Helga's Web (2 page)

Malone slumped further down in his chair, staring through the grimed window at the blank wall of the building next door. This police building had been erected in 1870, a year when the local public thought even less of its police than it did now. It sometimes seemed to Malone that every year since then had laid its cold, dusty dead hand on this room where he sat. Police circulars hung from the walls like peeling wallpaper; a fly-speckled picture of the Queen hung above four equally-speckled photographs of four Wanted men. Clements stood up and opened one of the lockers in the corner: it groaned like an ancient sarcophagus and Malone would not have been surprised if a convict from the First Fleet had fallen out. On Malone’s desk stood a typewriter in which he was expected to take some pride, as if he were some sort of antique dealer: it had been used to type out the first report on a famous murder case of the early Twenties. The only bright, new note in the room came from the early Christmas cards that Clements had now begun to arrange on the mantelpiece over the old blackened fireplace. It’s a job, Malone thought, but has it made me into a dull, stupid clot? Does Lisa really know what she’s marrying?

Then Smiler Sparks, the duty sergeant, came into the room. “Better get down to the Opera House.”

“Why?” said Malone. “They finished it at last?”

Sergeant Sparks didn’t laugh; he had never been known to be amused by anything. “They found the body of a girl. Looks like murder. You owe me thirty cents, Scobie, for those meat pies I got you on Friday.”

Malone shelled out thirty cents. “They were cold.”

“Don’t blame me, mate. Anyone deserves cold pies if he spends an hour trying to give advice to a pro.”

“She was only a kid. Sixteen.”

“I checked on her card. She was nineteen and she’d had twenty-two convictions. She was laughing at you, mate.”

“That’s more than I’ve ever seen you do,” said Malone, and went out of the room and out of the building, followed by Clements, his partner. He felt his mood improving as he went, glad as he always was to escape the sour, drab atmosphere that successive governments had considered the right environment for its law officers of Y Division.

The early summer humidity swamped them at once; even by the time they had crossed the road to the parked police car Malone was damp under the armpits. People struggled up the small hill from the Quay, faces shining as if they had come straight out of the waters of the harbour, the older ones inwardly cursing the climate that, on cooler days, they claimed was the best in the world. Another police car drew up and Inspector Fulmer got out. The cold-blooded bastard, Malone thought, he looks as if he’s come straight from the ice-works. Malone told him where they were heading.

“The Opera House’s first dramatic performance,” said Fulmer, and Malone and Clements smiled dutifully at his flat heavy humour. Fulmer did not go in very often for jokes and when he did they fell on the ear with a dull thump. “Well, I hope it’s a straightforward case, one that wont spoil your Christmas.”

He left them, walking in his stiffbacked way that suggested he was leading a review past the Commissioner. Clements looked after him. “I wonder what he was like as a kid?”

“I don’t think he ever was a kid,” said Malone. “He was born thirty years old and in uniform.”

Clements nodded and got into the car. “Well, let’s go and have a look at this girl, see if she’s gunna give us an easy Christmas or not.”

Malone pulled the Falcon out from the curb, wondering if the force would ever run to air-conditioned cars for its officers. He went round the block and drove down Macquarie Street, the glittering window-eyes of new office blocks on one side of the road glaring down on the green oasis of the Botanical Gardens on the other. They drove into the work compound surrounding the Opera House. Clements showed his badge to the gatekeeper just as a uniformed policeman came down the road from the main building site.

“Nobody in or out, Ted,” Malone told him. “And no outside phone calls, especially to the newspapers.”

The policeman looked at the gatekeeper, who looked hurt, as if he had been accused of high treason. “You heard that. You’ve just been made a deputy marshal. Sergeant Malone will send you a badge for Christmas.”

“You know what you can do with it,” said the gatekeeper. “I hope it has points on it.”

The policeman gave him an official smile, then turned back to Malone. “I’ll keep an eye out, Scobie. Jack Radcliff is still down with the body.”

Malone drove on. The Opera House loomed before them, the huge towering shells that were the roofs of the various

concert halls seeming to Malone to be like giant ears turned to the sounds of the harbour and to the suspect whisperings of the local citizens. The building, over the years of its long checkered history, had become variously a joke, an object of anger at waste of public money, a source of tremendous excitement that at last Sydney was going to have a center for the performing arts: no one, except perhaps visitors from other States, remained indifferent to it. So far work on it had been in progress ten years and there was said to be at least another two years before it would be completed.

“When opening night finally arrives,” said Malone, who blew hot and cold in his reactions to the project, “I wonder if God will be free to cut the ribbon? They wont be able to get anyone less than him, not after waiting this long.”

“Not if Labour’s back in power,” said Clements, who had the usual policeman’s cynicism towards politicians. “Whoever heard of a Labour politician letting an outsider steal the limelight?”

They drew up before the vast expanse of steps that led up to the open podiums below the shells. A short wiry man in shirt and tie, dark shorts, long socks and desert boots was waiting for them. He handed them each a construction worker’s helmet and slipped one on his own head. His hat was too big for him and with his thin legs tapering away beneath him he reminded Malone of a tight-headed toadstool.

“Kerslake’s the name. One of the engineers. Bit of a shock.” He sounded as if he would have a continual mouthful of words, any one of which could be spilled out like a lottery marble. He led them up the steps, into a wide opening, then across what he told them was going to be the main concert hall. The concrete shell soared above them like a vast ribbed tent. A scaffolding staircase reached up to the fluted roof, like a tall metal reredos beneath the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. Workmen moved like bats among the high scaffolding catwalks, their voices and the clash of their tools on metal magnified in the huge chamber. It was the first time Malone had been so close to the project and for the moment he felt a sense of awe.

Then Kerslake said, “The body’s down here,” and led them down a long flight of rough steps, talking all the way, sketching an angular embroidery of words: “Might never have found her. Just sheer chance. Old plans changed when Utzon, the original architect, left. Spaces down below, closed up, now being utilized. For new rooms. Watch your step.”

He had switched on a workman’s lamp and Malone and Clements followed him carefully as he led them through a labyrinth of passages that were only occasionally fit by electric globes hanging like fungi from the concrete walls. Malone sniffed, conscious of the smell of sea water.

“Below high tide level,” said Kerslake, and brought them to a small group of men standing like a queue of unemployed outside an opening in a wall. Timber had been torn out of the opening and lay scattered about. Somewhere far above them a pneumatic drill thumped away like an aural nerve. Malone sniffed again, but there wasn’t the sickly sweet smell he had expected.

“She hardly smells at all.” A uniformed policeman, Jack Radcliff, stepped out of the dark opening, balancing like an overweight ballet dancer on the pile of timber. “The air in there’s pretty dry, Scobie. And no light got to her.”

“Who found her?”

Everyone looked around; then the familiar lumpy figure leaning up against the wall said, “I did.”

“G’day, Dad,” said Malone, and hoped he didn’t sound as surprised as he felt: policemen were never supposed to be surprised by anything. “When did you start work here?”

“Your father?” Kerslake fired a couple of lottery marbles, bonus prizes. “What d’you know! Small world!”

“Come in this morning,” said Con Malone, still leaning against the wall, his helmet tipped like a challenge over one eye. “I’m labouring for one of the sub-contractors. Just my bloody luck.”

Malone didn’t ask what his father considered bloody luck: whether it was the fact of discovering the dead girl or having his own son as the investigating officer. Malone knew what the answer would be.

He stepped gingerly over the heaped timber and, guided by several lamps, went into the large chamber.

“Pretty appropriate,” said Clements. “This could be a tomb. What were they gunna do—bury politicians down here like those Egyptian kings?”

“Break it down, Russ,” Malone said, and Clements blushed, abruptly aware that these men around him were not as used to murder as he and Malone. ,

“It was going to be a dressing room,” said Kerslake. “But don’t know now. Know what theatrical types are like. Will reckon the place is haunted.”

There’ll be other ghosts before this place falls down, Malone thought, this is just the first. The girl lay in the spotlight of two lamps, her nude body half-exposed beneath a green silk dressing gown, old newspapers and the fossilized remainders of workers’ sandwiches scattered about her like the debris of funeral tributes. Her blonde hair hung like straw beneath her curiously twisted head; her mouth was open for a scream that she might never have made. There were dark bruises on her throat and her wide-open eyes were veined with hemorrhaging. She had that peculiarly ugly look that only beautiful women get when they have met a violent death. Malone had noticed it before: the living ugly seem to get no uglier in death.

“Anything on her to say who she was?”

Radcliff shook his head. “Nothing. I didn’t move her, Scobie. That’s your job.”

“Thanks,” said Malone drily: the police force had its own lines of demarcation. He looked around at the other six or

seven men in the high narrow room. Shadows hung in the corners and in the angles of the ceiling like dark cobwebs; a couple of the men glanced furtively about and one of them blessed himself. Malone noticed now that they were all Italians; most Australian construction would come to a standstill without the unskilled labour that the newly-arrived immigrants offered. Only one man had remained outside in the passage, the Old Australian with his helmet still cocked derisively over his eye and the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth like an old fang.

“Nobody leaves the work site,” Malone said to Kerslake. “Well want to interview everybody. Everybody,” he repeated, and looked out at his father. The fang came up, glowed red, then drooped again. “Where’s a phone?”

Kerslake, letting fly with today’s quota of unused words, spitting them out to the rhythm of the faraway pneumatic drill, led Malone back through the passages, up several flights of steps and into an office that looked directly out on the harbour. Gulls hung in the shining air like small crucifixes and a man sat in a rowing boat, his head bent as if he were praying for fish to bite at the rosary of his line. A ship went by, its decks crowded with passengers waving frantically at the wharf and the relatives they had left behind; streamers trailed the sides of the ship, giving it an air of tattered gaiety that must have pained its captain. The Manly hydroplane scooted by, hell-bent for the city with its load of housewives desperate to spend their money. No one has any time anymore, Malone thought, remembering his days as a kid when a ride on the ferry to Manly was an overseas experience.

He gratefully took off the helmet, which was already giving him a headache, picked up the phone and dialled Police Headquarters.

“Thought you’d have cars with radio,” said Kerslake.

“We do. But the newspaper blokes listen in on the wavelength. We try to keep them off the scene as long as we can.”

“That good public relations?”

“We’re old-fashioned,” said Malone. “We don’t think murder calls for any public relations.”

And left Kerslake with a mouthful of words that were useless.

Malone asked for a police photographer, a doctor and someone to take fingerprints. He hung up, looked wistfully out at the water preening itself under its nor’-easter breeze, then turned to Kerslake and said, “Send up Mr. Malone.”

“Your father?”

“Mr. Malone,” Malone said emphatically, aware of the two mini-skirted secretaries poised like carrier pigeons on the edges of their desks: they’d be away as soon as he’d let them go, carrying gossip between their ring-of-confidence teeth. Kerslake went away, helmet bobbing on his head like a loose cranium, and Malone looked at the two girls. “Do you know why those rooms ‘way down below were boarded up?”

The two girls looked doubtfully at each other; then the older of them, twenty-year-old face half-hidden between two scraggly scarves of dark hair, said, “It all happened while Mr. Utzon was here. You know, he was the original architect—” Malone nodded, trying not to look wearied by a story that even the metho drinkers in the Domain now knew by heart. “In Mr. Utzon’s conception—” There was no mistaking her tone: she was one of Utzon’s army. When the battle between the Danish architect and the State government had reached its peak, sides had been drawn on lines as distinct as those in the War of the Roses or the American Civil War; only the demonstrations over the war in Vietnam had produced as much heat. Malone himself had once been called out to separate two architects who, fired by drink and opposite aesthetics, had tried to demolish each other as a slum. The girl went on: “In Mr. Utzon’s conception all that space down below was not needed, it was just part of the basement structure. When he resigned—’ she underlined the word to emphasize

that her hero had not been sacked—“when he resigned and the new people came in—” Malone waited for her to spit, but she had been to a good private school where spitting had not been permitted. “The new people said they needed that space down below/’