Jon Cleary - A Different Turf

‘All right with me, Billy.’ He looked around at the casualties, then at the man on the gurney. ‘But you look as if you’re already having a busy night.’

‘And it’s only eight-thirty.’ Billy Logan was a wiry middle-aged man with close-cropped sandy hair and a lined face that could have been a mask; he had once told Malone that it was the only face he could wear on duty. ‘It’s starting to wear me down, this job. It’s about time I applied for promotion and got into administration.’

‘The feller over there, what happened to him?’

‘You know him?’

‘His name’s Bob Anders, he helped me on a case once. He’s with – or he was, maybe still – the Securities Commission. He’s one of their investigators.’

‘A-N-D-E-R-S?’ The medic turned back to the nurse, gave her the name; then he turned back to Malone. ‘He was bashed in Oxford Street about half an hour ago. A bit early in the night, they usually don’t go around bashing ’em till later.’

‘They?’

‘He’s gay, isn’t he? This time they rolled him as well, took his wallet. That’s why we had no identification. Poor bugger.’ He looked across at Anders, then back at Malone. ‘But there’s gunna be a job for you, I’d say. The kid leading the bashers, he was shot’

‘Dead?’

‘The third in two months. Looks like you’ve got a serial killer. Or a gay vigilante. Depends which way you look at it.’

2

Sunday morning Malone went to Mass with Lisa and the children. Lisa appeared to pay attention to the sermon, but Malone and the children all had the blank expressions of minds that were elsewhere. The sermon was based on a letter of St Paul to the Ephesians; Paul, whom Malone considered one of the Great Know-Alls, was not one of the family’s favourites. Malone often idly wondered if anyone from Ephesus ever wrote back. Did an Ephesian ever come in from his mailbox and grumble to his wife, ‘More bloody junk mail’? Such thoughts enabled him to get through a dull sermon.

Coming out of Mass his pager beeped. ‘Oh, God,’ said Maureen; and Lisa, Claire and Tom all rolled their eyes. There were disadvantages to being the family of an inspector, the Co-ordinator in charge of Homicide. There were, of course, advantages: seventy thousand plus dollars a year, good superannuation, the occasional chance that one might be a hero, a surviving one, that is. Yet, for all their complaints, Malone knew that none of them would want him to be anything else but a Homicide detective. Not so long as it was his own sole desire, which it was. Even though he could never fully explain to himself why.

In the church car park he unlocked the car and they all got in. It was a new car – his first in ten years – a Fairlane this time instead of the Holden Commodore he had driven for so long. It had hurt him to go out and buy the new car; he was not a car man, a petrolhead, and any vehicle that continued to go without falling apart was good enough for him. But the family, pleading social disgrace, had finally prevailed. And now they had the new car, complete with car phone.

Detective-Senior-Constable John Kagal was at Strawberry Hills. ‘I was beeped to come in, sir. Surry Hills wants us to come in with their task force on the guy who’s killing the gay-bashers.’

‘Did you know your friend Bob Anders was bashed last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Righto, I’ll be in.’ He hung up, cutting short any further discussion. He always tried to keep police business, especially murder, as remote from the family as possible. ‘Sorry. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ll meet you for lunch – where are we going?’

‘Doyles at Watson’s Bay,’ said Lisa. ‘If you’re not there, I’ll charge it to the Commissioner.’

‘I love you four. I read about a family like you. The Borgias.’

‘They’d have finished you off right quick.’ Claire was twenty, as goodlooking as her mother and as serene.

‘Can I come with you?’ Tom was going on fifteen, almost six feet tall and broad with it; Malone hoped that his son might be a better fast bowler than he himself had once been. He saw more to laugh at in the world than either of his sisters, but he was not careless of its traps. ‘I won’t get in your way.’

‘You can come with me the day you join the Service.’

‘Oh, God.’ Maureen was seventeen, more vivacious than the rest of them, a happy cynic who was beginning to trouble her father. ‘Two of them in the family! Big Cop and Little Cop.’

Malone left the car with them and caught a taxi into Strawberry Hills. The glass-fronted building had once been a mail-sorting exchange, notorious for its union troubles, but now it housed an administration section of Australia Post and several Police Service units, including Homicide. The ghosts of union organizers still wandered the building, depressed by all the peace.

John Kagal was waiting for him, as immaculate and handsome as ever. He was dressed this morning in a blue cotton skivvy, well-cut navy blazer, grey slacks and black loafers. Lately he had adopted the fashionable haircut of Hugh Grant, but his eyes were too shrewd for the floppy, little-boy look. He was masquerading, but Malone felt that was his natural pose. He did his best to like the younger man, but something always intruded on his good intentions. Perhaps it was Kagal’s slightly superior air, the knowledge that he had two university degrees and nobody else in Homicide had even one; perhaps it was that he had been to one of the more expensive private schools, that somewhere in his background was a family with money. Though he rarely, if ever, spoke of them. He was intensely private and that did not mesh with the police culture.

‘Garry Peeples at Surry Hills asked us to come in.’ It was typical of Kagal that he named rank only for chief inspectors and above; his own rank, or lack of it, seemed to trouble him. Peeples, Malone remembered, was a senior-sergeant in charge of detectives at Surry Hills. ‘He seemed to think that the killings are getting out of hand.’

‘Righto, let’s get over there. Anyone else in here today?’ Homicide did not run a duty officer at night and weekends, but there were always three detectives on call should local command detectives need them.

‘Kate is coming in, just in case we need her.’

Kate Arletti was one of two women members of Homicide, a girl who held her own against the chauvinism, repressed but still occasionally visible, in the seventeen-men-plus-two-women unit. She and Kagal got on well together, often working as partners, and Malone had begun to suspect mere might be something more than police work going on between them. So long as they didn’t start holding hands in the office, he didn’t mind. That was one of his standards.

On the way over to Surry Hills in an unmarked police car, Malone said, ‘I saw Bob Anders last night at St Sebastian’s. I was there saying hello to Russ’s new daughter.’

‘They both well, the baby and Dr Clements?’ Malone had noticed in the past that Kagal always gave Romy her rank.

‘Thriving. Your friend wasn’t. He looked badly bashed up.’

Kagal nodded. ‘I saw him first thing this morning. The bastards did a job on him. But he got one of them.’

‘Who? Bob Anders? He did the shooting?’

‘No, no. The killer. Or killers. There have been three in the past two months and there was one last year when we were working on the Huxwood case.’

‘Why weren’t we called in before this?’ But he knew why. There was nothing so sacred as a patrol commander’s turf; it was the civilized version of the animal kingdom’s territorial imperative. ‘No, don’t tell me. Let’s try and look like guests.’

Surry Hills police station was part of the complex known as Police Centre, a fortress-like building presumably designed to let the voters know that the police had a fortress-like mentality. A recent royal commission into police corruption, however, had shown that cracks were appearing in the mental fortress.