Jon Cleary - A Different Turf

JON CLEARY

Cover

Title Page JON CLEARY

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘A typical woman,’ said Clements, but with affection. ‘You ask her a question in the dark and all she does is nod her head.’

‘If she doesn’t have a headache,’ said Lisa, ‘that’s all you need.’

‘Don’t be crude,’ said Malone. ‘Not in front of the b-a-b-y.’

It was hospital bedside chat, just another coverlet to keep the patient warm. Romy Clements, breast-feeding her day-old daughter, smiled at the three of them. She was a goodlooking, square-jawed woman, dark-haired and looking still a little peaked from what had been a difficult birth. She had insisted on a natural birth and had given the doctor the edge of her tongue when he had suggested a caesarean. She had wanted to tell him she knew all about pain, both mental and physical, but she did not have that kind of conceit. She had wondered, but not discussed it with the doctor or any of the mid-wives, if her aversion to the knife on her own body had something to do with the fact that, as Deputy-Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, she assisted in the use of the knife on bodies in the city morgue almost every day in the week.

‘Russ’, parents are coming up from Cootamundra tomorrow. Their first granddaughter.’

Clements explained: ‘My two sisters have five boys between them. Mum will be out of her mind with this one. It’s a pity—’ Then he abruptly shut up, tripping over his tongue.

Romy put out a hand to him. ‘It’s all right. As you say, it’s a pity my mother couldn’t have seen her. But …’ Her mother had been dead twelve years. No mention was made of her father, who had suicided after committing three murders. Malone, looking at the infant Clements, wondered how she would be protected against her heritage.

Clements was a big man, over six feet tall and weighing more than a hundred kilos. His forte was untidiness, though since his marriage to Romy two years ago there had been some improvement in his outward appearance. His mind, however, was a stuffed garbage bag; he could fossick in it and come up with a fact that nailed a piece of evidence to any number of courtroom walls. He was a senior-sergeant, the field supervisor in Homicide, Major Crime Squad, South Region, and some day he might make chief inspector. But he would go no further, he had left his run too late, and by then the Young Turks, with their tertiary education degrees and untainted by the old police culture, would be running the Service.

‘Have you decided on a name?’ asked Lisa Malone, who liked life to be neatly catalogued. She was Dutch, though she had spent very little of her life in Holland, and there was a Dutch neatness to her that Malone and their children gently derided, though they would not have wanted her any other way.

‘Russ wanted to call her Marlene. He has some idea that all German girls are called Marlene or Romy or Brunhilde. She’s going to be Amanda.’

‘She’ll be called Mandy,’ said Malone, who liked Amanda but not the diminutive.

‘No, she won’t,’ said the new mother and Malone knew Amanda Clements would never be called Mandy. Not if the child had her mother’s willpower.

‘The girls and Tom will be in to see you,’ said Lisa. ‘They are already looking on her as their cousin.’

Malone looked again at the new baby, tiny face pressed against its mother’s breast. He tried to remember his first sight of his own three, but couldn’t and felt a certain shame. A man should remember something like that; after all, he was partly responsible for their entry into this life. He did remember that at the time he had had no worries about them, not even for Tom, the youngest, now almost fifteen; when they had come into the world the future had still looked reasonably bright. Sure, Australia had been on the verge of a recession when Tom arrived, but the country had weathered earlier recessions and two Great Depressions, in the eighteen nineties and the nineteen thirties; the national anthem had always been She’ll Be Right, Mate and somehow things had always come right, mate. But now the new century was just round the corner of the calendar and the future was a mess of lines on a computer screen. Old certainties had been shattered and Malone had begun to worry now for Claire, Maureen and Tom. And, because of his love for Russ Clements and Romy, he would worry for Amanda.

‘Time we were going.’ He stood up. ‘Can I kiss your wife while she’s got her breast bared?’

‘I dunno,’ said Clements. ‘Ask your wife.’

As the Malones walked down the corridor of the hospital Lisa said, ‘I’m glad for Romy. Today she starts a new life.’

‘In more ways than one.’

‘That’s what I meant. She can forget her father now.’

‘I hope so. If she doesn’t, then her old life isn’t over.’

Lisa looked at him with love, put her hand in his. ‘There are things about you that still touch me. Don’t ever change.’

They were a handsome couple, though they never thought of themselves as such. He was tall and broad-shouldered and still reasonably presentable round the waist; he had the sort of face that, because it did not run to fat would look handsomer as he grew older. Lisa was of medium height tending towards tallness, which was accentuated by her upright carriage. She was better than merely goodlooking, but she had no vanity about it. She had kept her figure with diet and once-a-week aerobics; she ran a tight house and kept her husband and her children from ever being slobs. Appearance counted with her, but not for appearances’ sake. She just had, as Malone did, standards.

‘This way.’

Malone opened a door that led to a flight of stairs. Romy was in the private wing of St Sebastian’s, but Malone, ignoring the hospital’s underground garage, had parked the car in the doctors’ section outside the main general wing. Anything to save a dollar or two, Lisa had said, but had gone along with his parsimony. She had lived with it so long she had palpitations on the rare occasion when he splurged money.

The stairs ended at a door that opened into the reception area of the Emergency ward. It was Saturday night – Butchers’ Picnic Night, as Malone had heard one ambulance medic describe it – and the casualties had already begun arriving. A young boy with a broken arm; a motorcyclist who, helmetless, had gone through the windscreen of a car; a woman who had cut her wrists and was screaming she wanted to die: they stood, sat, lay in the waiting area like wreckage from Bosnia. Then, stretched out on an ambulance gurney, Malone saw a man he recognized, though his face was a bloody mess beneath the pads taped to it.

‘Just a minute,’ he told Lisa and stepped across to the Triage desk. He had once looked up the word triage : the act of assorting according to quality. He could only assume that its use was designed not to hurt the feelings of those who thought they deserved first attention, that no one was more damaged than they. An ambulance medic was giving details to me duty nurse.

He finished, turned round and pulled up when he saw Malone. ‘Scobie! How’re things?’