Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ had pulled up at an intersection; he looked at the red traffic light, a warning sign. But he had to tell her the truth: ‘Yes.’

      ‘Then why do you keep on with it?’

      ‘I ask myself that at least a dozen times a year.’ The light turned green. ‘I think it’s because I feel I’d be deserting the victim if I walked away from it. Do you understand that?’

      ‘Of course,’ she said, and he realized his elder daughter had grown up, almost.

      When he reached home Lisa was up, getting ready to go over and collect Tom and Maureen. Claire went out to make breakfast for herself and her father, while Malone leaned in the bedroom door and watched his wife dress. After seventeen years of marriage he still got delight watching her first thing in the morning, it was the proper start to a day. She still had her figure, a little fuller now than when they had first married, and, as with some women, the beauty of her face had increased as she had got older. She was forty now and he hoped her beauty would last till the grave, an end that didn’t bear thinking about. For her, not for himself: he was not afraid of death, though he would not welcome it, not if it meant leaving her and the children alone.

      ‘I wonder if Will Rockne looked at Olive every morning like I look at you?’

      ‘I doubt it.’ She pulled on her skirt, a tan twill. ‘He wasn’t the sort to appreciate what he had.’

      She had been shocked when he came home last night and told her who had been murdered. But this morning she seemed to have accepted the fact. A certain callousness was necessary for a Homicide detective, but he hoped none of his was beginning to rub off on her.

      She slipped a yellow sweater over her head, then fluffed out her blonde hair. ‘Do you think I should call Olive?’

      ‘No, I’ll do the sympathy bit for both of us. Tell Claire not to call Jason, not till I’ve got the police bit sorted out down at their place. I’ll be home for lunch, I hope.’

      She came round the bed and kissed him. ‘Don’t be too hard on Olive.’

      ‘Why should I be?’

      It was 9.30 when he knocked on the door of the Rockne home in Coogee Bay Road. It was a solid bluebrick and sandstone house, built with the wide verandahs of the nineteen-twenties, when sunlight in a house was as Welcome as white ants. It stood on a wide block, thirty metres at least, behind a garden where early spring petunias, marigolds and azaleas mocked the gloom he knew must be in the house itself.

      The door was opened by a middle-aged woman instantly recognizable as Olive’s sister, though she was plumper and had kept pace with her birthdays. ‘I’m Rose Cadogan. We’ve been expecting you.’ She looked past him, seemed surprised. ‘You’re on your own?’

      ‘I thought Olive would prefer it that way.’

      ‘Oh, sure. Come in. But what one sees on TV, police are always swarming over everything . . . This is our mother, Mrs Carss. And this is Angela Bodalle, a friend of Olive’s. I’ll get Olive, she’s with the kids. They’re taking it pretty bad.’

      ‘We all are,’ said the mother, the mould from which her daughters had been struck. Ruby Carss was in her sixties, had henna hair worn thin by too much dye and too many perms, was thin and full of nervous energy and looked as if she had suddenly been faced with the prospect of her own death.

      Malone sat down, looked at Angela Bodalle. ‘I didn’t expect to see you, Mrs Bodalle.’

      ‘I’m here as a friend of the family, Inspector, that’s all.’

      She was, Malone thought, the most decorative, if not the best-looking, of the barristers who fronted the Bar in the State’s courts. There were only five female silks in New South Wales and she was the most successful of them. She was in her late thirties or early forties, he guessed, a widow whose husband had already made his name as a Queen’s Counsel when he had been killed in a car accident some years ago. She had then gone to the Bar herself and last year had been named a QC. She specialized in criminal cases and had already gained a reputation for a certain flamboyance. The joke was that she wore designer wigs and gowns in court, her arguments were as florid as the roses that decorated her chambers, she castrated hostile witnesses with sarcasm sharper than a scalpel. Even the more misogynistic judges tolerated her as she stirred blood in desiccated loins.

      ‘Do you want to sit in while I talk to Mrs Rockne?’

      ‘We all do,’ said Mrs Carss, settling herself for a long stay.

      Malone looked at her. ‘I think it’d be better if you didn’t. I’m going to have to ask her to run through everything that happened last night.’

      ‘Then she’ll want us to be there, to support her – ’

      ‘I think what Inspector Malone is suggesting is best,’ said Angela Bodalle.

      ‘Everyone’s taking over – ’ Mrs Carss was resentful, outsiders were taking away her role as mother.

      Olive Rockne came into the room with her sister. She was dressed in a light blue sweater and dark blue slacks; the frilly look had gone, she was fined down, this morning the girlish woman had vanished. Her hair was pulled back by a black velvet band and her face was devoid of makeup. Malone wondered if, for the first time, he was about to see the real Olive Rockne.

      ‘Let’s go outside,’ she said in a calm firm voice and led him and Angela Bodalle out to a glassed-in back verandah that had been converted into a pleasant garden room. It looked out on a pool in a garden bright with camellias and azaleas. The room was carpeted and furnished with cushioned cane furniture; the whole house, Malone had noted with his quick eye for furnishings, was comfortable. But there was little, if any, comfort in this house this morning.

      Rose Cadogan brought coffee and biscuits. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ she said with more diplomacy than her mother had shown and went back to the front of the house.

      ‘Olive, I won’t go over what you told me last night,’ said Malone, taking the coffee Angela Bodalle had poured for him. ‘But I’d like you to tell me – did Will have time to argue with whoever shot him?’

      Olive, refusing coffee, said, ‘I don’t think so. It was all so quick.’

      ‘I’m trying to establish if it was someone attempting a robbery, shoving the gun at Will and demanding money and then panicking when Will tried to push him away. Was there time for that?’

      Olive looked at Angela, who sat down on the cane couch beside her, then she looked back at Malone. ‘No, I’m sure there wasn’t. I – ’

      ‘Yes?’

      ‘I – I’ve been wondering – could he have been waiting for someone else, he made a mistake and shot Will instead?’

      ‘He could have been. But yours was the only silver Volvo in the car park. There might’ve been other Volvos, but yours was the only silver one.’

      ‘Then who could it have been?’ said Angela. ‘Some psychopath, out to kill anyone, the first person who presented himself? There seems to be a plague of them at the moment.’

      Malone nodded, but made no comment. Yesterday afternoon, out at Haberfield, an armed robber, holding up a liquor store, СКАЧАТЬ