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For Cate
Contents
1
The past is part of the present, if only in memory. But memory, as Malone knew, is always uncertain testimony.
The first body was discovered by a fellow worker of the deceased at 5.08 a.m. The second body was found by a housemaid at 9.38 a.m. Two murders in one night did nothing to raise the hotel’s rating from two and a half stars to three, a pursuit of the management over the past three months. An earthquake would have been more welcome, since insurance was preferable to bad publicity.
The Hotel Southern Savoy was one of several on the square across from Central Station, Sydney’s terminal for country and interstate trains. The station itself had been built on an old burial ground, an apt location, it was thought in certain quarters, for some of the deadheads in State Rail. The Southern Savoy’s clientele was mixed, but one would not have looked amongst it for celebrities or the wealthy. It catered mainly for country visitors and economy tour parties from Scotland, Calabria and the thriftier parts of Vermont. It had little or no interest in its guests, so long as they paid their accounts, and was discreet only because it was too much bother to be otherwise. It had had its visits from the police (two deaths from drug overdoses, several robberies, a prostitute denting the skull of a customer with the heel of her shoe), but it had always managed to keep these distractions out of the news. But murder? Two murders?
‘The manager is having a fit of the vapours,’ Sergeant Phil Truach told Malone, ringing on his mobile and out of earshot of the manager. ‘He seems a nice guy, but he’s a bit frail, if you know what I mean.’
‘Phil, put your prejudices back in your pocket. Have a smoke or two. Before I get there,’ he added.
Truach smoked two packs a day and had been told by his doctor that he had never seen such clear arteries, that Philip Morris could drive a truck through them. ‘I’ll have them empty the ashtrays. The media are already here. I think that’s worrying the manager more than the corpses.’
‘The bodies still there?’
‘The guy, the hotel worker, he’s been taken to the morgue. The woman’s in her room, the ME’s examining her. Crime Scene are still here.’
Normally Malone, head of Homicide, would not have been called in on a single murder till the circumstances of it had been fully determined. But two murders in the one hotel on the same night, one a male worker, the other a female guest, called for his presence. The homicide rate in the city was rising and everyone who was literate, from Opposition MPs to letter-writers to the morning newspapers and callers to radio talk shows, was demanding to know what the government and police were doing about it. Zero tolerance had become a mantra, even with voters who had never come within a hundred kilometres of a violent crime.
He went out to the main room of Homicide where Russ Clements sat at his desk, which, startlingly, was bare of paper. Usually it looked like the dump-bin outside a paper mill.
‘What’s the matter? You not accepting any more paperwork?’
‘This is what they call – is it a hiatus? I dunno if the system’s run outa paper, but I’m not, as they say, gunna make any enquiries. It’ll start up again, soon’s my back is turned. In the meantime …’
Malone and Clements had worked together for more years than they cared to count. Over the last year or two, as Homicide and Serial Offenders, part of Crime Agency, had expanded, they had worked together less and less out of the office. Clements, as Supervisor, the equivalent of general manager, had become trapped at his desk. Computers had proved to be just another form of land-mines, hemming him in. The diet of reports, reports, reports had put weight on him, turned muscle to fat. He was a big man, a couple of inches taller than Malone, and though he had never been light-footed, his tread now was heavy. He was a prisoner looking for parole.
‘In the meantime, on your feet,’ said Malone. He, too, had begun to thicken as middle age wrapped itself round him, but he still looked reasonably athletic. But he knew he was long past chasing crims on foot. ‘We’re going over to the Southern Savoy. You can help me count the bodies.’
Clements stood up, reached for his jacket as if it were a lifebelt. ‘I thought you’d never ask. Gail, keep an eye on this thing for me.’ He nodded at his computer, at its screen as blank as a crim’s eye. ‘Ignore everything but love and kisses from the Commissioner.’
Gail Lee, one of the four women detectives on the staff of twenty, looked at Malone. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘He’s light-headed, he’s going to be a detective again.’
The two men went out of the room, Malone as usual putting on his pork-pie hat. It made him look like a cop from the 1950s, but it was his trademark, though only in the eyes of his staff. They let themselves out through the security door and disappeared, unaware of the swamp they were to step into in Room 342 at the Hotel Southern Savoy.
Gail