Golden Relic. Lindy Cameron

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I relieve you of it and chuck it in the Yarra.’

      Sam was already reaching into the pocket of her jacket for her mobile. ‘Diamond,’ she answered curtly.

      ‘My name is Diamond. Sam Diamond.’ Jacqui’s attempt at Sean Connery sounded a lot more like Mae West.

      ‘Oh, hi Ben,’ Sam was saying. ‘We were just talking about you. My sister thinks...’

      Jacqui groaned and tried to hide behind her wine glass.

      ‘...that your life could do with a bit of spicing up.’ Sam listened, tried in vain not to smile, and said, ‘Ben wants to know if you’d like to have dinner with him.’

      ‘Yeah, sure, why not.’ Jacqui waved her hands around. ‘How about tonight?’

      ‘She says she’d love to, Ben, but tonight’s out because she has to take me to the airport.’

      Sam’s raised eyebrows and puzzled look, made Jacqui get quite antsy until it was obvious the half of the conversation she could hear had nothing to do with her, consisting mostly as it did of responses like: ‘Really? Which boss? Why? Okay, put him on. Yes sir. Well I’m not really dressed for work. No, yes I am dressed, but I’m at a restaurant. Of course, sir. I’ll be there in 15 minutes.’ She hung up.

      ‘Your plane doesn’t leave until 8 pm. I could’ve gone to dinner tonight,’ Jacqui said.

      ‘With Ben. Who’s suddenly not boring.’

      Jacqui shrugged. ‘He is quite the spunk though.’

      ‘And you are quite the desperado. Anyway, I’m not going to Canberra now. At least not today.’ Sam pulled her wallet out of the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I have to go check out a body at the museum.’

      ‘A body?’ exclaimed Jacqui, a little too loud for Sam’s liking. ‘But you don’t do that any more. You’re with the Cultural Affairs Department now. Or have they changed their bloody minds again?’

      ‘No, they haven’t. Perhaps a dead body in the museum comes under the category of cultural murder. Whatever the reason, this is officially my first assignment for the CAD, so I have to love you and leave you. Here’s my share of the bill.’ Sam stood up and slipped 20 dollars under the salt shaker so it wouldn’t be whisked into the river by the breeze that had just arrived from the Tropics by way of the Antarctic.

      ‘Do you want a lift?’ Jacqui offered, not in the least concerned that the rest of her day had just been casually unarranged by the person who’d arranged it in the first place.

      ‘No thanks. I have to go to the office first, for a quick briefing, so I’ll walk.’ Sam bent down and gave Jacqui a peck on the cheek. ‘See you at home later. Unless of course you ring that little cubicle of mine and arrange a date with the boring Ben Muldoon.’

      ‘Hey,’ Jacqui shrugged. ‘I usually get my thrills vicariously by regaling my friends with lurid and fictitious accounts of your adventures as a secret agent. Even boring Ben has got to be better than that.’

      An hour later Sam alighted from a Swanston Street tram in front of the sweeping steps of the green-domed State Library of Victoria. She was still trying to work out how a museum curator had been found murdered in a building that hadn’t been a museum for over 12 months. But then, the rather disjointed briefing she’d been given by her new boss in Canberra via her old boss in Melbourne had been confusing on almost every level.

      A man was dead, possibly murdered but probably not, in a building that no longer had anything to do with the museum, yet someone from the museum had bypassed the Victoria Police and the State Government completely and placed a call directly to the Federal Minister for Cultural Affairs, Sam’s soon-to-be boss. And why? Because that someone was convinced the man’s death was an “act of sabotage with international ramifications”.

      Good grief! Sam passed between the columns of the Library’s imposing facade. She was often perplexed by how fast the paranoia virus was spreading through society as it rushed towards the new millennium, and sometimes worried that it might be contagious.

      As if to confirm that, a woman – well-spoken, middle-aged, wearing a twin-set, pearls and a crisp tartan skirt – stopped in front of her, nodded and said: ‘The government will get you, you mark my words.’

      Sam couldn’t help herself. ‘It’s my job to get you,’ she said.

      Mrs-Middle-Class sidled away, swearing under her breath, and listing what sounded like the ingredients for a batch of lamingtons.

      Sam muttered a few words to herself, like “dipstick” and “one too many diet pills”, to reassure herself that all was hunkey-dorey in her world and then turned back to the task at hand. She calculated that it had been at least fifteen years since she’d set foot in this grand old building but she knew well the peace and quiet that lay beyond those unpretentious front doors. She’d spent several months at a desk under the impossibly high vaulted ceiling of the Library’s Reading Room while she finished her Criminology thesis and wondered how they cleaned the windows.

      Sam’s memories fled in several horrified directions as she entered the foyer to find it packed with a noisy, ratty, pubescent horde in untidy uniforms. Her initial head count produced a tally of a thousand and three high school students; her second count was a more realistic thirty-three – and one poor demented teacher. Sam made her way over to a uniformed police officer who was guarding against any incursions into the roped-off hallway behind him and, judging by the look on his face, was also responsible for scanning the crowd for terrorists. When she flashed her badge he smiled with relief and explained he was her escort.

      ‘Can you fill me in?’ Sam asked as they made their way into the section of the building that had, for nearly a century until the previous year, housed the various collections of the Museum of Victoria. Sam wondered where all those artefacts, those wondrous things she recalled from childhood visits, were being stored while the new Melbourne Museum was under construction.

      British flintlock cavalry pistol, .590 calibre, recovered after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Brought to Victoria by Viscount Canning, Governor General of India 1856-1862.

      Sam could picture the label for the handgun as clearly as if she was looking at it now. Then there was her favourite exhibit: stuffed, encased in glass and towering over her, Sam had been no less impressed by Australia’s greatest racehorse than her grandfather who had actually watched Phar Lap win the 1930 Melbourne Cup. ‘Where’s Phar Lap?’ Sam asked, interrupting Constable Rivers who had been telling her he couldn’t tell her much, except that the deceased’s body, lying by his work bench in one of the storage rooms, had been found by an assistant curator at nine that morning.

      ‘I’ve no idea where he is,’ Rivers said.

      ‘Does the forensic pathologist know the cause of death?’

      ‘Phar Lap’s or the guy downstairs?’ Rivers asked.

      ‘Phar Lap was allegedly poisoned,’ Sam said, as if this was a perfectly logical conversation. ‘How about the guy downstairs?’

      ‘I don’t know about him,’ Rivers shrugged and waited while a museum guard used a security card to open a door for them before continuing. ‘The forensics team have only been here about half an hour and the pathologist arrived just before you did.’

      Sam СКАЧАТЬ