Autumn Maze Read online

  Inglebath, the manager, was middle-aged and had a face and figure that suggested he liked a drink or two or three. He had prematurely grey hair that made his mottled face more conspicuous. He wore black thick-rimmed glasses that looked more like camouflage than a help to his sight. But if he was a drinker, there was none of the usual drinker’s bonhomie; when he smiled, it was a bank manager’s smile, cynical and I’ve-heard-it-all-before.

  He had not heard what Malone had to tell him. “Good God! Really? I only met him a couple of times, but he seemed—harmless?”

  “Maybe he was harmless, Mr. Inglebath. You don’t have to be harmful to be murdered, not these days. The trouble is, we don’t seem to know much about who he really was. I’d like to see details of his account.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Inspector.”

  “This isn’t a Swiss bank, is it? The Treasury Bank of Zurich or somewhere?” He did not like Mr. Inglebath, who seemed intent on being obstructive.

  Inglebath smiled, was suddenly friendly. “Inspector, I’m not trying to be obstructive. Incidentally, you’re wrong about Swiss banks. They are much more cooperative than they used to be when it comes to questions of secret accounts. I’ll let you see Mr. Kornsey’s account, but you’ll have to show me a warrant first. And I’d like written permission from Mrs. Kornsey. I presume there is a Mrs. Kornsey?”

  “He never mentioned her?”

  “Not as far as I know, but I can have my assistant manager check that.” He made a call on his inter-office phone, hung up and looked back at Malone. “We have no record of there being a Mrs. Kornsey. We have no home or business address for him, just a box number at the local post office. He opened his account here seven years ago, before all the tax mullarkey we now have to go through.”

  Malone asked if he could use the manager’s phone, then called Clements. “Russ, send someone out here with a warrant for us to look at the account of Terence Kornsey. And get someone out to the Kornsey place at Lugarno, someone to open a safe there. Try the Fraud Squad, they’re cracking safes all the time. I want it done now. Anything happening your end?”

  “Someone just tried to burn Cormac Casement alive.”

  III

  Kelsey Bugler and Kim Weetbix were neither revolutionaries nor did they even belong to a gang. They just hated the rich because they themselves were not rich. Given the option of being poor and revolutionary and being rich and rapacious, they would have opted for the latter. Each of them had been out of work for eighteen months and they had grown tired of trying to live on the dole, waking up each morning to a day that they knew was going to be worse than yesterday. Hopelessness had started to give way to hate against anyone better off than themselves.

  Kel Bugler was a fifth-generation Australian, though, if pressed, he would not have bothered to trace the generations back past his parents, who had kicked him out of the house when he was sixteen. He was tall and thin and might have passed for good-looking if surliness had not been his most prominent feature; he had long dark hair tied with a rubber band at the back in a pony-tail and there was a botched tattoo on the back of his left hand. He was twenty-two years old and had no training in any trade except mugging and he was still an apprentice at that.

  Kim Weetbix had never had a home to be thrown out of. Her father was an unknown American soldier; not the Unknown Soldier, just a cypher. Her mother, now dead, had been a Saigon bar-girl. Kim had arrived in Australia with the first boat-load of refugees, a scared but resourceful fourteen-year-old; she had escaped from the camp where she and the other refugees had been taken and she had been on the run ever since. She had begged, stolen, sold herself and managed to scrape up enough money to buy herself forged papers; she had taken her second name off the box of the first food she had been offered in the immigration camp. The hustler selling her the papers, a patriotic Aussie trying to enlarge the national consumer market by encouraging immigration, had looked at her quizzically, then given her her naturalization. For his price, of course. Kim was tall for an Asian girl, but that could be attributed to her father, whoever he was; she was never to find out, but he had been a high school basketball star and at six feet six an easy target for a Viet Cong sniper. She had good looks, was almost a beauty, but she had long ago set her face in stone against the world. She had twice as much intelligence as Kel Bugler and what she saw in him only she knew.

  When they found the small door could be opened in the big grille door of The Wharfs garage, they couldn’t believe their luck. They crept down into the bottom level of the basement garage, intending only to break into the cars they found there, taking whatever came to hand. They were disappointed when they reached the lower level and found only two cars and a truck: a Mercedes, a Bentley and a utility that, said the sign on its sides, belonged to B. PAKSON & SON, PAINTERS. In the back of the truck were several cans of paint and two cans of thinners: nothing worth stealing, since Kel and Kim were neither artists nor decorators.

  Then they saw the old geezer, carrying a briefcase, get out of the lift at the far end of the garage and walk towards the Bentley.

  “We’ll do him!” Kel was not over-intelligent but his mind was like a fox’s, quick on reflex.

  They were both wearing black leather jackets, worn jeans and cheap trainers. Each of them had a woollen scarf round his neck against the chill wind that, they were sure, always waited round the corner for them; they had even begun to hate nature, though this warm autumn perversely mocked them. They pulled the scarves up to cover their lower faces; they looked like the masked figures one saw on television almost every night of the week, the Arab, French, German stone-throwers, the brother- and sisterhood of protestors. But they had no cause other than grabbing a wallet from the elderly man now opening the door of the Bentley and throwing the briefcase on to the front seat.

  Cormac Casement half turned as the two figures came up in a rush behind him. He went down under the blow across the back of his neck. As he fell he rolled over, lay on his back and looked up as the masked man knelt on him, fumbling for his wallet while the other attacker, a girl, snatched the gold watch from his wrist.

  Cormac Casement had never worn an expensive watch in his life till his second wife had given him one; for him a watch had always been only something that told the time and its cost neither hurried time nor made up for the loss of it. He also was old money, so old he was pre-credit card. He was well known and knew he was; he frequented only places where he was recognized. Clothiers, clubs, restaurants: he ran accounts at all of them and never needed a credit card or cash. His wallet was as flat as a visiting card; all it contained was his driving licence and two ten-dollar notes, emergency money. He would have been much safer with Kel and Kim if he had been carrying a roll of notes and a venetian-blind of credit cards.

  When Kel saw how little there was in the wallet, fury suddenly took hold of him. He stood up and kicked Cormac Casement in the ribs; the old man yelped with pain and tried to roll away. “Where’s your fucking money? You gotta have more than this!” Kel had a very narrow view of the relationship between the symbols of wealth and actual cash; anyone who drove a Bentley should have a bank of ready money in the boot. He kicked Casement again. “Where is it, shithead?”

  Kim stuffed the gold watch into her pocket, then snatched the briefcase from the front seat. “Maybe there’s money in this! Come on, let’s get outa here!”

  “No!” Kel’s fury had grown, he was storming with anger and hate.

  He spun round the front of the Bentley and ran the few yards to the painters’ truck. He grabbed one of the cans of thinners and ran back to where Casement still lay on the ground, holding his ribs. “On your feet, arsehole!”

  He ripped off the cap of the can of thinners, dragged Casement to his feet and thrust the can at him. “You gunna burn this heap, fuck you! Start splashing!”

  Casement looked at him blankly; he could not bring himself to believe the hatred in this young man. He was not horrified at having to burn his car; his
horror was that this young savage could hate him so much. Kel shouted at him again, hit him across the face and Casement staggered against the car, splashing thinners over the bonnet. Kim stood aside, saying nothing; but above the mask of the scarf her dark eyes were troubled. She was capable of hatred, she had experienced enough degradation to have built up a store of it, but she could control it. It worried her to see that Kel had no leash at all on himself.

  Cormac Casement emptied the can, splashing thinners on the car from front to rear. He felt nothing at what was about to happen to the expensive car; possessions meant little to him. He stood back, inadvertently stepping on Kel’s foot as the latter lit a match and threw it on the car. Kel let out a shout of pain and shoved Casement against the car as the thinners burst into flame. Casement screamed as his hands were engulfed by fire and he fell away, trying to put out his burning hands by burying them in his armpits, much as he would have done if they had been frozen.

  “Serve you fucking right for being rich, arsehole!”

  Then Kelsey Bugler and Kim Weetbix ran up the ramp leading out of the lower level of the garage.

  6

  I

  “DID YOU see Casement?” said Malone.

  “They wouldn’t let me see him.” Clements settled himself at the Malones’ dinner table. “He’s in the private section at St Sebastian’s. He’s in mild shock, they said. We can see him tomorrow.”

  “Mild shock, that all? I didn’t think anything would shock him.”

  “It could of been the burning of his car. It was a Bentley turbo.”

  “A write-off?”

  “Total. John Kagal tells me it’s four hundred and sixty thousand dollars’ worth. That’d shock me.”

  “All right,” said Lisa, putting the first course of pumpkin soup on the table. “No shop talk.”

  “What’s it like being married to a policeman?” said Romy; then gave Clements a conciliatory smile. “Just a routine question, Sergeant.”

  Lisa sat down. The children had already eaten and retired to their bedrooms to do their homework. Lisa had an old-fashioned sense of discipline that Malone, if not the children, appreciated. She was appalled when she read stories or heard from old schoolfriends in Holland of the expansively liberal attitude of the burghers of Amsterdam, her home town; she was far from prudish and was liberal in many of her attitudes, but she believed that nothing worked if it was allowed to run off the rails. She ran her home better, she claimed, than most of the police stations she had seen—“At least I would make the drunks and the hoons clean up after themselves.” Standards had to be paid heed to.

  “You have to adjust,” she said to Romy, as if the two policemen were not present at the table. “It’s worse if he’s in Homicide. Even so, I suppose that’s better than Internal Affairs.”

  “Anything’s better than Internal Affairs,” said Malone.

  “Nobody’s talking to you,” said his wife. “How’s the soup, Romy? It’s a German recipe.”

  “Delicious. I love cooking,” with a sidelong amused glance at Clements, “but cooking for oneself, there’s no enjoyment in it.”

  “Geez.” Clements put down his spoon. “All right, let’s get married.”

  “You hear that?” Romy looked at the Malones. “You’re witnesses.”

  “Refuse him,” said Lisa. “If he’s genuine, he’ll ask you again when you’re alone. We shouldn’t be hearing this.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Malone. “You’ve been working on this proposal for two years, now you’re objecting to the way Russ has gone about it.”

  “It’s too casual,” said his Dutch wife. “Too Australian.”

  “That’s the way we operate in Homicide. We arrest people casually. How about coming down to the station, mate, while we charge you? That’s the way we do it. It works.”

  The banter was light, but all four knew there had been a commitment. Clements looked slightly bemused, as if he had stepped out of a plane in mid-air and wasn’t sure he could work the ripcord on his parachute. Romy looked at Lisa and winked, but there was no smug pleasure on her face. Lisa, a romantic, was the one who looked as if she had been proposed to. Malone, the pragmatist, who knew Clements better than either of the women did, just hoped the big man would not have second thoughts in the morning.

  He poured some wine and raised his glass. “To the two of you. May you be as happy as we have been.”

  “We couldn’t ask for more than that,” said Clements without awkwardness and Lisa got up, moved round behind him and kissed him fondly on the cheek, her arms round his neck. Then she looked across at Malone and he saw the glisten of tears and felt the lump in his throat, the sweet cancer of love.

  Later, out in the kitchen where Romy was helping Lisa stack the dishes in the dishwasher, Lisa said, “There’ll be a difference for you two. You’re both in the same line of work, almost. I could never stomach what you do.”

  “You get used to it.” Romy was as practised at the kitchen sink as she was at the autopsy table; plates and bones had much the same fragility. “Russ and I don’t talk about it now. There’ll be no need to change when we’re married. I get upset sometimes, especially if it’s a child, but death is worse for the living than it is for the dead. That’s an old saw, but it’s true.”

  “I know that.” Lisa closed her eyes for a moment against the thought of ever losing one of her children; then she closed the dishwasher, set it going. “Scobie tells me sometimes what it’s like when he has to call on a wife or family and give them the bad news. He hasn’t told me anything about it yet, but I think he had one like that today.”

  “He did. Russ told me.”

  “The government and the public think that all police are paid for is keeping law and order. They don’t know the half of it, damn them.”

  In the living room Malone and Clements were looking at a television programme on law and order. A politician was working some micro reform on the English language: “No Austrayan guvment has ever know-en or show-en—”

  Malone got up and switched off the set. “Bugger „em! When it comes to our work, no politician knows his arse from his elbow.”

  “Including our Minister.” Clements was enjoying what he called his cooling ale, his standard after-dinner drink; not for him a port or a brandy, he was Aussie right through to his liver. “Greg Random was on the blower to me just before I left the office. Zanuch had been on to him and Sweden had been on to him. I gather it was our fault someone tried to do in Cormac Casement.”

  Malone grinned wryly. “Isn’t it always? You think there’s some connection between the other murders and the attempt on Casement?”

  Clements shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. It’s a different MO, no subtlety about it. But maybe they worked it that way just to confuse us. He was lucky to get out of it, they could of locked him in the car. How’d you get on with Mrs. Kornsey?”

  Malone told him. “She knows nothing about her husband, or practically nothing. I’m hoping the safe in the garage will tell us something. Mr. Kornsey, whoever he was, had something to hide.”

  Then the children came in to say goodnight. Claire and Maureen kissed Clements and Tom punched him gently on the shoulder. “No kiss?” said Clements, grinning.

  “Garn, Dad would arrest me if I did that.”

  Then the two women came in from the kitchen and Lisa said, “Romy and Russ are engaged.”

  There was a shriek from the two girls and they rushed at Romy and hugged her. Tom waited till his sisters had stepped back, then he put his arms round Romy, lifted his face and kissed her on the cheek. Then he looked at Clements. “Okay, Uncle Russ?”

  “Okay.”

  Clements looked suddenly happy and relaxed, as if his parachute had opened safely.

  II

  Greg Random had come across to Homicide for the morning conference, but sat in the background, his unlit pipe hanging from one corner of his mouth. Occasionally it rose, like a pointer’s nose, as one of the
detectives produced another item of evidence.

  “We opened the Kornsey safe,” said John Kagal, putting two plastic bags on Malone’s desk. “There were some tools in it, but I didn’t bring those back. There’s a small computer outside on my desk, one of the latest. I’ve run through it, but it seems brand new, there’s nothing in its memory. He could’ve been getting ready for some project.”

  Malone emptied the plastic bags. There were half a dozen photos; two postcards of Manhattan; an Esso map of New York City, yellowed and cracked; two passports and an airline ticket, first class, to Hong Kong; a bundle of US one-hundred-dollar bills; a bank book and a bank statement; two boxes of headed notepaper; two boxes of ammunition and a Colt .45 automatic. “The average contents of the average suburban safe?”

  “Mr. Kornsey wasn’t your average suburban Joe,” said Kagal. “The passports are American, but in different names. Terence Kornsey and Joseph Caccia. Same photo, though, same date of birth. The money, it adds up to twenty-eight thousand dollars. The postcards have nothing on the back of them, so it looks as if he might’ve bought „em for sentimental reasons, a reminder of home. The map has a small biro circle on it, out in the borough of Queens. I’d say that was where he came from. The photos are all of him with someone. Some with an elderly couple who could be his parents, one of them with a girl, a real bimbo . . . No offence, Peta. She really is.” He held up the photo.

  Without moving closer to look at the photo, Peta nodded. “I’ll take your word for it, John.”