by Robert Gott
THE PORT FAIRY MURDERS
Robert Gott was born in the small Queensland town of Maryborough in 1957, and lives in Melbourne. He has published many books for children, and is the creator of the newspaper cartoon The Adventures of Naked Man. He is also the author of the William Power trilogy of crime-caper novels set in 1940s Australia: Good Murder, A Thing of Blood, and Amongst the Dead. This novel is a sequel to The Holiday Murders.
For my parents, Maurene and Kevin. Always.
Scribe Publications
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First published by Scribe 2015
Copyright © Robert Gott 2015
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Gott, Robert.
The Port Fairy Murders.
9781925106459 (paperback)
9781925113648 (e-book)
1. Murder–Investigation–Victoria–Port Fairy–Fiction. 2. Detective and mystery stories. 3. Port Fairy (Vic.)–Fiction.
A823.3
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
Before The Port Fairy Murders, 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 26 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’ death and to step out of his shadow …
–1–
Wednesday 12 January 1944
GEORGE STARLING HATED Jews, women, queers, coppers, rich people, and his father. He loved Adolf Hitler and Ptolemy Jones. Hitler was in Berlin, a long way from Victoria, and Jones was dead. He knew Jones was dead because he’d stood in the shadows and watched the coppers bring his body out of a house in Belgrave. One of those coppers had been a Jew named Joe Sable, and that meant one thing, and one thing only — Joe Sable’s days were numbered.
DETECTIVE JOE SABLE knew he’d returned to work too soon. He sat, bruised and miserable, at his desk in the Homicide division of the Victoria Police in Russell Street, Melbourne. Detective Inspector Titus Lambert and Constable Helen Lord were out, but he wasn’t alone in the office. Sergeant David Reilly sat on the opposite side of the room. Reilly was a recent acquisition, and Joe had yet to make up his mind about him. He knew Helen Lord resented Reilly, but her resentment was based less on his abilities and more on the fact that he threatened her position in the squad. She was there by the grace and favour of Inspector Lambert, who’d snaffled her by arguing chronic manpower shortages to his superiors. Under normal circumstances, a female constable could expect to languish unacknowledged for the duration of her career. Helen Lord was only too aware that Katherine Mackay, a woman she admired, had waited 13 years to be elevated to the dizzy heights of senior constable, and that was as far she would be suffered to rise.
The war had created unexpected opportunities, so that in mid-January 1944 Helen Lord remained seconded to Homicide — a fact that got up the noses of many in the force. Reilly, and any further additions to the squad, might end that secondment. Consequently, her relations with most of the male members of Homicide — who were destined to always outrank her, no matter how incompetent they might be — were fraught. She felt every sidelong glance, every raised eyebrow, every small sneer, with the force of an explicit verbal correction to her being there. She admired Inspector Lambert, and was grateful for his belief that her sex was irrelevant. Nevertheless, an ember of resentment that she was beholden to him could still be fanned by circumstances into something hot and restive. And then there was Sergeant Joe Sable. She needed to discipline wariness into her dealings with him. She was a much better detective than Joe — more instinctive, smarter, more observant — and yet she was acutely aware that her attraction to him might lead her into a deference she would otherwise abhor. She was, however, so easily lacerated by a careless remark, even by him, that she hadn’t so far fallen victim to obsequious agreement. Her return to the office, alone — Inspector Lambert was lunching with the assistant commissioner of police — interrupted Joe Sable’s morose self-absorption. It was David Reilly who spoke first.
‘Anything interesting?’
His tone was carefully, studiedly neutral. He was aware that he’d earned Constable Lord’s displeasure without even trying. This would normally not have bothered him, but his position in Homicide mattered to him, and Constable Lord mattered to Inspector Lambert. Ipso facto, as he’d said to his wife, Constable Lord needed to be kept on side. Barbara Reilly thought that the idea of a woman willingly exposing herself to the kind of horrors that her husband spoke of was unnatural.
‘She must be a bit mannish,’ she’d said.
‘She’s plain,’ David Reilly had said, and that had elicited a smug and knowing ‘Ah’ from Barbara.
Constable Lord sat down at a desk that had been pushed into a corner for her.
‘Depends what you mean by interesting,’ she said.
‘Anything other than what I’m doing would qualify,’ Joe said.
‘We all have to do paperwork, Sergeant,’ she said, ‘and you know you look like you’ve gone 14 rounds with Jack Dempsey. You can’t interview people. You’d frighten them.’
She smiled at him, but caught herself before it reached the arc of a grin. She was suddenly conscious of the jokey intimacy in her tone, and of David Reilly’s eyes on her. She turned to him.
‘Nothing interesting,’ she said, and began ostentatiously transcribing notes. Reilly ca
ught Joe’s eye and raised his eyebrows. Joe gave the slightest of shrugs in return, but Helen Lord noticed it peripherally, and her mood darkened.
THERE WERE TWO men in the bar of the Caledonian Hotel in Port Fairy, a small town a good five hours’ drive from Melbourne. One of the men was the bartender — a portly, wheezy, unshaven, easily rankled man named Stafford Giles. The other man, seated away from the bar near a window through which he watched a dust shower sweep down Bank Street, was George Starling. There was no one out and about, but an empty street was preferable to the view inside the hotel, which included the sight of Stafford Giles. Starling was repulsed by him, by his heft. Starling believed that fat people were lazy, complacent individuals who ate and drank more than their fair share. You couldn’t rely on a fat person: he’d be driven by self-interest, and he’d be a stranger to self-discipline.
Starling was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, although its sleeves were rolled up. He was conscious of the smell of fish that clung to him, trapped in the shirt’s cotton and in the thick hair of his arms. He liked the look of his arms; they were sinewy and masculine, and they intimidated people. They smelled of fish because he regularly scaled and gutted the catch brought in by a local fisherman. This man, Peter Hurley, whose red hair and fair skin should have confined him to sunless indoors, had dropped nets and lines in the Southern Ocean for close to thirty years, and his face was the creased, blotched, and blasted testament to every hour he’d spent at sea. He was fifty, and could easily have passed for a ravaged seventy. Starling didn’t like Hurley, although he didn’t despise him, which amounted to a kind of approbation. Hurley paid in cash, and made no inquiries about Starling’s private life. Starling offered Hurley the same incuriosity. This suited them both. Each had reason to preserve the lack of intimacy — Hurley because his catch was largely illegal, and illegally disposed of, and Starling because he was a person of interest to the police.
George Starling left the Caledonian Hotel and headed to the room he rented in Princes Street. The heat didn’t bother him, and neither did the smell of wrack and fish-rot, mixed with an aromatic hint of eucalypt forests smouldering after fires, that drifted through the town. When he reached his room he stretched out on the sour-smelling bed and added up the number of people he wanted to, needed to, kill. He’d start with Joe Sable, but he wouldn’t stop there.
WHEN INSPECTOR TITUS Lambert returned to Russell Street, he asked Joe Sable to follow him into the privacy of his office.
‘Close the door, Sergeant.’
Joe immediately felt uneasy. Lambert often made him feel uncomfortable, even incompetent. Now Joe faced his superior with the evidence of his incompetence writ large in the wounds he’d sustained in his first major investigation.
‘How’s the shoulder, Sergeant?’
‘It’s healing. The knife wasn’t a long one.’
‘I don’t believe you should be back here yet. It won’t make anything heal any faster.’
‘Are you asking me to stay home, sir?’
As soon as the words were out of his mouth Joe realised they sounded sulky.
‘No, Sergeant. There are things you can do here, and it frees Constable Lord to get valuable experience.’
Inspector Lambert’s tone was uninflected, but in his words Joe heard a rebuff, a reminder that Lambert considered Helen Lord a better police officer — certainly a better Homicide officer — than he. A wave of nausea washed over him.
‘Are you all right, Sergeant? You look ill.’
‘I’m fine, sir. Tom? How’s Tom?’
At the mention of his brother-in-law’s name, Inspector Lambert leaned forward in his seat and stared hard at Sable.
‘Tom Mackenzie is not now, and never has been, your responsibility. He joined you of his own volition. No one could have foreseen what was to happen to him. You can carry that weight if you want to, but it isn’t rightly yours to carry, and it will crush you.’
‘Mrs Lambert doesn’t share that view, does she?’
‘Maude, at the moment, is concentrating her energies on looking after Tom, not on blaming you.’
‘So how is Tom?’
‘He’s comfortable, I think. He’s walking, although he doesn’t leave the house. He’s in pain, and he doesn’t say much. I won’t lie to you; there’s something vacant about him now. I catch Maude watching him — waiting, I think, to see a glimpse of the brother she remembers. We’ll get him back eventually, Sergeant. Tom Mackenzie is as strong as his sister. He will recover.’
Joe felt his eyes well with tears and, unable to prevent it, he began to sob. He sat with his head bowed and his shoulders rising and falling. He made no sound, and Inspector Lambert made no move to intervene. As he regained control, Joe reached into his pocket and withdrew a handkerchief. He pushed it at his eyes and held it there.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Has that been happening much?’
Joe nodded. ‘Well, a few times, and mostly it takes me by surprise. I’m sorry. You must think …’
‘Don’t presume what I think, Sergeant. If you’d walked away from that investigation without suffering any effects, I’d say you were as cold and insane as the man who stabbed you and tortured Tom.’
‘Can I visit him, sir?’
‘No. Not yet. He’s not ready.’
‘And Mrs Lambert?’
‘No. She’s not ready to see you yet, either.’
There it was — the confirmation that Maude Lambert could not forgive Joe for the injuries to her brother’s body and mind. Joe remembered with searing clarity the words she’d spoken to Inspector Lambert at the hospital.
‘He’s all broken, Titus,’ she’d said. ‘He’s all broken.’
Joe looked up at Inspector Lambert, and although he recognised sympathy in his eyes, he also saw pity, or thought he saw pity. Another wave of nausea passed through him.
‘Are you up to discussing a few matters relating to the case, Sergeant?’
This took Joe by surprise.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
‘Good, because there are loose ends, and one of those ends in particular worries me.’
‘George Starling.’
‘George Starling. He’s still at large. If Military Intelligence had picked him up, I assume they’d have told us, although professional courtesy isn’t their strong point.’
‘He’ll have gone to ground, sir. Intelligence won’t find him. I didn’t spend much time with him, but he struck me as being as fanatical in his own way as Ptolemy Jones. And now that Jones is dead, Starling might want to pick up his leader’s sword. Tom spent more time with him …’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t Starling who tortured Tom, was it? It was Jones.’
‘I don’t think for a minute that that points to any squeamishness or humanity in Starling. Whatever the reason for his not being there, I’d say he felt cheated, peeved, at being denied that pleasure.’
‘He might also feel cheated because Germany will lose the European war. That gets clearer every day. I think our home-grown Hitlerites will quietly reorganise themselves into something less dismal, or work to whitewash their inconvenient allegiance.’
‘You don’t think George Starling will call his mates to arms?’
‘Ptolemy Jones was a deluded, fanatical psychopath. Those creatures are rare. George Starling is an acolyte. They’re common. I’m guessing, despite your observation, that politics mattered to him only because it mattered to Jones. With Jones gone, Starling’s hatreds are unfocussed and naked. He can’t dress them up in a well-tailored ideology. I may be wrong, of course. I hope I am. If it’s Nazism that fascinates him, I think we have a chance of catching him, because he’ll make contact with others. If he’s lost his taste for it, he’ll be an unpredictable menace. He’s out there, and I’m uneasy about that.’
‘Maybe
we’ll never hear from him again. Maybe he’ll lie low until the war is over and live an anonymous, miserable life.’
‘Let’s hope it’s miserable, at any rate.’
JOE SABLE SAT in the late-afternoon light in his flat in Arnold Street, Princes Hill. He’d recently begun to scour newspapers and journals for news of the horrors being visited upon Jews in Europe, and his life-long indifference to his own Jewishness had begun to torment him. He spoke to no one about this. His sleep was troubled, and his dreams, never remembered, left him waking each morning with a vague and lingering dread; and, to his mortification, he’d begun to cry in response to unpredictable, unrelated triggers.
He was twenty-five years old. Sometimes he thought of resigning, but what would he do? His arrhythmic heart wasn’t acceptable to the military. Manpower would place him somewhere ghastly — a munitions factory, or some other war industry where his brains were of no interest to his employer.
This afternoon, his thoughts were interrupted in their dismal progress by the jangling of his telephone.
‘I have a reverse-charge trunk call for a Joe Sable from a Fred — no other name. Will you accept the charge?’
Joe’s body tensed.
‘I’ll accept,’ he said.
‘Putting you through. Go ahead, please.’
There was silence, although Joe could hear Fred’s breathing.
‘You should live every day like it’s your last, Sable, because it might be.’
‘We know who you are, Fred. We know your real name is George Starling. We know all about you. We’ll find you.’
The line went dead, and Joe immediately regretted what he’d said. He’d thrown away what might have been an advantage — Starling’s probable assumption that Homicide didn’t know his real identity. Lambert would see this as unforgivable and, doubtless, typical thoughtlessness. Well, he saw no reason why Lambert had to be told the truth. He telephoned the inspector at home. Maude Lambert answered.