Helga's Web by Jon Cleary Page A

like that. There, Lisa. Is that too much?” She handed the plate to Lisa Pretorious, daring her to knock it back.
    ”I’m Dutch,” said Lisa.
    “I know,” said Mrs. Malone, looking as if the knowledge gave her indigestion.
    “We love big helpings. They never served me enough when
    I was in London.”
    “Not even at them big fancy dinners and things at the em- bassy houses and places like that?” Mrs. Malone shook her head in wonder at how the rich tried to economize.
    “That wasn’t a bad picture of me in tonight’s Sun,” said Con Malone.
    “It was a good one of Scobie, too,” said Lisa.
    “Yeah, ” Con Malone said. “Pity they had to take us together, but.”
    The visit had been awkward, but not quite as bad as Malone had expected. His father’s connection with the Opera House murder, slight though it was, had been enough to take the heat off Lisa, even if only occasionally. Brigid Malone, Irish as a peat-bog as she was, had missed out on one of her forebears’ talents: she could not wage war on more than one front. At last she had put aside her antagonism towards Lisa for another night and had concentrated on her son’s bad taste and lack of filial feeling in getting his father involved in police business.
    But Malone knew how to handle that sort of situation and it had not worried him. He poured some more claret into his father’s glass and said, “I never talk business when I’m eating. Lisa says it’s bad for the digestion.”
    “What do ambassadors and people like that talk about when they’re eating?” asked Mrs. Malone.
    “About each other,” said Lisa. “Excepting the French. They only talk about themselves.”
    In the house next door an argument suddenly started up, words booming and crackling beyond the thin kitchen wall like a distant barrage. Malone looked at Lisa and grinned. “There’s some diplomatic chitchat for you.”
    A woman’s voice, strident as a cracked siren, yelled, “You drunken bastard! I dunno what I ever seen in you—” Her voice cut off sharply asyomething thudded against the wall with a metallic clunk.
    “Something’s gunna cojfie right through the wall one night,” said Con Malone, sipping his claret, thinking maybe there was something to this business of gracious living or whatever they called it.
    “Two or three times a week it happens,” said Mrs. Malone. “Next thing you’ll hear him clout her.”
    On cue there was a scream from the woman. Lisa jumped and looked across at Malone. He shook his head. “If I went in there and interfered, they’d both go for me. That’s their own argument. They don’t want any outsider butting in.”
    “Least of all a copper,” said Con Malone, taking another sip of the Cawarra Red, wondering what the wife would do
    if one night he brought home a bottle of it. Probably throw him out of the house for being a pervert or something.
    “But he might kill her!”
    Mrs. Malone shook her head, an armchair general wise in the ways of such battles. “They never do. It’s the coldblooded ones do things like that. Like the one who killed your girl.” She nodded at Malone, giving him a proprietary interest in the dead girl of that morning. Then she noticed her mistake and for the first time looked s)*mpatheticalry at Lisa. “I didn’t mean you, dear. I meant the other one/’
    “I suppose in a way she is his girl,” said Lisa. “At least till he finds out who murdered her.”
    “Dad tells me it ain’t gunna be easy.” Mrs. Malone attacked her trifle.
    “We have to find out who she is, first,” said Malone.
    “And if you don’t, you’ll just forget her.” Mrs. Malone’s teeth clicked as they slipped on a piece of loose custard. “Pigeonhole her.”
    “They never try very hard when it’s a nobody,” said Con Malone.
    “We don’t know she’s a nobody,” said Malone, used to this sort of criticism and still unoffended by it. “She could be a somebody, for all we know.” Thojigh in his mind he