Babylon South. Jon Cleary
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who were wary but not cool.
‘You must be glad that’s over,’ said Dircks, stating the obvious yet again. As axeman, he would have told Anne Boleyn the same thing.
‘It’s not over, is it, Venetia?’ said Broad solicitously.
‘Not really. Did you sleep well last night?’
‘No. I don’t know what we’re going to do about your sister-in-law.’ He looked worried, even slightly creased. ‘Did you look at the messages this morning?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve had this—’ she waved a hand back at the vault ‘– on my mind.’
‘The New York market crashed last night, five hundred and eight points. That means the local market will go down today.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s probably already started.’
‘Jesus, of course!’ Dircks looked at his own watch; the dead man was forgotten, he had never known him anyway. ‘We’d better be going. We’ll call you later, Venetia. Nice funeral.’
He moved off, not waiting for Broad. The latter looked after him. ‘We’ll have to get rid of him. He’s bloody embarrassing. What do we do if the worst comes to the worst? I mean our share holdings?’
‘Call me as soon as you get back to the office and see what’s happening. Who knows? This may be our salvation. If prices do drop, we may be able to buy up enough to drop the bucket on Emma and Edwin.’
He looked at her admiringly, though there was still strain in his lean face. ‘You never give up, do you?’
‘Never.’
She turned away from him and pushed her way through the mulga scrub of polite hostility; these mostly elderly conservatives had never taken to her. She was surprised when she came face to face with a sincere, if restrained, smile. ‘John! Oh, it’s been so long—’
‘Hello, Venetia. I had to come – I felt it was time …’ John Leeds opened his hand in what, in a less self-contained man, might have been mistaken for a helpless gesture.
Once upon a passion she had been at the point of falling in love with this honest, conscience-stricken man. He seemed hardly to have changed, except for the grey in his hair and the few lines in the square-jawed face. He was as neat as she remembered him: everything about him was neat, including his pride and his conscience. It had been that in the end that had stopped her from falling completely in love. Someone else’s conscience was harder to live with than one’s own. Or was for her.
‘You’ve avoided me all these years. I looked for you at some of those official functions, but you always looked the other way.’
‘It was best, Venetia. I’ve been married for years – it’s been a happy marriage—’
She nodded, understanding; but half her lovers had been married men. She looked past him and saw Justine coming towards them. ‘You’ve never met my daughter, have you? Justine, this is John Leeds, the Commissioner of Police. He was an old friend of your father’s.’
‘His protégé,’ said Leeds. ‘He persuaded me to take a law degree, said it would help me in the Force. It did, so I have him to thank. Hello, Justine. I’m sorry we should meet on such an occasion.’
‘I never met my father. At least now I’ve met one of his old friends.’ She said it naturally, without any apparent effort to say the right thing. She was surrounded by her father’s old friends, but, as with her mother, they had never been hers. She liked this quiet, sober-faced man at once, aware that her mother, too, liked him. ‘We’re ready to go back to the house, Mother. Will you come, Mr Leeds?’
‘Unfortunately, I can’t.’ He watched her as she went off and Venetia watched him. ‘She’s a beautiful girl. Walter would have been proud of her.’
‘Would you have been?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘She could have been your daughter.’
‘Is she?’
But she didn’t answer that, merely said, ‘Why did you come, John? After all these years. Did you feel safe?’
‘Straight and to the point, still.’ He smiled, though it did not appear to come easily. ‘No, it’s you I’m concerned for.’
‘Me? Well, yes, I have some problems—’
‘The takeover? No, I didn’t mean that. You probably read about this man Dural who was released from prison a couple of weeks ago … I could have sent someone to warn you, but I thought I should come myself.’
‘Warn me?’
‘I looked up the reports on the case after Walter increased his sentence – I wasn’t on the case myself. He threatened he would some day kill Walter. It’s too late for that … The man’s a psycho, Venetia. He could switch his revenge to you. For some years he continued to rant against Walter while he was in gaol. I think you could do with some protection.’
‘Not police protection, John, please. The media would get on to it and that might only make this – this psycho worse.’ He had to admire how quickly her mind could see a problem. ‘I have my own security men. I’ll just double them. But thanks …’ She looked at him steadily. ‘That wasn’t the real reason you came, was it?’
‘No,’ he said after a long moment; an old love, no matter how fleeting it might have been, is hard to relinquish. He was happily married, had been for eighteen years, but one can’t help wondering what might have been. We create our personal mysteries, sometimes, out of nothing. ‘But there’s no answer, is there? Goodbye, Venetia. Take care.’ He meant there were more dangers for her than a vengeful psycho.
Venetia watched him as he departed, also wondering what might have been. He had been one of half a dozen lovers in that last year of her marriage, but he had been the only one with whom she wanted to lie after the love-making. That had always been her test of men. She sighed, then straightened herself and walked briskly across towards the Bentley.
‘Time to go,’ said Malone, still standing beside the distant grave.
‘Do you think the Commissioner saw us?’ Clements watched the Commissioner’s car drive off.
‘He saw us, all right. He never misses anything.’
‘So why was he here? That was a personal little talk he had with her ladyship.’ Clements, discreetly, had been using small binoculars to scan the crowd of mourners. ‘I wish I was a lip-reader.’
‘You might have read more than you wanted to know.’ Malone had the greatest respect for the Commissioner. He had cleaned out the Force and at last it also had regained some respect, from the voters.
‘Well, where do we go from here?’
‘I’ buggered if I know. I’ve got a feeling this one is going to go into The too Hard basket.’
They walked across to their unmarked car and drove away. Though he had had little hope of solving the case, Malone was disappointed. He had found himself wondering about Venetia Springfellow, what made her tick. He had seen the uses of power by powerful men; he wondered at its uses by a powerful woman. Most of all, he wondered about her as a woman. He would not mention his wonder to Lisa.
3
The driveway and the street outside were lined with cars: Mercedes, Jaguars, Volvos; the two or three small Japanese cars looked shamefaced, like queue jumpers. The security guard walked up and down them like a parking officer, frowning at the occasional passer-by who stopped to stare up at the Springfellow house.
Inside, Venetia glided amongst her guests. At last she came to a stop beside Edwin, whom she had once, for Walter’s sake, tried to like. It had not been easy.
‘It’s like old times,’ he said, doing his best to be friendly; he was not by nature an aggressive man. ‘So many