12

I

“WHAT ARE you going to do?” said Joanna.

“What can I do? I’ll stay with Philip.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Joanna threw herself backwards, as if trying to hurl herself through the back of the couch; Anita had never seen her sister so physically angry. Joanna’s usual temper emerged only through her tongue, which could be as sharp-edged and deadly as a scimitar; but now it seemed that her whole body was bursting with anger. “Why do you have to subject yourself to that? Walk out—come back to Sydney—you’d have no trouble getting a job in radio or TV—”

“Darling, it would not be as easy as you think. You’ve never been in public life—you get out there and, whether you like it or not, you’re trapped—” She played with the loose gold bracelet on her wrist; it seemed to her that in the two weeks since Brian’s death, her wrist had got thinner. She felt thinner; or perhaps bonier was the word. As if all her flesh had become numb and all she could feel were her bones, which hurt terribly. “How would I explain it? That I’d just become tired of living with the most popular man in Australia—”

“Oh, come off it! He’s not that!”

“You read the wrong women’s magazines. Anyway, Philip thinks he is and his minders have convinced most of the voters that he is. We’re the Number One couple, Jo—I don’t like it, but it’s a fact. Since Philip has been PM and we’ve been travelling overseas, you’d be surprised at what I’ve found out about some presidents and prime ministers and their wives. They’re farther apart than Philip and me, but they’ve had to stay together. Like I told you, I’m stuck with him till at least the next election. All I can hope for is that he loses the election.”

“God, you’re making the voters sound like a jury in the Family Court—if they have juries there.” She would never resort to the law courts to resolve her marital problems; she had given her previous husbands everything they had asked for without any public appearance on her part. Public opinion never troubled her, but she parted from her men in private. She reached forward to take her sister’s hand. “Well, then, all you can do is try to forget your lover. Bury him and forget him.”

“Could you do that?”

“I’ve done it,” said Joanna, but didn’t say whom she had put out of her life and memory.

Anita shook her head. “I’ll never be able to do that. I remember reading a poem once on radio, I can’t remember who by. It had a line in it that went something like—” She paused and her breath seemed to catch for a moment. “The heart can never bury its dead.”

II

Two weeks before, on that Monday evening, Harry Danforth had made a call from a public box. “Jack, it’s me. Harry.”

“No names, mate. You know what the police are like.” Jack Aldwych was sitting out on his verandah, feeling the cold but reluctant to go indoors; as if he knew he had a rapidly diminishing number of evenings and was trying to hold on to them. Jack Junior had brought him the telephone and he had taken it with irritation at being disturbed. “They’re likely to tap my phone, with or without a court order. What’s on your mind?”

“Everything’s been taken care of. You owe me for this one.”

“You mean we have nothing to worry about? Well, he won’t be missed. Yeah, I do owe you. You can start thinking about retirement now, mate.”

“I been doing that, all afternoon. It’s time I was getting out. A nice place up on the Gold Coast.”

“Leave it with me, mate. No more phone calls, no more visits. You understand? Look after yourself.”

Harry Danforth hung up and stepped out of the phone box. He suddenly felt cold, as if he had walked by a newly opened grave.

III

“Uncle Russ, what are you doing?”

Clements took the bottle away from his lips and grinned self-consciously. “I was giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The wine wasn’t breathing.”

Claire rolled her eyes and looked at her mother, who said, “Who writes your jokes, Russ?”

Three months had passed and November was warming up into December. It was a Sunday and the Malones were having a barbecue beside their pool. Clements had brought six kilos of steak and three kilos of sausages, enough to feed a football team, and now, decked out in shorts, thongs and a brightly patterned shirt, an ocker Beau Brummel, he was supervising Maureen as she and Tom turned the steak and sausages on the barbecue. He had brought a girl with him; the nineteenth, Lisa, who kept count, had whispered to Malone. Her name was Sheila, a long-legged blonde who, Malone thought traitorously, looked too classy and intelligent for Russ but who obviously was more than just amused by him. Lisa was working overtime as matchmaker.

“You’ll have to cure him of those dreadful jokes, Sheila. One can’t live with a man like that.”

“Steady on,” said Clements through the smoke and sizzle of the barbecue. “Sheila and I are just holding intellectual discussions, not living together.”

“What do you do, Sheila?” said Con Malone, one of the four other guests for lunch. He was wearing a bright green shirt and white slacks and, to Malone’s delight, looked as if he were on his way to a St. Patrick’s Day celebration; the outfit had been a birthday gift from his daughter-in-law and he didn’t like to tell her that he wore it only when he came to her place. Brigid, though she liked the green shirt, would have preferred him to wear his usual brown trousers. The white trousers, she thought, made him look like the oldest stroller on Oxford Street, a beat she had once ridden through on a bus with her eyes averted. “Are you in the police?”

“I’m a pathologist in the Forensic Science bureau.”

Con, Brigid and the two elder Pretoriuses all looked impressed; the world today was a different one from the one they had grown up in. Russ, they all silently agreed, was a lucky man.

Lisa came and sat down on the bottom half of the sun lounge where Malone, in swim trunks, was stretched out. She turned her back on the others, as if closing a door on them. “You’re quiet.”

“That was Brian O’Brien’s father on the phone.” He had gone inside to take a call ten minutes before.

“What did he want?”

“He said George Bousakis had been at him again. He asked me what I thought he should do.”

“What did you tell him?”

Malone put on his dark glasses, then took Lisa’s hand and held it. “I told him to tell Bousakis to get stuffed.”

A month ago Malone had been in his office at Police Centre when a call had come from the reception desk. “There’s a man here says he’d like to see you urgently, Inspector. A Mr. O’Brien. He says it’s about his son.”

When Horrie O’Brien Senior walked into his office Malone at once saw the resemblance: the son had been almost a carbon copy of his father. The same long lean face, the wide smile, the thick hair, almost white on the father: all that was missing was the quiet swagger of the son.

“I’m Horrie O’Brien, Inspector. I saw you at my son’s funeral, but I didn’t introduce m’self, I didn’t want anyone taking pictures of me. Can I come straight to the point?”

“Go ahead, Mr. O’Brien.”

“Well, I gather you know Brian and I didn’t get along. He wrote me a long letter a coupla days before he was—he was killed. Or killed himself?” There was no mistaking that the last was a question.

Malone didn’t commit himself; Harry Danforth had already resigned and left the Department. “I think we’d better stick to the coroner’s verdict, Mr. O’Brien.”

Horrie O’Brien hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah. Well . . . I got this letter, it was written on his stud’s notepaper, it was almost like he had a premonition. He said he was sorry for what we’d missed between us and he hoped that, if everything went all right for him, we’d shake hands and let bygones be bygones. I might of, at that—” He looked down at his big hands; they were like his son’s, wrapping and unwrapping each other. “Being bitter doesn’t get you very far, does it?” Malone didn’t answer; and O’Brien went on, “He said if anything happened to him I was to get in touch with his lawyers, he give me their name. I didn’t do that, not till this week. I’ve been to see „em this morning and they told me what’s in his will. He left me everything, lock stock and barrel. I’m a bus driver, with overtime and shift work, I take home roughly five hundred bucks a week. And now he’s made me a bloody millionaire!”

Malone felt a sudden warm glow of satisfaction. “I think Brian would’ve been pleased.”

“I dunno. Because there’s a problem or two, the lawyers tell me. The National something-or-other—”

“The NCSC?”

“Yeah, that’s it. They want to grab what they can. I don’t mind that, if Brian owed it to „em. That was one of the things him and me disagreed about. I try to be honest . . .” He stopped and looked at Malone with embarrassment. “Does that sound old-fashioned?”

“Not really. Not to me. But why did you come to me, Mr. O’Brien?”

The older man’s embarrassment didn’t entirely fade. “Because Brian spoke a lot about you in his letter. He said he’d made a friend, but too late—there was that premonition thing again, I guess. He mentioned a man named Bousakis, George Bousakis, a Greek he sounds like, and he said if I had any trouble with him I oughta come to you.”

“Are you having trouble with Mr. Bousakis?”

“Not yet. I haven’t met him so far. But the lawyers said he wants to buy out all Brian’s holdings here in Australia. The lawyers say no one else will make me an offer and even if I wait I won’t get anything better than Bousakis will offer me.”

“What do you think you’d like to do?”

“Mr. Malone,” the older man said slowly and gravely, “I’m due to retire—truth is, I’m past retiring age for a driver, but they don’t know my real age. When the wife died I just wanted to keep working, keep my mind off her going like she did. I haven’t got over losing her and now I’m trying to get used to the idea that I’ve just lost my son, my only kid. I’m not thinking too straight. The money don’t mean that much to me. All I think I want to do is do what Brian asked. I disagreed with him enough when he was alive. Now he’s dead, I’d like to make it up to him.”

Malone said nothing, looking at the man across the desk from him, seeing him fade into the younger O’Brien, Brian Boru, Horrie Junior. Then at last he said quietly, and he had to choke off the sweet venom in his voice, “Mr. O’Brien, I’d tell George Bousakis to get stuffed.”

And now, sitting beside the pool, he said, “I told him what I told him a month ago. To tell George Bousakis to get stuffed.”

Lisa pressed his hand. “So no one comes out a winner?”

“No one, at least as far as making money out of Brian’s murder. It’s just a pity he never got to name names to the NCSC, but you can’t have everything.”

Lisa looked across the pool at the children, then back at him. “I have everything.”

She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. Then she got up, went to the bucket of ice beside the back door and came back with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She poured the wine, then saw the direction of his gaze.

“What are you looking at?”

“It’s a green bottle. Have you got any more? Let’s keep them as souvenirs.” As soon as he said it he knew it was a stupid, insensitive remark.

“No,” she said and bent down and kissed him again, this time on the lips. “It’s the last green bottle. And I’m going to break it when it’s empty.”

THE END