‘Did your mother know?’
‘I dunno. Justin never said anything, he was about ten or eleven then. Maybe Mum did know and was afraid to say anything. Bev used to get drunk, he’d scare the shit outa all of us.’
‘Where is he now?’
She shrugged. ‘Who cares? He took off three months after Kelly was born. He said he couldn’t handle four kids, especially one like Jasmine.’
‘How long has she had -?’ said Kate.
‘Microcephaly?’ She also said the word carefully, recited like a curse. ‘She was born with it, she can’t talk. Then she got the scoliosis—’ Again recited carefully. ‘That fucks up your spine and your joints, you get osteoarthritis.’ She knew the diseases like the alphabet ‘I love her—’
Suddenly she stopped and began to weep. Malone put his arms round her and held her to him; sobs thudded through her like drumbeats. He looked at Kate over Jillian’s head and saw that she had turned away, had her hand to her mouth. They were on the far side of the main road now, but the mothers in the playground were still watching them. Be grateful, he told them silently, your luck is better than this. It could not be worse.
Jillian recovered, withdrew from his arms and wiped her eyes. ‘Thanks. Sometimes it gets to be too much, you know?’
Malone just nodded; he could not get out any words. Then Kate, turning back, said, ‘Let’s walk you home, Jill.’
They walked the rest of the way in silence. At the front door of Number twelve, Malone said, ‘Do you own this house?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Again the cynical smile; maybe it was her best, her only, defence. ‘We pay rent. A hundred and seventy bucks a week and the landlord says he’s doing us a favour, he feels sorry for us. A fucking Greek.’
‘Do you get any welfare help?’
She nodded. ‘A bit. Mum gets a single parent’s pension and something for Jasmine. But it doesn’t go far, with all the drugs and special foods she needs, things like that.’ She looked up and down the street, then back at them. ‘Sometimes I wanna turn the gas on—’
‘Don’t, Jill—’ But what hope could he offer? She might escape, but what of her mother and Jasmine and young Kelly?
She smiled again, less cynically this time. ‘I won’t. But it’s a thought …’
They left her and walked along to the car. They got in and immediately Kate broke down. Malone reached across and patted her shoulder. ‘I shouldn’t have brought you—’
She shook her head, dried her eyes. ‘I have to get used to it—’
‘Not like that, Kate. You never get used to tragedy like that. Let’s go back to the office.’
His mother and father would be at home in the house just round the corner, but he didn’t want to see them now. They would ask what had brought him to Erskineville and the story would not bear repeating. Not the way he felt at the moment
2
That afternoon Malone was at Surry Hills with Garry Peeples in the incident room that the task force had set up. Photos were pinned to the walls: of corpses, scenes of crime: a macabre gallery. Intelligence had supplied rough portraits of the suspects in the murders of the gay-bashers in the past seven months. ‘Intelligence is still working on a description of Saturday night’s suspect, a woman. So far she looks like a cross between Zsa Zsa Gabor and Whoopi Goldberg. I’m beginning to think all witnesses to a homicide are cross-eyed, astigmatic, or both.’
‘Could she have been a transvestite?’ Malone asked. ‘Drag seems to be pretty popular these days.’
Peeples shrugged. ‘Could’ve been.’ He gestured at the portraits. ‘There are three sketches for each suspect. The only common feature is the eyes, you notice? All dark, good-sized eyes, not squinty. Could be a woman’s eyes.’
‘You suggesting all four suspects could be the one person? That would do away with the vigilantes then. But the feller who rang me this morning said he belonged to a consortium. Unless they’re a family. They could be the family of a gay who was beaten up, maybe killed, by a gang of bashers.’ Then a thought struck him: ‘How did he know so soon that I was on the case?’
‘Search me. We haven’t put out anything.’
‘I got his call before I went out to Erskineville.’ He looked carefully at Peeples. ‘How many have you got on establishment here?’
‘Ninety-odd. Ninety-four, I think. Come on, Scobie, you don’t think it’s someone from—?’ He shook his head. He had thick wavy hair that he seemed to have difficulty in controlling; a curl fell down, an incongruous decoration to his broad aggressive-looking face. ‘No, I won’t pay that. We have a gay liaison guy here, a constable – he’s on leave at the moment. But he’s not the sorta guy goes around avenging gay-bashings. Besides, he wouldn’t know you are on the case.’
‘When he heard about the bashings and the murder, he’d have called up and checked what was happening. If he was a good cop.’
‘He is a good cop.’ Peeples still looked dubious. ‘I’ll check, but I think you’re on the wrong track.’
‘Garry, I’m not on any track at the moment.’ He moved to a map taped to a wall, a map that covered the area within a radius of two kilometres from Surry Hills station. ‘These pins, they’re the locations? I mean, of our four homicides. I’m not interested in any others.’
‘Yeah. The dates are there. Two in Oxford Street, one in Darlinghurst Road towards the Cross, one at The Wall. Whoever they are, this – this consortium keeps close to home.’
‘Assuming they all live around here.’
‘What about Anders, the guy who was bashed?’ Peeples said suddenly. ‘He’d have told his mates you were on the case. Maybe he has a partner—’
‘His partner’s dying of AIDS, I don’t think he’d have been in to see Anders. But yes, maybe he told someone else -G’day, Clarrie. Got something for us?’
Clarrie Binyan was a light-skinned Aborigine; he had been on the planet forty-five years but Malone was certain he was a million years old. Nothing ever fazed him; he took racial insults and service problems with equanimity. He was the sergeant in charge of Ballistics and it was his smiling boast that he could identify a tribal boomerang or nullah-nullah as easily as he could the bullet from a suspect gun. He had a child’s smile and an old man’s eyes. He and Malone were the best of friends, though only at work. It had only recently occurred to Malone that he had never invited Binyan home to Randwick nor had he ever been to the Binyan home in Dulwich Hill. He had tried to assuage his social conscience by telling himself he had never invited anyone home but Russ Clements. Nonetheless there was a feeling of guilt.
Binyan placed a plastic envelope on Peeples’ desk. ‘It’s from the same gun. A Thirty-two, either a Browning or a Beretta, I’d say. There are other guns, ones you can fit with a silencer, that take Thirty-twos, but they’re expensive and unusual – esoteric is the word I’m after, I think. But maybe this lot go in for them? What they do is esoteric by my standards.’
‘Homosexuality or killing?’ said Malone. ‘We don’t know that this lot, the vigilantes, are gays. A bloke called me this morning, told me what they were doing was a public service. If we find the gun, you could identify it enough for us to go to court?’
Binyan nodded. ‘We found some nice individual characteristics – the distinguishing marks on the lands and grooves. You know it, every gun has its own fingerprint. This gun has it, in spades – “The child’s grin”. An old tribal saying.’
‘Is he like this with you all the time?’ Malone asked Peeples. ‘Always mentioning the tribe? How his great-great-great-grandpa gave the finger to Captain Cook? Get on with it, Clarrie.’