he knew to the uniformed officers, but Jack got him to go through the story again. Bishop hovered discreetly in the background, his pen poised over his notebook, his pimple throbbing red and angry. Jack wished he would squeeze it, wondering vaguely if there was anything in what the Freudians said about it. Rosenberg was talking again and Jack bent forward, concentrating on what he was saying.
The attacks had begun a fortnight or so earlier. A passing motorist had noticed the daubs first and rung in when she got to work. Then there was the dog excrement smeared on the doors and shoved through the letterbox. Human too, Rosenberg observed with a shudder of revulsion.
Were there any other unusual incidents? Jack wanted to know, but Rosenberg insisted on giving them coffee before he would talk further. A heavy-set, silent woman with white hair and a slightly oriental cast of features handed them their coffee and it was good; thick and sweet, the kind you'd get in Vienna or Budapest. She had served it in fine white bone china, each cup accompanied by a tiny plate of sweet pastry. Mrs Gellhorn, the housekeeper, as she was introduced, had learned her trade in Vienna before the Nazis had come in 1938, in a vanished world. She bowed slightly, and withdrew.
'Unusual incidents, Inspector?' said Rosenberg, pushing his empty cup to one side and polishing his glasses on his napkin. 'Well, there were the telephone calls: five or six of them a day, although they've tapered off. Perhaps they suspect you've got a tap on my phone? We've had them on and off for years, you know, but nothing like this. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, quite vile, Inspector.'
Jack nodded. Booker had said they were pretty disgusting and they were when Rosenberg played the tape; a grating, ranting, self-righteous, barely educated voice spewing out a putrid stream of abuse straight from Julius Streicher's Die Sturmer but in Strine-accented English. Jack sighed at a hatred that knew no reason and it confirmed his private belief that a large slice of humanity was very little removed from the other Great Apes on the evolutionary ladder. But were apes racist, he wondered. Probably not. That was reserved for the greatest apes of the lot, though he'd heard chimpanzees went in for territorial feuding.
And that was it, really, Rosenberg concluded, dusting icing sugar from his hands. The city's Jewish population was very small - no more than thirty active families of both the Orthodox and Reform persuasions - and there hadn't been anything like this before except for the odd telephone call and that was most likely just cranks.
'We keep a low profile,' said Rosenberg. 'We're a mostly liberal congregation, so we scarcely stand out. Most people in this city probably don't even know we exist. Ask them where the synagogue is, and most would scratch their heads. There's never been any real trouble at all. There has probably always been a fair amount of low-grade anti-Semitism - calling tight people Jews and that kind of thing - but it's never led to anything before this. Jews had a hard time here in the old days under Governor Franklin, but not even ten thousand miles of ocean could keep out the Enlightenment forever.' He finished his coffee and poured out more for his guests.
Someone, however, was determined to change all that. A lone crank, or something more organised - a neo-Nazi gang perhaps - that was the question. Mr Rosenberg was clearly worried. He had, he said over a fresh cup of coffee, survived the war years in Europe. Born in what had been Polish Galicia in the 1930s, he had been studying in Warsaw when the Germans invaded. He fled to the countryside and was hidden by righteous Gentiles. When the fighting stopped there was nothing for him to return to. His shtetl had simply ceased to exist, it had been burned off the face of the earth and where he was sure his parents' house had stood, there was a Ukrainian farm, the people surly and unresponsive. He never saw any member of his family again. His world had been annihilated. It all came back, he said, it all came flooding back when the graffiti started. It was the same with Mrs Gellhorn. Her old nightmares had returned.
Jack was in a foul mood when he returned to the station. He'd kill for a fag and a bilious rage surged up with reflux into his oesophagus; he wanted to catch the Nazi graffiti artists and wring their necks. He was still irritated at being taken off the Adams murder inquiry, too. He contented himself with bawling out some junior constables, his blue eyes flashing, and sloped off to his office and set Bluey Bishop to work trawling through the files. Paisley took the opportunity to come and gloat in the doorway, but Jack didn't even acknowledge his presence. Eventually, Paisley moved on, idly scratching his testicles, muttering something about 'Big Noses', but Jack restrained himself.
Paisley was biding his time until the earliest possible opportunity for retirement. He was a bludger, a time-server detested by most of his colleagues, and a closed-minded bigot with a limitless and dangerous capacity for mischief and malevolence. He wasn't without brains and, had he been so inclined, he could have been a good policeman. But he was lazier than a sloth when it came to work. Fuller said in his usual crude way that Paisley would be in everything bar a shit sandwich and that, only because he didn't like bread. He had a patron Higher Up - his father-in-law in Launceston - how else could you explain how the man managed to survive despite his manifest laziness and incompetence? Jack also suspected he was bent and had his own file on the man, but lacked any hard evidence. The file Paisley had left on the case was useless, like just about everything that he got his hands on.
Jack's mind was working as he tapped the end of his spoon on his teeth - a habit that drove Helen to distraction. They'd have to stake the place out, even if it was an all-night job. The landlord of the 'Duke of York' would oblige them with a room; after all, coppers provided a significant part of his income. Bishop would love the overtime. In the meantime, there was one lead he wanted to chase up. A day or so before, he'd been accosted in the Elizabeth Street mall by a beautiful dark-haired young woman handing out leaflets. He took the leaflet from the inside pocket of his jacket and smoothed it out on his desk. Yeah, that was it. Smudgy, badly roneoed on blue paper with a picture of a man in a keffiyah wielding an assault rifle, the flyer exhorted the reader to support human rights for palestinians! and denounced what it called 'Zionist murder gangs' operating on the West Bank and in Gaza. The leaflet was authorised by an S. J. Calvert for a 'Palestinian Human Rights Group'. Those interested were encouraged to write to a post office box in Sandy Bay, or to ring one of a couple of local phone numbers. Jack Martin reached over and dialled the first one. After a while a voice - young, male, educated, slightly wary - answered. Jack said that he was interested in the group.
Half an hour later, Jack's unmarked white Holden police car was parked outside a block of double-storey red-brick terrace houses in Nixon Street, Sandy Bay. He knew the block well: two up and two down, with a single-storey kitchen and bathroom out the back. It was one of only a handful of such types of housing in the whole city; most of the houses here were single-storey weatherboards or brick bungalows. An old girlfriend had lived here long ago: Tracey Devine, dark-haired, petite and always ready to rock and roll. She'd had the face of a Celtic angel and even now the memory stabbed Jack's heart. She was bright too, and had been awarded a PhD for a thesis on something to do with ancient Rome. Last he heard, she was behind a kitchen sink in Burnie and married to an accountant, breeding Afghan hounds for a hobby, with a herd of ankle-biters and an eagle-eyed Dutch Calvinist mother-inlaw to keep her on the straight and narrow, her PhD testamur presumably forgotten in a dark cupboard among old towels and stocks of nappies. Bob Bishop coughed discreetly and Jack swam back to the present.
A wind had blown up and they could hear the sound of steel cables flapping against the hollow masts of the yachts moored in the river off the beach at Marieville Esplanade. The estuary was the colour of gunmetal and looked like it had the consistency of syrup. Jack lifted the heavy cast-iron doorknocker - it was the same one as twenty years before - and let it fall on its metal plate. A thin young man opened the door almost immediately. He had what could only be described as a starburst of reddish-blond hair. He was in his early twenties, with a wispy blond goatee and rather thick lips from which a smile was rapidly ebbing. His green eyes narrowed and his nose twitched as if he could really smell 'pork' on the doorstep. Jack held his badge under the young man's nose. 'Mind if we have a talk, Mr Calvert? I'm Inspector Martin and this is DC Bishop.'
'What about?'
