Murder Song. Jon Cleary

city, through the flat sprawl of suburbs and along the main roads too narrow for the traffic that clogged them. Freeways were being built, but for every mile of freeway laid down it seemed that a thousand cars had been newly spawned to flood it. They passed several miles of used car lots, metal beasts waiting to be released to add to the flood.

      O’Brien was silent most of the way, not sullen but worried-looking. Malone kept the conversation casual. ‘My sidekick, Russ Clements, has been looking up your history. You were bigger than I thought you were on the pop scene.’

      ‘I was in it when it started to take off, just after the Beatles first appeared.’

      ‘Russ told me about some of the groups you managed. There was one called – was it the Salvation Four or something?’

      ‘The Salvation Four Plus Sinner. They were big.’

      ‘I asked my two girls about them – they’d never heard of them.’

      ‘How old are your girls?’

      ‘Nine and almost fourteen.’

      ‘Another generation. Pop groups are like Olympic swimmers – they hit gold once, then they sink without trace.’ There was no pity in his voice for the failed pop groups or Olympic swimmers.

      ‘Why did you get out of the game?’

      ‘Boredom. And greed,’ he said frankly, as if avarice was a virtue. ‘I was making a million a year, but that’s chicken-feed in the pop game.’

      ‘The chickens started to bite you?’

      ‘Scobie, a million bucks is like a short-handled umbrella – you can’t swagger with it. But fifty or a hundred million, that’s different.’

      ‘I thought you didn’t like to swagger? The low profile and all that.’

      ‘The richest guy in America doesn’t swagger. He lives in a small city in Oklahoma and drives a pick-up truck to his office. But when he lifts the phone, the banks fall on their knees and salaam.’

      ‘The banks salaaming you now?’

      O’Brien smiled ruefully: there was some humour in it, even if it was as dry as a western creek-bed. ‘Not now. Not now.’

      When they reached Police Centre Russ Clements was waiting for them with the file from Goulburn. The file cover was dark blue, the spine of it faded to a sky blue where it had been exposed to light on a shelf; the papers and the single photo in it were yellowing round the edges. Evidently no one had looked at the file since 1965.

      The three men sat down in Malone’s office, but first Malone pointed out to O’Brien the three red pins on the map behind his chair. ‘Parramatta, Chatswood, City – three random murders. That’s what we thought at first. There’s going to be another one, I can feel it in my bones –’ He had Celtic bones, in which superstition was ingrained in the marrow.

      ‘We have a hundred and fifty-one names to choose from,’ said Clements. ‘Less Terry Sugar and Harry Gardner. We also have the same number of suspects, less, of course, those two and you two.’

      ‘Thanks,’ said Malone. ‘You always know how to keep the spirits up.’

      ‘I was in the class,’ said Clements soberly. ‘But not the same group. I think we can narrow it down to your group, if you can remember them all.’

      ‘The names aren’t classified in groups?’

      ‘No. We’re all lumped together.’

      ‘What about the photos?’

      ‘There’s only one, a class photo. There’s a caption on the back with all the names. Except there are only a hundred and fifty guys in the photo. They must have taken the names from the class roll without identifying them with individuals in the photo.’

      O’Brien said sarcastically, ‘The police academy must’ve been pretty smart in those days. I can’t remember – did they teach us how to identify mug shots?’

      Malone could feel Clements’ resentment even across the desk: no policeman likes the force being criticized, no matter how valid the criticism. He cut in before Clements could make a comment: ‘Have you worked out who’s missing?’

      ‘Not yet,’ said Clements. ‘I thought we’d start by you two trying to remember the names of all the guys in your group.’

      Malone’s was the mind trained by experience in the use of memory, but it was O’Brien, the half-trained accountant turned entrepreneur, the man who lived by his wits and the dropped name, who remembered most of their group-mates. Clements wrote the names down and then Malone and O’Brien tried to match a face in the photo with a name. The whole procedure took them half an hour. Without remarking on it, both Malone and O’Brien spent as much time looking at themselves when young as they did identifying the other members of their group. Malone felt a sense of loss looking at the distant youth who was himself: he was a stranger whom he wished he knew better. What had he felt in those days, what had he thought about, what mistakes had he made? But it was all so long ago, it was like trying to draw pictures on water.

      At last O’Brien said, ‘The guy who’s missing is Frank Blizzard.’

      Malone frowned. ‘I remember the name. But I can’t remember what he looked like.’

      ‘That was him. As soon as he left you, you couldn’t remember what he looked like. There was something else –’

      Malone waited.

      ‘We caught him cheating on an exam paper, remember? We hazed him, gave him a helluva hosing with a fire hose, then we kicked him out into – what was it, Bourke Street? – just in his underpants.’

      ‘I remember that,’ said Clements. ‘It was all around the academy the next morning.’

      ‘It was a stupid bloody thing to do,’ said Malone. ‘I mean, what we did.’

      ‘We were young,’ said O’Brien. ‘We thought cheating was against the rules.’

      ‘Wasn’t it? Isn’t it still?’

      ‘Not in the big wide world, chum. Frank Blizzard was just ahead of the rest of us.’

      Out of the corner of his eye Malone saw Clements’ lip lift just a fraction; he did his best to show no expression himself. ‘Would what we did to him be enough for him to start killing for revenge?’

      ‘After all these years?’

      ‘You should’ve stayed in the force,’ said Clements; his dislike of O’Brien was blatant. ‘You’d have learned some people will wait for ever for revenge. Women are the worst.’

      ‘Not necessarily,’ said Malone. ‘War veterans are as bad, some of them.’

      ‘We weren’t at war with Blizzard,’ said O’Brien.

      He was aware of Clements’ feeling towards him; for a moment he had looked unexpectedly uncomfortable. His hands gripped the seat of the chair beneath him like anchors; then they slowly relaxed, like an arthritic’s whose pain had been conquered. He moved stiffly, showing his shoulder to Clements, and looked at Malone.

      ‘None of us reported his cheating, not until they called us in and put it to us about what they’d heard. I can’t remember who it was who grassed, but then all the rest of us could do was nod and say yes, we’d done it. There were six of us, as I remember.’

      Malone nodded, remembering the scene in the Inspector’s office, hazy though the memory was, like a soft focus flashback in a television mini-series. At that time he thought they might all be dismissed from the academy; but Blizzard’s sin or crime or whatever you called it had been greater. Hazing, in those days, was tolerated in institutions as civilized barbarism, no worse than poofter-bashing. Blizzard had been doomed from the moment that – had it been Jim Knoble? – had opened his mouth and told about the cheating. Frank Blizzard had gone from the academy