Yesterday’s Shadow

The lift doors closed and he looked at the two couples riding with him and they looked at him. Both couples were elderly, all four of them seemingly past excitability.

‘We’ve heard about the murders –’ He was tall and thin and grey-haired with a face like a wrinkled riding boot: from the bush, thought Malone.

‘Don’t let it spoil your holiday.’

‘We’re not down here on holiday,’ said the male of the other couple, a stout and weatherbeaten man with faded blue eyes; it was obvious now that the four of them were together. ‘We’re here for a funeral.’

Malone cursed his loose tongue, was relieved when the lift stopped. ‘Sorry. My condolences.’

‘You, too,’ said the tall thin man, as if police grieved for all murder victims, and the lift doors closed on them.

Malone shook his head at the crossed lines of the world and went into Room 342. Phil Truach and the two Regent Street officers had gone, but Clements was still there with the two Crime Scene officers and the two uniformed men. With the bodies gone from the hotel, everything was looking routine. Out in the hallway there was the sound of a vacuum cleaner at work, taking the marks of the police team out of the carpet.

‘Anything?’ Malone asked.

‘We’ve got enough prints here to fill a library,’ said Norma Nickles with the fastidiousness of an old-fashioned housekeeper. ‘The maids seem to be a bit light-handed with the feather-dusters.’

‘Tell Deric on your way out. Did you get a print off the flush-button in the toilet?’

‘Yeah, there’s one clear one.’

‘Then maybe that’s the one we want. We nailed a feller years ago that way. A bloke usually has a leak before or after sex.’

‘Really?’ said Norma, who had known the true worth of the advertisements in the tights of male ballet dancers. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘They also have a leak after murder,’ said Clements. ‘It’s the excitement.’

‘You men,’ said Norma and all five of them grinned at her.

‘Righto, Russ,’ said Malone. ‘Let’s get back.’

‘Anything in the deposit box?’

‘Nothing. Where’s Phil?’

‘He’s downstairs with the guys from Regent Street, they’re interviewing the staff. You wanna question ’em?’

‘No, you and I had better get back to the office.’ His expression didn’t change, but Clements, the old hand, read his eyes. ‘Let’s have the report soon’s you can, Norma. Take care.’

He and Clements went down in the lift, squeezing in with half a dozen guests who recognized them as police and fell silent as if afraid of being questioned. The two detectives strode through the lobby before the reporters could waylay them again. Malone saw the manager standing behind the reception desk, staring at them as if they were guests who had trashed their room and refused to pay their account. Police are rarely welcome guests, certainly never in hotels.

Their unmarked car was parked in the hotel’s loading zone. A van had just pulled up and its driver leaned out of his door and yelled, pointing at the sign, ‘Can’t you buggers read?’

The two detectives ignored him, got into the car and Malone drew it out from the kerb, resisting the urge to give the middle finger to the van driver who was still yelling at them. Only then did Clements speak: ‘What have you come up with?’

Malone took the plastic envelope from his pocket, but didn’t remove the passport. ‘This. We’ve got trouble, mate. We take this to Greg Random and then to Charlie Hassett before we let anyone else see it.’

‘So she’s not –’ Clements looked at his notebook; he still carried it like an old family heirloom. ‘Not Mrs Belinda Paterson?’

‘No. She’s Mrs Billie Pavane. She’s the wife of the American Ambassador.’

2

‘Shit!’ said Charlie Hassett, Assistant Commissioner, Crime Agency. He looked at the passport as if it were his dismissal pink slip. ‘It’s our turf, but we’re gunna be overrun by our Federal blokes, the CIA, the FBI, Foreign Affairs … You’re absolutely sure this is the dead woman’s, Scobie?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s hers. I saw her before they zipped up the bag and took her away. It’s hers, all right.’

Clements had gone back to Homicide to prepare for the blizzard that would soon be coming out of Canberra. Cold weather had been coming up from the south all week, but there would be no snow sports for the New South Wales Police Service. Malone was wishing that he had taken his vacation, which was due; or even his long service leave, which would give him time to disappear to the other side of the world. Lisa, his wife, had been talking of a trip home to Holland and that now seemed an appealing faraway place. Instead he was now sitting in Assistant Commissioner Hassett’s office with Chief Superintendent Greg Random, head of the Homicide and Serial Offenders Unit.

‘Charlie, I’m not going to have my men pushed around by outsiders.’ Random was the guardian angel of his men and women, though if he had any wings they had been folded and stored in a cupboard. Tall and bony, with a stiff brush of grey hair, he was as dry as the dust on the Western Plains where he had grown up and he would have greeted Lucifer with the same laconic regard as he offered to other, lesser crims. He would not be bending the knee to any Hierarchy from Canberra. For him, anyone down there, whether politician, diplomat or bureaucrat, was a foreigner. ‘I want you to let them know that from the start –’

‘Greg, relax –’ Hassett made a downward motion with two large hands. He had started on the beat thirty-five years ago, when doubt had never entered his still developing mind; his powers of persuasion had consisted of a sledge-hammer for closed doors and a bunched fist for closed faces. He occasionally dreamed of the simplicity of those days, but these days there was no sharper mind in the Police Service. He wore his reputation as a hard case as some men, and women, wore their power suits. The sledgehammer had been put away and in its place was a perception as sharp as a professional woodchopper’s axe. ‘I’ll talk to the Commissioner and we’ll get the barricades up. We’re not gunna be overrun by outsiders. But we’ve got to get this news down to Canberra – how’re you gunna do it?’

‘We’ll start out with the proper channels, just to show we’re not obstructive,’ said Random. ‘I’ve talked it over with Scobie. When we leave here we’re going down to the US Consul-General. We’ll give him the news, tell him we’ve already got the investigation under way and he can let Canberra know. We’ll let them know – in a nice way, of course – that the case is ours.’

Hassett looked at Malone. ‘You’re not jumping for joy, Scobie.’

‘Would you be, sir?’

The Assistant Commissioner grinned. ‘You want a loan of my sledgehammer? It’s over there in the closet. I’ve had it gold-plated.’ He stood up. He was of what had once been the medium height for police officers, five feet ten inches, and he had thickened; he still suggested the battering-ram he had once been. ‘Now I’m gunna give the Commissioner the bad news. Good luck. My regards to the Consul-General. He’s a nice bloke and he’s gunna hate this as much as you.’

Random and Malone drove down to Martin Place, in the business heart of the city, parked the car in the basement of the MLC building and rode up to the fifty-ninth floor. Money rustled like a breeze in all the floors beneath, but here on the fifty-ninth diplomacy, at citizen level, was the order of business. Passports, trade and general enquiries: nothing that made waves. The two detectives, when they produced their badges, were checked through security as if they were close relatives of the US President and were shown into the Consul-General’s office before they could comment on their welcome.

‘You’ve got news of her?’

Consul-General Bradley Avery had been an All-American quarterback before he had given up throwing passes and taken to receiving blasts from Washington. He was as tall as Random and Malone and had shoulders that looked as if he still wore the pads that Malone always found ridiculous on gridiron players. He had dark curly hair and a broad black face just the pleasant side of plain.

‘Our embassy called me this morning – got me at home before I was out of bed –’

‘We’re talking about Mrs Pavane, the Ambassador’s wife?’ said Random.

‘Yes. Yes, of course –’ Then Avery waved the two detectives to chairs, came round his desk and sat his haunches on it. ‘She’s been missing since yesterday morning. She caught a nine o’clock plane out of Canberra for Sydney and she hasn’t been seen since she got off it –’

‘You didn’t have a consulate car out at the airport to meet her?’

‘Yes, there was one. The embassy called after she had left and ordered the car. But she didn’t meet it –’ Then he stopped, reading the atmosphere for the first time. ‘You’ve got bad news?’

Random nodded, looked at Malone. ‘Tell him, Scobie. It’s your case.’ Planting the territorial imperative early.

Malone recited the bad news. ‘That’s the bald fact, Mr Avery. What puzzles us is what was the Ambassador’s wife doing in a hundred-dollar-a-night hotel under an assumed name?’

Avery had listened in silence, without expression; but now he let out a long hiss of breath, as if he had been holding it in. ‘Holy shit! Does the media know?’

‘Yes. There was another murder last night at the same hotel, one of their cleaners. If it hadn’t been for the double homicide, I don’t think the press would have been down there. It would have got a three-line mention in the news brief in tomorrow morning’s papers, that’s all. But now –’

‘Do the media know who she is?’

‘Not yet. So far the hotel management doesn’t know. I didn’t let the manager see this when I took it out of the safe deposit box –’ He took the plastic bag containing the passport from his pocket. ‘All they know so far is that she was American.’