Babylon South. Jon Cleary
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that might be in it?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Fortague and smiled again.
Malone hesitated, wondering where to go next. He decided to lay his cards on the table, a hand that was almost blank. ‘Righto, I’ll tell you what we’ve found. A skeleton. No weapon. No shoes, which might have been the one item of clothing that would have survived the weather. All that was left, the only things to identify the body, were the signet ring and the briefcase. But it was empty.’
Fortague tapped his file without opening it. ‘I’ add those details later.’
‘Righto, now the 64,000-dollar question – what was in the briefcase?’
Fortague took his time, the smile now gone from his big rugged face. He looked faintly familiar and Malone suddenly remembered who he was, the odd name striking a bell. He had been one of the young university recruits who had sat in on this case at its beginning. He was now an old hand at intelligence, infected by the profession’s endemic suspicion of outsiders, especially other investigators.
At last he said, ‘I can’t tell you the specifics of what was in the briefcase – that’s classified. We know what he took home with him the previous Friday. It was all labelled top Secret.’
‘He took stuff like that home with him?’
‘He was an independent-minded man.’ Meaning: I would never do such a thing myself. ‘But 1 don’t mean to imply he was careless – nothing like that at all. He had his own way of working.’
‘What sort of man was he?’
‘Brilliant. A bit hard to get to know, but brilliant. He spoke French and German fluently and when he came to us started learning Chinese and Indonesian.’
‘What were his relations with the people he worked with in Melbourne?’
Fortague hesitated a moment. ‘I’ tell you something off the record. He was often impatient with the ex-military types who were then running our organization.’
Malone smiled, trying to make himself an ally. ‘Oh, I remember them. You probably don’t remember, but you and I met here in this office twenty-one years ago. We were both rookies.’
Fortague suddenly smiled again. ‘Of course! Christ – and we’ve both survived!’ He looked at Clements. ‘Are you one of the old hands, too. Sergeant?’
Clements nodded. ‘I thought the scars showed.’
All at once the atmosphere had changed. Fortague looked at his watch, then out of the window at a submarine, sinister as a black shark, gliding by from the base round the point. ‘The sun’s well over the yard-arm on that sub. What’s your choice?’
‘I think you’d better make it a beer,’ said Malone. ‘We don’t want to be picked up by the booze bus.’
‘I’ve had that happen to me twice,’ said Clements. ‘It’s been bloody embarrassing for us both, them and me.’
Fortague went to a cupboard and opened it, exposing a small fridge and two shelves of bottles and glasses. He poured a Scotch and two beers and came back with the drinks on a tray. They toasted each other’s health, then he sat down behind his desk again. He was all at once relaxed, but he had once more stopped smiling. ‘If Springfellow was murdered and the murderer took the papers that were in the briefcase … Why did he leave the briefcase?’
‘I’ve seen it,’ said Clements. ‘It’s his own, not government issue. His initials are on it. It’s an expensive one.’
‘That may have been the reason,’ said Malone. ‘My initials are S.M. If I’d stolen a briefcase with the initials W.S. on it, I wouldn’t carry it around with me.’
Fortague nodded. ‘Feasible. But what about his wallet?’
‘We’re assuming the murderer took that. But what if the body was found by someone who didn’t want to get in touch with us? there are a lot of elements out there who have no time for the police.’ Including the cast and crew of Sydney Beat. ‘I gather Springfellow was a pretty dandy dresser. His suits would have been pretty damn expensive – or they would have been by my standards.’ He dressed off the rack at Fletcher Jones; he was lucky that his clothes fitted him, because it was the price that had to fit him first. He would never make a tailor rich. ‘Someone could have stolen the clothes and the shoes.’
‘I can’t imagine anyone stripping a dead man and then leaving him to rot in the bush.’
Malone sipped his beer. ‘There are more animals out there than there are in the zoo. We come across at least one a week. Let’s forget about murder for a moment. Let’s say he committed suicide. So whoever took the papers and the wallet and maybe his clothes, he also took the gun.’
‘So that brings us back to taws,’ said Clements. ‘Why would he commit suicide?’
He and Malone looked at Fortague, but the ASIO man shook his head. ‘We asked ourselves that years ago. The answer was, he wouldn’t have done it. He wasn’t the type.’
Malone said, ‘What was the domestic situation?’
Fortague hesitated, took a sip of his own drink. He hated scandal, though sometimes his profession had to use it as a weapon. ‘We had no evidence that anything was wrong between him and his wife. But …’
Malone and Clements waited with that patience learned from experience.
‘But Lady Springfellow didn’t keep the home fires burning while he was away on business. I don’t know whether you know, but she has the reputation of being something of a man-eater. That’s not a late development. She was always like that.’
The two policemen were neither shocked nor impressed. They knew, with male certainty, that women were no more moral than men, just smarter in that fewer of them were caught. ‘Why did a sober, pillar-of-the-Establishment man like him marry someone like her?’ said Clements.
Malone knew the answer. Adam hadn’t followed Eve out of the Garden of Eden because God had told him to go. Forget the apple: there’s no temptation like a sinful woman.
‘Search me,’ said Fortague and looked like a man who had gathered no intelligence at all about love or lust or whatever one called it.
‘1 think we’ll go and see Lady Springfellow,’ said Malone.
‘I suppose you have to follow it through?’
‘You don’t want to know what happened to your Director-General?’
‘Of course. But you know what it’s like in our game – the less publicity …’
‘That’s why you won’t show us what’s in that file?’
‘It’s not my decision. That came from Canberra.’
‘From Cabinet or ASIO headquarters?’
‘Ah,’ said Fortague and this time the smile was forced. ‘That’s classified, I’m afraid.’
2
Chilla Dural sat alone in his room in the rooming-house in the side-street off William Street. He had come back to King’s Cross because that had been his departure point when he had begun the journey to the twenty-three years in Parramatta Gaol. It had not been a matter of coming home but of coming back to something recognizable, a landmark from which he could plan the direction of the rest of his life. In the old days he had been able to afford a two-bedroomed flat up in Macleay Street; now, at what he could afford to pay, the estate agent had told him, he was lucky to get this room in this seedy side-street. Inflation, amongst other things, was going to blur what had once been so familiar.
He sat on the single bed, his opened suitcase beside him. It was not a large case and in it was everything he owned in the world except his bank balance and he had no idea what that was. He took out the framed photograph of his wife and two children, the woman and