Dark Summer (5 page)

Aldwych turned back, winked at Malone and went on as if there had been no interruption. “I've done the lot, Scobie. Sly grog, SP betting, robbed banks, run whores, you name it, I've done it. You blokes know all that, but you ain't been able to put me away in years. One thing I never touched was shit. Shirl, that was my wife, she made me promise never to do that and I never did. Oh shit, Border's gone! We're in trouble now. What's that? Four for fifty after, what, fifteen overs?”

“The bowlers look like they're on top,” said Malone, licking his lips. The Indians were beating the bejesus out of the 7th Cavalry; or, in this morning's headlines, it was as if the Iraqis had suddenly started to win the Gulf war. “Good.”

“You didn't say how Scungy was killed.”

All along the balcony people were standing up to stretch their legs while they waited for the incoming batsman. In the boxes immediately on either side of the Aldwych box, men and women had their heads in peculiar positions, as if they had become paralysed, as they tried to catch the conversation in Box 3A; ears were being dislocated and peripheral vision was strained to the point where one could imagine eyeball muscles twanging. One or two of them would cheat or swindle in business, but they could
not
bear to be caught eavesdropping.

Malone had a quiet voice; he made it even quieter. “He was poisoned, we think.”

“Poisoned? And you think I might of done it? Or had it done? Inspector, I belong to the old school—you know what I mean.” He put out his forefinger, made a rough imitation of a gun; then he raised the finger to his throat, turned it into a razor. He was smiling all the time, sharing the joke with a cop. Then he looked up behind Malone. “Oh, hello. You dunno my son, do you, Scobie? Jack Junior, this is Inspector Malone.”

Jack Aldwych Junior was as tall as his father but trimmer. He was about thirty, good-looking in a manufactured way, as if he had been put together by a hairdresser, a cosmetician and a tailor rather than just sired and borne. But his smile was genuine, if everything else about him looked artificial.

“Inspector.” His handshake was firm. He was casually dressed in sports shirt, blazer, slacks and loafers, but he was labelled all over: Dunhill, Ralph Lauren, Gucci. Malone, whom Gucci would have looked at and sent away barefoot, wondered if the Aldwych underwear was labelled. “Has Dad been up to something he shouldn't have?”

“He's just been telling me he could run for Pope.”

“Jack Junior runs the family companies. The legitimate ones.” Aldwych smiled, a robber baron safe in his keep. He was one of the richest men in the country, but he never figured in any of the business magazines' Rich Lists. Some of the other robber barons who
had
figured in those lists were now bankrupt and disgraced, but Jack Aldwych still had standing with some of the leading banks, though none of them would have wanted to be quoted as saying so. “This year he's up for president of the Young Presidents.”

“Then he wouldn't have known Scungy Grime?” Malone addressed the question to Jack Senior, but he had one eye on Jack Junior.

“Who's he?” said Jack Junior.

“A small-timer,” said his father. “He worked for me once upon a time. Who've you got with you today?”

Jack Junior glanced back through the wide window into the inner lounge. “Her name's Janis
Eden,
she's a social worker.”

“That's a change. They're usually models or society layabouts,” Aldwych told Malone. He had his class distinctions, it came of being a self-made man.

Then the girl, a glass of champagne in her hand, came out on to the balcony. She was no startling beauty, but she had made the most of what looks she had; and somehow she looked less artificially handsome than Jack Junior. She was well dressed, in a casual way, and Malone wondered if she looked as elegant as this, Monday to Friday, when handing out comfort and advice to the battlers. But perhaps her welfare clients were bankrupt robber barons.

She pushed her thick auburn hair back with her free hand and gave Malone a cool nod when they were introduced. Malone knew that a lot of social workers were antagonistic to the police, but he had hoped for a little more sociability on a national holiday and here at the cricket.

“Inspector Malone had a murdered man dumped in his swimming pool this morning,” Aldwych offered. “It's no way to start the day.”

“It was this Scungy what's-his-name?” Jack Junior shook his head; not a hair in the thick dark mane moved. The girl's hand moved towards the head, then she seemed to think that might not be appreciated and it landed on his shoulder. “I'm glad Dad's put all that behind him.”

Malone looked at the girl, wondering if she knew who Jack Junior's dad really was. She read the question in his face: “Oh, I know all about Mr. Aldwych.” She gave the old man a sweet smile. “Jack didn't tell me about you. I read up on you.”

Aldwych didn't appear to be put out; his reputation had never been a hair-shirt. “You mean there's a file on me? In Social Services? You got one on me, too, Scobie?”

“Not yet,” said Malone, trying to sound good-humoured and sociable.

Janis Eden looked at him from above the rim of her champagne glass. She had certain studied mannerisms, as if somewhere there was a hidden camera photographing her for a television commercial. They would not go down well at Social Services, but maybe she used them only at weekends.

“How do you police feel when crime lands, more or less, on your doorstep?”

“
We don't like it. I hear you're a social worker. What field?”

“Drug rehabilitation. We're kept busy.”

“I'm sure you are.” Malone stood up. The new batsman, Mark Waugh, had just begun his innings by belting three fours off the first three balls he had received. It was time for an old bowler to depart, before the insults started. “Well, I better be looking busy, too. Sitting here isn't going to tell me who dumped Scungy Grime in my pool.”

Aldwych had been looking at the action out on the field, but he turned his head as Malone stood up. “Don't you really wish you were out there now?”

“No, Jack. I'm like you, I retired at the right time.”

He left them on that before they saw the lie in his face. He would dearly have liked to be out there on the field, even wearing coloured pyjamas and being belted all over the field by those hated bastards, batsmen. Life then, though it paid peanuts in those days, had been simple, uncomplicated and uncorrupted. But as he went down in the lift he had the itchy feeling that Jack Aldwych, retired or not, knew more about the last months of Scungy Grime's life than he had told.

IV

When Malone had gone Jack Junior saw some acquaintances in one of the private boxes farther along the balcony and said he would go and say hello to them.

“You want to come, Janis? It's a chance for you to meet some of the guys who make the wheels go round in this town.”

“No, thanks,” she said, moving into the seat next to Aldwych Senior and settling herself. “I'll stay and talk to your father. I think he made more wheels go round than those men along there, no matter who they are. Am I right, Mr. Aldwych?” She gave him a full smile.

He nodded to his son. “You go along there, Jack. Janis and I are gunna get to know each other a little better.”

Jack Junior hesitated, like a man who did not trust either one or the other or both of them;
then
he smiled. “Don't let her rehabilitate you, Dad.”

When his son had gone, Aldwych said, “You're not afraid of my reputation, Janis?”

“That's past, Mr. Aldwych. You've reformed.”

He shook his big silver head. He had always been too beefy to be strictly handsome, but age had found some bone in his face and now he had the craggy look of a chipped and cracked Roman bust. But he never went to museums, so he never saw the resemblance. “No, I'm not reformed. Retired. There's a difference.”

He turned his head for a moment as there was a roar from the crowd; one of the Australian batsmen had cracked another boundary. Then he looked back at her, his gaze as impenetrable as smoked glass. It was the look his enemies had seen when their fate hung in the balance.

But she did not seem disturbed by it. “Well, whatever. The law is no longer chasing you, is it?”

Only his wife Shirl had spoken to him like this; but she had not had the education and poise of this girl. He was not used to dealing with today's generation, especially the female side of it. He had known some tough women in his younger days, Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine had been two of them, but they had been rough and ready, their sense of gender equality based on the razor- and knuckle-men they employed. They had had none of the smooth arrogance of this young woman.

“Would you be going out with Jack Junior if the law was still chasing me?”

“For one thing, I don't think of him as Jack
Junior.
That implies he's not his own person. Have you ever thought of that?” She turned and looked back through the plate-glass at Larry Quick and held up her champagne flute.

Aldwych was annoyed at her self-confidence. Women, he thought, had too much independence these days; he was glad he was in the home stretch of his life. Though he was not given to metaphors of the turf: horses and jockeys were as unreliable as women. Women in general, that is: he had never lumped Shirl with the rest of them. “No, I haven't. His mother christened him, not me. He's done all right.”

Her glass refilled, she turned back to him. She had no interest at all in what was going on out in the middle of the ground; that, too, annoyed him. In his youth she was the sort of girl he would have
belted;
but Jack Junior would never do that, he was sure. His son, he sometimes thought, was a wimp, too influenced by his mother, who had believed in Christian morals and respect for girls and other hopeless ideas.

“To answer your question, yes, I'd still go out with Jack, whether the law was after you or not. I'm very single-minded, Mr. Aldwych. Much like you used to be, I'd guess.”

They were now sitting in the middle seats of the back row on the balcony, several seats distant from the boxes on either side. The inquisitive woman had not reappeared and the men on both sides were more interested in the cricket than in trying to listen to the conversation between the attractive young girl and the old criminal. Old men rarely have interesting conversations with young girls, not unless they're dirty old men, and the young girl looked too composed to be listening to that sort of approach.

“Are you after his money? He's gunna be a rich man some day.”

“Yes, I suppose I am, in a way. I'm in danger of losing my job, the State's cutting back on welfare, and the thought of being poor and out of work doesn't appeal to me.”

“Well, one thing, you're honest.”

“No, I used to be. I've reformed.” She sipped her champagne, her eyes smiling at him above the flute. There was no coquetry to it; it puzzled him at first what it was. Then he recognized it: it was the look of another criminal, or anyway a potential one. He began to worry for Jack Junior, if only for Shirl's sake.

“You've never been poor?” he said.

“No. I come from a family that could afford to send me to a good school and then to university. But my father committed suicide after the stock market crash in eighty-seven and we found he'd left us no money at all. My mother now draws the pension and I have a brother who works as a barman in a pub, the only job he could get with a PhD in archaeology.”

Aldwych wondered why anyone in Australia would want to take a degree in archaeology; but he had never been one for digging up anything, unless it could be used for blackmail. “So you've set your sights on my son?”

“Yes.”

“
Does he know it?”

“He'd be dumb if he didn't. And I don't think he is. Why did you become what you are?”

“You mean a crim or a success?”

Out on the field another Australian wicket had fallen; things were going from bad to worse, the bloody Poms were on top. He hated the English, despite his English name and lineage. His convict great-great-grandfather had spat on England the day they had transported him for assaulting and robbing a gentleman, and the family ever since had carried on the tradition. Three years ago, during the height of the Bicentennial celebrations, Aldwych had applied for membership of the First Fleet Pioneers, a society of the descendants of the first settlers; but he had been rejected. It was permitted to have had a convict as an ancestor, but the stain was supposed to have been washed out in succeeding generations. Criminality was not supposed to be part of the national heritage, though other nationalities were loud in their doubts of that belief.

Janis said, “I know why you became a success—you were ruthless. Why did you become a criminal? Was it because you had a deprived childhood? That's what I hear a lot from the junkies I counsel.”

He laughed, a sound that still had some volume despite his age; some men in the box on their right turned their heads, wondering if the old crim was laughing at what was happening to Australia out there on the field. You never knew where a crim's loyalties lay.

“I was born what I grew up to be. My mother reckoned I was bad from the day I was weaned. I belted other kids and pinched whatever they had. I went to a State School and hated it and the teachers. I left soon's I turned fourteen and I joined the old Railway Gang with Chow Hayes and Kicker Kelly and other blokes, all of 'em older than me. Then I become a stand-over man for Tilly Devine and her sly-grog racket . . . You want me to go on?”

She was smiling; it was difficult to tell whether she was impressed or disgusted. “You're really proud of what you were, aren't you?”

“No. I'm not ashamed of it, either. It's a fact and you never get anywhere in life denying facts.
That'
s why this country is in the mess it is right now, the politicians keep denying facts. One thing I never had was conceit. That was what killed more than half the crims I come up against. They thought they were better than me and they weren't. That was a fact they denied.”