Babylon South

‘Righto, I’ll tell her. Can you come out and pick me up?’

‘What about Woolloomooloo Vice?’ It was their private joke.

‘You wouldn’t believe what they’re shooting today. The actor playing you wears a gold bracelet and suede shoes.’

‘I’ sue ‘em.’

Malone hung up and smiled at the assistant floor manager who had brought him to the phone. She was a jeans-clad wind-up doll, one year out of film school, bursting with self-importance and programmed to talk only in jargon. She was always explaining to Malone how the dynamics of a scene worked. She was intrigued at the dynamics of Malone’s call. ‘A homicide, Scobie? A real one?’

He nodded. ‘A real one, Debby. Where will I find Lady Springfellow?’

‘Holy shit, Lady Springfellow! Is she involved?’

‘Imagine the dynamics of that, eh?’

He grinned at her and went back on the set to tell the director he would not be available for the rest of the day. He welcomed the escape, even if he could have done with better circumstances; he could not remember disliking an assignment more than this one. Sydney Beat, an Australian-American co-production, was a thirteen-part series and he was supposed to spend one day each week with the production as technical adviser. This was the third week and so far it had all been purgatory.

Simon Twitchell, the director, was another film-school graduate; he had majored in temperament. ‘Oh God, what is it this time? You’re always pissing off when we need you – ’

Malone wanted to king-hit him, but Twitchell was small and dainty and Malone didn’t want to break him in half like a cheesestick. He also had in mind that, though Sydney Beat was supposed to be a police series, the crew and the cast, all at least ten to twenty years younger than Malone, had no time for real cops, the fuzz and the pigs. Sovfilm, making a John Wayne movie, would have been more respectful.

‘I was pissed off the day I walked in here,’ said Malone keeping his temper.

Then Gus Leroy, the producer, came out of the shadows and into the lights. He was a short, round man who always dressed in black and whose moods and humour could be the same colour. ‘What the fuck’s the matter this time?’ All his aggression, like Twitchell’s, was in his language; they would leave bigger men to do their fighting for them. ‘You’re always fucking nit-picking. What’s wrong this time?’

‘You mean with the production?’ All at once Malone saw the opportunity to escape from this farce for good. ‘It’ll never get the ratings. Every crim in the country will laugh their heads off – they’ll think it’s the Benny Hill Show. I have to go and see Lady Springfellow. Hooroo, in case I don’t come back.’

He walked across the set, watched by the crew and cast. The set was a permanent one, the apartment of the series’ hero, a detective-sergeant. Malone had criticized it, saying its luxury would embarrass even the Commissioner, but Leroy had told him they hadn’t engaged him as a design consultant. He, an American, knew what American audiences liked and this series was aimed at the American market. Malone walked past a backdrop of Sydney Harbour, a panorama only a millionaire could afford, and out of the sound stage. As the heavy sound-proof door wheezed to behind him, it sounded like an amplification of his own sigh of relief. He would be hauled over the coals tomorrow at Police Headquarters, but that was something he could weather. He had gone in one step from being an adviser to being a critic and he felt the smug satisfaction that is endemic to all critics, even amateurs.

It took him several minutes to get to see Lady Spring-fellow; it seemed that she had more minders than the Prime Minister. Perhaps the richest woman in the land was entitled to them; there was no reason why rich women should be more accessible than rich men. All at once he longed for a call to go and interview someone out amongst the battlers in the western suburbs, someone alone and without minders. But not to give him or her bad news.

‘Lady Springfellow says what is it about?’ The last line of defence was an Asian secretary, a beautiful Singapore-Chinese with her blue-black hair cut in a Twenties bob and her demeanour just as severe. Malone could see her guarding the Forbidden City in old Peking with a two-edged sword and no compunction about chopping off a head or two.

‘I’ll tell her when I see her,’ he said evenly.

The secretary stared at him, looking him up and down in sections. She saw a tall, well-built man in his early forties, who was not handsome but might be distinguished-looking in his old age, long-jawed and blue-eyed and with a wide good-humoured mouth that, she guessed correctly, could be mean and determined when obstacles were put in his way.

‘I’ see what she says to that.’ In her Oriental way she could be just as stubborn. But when she came back from the inner office she produced an unexpected smile, though it might have been malicious. ‘Watch your step, Inspector.’

‘Oh, I always do that,’ he said, but there were some in the Department, including the Commissioner, who would have disputed that.

Malone had been told that the Channel 15 network was being done over in its new owner’s image. The previous colour scheme of the network, from ashtrays to screen logo, had been bright blue and orange, a combination that had brought on a generational bout of conjunctivitis known to ophthalmologists from Perth to Cairns as ‘Channel 15 eye’. The new owner had insisted on muted pink and grey, a choice that had viewers, on tuning into the new network logo, fiddling with their controls. The natives liked colour, otherwise what was the point of owning a colour set? Even Bill Cosby had a purple tinge on Australian screens.

The chief executive’s office was pink and grey; so was the chief executive, Roger Dircks, who sat in a chair at one side. The owner herself sat behind the big modern desk; reigning queens do not squat on their own footstools. She was dressed in pink slacks and shirt, grey calf-length boots and had a pink and grey silk scarf tied round her shoulders. A pink cashmere cardigan was draped over the chair behind her.

‘So you’re the estimable Inspector Malone?’ He had never been called estimable before, not even by the better educated, unembittered crims. ‘What do you think of our series?’

He thought he had better get that out of the way at once. ‘I have an eight-year-old daughter – she’ll love it.’

‘It’s not being made for eight-year-olds.’ The throaty voice suddenly turned chilly, an icy wind over the rocks. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Lady Springfellow, that’s not why I’m here. It’s something more important – and I think it will upset you.’

Venetia went stiff without moving. He had not seen her in person since that visit to her home in Mosman long ago and he was surprised how little she seemed to have changed. True, there were signs of age, but she had lasted remarkably well. Her skin and jawline had kept their own suspension, there had been no need for lifting, and her blonde hair was still thick and lustrous. Even her mouth had somehow missed that thinning of the lips that comes to ageing women, as if pursing them at the misdeeds of men has worn away their youthful fullness. But then rumour said that Venetia Spring – fellow had never tired of men and was careless of their misdeeds, except in business. She was regal amongst her commoner lovers. Money and power turn a beautiful woman into a fantasy.

‘Upset me, Inspector? Then it must be something dreadful.’

Malone told her, as gently as he could. ‘They’re certain it’s your husband.’

Venetia blinked; but there was no sign of tears. She looked at Roger Dircks, who moved his small mouth as if he were trying to find words to fit it. He was a tall, plump man in his early fifties, with a smooth pink face under a pelt of grey hair that lay on his small head like a bathing-cap. He was dressed in a grey wool suit with a pink shirt and a grey silk tie. Malone, in his polyester blue, felt like an ink-blot on a pale watercolour.

Dircks stood up, moved towards Venetia, then stopped. One did not lay a hand on the Queen Bee, even in sympathy; she was to be touched only by invitation. At last he said, ‘This is God-awful, Venetia! It’s the last thing you want—’

‘Of course it’s the last thing I want,’ she said coldly. ‘You have a talent for the bon mot, Roger.’

Malone had an abrupt feeling of déjà vu; the last time he had met Venetia Springfellow there had been animosity between her and someone else – had it been her sister-in-law? He wasn’t sure; he had forgotten the case till he had come here to the studio and learned that Lady Springfellow was the new boss.

‘Do I have to – to identify him, Inspector?’

‘No, I think you can be spared that. There’s only a skeleton.’ She winced a little, as if she found it hard to believe that that was all that was left of a loved one. ‘But they’ll ask you to identify the ring and the briefcase.’

She said nothing for a while, looking at him and through him. Then she frowned, her gaze focusing. ‘I have a memory for faces and names. Haven’t I seen you before somewhere?’

‘Years ago. I came with Sergeant Zanuch to interview you when your husband first disappeared. He’s an Assistant Commissioner now.’

She nodded, looked abstracted again. Malone studied her while he waited for her to make the next move. She had come a long way from Venetia Magee, the midday TV hostess of the Sixties; he had never known where she had stood in the ratings, but it had been reasonably high. Her biggest cachet was that she had married into the Springfellow family; old money had meant more then than it did now. Now, of course, she had new money, her own, trainloads of it. He could only guess at what she owned, maybe even a major part of the country. She was the only woman amongst the nation’s twenty richest voters, a rose amongst some very prickly males who, it seemed, were always photographed looking sideways, as if they expected her to sneak up in ambush on them. It was said that if she wore her success lightly, others wore it heavily. She was a boss to be feared.

She said, ‘Did he die – naturally? Or suicide or what?’

‘They think it was murder.’ He didn’t want to describe the state of the dead man’s skull. The bereaved should be left with proper memories.

‘Murdered?’ She frowned again and suddenly, just for a moment, seemed to age.

Then the door opened and a young girl stood there. ‘Mother – oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you—’

‘Come in, darling.’ Venetia had recovered, the lines disappearing from her face. ‘This is Inspector Malone – he’s just brought me some bad news. This is my daughter Justine.’

Venetia and Justine: whatever happened to good old names like Dot and Shirl? The daughter had a resemblance to her mother, though she was more beautiful, her features more perfect; she had dark hair, instead of her mother’s blonde, but it was cut in the same full style. She was dressed as stylishly as Venetia, though not in pink and grey. She was in a blue silk suit and Malone didn’t feel quite so much of a blot. She had all the looks, but there was something missing: her mother’s shadow dimmed the edges of her.

‘Bad news? What bad news?’

‘They have found your father’s – skeleton.’ The image was still troubling her. A collection of old bones: could one have once loved that? ‘Somewhere up in the Blue Mountains.’

‘Blackheath,’ said Malone.

Justine sat down in one of the grey chairs. Dircks moved to her and put his hand on her shoulder; she was touchable, her mother’s daughter but not yet the boss. ‘It’s dreadful, love. You don’t need such a shock—’ Then he looked at Venetia, knowing he had said the wrong thing again. His shallowness had less depth than one would have thought. He had risen to this position as chief executive only because he was a survivor; he had no talent, managerial or creative, but that often wasn’t necessary in the entertainment business. Selling oneself was as important as selling air-time and up till now he had sold himself well. ‘I’ get your driver to take you both home—’

‘No,’ said Venetia. ‘We’ll finish our business first. After – what? – twenty-one years, another half-hour … When will you bring the ring and the briefcase, Inspector, for me to identify?’

‘The Scientific men will bring that, I guess.’

‘Was there nothing else? His clothes?’

‘They didn’t mention any. Can you remember what he was wearing when he disappeared?’

She shook her head. ‘Of course not. All those years ago? There would have been a label in them – he had everything made at Cutlers – he prided himself on the way he dressed.’

‘I’ see they bring everything to you that they’ve found. I have to go up to Blackheath now.’

‘To the scene of the crime?’ said Dircks, once more saying the wrong thing.

‘Crime?’ Justine spoke for the first time since she had sat down. She had just been presented with the discovery of the skeleton of the father she had never known. All her life she had felt a sense of loss at never knowing him and often, even these days, she sat in front of the photograph of him in the Springfellow drawing-room and wondered how much she would have loved the rather stern-looking, handsome man who had sired her. She had dreamed as a child, as a schoolgirl, even now as a young woman, that he was still alive, that some day he would come out of the past, like a figure in a mirage, and into their lives again. It gave her a shock and a terrible sense of final loss to learn that only his bones were left. ‘What crime?’

Venetia looked at Malone: there were certain things a mother should not have to tell her daughter. He caught her unspoken plea and said, ‘We think your father was murdered. I’m going up to Blackheath to start the investigation.’

‘Murdered?’ All her conversation so far had been questions. Malone had seen it before; shock could leave some people only with questions.

‘It’s only a guess at the moment,’ he said gently, ‘It’s not going to be easy to find out exactly what happened, not after so long.’

He was at the door when Dircks, foot in mouth again, said, ‘You didn’t tell us what’s wrong with our series.’

Malone noticed that, though Venetia was annoyed, she was waiting on his reply. ‘The cops solve everything too easily. It never happens that way, not in real life.’

2

A studio car had picked up Malone each week and brought him out here to Carlingford on the inner edge of the western suburbs. The studio, surrounded by landscaped grounds, backed on to a Housing Commission development; the Commission residents, battlers all, looked over their back fences at the factory where their dreams were made. They waved to the stars of the soaps who drove in every day; stars dim and tiny, but any galaxy is a relief from the kitchen sink and the ironing-board and a husband who thinks foreplay is a rugby league warm-up. One morning a woman had waved to Malone and he had waved back, hoping she had not recognized her mistake. He hated to disappoint people.

The driver got out of his car when he saw Malone come out of the front door of the administration building; but the detective waved him back. He stood on the front steps, savouring the mild sunny day. October was a good month; it brought the jacaranda blooms, one of his favourite sights. The landscape designer had planted jacarandas, interspersed with the occasional flame tree, all along the front fence of the big gardens; Malone wondered if, with the new owner, he would be told to replace them with pink blossom trees and grey gums. But Venetia Springfellow, he guessed, was an indoors person and probably never noticed the outdoors through which she passed. The seasons would mean nothing to her, except the financial ones. He wondered if he was going to finish up disliking her.

Russ Clements arrived fifteen minutes later in the unmarked police Falcon. It was a new car, so far with not a scratch or a dent in it. The State government, with an election due within months, had embarked on a new law and order policy; the police had benefited, with new cars, new computers, even a couple of new helicopters. There were fewer muggings in the streets but more in the gaols, which the government was claiming was an improvement. The voters, cynical of politics, gave no hint of how they would vote in the elections. They knew when they were being mugged.

Malone got into the car and Clements headed west towards the Blue Mountains. The new car had not improved his appearance; he was as unkempt as ever, a big lumbering man who looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was the same age as Malone, still a bachelor, and Lisa Malone was forever promising to find him a wife, an offer he always received with a grin but no enthusiasm.

‘So how’d the Queen Bee take it?’ A gossip columnist in the financial pages of the Herald, a man of infinite imagination, had given her that name and now it was common usage, even amongst those who were not her drones.

‘She’s a cool bitch.’ Why had he called her a bitch? He would have to watch out, to kill his prejudices before they grew too far. ‘But I think she was shocked.’

‘I was in the Springfellow offices this morning. They’re my stockbrokers.’ He grinned at Malone’s querying eyebrow. ‘It’s not coincidence. I’ve been with them since the beginning of the year. They can’t get over having me as a client. I have to keep telling ’em I’m not with the Fraud Squad.’

‘She has nothing to do with the broking firm, has she?’

‘Only as the biggest shareholder in the holding corporation. She has nothing to do with the day-to-day running of it.’

‘So what are you doing with a broker?’

Clements’s grin widened. ‘I’ve been winning so much on the ponies, it was getting embarrassing. I was going into the bank every Monday morning putting in three or four hundred bucks every time. The tellers were starting to look suspicious. How could I tell ’em I was just an honest cop having luck at the races? So I started investing some of it on the stock market – this boom looks too good to be true.’

‘The boom can’t last.’

Clements nodded. ‘That’s why I was in their office this morning. I’m thinking of selling everything. All good stuff, Amcor, Boral, Brambles – but even they can’t keep going up and up. You should’ve got into the market.’

‘That’s what Lisa’s dad told me. But they won’t take mortgages as a payment.’

‘From what I hear, some of the yuppies have paid with nothing else. They’re buying futures.’

‘It’s not for me.’ He had never dreamed of wealth and so he would always be an honest cop.

They drove on out of the city up into the mountains where lay the bones of a man whose future had ended twenty-one years ago. Two local police were waiting for them, a detective-sergeant and a uniformed constable. They led the way in their marked car out through the small town, past the comfortable homes of retirees and the holiday guest-houses, to bushland that showed the occasional black scars of the past summer’s fires. The two cars turned down a narrow side-road that led down to thick bush. Beyond and below was the Grose Valley, its perpendicular rock walls glinting in the sun like stacked metal, its grey-green forest floor thick and daunting as quicksand. Hikers were being lost in it every weekend, the police always being called in to help find them.

They started down the track that had been hacked out of the bush when they had carried out the bones yesterday. The young constable went ahead, occasionally slowing up to look back sympathetically at the three older men. He was all lean muscle and Malone wondered if he spent his spare time rock-climbing. This was the ideal beat for it.

The detective, Sam Pilbrow, pulled up to get his breath. ‘There used to be a track right down here years ago. You could drive a vehicle down it for another half a mile.’ He was in his middle forties, years and circumference, and walking obviously was not a hobby with him. He would never volunteer to find a lost hiker. ‘Well, I guess we gotta keep going.’

At last they came to a tiny clearing where the bushes had been chopped off and thrown aside. White taping fenced the clearing, but no attempt had been made to outline where the skeleton had been.

‘We didn’t reckon it was worth it.’ Pilbrow was a cop who would always weigh up the worth of doing anything. He had started in this town and would finish here. ‘We’ve combed the area—’ He swung a big thick arm. ‘All we come up with were the ring and the briefcase and one shell. My guess is it was probably from a Colt .45. That would account for the way the jaw was smashed, with the gun held close. It could have been an execution.’

‘Judges aren’t executed, except by terrorists,’ said Clements. ‘And we didn’t have any of them back in the Sixties.’

‘Well, he was ASIO, wasn’t he? You never know what happens in that game.’ Pilbrow read spy stories.

‘Who found him?’

‘Some hikers. By accident – they got off the track that leads down into the valley. He could have laid here for another twenty years or whatever it was.’ He really wasn’t interested in such an old case.

‘Any sign of clothes?’

‘Nothing. If everything he wore was natural fibre, if it was all cotton and wool, the weather would have destroyed it. Or birds might’ve taken it for their nests. Even his shoes were gone. The briefcase is pretty worn.’

‘Any bushfires through this part?’

‘Not down here on the lip. If there had been, we’d probably have found the bones years ago.’

Malone looked out at the valley, wondering what peculiar fate had brought Sir Walter Springfellow to this lonely spot. Down below him two currawongs planed along, their ululating cries somehow matching in sound their oddly swooping flight. Out above the valley a hawk hung in the blue air like a brown cross looking for an altar; far down amongst the trees the sun caught a pool of water and for a moment a bright silver shard lay amidst the grey-green quicksand. He could see no sign for miles of any human activity.

‘You questioned any of the locals?’

‘Who’d remember back that far?’ said Pilbrow. ‘Yeah, we questioned them. This used to be a lovers’ lane in those days, but there were no lovers down here the night he was killed. Or if there was, they’re married to someone else now and got kids and moved elsewhere. I don’t think you’re gunna get far with this one, Inspector. There’s bugger-all to start with.’

Malone nodded; then said, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place to start.’

He thanked Pilbrow and the constable for their help, said he’d be in touch if he wanted any more information, nodded to Clements and led the way back up the track, not bothering to wait for the toiling Pilbrow. He knew the local detective would think him rude and arrogant, a typical bastard from the city, but he felt he owed the lazy, overweight man nothing. Pilbrow would just as soon see the file on Sir Walter Springfellow remain closed.

Malone and Clements drove back to Sydney. It started to rain as they got to the outskirts and Malone looked back at the mountains, gone now in the grey drizzle. It somehow seemed an omen, a mist that would perhaps hide for ever the mystery of Sir Walter Springfellow.

‘What’s happening to the, er, remains?’

‘They’re at the City Morgue,’ said Clements. ‘I guess the family will reclaim them. They’ll bury ‘em, I suppose. You can’t cremate bones, can you?’

‘They do. Whatever they do, it all seems a bit late now. If there’s a funeral, we’ll go to it. See who turns up to pay their respects.’

‘Where to now? I’ve never worked on a homicide that’s twenty-one years old. I feel like a bloody archaeologist.’

‘That’s where we start, then. Twenty-one years ago. When we get back to town, go to Missing Persons and dig out the file on Walter Springfellow.’

They reached the city, threaded their way through the traffic and turned into the Remington Rand building where Homicide, incongruously, rented its headquarters space amongst other government branches. Sydney had started as a convict settlement two hundred years ago and it seemed to Malone that it was only back then that the police had been together as a cohesive unit.