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JON CLEARY
Murder Song
For Kathleen and Bob Parrish
Contents
1
It was a perfect day for aviators, bird watchers, photographers and sniping murderers. The air had that clean bright light that occurs on some days in Sydney in the winter month of August; the wind blows out of the west, across the dry flat continent, and scours the skies to a brilliant blue shine. Thin-blooded citizens turn up their coat collars and look east to the sea or north for the coming of spring. But hardier souls, depending upon their pay or their inclinations, welcome the wind-polished days of August.
The construction worker, in hard hat and thick lumber jacket, was alone on the steel beam of the framework of the twentieth floor of the new insurance building in Chatswood, a northern suburb. He was leaning against the wind, holding tightly to the safety rope, looking north, when the bullet hit him in the chest. He did not see it coming, despite the clear light; if he cried out as he died, no one heard him. He fell backwards, away from the safety rope, was already dead as he went down in a clear fall to the ground two hundred feet below.
Several of his workmates, horrified, saw him fall. None of them at that moment knew he had been shot. None of them looked for the murderer, so none of them saw him. The shot could have come from any one of half a dozen neighbouring buildings, all of them occupied, but the time was 9.10 in the morning and bosses and workers were still settling down at their desks. It was too early in the day to be staring out of windows.
The dead man was Harry Gardner, a cheerful extrovert with a wife and four children and not an enemy in the world. Except the unknown man who had killed him.
2
A week later, on a cold rainy night when no one had a good word to say about August, Terry Sugar, a twenty-four-year veteran of the New South Wales Police Department, was getting out of his car in the driveway of his home in Mount Druitt, a western suburb of Sydney, when the bullet hit him in the neck, went down through his chest, came out and lodged in the car seat. He saw his killer, though he did not recognize him, but he died almost instantly and had no time to tell anyone.
First Class Sergeant Sugar was married and had two sons, one at high school and the other in his first year at university. Naturally, as a policeman, not everyone was his friend: that was the Australian way. He had, however, received no death threats; for the last year he had been in charge of the desk at the Parramatta Police Centre and had been working on no outside cases. The detectives assigned to the murder attempted no written guesses, but amongst themselves they put the killing down as the work of a crank who had a grudge against all police, a thrill-killer or someone who had mistaken his victim for someone else.
Detective-Inspector Scobie Malone and Detective-Sergeant Russ Clements, both of whom had known Terry Sugar, attended the funeral. There was a police guard of honour and four of Sergeant Sugar’s fellow officers were the pall-bearers; Police Commissioner John Leeds and several other senior officers and a hundred uniformed officers marched in the cortège. Around Parramatta there were four break-ins, two bag-snatchings and an attempted bank hold-up during the forty-five-minute church service.
It was another fine clear day, but the wind, coming today from the south-west, had a touch of Antarctica to it; tears were cold on the cheeks. The light was ideal for the press photographers and the newsreel cameramen, though funerals don’t photograph as well as fashion parades.
Malone and Clements, the Commissioner and other outsiders dropped out after the token march down the main street; the family had requested that the actual burial be as private as could be arranged. As he stepped aside Malone bumped into one of the television cameramen, a tall, bald, overweight man with a beard.
‘Sorry.’ The man took his eye away from the view-finder. ‘I didn’t see you, Inspector.’
Malone didn’t know the man’s name, but he had seen him occasionally at the scenes of crimes; he recognized the logo on the camera. ‘Will it be on Channel 15’s news tonight?’
‘Probably.’
Malone glanced at Clements. ‘Remind me not to look.’
The man smiled through his thick black beard. ‘I understand. But I have a job to do, just like everyone else. I don’t enjoy these jobs.’
‘Maybe,’ said Malone. ‘I just don’t like my kids to see their father following another cop’s coffin.’
1
‘There’s been another one,’ said Claire, coming into the kitchen.
‘Another what?’ said her mother.
‘Homicide. Pass the Weet-Bix.’