Dragons at the Party

When they took the bag of emeralds from the pocket of the murdered man, the President sighed loudly and the First Lady, who had been taking French lessons with her sights on asylum on the Riviera, said, ‘Merde!’

All this Malone learned within five minutes of arriving at Kirribilli House. Sergeant Kenthurst, the leader of the detail of Federal Police who were guarding President and Madame Timori, might know next to nothing about homicide but, coming from Canberra, had a sharp ear for detail and expletives.

‘It struck me as a bit off-colour,’ he said.

‘It would have been a bit more off-colour,’ said Russ Clements, who had taken high school French, ‘if she’d said it in Aussie.’

‘Righto, Russ, spread yourself around, see what you can pick up.’ Malone and Clements had started together as police cadets and Malone sometimes wondered if Clements, with his basic approach to everything, didn’t have the right attitude. There had been a time long ago when his own approach had been irreverent and somehow police work had been, or had seemed to be, more fun. ‘Are those protestors still outside?’

‘They’ve been moved further back up the street. I’ll see what I can get out of them. It may have been one of them who did it.’ But Clements sounded doubtful. Demonstrators didn’t bring guns to their outings. You didn’t volunteer to be manhandled by the pigs with a weapon in your pocket.

As the big untidy Homicide detective lumbered away, nodding to two junior officers to go with him, Kenthurst said, ‘Is he a good man?’

Malone sighed inwardly: here we go again. He was a patient-looking man, always seemingly composed. He was tall, six feet one (he was of an age that still continued to think in the old measures), big in the shoulders and still slim at the waist; he had that air of repose that some tall men have, as if their height accents their stillness. He was good-looking without being handsome, though the bones in his face hinted that he might be thought handsome in his old age, if he reached it. He had dark-blue eyes that were good-tempered more often than otherwise and he had a reputation amongst junior officers for being sympathetic. He suffered fools, because there were so many of them, but not gladly.

‘Don’t they teach you fellers down in Canberra to be diplomatic?’

The Federal Police Force, headquartered in the Australian Capital Territory, was a comparatively recent invention. Being so new, it had had no time to become corrupt; based in Canberra, it had also been infected by the virus of natural superiority which, along with hay fever and blowflies, was endemic to the national capital. The police forces of the six States and the Northern Territory, older, wiser and more shop-soiled in the more sordid crimes, looked on the Federals in much the same way as State politicians looked on their Federal counterparts, smart arses who didn’t know what went on in the gutters of the nation. The cops of Neapolis, bargaining with the pimps of Pompeii, had felt the same way about Rome and the Praetorian Guard.

Kenthurst blinked and his wide thin mouth tightened in his long-jawed face. He never liked these assignments here in New South Wales: the locals were too touchy. ‘Sorry, Inspector. I didn’t mean to criticize –’

‘Sergeant, if we’re going to get on together, let’s forget any rivalry. I’m not trying to muscle in on your territory – looking after a couple like the Timoris would be the last thing I’d ask for. You called in the local boys from North Sydney and they called us in from Homicide. I don’t want to take your President away from you. This is the biggest weekend of the year, maybe in Australia’s history, and I was looking forward to spending it with my wife and kids. So let’s co-operate, okay?’