Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ okay, sir. I’ve used her a coupla times before in a situation like this. Females come in handy.’

      ‘Yes, don’t they?’ But Ellsworth missed the dry note. ‘Let’s see if Physical Evidence have come up with anything.’

      The car park now was as busy as a shopping mall on Thursday night. It was bathed in light, police cars stood about, blue and red lights spinning on their roofs; revellers from the social club across the road were collecting their cars, and knots of spectators, those ubiquitous watchers-on-the-fringe that appear at the scene of every urban crime, as if called up by computer, were in place. The silver Volvo stood roped off by blue and white tape like the latest model at a motor show.

      Romy Keller, the government medical officer, was examining the body, still in the car, when Malone approached. She straightened up and turned round, her dark coat swinging open to reveal a low-cut green dinner dress underneath.

      ‘All dressed up?’

      She drew the coat around her. ‘Russ and I were at a medical dinner. I’m on call.’

      ‘Like me. Where’s Russ?’

      ‘Over there in his car. He didn’t get out, he’s in black tie. He thought one of us in fancy dress was enough . . . It looks like just the one shot, through the right eye and out the top of the cranium. Death would have been instantaneous, I’d say.’

      He looked past her at the dead Will Rockne. The body was slumped backwards and sideways, one hand in its lap, the other resting on the dislodged car phone, as if he had made a last desperate call for help, from God knew whom. The car keys were in the ignition and the steering wheel was twisted to the left, as if Rockne might have tried to drive away before he died. The dead man’s face and the front of his shirt and jacket were a bloody mess.

      ‘We’ve got the bullet, Inspector.’ That was Chris Gooch, of the Physical Evidence team, a bulky young man with more muscles than he knew what to do with; he was forever strenuously denying he was on steroids, but no one believed him. ‘Looks like a Twenty-two. It was in the roof. Looks like the killer shoved the gun upwards at the victim, maybe at his throat, but missed and shot him in the eye.’

      ‘You done with the body?’ Malone asked Romy.

      She nodded towards the government contractors who had now arrived. ‘They can take it away.’

      She drew the high collar of her coat up round her throat against the wind; her dark hair ruffled about her face. She looked glamorous, ice-cool, she whose own father had been a four-times murderer and a suicide. Malone did not understand why she had stayed on as a GMO at the city morgue, but he had never asked Russ Clements if he knew the reason. She still worked with cool efficiency and a detachment that Malone, when he saw it, found troubling. But she was Clements’s problem, not his. It was Russ who was in love with her.

      He walked across to the green Toyota where Clements, in dinner jacket, black tie unloosened, sat behind the wheel like a moulting king penguin. ‘They tell me it’s a guy named Rockne. You know someone with that name, don’t you?’

      ‘It’s the same one. We were with them at Holy Spirit tonight. They’ve just taken the wife home. Are you on call tomorrow?’

      ‘Yes.’ Clements looked at Romy, who had got into the car beside him. it looks like he’s gunna spoil our Sunday.’

      She smiled at him, then at Malone. They were the men who had caught her father, who had been there when he had committed suicide; yet she loved one and almost loved the other. They, and Lisa, were the ones who had reconstructed the floor of her life when everything had fallen apart around her. ‘Why don’t the three of us open a post office or something? Five days a week and no overtime.’

      Clements smiled at her. He had had countless women friends, but Malone had never seen him so openly in love as with Romy. ‘With our luck, there’d be a body in the parcel post.’

      ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning,’ Malone told him. ‘You’re on this one with me. Don’t bother to come dressed up.’

      The Toyota pulled out of the car park and Malone turned as Ellsworth stepped up beside him. ‘Do I work with you on this, sir?’

      ‘I guess so – Carl, isn’t it? I’ll see Mrs Rockne in the morning, but I’d rather do it on my own. I know her, slightly anyway, and I think she’ll talk more freely to me if no one else is there. You do the legwork on what the Crime Scene fellers give you.’ He still sometimes slipped into the old name for the Physical Evidence team. In recent years the New South Wales Police Service had undergone so many reorganizations and name changes that some joker had fed it into the police computer system as the AKA Force. ‘Mrs Rockne may give us a lead. In the meantime set up a van here, see if anyone comes forward with any information.’

      ‘She’s a bit odd, don’t you think? Mrs Rockne.’

      ‘Most wives are a bit odd when their husbands get blasted. You married?’

      ‘Divorced.’

      ‘How long were you married?’

      ‘Eighteen months.’

      ‘Not long enough. You’ll learn, Carl. About wives, I mean.’

      He left Ellsworth and walked across to his car. He leant on the roof, cold as ice under the wind, and looked at the scene, at the silver Volvo at the centre of it. For the next few days, maybe weeks, this was where his attention and effort would be focused. As the officer in charge of Homicide, Regional Crime Squad, South Region, he would be supervising other murders, but this one would be his major concern. On the other side of the world an empire was falling apart; putty-faced old men had attempted to turn the clock back in a last-minute coup, only to find the clock had no works; hundreds of thousands of people were filling the squares of Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev, filling the world’s television screens: the century was going out as it had begun, in turmoil. The murder of Will Rockne would not be marked as history, but it had to be witnessed, recorded, and, maybe, solved.

      He got into the Commodore and drove towards home, where the effects of history were peripheral.

      3

      He went to early Mass, dragged there by Claire, who didn’t want her day delayed by late church-going. On the way home he told her of Will Rockne’s murder – ‘Oh no, Dad! Jason’s father?’

      On the way to Mass he had debated with himself when he should tell her; he had put it off because, he had told himself, she was not yet wide awake enough to take in the dreadful news. She took it in now, slumping sideways in the seat. ‘Oh God, poor Jay and Shelley!’

      ‘Poor Mrs Rockne.’

      ‘Yes, her too. Are you on the case?’ He nodded. ‘Can’t you let someone else do it? Uncle Russ, for instance?’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I dunno, it’s just – well, you’re going to bring it home every night.’

      ‘I’ve never done that before. You know I never discuss a case in front of you kids.’

      ‘I know that. But . . . will you tell me how it’s going if I ask you?’

      ‘No.’

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