Murder Song Read Free Page A

neighbouring buildings. “Where do you reckon the shot came from?”
    â€œOver there.” Clements pointed at a block of offices in Kent Street, the next street west. “He’d have had an ideal spot there on that flat roof. It’s about a hundred and fifty metres away, no more. If he was experienced, with a good gun and a night „scope, she’d have been an easy target.”
    â€œRighto, send for Andy Graham, get him to do the donkey work, tell him to search that roof and next door to it for any cartridge cases. Stay here till he turns up. I’m going out to Paddington, see if there’s anyone there to tell the bad news to.”
    â€œBetter you than me.”
    â€œSome day you’re going to have to do it.” I just hope to Christ you don’t have to tell the bad news to Lisa.
    He left Clements, went down in the lift with the two men from the funeral contractors and the body of Mardi Jack. The lift wasn’t big enough to take the stretcher horizontally and one of the men was holding Mardi Jack in his arms as if she were a drunken dancer.
    â€œWouldn’t you know it?” he said over the green plastic shoulder to Malone. “The bloody service lift isn’t working. I guess it’s gunna be one of them weeks.”
    â€œAt least you’re still breathing,” said Malone.
    The man, tall and painfully thin, a living cadaver, wasn’t offended; his trade brought more abusive jokes than even a policeman’s lot. “Sometimes I wonder who’s better off,” he said and looked reproachfully at the shrouded corpse as if Mardi Jack had missed a crucial step in their dance.
    Malone went out into Clarence Street, pushing through the small crowd that had stopped to see why an ambulance was double-parked in the busy street. There were also two TV vans double-parked behind it; a cameraman aimed his camera at Malone, but he shook his head and put a hand up to his face.
    Two reporters came at him, but he just smiled and said, “See Sergeant Clements, he’s in charge,” and dodged round them.
    There were two parking tickets on the Commodore; the Grey Bombers, the parking police, must be making blanket raids this morning. He lifted them off, stuck them under a windscreen wiper of one of the TV vans, got into the car and pulled out into the traffic. He glanced in his driving mirror as he drove away and saw the body of Mardi Jack, now on the stretcher, being pushed into the ambulance.
    The start of another week, another job. He wondered how senior men felt in Traffic or Administration each Monday morning. But even as he drove towards that aspect of murder he always hated, the telling of the dreadful news to the victim’s family, he knew he would always prefer people to paper. The living and the dead were part of him.
    II
    Goodwood Street was a narrow one-way street lined on both sides by narrow-fronted terrace houses. Paddington in the last century had been a mix of solid merchants’ houses and workmen’s cottages and terraces; perched on a ridge, the merchants and one or two of the workmen had had a distant view of the harbour, but most of the citizens had just stared across the street at each other, not always the best of sights, especially on Friday and Saturday nights when the drunks came rolling home. Then in the twenties and thirties of this century it had become almost solely a working man’s domain, the narrow houses crowded with large families, constant debt and a solid Labour vote. In the last twenty years it had been invaded by artists moving closer to the wealthy buyers of the eastern suburbs, by writers who weren’t intellectual enough for Balmain and by yuppies turning the terrace houses into shrunken mansions. Houses with sixteen-foot frontages now brought prices that would have kept the families of years ago for a lifetime. It was another turn of the wheel in the history of any city that manages to