A Different Turf. Jon Cleary

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      ‘That’s what I meant. She can forget her father now.’

      ‘I hope so. If she doesn’t, then her old life isn’t over.’

      Lisa looked at him with love, put her hand in his. ‘There are things about you that still touch me. Don’t ever change.’

      They were a handsome couple, though they never thought of themselves as such. He was tall and broad-shouldered and still reasonably presentable round the waist; he had the sort of face that, because it did not run to fat would look handsomer as he grew older. Lisa was of medium height tending towards tallness, which was accentuated by her upright carriage. She was better than merely goodlooking, but she had no vanity about it. She had kept her figure with diet and once-a-week aerobics; she ran a tight house and kept her husband and her children from ever being slobs. Appearance counted with her, but not for appearances’ sake. She just had, as Malone did, standards.

      ‘This way.’

      Malone opened a door that led to a flight of stairs. Romy was in the private wing of St Sebastian’s, but Malone, ignoring the hospital’s underground garage, had parked the car in the doctors’ section outside the main general wing. Anything to save a dollar or two, Lisa had said, but had gone along with his parsimony. She had lived with it so long she had palpitations on the rare occasion when he splurged money.

      The stairs ended at a door that opened into the reception area of the Emergency ward. It was Saturday night – Butchers’ Picnic Night, as Malone had heard one ambulance medic describe it – and the casualties had already begun arriving. A young boy with a broken arm; a motorcyclist who, helmetless, had gone through the windscreen of a car; a woman who had cut her wrists and was screaming she wanted to die: they stood, sat, lay in the waiting area like wreckage from Bosnia. Then, stretched out on an ambulance gurney, Malone saw a man he recognized, though his face was a bloody mess beneath the pads taped to it.

      ‘Just a minute,’ he told Lisa and stepped across to the Triage desk. He had once looked up the word triage: the act of assorting according to quality. He could only assume that its use was designed not to hurt the feelings of those who thought they deserved first attention, that no one was more damaged than they. An ambulance medic was giving details to me duty nurse.

      He finished, turned round and pulled up when he saw Malone. ‘Scobie! How’re things?’

      ‘All right with me, Billy.’ He looked around at the casualties, then at the man on the gurney. ‘But you look as if you’re already having a busy night.’

      ‘And it’s only eight-thirty.’ Billy Logan was a wiry middle-aged man with close-cropped sandy hair and a lined face that could have been a mask; he had once told Malone that it was the only face he could wear on duty. ‘It’s starting to wear me down, this job. It’s about time I applied for promotion and got into administration.’

      ‘The feller over there, what happened to him?’

      ‘You know him?’

      ‘His name’s Bob Anders, he helped me on a case once. He’s with – or he was, maybe still – the Securities Commission. He’s one of their investigators.’

      ‘A-N-D-E-R-S?’ The medic turned back to the nurse, gave her the name; then he turned back to Malone. ‘He was bashed in Oxford Street about half an hour ago. A bit early in the night, they usually don’t go around bashing ’em till later.’

      ‘They?’

      ‘He’s gay, isn’t he? This time they rolled him as well, took his wallet. That’s why we had no identification. Poor bugger.’ He looked across at Anders, then back at Malone. ‘But there’s gunna be a job for you, I’d say. The kid leading the bashers, he was shot’

      ‘Dead?’

      ‘The third in two months. Looks like you’ve got a serial killer. Or a gay vigilante. Depends which way you look at it.’

      2

      Sunday morning Malone went to Mass with Lisa and the children. Lisa appeared to pay attention to the sermon, but Malone and the children all had the blank expressions of minds that were elsewhere. The sermon was based on a letter of St Paul to the Ephesians; Paul, whom Malone considered one of the Great Know-Alls, was not one of the family’s favourites. Malone often idly wondered if anyone from Ephesus ever wrote back. Did an Ephesian ever come in from his mailbox and grumble to his wife, ‘More bloody junk mail’? Such thoughts enabled him to get through a dull sermon.

      Coming out of Mass his pager beeped. ‘Oh, God,’ said Maureen; and Lisa, Claire and Tom all rolled their eyes. There were disadvantages to being the family of an inspector, the Co-ordinator in charge of Homicide. There were, of course, advantages: seventy thousand plus dollars a year, good superannuation, the occasional chance that one might be a hero, a surviving one, that is. Yet, for all their complaints, Malone knew that none of them would want him to be anything else but a Homicide detective. Not so long as it was his own sole desire, which it was. Even though he could never fully explain to himself why.

      In the church car park he unlocked the car and they all got in. It was a new car – his first in ten years – a Fairlane this time instead of the Holden Commodore he had driven for so long. It had hurt him to go out and buy the new car; he was not a car man, a petrolhead, and any vehicle that continued to go without falling apart was good enough for him. But the family, pleading social disgrace, had finally prevailed. And now they had the new car, complete with car phone.

      Detective-Senior-Constable John Kagal was at Strawberry Hills. ‘I was beeped to come in, sir. Surry Hills wants us to come in with their task force on the guy who’s killing the gay-bashers.’

      ‘Did you know your friend Bob Anders was bashed last night?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Righto, I’ll be in.’ He hung up, cutting short any further discussion. He always tried to keep police business, especially murder, as remote from the family as possible. ‘Sorry. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ll meet you for lunch – where are we going?’

      ‘Doyles at Watson’s Bay,’ said Lisa. ‘If you’re not there, I’ll charge it to the Commissioner.’

      ‘I love you four. I read about a family like you. The Borgias.’

      ‘They’d have finished you off right quick.’ Claire was twenty, as goodlooking as her mother and as serene.

      ‘Can I come with you?’ Tom was going on fifteen, almost six feet tall and broad with it; Malone hoped that his son might be a better fast bowler than he himself had once been. He saw more to laugh at in the world than either of his sisters, but he was not careless of its traps. ‘I won’t get in your way.’

      ‘You can come with me the day you join the Service.’

      ‘Oh, God.’ Maureen was seventeen, more vivacious than the rest of them, a happy cynic who was beginning to trouble her father. ‘Two of them in the family! Big Cop and Little Cop.’

      Malone left the car with them and caught a taxi into Strawberry Hills. The glass-fronted building had once been a mail-sorting exchange, notorious for its union troubles, but now it housed an administration section of Australia Post and several Police Service units, including Homicide. The ghosts of union organizers still wandered the building, depressed by all the peace.

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