Endpeace

Sheila squinted, put her glasses back on; Custer held up his glass, as if looking for an answer in the half-inch of whisky still in it. Then he said, ‘We’d probably sell. Anything for fucking peace and quiet.’

‘Who told you the Press is for sale?’ said Sheila.

Malone stood up. ‘We’re not answering questions at this stage. Just asking them. I’ll be in touch.’

He made his own way out of the house, crossed the lawn again and went round to the east wall of the main house. The roses were there, as Sheila had said; and the latticework up the wall. The gardener was also there, the long-handled shovel he had brandished down on the shore now driven into the earth, a pair of secateurs in his hand. He looked at Malone: ‘Lady Huxwood wants fresh flowers in the house every day. You think I ought to, today?’

‘I wouldn’t. You’re –?’

‘Eh? Oh yeah.’ He appeared to look closely at Malone for the first time. ‘You’re one of the Ds?’

Malone introduced himself.

‘Oh sure, I’ve read about you a coupla times. You work for someone publishes a newspaper, you read it all the way through. Just in case you get a mention, even in the obituaries. It’ll be interesting to see what the Old Man’s obit says ... I’m Dan Darling. Or Darling Dan, as the Old Lady calls me. A poor bloody joke, but most of her jokes are. She doesn’t have much chop for the intelligence of the working class.’

He said it without emphasis, neither bitterly nor with affection. He was in his sixties, a grizzled bear of a man with the face and arms of someone who had spent the best part of his life in the sun and, by some miracle, escaped the rat-like nibbling of sun cancers. He had eyes and mouth of strong opinions and Malone wondered how he got on with Lady Huxwood.

‘The feller from Rose Bay has already been around here, looking for footprints, he said. There’s nothing.’

‘Nothing on the latticework?’ The gardener shook his head. ‘If it was an outsider, how d’you reckon he got upstairs?’

‘Up the back stairs. That door’s never locked. All the bloody security, costs a bloody fortune, and the back door’s always left unlocked.’

‘Why’s that?’

Darling shrugged. ‘Beats me. Ask the Yugoslavs, the butler and his missus.’ There was a sudden bedlam of birds in a nearby tree; it went on for almost half a minute, then the birds were gone as suddenly as they had come. The gardener spat into the dry soil at his feet. ‘Bloody foreigners.’

‘Who?’ Dan Darling sounded like Con Malone, the xenophobe from way back. Malone had grown up listening to his father complaining about ‘bloody foreigners’.

‘The birds. They’re Indian mynahs. Taking over everything.’

Malone said off-handedly, ‘Do the family fight like those birds?’

Darling squinted at him sideways, but still challengingly. ‘You don’t expect me to gossip about the family, do you? Christ, I’m family, too. So the Old Lady is always telling me.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Forty-two years. I was a printer’s apprentice at the Chronicle, in my last year. I got my hand caught in the rollers –’ He held up his left hand and for the first time Malone saw how maimed it was, an ugly stump-fingered fist. ‘I never went back, I was scared shitless of the rollers. Sir John, Harry’s father, he was the boss then. He gave me a job here as under-gardener and I fell into it like a pig into muck – I didn’t know it, but that was what I wanted to be, a gardener in a garden like this.’ He waved his good hand, the one holding the secateurs, around him. ‘The paper’s gardening expert, she comes out to see me whenever she’s got a problem.’

‘You do it all on your own?’ Malone looked around: the gardens were more extensive than he had thought.

‘No, I’ve got a young bloke works for me. Two of us are enough. I been here all them years, I’ve got everything under control.’

‘Where’s he?’

‘Well, I dunno. He ain’t come in this morning, ain’t rung. I can’t say it’s not like him, he’s only been here a coupla weeks. I dunno him that well.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Dwayne Harod. His dad’s a Turk, he says, his mum’s a Lebanese. He lives out in Marrickville with an uncle and aunt. Dwayne’s an old Turkish name, I gather.’ A crack of a grin, dry as an eroded creek bank.

‘So I wonder why he didn’t come in today, of all days?’

‘He’d of heard about it on the radio. He’s pretty quiet, maybe he just wanted to miss all the commotion. Maybe he ain’t a stickybeak, like them out there.’ He gestured towards the launchful of photographers, now retreating like other, earlier invaders who had been repelled by the natives. ‘I wouldn’t worry about Dwayne, you got enough on your plate. You think flowers would be outa place in the house today?’ He snapped the secateurs, as if they were used every day and he hated the thought of interrupting the routine.

‘Not today, Dan. I’ll be in touch. They smell beautiful, though.’

As he walked round the corner of the east wall he heard a sound coming from an open window on the first floor. He wasn’t sure whose room it was, but it was in the main bedroom wing. The sound was a low moaning, faintly ululating, a primitive murmur of grief, almost animal-like.

3

Assistant Commissioner Bill Zanuch moved around the Big House without hurrying, with the proprietorial air of an old friend or a bailiff. He had his hands clasped behind his back, a habit he had adopted since he had, several years ago, been assigned to accompany Prince Charles on another Royal visit to Australia. It had been a characteristic of the Duke of Edinburgh, the prince’s father, and the prince himself had adopted it. Lately, however, Zanuch had noted from newsreels that the prince had moved his hands in front of him, where they nervously wove patterns in the air as if practising argument with his estranged wife. The Assistant Commissioner had none of the Royal problems; he had not made a nervous gesture since kindergarten and even there the other infants had known who was Number One.

Socially he had never aimed higher than God; he always felt that he fitted in. Wherever he went in the city’s social circles he was treated as an equal amongst equals, proving that flattery is no burden if one leaves others to carry it. He knew, just as the prince did, who would be king one day. Soon, maybe just a year or so down the track, he would be Commissioner. The thought did not make him giddy, since he had been tasting it ever since he had been promoted to sergeant, but he savoured it every day.

He stood outside the bedroom door listening to the low moaning coming from inside. He was not insensitive, but he knew Phillipa Huxwood would have to be interviewed and it was better that he do it rather than one of the five or six detectives still on the estate. After all, he could talk to her as an equal.

But first he moved along the hall to the next door, which was open. He had never been upstairs here, but this, he guessed, was Harry Huxwood’s room. He went in, ducking under the Crime Scene tape across the doorway. Another tape was strung round the four-poster bed, like a decoration from some old wedding-night bed.

Then the door to the adjoining room opened and Phillipa Huxwood stood there. Her face was even gaunter than usual, her eyes were red from weeping; but her carriage was still stiff and straight, her voice as firm as ever: ‘Do they have to put that ridiculous piece of ribbon on the bed?’

‘I’m afraid so, Phillipa. How are you?’

She waved a hand, almost a dismissive why-do-you-ask? ‘It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I’ve been laying there –’

She used the Americanism. Up till her late teens she had lived a nomadic life with her archaeologist father and travel-writer mother; she still threw in local usage like postcards, as if to show she had been around. When she used a foreign phrase the accent was always immaculate, no matter what the language. Yet she wrote to reporters and anchor-people on the corporation’s radio and television stations who said ‘d-bree’ for ‘debris’ and used other Americanisms. She was rigid in her inconsistency, as despots are.

‘How are the others taking it?’ She led him back into her own room, seated herself in what he took to be her favourite chair by a window that looked down on the rose gardens.

‘I’ve only seen Derek,’ he said. He remained standing, aware of the disorder of her room, which surprised him; he had always thought of her as a meticulously neat person. But her bed was rumpled, the sheets twisted as if she had writhed in them in a frenzy. Her clothing, her dress and underwear, were thrown on the second chair in the room; the underwear, he thought, looked skimpy for a woman of her age. There was also a couch, an antique chaise-longue, but it was against a far wall; he could not seat himself there and talk to her across the width of the room.

‘How is Derek? Shocked?’

‘Of course.’

‘When I saw Harry –’ She closed her eyes, was silent for a moment, then she opened them. ‘I’m alone now, Bill. What do I do?’

He knew she didn’t want an answer. They were acquaintances, not friends, which is how it is in half of any large city’s social circles. He had known nothing of the intended selling of the publishing empire till Derek had filled him in this morning. What he knew of this family, even though he had been coming here for years as a dinner or luncheon guest, had been gleaned from observation and not from confidences.

‘How long have we known you?’ Her mind, it seemed, was shooting off at tangents this morning.

‘Twenty-five years.’

She looked at him in astonishment. ‘You’re joking!’

‘No. I first came here twenty-five years ago on a police matter –’

‘Ah.’ She nodded, was silent a while. He thought she was going to say no more, then she went on. ‘There was mystery then, too, wasn’t there? This is a mystery, Bill. Or is it?’ She glanced sideways at him, almost slyly.