Babylon South. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ Lisa’s dad told me. But they won’t take mortgages as a payment.’

      ‘From what I hear, some of the yuppies have paid with nothing else. They’re buying futures.’

      ‘It’s not for me.’ He had never dreamed of wealth and so he would always be an honest cop.

      They drove on out of the city up into the mountains where lay the bones of a man whose future had ended twenty-one years ago. Two local police were waiting for them, a detective-sergeant and a uniformed constable. They led the way in their marked car out through the small town, past the comfortable homes of retirees and the holiday guest-houses, to bushland that showed the occasional black scars of the past summer’s fires. The two cars turned down a narrow side-road that led down to thick bush. Beyond and below was the Grose Valley, its perpendicular rock walls glinting in the sun like stacked metal, its grey-green forest floor thick and daunting as quicksand. Hikers were being lost in it every weekend, the police always being called in to help find them.

      They started down the track that had been hacked out of the bush when they had carried out the bones yesterday. The young constable went ahead, occasionally slowing up to look back sympathetically at the three older men. He was all lean muscle and Malone wondered if he spent his spare time rock-climbing. This was the ideal beat for it.

      The detective, Sam Pilbrow, pulled up to get his breath. ‘There used to be a track right down here years ago. You could drive a vehicle down it for another half a mile.’ He was in his middle forties, years and circumference, and walking obviously was not a hobby with him. He would never volunteer to find a lost hiker. ‘Well, I guess we gotta keep going.’

      At last they came to a tiny clearing where the bushes had been chopped off and thrown aside. White taping fenced the clearing, but no attempt had been made to outline where the skeleton had been.

      ‘We didn’t reckon it was worth it.’ Pilbrow was a cop who would always weigh up the worth of doing anything. He had started in this town and would finish here. ‘We’ve combed the area—’ He swung a big thick arm. ‘All we come up with were the ring and the briefcase and one shell. My guess is it was probably from a Colt .45. That would account for the way the jaw was smashed, with the gun held close. It could have been an execution.’

      ‘Judges aren’t executed, except by terrorists,’ said Clements. ‘And we didn’t have any of them back in the Sixties.’

      ‘Well, he was ASIO, wasn’t he? You never know what happens in that game.’ Pilbrow read spy stories.

      ‘Who found him?’

      ‘Some hikers. By accident – they got off the track that leads down into the valley. He could have laid here for another twenty years or whatever it was.’ He really wasn’t interested in such an old case.

      ‘Any sign of clothes?’

      ‘Nothing. If everything he wore was natural fibre, if it was all cotton and wool, the weather would have destroyed it. Or birds might’ve taken it for their nests. Even his shoes were gone. The briefcase is pretty worn.’

      ‘Any bushfires through this part?’

      ‘Not down here on the lip. If there had been, we’d probably have found the bones years ago.’

      Malone looked out at the valley, wondering what peculiar fate had brought Sir Walter Springfellow to this lonely spot. Down below him two currawongs planed along, their ululating cries somehow matching in sound their oddly swooping flight. Out above the valley a hawk hung in the blue air like a brown cross looking for an altar; far down amongst the trees the sun caught a pool of water and for a moment a bright silver shard lay amidst the grey-green quicksand. He could see no sign for miles of any human activity.

      ‘You questioned any of the locals?’

      ‘Who’d remember back that far?’ said Pilbrow. ‘Yeah, we questioned them. This used to be a lovers’ lane in those days, but there were no lovers down here the night he was killed. Or if there was, they’re married to someone else now and got kids and moved elsewhere. I don’t think you’re gunna get far with this one, Inspector. There’s bugger-all to start with.’

      Malone nodded; then said, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place to start.’

      He thanked Pilbrow and the constable for their help, said he’d be in touch if he wanted any more information, nodded to Clements and led the way back up the track, not bothering to wait for the toiling Pilbrow. He knew the local detective would think him rude and arrogant, a typical bastard from the city, but he felt he owed the lazy, overweight man nothing. Pilbrow would just as soon see the file on Sir Walter Springfellow remain closed.

      Malone and Clements drove back to Sydney. It started to rain as they got to the outskirts and Malone looked back at the mountains, gone now in the grey drizzle. It somehow seemed an omen, a mist that would perhaps hide for ever the mystery of Sir Walter Springfellow.

      ‘What’s happening to the, er, remains?’

      ‘They’re at the City Morgue,’ said Clements. ‘I guess the family will reclaim them. They’ll bury ‘em, I suppose. You can’t cremate bones, can you?’

      ‘They do. Whatever they do, it all seems a bit late now. If there’s a funeral, we’ll go to it. See who turns up to pay their respects.’

      ‘Where to now? I’ve never worked on a homicide that’s twenty-one years old. I feel like a bloody archaeologist.’

      ‘That’s where we start, then. Twenty-one years ago. When we get back to town, go to Missing Persons and dig out the file on Walter Springfellow.’

      They reached the city, threaded their way through the traffic and turned into the Remington Rand building where Homicide, incongruously, rented its headquarters space amongst other government branches. Sydney had started as a convict settlement two hundred years ago and it seemed to Malone that it was only back then that the police had been together as a cohesive unit.

      Clements went across to Missing Persons in Police Headquarters in Liverpool Street. The NSW Police Department was spread around the city as if its various divisions and bureaux could not abide each other, a decentralization of jealousies.

      He was back within half an hour. ‘The file on Springfellow is missing. It just ain’t there.’

      ‘When did it go missing?’

      ‘That’s what I’ve been looking up. A file is usually kept for twenty to twenty-five years, there’s no set time. Every five years they go through them, cull them. There’s an index. Springfellow’s name disappeared from the index a year after he went missing, which means someone lifted his file before then.’

      ‘Do we go back to the family, then?’ Malone asked the question of himself as much as Clements. ‘No, we’ll let them bury him first. They’ve been waiting a long time to do that.’

      Clements looked at him, but he had meant no more than he had said.

      3

      ‘Oh Daddy! You’ve resigned from TV? And I’ve told everyone at school you were the director!’ Maureen, the eight-year-old TV addict, was devastated.

      ‘Well, it was crap anyway,’ said Claire, the thirteen-year-old who was reading modern playwrights at school this year.

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