The two fictional police officers kneeled beside the body of Eleanor making notes. ‘Poor bitch. Bottom of the bloody heap.’ When Lockwood stood up it became apparent that he was wearing a blouse and skirt with a string of pearls about his neck. Inspector Phillips looked mildly surprised but made no comment once the transformation into Lillian Armfield was complete. ‘What’s this?’ asked Armfield, picking up the Ladies’ Bacchus Club letterhead.
‘It’s a very convenient clue,’ said Inspector Phillips with his usual squint of cynicism. ‘Why would anyone connected to this piece of paper leave it at the crime scene—and with a phone number to boot? Unless the killer meant for us to find it, of course. There is only one question that will lead us to the truth: who benefits from the murder of this woman?’ Inspector Phillips had a gift for putting his finger on the nub of the problem. Sergeant Armfield pondered the possibilities. Who benefits from the murder of this woman?
Frankie Goldman? Because Ellie was his ‘spoiled bit of merchandise’ and Jeffs must never find out; because she knew he was making money on the side with other dope dealers and was going to rat on him; because she knew Tilly Devine had tried to bribe him to betray his boss?
What about Gordon Fielding-Jones? Because Ellie was one of his secret vices, like cocaine and gambling, but she then got uppity ideas about him saving her; because she knew he was in business with Jeffs, helping him to launder his dirty profits; because she had threatened to squeal to his wife or the cops or the press?
What about Olympia and her Ladies’ Goddess Club? Because Ellie demanded more money to keep quiet about their deviancy; because she could name names and ruin reputations; because she wasn’t the first whore that Gordon had slept with in protest against his wife’s lewdness?
And then there was Mr X, the gentleman caller, Ellie’s ‘knight in shining armour’, whom Jessie had briefly glimpsed and had overheard through the flat’s door. Was he in fact Gordon Fielding-Jones or someone else? Had Ellie begun to make unreasonable demands, threatened to expose him? Or had she told him the affair was over and he had killed her in a fit of rage and disgust at being thrown over for the love of a woman?
‘Who found the body?’ Inspector Phillips asked his trusted sergeant. In the dream, Joan saw Bernice kneeling in the corridor, screaming and weeping, her hands and blouse stained with blood. No forced entry. Ellie let the person in. Joan’s own voice. The figure in the corridor transformed into Jessie, also crying and rocking back and forth. They were lovers. She and Ellie fought. A really bad fight. Jessie’s voice. I saw … I know who … Jessie’s voice again.
Joan woke from this nightmare gasping for air like a drowning woman struggling to break the surface. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat, as was her pillow. For a brief in-between moment, she imagined it was Inspector Phillips leaning over her divan bed. Poor bitch.
‘Are you okay, love?’ It was Bernice.
Joan sat up. ‘Sorry, did I wake you? I must have had a bad dream.’
‘It’s alright, I was already awake. And look what I found shoved under the door.’ Bernice thrust a piece of paper at Joan: it was an eviction notice. The tenants of Bomora had been given two weeks to vacate the premises. ‘Greedy arseholes,’ swore Bernice. ‘I say we organise. Refuse to leave. Lock ourselves in and blockade the corridors. Make ’em drag us out.’
But Joan was only half listening. ‘What time is it?’ she asked, noticing that her favourite rectangle of sky had deepened to the purplish-blue of evening.
‘About six. Why?’
There was a knock at the door.
‘Who is it?’ called Bernice.
‘It’s Lillian Armfield. Is Miss Linderman in?’
Of course! Joan had completely forgotten. At the hospital Armfield had told her she was coming to Bomora and would want to talk to her about the attack on Jess.
Bernice opened the door. ‘How can we help you, Officer?’
Joan leaped up from the divan bed and hastily pulled on her dressing-gown. ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell you, Bernie. Jess wasn’t in her hospital bed when I got there this morning.’
Bernie returned Joan’s grim look with one of alarm. ‘What?’
‘And I’m afraid she still hasn’t been found,’ said the policewoman. ‘May I come in?’
‘Of course, of course.’
Bernie ushered the sergeant into the flat, where she stood awkwardly for a moment by the unfolded divan. ‘Please.’ Joan indicated the chair at her desk. Thankfully she had taken down the eight crime scene photos after the policewoman’s previous visit and they were now hidden in her desk drawer.
Armfield graciously accepted an offer of tea before producing her notebook and pen.
Joan answered her questions as honestly as she could. But when it came to the actual attack, her nerve failed her. She remembered Frankie Goldman’s threat: You stay out of it, you nosy bitch, or you’ll get yours! We know where you live. ‘It was dark and it all happened so fast,’ she said. Her voice was firm and clear but her palms were clammy. ‘There were two men but only one had a razor.’
Miss Armfield made notes. Bernice had the presence of mind to hand over the name and address of Doris, the friend of Jess who had invited her to stay. ‘Who knows? She might have gone to ground there.’
‘Thank you, Miss Linderman, Miss Becker. I’ll let you know when we have any news of Jess’s whereabouts.’
‘Have you finished with the flat downstairs yet?’ asked Bernie.
‘I’m afraid we’ll need it for a few more days.’
‘I only ask because Ellie’s mum has asked for some of her personal things. Her diary, letters, knick-knacks; sentimental items. Especially as this whole building is coming down soon.’
‘We’ve taken the diaries and letters as evidence for now. Everything else has been fingerprinted, photographed and documented, so you can take those. The junior constable on duty at the crime scene will advise you and ask you to sign them out.’
Bernice and Joan both thanked the policewoman for her thoroughness.
‘We’re pretty stretched what with all the troubles with the New Guard and the Reds,’ Sergeant Armfield admitted. ‘Not to mention the crime wave of bashings and robberies. Desperate times, desperate people. But we do our best.’
So she’d been right, Joan thought. The police did have their hands full; Armfield had confirmed as much. It made her more determined than ever to find out the truth about Ellie’s death herself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As she dressed and fixed her hair, Bernice declared she was sticking to her plan to attend a rehearsal of her new play, Bathsheba, which was being staged over on Phillip Street. As in her novels, Bernice favoured historical settings for her plays, from the Stone Age to Ancient Egypt, the Moghul Empire to the Kingdom of David. And both her novels and plays featured vulnerable but strong, erotically mesmerising but coolly chaste women in the grip of the eternal battle between flesh and spirit.
‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ asked Joan as Bernice headed for the door.
‘If I let myself dwell on what has happened, I will be lost. Utterly lost. I cannot face it. Not now. Not yet.’ And she left.
Joan sighed, grateful to be alone again but also unnerved by the sudden silence. Except for the rhythmic bucking of the blind in the breeze, the flat was eerily quiet. No Bernice, no Rimbaud, no Lillian Armfield, no Mrs Moxham, no Jess. As she contemplated the intensely familiar room—the divan bed, the Japonerie screen, the pockmarked mirror over the mantelpiece, her cluttered desk, the stone paperweight—Joan fancied for a moment that the mayhem that had entered her life barely forty-eight hours earlier with the force of a cyclone had swept through just as suddenly as it had arrived, taking with it all the horrors of the last two days and restoring this room to its habitual calm. Her deep exhaustion of that morning had also abated. With an almost cheery determination to make the most of this brief period of normalcy, she smoothed out her sheets, plumped her pillows and folded up the divan bed. She
then gave herself a sponge bath at the basin and slipped on some fresh clothes. Nausea (born of fear, or of guilt at lying to Sergeant Armfield?) tugged at her guts, but she checked the pantry anyway in case of hunger later in the evening. Tinned soup or tinned beans were the only choices on offer.
The typewriter beckoned. Joan sat at her desk, fished her pack of Luckies out of the top drawer—the same drawer where she had tucked away her crime scene photos—and lit up. She had not touched her novel since Saturday night and wanted to get back to work. But Joan was troubled by all the obstacles that seemed to stand between her and Reg Punch’s deadline. The eviction notice left her and Bernie only a fortnight in which to find new digs and, while smoking calmed her nerves a little, it could not stifle the grief she now felt at the looming loss of this cosy flat and her favourite rectangle of sky.
Worst of all, how could she justify writing about fictional crime when she was now so deeply immersed, heart and flesh, in the mess of at least one real crime, if not more than one? Murder, assault, stealing evidence, blackmail. She was like the idle wader who, having ventured ankle-deep into the rough surf, finds herself dragged in over her head, struggling against a riptide.
She wound a fresh sheet of paper into the Corona and forced herself to begin:
Sergeant Lillian Armfield had seen many crime scenes in her seventeen years on the force, but the savagery of this murder stood out in her mind as exceptionally frenzied and cruel. Inspector Phillips kneeled by the victim’s body and examined the deep wounds to her throat and face. ‘Nasty,’ he murmured. ‘Gotta wonder if this one wasn’t particularly personal. If you know what I mean.’
Lillian nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. Looking around the cramped, dingy bedsit with its rusted gas ring and mildewed wallpaper, Lillian was sure this was no break-and-enter. There was nothing of worth to steal in this rundown boarding house. Some well-known Sydney prostitutes, like Dulcie Markham, made spectacular amounts of money——as much as fifty pounds a night——but this poor love was not one of those high-class hookers. Maybe she had been once: there was a moth-eaten fur coat in the wardrobe and a very nice old Magnavox radiogram in the living room. But she had probably ruined herself with snow; it was an all-too-common story for young prostitutes. As was the other likely motivation for this woman’s brutal fate. Neither Lillian nor Inspector Phillips stated the obvious: the autopsy would establish if she had been raped before she was killed and mutilated.
‘Have you had a chance to speak to the woman who found her?’ asked the Inspector, who was more than happy to leave the task of interviewing overwrought female witnesses to his trusted sergeant. ‘Needs a woman’s touch,’ he would always say in such circumstances.
‘Yes, I have a brief statement,’ said Lillian, pulling her notebook from the inside pocket of her twill jacket. ‘When Eleanor Dawson——the victim——failed to show up for an arranged meeting at eleven pm at the brothel where she worked on Darlinghurst Road, Miss Bernice Becker immediately returned to the boarding house. She found the door to Miss Dawson’s flat wide open and her body by the bed.’
‘So who was the last person to see Miss Dawson alive?’ asked the Inspector. The boys at the morgue would try to estimate time of death, but it was always useful to have any accounts of the victim’s final movements. It helped to fill in the backstory and often yielded clues as to the victim’s state of mind——not to mention it narrowed the list of suspects.
‘Let me see,’ replied Sergeant Armfield, checking her notebook again. ‘That would probably be a Miss Mavis Thorne, a prostitute who worked with the victim.’
Joan stopped typing and stared at the page in astonishment. Where had this come from? Then she remembered her strange dream. What on earth was she doing, turning the horror of Ellie’s death into fiction? How cold-blooded was that? Joan felt ill with self-disgust.
But wait a minute. It was not that simple. Depending on how you looked at it, writing about a fictional crime was the obscenity, not the other way round. She had told herself she owed it to Ellie—and possibly now to Jess as well—to find out the truth. Was this not the obvious way to do just that? Joan would sift the evidence and follow the leads of a real crime through the eyes of her fictional version of Lillian Armfield. That way the story would be unfolded in real life and on the page at the same time, back and forth, one creating the other. Already this new story had shown her the next step. It seemed obvious now but it had taken her writer’s imagination to bring it into focus.
She must talk to Mavis Thorne.
Joan had only met Mavis once, when the other woman had joined Ellie and Jess for a late-night supper at H.S. Gilkes’ Wine Saloon with Bernie and Joan. She was older than the others, possibly in her late thirties, and had once been a singer. Working in Tilly Devine’s brothels on Palmer Street for years (‘A bad-tempered old bird but much kinder to her girls than that two-faced bitch Kate Leigh’), she had recently sought employment with Jeffs. While Tilly was off ‘rusticating’ in England for breaking the consorting laws, her husband Jim had managed to get himself razor-slashed and then hauled up on a murder charge for accidentally killing a taxi driver during a shootout. ‘Tilly’s business affairs were a bloody mess; it was time to get the hell out.’
How was she going to convince Mavis to talk to her? Joan wondered as she stomped through the puddles along Victoria Street, the cold wind and slanting needles of rain stinging her face beneath her umbrella. Her head was encased in a scarf and she hugged her well-worn overcoat tightly about her. In the inside pocket she had stuffed some cash taken from the nest egg hidden under her bed. Maybe money would help. Who knew?
As she neared the brothel—an undistinguished terrace house with no lighted windows facing the street—Joan slowed down. She dared not try to enter the building; why would a woman other than a whore trespass here? And there was still the terrifying possibility she would come face to face with Frankie Goldman again. Her palms grew damp at the thought of that bastard’s cruel face coming out of the darkness. Fortunately, Joan had devised a plan to avoid him.
When a man in a grey mackintosh and rain-stained fedora brushed past her, heading towards the brothel’s front door, Joan cried out: ‘Excuse me, please.’
The man stopped, obviously taken aback at the note of alarm in Joan’s voice.
‘Are you alright, miss?’
Joan took a step nearer. ‘I need a favour and I’m happy to pay.’
A look of surprise tinged with suspicion crossed his face. ‘Are you a cop? Is this some kind of stitch-up? ’Cos I’m not falling for that.’
‘I have a friend inside,’ said Joan, pointing at the brothel behind her. ‘I urgently need to get a message to her. Her name is Mavis. I have ten shillings to make it worth your while.’
The man whistled. ‘Jesus, lady! It must be some emergency. Well, what the hell, I was planning a visit anyway. Gimme the message.’
Joan handed over an envelope with Mavis’s name inscribed on the front and pressed the coins into the stranger’s hand. There was a pound note inside the envelope, along with a short message asking Mavis to join her for a quick drink and the promise of a second pound if she was willing to talk. Joan had signed her name and then added in brackets: a friend of Ellie’s. This could prove to be an expensive and utterly futile fishing expedition, thought Joan, as she watched the man eagerly pocket the envelope and dash up the front stairs without another word or glance in Joan’s direction.
Joan waited. The rain fell harder still. Her feet became soaked and numbed by the cold. Why was she such an idiot? She was on the verge of giving this up as a mug’s game when the front door opened and a figure in a hooded coat came down the front stairs.
‘This had better be important,’ said the whore as she approached Joan. ‘I’ve got twenty minutes.’
The two women retreated to the muggy warmth of the nearest sly-grog joint, where Joan shouted Mavis a whisky. ‘I recognise you: you’re Bernice’s friend. Share a flat with her, right? We had s
upper once at Gilkes’.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘So why are you snooping around about poor bloody Ellie? I assume that’s why you’re here. Not an undercover copper, are ya? I’ve already told them everything I know.’
‘You’ve spoken to the cops?’
‘Yeah, thanks to Becker and her big mouth. That bloody woman copper—whatsername … Armfield—comes round and interrogates the lot of us. Me most of all. Did I see anything fishy going on between Ellie and Goldman? Like I’d tell her. No way am I going to stick my neck out to get myself slashed or worse by Frankie!’
‘Was something going on between Frankie and Ellie? Bernie said Ellie told her as much.’
‘Maybe. I couldn’t say.’ But Mavis’s tone left little doubt that she was well aware of the situation.
‘So you were the last person to see Ellie alive?’ Joan persisted.
‘Yes, probably. Except for the killer, of course!’
‘And you saw her around nine-thirty that night?’
‘Something like that. She was due to start her shift at seven o’clock. Frankie was furious that she hadn’t turned up. Said he’d dock her pay. And the rest.’
‘So Frankie was at the brothel?’
‘Well, yes. Off and on. I was a bit busy, so I can’t say when exactly. But not when Ellie dropped by, luckily. Frankie had gone by then. He reckoned he had some important meeting. Probably with Jeffs.’
‘Was there anything odd about Ellie? Did she look sick?’
Mavis looked around the room, checking no one could overhear them. ‘She was in a crazy mood, now that you mention it. Half crying, half laughing. And I’ll tell you something else that I also told the police: she had a black eye coming on.’
‘Someone had hit her?’
‘Yep, given her a real shiner. She’d tried to cover it up with make-up, but I could tell. Seen a few of those in my time.’
‘Did she say anything about it?’
Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 9