Jon Cleary - The Easy Sin

Clements stood up slowly, as if his joints had set. ‘You’re not very sympathetic, are you?’

‘You said yourself you were greedy. What do you want me to do – bless you?’

‘I’ll be glad when you move out.’

Malone hummed, ‘You gonna miss me, honey, when I’m gone –’

They grinned at each other. The glue of friendship still held fast.

I’m gunna take half an hour off and duck over to see Romy.’

‘You’re going to give her the bad news in the morgue?’

Romy was the Deputy-Director of Forensic Medicine in the State Department of Health and second-in-charge at the City Morgue. She earned more than Clements and, like Lisa, kept an eye on household accounts.

I wanna get it off my chest.’

‘Good luck. I’ve got two females to interview, Magee’s girlfriend and his wife. Do I toss up?’

‘Take the girlfriend. She’ll always tell you more than a wife.’

They grinned at each other again, further glued by domestic chauvinism.

As Clements left, Malone saw Kagal and Sheryl Dallen come into the main office. He signalled them and they came in and sat down opposite him. They had no look of excitement on their faces.

‘Mr Todorov doesn’t think much of the New South Wales Police Service,’ said Kagal.

‘Or any police service,’ said Sheryl Dallen. I just wonder whose side he was on back in Bulgaria.’

Though not a lesbian or a man-hater, she always had reserved opinions about men. She was attractive without any distinguishing good looks, except that she always looked so healthy; she worked out three times a week at a gym and was on first-name terms with every muscle in her body. Just looking at her sometimes made Malone tired.

‘He doesn’t seem too upset by what happened to his girlfriend,’ said Kagal. ‘He’s already asking if he can claim worker’s compensation for her murder.’

Kagal always added distinction to the office. But his looks, his sartorial elegance compared to Malone and Clements, never hid the fact that, like Sheryl Dallen, he was a bloody good detective.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ said Malone. ‘Could he have had a hand in the kidnapping? Things went wrong when his girlfriend somehow got her skull bashed in?’

‘Maybe,’ said Sheryl, ‘but it’s a long shot. But we’ll put him on the list. Do we put surveillance on him?’

‘Let The Rocks do that.’ Never deprive another command of work. ‘Has the maid got any relatives?’

‘In the Philippines. We’re trying to get in touch with them.’

The paperwork of murder: ‘Try and unload that on The Rocks, too. In the meantime keep looking for Mr Magee. Though he’s ostensibly been kidnapped, he’s our Number One suspect for the moment. Unless you’ve got another candidate?’

They shook their heads, got up and left his office. He sat a while, trying to stir up energy and enthusiasm; suddenly he was in limbo. Was this what promotion did to you? He remembered that Greg Random, though a melancholy man at the best of times, had once told him that his devotion to police work had evaporated the day he had been promoted out of Homicide. Maybe there was a rung in the ladder of upward mobility (where had that phrase gone to?) where your foot found a natural resting place, where you really didn’t want to go any higher. But then (and he had seen it happen too often) there was the danger of growing fat and lazy on that rung.

He stirred himself, reached for his phone and called Detective-Constable Decker at The Rocks station. ‘Inspector Malone, Constable.’ He was always formal with officers from someone else’s command; he expected the same treatment for his own officers by other commanders. ‘What’s with Miss Doolan?’

I left her with her sister, sir, out at Minto. Macquarie Fields are keeping an eye on her, Minto is in their area. Any progress at your end, sir?’

‘No.’ Was she keeping score? Or was he becoming sensitive in his late middle age? I’m going out to see Miss Doolan now. I’ll keep you up to date.’

‘You want me to come with you, sir? I think I built up some rapport with her.’

He hesitated, then said, ‘No. I’ll be in touch, Constable.’

‘Yes, sir.’

It was always the same, the territorial imperative, the defence of one’s own turf. David Attenborough should bring the BBC Science Film Unit down here to study the wildlife in the NSW Police Service. Beginning with ageing bulls …

He had no sooner put down the phone than it rang: ‘Scobie? Sam Penfold. Norma has been back to the Magee apartment, something about the computers worried her.’ He paused: Physical Evidence were becoming actors.

‘Get on with it, Sam. Forget the dramatic pauses, I get enough of that on TV.’

One could almost imagine Penfold’s grin at the other end of the line. ‘Just effect, mate, that’s all. Norma looked again at the keys on the computers, all of ‘em. On all the keys the prints were the same – we surmise they were Magee’s own. Evidently no one but him used the computers. On the keys that tapped out the ransom note, on all the computers, there were no prints or they were smudged. As if he’d worn gloves. Did he have something wrong with his hands, dermatitis or something?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Sam. I’ll ask Miss Doolan. I should imagine it’s not easy to type with gloves.’

‘Unless they were thin gloves. Surgical gloves. Ask Miss Doolan if he ever wore those.’

‘Righto, Sam, thanks. You fellers take care of Norma. She’s useful.’

‘Some women are. Don’t quote me.’

Malone took Sheryl Dallen with him out to Minto. She drove and he sat beside her, his feet as usual buried in the floorboards. He was not a car man; he had never envied Inspector Morse his Jaguar or that American detective of long ago who rode around in a Rolls-Royce. All travellers have attitudes; in a car his was nervousness. Sheryl drove as he imagined she exercised, purposefully and keeping her pulse rate up; and his. They talked of everything but the case, as if to mention it would sully the shining day through which they drove. Summer was going out like a fading benediction.

It was a long drive, almost fifty kilometres, on roads clogged with traffic. Heavy vehicles bore down on them like ocean liners; speed-hogs, driving not their own but company cars, sidestepped in front of them without warning. Sheryl swore at them and Malone buried his feet deeper in the floorboards.

They passed a military camp, strangely deserted but for a squad of soldiers marching stiff-legged to nowhere, training for wars not yet declared. A tank rolled without warning out into the road before them, right in the path of an oncoming 10-ton freight truck. Malone sat up, waiting for the coming crash, but somehow the two leviathans managed to avoid each other.

‘Pity,’ said Sheryl and drove on.

Minto lies in what was once rolling farm and orchard country. It was first settled almost two hundred years ago and only in the last fifty years has it grown to being a populated suburb of the nearby small city of Campbelltown. Its name was another example of the crawling, sucking-up, brown-nosing, call it what you will, that distinguished the early colonists. In 1808 officers of the New South Wales Corps, rum-runners that the Mafia would have welcomed as Family, deposed Governor William Blight and assumed control of the colony themselves. Then they decided they had better curry some favour with someone in authority. They chose to nominate the Earl of Minto, the nearest high-ranking British official, as patron of the new settlement south of Sydney. That Minto was Viceroy of India, was 7500 miles from Sydney and hadn’t a clue what went on below the Equator, didn’t faze the crawlers. They knew an easy target when they heard of one; they were years ahead of the traps of mobile phones and e-mail and faxes. That a settlement of less than forty people was named, supposedly as an honour, after a man viceroy to 200 million was a joke that nobody spread.