They travelled up on an escalator and stepped off into the big lobby, which was crowded and echoed to the clamour of voices, all of them American. They squeezed their way through the throng, asked for the manager and were directed to his office.

      He was a small neat man, French and polite; the owners back in France had realized that it would be pointless sending French arrogance to handle the native barbarians. With him were two Americans, both grey-haired, both grey with concern.

      ‘I am Charles Champlain. This is Mr Zoehrer, vice-president of the American Bar Association, and this is Mr Novack, the American Consul-General.’

      ‘A terrible tragedy, terrible!’ Zoehrer was a big man with a big voice and big gestures; he flung his hands about, addressed Malone and Clements as if he were addressing a jury. ‘His wife’s due in today – God, what a way to greet her! Orville’s been murdered!’

      ‘She’s on her way СКАЧАТЬ