The Bear Pit by Jon Cleary Page A

think of anywhere that’s further away and still has decent hotels?”
    Malone went back to Strawberry Hills, to Homicide’s offices. The area had been named after the English estate of Horace Walpole, near-silent member of parliament but compulsive correspondent; he wrote mailbags of letters and Malone sometimes wondered how he would have reacted to the cornucopia of the internet. The offices were spacious and always neat and clean, a tribute to Clements, an untidy man with a contradictory passion for housekeeping, except on his own desk.
    Phil Truach, looking in need of another one of his forty cigarettes a day, was waiting with good news: “Fingerprints have traced that hand-print on the window-sill. A guy named August, John August. He did three years for armed robbery down in Pentridge and he’d been acquitted before. He’s got enough form.”
    â€œAnything on him recently?”
    â€œThe Victorians say they haven’t heard of him for nine years. They say on his form he wasn’t a hitman, but you never know.”
    â€œIs his name on the Sewing Bee’s list of customers?”
    Russ Clements had come into Malone’s office, taken his usual place on the couch beneath the window. Though the couch was only four years old, he had dented his imprint on it at one end. He gestured at the typewritten list in his hand. “There’s no August. The name here is John June.”
    Malone shook his head at the folly of criminals. “Full of imagination. What’s the address?”
    â€œNone. Just a phone number.”
    He gave it and Malone punched it. He listened for a moment, said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up. “Happy Hours Child-Care Centre.”
    â€œWhat?” said the other two.
    Malone repeated it. “Possible hitman running a day-care centre? It’s a switch.” He reached for the phone book, found what he wanted. “The Happy Hours Child-Care Centre, Longueville. I think I’ll take one of the girls with me. That’ll look better than two big boof-headed cops turning up to frighten the ankle-biters. What else have you got, Russ?”
    â€œAnother list.” Clements held it up. “All the political bods we should look at. You want boof-headed cops on that?”
    â€œWe’d be the only ones they’d understand.” He stood up, sighed. He was sighing a lot these days, as if it were a medical condition. “I’m not looking forward to the next coupla weeks.”
    â€œIt’s all in a good cause.”
    â€œDid you ever think you’d say that about The Dutchman?”
    â€œNo,” said Clements. “But the old bugger stood by us when we needed him. I think we owe him.”
    Malone collected Gail Lee and drove out to Longueville. Gail, half-Chinese, was slim and good-looking, a shade of coolness short of beautiful and as competent as any man on Malone’s staff of nineteen detectives. She drove a little too fast for Malone’s comfort, but he would have been a poor passenger with the driver of a hearse.
    Longueville is a small suburb on the northern shore of the Lane Cove river, one of the two main rivers that flow into Sydney Harbour. It is now a pleasant area of solid houses in their own grounds, though some of the more modern ones are as conspicuous as circus tents in a cemetery. The suburb is a quiet retreat that has no major highway running through it. Once, long ago, it was thickly wooded with cedar and mahogany and populated, according to gossip of the times, by murderers and other assorted criminals. Today, if there are any criminals in the area, they are hidden behind accountants, the new forest for retreat
    The Happy Hours Child-Care Centre looked as if it might once have been a scouts’ or a church hall. It stood in a large yard shaded by two big jacarandas and a crepe myrtle. There were sandpits and playground equipment and a dozen or more small children in the yard.