8

I

“INSPECTOR—”

“G’day, Andy, where’ve you been? I thought you’d resigned from the Department or something.”

“I’ve been following those suggestions you gave me.” Andy Graham grinned; he had learned that you could relax with Malone, just so long as you did your job. “The Feds have been really helpful on this one.”

Malone looked across at Clements. “Do they owe us something?”

“I don’t think so.” All the police forces, State and Federal, were fiercely independent, sometimes even mistrustful, of each other. They were bureaucracies and being in uniform made them no different from other bureaucracies. Clements, a State chauvinist, had no time for Canberra. “The PM must be calling an election and is looking for votes.”

“Who’d vote for Phil Norval except little old ladies?”

Andy Graham waited while his two seniors discussed Canberra. Then he said, “At the same time as Walter Springfellow disappeared, a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy went into smoke. The same weekend, March 27 and 28, 1966.”

“You get his name?”

Graham looked at his notes. “Alexis Uritzsky. According to the Federal, the Russians never issued a comment. They did inform External Affairs, as it was then, that he’d been recalled to Moscow for personal reasons.”

“Did anyone make a connection between his and Springfellow’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know. I guess only ASIO would know that. I tried contacting them, but they just brushed me off. I don’t think they talk to detective-constables.”

Malone grinned at Clements. “We’ll try a higher rank, see how we go. Right, Andy. Good work. See if you can dig up anything more on—what’s his name?—Uritzsky.”

“Right.”

After Graham had galloped away, Malone picked up his phone and dialled the Herald and asked for the editor-in-chief. “Jack Montgomery? Jack, this is Scobie Malone. Could I drop in to see you for a few minutes?”

“So long as it’s in the next hour. After that I’ve got to look as if I’m working.”

Fifteen minutes later Malone and Clements walked into the Herald building uptown and went up to Editorial on the sixth floor. Jack Montgomery, tall and stooped, grey-haired and slow-talking, looking and sounding more like a battling farmer than one of the most highly regarded newspapermen in the country, took his feet down off his desk as the two detectives came into his office. He took his pipe out of his mouth, a major concession.

“They never had editors-in-chief when I first started as a copy boy. I still don’t know what it means, but it’s a nice-sounding title and they don’t expect you to work too hard. What can I do for you?” He put his pipe back in his mouth, where it would remain for the rest of the conversation.

Malone introduced Clements and then came straight to the point, explaining that he was working on both the Springfellow murders. “Jack, you were in Canberra in the 1960s, weren’t you?”

“I was working for the Age in those days. I was chief political hack.” Montgomery had a gentle sardonic way of putting himself down; he was the general commanding on this floor, but he would never write self-extolling memoirs.

“What year are we talking about? The year Walter Springfellow disappeared? That was 1966.”

Malone was impressed that the newspaperman hadn’t paused in remembering the date. “March 28, 1966. That same weekend a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy dropped out of sight. A cove named Alexis Uritzsky.”

Montgomery frowned, chewed on his pipe. The flat drawl and the pipe constantly in his mouth made him difficult to understand; Malone wondered how foreigners ever carried on a conversation with him. “Yeah, I remember that. Not very clearly—I had no facts to go on. A feller in External Affairs tipped me off that a Russian just wasn’t around any more—I think it was about a week or so after Springfellow disappeared. I tried to get something out of the Russians, but they were worse then than they are now—they hadn’t coined the word glasnost back then. There was a rumour that Uritzsky—that his name?—was a KGB man, but I was never able to check that—you never can. He was a bit of a party-goer, even in those days—he liked the cocktail circuit. I can’t remember him too well—he was young and he liked women. I did a piece on his disappearance, but the story was spiked. I learned later that ASIO had offered some reasons why it shouldn’t run—I didn’t learn what the reasons were. Just after that I came up to Sydney to join the Herald and I never followed it up. There was a lot of funny stuff went on about then. The Springfellow thing was allowed to die as if Springfellow himself was no more than some wino who’d disappeared from Belmore Park.”

“You said Uritzsky liked women. Did he have any particular girlfriend?”

“I couldn’t say, Scobie. I never cultivated him—he only became interesting after he disappeared. And then only for a week or two.”

“Did you connect him with Springfellow?”

“I suppose I thought about it—that was probably the reason I wrote the story. But I got no encouragement, so I didn’t pursue it. The Age in those days wasn’t interested in investigative journalism. Muck-raking, if you like.”

The two detectives stood up. “I’m all for muck-raking, Jack, so long as you don’t run the rake through us cops.”

Montgomery took the pipe out of his mouth. “Scobie, you’re safe. Just do me a favour. If you crack this case, or cases, let me know. I’d love to show these hot-shot kids who work for me that some old coves still know a good story when they see it. Some of them think editor-in-chief is a euphemism for pensioner-in-chief.”

When they got outside the Herald building, Clements said, “Where next? ASIO?”

“How’d you guess?”

They drove over to Kirribilli through a brilliant day, one that invited an escape to the beach. Fortague, the ASIO chief, was not pleased that the two policemen had dropped in on him without warning.

“I’d have liked a little notice, Inspector.”

“Forewarned is forearmed, isn’t that what they say? I’m sure you security fellers work on that principle.”

“So you’re trying to catch me on the hop, is that it?” It was hard to tell whether Fortague was genuinely annoyed or putting on an act to discourage Malone and Clements from further unannounced visits. He certainly wasn’t offering them a drink, though the sun was well over the yard-arm; he didn’t offer them even a cup of coffee. “I take it we’re still talking about the Springfellow case? Sir Walter’s, not his sister’s. That was tragic,” he said, softening for a moment. “I never met the poor woman, but women don’t seem safe any more, do they? Not even in their own homes.”

“That’s where most of them are killed.” But Malone wasn’t here to discuss the demography of murder. “Let’s go back to March 1966. When Sir Walter disappeared, at the same time a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy, a cove named Alexis Uritzsky, vanished. Do you remember that?”

Fortague was stone-faced. “Jog my memory a bit.”

“The story never got into the papers. It was all hushed up and as far as we can tell Foreign Affairs—or External Affairs as they were called then—went along with the act. So must have ASIO. Why?”

“And you expect me to know the answer?”

“Not off the top of your head, no. But I thought you might help us find the answer. Look, Guy—” Malone tried the old mates’ act. It is no different from the old boy network, just more proletarian. It binds Australia together more than blood ties or school ties ever could. “I’ve got to get to the bottom of this—the Commissioner is breathing down my neck.” Which was only partly true: John Leeds was certainly breathing down his neck but for a different reason. “Russ and I are a stubborn pair of bastards—we’ve got to keep at it, otherwise we’ll finish up out at Tibooburra. Where do they send spy chiefs when they foul up?”

Fortague suddenly smiled. “Haven’t you read all the spy books? They usually promote us. Okay, Scobie, I’ll see what I can do. But it’s not my decision. I’ll have to contact the Director-General in Canberra. What exactly do you want to know?”

“Why a black-out was put on Uritzsky’s disappearance, why did External Affairs co-operate, was there any connection between Uritzsky and Springfellow, does anyone know where Uritzsky is now.”

Fortague smiled again. “And that’s all? Canberra may not co-operate.”

“Tell them that if they don’t, a certain newspaper may start asking whether ASIO wants to know who murdered its former chief or doesn’t it care any more.”

“You’ve been to the newspapers with this?”

“No,” lied Malone. “But I know there’s a certain journalist who’d like to talk to me about it. I’ve been dodging him up till now.”

Fortague thought a moment, then promised to do what he could. Then he offered them a drink. When Malone and Clements left twenty minutes later, they felt they had the ASIO Sydney chief on their side. But Malone knew that a lone player in the espionage business was like a lone player in a police force: more often than not, they took the ball away from him.

When they got back to Homicide, two visitors were waiting for them.

“How’s that for service?” said Sergeant Don Cheshire from Fingerprints. “Right to your door.”

Malone looked at the other visitor, Constable Jason James from Ballistics, who said, “I’m here for the same reason as Sergeant Cheshire, sir. Anything to get out of the office.”

“That’s it, Scobie. You get service and we get a break from the office.”

Malone grinned. He had pulled the same trick himself when they had tried to chain him to a desk in his junior days. It was the old army and police academy trick of going walkabout; so long as you carried a piece of paper, nobody queried what you were doing. “Righto, where are your pieces of paper?”

Cheshire, the senior man, produced his first. He was a thirty-year veteran of the force, the last twenty years in Fingerprints. He was a big man, at least twenty kilos overweight, with a double chin and bloated cheeks hiding what once might have been a handsome face. He had a rough, gruff voice and, having been passed over for promotion in favour of younger, better educated officers, he had no respect for anyone. There was, however, still no one better than he at his job.

“Well, I’ve come up with some matching prints. I took the prints off of that drink coaster you gave me—they were clear. You didn’t give me any name on them, so I’ve marked them down as Print X. Then I had a look at the gun, the Walther.”

Malone wondered why he felt such trepidation at what Cheshire might say next.

“The butt of the gun’s been wiped clean, but I got a fraction of a print off of the end of the barrel. It was a faint one, but it come up under the Xeon lights. I can’t say it’s a man’s print—it’s too faint and there’s not enough of it to be sure. It could be a woman’s. It’s not someone who’s ever done any hard yakka, that’s for sure. You get some little bloke with soft hands, some poofter ballet dancer or something like that, and you’d have trouble telling his prints from some woman’s, especially a female with big hands like some of those Wog peasants.”

Malone, Clements and James kept their faces blank. Cheshire knew all there was to know about fingerprints, but he knew nothing about community relations.

“Okay, that second one is Print Y. Then I started looking for what else I could find. Like I said, the butt and trigger had been wiped clean. So I took out the magazine from the butt and lo and behold—” He was a dreadful actor, a navvy playing Shakespeare. “Lo and behold, there was another print. I give it the beery breath treatment.” He gave a demonstration, breathing heavily on the imaginary magazine. “A fingerprint is 99 per cent moisture, oils et cetera. You give it a little humidity and it shows up, even after it’s faded.”

“How old would this print on the magazine have been?” said Malone.

“It don’t matter, Scobie, so long as it’s been protected from drying out completely. Like as if it had been lying out in the sun. A coupla years ago they brought me a pile of silver coins that had been under a house for eight years, where it was pretty damp. They were the proceeds from a bank robbery that the guy didn’t want. I found a print on one of the coins and it matched the suspect’s. It wasn’t easy, but we did it. He’s doing six at Parramatta.”

Malone shut his mind to the thought of Justine doing time in some women’s prison. “So what about this print on the magazine?”

“Well, whoever fired the gun hadn’t taken the magazine out to wipe it clean. Stuck up inside the butt, it was protected and so was the print. Lo and behold—” He raised his hands again. “It matches Print X on the drink coaster. They’re the same, I’ll swear in court, if you like. No argument.”

“Good,” said Malone, trying to sound convincing. “Thanks, Don. That gets us halfway there. Now what about you, Constable?”

“I’m afraid my job was much easier, sir.” James was a young man who looked too small to be a policeman; one could not imagine his being called in to help with crowd control. He was baby-faced, with small delicate hands; he was lucky Sergeant Cheshire had not already branded him a poofter. “The weapon’s serial number checks with that on the Springfellow inventory. The bullets hadn’t been damaged going into the body and they remained there. I checked the lands and grooves, the rifling, and there’s no doubt those bullets came from that particular Walther PPK .380.”

“You’d go into court on that?”

“Yes, sir.” He hesitated a moment: “There’s just one thing. I think a silencer might have been used. The outside of the barrel has been threaded to screw on a silencer.”

“There was no mention of a silencer in the insurance inventory. But then they’re illegal in New South Wales, so it wouldn’t be in it, anyway.”

“The threading looks pretty new,” said James. “Silencers on automatics work okay, but not as you see in the movies.”

“Silencers mean premeditation.” Clements looked directly at Malone from the other side of the desk. “It’s beginning to look bad for you-know-who.”

Malone nodded reluctantly, knowing there was nothing more he could do to hold back any further investigation of Justine Springfellow. “Righto, have you got copies of your reports for me? Good, leave them with Russ, plus the evidence. I’ll let you know when we make an arrest and you can hold yourselves ready for the magistrate’s hearing.”

“You don’t want us for the coroner’s inquest?”

“No, not that soon.” Putting off the evil day.

“Who’s the suspect, Scobie?” said Cheshire.

Malone sat back in his chair. He would have preferred to have brushed the question aside till he had seen John Leeds; but he couldn’t do that, not with Clements sitting across from him. “Keep it under your hat—we still have a few things to tie up. It’s Emma Springfellow’s niece, Justine.”

Cheshire pursed his lips, but didn’t whistle; he was long past surprise in the matter of murder. “Christ, the media is gunna make a meal of this.”

“Just don’t give them an early serving, Don. Keep it under your hat, like I say. Don’t even tell your mates in your section. The same goes for you, Jason.”

Both policemen promised to remain silent and went away looking as if they were egg-bound. “They’ll rupture themselves if they can’t tell someone,” said Clements.

“I know. It’s a risk we’ve got to take.”

“So do we go and bring in Justine and charge her?”

“Let’s hold off a day or two, till we hear from ASIO.”

“What are you trying to do?” Clements looked puzzled; or suspicious.

“I’m trying to see if there’s any connection between the two murders.” He hoped he sounded convincing; at least there was some truth in what he said. He hoped he could see the Commissioner before he had to take another step. “Let’s wait till we hear from Fortague. Take a breather, spend the rest of the day counting your money. You must be the richest cop in Australia by now. The richest honest one.”

“I went into the bank this morning to put in my Melbourne Cup cheque. The girl behind the counter asked me if I was married or anything. She did everything but rip the buttons off her blouse for me.”

“They do that with all the male customers now. It’s part of the new competition amongst banks.”

Feeble jokes were part of the cement that bound their friendship; it was the lighter side of the old mates’ act. Yet Malone felt a troubling sense of disloyalty towards Clements.

“Do we tell Greg now what we’re going to do?” said Clements.

“I guess we’d better.”

Malone, however, felt relieved when one of the other detectives told him that Chief Inspector Random had gone home with an early summer virus.

II

Clements went out to the toilets and Malone picked up his phone and asked for the Commissioner. “I’d like to see you, sir. Something’s come up.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line. “I think it would be better if we didn’t meet here. Did you bring your own car in today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, pick me up. I’m not in uniform today. I’ll see you in ten minutes up in Oxford Street, opposite the Koala Hotel. You can take me for a ride.”

More likely you’re taking me for a ride. “I’ll be there, sir. I have a grey Commodore.”

He left a note on Clements’s desk saying he had gone to do some shopping for Lisa, and escaped before Clements came back. He would be glad when he could start telling Clements the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me, Commissioner.

Leeds, neatly dressed as always, looking like a successful lawyer or doctor, was waiting as Malone brought the Commodore into the kerb. “Don’t look at the mess in the back, sir. I have three kids—”

“So have I, all at high school. Old enough to—” Then he said no more, his lean, strong-jawed face clouding over.

Malone drove up Oxford Street. It was the homosexual community’s Main Street, but in today’s hot sunlight it looked only shabby and dully suburban. A couple of punk girls crossed at the Taylor Square traffic lights, hair bright green and red, their black stockings polka-dotted with holes, but they were the only exotic wildlife to be seen. Malone turned south and drove on out to Centennial Park, the huge green oasis only four miles from the heart of the city.

He parked by a line of palm trees that bordered one end of the park’s longer lakes. Brown ducks, mallards and a couple of black swans glided in on the lake’s still waters towards two elderly women who had just got out of a car with two large plastic bags full of bread scraps. The bread flew through the air and the wildfowl started a riotous assembly.

“I hope there’re no undercover photographers out here,” said Leeds.

Malone grinned, remembering photos taken of a prominent lawyer meeting an even more prominent underworld figure under some of the park’s trees. “I think we’re safe, sir.”

“I don’t think so, Scobie,” said Leeds, and Malone caught his other meaning.

“Well, no, maybe not. We’ve built a case against Justine.” He outlined it as it would be presented to a magistrate. “It doesn’t look good.”

“She didn’t do it, you know.”

“How do you know?”

Leeds looked away for a moment, out at the two elderly women still throwing manna to the ducks and the swans. Some gulls had arrived from somewhere and, more aggressive than the ducks, were throwing their weight around. Leeds noticed that they stayed away from the two majestic swans. There were always king-pins who had to be left alone: it had been the story of his official life once he had got to a certain rank. But now things were different. He was fighting to protect the girl who might be his daughter, but, let’s face it, he was fighting to protect himself, too. He was a king-pin who might be exposed.

Up till a few weeks ago his personal life had been as smooth as the lake on which the waterfowl floated. There had been the family life, as solid as the house in which they lived in Waverton. on the lower North Shore: his wife Rosemary, his daughter, his two sons. The sins of the past—he was a churchgoing High Anglican who thought in terms of sin, which, as a policeman, he knew was different from crime—the sins of the past were in the past, almost forgotten, certainly never thought about. He had been startled when, coming home from Walter’s funeral, he had been asked by Rosemary if there had ever been anything between him and Venetia Springfellow. He had laughed at the suggestion, but he had wondered how good a liar he was. He was not by nature a liar: he remembered the pain of his deceit all those years ago.

“I don’t know,” he confessed, “I don’t even know the girl. I’ve met her only once, just for a few moments.”

“I have to ask this, sir. What’s your interest in this? If you and Lady Springfellow were—friends all those years ago, what do you owe her?”

A third swan was crossing the road, its black neck curved in a question mark. Leeds watched it as if its destination was important to him. It came up behind one of the elderly women and nipped at her behind. She jumped and swung round, showering the swan with bread; some of it lay on its black back like a tiny snowfall. Malone, also watching the scene, smiled, but Leeds’s face remained stiff.

Then he said, “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain this. Scobie, Justine could be my daughter.”

Malone was silent, moving his lips up and down over his teeth, as if words were stuck between them. At last he said, “Do you know that for sure?”

“No, and I’ll never know. But there’s a fifty-fifty chance that she is. If you put her to trial and you get a conviction, how do you think I’m going to feel for the rest of my life?”

Malone slumped in his seat, bounced his hands up and down on the steering wheel. “Jesus, I think I’d rather be in Tibooburra . . . I can’t ditch the evidence we have. Russ Clements would start asking questions . . . There’s something else I’d better tell you. We’re picking up evidence against Lady Springfellow—I mean about her husband’s murder.”

Leeds, who had been half-watching the swan harassing the two women, suddenly jerked his head round. “You’re crazy! God Almighty, Scobie, what started you on that track?” He was even more agitated than he had been in his office three days ago. He put a hand on the dashboard; it was shaking, like that of an old man with ague. “You’re getting carried away with this—you’re letting suspicion get the better of you! You’re—”

Malone interrupted: there was no rank between them now. “You’re letting your feelings get the better of you. Why the hell do you think I’d have any axe to grind on this, on either of these cases? I’m not some bloody left-wing crank out to chop down the silvertails. Christ, I thought you had more respect for me than that!”

It was no way to speak to one’s Commissioner; but Leeds was in mufti, plainclothes as it was called, they both were, and Malone’s anger was anger plain, man to man. Leeds, an honest, sincere man, recognized Malone’s right to say what he sincerely thought. He backed down.

“I’m sorry—I apologize . . . But how? How can you come up with that sort of charge against her?”

“I’m a long way from charging her.” Malone cooled down. He valued Leeds’s friendship, though it would always be constrained by the difference in their rank. Perhaps, when they were both retired, they could become real friends; but by then, Malone knew, it would be too late. This confidence Leeds had given him would always stand in the way of other, more relaxed confidences. “All I have against her at the moment is that she gave money, quite a bundle of it, to some feller, a bloke with a foreign accent who’d never been to the house before. About then the Colt .45 went missing from Sir Walter’s gun collection. The following Monday he disappeared. Twenty-one years later we find his bones, with the lower half of the skull blown away by what could have been a large-calibre gun, a Colt .45.”

Leeds shook his head. “Are you trying to say she hired a hit man?”

“I don’t know at this stage what she did. There’s another angle.” He told of Uritzsky’s disappearance. “He could have been the cove who came to see her, the one she gave the money to.”

“Why would she give money to a Russian? I told you, you’re—no, I’m sorry. You’re not prejudiced against her. Are you?” he asked doubtfully.

“No, I’m not. She rubs me up the wrong way occasionally, but that’s been happening to me ever since I became a cop.”

“She’s—harder than when I first knew her. She was never exactly, well, vulnerable, but she was much softer than she is now. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you make your first hundred million.” He sounded suddenly cynical, an endemic condition with policemen; but this was personal. “I wonder what Walter would think of her now? He wanted her to give up her career when they married. In those days she wasn’t a tycoon.”

The elderly ladies had distributed all their bread upon the waters; the ducks and swans and gulls had picked the waters clean. The women smiled at each other, folded their plastic bags neatly and walked back to their car, an old square-nosed Rover as sedate as themselves. The ducks and swans glided away without a backward glance, unbothered by having to look grateful for the charity. The gulls squabbled amongst themselves for the crumbs left on the grass and two currawongs flew down to watch the proceedings, like lawyers looking for clients.

“Well,” said Leeds after a long silence, “what are you going to do? Arrest Justine and charge her? And then her mother?”

“Forget the mother for the time being. I’ll bring Justine in and question her again. But I can’t see any way out of it—I’ll have to charge her on the evidence. The motive was there. Emma left a diary and there are some pretty incriminating entries in it about Justine. Incidentally, she refers to Justine as „Venetia’s bastard child.’”

“Bastard child? That’s an old-fashioned phrase.”

“Biblical, Russ Clements called it. Russ is our problem. He knows as much about this case as I do. He’s flat out to bring in Justine.”

“Am I mentioned in the diary?”

“No. She mentions „Venetia’s old friend,’ but that could be anyone. Unless they question Lady Springfellow and she dobs you in. There’s an entry that says, J. threatened me. J. could be John, but I don’t think any Crown Prosecutor is going to read it that way. He’ll read it as Justine.”

“I had a row with Emma the night she was murdered, but I didn’t threaten her.”

“No, this was an earlier entry. She was killed before she wrote down anything for the last day and night.”

“Are there any other diaries? For other years?”

“We haven’t found any so far, but I’m sure there were. They could be in a safe deposit box somewhere. There is a safe deposit we’ve turned up, but it only had her jewellery in it and some papers.”

Leeds was silent again; then he sighed. “Okay, Scobie, do what you have to do. All I can do is pray my name is kept out of it. I’m happily married and I have three kids I love very much. I don’t want something I did years ago, before I was married, to ruin their lives. It was reprehensible, betraying a friend the way I did Walter. But . . .” His voice trailed off; decent men sometimes cannot understand their sins. It’s the bastards of the world, thought Malone, who can afford peace of mind. “Let’s go back.”

Malone started up the car, but had to wait while a black swan crossed the road in front of them with pompous flat-footed dignity, its neck arched in another question mark.

III

“It’s strong enough.” Chief Inspector Random blew his nose for the third time since Malone had sat down opposite him. He should not have come to the office this morning; Malone wished he had not. “You could put a case against her and any magistrate would listen to it. It’s going to have the media howling like a pack of wolves. If you put it up, you’ll have to make it stick. They’ll be looking for a conviction, especially since she’s Venetia Springfellow’s daughter. You know what they’re like—if they can’t chop down a tall poppy, get the tall poppy’s son or daughter. You see it all the time, but especially since the stock market crash. There is an air of sort of malicious revenge.”

“There’s another thing,” said Malone, getting everything off his chest; why did he feel he was confessing some sort of sin? It was like being back at the Marist Brothers school, going to Confession every first Friday in the hope of the salvation that the brothers thought you so desperately needed. “I’m building up half a case against Lady S. herself on the disappearance of her husband.”

Random blew his nose again; it sounded like a snort of derision. “Are you developing some sort of vendetta against the Springfellow women? Are you anti-feminist?”

“You’ve met Lisa, Greg. She’d cut my balls off if I showed anything like that.”

“You’re not anti-the-rich?”

Malone’s grin was lopsided, like his feelings, “I accused someone else of that. No, I’m not. I don’t love „em, but I’m not going to go out of my way to shoot „em down.”

“Okay, what have you got against the mother?”

Malone told him. “I’m waiting to see how much further I can get with ASIO.”

“As you said, you’ve only got half a case. Not even that. Watch your step, Scobie. This lady has friends in Canberra, like all those tycoons.”

She has a friend right here in the Department. “I’m not going to shove my neck out, Greg. I’ll only bring something against her when I’m absolutely certain.

“Are you absolutely certain about the daughter?”

Malone hesitated before replying: “Ninety-nine per cent. Do I bring her in now?¹

Random blew his nose again, sighed loudly with irritation. “Bloody virus—I feel lousy. I think “I’ll go home again. You take over. Do whatever you want.”

“I think I’ll wait till we get the coroner’s report.”

“Okay. Just keep an eye on her, in case she tries to piss off out of the country. We don’t want another bloody extradition foul-up.” The Department had not had much luck with its last few extraditions of wanted criminals. “I think we should take some lessons from the Israelis. Just go in and grab who you want.”

“Go home, Greg. You’re starting to sound like Rambo.”

Random, still blowing his nose, went home and Malone was left in charge of the bureau. He did not want, however, to sit at his desk making decisions on other detectives’ cases. When Fortague rang and invited him to come over to Kirribilli, he went, taking Clements with him. He was not afraid of assuming responsibility; like Random’s virus, it was something he did not want, at least for the moment. When in doubt, go out.

He and Clements went out to Kirribilli, to the air-conditioned view from Fortague’s office. It seemed, from the ASIO chief’s demeanour, that he had turned up the cold air in his room.

“I’m afraid the black-out remains on Uritzsky. The file was closed a month after he disappeared.”

“Why are you defending a Russian? Did he come over to our side and have you given him a new identity?”

“I can give you no explanation. The matter has been marked Top Secret.”

Malone and Clements looked at each other. Every bureaucracy has its secrets. The Chinese, who invented bureaucracy, understood the reasons for secrecy: it is the sauce that makes dull work palatable. Sometimes, of course, it makes corruption palatable. The two detectives had dealt in secrets of their own, but that didn’t make them sympathetic towards ASIO and its clandestine frame of mind. Murder was a public affair, or so the policemen thought.

Clements said, “Then did Springfellow defect? If he did, why was he shot?”

“I told you, I can tell you nothing.” The air-conditioner hummed in the background, getting chillier.

“Let me tell you something,” said Malone, coolness creeping into his own voice, “we’re working on the possibility that there was a contract out on Springfellow, that he was killed by a hit man.”

“Who put out the contract? Uritzsky?”

Malone grinned. “For the moment, that’s Top Secret.”

Fortague was silent for a moment, head cocked as if listening to the air-conditioner; its humming seemed softer, as if someone somewhere else in the building had decided the chill was too much. Fortague must have decided the same.

He smiled. “We’re playing games, aren’t we?”

“I guess we are,” said Malone, relaxing; he could tell when a man was going to talk. Twenty years of interrogation teaches you a lot about the looseness of the human tongue; its natural function is to say something. Fortague, whose trade was secrecy, was only a little different from all the other men with whom Malone had sat in rooms, waiting for questions to be answered. “But we’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

Fortague nodded. “I should hope so. Look, I can’t tell you everything I know—you appreciate that. Furthermore, I don’t know everything. I’m 2 i/c of ASIO, but I doubt if I’ll ever know, not unless I get to be Director-General.”

“Tell us what you do know. We’ve got to put the lid on this case one way or the other. The newspapers aren’t going to let us alone.” It was an empty threat.

“Stuff the newspapers,” said Fortague. “If we took any notice of them, we might as well go out of business . . . All I can tell you, because there was talk of it at the time, it was no secret, at least not then, was that Uritzsky had a girlfriend. Her name was—Jennifer—” He turned over a small pad on his desk. “Jennifer Acton.”

Malone remarked that Fortague had had the name at hand: he must have been half-prepared to make a concession or two. The room had warmed up a little. “What happened to her?”

“She hung around Canberra for several months after he disappeared, then she moved to Sydney. She was a very pretty girl, but apparently didn’t have much up top. She was a hostess, he met her in some restaurant. I don’t think his interest in her was serious, he just liked to go to bed with pretty girls and she was the most available. Evidently she was in love with him.”

“Have you kept tabs on her?”

“We did up till about ten years ago. By then she’d married and had kids and forgotten all about Uritzsky.”

“What was her married name?”

Fortague looked at the pad again. “Mrs. Clive Ventnor. He was a truck driver.”

“A flash name for a truckie,” said Clements. “I thought he’d be at least a banker with a monicker like that.”

“No, this guy was a tough one. A wife-beater.”

“So are some bankers.”

Fortague looked surprised, as if he thought bankers were like spies, gentlemen through and through. “Well, I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”

Malone wondered if the world of spies was much smaller than he had imagined. “Where was Mrs. Ventnor when you last heard of her?”

Fortague once more looked at his pad. “She lived out at Paradise Valley. It’s a Housing Commission estate out past Mount Druitt.”

“She still there?”

“I couldn’t say. We gave up surveillance ten years ago.”

Malone stood up. “Thanks, Guy. Tell me something—why did you decide to be on our side and tell us about Mrs. Ventnor?”

Fortague was tearing up the sheet from his pad, dropping the tiny pieces into his waste basket; from there, Malone guessed, they would go into a shredder. “I decided to show you and Russ that we’re human. Not all of us think that you and the rest of them out there—” he waved at the window “—are a mob of subversives. I don’t think you’re going to find Uritzsky by interviewing Mrs. Ventnor, but at least you can’t say I was a totally obstructive bastard.”

“Oh, I never thought of you as that,” grinned Malone.

Fortague’s rugged face broadened in an answering grin. “Thanks. Incidentally, Alexis Uritzsky was a grand-nephew of the Petrograd chief of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. He was shot in 1918.”

“Is that what the KGB did to our Uritzsky?”

The ASIO man’s grin was now enigmatic. “I wouldn’t know, Scobie. Good luck.”

Fifty yards up from where Clements had parked the police car was a phone-box. Malone walked up to it, found the phone-books inside it were intact; Kirribilli must be an area that vandals hadn’t yet discovered. He looked up the Ventnors: there was a C. Ventnor at a street in Paradise Valley. Then he called Jack Montgomery at the Herald.

“Jack, did you know Alexis Uritzsky had a girlfriend called Jennifer Acton?”

Montgomery drawled an obscenity; Malone sometimes wondered if his farmer’s image was an act. “I’d forgotten all about her. Yeah. I tracked her down once, but I didn’t get much out of her.”

“She was a restaurant hostess, pretty but on the dumb side.”

“I wouldn’t know about the dumb bit—I can never fathom women.”

“You should read your women’s pages. Jack, keep turning your memory over. If you come up with something, anything, let me know.”

“If you come up with something, let me know.”

“Don’t write anything for the moment, Jack.”

“Scobie, have I ever stabbed you in the back? Okay, I’ll keep mum. But if anything breaks, you owe me.”

“You’ll be the first to know, Jack.”

He went from the phone-box back to where Clements waited in the car. “The bloody airconditioner’s gone on the blink again,” said Clements. “We going back to the office?”

“We’re going out to Paradise Valley.”

“The bloody Outback? Burke and Wills died out there.”

They drove out to the far western suburbs, into heat that seemed to increase a degree for every kilometre they covered. They went beyond Parramatta, out along the Western Highway and at last turned off and drove several kilometres across gently rolling terrain where drab houses seemed to crouch exhausted beneath the burning heat. Then they came to Paradise Valley, several hundred acres of planned living that had never come to life. Houses that had all the charm of large packing cases stood in tiny plots where grass struggled to punctuate the hard yellow-brown earth; a few householders had tried to cultivate gardens, but the flowers and shrubs had the withered look of those in untended cemeteries. The police car drove through a small shopping centre, but the shops looked deserted; two of them had For Lease signs plastered across their windows. Malone caught a glimpse of a poster in the window of a video shop—ESCAPE . . . He couldn’t read the rest of it and he didn’t know whether it was the title of a movie or a shout of desperate advice. There was no McDonald’s, no Pizza Hut, no sign of a cinema or a community centre. The planners, secure in their inner-city environment, had lost either their enthusiasm or their imagination before the pioneers had moved into Paradise Valley for the new life that died at birth.

The Ventnors lived in one of the drabbest of the packing cases, on a plot where no attempt had been made to grow a lawn or start a garden. A battered, dirty Toyota, wheelless, squatted on blocks in the narrow space beside the house. A mongrel dog under the car growled at the two detectives as they came in the wire front gate, but was too listless to come out and challenge them. Maybe nothing and nobody inside the house was worth defending.

Jennifer Ventnor opened the door to their knock. She looked at the two tall men and Malone at once saw the apprehension in her hazel eyes.

“Police? Is it Clicker? Is he hurt? In trouble?”

“Clicker?”

“My hubby. Clive.” She spoke in gasps, as if the heat was too much for her. “You are coppers, aren’t you?”

Malone produced his badge and introduced himself and Clements. “No, it’s nothing to do with your husband, Mrs. Ventnor. Could we come inside?”

Despite the heat women had come out on to the front steps of the houses on either side. One of them, tall and thin, with a thin, high voice, called out, “You all right, Jenny? Everything all right?”

Jenny Ventnor just nodded, turned and led Malone and Clements into the house. “Shut the door, I’m trying to keep the heat out. I’m having a cuppa coffee. You want one?”

The small house was a mess: Jenny Ventnor was no housekeeper. Children’s clothes and toys cluttered the front room; Clements trod on a doll and it protested with a thin squeal. The kitchen was a far cry from the kitchens one saw on TV commercials: there was no Persil sparkle, no Sunbeam blender whipping up a soufflé, no mum who oughta be congratulated. Malone, remembering Mrs. Leyden’s kitchen in the Springfellow house, thought it looked like a garbage tip.

A radio was playing, some housewives’ friend making a comment on the day’s news; Malone wondered why all these battling women made heroes of these richly-paid, right-wing gurus. Spread out on the table, from which the breakfast dishes hadn’t yet been cleared, was the Good Living supplement from the Herald. Malone wondered what escapism Jenny Ventnor found in a supplement written by well-paid journalists for supposedly well-heeled readers. A food critic recommended a $60-a-head restaurant for a reasonable night out.

Jenny Ventnor made three cups of instant coffee and they all sat down at the cluttered table.

“Well, what’s it all about?”

She had been pretty once, but it had all faded behind the dusty windows of the years. Once she might have had a good figure, but now she was fat and unhealthy-looking. She had the voice of a crow: from shouting above the crying of her kids, from yelling at her husband who came home from work and turned deaf as soon as he entered the house. It takes a sensitive ear to recognize that a whine is sometimes a cry for help. At the moment Malone was not attuned to Jenny Ventnor.

“Some time ago, twenty-one years ago, you knew a Russian man named Alexis Uritzsky.”

She suddenly frowned and shook her head, looking at him with a hurt stare as if he had struck her. “Aw, Jesus, why—? Is he back here in Australia?”

“We don’t know,” said Malone. “Nobody’s had any trace of his movements since March 1966.”

She nodded, the hurt look slowly disappearing from her plump sad face. “Yeah, that was the last time I saw him. I dunno the exact date, it wasn’t the sorta weekend I wanted to remember. He was all sorts of a bastard in a way. But I—we were in love.” She looked at them as if pleading with them to believe her. She then looked down at herself, at her fat body sloping down like a steep hill under the faded blue sun-dress she wore. Her work-worn hands rested on an illustration of a $700 dress: the slim beautiful model smiled out at her with smug superiority. On the opposite page an article began: As you talk with your husband or live-in lover over your Sunday morning coffee and croissants . . . “I was good-looking then, believe it or not. I was a size twelve. Now . . .” She closed her eyes, put her hand over her quivering mouth.

Malone and Clements looked away; neither of them, despite the years of experience, had ever learned to feel comfortable with a woman’s tears. Malone looked out of the kitchen window: a breeze had sprung up from somewhere and a Hills clothes hoist turned slowly, creaking like a windmill, the children’s dresses and the man’s shirts fluttering like defeated banners. This is battlers’ territory, he thought, a sunburnt Siberia.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jenny Ventnor wipe her eyes with her hand; then she croaked, “Sorry. I haven’t thought about him or any of that in years. My hubby would kill me if he knew.” Without thinking she caressed a dark bruise on her fat upper arm. “I’m just glad he’s not home now, while you’re here.”

“He need never know we’ve been here. If your friends next door—” He knew the dangers of next-door neighbours; they could kill with curiosity as well as kindness. “If they ask who we were, just say we were from Social Welfare, but everything was okay, there’d been a computer mistake. You can always blame anything on computers.”

“They wouldn’t believe me.” She suddenly smiled, the ghost of the girl from the past came out of the plump plainness. Her teeth were still good, white and even, and her eyes for the moment were no longer full of pain. “If you stay longer than ten minutes, they’ll think I’ve been having a bit on the side with both of you.”

“Well, at least they won’t tell your husband that,” Malone returned her smile. “Tell us about Mr. Uritzsky.”

She looked out of the window as if looking for 1966 on the hot blue screen of the sky. “He didn’t wanna go back to Russia. He was gunna defect, he told me, take me with him and we’d start a new life somewhere here in Australia, Queensland maybe. He liked the heat. I only half-believed him. I wasn’t as dumb as he thought I was, like a lot of people thought I was. I only got to be dumb later on, when I . . .” She looked back at them, then at the messy kitchen. Malone began to wonder what Clive, Clicker, Ventnor was like. “I think Alex was gunna disappear on his own.”

“Did he have any money?”

She laughed, a harsh giggle. “You kidding? The Russians don’t pay their people anything, leastways they didn’t in those days. That was why he picked me up in the first place, I used to tell him. I used to fiddle the bill at the restaurant where I worked. He got a cheap meal and a free lay. I sound cheap, don’t I?”

“No,” said Malone gently. “If you fell for him . . . I believe he was very attractive to women.”

“Oh, he was that, all right. He was a real ladies’ man. I was flattered he paid me more attention than he did the others. You don’t believe I was a good-looker then, do you?”

“Why not? Sergeant Clements once was handsome and slim.”

She looked at Clements, then laughed softly: the Jenny Acton of twenty-one years ago peeped through the fat screen. “I’ll believe you if you believe me.”

Clements smiled. “I’ve never doubted a lady’s word.”

Reassured, Jenny Ventnor looked back at Malone. “You were talking about money. No, Alex never had any. But he told me that week before he disappeared that he knew where to get some. He said he had two—sources? Is that the word?—who were gunna come good. I remember him saying it was gunna be easier than winning the lottery.”

“Did he say how much?”

She shook her head. A lock of hair fell down and for the first time Malone noticed how much grey there was in the light-brown hair. “No, he could shut up, just like that, sometimes when we were talking. As if he was scared he was gunna tell me some secret or something.”

“He was rumoured to be one of their KGB men at the embassy.”

“Alex? A spy?” Again she shook her head; more hair fell down. “Well, I dunno, I suppose he could of been. Nobody ever told me what happened to him. I went to the embassy to find out, after I hadn’t seen him for a coupla weeks, but they just told me to get lost.”

“Did ASIO interview you?”

“ASIO? Oh you mean our crowd? Yeah, they come to see me. You’d of thought I was a spy, the way they treated me. They aren’t like James Bond, are they? You guys are much politer.”

“We have more experience with women. ASIO doesn’t meet many women spies—they think it’s a man’s club, like Rotary. So you never heard from Alex again after he disappeared?”

“Nothing, not a word. I suppose he’s in Siberia or wherever they send „em. Poor devil.” She’d forgive him, no matter what he had done to her. Then she looked out of the window again, saw her own Siberia and a note of self-pity crept back into her voice: “I often used to wonder where I’d be if he’d taken me with him.”

“One last question, Jenny. Did he ever mention the name Springfellow to you?”

“Springfellow? That’s them that’s been on the news lately, right? I remember now, the ASIO guys asked me that. No, I don’t think he ever mentioned them. On the last night I saw him, the Wednesday I think it was, I’m not sure but I think it was the Wednesday or it might of been the Thursday, he said he was going up to Sydney to see if one of his—sources?—was gunna help him. But he didn’t mention no names. He just said it was a woman who had more money than sense. No, not sense. What’s another word?”

Malone thought a moment. “Discretion?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” She smiled again. “You could say that about me, I guess. No money, but no discretion, either. A lot of women are like it. We’re a dumb lot when it comes to you men.”

Malone couldn’t argue with that; he had seen too many willing victims. He and Clements stood up. “Thanks, Jenny, you’ve been a great help.”

“Are you trying to find him after all this time? If you do, don’t tell him you saw me, okay? I wouldn’t want him to see me . . . Jesus, how does life get away from you?”

Malone put his hand on her fat, bare arm; even there he could feel the sobs quivering to get out of her gross body. “I’m sorry we had to come, Jenny. It would’ve been better if we hadn’t had to drag up the past. But it has a habit of coming back . . .” As my Commissioner would tell you if you asked him for sympathy. “Don’t forget—if your neighbours get nosey, we were from Social Welfare and it was all a mistake, a computer mistake.”

She managed a smile, the sobs subsiding before they could surface. “I might keep „em guessing. Two good-looking guys . . . Will you have to come back?”

“No,” said Malone, having caused her enough pain. “Good luck, Jenny. Don’t say anything to Clicker about our visit.”

“Are you kidding?” Her hand went again to the bruise on her arm.

They left her on that. At least she was smiling and the whine had gone from her voice. For a few minutes, though unhappy, she had been Jenny Acton of long ago and far away from Paradise Valley.