Murder Song

‘This is one of his milder days,’ said Malone, deciding that Clements had bowled enough bean-balls. ‘We don’t want to be rudely blunt, Mr Bousakis, but we are investigating a murder committed in a flat owned by one of your companies.’

Bousakis said nothing for a moment, then he nodded. ‘Sure. It’s a good point.’ It’s the only point, thought Malone; but didn’t press it. ‘I’ll take you up to him.’

He pushed back his chair from the leather-topped antique desk; only then did Malone notice the semicircle cut away in the desk-top to accommodate Bousakis’ belly. The big man looked down at it and smiled without embarrassment.

‘It’s an idea I picked up in London, at one of the clubs there. Brooks’. There’s a table where Charles James Fox, he was an eighteenth-century politician, used to play cards – they cut a piece out of the table so that he could fit his belly in. An admirable idea, I thought. I’ve always been built like this, even as a kid.’

‘How did you get on at a desk when you were working your way up to this?’ Clements was getting blunter by the minute. Malone had only thought of the question.

‘I sat sideways,’ said Bousakis and for the first time smiled. ‘That way I was able to keep an eye on the competition.’

The three of them went up in a private lift to the boardroom and the office of the executive chairman. The reception lobby here was much smaller; the board directors were either modest men or the chairman did not feel that visitors had to be impressed. A lone secretary sat at her desk, a girl as elegant as Miss Rogers downstairs but a few years older, experience written all over her. She stood up as soon as Bousakis led the way out of the lift and said, as if she had been expecting them, ‘I’ll tell Mr O’Brien you’re here.’

She went into the inner office and was back in a moment. Bousakis led the way in, filling the doorway as he passed through it and looming over the secretary like a dark blue hippo. This office was as large as Bousakis’, as elegantly furnished but more modern. There were expensive paintings here, too, and several pieces of abstract statuary. And, between two of the paintings, a gold record in what looked to be a gold frame.

Brian Boru O’Brien rose from behind his brass-and-glass desk. He was in his early forties, it seemed, lean and fit. For all his ultra-Irish name, he looked pure Australian: the long jaw, the cheekbones showing under the stringy flesh, the squint wrinkles round the narrow eyes. He had thick dark hair, a wide, thin-lipped mouth full of very white, rather big teeth and a smile that, used too much, would puzzle strangers as to its sincerity. He was not handsome, never would be, but more women than not might find him attractive.

He came round the desk and put out a large hand. ‘Hullo, Scobie. Remember me?’

Chapter Three (#u51becc4f-f3c6-528a-bf50-82abda9fe3cf)

1

Malone stared at him. He had trained himself to remember faces. In a game where names are just part of a criminal’s wardrobe, to be changed at will, a face is as important as a fingerprint. There was something faintly familiar about O’Brien, but it was a face seen through the dusty glass of many years.

‘Over twenty years ago,’ said O’Brien. ‘Twenty-three, twenty-four, whatever it was. At the police academy. I was Horrie O’Brien then, a cadet like you. A long long time ago,’ he said and seemed to be speaking to himself.

Malone relaxed, suddenly laughed. ‘Crumbs – you! That’s you – Brian Boru? Is that your real name? No wonder you didn’t use it at the academy.’

‘No, Horace is my real name. Horace Clarence. Or Clarence Horace, I’ve done my best to forget which.’ He looked at Bousakis and showed his big white teeth; it could have been either a smile or a snarl. ‘You mention that outside this room, George, and you’re out of a job. We all have our little secrets.’

‘Sure we do, Brian. My middle name’s Jason, if that’ll make you any happier. My mother was always telling me to go looking for the Golden Fleece.’ He sounded smug, as if he had found it. ‘Do you have a middle name, Sergeant?’

Malone felt the game was getting away from him; he chipped in before Clements could answer. ‘It’s Persistence. Can we see you alone, Brian?’

‘You want to talk about old times?’ O’Brien gave him a full smile.

‘Not exactly. If you’d excuse us, Mr Bousakis? We may be back to you.’

Bousakis flushed; he was not accustomed to being dismissed. He went out without a word, the bulk of his back seeming to tremble with indignation. O’Brien moved to the door, closed it and came back and waved Malone and Clements to green leather chairs set round a low glass coffee table.

‘George doesn’t like being shut out of things. He thinks this place can’t run without him.’

‘Can it?’ said Clements.

O’Brien seemed to freeze in mid-air for a split second as he sat down; then he dropped into a chair. ‘You mean the rumours? Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers, Sergeant. Were you at the academy when I was there?’

‘You wouldn’t remember me. I was in another group. I moved across to Scobie’s group the week before we graduated.’

‘I never did graduate. I often wonder what would have happened to me if I’d hung on there. But you’re not here to talk about old times, you said. You’re not from the Fraud Squad or anything like that, are you?’

‘No,’ said Malone. ‘Homicide.’

For the first time O’Brien lost his composure. ‘Jesus! Homicide?’

Malone gave him a brief summary of why they were here. ‘Did you ever meet a woman named Mardi Jack?’

There was a moment’s hesitation; the frown of puzzlement came a little too late. ‘Mardi Jack? No. Has she murdered someone?’

‘No. She was the one who was murdered. Shot by a high-powered rifle in a flat owned by one of your companies in Clarence Street.’ Malone bowled a bumper of his own.

O’Brien didn’t duck. ‘I didn’t know her. I don’t even know anything about the flat.’

Malone had had no conviction that the B. in Mardi Jack’s journal stood for Brian; it could have been the initial for half a dozen other names, surnames as well as given names. It could even stand for Bousakis. He stumbled mentally in his run-up to his next question: it was difficult to imagine that a mistress could be so desperately in love with a man as huge as Bousakis. Which only showed the prejudice of a lean and fit man.

He started again: ‘This murder isn’t going to be good for your corporate image. I mean, in view of the rumours …’

‘You believe the rumours, too?’ Hardly any of the big white teeth showed in O’Brien’s dry smile.

I don’t even know what they are: Malone, a non-investor, rarely read the financial pages. ‘It’s what other people believe that counts, isn’t it? You want to hear what Sergeant Clements thinks? He’s the Department’s biggest investor, outside the police pension fund.’

O’Brien looked like a man who knew his leg was being pulled. ‘What sort of investor are you, Sergeant?’

‘A cautious one. I’ve also punted on a few of your horses.’

‘Cautiously?’

Clements nodded, but didn’t elaborate; the inference was that he did not take O’Brien’s horses at face value. ‘These rumours, Mr O’Brien. They involve a lot of people – I’ve heard a State cabinet minister mentioned and a Federal Opposition front-bencher. Insider trading.’

‘It’ll all come out in the wash,’ said O’Brien, his leg safe but the rest of him now looking vulnerable. ‘And the wash will be cleaner than you’ve all expected. It’s the old tall poppy syndrome – chop down anyone who does better than the mediocre. That’s the sacred koala in this country – mediocrity.’

Malone had heard it all before; there was a certain truth to it. He wondered, however, if a nation dedicated to worship of the brilliant would have been any better. The jails weren’t full of just failures; there were a lot of over-achievers amongst them. Tall poppies who had lopped off their own heads.

‘Is the NCSC gunna hold an enquiry?’ said Clements.

‘They’ve already started.’ O’Brien appeared relaxed; but he was gently bouncing one big hand in the other. ‘I thought you’d know that.’

Clements took another tack, a wide outswinger: ‘Didn’t you have something to do with music at one time?’

The hands paused. ‘Yes. Quite some years ago. That was how I first got started.’

‘You managed and promoted pop stars in Britain and America?’

That explained O’Brien’s accent. Malone had been trying to place it: it had an Australian base, the vowels occasionally flattened, but there was something else laid over it, a transatlantic sound.

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien. ‘What’s this got to do with what happened today? The murder, I mean.’

Malone took up the attack again, seeing where Clements was leading. ‘Miss Jack was a singer. One of your firms, Kensay, owns a recording studio where she was working on Saturday before she was killed. How long ago were you in London – what do I call you, Horrie or Brian?’