‘You think Jack had him done in?’
‘I hope not.’
He did not want to take on the biggest crim in the country, not if Scungy Grime had been Jack Aldwych’s calling card left on the doorstep of the Malone home.
3
He and Clements drove over the Harbour Bridge and out to Harbord, one of the closest of the northern beaches. The main road was clogged with holiday traffic. The northern beaches were supposed to be cleaner than the beaches south of the harbour, the sewage spill apparently knowing where the fortunate northerners swam and obligingly avoiding them. So people came from the south and the west and piddled in the northern waters and everyone cursed the Water Board and the government for not doing their job. The sun blazed down and everyone was slowly dying of sun cancer, but what better way was there to spend a hot summer holiday?
The air-conditioning in Clements’ car suddenly stopped working. Clements, patience exhausted as he halted for the fifth time in a traffic jam, reached for the blue light that he wasn’t supposed to carry in his private vehicle, put it on the roof and blared his horn. At once two youths jumped out of a stolen car and ran off down a side street and half a dozen other drivers looked guilty, wondering if they had been chased all this way for breaking the speed limit over the Bridge. Clements pulled his Nissan out on to the wrong side of the road and drove down against the oncoming traffic.
‘You’re going to get us booked for this,’ said Malone. ‘I’ll tell ’em you did it against my express orders.’
‘Tell ’em I went mad with the heat. Hello, we’ve got company.’
Up ahead a motorcycle cop, straddling his bike, was waiting for them directly in their path. Clements pulled up, got out and approached the officer. He was back in less than a minute.
‘Righto, what bull did you feed him this time?’ said Malone.
‘I told him the truth – or anyway, half of it. I said a dead man had been dumped in your pool and we had to get to the chief suspect before he packed up and fled the country. Hang on!’
‘You mention Jack Aldwych’s name?’
‘Who else? It’ll make that motorcycle cop’s day. Better than picking up mug lairs exceeding the speed limit.’
‘You’re exceeding it. What if he radios Manly and we get half their strength as back-up?’
‘I told him we’d already called Manly.’
Half-truths are weapons police and criminals use against each other; they have learned from the black-belt masters, the lawyers. Malone hoped that the motorcycle cop up ahead, siren now screaming, showed a sense of humour when he learned the full truth.
The motorcycle cop took them out of the main stream of traffic, through side streets, and within five minutes brought them, his siren still screaming, to the front gates of Jack Aldwych’s mansion. It was a big two-storeyed house with verandahs right round it on both levels. It had been built at the turn of the century by a circus-owning family and it was said that the ghosts of acrobats still tumbled around the grounds at night and a high-wire spirit had been seen flying across the face of the moon. Ghosts didn’t protect Jack Aldwych, just a black-haired minder built like a small elephant.
He stood inside the big iron-barred gates, shaking his head at Malone and Clements. ‘Mr Aldwych aint here. No, I dunno I can tell you where he is, he don’t like being disturbed.’
Clements said, ‘Would he be disturbed if we ran you in?’
‘What fucking for?’
‘Swearing at an officer. Come on – Blackie Ovens, isn’t it? You better tell us where we can find him or we’re gunna camp here till he comes home. It’ll lower the tone of the neighbourhood. Jack wouldn’t like that.’
Ovens pondered, then shrugged. ‘Geez, youse guys are hard. Okay, he’s out at the Cricket Ground. He’s got a private box in the Brewongle Stand.’
‘He’s a cricket fan?’ Malone’s voice cracked with surprise.
‘Nuts about it. I’ll tell him you’re coming.’ He unhitched a hand-phone from his belt. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll wait for you. He wouldn’t leave a cricket match even to see the Police Commissioner bumped off.’ He grinned to show he was only joking; the three officers stared back at him. ‘Sorry.’
As Malone and Clements got back into the Nissan, the motorcycle cop, already astride his machine, eased in beside them. ‘So you were afraid the chief suspect was gunna split overseas? He’s out at the cricket! Next time you come over this side of the harbour, go through the proper fucking channels!’
He roared off and Clements looked at Malone. ‘They’re not very polite this side of the harbour, are they?’
‘What are you going to do, pull rank on him? Forget it. We asked for it and we got it. Take me out to the Cricket Ground and then go on out to my place and see if they’re finished there. Lisa wants everyone out by this evening. Make sure she gets what she wants.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Rustle up someone and send him down to talk to that caretaker at Scungy’s flats. Get him to talk to the other people in Scungy’s block.’
‘What if he just died of a heart attack or something?’
‘I still want the bastard who dumped him in my pool. Maureen was shivering when she came in to tell me she’d found him. What are you doing?’
Clements was getting out of the Nissan. ‘I don’t run to a car-phone, I’ve just got the radio connected to Police Centre.’
He went back to the gates, spoke to Blackie Ovens, who handed him his hand-phone. Clements punched a number, waited, then spoke into the mouthpiece. Malone was too far away to hear whom he was calling or what was being said. Then Clements handed the phone back to Ovens and came back to the car.
‘I just called Romy Keller. She thinks Scungy was poisoned. It looks as if you’re gunna get your murder after all.’
When Clements dropped Malone at the Cricket Ground people were still queuing to get into the ground. Malone flashed his badge at the attendants on the turnstiles into the Brewongle Stand, but his name meant nothing to them. He had played for the State on this ground twenty years ago, but these men would have been only boys then and he had never been big enough to be a boyhood hero. He went up in the lift to the floor where the private boxes were situated, flashed his badge again at the floor attendant, an older man who remembered him, and knocked on the door of the suite marked Saltbush Investments. It was opened by a waiter in a white jacket, whose small thin face went whiter than the jacket when he saw Malone.
‘Hello, Larry. You do a waiter’s course last time you were inside?’
‘G’day, Inspector.’ Larry Quick gave his con man’s smile. ‘You wanna see me or Mr Aldwych?’
‘The boss. I think he might be expecting me. Didn’t he get a phone call?’
‘Yeah, but he doesn’t always tell me everything.’
Malone followed Quick through the small private lounge and out to the seats on the balcony. Jack Aldwych, tall and heavily built, broad-brimmed white panama on his silver hair, regal in a cannibal chief way, sat there alone.
‘Inspector Malone.’ His dead wife Shirl, a respectable woman, had taught him to be polite; it was an effort, but occasionally he succeeded. ‘I got a message you were on your way. Come to see the match? You must wish you were out there now, eh?’
Malone looked out at the famous ground, a bright green lake surrounded by cliffs of stands speckled, as if with the child’s decoration of hundreds and thousands, with the huge crowd’s colours. In the middle two Australians, in green