Helga's Web (3 page)

“When were these changes known?”

The two girls looked at each other and now the younger one, face as blank as a clock’s without hands, took her cue: “Oh, we’ve known about them for some time. In this office, I mean. I don’t know about the, you know, workers outside.” There were lines of demarcation here, too: the office workers and the, you know, workers outside. “Why, inspector?”

“Sergeant,” said Malone, unflattered. He looked them up and down, wondering what they’d be like in bed; maybe he should have brought Clements up here with him, got his mind off his winning bets. The blonde sat higher on the edge of her desk, mini-skirt tucked into her lap so that it was almost invisible. I don’t know why rape is a crime, Malone thought. Being eye to eye with a girl’s crotch all day and half the night should give a man certain privileges. A man, unwittingly leaving his fly unzipped, could be arrested for indecent exposure; a girl, exposing her crotch or her behind, was just considered to be fashionable. Women were subtly providing their own answer to the double standard for men. The blonde girl was aware of Malone’s look, but evidently she trusted policemen.

Then Con Malone, who wouldn’t have trusted the Police Commissioner, came in with Kerslake. Malone excused the engineer and the two girls and closed the door after them, then turned to his father. “Take off the helmet, Dad. You look like something out of All Quiet on the Western Front.”

Con Malone took off his helmet, held it tucked against one hip and tapped the ash of his cigarette into it. He was not as tall as his son and he looked much shorter because of his broad figure. His thick grey hair was close-cropped above the

wide face with its doorknocker nose, its long Irish upper lip and the years marked like notches in the cheeks and around the eyes. It seemed to Malone that his father had looked this old for as long as he could remember, yet Con still kept going, working as hard as he had ever done, never mentioning the word retirement. He was sixty-three or four and he still had another good ten years in him. Only the worry and disgrace of having a copper for a son might wear him out.

“I’m not gunna be mixed up in any of this,” he began, taking over the interview, showing who was senior and who was junior. “It could ve been any of us, me or the Dagoes, who found her—”

Dagoes: the Old Man was like the Old Lady, still carried his prejudices like football club ribbons. “Dad, you are mixed up in it. Nothing serious, you’ll probably just be called as a witness at the inquest—”

“No bloody fear!” Con Malone shook his head emphatically, as if he had been asked to denounce the Pope. He never went near a church except on Christmas Eve when, as his Christmas present to Brigid, he went to midnight Mass with her. But he believed in the institution of the Church and considered the Pope worth a dozen kings or presidents. He had got drunk when Pope John died, but didn’t think he’d go that far for this new bloke Paul. He’d get drunk, all right, cause a, whatyoucallit, disturbance before he’d go into bloody court as a police witness.

Malone sighed and looked out the window again. Another liner was going down the harbour, another means of escape. Since his one and only trip abroad two years ago, a short and not very happy trip, when he had gone to arrest the Australian High Commissioner in London for murder, he had been dreaming of another journey to Europe. He had been saving every cent he could, even investing in some of Clements’ sure-fire tips, and now he had enough for a three months’ economy tour of Europe. But a week ago he had asked Lisa to

marry him and now the money was earmarked as down payment on a house. He was trapped, tied down to the routine of investigations like this one and the irritation of witnesses who did not want to get mixed up in anything. Angry at himself as much as at his father, feeling he was being disloyal to Lisa, he spun back and said sharply, “You’ll be called when they want you, Dad.”

Con Malone sucked on his cigarette, then without taking it from his mouth asked with massive sarcasm, “You want me name and address, then?”

Malone grinned: it was hard to take the Old Mans antagonism seriously. “I’ll get it from the wage sheet. When you got down there this morning, did the timber in front of the opening look as if it had been disturbed? Or had it been put neatly back in place?”

Con Malone scowled, then said grudgingly, “I didn’t notice nothing. I mean, whoever done it, he done a neat job of putting all the timber back. It wasn’t nailed or nothing, but he’d put it all back the way it’d been.”

“You were pretty observant.”

“Not at the time. I been thinking about it since, like.”

“You see where I get my detective instincts from?”

“Christ!” said Con Malone, and almost spat into his helmet.

“Whoever dumped that girl there must have worked here at some time.”

“He could work here now.” Despite himself, Con Malone could not resist hazarding an opinion.

Malone shook his head. “No, he must have been a bloke who worked here in Utzon’s time. You’ve worked here before, Dad. How long ago was it?”

“You accusing me of dumping her down there?”

“If I were, I’d just turn the case over to Mum. She’d have you up against the wall in no time.”

Con Malone looked out the window and remained silent for a while as if he were not going to give any more answers.

But Malone knew how to handle his father and he waited patiently. At last, doing the police force a great favour, Con Malone said, “About six years ago, I used to work down in that particular bit.”

“If you had worked here, knew your way around, and you wanted to dump a body, how would you go about it?”

“You’re making it pretty bloody crook, ain’t you? Asking me to think like a crim!”

“I thought you’d rather think like that than like a cop.”

Con Malone eyed his son warily. “You’re too bloody smart.” Malone waited patiently, knowing the Old Man better than he knew himself. Con Malone’s life had been so empty of any importance he could not resist any temptation to pontificate, even if it meant helping a mug copper. “It’d be easy as falling off a log. Plenty places around the harbour where you could dump the body in a boat, then bring it around here. There’s only a coupla security men on guard here at night and the Water Police patrols only get around here a coupla times a night. They’d never cotton on to a small rowing boat, not if you kept close to the shore all the way around. Then it’s dead easy to slide in under this place, in between the pylons.”

“How would you get into the actual basement, though?”

“There’s air ducts all around the bottom, just faced over with some steel netting. Good pair of pliers’d snip ‘em in no time. What the hell am I telling you all this for, but?”

“I don’t know,” said Malone innocently. “But you’d have made a good cop.”

Con Malone reeled and looked out the window, seeking his own escape. Malone himself looked down at the week-old newspaper spread out on the desk. A story was ringed with red pencil: Minister Would Welcome Ideas, said the headline. Malone read on: “Mr. W.P. Helidon, Minister for Cultural Development, said yesterday that he would welcome any serious suggestions for the first year’s programme of the Opera House. He would study further the Returned Soldiers

League’s suggestion of an Anti-Communism Pageant. He did not take seriously the Students’ Union’s suggestion of a nude version of White Horse Inn or The Sound of Music …” Ma-lone shook his head in amusement. Everyone had his problems, especially Ministers saddled with the responsibility for cultural development.

Then Kerslake came back with Clements. “Get anything more?” Malone asked.

Clements just nodded, disappointing both Con Malone and Kerslake, who had set their ears forward in the hope of catching up on something they had missed. Kerslake chewed on a mouthful of questions, but thought better of asking them and finally shrugged and said, “We’d been hoping to stay out of the news. Had far too much publicity. Just our luck. Sorry for the girl, of course.”

“Who isn’t?” said Malone, and managed to make the remark toneless.

Twenty minutes later the doctor, the fingerprint expert and the photographer arrived and Malone and Clements went down to the basement with them. Kerslake wanted to lead the way again, but Malone, doubly perverse, insisted that Con Malone was enough as a guide. Con, grumbling in his throat like a bronchial dog, switched on his lamp and led the way. Kerslake, disgruntled, took off his helmet, sat down and invited the mini-skirted girls to join him in sniping at the arrogance and rudeness of the police force. The girls, as practiced as all other Sydney citizens in such abuse, willingly joined in.

The photographer took a dozen photos, his flash sparkling with indecent brightness, like a carnival cracker, in the gloomy room. The doctor examined the girl, going over her body with that casual detachment that Malone, even after years on the force, still found hard to accept. He knew that a dead body was no more than a piece of evidence, that the soul, if you believed in such a thing, had gone and left only

a clay vessel, that no amount of sympathy or grief could ever bring the body back to life. But it had once been a person and somehow he thought it deserved more than the cold unconcern that a butcher might have shown towards a side of beef. In some odd way Malone felt a sense of guilt that the girl should be handled in such a way. But then, he told himself, it wasn’t his job to protect the dead.

The doctor, a young man who wore a strip of plaster across his nose from last night’s squash match, stood up. “Strangulation. Pretty vicious, too.”

“Done by a man?”

“Probably. But it’d be hard to tell. Could’ve been done by a woman with strong hands. There are some scratches on the throat, but that doesn’t mean anything. Even blokes are wearing their nails long these days.”

“Any sign of rape?”

The doctor swung back one of the girl’s legs as if he were opening a gate. “There are some bruises on the inside of the thigh there, but that doesn’t prove anything, either. There’s no sign of bruising around the vagina.” He looked down at the girl, for the first time showed a spark of interest. “She would have been quite a looker. Why do they kill the good-looking ones? There are plenty of crows around.” Then he stepped back, already impatient to be gone. “You’ll be able to get some fingerprints, Herb. This room must have been pretty airtight. Her hands have mummified a bit.”

The fingerprint man knelt down beside the body and Ma-lone jerked his head and led Clements out into the passage. They walked round the curve of it and came to an opening that looked out through a pattern of concrete pylons to the waters of the harbour. Steel netting covered the opening, but when Malone pushed against it a section fell out, leaving a hole about three feet square.

“That’s how they got in.”

“They?” said Clements.

“You want to lose some of that money of yours? Ill bet it needed more than one bloke to get that girl in here. What did you find on her?”

“There’s half a dry-cleaning tab on her dressing gown. And—you’re not gunna believe this—there are two nipples tattooed on her arse. One on each cheek.”

“There’s your filthy imagination at work again. They were probably rat bites. The doc didn’t say anything.”

“He probably didn’t see them. You know what a perfunctory bastard he is. But they’ll see them right enough when they get her into the morgue.”

Malone stared out at the water lapping against the pylons. A fruit box floated by, a stalk of celery sticking up out of it like a bedraggled flag on a child’s home-made boat. “If she went in for that sort of caper, she must have been in the game one way or another.”

“Oh, I dunno. You never know with kids these days, even the so-called nice ones. Anything for a giggle.”

“She’s around twenty-seven or eight. When she was a kid, the nice ones weren’t doing that sort of thing for a giggle. I think we’ll start assuming she’s not a nice kid. Anyone in my day had tattoos on her bum, she wasn’t captain of the school.” My day: I’m thirty-five and I’m talking like my dad. The generation gap was opening quicker every year. “Maybe we’ll have her prints in the records. But I thought I knew most of the recognized performers.”

“I’ve never seen her before,” said Clements. “And I’ve been to all the most exclusive places.” He, too, looked out at the dirty, heaving water under the pylons. He sniffed the air, cold and damp here despite the heat further out, and his big basset-hound face suddenly drooped. “Makes you wonder, though. Why would a goodlooking bird like her finish up down here?”

Tuesday, November 26

The fishing trawler bumped against the jetty, rocking gently on the backwash from a speed boat that had pulled out from the other side. Jack Savanna, still feeling queasy from the long hours out at sea, clambered awkwardly up from the trawler’s deck on to the jetty. The cameraman and his as- sistant were already ashore, festooning themselves with their equipment before they moved along to the truck that was waiting for them out on the roadway. Savanna could see the sign on the side of the truck: Olympus Film Productions; and he shut his eyes against the bitter joke of it. When he opened them the skipper of the trawler, Bixby, was standing beside him.

“Feeling all right?” The look on the man’s weather-carved face was as sardonic as the sign on the truck.

”I’ll survive.” Savanna’s voice croaked, the words sticking like splinters in his throat. Twenty years as a radio announcer, ten years doing voice over on television commercials, and he sounded like W.C. Fields with a cold. He cleared his throat, as a matter of professional pride as much as anything else, but then decided against saying anything further. The less he said to this chap, the sooner he got away from him, the better.

He was conscious of Bixby watching him as he walked along the jetty after the cameraman and his assistant. He had the feeling that Hopkins, the cameraman, should be walking backwards before him, camera raised for a tracking shot: this was the sort of scene one saw night after night in the cheap melodramas that filled in the time between the commercials. The hero, debonair and indistinguishable from any of the heroes in the commercials, walking away from the villain who might at any moment decide to take a shot at him. Then the ridiculousness of his imagination tickled him and he laughed, a cough of embarrassment. Hopkins looked over his shoulder. “Something funny, Jack?”