Dark Clouds on the Mountain. John Tully

thirty active families of both the Orthodox and Reform persuasions - and there hadn't been anything like this before except for the odd telephone call and that was most likely just cranks.

      'We keep a low profile,' said Rosenberg. 'We're a mostly liberal congregation, so we scarcely stand out. Most people in this city probably don't even know we exist. Ask them where the synagogue is, and most would scratch their heads. There's never been any real trouble at all. There has probably always been a fair amount of low-grade anti-Semitism - calling tight people Jews and that kind of thing - but it's never led to anything before this. Jews had a hard time here in the old days under Governor Franklin, but not even ten thousand miles of ocean could keep out the Enlightenment forever.' He finished his coffee and poured out more for his guests.

      Someone, however, was determined to change all that. A lone crank, or something more organised - a neo-Nazi gang perhaps - that was the question. Mr Rosenberg was clearly worried. He had, he said over a fresh cup of coffee, survived the war years in Europe. Born in what had been Polish Galicia in the 1930s, he had been studying in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. He fled to the countryside and was hidden by righteous Gentiles. When the fighting stopped there was nothing for him to return to. His shtetl had simply ceased to exist, it had been burned off the face of the earth and where he was sure his parents' house had stood, there was a Ukrainian farm, the people surly and unresponsive. He never saw any member of his family again. His world had been annihilated. It all came back, he said, it all came flooding back when the graffiti started. It was the same with Mrs Gellhorn. Her old nightmares had returned.

      Jack was in a foul mood when he returned to the station. He'd kill for a fag and a bilious rage surged up with reflux into his oesophagus; he wanted to catch the Nazi graffiti artists and wring their necks. He was still irritated at being taken off the Adams murder inquiry, too. He contented himself with bawling out some junior constables, his blue eyes flashing, and sloped off to his office and set Bluey Bishop to work trawling through the files. Paisley took the opportunity to come and gloat in the doorway, but Jack didn't even acknowledge his presence. Eventually, Paisley moved on, idly scratching his testicles, muttering something about 'Big Noses', but Jack restrained himself.

      Paisley was biding his time until the earliest possible opportunity for retirement. He was a bludger, a time-server detested by most of his colleagues, and a closed-minded bigot with a limitless and dangerous capacity for mischief and malevolence. He wasn't without brains and, had he been so inclined, he could have been a good policeman. But he was lazier than a sloth when it came to work. Fuller said in his usual crude way that Paisley would be in everything bar a shit sandwich and that, only because he didn't like bread. He had a patron Higher Up - his father-in-law in Launceston - how else could you explain how the man managed to survive despite his manifest laziness and incompetence? Jack also suspected he was bent and had his own file on the man, but lacked any hard evidence. The file Paisley had left on the case was useless, like just about everything that he got his hands on.

      Jack's mind was working as he tapped the end of his spoon on his teeth - a habit that drove Helen to distraction. They'd have to stake the place out, even if it was an all-night job. The landlord of the 'Duke of York' would oblige them with a room; after all, coppers provided a significant part of his income. Bishop would love the overtime. In the meantime, there was one lead he wanted to chase up. A day or so before, he'd been accosted in the Elizabeth Street mall by a beautiful dark-haired young woman handing out leaflets. He took the leaflet from the inside pocket of his jacket and smoothed it out on his desk. Yeah, that was it. Smudgy, badly roneoed on blue paper with a picture of a man in a keffiyah wielding an assault rifle, the flyer exhorted the reader to support human rights for palestinians! and denounced what it called 'Zionist murder gangs' operating on the West Bank and in Gaza. The leaflet was authorised by an S. J. Calvert for a 'Palestinian Human Rights Group'. Those interested were encouraged to write to a post office box in Sandy Bay, or to ring one of a couple of local phone numbers. Jack Martin reached over and dialled the first one. After a while a voice - young, male, educated, slightly wary - answered. Jack said that he was interested in the group.

      Half an hour later, Jack's unmarked white Holden police car was parked outside a block of double-storey red-brick terrace houses in Nixon Street, Sandy Bay. He knew the block well: two up and two down, with a single-storey kitchen and bathroom out the back. It was one of only a handful of such types of housing in the whole city; most of the houses here were single-storey weatherboards or brick bungalows. An old girlfriend had lived here long ago: Tracey Devine, dark-haired, petite and always ready to rock and roll. She'd had the face of a Celtic angel and even now the memory stabbed Jack's heart. She was bright too, and had been awarded a PhD for a thesis on something to do with ancient Rome. Last he heard, she was behind a kitchen sink in Burnie and married to an accountant, breeding Afghan hounds for a hobby, with a herd of ankle-biters and an eagle-eyed Dutch Calvinist mother-inlaw to keep her on the straight and narrow, her PhD testamur presumably forgotten in a dark cupboard among old towels and stocks of nappies. Bob Bishop coughed discreetly and Jack swam back to the present.

      A wind had blown up and they could hear the sound of steel cables flapping against the hollow masts of the yachts moored in the river off the beach at Marieville Esplanade. The estuary was the colour of gunmetal and looked like it had the consistency of syrup. Jack lifted the heavy cast-iron doorknocker - it was the same one as twenty years before - and let it fall on its metal plate. A thin young man opened the door almost immediately. He had what could only be described as a starburst of reddish-blond hair. He was in his early twenties, with a wispy blond goatee and rather thick lips from which a smile was rapidly ebbing. His green eyes narrowed and his nose twitched as if he could really smell 'pork' on the doorstep. Jack held his badge under the young man's nose. 'Mind if we have a talk, Mr Calvert? I'm Inspector Martin and this is DC Bishop.'

      'What about?' the young man asked, his composure regained. 'As far as I'm aware, I haven't broken any laws, at least not lately.' He had folded his arms and was contemplating his visitor with a level green gaze.

      A smart-arse, Jack decided. 'Better if we come inside, Mr Calvert,' he said. 'The neighbours might start to talk. It wouldn't do in a respectable neighbourhood like this.' It hadn't been too respectable twenty something years before, when Jack had been round at Tracey's place, boozing with a fast crowd from the Traveller's Rest Hotel: students, artists, waterside workers and escapees from Smithton anxious to make it in what they perceived to be the Big Smoke. There was a German bloke from round the corner who played classical music on the piano and was into S & M, and his seedy-looking friends from the Brazil coffee house and the basement bar of the Ship Hotel. Jeez, there had been Jack's best mate, too, another young copper called Damien Mazengarb. Christ knows how they were accepted by that crowd. Mascots and oddballs maybe? The neighbours had threatened to call the police, so Jack, then a young constable, had had to placate them. It had earned him a bollocking from the legendary Chief Superintendent Frank Bull, no less, and must still be on his record sheet, mouldering in some back room of the cop shop files.

      Calvert's mouth was opening and closing. 'Let 'em talk,' he scoffed, but he jerked his head to the side to indicate that the policemen could follow and Jack resurfaced from his dreams. The door opened straight into the lounge room, just as Jack remembered. A couple of dark-haired young women were seated on a tattered couch, talking in low voices over what looked like an art book, and a silver tabby cat was washing behind its ears. Bishop's jaw had actually dropped at the sight of the women, and he blushed up to his springy red hair. Didn't they have pulchritude in Burnie? Jack thought, but he too was impressed. They were stunners. One of them had handed him the leaflet in the Mall. Women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, Jack thought, the words springing up unbidden almost into his mouth. Calvert didn't introduce them but walked straight through to a back room where he invited the policemen to sit on hard-backed chairs round a linoleum-topped table. (Could it be the same table? Jack wasn't sure, knowing that memory was easily distorted by nostalgia.)

      The back room was Spartan, with a clutter of papers strewn over an ancient couch with the springs poking out. They spilled off the table too and out of a tall writing case that stood next to the stairs leading to the first floor. The white paint on the walls had faded to a dull grey and there was old lino on the floor. That had been there all those years before, Jack was sure. There were mounds of newspapers too, some still tied up in string