Babylon South

Clements went across to Missing Persons in Police Headquarters in Liverpool Street. The NSW Police Department was spread around the city as if its various divisions and bureaux could not abide each other, a decentralization of jealousies.

He was back within half an hour. ‘The file on Springfellow is missing. It just ain’t there.’

‘When did it go missing?’

‘That’s what I’ve been looking up. A file is usually kept for twenty to twenty-five years, there’s no set time. Every five years they go through them, cull them. There’s an index. Springfellow’s name disappeared from the index a year after he went missing, which means someone lifted his file before then.’

‘Do we go back to the family, then?’ Malone asked the question of himself as much as Clements. ‘No, we’ll let them bury him first. They’ve been waiting a long time to do that.’

Clements looked at him, but he had meant no more than he had said.

3

‘Oh Daddy! You’ve resigned from TV? And I’ve told everyone at school you were the director!’ Maureen, the eight-year-old TV addict, was devastated.

‘Well, it was crap anyway,’ said Claire, the thirteen-year-old who was reading modern playwrights at school this year.

‘Everything’s crap,’ said Tom, the six-year-old who read nothing but majored in listening.

Lisa cuffed both of them across the ear, a smack that hurt. She was totally unlike the mothers one saw on television, especially American moms who had never been seen to raise a hand against even child monsters. She had left Holland as an infant and there was none of the new Dutch permissiveness about her. Had she lived in Amsterdam she would have cleaned up the city in a week. Instead, she lived in this eighty-year-old house in Randwick, one of Sydney’s less affluent eastern suburbs, and she kept it as unpolluted as she could. Malone sometimes referred to her as his Old Dutch Cleanser.

‘Watch your language,’ he said, ‘or I’ll run the lot of you in.’

‘Isn’t there any bad language in Sydney Beat?’ asked Maureen. ‘Oh God, Daddy, I’m so angry with you! I was going to bring all the girls home for your autograph. I wanted Mum to have Justin Muldoon home for dinner one night—’ Justin Muldoon was the star of the show, an actor who, Malone had told Clements, changed expressions by numbers.

‘That’s enough of that,’ said Lisa. ‘Dad’s on a case. That’s a detective’s job, not sitting around a TV studio.’

‘Talking to actresses, you mean?’ said Claire, a junior cadet getting ready for the battle of the sexes.

‘Is that what you do?’ said Lisa.

‘Sometimes they sit in my lap, but it’s all official duty.’ they smiled at each other, knowing how much they trusted one another.

‘Are you on another homicide?’ said Tom, who had just learned what the word meant.

‘No,’ said Malone, who tried to keep any mention of murder out of the house. This was his haven, something that Lisa did her best to maintain.

Later, while the two girls were doing the washing-up and Tom was having his shower, Lisa came into the living-room and sat beside Malone in front of the television set. ‘Anything on the news?’

‘Nothing that interests us. Which is the way I like it.’

He held her hand, lifting it and kissing it. In public he was held back by the stiffness with affection he had inherited from his mother and father, but in private he was full of affectionate gestures towards Lisa and the children. In his heart he knew he was making up for the lack of affection shown by his parents towards him, their one and only. They loved him, he knew that, but they were both too awkward to express it. He never wanted Lisa or the children to say that about him.

Lisa stroked his cheek, not needing to say anything. She was close to forty, but had kept her looks: regular features, faintly tanned skin, blonde hair worn long this year and pulled back in a chignon, blue eyes that could be both shrewd and sexy, and a full figure that still excited him. She could hold the world at bay; but, he hoped, never him.

‘The stock market’s still going up,’ he said, but, having no money invested, it meant nothing to either of them. ‘Your father must … Ah, I wondered if they were going to mention it.’

Richard Morecroft, the ABC news announcer, was saying, ‘The skeleton of a man was found today in the bush near Blackheath. Police say it could be that of Sir Walter Springfellow, Director-General of ASIO, who disappeared in March 1966 …’

‘Nothing about his being murdered,’ said Lisa.

‘We’re holding back on that as far as the press goes – we’re not sure of anything. We – hold it!’ He held up a hand.

Morecroft picked up a sheet of paper that had been thrust into his hand from off-camera. ‘A late piece of news has just come to hand. Charles (Chilla) Dural was today released from Parramatta Gaol, where he had been serving a life sentence for murder. A one-time notorious criminal, Dural was the last man sentenced by Sir Walter Springfellow before he left the Bench to become head of ASIO. Police would make no comment on the ironic coincidence of the two events occurring on the same day …’

‘Bugger!’ said Malone and switched off the set.

‘What’s the matter? It’s just as they said, a coincidence—’

‘It’ll give the media another handle to hang on to. They’ve got enough as it is – Springfellow turning up as a skeleton, his missus now a tycoon and up to her neck in a family takeover—’

‘It’s supposed to be the daughter who’s trying to take over the family firm.’ Lisa read everything in the daily newspaper but the sports pages; she knew when BHP or News Ltd went up or down, what knives were being sharpened in politics, but she knew nothing of Pat Cash’s form or what horse was fancied for the Melbourne Cup. Though not mercenary, she had a Dutch respect for money and the making of it. ‘Justine Springfellow is only trying to emulate her mother. Two tycoons in the family are better than one.’

He looked at her. ‘Who said that?’

‘Someone in Perth.’ Where tycoons bred like credit-rated rabbits.

‘Don’t believe what you read about the daughter. I met her today. She’d do everything her mother told her.’

Lisa had picked up the financial pages of the Herald, knew exactly where to turn to. ‘Springfellow Corporation was at its highest price ever yesterday. What’s this prisoner Dural like?’ Lately she had developed a talent for non-sequiturs, and Malone, being a man, had wondered if she was at the beginning of her menopause. Which thought was a male non-sequitur.

‘I haven’t a clue. He was before my time. I’ve heard of him – I think he killed a cove in prison about ten years ago. But he’s a stranger to me.’ And I hope he stays that way.

Maureen came into the living-room. ‘In this house a kid’s work is never done. None of my friends have to do the washing-up.’

‘Lucky them,’ said Lisa. ‘Sunday you can do the washing and ironing. That will give me Monday free.’

Malone grinned, loving the dry banter that went on in his family. He wondered what sort of banter went on among the silvertail Springfellows. Though perhaps tonight there would be nothing like that, not with the bones of a long-dead husband and father lying between them.

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