‘Bugger off, you crazy bitch! It’s not even eight o’clock!’ Bernice stood in the doorway of her bedroom, her silk kimono hanging half open, a sleep mask still covering one eye.
‘How dare you talk to me like that, Bernice Becker! I have every right to demand access to my tenants’ flats when I find out they’ve been lying to me! Open up!’
Jess opened her eyes groggily, her face paler than the two china cups that still sat on Joan’s desk from the night before. ‘What’s all the noise?’ she groaned.
Before anyone had a chance to move, they heard a key in the lock and the door was flung open. Mrs Moxham stormed into the room brandishing a newspaper. It was the morning edition of Truth. ‘Have you seen this—this filth?’
‘Not bloody likely as we’ve only just been woken by your mad screeching!’ Bernice snatched the paper from Moxham. A photo of Ellie’s bloodstained room was on the front page with the headline: PROSTITUTE MEETS GRISLY DEATH IN BOARDING HOUSE: RAZOR WARS HEATING UP AGAIN? Bill Jenkins had made his deadline. Both Joan and Bernice were named as having discovered the body. The police made their usual plea for information.
‘Prostitute, eh?’ Moxham’s face had flushed as red as a boiled beetroot and a vein throbbed at her temple. She advanced on Jess, still prostrate on the cot bed. ‘And you? Are you a whore too, dearie, like your chopped-up roommate? Carrying on your filthy business right under my nose? Bringing depraved men into my boarding house? Rapists, gangsters, murderers!’ She turned to look at Bernice and Joan. ‘And I bet you two knew about it the whole time and said nothing!’
Jess had covered her head with both arms as if to shield herself. ‘I never, Mrs Moxham! I never did any such thing!’
‘You’ve got no proof,’ said Joan, stepping between Jessie and the apoplectic landlady. ‘What Eleanor and Jess do—did—outside these premises hardly concerns you, does it? They pay their rent and keep everything quiet and clean, just like the rest of your tenants.’
‘Your references said you were both in retail,’ Moxham thundered at Jessie.
‘Well, what Jess does is a kind of retail,’ Bernice observed with a grim half-smile.
‘Very bloody funny! Well, guess what, ladies? Youse’ll all be laughing on the other side of your smug dials when I tell you the news I got yesterday.’ Mrs Moxham crossed her arms. There was a glint of triumph in her rheumy eyes and an unpleasant smirk on her lips. ‘The owners are selling up. Bomora’s going to be torn down to build more of those hideous dog-box flats. So have a good laugh about that. Youse’ll all be out on your ear in a week or two. This nasty business is the final nail in the coffin.’
Bernice and Joan looked at each other in shock, hardly able to believe they were about to lose their home.
‘Not so bloody cocky now, are we?’ sneered the landlady. ‘May as well start packing your bags and looking for somewhere else to flaunt your immoral ways, the blinkin’ lot of you!’ As she turned to go, there was another rap at the door. ‘Like bleedin’ Pitt Street in here, it is,’ exclaimed the landlady.
Bernice tightened the sash on her kimono and opened the door. A tall, broad-shouldered woman in a dark blue, high-waisted skirt, white blouse and long twill jacket stood in the doorway. She was hatless but her hair was pinned up neatly off her face. She wore a string of pearls at her throat and a matching set of pearl earrings and clutched a sturdy, nondescript handbag. She could have been any doorknocking charity collector or dowdily turned out accounts clerk from Anthony Hordern’s or Mark Foy’s.
‘Who the hell are you?’ croaked Mrs Moxham.
Joan did not need to be told. She had seen this woman’s face in the newspapers several times.
‘I’m Special Sergeant Lillian Armfield,’ the woman said calmly. ‘Sorry to bother you so early but I’ve come to accompany Miss Jessie Simmons down to Central Police Station.’
Jessie rolled over on the cot bed and groaned.
‘It’s important we get your statement as soon as we can, my dear,’ Sergeant Armfield told her, ‘if we’re to have any hope of finding your friend’s killer.’
Jessie nodded and rose slowly from the cot.
‘I can lend you something to wear,’ offered Bernice, and she ushered the still half-asleep girl into her bedroom to get changed.
‘And I assume you’re one of the ladies who discovered the body?’ said Sergeant Armfield, addressing Joan. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’
‘Don’t mind me, I’m just the bleedin’ landlady,’ said Mrs Moxham, pushing past the policewoman in a huff. ‘I’ll leave youse to it then.’
‘Don’t worry, madam,’ the sergeant said, ‘we’ll be back to take statements from you and your other tenants soon.’
Mrs Moxham hesitated on the landing before making her final exit. ‘Well, you’ll need to get your skates on. This whole place is coming down in two weeks and all of us’ll be out on the street by then.’
Joan politely gestured to Sergeant Armfield to sit down. ‘Please. I’m Joan. Joan Linderman. Can I offer you a cuppa?’
‘Much obliged.’
Lillian Armfield took a seat on the divan, her handbag resting in her lap. Joan was more than a little flustered to have this famous policewoman right here in her flat. What an honour! She’d heard many a story from Bill about how unarmed Lillian resorted to swinging that handbag to get out of a tight scrape, dodging fists and bottles, in the laneways round Frog Hollow and Surry Hills. Not everyone was as hospitable as Joan. Armfield had even been pursued by well-known cocaine dealer, ‘Botany May’ Smith, who threatened to ‘knock her skull in’ with a steaming flat-iron, fresh off her ironing board. Joan wanted to profess her admiration for this pioneer policewoman’s courage but was too tongue-tied.
‘Did you know the victim at all, Miss Linderman?’ asked Sergeant Armfield.
‘No, not really. Not like Bernie did.’
‘Such a tragic end to a young life. It angers me to see so many working women preyed upon in this way. Even with the new consorting laws, we’ve still got our work cut out. Thank you, my dear.’ She took the cup of tea from Joan and motioned for her to sit down. ‘And what do you do, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I work for The Australian Woman’s Mirror.’ Joan actually blushed.
The policewoman’s face lit up. ‘I love that magazine! Such wonderful stories. So you’re a writer then?’
Joan longed to tell Lillian about her crime novel but knew she would regret such foolishness. What would a police officer who confronted the realities of crime every day make of her idiotic scribblings on the subject? Oh, but how sorely tempted she was! For one who’d seen the worst of human nature up close, Lillian Armfield had a strangely calm, almost soulful face, one that inspired trust. ‘I dabble with the odd short story,’ admitted Joan.
‘I wish I knew how to write,’ sighed the policewoman, draining her cup as Jessie, clad in a peach dress, straw hat, gloves, stockings and shoes, entered the room with Bernice. ‘There’re a few stories I’d like to tell one day.’
And then Joan realised with a sudden stab of panic that the sergeant was staring over her shoulder at the eight forensic crime scene photos thumbtacked to the wall above Joan’s desk. Dear God! How had she managed to forget about them? What policewoman worth her salt would fail to notice something as conspicuous as those in this tiny flat?
Joan was in for it now.
‘Well, best be off.’ Sergeant Armfield cleared her throat and handed the empty teacup back to Joan. It was obvious that she had seen the photos and had made a deliberate decision not to mention them. Joan could feel her cheeks burning. She had been exposed as a fraud, meddling amateurishly in the world of crime, but forgiven her folly by this remarkable woman.
She felt the urgent impulse then to show Miss Armfield the piece of paper she had hidden in her pillowcase. What right had she to withhold evidence from the police? And what impulse had prompted her to conceal it in the first place? Was she protecting her Aunt Olympia, of all people, from
suspicion? She certainly owed that woman nothing. Or maybe it was Bernice she was protecting, for her part in introducing Ellie to the club? Or was her reason more selfish than that: some half-formed, insane thought that she, Joan Linderman, could solve the murder? It was Bill Jenkins’s taunt—‘crime’s not a woman’s business’—that had done it. It had stuck in her gullet, festering there like an ulcer. But she’d show him, she vowed. She’d scoop him at his own game! Even as the thought flitted across her mind she knew how ridiculous and childish it was. Not to mention the fact that she was breaking the law.
‘Sergeant Armfield?’
The policewoman turned at the door. ‘Yes, Miss Linderman?’
Joan hesitated. Tell her, an inner voice urged. She cleared her throat. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you.’
CHAPTER FIVE
When Joan rang Hugh at nine o’clock that Sunday morning from the padded telephone kiosk in the lobby of the Cairo Guesthouse on Macleay Street, she broke down and cried for the first time since finding Ellie as she described what had happened. ‘It was so horrible, Hugh.’
‘Poor darling! Listen, how about we meet up at the Arabian? I can probably get over there by midday, if the trams are running on time.’
Both Hugh’s parents were dead and he lived in Balmain with an overly protective older sister, Celia, who devoted herself to his full-time care. Celia liked to know where her brother was every hour of the day, though he had managed to negotiate a degree of freedom without hurting his sister’s feelings. Joan had not yet been to Hugh’s terrace house in Balmain, nor had she met Celia. He had made it clear that, for now at least, it was preferable that his sister believe that he and Joan were no more than comrades-in-arms. ‘Sis has been treated pretty shabbily by menfolk,’ explained Hugh. ‘She was jilted at the altar two years back by a feckless bastard whose face I would happily rearrange if he ever dared show it around our neck of the woods again. I keep hoping she might meet someone else.’ It was clear the siblings’ overprotectiveness was mutual.
‘I’ll see you at midday then,’ Joan agreed. ‘I’ll have to get Velma or Iris to keep an eye on Jess once she gets back from the police station. And I have no idea how long Bernie will be out at Tempe, God help her. What a nightmare … Greta’s only six.’
‘No worries. You do whatever you have to do. I’ll wait for you.’
Joan had first met Hugh six months ago at a public meeting at the Trades Hall on Goulburn Street, fresh from her disgust and anger at her Aunt Olympia’s immunity to the suffering of those less fortunate. Joan had been impressed both by the strength of his convictions, which spoke to her own maturing awareness of an unjust world, and also by his unquestioning respect for her intellect, something she had never really encountered in a man before.
Hugh was now a veteran of another war. Proud to be in the frontline of the clashes in the Domain in May 1921, he had bloodied the noses of ex-diggers from the King and Empire Alliance militia when they attacked communist speakers with clubs. In the last twelve months, there had been even bloodier brawls between communists and a new gang of fascist bullyboys, the so-called New Guard. A secret army of right-wing militants, many of them returned soldiers and officers, the New Guard had swelled to a rumoured hundred thousand men, armed and ready to stop the communist revolution they believed was about to tear Australia apart. Hugh had explained that, while the rank and file were clerks, bank managers, shopkeepers, barristers and accountants, the leadership were members of the capitalist class, men of means. ‘Company executives and owners in banking, manufacturing, shipping, coal mines. Many of them senior army officers who believe the country they fought for is under threat. Nothing to do, of course, with the fact that more than a third of men are now unemployed, their families are on the breadline, and the Commonwealth government is selling us all out to the British banks. No, it’s us Reds that are the troublemakers!’
Joan wasn’t all that surprised to learn from Hugh that her own uncle, Gordon Fielding-Jones, was involved in the New Guard leadership. Even in his Savile Row civvies, Gordon had never lost his martial bearing and air of command and made no secret of his combative, conservative views, particularly about the workshy unemployed and ungrateful working class. ‘Your uncle is in charge of defending the silvertails of Darling Point, Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay. When the workers rise up in revolt, he has plans to barricade the Butler and McElhone Stairs with machine gun posts and patrol the streets with shock troops. The New Guard has stockpiles of weapons all over the city. It’s gonna be war, Joan.’
In the last month, Lieutenant Colonel Eric Campbell, the New Guard’s leader, had held large public rallies where he had made a commitment to replace Premier Jack Lang’s subversive ‘socialist’ state government and unapologetically copied the right-armed salute of the Italian and German fascists. The New Guard were on the streets as well, attacking communists at their outdoor meetings across the city.
‘Believe me, Joan, Judgement Day is coming sooner than anyone thinks,’ Hugh had told her one evening, his voice lowered to a hoarse whisper for fear of being overheard. ‘Maybe only a matter of weeks. Some of us believe that Campbell’s plans go even further. To kidnap Premier Lang and overthrow the state government. A military coup.’
Hugh had tried to recruit Joan to write for the Communist Party’s Militant Women’s Group’s monthly paper, Woman Worker, but Joan was not ready to make the kind of all-consuming self-sacrifice the party demanded of its members, not to mention physical courage. It was not only men who were expected to be brave. Following a public protest meeting by two hundred and fifty unemployed women workers at Sydney Town Hall just over a year ago, sixty police had charged and assaulted the assembly, tearing off the women’s clothes and hats as they tried to pull them into paddy wagons. If there was any lingering doubt that women’s fighting spirit was the equal of men’s, this street-fight had put an end to it.
Maybe Joan was a coward, but she doubted she had the stomach for that kind of fight. It would also mean more time away from her own writing and, whether that was monumentally selfish (‘bourgeois individualism’ was the preferred term) or not, that was obstacle enough. She had a senior editor interested in her crime novel and a deadline to meet; she would never forgive herself if she let this opportunity slip by.
Joan couldn’t deny that her attraction to Hugh sprang not just from a meeting of minds; Hugh was handsome, what Joan’s mother would call ‘one of nature’s aristocrats’, with broad shoulders and chest, a tapered waist, perfect muscled calves and muscular upper arms—not to mention his sandy curls, intelligent grey-blue eyes and thoughtful smile. Though he’d been educated (‘Brainwashed more like,’ said Hugh) at poor inner-city Catholic schools, Hugh could easily pass for one of those private school rowing-and-rugby demi-gods. However, there was no getting around the fact that the war had aged Hugh prematurely, as it had so many men, adding perhaps another decade or more to his thirty-four years. Silver-grey hairs proliferated in his moustache and hair, a fine web of creases had formed about his eyes and furrowed his forehead, and there was a softening of the flesh under his chin and jawline. On bad days, his illness cast deeper shadows of exhaustion and anxiety over his fine features, but Joan loved him no less for that; in fact, his pallor and pain bestowed its own air of noble beauty.
‘Take a deep breath, Joanie,’ he said to her now. ‘It’s going to be fine. I promise.’
‘Thank you, darling. I knew I could count on you.’
But there was always a catch, wasn’t there, when it came to love? While Joan appreciated how respectful and protective Hugh was, she found him to be chivalrous to a fault. There was unmistakeable tenderness in the way he looked at her, kissed her, even held and caressed her, but despite clear signals that she craved more, Hugh held back. She had enjoyed sexual relations with Bill Jenkins and other men, so why not with Hugh, whom she desired much more fiercely?
‘I love you, Joan,’ Hugh confessed abjectly when she tentatively broached the subject. ‘Please
be patient with me.’
Joan had showered him with kisses and reassurances then, wanting to spare her broken warrior any more pain. But in her heart, she was bewildered. What was the cause of his reluctance? There was nothing of the wowser about Hugh as far she could tell, so was it linked to some betrayal in his past? Or was it the gas neurosis that made him feel unmanly, perhaps afraid that intercourse might trigger an attack? He wouldn’t say and she didn’t insist. While Bernice and the other women in their bohemian circle indulged in a carnival of sexual adventure, Joan was obliged to exercise a nun-like restraint that she had happily abandoned when she left home nearly four years ago.
‘I’ll see you soon, Joan.’
‘See you.’
The next phone call Joan made was to her mother, Gloria. It had been at least three weeks since she had last rung home and getting on for a year since she had visited. The call was largely motivated by guilt, but it was also intended to head off any panic stirred up by her parents’ spiteful neighbour, Mrs Parkinson, who loved to trawl the newspapers for alarming stories about the evils of Sydney.
‘Hi Mum, it’s me. How’re you doing?’
‘We muddle along, love, as you know.’
Joan was resigned to the fact that her parents were always just ‘muddling along’. Her father had given up his full-time medical practice, thanks—ironically—to his own chronic ill-health and the lack of paying patients. These days, he mostly tinkered in the back shed or tended his rows of tomato plants and fruit trees while Gloria took in mending on the side to keep the household going. There was Richard to look after, as well: Joan’s older brother, who had been injured in the Battle of Hamel and had come home ‘a cot case’. His daily medications did little to ease the migraines from his head injury and his violent episodes of shell shock. And then there was James, of course. The son who never came home. Fourteen years after war’s end, James was still listed as missing in action, presumed killed. No remains had been buried in France, no fellow soldiers had come forward to testify to his brave last moments. Horace and Richard were reconciled to James’s death but Gloria’s faith in his return was unshakeable. Any day now, she insisted, James would come knocking on the front door.
Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 4