Yesterday’s Shadow

He dropped Random off at Police Centre and drove on back to Homicide in Strawberry Hills. There were no hills and there had never been any strawberries, but the voters of Sydney lived and worked in other areas with names just as illusory: Ultimo, Sans Souci, Como. God set a bad example for developers when He named the Garden of Eden.

Malone rode up to the fourth floor, let himself in the security door and found Phil Truach sitting with Clements, waiting for him.

‘How’d you go?’ asked Clements sympathetically.

Malone told them of the visit to the Consul-General’s office. ‘I think it’s going to be a really bad headache. Let’s talk of something simpler. How’d you go, Phil?’

‘I haven’t come up with much. Nobody saw the cleaner knifed – he was well and truly dead when another guy found him. He wasn’t popular, but I didn’t get the idea that anyone there would want to top him. He was found in the room where they keep all the cleaning equipment. There didn’t appear to have been any struggle – all the buckets and mops and things were neatly stacked. Unless the killer put everything back … Crime Scene have dusted the room for prints. They’ll let us know.’

‘Who was he?’

Truach looked at his notebook. ‘Boris Jones, aged forty, his card said. He was a Russian, they said, but he’d changed his name. Mrs Jones is in there –’ He nodded towards one of the interview rooms. ‘I went out to see her, she lives out at Rozelle. She asked who was in charge and I said you and she said you were the one she wanted to talk to.’

‘Why me?’

‘I dunno. Ask her.’

‘How’s she taking it? His murder?’

‘She’s pretty calm, considering.’ Truach looked towards the closed door of the interview room. ‘She’s been bashed. A black eye and some bruises.’

‘The husband did it?’

‘She didn’t say. Just said she wanted to talk to you. She hardly said a word all the way back here. She’s got a friend with her, a Mrs Quantock. She does all the talking.’

Malone stood up. ‘Righto, I’ll talk to her. But she’s your girl. I’ve got enough on my plate with the Ambassador’s missus. Russ, make sure that Regent Street has got the names and addresses of everyone who was booked in last night at the Southern Savoy. They can start doing the donkey-work, checking everyone on the hotel’s register.’ Then he looked at Clements’ still-clean desk. ‘Get ready, mate. That desk is going to see more paper than a ticker-tape parade.’

‘I can’t wait,’ said Clements and slumped further back in his chair.

Malone went into the interview room, motioning Gail Lee to follow him. It was standard procedure that two officers had to be present during an interview; he chose Gail because of the two other women in the room. In the climate of women he, with a wife and two daughters, was showerproof; but heavy weather was another matter. Not that he expected heavy weather in this room: that was to come when he met Ambassador Pavane.

The two women were sitting side by side at the single table in the room. One was in her mid-forties: age and measurement: there was a lot of Mrs Quantock and she looked ready to use her weight and experience. The other woman was slight, dark-haired and would have been attractive but for the damage to her face.

‘Well!’ said Mrs Quantock; she had a voice for shouting over backyard fences, several of them. ‘We’ve had to wait long enough!’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Quantock. There was another murder at the same hotel –’

‘Another?’ She looked at Mrs Jones. ‘Delia –?’

Delia Jones looked across the table as Malone sat down. ‘Hullo, Scobie.’

Malone was accustomed to shock; it came with a policeman’s lot. But not for the shock of meeting Delia Bates, the long-forgotten love of twenty-five years ago, now the widow of a murdered man. Recognition had not been instant: twenty-year-old Delia was partially hidden in this woman with the battered face sitting opposite him.

‘Delia –’ Involuntarily he put his hand across the table to press hers. ‘Jesus, I didn’t know –’

‘You know each other?’ Mrs Quantock was the sort of friend who would never be left out of any relationship. She would intrude with the best of intentions, swamping the friend with rescue efforts, throwing lifebelts like hoopla rings. She glared at Malone: ‘You didn’t know what sorta bastard he was? He’s been belting her all their married life, in front of the kids –’

Delia, still with her eyes on Malone, put her hand on her friend’s arm. ‘It’s okay, Rosie. We haven’t seen each other in twenty-five years.’ As if she had counted every one of them. ‘He knows nothing about Boris. He’s married and has got kids of his own.’

Malone was aware of Gail Lee observing all this with what he called her Oriental lack of expression (though never to her face). She was half-Chinese and she had never succumbed to the temptation to favour her Australian half; serenity is not an Australian expression, at least not amongst the city voters, and she always looked serene. At the moment her face was blank.

Malone was a private man and he did not like his private life exposed; not even that of twenty-five years ago. He had been in love then; or thought so. Till he had gone to London and met Lisa, and then Delia and all the other girls he had known had dropped out of his mind. He had come back to Sydney (he had that year been on another case that had taken him into diplomatic territory; he had gone to London to arrest the Australian High Commissioner, another ambassador, for murder), had spent two days finding the courage to be decent, then met Delia and told her it was all over, that he had fallen in love, deeply, with another girl. Delia had looked at him, saying nothing, then she had got up from the table where they had been at an outdoor café and walked away without a word and out of his life. He had sat there, feeling an utter bastard; then there had been the deep feeling of relief (an honest emotion that bastards can feel) and he got up and went down to the old GPO and booked a call to Lisa, still in London. He would never be able to explain that to Gail Lee. Nor had he ever fully explained it to Lisa. Girls one has slept with should be left undisturbed.

‘I dunno,’ said Mrs Quantock, ‘I dunno how you can sit there so bloody calm, like nothing’s happened –’

‘I was always calm, wasn’t I, Scobie?’

‘Not always.’ Remembering how she had been in bed.

‘No, not always.’ For a moment there was the hint of a smile at the corner of her bruised mouth; then it was gone: ‘I didn’t show it, but I wasn’t calm when you told me you were going to marry another girl.’

‘Delia, please –’ He had taken his hand away from hers.

There was silence in the small room; even Mrs Quantock seemed engulfed by it. Then Gail Lee said quietly, ‘Mrs Jones, do you know anyone who would want to kill your husband?’

Delia looked at her as if seeing her for the first time; she glanced back at Malone, as if waiting for him to say something, then looked at Gail again. ‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘Me.’

‘Oh, for Crissake, Delia!’ Mrs Quantock moved even closer to her, grabbed her friend’s hand. ‘Don’t be so – so bloody cool! Your life’s been hell –’

Delia pressed Rosie Quantock’s hand again, stared straight at Malone. ‘I killed him, Scobie. I stabbed him, I dunno how many times.’

There was silence again but for a gasp from Mrs Quantock. Malone sat back, gathering himself together, trying to find the cop who had been lost in himself for a minute or two. ‘Delia, if you’re going to make a confession to killing your husband, I’ll have to turn that on.’ He pointed to the video recorder. ‘Then we’ll have to warn you –’

‘I know. I watch The Bill, Law and Order, all those shows –’

‘We have to warn you anyway,’ he said and did so. ‘Righto – What’s the matter?’

‘You still say that.’ Again the small smile. ‘Righto.’

‘Yes, I guess I do. Now I’ll put the question – did you kill your husband Boris Jones?’

‘Yes, this morning at the hotel where he worked, the Southern Savoy. In the room where he kept all the cleaning stuff.’

‘Was it self-defence? Did he bash you?’ He should not have put leading questions like that; he was still coming back out of that dim distant past. The coin had been spun again, the irrational had invaded the orderly again.

‘He bashed me before he went to work last night.’ She put her hand up to her face almost automatically: as if she had been doing it for years.

‘You went to the hotel, followed him to work, to kill him?’ said Gail.

‘Hold on!’ Rosie Quantock was there again, throwing lifebelts. ‘If you’re gunna question her like that, she needs a solicitor. Keep quiet, Delia, don’t tell ’em any more.’

‘It’s all right, Rosie–’

‘It’s not all right! For Crissake, love, think of yourself and the kids!’ She looked at Malone: as Delia’s old lover, not a cop: ‘Tell her for her own good –’