Babylon South

Author:Jon Cleary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 2013-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

8

I

“INSPECTOR—”

“G’day, Andy, where’ve you been? I thought you’d resigned from the Department or something.”

“I’ve been following those suggestions you gave me.” Andy Graham grinned; he had learned that you could relax with Malone, just so long as you did your job. “The Feds have been really helpful on this one.”

Malone looked across at Clements. “Do they owe us something?”

“I don’t think so.” All the police forces, State and Federal, were fiercely independent, sometimes even mistrustful, of each other. They were bureaucracies and being in uniform made them no different from other bureaucracies. Clements, a State chauvinist, had no time for Canberra. “The PM must be calling an election and is looking for votes.”

“Who’d vote for Phil Norval except little old ladies?”

Andy Graham waited while his two seniors discussed Canberra. Then he said, “At the same time as Walter Springfellow disappeared, a Third Secretary from the Russian embassy went into smoke. The same weekend, March 27 and 28, 1966.”

“You get his name?”

Graham looked at his notes. “Alexis Uritzsky. According to the Federal, the Russians never issued a comment. They did inform External Affairs, as it was then, that he’d been recalled to Moscow for personal reasons.”

“Did anyone make a connection between his and Springfellow’s disappearance?”

“I don’t know. I guess only ASIO would know that. I tried contacting them, but they just brushed me off. I don’t think they talk to detective-constables.”

Malone grinned at Clements. “We’ll try a higher rank, see how we go. Right, Andy. Good work. See if you can dig up anything more on—what’s his name?—Uritzsky.”

“Right.”

After Graham had galloped away, Malone picked up his phone and dialled the Herald and asked for the editor-in-chief. “Jack Montgomery? Jack, this is Scobie Malone. Could I drop in to see you for a few minutes?”

“So long as it’s in the next hour. After that I’ve got to look as if I’m working.”

Fifteen minutes later Malone and Clements walked into the Herald building uptown and went up to Editorial on the sixth floor. Jack Montgomery, tall and stooped, grey-haired and slow-talking, looking and sounding more like a battling farmer than one of the most highly regarded newspapermen in the country, took his feet down off his desk as the two detectives came into his office. He took his pipe out of his mouth, a major concession.

“They never had editors-in-chief when I first started as a copy boy. I still don’t know what it means, but it’s a nice-sounding title and they don’t expect you to work too hard. What can I do for you?” He put his pipe back in his mouth, where it would remain for the rest of the conversation.

Malone introduced Clements and then came straight to the point, explaining that he was working on both the Springfellow murders. “Jack, you were in Canberra in the 1960s, weren’t you?”

“I was working for the Age in those days. I was chief political hack.” Montgomery had a gentle sardonic way of putting himself down; he was the general commanding on this floor, but he would never write self-extolling memoirs.

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