The Orchard Murders

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The Orchard Murders Page 1

by Robert Gott




  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  First, there was The Holiday Murders

  And then there was The Port Fairy Murders

  Followed by The Autumn Murders

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  4

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  7

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  9

  10

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  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  Acknowledgements

  THE ORCHARD MURDERS

  Robert Gott was born in the Queensland town of Maryborough, and lives in Melbourne. He has published many books for children, and is also the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He is the author of the Murders series, comprising The Holiday Murders, The Port Fairy Murders, The Autumn Murders, and The Orchard Murders, and of the William Power series of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, Amongst the Dead, and The Serpent’s Sting.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA

  Published by Scribe 2021

  Copyright © Robert Gott 2021

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may 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 written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

  978 1 922310 67 5 (paperback)

  978 1 922586 06 3 (ebook)

  Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.com

  For my parents, Maurene and Kevin. Always.

  First, there was The Holiday Murders …

  IN LATE 1943, the newly formed Homicide department of Victoria Police in Melbourne finds itself undermanned as a result of the war. Detective Inspector Titus Lambert has seen the potential of a female constable, Helen Lord. She is twenty-six years old, and, as a policewoman, something of a rarity in the male world of policing. Lambert promotes her on a temporary basis to work in Homicide, alongside a young, inexperienced detective, Joe Sable.

  On Christmas Eve, two bodies — of a father and son — are found in a mansion in East Melbourne. As the investigation into their deaths proceeds, Military Intelligence becomes involved. An organisation called Australia First has already come to the attention of the authorities through its public meetings and its pro-Hitler, pro-Japan, and stridently anti-Semitic magazine, The Publicist. A local branch of the organisation’s enthusiasts has been trying to form itself into a political party, but they are essentially dilettantes. What they feel they need is muscle, and they find it in the person of Ptolemy Jones — a fanatical National Socialist. Jones has gathered about him a small band of disaffected men, susceptible to his dark charisma. Among these is George Starling, who calls himself Fred, a man in his late twenties who is dedicated to Jones.

  Soon, Military Intelligence joins with Homicide to find the killer. Detective Joe Sable, for whom the atrocities in Europe are awakening the dormant sense of his own Jewishness, is given the task of finding his way into Australia First. He does so with the help of Constable Helen Lord and

  Group Captain Tom Mackenzie, an air force officer who is also Inspector Lambert’s brother-in-law. But the operation goes horribly wrong, and both Sable and Mackenzie are badly injured.

  The Holiday Murders ends with the death of Ptolemy Jones, and with the sense that this case has not yet run its course. It has damaged the lives of everyone involved in it. George Starling, previously overshadowed by Ptolemy Jones, remains at liberty, and he is determined to avenge Jones’s death and to step out of his shadow …

  And then there was The Port Fairy Murders ...

  SERGEANT JOE SABLE, of the Melbourne Homicide division, has returned to work, having suffered severe injuries in the course of an investigation into National Socialist sympathisers. The investigation has for Joe, who is Jewish, focussed his attention on what is happening to the Jews in Europe under the Nazi regime. Inspector Titus Lambert, the head of Homicide, is worried that Joe has returned too soon.

  When a known Hitlerite, John Starling, is found dead at his property near Warrnambool, a town six hours south-west of Melbourne, Inspector Lambert, Sergeant David Reilly, and Constable Helen Lord make the long trip there to investigate. They’re interested because John Starling’s son, George Starling, is a known acquaintance of the brutal Ptolemy Jones, the man who tortured both Joe and Group Captain Tom Mackenzie, Lambert’s brother-in-law. Both Joe and Tom were working for Military Intelligence at the time.

  In Melbourne, two men are savagely murdered, and Joe’s flat is burned to the ground. Now homeless, he is billeted with the wealthy businessman Peter Lillee, who lives in a grand house in Kew, along with his sister, Ros Lord, and her daughter, Helen Lord. Inspector Lambert organised the billet, and Lillee was happy to oblige. Here, Joe should be safe.

  In a decision that will put both their lives at risk, Joe and Helen are sent to Port Fairy, a small seaside town near Warrnambool, to investigate the bizarre double murder of a brother and sister. Nothing about the case is straightforward, but nothing is as dangerous as the menacing George Starling, who has become obsessed with finding and killing Joe Sable, and whose shadow falls as far as Port Fairy.

  Followed by The Autumn Murders …

  GEORGE STARLING, A murderous National Socialist sympathiser, sets sets out to exact revenge on Detective Joe Sable, of the Melbourne Homicide division. Homicide, which is riven by internal turmoil, has become a dangerous place for Joe to work. Corrupt police officers are targeting him to prevent him giving evidence against one of their own.

  Helen Lord, no longer with the police force, suffers a tragedy in her family, and she and her friend, Dr Clara Dawson, set out to discover the truth of what happened.

  George Starling, having completed his preparations for finding Joe Sable and killing him, returns to Melbourne where he begins to settle old scores with people he considers his enemies.

  An old friend of Joe’s, Guy Kirkham, damaged by an incident in New Guinea, comes back into Joe’s life. Together with Tom Mackenzie, an air force officer who suffered terribly at the hands of Starling’s Nazi mentor, Ptolemy Jones, they set a trap, with the help of Helen Lord, to catch Starling before he catches them. Inspector Titus Lambert, the head of Homicide, considers this foolish and reckless, and the consequences for everyone will change their lives.

  1

  May 1944

  ZAC WILSON HEARD Peter Fisher before he saw him. It was a strange sound, a kind of blubbering and gasping and choking. Wilson was checking his crop of pears, walking the rows, looking for blight and hoping to Christ that this year’s harvest would be better than last year’s. Fisher stumbled into view at the end of a row. He was some distance away, clutching something to his chest. He fell to his knees and stayed there. Wilson walked towards him, and as he got closer he saw that Fisher’s face was contorted and that snot was oozing from his nose.

 
‘What’s wrong, mate?’ Wilson called. As Wilson reached him, Fisher raised the towel-wrapped bundle like an offering.

  ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘All dead.’

  ‘Who’s dead?’

  ‘He killed them.’

  Fisher pushed his bundle towards Wilson, who reflexively took it in his hands, which were made clumsy by the gardening gloves he was wearing. The towel was soaked with blood, and when Wilson looked down at it he saw what once had been a baby, but was now a pulpy mess. He dropped the bundle as if it were hot, and as it hit the ground the towel unravelled to reveal the body of Sean Fisher, the two-month-old son of the man who knelt, his hands on his knees, his nose dropping a string of mucous onto his shirt. Wilson saw that Fisher’s clothes were soaked like an abattoir worker’s apron. Appalled by letting go of the small corpse, Wilson gathered it up and, not knowing what else to do, handed it back to Fisher, who took it and hugged it to him.

  Wilson, flummoxed, said, ‘Christ, mate.’

  ‘He killed them,’ Fisher said again, and releasing one arm from holding the bundle, indicated behind him in the general direction of his farm, a few paddocks over.

  ‘Who? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s dead, too.’

  ‘Who? Who the fuck are you talking about?’

  Wilson’s raised voice jolted Fisher to his feet.

  ‘Him. I’ll show you.’

  Fisher began to walk back towards his own property. Wilson, his nerves frayed, followed. They had to duck under two barbed-wire fences, and Wilson was glad of the gloves, although at the second fence he misjudged his manoeuvring and caught his shoulder on a barb. It ripped through his shirt and dug into his flesh. As he moved to extricate himself, it tore his skin. The sharp stab of pain distracted him for a moment, but it vanished when he looked up and saw Peter Fisher’s house, now just 50 yards away. It was a good, solid place with a handsome, wide veranda. There were two chairs and a table where Fisher and his wife, Deborah, might sit in the early evening to watch the gloaming settle over Wilson’s orchard. There wasn’t a breath of wind, so the body hanging from the veranda rafter was rigid. When Wilson mounted the steps, the boards creaked under his weight, and the corpse moved slightly so that the rope slung over the beam groaned. Fisher stayed at the bottom of the two steps.

  ‘The prick’s name is Emilio,’ he said. ‘Go inside and see what he’s done.’

  Wilson, who’d only seen one dead body in his life, and that had been the wizened, desiccated remains of his grandfather, was both morbidly fascinated and repelled by the depending figure. The sight in Fisher’s bedroom made him physically sick. It took a moment to make sense of the bloody mess on the floor beside the bed. It was a woman, although Wilson only glanced at the face, now cleaved and hacked into unrecognisable mash and bone. He bent double and vomited onto the mat at his feet. He didn’t linger in the room, but needed the wall, spattered with blood, to support him on his way out. He hurried past the hanging man into the yard. Fisher was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Peter!’ he called hoarsely, his throat sore and his mouth filled with the acid taint of vomit. There was no reply. Wilson walked around the house. Where had Fisher gone with his murdered baby? He heard a sob and followed it to behind the outside dunny. Fisher was sitting propped against the toilet wall, the baby in his lap. There was something in his mouth. It looked like a candle. Fisher looked at Wilson blankly and struck a match. The fuse fizzed, and Wilson, knowing now that this was a stick of gelignite, backed away, but stumbled and fell. He heard the explosion before the obliterating darkness of unconsciousness overwhelmed him.

  INSPECTOR TITUS LAMBERT watched as Martin Serong photographed the unspeakably awful scene at Fisher’s farm. The 12-year-old boy who’d come upon the slaughter had been delivering mail and bread. Fortunately, Titus thought, he’d only taken in the hanging man and had bicycled to the post office in Nunawading, where he’d stammered out a description of what he’d seen. The postmistress had telephoned the police, and the machinery of investigation had been set in motion. The crime-scene attendants had gathered and were waiting impatiently for Serong to finish. Among them were detectives who were inexperienced in seeing the gruesome tableaux of killing. The Homicide division of the Victorian police force had been made a discrete unit just 12 months earlier, in 1943. Its head, Inspector Lambert, was now grappling with the legacy of a case that had depleted his team, particularly those closest to him. Sergeant Joe Sable had resigned. So, too, had constable Helen Lord. They were young, but Lambert had trusted each of them, and in Helen Lord’s case, he’d admired her intelligence and skill. He’d seconded her into the division against the advice and directives of those above him. Lambert’s critics now felt vindicated. The experiment of placing a woman in Homicide had failed.

  ‘What do you see, Martin?’

  ‘I see what our species is capable of, Titus, and it sickens me more and more. You never get used to this.’

  There was something in Martin Serong’s voice that Titus hadn’t heard before. It sounded like despair.

  ‘No, Martin, you never get used to it. Murder is never just about the perpetrator and the victim. So many lives are tainted by it.’

  ‘This is a bad one, Titus.’

  Lambert trusted Serong’s eyes almost as much as he trusted the close examinations of his crime-scene specialists, the men who found evidence in microscopic analysis. Serong’s photographs had often guided him towards a vital clue. He’d been helped by Maude, his wife, whose analytical skills were subtler than his own. Titus kept nothing from his wife. If police command knew that Inspector Lambert took crime-scene photographs home for Maude’s perusal, he’d have been disciplined, demoted, or probably dismissed. For Titus, the risk was worth it.

  ‘Give me a thumbnail sketch, Martin.’

  ‘The bloke hanging from the rafters looks about 17 or 18. It’s hard to tell, though. The woman in the bedroom is so disfigured, all I can tell you is that she’s a woman and that the person who attacked her did it in a rage. The body behind the shed is only half a body. Forensics is going to have to find as much of him as they can. He’s fairly intact from the waist down. There was an infant in his lap, who weirdly escaped the worst of the explosion, and I’d say he or she was dead before the gelignite went off. I’m assuming it was gelignite. The baby’s injuries are still very obvious, and I’d say they were inflicted with the same axe that was used on the woman.’

  ‘We’re presuming that’s the axe that’s leaning against the wall near the hanged man?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘There’s a survivor, of course.’

  ‘He’d been taken to hospital before I got here.’

  ‘He hasn’t regained consciousness yet. What do you think happened, Martin?’

  ‘I can tell you what we’re supposed to think happened. We’re supposed to think the young man on the veranda wielded the axe and then hanged himself, and maybe that’s what happened. As for the others, I have no idea. It’s so grotesque it defies speculation. Your turn, Titus. What do you know?’

  ‘Not much more than names, and we’re assuming the woman and the male torso are the people we think they are. The young man is Emilio Barbero. He’s 17 years old. Italian. The woman is Deborah Fisher, 25 years old, the wife of the gelignite victim. He’s Peter Fisher, 35 years old. He owns this place. The baby is their son, Sean, two months old. The survivor is an orchard grower named Zachary Wilson. His orchard is across the paddock. We need him to pull through, because at the moment it’s like someone threw a jigsaw puzzle into the teeth of a gale. The pieces are all over the place, and the key pieces could be anywhere.’

  ‘Is there a Mrs Wilson?’

  ‘There is. She’s at the hospital with her husband. She hasn’t been allowed in to see him, and there’s a policeman with her. She’s very distressed. I don’t think it’s occurred to her yet that her husband might be a suspect.�
��

  ‘I’ll have the photographs developed as quickly as I can, Titus. I’ll get them to you by this afternoon.’

  Again, Titus heard a weariness in Martin Serong’s voice. This troubled him. Serong was always on the side of the victims, whoever they might be. He couldn’t preserve their dignity. The brutal intimacy of the photograph stole this. What he could do, and what he always tried to do, was expose in his pictures some detail that the naked eye might miss. He’d said to Titus once that when photographing victims he was attempting also to photograph the killer. The thought of investigating a murder without Martin’s presence was as unthinkable to Titus as investigating it without Maude’s assistance.

  JOE SABLE AND Guy Kirkham were sitting in the library in the late Peter Lillee’s house in Kew. Peter Lillee had been dead for only a few weeks. His sister, Ros Lord, and his niece, Helen Lord, had assured Joe and Guy that there was no reason for either of them to move. Joe had been living in the Lillee house since his flat had been destroyed by arson, and Guy had only recently found sanctuary there, having been invalided out of the army. Neither of them felt entirely comfortable, and Ros Lord’s refusal to accept rent added to this unspoken discomfort. Joe could, after all, afford to pay rent, despite having resigned from the police force. Guy had a small reserve of cash to draw on, but no income and no prospect that his wealthy parents would help out. The bridge between him and his parents, if not actually burnt, was smouldering and unsteady.

  ‘You should marry her, Joe.’

  ‘Who? Who should I marry, Guy?’

  ‘Helen Lord.’ He paused for effect. ‘Then you could live here permanently.’

  ‘There are a few things wrong with that suggestion, Guy. Firstly, I don’t want to live here permanently. Secondly, I don’t want to get married. Thirdly, when I do get married, it won’t be to secure accommodation somewhere. Fourthly, Helen doesn’t have a very high opinion of me. Shall I go on? I’ve got a lot more reasons.’

 

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