Jon Cleary - Endpeace

‘Thanks,’ said Malone drily and pressed the button to go back upstairs again.

Clements was waiting for him. ‘What’d he have to say?’

‘The usual. We tread carefully about the family.’

Clements bit his lip. ‘What d’you think? One of them did it?’

Malone took his time. ‘I dunno. An amateur wouldn’t take the time to collect the cartridge shell. But you never know – TV shows you how to do everything, including commit murder ... I’d like to see the family lined up all together. I still haven’t met the grandkids. I gather they’re all old enough to have pulled a trigger. I’m going out there, see if I can round up one or two of them. You want to come?’

Clements shook his big head. Since he had become the Unit Supervisor, had had to assume more paperwork, he appeared to have lost his once-habitual unhurried approach. The re-organization in Homicide had not worked quite the way the planners had planned it, but that has been the way of the world since ivory towers were first built and graphs took the place of commonsense.

‘I’ve got too much to do here. You should be here, too,’ he said almost critically. ‘You’re supposed to be the Co-ordinator.’

‘I’m the most unco-ordinated bastard you ever met,’ said Malone, remembering his loose tongue.

He picked up his hat and left. Downstairs Kate Arletti was crossing the lobby towards the front doors. ‘Where are you heading, Kate?’

‘Out to Vaucluse, sir. I’m going to talk to that under-gardener, Harod or whatever his name is.’

‘Cancel your transport. You can come with me.’ He had a police car of his own, unmarked, but he did not like driving if he could persuade someone else to drive him. One of the advantages was that he never had a parking problem. ‘You can drive.’

They left Strawberry Hills and drove towards the far eastern suburbs, the city changing gradually as they drove, housescapes merging into housescapes, fresco secco into buon fresco , till at last they reached Huxwood Road, still cordoned off by a police barrier with a uniformed officer there to allow only residents and tradesmen past the barrier. Yesterday morning’s crowd had gone but Malone noticed that in several houses owners and their guests were having morning coffee on the front verandahs, some even out on their front lawns under large umbrellas. Curiosity was endemic, not just a disease amongst the lower classes.

Malone paused as he and Kate Arletti got out of the car. ‘Kate, you heard what Chief Superintendent Random said – don’t lean too heavily on the family. You’re developing a thing about them.’

‘Sorry, sir.’ She looked neat this morning, but it was still early in the day. She was in a linen dress with a matching jacket; there didn’t appear to be any buttons that could come undone or a sleeve unrolled. ‘It’s just –’

He didn’t move. ‘Go on, Kate. What’s on your mind?’

She looked away from him, at no place in particular. She reminded him of all the young actors in movies and television these days who, every time they were asked a question by another actor, looked off-screen as if their next line was written on some blackboard there. But Kate Arletti had obviously been chewing over her lines for the past two days; she looked back at him, her jaw set:

‘The Chronicle ruined my father, killed him. He was Italian, you know that, he was much older than my mother. As a young man he was a Fascist, Mussolini was his hero, but once he came to Australia he put all that behind him. He started his own business, he was a job printer. Then he decided, after he’d become a citizen, to run for local government, the local council, he never stopped being political-minded. The Chronicle was doing a series on local government, the sort of people who ran for council aldermen. Alderpersons. Somehow they dug up Dad’s past, they really dug the dirt on him. All of it was true, I’ll admit, but it was past, dead and buried. They buried Dad with it, literally. He lost his business and then he committed suicide. I was ten years old, I was the one who found him -’ She stopped and looked away again, put up a hand to wipe away tears.

‘Kate –’ He waited till she looked back at him. ‘You’re off this case. I’m sorry.’

She shook her head angrily, almost like a child being denied. ‘No, sir! Please .’

‘Kate, you’re biassed –’

‘All police are biassed, we can’t help it-’ Then she broke off, drew a heavy breath. ‘Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean you-’

Less than an hour ago, Greg Random had suggested he might be less than disinterested. But it was true: it was a rare cop who could deny bias once he was into a case. Sometimes it was no more than a counter to bafflement, the effort to find an answer, any answer.

She was more in control of herself now: ‘This is my first big case, sir. I’ve made a mistake, but I think I can overcome it. Give me today. If you still think I’m biassed against the Huxwoods –’

‘It wasn’t the family who would have written that series.’

‘It was. I looked them up when I was older, when I understood what had gone on. The series was written by Derek Huxwood. The editorial that summed them up was written by Sir Harry, that was the most unfair of the lot. It wasn’t signed, but I found out who’d written it.’

There was silence between them. At the wide gates into the Huxwood estate Crime Scene tapes fluttered in the slight breeze, like the long tail of a child’s kite lost amongst the shrubbery. A kookaburra in a nearby jacaranda laughed hollowly; mynahs, the foreigners, instantly swooped on it and chased it away. On the opposite side of the road a woman paused in the act of pouring coffee for two guests and looked across at the man and the girl beside the unmarked car, looked at them, Malone thought, as if they were trespassers.

He nodded at Kate Arletti. ‘Righto, today’s your test. But if I see any –’

‘You won’t, sir. I promise. Thanks.’ She moved towards him and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him. But she went by him and ducked under the tapes. ‘The under-gardener or the family – who’s first?’

‘The under-gardener. Dwayne the Turk.’

Malone had never heard the term under-gardener before; he would have called the man the assistant gardener, if he called him anything. He could only surmise that it was an English term.

Dwayne Harod was short and slim and outgoing; hawk-faced but handsome, dark-skinned and dark-haired and in his early twenties. He was working amongst the roses when the two detectives approached him, having skirted the house and, so far, avoided any of the family.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard it on the radio yesterday morning. It sorta floored me.’ His accent was broad Australian; Anatolia was somewhere back in the memory mist of childhood. ‘I was pretty sick, anyway, I got this virus that’s been going around. Or maybe it’s an allergy, I dunno. That’d be a joke, eh? If I was allergic to flowers.’ He waved an arm; he was waist-deep in the last roses of summer. Long-stemmed blooms, already cut, lay on a sheet of plastic. ‘These are for inside the house. Lady Huxwood wants them, same as usual.’

‘We understand you’ve been here only two weeks, Dwayne. Is that your real name?’

He had a charming smile. ‘I give it to m’self when I was fifteen, sixteen. My old man named me Kemal. He was a great admirer of Kemal Atatürk. You heard of him?’

‘Vaguely.’ This seemed to be Old Dictators Week. Malone glanced at Kate Arletti, whose father had admired a dictator, but she was apparently ignorant of Kemal Atatürk. Malone only knew of the Father of modern Turkey because he had once spent a month unsuccessfully chasing two Turks who had killed a man in a botched bank robbery and who had somehow escaped the nets at airports and vanished back to Turkey. ‘Does Kemal mean anything?’