The Easy Sin

He didn’t ask why; he suddenly felt old and tired. ‘Good luck.’

He left her and went home to Randwick, where there was no computer, no e-mail, no fax, only Lisa. Oh yes, there was Tom, his son, and he had a computer in his room; but Malone never looked at it, avoided it as if any virus it contained was the Ebola strain. There were the two mobile phones, without which no home today was completely furnished, but he looked on them as infectious. He consoled himself with the thought that he belonged to the last century, the further back in it the better. He wallowed in technology atavism.

He wondered if Errol Magee, linked to his world with every conceivable communication, would be heard from again.

Chapter Two (#ulink_db6cdeda-8059-5895-b0b8-0d4c020903a3)

1

Shirlee Briskin was neat: everyone said so. Her blonde hair, her features, her dress: a neat package, said her doctor, a lecher, and her chiropodist, a lesbian lecher, swooned over her neat feet. In her house there was a place for everything and everything was in its place, or you’d better look out. In other people’s houses she straightened the pictures on their walls. Her daughter Darlene, a cynic, told her she should have gone into government: she’d have had the country shipshape in no time.

Shirlee was also utterly amoral, though neat about it. She had not been innocent from the day she had first walked; she had gone from bad seed to full bloom in one step. She had learned the Seven Deadly Sins at convent school and thought them an ideal design for living. Her entire lack of morals and scruples was, in its own way, a sort of innocence. Or so she liked to think, when she thought of morals and scruples at all.

‘What the devil got into you?’ Her vocabulary, too, was neat; she never used four-letter words. ‘How could you mistake a man for a girl?’

‘Mum, it was fucking dark in the room –’

‘Wash your mouth out.’

Corey Briskin sighed. He loved his mother in an off-hand sort of way, but you always had to be careful of the landmines of her temper. She, with some help, had planned the kidnapping of Errol Magee’s girlfriend, but, like a good general, she had not come to the scene of the action.

‘And that girl,’ said Shirlee. ‘Their maid, she’s dead.’

‘You were the one’s been watching everything. You said she only came in during the day.’

‘It was an accident, Mum.’ Phoenix Briskin, without his ski-mask, wouldn’t have attracted attention. He had such a plain face Shirlee sometimes wondered what she had been thinking about when she had conceived him. He had a thick neck and shoulders that could have carried an ox-yoke. ‘She was gunna scream the house down if Corey hadn’t clocked her.’

Shirlee looked at Darlene. ‘Who was the bloke you said you saw come into the flat?’

‘Got no idea,’ said Darlene. ‘All I could see was that he was wearing gloves. On a summer night, if you’re wearing gloves, you’re up to no good.’

‘Corey was wearing gloves,’ said Phoenix. ‘So was I. Medical ones.’

‘Pull your head in,’ said his brother wearily. The resemblance between them was so faint one could be mistaken. Corey had a pleasant face, except for a certain caution about the eyes, as if he trusted no one. He was slim without being skinny and, where his brother was flat-footed, he moved with a certain grace. ‘What we gunna do with Mr Magee? Can you ask a guy to pay for his own kidnapping?’

‘Why not?’ said Darlene, who had gone further at school than her brothers. ‘There are self-funded retirees. Here’s a self-funded kidnappee.’

‘Let’s talk sense,’ said Shirlee, never without a supply of brass tacks.

They had brought Errol Magee, still drugged, to this house eighty kilometres south of Sydney. It was a timber house with a corrugated-iron roof, a turn-of-the-previous century relic; it stood in two hectares of partly-cleared, partly-timbered land that had somehow escaped developers and city folk looking for a weekend hideaway. Clyde Briskin, now dead by his wife’s steady hand, had inherited it from his parents, who had inherited it from their parents. Clyde, though a drunk and a philanderer when he was not holding up service stations or in jail, had been a sentimentalist. In his will he had inserted a clause, as had been in his parents’ and grandparents’ wills, that the property was never to be sold. Shirlee, no sentimentalist, had nominated it as one of her reasons for poisoning him with fox bait.

Now she was glad they had not been able to sell the house. It was an ideal hideaway; there were no neighbours for at least a kilometre on either side. The road that ran past the property was a dirt track that led to a dead end against the Illawarra escarpment. Errol Magee could have disappeared off the face of the earth.

‘I think you and me should talk to Mr Magee,’ said Darlene. She was better-looking than her mother, but not a neat package; there was always the suggestion that something, physically or emotionally, was going to break out of her. But she had control, something else she had inherited from her mother. She worked for a bank, where control is endemic. ‘We’ll see how much he values himself.’

‘Let me and Corey do it,’ said Phoenix. ‘We can scare the shit outa him –’

‘Darlene and me can do that,’ said his mother. ‘Wash your mouth out. Here, Darlene, put this on.’

She had planned everything, even to the calico hoods to be worn when they were with Magee. They were pale blue, with round holes for eyes and mouth. ‘Very chic,’ said Darlene, slipping a hood over her head. ‘Does it go with my yellow shirt?’

‘Cut the crap,’ said Corey, ‘and get in there and tell him what our price is.’

Errol Magee was feeling sick: with the smell of the chloroform in his nostrils and with fear. Early this morning two hooded men had come into this room and taken him to the toilet, where everything had gushed out of him. They had brought him back here to the kitchen chair in this bedroom and rebound him with the brand-new leather straps. They had not spoken to him, just ignoring him when he had asked why the hell he was here. Then he had been left alone till now.

He looked up in surprise when the two women, hooded as the men had been, came into the room. He had heard voices somewhere at the back of the house, but he had not been able to tell how many there were.

‘Mr Magee,’ said Shirlee, nailing brass tacks to the floor, ‘let’s talk business.’

‘Business? What sort of business?’ His voice was a croak. His hands, bound together by a strap, were in his lap. In his blue dress, his knees bound together, he looked demure.

‘Well,’ said Darlene, ‘we made a mistake, Mr Magee. We meant to take your girlfriend, not you. Do you usually mope around the house in drag at night?’

Magee felt even sicker, with embarrassment. ‘No. No, of course not! It was – it was a joke, I was fooling around … What’s going on, for God’s sake?’

‘We’ve kidnapped you,’ said Shirlee. ‘For money. Five million dollars.’

‘American,’ said Darlene, who knew the exchange rate. ‘Not Australian.’

Magee looked at them; but the hoods were blank. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding! I’m broke – skint –’

He was still sick with fear; but he was a good actor. He wouldn’t tell them about the money hidden away overseas, not till they held a gun at his head and threatened to kill him. At the moment they were just talking a deal.

‘Mr Magee,’ said Shirlee patiently, ‘you are worth seventy million dollars –’

‘On paper,’ said Darlene. ‘Australian.’

‘Christ, that was twelve months ago! Don’t you read the papers?’ But he had forgotten. There had been only rumours, buried away in financial columns, nothing in the headlines. He began to regret his closed mouth. ‘My company is going into receivership –’

The two hoods turned towards each other. Then Darlene looked back at him. ‘We’re not financial wizards, Mr Magee, but do you expect us to believe you could lose that much money in twelve months?’

He was dealing with financial idiots; or anyway, infants. He could feel his fear subsiding; a little expertise can stiffen a spine. ‘Ladies –’

‘Cut out the bullshit,’ said Darlene.

Her mother’s hood looked at her, but said nothing.

‘Ladies, in IT –’

‘What’s that?’ said Shirlee.

‘Information Technology.’ They were idiots, no doubt about it. ‘In IT fortunes were made overnight. On paper, that is. And the millionaires went broke overnight. Throats are cut every day of the week. They started cutting my throat three months ago.’

‘Who’s they?’ asked Shirlee.

‘I’d rather not say –’

‘Mr Magee,’ said Darlene, I know what you say is true, about all those paper millionaires. But I don’t think you are one of them. But for the record, who’s been trying to cut your throat?’