The Orchard Murders

by Robert Gott

  No one said anything for a few seconds.

  ‘It’s ugly,’ Maude said.

  ‘But it’s not all lies, is it?’ Winslow said.

  ‘It’s that final sentence,’ Tom said. ‘The call to hate them all.’

  ‘And that would include my wife. There were plenty of other posters like this one.’

  ‘Stamp out the Jap,’ Tom said. ‘That campaign is still running.’

  ‘Look,’ Winslow said, ‘the Japanese army is the enemy, and I want them defeated as much as the next man. And I don’t doubt for a second that the atrocities they’ve been accused of are real and not exaggerated. I had the misfortune, perhaps, to fall in love with a Japanese woman. I don’t know what that will mean for us when the war is over. Japan is going to be defeated. That’s becoming increasingly obvious, but every fibre of their being is trained to find surrender unthinkable. How does an entire nation commit harakiri?’

  Feeling that the conversation had become too serious, Winslow added, ‘There just aren’t enough sharp swords in Japan to cope with the demand.’

  Maude wasn’t quite ready to abandon the conversation.

  ‘Will you bring your wife here when the war is over, or will you go to Japan?’

  ‘Can you imagine how she’d be received here? I couldn’t put her through that. I won’t be welcomed by the family there either, of course. We’ve got a better chance of being happy if I go there, to Hiroshima. There’s an island nearby called Shikoku. Etsuko and I have been there a few times. I don’t even know if it will be possible, but I’d like to buy a place there and just live quietly, living off investments. It’s a fantasy, I know, but if you could see how beautiful it is, if you could come with me to the Dogo Onsen, you’d see why I love Japan.’

  ‘Come with you where?’ Titus asked.

  Winslow explained the etiquette and ritual of the Japanese bath house.

  ‘Everyone is naked together?’ Titus said.

  ‘The sexes are usually, but not always, segregated. Believe me, all it takes is one visit and you’d be converted.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy sitting around in hot water with a lot of naked men,’ Titus said.

  Winslow laughed.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘Turns out, it’s marvellous. Clothes define us. Get rid of the clothes, and Jack is as good as his master.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Jack or his master naked,’ Titus said.

  ‘You don’t have to look, darling,’ Maude said. ‘Modesty can be exercised by the observer as well as the observed.’

  ‘That’s a very Japanese idea, Mrs Lambert.’

  At the end of the evening, Winslow left first, which allowed Titus, Maude, and Tom to do a post-mortem on him. Maude was unequivocal.

  ‘He’s not a spy. I think he’s a lovely man who loves his wife and misses her terribly.’

  ‘If he is a spy,’ Titus said, ‘being so open and frank about his relationship with Japan is a strange strategy. He’s made it impossible for Intelligence not to be wary of him.’

  ‘It might be a brilliant strategy,’ Tom said. ‘Hide in plain sight. I don’t think so, though. I’m tempted to come clean with him about bloody Tom bloody Chafer.’

  ‘That,’ Titus said, ‘would be a very bad mistake.’

  Tom sighed.

  ‘I know, Titus. God, I loathe Tom Chafer.’

  7

  DR CLARA DAWSON always had trouble sleeping after night shift. She read the papers, dipped into a book, and ate something, trying to reproduce the rhythm of the end to a normal day. This might have been easier if the night shifts followed one after another, but they didn’t. Her next shift wouldn’t begin until Sunday evening, which would give her most of the weekend to recover, but her disrupted sleep patterns wouldn’t fully realign. As she stretched out on her bed on Friday afternoon, she wasn’t hopeful of drifting off easily. There were several patients she was worried about, and she couldn’t quite shake the irritation she was feeling about Gerald Matthews’ ugly behaviour. She knew he was married, and pondered how thankless it must be to be his wife. Perhaps he was a different man at home. She doubted it.

  She managed to fall asleep, and woke again just after midnight. Was it the front door opening and closing? It was too late for either of the two women with whom she shared the house to be getting home. Both of them kept regular hours, but it was Friday, so perhaps one of them had stayed out unusually late. She was sufficiently curious to get up, unlock and open the door to her room, and check the corridor. Pat, the schoolteacher, was irritatingly careless in leaving the front door of the house unlocked. She hadn’t been in Melbourne when the American soldier Eddie Leonski had murdered three women and terrified the city. She’d grown up in the country, where doors were never locked, and she hadn’t got into the habit of turning the key.

  The corridor was dark, but illuminated by the light from Clara’s room. She checked the front door, and found that it was unlocked. She’d say something, for the umpteenth time, to Pat the next time she saw her. On her way back to her room, she noticed an object on the floor beside the doorjamb. It looked like a wallet. She bent down to pick it up, thinking that perhaps Pat had dropped it. It was sticky, and as she brought it into her room, she realised that the stuff on her fingers was blood. She put the wallet on a table and stared at it. Blood didn’t usually disgust her, but this blood did, and she hurried to the sink to wash her hands clean. When she returned to the table, she gingerly flipped the wallet open. There was a small photograph visible behind a clear pocket. It was Gerald Matthews, and Clara knew with a dreadful certainty that the wallet had been taken from his corpse. Kenneth Bussell, she thought. Kenneth Bussell. She went cold as she realised that he might still be in the house.

  The telephone was in the corridor. She tried to think clearly. She had to call the police. Did they work this late? What would she tell them? She opened her door and called into the darkness. ‘Pat! Pat! Susan! Susan!’ She was aware that there was an edge of panic in her voice. She ought to have just knocked on their doors. It was too late now. There was no immediate response. It was reassuring that Bussell didn’t show himself, but what if this meant that both her housemates were dead? Clara uttered a small gasp, and felt suddenly weak. No, no, she told her body, do not go into shock; do not go into shock.

  Both Pat and Susan emerged from their rooms at the same time.

  ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’ Susan asked.

  Clara felt a moment of relief, followed by a spike of white-hot anger.

  ‘You didn’t lock the fucking door, Pat! Why didn’t you lock the fucking door?’

  Pat, taken aback by Clara’s fury, became self-righteous. ‘For God’s sake, Clara. What’s the big deal?’

  ‘The big deal, Pat, the big fucking deal is that a fucking murderer left something on my doorstep.’

  ‘Please stop swearing, Clara,’ Susan said. ‘It doesn’t help anything.’

  ‘Yes, it fucking does, Susan. You should try it sometime. Did you both hear what I said?’

  ‘You must have had a nightmare,’ Pat said.

  ‘A man’s wallet, covered in blood, is on a table in my room. It was left outside my door.’ Clara was now speaking quietly. ‘The person who left it there might still be here, in the house.’

  Susan clutched at the collar of her nightdress. Pat looked stricken.

  ‘That’s what happens when you don’t lock the fucking door, Pat.’

  Pat gathered herself. ‘I’ll check the rest of the place,’ she said, and before Clara or Susan could stop her, she’d headed towards the back of the house. They followed her. With all the lights turned on, and having established that there was no one else there, they each felt more secure. Pat, in an act of courageous atonement, went out into the backyard with a torch. When she returned, she poked the embers in the stove and goaded them into a fl
ame. She put a kettle on the hob.

  ‘You call the police, Clara,’ she said. ‘I’ll make us some tea.’

  ‘I’m sorry I lost my temper,’ Clara said.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t lock the fucking door.’

  Hearing Pat — who, like Susan, never swore — use Clara’s favourite expletive made all of them laugh.

  After Clara had made the telephone call, all three of them sat in Clara’s room, waiting for the police to arrive. Now that they were all calm, they looked at the wallet lying on the tabletop. They didn’t touch it. Clara, who’d been impressed by Pat’s courage and by Susan’s absence of hysteria, told them that she knew the man in the photograph.

  ‘I had a run-in with him, just before my shift ended. It was in front of a patient, a strange bloke who stood up for me, in a way.’

  ‘We don’t know that this Dr Matthews is actually dead, though,’ said Pat.

  ‘No, we don’t. I’ve just jumped to that conclusion, because why else would someone steal his wallet and present it to me?’

  Susan sipped at her tea and said, ‘You think this is like a cat bringing home a dead rat, or a dead bird?’

  ‘That’s a perfect analogy, Susan. It’s a trophy.’

  Two constables arrived just after 1.00 am. When Clara let them in she couldn’t resist pointing out that more than an hour had passed since her phone call. The older of the two constables, a man in his forties, said, with mild sarcasm, that finding a man’s wallet didn’t constitute an emergency.

  ‘Lost property isn’t the same as murder,’ he said.

  ‘That’s very funny,’ Clara said, and she meant it. If she were a policeman, stuck on night duty, called out to look at a wallet, she hoped she could summon a bit of wit. She liked this constable, whose name was Barclay.

  ‘However, this isn’t exactly a lost wallet. I’d describe it as the bloody trophy from a corpse you haven’t found yet.’

  ‘That’s your professional opinion, is it, Miss …?’

  ‘Doctor. Dr Clara Dawson. It’s not an opinion. It’s a hypothesis.’

  The young constable was about to pick the wallet up when Barclay snapped, ‘Don’t touch that, Jim.’

  His sharp tone suggested he wasn’t dismissive of Clara’s claim. He stood over the wallet, and moved it carefully with his fountain pen.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked simply, and Clara described the events leading up to the finding of the wallet outside her door. Constable Barclay took copious notes. Using a handkerchief, he slowly removed the contents of the wallet. There was £20 in notes, which Barclay noted was a large amount of money to be carrying around.

  ‘And a large amount not to steal,’ Clara said.

  There were Matthews’ identification papers, a crackled photograph of a woman, and a photograph of two children. There was also a piece of card with several telephone numbers on it, including one labelled ‘home’.

  ‘It’s after 1.00 am.’ Barclay said. ‘It’s very late to be telephoning Mrs Matthews.’

  ‘If my husband was missing,’ Susan said, ‘I’d want to hear from the police. She might be sitting at home worrying herself sick. And if Dr Matthews is there, he might appreciate knowing his £20 is safe.’

  Barclay agreed, and went into the corridor to telephone the number on the card. He closed the door behind him so no one could make out what he was saying. When he returned, he said, ‘We have a missing person. Dr Matthews didn’t return from his shift. Mrs Matthews said her husband was often late home, but that this was unusually late. She was just about to ring the police. She’d already rung the hospital and been told that Dr Matthews had finished his shift on time, and had left the hospital.

  ‘How did she sound?’ Clara asked.

  ‘Matter-of-fact. Sensible. Calm.’

  Barclay put the contents of the wallet back, and wrapped it in his handkerchief.

  ‘We might get some prints off this,’ he said.

  ‘My fingerprints will be all over it,’ Clara said.

  ‘It might still be a storm in a teacup. If your hypothesis turns out to be correct, you’ll need to come down to Russell Street to have your prints taken, for elimination purposes.’

  ‘Unless, of course, I killed him.’

  ‘Clara!’ Pat was genuinely horrified.

  ‘It’s no secret that I couldn’t stand Dr Matthews, Pat. I’d have to be a suspect, surely, wouldn’t I, constable?’

  ‘That is true, Dr Dawson.’

  ‘So my fingerprints might incriminate me, as well as eliminate me.’

  ‘It can’t be both,’ Barclay said.

  Clara ignored the gentle correction.

  ‘Let’s hope Kenneth Bussell’s prints are there as well.’

  Within two hours of the two constables’ departure, Clara’s hypothesis had been proved correct. Dr Matthews’ body was found in the Fitzroy Gardens, lying face down in a puddle of stale water at the bottom of an air-raid ditch.

  ‘THIS ONE LOOKS pretty straightforward, Titus.’

  Martin Serong stood on the edge of the air-raid ditch looking at the body that at its bottom.

  ‘Nothing is ever straightforward about murder, Martin,’ Titus said.

  ‘I was speaking comparatively, I suppose. A single body in a ditch looks less complicated than four bodies on a farm. Motives, of course, are never straightforward. But I just take the pictures, Titus. Motives, and all the rest of it, that’s your job.’

  ‘We’ve got a head start on this one. The victim is Dr Gerald Matthews. We even have a suspect — a bloke named Kenneth Bussell. All this is courtesy of Dr Clara Dawson, whom you know.’

  ‘She should be working for you, Titus. She’s wasted in medicine.’

  ‘You think good doctors are less important than good detectives?’

  ‘When you put it like that, no. By the time you’re involved, it’s too late to expect a full recovery.’

  Titus, as a general rule, didn’t approve of police officers who engaged in banter around a corpse. He didn’t buy the idea that black humour was a coping mechanism. Now, though, he was relieved to find that Martin Serong seemed to have lost the worrying edge of despair he’d revealed at Fisher’s farm.

  ‘So, open-and-shut case then?’ Serong said.

  ‘Wouldn’t that be nice? We don’t know for sure how this man died.’

  ‘He could have drowned. There’s water down there.’

  ‘And, unfortunately, Kenneth Bussell isn’t cooperating by turning himself in. And, as you know, Martin, having a name is a long way from having a conviction.’

  CLARA DAWSON SAT alone in Inspector Lambert’s office at Russell Street. It was Saturday lunchtime. She’d managed to sleep for a couple of hours, but the sleep had been shallow and not restorative. Her eyes felt scratchy. She was due back on night shift the following day, so between now and then she simply had to get some sleep. Titus entered, and apologised for being late.

  ‘Does the head of Homicide normally take witness statements, Titus?’

  ‘Well, you’re not really a witness, and this isn’t really a statement. You’ve already given that to Senior Constable Barclay.’

  ‘Who’s very good at his job, may I say. Why is he languishing on night duty?’

  ‘I have no idea, but that is good to hear. I’ve read the statement, and it’s surprisingly free of spelling mistakes. You make no secret of the fact that you didn’t much like Dr Matthews.’

  ‘I thought he was a frightful man and a workmanlike doctor. Nothing more. He was arrogant, and from what I’d seen of his interactions with patients, unsympathetic and undiplomatic. He wasn’t good with people. Impatient and dismissive. He should have been a vet. Animals don’t know when someone is being rude to them. No, I didn’t like him.’

  ‘Tell me about this Kenneth Bussell.’

  ‘He presented wi
th a shallow stab wound and a flimsy story about how he’d acquired it. It isn’t my job to dispute his account. He was well nourished and clean, so he wasn’t living rough. What he was doing in the park, where he said he was attacked, at that hour of the night, is his business, however unsavoury it might have been. He was polite and cooperative, two qualities that I appreciate in my job. I didn’t think he needed to be admitted, but I wanted him to stay until I’d finished my shift, just to be sure I hadn’t missed anything. I actually forgot about him, and when I went to check on him, Dr Matthews was there dispensing his unique brand of medicine. This involved questioning my judgement in front of a patient and ostentatiously checking the quality of my sutures. I left and thought no more about it, until the wallet appeared at my door.’

  ‘You’d never met Bussell before?’

  ‘Never, and I understand the meaning behind the question, Titus. Why would this stranger become my champion?’