Jon Cleary - Murder Song

‘There’s a black fox coat, dyed, I think, in the main bedroom,’ said Clements.

‘How do you know so much about dyed fox coats?’

‘I bought one once that fell off the back of a truck. For my mum.’

Malone looked down again at Mardi Jack, then drew the sheet back over her. ‘How long’s she been dead?’

Clements glanced at the government medical officer, who had come in from the kitchen, where he had just made himself a cup of coffee. ‘How long, doc?’

‘Thirty-six hours, maybe a bit more. Saturday night, I’d say.’ The GMO was a man who looked ready to burst from years of good living; belly, cheeks, chins all protruded and his breath wheezed out of a fat throat. Malone often wondered why Doc Gilbey had chosen an area where most of the corpses he examined were at ankle-height. One day the GMO, bending down, was going to collapse and die on top of one of the bodies. ‘Just the one bullet in her, right into her heart, I’d say. A lucky shot. It’s still in the body.’

‘Let me know when you’ve sent it on to Ballistics.’

Gilbey slurped his coffee. ‘They’ll have it today.’

The small apartment was becoming crowded; two men from the funeral contractors had arrived to join the Crime Scene men, the girl photographer and the two uniformed officers. Malone pulled back one of the glass doors and stepped out on to the balcony, jerking his head for Clements to follow him.

‘What have you got so far?’

‘Bugger-all.’ Clements bit his bottom lip, an old habit. He was a big, plain-looking man, a couple of inches taller than Malone and almost twenty kilos heavier. He was a bachelor, afraid of commitment to a woman but envying Malone his comfortable family life. He was mildly bigoted and racist, but kindly; he could complain sourly about too many Asians being allowed into the country, then tenderly, if awkwardly, console a Vietnamese woman who had lost her son in a gang battle. At that he was no more complex than Malone and sixteen million other Australians, including the Asian-born.

‘Who found her?’

‘The cleaning lady.’ Clements belonged to that class which thought that to call a woman a ‘woman’ was demeaning to her; it was another manifestation that contradicted the native myth that Australians did not believe in class distinction. ‘I’ve interviewed her and let her go home. She’s a Greek, a bit excitable about dead bodies.’

‘So am I. I don’t like them. You talk to anyone else?’

‘I’ve got a coupla the uniformed guys going through the building. So far they haven’t brought anyone up here.’

‘The flat belong to her?’ Malone nodded in at the corpse, now being covered in a green plastic shroud.

‘No, it’s a company flat. There’s some notepaper and envelopes in a desk inside. Kensay Proprietary Limited. Their offices are in Cossack House in Bridge Street. She had a key, though.’

Malone, raincoat collar turned up against the wind coming across the western reaches of the harbour, looked out at the buildings surrounding them; then he looked at the bullet hole in the glass door. ‘A high-powered rifle?’

‘I’d bet on it. I don’t think anyone would have been standing here and shot her through the glass. There’s a lot of dust and dirt here on the balcony – looks like the cleaning lady doesn’t come out here in winter. There’s no sign of any footmarks.’

Malone looked down at the marks his own and Clements’ shoes had made. Then he looked out again at the neighbouring buildings. ‘Where do you reckon the shot came from?’

‘Over there.’ Clements pointed at a block of offices in Kent Street, the next street west. ‘He’d have had an ideal spot there on that flat roof. It’s about a hundred and fifty metres away, no more. If he was experienced, with a good gun and a night ’scope, she’d have been an easy target.’

‘Righto, send for Andy Graham, get him to do the donkey work, tell him to search that roof and next door to it for any cartridge cases. Stay here till he turns up. I’m going out to Paddington, see if there’s anyone there to tell the bad news to.’

‘Better you than me.’

‘Some day you’re going to have to do it.’ I just hope to Christ you don’t have to tell the bad news to Lisa .

He left Clements, went down in the lift with the two men from the funeral contractors and the body of Mardi Jack. The lift wasn’t big enough to take the stretcher horizontally and one of the men was holding Mardi Jack in his arms as if she were a drunken dancer.

‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ he said over the green plastic shoulder to Malone. ‘The bloody service lift isn’t working. I guess it’s gunna be one of them weeks.’

‘At least you’re still breathing,’ said Malone.

The man, tall and painfully thin, a living cadaver, wasn’t offended; his trade brought more abusive jokes than even a policeman’s lot. ‘Sometimes I wonder who’s better off,’ he said and looked reproachfully at the shrouded corpse as if Mardi Jack had missed a crucial step in their dance.

Malone went out into Clarence Street, pushing through the small crowd that had stopped to see why an ambulance was double-parked in the busy street. There were also two TV vans double-parked behind it; a cameraman aimed his camera at Malone, but he shook his head and put a hand up to his face. Two reporters came at him, but he just smiled and said, ‘See Sergeant Clements, he’s in charge,’ and dodged round them.

There were two parking tickets on the Commodore; the Grey Bombers, the parking police, must be making blanket raids this morning. He lifted them off, stuck them under a windscreen wiper of one of the TV vans, got into the car and pulled out into the traffic. He glanced in his driving mirror as he drove away and saw the body of Mardi Jack, now on the stretcher, being pushed into the ambulance.

The start of another week, another job. He wondered how senior men felt in Traffic or Administration each Monday morning. But even as he drove towards that aspect of murder he always hated, the telling of the dreadful news to the victim’s family, he knew he would always prefer people to paper. The living and the dead were part of him.

2

Goodwood Street was a narrow one-way street lined on both sides by narrow-fronted terrace houses. Paddington in the last century had been a mix of solid merchants’ houses and workmen’s cottages and terraces; perched on a ridge, the merchants and one or two of the workmen had had a distant view of the harbour, but most of the citizens had just stared across the street at each other, not always the best of sights, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the drunks came rolling home. Then in the twenties and thirties of this century it had become almost solely a working man’s domain, the narrow houses crowded with large families, constant debt and a solid Labour vote. In the last twenty years it had been invaded by artists moving closer to the wealthy buyers of the eastern suburbs, by writers who weren’t intellectual enough for Balmain and by yuppies turning the terrace houses into shrunken mansions. Houses with sixteen-foot frontages now brought prices that would have kept the families of years ago for a lifetime. It was another turn of the wheel in the history of any city that manages to survive.

Malone had to park again in a No Standing zone; the Commodore, in a year, collected more parking tickets than it did bird-crap. He knocked on a bright yellow door in a dark green house; the iron lacework on the upstairs balcony was painted white. As he was about to knock for the third time the door was opened by a girl in a terry-towelling dressing-gown; she had frizzled yellow hair and sleep in her eyes. She blinked in the morning sun.

‘Yeah, what is it?’ She had all the politeness of someone who hated her sleep being disturbed, even at ten o’clock in the morning.