Murder Song. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ sit. ‘Not if I have to make any statement.’

      Malone looked at him carefully. He hadn’t yet warmed to O’Brien: he was the free-wheeling entrepreneur that was a new breed, one for which Malone had little time. Unambitious himself, uninterested in being rich, he had tried to but had never understood greed, for either money or power: in today’s world he knew that made him a simpleton. O’Brien was the very epitome of the new breed, yet Malone fancied there was a slight crack in him through which decency, a long-dead seed, was trying to sprout. He remembered that, though Horrie O’Brien had been the rebel in the academy class, he had never been unpopular, neither with the cadets nor the instructors, though he had been a loner.

      ‘You’ll have to make a statement about knowing Mardi Jack and going to the flat with her – there’s no way you can dodge that. But we’ll keep quiet about your lady friend – I don’t want to bring her into it unless we have to.’

      ‘Not even then,’ said O’Brien quietly and vehemently. ‘No way.’

      Malone was non-committal on that. ‘I want you to look at some names and photos with me. They’re being sent up from Goulburn this morning.’

      ‘Goulburn?’

      ‘The main academy is down there now, they only do secondary courses at Redfern. They keep the police library at Goulburn. You and I can look at the class of ’65.’

      O’Brien hesitated, then stood up. ‘Okay. Can you give me a lift back to town? I don’t own a car. I usually have a hire car pick me up.’

      ‘I thought all you fellers had a Rolls or a Merc or both.’

      O’Brien smiled, again without mirth. ‘I once bought my old man a Merc. He sent it back with a note telling me to drive it up the track where the sun never shines.’

      He went into the house without saying any more about his relationship with his father. He came out two or three minutes later with a briefcase and walked across to where Malone was waiting for him by the police car.

      ‘You call your lawyer?’

      ‘No. If you must know, I rang my lady friend.’

      Malone looked around the stud, admiring it and, yes, suddenly envying O’Brien his possession of it. He thought what it would be like to live here with Lisa and the kids, to breathe this clear air every morning, to live in this easy rhythm, never to have to think about homicides and the sleaze of human nature that irritated him every day like an incurable rash. He said, ‘I wouldn’t come up here again, not till we’ve nailed this killer.’

      ‘Why not? We have a security patrol here.’

      ‘All day, twenty-four hours a day?’

      ‘No, just at night.’

      Malone pointed to a clump of trees bordering a side road beyond the main paddock. ‘He could park his car amongst those trees and you’d never notice him. He could pick you off right where you’re standing and he’d be gone before anyone knew where the shot came from.’

      ‘That’s a fair distance, three hundred yards at least.’

      ‘This bloke is an expert, Brian. With a ’scope, you’d be like a dummy in a shooting gallery. Take my advice. Don’t come up here unless you have to and then have your security guards here to meet you. Just warn them, this bloke might take them out, too.’

      O’Brien stared across at the trees, as if the assassin was actually there. There was no sign of immediate fear on his face, but he was looking, for the first time, at the possibility of his own death. ‘I don’t want to die, Scobie. Not now.’

      ‘Who does?’

      They drove back to the city, through the flat sprawl of suburbs and along the main roads too narrow for the traffic that clogged them. Freeways were being built, but for every mile of freeway laid down it seemed that a thousand cars had been newly spawned to flood it. They passed several miles of used car lots, metal beasts waiting to be released to add to the flood.

      O’Brien was silent most of the way, not sullen but worried-looking. Malone kept the conversation casual. ‘My sidekick, Russ Clements, has been looking up your history. You were bigger than I thought you were on the pop scene.’

      ‘I was in it when it started to take off, just after the Beatles first appeared.’

      ‘Russ told me about some of the groups you managed. There was one called – was it the Salvation Four or something?’

      ‘The Salvation Four Plus Sinner. They were big.’

      ‘I asked my two girls about them – they’d never heard of them.’

      ‘How old are your girls?’

      ‘Nine and almost fourteen.’

      ‘Another generation. Pop groups are like Olympic swimmers – they hit gold once, then they sink without trace.’ There was no pity in his voice for the failed pop groups or Olympic swimmers.

      ‘Why did you get out of the game?’

      ‘Boredom. And greed,’ he said frankly, as if avarice was a virtue. ‘I was making a million a year, but that’s chicken-feed in the pop game.’

      ‘The chickens started to bite you?’

      ‘Scobie, a million bucks is like a short-handled umbrella – you can’t swagger with it. But fifty or a hundred million, that’s different.’

      ‘I thought you didn’t like to swagger? The low profile and all that.’

      ‘The richest guy in America doesn’t swagger. He lives in a small city in Oklahoma and drives a pick-up truck to his office. But when he lifts the phone, the banks fall on their knees and salaam.’

      ‘The banks salaaming you now?’

      O’Brien smiled ruefully: there was some humour in it, even if it was as dry as a western creek-bed. ‘Not now. Not now.’

      When they reached Police Centre Russ Clements was waiting for them with the file from Goulburn. The file cover was dark blue, the spine of it faded to a sky blue where it had been exposed to light on a shelf; the papers and the single photo in it were yellowing round the edges. Evidently no one had looked at the file since 1965.

      The three men sat down in Malone’s office, but first Malone pointed out to O’Brien the three red pins on the map behind his chair. ‘Parramatta, Chatswood, City – three random murders. That’s what we thought at first. There’s going to be another one, I can feel it in my bones –’ He had Celtic bones, in which superstition was ingrained in the marrow.

      ‘We have a hundred and fifty-one names to choose from,’ said Clements. ‘Less Terry Sugar and Harry Gardner. We also have the same number of suspects, less, of course, those two and you two.’

      ‘Thanks,’ said Malone. ‘You always know how to keep the spirits up.’

      ‘I was in the class,’ said Clements soberly. ‘But not the same group. I think we can narrow it down to your group, if you can remember them all.’

      ‘The СКАЧАТЬ