Bleak Spring. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ moment. She had a lot to learn about married life and, the protective father, he wondered if she was learning too much too early.

      ‘By the time we get there, the wife is dead. Or the husband,’ he added.

      Lisa switched off the set. ‘Anything on Will Rockne’s death?’

      ‘I don’t think we want to spend Sunday night talking about murder, do we?’

      ‘You mean, not in front of the child, right?’ said Claire. ‘Come on, Dad. If you want to be a cop, what d’you want us to do? Think of you as a bus driver or a schoolteacher like Mr Cayburn next door? For God’s sake, I knew Mr Rockne! Why can’t I be interested?’

      Malone sighed, nodded. ‘Have you spoken to Jason?’

      ‘I called him this afternoon, he sounded really low. God, just imagine when he goes back to school tomorrow!’

      ‘He probably won’t be going to school tomorrow,’ said Lisa. ‘When’s the funeral?’

      ‘I dunno. That’ll depend on when the coroner releases the body. Romy’s handling it.’ He looked at Claire, who had suddenly stiffened. ‘That’s what murder is all about, love, at least after the event. Mr Rockne is now just a body, a name and a number on a computer print-out – you still want to discuss it?’

      ‘That’s enough!’ said Lisa.

      Tiredness had brought cruelty. ‘I’m sorry, Claire. Maybe I’ll talk to you about it when it’s all over, when we’ve caught whoever killed him – if we ever do. But right now . . .’

      Claire stood up, crossed to him and kissed the top of his head. ‘Why couldn’t you have been a lawyer or a doctor?’

      ‘Tom once asked me why I couldn’t have been the Pope. I think he saw us there on that balcony at St Peter’s every Sunday morning, waving to the mob. The Holy Family, Part Two.’

      She kissed him again, this time on the forehead. ‘Mother Brendan thinks you’re a heretic.’

      ‘I’ve had the Commissioner call me that, too. I must look it up. Goodnight, love. Tell your sister to get her ears out of that rock concert and go to sleep. And put Tom’s light out.’

      Claire went in to prepare for bed and Malone went out to the kitchen to make himself some tea and toast; he had not eaten much during the day and now suddenly he felt hungry. Lisa followed him. ‘So how is it going?’

      ‘The Rockne case? We’re stumbling. Olive told me a few things last night that don’t jell with some of the evidence we’ve dug up today.’

      ‘Are you saying she might have killed Will?’ She showed no surprise, but that was because over the years she had learned not to.

      ‘I don’t know.’ He dropped two slices of multigrain into the toaster. ‘Do you know Angela Bodalle?’

      It took her a moment to identify the name. ‘The QC? Is she representing Olive? Already?’

      ‘No, not officially, not yet. She’s a friend of the family. Didn’t Olive ever mention her to you?’

      ‘Darling, I’ve never been close to Olive. You warned me against getting too involved with them, remember?’

      ‘Just as well I did. Where’s the leatherwood honey?’

      Lisa reached into a cupboard for a jar, put it on the table. This morning the honey had been in the plastic container in which he had bought it yesterday; now it was in the decorated jar with the silver spoon beside it. Lisa’s table was always properly set, none of your slapdash cartons and plastic containers cluttering it. Her Dutch neatness was legendary with him and the children, though sometimes he wondered if neatness was a myth back home in Holland. It struck him that Olive Rockne probably fan her own house with the same style, though he suspected there would be a fussiness to her neatness.

      ‘I can’t believe you might suspect Olive of – you know. She always struck me as being a bit wimpy. I mean Will trod all over her.’

      ‘That sort get tired of being trodden on, though usually they kill their husbands on the spur of the moment, not cold-bloodedly. What would you do as a wife if you found out your husband had five and a quarter million dollars tucked away in a bank account?’

      ‘You’ve probably got that much salted away somewhere, you never spend anything.’

      ‘Be serious.’ He told her what he had found in the Rockne safe. ‘Would you claim it or would you turn your back on it because it might have blood on it?’

      She thought about it while she made the tea: tea leaves, not tea bags, in a crockery pot. ‘I honestly don’t know. What are you expecting Olive to do?’

      ‘I’m expecting Olive to claim it. I don’t think she is as much of a wimp as we thought.’

      4

      Monday morning Clarrie Binyan, the sergeant in charge of Ballistics, came into Malone’s small office in Homicide. Binyan was part-Aborigine, the recognized expert on white men’s weapons; he often joked he couldn’t tell the difference between a boomerang and a didgeridoo, but he could tell you whether a bullet had been fired from a Webley or a Walther. ‘There you are, Scobie, the Maroubra bullet. Fired from a Ruger, I’d say.’

      ‘Through a silencer?’

      ‘Could be. Silencers usually have no effect on a bullet. But if it was a Ruger fitted with a silencer, then I’d say it was a professional hit job.’

      ‘How many hitmen do we know who use a Ruger?’ But it was a useless question and he knew it. Crime in Australia had become organized over the past few years, coinciding with the national greed of the Eighties. But professional killings were still just casual work, often done crudely. ‘We don’t have much in the way of clues on this one, Clarrie.’

      ‘I can’t help you there, mate. You gimme something more than one bullet to go on and I’ll try and build you a case. Or gimme a particular gun. But one slug . . .’ He shook his dark head, rolled a black eye that showed a lot of white. ‘Some day you’re gunna bring in a spear and ask me to name it. I’m looking forward to that. I might run it right through you.’

      ‘Get out of here, you black bastard.’

      Binyan grinned and left: the two of them respected each other’s ability and there had never been a moment’s friction between them. The big room outside began to fill up with detectives; Malone had seventeen men under him in Homicide. There had been a spate of murders since the Strathfield massacre, but that was often the case, as if a damn had burst and murder had escaped. All the detectives were assigned. He looked out at them through the glass wall of his office and, not for the first time, remarked how few of them had come out of the same mould. Some of them were straight down the line, as if they worked under the eye of some stern judge; others bent the rules because, they argued, life itself didn’t run according to the rules. There was Andy Graham, all tiring enthusiasm; chainsmoking Phil Truach, so laconic he seemed bored by whatever he had to investigate; John Kagal, young and ambitious, his eye already on Malone’s chair, a fact that Malone had noticed without letting Kagal know; and Mike Mesic, the Croat whose attention for the past month had been home in Yugoslavia where his hometown was being blasted by СКАЧАТЬ