Dark Summer. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ fucking for?’

      ‘Swearing at an officer. Come on – Blackie Ovens, isn’t it? You better tell us where we can find him or we’re gunna camp here till he comes home. It’ll lower the tone of the neighbourhood. Jack wouldn’t like that.’

      Ovens pondered, then shrugged. ‘Geez, youse guys are hard. Okay, he’s out at the Cricket Ground. He’s got a private box in the Brewongle Stand.’

      ‘He’s a cricket fan?’ Malone’s voice cracked with surprise.

      ‘Nuts about it. I’ll tell him you’re coming.’ He unhitched a hand-phone from his belt. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll wait for you. He wouldn’t leave a cricket match even to see the Police Commissioner bumped off.’ He grinned to show he was only joking; the three officers stared back at him. ‘Sorry.’

      As Malone and Clements got back into the Nissan, the motorcycle cop, already astride his machine, eased in beside them. ‘So you were afraid the chief suspect was gunna split overseas? He’s out at the cricket! Next time you come over this side of the harbour, go through the proper fucking channels!’

      He roared off and Clements looked at Malone. ‘They’re not very polite this side of the harbour, are they?’

      ‘What are you going to do, pull rank on him? Forget it. We asked for it and we got it. Take me out to the Cricket Ground and then go on out to my place and see if they’re finished there. Lisa wants everyone out by this evening. Make sure she gets what she wants.’

      ‘Anything else?’

      ‘Rustle up someone and send him down to talk to that caretaker at Scungy’s flats. Get him to talk to the other people in Scungy’s block.’

      ‘What if he just died of a heart attack or something?’

      ‘I still want the bastard who dumped him in my pool. Maureen was shivering when she came in to tell me she’d found him. What are you doing?’

      Clements was getting out of the Nissan. ‘I don’t run to a car-phone, I’ve just got the radio connected to Police Centre.’

      He went back to the gates, spoke to Blackie Ovens, who handed him his hand-phone. Clements punched a number, waited, then spoke into the mouthpiece. Malone was too far away to hear whom he was calling or what was being said. Then Clements handed the phone back to Ovens and came back to the car.

      ‘I just called Romy Keller. She thinks Scungy was poisoned. It looks as if you’re gunna get your murder after all.’

      When Clements dropped Malone at the Cricket Ground people were still queuing to get into the ground. Malone flashed his badge at the attendants on the turnstiles into the Brewongle Stand, but his name meant nothing to them. He had played for the State on this ground twenty years ago, but these men would have been only boys then and he had never been big enough to be a boyhood hero. He went up in the lift to the floor where the private boxes were situated, flashed his badge again at the floor attendant, an older man who remembered him, and knocked on the door of the suite marked Saltbush Investments. It was opened by a waiter in a white jacket, whose small thin face went whiter than the jacket when he saw Malone.

      ‘Hello, Larry. You do a waiter’s course last time you were inside?’

      ‘G’day, Inspector.’ Larry Quick gave his con man’s smile. ‘You wanna see me or Mr Aldwych?’

      ‘The boss. I think he might be expecting me. Didn’t he get a phone call?’

      ‘Yeah, but he doesn’t always tell me everything.’

      Malone followed Quick through the small private lounge and out to the seats on the balcony. Jack Aldwych, tall and heavily built, broad-brimmed white panama on his silver hair, regal in a cannibal chief way, sat there alone.

      ‘Inspector Malone.’ His dead wife Shirl, a respectable woman, had taught him to be polite; it was an effort, but occasionally he succeeded. ‘I got a message you were on your way. Come to see the match? You must wish you were out there now, eh?’

      Malone looked out at the famous ground, a bright green lake surrounded by cliffs of stands speckled, as if with the child’s decoration of hundreds and thousands, with the huge crowd’s colours. In the middle two Australians, in green and gold, were batting; spread around them, in two shades of blue, were the eleven Englishmen. This was a one-day match, a type of game that hadn’t been invented when Malone was playing. Its accelerated pace, the almost desperate chase for runs, the pyjama-like uniforms, the hoopla and exaggerated behaviour of the players, all of it had brought the crowds back to cricket, but Malone was one of the old school. If a team-mate had kissed him when he had taken a wicket, he would have run a stump through the molester.

      ‘No. I was a bowler, Jack. One-day games aren’t meant for bowlers, they’re for batsmen. You never hear of a groundsman these days preparing a wicket for bowlers – the Cricket Board would have him jailed. All the crowd wants to see is big hitting. It’s Happy Hour for the batsmen and bugger-you-Bill for the bowlers. You come here often?’

      ‘Every day there’s a match, one-day games, Sheffield Shield, Test matches. I’m a cricket-lover. Most of the crims you and I know, they all go to the races, the horses or the dogs. But I love cricket. A gentleman’s game – or it used to be.’ He smiled an old crim’s smile, full of wry irony. ‘I bought this private box through one of my companies and I come here as a guest of meself and watch in comfort. I tried to become a member here, but they always found a reason why I couldn’t make it. It’s okay if you’re a white-collar crim, but not if you’re a blue-collar one like I was. So I pay forty-two thousand bucks a year, but I don’t have to sit down there amongst the hoi-polloi, God love ‘em, and I can sit here and jerk my thumb at them across there in the Members’ Stand. What d’you want?’ he said abruptly, turning his head sharply to stare at Malone, who had sat down two seats along from him.

      There were no dividing walls between the boxes out here on the balcony, only iron railings. Too much privacy might suggest elitism and that, God knew, was worse than bloody multiculturism. The neighbouring boxes were packed, mostly with men; the few women amongst them were watching Jack Aldwych, having been told who he was; they could hear nothing for the chatter of their own menfolk, who were already well oiled by the free grog of their hosts in the corporation boxes. Still, Malone dropped his voice almost to a murmur: ‘Jack, one of your fellers, Scungy Grime, turned up in my swimming pool at home this morning. Dead.’

      ‘Scungy? Poor little bugger.’ Aldwych showed no surprise. ‘You want something to drink?’

      The morning heat struck into the balcony; the ground was slowly turning into a cauldron. Malone had taken off his jacket, but his armpits were marshes of sweat. ‘I’d like a light beer, if you’ve got one.’

      Aldwych looked up at Quick, who had appeared in the doorway to the lounge. ‘A light beer for Mr Malone . . . Larry’s become my handyman. He’s lost his nerve. Makes you wanna laugh, a con artist who’s lost his nerve. But it’s sad, don’t you reckon? There aint too many artists left these days in our game.’

      ‘Jack, don’t change the subject. What about Scungy? That’s sad, being dead.’

      ‘Oh, you’re right about that. But you’re wrong about him being one of my fellers. Scungy wasn’t working for me for at least three months before he went in last time. He started talking drugs.’

      ‘Scungy? СКАЧАТЬ