The Orchard Murders

by Robert Gott

  ‘It’s amazing that no one was hurt, don’t you think?’ Guy said.

  ‘Someone was hurt, Guy.’

  ‘He doesn’t count.’

  ‘You were brave. If you hadn’t been there, things would have been a lot worse.’

  ‘It was just instinct.’

  Now that the subject had been broached, Clara asked Guy what he thought of Helen’s decision to set up as a private inquiry agent.

  ‘I don’t really know her,’ he said. ‘She and Mrs Lord have taken me in off the street, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that, but I met Helen for the first time just a few weeks ago. She’s given Joe a job, which is great. What do you think about it? You know her much better than I do.’

  ‘Helen is the smartest person I know, but I hate the idea of her putting herself in any sort of danger. I couldn’t do it. I meet enough unpleasant people just accidentally in the course of a day. I can’t imagine deliberately setting out to find them, and that’s what a private inquiry agent does, isn’t it? The ugly behaviour of others becomes your bread and butter.’

  ‘I hope some of that bread and butter falls my way. I can’t work as a private detective, but Helen did say that there are no laws about me helping out with stuff like surveillance.’

  ‘Actually, Guy, I think there might be laws about that.’

  ‘I suppose she meant that there are ways around them.’

  ‘Your family doesn’t live in Melbourne, do they?’

  The non sequitur threw Guy for a moment. The last thing he wanted to talk about was his family.

  ‘No,’ he said, and he said it so emphatically that Clara understood that further questions along this line would be unwelcome. There was a change between them after that. It was subtle, but each of them was aware that the light-heartedness with which the evening had begun had darkened a little. They spoke of other things, and it was pleasant, but neither of them tried very hard to extend the evening. Clara wasn’t in any way offended. She liked Guy’s company. Guy, however, felt he’d spoiled their meeting, and he couldn’t find a way of retrieving it. He’d wanted to impress Clara, to charm her, and instead he’d revealed to her a truculence that she no doubt found unattractive.

  Guy offered to walk Clara to her flat in East Melbourne. She declined the offer, and seeing that Guy had taken this as a kind of reproach, she said, ‘You know, Guy, I would like to go to the pictures with you. It’s just a matter of finding the time.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely. You’re good company, Guy, and good company is rare and precious.’

  Rare and precious. Guy thought seriously about having those words tattooed somewhere on his body.

  4

  MEREDITH WILSON HAD pondered on more than one occasion whether she’d have married Zachary Wilson if she hadn’t been pregnant. But she had been pregnant, so the luxury of choice had been denied her. Having the baby out of wedlock had been out of the question. Within two months of the marriage, Meredith had miscarried, and in the ensuing ten years she hadn’t become pregnant again. Sometimes she looked at her husband across the table and thought that, if she’d just waited, someone better might have come along. He didn’t disgust her. He was quite good-looking and he hadn’t let himself run to fat, and he was clean. He wasn’t dull — he could make her laugh — but the grinding rhythm of orchard farming stifled passion. How many conversations could a person endure about gall wasps and leaf mould?

  The orchard provided the Wilsons with a living, but profits fluctuated, and Meredith had come to know that Mother Nature was a bitch with no interest in the welfare or wellbeing of the pathetic creatures who depended on her largesse. She’d shrivel or swell a crop with an equal show of indifference. There were few luxuries in the Wilson house, not that Meredith craved them. What she craved was company. Her brother visited sometimes and stayed overnight, which would have been fine if she’d liked him. She didn’t. The nearest neighbour was Peter Fisher. Fisher had a young wife. Meredith had spoken to her once or twice, but what did she have in common with a 25-year-old? Mrs Fisher had had a baby, and maybe they could have found common ground there. But there was that nonsense that her husband Peter preached, and which her own husband had been seduced by. They’d had rows about that, ugly rows. Meredith thought she’d married an intelligent man, not a gullible one. He’d discovered that he’d been a fool, but Meredith had seen the weakness in him, and it diminished him so that now, as he sat alone on remand, she felt neither grief nor dread. She didn’t believe for a minute that he was guilty of these crimes, but his suffering failed to touch her somehow. His absence meant that she had to walk the rows of trees. She thought she’d despise this, but the exhaustion that almost overwhelmed her that first night was glorious. Why had she been confined — why had she confined herself (Zac had never demanded it of her) — to the farmhouse?

  HELEN LORD STOPPED at the Fisher place first. She hadn’t expected anyone to be there. There was someone there, though, and it was someone who didn’t want to be seen. Helen stepped from the car and was aware of a movement, almost the memory of a movement, behind one of the windows. Was it a shadow shifting, or the faintest shiver of a curtain? It was furtive, and it signalled to Helen that she needed to be wary. She’d checked with Inspector Lambert, who’d told her that the Fisher house was unoccupied and that forensics had completed all their work on it. Perhaps it was a member of Peter Fisher’s family, or his wife’s family. Someone, after all, had to have an interest in the property. Helen had intended to simply walk about to get a feel for the scene of this hideous crime. She’d had no expectation that she’d get into the house. Now, though, she thought it was worth trying to do just that. She’d been spotted, so knocking on the door seemed logical. There was no answer. She moved to the veranda, and stood where Emilio Barbero’s body had hung. There was no evidence of his pointless death. She returned to the door and knocked again. Did someone move within? Helen tried the doorknob, and it turned. Whoever was inside had entered with a key. Why was he, or she, reluctant to answer the door? Four people had died in this place. Helen’s heart was pounding as she pushed the door open and entered the house.

  It was an ordinary house with a living room well lit by the morning sun. Could something unspeakable really have happened here among the knick-knacks and domestic disorder of ordinary lives? Helen stood still, conscious that there was another person taking breaths in here, and that that person didn’t want to be discovered.

  ‘My name is Helen Lord,’ she said, loudly enough to penetrate every room. Silence.

  Helen identified the door to the bedroom where Deborah Fisher’s body had been found. It was closed. She felt slightly foolish, but she knocked on it, gently, as if Mrs Fisher and her baby might still be woken from a slumber. She went into the bedroom and stood at the foot of the Fishers’ bed. It had been stripped of its bedclothes, but the mattress showed the dried wash of blood that had flowed from Deborah Fisher’s body.

  There was, too, a horrible odour that made Helen gag. She put her finger under her nose, and was unprepared for the hard shove in her back that propelled her onto the foul mattress. She hit it with sufficient force to feel dazed, but the awareness that her face was in contact with Deborah Fisher’s dried blood made Helen recoil and scramble to her feet. She felt ill, and had to wait while she quelled the bile that was rising in her stomach. When she’d regained her composure and her alertness, she began to search for her assailant. She checked every room in the house, her initial tentativeness on entering rooms giving way to indignation at having been manhandled. There was no one in the house. She hurried outside, but whoever had pushed her had fled. She turned on a tap attached to a water tank and washed her face. She tried to assess the strength of the hands that had assaulted her. Were they a man’s hands or a woman’s?

  Having gained a clear idea of the murder scene, Helen drove to the neighbouring orchard. Meredith Wilson wasn
’t expecting her, and she would doubtless be suspicious of a woman claiming to be a private detective. Helen hoped that Meredith’s desire to have her husband released from jail, and from suspicion, would allow her to speak freely, particularly about Zac Wilson’s relationship with his neighbours.

  There was no answer to Helen’s knock on Meredith Wilson’s door. There was a small truck in the driveway with ‘Wilson’s Fruit’ printed on its doors. Unless they also owned a car, which was unlikely, Helen surmised that Meredith must be somewhere on the property. She walked to the back garden, which was unkempt, although perhaps it looked that way because it had largely been given over to growing vegetables — and vegetables, Helen thought, always looked unruly and ungoverned even when they were carefully tended. She saw the figure of a woman in the middle distance, reaching up to prune a tree. Helen walked towards her. She was noticed quickly, and the woman stopped what she was doing. She let her arms drop to her sides and simply waited.

  ‘Mrs Wilson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Helen Lord. I want to prove that your husband is innocent.’

  ‘Why?’

  This was not the response to her cool declaration that Helen had expected, and when she reflected on it later, she realised that it pointed to something formidable in Meredith Wilson.

  ‘I’m a private inquiry agent, Mrs Wilson.’ Helen produced her identity card. ‘I’m interested in justice, and I think the police have arrested the wrong man.’

  ‘You’re also in business, Miss Lord. I wonder how proving my husband innocent might be financially rewarding to you. Are you hoping I’ll pay you?’

  ‘I have no financial interest in this at all, Mrs Wilson. I’m not being paid by anyone, and I’m not expecting payment from anyone.’

  Meredith removed the gloves she’d been wearing.

  ‘I am half-sick of crusading, Miss Lord,’ she said wearily. ‘Still, you’d better come into the house. Talking to you is the least I can do for my husband.’

  Her tone suggested to Helen that the least Meredith could do might be her preferred option.

  Meredith didn’t offer Helen a cup of tea. The stove had no fire in it, so it would have taken an effort Meredith was unwilling to make to begin the process of tea-making. She wasn’t intimidated by Helen’s presence, and she sat across from her at the kitchen table, looking directly at her.

  ‘You’ve spoken to the police, of course,’ Helen said.

  ‘Of course. I wasn’t very helpful. I wasn’t deliberately unhelpful, but I don’t think I was of much use to them. They’ve been back a couple of times. I got the impression they think I know more than I’m telling them.’

  ‘And is that impression correct?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Did you, for example, mention anything about the Messiah?’

  Helen had intended to introduce this shred of information much later in the conversation. She’d hoped, in fact, that Meredith Wilson might mention it unbidden. It seemed right to her, though, having met and assessed Meredith, that she should produce it early. It was risky, because she had nothing to back it up with. It was bluff. The effect on Meredith looked at first to be minimal. She straightened slightly, and her lips, which had been parted, closed. These small reactions disguised a rush of emotions that if separated would have included dismay, relief, astonishment, and fear.

  ‘None of the policemen mentioned that,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not a policeman, Mrs Fisher.’

  Helen had fired her one piece of ammunition, and knew instinctively that the worst thing she could do was attempt to direct the interview at this point.

  ‘My husband was a fool. A complete fool. Imagine believing that that unimpressive little Peter Fisher was the Messiah. It’s laughable, or it would be if it wasn’t so bloody stupid.’

  Helen wished that Joe was here with her. She felt ill-equipped to wrestle with anything to do with religion. She’d had a desultory acquaintance with it at Methodist Ladies’ College, but neither her mother nor her uncle had been religious, so she’d never experienced, or even witnessed, zealously expressed faith. Joe wasn’t religious either — she knew that — but he had a better grasp than she had of the arcane workings of various institutions. Helen tried to maintain the fiction that nothing Meredith Wilson was saying was new to her.

  ‘Did your husband talk to you about his belief?’

  ‘There were a few months when he talked about nothing else. It was as if he’d lost his mind. I mean, have you ever seen Peter Fisher?’

  ‘Only a photograph.’

  ‘He was unprepossessing, to say the least, and he had a high, wheedling voice. That, I said to Zac, is not the voice of God. He realised that himself soon enough, of course, but not before he’d given Fisher hundreds of pounds. He’s embarrassed about it now.’

  ‘And angry?’

  ‘That’s a disappointingly obvious leading question, Miss Lord.’

  ‘Is there a disappointingly obvious answer?’

  ‘There is,’ she said. ‘Zac was more ashamed of his gullibility than he was angry about it. So, no, he wasn’t so enraged that he went berserk and murdered four people.’

  ‘It must be upsetting to have him on remand.’

  ‘It’s upsetting for him, certainly.’

  Helen liked the frank lack of ambiguity in this answer. Apart from anything else, it lent credence to Meredith’s claim that her husband was innocent, or at the very least it lent credence to her belief that he was innocent.

  ‘I know what you must be thinking, Miss Lord: if not Zac, then who?’

  ‘Tell me about Anthony Prescott.’

  ‘So you know something about these people already.’

  Helen decided that Meredith would discover fairly quickly that all she had was a name, and the vaguest idea about some strange religious goings-on. Her instinct was to come clean.

  ‘To be honest, Mrs Wilson, I was trying to create the impression that I know more than I do. I know the barest details, and none of them makes much sense to me. Anthony Prescott is just a name that was mentioned by someone connected to Emilio Barbero. You can safely assume that I’m working in the dark. Any light you can shine would be appreciated.’

  ‘You had me fooled,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to fool you. I want to find out what happened at the Fisher house.’

  Meredith folded her arms and looked directly at Helen.

  ‘I’ve got work to do. If you walk with me along the rows, we’ll talk. Peter Fisher was a madman, and somehow his madness was contagious.’

  She stood up, put on work gloves, and. with Helen following close behind, left the house.

  TOM MACKENZIE WASN’T expecting visitors. Just a few months earlier, a knock at the door might have aroused annoyance, or curiosity. Now, it made him jump. His flinch made him realise that despite feeling stronger, residual damage to his nerves remained. There was no need to be nervous. The threat to his personal safety had been removed. Whoever was at the door hadn’t come to kill him. He knew this, and even though he understood that it was irrational, he was afraid.

  There were two men on his doorstep. One of them was facing him; the other had his back turned, watching the street. Tom didn’t recognise them, but recognised their type. They wore suits, and not the cheap Dedman suits that men had been encouraged to buy once the war had got under way. These suits had both cuffs and pockets. Their hats were also of superior quality.

  ‘You blokes are supposed to be invisible,’ Tom said. ‘You might as well carry a big sign reading Military Intelligence.’

  The man who’d been surveilling the street turned around, and smiled. It was he who spoke.

  ‘Group Captain Thomas Mackenzie.’

  ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

  The man who’d knocked on the door removed his hat to reveal a
carefully oiled head of well-cut, copper-coloured hair.

  ‘I’ve seen you around the corridors at Victoria Barracks, sir,’ he said. ‘May we come in?’

  ‘I’m not in uniform, so you don’t need to call me sir.’

  ‘We, however, are in uniform. Apparently,’ he said, and smiled.

  Tom, in the face of both the deferential tone and demeanour of each of these men, was conscious that his hostility was unwarranted.

  ‘How do I know you are who you say you are?’

  ‘We haven’t said who we are yet, sir, but your first impression was correct. I’m Benjamin Newman, and this chap’ — he unexpectedly put his hand on the man’s shoulder — ‘this chap is Vincent Deighton.’

  Deighton removed his hat. His hair was dark and receding at a rate that, Tom thought, probably bothered him, given that he looked no older than thirty.

  ‘We’re stationed in hopelessly cramped conditions at Victoria Barracks, in the Office for Native Policy in Mandated Territory.’

  ‘So, Military Intelligence,’ Tom said.

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘You’d better come inside.’

  When both visitors were seated in Tom’s living room, he offered them tea, which they declined. Benjamin Newman placed his hat on the arm of his chair. Vincent Deighton held his, and moved it around between his fingers. Newman seemed to Tom to be the senior of the two, although they were close in age.

  ‘It won’t surprise you to know, sir, that we’ve read the report on your …’ He paused to find the right word. ‘Ordeal. May I say that your physical recovery has been remarkable?’

  Tom liked the discretion shown by the use of ‘physical’ and the slight emphasis Newman had given it.

  ‘You weren’t, of course, working for us.’

  ‘I was voluntarily alleviating the boredom of my job. Are you here to tell me I’ve committed some sort of offence?’

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, sir. You weren’t working for us then. We’d like you to work for us now.’