Dark Summer. Jon Cleary

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ check with you on our way out, Mr Shanagan.’

      Shanagan could take a hint; in the ’Loo, if you didn’t, you often took something else, like a fist in the face. ‘Sure, sure. You know where to find me. Take your time.’

      Clements closed the door on him and Malone said, ‘We’ll talk to him later. He’s busting to tell us anything we want to know.’

      ‘You think he knows any more than he’s told us?’

      ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I’d say no. He’s a bull artist, the sort who’ll break their neck to be called as a witness. We’ll send one of the young blokes back to talk to him.’

      The flat was small. A bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen: you could swing a cat in it, but the terrified beast would have been scratching the walls with each swing. It was neat, a place for everything and everything in its place. Including a diary and an address book, one placed neatly on the other; the morbid thought struck Malone that perhaps Grime had laid everything out for them. He had always thought Grime a cheerful little man, one who would have turned a blind eye to the possibility of his own death. But maybe he had been wrong about the little man.

      ‘Nothing’s been disturbed,’ said Clements, coming back from the bedroom. ‘Doesn’t look as if he died here. The bed’s still made, with the cover on it. He’s even got his pyjamas laid out on it!’

      ‘Where do you lay yours out? On the floor?’

      Malone looked around. This was a lonely man’s home; one could feel the loneliness, like a sad current in the air. There was a solitary photo: a young Grime between a couple who could have been his parents. All three were smiling: a happy day long ago. Malone wondered if Grime had remembered when the photo was taken. He turned it over. On the back was a date: 1963, November 22. Not really a happy day, though he doubted that Scungy Grime, even then, would have been upset by the assassination of a President. He had always had a limited view of the world.

      ‘Did you know he worked on the wharves?’ Clements held up a card. ‘This is a WLU ticket.’

      Malone shook his head. ‘He told me he was still on the dole. How would he get into the Wharf Labourers Union? He couldn’t lift a box of cornflakes.’

      ‘You’re living in the past, mate.’

      ‘My old man’s past. He worked on the wharves. Yeah, I know it’s all mechanized these days, but they still look for muscle.’

      ‘He could’ve been a tally clerk.’

      ‘If he was, God help the balance of payments. Put a pencil in his hand and he couldn’t do anything else but make two and two add up to five. Check with the WLU.’

      ‘What about his family? Did he have any?’

      ‘He had a wife one time, down in Melbourne. He came up here about ten years ago. He had a record down there, the same things he did up here, small-time stuff.’

      He was looking through Grime’s diary. No full names were mentioned, as if the dead man stood by the old army and criminal code: no names, no pack drill. But occasionally a given name appeared in front of an initial, as if to distinguish that person from someone with the same initials. One name and initial figured twice in the diary, the last entry only two nights ago. Ring Jack A . . . ‘Where would a 905 number be?’

      Clements was a grab-bag of inconsequential information, with a mind like the waste-bin of a computer. He frowned, bit his lower lip, then said, ‘Somewhere around Manly. Maybe Harbord, around there.’

      ‘Who do we know named Jack A. who lives in Harbord?’ But they both knew and they looked at each other with that cynical surprise that passes for excitement with cops of long experience. ‘Jack Aldwych. Why would Scungy be ringing our friend Jack? He told me he’d given up working for Jack even before he went into the Bay.’

      ‘You think Jack had him done in?’

      ‘I hope not.’

      He did not want to take on the biggest crim in the country, not if Scungy Grime had been Jack Aldwych’s calling card left on the doorstep of the Malone home.

      3

      He and Clements drove over the Harbour Bridge and out to Harbord, one of the closest of the northern beaches. The main road was clogged with holiday traffic. The northern beaches were supposed to be cleaner than the beaches south of the harbour, the sewage spill apparently knowing where the fortunate northerners swam and obligingly avoiding them. So people came from the south and the west and piddled in the northern waters and everyone cursed the Water Board and the government for not doing their job. The sun blazed down and everyone was slowly dying of sun cancer, but what better way was there to spend a hot summer holiday?

      The air-conditioning in Clements’ car suddenly stopped working. Clements, patience exhausted as he halted for the fifth time in a traffic jam, reached for the blue light that he wasn’t supposed to carry in his private vehicle, put it on the roof and blared his horn. At once two youths jumped out of a stolen car and ran off down a side street and half a dozen other drivers looked guilty, wondering if they had been chased all this way for breaking the speed limit over the Bridge. Clements pulled his Nissan out on to the wrong side of the road and drove down against the oncoming traffic.

      ‘You’re going to get us booked for this,’ said Malone. ‘I’ll tell ’em you did it against my express orders.’

      ‘Tell ’em I went mad with the heat. Hello, we’ve got company.’

      Up ahead a motorcycle cop, straddling his bike, was waiting for them directly in their path. Clements pulled up, got out and approached the officer. He was back in less than a minute.

      ‘Righto, what bull did you feed him this time?’ said Malone.

      ‘I told him the truth – or anyway, half of it. I said a dead man had been dumped in your pool and we had to get to the chief suspect before he packed up and fled the country. Hang on!’

      ‘You mention Jack Aldwych’s name?’

      ‘Who else? It’ll make that motorcycle cop’s day. Better than picking up mug lairs exceeding the speed limit.’

      ‘You’re exceeding it. What if he radios Manly and we get half their strength as back-up?’

      ‘I told him we’d already called Manly.’

      Half-truths are weapons police and criminals use against each other; they have learned from the black-belt masters, the lawyers. Malone hoped that the motorcycle cop up ahead, siren now screaming, showed a sense of humour when he learned the full truth.

      The motorcycle cop took them out of the main stream of traffic, through side streets, and within five minutes brought them, his siren still screaming, to the front gates of Jack Aldwych’s mansion. It was a big two-storeyed house with verandahs right round it on both levels. It had been built at the turn of the century by a circus-owning family and it was said that the ghosts of acrobats still tumbled around the grounds at night and a high-wire spirit had been seen flying across the face of the moon. Ghosts didn’t protect Jack Aldwych, just a black-haired minder built like a small elephant.

      He stood inside the big iron-barred gates, shaking his head at Malone and Clements. ‘Mr СКАЧАТЬ