Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ set up a van near the surf club. We’ve been trying to trace everyone who had their cars in the car park. There were four hundred people in the social club last night. Not counting the staff and the entertainers.’ Ellsworth sounded peeved, as if everyone should have spent Saturday night at home watching television. Preferably The Bill, the British series that showed how tough life was for cops. ‘Oh, Sergeant Clements is here, he wants to speak to you.’

      Good old Russ: on the job, starting at the starting point. ‘I think the boys here have got everything under control, Scobie. It’s gonna be the usual slog, unless they come up with a witness who saw everything. Where d’you want me to meet you?’

      ‘I’m going down to Rockne’s office – ’ He turned to Angela Bodalle, who was still shadowing him. ‘What’s the address?’

      She gave it to him. ‘I’ll come with you.’

      Malone gave the address to Clements. ‘If Carl Ellsworth has anything for me, bring it with you.’

      He hung up, gestured for Angela to go ahead of him and followed her into the living room, where the family was now congregated. It was a large room, but had the narrow windows of the period when the house had been built; Olive had attempted to lighten it with a pale green carpet, green and yellow upholstery on the chairs and couch, and yellow drapes. The only dark note in it this morning was the family. They all looked at him, the intruder, and not for the first time he wondered why the voters bothered to call the police, why they didn’t clear up their own messes.

      ‘Will you let me know if you find anything?’ Olive sat between Shelley, her thirteen-year-old daughter, and Mrs Carss. The tableau suggested the three ages of a Carss woman: the resemblance between them all was remarkable. They had another common feature: shock.

      ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Jason, unwinding himself like a jeans-clad insect from a chair.

      ‘There’s no need,’ said his mother. ‘Angela has said she’ll go down with Mr Malone – ’

      ‘Mother – ’ The boy was treating his mother almost formally, as if to mask his defiance. ‘Now Dad is dead, I’m the man of the house. I better get used to whatever I’ve gotta do.’

      His sister frowned and screwed up her pretty face. ‘Oh God, Jay, don’t start that Big Brother crap – ’

      Her grandmother reached across a generation to slap her arm. ‘Watch your language, young lady!’

      ‘Let’s go, Mr Malone.’ The boy spun round and went out of the room.

      Malone looked at the assembled women. Rose Cadogan was gathering up the coffee cups to take them out to the kitchen. Malone noticed for the first time how remarkably neat the whole house was; it might be full of emotional debris, but the carpet would be swept, the corners dusted, the cushions plumped up and arranged. He wondered who the housekeeper was, then guessed it could have been any one of Olive, Rose or Mrs Carss. There was a neatness about them that would always be with them, they would die neatly if they had anything to do with it.

      ‘For what it’s worth, I think Jason is right. He’s got to start learning to be the man of the house. Don’t worry, Olive, I’ll teach him gently.’

      He went out of the house, followed by Angela Bodalle and Jason. ‘Can I ride with you, Mr Malone?’ said the boy, not looking at the lawyer.

      She seemed to take no offence; she had built up a defence against all males, from schoolboys to senior judges. She walked away to her car: a red Ferrari, Malone noted.

      ‘I thought you’d have preferred to ride in a car like that,’ he said to Jason as they got into the seven-year-old Commodore. ‘She wouldn’t need to get out of second gear to outrun this bomb.’

      ‘It’s not the car. I just don’t like flash women.’

      ‘I wish I was as much a connoisseur as you. What do I call you, Jay or Jason?’

      ‘Fred.’ A slight grin slipped sideways across the thin, good-looking face. He had thick blond hair which, Malone guessed, would be even fairer in the summer, and the sort of complexion that would always need a thick coating of sunblock to protect it from sun cancers. ‘Bloody Jason, I hate it. Call me Jay, I guess. Everybody else does, except my mother and my grandmother. And Dad.’

      ‘How did you get on with him? Did you confide in each other?’

      ‘Is that what fathers and sons are supposed to do?’

      ‘Tom and I do.’

      ‘He’s, what, nine years old, Mr Malone. He confides in you, but you don’t tell him everything, right?’

      This boy, unlike his mother, was years ahead of his birthdays. ‘So you and your father didn’t talk much, is that it?’

      ‘Not as much as I’d have liked. This is it, next to the milk bar.’

      There was council work going on at the northern end of the beach promenade; at long last it seemed that someone had decided to give Coogee a face-lift. Malone had come down here as a boy and youth to surf, but it had never been a popular beach with real off-the-wall surfers. For the big, toe-curling waves you went south, to Maroubra.

      He pulled the Commodore into a No Parking zone. Last night’s wind had dropped and today promised to be an early, if very early, spring day. Out of the car he paused a moment and looked away from the beach. Over there, in its shallow hollow, was Coogee Oval, where he had begun his cricketing career; but if he closed his eyes, all he would see would be the darkness of his lids, nothing of the small glories of his youth. He doubted that he would ever confide any of those memories to Tom. He had never been a headline hero, even though he had gone on to play for the State. That would make life easier for Tom; he had never regretted that Tom was not the son of a famous father. He wondered what Will Rockne had thought of this gangling boy beside him, what he had tried to protect him from.

      A row of shops, their paint worn by the salt air, stood at this northern end, some with offices above them. There had once been an indoor swimming baths on this site; one winter it had been closed to swimmers and used to exhibit a grey nurse shark caught by the local fishermen. The shark had spewed up a tattooed human arm and the resultant murder case had become famous; police had caught the murderers but had also dredged up connections that stank as high as a dead shark. Malone was grateful that the Rockne case promised no such connections.

      The Ferrari, exhaust gurgling like an expensive drain, pulled in behind the Commodore and Angela Bodalle got out, exposing a nice length of leg as she did so. Malone, a connoisseur of limbs if not of flash women, remarked that she had very good legs. Some surf kids were standing in a group outside a milk bar and one of them whistled, but he was whistling at the car, not its owner.

      Angela looked up at the No Parking sign. ‘Do we worry about tickets?’

      ‘You can defend me if we cop any. Who has a key to the office?’

      ‘I do. Olive gave it to me.’ She handed it to Jason, as if it were a peace offering.

      The boy just nodded, unlocked the door to the flight of stairs that led up to the offices of William A. Rockne, Solicitor. There was a reception room with a secretary’s desk and chair; some flowers drooped in a vase on the desk. Four leather-seated chairs lined one wall, fronted by a coffee table neatly stacked with old copies of СКАЧАТЬ