Five-Ring Circus Read Online Free Page A

Aldwych.”
    â€œAre we?” Clements looked at his watch. “He’ll be in bed.”
    â€œIf he is, he’ll be wide awake. He’ll have just had a phone call from Les Chung.” Malone explained to the other detectives the set-up at Olympic Tower. “John, you and Gail find out what you can about—” he looked at his notes—“the Bund Corporation, a Shanghai outfit. See if it’s registered here. Phil, you look into Lotus Development. Ten o’clock tomorrow morning I want to know all there is to know.” He grinned at Kagal. “Dress will be informal.”
    The younger man smiled in return; there was rivalry between them, but also respect. Some day Kagal would hold Malone’s job or even a higher one; he could wait. “I’ll wear thongs.”
    Driving over the Harbour Bridge in his family Volvo, Clements said, “I’ve got the feeling we’re putting our toe into a very big pool.”
    â€œWhat do you know about Olympic Tower?”
    â€œNo more than I’ve read in the papers.” He always read the financial pages before he read the rest of the news; the last thing he read were the crime reports. Homicide and Fraud were the only two Police Service units that subscribed to the Financial Review, and the FR was purely for Clements’ benefit. Big and slow-moving, almost ox-like, he had a brain that could juggle figures like the marbles in a lottery barrel; except that his results were never left to chance. Malone had no idea how successful Clements was in his stock market bets, but the odds were that he made more from them than he made as a senior sergeant, the Supervisor of Homicide. “Get Lisa to look into it. She’s at the Town Hall.”
    â€œShe’s on the council’s Olympic committee, not in council planning.”
    â€œOkay, but she’d know who to ask. Watch it, you stupid bastard!” as a car cut in front of them to take the Pacific Highway turn-off.
    â€œI don’t like asking my wife to do police business.”
    â€œYou ask my wife to do it.” Romy Clements was deputy-director of Forensic Medicine stationed at the city morgue.
    Malone gave up. “Righto, I’ll ask her. But from what she tells me of council politics, I don’t want her getting bumped around.”
    Twenty minutes later they were approaching Harbord. Jack Aldwych lived high on a hill in the small seaside suburb. The house was two-storeyed, with wide verandahs on both levels and all four sides. Standing on an eastern verandah, its owner had a 180-degree view of the sea, a domain that had never provided any return, since he had never dealt in drugs, either by sea or any other entry. He had only just been getting into crime when Sydney had been a halfway house for illegal gold shipments between Middle East ports and Hong Kong; he had missed out on that lucrative industry, but had graduated into robbing banks of gold, a much more dangerous pursuit. Standing on a western verandah he looked back on slopes and valleys lined with modest mortgage-mortared houses and blocks of flats as alike as slices of plain cake. This, too, was not the sort of territory where he had made his money; he had never been a petty criminal, at least not since his teen years. He had once boasted that he had never robbed the battlers; but only because the battlers weren’t worth robbing. He had his principles, but only for amusement.
    Every morning, summer and winter, although he was now in his late seventies, he went down to Harbord beach to swim. Once upon a time sharks had cruised off the beach and there had been one or two fatalities. But, whether it was coincidental or not, from the day Jack Aldwych entered the surf no more sharks had been seen. Perhaps the grey nurses and the hammerheads and the great whites knew a bigger shark when they saw one.
    When Malone and Clements rang the bell at the big iron gates that led to the short gravel