Chapter Seven

1

At ten the next morning Romy rang Malone. ‘I came in early. I’ve done the autopsy. Ballistics have the bullets.’

An hour later Clarrie Binyan came across from Ballistics at Police Centre. His dark Aboriginal face had a blue tinge from the cold morning air; he wore a heavy overcoat, a scarf and a tweed cap. ‘I’d ask for a transfer up north if I could trust the Queenslanders. My mumma came from up there, on a mission reserve. They treated her like dirt.’

‘I’ll bet your mumma wouldn’t recognize you now.’ There was no racial edge between himself and Binyan, but he was always cautious about asking what the Aborigine’s life had been like before he had joined the Police Service. He felt a sense of guilt, but he didn’t question himself too much on that, either. ‘You look like a rah-rah footy fan on your way to a rugby game. You got leather patches on your elbows?’

Binyan held up his elbows. ‘Clean.’ He laid a plastic envelope containing two bullets on Malone’s desk. ‘Standard Thirty-eights. Not the same gun that killed Brame and Rockman.’

‘Bugger!’ said Clements, who had followed Binyan into the office.

‘Relax,’ said Binyan, who never looked otherwise but relaxed. ‘The news isn’t all bad. We’ve identified the gun that killed the other two. Police divers came up with it this morning, over in Darling Harbour – they’ve been down there since Tuesday morning. It’s the make I suspected. A Sig-Sauer P Two-thirty, a Swiss piece but it’s made in Germany. It fires nine-millimetre ultras, the sort we found in both bodies. It’s also a very expensive piece, your ordinary run-of-the-mill hitman wouldn’t be using one.’

‘Any prints on it?’

‘Fingerprints have seen it. Nothing. It was coated in mud.’

Malone looked at the two bullets in the envelope. ‘I hope Peta didn’t feel those,’ he said quietly, almost to himself.

The other two men glanced at each other, then Binyan wound his scarf more tightly round his neck. ‘When’s she being buried?’

‘Some time next week, soon’s the coroner okays it.’ He had remained staring at the bullets; now he looked up. ‘Thanks, Clarrie. I hope that’s the last we have to send you.’

‘Are you kidding?’ said Binyan and left.

Malone had meant, the last bullets that would kill a police officer; but Binyan had gone before he could explain.

Greg Random had assumed overall command of the investigation and seven detectives were now working on the three murders. Andy Graham had taken over the flow charts and the consolidation of the running sheets. Evidence was being accumulated, but it was like trying to knead flour that wouldn’t bind. Malone had begun to worry that his concern for Lisa was preventing his getting a grasp on what they had gathered.

‘We’re not doing so well,’ said Clements. ‘We’re short-handed. We’ve got the tail on the Douranes and the one on Channing. I’ve had to ask for the loan of some uniformed guys, put them in civvies. We’re stretched, mate.’

‘What about Mr Federal?’

‘John Kagal’s been around the top hotels, checking if Mr Federal has been staying in any of them, like Dourane said.’

‘What about the Douranes?’

‘We got a warrant and had their house searched. Nothing. No weapons, no paperwork, nix. It was as if they had been expecting us before we got to them yesterday.’

‘Righto, get John in here.’

Clements stood up and tapped on the glass that looked out on to the main room. Kagal, who had been working in front of a computer, stood up and came into the office. He was as impeccably dressed as ever, but somehow he seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes. His dark handsome face had aged, all the near-cockiness was gone. He sat down in the spare chair and shook his head.

‘It’s like a morgue out there.’ He didn’t appear to notice the inaptness of his remark. ‘Only now she’s gone do we realize how much she fitted in. I should’ve been with her yesterday, you know.’

‘Then we might of been missing the two of you,’ said Clements, his voice a little too sharp. ‘What did you get out of the hotels?’

‘I’ve just been putting it into the computer.’ Kagal sat up straighter, squared his shoulders in the Serafino suit. ‘He was at the InterContinental. Martin Federal, Swiss passport. He came in last Friday and checked out yesterday. Half an hour after Peta was shot.’

‘Are we to take it Mr Federal and Mr Ballinger are the same man?’ said Malone.

‘Could be.’

‘Did you get a description of him?’

‘Vague. Thin, average. He hadn’t stayed there before, so they couldn’t tell me much about him, the way they could with a regular. He moved around, it seems. He’s been in Sydney four times in the past three months, stayed at a different hotel each time. The Ritz-Carlton in Macquarie Street, the Regent, the Hilton. Looks like he didn’t want to leave an impression on anyone. He never ordered a car through any of the hotels, never had a meal in any of their dining rooms, not even breakfast.’

‘Must be a new breed of businessman. I thought they all tried to make an impression,’ said Clements.

The three of them pondered for a moment the accepted immodesty of businessmen as distinct from their own low profiles, then Malone said, ‘How did he pay his bills?’

‘Cash, every time.’

‘I didn’t think hotels took cash any more.’

‘They do when the guests have been guaranteed by a respectable firm, the one making the booking.’

‘Who made all the bookings?’

Kagal’s face came alive; he suddenly seemed to fill his suit again. ‘Channing and Lazarus.’

2

The girl on the reception desk gave Malone a dazzling smile; she was the only one at Channing and Lazarus who was prepared to welcome him. ‘Both Mr Channing and Mr Lazarus are in court this morning. All day.’

He pulled up one of the purple-tweeded club chairs close to her desk. ‘Maybe I don’t need to see them. Do you do all the hotel bookings for the firm? For the clients, as well?’

She raised an eyebrow, as if to say, What’s this about? A call came in on the small board and she answered it, connecting it to somewhere else in the offices. Then she gave Malone her attention again, but warily. ‘I don’t know I should be answering questions. I work here, y’know.’

Don’t pull the client confidentiality act on me, please. ‘I appreciate that, Miss—?’

‘Piric. Pam Piric. That was how I used to answer the phone when I first started here. Pamela speaking. I used to work for Avis, you know. Then Mrs Johns heard me one day and blew her top. Said this was a law office, not a car rental agency.’

‘How long has she been here? Long?’

‘Oh no, two years I think. She was here when I came eighteen months ago. She’s efficient – God, is she!’

He let Pamela keep on talking; the tongue has collapsed more walls than pickaxes ever have. He should know: once upon a time his own tongue had undermined him more times than he cared to count. ‘Where is Mrs Johns now?’

‘In her office. She doesn’t sit out front here, I’m all on my own. It gets pretty boring at times.’

‘But you’re kept busy?’

‘Oh yes.’ She answered another call, made another connection. She was more relaxed now, less suspicious of him. ‘We’ve got very busy over the last six months, since we expanded.’

‘That goes against the trend. Most of the law offices I read about, they’ve been reducing staff, not expanding. I’m glad to hear it, for your sake.’ He gave her one of his own dazzling smiles, a rare sight; he was not dour, but a dry grin, barely showing his teeth, was his usual expression of flattery. ‘Did you book Mr Federal into the Hotel InterContinental last Friday?’

‘Mr Federal?’

‘Yes, a director of ZPH. He came in from Zurich, I believe.’

‘What’s going on?’ Mrs Johns stood in a doorway, all brassy indignation. ‘How dare you come in and start interrogating our staff without seeing me!’

Malone stood up, put the club chair back in its place against the wall, gave the dry grin this time to the receptionist.

‘Thanks, Pamela … You’re wrong, Mrs Johns. I wasn’t interrogating your staff, we were just passing the time of day.’ He wasn’t going to stand the girl up against a wall to be shot by the office manager. ‘May I see you in your office?’

‘I’m busy.’

‘Who isn’t, now the recession’s turned around? Miss Piric was telling me how much the firm has expanded in the past six months.’

That was a mistake, the tongue rolling on too long. ‘I thought you said you were just passing the time of day?’ said Mrs Johns.

‘Oh, we were. This and that.’ He abruptly lost his patience: ‘Come on, Mrs Johns! Let’s go into your office, whether you’re busy or not.’

But as he followed the office manager out of the reception lobby he winked at Pamela Piric and she gave him a surreptitious smile, which Mrs Johns did not see. He might need Miss Piric again; receptionists were a filter in which scraps of information stuck like paper in a storm-water grille.

Mrs Johns’s office was a small cubicle off the main room, where a dozen women sat in front of word processors. She paused by her office, then, as if it would belittle her to entertain him in such a small space, she led him on into a medium-sized boardroom. Malone was aware of eyes staring into his back as fingers paused and words stopped being processed.

In the half-hour wrangle at Homicide yesterday afternoon over the detention of the Douranes, June Johns had been ready to explode. To Malone’s surprise it had been Channing, showing unexpected firmness, who had kept her in check. Dourane and his wife had been very quiet, letting Channing argue for them. Mrs Johns had in the end turned sullen, saying nothing for the rest of the meeting, not even when she was leaving.

She seated herself at the head of the large teak table and looked across at Malone as if she were a lawyer and he was a client whose chances of being acquitted she thought were pretty poor. ‘So what is this all about?’

‘I thought that would’ve been pretty obvious. It’s about the three murders we’re investigating.’ Then he bowled his favourite weapon, the bean-ball: ‘Do you know Mr Martin Federal of ZPH, the Swiss firm Mr Channing and Mr Lazarus represent?’

She ducked that one without effort. ‘No.’

‘Righto, let’s try again. Did you instruct Miss Piric to book him into the Hotel InterContinental last Friday? And before that, over the past three months, into the Regent, the Ritz-Carlton and the Hilton?’

There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve never met him?’

‘No.’

‘So you booked him in on the instructions of Mr Channing?’

‘I suppose I must have.’

He grinned, without humour. ‘You’re a beaut, Mrs Johns … What about a Mr Ballinger?’

‘Who?’ There was no hesitation, not the slightest gathering together of any defences.

‘Mr Ballinger. He shot and killed Detective Smith yesterday afternoon.’ His voice suddenly grated; he stopped, to soften it. ‘I asked you about him yesterday at Homicide.’

‘No, you never mentioned him to me.’

She had him there: maybe he had not asked her about the mysterious Mr Ballinger. He and Clements had concentrated on Dourane and his wife and, once Rod Channing had arrived, had got nowhere.

‘Why are you so obstructive?’

‘A good office manager protects her employers. From what I read, the police protect each other.’

‘What did you do before you came here, Mrs Johns?’

‘This and that.’ A tiny sarcastic smile.

He went back on another tack: ‘On whose authority did you guarantee Mr Federal’s charges at those hotels?’

Again there was the slight hesitation. She was wearing a mustard-coloured wool skirt and a brown blouse with buttoned cuffs; she paused, one hand at her wrist as if she had just found a loose button. There are a hundred ways of covering hesitation: Mrs Johns, it seemed, was a past mistress at the ways. She fiddled with the button: ‘Damn! I’m going to lose that … I’ve forgotten whether it was Mr Channing or Mr Lazarus.’

‘Come on – June, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s Mrs Johns.’

So much for the familiar approach, as the unofficial manual advised; he accepted the rebuff with a grin. ‘I was just trying to put you at ease. You seem a little uptight.’

‘I don’t think so. You’re the one who’s uptight. Or off-course. Whatever. You’re trying to make perfectly legal connections into something criminal.’

‘Killing one of my colleagues is criminal, Mrs Johns. Not to mention Mr Brame and a security guard named Rockman. If I’m uptight, it’s about those murders!’ His mood changed abruptly; it was time to go. He stood up, but paused, standing close to and above her. ‘Don’t get yourself too involved with what’s going on at Channing and Lazarus, Mrs Johns. You might be too loyal to your bosses!’

It was a reckless statement, but his mention of Peta Smith had brought the dead girl back into his consciousness; guilt stirred him up like a poison. He went out of the boardroom without a backward glance, strode past the stares of the word processors (words were now processed, for Chrissakes, like food and waste!), and was outside the lifts, not smiling at Miss Piric as he swept by her, before his feelings cleared. The two other people in the lift, a girl and a middle-aged courier, glanced cautiously at the tall man who got in, moving his face as if checking whether he had broken his own jaw.

‘You okay, sport?’ said the courier.

Malone looked at him, struggled for a grin. ‘It’s okay. I’ve just bitten my tongue.’

3

Joanna Brame had taken a trip across into the city proper. She had had breakfast in her suite and watched the CNN news segments that the hotel ran for the benefit of its American guests. But why, she had wondered, would anyone want to look at the news that assaulted one from the television screen? President Clinton was still besieged, still falling in the polls; she had not voted for him, but his failure gave her no satisfaction. From Rwanda, misery stared at her with huge accusing eyes; she was always charitable when disasters struck, but at the moment she had her own misery. The Middle East appeared at long last to be creeping towards peace but, though she hated the phrase and the sentiment, she could not have cared less. Her world had abruptly narrowed and she felt no shame that she did not want to look outside it.

She had not called for a cab or a hire car, but had chosen to ride over into the central business district on the monorail. Without knowing it, and certainly not wanting to know it, she had ridden in the very car in which her husband had been murdered. She had not made the trip as a tourist, but as an escapee from the suffocation of her hotel suite and the possible attentions of Richard De Vries and Karl Zoehrer. The return to New York could not come quickly enough, even though it would mean the saddest journey of her life. No one, not even the dead, should have to endure a 10,000-mile funeral.

She never strolled the streets of Manhattan, not even the reaches between 57th and 65th and between Fifth and Lexington; the homeless, a councilman had told her at a charity dinner, were kept lower down the island, like debris swept into unvisited corners. She had never been mugged or accosted, but she had friends who had been. She rode in limousines past the waste of the city, both human and otherwise, and, though she admired other cities, American and European, would not want to live anywhere else but in New York and, of course, the country estate in Connecticut.

Today she strolled through Sydney, listening to the flat accents and syncopation that made English sound like another language. She had decided that one should not be attacked by grief while in a foreign land. Despite the superficial American look of Sydney, she felt alien here; she would have been less alien in France or Italy, which she knew better. She kept her grief at bay by shutting her mind to all but externals.

She marvelled at the cleanliness of the streets, at the shine on the girls’ hair, at the bright sunshine on a cold winter’s day, at the absence of panhandlers and derelicts. She window-shopped through a huge cupola-topped building called the Queen Victoria Building: restored to its Victorian splendour, she was told by a shopkeeper, by an Asian company. She found another pleasure, another restored gallery of shops called the Strand Arcade, and when she finally hailed a cab to be taken back to her hotel she was filled with regret and grief that she had never had the chance to share the excitement of his home city with Orville. And wondered how much, if at all, he had missed it.

She had no sooner entered her suite than Dick De Vries and Adam Tallis knocked on the door. With a sigh of annoyance that she managed to conceal she invited them in.

‘How is the convention going?’ She really had no interest in the convention. She respected lawyers and their work, appreciating, if only with wifely good humour, Orville’s belief that the law, and not love, made the world go round. A thousand lawyers in one spot, however, stopped the world dead. Here in front of her was one lawyer who, again in Orville’s belief, could do the deed on his own. ‘Have you been attending the sessions, Dick?’

‘No. Adam is doing that for us.’

‘And what have you all come up with, Adam? A thousand conflicting opinions?’

He smiled. ‘So far, all we’ve been doing is reviewing the past. It’s a legal trick of the trade.’

De Vries looked disapproving, but changed the subject. ‘Anything new from the police on Orville? Dammit, you’d think they would have come up with something by now. They haven’t been near us in two days.’

‘I think they’re probably preoccupied with the shooting of that woman detective,’ said Tallis. ‘She was the one working on Mr Brame’s case and that of the security guard.’

Joanna frowned. ‘Rodney Channing mentioned her last night—’

De Vries interrupted her: ‘Last night? You saw Channing last night?’

‘I had dinner at his home. With him and his wife and mother. You seem surprised, Dick?’

‘Eh? No, no. After all—’

‘After all?’ She wasn’t going to let him get off the hook, not after his attempt at policing her movements.

‘After all, he is your brother-in-law. Did he have anything to say? I mean, about Orville’s – about Orville’s case?’

‘Nothing at all. But I gather the plot, as they say, is thickening.’ She shook her head. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say that. Someone warned me that we mustn’t start playing Miss Marple.’

‘Playing who?’

She was saved by the phone; she had once remarked to Orville that it had been invented by a dramatist and not by Alexander Graham Bell. This time it was Reception telling her that Inspector Malone was on his way up. She hung up and said to De Vries, ‘Inspector Malone must have heard you complaining, Dick. He’s coming up.’

‘With some news, I hope,’ said De Vries, voice more clipped than usual.

Joanna was grateful for the interruption of Malone’s arrival, but disappointed when he told her he had no further news.

‘I heard about the killing of your young woman detective,’ she said. ‘It must have been a dreadful shock to you.’

Malone nodded. ‘It was totally unnecessary. She just wanted to question the man, not arrest him.’

‘Do you know who the killer was?’ said De Vries.

‘No. A man named Ballinger, but we don’t know if that’s his real name. We think he’s connected with the killing of Mr Brame and the security guard Rockman.’

‘Christ, this is getting out of hand!’ The English accent for the moment was gone; the voice was nasal Yankee.

Malone looked at him curiously, but said only, ‘That’s what we think, Mr De Vries. Have you been in touch with your New York office about what might be in Mr Brame’s files?’

‘Yes.’ The voice was under control again. ‘Nothing. I’m going back with Mrs Brame on Sunday, I’ll check myself if there is anything in the files.’

Joanna was surprised she was going to have company on the flight; the prospect didn’t please her. ‘You didn’t tell me, Dick—’

‘There’ll be formalities in Los Angeles when we take the, er, body in. I’ll handle all that for you, I don’t think you should be subjected to it.’

‘Thank you.’ She was not ungracious. ‘Inspector, why do you think there is some connection between all these killings? My husband, who’s never been under threat in his life, leaves New York and in a matter of days … It’s all too bizarre.’

‘Mrs Brame, when you’ve been involved in crime as long as I have, you find there’s no such word as bizarre … Did Mr Brame make any trips to Europe in the past three months? To Zurich in particular?’

Joanna frowned. ‘No. The only overseas trip Orville made this year was to Japan. I went with him, in April.’

De Vries had looked at his watch, then moved to the drinks cabinet. ‘Do you mind, Joanna? The sun is over the yardarm, or wherever it’s supposed to be. My partner was a very keen yachtsman, I’m not,’ he explained to Malone. ‘Drink?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Joanna? Adam?’

Nobody, it seemed, wanted a drink right now; he sighed and turned away from the cabinet empty-handed. ‘Well, I’ll wait. Sorry, Inspector. I interrupted you—’

‘Mr De Vries, did you make any trips to Europe this year?’

‘Did I?’ He looked at Tallis, but before the younger man could answer he said, ‘Yes, I did. I went to Zurich. One of our clients is Credit Suisse, one of the top Swiss banks.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last month. It was a quick trip, I was there just two days. No more, really, than a courtesy call.’

‘Credit Suisse wouldn’t have referred you to a Zurich firm called ZPH? Zurich Private Holdings?’

‘No–o. What do – ZPH? – what do they do?’

‘I gather they’re an investment company. Channing and Lazarus represent them out here. One of their directors, Mr Federal, is here in Sydney right now, but he seems pretty elusive. That was why I asked if Mr Brame had been to Zurich – I thought he might have been planning to meet Mr Federal while he was there.’

Joanna, watching both men closely, wondered at De Vries’s studied nonchalance and the casual, almost naïve approach of the detective. Her father had been a criminal lawyer and as a college student she had gone to watch him in the cut-and-thrust of court proceedings; she had a dim memory that the bludgeon had been rarely used, that cross-examination had been mostly a matter of stroking and counter-stroking; or at least that was how her father had operated. Then the flood-money Eighties had come along and Schuyler, De Vries and Barrymore turned away from crime, or anyway the more violent sort, and gave its attention to mergers, litigation and the defence of clients who had never bothered to read the law when it came to the difference between the right and wrong ways of making money. Orville had been a master at mergers, suffered the pursuit of litigation and had a profound dislike of clients who thought greed was an excuse for breaking the law.

She watched Malone and De Vries: stroke and counter-stroke were being applied here. But did the detective suspect Dick De Vries of something? Orville’s partner was stupid at times, incompetent at all times, but he wasn’t a criminal. Yet …

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said De Vries and looked at his watch again; the gesture was studied, as if time were of absolute importance to him. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, Inspector. I have a lunch appointment. With Karl Zoehrer,’ he told Joanna. ‘Would you like to join us?’

She would like nothing less. ‘What a pity! I’ve already told Adam I’ll have lunch with him.’

Tallis caught on, looked at his watch. ‘I’ve booked us for one o’clock.’

‘Oh well, some other time.’ De Vries did not sound disappointed that his invitation had been declined. ‘Goodbye, Inspector. Let us know as soon as you’ve come up with something?’

‘Of course, Mr De Vries. Why should we keep it to ourselves?’ His tongue was on the loose this morning, but De Vries had begun to irritate him with his evasion and superior air.

De Vries gave him a hard look, then left, closing the door sharply behind him. Joanna said, ‘I don’t think you and Mr De Vries hit it off, am I right, Inspector?’

‘We don’t hit it off with 50 per cent of the people we meet, Mrs Brame. It comes with the job. Yes, Mr Tallis?’

The young man hesitated, then gestured awkwardly. ‘No, it doesn’t matter.’

‘No, Adam,’ said Joanna. ‘Everything matters. If you were going to tell Inspector Malone something, out with it!’

There was no mistaking the sharpness in her voice; she was his boss’s, or late boss’s wife. ‘I feel I’m being disloyal, Mrs Brame—’

‘Who to? My husband?’

‘No. Oh no, not him.’

‘Who, then? Mr De Vries?’ Tallis nodded. ‘Well, that’s up to you, Adam. But you worked for my husband, not Mr De Vries. I don’t apologize for being so blunt – but I think you owe your loyalty to my husband. Tell us what’s on your mind!’

Tallis looked at each of them in turn, taking his time, as if afraid of the jump that lay ahead of him. Jobs for young lawyers in prestigious New York firms were plums reached for each year by a thousand graduates; if it became known that he had spoken against the remaining senior partner, he would be out on Broad Street with the other panhandlers. At last he said, ‘Mr De Vries said he’d called New York to check if there was anything in the files. I talked to Connie Letoni this morning—’

‘Miss Letoni is – was my husband’s secretary,’ Joanna explained to Malone.

‘Connie said she hadn’t heard from him since he left New York.’

‘What about his own secretary?’ said Malone. ‘Does he have one?’

‘She’s away, on her honeymoon. Connie is handling both offices, with both senior partners away.’

‘What about a fax?’

Tallis shook his head. ‘She’d have mentioned that if one had come in. She’s very efficient.’

‘I can vouch for that,’ said Joanna. ‘But why did Dick say he’d talked to the office when he hadn’t? Unless he’s forgotten. He’s always been slipshod, Orville was always complaining to me about him. Forget you heard me say that, Adam.’ He nodded and smiled weakly; then Joanna looked back at Malone. ‘I had dinner at my brother-in-law’s last night. His mother, my mother-in-law—’ she said it almost as a query, as if she had not come to terms with having such a relative, a common disease in human relations. ‘She told me that her son Rod was working on something that would bring in the biggest fees his firm had ever earned. Some deal that he couldn’t even tell his wife about.’

‘But he didn’t mention your husband’s name in connection with it?’

‘Well, ‘no–o … I’m sorry, Inspector. Perhaps I shouldn’t have—’ She was suddenly helpless; she felt useless. ‘I’m chasing wild geese. But anything that will tell me why Orville was killed …’

Malone’s pager beeped. ‘May I use your phone?’

She gestured at the phone on a side-table; he moved to it, picked it up and dialled Homicide. Clements came on the line: ‘We’ve just had a call from Dicey Kilmer. She’s having a fit, she says they have found her.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Out at Miranda, in the Fit-to-Measure gym. I’ll meet you there. In the meantime I’ve asked Miranda to send two uniformed guys down to the gym, just in case.’

Malone hung up. ‘I’ve got to go. Mrs Brame – and you too, Mr Tallis – what you’ve just told me, keep to yourself. I’ll talk to Mr De Vries, don’t either of you have a word with him. I can’t give you orders, but take it as one, okay?’

Then he was gone and Joanna looked at Tallis. ‘I think we’ll have lunch up here, Adam. I don’t think I can face a restaurant full of lawyers, not today. My father, who was a very cynical man, once told me that the law was built on the interpretation of lies. I think I’m being caught up in a mesh of lies, Adam.’

She dared not confess to him that one of the liars might have been Orville.

4

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Where else was I gunna go, I’d feel safe? When I got back to the flat this morning, I’d been shopping, when I saw that someone had been through all my things – Jesus! They took nothing, far’s I could see, but all the drawers were open and the cupboards, like they were searching for something, I dunno what …’ Dicey Kilmer paused, gulped in a deep breath. ‘I was coming to gym anyway, I was all dressed for it, so I come here and rung you from here. I know all the people here. Look at the guys – you think someone is gunna come in here and do me over, all that muscle standing around waiting to be used? And the girls – they’d tear anyone to pieces, someone tried any rough stuff with me. You should see what some of ’em carry in their bags – Mace, steel bodkins, one girl’s got knuckledusters.’

‘Dicey, these guys are using guns,’ said Clements. ‘They don’t beat people up, they kill them. All the muscle in this gym isn’t gunna stop a bullet.’

She nodded morosely. ‘Yeah, I know. Still, where else was I gunna go till you turned up? Thanks anyway. I mean for those two guys in uniform. They were here five minutes after I called you. They were all over me like a rash, being protective.’

‘You shouldn’t wear such a tight outfit,’ Malone grinned.

The Fit-to-Measure gymnasium was obviously popular. At one end a dozen men worked on weights; muscles and sweat-drops stood out as if heralding an explosion of flesh. At the other end music started up, loud and rocking; no swans floated through a dance here. In front of a mirror-wall a moustachioed, bald-headed Narcissus, erotically in love with his own reflection, led two or three dozen women and half a dozen men in an aerobics class. In some cases fat bounced like jelly in an earthquake; some of the women and one or two of the men looked as if they were giving birth. The huge room reverberated to the thump-thump of the music, the mirrors told the aerobists that they were one in a million; or, they hoped, soon would be. Malone and Clements, in suits and hats and ties, not a muscle in sight, looked like drop-ins from another planet.

Malone yelled above the music, ‘Is there somewhere else we can go?’

‘There’s a fruit-juice bar down the hall.’

Dicey Kilmer led them out of the gym and down a narrow hall to an area of plastic-topped tables and spindly chairs designed for narrow bums and anorexic aerobists. She bought three juices and she and the two detectives sat down at a table, Clements’s ample behind straddling his chair as if it were a saddle. The beat of the music could still be heard, but here it wasn’t so deafening.

‘Do all you fitness fans finish up with impaired hearing?’ Malone was trying to settle Dicey’s nerves; she was still on edge. ‘It makes a nice picture. All those sleek healthy bods leaning forward with their hands to their ears saying, Eh, what’d you say?’

Dicey smiled. ‘You’re trying to cheer me up, right? Well, I feel better now you’re here. When I got back to my place this morning, saw what they’d done, I was scared sh – well, I was scared. I got the shakes, truly.’ She held up a hand, looked satisfied that it was no longer shaking.

‘We’ll have the Fingerprints fellers go there, see what they can dig up. But to be honest, I wouldn’t expect much. There were no prints when they cleaned out Murray’s flat.’

‘They’d been through there, too? I didn’t know that. Jesus, what are they after?’ She sucked noisily on the straw in her juice. Malone and Clements, not pineapple lovers, had hardly touched theirs. ‘I took nothing with me that belonged to Murray … I saw the news last night. About what happened to Peta Smith. That made me sick, I got the shakes then, too.’

‘I think we’re going to have to put you in protective custody, Dicey. For a week or so, anyway.’

She shook her head. ‘No, no way. What does that mean? Staying locked up in my flat all the time, guys crowding me – I’ve seen it in the movies. Gimme Richard Gere, then okay—’ She tried for some humour, but it was too heavy, she couldn’t raise even a weak grin. ‘No, thanks. You wouldn’t let me go to work, would you?’

‘I can’t see two guys sitting under hair-dryers keeping an eye on you,’ said Clements. ‘Richard Gere, maybe, he’s got enough hair for a perm, but not our guys. We could ask for women officers, but I dunno any station that has enough women to fill a twenty-four-hour roster, two at a time. The area commander would tell us to get lost.’

‘I could go home,’ she said without enthusiasm.

‘To, where was it, Cawndilla?’

‘Yeah. I’ve got two weeks’ holidays coming up. If I explained – or maybe you could – to Antoinette—’

‘Who?’

‘Antoinette, she’s my boss. Her real name’s Aggie, Agatha, but who’d go to Aggie’s for a shampoo and facial? Only the old bags from the Bargain Bag Store. That’s a joke.’ She smiled, humour creeping back into her like blood that had stopped flowing.

‘Will Aggie – Antoinette understand if we explain?’

‘She’s a real nice person, she’ll understand. But Cawndilla?’ She made a face. ‘I thought I’d got away from that place.’

‘I think you’ll be safe there,’ said Malone quietly. ‘We’ll ask the Cawndilla cops – is there a station there?’

‘Four cops, there used to be. Booking drivers, running in Abos for being drunk, nothing exciting.’

‘Well, we’ll ask ’em to keep an eye on you, but not to crowd you. Someone turns up to worry you, get in touch with me or Russ immediately, okay? I’m sorry it has to be this way, Dicey, but you made a bad choice when you picked Murray.’

‘The story of my life.’ She stood up, as fit as she could possibly be on the outside, a quicksand of feeling on the inside. ‘When’s it gunna end? I mean, how soon are you gunna catch them?’

‘Soon,’ said Malone and did his best to sound confident and reassuring. ‘Let’s go and explain the position to Antoinette.’

5

Karl Zoehrer and Richard De Vries and twenty other American lawyers sat in the public gallery of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and watched another demonstration of the old saw that the first rule of democracy is the survival of the politicians who profess belief in it. The Assembly was called the Bear Pit by the local voters and though it did not stage fist-fights and other entertainments such as one saw in the Japanese Diet or the roundabout parliaments of Italy, there were abuse and jeers and rude signs that reminded the older visitors of Earl Long and other exuberant democrats.

The Leader of the Opposition, Hans Vanderberg, an elderly vulture in an ill-fitting suit, was on his feet criticizing the Police Minister. ‘Why is not more being done to expedition the solving of the present spattle of murders? How many police officers are being employed on the cases? A stitch in time doesn’t save any thread—’

‘He’s called The Dutchman,’ Rod Channing, the party’s guide, told Zoehrer and De Vries. ‘He came out from Holland nearly fifty years ago and he’s been mangling the language ever since. He does it on purpose – I’d bet he could recite Paradise Lost if it would get him votes. He was Premier for three terms and he hates the idea of being in Opposition.’

‘Just like home,’ said De Vries.

‘Is he interested in impressing us?’ asked Zoehrer. ‘Or the local voters?’

‘With all due respect, Karl, he couldn’t give a fig for you visitors. If you’re not a voter here in New South Wales, you don’t count – and that includes the rest of Australia. He’s just latched on to this topic because it’s opportune.’

‘Just like home,’ said De Vries again.

The Police Minister, bald and handsome, rose to his feet. He knew all about murder: his own son had been a victim and he had applied all his ministerial pressure during that investigation. ‘The Honourable Member, who was once himself Police Minister, knows very well that, like that of miners and speleologists, most police work is done beneath the surface.’

‘He’ll have got him with speleologists,’ Channing whispered.

‘I am assured by the Commissioner that progress is being made—’ Tom Sweden looked up at the gallery. ‘Today we have as guests a party of distinguished American lawyers. I should like to assure them that my Service is doing everything in its power to solve the murder of the Bar Association’s president and we are hopeful of a solution any day now. But as lawyers, I am sure they understand the need for prudent delay—’

‘Just like home,’ De Vries said yet again.

Down in the body of the chamber, on a bench reserved for officials, Greg Random sat with Commissioner John Leeds. They looked at each other and Leeds muttered from the side of his mouth, ‘You heard that?’

‘Like an earache, sir,’ said Random.

The Dutchman was on his feet again, arms akimbo increasing the image of an aged bird unable to fly but still ready to pick at any carcase. ‘The Minister, in his usual form, is beating about the mulberry bush. He talks about prudent delay, but like some Greek fishmonger once said—’

‘There goes the Greek vote,’ said Random.

‘ – like he once said, prudent delay is just another name for specious cowardice—’

‘Thucydides,’ said Zoehrer. ‘This guy’s smarter than he lets on.’

Channing nodded. ‘But he’ll never let the public know. Australians have always been suspicious of orators, they think they’re bullshit artists. Your man, William Jennings Bryan, or even Roosevelt or Churchill wouldn’t ever have got a vote out here.’

Down in the chamber Random was staring up at the gallery. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the Commissioner.

‘Channing, the solicitor, he’s up there with the Americans. Malone has him on our list as the principal suspect.’

Leeds frowned, dropped his whisper even lower. ‘For Chrissake! You mean he thinks Channing committed the murders? And he’s up there with Brame’s successor?’

‘He doesn’t know whether Channing used the guns, but Channing knows who did.’

The Commissioner looked up at the gallery. Channing looked down and the two men’s eyes met. There was no nod of recognition from either; they had never met. The voice of the Police Minister cut across the gaze: ‘I reiterate, the police are hopeful of a solution any day …’