Jon Cleary - Endpeace

Strawberry Hills was the enticing name of the new location, though no strawberry had ever been grown there nor had it ever been really enticing. It had begun as clay-topped sandhills held together by blackbutts, blood-woods, angophoras and banksias, but those trees had soon disappeared as the men with axes arrived and development raised its ugly shacks. ‘Environment’, in its modern meaning, had just been adopted in England, but so far word, or the word, had not reached the colony. For years there was a slow battle between the sandhills and the houses built on them, but that did not stop a developer from naming his estate after the sylvan Strawberry Hill in England where Horace Walpole, in between writing letters to addressees still to be chosen, had built a villa that would never have got above foundation level if it had been built on the colony’s sandhills. Time passed and gradually Strawberry Hills, like the sandhills, virtually disappeared off maps. The city reached out and swamped it. A vast mail exchange was built where once tenement houses had stood, but though Australia Post could sort a million letters an hour it couldn’t sort out the industrial troubles in the exchange. Eventually the huge ugly structure was closed as a mail exchange, an impressive glass facade was added, as if to mask what a problem place it had been. Six huge Canary Islands date palms stood sentinel in the forecourt, looking as out of place as Nubian palace guards would have been. The winos across the street in Prince Alfred Park suffered the DTs for a week or two, but became accustomed to the new vista and soon settled back into the comfort of the bottle.

Australia Post moved its administrative staff back in and then looked around for tenants who would be less of a problem than its unions had been. Whether it was conscious of the irony or not, it chose the Major Crime Squad. Level Four in the refurbished building was almost too rich in its space and comfort for the Squad’s members, but it is difficult to be stoical against luxury. One of the pleasures for those in Homicide on night duty was to put their feet up on their brand-new desks, lean back and, on the Unit’s television set, watch re-runs of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue and pity the poor bastards who had to work in such conditions.

The morning after the Huxwood dinner Malone overslept, but, a creature of certain habits, he still went for his five-kilometre walk before breakfast. It was nine-thirty before he reached Homicide and let himself in through the security door. Russ Clements was waiting for him, looking worried.

‘You sick or something? I rang Lisa ten minutes ago -’

‘I’m okay. I knew there was nothing in the synopsis -’

‘There is now. Four murders in our Region alone, two in North Region’s. You and I are on our way out to Vaucluse –’

‘I’m not going out on any job. That’s for you –’

The big man shook his head. ‘I think you’d better come on this one, Scobie.’

Malone frowned. ‘Why?’

‘Lisa told me where you were last night. Malmaison House. That’s where we’re going. Kate Arletti’s out there waiting for us – I sent her out as soon as Rose Bay called in. It’s their turf, theirs and Waverley’s.’

‘A homicide at Malmaison?’ Lady Huxwood invites homicide . ‘Who? Lady Huxwood?’

Clements looked at him curiously. ‘What made you say that?’

‘Lisa and I were talking about her on our way home ... It was a bugger of a night, you’ve got no idea. She’s the – she was the Dragon Lady of all time.’

‘She probably still is. It was the old man, Sir Harry, who was done in.’

Malone managed not to look surprised. No one knew better than he that murder always held surprises, not least to the victim. But Sir Harry? ‘How?’

‘I’m not sure yet. Rose Bay called in, said there was a homicide, but gave no details other than that it was Sir Harry who copped it. The place is probably already overrun with the media clowns.’

‘What about the other murders?’

‘I’ve organized those. I’ll tell you about them on the way out to Vaucluse.’

Homicide had been re-organized late last year in another of the Service’s constant changes. Modern life, Malone thought, had been taken over by planners; they were everywhere, termites in the woodwork of progress. Change for change’s sake had become a battle cry: if it ain’t broke, let’s fix it before it does break. Malone was still the Inspector in charge of Homicide, but he was now called Co-ordinator and his job, supposedly, was now more desk-bound. Clements had been promoted to senior-sergeant and was now the Field Supervisor. Murder was still committed, evidence was still collected, the pattern never changed; only the paperwork. Malone knew that conservatism was creeping over him like a slow rash, but he didn’t mind. The itch, actually, was a pleasure.

The two detectives drove in an unmarked car out to the farthest of the affluent eastern suburbs. Vaucluse lies within the shoulder of the ridge that runs out to end in South Head at the gateway to the harbour; it is a small area facing down the harbour like a dowager gladly distant from the hoi polloi. The suburb is named after a property once owned by a titled convict who was as thick in the head as the timber that grew down the slope from the ridge. He built a small stone house and surrounded it with a moat filled with soil shipped out from the Irish bogs – ‘to keep out the snakes’. The area has had several notable eccentrics since then, but Sir Henry Brown Hayes had established the standard. The Wentworths, a family with its own quota of eccentrics, were the first to give the suburb its social tone, which it has never lost.

The first Huxwood arrived in 1838, bought five acres along the shore and built the first stage of what was to become La Malmaison. Huxwoods still owned the five acres, paying local taxes that exceeded the annual entertainment allowance of the entire local council. There were three houses on the estate, which had not been subdivided: the Big House, Little House One and Little House Two. Tradesmen, coming to the estate for the first time, had been known to expect fairies at the bottom of the extensive gardens and were surprised to find the family appeared to be both sensible and heterosexual.

Huxwood Road had been named by the founder of the family, determined to have his name on the map; in the 1840s, when he had suffered his first delusion of grandeur, it had been no more than a dirt track. Some years ago, Sir Harry, at the urging of his wife, had attempted to have the council change the name, insisting the family was not interested in advertising or being on any map. But Huxwood Road was now the street in Vaucluse, if not in Sydney, and the residents, having paid fortunes for the address, were not going to find themselves at a location that nobody would recognize. One didn’t pay thousands of dollars a year in taxes to live in Wattle Avenue or, God forbid, Coronation Street.

When Malone and Clements arrived, the street had gone down several hundred thousand dollars in rateable value, at least temporarily. It was chockablock with police cars, press and radio cars, TV vans and an assorted crowd of two or three hundred spectators, most of whom looked as if they had rushed here from nearby Neilsen Park beach. The street had not looked so low grade since the titled convict’s day. The snakes had taken over the Garden of Eden, Irish bog soil notwithstanding.

‘Christ Almighty,’ said Clements. ‘It looks like the finish to the City to Surf gallop.’

He nudged the car through the crowd, in through the wide gates of the estate and down the driveway to the front of the house. Several vehicles were parked there, including three police cars and a private ambulance. As Clements pulled up, another car came down the driveway behind them. Romy Clements got out.