Murder Song. Jon Cleary

police said she’d been shot, it looked as if it was from a neighbouring building.’

      ‘Did you and – did she go to the flat regularly?’

      ‘Fairly regularly – up till I met you.’

      ‘Did she have a husband or a boy-friend?’

      He looked at her with admiration; he was recovering his composure. ‘You would make a good detective.’

      She hadn’t meant to sound like that. ‘You don’t want me playing detective – there’ll be enough of the real ones. You should have told them the truth right from the start. In the long run it’s always best.’

      ‘You don’t believe that.’ He was gently cynical for the moment. ‘Not with a husband in politics. This is the same, darling. There are always cover-ups in politics. I was trying to cover up on you.’

      So far she had felt little fear; she was more concerned for the situation he had got himself into by his lying to protect her. Six months ago she would have laughed at the idea that she would be having a passionate clandestine affair with a man who was hated, even despised, more than he was admired. She was forty-five years old and a grandmother, even if only recently. True, she was still beautiful in face and figure, thanks to Jane Fonda’s videos and her own genes; her parents, in their late sixties, were still a handsome enough pair to look good even in the candid camera shots on the social pages. She was intelligent, could be witty, if sometimes waspish, and always rated in the top five of the list of Most Popular Women of the Year. She was married to the most popular prime minister in decades, a man who fitted perfectly into the Image, a quality that, his minders told her, was the most necessary qualification for today’s leaders. She had two children, one of whom had fled the Image of his father and was now working in a merchant bank in London, the other married to a doctor and living in the Northern Territory, where the Image never penetrated; she had two grandchildren, both too young to know what an Image was even when it interrupted their cartoons on television. She was moral and decent and had taken seriously her task of trying to set an example. Then she had met Brian Boru, the last man she would have thought she would fall for, and had stepped off a cliff.

      And now, somehow, she was involved in a murder. For the first time she was suddenly, terribly afraid; but for him: ‘Was it someone trying to kill you?’

      He hesitated, took his hand away and put his arm along the back of the couch behind her. ‘I thought of that, only a few moments ago. I’ve got enemies, but I never thought anyone’d want to kill me. Christ, I hate violence!’

      She was studying him, looking for the stranger she hadn’t yet discovered: she knew there was one hidden there in Brian Boru O’Brien. He had none of Philip’s classical good looks; the only feature that gave him distinction were the streaks of grey thick hair along his temples; there was no grey in her own equally thick dark hair, yet she was two years older than he. In public he had a certain arrogance to him, but never with her: not even at the moment they had first met, she remembered. He had been extraordinarily successful in a generation that, it seemed to her, had bred successful men like too-fecund rabbits. Yet, unlike the country’s nouveaux riches, he did not flash his wealth. Sure, he lived in luxury at the Congress, but no one could drive or sail past and say, with sour envy, ‘There’s that bastard O’Brien’s ten-million-dollar waterfront palace.’ He owned no yacht, no Learjet, not even a car; once, he told her, he had owned a Rolls-Royce in London, but in those days in the pop world you were expected to own a Rolls. It wasn’t so much a status symbol, he had said, as a jerk of the thumb at the Establishment who had thought up till then they had owned the world. The financial columnists told her that his dealings with the business Establishment in this country were done with a jerk of the thumb; yet he was always a gentleman of the old school with her, though her father had belonged to the Establishment. He was not a gentleman in bed, but it was her guess that no man worth his balls was ever a gentleman in bed, even one of the old school: she couldn’t imagine anything more boring than being made love to by a gentleman. Brian Boru was a sum of contradictions and she hadn’t yet got them all in place. There was still a stranger hidden amongst them.

      ‘I think you should go to the police and tell them the truth.’

      He shook his head emphatically. ‘I’ll never tell them about you.’

      ‘I don’t want you to – I hope you don’t have to. But if you have to explain where you were Saturday and Sunday …’

      They had spent the weekend at a hotel on the Central Coast; in winter it had few guests and certainly none who would recognize O’Brien. She had worn a blonde wig and the rimless fashion glasses she wore when watching movies or television; they made her look older, but, she had told herself, she wasn’t spending the weekend with some youth half her age. The wig had been a joke gift from Dolly Parton, whom Philip had invited to dinner at The Lodge during one of the singer’s tours: she had got on like a fond sister with Dolly, a woman who understood men. She had trimmed the wig; she hadn’t wanted some guest at the hotel asking her to sing ‘We Had All the Good Things Going’. Brian Boru had laughed at her disguise, but not in an offensive way; it had been a wonderful weekend. At forty-five she had been like a young girl in love for the first time, keeping him in bed till she had exhausted him and then, laughing, mothering him.

      ‘Go and see the police. You may need their protection.’

      ‘Darling, the police don’t protect you – it’s not their job. Not unless they want you as a witness.’

      ‘They protect me –’ But she knew that was different. ‘No, you’re right. But I still think you should go to them, tell them you knew – what was her name?’

      ‘Mardi Jack. She was a singer, you’d have never heard of her.’

      ‘I wish I hadn’t.’ She couldn’t help that: there are several sorts of love-bites.

      He nodded, understanding. She wondered if he had been so understanding with his other women. ‘I first met her in London years ago, just after my second marriage broke up.’

      God, you and your women! All at once, for the first time, she was jealous. But all she said was, ‘Don’t tell me any more about her.’

      ‘You’ll read all about her in the papers, I suppose.’

      ‘I’ll try not to.’ But she knew she would: you didn’t know what masochism was till you were truly in love.

      ‘The papers will get on to me as soon as they find out who owns the flat. It’s going to be pretty harsh from now on.’

      He looked out at the grey garden. The rain had stopped, but the trees and bushes were still dripping. Some leaves floated on the pool like scabs on the dark green water; a magpie strutted importantly across the big lawn. More rain was coming up from the south-west, thick grey drapes of it. He understood weather; it was one of the reasons he had come home from England. He had been only thirty-five then, but already he had known that he could never grow old in the English climate. Now, suddenly, he was in a climate that frightened him.

      ‘I think we’d better not see each other for a while. Just in case …’ He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘I’d never forgive myself if you were hurt.’

      ‘I’m going to be hurt if I can’t see you.’ But she knew he was right. ‘How did we two fall so much in love?’

      3

      It was the next afternoon, Tuesday, when Clements got the call from Ballistics. He listened to what they had to tell him; then he hung up and came into Malone’s office. Malone was reading the running sheets of three other cases being handled by Homicide in Southern Region. When the Department had been regionalized almost two years ago, no one had quite been able to work out how the State had been cut up; it had been described as a cross between a jigsaw and a gerrymander, with no winners. Southern Region covered most of Sydney south of the harbour, then ran in a narrow strip about a hundred and eighty kilometres down the coast, then cut in an almost straight line across the State to the border with South Australia, taking in the whole