Something Fishy

PRAISE FOR SHANE MALONEY AND MURRAY WHELAN

‘One of our best and most consistently original crime writers. Highly recommended.'
Canberra Times

‘Maloney, the great exponent of the Australian crime genre, has done it again.
The Big Ask
is full of laugh-out-loud humour as well as jaw-dropping accuracy in describing Australian political life.'
marie claire

‘The great joy of Maloney is that he seems effortlessly to marry tightly constructed crime stories to great satirical vision…there's no doubting the brilliance of the writing.' Ian Rankin,
Age

‘There is only one Australian crime writer on my list this year—Shane Maloney. His satires on Australian political life are always hilarious.'
Examiner

‘Maloney is top shelf.'
Australian

‘Whelan's wry social commentaries, ironic observations and many failed attempts at getting the girl make him one of Australian crime fiction's most attractive characters, and Maloney one of the genre's most gifted writers.'
Who Weekly

‘I look forward to the next Murray Whelan book with the same anticipation of pleasure that I feel for the new Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.'
Sydney Morning Herald

‘Maloney is a literary writer who…takes characters that are stereotypes (the public servant, the minister, the arty type) and depicts them with subtlety and originality and compassionate humour. He also writes a ripping yarn.'
Eureka Street

‘To the list that contains Charles Willeford's Florida Keys, Jim Thompson's West Texas, Pete Dexter's Philadelphia, James Crumley's Montana and Carl Hiaasen's Miami, you can add Shane Maloney's Melbourne. Maloney has created a fictional city that contains the best of the real and the not quite real.'
Herald Sun

‘Maloney is a born writer…For the first time, in the vicinity of Australian crime-writing, we hear the true national voice of comic futility, a literary voice which is rich, ridiculous and tawdry, which can set itself up with a soaring rhetoric and slide on the banana skin of its own piss-elegance… Maloney is terrific.'
Age

‘A writer who seems to have been sitting on a thousand observations now unleashed.'
Sunday Age

‘The pure pleasure of Maloney's book lies in being plunged so thoroughly into the complicated byways of Australian politics…a fast-paced, fresh, unerringly funny book… Murray is a great creation, one that takes the wisecracking wise guy into a whole new realm.'
Houston Chronicle

‘Maloney has a quirky eye for descriptive details that lend frequent humor to a fascinating and adventurous plot. Highly recommended.'
Library Journal

SOMETHING FISHY

Shane Maloney's novels
include
Stiff, The Brush-Off,
winner of the Ned Kelly Prize
for Crime Fiction
, Nice Try
and
The Big Ask.

SHANE

MALONEY

something fishy

A MURRAY WHELAN THRILLER

The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Shane Maloney 2002

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published 2002
This edition 2003, reprinted 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008

Printed and bound by Griffin Press
Designed by Chong Weng-ho
Typeset in Baskerville MT by J&M Typesetting

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Maloney, Shane.

Something fishy.

1. Whelan, Murray (Fictitious character) - Fiction. 2. Abalone fisheries - Australia - Fiction. 3. Australia - Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories. I. Title.

A823.3

ISBN 978 1 877008 70 2

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are
always aiming at something beyond political
life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

Aristotle,
Ethics

The author of this book, its setting
and characters are entirely fictitious.
There is no such place as the state of Victoria.
The Australian Labor Party exists
only in the imagination of its members.

A fraction of a second, that's all it takes.

By my reckoning, Rodney Syce and Adrian Parish began their break-out from the Melbourne Remand Centre at precisely the moment I emerged from the trees in the Fitzroy Gardens and found Lyndal Luscombe sitting on the bench beside the birdbath fountain.

Her message said she'd wait there until six, hoping the Hon. Murray Whelan could make it. A personal matter. The Legislative Council usher must have liked that bit because he was even more inscrutable than usual when he passed me the note during the third reading of the Administrative Resources Amendment Bill (1994).

I got the note just after five-thirty, a welcome distraction from the drone of the Minister for Administrative Services. Rising from my place in the back row of the opposition benches, I bowed to the Speaker and sidled out of the chamber, hoping the party whip wouldn't notice I was gone.

Not that my presence in the upper house of the state legislature made a skerrick of difference, of course. Since our disastrous defeat at the last election, there were so few of us left in parliament that to describe the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party as an impotent rump would have seriously overstated both our size and influence.

I left Parliament House by the rear door, dodged a snaggle of peak-hour trams and made my way through Treasury Place, the pavement thick with homeward-bound public servants. Whatever it was, it must have been pretty important for Lyndal to summon me like this. Why not wait until parliament adjourned for dinner at seven, talk to me then? And why the gardens?

Oh Christ, I thought, picking up my pace as I entered the long avenue of overarching elms. She's in the gardens because of what borders them. The Freemasons Hospital. The Mercy. Medical suites and day-procedure centres and rows of Victorian terraces filled with specialists. She's been to a medico of some sort. Something's wrong and she wants to talk about it. Somewhere quiet, somewhere she'll have my full attention.

I came out of the trees and saw her before she saw me, bathed in a pool of late-afternoon sunshine, the light catching the chestnut hues in her hair. Her eyes were downcast and she was fiddling with the hem of her knit skirt where it ended just above her knees. Her lips were moving as if she were rehearsing lines. She definitely had something on her mind.

It was about then that the alarm must have gone off at the Remand Centre. Not that I could hear it, three kilometres away on the other side of the downtown grid. I was attending to my own, inner alarm bells. Don't panic, I told myself, wait until you hear what she has to say.

‘Hi,' I said cheerfully, bending to plant a kiss on her cheek. Act natural, let her take her own sweet time.

Lyndal met my descending smile with a brisk, open-palmed slap. ‘Don't you dare,' she warned. ‘You filthy beast.'

I rocked back on my heels, jaw slack. What had I done to deserve this? It wasn't as though I hadn't tried to kiss her before. Or worse. And succeeded.

‘What's got into you?' I said, hand pressed to my face.

Quickly glancing around, I checked that nobody was watching. Not exactly good for the parliamentary image, copping a biff from a woman, especially one as attractive as Lyndal. But the gardens were deserted. A mid-autumn chill was already rising from the lawns. A spill of white-clad nurses emerged from the Mercy Hospital across the road, but none of them looked our way. Cars rolled past, their drivers intent on making good time to the freeway.

‘What's got into me?' said Lyndal. ‘I'll tell you what's got into me. You have, Mr Sexpot. I'm pregnant.'

My jaw resumed the slack position. ‘Pregnant?'

‘Potted. Up the duff. Preggers. Bun in the oven. Expecting.'

Pressing both cheeks, I sank onto the seat beside her. ‘Goodness,' I said.

Lyndal inched away. ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it, pal.' Her counterfeit ire dissolved into a self-congratulatory grin.

‘You're sure?'

‘Sure as spermatozoa,' she nodded. ‘And I've got the picture to prove it.' She fished in her handbag and thrust a Polaroid at me. It looked like an underexposed satellite reconnaissance photograph of atmospheric turbulence over the South China Sea. ‘She's the spitting image of you, don't you think?'

‘She?' A grainy blob occupied the north-west quadrant of the photograph, a furball in a blizzard. ‘How?' I said. ‘I mean when?'

Lyndal's expression had become beatific, placid, wise. Christ, freshly duffed and she was already turning into the Earth Mother. ‘By the usual method,' she said. ‘Last January, during the summer holidays. One of those lazy afternoons with nothing better to do than.'

‘Not that when,' I said. ‘I mean, when's it due? I mean she.'

‘Nine months from the time of conception, Murray,' she said patiently. ‘Even you should be able to figure it out.'

My fingers did the sums. ‘October.' But it was already April. ‘How long have you known? And why didn't you say anything?'

‘I wanted to be one hundred per cent sure that everything was okay before I told you.' She nodded towards the building beside the hospital. ‘I've just seen the obstetrician. It's too early for amniocentesis but the ultrasound indicates a normal baby.'

‘Normal?' I said, incredulous. ‘With you for a mother? A sneaky minx who doesn't even bother to tell her poor dumb paramour that she's gone and got herself knocked up.'

Waves of relief broke over me, a treacly ocean of love and pleasure and pride. My feet executed a little jig. Slipping my forearm beneath Lyndal's thighs, I swung her legs up onto the bench and tilted her sideways so she sprawled on her back the length of the slatted seat. I dropped to my knees and gently pinned her shoulders.

‘Under the circumstances,' I said, ‘I don't see how you've got any choice but to marry me forthwith.'

She smirked back. ‘Determined to make an honest woman of me, are you, Murray Whelan, MLC?'

Oh yes, indeed. I lowered my face to hers. She yielded, squirming beneath my caress, ripe and lush, letting her arms dangle. I laid a hand on her breast. ‘Now that you mention it, I do detect a certain womanly fulsomeness.'

She smacked my hand away and swung her feet to the ground. ‘Get up,' she commanded. ‘You look ridiculous. Forty-two-year-old politician in a double-breasted suit, down on his knees, slobbering like a teenage Romeo.'

I stayed exactly where I was. ‘Groping the tits of the fiercely independent thirty-five-year-old public policy analyst whose swelling belly is heavy with his love child.'