Dark Summer. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ Mr Aldwych.’ She gave the old man a sweet smile. ‘Jack didn’t tell me about you. I read up on you.’

      Aldwych didn’t appear to be put out; his reputation had never been a hair-shirt. ‘You mean there’s a file on me? In Social Services? You got one on me, too, Scobie?’

      ‘Not yet,’ said Malone, trying to sound good-humoured and sociable.

      Janis Eden looked at him from above the rim of her champagne glass. She had certain studied mannerisms, as if somewhere there was a hidden camera photographing her for a television commercial. They would not go down well at Social Services, but maybe she used them only at weekends.

      ‘How do you police feel when crime lands, more or less, on your doorstep?’

      ‘We don’t like it. I hear you’re a social worker. What field?’

      ‘Drug rehabilitation. We’re kept busy.’

      ‘I’m sure you are.’ Malone stood up. The new batsman, Mark Waugh, had just begun his innings by belting three fours off the first three balls he had received. It was time for an old bowler to depart, before the insults started. ‘Well, I better be looking busy, too. Sitting here isn’t going to tell me who dumped Scungy Grime in my pool.’

      Aldwych had been looking at the action out on the field, but he turned his head as Malone stood up. ‘Don’t you really wish you were out there now?’

      ‘No, Jack. I’m like you, I retired at the right time.’

      He left them on that before they saw the lie in his face. He would dearly have liked to be out there on the field, even wearing coloured pyjamas and being belted all over the field by those hated bastards, batsmen. Life then, though it paid peanuts in those days, had been simple, uncomplicated and uncorrupted.

      But as he went down in the lift he had the itchy feeling that Jack Aldwych, retired or not, knew more about the last months of Scungy Grime’s life than he had told.

      4

      When Malone had gone Jack Junior saw some acquaintances in one of the private boxes farther along the balcony and said he would go and say hello to them.

      ‘You want to come, Janis? It’s a chance for you to meet some of the guys who make the wheels go round in this town.’

      ‘No, thanks,’ she said, moving into the seat next to Aldwych Senior and settling herself. ‘I’ll stay and talk to your father. I think he made more wheels go round than those men along there, no matter who they are. Am I right, Mr Aldwych?’ She gave him a full smile.

      He nodded to his son. ‘You go along there, Jack. Janis and I are gunna get to know each other a little better.’

      Jack Junior hesitated, like a man who did not trust either one or the other or both of them; then he smiled. ‘Don’t let her rehabilitate you, Dad.’

      When his son had gone, Aldwych said, ‘You’re not afraid of my reputation, Janis?’

      ‘That’s past, Mr Aldwych. You’ve reformed.’

      He shook his big silver head. He had always been too beefy to be strictly handsome, but age had found some bone in his face and now he had the craggy look of a chipped and cracked Roman bust. But he never went to museums, so he never saw the resemblance. ‘No, I’m not reformed. Retired. There’s a difference.’

      He turned his head for a moment as there was a roar from the crowd; one of the Australian batsmen had cracked another boundary. Then he looked back at her, his gaze as impenetrable as smoked glass. It was the look his enemies had seen when their fate hung in the balance.

      But she did not seem disturbed by it. ‘Well, whatever. The law is no longer chasing you, is it?’

      Only his wife Shirl had spoken to him like this; but she had not had the education and poise of this girl. He was not used to dealing with today’s generation, especially the female side of it. He had known some tough women in his younger days, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine had been two of them, but they had been rough and ready, their sense of gender equality based on the razor- and knuckle-men they employed. They had had none of the smooth arrogance of this young woman.

      ‘Would you be going out with Jack Junior if the law was still chasing me?’

      ‘For one thing, I don’t think of him as Jack Junior. That implies he’s not his own person. Have you ever thought of that?’ She turned and looked back through the plate-glass at Larry Quick and held up her champagne flute.

      Aldwych was annoyed at her self-confidence. Women, he thought, had too much independence these days; he was glad he was in the home stretch of his life. Though he was not given to metaphors of the turf: horses and jockeys were as unreliable as women. Women in general, that is: he had never lumped Shirl with the rest of them. ‘No, I haven’t. His mother christened him, not me. He’s done all right.’

      Her glass refilled, she turned back to him. She had no interest at all in what was going on out in the middle of the ground; that, too, annoyed him. In his youth she was the sort of girl he would have belted; but Jack Junior would never do that, he was sure. His son, he sometimes thought, was a wimp, too influenced by his mother, who had believed in Christian morals and respect for girls and other hopeless ideas.

      ‘To answer your question, yes, I’d still go out with Jack, whether the law was after you or not. I’m very single-minded, Mr Aldwych. Much like you used to be, I’d guess.’

      They were now sitting in the middle seats of the back row on the balcony, several seats distant from the boxes on either side. The inquisitive woman had not reappeared and the men on both sides were more interested in the cricket than in trying to listen to the conversation between the attractive young girl and the old criminal. Old men rarely have interesting conversations with young girls, not unless they’re dirty old men, and the young girl looked too composed to be listening to that sort of approach.

      ‘Are you after his money? He’s gunna be a rich man some day.’

      ‘Yes, I suppose I am, in a way. I’m in danger of losing my job, the State’s cutting back on welfare, and the thought of being poor and out of work doesn’t appeal to me.’

      ‘Well, one thing, you’re honest.’

      ‘No, I used to be. I’ve reformed.’ She sipped her champagne, her eyes smiling at him above the flute. There was no coquetry to it; it puzzled him at first what it was. Then he recognized it: it was the look of another criminal, or anyway a potential one. He began to worry for Jack Junior, if only for Shirl’s sake.

      ‘You’ve never been poor?’ he said.

      ‘No. I come from a family that could afford to send me to a good school and then to university. But my father committed suicide after the stock market crash in eighty-seven and we found he’d left us no money at all. My mother now draws the pension and I have a brother who works as a barman in a pub, the only job he could get with a PhD in archaeology.’

      Aldwych wondered why anyone in Australia would want to take a degree in archaeology; but he had never been one for digging up anything, unless it could be used for blackmail. ‘So you’ve set your sights on my son?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Does СКАЧАТЬ