Murder Song by Jon Cleary Page B

quality that, his minders told her, was the most necessary qualification for today’s leaders. She had two children, one of whom had fled the Image of his father and was now working in a merchant bank in London, the other married to a doctor and living in the Northern Territory, where the Image never penetrated; she had two grandchildren, both too young to know what an Image was even when it interrupted their cartoons on television. She was moral and decent and had taken seriously her task of trying to set an example. Then she had met Brian Boru, the last man she would have thought she would fall for, and had stepped off a cliff.
    And now, somehow, she was involved in a murder. For the first time she was suddenly, terribly afraid; but for him: “Was it someone trying to kill you?”
    He hesitated, took his hand away and put his arm along the back of the couch behind her. “I thought of that, only a few moments ago. I’ve got enemies, but I never thought anyone’d want to kill me. Christ, I hate violence!”
    She was studying him, looking for the stranger she hadn’t yet discovered: she knew there was one hidden there in Brian Boru O’Brien. He had none of Philip’s classical good looks; the only feature that gave him distinction were the streaks of grey thick hair along his temples; there was no grey in her own equally thick dark hair, yet she was two years older than he. In public he had a certain arrogance to him, but never with her: not even at the moment they had first met, she remembered. He had been extraordinarily successful in a generation that, it seemed to her, had bred successful men like too-fecund rabbits. Yet, unlike the country’s nouveaux riches, he did not flash his wealth. Sure, he lived in luxury at the Congress, but no one could drive or sail past and say, with sour envy, “There’s that bastard O’Brien’s ten-million-dollar waterfront palace.” He owned no yacht, no Learjet, not even a car; once, he told her, he had owned a Rolls-Royce in London, but in those days in the pop world you were expected to own a Rolls. It wasn’t so much a status symbol, he had said, as a jerk of the thumb at the Establishment who had thought up till then they had owned the world. The financial columnists told her that his dealings with the business Establishment in this country were done with a jerk of the thumb; yet he was always a gentleman of the old school with her, though her father had belonged to the Establishment. He was not a gentleman in bed, but it was her guess that no man worth his balls was ever a gentleman in bed, even one of the old school: she couldn’t imagine anything more boring than being made love to by a gentleman. Brian Boru was a sum of contradictions and she hadn’t yet got them all in place. There was still a stranger hidden amongst them.
    â€œ I think you should go to the police and tell them the truth.”
    He shook his head emphatically. “I’ll never tell them about you.”
    â€œI don’t want you to—I hope you don’t have to. But if you have to explain where you were Saturday and Sunday . . .”
    They had spent the weekend at a hotel on the Central Coast; in winter it had few guests and certainly none who would recognize O’Brien. She had worn a blonde wig and the rimless fashion glasses she wore when watching movies or television; they made her look older, but, she had told herself, she wasn’t spending the weekend with some youth half her age. The wig had been a joke gift from Dolly Parton, whom Philip had invited to dinner at The Lodge during one of the singer’s tours: she had got on like a fond sister with Dolly, a woman who understood men. She had trimmed the wig; she hadn’t wanted some guest at the hotel asking her to sing “We Had All the Good Things Going.” Brian Boru had laughed at her disguise, but not in an offensive way; it had been a wonderful