Murder Song (31 page)

And now, late in the morning, she was still on the same theme, but more restrained now: “Have you thought any more about resigning? I went into Noosa this morning to a travel agent—we could all go back to Holland, Mother and Dad still have a flat in Amsterdam—”

“To
live
?”

“Of course to live.” Her voice was calm, but her thinking was hysterical; he had never known her like this. “You could get a job in the Dutch police—No! Forget I said that.”

“That's easily done. You think the Dutch cops don't run risks? There are terrorists in Europe. At least we don't have
those
here, not yet anyway. Darl, when you've had time to think about what you're suggesting, you won't want to uproot the kids. They belong
here.
So do you and I,” he added and waited for her to disagree.

There was over a thousand kilometres of silence between them; if he hadn't known her as well as he did he would have thought she had left the phone and walked away. But he knew her silences: they could be icy calm or as tender as her lips against his cheek. He almost sighed with relief when he heard
her
say, “I know you're right, darling. But . . .”

“I'm going to be all right,” he lied hopefully. “The Department's putting a guard on me and Brian O'Brien, and he's got his own security men. If they haven't caught Blizzard within the next week, I promise we'll go somewhere right out of Sydney. I'll take my long service leave and we'll go to New Zealand or somewhere while they try to track him down.”

“What about Mr. O'Brien?”

“He has enough money to go anywhere in the world.”
If he doesn't go to jail.
Where O'Brien would probably be no safer than where he was now.

“On his own? Poor man.” It was typical of her that she should feel deep sympathy for a man she had never met, a man whose financial shenanigans she abhorred. She was puritanically honest, but admitted her naïveté in expecting absolute honesty in business. “What happens if they don't catch Blizzard?”

He sighed, making a concession. “Then maybe we'll go to Holland.”

She made no comment on that, but said, “You want to speak to Maureen and Tom?”

I'd better, he almost said; but that would have sounded too much like a premonition. “Put them on.”

Maureen came on the line, plunging in without any preliminary. “I'm in the doghouse, Daddy.”

Her usual location. “Don't tell me!”

“I got bubblegum on the seat of Nanna's car. Then when I tried to scrape it off, I tore the upholstery. Mummy told me to try and sew it up, but I lost the needle in the seat and Mummy sat on it.”

He had to hold on to his laughter. “I don't see what everyone is complaining about.”

“Neither do I. Could you put in a good word for me, Daddy?”

“Leave it to me. Is Tom there?”

Tom was. “G'day, Daddy. You know what? I'm in the doghouse, too. I was just kicking my soccer ball around in Nanna's kitchen, I was Maradona shooting for a goal, and I knocked over a bottle of wine, Grandpa said it was one of his best, he'd been saving it, and it all spilled out over Mummy—”

When
he hung up five minutes later he sat down on the bed and half-laughed, half-wept. O'Brien came to the bedroom door. “Something wrong?”

Malone shook his head, wiped his eyes without embarrassment. “I've just been talking to the kids. You know what? Outside there, the world is still normal.”

III

“You've been acting abnormal.”

“Oh, come on. What do you mean—abnormal?”

“All this working back. Where did you go last night?”

“I told you when I went out, I was going to see Nick Katzka.”

“You've been telling me that for weeks. Working overtime, taking night shifts you aren't rostered for—”

Colin Malloy sighed. “Honey, I've explained what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to persuade Nick to let me do a documentary on crime in the streets. I don't want to be just a news cameraman all my life, chasing ambulances and fire engines and politicians on the steps of Parliament House.”

Julie looked at him slyly across the narrow table in the breakfast nook. “No, Colin. I rang Nick Katzka last week. He said you hadn't mentioned anything to him about a documentary.”

Malloy felt a flash of anger that she had doubted his word and gone behind his back; she was not normally like that. He sipped the decaffeinated coffee, then spread the multigrain toast with yellowbox honey. Julie was a health food fanatic and he did his best to please her while he was at home; out on the job he ate all the junk food that came his way and enjoyed every mouthful. It was a constant irritation to her that he was overweight, but she never complained. She had never complained about anything, till now.

“Are you having an affair?”

He looked at her in surprise. “An affair? Who with?”

“That scruffy sound-girl, Luanne. She'd be sexy and very pretty if she cleaned herself up.”

“
Honey, she never has a shower—I don't think she even washes, she thinks that's bourgeois. If I was going to have an affair with anyone, I'd at least pick someone who was
clean.”

She didn't disagree with that. Their sex life was more than satisfactory, experimental without being too kinky; she had wondered why he would want to have an affair with another woman, though she admitted to herself that she was not an expert on men. “Where do you go then? What do you
do
?”

I go out killing men I hate.
But he loved her too much to tell her that. He had tried to rationalize his hatred of those men who had destroyed his life, but had failed. Reason told him that his life had not been totally destroyed. He had a wife whom he loved and who loved him, a job that paid him more than he would ever have earned as a policeman unless he had attained a top rank: it also gave him travel opportunities that no cop was ever offered. He and Julie had good friends, though he felt close to none of them; both he and Julie, in their own ways, were loners. The hatred was there, undeniable, unconquerable. He had read enough to believe that in everyone there was hate, as implicit in man as love, fear and the other lively emotions. Even Julie, the gentlest of women, hated: adults who abused children, people who ruined the environment, racial bigots. But her hatred of them would never lead her to murder; she had an equal hatred of killing of any kind. He was plagued, mortally, by the consuming urge for revenge, something that would never infect her and that she would never understand.

He chewed on his toast, taking his time. He had never imagined that she would actually
check
on him with Nick Katzka, the current affairs executive producer at Channel 15; she had always been the most unsuspicious of wives. He had met her in London five years ago, where he had been working for one of the independent television news organizations; she had come from Adelaide to London on a working holiday and had joined the news organization as a temporary secretary. She knew little about him, even after five years; he had told her he was an orphan, came originally from Perth and had no relatives. He had invented other details as the need had arisen and she had accepted what he had told her without question. She had told him on their wedding night that she was interested only in their present and their future, almost as if afraid that there might be something buried in his past that could ruin their happiness.

Malone, O'Brien and the others had always been there in the back shadows of his mind; the
hatred
of them had been a rottenness that he had managed to hide from her. Sometimes, in moments alone, he would weep for his dead Uncle Jeff, the only person, up till he had met Julie, he had ever loved. The two of them, the young man and the older one, had talked often of his ambition to be a policeman; of more than just that, to rise in the force to a position of authority. Jeff had been a simple-minded man of old-fashioned honesty; he had never respected anyone as he had the tough, wiry timber-cutter. Jeff was the only one who had understood the instability that occasionally showed in him:

“Frank,” he had said more than once, “look out for that temper of yours, it's gunna get you in terrible trouble one of these days.”

“Not with you, Uncle.”

“No, mebbe not with me. But you've got a streak of something in you, I dunno what it is, that you gotta watch. Especially when you become a cop. You're gunna get into situations as a cop when you're likely to do your block and you're gunna have to watch yourself.”

“You think I'm a little crazy?” He had said it jokingly, but he had known even then there were times when he didn't understand his own actions. Only a week before he had killed a neighbour's dog that had attacked him, had taken it out into the bush and buried it, then, later, helped the neighbour search for his missing pet.

When he met Julie he had just started to experience loneliness, something he had never felt before; perhaps it had had something to do with being cooped up in London, a city that engulfed him. She, though attractive and quietly pleasant, never seemed to go beyond one date with any particular man. She had told him later that the main reason, at first, that she had gone out with him on a second and third date was that, unlike all the other men, he had not tried to get her into bed on the first night. There was an old-fashioned streak in her that, to his surprise, appealed to him; the old church-going days with Uncle Jeff and Aunt Elsie still had a superficial influence on him. They didn't fall in love at once, but gradually they came to depend on each other; it was, perhaps, love with pity, though neither of them thought in those terms. Each recognized the loneliness of the other and, with the conceit of love, thought they could do something about it. There had been rocks along the way, some that had almost wrecked the
marriage.
Once he had hit her, almost knocking her unconscious; he had been ashamed that he had not been instantly contrite. Instead he had looked at her coldly and walked away; only hours later had it hit him how shamefully he had acted. She had forgiven him, but from then on she had retreated from their occasional quarrels before they became too serious.

There had been other examples of cold-bloodedness, of which she had known nothing. Once, covering the civil war in Beirut, he had picked up a rifle dropped by a dead militiaman and shot a civilian running across the street a hundred yards away. He had not known whether the civilian was one of those shooting at those at this end of the street; it had been enough that the man, whoever or whatever he was, had been on the other side of the dividing line. When the reporter covering the scene with him had remonstrated with him, he had dropped the rifle, picked up his camera and just walked away into the ruin of a neighbouring building. The reporter had left the next day for Tel Aviv and Malloy had never worked with him again.

He reached for a second piece of toast, though he had not yet finished the first slice. “I didn't want to tell you this. I want to
write.”

“Write what?” She sipped her celery juice. She had tossed and turned most of last night; this morning, pale and drawn, she didn't look a health fanatic.

“Detective novels. I've always dreamed of some day being able to turn out something like Raymond Chandler. Or Elmore Leonard, though I don't think I'd have his ear for dialogue.”

“You want to be a
writer
?”

He managed to grin, though it was almost hidden in his beard.

“Don't say it as if I want to be a rapist or a bank robber.”

“Have you written anything?” She still sounded doubtful. “I've never seen you making notes or whatever it is writers do.”

“I've got bits and pieces at the office.” He was creating fiction while they sat here at the table and he knew he was not doing a good job. How did husbands who were experienced liars fool their wives? Yet he did not want to fool her, only to protect her.

“
Why didn't you tell me? All that stuff about making a documentary . . . You know I like detective mysteries as much as you do.”

The shelves in the second bedroom, which they had converted into a study, were full of crime books, fiction and non-fiction, hardback and paperback. The list of writers ran from Poe and Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle through to Hammett and Chandler and Ross Macdonald and on to Higgins and Ross Thomas and Leonard and Freeling; detectives' names stood out on the books' spines: Holmes, Maigret, Trent. Those and crime movies were something the Malloys shared as enjoyment, though he had had to introduce her to them.

“What's your book going to be about?”

“About a private eye tracking down a vengeance killer.”

“What's the private eye's name?”

He was tempted to say Frank Blizzard. “I haven't decided yet. I want a name that's different, like Sam Spade or Nero Wolfe. I'm just calling him Joe Smith for the moment.”

“That'd be different, a private eye named Smith.” She got up, began to clear the table. She looked suddenly healthy again, a flush of enthusiasm in her face; she was relieved that she could wash her suspicions down the kitchen sink. She believes me, he thought; but knew it would be mostly because it had hurt her to doubt him. She loved him more than he deserved, though he would never be able to tell her that. And he hoped she would never find out. “Can I read some of what you've written?”

“When I've finished the first draft.”

“When will that be?”

“Another week or two.” By which time the last two green bottles would be dead marines and only God knew what would have happened to him.

Last night's close encounter with Malone had scared him. He had made a mistake in trying to pick off two targets at the same time. All the other murders had been safe ventures, even the daytime killing of Harry Gardner, the construction worker and ex-cop.