Murder Song (6 page)

“Never you, Penelope.” No one ever called her Penny, except one man: that would suggest a value much below that which she put on herself.

She was the State Minister for Development; her main development, it was said, was her own advancement. Her ambition was so naked that the Premier, Hans Vanderberg, had once remarked that it should be censored and not allowed on television in front of children; it was rumoured that when in the Cabinet Room with her, he wore a chain-mail vest and never turned his back on her. She was a goodlooking redhead till she turned her face full on to one: then one saw the green ball-bearings that were her eyes and the white steel smile. She gave Anita the smile now.

“
No, that's true. It's very comforting representing constituents who think I'm Mother Teresa.”

That was when God should have sent the bolt of lightning; but God, Anita often thought, was a Labour sponsor. “How's Arnold? I rarely see him in Canberra.”

Arnold Debbs was a Federal Labour member, sitting on the front bench opposite Philip and his ministers. The Debbs were a formidable pair. “He finds Canberra boring—one always does when one is in Opposition. He tries to escape as often as he can. I'll tell him you asked after him. Give Philip my love. How is he? Still playing God? Or is it the other way round?”

“He's busy.” Though God knew what at or with whom. He had a new secretary who was either slow at her word processor or quick in bed; either way, Philip and she had been working an awful lot of overtime lately. Anita did not care, so long as Philip didn't ask what
she
was doing. “I'll tell him you asked after him.”

Then the house was empty but for the servants cleaning up, her secretary and the Federal policeman who was her security guard. All at once she wished she were rid of it all, it had all suddenly become tiring, tiresome and empty; she had tried to become a political animal but the metamorphosis had been too much for her, though few would have known. She longed now for escape with Brian Boru, away from the constant wearing of a face that was false, the rein on a tongue that wanted to be truthful, the
politics.

She hurried upstairs, checked her make-up, went to the bathroom for a nervous pee, as if she were a teenager sneaking out on a date, put on a raincoat and hat, and as she came downstairs was met by her secretary, Grace Weldon.

“Going out? I'll tell Sergeant Long—”

“No, Grace. I'll drive myself. May I borrow your car?”

Each time they came up from Canberra for an extended stay, Grace Weldon drove up in her own car, a bright red Celica. Not really a car to be driving in to a secret assignation, but better that than to be driven there in a government car.

Grace looked dubious. “I don't know—no, I don't mean I don't want to lend you my car. By all
means,
take it. But Sergeant Long will hit the roof when I tell him you've gone off—”

“Then don't tell him, not unless he asks.”

“May I ask where you're going?” Grace was tentative, but she asked out of the best of intentions. “Ted Long said you were gone Saturday night and all day yesterday. He was nearly out of his mind. He rang me at my mother's, wanted to know what I knew. Did he say anything to you?”

“Yes, this morning. Very politely. I just told him I was visiting an old schoolfriend who's in trouble and I thought the fewer people who knew about it, the better.”

“Is that what you're telling me now?”

She hesitated, then put her hand on Grace's arm; it was almost as if she were speaking to her own daughter. “No, Grace. I'm going to meet a man I'm very much in love with.”

Grace pursed her lips as if she were about to whistle. She was a romantic, which, with being a cynic, is the best of two things to be in politics; it was the in-betweens, like Anita, who couldn't stand the disillusion. She squeezed Anita's hand. “You look marvellously happy. That's good enough for me. Here are the keys. I'll take care of Sergeant Long.”

Anita drove north up Pacific Highway, the main artery to the tree-thick suburbs of the North Shore. The area was called the North Shore, though it did not begin till one had travelled at least five or six miles from the actual north shore of the harbour. The Japanese business community, which had moved into the area in the last few years and started its own school, was still bewildered at the natives' careless attitude to geography and put it down to the fact that the continent was so vast that a few miles here or there didn't matter. There was no South Shore or West Shore; the underprivileged who lived in those desert regions had to find their own social status symbols. To live on (never
in)
the North Shore was a sign that one had arrived at a certain altitude on the social climb: half the climbers might be bent double under the back-pack of mortgages, but social status supplies an oxygen all its own.

Anita turned off into Killara, one of the older suburbs. She had grown up here and when she and Philip had bought their own small mansion in one of the quiet tree-lined streets, when Philip had been at the height of his TV fame, there had been no feeling, at least on her part, that she was a new
arrival.
Her mother and father, he a retired banker, lived half a dozen streets away. They were pillars of the local community, Doric columns of respectability, and they would have been frozen stiff with disapproval if they had known what she was doing.

She turned into the driveway.
This
was home to her: The Lodge in Canberra and Kirribilli House were only
pieds-à-terre.
All political leaders' spouses felt the same, she guessed: the tenants of the White House and Camp David, of Number 10 Downing Street and Chequers could never think of those places as
home.
She loved the big old house, but just tolerated the extravagances Philip had added when the money had been rolling in: the 100-foot swimming pool, the cabana that her son and daughter had always called the Taj Mahal dolls' house, the all-weather tennis court, the jacuzzi and the sauna. She had put her foot down only when Philip had ordered a haute cuisine barbecue. Though she had been in radio when she married him, she had been with the ABC, whose poor budget didn't encourage extravagance and so had built for its stars a reputation for good taste.

She parked the red Celica in the triple garage, closed the doors to hide it and went across to the house. As she put her key in the front door Brian Boru came hurrying up the driveway, seeming to half-run on his toes, as if he did not want to arouse the neighbours with the sound of his shoes on the gravel. He was wearing a raincoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim turned down all round and looked like a minor character out of the Midnight Movie.

“Where did you park your car?”

“Quick, inside!” He almost pushed her into the house, slammed the door shut behind them. “Is there anyone here?”

“Of course not.” She wanted to laugh at the melodramatic way he was acting; but reason told her he would not be acting like this without cause. “That's why I suggested we come here. I don't want to be found out, any more than you do. Now what's this all about?”

He took off his hat and now she saw clearly the worry and concern in his bony face. She was a practical woman, even when wildly in love. She wanted to embrace him, hold him tight against her till she could feel the hardening of him; but, as always, she first wanted to know exactly where she was. The actual
place
didn't matter, the situation did.

“Has Philip found out about us? Has he been on to you?”

“Christ, no! I could handle him.” He took her by the hand and looked about him. He had met her here two or three times since they had fallen in love, but he still didn't know his way round the house. It was one thing to know one's way around a man's wife, but another one altogether to invade his house willy-nilly. “Where can we go?”

She could feel the tension in him. “Relax, there's no one here. Our cleaning woman comes in once a week when we're not here, just to rearrange the dust. We'll be
all right,”
she said reassuringly. This was her first affair since she had married Philip, yet sometimes she felt so much more experienced than her lover. “Let's go in here.”

She led him into the sun-room that looked out on to the back garden and the pool. As in almost every room in the house, there was a television set here; Philip never wanted to miss any screening of himself, no matter how brief. The screen now was, mercifully, grey and blank.

They sat down beside each other on a couch, still holding hands. He looked at their hands, then at her face. For weeks she had tried to put a name to that look: it was more than love. Suddenly she realized it was gratitude and the thought hurt her.

“You're a real comfort,” he said. Then his grip tightened; she was always surprised at the strength in those big hands, they had often bruised her in their love-making. “I'm in trouble.”

“Trouble?” She had heard the rumours; even Philip had discussed them at the breakfast table as he read the financial pages. “You've never talked about the rumours—”

“No, not them. Well, yes, maybe—” A thought struck him, one that hadn't occurred to him before. “A girl was murdered in our flat at the weekend.”

“Our
flat?”

Then she realized which one he meant. They had met there half a dozen times, he always making sure that none of his corporate executives ever tried to use it at the same time. She had felt sleazy at first, sharing a bed with God knew how many other lovers; the sheets were always clean, but she had
seen
the semen stains on the mattress, like dirty handprints. The flat was obviously as much a fringe benefit for the local executives as it was an accommodation for interstate and overseas executives. Then she had come to realize that all the beds they shared, with the exception of that here in her own house, would provoke a feeling of sleaze: she had never achieved the blind innocence of the really promiscuous. Even here she never took him into her and Philip's bed; they always went into one of the spare bedrooms. As if he were no more than a visitor in her life. Which (and the thought chilled her) was all he might prove to be.

“A girl—
murdered?
Which girl?”

“One I used to know.” He had known dozens, she knew that, though he had never boasted of them. Indeed, he had seemed almost ashamed of them, as if he would rather have come to her a virgin.
You're the only woman I've ever loved,
he had told her the second time he had made love to her, and she had believed him. He was a liar and a robber in business; she had heard the Minister for Business Affairs describe him that way to Philip. Yet with her (or was it conceit on her part?) he was sometimes self-scaldingly truthful. As he was now: “I told her it was all over, but she didn't want to believe it.”

“Who killed her?”

“How the hell—sorry. I don't know. The police are working on it.”

“Have they been to see you?” He nodded. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing. That's where I was stupid—they'll find out eventually. All I wanted to do, I was thinking on the spur of the moment, was to protect you.”

“You told them you didn't know the girl?”

“I even told them I knew nothing about the flat. I was bloody stupid, but I could see them asking other questions . . .” She wondered if men in desperate love were always so naïve. But naïveté, of course, was a part of love: that was one of its weaknesses.

“She was murdered at the weekend? Did they ask where you'd spent Saturday and Sunday?”

“I told them I'd spent it with a lady I wasn't going to name.” He could be very old-fashioned at times; it was one of the more endearing things about him. She wondered if the original Brian Boru had
been
chivalrous towards women, but decided it was unlikely: Irish and medieval, he would have been too busy fighting, drinking and talking.

She squeezed his hand in thanks; then felt ashamed that so far her concern had been only for themselves. “How was the poor girl killed? Was it an intruder or someone?”

“The police said she'd been shot, it looked as if it was from a neighbouring building.”

“Did you and—did she go to the flat regularly?”

“Fairly regularly—up till I met you.”

“Did she have a husband or a boy-friend?”

He looked at her with admiration; he was recovering his composure. “You would make a good detective.”

She hadn't meant to sound like that. “You don't want me playing detective—there'll be enough of the real ones. You should have told them the truth right from the start. In the long run it's always best.”

“You don't believe that.” He was gently cynical for the moment. “Not with a husband in politics. This is the same, darling. There are always cover-ups in politics. I was trying to cover up on you.”

So far she had felt little fear; she was more concerned for the situation he had got himself into by his lying to protect her. Six months ago she would have laughed at the idea that she would be having a passionate clandestine affair with a man who was hated, even despised, more than he was admired. She was forty-five years old and a grandmother, even if only recently. True, she was still beautiful in face and figure, thanks to Jane Fonda's videos and her own genes; her parents, in their late sixties, were still a handsome enough pair to look good even in the candid camera shots on the social pages. She was intelligent, could be witty, if sometimes waspish, and always rated in the top five of the list of Most Popular Women of the Year. She was married to the most popular prime minister in decades, a man who fitted perfectly into the Image, a quality that, his minders told her, was the most necessary qualification for today's leaders. She had two children, one of whom had fled the Image of his father and was now working in a merchant bank in London, the other married to a doctor and living in the Northern Territory, where the Image never penetrated; she had two grandchildren, both too young to know what an Image was even
when
it interrupted their cartoons on television. She was moral and decent and had taken seriously her task of trying to set an example. Then she had met Brian Boru, the last man she would have thought she would fall for, and had stepped off a cliff.