Dark Summer (4 page)

Clements was a grab-bag of inconsequential information, with a mind like the waste-bin of a computer. He frowned, bit his lower lip, then said, “Somewhere around Manly. Maybe Harbord, around there.”

“Who do we know named Jack A. who lives in Harbord?” But they both knew and they looked at each other with that cynical surprise that passes for excitement with cops of long experience. “Jack Aldwych. Why would Scungy be ringing our friend Jack? He told me he'd given up working for Jack even before he went into the Bay.”

“You think Jack had him done in?”

“I hope not.”

He did not want to take on the biggest crim in the country, not if Scungy Grime had been Jack
Aldwych'
s calling card left on the doorstep of the Malone home.

III

He and Clements drove over the Harbour Bridge and out to Harbord, one of the closest of the northern beaches. The main road was clogged with holiday traffic. The northern beaches were supposed to be cleaner than the beaches south of the harbour, the sewage spill apparently knowing where the fortunate northerners swam and obligingly avoiding them. So people came from the south and the west and piddled in the northern waters and everyone cursed the Water Board and the government for not doing their job. The sun blazed down and everyone was slowly dying of sun cancer, but what better way was there to spend a hot summer holiday?

The air-conditioning in Clements' car suddenly stopped working. Clements, patience exhausted as he halted for the fifth time in a traffic jam, reached for the blue light that he wasn't supposed to carry in his private vehicle, put it on the roof and blared his horn. At once two youths jumped out of a stolen car and ran off down a side street and half a dozen other drivers looked guilty, wondering if they had been chased all this way for breaking the speed limit over the Bridge. Clements pulled his Nissan out on to the wrong side of the road and drove down against the oncoming traffic.

“You're going to get us booked for this,” said Malone. “I'll tell 'em you did it against my express orders.”

“Tell 'em I went mad with the heat. Hello, we've got company.”

Up ahead a motorcycle cop, straddling his bike, was waiting for them directly in their path. Clements pulled up, got out and approached the officer. He was back in less than a minute.

“Righto, what bull did you feed him this time?” said Malone.

“I told him the truth—or anyway, half of it. I said a dead man had been dumped in your pool and we had to get to the chief suspect before he packed up and fled the country. Hang on!”

“You mention Jack Aldwych's name?”

“Who else? It'll make that motorcycle cop's day. Better than picking up mug lairs exceeding the
speed
limit.”

“You're exceeding it. What if he radios Manly and we get half their strength as back-up?”

“I told him we'd already called Manly.”

Half-truths are weapons police and criminals use against each other; they have learned from the black-belt masters, the lawyers. Malone hoped that the motorcycle cop up ahead, siren now screaming, showed a sense of humour when he learned the full truth.

The motorcycle cop took them out of the main stream of traffic, through side streets, and within five minutes brought them, his siren still screaming, to the front gates of Jack Aldwych's mansion. It was a big two-storeyed house with verandahs right round it on both levels. It had been built at the turn of the century by a circus-owning family and it was said that the ghosts of acrobats still tumbled around the grounds at night and a high-wire spirit had been seen flying across the face of the moon. Ghosts didn't protect Jack Aldwych, just a black-haired minder built like a small elephant.

He stood inside the big iron-barred gates, shaking his head at Malone and Clements. “Mr. Aldwych ain't here. No, I dunno I can tell you where he is, he don't like being disturbed.”

Clements said, “Would he be disturbed if we ran you in?”

“What fucking for?”

“Swearing at an officer. Come on—Blackie Ovens, isn't it? You better tell us where we can find him or we're gunna camp here till he comes home. It'll lower the tone of the neighbourhood. Jack wouldn't like that.”

Ovens pondered, then shrugged. “Geez, youse guys are hard. Okay, he's out at the Cricket Ground. He's got a private box in the Brewongle Stand.”

“He's a cricket fan?” Malone's voice cracked with surprise.

“Nuts about it. I'll tell him you're coming.” He unhitched a hand-phone from his belt. “Don't worry, he'll wait for you. He wouldn't leave a cricket match even to see the Police Commissioner bumped off.” He grinned to show he was only joking; the three officers stared back at him. “Sorry.”

As Malone and Clements got back into the Nissan, the motorcycle cop, already astride his
machine,
eased in beside them. “So you were afraid the chief suspect was gunna split overseas? He's out at the
cricket
! Next time you come over this side of the harbour, go through the proper fucking channels!”

He roared off and Clements looked at Malone. “They're not very polite this side of the harbour, are they?”

“What are you going to do, pull rank on him? Forget it. We asked for it and we got it. Take me out to the Cricket Ground and then go on out to my place and see if they're finished there. Lisa wants everyone out by this evening. Make sure she gets what she wants.”

“Anything else?”

“Rustle up someone and send him down to talk to that caretaker at Scungy's flats. Get him to talk to the other people in Scungy's block.”

“What if he just died of a heart attack or something?”

“I still want the bastard who dumped him in my pool. Maureen was shivering when she came in to tell me she'd found him. What are you doing?”

Clements was getting out of the Nissan. “I don't run to a car-phone, I've just got the radio connected to Police Centre.”

He went back to the gates, spoke to Blackie Ovens, who handed him his hand-phone. Clements punched a number, waited, then spoke into the mouthpiece. Malone was too far away to hear whom he was calling or what was being said. Then Clements handed the phone back to Ovens and came back to the car.

“I just called Romy Keller. She thinks Scungy was poisoned. It looks as if you're gunna get your murder after all.”

When Clements dropped Malone at the Cricket Ground people were still queuing to get into the ground. Malone flashed his badge at the attendants on the turnstiles into the Brewongle Stand, but his name meant nothing to them. He had played for the State on this ground twenty years ago, but these men would have been only boys then and he had never been big enough to be a boyhood hero. He went up in the lift to the floor where the private boxes were situated, flashed his badge again at the floor
attendant,
an older man who remembered him, and knocked on the door of the suite marked
Saltbush Investments.
It was opened by a waiter in a white jacket, whose small thin face went whiter than the jacket when he saw Malone.

“Hello, Larry. You do a waiter's course last time you were inside?”

“G'day, Inspector.” Larry Quick gave his con man's smile. “You wanna see me or Mr. Aldwych?”

“The boss. I think he might be expecting me. Didn't he get a phone call?”

“Yeah, but he doesn't always tell me everything.”

Malone followed Quick through the small private lounge and out to the seats on the balcony. Jack Aldwych, tall and heavily built, broad-brimmed white panama on his silver hair, regal in a cannibal chief way, sat there alone.

“Inspector Malone.” His dead wife Shirl, a respectable woman, had taught him to be polite; it was an effort, but occasionally he succeeded, “I got a message you were on your way. Come to see the match? You must wish you were out there now, eh?”

Malone looked out at the famous ground, a bright green lake surrounded by cliffs of stands speckled, as if with the child's decoration of hundreds and thousands, with the huge crowd's colours. In the middle two Australians, in green and gold, were batting; spread around them, in two shades of blue, were the eleven Englishmen. This was a one-day match, a type of game that hadn't been invented when Malone was playing. Its accelerated pace, the almost desperate chase for runs, the pyjama-like uniforms, the hoopla and exaggerated behaviour of the players, all of it had brought the crowds back to cricket, but Malone was one of the old school. If a team-mate had kissed him when he had taken a wicket, he would have run a stump through the molester.

“No. I was a bowler, Jack. One-day games aren't meant for bowlers, they're for batsmen. You never hear of a groundsman these days preparing a wicket for bowlers—the Cricket Board would have him jailed. All the crowd wants to see is big hitting. It's Happy Hour for the batsmen and bugger-you-Bill for the bowlers. You come here often?”

“
Every day there's a match, one-day games, Sheffield Shield, Test matches. I'm a cricket-lover. Most of the crims you and I know, they all go to the races, the horses or the dogs. But I love cricket. A gentleman's game—or it used to be.” He smiled an old crim's smile, full of wry irony, “I bought this private box through one of my companies and I come here as a guest of meself and watch in comfort. I tried to become a member here, but they always found a reason why I couldn't make it. It's okay if you're a white- collar crim, but not if you're a blue-collar one like I was. So I pay forty-two thousand bucks a year, but I don't have to sit down there amongst the hoi-polloi, God love 'em, and I can sit here and jerk my thumb at them across there in the Members' Stand. What d'you want?” he said abruptly, turning his head sharply to stare at Malone, who had sat down two seats along from him.

There were no dividing walls between the boxes out here on the balcony, only iron railings. Too much privacy might suggest elitism and that, God knew, was worse than bloody multiculturism. The neighbouring boxes were packed, mostly with men; the few women amongst them were watching Jack Aldwych, having been told who he was; they could hear nothing for the chatter of their own menfolk, who were already well oiled by the free grog of their hosts in the corporation boxes. Still, Malone dropped his voice almost to a murmur: “Jack, one of your fellers, Scungy Grime, turned up in my swimming pool at home this morning. Dead.”

“Scungy? Poor little bugger.” Aldwych showed no surprise. “You want something to drink?”

The morning heat struck into the balcony; the ground was slowly turning into a cauldron. Malone had taken off his jacket, but his armpits were marshes of sweat. “I'd like a light beer, if you've got one.”

Aldwych looked up at Quick, who had appeared in the doorway to the lounge. “A light beer for Mr. Malone . . . Larry's become my handyman. He's lost his nerve. Makes you wanna laugh, a con artist who's lost his nerve. But it's sad, don't you reckon? There ain't too many artists left these days in our game.”

“Jack, don't change the subject. What about Scungy?
That's
sad, being dead.”

“Oh, you're right about that. But you're wrong about him being one of my fellers. Scungy
wasn'
t working for me for at least three months before he went in last time. He started talking drugs.”

“Scungy? Thanks, Larry.” Malone took the light beer, slaked his thirst. “He was talking drugs
before
he went in?”

Aldwych nodded, sipping his own beer. “Yeah. Why, was he talking to you about them recently?”

Malone hesitated; then decided to give a little information in the hope of some in return. “I've been using him, Jack, since he got out of the Bay.”

“T'ch, t'ch,” chided Aldwych, watching the game out in the middle. “Blokes who give information to coppers ain't my favourites. Oh, nice shot! You see that?”

“I saw it,” said Malone sourly. Alan Border had clipped the English fast bowler in the air between slips and gully for four.

“He'd never think of risking a shot like that in a real game. If it's any consolation, Scungy never mentioned your name to me.”

“Then why are you here?” Aldwych looked back at Malone.

“I came across your initials and your phone number in a diary he kept.”

“Did he say anything about me in the diary?”

“Jack, I'm not laying all my cards on the table, not yet.”

“There would have been nothing Scungy had on me.” He tipped his panama back. “I'm retired, Scobie—you mind if I call you Scobie? I'm seventy-five years old, my wife died eight months ago, and I'm tired. I've been a crim for over sixty years, I started when I was fifteen—they could call me the Godfather, if we went in for that sorta stuff out here. But for the last year, when I knew my wife was dying of cancer, I been as clean as a young nun. What could Scungy tell you about me that would interest you? Do you think I killed him?”

Beyond Aldwych, Malone saw a woman in the next box lean forward, ears popping out of her blow-wave like rabbits out of long yellow grass. “The thought occurred to me when I saw your initials in his diary.”

“
Scobie, I don't kill people.” He was a liar, but a good one; honesty shone out of his rheumy blue eyes like a smuggler's beacon. When he was younger he had killed four men, but he had been acquitted of two of the murders and never been charged with the others. In later years he had hired other men to do the killing, as a good general should. “I'm sorry Scungy is dead, but if he was dealing in shit he deserved what he got. I've done everything else in my time—” He suddenly looked over his shoulder at the eavesdropping woman. “Am I talking loud enough, madam?”

Malone almost burst out laughing at the look on the woman's face. She reared back, the blow- wave bobbing on her head as if a strong wind had blown through it. She said something to her husband, a man recognized as one of the town's top stockbrokers, but he, a man who knew when to buy and when to sell, was not buying into this. He said something to her, obviously a caution, and went back to watching the cricket, a much safer occupation than trying to pick a fight with a top crim. The woman abruptly got up and went back into the lounge.