by Robert Drewe
It was on her way through the house to lock the door, as she turned into the front hall, past the high French windows which opened onto the back terrace, that she saw the figure standing motionless on the terrace, pressed full-length against the glass, looking into the house.
The man was so close to her that she almost missed him. They surprised each other. He saw her at the same time and his body squirmed and rubbed against the glass. His body and her body, separated by glass, were no more than two feet apart. The dark, blurred shape of him, his brow, was more or less on her level. He was masked. His hands were up against the glass and they were what she noticed most. The hands were wearing women’s gloves and suddenly they shone a thin beam of light on her.
She lurched back from the glass, from the big, floor-to-ceiling windows she’d always wanted, the biggest windows in Circe Circle, windows to let the sunlight in, windows that defied the gloomy Leon Road leadlights of Mrs Sefton.
‘Police!’ she cried. The man had hardly moved. His narrow light beam played calmly up and down her body, her nightdress, around the hall, investigated the room. In her panic she fell back against the telephone table. The phone was right beside her. ‘Police!’ she yelled again, even before she dialled it.
The light beam picked up her dialling the telephone. She heard the torch tap against the glass as he moved it. The beam seemed to be hovering on her, following her, as if making up its mind what to do now. As she dialled Detective-Sergeant John McCurry’s number in the Teledex, waited for an answer, she thought abruptly, the back door! But she had to speak to McCurry so she stayed on the phone. The man moved back from the window, turned towards the back door! and stumbled into our table-tennis table. The table, divided in the middle in a series of hinges, slid off one trestle, then another, and crashed heavily – in two, three, four stages – to the floor.
In the clatter she dropped the phone. She ran to the back door. (Big windows everywhere! He’d see her!) She locked it and ran back to the phone. She thought the prowler had gone then, but as she held on while the police operator was calling McCurry’s car the torch beam shone again from somewhere further back on the terrace. Its beam was thin and probing – it must have been one of those pencil torches – and it played over her body once more, as if reconsidering.
Why hadn’t he run away? The thought struck her: He knows Roy isn’t here! He’d already looked in the bedroom windows and seen there were only the two children home with her. The torch went off. She couldn’t see the prowler but she thought she could hear him padding around the demolished table-tennis table towards the back of the house.
McCurry was there surprisingly quickly. As his car pulled up outside, its radio crackling, its searchlight beaming into the trees, the man slipped into the shadows of the back yard and disappeared.
McCurry had been on patrol only two streets away, in Minora Road. He sat with her over a cup of tea while the other cop cruised around the neighbourhood. ‘Did you see him?’ he asked, not too hopefully.
She said, ‘He had a handkerchief tied around his face like a cowboy. But I have a feeling he was the same prowler as the other time.’
I arrived home then to see all the lights in the house blazing. I got a fright when McCurry met me at the door. He was wearing a maroon cardigan under his suit jacket, and his buttoned chest and stomach filled the doorway in a proprietorial manner. What had happened? I squeezed past him and hurried into the kitchen. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table in her dressing-gown smoking a cigarette.
‘A night-owl, eh?’ McCurry said. ‘Your mother could have done with you here, son.’
I felt instantly guilty. I also felt like an interloper. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘Car trouble.’
‘He doesn’t go out very much,’ she said to McCurry. ‘And he’s had a big day running the mile.’ She smiled at me wanly and pulled her gown tighter around her. ‘I’ve had another visitor.’
McCurry gave me a last dismissive look and leaned over the table towards her. He seemed to take up the whole kitchen. He told her not to worry, the average peeping tom was pretty harmless. Then he winked. ‘A bloody menace to a clothesline full of panties, though.’
My mother shuddered and looked sceptical. She didn’t say anything. She seemed exhausted.
That reminded him of something. ‘By the way, you don’t shop at Shirley’s Frock Salon up on the highway, do you?’ he asked her. He didn’t wait for an answer. He was grinning. ‘We’ve got a charmer who keeps breaking into Shirley’s and making love to the mannequins in the front window. We lock him up and the moment he gets out he rides his bike right through the window again, smashes the window with his handlebars. Most times he’s still on the job when we get there. In full public view. Light as day. The alarm’s going off. I say to him, “Come on, Errol Flynn. Say good night to your girlfriend,” and he looks up from the floor and says, “Would you mind giving Sonia and me a few minutes’ privacy?” ’ He laughed and drained his cup. ‘True love.’
I stayed up until McCurry’s car returned. My mother thanked him and shook his hand and he left. Then she told me what had happened. She said, ‘I wish I could be more definite that I knew who it was.’ As we walked around the house re-checking all the doors and windows, she said, ‘That business about the pervert raping the shop dummies – do you think that was meant to make me feel better?’
Even though she looked drained she laughed then and I laughed with her. We left the lights on and said good night.
In the bright light I suddenly noticed long blonde hairs glistening all over my jumper. If she saw them when I kissed her good night she didn’t say anything.
PART THREE
1
THE REAL WORLD
Before my first day at work I went to stay with Simon Watson and his family in Renown Avenue. It was the middle of the summer holidays and my family was holidaying down at Albany. Mrs Watson had invited me to stay until they returned. The Watsons had forgiven me for demolishing their letterbox. And I hadn’t brought up the murder weapon again.
Even though the hatchet often crossed my mind, and a couple of times I found myself gazing at the garage wall where they hung their tools, at the empty, hatchet-shaped painted outline next to the occupied outlines of the hammer and saw and chisel and garden shears (the police still had the murder weapon in their possession), I found it easy enough to conduct conversations for a week without the word ‘hatchet’ coming up.
Anyway, while the Berkman murder was still unsolved, the police had finally captured Jillian Brewer’s killer. He was a nineteen-year-old deaf-mute named Darryl Beamish. I’d known Beamish as a rowdy older boy at the Claremont baths when I was younger. Once the police came to the baths to question him. He hung around with a noisy gang of deaf boys who used to touch girls as they swam by. His strange angry sounds and risky behaviour made me think he wasn’t right in the head. Using an interpreter, the police had got him to confess. He’d been convicted and sentenced to death.
The telegram from the editor of the West Australian, Griff Richards, had arrived three days before we were due to leave for Albany. It said I had the job as a cadet reporter. I was more than happy to miss out on Albany. The starting date was my birthday, a week later. I thought it was a good omen.
My mother and Simon’s mother decided I shouldn’t have to go home to an empty house on the important day that I both started work and turned eighteen. It was also the day the Leaving Certificate results were announced and Mrs Watson made Simon and me a special dinner that night. Next morning when the paper arrived she complimented me on my first published story. She cut it out and kept it for my mother.
The newspaper cutting was the size of a large postage stamp. In its entirety my story said: Patrick O’Donnell, 56, of no fixed address, received a broken leg and abrasions when he was struck by a car at the intersection of Murray and William streets yesterday.
The newspaper’s police roundsman, Ralph Wheatley, like many of the senior reporters a middle-a
ged Englishman, bluff and tweedy and pipe-smoking and proud of his ex-service moustache, had allowed me that filler item from the day’s police-rounds grab-bag. I was lucky to get it. Ralph was still reeling from my hard-boiled crime-reporter’s small-talk during our afternoon rounds of the Perth detectives.
‘This is my new assistant,’ he’d said. ‘It’s his first day.’ We were in the vice-squad office. It was hot and stuffy and an old fan whirred and rattled in a corner. Four vice detectives loomed slowly out of their chairs and shook hands. I’d already undone my collar button and loosened my tie so I’d fit in. The detectives remained standing, lounging in their shirtsleeves against filing cabinets full of wicked case histories. I thought of all the vice details stored in those cabinets. All the sin and obscenity they dealt with every day. The detectives stared at me. I felt an air of expectation in the room.
‘Tell me,’ I heard an unfamiliar voice pipe up, a twelve-year-old choirboy’s perhaps. ‘On the subject of rape, I read that penetration is enough, legally speaking.’
The detectives stared silently at me. A strange mist floated through the room. Relentlessly, in a sort of suicidal trance, I ploughed on. While one part of my brain was urging me to shut up, another part was dredging up some case I’d read years before while trolling for sex information in Sten Gunn’s father’s law library. I couldn’t stop. I dearly wanted to, but I couldn’t.
‘This judge said there doesn’t need to be ejaculation for it to be rape,’ I said. Still no one spoke. A blowfly buzzed and bumped against the vice-squad’s dusty window pane. My brain registered a brown leather shoulder-holster hanging over the back of a chair. ‘That’s what I read in this law book, anyway.’
Ralph didn’t say anything as we walked downstairs to continue the round, but he was deep in thought. We walked past the petty-sessions courts to the deserted Press room. Caustic smells wafted up from the holding cells below the courts. Ralph made a noise in his throat. ‘Would you mind waiting down here while I see the Commissioner?’ he said.
He was gone a long while, more than enough time for me to carve my name beside all the others on the Press-room desk. But I didn’t. I was still squirming about my encounter with the vice-squad. I felt too much of a novice to presume desk-carving rights, even to presume I’d have a job the next day.
There was also time enough for me to read all the Wanted posters in the entrance hall, even to learn them by heart. Their gritty details cheered me up a little, especially the old, yellowing poster for an American felon, Jacob ‘Cheemy’ Perlmutter. Cheemy Perlmutter was wanted for escaping from gaol in New Jersey ten years before. He had a record of fraud and racketeering offences going back thirty years. I could see why the New Jersey police or the FBI might want to catch him, but in alerting the West Australian public they seemed to be casting an exceedingly wide net.
A few weeks later, in my own time, I wrote my first ‘feature’ story. Its subject was Cheemy Perlmutter. I fantasised that Cheemy was indeed hiding out in Western Australia, living the quiet life in some sandy suburb. It wasn’t as if he was a murderer or anything. I imagined the retired racketeer pushing a shopping trolley at Tom the Cheap Grocer’s, learning to surf, throwing out a fishing line now and again. He might have trouble obtaining his cigars and bagels but I could see him enjoying a nice grilled whiting for breakfast.
Ralph snorted in his moustache when he read the published story. He’d passed Cheemy’s Wanted poster a thousand times. ‘Interesting little angle,’ he said. The West Australian saw itself as the paper of record rather than the paper of interesting little angles. It was more at home with Paddy O’Donnell’s accident than Cheemy Perlmutter’s long-ago gaol escape in another hemisphere.
The paper of record provided entry into what reporters liked to call ‘the real world’. The real world was in a different galaxy to the world of rubber products. It seemed to be populated solely by the police and people in trouble with the police. And reporters, of course.
Despite rare intrusions like the Jillian Brewer murder – now solved at last – it was also situated a long way from Dalkeith and its environs. The real world was somewhere across the river.
When we weren’t assisting the senior police, courts, industrial, finance, sport and political reporters we first-years were assigned to back-of-the-paper clerical tasks: collecting and typing up the weather details; the vegetable, fruit, meat and fish market prices; and the television and radio programmes.
Serving in these nether regions, our day’s work buried near the classified ads, kept us humble and keen. The repetitive nature of the jobs supposedly sharpened us up and taught us accuracy. In the avuncular, pipe-tobacco-scented atmosphere of the newsroom, these monotonous tasks, like our compulsory shorthand lessons with Miss Pat May, were regarded as builders of journalistic character as well as reporting skills. If so, we cadets were chock full of it.
We also staffed the only fractionally less inferior suburban supplements. I was assigned to the west suburban section, covering the serene suburbs between the river and the coast, my old stamping ground. The middle-class west had even less news than the scruffier points of the compass. My supplement beat was known as eisteddfods-and-shitfights.
Eisteddfod, I soon learned, was the most depressing word in the reporter’s stylebook. The Welsh had a lot to answer for. It seemed that every week some suburban choir or twelve-year-old Shenton Park nightingale was competing in one of these tricky-to-spell events. As for the shitfights, shit-scuffles was closer to the mark. These weren’t major controversies, although we tried hard to make them so, but the usual local government spats about rezoning and rates and tree removal and preserving old buildings and road widening and how to deal with defecating dogs.
Meanwhile, between eisteddfods and shitfights I covered those sports with a following so minuscule that the real sportswriters shunned them – lacrosse, badminton, Royal tennis.
I hadn’t realised how many arcane pursuits there were out in the suburbs. Or how desperate they were for publicity. Previously ignored archers, hurlers, go-karters and clay-pigeon shooters greeted me as a flower does the sun. Soon they were plaguing their new mouthpiece at all hours. I dreaded Monday mornings. Earnest fencing-club secretaries were first on the phone with the weekend épée, foil and sabre results. Then the speleologists brought me up to date on their weekend cavings. (My standard opening question: ‘So how deep did you go this week?’)
I barely had time to catch up on recent manoeuvrings in table-tennis association politics, and to sympathise with the latest rebuff to go-karting’s territorial ambitions, before the newsroom door swung open and my keenest news source, Mrs Thelma Knopp, secretary-treasurer of the Claremont-Cottesloe Croquet Club, arrived at my elbow. Mrs Knopp preferred to personally deliver her weekly six-page, handwritten, blow-by-blow croquet sagas – the headings already written and marked Do Not Change!
There was so little real news in eisteddfods-and-shitfights that I walked the suburban streets looking for it. Senior reporters often talked nostalgically about going ‘back on the road’ but they didn’t take it as literally as I did. Every day for a month I caught a bus into the western suburbs, got off somewhere along the route in Shenton Park or Claremont or Mosman Park, chose a street that looked as if it might hold a few secrets, wiped my damp palms on my pants, took several deep breaths, knocked on a random door and asked the bemused householder if he or she had a story.
Twice they did. I had a labrador released from the dog pound and ‘saved from certain death’. And I found a seventy-year-old primary school cleaner who had taken over coaching the school’s girls’ softball team. Any day soon they’d win a game.
Even for an eisteddfods-and-shitfights reporter I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. The supplements editor, Jack Morrison, told me brusquely to ‘put Dalkeith under the microscope’. All right, I said, but I didn’t expect to find much when I looked through the lens.
Dalkeith people prided themselves on living respectable and modern suburba
n lives. Modernity was as important as respectability. They lived in the immediate present. The past, as I’d heard it described all my life, went back only as far as the war. But it certainly went back that far. The Circe Circle matrons still ostracised Mrs Brotherson down the road for ‘going with’ Americans in 1942. Mrs Brotherson was now in her fifties.
In desperation I recalled my piece on Cheemy Perlmutter. At least it had raised Ralph’s eyebrows and made a small splash in the office. I’d try to drum up some more feature articles. I started in the newspaper library. And in the library I learned some things. That Roberta Ainslie was working there, for a start.
It was a shock to see my former Rottnest bathing beauty wielding a Stanley knife with the other library assistants. They were mostly older women in their late twenties, jaded stunners with bohemian reputations and sexy smokers’ voices. Sarcastic and well connected, they were renowned for the languor with which they cut out and – eventually – filed the stories in the day’s papers. They undulated between cutting table, filing cabinet and canteen, trailing cigarette smoke, cynical trills of laughter and world-weary sighs. They had better things to do – gossiping, nursing hangovers, reading magazines, flirting with sportswriters – than assisting apprentice reporters younger than themselves.
Roberta, it turned out, wasn’t planning a career as a librarian or a bohemian. She wanted to be a journalist. She’d studied for a year in America and was marking time until she got a cadetship. Meanwhile, it wasn’t the hardest job in the world, she said. It hadn’t been too difficult to come by, either. Her father was the company lawyer.
For old times’ sake she broke ranks and helped me with my research. Well, she stood up from the table, took some files out of a cabinet and showed me how to work the microfiche viewer.
Seeing her out of her Rottnest context was disconcerting. She was wearing a pale blue Angora sweater, dark blue skirt and high heels. Her tan was paler. In heels she was taller, of course. She wasn’t showily smoking but I saw a cigarette burning discreetly in an ashtray beside her Stanley knife. She was still beautiful but more jaded. She’d learned to walk the undulating table-to-cabinet-to-canteen walk. She looked like a girl who had travelled. She looked like a girl who worked, but not too hard.