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scattered about. Somewhere far above them a pneumatic drill thumped away like an aural nerve. Malone sniffed again, but there wasn’t the sickly sweet smell he had expected.
    “She hardly smells at all.” A uniformed policeman, Jack Radcliff, stepped out of the dark opening, balancing like an overweight ballet dancer on the pile of timber. “The air in there’s pretty dry, Scobie. And no light got to her.”
    “Who found her?”
    Everyone looked around; then the familiar lumpy figure leaning up against the wall said, “I did.”
    “G’day, Dad,” said Malone, and hoped he didn’t sound as surprised as he felt: policemen were never supposed to be surprised by anything. “When did you start work here?”
    “Your father?” Kerslake fired a couple of lottery marbles, bonus prizes. “What d’you know! Small world!”
    “Come in this morning,” said Con Malone, still leaning against the wall, his helmet tipped like a challenge over one eye. “I’m labouring for one of the sub-contractors. Just my bloody luck.”
    Malone didn’t ask what his father considered bloody luck: whether it was the fact of discovering the dead girl or having his own son as the investigating officer. Malone knew what the answer would be.
    He stepped gingerly over the heaped timber and, guided by several lamps, went into the large chamber.
    “Pretty appropriate,” said Clements. “This could be a tomb. What were they gunna do—bury politicians down here like those Egyptian kings?”
    “Break it down, Russ,” Malone said, and Clements blushed, abruptly aware that these men around him were not as used to murder as he and Malone. ,
    “It was going to be a dressing room,” said Kerslake. “But don’t know now. Know what theatrical types are like. Will reckon the place is haunted.”
    There’ll be other ghosts before this place falls down, Malone thought, this is just the first. The girl lay in the spotlight of two lamps, her nude body half-exposed beneath a green silk dressing gown, old newspapers and the fossilized remainders of workers’ sandwiches scattered about her like the debris of funeral tributes. Her blonde hair hung like straw beneath her curiously twisted head; her mouth was open for a scream that she might never have made. There were dark bruises on her throat and her wide-open eyes were veined with hemorrhaging. She had that peculiarly ugly look that only beautiful women get when they have met a violent death. Malone had noticed it before: the living ugly seem to get no uglier in death.
    “Anything on her to say who she was?”
    Radcliff shook his head. “Nothing. I didn’t move her, Scobie. That’s your job.”
    “Thanks,” said Malone drily: the police force had its own lines of demarcation. He looked around at the other six or
    seven men in the high narrow room. Shadows hung in the corners and in the angles of the ceiling like dark cobwebs; a couple of the men glanced furtively about and one of them blessed himself. Malone noticed now that they were all Italians; most Australian construction would come to a standstill without the unskilled labour that the newly-arrived immigrants offered. Only one man had remained outside in the passage, the Old Australian with his helmet still cocked derisively over his eye and the cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth like an old fang.
    “Nobody leaves the work site,” Malone said to Kerslake. “Well want to interview everybody. Everybody,” he repeated, and looked out at his father. The fang came up, glowed red, then drooped again. “Where’s a phone?”
    Kerslake, letting fly with today’s quota of unused words, spitting them out to the rhythm of the faraway pneumatic drill, led Malone back through the passages, up several flights of steps and into an office that looked directly out on the harbour. Gulls hung in the shining air like small crucifixes and a man sat in a rowing boat, his head bent as if he were praying for fish to bite at the rosary of his